by Ruth Rendell
“The reality is,” Julia said to Susan, “that I am the only one who can keep her from shutting herself up in her own room from morning till night. That is what she would do at the weekends if she had her way. She has to be prevented from disappearing into herself.”
And to Jocelyn she said, “Responsibility is something she simply can’t handle. I mean, for instance, she has her own front-door key, of course she has, but she hardly ever uses it. She expects me to be there waiting in the hall to open the door for her. It’s for reassurance, I know that, it’s a facet of her total dependence on me.”
Noele, the childless one, received different explanations. “The way to teach independence, contrary to popular belief, is not to load the subject with tasks too challenging for her fragile capabilities, but to build infinitesimally, day by day, a structure of confidence.”
“How on earth?” said Noele.
“One way of crafting this structure is by requiring a series of small duties from the subject, then increasing and enlarging them until whole areas of responsibility can be assumed and a routine of life-management established.”
“If you say so,” said Noele. “The new designers-for-less range is coming in this week so if you’re interested you want to pop in on Thursday.”
Taking a year off was what Julia had aimed for, but now it had been decided on, there loomed before her a new anxiety. While Francine was at school she had been taken care of for a large part of every day and when she came home there was homework to be done and friends to visit or be visited under supervision. Now she would be free, at liberty, idle. But what if she wanted to work? Take a job? The idea of that was far worse.
“Holly’s got a job,” Francine said. “Starting in August. She’s doing some work for an MP, it’s not paid, of course, that’s how she got it. This MP has a surgery where she sees constituents and Holly will be working there.”
“Doing what, for heaven’s sake?” said Julia.
Francine admitted that she didn’t know. “I’d like to do something like that.”
“No, you wouldn’t, my dear. You think you would, but you wouldn’t. Not keeping office hours and meeting those sort of people, the kind you’ve never come across. You’re totally unfitted for anything like that.”
“I’d like some sort of job. I can’t just stay at home here.”
“Why can’t you?” said Julia. “I do.”
Because I’m eighteen years old, thought Francine, and that means I’m young but I’m also, officially, an adult. You’re fifty. It’s different for you. She didn’t say this aloud because she shrank from anything like rudeness.
“I should have thought,” said Julia, “that you had enough on your mind with your A Levels coming up without thinking about jobs.”
Francine returned to the book she was reading. It was Chekhov’s Letters and she was enjoying it, but for a while she stared unseeing at the page. Yet she had plans for a future if she could only be allowed to carry them out. Everyone at school had known about those events in her early life, they knew what had happened, though no one ever mentioned it. Francine was determined that no one she might encounter in the next stage of her life should know anything about it. She would tell only if she was asked. And another part of the plan was to break away, not so much from her father as from Julia. Yet she sensed that once school and exams were over and she was at home, Julia would want to spend long hours with her, take her about, accompany her to museums and libraries, cinemas and theaters, have her meals with her, talk exhaustively to her.
Holly had been very ready with advice. “Legally, you’re an adult. You can vote. Actually, you’ve been old enough to get married for two years. Not that I suppose you want to.”
“Of course I don’t want to get married,” Francine said.
“Everybody knows what your wicked stepmother does, you know. Everybody can see and everybody’s sorry for you. But you’ll have to assert yourself. I mean, all you have to do is say, I’m going to do this or that or whatever, and you can’t stop me, and just do it. Stay out all night if you want. You’re an adult. You can do as you like.”
“You say, all I have to do,” said Francine, “as if it’s easy, as if anyone can do anything.”
“They can.”
“She’s not wicked, you know. She means well, she wants what she thinks is best for me. Only what she wants isn’t what I want.”
At the moment it was less important because of her A Levels. Julia or no, she had to stay at home and work for them. For a few months she would be no different from her friends, for whom all going out in the evenings had ceased. They were as much prisoners in their rooms as she. At last she was the same as other girls.
She hadn’t calculated its effect on Julia. She hadn’t anticipated—how could she?—the view Julia would take of her stepdaughter’s sudden abandonment of the mild rebelliousness she had recently shown. All she saw was Julia’s apparent satisfaction and the new pleasure she took in her, Francine’s, society. Julia must be happy, Francine thought, as her father was, that she was working so hard for her A Levels.
And Julia was happy, but not because Francine was studying. She was an astute woman in her way, had a very good idea of Francine’s high intelligence quotient and knew that she was a natural scholar who loved application to books for its own sake. You might say she was a person who couldn’t help studying.
“I’m told that these days it’s the girls who work harder for examinations than the boys,” said Richard. “It’s going to be a woman’s world.”
Julia gave one of her sad smiles. From being statuesque, she had become a big, heavy woman, solid and massive. Her face and arms and bosom were whiter than ever. Skin thins with age, but Julia’s seemed to have grown thicker and more opaque, her hair, bleached now, more golden and her fingernails redder and longer. But in spite of being so large and colorful, sadness suited her and she reminded Richard of a statue he had seen somewhere of Niobe weeping for her dead children.
“I fear it will never be Francine’s world,” she said.
“Of course it will.” The flights of fancy that he indulged in brought color into his face. “I see her one day as—as mistress of a women’s college or as a government minister or—well, something distinguished.”
Julia said nothing for a moment, then, “I do love her, you know, I love her as if she were my own.”
“I know,” he said.
“It is just that we see these things so differently. It’s rather odd but, you know, my dear, you’re living in a pre-Freudian world, I might almost say a pre-psychology world. You sent Francine to me while I was in practice—and thank God you did because that was how we met—but I honestly believe that you thought it was like sending someone with an abscess to the doctor. All he has to do is lance the thing and a cure is immediately effected. The mind isn’t a sore finger. The emotions aren’t so easily mended.”
“I might agree with you if I saw any of these signs of trauma in Francine, but I don’t. She seems to me eminently normal. Maybe a little quiet and bookish, but that’s about it.”
Julia smiled and patted his hand. “One day she will be normal. I shall see to that. Leave it to me. She wants a job while she’s taking her gap year. Did you know?”
“A job?”
“That tiresome little Holly has something fixed up for herself and naturally Francine wants something similar. The reality is that they’re very imitative at that age. Shall I ask around and see what I can come up with?”
“Do you think you can?”
“Something close to home,” said Julia thoughtfully, “something undemanding. The pity is that ladies don’t have companions anymore. I frankly doubt if Francine is fit to look after children.”
“Fit?” said Richard.
“I really mean ‘up to.’ But we’ll see. I am afraid working in a nursing home might lead to too many horrible sights. But leave it to me.”
He did. He had a new job and traveling was an essential part of i
t. Nothing must be allowed to take priority over this projected four days in Zurich and, later in the month, a conference in Frankfurt. Why should there be anything to upset his plans? Julia, as always, was loving and concerned and attentive to Francine, and Francine was—he nearly said it—“obedient.” Even “compliant” wouldn’t be the word. She was just being her sweet, gentle self. Working, concentrating, intent on getting the best possible A-Level passes.
Richard’s trip to Switzerland passed uneventfully. On the way home, in the plane to Heathrow, he was struck by a sudden alarm that on reaching the house he would find a frightening chaos, Francine a resentful, weeping prisoner, Julia an adamant wardress, the two of them hurling reproach at one another. Not that there had ever been anything like that, not so far as he knew, and he surely did know. He was imagining things. Sometimes he hated his own imagination, yet even as he thought that, leaning his head against the seat back and closing his eyes, he let himself indulge in the fantasy he increasingly had and increasingly enjoyed.
Jennifer was alive. The man had never got into the house and killed her, for the entry in the telephone directory read simply, as his current entry did: Hill, R. He was not a vain man, subject to the sin of Pride, but modest and simple, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to call himself Doctor just because he possessed a doctorate in philosophy. So Jennifer was alive today and they were still living down there in the cottage in the lovely semi-countryside of Surrey, Jennifer older, of course, but rather more beautiful in her maturity, and perhaps there had been another child.
Why not? They had sometimes talked of it, or they had up until that last year when she had changed toward him. But he would have changed her back and there might have been another little girl, a child playing with toys while Francine sat studying for A Levels. In her own old home with her own mother, with no ugly past.
He came into the cottage and took Jennifer in his arms and kissed her. Once or twice, though this obscurely shamed him, he had made love to Jennifer in this fantasy, with real excitement and, curiously enough, real satisfaction. But now he only kissed her and kissed Francine, and as they talked the small dream child came running in and called, “Daddy, Daddy” and put out her arms …
The seat-belt sign came on and the instruction to place seats in the upright position, and in ten minutes they had landed. His fear came back in the car as he was on the M4, but when he let himself into the house—the home of his second, less idyllic marriage—he found that all was well.
Julia was full of news. Her friend Felicia in Australia was coming over for a holiday, her friend Rosemary and her husband had won a substantial sum on the Lottery, her friend Noele was opening a shop selling nearly new designer clothes. Julia had more women friends than he could keep up with. He asked about Francine, but before Julia could answer his daughter appeared in the doorway, smiling, with a textbook in her hand.
“You smell of the lamp,” he said.
She thought quickly. “Because I’ve been burning the midnight oil? Well, I have, I’ve been working so hard I can’t see straight.” She came to him and kissed him. “Have you had a good trip?”
“Pretty well what I expected.”
“I’m going to need that gap year,” she said, and he had the not entirely welcome idea that she was saying it to please him and to please Julia. “I’m worn out. I’m never going to want to see a book again after June.”
“We should all take a holiday, Richard,” said Julia. “Can we do that? In August, say. You’re due for a month off, aren’t you? Could we take a month?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“And go somewhere quiet and secluded, away from everything. That’s what Francine would like.”
Holly showed Francine her body piercing, a ring in her navel, a stud at the base of her spine. Francine knew about Miranda’s tattoo and Isabel’s diamond nose stud, but this shocked her, though she concealed her amazement.
“I wanted my nipples done but the guy wouldn’t. Do you know why not? He said it was my accent. Not with that posh voice, my love, he said, I’ll have Daddy on my doorstep. It makes me spit. It’s that naff school we go to, it’s as bad as Eton. I’m going to change the way I speak, I’m going to get Estuary English tapes and learn to talk like other people.”
“It was a man who did it?” Francine said.
“Why not? It’s a man who’s going to see it. Well, he has seen it and the reaction was deeply satisfying, I’m telling you.”
Holly’s new boyfriend was called Christopher and she was out with him every night, in spite of exams. If he wasn’t fazed about the Finals he was in the throes of at Eastcote College she certainly wasn’t going to get steamed up about a piddling thing like A Levels.
“I’d like to meet him,” Francine said.
“You know, sometimes you sound like your wicked stepmother. You really do. A hundred years old and well past everything.”
“Because I said I’d like to meet Christopher?”
“Because of your tone and your words. Oh, don’t look like that. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what, when Eastcote puts on its degree show you can come along with me and we’ll meet Chris there and his twin brother who’s been doing Fine Art and who’s got a painting in the exhibition. He looks just like Chris and he’s bound to fancy you and—wouldn’t it be great, France, if you and me were going about with twins?”
Francine shook her head. “Imagine Julia.”
“If I didn’t know her I couldn’t imagine her,” said Holly. “You’d have to be a—a Balzac to imagine her.”
“Which reminds me I ought to work. I’ve got French tomorrow morning.”
Francine experienced no traumas over her exams. She encountered no surprise questions and nothing much to alarm her. But when she had done the last exam and all was finished she was surprised to find Julia waiting for her outside school with the car. Julia explained that she had been to see the Chief Executive with a request which, she said, she knew would gladden Francine’s heart.
“To whisk you out of school now those A Levels are done with and carry you off on holiday. And she was perfectly charming about it. Absolutely no point, she said, in trolling in here for another two weeks until the official end of term.”
And no school-leaving parties, no idling about the grounds with one’s friends, no freedom to swim in the pool whenever one chose and play tennis and make plans for future reunions. “Where are we going?” Francine asked.
“Wait till you hear. A lovely little island in the Outer Hebrides. There’s nothing there but the seabirds and the beaches and the mountains and the heather.”
I won’t go, she thought of saying. Julia can’t drag me out of the house by force, any more than she can keep me a prisoner inside it. When they got home she found that Julia had already packed her suitcase. All their luggage was standing in the hall. Julia had arranged with Noele to keep an eye on the house, canceled the milk and the papers. And no time was to be wasted. They would be flying to Glasgow that evening, meeting her father at Heathrow.
Before they left she tried to phone Holly, but there was no reply and when she tried Miranda she got the answering service.
16
He hardly ever got letters. His post was mostly services bills and junk mail. The envelope he picked up from the doormat was buff-colored with University of Eastcote and the college’s eagle crest in red in the upper left-hand corner. He couldn’t expect to be informed of his degree yet, it was too soon and wouldn’t, anyway, come like this. Opening it suspiciously, he stared for a while without understanding. Then he did, then he realized.
It hadn’t crossed his mind. Of course he knew that Eastcote annually awarded a prize to the producer of the best piece of craft work submitted for the BA degree in Ornamental Art. He knew it, but hadn’t connected it with himself. And here, now, he was being told that he had won the Honoria Carter Black prize for his mirror. It brought with it an award of one hundred pounds.
The money was nothing—though he c
ould do with any money—but the prize was prestigious, something to be immensely proud of. Teddy had never before won anything. He had not even won praise or encouragement. His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing. Noncompetitiveness was the watchword. As to his family, his grandmother thought praising a child encouraged him to show off; his parents hadn’t thought about it at all.
A strange thing was happening to him. And this, too, was new. He was feeling what all who have a sudden success experience, a desire to tell someone about it. He had never before wanted to tell anyone anything, but now telling himself wasn’t enough. That inner exchange which was his version of conversation seemed inadequate. But there was no one to tell.
Mr. Chance was long dead. He made a face at the idea of going around to his grandmother’s. What would he say and what would she? Damon he had never phoned again after his driving test was behind him. Megsie had put her head over the fence and invited him to Nige’s birthday barbecue, but he had said he was busy. And he had sat indoors on that hot Saturday afternoon, watching Mr. Chance’s workshop used as a summerhouse, his garden filled with smoke and the smell of burned burgers and sausages, wondering what they were all saying about the car next door, maybe looking at it and speculating. But he had never regretted not accepting the invitation. He couldn’t be with people, just as he couldn’t now, to save his life, tell his news to Megsie and Nige.
His satisfaction must be from the prize alone and from himself alone knowing about it. Still, he soon found that others knew, everyone who mattered, for when he went along to the Chenil Gallery in the King’s Road where the Eastcote Graduation Exhibition was being set up he was congratulated by all sorts of people. The Dean of Studies happened to be there and the Head of the Ornamental Art Department as well as a great many graduands, none of whom had taken much notice of him before. It was the first time anyone had ever shaken hands with him and he found it a novel, not altogether pleasant, experience. He didn’t really know how to comport himself, but shifted about, muttering his thanks and longing to get to his mirror which he could see in the distance out of the corner of his eye.
