by Ruth Rendell
“I’m selling it for Keith,” Teddy said, more expansively than usual. “He said to sell it if I can get a good price.”
“You’d think he’d got something in there he doesn’t want us to see, I said. And Nige said, yeah, maybe he’s got drugs in there with a street value of untold millions. Funny the things you think of, isn’t it? Many’s the time I’ve cursed that Esme, taking up the whole garden, but I don’t know, I reckon I’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
“Edsel,” said Teddy, more as a matter of form than because he thought she would learn.
If cleaning the car meant doing it under her eyes he decided against it. Whatever happened, he had a busy day ahead of him. The phone rang and he was sure it must be Francine. There had been some talk of his going with her to look at that Holly’s new flat, and then he and she and Holly and some guy called Christopher going out somewhere. He hated the whole idea, but he would do it if that was what she wanted. It wasn’t Francine on the phone but a man in Highgate who had come upon Teddy’s old advertisement, had noted it down at the time or kept the paper or something, and wanted to know if he could have an estimate for a couple of built-in wardrobes. Having long ago decided to turn nothing down with the exception of rough laboring, Teddy told Mr. Habgood of Shepherds Hill that he would be along at three in the afternoon.
The man he saw at Miracle Motors wasn’t the one he had talked to on the phone. This was the manager, or perhaps the managing director, and when Teddy said he had practically had a promise of a sale he pursed his lips and began shaking his head from side to side in a discouraging way.
Then the one he had talked to came out and behaved very differently from what Teddy had expected. “Now if it was part exchange,” he said, “that would be a whole different ball game.”
The manager stopped shaking his head and started nodding it. “Then we could be talking a couple of K, right, Mick?”
“Two thousand pounds?” said Teddy, aghast.
“That’s about the size of it.”
“And I’d have to buy another car from you?”
They looked amused. Then Mick said quite sharply, “Frankly, I’m surprised Mr. Brex wants to sell. Or maybe what I mean is I’m surprised he didn’t come himself if that’s what he wants. Where’s he got to, anyway?”
“He’s living in Liphook,” said Teddy.
“Is that right? He’s down there and you’re up here with his car?”
Both men looked him up and down. They looked at him in the way people in their forties and fifties do look at young men, with a mixture of contempt and envy and suspicion. A layabout, they were very likely thinking, a drawer of benefit and probably a fiddler of benefit, on the fringes of crime.
“If we’re talking about a straight purchase,” said the manager and, from having exhausted his gaze on Teddy, turned at last to eye the Edsel, “a grand is the kind of area that’d be realistic.”
Appalled, he thought of the ten thousand he had had in mind. But to be rid of the thing, for it no longer to be the first object he saw when he woke up in the morning, no longer to fill his garden and press its rear against his windows. Even its color was becoming his most hated color, that insipid pastel-yellow …
“Would you give me a thousand for it, then?”
“I take it you’ve got the vehicle registration document with you, the MOT and a valid certificate of insurance?”
He had never even heard of these things. What was the MOT?
He dared not ask.
“I’ll tell you what, you get Mr. Brex to come in here and have a word with us himself. Frankly, I’d rather do business with Mr. Brex in person. Liphook’s not at the end of the world. You take that motor away for the time being and maybe if Mr. Brex puts in a personal appearance we can come to a more satisfactory arrangement for all.”
Teddy said nothing. He walked toward the Edsel.
“You tell him Wally says all the best,” the manager called after him.
Mr. Habgood lived in one of those sixties townhouses without a single cupboard. He had just moved there from a Victorian villa that was amply supplied with storage space. Teddy looked at the bedrooms, measured up, lost his enthusiasm when the client said chipboard would do for the doors, he didn’t want any fancy stuff, not a lot of expense, but again he felt that he could barely afford to turn down anything of this nature.
“That’s quite a vehicle you’ve got there,” Habgood said, showing him out. “You must be in a fair way of doing, getting your hands on a nice job like that at your age. Drinks juice, I bet.”
Teddy was almost too angry to speak. But he told himself that if Habgood believed him successful he would be likely and willing to pay more and he resolved to ask double what he had first intended.
On the way home he stopped at a DIY center and bought ready-mixed concrete. It was a strange sensation using the Edsel’s boot for a legitimate purpose, actually putting something into that space which had been for so long a forbidden area.
Petrol was the next requirement. As he served himself he watched the car drinking juice. With its ugly fish mouth and its cocked-up tail, it had something animal-like about it and it was easy to imagine it greedily slurping up the oil that sustained it. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a yellow tongue pop out of its mouth. Thank God for the money in the handbag. But it brought him almost physical pain to see so much of it vanish into the service station’s till.
He was experiencing that sensation of hopelessness that follows when we plan to be rid of an encumbrance, are positive it will vanish if certain steps are faithfully followed, anticipate the relief that will result from its disappearance, only to find ourselves back in the situation as before, the position that has always been. It can’t be done. The best-laid plans have failed. The thing, whatever it may be, the rash of pimples on one’s face, a plague of flies, the next-door neighbor’s night-long stereo, is still there.
So it was for Teddy. Deep humiliation was what he felt as he drove the Edsel back through the gates and under the hated carport. His shame was exacerbated by his remembering, at exactly that moment, that he had told Nige and Megsie he was selling the car. Yet here it was, back where it had always been. For a while he tried maneuvering it backward and forward in an attempt to find a new position for it, but all he could achieve was to leave a couple of yards instead of a couple of feet between its tail and his window.
He was so preoccupied with the Edsel and his money problem that a curious, even terrible, thing happened to him. When Francine phoned a few seconds passed by before he knew who it was. It simply failed to register. Her voice spoke to him and she spoke her name and he could almost have asked, who?
Then he collected himself. She, his woman, the wearer of his ring, she who saw herself in his mirror, came back to him. But it was with actual relief that he heard her say she couldn’t come over that evening, she really couldn’t. Her father had gone away again, would be away for a week, and her stepmother—here Francine hesitated, searching for the right term—was “in a nervous state,” she had begged her not to go out and had made wild threats.
This was all beyond Teddy’s comprehension. He made no effort to understand. If she wanted to stay at home with that crazy woman, that was all right with him; as it happened he needed no distractions this evening. A flicker of anxiety was teasing him now, the remote possibility of someone else entering Orcadia Cottage and opening that cellar door … Naturally, he said none of this to Francine, merely that he would see her the next day.
“Then can we go and see Holly’s place? And go out with her and Christopher? We could go to the cinema. I can’t go to a club because Julia will fuss—well, she’ll fuss anyway, but if I’m out late she’ll go mad.”
For the sake of peace and to keep her happy, he agreed. If it had been left to him he would have stayed at home with her or, maybe, if they had to go out, taken her for an afternoon at the V and A.
“You are a dear,” she said. “You’re so good to me.”
/> “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he said.
It was a funny thing, but unless he could see her she was scarcely there. Asleep, gazed at appreciatively, she was more real than this disembodied distant voice. He felt suddenly angry and resentful, he didn’t know why, it must be the prospect of the company of Holly and Christopher. Again the notion of someone coming into the house came to him. But who could? There was no one, Harriet had lived alone. In the unlikely event of a cleaning woman arriving, the dirty state of the cellar was evidence that she never went down there.
But the sooner he was back there the better. He got the Edsel out again. By the time he reached Orcadia Place it was growing dark, the gleaming damp dusk of a London autumn evening. Lamps shone like beads of amber against the far backdrop of a hazier chemical light on Grove End Road. The sky was reddish-purple, an ugly color. This time he was seen as he drew up at the garage doors. But there was no element in it of being caught out. A woman with two small fluffy dogs on leads smiled at him, or smiled at the car which she evidently recognized. Probably she thought he was a mechanic returning it after a thousand-mile service.
Now he was well supplied with keys, he could enter the house by the back door. Carrying his toolbag, he paused inside the kitchen and listened. Somehow he thought that if anyone had been there, even if someone had been and gone, he would know, he would sense it. But all was emptiness and silence. Nothing was disturbed, not even the air in the place. He opened the cellar door and looked down, but without putting the light on. In the dimness he saw a silvery sheen on the plastic, the pale furriness of the blanket and, less comfortably, protruding from it, Harriet’s foot.
Not long, though, and he would never have to see it again. No one would see it, ever. He spread newspaper on the floor and set out his tools. The first thing he did was remove the screws on the hinges and take off the door. An ordinary sort of door, consisting of six panels and with a brass handle. Perhaps he could find a use for it. The next stage would take longer. Using his mallet, he set about freeing the architrave from the brickwork and plaster. It was a noisy task, but Orcadia Cottage stood on its own, a road to one side of it, its nearest neighbor twenty feet away and separated from it by a wall and a fence and bushes and trees. There were no Megsie and Nige next door and no common wall for them to bang on.
For all that, the heavy hammer blows made him uneasy, even though he knew that people in London are rarely alerted by building work going on in a neighbor’s house. It was different up in Neasden. Almost as disconcerting was the mess he was making, splintered wood lying everywhere and plaster dust making him choke. He realized quite suddenly that he was going to have to make a new skirting board, even perhaps carve it if he couldn’t find the right beading to match the existing one.
Once the door frame was off, he could clear up for the night. There would be no more noise. Soon there would be no more cellar. He found a broom, dustpan and brush and a roll of bin-liners, and swept up meticulously. Then the vacuum cleaner came out and he removed the last vestiges of dust.
Should he transport the bricks in preparation for tomorrow’s work? He decided yes. It would have to be done in the morning as he was going on this horrible visit in the afternoon. His anger returned, flickered. Outside in the backyard the night was growing cold, there was frost in the air, reminding him of the night Keith died. He needed a bricklayer’s hod but must manage without. His father had been a bricklayer and presumably had had his own hod, but where it was, what had happened to it, Teddy didn’t know. He felt an obscure resentment at the disappearance of that hod—along with the absence of so many things which should by rights have been his.
Something he had forgotten, matte white wall paint to match the existing paint. He must buy some on his way in the morning. Bringing bricks into contact with the beautiful velvety carpet or the hardwood floor at the top of the steps pained him. He hunted around until he found a stack of magazines, Vogue, Harper’s, Hello!, and spread their glossy pages on the floor before carefully depositing the bricks on them.
It might be best to dispose of the cellar door and door frame splinters at once. He carried them outside to the Edsel. The door would have failed to go into the boot if it had been a centimeter longer. Returning, looking at the manhole cover, he had a thought which made him smile and then laugh. It was another beautiful idea, almost amounting to genius.
Julia worried Francine and made her increasingly uneasy. It was not only that she was like an animal of uncertain temper, which must be constantly placated, but that her behavior in many small details became more and more bizarre. A lot of this was hidden from Richard, Julia purposely hid it, but Richard was away and in his absence all her strangeness was allowed to show.
At home, for she had nowhere to go without Teddy, Francine witnessed for the first time Julia’s pacing. Up and down, up and down, she could hear it even upstairs in her room, but when she came down Julia stopped and sat stiffly in a chair, as if exasperated, as if obliged to give up for the sake of someone else’s whim an essential task. Francine tried to talk to her, asking her what she thought of some item in the morning’s newspaper or if she fancied this new film that was so prominently reviewed, but Julia only nodded or shook her head impatiently. Her eyes she kept on the window, staring out into the busy road.
Then, suddenly, without warning, she jumped up and ran out into the hall, snatched a coat off the hall-stand and rushed out of the front door. Francine saw her pause perfunctorily for a lorry to pass, then run across to the island in the middle of the road, pause again before running to the other side. There was someone sitting in the bus shelter and she spoke to him, seemed to harangue him, gesticulating with her hands.
Francine watched her return, said when she came back into the room, “What was all that about?”
Julia’s reply was the disturbed person’s gesture of sharply turning away her head like a peevish child. She marched to the other end of the room, wheeled around, came back and sat down heavily on the sofa. She had put on still more weight and when she lowered her body into a chair or settee the springs groaned. Francine wondered if she was a secret eater, bingeing for comfort in some sorrow. But what sorrow?
Julia suddenly began to talk. “You don’t know what men are like, Francine. The decent ones like your father are few and far between, let me tell you. Any boy you are likely to go out with will only want you for one thing, and he’ll get as much of that as he can, as much as you give him, and then he’ll get tired of you and you won’t interest him anymore. They are all like that.”
“But you said some are like Dad,” said Francine.
“I’ve given my life to you, to protecting you and looking after you and trying to make you understand that a special person like you can’t go out into this world and mix with filthy creatures; you’re not prepared for it; I can’t prepare you, though God knows I’ve tried. I’ve wished we lived in another age when parents had rights over their children and could compel them to be obedient. The filthy creatures are everywhere out there, there was one of them over in the bus shelter. You know what he was there for, don’t you?”
“No, Julia, I don’t.” Francine felt a chill in the air, the shiver the unknown brings with it. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I wish you wouldn’t lie to me. I only want you to be honest. You know very well he was waiting for you.”
Francine crossed to the window. The young man was still there, but now he had been joined by another. She was unable to see clearly across that distance, but she thought they had both lit cigarettes.
“I don’t know those people, Julia.”
Julia let out a loud derisive snigger. “You’re a barefaced little liar, aren’t you?”
She had got to her feet, a tall, heavy woman who carried her increased weight on the front of her, big bolster-like breasts and full stomach without the intervention of a waist. Her face had become jowly, her cheeks cushions and her casque of yellow hair sat on her head like a brass helmet. She took
a step and then another, her head threateningly lowered, and Francine remembered that one occasion on which her stepmother had struck her. She refused to retreat and stood her ground.
And Julia’s intention was quite different. A weak smile softened her face, made it slack and spongy. She put out her arms in what seemed a pleading gesture, then enfolded Francine in them, holding her, then hugging her suffocatingly tightly.
Francine, when she could tactfully escape from this embrace, laid her hand on Julia’s upper arm and stroked it gently. “Can’t we try to be nice to each other, Julia? We used to get on so well when I was little.” Did they? Had they? It seemed best to pretend they had. “I promise I will be honest with you. I don’t mean to deceive. Really. But I’m not meeting that boy over there or his friend, I’ve never seen either of them before.”
Julia began to cry.
“Please don’t cry. Let’s go out somewhere together, shall we? I’m not going anywhere, so we could do something together. I’d like to have a look at the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, wouldn’t you? Or we could go shopping, you said you wanted a winter coat.”
“I don’t feel like it,” Julia said. “I’m too ill. You’ve made me ill.”
After that, Francine felt reluctant to go out anywhere on her own. She went up to her bedroom and sat there thinking about Julia and what was happening and what she might possibly do to change things. The irony was that in those childhood days she had spoken of it was she who had been sent to Julia for psychiatric help, while now she felt it was her function to seek therapy for Julia. The only way, obviously, was to try to talk to her father about Julia’s state, persuade him that Julia was having some kind of breakdown. But her father was in Strasbourg.
She picked up her mobile phone and tried to call Teddy, but there was no answer. He was the only person she knew who had no answering machine. But recorded voices weren’t much comfort to you, she thought, when she had tried Isabel and Miranda, and Holly’s new number only to be told of absence or unavailability.
