A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  Did she like Teddy? Some knowledge beyond her age and her experience whispered to her that if she had plenty to occupy her mind, lots of friends and interests and work, she would forget Teddy overnight. But she hadn’t got those things, she had only an emptiness which he could fill. Already, without seeing him again or hearing his voice, she had dropped his surname in her thoughts and was calling him Teddy. Already, she was having silent one-sided conversations with him, telling him how she felt, how unfair things were for him and her—for “us”—and forming an alliance with him against the world.

  Although she knew Julia very well by now, Francine hadn’t really believed that this idea of buying a house in Oxford would carry weight with her father. But it had. It did. Estate agents’ specifications and brochures had begun to arrive and she was expected to give her opinion on this house and that.

  In one way it seemed a good thing, for it meant that she would get to Oxford. They were serious about her going up to Oxford, they weren’t humoring her or preparing the ground to tell her it was unwise or impractical or anything like that. She would get there. But in another way it was alarming. Julia would be an even nearer presence than she had been when she was at school, far nearer, on her doorstep if she had her way. If she prevailed and could obtain it—Francine knew this from the situations of these houses—she would buy a house opposite the college gates. The porter’s lodge, thought Francine bitterly, if only it were for sale.

  They had their day out in Oxford, viewing houses. Francine was repeatedly asked for her views and her preferences.

  “It is just as important that you should like the place as that we should, Francine. You must say. This is one of those serious decisions in life people aren’t usually called on to make at your sort of age. That’s why we think it would be so good for you to confront it.”

  Francine confronted it, but Julia’s reply always was that the houses she liked were too far outside the city, too inaccessible. “I for one am not going to live in Woodstock,” said Julia. “But never mind. We’ll call it a day. Maybe we should come back tomorrow.”

  With the morning post came Francine’s A-Level results. Three passes to A. It was impossible to have done better. Holly had two As and a B and, jubilant herself, was gracious and lavish with her congratulations. Francine wanted to phone her father in Frankfurt and fetched him out of a meeting to speak to him, a move which made Julia click her tongue and call her hysterical. “You really are the center of your own little universe,” she said, but she said it abstractedly.

  Also with the post had come a letter for her from a family member with the news that David Stanark was dead. He had hanged himself. If there had been anything in the papers about it Julia hadn’t seen it. The letter said David’s wife Susan had left him two months ago, he had been deeply depressed and threatened suicide, but no one had believed him. Julia felt very upset. She felt guilty, too, because she hadn’t been in touch with Susan for a long while and, being Julia, she had this conviction that if only she had and could have talked to her and talked to David, appointed herself, in fact, their marriage-guidance counselor, the entire tragedy could have been avoided.

  Hanging oneself was such a dreadful way to do it. Why not pills and drink or even a car exhaust? It must have been, thought Julia in her psychological way, that he had so much self-hatred that he wanted to punish himself right up to the moment of death. But that final moment, that point at which the rope broke the hyoid or whatever it did—Julia didn’t quite know what it did but the whole thing was hideous. She longed to tell Richard, to discuss it with him, but Richard was in Stockholm.

  Francine went off to New Departures. She had just two more weeks to work there before the crisis came.

  She could never be sure whether the trouble was her appearance or her moral character. To please Noele and not cause trouble with Julia she had steadily played down her looks and dressed more and more like someone middle-aged. She put up her hair in a knot, wore loose Dockers instead of jeans and although she had lately enjoyed enhancing her eyes with a little shadow and mascara, left it off. Noele still wasn’t satisfied, but seemed unable to find further ways in which Francine might uglify herself.

  A customer, angry when the waistband of an Armani trouser-suit she was trying on refused to meet around her middle, turned on Francine and accused her of anorexia. “You obviously starve yourself,” she shouted, struggling with the tight trousers.

  “I’m only eighteen and I’m naturally thin,” Francine said. She spoke coolly but gently, there was no indignation in her voice, but the customer, and then Noele, accused her of outrageous rudeness.

  “How dare you imply that you’re more attractive than one of my clients?”

  Francine could think of a lot of answers to that, but she uttered none of them aloud. In silence she went to the workroom and fetched her jacket which hung on a hook behind the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “It was nice of you to take me on, Noele, but I obviously don’t suit. And …” Francine drew a deep breath “… I’m afraid this place doesn’t suit me. I won’t take any money for this week. Good-bye.”

  Noele flung open the door and called after her down the street, “Julia will have your guts for garters, you little bitch!”

  Strange that a woman like that could call Teddy vulgar. Francine ran all the way home, enjoying something she supposed must be freedom. Freedom! She had never had much of it. Julia opened the front door just before she got there. Noele must have been on the phone seconds after she uttered her abuse.

  A fresh torrent began. Francine was ungrateful, lazy, egocentric, rebellious and immature. It was a blessing she was taking a year off as she was obviously unfitted to take part in the life of a great university, no matter how brilliant her A Levels. Her father would be so bitterly disappointed that she, Julia, dreaded having to tell him what had happened. And now she thought the best thing would be for Francine to go up to her room and spend the rest of the day there.

  Francine sat down in an armchair. She said very calmly, “Don’t be silly, Julia.”

  Julia stared. She put both hands up to her face, as if making a protective armor for it against a rain of projectiles.

  “I am eighteen years old, I’m not a child. Of course I’m not going to my room till I’m ready.”

  Julia’s answer, a vain one, was to attempt a phone call to Stockholm. Richard was out and all she got was the hotel’s answering machine. She moaned something about Francine breaking her heart and her father’s, and destroying her life. As if she wasn’t upset enough with one of her best friends hanging himself, she said, and went out of the room and banged the door.

  For form’s sake Francine remained in her chair for ten minutes. Then, having listened for a moment to Julia’s smothered weeping behind the kitchen door, she went upstairs to her room and found the mobile phone Julia had given her. It took a little while and a little studying of the instructions to learn how to use it, but after a moment or two she mastered its intricacies. Then she punched out Teddy Brex’s number and waited. But there was no reply.

  20

  Afumbling among the things on her dressing table woke Harriet rather than any untoward sound from elsewhere in the house. In the half-dark she made out the figure of Franklin. He was holding the pole with a hook on one end that opened the fanlight.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Quiet,” he said. “There’s someone downstairs.”

  The first time he said that to her in the middle of the night she had shrieked in fear. That was twenty years before. There hadn’t been anyone downstairs on that occasion nor on the next or the next and, no doubt, there wasn’t now. Franklin heard sounds that no one else did, he had the sort of tinnitus that was less a ringing in the ears than a buzzing and bumping. He also failed to hear sounds that others heard. Silly old man. She repeated the words scornfully to herself. Silly old man, silly old fool.

  He had put on his camel-hair dressing
gown and tied the cord around his middle. He opened the bedroom door stealthily, pole in hand. Once, on a similar occasion, she had put on a light, which had made him grimace and punch the air and stamp in dumb show until he got darkness again. She heard the stairs creak as he went down them. No other sound until he gave his usual challenge, uttered in commanding officer tones. “Don’t move. Stay where you are. I am armed.”

  After that, when he got no response—and he never had got a response—he put on the lights. She switched on the bedroom lamps.

  “I suppose you realize,” she said when he came back again, “that any burglar worth his salt could overpower you in two seconds. You’re an old man.”

  “I’ve no doubt you’d prefer me to cower under the bed while the intruder raped you,” said Franklin with a knowing grin.

  She lay awake for a while. On the bedside cabinet beside her was the envelope containing Teddy Brex’s drawings and his covering letter. She would phone him in the morning and ask him to come back and talk about the project. Of course there wasn’t really a project, Franklin would have a fit if he thought some youth from Neasden intended building a cabinet in one of his Georgian alcoves and the whole thing wasn’t feasible. None of that mattered because Harriet wasn’t serious about it, the only one who was being Teddy Brex. Harriet would give him one more chance to understand her true intention and, if he didn’t, give him and his drawings their marching orders.

  But, perhaps because it was the middle of the night and things always look different at night, more hopeless and depressing, she told herself that she had made a mistake about Teddy Brex. It wouldn’t be the first time. Her overtures had a failure rate of about one in four, for although she had entertained over the years young construction workers in such numbers that, banded together, they could by their combined efforts (as she sometimes thought with a giggle) have built and fitted up a hundred-acre housing estate, there had always been some who turned her down. There had always been one or two, or three or four, who rejected her because they were shy or newly married or gay or even faithful to a wife or girlfriend. It was possible, too, that some simply didn’t find her attractive.

  Into one of these categories it was likely that Teddy Brex came. If it was so it couldn’t be helped. She slept after a while and woke to find Franklin standing by the bed with a piece of broken glass in his hand. The disturbance in the night had apparently been caused by someone in the mews throwing a stone over the wall and breaking one of the rear windows. Since the window was barred there had been no danger, only nuisance.

  “Why show me?” said Harriet. “I’m not going to mend it.”

  “Perhaps I’m going to cut your throat.” Franklin laughed merrily to show he wasn’t serious. “You will have to find a glazier.”

  “A what?”

  “A man who fits glass into window frames.”

  That was an idea. Failing Teddy Brex, a glazier. She contemplated herself in the mirror and felt quite pleased with what she saw. Phone Teddy, go to the hairdresser, maybe buy something new to wear in St. John’s Wood High Street. There wouldn’t be time to go down to the West End or Knightsbridge. If Teddy agreed to come at, say, two, she could phone for a glazier at one-thirty. That way their visits wouldn’t clash.

  Franklin brought her tea and the newspapers. She had a sudden urge to ask him if he had been faithful to her, but what was the use of such a question? You either got a lie in response or the same inquiry cast back at you. She looked at herself in the mirror. Maybe there would be a glazier advertising in the Ham and High, she thought, watching herself opening the paper. Franklin got in her way, returning to his pockets handkerchief, keys, small hange and folded checkbook. She dodged around his head and back to see how white her skin was and how red her hair.

  “Why are you always looking at yourself?” he said as if he had never asked before.

  “I don’t look at myself any more than anyone else.”

  Franklin laughed. “I’m off on my hols next week, may I remind you. So I’ll want my stuff back from the dry cleaners. You ought to have fetched it yesterday, I don’t know why you didn’t.”

  “Are you going alone, Frankie?”

  “Why do you ask? I never ask you.”

  She pouted at her reflection. “One of these days,” she said, “you might come back and find me gone.”

  “True.” He didn’t really think it was true. “And you might come back and find me gone.”

  “What would you do if I just walked out?”

  Franklin grinned. As is the case with many thin men when they grow old, his smile made a death’s head of his bony face. “Don’t forget to phone a glazier,” he said.

  Instead, when he had gone, Harriet phoned Teddy Brex. Two o’clock would suit him. What had she thought of the drawings? Harriet had scarcely looked at the drawings, but she said she would rather not give her opinion over the phone. That was what they would talk about when he came.

  The hairdresser put a fresh application of Tropical Mahogany on to her hair, chatting the while about her gray roots which in places had become white roots. Harriet was relieved to see them all covered up in purple paste. In the shop next door she bought a pair of white palazzo pants and a white, pink and jade-green top, which she kept on, carrying the clothes she had been wearing home in the shop’s bag.

  Today there were no glaziers advertising in the Ham and High, but she found a great number in the Yellow Pages, finally choosing one whose first name was Kevin. Kevins were usually a good bet, being mostly under thirty. This Kevin wasn’t at home, so Harriet left a message on his answering machine which suited her very well. It would have been awkward if he had said he would come along immediately.

  Her earlier feelings were aroused when she saw Teddy Brex once more in the flesh. A little thrill of excitement, the kind she used to feel when she was young, ran through her. He looked her up and down, but his expression was impossible to read. She liked to think he was attracted and admiring.

  But again he refused a drink. The main thing was to look at the drawings together, he said, and decide on what she wanted. Harriet had left them upstairs on purpose. There had been some idea underlying this of getting him to follow her into the bedroom, but he let her go alone, his manner, she thought, growing colder and more distant by the minute. When she came down again he was standing by the broken window, looking out at the paved area, the back of the garage and the gate into the mews. “How did that happen?” He indicated the broken pane.

  “Someone must have thrown a stone in the night.”

  He nodded. “You want to get that boarded up.”

  He didn’t say why or offer to do it. She stood close beside him, pretending to examine the window. He bent down to pick up something from the floor. It was a pebble that long ago and on some distant beach the sea had worn smooth. Their heads brushed as she bent down and he straightened up. If anything could have told Harriet she was wasting her time his movement of recoil did. He sprang away, the stone clutched in his fist as if he meant to hurl it at her.

  Flushing, for she was not totally thick-skinned, she sat down at the dining table and spread out the drawings listlessly. Even someone less observant than Harriet, or less inclined to take an interest in people other than as sex objects, would have noticed Teddy’s eyes light up at the sight of his own work and something that was almost adoration alter the whole expression of his face. But the adoration was plainly not for her and, besides, she was already humiliated and sore. She said suddenly, “I don’t really think so. These aren’t what I want.”

  The look he turned on her was not a nice one. Contempt was in it and a savage dislike. “What?”

  “I said this stuff isn’t what I want.”

  “It’s what you asked for.”

  “I can’t help that. It still isn’t what I had in mind. It’s all wrong.” She was half enjoying herself now. “These designs just aren’t very good,” she said. “I do know about these things. You’ve only to look around this house t
o see that. Your designs—well, they aren’t up to the standard of the house.”

  It was his turn to flush, but he didn’t. He turned very pale and his long fingers, perfect but for one that was mutilated and deformed, closed into fists. He got up. Somehow she knew he wasn’t going to speak another word to her and she was surprised when he did. His tone was brittle and icy. “Can I go out the back way? I’ve left my car in the mews.”

  “Go any way you like,” she said. “It’s all the same to me.”

  She watched his departure as if she suspected him of stealing something on his way out. Not that there was anything to steal out of that little paved yard but a stone pot with a juniper in it and the white wrought-iron garden furniture, most of it too heavy to lift. He opened the gate, gave her a sullen look over his shoulder and went out into the mews, closing the gate behind him.

  Harriet waited until she heard his car engine start up. Then she went down to the gate and bolted it. The back of the house was even more thickly covered with that creeper than the front, its leaves reddening now. How many leaves would there be on this one plant? Millions—well, hundreds of thousands. Fourteen Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa, she repeated to herself. Thinking in this way wasn’t like her. What did it matter how many leaves there were? She went into the house and to the nearest mirror to study her image.

  Franklin had once told her, in their early days, catching her staring at herself, how no one ever sees themselves in a mirror as they really are. They always pout a little or raise the corners of their mouths or lift their chins, pull in their bellies, straighten their shoulders, open wide their eyes or soften their expressions to wistful idiocy. That was why it was absurd to look at oneself in the glass except to check quickly for neatness and make sure one’s flies or skirt zip were not unfastened.

  But she had gone on looking in spite of these remarks of his and as she looked now, she did all the things he had cited and more besides, half closing her eyes so that the lines about her mouth were blurred and putting up one hand to hide the parallel ridges that ran horizontally across her neck. In those conditions it was a pleasing picture that she saw, a woman absurdly young for fifty-odd, and while she was admiring herself the phone rang.