by Ruth Rendell
And ever since then Richard had suffered inner agonies of guilt over that “Dr.” before his name in the telephone directory. For there had been no need of it. His profession and his success in it hardly required that all and sundry should know he had a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. He had had it inserted in the directory through pride. He was proud and vainglorious of this achievement of his and the title it conferred, and because of it, through vaunting it, he had murdered his wife.
One evening, while the two men were having a drink together, he told David Stanark how he felt. David didn’t tell him anything comforting. He said not a word about Richard not blaming himself, having nothing to be ashamed of, or that he should put this guilt out of his mind. Richard had rather expected he would say that, had hoped he would. David’s, “It’s just something you have to live with, all you can say is it’ll get less with time,” disconcerted him.
“So you do think it was my fault? I’m right to feel guilt?”
“Any reasonably responsible human being in your situation would feel guilt,” David said, and he smiled, perhaps to soften harsh words. “You did lead this man to your house. You did so directly by your action. You call it vanity, a kinder judgment would be that it was evidence of a justifiable pride in your achievement. Whatever it may have been, it resulted in this man killing your wife. But we can’t predict what our actions will lead to. Maybe if we could we’d never go out at all, put pen to paper, never even get up in the morning. That’s not possible, so the answer is to try always to be very circumspect in what we do.”
“Avoid the Seven Deadly Sins?” said Richard.
But he didn’t like it when David nodded and said in a parsonical tone, “Events like this one show us why Pride is one of them.”
After that a coolness arose between the two men and although they still occasionally saw each other, things were not the same. Their friendship was mended only after both were married and their wives became close. Instead of David Stanark, Richard took his troubles to Julia and her reaction was more to his taste.
She was—at least in her own estimation—a child psychotherapist but, having no sound belief in psychotherapy of any kind, Richard rather thought this wouldn’t matter. The two beliefs were balanced side by side in his mind: the one that psychotherapy was rubbish and the other that Julia, because she was good-looking and understanding and calm and confident, must be a good psychotherapist. In fact, as he told himself, she was the only one of her ilk whom he could trust.
Julia had no objection to taking him on as a client. An adult was more challenging than a child. An adult man and an attractive one confessing to you the secrets of his heart, while you sat close together in a warm room at dusk with just one lamp on, was more exciting than watching a child play with dolls. And Richard found that he could say anything to Julia, he could tell her everything. She listened, she never interrupted. She put one elbow on the arm of the sofa and, her head a little on one side, rested her rather small receding chin in the palm of her hand and, with her beautiful fish’s lips slightly parted, she listened. Occasionally she nodded, in such a way as to imply that the horrors he admitted to, the weaknesses and follies, were all perfectly understandable. She knew, she understood and she pardoned.
He told her of the vanity that had led him to call himself Dr. Hill in the phone book and how he therefore blamed himself for the death of his wife.
“The first thing you have to understand,” she said, “is that guilt is part of the cumbersome and often dirty baggage we human beings have to carry around with us. Often it doesn’t bear much relation to reality, but you’d be a strange man if you didn’t have it. Suppose I said you’d have to be a psychopath not to feel guilt? How about that?”
He told her how his wife and he had grown apart in the months before her death, how she had become cold toward him and he had spent more and more time away from his family, furthering his career. Now he blamed himself for that too, for being insensitive to Jennifer’s needs, for failing to ask, to talk.
“What would you like best in the world?” said Julia.
He didn’t have to think about that. “To undo it. To go back and do things differently.”
“But the reality is that you can’t do that. No one can. If you had three wishes, three reasonable, possible wishes, what would they be?”
“To protect Francine,” he said. “Have her grow up safe and without trauma. To sleep at night the way I used to.”
“And the third wish?”
Until that moment he hadn’t known what a third wish would be. It came to him like a beam of light penetrating a dark room. Disclose it now he couldn’t. He could only look at Julia, shake his head and say, “One day I’ll tell you.”
She smiled. She took her hand from under her cheek and laid it on his. “Time’s up, Richard. Shall I see you next week? Same time, same place?”
“Of course.”
Francine came to her next day, brought by Flora.
“It’s time we talked about that day, Francine,” said Julia.
What was meant by “that day” Francine knew at once. She had never spoken of it with Julia, though she had with almost everyone else. She would have liked to try and put it away from her, bury it in the past and have it come back only in her dreams. Now Julia said that would be wrong. It must be talked over.
She wasn’t a rebellious child, but quiet and sweet, and above all anxious that her father should be happy. She came to Julia without protest because her father wanted her to. But she was desperate not to talk to Julia about that day.
“You think the man will find you, don’t you, Francine?”
It had never crossed her mind.
“I know the reason why you don’t want to talk about it. It is because you are afraid of the man finding you. Aren’t I right?”
Francine was anxious not to cry, but she did, she couldn’t help herself.
Julia took her into her arms and held her against her slippery white satin blouse, hugged her long and lovingly and stroked her hair. “I will never let you come to any harm. Daddy will never let you come to harm. You know that now, don’t you?”
Nearly a year was to pass before Richard understood the cause of Julia’s sudden decision to retire from practice, sell her house and move. At the time these seemed acts heavensent for his own purposes, or beautiful coincidences. One Saturday evening, when he and Francine were alone, when they had had their supper and had just finished listening to a CD of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, he said to her, “Sweetheart, I want to ask you something. It’s rather serious.”
“Is it about that day?” she said.
He knew what she meant and he was taken aback. Had he been in danger of forgetting how much the past preyed on her mind? “No, it’s not about that. We’ve said everything there is to say about that.”
She nodded, then, as if on an afterthought of doubt, shrugged her shoulders.
“What I want to ask you is quite different. It’s about the future, not the past, the time to come.” He waited, then said, “How would you feel if I got married?”
“Married?”
“I’d like to get married. I will never forget your mother, you know that. I will never stop loving her. But I want to be married again, for your sake too. I expect you know who it is?”
“Flora,” she said.
Her guesswork, as wide of the mark as could be, almost angered him. She was only a child. Still, to suppose him likely to marry an overweight frump with permed hair and red hands, a one-time State Enrolled Nurse with a Bristol accent.… “It’s Julia.” He kept his patience. He even smiled, but without looking directly at her. “I haven’t asked her yet. I am asking your permission, Francine. I am saying, my dear little girl, may I marry our good friend Julia?”
A parent who asks a child if he may marry again always intends to do so whatever the answer may be. It just makes things smoother if the answer is yes. Francine didn’t know this, but she intuited it. I
f she had been five years older she would probably have said, I can’t stop you, or, Do as you like, it’s your life. But she was only nine and she loved the idea of seeing him happy.
Once she had lost the power of speech and sometimes even now, though she had never confessed to anyone, she was afraid muteness might come back. One day she would wake up and be unable to speak. That had never happened and it wasn’t happening now. Her failure to speak this time was a matter of choice. She looked at him in silence and nodded.
6
All the years of his childhood Teddy had called at his grandmother’s once a week for his pocket money. Both of them, by nature or conditioning, had cold temperaments and both were loners. Agnes Tawton had been relieved when her husband died and said so without shame. She no longer had someone living in the house whose wishes might not invariably accord with her own and who had occasionally demanded a modicum of her attention.
She gave little of this to Teddy, but she gave him his pound. Sometimes his visit would pass without a word being exchanged beyond his thanks which she insisted on, which she demanded even before it reached his hand. If he stared at her in silence, his mouth clamped shut, she would snatch the money away and hold it behind her back. “What do you say?”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, Grandma.”
“Thank you, Grandma.”
Often she didn’t ask him in and if she did, offered him nothing to eat or drink. Their conversation, at these times, consisted in her bullying him with questions about his schoolwork and picking his brains as to what went on in the Brex household, and in his monosyllabic if not quite dumb insolence. She was old, in her mid-seventies by the time Teddy was ten, but strong and spry. Though never invited, she occasionally came around to see her daughter, but even if this visit happened at the time Teddy’s weekly stipend was due, she would never pass over his pound. He had to call on her for that.
So a relationship of a kind developed between these two apparently unfeeling people. Though each was uninterested in human nature—beyond sharing a general contempt for it—they probably knew each other better than either of them knew anyone else. As Teddy entered his teens and grew tall, and became highly personable, Agnes even softened her attitude toward him, occasionally making a remark that was neither censorious nor hectoring nor derisive. “Cold out today,” she might say, or, with great satisfaction, “You’re going to be a lot taller than your dad.”
It was therefore strange, beyond ordinary human understanding, that when Teddy was eighteen and off to college, Agnes blew it. She could have given him twice or even three times what he was getting—she could afford it—but instead, because he had his grant, she announced that his weekly pound was to stop. “You’ve got more coming in than I have,” she said.
Teddy made no reply, for he had no idea of his grandmother’s income.
“Won’t bother with me anymore now, will you?” This was uttered in a tone of triumph.
“Probably not.”
“Suit yourself,” said Agnes.
When Keith asked why the house smelled of acetone Eileen knew for sure she shared her late father’s disability. It was on her breath and perhaps coming out of her pores, but Jimmy hadn’t noticed it. For a long time she had suspected. Knowing Tom Tawton’s symptoms, she finally recognized what her constant raging thirst, dry skin and weariness must mean. She had been coping with thirst by drinking lager, pouring it down alternately with cans of Diet Coke. Her eyes weren’t what they had been either, but she had coped with that by buying herself glasses at Boots.
Some degree of eyesight was essential if she was to continue with and finish the white lace counterpane. The time had come when ignoring things and pretending they weren’t there was no longer going to work. She would have to do something. None of the men in the household showed any more interest in the state of her health after Keith had commented on the acetone smell. She would have been surprised if they had.
In spite of the lager she had lost weight, for she had no appetite. “I reckon I could get my ring on again,” she said to Jimmy as they were watching ’Allo ’Allo one evening. “You look at my finger.”
But Jimmy didn’t. He dodged around the hand she thrust in front of him, a hand so dry and the skin so flaky that it looked as if it had been dipped in a bag of flour. He leaned in the other direction, peered at the screen and laughed throatily.
Dressed in a red and gray crocheted skirt and jumper with a crocheted red cape and crocheted yellow peaked cap, Eileen set off to get the bus to her mother’s. On the way she passed the doctor’s surgery, newly renamed the medical center, and she noticed it, she actually paused outside it, and read on the notice board the times at which patients could attend and directions for making appointments. But she passed on. She still remembered, after nineteen years, the fuss there had been over her failure to seek medical attention before and when Teddy was born, the contemptuous GP and the tight-lipped midwife. And she thought of what they would do if she went in there. Her knowledge of this was culled from television. She imagined the tests, the nagging, the humiliation, the adjurations to stop smoking.
At the bus-stop she lit a cigarette. A woman who was also waiting fanned the smoke away with her hand and Eileen relieved her feelings by giving her a mouthful of abuse. By the time she got to her mother’s she was very tired, not least because during the journey she had twice had to seek out public lavatories to cope with her lavish urination.
When she heard what Eileen intended, Agnes made a feeble attempt to argue her out of it. But along with any warmth or real interest in the fate of others, she lacked persuasive powers. She wasn’t sufficiently involved. “You’ll upset your insides,” she said.
“It’s not my insides, is it? It’s my leg I’m going to do it to.”
“Your dad’s stuff will have gone off. It’s been there five years.”
But she couldn’t stop Eileen going into the bathroom for the syringe and the ampoule. Eileen had watched her father do this so often that she knew exactly what it involved. Tom Tawton had left ample supplies of the stuff behind and Agnes had thrown out none of it, as the NHS practice nurse had instructed her to do. Eileen thought she could take some of it back with her and buy her own syringe.
Searching through the medicine cabinet, she found a container labeled Tolbutamide. Remembering that this had once been prescribed for her father to take by mouth before his treatment had become intravenous, she swallowed a couple of capsules in water from the cold tap. It couldn’t do any harm. Injecting herself was more of a challenge, but she had seen it done so she could do it.
Afterward, she went back to her mother and said she’d make them a cup of tea. She was going to stop taking sugar in her tea. “It’ll be a wrench,” she said, “but I have to think of my heath,” and then, because she had heard the phrase somewhere, or something like it, “I owe it to Jimmy to think of my health.”
In the kitchen, while the kettle was boiling, she had to sit down. She sat, felt her head swim, her vision blacken, her body quake, she slid to the floor and collapsed in a coma. Her mother, weary with waiting for her tea, fell asleep and failed to find her till five hours had passed.
* * *
Home from college for the Easter break, Teddy found that the house was deserted by day. Jimmy had neglected to inform the authorities of his wife’s death and continued to draw the full retirement pension for a married couple to which he had previously been entitled since he became sixty-five. At much the same time the law had changed and pubs stayed open all day. Jimmy went to the pub at ten in the morning and stayed there until six or seven in the evening.
Always a hard worker, Keith, who had been drawing his pension for a year longer, still worked as a plumber as well, mostly for money in the back pocket. He was a serious earner, was Keith, having, for instance, made enough in the past year to take himself away on holiday to Lanzarote and build a carport on the concrete pad to shelter the Edsel from the elements. A good plumber, who wil
l come whenever he is called on, when the tank in the loft leaks, when the lavatory cistern won’t stop filling, is always in demand. So the house was empty and for the first time in his life Teddy had it to himself.
He could have asked friends around, but he had no friends. Alfred Chance had been the nearest to a friend he ever had. Girls at college fancied him and made their feelings plain, but he repulsed them. He was a loner and he liked to think of himself as such. At first, when he was alone in the house, he explored and searched it in a way he had never had the opportunity to do before.
It was very dirty and, because there was so much wool about and so many woollen garments, infested with moths. Woodworm were devouring the living-room furniture and from the television table had bored into the skirting board. Teddy closed his eyes and thought of the house as being eaten up by insects, boring and drilling and chewing, and he almost fancied he could hear their depredations as a range of steady hummings and buzzings on various different notes.
Spiders were in the bath and silverfish wriggled across the floors. Ladybugs were concentrated in crimson clusters on the dirty curtains. From a distance they looked like scabs on skin. He went into Keith’s room, not because there was anything in there he specially wanted to see or to check on, but rather in wonderment and fascinated disgust. An obscure pleasure was what he felt in simply contemplating the bed which was never made and on which the sheets were never changed. Since Eileen’s death there was no one to do the washing and a heap of soiled clothes lay in one corner. Keith would wait until he had just one pair of trousers and one ragged T-shirt left and then he would put the pile of clothes into a bin-liner and take it down to the launderette.
The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, blue cheese and the dry, bitter, yellow stink of unwashed bedlinen. Normal-sized ashtrays weren’t big enough for Keith and he used an old Pyrex casserole in which to deposit his ash and stub out his fag ends. It stood on the floor beside the bed. Teddy squatted down and looked underneath. From his childhood he remembered that Keith kept drink under there. He still did, a half-bottle of vodka, a whole one of gin, three cans of lager, still in their quadruple plastic collar.
