A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  A woman whose function he didn’t know and whom he had never seen before told him it was to have a section of the wall space to itself. Winners of the Honoria Carter Black prize always did have their own stand in pride of place. They thought of hanging it just here where the light was good—what did he think?

  He didn’t think, he didn’t know. “I guess it’s okay,” he said.

  “Why don’t you come back the day before the Private View and see if you like it?” She smiled. He was so handsome and so shy, and so talented. “Then there would be time to change it around.”

  “No, it’ll be okay,” said Teddy and he went off to find someone to tell him when and where he would get the money.

  Winning the prize stimulated him to phone the newspaper with his advertisement. While he’d still got some money left to pay for it. The fifty pounds from “Max and Mex” was gone and not much remained of the sum he had taken off Keith’s body, though, apart from buying himself a watch, he had been as frugal as possible. In drafting his small ad he would have liked to find some way of putting in “winner of the Honoria Carter Black prize” but people might not know what that was and it would raise the price of insertion. In the end he simply wrote: Joiner and cabinetmaker. BA in Ornamental Art, will make or fit fine furniture to your specification. Reasonable charges, and he added his phone number. Then he thought that putting young before joiner and newly starting out after art would make it sound more appealing. He asked for the paragraph to go in three weeks running.

  With no positive idea of where he was going or even why he was going, he screwed up his nerve and took the Edsel out. First he checked there was petrol in the tank. It was nearly full. Petrol was something he couldn’t afford, but he certainly couldn’t afford to run out of it and have to abandon the car somewhere. The Edsel, he remembered Damon saying, had a heavy fuel consumption. He wouldn’t take it far. Maybe only around the block.

  Handling it was very different from driving Damon’s VW Golf. The engine stalled. The car juddered and sprang about like some lively young and very large animal—a cheetah maybe. Teddy kept his head, told himself to keep cool. It was a matter of getting the hang of it and very soon he did, reversing the Edsel and, finally, learning control, maneuvering it through the wide-open double gates into the quiet street. It was early on Sunday morning.

  He did what he had promised himself and drove it around the block. Twice he had stalled the engine, but twice started it again without difficulty. He came back to the open gates, the empty garden and the carport and, much more confident now, took it out again. This time he stopped and parked it, bought a Sunday paper, started it up again with no difficulty. A man carrying a carton of milk turned around to watch him pass, a woman with a dog stared at the great pale-yellow, glittering, fish-like torpedo-like thing. The purring many-finned projectile with its silver eyes and pursed codfish mouth. It was no longer polished and gleaming, for no one had laid a sponge or duster on it in five months, so when Teddy got back for the second time without mishap he set about cleaning it.

  Leaving the car dirty would, he thought, eventually attract attention to it. Besides, he wanted to be near it legitimately for a while, with a reason for close-up contact. He fetched a sponge, two buckets of water, cloths from the kitchen. Without a hose, cleaning the Edsel took a very long time, particularly as it was not in Teddy’s nature to do a less than thorough job.

  He couldn’t smell any smell. And if he couldn’t no one could. Plastic had its advantages and this car its uses, if only as a coffin. He felt he had taken a big step. He had taken it out and brought it back, he could drive it. What he must do now was find somewhere, think up somewhere, he could take it and dump it and Keith’s body. Some pond or reservoir—the sea? This was flagrant fantasy and he knew it. He wouldn’t be capable of driving a car into a pond and sinking the car and getting out of it alive. Besides, where was there such a place he could use without being detected? Brent Reservoir? Impossible. Unthinkable. Probably he would have to dump the body and then, one day, sell the car. Sell it back perhaps to the firm in south London Keith had bought it from.

  Lift that body out again? If you can kill it and put it there you can lift it out, he told himself, rubbing hard at the Edsel’s pastel-lemon bodywork with a duster. You got it in, you can get it out. Nige had come out into the garden next door with a woman who was probably his mother. They gave him approving smiles. Teddy had noted, with disdain, that people always enjoy the sight of manual work being done, particularly when it is unpleasant.

  “You can come and do mine when you’ve finished with that,” the woman called out.

  “Fancy a coffee?” said Nige.

  Teddy said thanks, but he was busy. He finished the Edsel, locked it and went indoors where he settled down to read the paper he had bought. An article about the kind of people who murder other people told him that psychopaths often begin their career by killing a member of their own family. Did that mean he was a psychopath? He started thinking about Keith’s body again, how to dispose of it.

  In spite of saying he was satisfied with the arrangements for displaying his mirror he went back to the gallery. But on the day of the Private View itself. There is a limit to the indifference one can feel to the opinions of others and though Teddy’s scorn threshold was very low, he found he very much wanted to see the look on visitors’ faces when they contemplated the mirror, their admiration and perhaps their longing to possess it.

  He arrived just in time for the Chancellor’s speech. The Vice-Chancellor was an academic, but the Chancellor was a television actor who had achieved fame through appearing in a detective series. He spoke in a very actorly way, not saying anything of note, but with impeccable timing and in a Royal Shakespeare Company accent so beautiful that it didn’t matter what he said. Teddy was surprised to see so many people. He positioned himself near but not absolutely beside his mirror, preparing for reactions.

  Then he saw her. She was just a human being among other human beings, a species he disliked. So for a moment he hardly believed her human. Not as the man next to her was, the twin of that guy who was Kelly’s boyfriend’s friend, and the girl with him, normal ugly people. She was an angel or a wax effigy, a statue or an illusion. Her pale oval face, the dark shining eyes, the full red mouth, formed just one more object of beauty among all these artifacts on show. The most perfect of them, the best, the one that should have won the prize, but still an object.

  He closed his eyes, mentally shook himself. Was he crazy? This was just a girl. He looked again. She was looking at him. Their eyes met. Never had there been such eyes, never in his experience, so large and depthless and clear and sweet. That word “sweet” he used to himself and again thought he was losing his mind. He had never used it before except to describe a taste or, as everyone did here, in the college slang meaning of “good.” She put up her hand to smooth back the black hair that fell across her white forehead, her comma eyebrow, and then she smiled at him. He tried to smile back and was just about succeeding when the crowd shifted, faces moved in front of hers—pig faces, ape faces, misshapen, unfinished, the twin man, the frizz-haired girl—and she was lost.

  He pushed his way through the crowd. They were drinking now, wine and water and fruit juice. A girl he shouldered past spilled orange juice all over her dress and she shouted angrily at him. Teddy took no notice. He found the woman who had arranged the show and asked her, “Who’s that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That girl with the long black hair in the white dress.”

  “My dear boy, I don’t know. Just a guest.”

  Kelly would tell him. He looked for her, saw the twin’s twin and the twin’s friend, but not Kelly. Teddy had never had much to do with these people, had long ago cold-shouldered their pleasantries and their overtures of friendship. They disliked him now, but he couldn’t help that. Presumably they would still speak to him if he spoke to them. “Who’s that with your brother?”

  The twin hesita
ted. He shrugged, said, not very warmly, “You mean his girlfriend? Holly?”

  “The one with the long black hair.”

  “Don’t know who that is. Friend of Holly’s maybe. Why?”

  Teddy was now completely nonplussed. He didn’t know what one did in a situation like this. Come to that, he didn’t know what he wanted. To look, he supposed. To be near and to look and to marvel. He remembered his grandmother and Damon meeting by the French windows, and what Agnes had said and done. “I want someone to introduce me.”

  The twin shook his head like someone who has seen everything bizarre this world can offer, but who can still be surprised. “You really are something else, Brex. I don’t know why I don’t just tell you to piss off. Come on, then.”

  They found the three people standing in front of Teddy’s mirror. Teddy’s internal organs shifted and moved about, and some of them seemed to turn over. He had never before felt anything like it. Perhaps he made a sound, a gasp or a grunt, for the girl turned around and he experienced again the full frontal effect of those eyes, those softly parted red lips, that skin as white as a lily. And this time he saw the whole of her, slender, long-legged, her waist the span of the stems of a bunch of flowers, her wrists and ankles narrow as a child’s.

  The twin was saying, “Holly, James, this is the guy who made it. The prize winner. He’s called Brex, can’t remember what comes before Brex.”

  She said—she, the only she who counted—“It’s on the card, Christopher.” She looked at him. “Is that right? Teddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mirror is utterly gorgeous.”

  It wasn’t she who said it but the Holly girl, that big-breasted, green-eyed frizz-head, her voice unbelievably loud and upper-class after hers. Teddy just nodded. He wanted her to say it, but she only smiled.

  Holly said, “Have you won thousands and thousands of pounds?” Luckily, she didn’t wait for an answer. “What are you going to do with your mirror? Sell it? Give it to your mum?”

  They were all looking at him. Their faces, curious, teasing, malicious, confirmed him in his misanthropy. Except hers, which was shy, reserved, those eyes no longer meeting his. A little white hand like a flower held her glass of sparkling water. Along the crown of her bowed head, bisecting the silky blackness, the parting ran like a narrow white road. He imagined laying on it a wreath of pale flowers.

  He drew a deep breath. “I shall give it to my woman.”

  He said it violently, quelling any possible amused response. There was none, but a vague uneasiness.

  The Holly girl pursed up her thick lips. “What do you mean, your woman? That’s a very peculiar way of putting it. Do you mean your girlfriend?”

  “My woman,” he said firmly and added, “when she’s mine.” His voice entered a deeper range. “To see her face in,” he said and he turned away with an unfamiliar sensation of the blood rushing up to his face and neck. Then and only then, when he was yards away, swallowed by the crowd, he remembered that he had been told everyone’s name but hers.

  It couldn’t be left like that. She was gone. He could no longer see her. Come to me, he asked her silently, come away from them and to me. How did one manage these things? He had no experience, no guidelines, no knowledge. He turned back, pushing his way past the table that stood beneath his mirror, past Kelly’s painting, James’s wrought iron, searching the crowd for her, frustrated by bodies, legs, arms, heads, buttocks, bulk, getting in the way. And then suddenly she was in front of him.

  Alone, if you could be alone in this crowd, Holly and the twins somewhere else. He and she were alone, facing each other in this swell and press of people, an island of him and her in a sea of humanity. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows. It was what he felt if he didn’t know the words. He didn’t know the words in which to put his question either, so he said it straight out. “What’s your name?”

  She put up her hand, but not quite to her lips. “Francine. Francine Hill.”

  What did you ask next? Phone number, of course. He asked, she answered, he repeated it over and over, imprinting it on his mind.

  “My friends are waiting for me,” she said gently, almost apologetically.

  She could go now, he didn’t care. It was too much for him, anyway, it was killing him. Her eyes were eating him up, so that he felt faint, sick. “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Did you mean that? About giving the mirror to—someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Well, good-bye.”

  By the time he got home half the number had gone from his mind. He had had nothing to write with or write on and his head was spinning. He didn’t know if the last part was double nine three two or double three two nine, but he remembered the exchange number. The phone book had Hill, R., and nine two double three. What to do with it now he had found it he didn’t know. He lay on his bed, still the same camp-bed his parents had consigned him to when he was four, and thought about her.

  The most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The perfect object made flesh. Better than anything a man could make or shape or paint. He imagined having her here with him, in this room, but it was unimaginable, this was no place for her, it would be like the diamond ring mixed up among his parents’ rubbish. “Francine,” he said aloud, “Francine.” He had never heard the name before but it was beautiful, like her. Francine.

  If he had money and a beautiful place to live he would like to build a plinth for her and drape it in white and seat her on it in a white-and-gold chair. He would put the diamond ring on her finger and tiny white orchids from a florist’s shop in her hair and dress her. A dress like Marc Syre’s Harriet wore in Orcadia Place, a floor-length tunic of fine pleats, but white, not red, the purest white of her skin and the orchids. And she should look at her face in his mirror and worship it as he would, as he did.

  Francine.

  The evening sun glinted on the fins of the Edsel and suddenly, as clouds parted, made a blinding flash there so that it hurt the eyes to look. It was as if flames licked along the boot lid and seared the rear windscreen. He buried his head in the pillow. Francine.

  17

  Well, my dear, you have a job!”

  Julia said it with one of her bright and somehow conspiratorial smiles, hands clasped, shoulders hunched. She might have been talking to a child whose parents have made a compromise with its bad behavior. If you must be naughty, let us direct your naughtiness into useful channels. Francine returned the smile, not very enthusiastically.

  “In Noele’s shop. You’ll be helping Noele sell her gorgeous nearly new designer clothes. Three days a week, she won’t need you more than that, and the marvelous thing is she’s going to pay you. Not very much, but she will pay you. Now I think you said Holly isn’t getting paid, so you can pull rank over her. So what do you say?”

  Francine remembered from childhood that when the grown-ups asked you what do you say, they meant, “Why haven’t you said thank you?” She resisted doing that now. Why would she want to have an ascendancy over Holly? She nodded, said, “All right, Julia, I’ll try it. I expect I can do it.” It would get her out of the house, she thought.

  “Of course you can do it. Standing on your head. And I expect Noele will let you have all sorts of lovely things at a discount.”

  Francine didn’t want secondhand Jean Muir and Caroline Charles designed for forty-five-year-olds but she didn’t say so. Imagining herself serving customers at Noele’s standing on her head with her hair trailing along the floor and her feet waving in the air made her smile. Julia took this for pleasure and even excitement.

  “And the beauty of it,” she said to Richard, “is that she’ll only be a stone’s throw from home. I mean, right up at this end of the High Street. If I look out of the front upstairs window at the side I could almost see her going in at Noele’s door.”

  Richard nodded. At least Francine would have a job, she would have an occupation for her gap year. He could tolerate
Julia, even revive fondness for her, when he saw her only for two or three days at a stretch. And he could teach himself to be easy in Francine’s company when he had presents to bring her home and questions to ask her about her activities, things to tell her about places she had never visited. No longer seeing her on a regular basis, he was distanced from her, able to convince himself she was learning what all people of her age must learn, to grow away from the family home and adjust herself to the outside world.

  For Julia as guardian and guide he had no misgivings. Or none he wanted to bring to the forefront of his mind. In her care, as he told himself over and over, Francine could come to no harm, Francine would be the safest girl in London. He had begun planning for the move to Oxford. Now he could work from home while in this country, now he spent so much time traveling to and from Heathrow, Oxford would be just as convenient a place to live in as Ealing. More convenient. Francine would be safe and Julia would be pleased.

  But safe from what? When that question arose in his mind he quelled it. If he told himself often enough that Julia knew best, he could stop worrying. About anything.

  * * *

  Clothes held little interest for Francine. This may have been because they interested Julia very much and since Francine was twelve she had been trying to dress her in jumpers and skirts with pearls and pretty cotton frocks. But Francine had her own dress allowance from her father and, when she was allowed out with Holly or Miranda or Isabel, spent it on jeans and leather and old army greatcoats and Doc Martens. Like the others did. She had two black dresses and a white dress—the one she had worn at the Private View—and bits and pieces that had taken her fancy, odd-shaped little jackets and skinny tops and miniskirts. That was the extent of her wardrobe.