A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  He straightened the bottom sheet and shook out the white silk coverlet. When he plumped up the pillows he saw Harriet’s address book lying underneath. Sitting on the bed, he went through it again. One of these phone numbers might be her PIN. What did PIN stand for, anyway? Personal something? Personal Index Number? No, Personal Identification Number. Perhaps she had used her own phone number. Or Simon Alpheton’s. He had an idea that if you kept trying the wrong numbers in one of those machines it would eventually, maybe after three goes, swallow up the card and keep it.

  It could be any number. You wouldn’t use a friend’s phone number for that, though, would you? If you were like him and had no friends it was hard to know. What would he do? Remember it, he thought. But just as few people were as tidy and clean and particular as he, so few had his retentive memory. The time was coming, he had read, when those cash dispensers would work on a fingerprint or a picture of the iris of your eye. But it hadn’t come yet. At the moment it still relied on numbers.

  Once again he leafed through the address book. Most of the names were of people, but some seemed to be of restaurants and there were a lot for people who performed services, plumbers, electricians, builders of various kinds. To maintain the house in its pristine condition, he supposed. Why would she have all those restaurants?

  Rich people ate out a lot, of course. Would she eat out alone? Take a guest with her? He knew so little about that kind of life. He had heard of none of those restaurants: Odette’s, the Ivy, Orso’s, Odin’s, Jason’s, La Punaise, L’Artiste Assoiffé, L’Escargot. If they were restaurants.

  Back at home, he finished making the wooden frame for the flagstone. In Orcadia Cottage he had drawn a section through the skirting board to be sure the molding was right, and now he set about cutting and planing a suitable piece of deal. It would be possible to buy beading to fit, but he couldn’t afford to buy anything. His finances were in a serious state. Francine didn’t seem to understand that they couldn’t go out driving in the Edsel or eat in even the meanest restaurant because he had no money.

  Restaurants. He found the Yellow Pages and looked up all those listed in Harriet’s address book. The only one that wasn’t there was La Punaise. The exchange was the same as Jason’s which meant, according to Jason’s address, that it must be somewhere in Maida Vale. The four-digit number was four-one-six-two. He dialed the seven digits and got a woman’s voice saying that the number he had called could not be located, whatever that meant.

  On the way back to Orcadia Place he found a parking meter off the Finchley Road with fifteen minutes left to run. The space was big enough to accommodate the Edsel, which most were not, so he left the car there and went off to find a cash dispenser.

  Nervously—he half expected the machine to carry out immediate retribution of some kind—he inserted Harriet’s Connect card and when requested to punch out four digits, used her phone number. Please Wait, said the machine. Then it said there was a fault and his order could not be processed. But the card came back. He was afraid to try a second time.

  Rage or hysterical joy, Francine was accustomed to one or the other from Julia. But silence was new. To be greeted with an injured stare, head lowered, a frown gathering between those suffering eyes, but not a word uttered, was unprecedented.

  Somehow she knew quite well that asking why, what was wrong now, what had she done, what should she do, all those inquiries were useless. Julia was beyond reason. If she had once genuinely feared harm would come to Francine from some external cause or from within herself, this she had long since forgotten. All that now mattered to her was her obsession with keeping Francine there with her, indoors, under her eye day and night. Going upstairs to her room, Francine thought that Julia didn’t even want her to have a job, suitable friends, an occupation. She wanted a prisoner she could control.

  Her father was at home. She had made up her mind to tell him the truth, that she was meeting Teddy, “seeing” Teddy, that he was her boyfriend. She was tired of lying, she hated it, the false statements that she was visiting this girl’s home or that. But she was unable to be with him without Julia being there and although he would certainly tell Julia, she couldn’t bring herself to come out with it all in Julia’s presence, face her rage and panic and somehow, too, her triumph. But nor could she say to her father that she would like to speak to him alone. The result was that she said nothing and spent long hours up in her room.

  Next day she was due to see Teddy again and she wanted to see him, she wanted to reassure him once more. It was her firm belief that if she could only make him understand it didn’t matter and she didn’t mind, things would come right. But to go over to Orcadia Place on Thursday would mean directly lying to her father. Making false statements to Julia was one thing, to her father quite another. It would be impossible to bring herself to stand in front of him and say she was going clubbing with Miranda or to the cinema with Holly when in fact she was meeting Teddy. Francine was learning that while it is easy enough to lie to someone who means nothing to you, it is a very different matter with a person for whom you feel love and respect.

  She phoned Teddy at home and got no reply. The Orcadia Cottage number she didn’t know and she reminded herself to find out what it was. That set her speculating about Orcadia Cottage and worrying a little. Who was this woman who lived there and allowed Teddy to make free with her house? Young as she was, Francine was already an observer of people and she thought that few would behave like that, let someone who was, after all, a builder, move into one’s house and sleep in one’s bed and bring his girlfriend there.

  Teddy’s past life remained a mystery, perhaps a secret. She knew only that his parents were dead. It might be that this woman was some relation, an aunt or godmother. There were holes in this theory—who, for instance, did the men’s clothes belong to?—but on the whole it satisfied her. She would ask or he would tell her without being asked. When she tried phoning him again, this time in the early evening, he answered.

  A sulky response to her excuses for not seeing him was what she expected. She had to listen to indignant protests and a stream of invective directed at Julia.

  “I’ll see you this weekend,” she said. “Don’t be cross. Please.”

  “I’m not cross with you.” But he sounded it. Then he said, “Francine?”

  “What is it?”

  “You know French, don’t you? You did it for your A Level.”

  “You want me to translate something?”

  “What does La Punaise mean? P-u-n-a-i-s-e.”

  People who don’t understand a foreign language that you do always expect you to know every word it contains, to be a complete walking vocabulary. You couldn’t be that even in your own language, there would always be some words you had to look up in the dictionary.

  “I don’t know, Teddy. I’ve never heard it before. Shall I look it up and call you back?”

  At home again, he was working on the skirting board. He didn’t mind carving and sanding, these were soothing, tranquil activities, but at the same time it irked him to think that if he had had a few pounds at his disposal he could have bought beading to do a job in ten minutes that was taking hours.

  There had been no reply from Mr. Habgood. No doubt he was impatient, but if that estimate had been accepted, the ten percent deposit he had asked for should also have come in the envelope. Craftsmen sometimes had to wait weeks, months, to get paid, as he remembered from certain remarks of Mr. Chance, complaints that had gone over the head of a small boy but now came back to him.

  Francine hadn’t called back. He didn’t ask himself why not, he could imagine. That old woman had got hold of her and was haranguing her, or her dad had come home and needed her for something or other. Still, you’d think she’d keep a French dictionary in her room. A bell started ringing, but it was the doorbell, not the phone. Nobody ever called, he couldn’t imagine who it was unless Nige had come around to make a fuss about the noise the plane made.

  It was his grandmot
her. She had rung the bell—for “politeness’s sake,” she said—but immediately let herself in with her key. “Hello, stranger,” she said.

  He wanted to keep her in the hall, but she came in, marched into his room and stared at the Edsel, which she evidently hadn’t expected to see. But her first remark wasn’t about the car. “This place is like ice. It’s colder than outdoors.”

  “I can’t afford to heat it,” he said.

  “Too proud to sign on, are you? Well, it makes a change to find some pride in this family. I’m not stopping, I wouldn’t want to take my coat off. The doctor says I’m not to get chilled, I could get that hypothermia they all have nowadays and I don’t fancy being wrapped up in cooking foil in an ambulance at my age. I came to say my pal Gladys has done your curtains and what about you painting her outside toilet like you promised.”

  The idea of curtains for this house seemed to belong in the distant past. He had a new home now and a warm one. Maybe he could sell Gladys’s effort, take it to one of those secondhand curtain places. But meanwhile he would have to paint a freezing-cold backyard privy …

  The phone was ringing. He could see his grandmother brightening up, the way she always did when she had the chance of overhearing someone’s private conversation. He picked up the receiver. It was Francine.

  “I’m so sorry, Teddy. My dad came home just at that moment. And then Miranda’s dad’s secretary phoned to say I hadn’t got the job.”

  He cared nothing about all that. “Did you find out what La Punaise means?”

  “Yes, I did. It means a pin.”

  “La Punaise means a pin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re wonderful,” he said. “You’re brilliant. I’ll call you back.”

  He threw his arms into the air and jumped up and down. He burst into peals of laughter. His troubles were over, everything had come right.

  “Whatever’s got into you?” said Agnes.

  31

  David Stanark had died by his own hand and Richard had failed to be there in his hour of need. He was ignorant of David’s troubles because he hadn’t bothered to find out, because he had neglected David. An hour of need it must surely have been as, deserted by his wife, no doubt friendless, with no one to whom he could unburden himself, he had hung the rope over a beam in his garage and made a noose, put it around his neck and stepped off the chair.

  It was months since Richard had seen him. Their friendship had never been the same after David had said those sententious things about the reason why Pride was one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Richard knew it himself, it was only an echo of his own conclusions, but there are situations in which we dislike those who agree with us. We have confided in them because we want them to deny our humiliating suspicions and too-frank analysis of our own character. Richard could never see David without remembering that little lecture on vanity and learning to live with our own mistakes. So he continued to see him only rarely and then always with his wife, Susan, who was Julia’s friend.

  But now he was dead, David who hadn’t deserted him when a friend was needed, David, who, if he hadn’t quite saved his life, had at least spared him days or weeks of police interrogation and suspicion and a calumny that might have stuck. Guilt overwhelmed him. If he had been a true friend David might be alive now. Again it was that wretched pride of his intervening to wreck his life and other people’s. All he could do now, and very inadequate it was, would be what the police asked and go to see them on his way to Heathrow on Friday.

  As soon as her father’s back was turned, as it seemed to Julia, Francine went out. Possibly she said where she was going, Julia hadn’t listened. She was tired of these attempts to make a fool of her when she knew the girl was going off to meet Jonathan Nicholson.

  She told herself she was glad to see the back of Francine. Without her tiresome obstinate presence in the house she, Julia, could get on with all the tasks and occupations her conscientiousness had forced her to neglect for so long. After all, she was an educated woman with an active mind. There were a thousand things to do which a tiresome teenager knew nothing of and should no longer be allowed to interfere with.

  But when she reviewed these pursuits she found that they had disappeared or no longer held any interest for her. That phase of her life was over. She hadn’t had a big lunch, or so it seemed to her now, three hours later, so she ate up the remains of the quiche no one had had much of, and all the chocolate biscuits in the tin and a guava-and-mango yogurt. All there was to do was make phone calls. She phoned Noele, who couldn’t talk for long, Friday being a busy time in the shop, and Jocelyn, whose answering machine replied, and Laura, who had time to spare and was quite willing to talk for half an hour about the outrageousness of the modern adolescent.

  At about six a strange thing happened. She suddenly understood that all afternoon she had been longing for Francine. It had seemed to her that if the girl had walked in the door all her troubles would be past and she would be happy and serene again, she wouldn’t have to gorge herself on unsuitable foods, she wouldn’t have to make occupation.

  But as it grew dark, a second desire entered Julia’s mind and, although its opposite, existed alongside it, running parallel to it. She longed for Francine and she hoped, perversely, that she wouldn’t come, that she would be extravagantly late, as late as midnight, which she had never been. She wanted Francine to be desperately, appallingly late so that she, Julia, could reach a peak of anxiety and terror beyond anything she had known before, a madness of waiting and enduring until, when Francine finally came, she could explode. She could burst like the rainstorm that comes at the end of a day of insufferable heat.

  In this frame of mind she watched the clock. Paced and looked at the clock, paced and told herself not to look at the clock again until she had counted a hundred paces. The bus shelter had been empty for hours, she could see into it clearly enough by the street lights, but she was unsurprised by Jonathan Nicholson’s absence. Of course he wasn’t there, she thought grimly; he was with Francine.

  By seven-thirty she was almost happy. She was getting what she wanted. Francine wouldn’t come for hours and hours. Huge fantasies of rape and assault and murder could be allowed to fill her mind unchecked. A bulging edifice of tension began to grow. Nine o’clock would become ten and ten eleven, and long before that she would have been sick with dread, actually physically sick, and have eaten to steady herself, perhaps at some point lain on the floor and screamed. She paced and watched the clock, her heart beginning to race.

  At nine, or a few minutes after, Francine had come in. Julia couldn’t speak. She was stunned with relief and disappointment, both at the same time. She simply looked at Francine, giving her a long, wretched and disgusted glare, and in her misery turned away her head.

  Four-one-six-two. Harriet Oxenholme might have had to write it in her address book, masquerading as a restaurant, but he had no need of secret mnemonics. If she had had a memory like his she wouldn’t have betrayed herself and opened the door to her bank account, as simply as one might lift the lid of a box of chocolates and offer its contents. What a fool! Probably she thought she was being clever, when all she had had to do was look up “pin” in a French dictionary.

  He walked over to the cash dispenser on the Barclays Bank branch that was on the corner of Circus Road and Wellington Road. He found himself unable to bear the suspense any longer. First he checked that the machine would accept Visa Connect. It would. It showed a small picture of a card like Harriet’s. Teddy held his breath, told himself not to be stupid and started breathing normally. The card went in. He did it the wrong way up the first time, so had to begin again. This time all was well.

  Very carefully, with a finger he would not allow to tremble, he punched out the number, four-one-six-two. There was no explosion, no angry voice, no simple refusal. But this was a slightly different machine from the one he watched the girl operate. Hers required you to say what kind of money you wanted—English, French, U.S. or
Spanish—it asked you if you needed a receipt. This one was simpler. He punched the “enter” key.

  “Please Wait,” said the machine, then, “Your order is being processed.” The card came back. He couldn’t believe it. He had known it must work, but he still couldn’t believe it. The money came out. Not with a squeak or a roll of drums or to the tune of the National Anthem, but slipped out in silence. Eight twenty-pound notes and four ten-pound notes.

  It worked. He was in business.

  * * *

  It was a mysterious encounter, this interview with the Detective Superintendent and the Inspector, strangers, for Wallis had retired. Even when it was all over and he was hailing a taxi, Richard had only a scant idea of their purpose in inviting him there. If one concrete fact came out of the meeting it was that Susan Stanark had left her husband back in the summer.

  “Is that why he killed himself?” Richard asked.

  “Perhaps. Partly. We think there may have been other reasons.”

  “You don’t want me to—I mean, you haven’t asked me here to identify him?”

  “No, no. His brother did that. He was related to your present wife, I believe?”

  Richard didn’t like that “present,” as if he had wives in series. “Distantly,” he said, surprised. “A second cousin or something of the sort.”

  “You’d known him a long time, I think?”

  “Eleven years.”

  Richard didn’t see why he should go into all that alibi stuff with them. They ought to know about it and if they didn’t he wasn’t going to assist them. Besides, if you tell a policeman that at one time you needed an alibi he will immediately assume (so reasoned Richard) that you were either guilty or that you engaged in activities that made you a suspect. So he said nothing and the policemen said very little more beyond mysteriously inquiring if he had “any samples of the late David Stanark’s handwriting” in his possession. Richard said he hadn’t, they had never written to each other, and then they let him go.