by Ruth Rendell
Instead he bought the house. Orcadia Cottage was its name, but it was known to the Post Office as 7a Orcadia Place. Marc Syre had not owned but rented it and now it had come on to the market.
“A curious world we live in,” said Franklin to his love, “where one can afford a house but not a picture of a house. That must tell us some profound truth. But what, I wonder?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Frankie, how should I know? I hope it’ll be all right.”
What Harriet had meant was, if you buy it will Marc find out where I am? She didn’t say this aloud, for Franklin knew nothing of the two thousand pounds. But as it turned out, by some bizarre coincidence, if coincidence it was, on the day Franklin completed the purchase of Orcadia Cottage Marc Syre died. Already full of heroin, he sucked some LSD according to his custom on a lump of sugar and, reacting uncharacteristically, jumped to his death off Beachy Head.
Harriet would have gone to the funeral if she had been able to find out where it was taking place. It would have been a way of getting her picture in the papers. She could get into the papers now without risking her life. Simon Alpheton went, was on the front page of the Daily Mail, and the Tate Gallery bought Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place for an undisclosed sum.
As to the house, Franklin said he had bought it for her. He must have meant for her to live in, for it was kept in his name. He furnished it with the eighteenth-century furniture he was particularly fond of, taking a very long time about it, to get it quite right. Harriet was not consulted. Harriet was not married either. Anthea Merton refused to divorce Franklin and made him wait five years, after which her consent was not required.
People said “Ooh!” and “Aah!” at the sight of Franklin’s house. Because of the high wall between it and the pavement it was almost invisible from the street, but passersby peered between the bars of the wrought-iron gate set under its brick arch. They saw the pastel-gray front door and the bay trees on the shallow stone steps, the little medallion after Della Robbia peeping out between the green or yellow or red fronds of creeper and they saw the flowers that were everywhere from March till October, filling the border and cascading from the window boxes and spilling over the rims of the round stone tubs.
Franklin saw to the flowers. He was a great gardener. The Virginia creeper made a glorious backcloth in spring and summer for the red impatiens, the orange begonias and the purple petunias, and in autumn for the white chrysanthemums. He planted scyllas and specie tulips and Star of Bethlehem in the majolica pots and a daphne in the round bed where Marc Syre’s suitcase had come down. Harriet took very little notice. Gardening wasn’t among her interests. Harriet was interested in very little except Harriet and her appearance, and a certain kind of young man.
She had accepted the house and moved into it because it was a house and somewhere to live, and be safe and looked after, but she had no sentimental feelings for it. Its beauty had never much struck her when she was living in it with Marc Syre and it didn’t later. It was her own that was her principal concern and, ever since she was fourteen, a long time ago now, she had looked into every mirror that she passed. The mirrors in Orcadia Cottage had reflected her own adoring image at her a dozen times a day and the mirrors in Chesterton Road and through the twenty-three years of her marriage a different set of mirrors in Orcadia Cottage did the same just as often.
Franklin commented on her habit before he left for work that morning when he caught her sitting up in the four-poster bed they still shared and gazing at herself in the dressing-table glass. The wondrous hair, dyed now, still fanned out to frame her small white face in a cloud of crimson froth. “Why are you always looking at yourself?” said Franklin irritably. Nearing seventy now, he was rather shrunken and dried-up, though spry as ever. “What on earth is the point at your age?”
“I’m not always looking at myself,” said Harriet, who thought this kind of defense would make people believe themselves mistaken. “I don’t look at myself any more than anyone else does. You look at yourself.”
“Only to shave. I suppose you like what you see.” He laughed a little, as if this were odd enough to provoke mirth. “I suppose you must do. How extraordinary.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Harriet.
She had liked him once, for a year or two. From that moment when they met in Holland Park Avenue the idea of all the money he must have had dazzled her. But love had never come into it. By the time she and he had lived in Orcadia Cottage for five years Harriet no longer had the slightest interest in marrying him. She had done so because what else was there to do? He was her meal ticket and landlord and clothes voucher and replacer, endlessly, in series, of the money she had brought away in the suitcase with her from this very house. Sometimes she thought he had never forgiven her, not for taking him from Anthea, but for the consequent separation from O’Hara.
Franklin came back into the bedroom with her coffee and the newspapers, The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Ham and High. He put the coffee cup on the bedside cabinet and the papers on the bed in front of her. This was typical of him, to insult her, then placate her. Not that she was a reader of newspapers, more a dipper-into a particular section of them, but he didn’t know that. Or did he know and not care?
She watched him. All their married life, all their life together, before going to bed at night he had taken all the contents out of his trouser pockets and laid them on her dressing-table: invariably a large white handkerchief, house keys and car keys, his checkbook folded in the middle and his loose change, and occasionally a train ticket or a business card. She hated this litter deposited there among her silver hairbrushes, her flagon of Eau d’Issy and her earrings hanging on their silver-branched earring tree.
He had other maddening habits. Before sitting down in an armchair or on the sofa he threw all the cushions on to the floor. Yet he had bought the cushions himself and insisted on their being there. Picking them up again was left to her. She watched him putting all that stuff back into his pockets. They bulged and eventually sagged, ruining his expensive Huntsman suits.
She looked away and directed her gaze to the “Services” columns of the Ham and High.
* * *
It began with Otto Neuling. He was the first of them. And perhaps it was because Marc Syre had cured her of love, or being rejected by him had cured her. Marc had been demanding, exigent, critical and, no matter how she had obeyed him and done her best to please him, he had still had other girls, dozens of them, hundreds probably, anyone he wanted. Otto had demanded nothing except sex and when they went out on his bike her paying her share, just going Dutch, really. And he never had enough of sex, he never got tired and had, she was sure, been faithful while it lasted.
She gave him up when Franklin came along. Nothing else was feasible. Otto disappeared and for a few years he wasn’t replaced. She knew what she wanted: another Otto, another strong, virile, vigorous, insatiable young working man, without much in the way of brains. After all, and she had never been slow to admit it, she hadn’t much in the way of brains herself. Franklin wasn’t sexy. Franklin wasn’t much to look at and he had a lot of brains. He was intelligent and all his friends were intelligent and, as far as sex went, Harriet wouldn’t have given them a second glance.
He expected her to do everything in the household, even the housework. Once they were married, that is. Before they were married she was still his goddess, up on her pedestal, the icon of Orcadia Place, to whom tributes were almost daily brought and for whom endless sacrifices were made. Then, after their little hole-in-the-corner wedding—Harriet in the Fortuny dress and a black hat—he changed. He even said so, in a quotation from something or other. “Men are April when they woo and December when they wed.” He smiled, presumably to soften the brutality.
Anthea’s alimony was costing him a fortune. And keeping up the Campden Hill Square house. Or so he said. The least Harriet could do was the cleaning and the laundry, and see to sending for electricians and plumbers and decorat
ors and roofers and carpenters when the services of such artisans were required.
“You don’t keep a bitch and bark yourself,” said Franklin.
“Pity I’m not an Irish setter,” said Harriet and had the satisfaction of seeing him wince.
Cooking, which she would quite have enjoyed, he wouldn’t allow her to do. Franklin said she couldn’t cook and she wasn’t hygienic, he wasn’t in the business of getting food poisoning. Salmonella and listeria were unheard of in those days, but that was what he meant. They ate out. They went to restaurants on a daily basis long before anyone else in London did and became trendsetters.
He usually laughed or smiled pleasantly whenever he made a particularly nasty remark. Smiling made it all right. As when he said, “I intend to take separate holidays from you. I shall go away on my own in the spring and the autumn. You can do as you like.”
And when he said, “I didn’t want to get married, you know. I married you because I’m a man of honor and you were my mistress. Some would say my views are out of date, but I dispute that. The apparent change is only superficial. I reasoned that no one would want my leavings so, for your sake, the decent thing was to make an honest woman of you.”
That was what did it. Next day, or soon after, they had a new carpet fitted in his study. The carpet fitter was fat and sixty and his assistant skinny and sixteen, and wouldn’t do at all. But the door had to come off and couldn’t be put back until a quarter of an inch had been planed off its base. A suitable carpenter was named by the carpet fitter and his phone number supplied. He came two days later.
He might have been Otto’s brother or his clone. His name was Lennie and he was about twenty. Harriet knew that you were supposed to give a workman cups of tea, but tea went nowhere when it came to helping a man lose his head and his inhibitions. After the door was back on its hinges she made dry martinis for herself and Lennie. Not only had he never before tasted a dry martini, he hadn’t tried gin either. Its effect, combined with Harriet’s winning ways, was startling and after half an hour and two more martinis they were in bed.
Lennie came back several times a week for a couple of months. Then one day he asked her in a rather resentful tone if she realized he went without his lunch in order to come and see her.
But what finished things was when she said, “Why is it only working-class men are called Lennie and never, ever, anyone else?”
For a while she was without a lover. Just as she was starting to feel restless Franklin did something to solve her difficulty. He bought a computer. Not quite a prototype but almost. Anthea had remarried and he no longer had to be even moderately careful of what he spent. The computer was big and unwieldy and took up most of his desktop, and he needed a new double point inserted in the wall as outlets for the power it required. “You’ll have to find an electrician,” said Franklin.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Running the household is your business. Try the one we had before.”
The one they had before had moved or was dead. At any rate, dialing his number resulted in the unobtainable signal. Harriet looked in the paper. Among the small ads she found a man who offered his services under the line, “Stephen will do any electrical work, big or small.” She called the number and Stephen came, even younger than Lennie, darker, thinner, but otherwise just as satisfactory.
In the years that passed, the eighties and early nineties, a stream of young working men came to Orcadia Cottage. Not at Franklin’s request, of course, there is a limit to the number of electrical points that are required, door bases that need planing and tap washers replacing. Harriet became very blasé and brazen about the whole thing, simply inventing a task for the man she had summoned—the shower head dripped, there was a smell of gas—and after a while scarcely bothering even with that.
Of course, it didn’t always work. The handsomest young man ever to arrive on the Orcadia Cottage doorstep, a television engineer, was gay, and a likely-sounding electrician astounded Harriet by turning out to be a woman. Not everyone who responded to her phone calls was attractive to her, but on the whole they were what she wanted and apparently she was what they wanted. In recent years she had had more refusals than she was used to and she couldn’t understand why. It accounted for her scrutinizing herself even more closely in mirrors—though she could hardly give that reason to Franklin.
After all, she was only a little over fifty. People said she looked ten years younger. She had kept her figure. Any possessor of her hair color was fortunate because everyone thought it was dyed anyway, so when you did start dyeing it no one noticed. Harriet ran her fingers through it and took a good long look at herself in the mirror. If she turned her head and looked upward yearningly, if she extended one white arm, if she parted her lips and gazed at some unseen other face, she was Harriet in Orcadia Place again, unchanged, no different.
Back to the Ham and High. How about a landscape gardener? Not a very good idea. He might be middle-class, he might be a woman. Besides, anyone summoned to look at this garden, so exquisitely maintained by Franklin, would think its owner mad to want to change it. Double glazing? Impossible on the Orcadia Cottage windows. Perhaps she should try the Yellow Pages instead. But there was something so official and respectable about that. The small ads were best and had seldom failed her.
How about “Hardwood floors laid to your specification, pine, cherry or oak finish, incredibly low prices”? Calling the number would fetch someone called Zak. Harriet liked the sound of it. She dialed the number. Zak seemed short of work, sounded eager and said he would come that day at noon sharp. His accent told her he was eminently suitable, the timbre of his voice that he was young.
Sometimes she wondered if Franklin did much the same thing. Well, not the same thing, but had a girlfriend or a series of girlfriends. Those separate holidays he insisted on taking, for instance. The huge sums of money he spent. When she had a young man like this Zak calling and then the guarantee of his dropping in twice a week for weeks, she didn’t care about Franklin. He could have a woman if he liked, it was nothing to her. But when she was alone or her latest invitation had met with no success, she cared. She wondered who it could be, if it was someone they knew, a so-called friend. And she would review the members of their circle, his business acquaintances, that relative of Simon Alpheton’s who had been to dinner once or twice, the woman from the flats in the mews called Mildred Something he always stopped to gossip with.
After a while she got up. She stripped the bed, fetched clean sheets from the airing cupboard. Before she had her bath and washed her hair and dressed she would run the vacuum cleaner around, dust a little, pick some of Franklin’s flowers for the vases. She would see to it that there was ice and put the gin bottle and the glasses in the fridge. Harriet had never become lackadaisical about things like this. Her young men deserved a good time too, the best kind of time she could give them, it was only fair. Besides, she liked to see their cautious wonderment as they cast covert glances around the house, climbed the stairs, came in here.
For them it must be the experience of a lifetime, something to look back on when they were married and living in a council tower block in Hounslow.
15
Julia had a great many friends. Women, of course. It was her opinion that a married woman’s men friends should be her husband’s friends, encountered only in his company. So for her David and Susan Stanark were “our” friends. Hers were women contemporaries gathered up along life’s highway, but mostly in the early stages of the march. She even still retained one that she had been at school with.
This was Laura, a PR consultant, almost her precise contemporary, having been born in the same month of the same year as herself, but two days before. Rosemary she had found an instant rapport with on her first day at teacher training college. Noele, the buyer for a prestigious dress shop, had been her first husband’s sister-in-law; Jocelyn, the civil servant in the Home Office, she had met at Noele’s wedding and, as Julia herself put it, they had
immediately “clicked.” Della, the most recent acquisition, was the aunt of Francine’s friend Isabel and had no job. Had she belonged to a less elevated social stratum she would have been called a housewife.
All these women were or had been married and all but Noele and Susan had children. Julia lunched with them and held long telephone conversations with them. Occasionally one of them would come to lunch with her at home. She spent evenings with one or other of them, always providing, of course, that Richard was at home to be with Francine.
Many of their discussions concerned the difficulties of bringing up children, especially when those children became adolescents. This was a stage of life they had all entered in the past few years or were about to enter, being of that sort of age, the late forties. And although Julia was not a mother but a mere stepmother, they tended to defer to her opinion. She was, after all, or had been, a psychotherapist specializing in children’s problems. Perhaps, too, they felt some generosity was owed to Julie who had, and often told them she had, given up her own chance of children to devote herself to Francine.
This stepdaughter they all knew to be a profoundly difficult child. They hadn’t personally seen any evidence of this, but they knew from their experience with their own children that the young can be perfectly charming to visitors, while monsters of rudeness and recalcitrance at home alone with their parents. Francine, Julia told them, could of course be excused, they mustn’t think she was blaming her, it wasn’t her fault, but she was a damaged girl. It was Julia’s mission to lead her painstakingly toward the possibility of a normal life one day—the possibility only.
