by Ruth Rendell
It was Kevin the glazier. Could he come tomorrow mid-morning? Gladly, Harriet said he could. He sounded about nineteen.
21
They went to a pub. It was the nearest one to where Francine lived, a red-brick thirties roadhouse on a crossroads that looked huge from the outside but was quite small within, packed with gambling machines, smoky and noisy. He drank water and she drank orange juice.
He talked to her about the pub, how ugly it was, what an offense that such places could have been built, could still endure. They should be pulled down, all such places should be demolished, everything that was as hideous as this and things halfway as hideous should be flattened, bulldozed, razed to the ground. Only beautiful things should be allowed to exist so that everywhere one looked one’s eye was pleased and one’s senses satisfied.
She listened and nodded because he talked well and seemed to know about these things. And somehow she understood, if he didn’t, that this was his way of courting her and that his praise of beautiful things was a displacement of his admiration for her.
“I wish I lived somewhere beautiful,” she said, “but I don’t. Do you?”
He didn’t want her to see it—ever. He shook his head. A surge of anger rose in him as he thought how he had nowhere to take her that was fit for her, nowhere he wouldn’t be deeply ashamed of.
“I did once,” she said and she thought of the cottage whose prettiness was spoiled for her by what had happened there. “Do you live at home?”
Where else could one live? Where one lived was home, wasn’t it?
“With your parents, I mean?”
“My parents are dead.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what that’s like. My mother’s dead.”
She would never tell him how her mother had died, she would never tell him about hiding in the cupboard and hearing the man come and the shot. Her friendship with him, if friendship it turned out to be, she would keep clear of that. She began talking instead of the year she was taking out before going to university, of the job she had had and of possible future jobs. He listened, he didn’t ask. She had no means of knowing that it was her voice he listened to, the tone and timbre of it, her beautiful Champlaine School accent like an actress in a play on television, not her words or her meaning.
“I told her I was going out with a girlfriend,” she said. “I said I was with my friend Holly. You remember my friend Holly?”
“Do I?”
“At the exhibition.”
“Yes,” he said, “yes,” and added, “She’s a dog.”
Francine was shocked. “She’s not, she’s very good-looking. Everyone says so. She’s very attractive to men.”
“Seeing you with her,” he said, and his voice was serious and intense, “was like a—a princess and a toad!”
She laughed at that and after a moment he laughed too, a grim laugh as if he didn’t express his feelings this way very often. They soon walked back, but on the way went into a little park and sat on a seat. It was a mild evening, not yet autumnal. Because he was silent and seemed to be waiting for her to speak she remembered why she had made that phone call to him in the first place. Because she needed someone to confide in and someone who was not one of those impatient school friends, someone new, someone who—and the word came strangely into her head—would treasure her. So, sitting beside him on this park bench in the dusk, she talked to him about the way Julia imprisoned her and acted the vigilante, watched her every movement and tried to worm her way into her heart and soul. And how she was afraid Julia and her father would finally close in upon her, find some way of confining her to indoors and prevent her going up to Oxford.
He didn’t interrupt. He listened and sometimes he nodded. She expected solutions of the kind Holly and Miranda offered and she dreaded them, but he produced no answers. He was like what psychotherapists should be, listeners, receivers, absorbing everything the better to understand. Real ones, not the Julias of this world. When they walked on he took her hand and held it. No one, she felt, had ever performed for her such a much-needed gesture at precisely the right time.
If he had kissed her before they parted she would have been afraid and perhaps shocked. He didn’t, but only said as if there could be no doubt about it, as if it were arranged and scheduled by some higher authority or by fate, “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“Where?” she asked him.
“Here. Right where we are now. Under these trees. At seven.”
Julia was waiting just inside the door. It swung open seconds before she reached it. There is always something ominous and almost sinister about a door opening before one has rung a bell or inserted a key in then lock. It suggests reproaches to come. And reproaches there were. Julia said in a high voice, “How did you get home? I didn’t hear a taxi.”
“I walked.”
“Do you mean you walked from the tube station, Francine? You mustn’t do that. Not after dark. You know that. I thought you were learning to be more responsible. If you haven’t enough money on you for a taxi you only have to ask the driver to wait while you fetch me and I will pay him.”
Francine went up to her room.
Mrs. Trent chose a sickly pale green and a muddy ocher-yellow for her rooms. Teddy didn’t like applying it to the walls, but he had to. It was his first lesson in understanding that if you work for other people for money you must do as they ask. Who pays the piper calls the tune.
He thought as he worked. Harriet Oxenholme had almost vanished from his mind except, occasionally, as a source of wonderment. That she could be the Harriet of Alpheton’s painting still astounded him. A cause of greater concern was that he had left his drawings behind in her house. If he had been able to afford it he would have made photocopies of those designs, but he couldn’t and he hadn’t. He wanted them back and he wanted to go to the house again.
Presumably, she lived there alone. No mention had been made of any other occupant. A kind of daydream began to unfold in which he took Francine to Orcadia Cottage and the place was empty but for them. Harriet had gone away and left it to them. Francine was in the bedroom in that bed and he came up to her … Teddy could hardly bear to pursue this fantasy, for all his strong young man’s need and desire, so long unacknowledged, overcame him. His body became too much for him, the physical was all, and his mind nothing but a red heat and light.
He cooled himself, breathing deeply. This possession of Orcadia Cottage was something he mustn’t think about, it was useless to dwell on the impossible. He must think about using the place, he must ask himself if the solution which occurred to him was a practicable one.
Home again, instead of relaxing he cleaned the house. In his eyes it still looked horrible. But where could he bring her if not here? If he had a car it would be easier, but with that thought he put away the vacuum cleaner and stationed himself at the French windows. The high, finned rump of the Edsel gleamed a deeper gold in the sunset light. Even if it were not burdened with its cargo of Keith he couldn’t imagine her in it, her exquisite refinement in its vulgarity. The only future for the Edsel was to sell it and perhaps buy something less offensive with the money.
First the contents of the boot must go. His eyes fixed on the car, he thought how afraid he would be to open that boot. He admitted it to himself, he would be afraid. Six months had passed, seven, since that night. What had happened in that time? Decay, certainly, but what was decay? He remembered his grandmother approving cremation when his mother died, saying something about that way you wouldn’t be eaten by worms. Were there worms in that plastic bag, or some kind of liquefaction or what? He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He couldn’t open that boot; yet he would have to open it.
An idea came to him of years passing, of the Edsel standing there for years on end, the boot never opened, of himself everlastingly watching over it until a decade or two had gone, and then one day lifting the lid to find a bagful of dry gray bones. It was another version of his dream. He knew it cou
ld never be, he could never tie himself to this place for a fife-time. And what of her? What of bringing her here with that a few feet away from his bed?
He went out to meet her under the trees and took her to another pub. She wanted to know all about him, his childhood, his parents, his friends, the people he knew. Telling the truth about Jimmy and Eileen was impossible, but invention was beyond him. Instead, he told her about Keith and his cars, and the great car-makers who were his idols. She wanted to know where his uncle was now and he said, retired to Liphook, he had bought a bungalow in Liphook.
“And left his car behind? Won’t he come back and fetch it?”
That nearly made Teddy shudder. Gray, bony Keith, in a stage of decay, lumbering in through the gates to drive away his car …
“I know Liphook quite well,” she said. “My mother came from there. I’ve got relations there.”
A shadow seemed to pass across her face and he was glad of it, not interested in knowing the cause, only pleased that she wasn’t pursuing the Liphook connection. He gazed in silence at her, the folded lips like a red flower, the big dark eyes, the black hair which, parted in the center, fell in two smooth curtains on either side of her face. He might have taken her hand, but he was afraid to do it in case the touch of her was too much for him and he pulled her to him, seized her, there in front of these indifferent drinkers.
“About the mirror,” he said. “The exhibition’s over. Will you come with me to fetch it?”
“I won’t be able to tomorrow or the next day, I’m sure I won’t.”
“I’m talking about Saturday.”
“All right.” She thought for a moment, then said, like a much younger girl than she was, “And then can I come and see your house and the crazy car?”
There was no help for it. He had to be alone with her and where else was there? He had to be alone with her and somehow make her want him as much as he wanted her. How to do that he seemed to have no idea. But standing with her under the trees, where they had parted last night and met this evening, he understood something that made things simple. When you are young and the other person is young and you are both good to look at, words are of no account, nor does cleverness or experience matter. Nothing more is necessary than to look. All you need do is look, then long, then touch. And what follows is an electric charge that brings you together into a desire each to be engulfed by the other, perhaps, even, to be the other.
Their kiss was a natural part of this. Kissing her, he didn’t want to stop, he wanted to go on to a complete possession and without words he knew she felt the same. A tide seemed to break over them, a wave that threatened to drown them. It was he who broke apart, pushed her away and held her at arms’ length, gasping while she gasped.
He stared into her eyes and she into his. They were both breathing like people who have run a race. He put his hands to her face, cupped it and murmured his good-byes. Then he ran. He ran down the street toward the tube station as if fleeing something, as if instead of embracing a girl who wanted his kiss as much as he wanted to give it he had committed some violent assault and was escaping the consequences.
They had made no arrangements for Saturday. While he was wondering what to do she phoned him. Her father would be home at the weekend and had told her on the phone he wanted to take her and her stepmother on a visit to some friends in the country, but she had said she couldn’t, she had this engagement with Isabel. Her stepmother had tried to persuade her to cancel, but she wouldn’t, she had told her father she was too old to tag along on outings with him and Julia.
It was a world of which Teddy knew nothing. These people were beyond his comprehension. He asked Francine to meet him at the Tate Gallery and then he went off to Mrs. Trent’s to paint her living room pale green. His own house—he thought of it as his own, though without pride—was as clean as could be, everything neat, washed and scrubbed, the windows sparkling. But could he bring her there? He must. She should come for one visit while the Edsel and its boot contents stood outside those windows, but only one. After that, as soon as possible, he would do what had to be done. Then, and only then, the place would be truly clean and he free.
22
The young man with the horrible voice was sitting in the bus shelter. He was there again, in spite of having been warned off by her and by Noele. Julia watched him from the window. She had to be sure he was the right one. By that, of course, she meant the wrong one, everything about him was wrong, his voice, his appearance, his manner, his insolence. But was he the one who phoned Francine, talked to Francine and called at Noele’s?
If he had a car, why was he waiting in a bus shelter? That was easy, he wasn’t waiting for a bus, but for Francine. He would have parked that car somewhere. Julia put on her coat and ran across the road, having to stop in the middle for cars going the other way to pass and hear a driver swear at her.
By this time the young man was standing up, pretending to read the bus timetable on the shelter wall. Julia sat down on the seat and studied him. She wanted to make sure she would know him again. His black hair was curly, which she hadn’t noticed that first time, and his eyes were brown. Probably he was Asian or half Asian. The fact that he talked cockney meant nothing. No doubt he had been born here. He was dressed in a suit, dark blue with a pinstripe, and he had a white open-necked shirt on. A ridiculous combination, Julia thought.
She would have liked to ask him his name, but she lacked the nerve. There was hardly anything Julia would not have done to save Francine and protect her from harm. Still, going up to a stranger and asking who he was daunted her. If the time came when she had to she would, but not now.
A complete picture of him imprinted on her memory, Julia walked around the corner into the street which turned off this main road just past the pedestrian crossing. She was looking for the young man’s red sports car and she had to walk quite a long way before she found it. The street climbed up a fairly steep gradient and she climbed with it and on top of the hill she found a red sports car parked. It didn’t surprise her, she had known it would be somewhere.
There was no one about. As is usually the case the street was populated with cars, not people. She walked around the car, looking in at the windows. On the dashboard shelf lay a brochure, a railway timetable and on top of them an envelope with an enclosure. The name typed on the envelope was Mr. Jonathan Nicholson and the address was Fulham, SW6.
Julia returned home well satisfied with her detective work, but otherwise deeply troubled. She wondered where Francine had met this man. Been introduced to him by one of those friends of hers, she supposed, one of the Hollies or the Mirandas. She acknowledged to herself that Francine had won a great victory that day she left Noele’s and for the first time, when told to go to her room, disobeyed. Since then she had gone out when she pleased, her only concession to authority that she still came home reasonably early. How had it happened? How had she allowed it to happen?
As surely as she knew her own name and where and who she was, Julia knew that through this freedom Francine had snatched for herself she would come to grief. It would be the ruin of her. She would be destroyed and if not die, eventually be confined in a psychiatric ward. Julia would do anything to avoid that.
Francine was up in her room. If only she, Julia, could just go up there and lock the door. Francine, after all, had her own bathroom, she wouldn’t be put to any undue suffering. She could use the bathroom and get water. Julia imagined having a new door fitted to Francine’s room with a window and a hatch in it. She had seen such arrangements in programs about prisons on television. The hatch door could be opened and closed only from the outside. The aperture would be big enough for Francine’s meals to be passed through. You read stories about people being shut up in their rooms by anxious parents and such incarcerations enduring for years. Julia had read them and thought such things outrageous, but now she was less sure.
The phone rang. It was her friend Laura who had won the Lottery. She and her husband were settin
g up a business on the proceeds, a hotel and restaurant, and hoped to open in a month’s time. If Julia was still looking for a job for Francine, there might be an opening for a good-looking well-spoken girl as a receptionist. Julia thought of the people Francine would meet in such a situation, of how attractive she would have to make herself to the male guests, and she said a decisive no, trying to keep the shudder out of her voice.
She found herself pacing the floor. It happened a lot these days. The only benefit derived from it might be a weight loss, but Julia was not losing weight, rather the reverse. She paced, not because she wanted to but because she couldn’t keep still. Her restlessness wore her out. She often wished she smoked or had recourse to some other prop to the nerves.
After a while Francine came downstairs, wearing her black leather jacket and with her hair tied back. Julia asked her where she was going and Francine said, “To the shops.”
Even a few months ago that could never have happened. Julia went upstairs and watched her departure from the bedroom window. She expected her to cross the road to where Jonathan Nicholson was waiting, but Nicholson had gone and the bus shelter was empty. Francine had remained on this side and was walking in the direction of the High Street. Julia left the window and went into Francine’s bedroom. She had once been an honorable woman, but now had no compunction about searching Francine’s room and prying into her things.
The mobile phone was there, on charge, plugged into a socket by Francine’s bed. Bitterly, Julia saw that this object, which had been bought and bestowed to ensure the girl’s safety and to keep tabs on her, now had its backlash. Because of it Francine could make private phone calls in secret. Julia opened drawers, looking for she hardly knew what. She found an address book and scrutinized it but, strangely perhaps, jibbed at looking inside Francine’s engagement diary. A hot wash of shame flooded over her at the thought.
