A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  Julia said, had been saying for years, that the man would think she had seen him. She had seen him, the top of his head and the tips of his toes. Her father had told her, it must have been about a hundred times by now, that the man wasn’t looking for her, that it was all nonsense and a complete fabrication that he had ever hunted for her. As a heroin addict, he was probably dead, anyway. It was another Dr. Hill’s house he had thought he was in, not theirs.

  Francine wasn’t afraid of the man and never really had been. She didn’t want to know who he was or where he was or what had happened to him. There was a cliché often uttered about finding out the cause of someone’s death: “That won’t bring them back.” She thought of it often, that knowing who the man was, catching him, punishing him, removing him from being a danger to others, wouldn’t bring her mother back.

  Julia’s psychotherapy technique had been to ask her clients how they would use three wishes. She had asked Francine that once and she had asked Richard once, but since giving up her profession she had never asked it again. If she had asked, Francine would have said that the first would be have that day not happen and, if that wasn’t possible, to be made to forget it; the second to go up to Oxford; the third she was too polite and too kind to say.

  Except to herself. For her third wish was for Julia to go away. She didn’t wish her any harm. The last thing she wanted was for her to die, of death she had seen enough, but maybe to meet a really nice, good-looking, wealthy man and go off with him.

  It was Holly’s suggestion. Anything to do with sex usually came from Holly. “She’s fat and she’s old, but she’s still quite good-looking,” said Holly. “Some old man might fancy her.”

  “She’s not fat,” said Francine.

  “Oh, come on. She’s a size sixteen. At least. A big fat fish. She used to be a goldfish, but now she’s a dolphin. And one day she’ll be a whale.”

  “Dolphins and whales aren’t fishes, Holly.”

  “Marine creatures, then. She’s a big fat marine creature.”

  The only way to deal with Julia was to agree with her, acquiesce, and quietly do your own thing. Insofar as you could. Anything else, anything in the nature of an argument or a discussion, wore you out. You might be sixteen to her forty-nine, but you still got worn out first. Francine had reached a point where she didn’t really speak to Julia much, just said yes and no and thank you and smiled.

  This didn’t stop Julia saying, and saying with variations quite often, “Now, Francine, what is the matter with you? What have I done? If I’ve done something to upset you I would really like to know what it is.”

  “You haven’t done anything, Julia,” Francine always said.

  “Because if I have it’s better to have these things out in the open, to confront them and talk them through, you know.”

  “But there’s nothing, Julia.”

  “You’re very young, you know, not much more than a child. Well, you’re a child to me and yet you often seem old beyond your years. You act like an old woman. Are you aware of that?”

  Francine didn’t answer. If she acted like a young one, would Julia like it any better? Like Miranda, who boasted that her new boyfriend was the fourth one she’d slept with? Or Kate, who kept a pack of Ecstasy tablets in her desk as she, Francine, kept Smarties? She felt in lots of ways much older than her contemporaries. She had suffered more than they, had lost more, had seen things that she knew most people would never see in a whole lifetime, had dreams so bad that she could tell no one about them, had been set apart by fate.

  Which of them, for instance, if she saw a red admiral would see the long red streak on its black velvet wings as a splash of blood, flown there from a murdered woman’s wound? Only she of all the school had shivered, been momentarily struck dumb, frozen and staring, when shown by a visiting police lecturer, a kindly, quiet man, the pistol he was issued with in occasional emergency situations.

  Her voice had soon come back. But she was afraid of a reversion to that loss of the power of speech which had afflicted her for so many months after the murder. For years she was afraid, when she woke up in the mornings, of having no voice, of being unable to utter a word, and the first thing she did was to speak to herself aloud. To say her own name and the day and date. “Francine, it’s Thursday, June the fourteenth.”

  She no longer did it, but she still dreamed of loss of voice. In one dream, a very recent one, she was in a museum and, entering an inner gallery, found herself in a hall of weapons, arrows, javelins, harpoons, pikes, cudgels, carbines, hand grenades. She hadn’t known she knew of such things, still less what they were called, but she awoke moaning, stuffing the sheet into her mouth to keep the sounds from her father.

  Would she always do this? Was this her fate?

  It must have been her father, working on Julia, whose efforts led to the order of release. School was too far away for her to go there and come home by public transport, and reasonable for Julia to continue taking and fetching her by car. Most of the girls were brought to school by car. But most were allowed to go home with another girl after school if they wanted to, perhaps stay overnight in another girl’s home. Francine never had been, but now that changed. She might go, in their company and supervised, to Holly’s house or Miranda’s or Isabel’s. They might come to her. She was freed from another constraint and allowed to go out with them—so long as she was home before dark.

  Julia was the ideal mother. She kept the house exquisitely and she was always buying Francine little presents: a new kind of honeycomb soap from Neal’s Yard, boxes of notelets, Calvin Klein perfume, paperback books, CDs. Francine had clean sheets put on her bed every other day and clean towels in her bathroom. Her favorite food was always prepared for her. She was wakened in the mornings well in advance of the time she was due to get up and last thing at night a hot drink was made for her.

  Julia and she had many long interviews and serious talks. It was a great trust, Julia said, as Francine learned to be responsible for herself. It must happen slowly and gradually. She made Francine feel as if it were she who had committed a crime and were being let out on parole.

  “There isn’t anyone waiting out there to harm me, Julia,” Francine said gently. “You know there isn’t. Perhaps there was once, but not now.”

  “I am not saying there is,” said Julia. “I no longer believe that, the danger of that is past. It’s of you, not him, that I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean?” She hated this.

  Julia explained. Her stepdaughter, in her view, was innocent, naive, fragile, incapable of taking care of herself, the reverse of streetwise. Her history and one terrible experience had made her so. Julia didn’t say, perhaps she didn’t know, that her fear of one particular man had been replaced by her fear of many, those men she read about in newspapers and saw on television, who mugged women or abducted them or raped them. But she lectured Francine on the habits and desires of strange men, on not lying to one’s parents, on punctuality, keeping one’s word and choosing one’s friends carefully. “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” she said, quoting the Apostle Paul.

  For Christmas, among other presents, she had given Francine a mobile phone. Young people, she believed, loved things like that, anything that demanded a little technological expertise, this button to press, then that one, this antenna to pull out, these numbers to juggle with. The idea, of course, was that the girl should use it to phone home to give them some idea of where she was and especially if there was a chance of her being delayed. She would love possessing something so grown-up that would give her a chance to behave responsibly. Julia said she saw the ownership of the mobile phone as the next essential step in Francine’s slow metamorphosis.

  Francine thanked her politely and said that some time or other she would read the instructions that came with it. If she did, she never used the phone. Challenged, she said she couldn’t get on with it, she was baffled by it. She was sorry because it had been a present and she didn’t want to hurt Juli
a’s feelings when she had been so thoughtful. Would Julia perhaps like to use it herself?

  One day in February, when she had been out with Holly, she got home an hour later than she had said. It was still only six in the evening, but nevertheless she was an hour late. Of course she had not been given a key to the door, Julia would never have agreed to that, and she had to ring the bell. Trembling, her mouth working, Julia pulled her inside and struck her.

  It wasn’t a hard blow. If you have never in your life hit anyone across the face, when you come to do it your effort will be ineffectual, a glancing smack that can be easily dodged. Francine dodged, but not enough, and Julia’s hand caught the side of her neck. Holding her hand to the place where she had been struck, Francine stared in breathless silence at her now-weeping stepmother. The tears gushed down Julia’s face and she moaned.

  “I won’t tell my father,” Francine said.

  Not “dad” or “daddy” but “my father.” It was the first time.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” sobbed Julia. “I don’t know what came over me. I’ve been so frightened, I was nearly out of my mind.”

  You are out of it was what Francine would have liked to say, but she never said things like that to anyone. “You mustn’t do violent things to me,” she said. “Or say violent things. Please.”

  And then she went upstairs to her room, but when Richard came home she came down again and asked him for a key to the front door.

  “I thought you had one,” he said untruthfully, glancing at his wife.

  Julia said, “You should have asked. Why didn’t you ask?”

  “Of course you must have a key,” Richard said. “You can have my spare one and I’ll have another cut.”

  Francine went to a disco with Miranda, but she didn’t like it much. All those teenage years when others had gradually been indoctrinated into the enjoyment of noise she had lived in unnatural quiet. The disco was too much for her and the club where she went with Holly and Holly’s male cousin she found boring. At home she was accustomed, had been for ages, to drinking wine with meals and she thought alcoholic lemonade, not to mention Bacardi and blackcurrant, revolting. The cousin, though, she liked, or thought she did until, while they were dancing, he put his hands all over her.

  Richard was proud of Francine when she was offered a place at Oxford consequent upon her securing satisfactory A Levels. Of course she would do well. He had been told several times she was the brightest girl of her year. And he marveled that her intellect was unaffected by what had happened to her. Every aspect of his beautiful, clever daughter seemed untouched by it. Several years had passed since either of them had made reference to the murder of her mother. Francine was learning to forget, had perhaps already forgotten. When he looked at her he saw a happy, well-adjusted girl, not particularly vivacious perhaps, rather quiet and contained. But that was her nature. He wouldn’t have liked a bouncing hoyden—he used the old-fashioned word to himself—like Miranda, or Holly, that sly little flirt with her sidelong glances.

  Much of Francine’s contentment and adjustment to normal life must be due to Julia. He could see that now. Protecting and sheltering her had been the wisest thing. Possibly, at one time, she had gone too far, but that was over now. Francine had the key to the door. Francine had gradually been brought out into the world and was behaving impeccably in it If there was anything he could be certain of it was that his daughter would firmly say no to any drugs that were offered her and to any importunate young man and—it went without saying—to any behavior at all on the wrong side of the law.

  For this he had Julia to thank. Unfortunately, he had ceased to like her very much, certainly to love her. But he must be grateful. He could see now that Julia had known best. Julia had been Francine’s guiding star. So that when Francine said something to him that might be construed as indirect criticism of Julia he was taken aback. They were alone. Julia occasionally went out by herself these days just as he occasionally did, though they had never yet left Francine at home alone. She had gone to some reunion at her old college.

  Francine was curled up in an armchair, reading a novel. But when he glanced at her he saw that she wasn’t reading, but had lifted her eyes and was staring across the room. He looked away and looked again a few minutes afterward and she had still not returned to her book. Before he could ask her what was wrong, she said in a clipped, forced voice, “I will go to university, won’t I?”

  That was unexpected. “Of course you will. Why do you ask?”

  She didn’t reply. “Julia won’t stop me?”

  “Julia loves you, Francine. She only wants what’s best for you. She always has.”

  Francine said no more for a while and Richard was troubled. Whenever his daughter showed unease his guilt, these days dormant, came to life. If he had not out of his vanity directed that entry to be put into the telephone book, if he had appeared as plain Hill, R., if he had not been a slave to pride, his dear wife Jennifer, whom he was sure he would have adored to this day, would still be alive, his daughter would have grown up a normal, happy girl and as for Julia … “What is it?” he said.

  Francine’s large dark eyes were a little too bright. “If I’m never allowed to go out alone and I’m never here in the house alone and I always have to be home before dark, how am I going to go up to Oxford where I’ll have to be on my own?” She added, “I’m only asking. If it sounds sarcastic I don’t mean it to.”

  Julia was—the word that came into his head was “grooming”—was training her up for that. Gradually. Getting her used to life and the world out there and social usage. Or was she? Was she really?

  “How am I going to live alone? Because that’s what I’ll be doing, won’t I? How am I going to be allowed to look after myself with no one to watch over me the way Julia does?”

  A memory came to him of reading about people who had been accompanied to their universities by parents or guardians or selected companions. It was a nightmare idea—or was it? He said tentatively, “You know, you could take a year out.”

  It was Julia’s suggestion. She had made it to him the evening before. “Let her go up to Oxford in October twelvemonth, let her take a gap year. They’re all doing it, it’s the fashionable thing.”

  “What and loaf about at home here? Doing what?”

  Julia hadn’t replied. “And when her year is up I was thinking, well, I was wondering—could we possibly move to Oxford so that we’d still all be together?”

  “And what am I supposed to do every day? Commute?”

  But after a moment’s thought Richard had agreed to the first part of Julia’s proposal. Francine should take a year out. If she wanted to. She hadn’t replied. He put it to her again.

  “Holly is going to do that,” Francine said thoughtfully.

  Richard had never thought he would bless that little hussy Holly for anything. He smiled.

  12

  When he had taken the last bagful of wood out with him and the dining room was empty, Teddy cleaned it. He took down the curtains and threw them into his parents’ bedroom. He swept the floor and washed the French windows. Many of his drawings were already up on the walls and now he added to them another design in a frame he had made from the mahogany from the dining table. The rest of it had been transformed into a low circular table. The thick polish and dirt-encrusted surface planed away, he had left the wood its natural shade of a warm golden russet and inlaid the border with ebony and maple, pieces of which he had picked up at college when no one was looking. This table, his bed and the books between the book-ends were the room’s sole furnishings, but the rest of it was filled up with his workbench and his tools.

  Keith hadn’t been into the dining room since the day the policeman had come and told him Jimmy had been taken to hospital. What brought him in now Teddy didn’t really know. Possibly, having returned from his last call-out of the evening via Oddbins, he had been made suspicious by the light behind the French windows. Undimmed by the thick velvet curtain
s, it must have streamed out across the concrete, a floodlighting to meet Keith as he wobbled in on the motorbike.

  Teddy switched off the light. The back garden went pitch dark, as Keith had turned off the motorbike lights when he came through the gate and there were no lights on next door. The yuppies, Teddy was pretty sure, were out. He heard Keith stumble as he blundered to the back door. Once he was inside, Teddy turned his light on again and returned to his drawing. It was January and the mirror he was designing had to be finished and submitted by the last day of April.

  Keith didn’t knock. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to do so. Teddy heard how he opened the door. He turned the handle, then stepped back and aimed a mighty kick at the door. It flew open and its handle hit the wall behind. He stood there, breathing heavily from the effort. The bags he let fall on to the floor as if their weight was finally too much for him. Whatever he might have come to say, he didn’t say it. His mouth fell open. “What’s happened to the furniture?”

  “What furniture?” said Teddy.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ give me what furniture. My dad’s table and chairs and sideboard as was in here. What you done with it? Old Chance had to take that to pieces and put it together again to get it in here.”

  “Then it can’t have got out, can it?”

  Keith picked up his bags and retreated to the kitchen. While there he must have taken a swig of whiskey. He came back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “If you’ve sold that furniture I’ll have the law on you. That was mine, like everything else in this house.”

  “It’s got legs,” said Teddy, “so it can walk, can’t it? What else are legs for? It squeezed through the doorways and walked out in the street and got on a bus and now it’s living in a second-hand shop in Edgware.”

  Keith put up his fists and came at him the way Jimmy had done all those years ago. Teddy stood up. He was about three inches taller than Keith, as well as a couple of lifetimes younger. “Don’t try that,” he said.