A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  He carried his tools into the dining room and began. It was five o’clock when he started and by seven-thirty he had sawn the legs off all the chairs and the arms off the carvers, sawn off their backs and prized out the seat cushions. He didn’t want to stop to eat, so he sharpened the ax on Mr. Chance’s whetstone and started chopping. Within half an hour he had reduced the six chairs to firewood. That was when the people next door banged on the wall. They banged a few times and then the phone started ringing. Teddy guessed it was them, a yuppie couple who had bought Mr. Chance’s house and thought themselves a cut above the rest of the people in the street. He ignored the banging and the phone, but his ax work was done for the time being and he began sawing up the sideboard.

  The man next door came around and rang the bell when Teddy started chopping again at nine. Teddy let him ring a few times and then he went to the door with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation in his hand, open at the chapter called “Grandeur and Obedience.”

  “Look, what’s going on? What is this?”

  “My uncle’s making a coffin,” said Teddy. “He’s got a deadline.”

  The neighbor was one of those who blush when they think they’ve been told a lie or are being sent up, but don’t know how to handle it. “What deadline?” he said.

  “Ten P.M.,” said Teddy. “Nearly over. Good night.”

  He shut the door hard and gave it a kick. Saying sorry wasn’t a habit of his. Before going back to his dismemberment of the furniture he went upstairs, found the gin bottle under Keith’s bed and poured an inch of it into the egg cup he had taken up with him. Into it went the diamond ring. Teddy put the egg cup under his own bed. He chopped up the sideboard in double-quick time, stacked a woodpile four feet high and was in the kitchen eating a large can of baked beans on three rounds of toast when Keith came in at twenty-five to eleven.

  “You’re eating late,” said Keith.

  Teddy didn’t reply.

  Keith set down his two plastic carriers, full of bottles and beer cans, lit a cigarette with a match and dropped the match on the floor. “Don’t you want to know how your dad is?”

  “What do you think?” said Teddy.

  “You watch your mouth. You haven’t been near your dad since he went in there and that’s all of two fuckin’ months. Poor old sod’s on his way out and you don’t give a fourpenny fuck.”

  “How about you watching your mouth?” said Teddy. “Or washing it out? With like cyanide.”

  He went into the dining room and banged the door. But he started laughing when he was inside. That night he slept like a log. Or like a Brex, they were all heavy sleepers, though he was sometimes the exception. The following evening he sawed the legs off the table and chopped them up, but not the tabletop. Late in the day, but not too late, he saw what a fine piece of mahogany it was. He took it carefully apart and stacked the boards against the wall.

  The chopped wood made a pile to occupy a space roughly the size the sideboard had been. The only way to get rid of it that came to mind was to take three or four pieces with him in a plastic carrier every time he left the house. Rather like someone disposing of a body, half a leg one day, a hand another, finally the head.

  Fortunately—he had never thought of it as being fortunate before—the place was awash with plastic bags. They filled the kitchen drawers and flopped out when you opened the cupboard under the sink. Keith got them from the Safeway when he bought his booze and he never took used ones back. Recycling in any shape or form had no place in his lifestyle. When Teddy went to get the tube to college he’d take some of those bits of leg with him in a bag and put them in a waste bin.

  As Kelly’s grandma had predicted, the gin had cleaned the ring. Lumps of gray waxy substance, one with a hair embedded in it, floated on the surface of the liquid in the egg cup. Teddy sniffed it with a shudder. He was preserving another virginity, that of never letting alcohol pass his lips.

  The ring sparkled in the morning light. Teddy wondered whose it had been before it came on to his mother’s hand. Grandma Brex’s? Surely not. More likely it was stolen, but he doubted if his father had ever had the courage to steal anything. Perhaps he was wrong and the ring was worthless, perhaps it had come out of a Christmas cracker.

  He questioned if something so beautiful could be valueless. One day he would find a woman and give it to her.

  8

  Soon after Richard and Julia were married the police asked Richard if he would let Francine attend a lineup. “She only saw his shoes and the top of his head,” Richard protested.

  “If you think about it,” Detective Inspector Wallis said, “I’m sure you’ll agree that no one looking down from above ever just sees the top of someone’s head and his shoes. There’s going to be a lot more than that. His hands, for instance, the shape and size of him, his ears, his shoulders.”

  Julia thought the project very wrong. Francine, in her opinion, was disturbed enough already, a frightened, traumatized child. This might send her over the edge. It was their first disagreement, hers and Richard’s. Richard won it, but that was the last struggle with Julia he was ever to win. She sighed and looked sad, saying, “I hope we aren’t talking about irreparable damage to Francine’s already fragile personality.”

  They both went with her to the police station in Surrey where the lineup was held. Because of the peculiar nature of the view Francine had had of the man on the doorstep, she was placed in a room where she could look down on the eight men in the lineup. The glass in the window was one-way so that she could see them but they could not see her. Or so the police told Richard.

  It looked like normal glass to Julia. “They would say that, darling,” she said, “to set our minds at rest.”

  In any case, Francine was unable to pick out the man. She could pick out four, she said the tops of their heads all looked like the top of the head she had seen, but no particular one. What happened to the men in the lineup none of them was told, but no one was arrested.

  “But he’s seen her, hasn’t he?” said Julia.

  “That was the point of the one-way glass,” Richard said, “so that he couldn’t see her.”

  Julia, who was nothing if not illogical, said, “It doesn’t matter, though, does it, if he saw her or not? The reality is that he knows who she is and he knows she’s the only witness the police have.”

  “You’re presupposing that he was one of those eight men.”

  “Well, of course he was, Richard. He wouldn’t have been there if he wasn’t.”

  What motivated Julia toward her subsequent actions? Later on, this was a question Francine asked herself. At the beginning she was too young to ask. Richard didn’t ask. He didn’t question at all, for he recognized that Julia had a genuine fear for Francine’s safety and believed that Francine herself was afraid. In embarking on her system of the protection and cocooning and insulating of Francine, she was only obeying her conscience and her knowledge of psychology.

  That she might be carrying out her safeguarding program for other reasons, because she was herself childless and likely to remain so, or because she had lost her means of livelihood and profession, or because she had abandoned all other areas in which to exercise power, occurred only to her stepdaughter, and that not for another ten years.

  But at that time what principally troubled Francine was the departure of Flora. She might have stayed, at least as an occasional visitor or helper, or been invited to be a sitter while Richard and Julia went out in the evenings. But Richard and Julia never went out in the evenings, they never went out together. Julia thought it harmful for Francine to be in the house without either one of them. So Flora left and Francine cried.

  “You can come and see me,” Flora said. “I’m not far away. You get Mrs. Hill to bring you.”

  But somehow Julia never had the time. She was too busy looking after Francine. Privately, she told Richard it was better for Francine to make a clean break with Flora. “On a practical level,” she said, “you wouldn’t want your d
aughter picking up that accent.”

  It was at about this time, after Flora had gone, when Francine was nearly nine and had tried and failed to spot the man in the lineup, that Richard read a letter addressed to Julia from a former client’s solicitor. He read it by mistake, confessed and apologized, but still, quite humbly and contritely, wanted to know what it meant.

  “It means that a very vindictive, and I must say unbalanced, man has finally won his victory over me. He has succeeded in putting me out of practice and no doubt his triumph is complete.”

  The explanation which followed made Richard nearly as indignant as his wife. This man’s son had been Julia’s client. He was a boy often. A tragedy had nearly ensued when, after coming home from a session with Julia, the boy had tried, and luckily failed, to hang himself. The father threatened to bring an action against Julia, was set to do so, being certain he could show evidence of damage to his son’s mind directly caused by her, but had finally been persuaded to settle on payment by Julia of two thousand pounds and her promise to retire from all psychotherapeutic work.

  “You should have fought it,” Richard said.

  “I know. I hadn’t the strength. I hadn’t the courage, Richard. I was all alone—then.”

  She said nothing about the eminent psychiatrists who had been willing to give evidence in court. She gave no hint of the boy’s testimony to his father’s solicitor of the terrors, agoraphobia and recurring nightmares her questionings and suggestions had allegedly induced in him.

  “I’ll still be able to make use of all my knowledge,” she said quite gaily. “There are others to benefit from it. You and Francine. Would you think me melodramatic if I said I intend to devote my life to Francine?”

  All children need to be looked after and at first it was only that Francine was looked after more thoroughly than most. For instance, there was the matter of her father and her stepmother never leaving her with anyone else, there was the business of Julia vetting her school friends for their suitability and there was the baby monitor. This transmitted from her bedroom to Julia’s and Richard’s bedroom any sounds that might indicate she was having a nightmare or even a disturbed night. Her reading matter was scrutinized by Julia and the small amount of homework she did, the occasional essays she was expected to write, studied for evidence of a disturbed psyche. Flora had left her considerable privacy. With the coming of Julia she had none.

  It was Julia’s discovery of the videocassette box that prompted Francine’s drastic action. Remarkably for her, Julia didn’t look inside the box, only at the wording and illustration on its cover. “A Passage to India is a wonderful book, Francine, and I believe a very good film was made from it,” said Julia, “but I don’t think you’re quite old enough for either yet. It’s best to postpone these things until you can understand them.”

  “I don’t want to watch it,” Francine said, “I just want to have it,” and she put out her hand for the box.

  “Shall I take it downstairs and put it with the others? Then we’ll know it’s safe.”

  “It’s safe here,” said Francine as firmly as she could, but was quite surprised just the same when Julia’s scarlet-tipped fingers relinquished the box and Julia gave one of her bright, colorful smiles, red lips, white teeth, the prominent blue eyes of an ornamental fish.

  Of course, it was not true, what she had said. The box and its contents were far from safe. While she was at school there was nothing to stop Julia coming in here and taking it and looking inside. Julia, certainly, could read that writing.

  But now, perhaps, so could Francine.

  A curious reluctance to look at those sheets of paper took hold of her. The idea of them frightened her. Not as an illustration in her book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales frightened her, so that, knowing precisely where it came in the fat volume, between page 102 and page 104, she carefully turned three pages at once when she looked into that particular story. Not like that, for she felt only a kind of distaste, a sense of wishing to avoid the contents of the cassette case in the way she wanted to avoid eating anything flavored with ginger.

  It happened that she was reading a child’s book of Greek myths and one of the myths described was of Pandora and how when she opened a certain precious box she released into the world a swarm of evil things. Francine didn’t believe that she would let out anything similar if she opened her box, but even at ten years old she could see the analogy. Still, that same day she lifted the lid of the box and took out the now yellowing sheets of paper. And for the first time she understood that what she was looking at were letters.

  On the top sheet was no address, but there was a date, a day in March some three and a half years before. She read the way the letter started: “My darling.” It was no longer difficult for her to read this handwriting, but it was still impossible to do so. For some reason, and she had no idea what, she was too frightened to read on. Her eyes refused to focus on the forward-sloping letters. She saw a blur of darkish stripes on a pale ocher background, and then she put the pages back into the box and closed the lid as hard as she could, pressing it down as if it hadn’t clicked into place at once.

  The house had no fireplace. She was never alone in the street where there were rubbish bins. It was only at school that she was away from Julia’s loving, watchful eye. She took the videocassette box to school with her in the navy-blue, yellow-trimmed backpack all the pupils of this select preparatory school carried with them, and at morning break took the letters out of the box, put them into her blazer pocket and went out into the playground. Everyone else was also out in the playground, which was really a garden with lawns and play areas and a sandpit and a mini-zoo, and Holly, who was Francine’s best friend, called out to her to come and see the new baby guinea pigs.

  On her way Francine had to pass one of the crimson-painted bins with swing-lid tops which were set about this part of the gardens to teach pupils the virtues of tidy litter disposal. Francine swung up a lid as she passed and pushed the letters quickly in under it. Holly was still calling her and now she waved back and ran over to look at the little curled-up blind things and their fat mother who was colored like a tortoiseshell cat.

  But next morning, when Julia dropped her off at the school gates—it was only with difficulty that Francine had stopped Julia accompanying her all the way into the classroom—she had to pass that red bin with its swing lid. With a hasty look over her shoulder, to check that Julia was moving off, she lifted it up and looked inside. The bin was empty and someone had put a fresh liner inside.

  Sometimes Richard thought Julia too watchful. Francine had no chance to be independent or private or to develop without supervision. But he hardly knew what to believe or what to think. Perhaps the child was in danger. The man who had killed his wife was still at large and maybe he lived in fear of what Francine might one day remember, and remembering, tell. And apart from that there was the possibility of damage to her mind or her psychic self or whatever the term was. In the light of present-day thinking it was almost unbelievable that the things that had happened to Francine could leave any child unscathed.

  She must be damaged, even if the scarring was unapparent to him. He might be unable to see it, but that need not mean it wasn’t there. He was torn in two by half-belief and dread of further self-blame, in no mood to argue with Julia or attempt to dissuade her from her excessive vigilance. Suppose he were to call off this watchdog and then find that all her warnings had been well-founded? He thought of the story of Cassandra, whose predictions were doomed to be disbelieved, yet who had been right.

  So when the time came for Francine to change schools, the grant-aided former grammar school where the neighbors’ daughters went and that she herself favored was rejected in favor of Julia’s choice, a very select, very expensive private girls’ school called the Champlaine. Holly de Marnay was going there and it was from Holly’s mother that Julia gleaned all the knowledge she had about it. The Champlaine was housed in a Georgian mansion on the edge of Wimbledon Com
mon, a long way from where the Hills lived, but it had an exemplary record of pupils going on to the best of further education. In the previous year just under ninety-five percent of the sixth form had entered university, twelve to Oxford or Cambridge.

  Classes were small, academic qualifications of teachers high. Among the students—never called pupils—were an earl’s granddaughter and a Thai princess. Lacrosse was played, but soccer too. The Champlaine had a large heated swimming pool, squash courts and both hard and grass courts for tennis. Its new science lab was reputed to have cost three million pounds. Fees, therefore, were extremely high and paying them would involve considerable sacrifice on the Hills’ part. Julia didn’t protest. If it meant no foreign holidays, no second car and few new clothes, she accepted this as the price which must be paid for Francine’s safety.

  Though boarding was favored by the Champlaine authorities, she was not allowed to board. Julia would never have a quiet moment. There had been a recent story in the newspaper of a man getting into a school dormitory and raping a girl. If he could rape he could kill. So Francine became a day girl and thus a member of a slightly disfavored minority. From certain in-jokes, cult behavior, secret societies and private rituals she was excluded. It might have been less marked if the pupils had not known her past history and the events in the house in Orchard Lane. But they did know. Julia had insisted that the Headmistress—mysteriously known here as the Chief Executive—told the entire school and staff at an assembly before Francine arrived.

  “For her own protection,” Julia explained to Richard. “If they know they will be vigilant on her behalf. They will help to protect her.”

  Richard doubted if teenagers thought or behaved like that, but Julia must know. She had been a teacher before she became a psychotherapist.