A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  She went into Francine’s bathroom, noticing how clean and neat it was. And this, obscurely, added to her discomfiture. But she opened the cabinet over the basin to see what was inside. Although she possessed a diaphragm, Julia had never taken oral contraceptives and didn’t know what the Pill looked like. The only item in the cabinet that might possibly be the Pill turned out to be paracetamol. She had heard there were some brazen girls, that Holly, she was sure, who actually carried condoms about with them for their boyfriends’ use, but those she would have recognized and there was none in Francine’s room.

  She closed the door behind her, found that she was shaking all over and going downstairs again, clinging to the banisters, poured herself a tot of brandy. This was almost unprecedented. Julia didn’t drink. The brandy burned her throat and filled her head with fire. Food provided greater comfort. She went to the fridge and stuffed into her mouth a slice of cheesecake, a piece of pizza and some potato salad, devouring it in gulps as if speedy eating would lessen the quantity and its effects. She sat down on the chair in the hall, the one by the telephone. There, racked by the burning sensation of heartburn, she wrung her hands and moved her head from side to side.

  Francine came back after she had been sitting there for about an hour. “Is something wrong?” she said.

  Julia stared at her and at the small gold studs in her ears. “You’ve had your ears pierced!”

  “That’s right.” Francine smiled. “About time, don’t you think? My friends had it done when they were twelve.”

  “I suppose you realize you’ll get AIDS?”

  “No, I won’t, Julia. They used a fresh needle from a sterile pack.”

  “I don’t know what your father will say.”

  Francine went upstairs. Still sitting in the hall, Julia wondered what she would do if Francine came down again and accused her of searching her room. Of course she would justify herself, she could do that, she had every right when it was a question of Francine’s protection. But Francine didn’t come and eventually Julia began to think that she should get lunch for the two of them. She was as hungry as if she hadn’t eaten that pizza and that cheesecake.

  She pottered about in the kitchen, making a salad, cutting bread and almost cutting herself. Two o’clock had come and gone before it was on the table. Julia called upstairs in a tremulous voice and Francine appeared, looking calm and happy. She began talking about Holly, who was moving out of her parents’ house and into a flat which she would share with another girl, and about Isabel’s trip to Thailand.

  Julia said, “What are you trying to say, Francine?”

  Francine looked at her in bewilderment.

  “If you are hinting in a roundabout way that you should be allowed to do those things I wish you wouldn’t, I wish you’d come straight out with it. I hate this deviousness. You’ve become very underhand lately, did you know that?”

  Instead of getting up from the table and leaving the room, Francine forced herself to stay there and speak gently. “Julia, I was making conversation, that’s all. I thought it was interesting.”

  “Please don’t feel you have to make conversation with me.”

  “All right. Let’s leave it, shall we?”

  They separated for the afternoon. Music could be distantly heard from Francine’s room, Oasis and then Elton John. The sound of Richard’s key in the lock brought Julia rushing out into the hall. He closed the front door behind him and she threw herself into his arms, crying and sobbing, beside herself with inexplicable grief.

  Teddy was waiting for her on the steps of the Tate Gallery. She had wondered how to greet him, what she should do and what he would do. Would he kiss her? Embrace her? The memory of that long passionate kiss came back to her with a strange unfamiliar thrill of excitement. He surely wouldn’t kiss her like that now.

  She walked up the steps toward him. He smiled, held out his hand, took hers and pulled her to him. They stood close for a moment, looking into each other’s faces. Then, “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you a picture.”

  Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place. She read it aloud from the description on the wall. “Simon Alpheton,” she said. “Didn’t he paint a picture of a pop group?”

  “They were called Come Hither,” said Teddy. “The painting’s called Hanging Sword Alley.”

  She looked away, said in a troubled voice, “My mother had a CD of Come Hither,” and then, “No, it wasn’t a CD, not then, it was a record. I broke it. I didn’t mean to, but she was awfully upset. ‘Mending Love,’ it’s called.”

  He didn’t see the tears in her eyes. He wasn’t interested. No kind of music meant anything to him. “What do you think of it?” he said, directing her attention once more to the girl in the red Fortuny dress, the boy in the blue suit, the house behind in its glowing cloak of green.

  “I don’t know anything about painting.”

  He began explaining, recalling what Professor Mills had said, talking about its accuracy, its breadth of construction and Alpheton’s treatment of light and shade.

  For her there was only one thing to be noticed. “You can see they were in love,” she said.

  He made no reply. For a few more minutes he continued to gaze at the painting. Then, “I wanted to show it to you,” he said. “I’ve been to that house. With all the leaves. We’ll go now. We’ll go and fetch my mirror.”

  Someone had packed it very carefully and boxed it in hardboard. She expected him to have a taxi to take them and the mirror to his house, she was used to taxis, but they took the bus to Sloane Square station and then the tube. He wouldn’t let her help him with the mirror. She could see by the ease with which he carried it that he was very strong.

  “My dad and my stepmother have gone out for the day to friends,” she said. “I wouldn’t go. I wanted to be with you.”

  “It’s a dump I live in. I’m warning you, so don’t be surprised.”

  But it wasn’t a dump. It was the cleanest, neatest place she had ever been in. Everywhere was painted in soft, pale colors, the windows shone, the floors, of plain wooden boards, had been stained and waxed. Of furniture there was very little, most of it being in the downstairs front room, where clean faded cotton curtains hung at the window. Teddy’s drawings, in black frames or frames of natural wood, hung on the walls, designs for the mirror, designs for a table, line-and-wash representations of great houses, pastels of statuary. On the table, spread out, portrait drawings.

  “You are very clever,” she said. “Those drawings are me, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one ever drew me before.”

  She went into his own room where his bed was and the coffee table he had made and his bookends, where his tools were and where the flaring rump of the Edsel pressed up against the window.

  “Can we go outside and look at it?”

  “If you like.”

  She didn’t find the car ugly. Her enthusiasm for it seemed to him to open a gulf between them. The pouting mask that was its hood made her laugh. She walked around the car, admiring its size and its color, but when she laid her hand on the boot lid he couldn’t restrain himself.

  “Don’t touch it!”

  He had spoken so roughly that she pulled her hand away as if the yellow metal had burned her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”

  “It’s dirty,” he said. “I don’t want you to get dirt on you.”

  While she was looking at the rest of the house he unpacked the mirror. She came downstairs and went into the front room and there it was, propped on a chair. He said, “It’s for you.”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t!”

  “I want you to have it. You must have it.”

  He put his arm around her and led her to the mirror. She remembered what he had said about giving it to his woman for her to see her face in. A deep blush spread across her cheeks and up to her forehead. She looked at the blush in the mirror, at her fiery face, her shining eyes, and then she turned to him.

 
He kissed her, the way he had under the trees. He pulled her down on to the settee. Her body felt weak and a wave of heat came over her as if it were a hot summer’s day.

  “I’ve never done this before,” he said.

  “Nor have I.”

  He took the white dress off her. He pulled her underclothes off as if he disliked them, as if they were too functional. She covered her breasts with one arm, laid her other hand across her pubic hair, then seeming to realize the absurdity of it, pulled her hands away and showed him. He was trembling, she could actually see him shake. She wrapped him in her arms and lay down with him.

  “You must show me how to do it right,” he whispered.

  “But I don’t know myself.”

  Then she found she did know.

  “Like this—is that right? And this? Tell me.”

  “Yes, oh, yes …”

  “And if I kiss you there, is that all right? And do this?”

  But she was becoming aware, without knowing what rightness would be, that this wasn’t right. His hands had been eager and his mouth urgent, but there should be more to it than the tender touch of fingers and the warm probing of a tongue. She knew very well what there should be and it wasn’t this limp shrinking of the flesh, the yielding of his body into apathy. Her own warm wetness—unexpected this, no one had told her of this—dried and cooled. He muttered something. She thought he had said, “I can’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Only it did, rather a lot. She found herself supplying excuses for him, not knowing that these were the kind woman’s reassurances uttered since time immemorial. “You’re tired, it’s been a strain. I know it has for me too. All this hiding and tension, and having to be secret. It will be different next time.”

  Richard and Julia canceled their lunch engagement. They had planned to drive down with Francine into Surrey to visit Roger and Amy Taylor. Roger Taylor, Richard and Jennifer had all been at university together, but Roger had married much later than his friends, not until after Jennifer’s death, and Jennifer had never known his wife. She, however, had joined the number of Julia’s women friends. Julia had been looking forward to seeing Amy, though she hadn’t, in her own words, “much time” for Roger, but even the prospect of half a day with her friend couldn’t be contemplated when it was a question of Francine’s safety.

  “We shall be back here before she is,” Richard said. “She has a key. You know what they’re like at that age, she’ll only come in and go straight up to her room. She may as well do that on her own, she doesn’t need us there.”

  But Julia put forward all sorts of arguments against this. Suppose “something happened” to Francine, her friends or the police or the hospital wouldn’t know where to find her parents. Then there was the danger of this boy. Julia had told her husband all about this boy, how she had seen him several times waiting for Francine in the bus shelter, and how she had found his car with his name and address on an envelope on the dashboard shelf.

  “Why was he waiting for a bus if he has a car?” said Richard.

  “I’ve told you. He wasn’t waiting for a bus. He was waiting for Francine.”

  “You actually saw him meet Francine? You saw her get in his car? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Julia shook her head in exasperation. “I am afraid I think it quite possible Francine may bring him here while we are out.”

  “What are you suggesting, Julia?”

  “She’s human, isn’t she? She’s young.”

  “Not Francine,” said Richard. “She wouldn’t do anything like that.” But he phoned Amy Taylor and canceled their visit, wincing when she was abrupt with him and when she asked why he couldn’t have let her know sooner.

  He hesitated, then said to Julia, “You don’t really believe Francine would—well, have relations with this boy, do you? Anyway, I thought she had gone out for the day with Isabel What’shername. Hasn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” Julia said tightly. “Why ask me? She never speaks to me.”

  “Julia, Francine couldn’t handle anything like that. She may be old in some ways, but in others she’s very young for her age. You don’t really think she would let him …?”

  “Fuck her?” It was an expression Julia had never in her life used before. She had barely heard it used except in movies. But she uttered it in a vicious snap and saw her husband gasp. “Why not?” she said. “She’s unstable, we’ve always known that. People like her, traumatized people, they’ve no moral sense and they’re oversexed, it’s a well-known fact. Of course she’d let him …”

  “For God’s sake, don’t use that word again!”

  They spent a miserable day. There was very little food in the fridge, Julia had eaten it all, so since she refused to leave the house, Richard had to go shopping. He came back and attempted to watch Rugby Union on television, but Julia came in and switched off the set, saying that he was heartless to amuse himself like this when she was beside herself with anxiety. Pacing had become habitual with her, but he had never before seen her pace. It taught him that this nervous habit is one of the most irritating and upsetting one human being can contemplate in another. He shut himself in their bedroom and lay on the bed to get away from it and he longed for Tuesday when he was due to get on a mid-morning flight to Frankfurt.

  It wasn’t late when Francine came home. She was probably the only girl from her class at school who arrived home by ten that Saturday night.

  She hadn’t wanted to come. She hadn’t wanted to leave Teddy and would have loved above all things to have stayed the night with him. He wanted that too. In both their minds was the same thought. If she stayed it would be all right, she would be receptive again, he would make love to her. But the difference was that he couldn’t understand that she had to go and tried physically to hold her back.

  “I have to,” she said. “I know you don’t understand and I don’t know how to make you. It’s just a fact. I have to go home.”

  “I’ll come all the way with you. I’ll bring the mirror.” Then she had to explain that she couldn’t take the mirror. Not even if she had a taxi all the way. The mirror was something she couldn’t explain to Julia and her father. Julia was capable of breaking it. He understood that, she saw a kind of shadow cross his face at the prospect.

  “You keep it for me. I’ll see it when I come to see you.”

  She phoned for a taxi. It amazed him that she had that kind of money. While they waited for it he ironed her white dress for her, for he said he couldn’t bear to see her in anything creased. On the front-garden path, watched from an upstairs window by the neighbors he called yuppies, he kissed her so long and so intensely that the cab driver shouted at them to give over as he hadn’t got all night.

  Francine sat shivering in the back of the cab. So much had happened that she felt almost as Julia constantly forecast she must feel, that life could swiftly overpower her. Almost, but not quite. And when she was home and had paid the driver, she found herself walking quite calmly up to the front door and letting herself into the house as serenely as if she had really made love and had triumphed and been gloriously satisfied.

  It was Julia who disturbed her equilibrium by rushing out into the hall and throwing her arms around her, burying a tear-drenched face in Francine’s shoulder. “Oh God, oh God, you’re home! Thank God you’re home.”

  For a moment Francine was afraid. Some chord from the past had been struck. “It’s not Dad, is it? Something hasn’t happened to Dad?”

  A voice that was both weary and cheerful—perhaps a forced cheerfulness—greeted her from the living room. “I’m in here, darling. I’m fine.”

  Had he ever called her darling before? She couldn’t remember. But when she looked into Julia’s wet, crumpled face she didn’t like what she saw there. Many times before in her thoughts, and once or twice to Holly and Miranda, she had lightly called Julia mad. Now she knew that in saying it she hadn’t known, until this moment, what madness was.

  23

&nb
sp; In his dream the mirror ceased to be a mirror and became a framed portrait. By some curious chemical or magical process, because Francine had looked into it so many times, her image was imprinted and fixed inside the glass, it was now a picture of her. His own face wasn’t reflected back at him. He looked at hers and worshiped.

  But that was the good dream. In the bad dream she laid her small white hand on the boot lid of the Edsel and the substance of which it was made, the gleaming lemon-colored metal surface, melted and dissolved like soft butter. Her hand passed through and reached down, down, into gray decay and wet vile putrefaction … Teddy awoke, shouting so loudly that when, later, he went outside to the dustbin, Megsie put her head over the fence and asked him what was going on. She and Nige had heard this awful scream in the night, they’d thought someone was being murdered.

  “Not this time,” said Teddy.

  “Don’t you make a habit of it, will you? It was touch and go Nige and me didn’t call nine-nine-nine.”

  Francine had been to the house four times and every time he thought of what was in that boot and of her proximity to it, of her beauty and perfection, and of that horror. The time had come to do something. She wasn’t coming over until the afternoon. At ten in the morning he went up to Orcadia Place.

  The house looked different. For a moment he couldn’t decide in what respect. Then he understood that autumn had come. The leaves that canopied the house, back and front, were changing color, from green to a gingery gold or to a reddish purple. The creeping tendrils were the soft, delicate pink of a rose. Without knowing anything about gardens or gardening or plants, he realized that there had been frosts and he saw that Harriet Oxenholme (or her gardener) had cut down the flowers or uprooted them, that the earth in the tubs was fresh and the earth in the borders turned and newly planted. A lover of order and neatness, he almost preferred this spruce look to the wild abundance of blossom.