A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  “There is less to worry about when she’s in the classroom,” said Julia. “I’m thinking of when she’s outside in the grounds. Her friends can operate surveillance.”

  Francine had many friends, other day girls. It was to be a long while before she was allowed to go to their houses, but Julia allowed them to come to the Hills, once they had been carefully vetted by her. She would ring up a girl’s mother and suggest they meet for lunch, then grill the woman as to her family, her husband’s—and occasionally her own—profession, the number of her children, and her attitude toward crime and punishment, this to include what she thought of prisons and whether she favored the reintroduction of capital punishment.

  The women didn’t seem to mind too much. Julia never revealed her motives and these parents of Champlaine pupils thought she was interested in their ancestry or their claims to belong to an upper class and particular political persuasion. The result of it all was that Francine was allowed to ask one or two friends around and occasionally have them stay the night. But she was never to go out with a friend and the friend’s family or on school trips. The Champlaine took the fourth form to Lake Lucerne one year and the fifth form to Copenhagen the next without her. National Theatre visits happened, but in Julia’s company, not her schoolfellows’.

  Francine was at an age to rebel and rebel she did—a little. Why was she guarded like this? What was the point? She even said, “I’d rather have someone attack me than be kept in prison.”

  The occasion was a proposed visit to the ballet with two school friends and the mother of one of them. Julia had uttered an unhesitating no. To the West End in the evening by public transport? All right, Miranda’s mother would be with them and Francine would stay the night at Miranda’s and phone when she got there, but suppose …

  “You have to realize you’re in a special position, Francine.”

  “I’m never allowed to forget it.”

  “Do you think I like it?” said Julia. “Do you think it’s for my pleasure?”

  “I didn’t say that. But I don’t think I’m at risk—I mean, who am I at risk from?”

  Then Julia did what she had promised Richard she would never do. She told Francine her theory.

  Francine turned white and began to shiver. “But I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anything.”

  “Francine, you have nothing to worry about if you behave sensibly, if you let us look after you.”

  “Can’t we somehow let him know I didn’t see him? Can’t we—I don’t know—put it in the papers, make the police tell him?”

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  Why did she do it? Julia, that is. Why? Her own explanation for her vigilance she believed. The man thought Francine could identify him, therefore he pursued Francine. If she hadn’t believed that and continued to do what she did she would either have been an evil woman or a fool. Julia was neither. She was no wicked stepmother. At first, and for a long while, she had confidence in that theory of hers, but after a time her motives blurred and her aims became confused.

  For instance, she seldom asked herself what use she would be as a protector, how she, a not particularly athletic woman of nearly fifty, could defend Francine or convince a potential attacker she was a force to be reckoned with. She never carried a weapon or would have dreamed of doing so. By night she slept and Richard slept while Francine was alone in her bedroom, which an intruder might surely have entered as easily as, or more easily than, a school dormitory.

  The baby monitor was long gone. (Francine, who put up with a lot, who was both gentle and stoical, had protested finally about that and demanded its banishment.) Julia, moreover, had no real knowledge of what happened while Francine was at school. She hoped, she trusted, but she didn’t know whether Francine went out in her lunchtime or what she did during free periods or even if she sometimes played truant. Many did—even the earl’s granddaughter.

  All this Julia was vaguely aware of and aware, too, that the time was coming when either Francine must be shut up, institutionalized like some helplessly handicapped girl, or else set free into the world. But it was over just this question that what good sense she had left, and what common sense, collapsed. Francine was her charge, over whom she fancied she had absolute power. She had saved her, preserved her through childhood and adolescence to the approach of womanhood, and she could not relinquish her.

  And during those years she had sacrificed herself for Francine. No one had asked her to do so—Richard had merely asked her to marry him—she had done it entirely of her own volition. But it had been a sacrifice. There had been time, when she was first married, to have a child of her own, she was young enough, but that would have meant in part deserting Francine. She could have pursued one of her two careers—but that would have meant neglecting Francine. Day in, day out, during term time, she had driven Francine the ten miles through heavy traffic to school and the ten miles back and the ten miles to fetch her and the ten miles back. Not once had she been out with her husband in the evening unless they had Francine with them.

  Her marriage, too, she had sacrificed. She had spoiled it for Francine’s sake. For things were never the same again between them after Richard found out that she had broken her promise and told his daughter. It was farcical, that theory of hers, but Francine was only fifteen years old and to lay such a burden on a child who had surely suffered enough, who had suffered a lifetime’s agony before she was eight, that he thought indefensible. Julia he saw with new eyes, as predatory and overweeningly possessive, and as spiteful, too. For what other motive could she have had for telling Francine but malice? The girl had wanted a little freedom, had been, if not rude, a little too direct, and Julia had lashed back with a tale calculated to terrify.

  “Malice?” she said. “Malice? I love Francine. All I want is to make it possible for her to live as happy a life as she can in an imperfect world.”

  “You are going to have to rethink your whole attitude,” he said in a somber tone. “You are going to have to understand that she is growing up and will inevitably grow away.”

  Julia saw it very differently. To Francine she had devoted herself and how could she now wrench herself away or even pave the way for so doing? Besides, there was another aspect to be considered.

  She couldn’t relinquish Francine now, give her up and see her make closer friends and take up other interests more important than her, Julia. With her sacrifice and her self-denial, she had bought her stepdaughter, she had paid a price for her and made her hers. Francine was her stepdaughter, but she was also her possession, a girl she had created out of a frightened child.

  In a way Francine was more her child than if she had given birth to her. And she would fight to keep her.

  9

  One night after his brother had been to see him, had sat by his bed for an hour while they both watched the ward television, Jimmy Brex died. The last of his viable arteries closed up, the substance which lined it finally thickened so that the thread-breadth passage shrank to hair’s-breadth, to nothing, and Jimmy, gasping, in agony, fighting for blood, breath and oxygen, passed out of life. He was sixty-seven.

  The neighbors said he hadn’t wanted to live after his wife died. His brother registered the death, summoned undertakers, fixed up the funeral and invited a chosen few home for a beer, whiskey and crisps after the cremation. His son attended, though virtually silently, surveying the place that was now his, not thinking much of it, but gratified by the possession of property, any property.

  After everyone had gone, Teddy said to Keith, “I’m not evicting you, you needn’t think that. I know this has been your home all your life. But I’d like you to think about being gone by, say, Christmas.”

  It was October. Teddy’s final year at the University of Eastcote had just begun. They were in the living room, among the heavy crowded furniture, with its throws of colored crochet, an antimacassar over the back of an armchair, a shawl draped across the settee. Lilies, a wreath of them, brought unexpectedly b
y someone, lay wilting in the dust on the coffee table. Keith, heavily sedated with Chivas Regal, but recovering fast and absolutely on the ball, favored Teddy with a slow smile. His drooping jowls and the long, now gray, mustache, gave him the look of a benign walrus. His eyes remained sharp, the eyebrows flaring in Mephistophelean arcs.

  “This house belongs to me,” he said. “To me. It’s mine. You needn’t look like that. Well, I mean, you can if you like. It’s all one to me. My dad left me this house. My mum had a life interest and when she died it reverted to me. That’s the term, ‘reverted.’ Okay?”

  “You’re lying,” Teddy said. He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Let me explain. I don’t fuckin’ see why I should, but I will. I might as well. Your dad, God rest his soul, poor sod, your dad wasn’t my dad’s son. My mum was carrying when he took up with her. Well, you can guess the rest. He was okay about it, but as for getting the house, well, you’ve got to draw the line, right?”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Teddy.

  “Too bad. That’s your problem. I got the deeds in the bank and that’s more proof than anything you believe in. However …” Keith repeated the word which he seemed to like the sound of. “However, I’m less of a bastard than what you are. Surprise, surprise. And since you’re my nephew, or my half-nephew, not much doubt about that, I’m not turning you out the way you’d have got shot of me. You’d have kicked me out at Christmas, but as far as I’m concerned you can stop here so long as you’re up at that fuckin’ college. How about that?”

  Keith wasn’t averse to further explanations. His father had told him the facts of Jimmy’s paternity when Jimmy was twenty-three and he was twenty-one. Brex senior was a magnanimous man and had brought up the elder son as his own. Property, though, and the inheritance of property, was another matter. The house that he had saved for and for years had a mortgage on must go to his own natural son.

  “I might make a will and leave it to someone else in the family,” said Keith. “I reckon I’ve got a bunch of cousins somewhere. Or I might leave it to you. If you behave yourself. Show a bit of respect. Clean the place, bring me up a morning cuppa.” He started laughing at his own wit.

  “Why was I never told?”

  “Why wasn’t you what? Do me a favor. Your mum and dad was alive, you want to remember that. I let them live here and now I’m letting you. You’re fuckin’ lucky if you did but know it. A lot of men in my position’d expect you to pay rent.”

  Teddy walked out, slamming the door behind him. He went into the dining room and sat down on the floor by the woodpile. He had intended, if not tonight, tomorrow, to begin clearing out the living room and his parents’ bedroom. Maybe get someone in to clear it, a second-hand furniture dealer who might give him something for the bedroom suite and the battered sofa. That was not now possible, might never be possible.

  He felt overwhelmed by ugliness. Everything in the house was ugly with the exception of one or two objects in this room and these, his own drawings in their pale wooden frames, his row of books between the bookends he had carved, now seemed to him pathetic. His tools weren’t ugly, the workbench where the sideboard had been, the two planes, the rack of saws, the hammers and the drills, but they were simply utilitarian. The smell seemed more than usually pervasive, penetrating even here. It was too cold to open the windows. The house was a hideous dump, but he had thought it was his, it was all he had. Only he didn’t have it. Keith did, Keith who was one of the ugliest things in it, whose bloated body and soggy face, begrimed hands and broken, yellowing teeth, offended him every time he saw him.

  For a little while he seriously considered leaving. But where could he go? At his university it was possible to live in one of the two overcrowded halls of residence, but not in one’s third year. There was no way he could afford to rent even a single room. His grant was inadequate for just the bare living and traveling. It occurred to him—as a matter of interest, he didn’t care that much—that never in his life had he bought a new garment or had one bought for him. He’d never been abroad or to a London theater or into any restaurant more up-market than the Burger King.

  His plan, scarcely formed, taken for granted, had been to sell the house. Clear it out, do it up, paint the outside and sell it. It was probably worth about as little as any thirties-vintage semi anywhere in London, but it would still fetch thousands and thousands, maybe as much as forty thousand pounds.

  But it was Keith’s.

  Teddy kept the ring in the pocket of his only other jacket, the zipper one that hung on a hook on the inside of the door. He held it in the palm of his hand and looked at it. He still hadn’t had it valued. If he tried to sell it the jeweler would think he had stolen it. He could try pawning it. Teddy knew very little about pawning things but pawnshops existed, he had seen them, and he had an idea a pawnbroker would give him approximately half what the ring was worth. That would be a way of getting it valued. He wasn’t going to sell it.

  He would never sell it. Money wasn’t all that much of a serious problem, anyway. He could manage, he always had. While Keith continued to provide some of their food he wouldn’t starve. And he could go on making things and learning to make things, and finish his course and get his degree.

  He had to make something for his degree submission, some artifact that would be a sample or demonstration of his particular skills. Most of the others would produce a coffee table or a desk and there was someone who was a gifted wood carver, who Teddy knew would be making a mermaid for a ship’s figurehead. His talent was in inlaid work, but he also fancied himself as an artist in painted furniture. He would make a mirror. His would have a frame of pale wood, sycamore or the darker walnut, inlaid with holly and yew, painted blue and gray and gold.

  If only it didn’t have to be here, in this place where everything his eye alighted on was a deformity or a vulgar affront. Outside the window even the Edsel was covered up in plastic under its four-legged plastic-roofed shelter. Keith’s motorbike had a black bin-liner over its handlebars and another covering its saddle. The place was a storehouse for plastic bags, there was even one drifting about on the concrete, where grayish blades of grass struggled up through the cracks. Another had plastered itself up against the chain-link fencing, its corners poking through into next door as if it were trying to escape. Teddy drew the curtains.

  Keith was asleep in the living room. He had been drinking more since his brother died, you could say he was drinking for two, Jimmy’s share as well as his own. Quite often he didn’t go to bed, but came back from whatever job he had been doing, covered up the bike with the bin-liners and moved directly into the living room with his two plastic bags, one containing the smaller and more portable of his plumber’s tools, the other his preferred Chivas Regal and Guinness for the evening. The television went on, Keith uncapped his first can or bottle and lit his first cigarette for some hours. His customers refused to let him smoke in their houses.

  When he saw Teddy looking, he offered an explanation. “I’m not leaving no drink in this place while I’m out working. I wouldn’t trust you round my Chivas further than I could fuckin’ throw you.”

  Teddy made no answer. What was there to say? He never touched alcohol and Keith knew it as well as he did himself. For some reason Keith, who in days gone by had behaved rather better to him than his parents had, since their departure had become abusive, foul-mouthed and unremittingly surly. Teddy didn’t care. He made no conjectures either as to whether this happened because Keith had in fact loved his brother and missed him or was disturbed by having no one to look after him and, occasionally, to talk to. It was nothing to him. He watched Keith, sometimes from the open doorway, and especially when the whiskey and the Guinness had done their work, not out of interest or sympathy or pity, but with a kind of fascinated disgust.

  Often he stood there for ten or fifteen minutes, just looking. Not only at Keith but at Keith’s surroundings, absorbing the dreadful room, the curtains coming off their hooks and pinn
ed together with some clip or clamp from Keith’s tool-bag, the dust so thick that it grew off surfaces like fur, the never-emptied ashtrays, the saucers, tin lids, glass jars full of ash and fag-ends, the sagging broken furniture and square of carpet on which the seemingly floral pattern was in fact made by drink stains, mud brown on sewage gray, the discarded lampshade and bare bulb hanging from a knotted lead, until his eyes finally fixed themselves on Keith himself.

  His snoring was worse now than sixteen years ago. He trumpeted, he snorted, and every few minutes jolted and jumped as if jabbed with an electric probe. Then the rhythmic snoring was reestablished, regular, long drawn-out, rattling through Keith’s nasal passages and expelled in a kind of juddering whistle. Once—but once only—he came fully to his senses and sitting up yelled, “What are you fuckin’ lookin’ at?”

  It never happened again. Keith was too stunned and bludgeoned by his favored mixture. He lay with his mouth wide open, his arms hanging over the arms of the chair and his big round belly, covered by a moth-eaten green wool sweater, reared up like some grassy hill in which speculators have dug holes. He never used a glass but drank straight from the can. The whiskey he poured into a yogurt pot, though where it came from Teddy didn’t know. Crazy to imagine anyone living here ever eating yogurt. Usually one plastic bag lay on his knees, a couple of others on the floor beside him. Quite often he didn’t even bother to take the whiskey out of the bag it had been bought in, but pouring it out, lifted bottle and enveloping bag together.

  It might be midnight, but the television would still be on. Keith would be there all night. If he needed to pee he would never make it up the stairs to the bathroom but would stagger out into the front garden. Teddy often smelled it. The yuppies next door thought it was cats. Keith snorted and gave one of his violent galvanic starts. By coincidence the characters in the Accident and Emergency sitcom on the television were on the point of administering heart-stimulating shocks to a patient on a trolley. Teddy switched it off and went to bed.