A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  “You are very likely to hear from us again, however,” said the Superintendent, making it sound more like a threat than a guarantee.

  When one thing goes well, and it is a big thing, all good things will follow. It is as if that initial success lays a spell over all subsequent enterprises, sheds light on the path toward them. Teddy had had trouble with his plastering of the cellar wall where, as it turned out, it hardly mattered. Up here, beginning the work with caution, he found that he couldn’t put a foot wrong—or, rather, make a false move with the diamond-shaped trowel.

  The plaster was of precisely the right consistency, neither too dry nor too damp. It went on like cream. His firm, assured movements created a smooth, even surface which, when painted, would be indistinguishable from the original walls of the hall. He set the strip of carved wood he had had to make himself in place and, if anything, he thought, it was an improvement on the existing skirting board.

  Now it was finished, though the plaster was still wet, he couldn’t keep from laughing out loud. It was going to look as if that wall had been there forever. He might even hang a picture on it. Why not fetch that Simon Alpheton still life? It deserved a wall to itself, not to be reduced to mediocrity among the other indifferent stuff in the dining room.

  Francine was coming. The golden spell of his success was reaching ahead to her visit as well and he was making plans for it, something almost unprecedented with him. He would be sensible, understand that his failure was due to overwork, to tiredness and anxiety. Today he wouldn’t try. Let her make what she liked of that, he wasn’t obliged to fall in with all her wishes.

  They’d go out for a drive in the Edsel. He was picking her up near where she lived and they would go to the Imperial War Museum and see the exhibition of forties fashion. That was something he longed to see and all girls liked fashion, he thought. Then they’d come back here and he’d show her the new wall and watch her face. Maybe she’d clap her hands, he wouldn’t be surprised. She’d expect him to want her to take her clothes off and pose for him all covered in silk and jewels, but he wouldn’t ask. Not today.

  He’d have wine for her, something expensive, and after that they’d go out to eat. Somewhere or other, it didn’t much matter where. Perhaps he’d buy her a dress, white or black. A black velvet dress would be wonderful, with a long skirt cut on the bias and a draped neckline. The Edsel would be full of petrol, so he could drive her all the way home, and if she wanted to be early he wouldn’t make a fuss. Tomorrow, Sunday, he’d take the card to the machine again and draw out another two hundred pounds.

  Waking hungry at four in the morning, Julia went downstairs and ate two of the white chocolate finger biscuits. Then, because she knew that if she went back to bed on an empty stomach she would only have to come down again, she ate the rest of the packet. Strangely, though she often needed to eat in the nighttime she never wanted to pace. She walked languidly from window to window, looking out at nothing, at the empty, light-washed street and the little island in the middle of it with its solitary bollard.

  She understood that young girls like to sleep late in the mornings. Miranda’s mother had told her that her daughter sometimes lay in bed till two in the afternoon. Julia had never allowed that. Ten was absolutely the latest Francine had been permitted to lie in and that only at the weekends. But she had parted early from Jonathan Nicholson the night before and come home early. This Sunday morning she was up before her stepmother. Julia came downstairs at nine, heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, and found Francine at the kitchen table, eating cornflakes.

  “Shall I cook lunch today?” Francine asked. “You’re always cooking for me and I’d like to do it for a change. Shall I?”

  “Not if it’s going to be mung beans or tofu or anything like that.” Francine was inclined to this sort of food when she prepared it herself. “You can take some meat out of the freezer or I’ve got a free-range chicken.”

  Francine said she would cook the chicken and bake potatoes. And make what she called her special salad with avocados and peppers. “You won’t have to do a thing. I’ll get it ready and clear up and wash up, or at any rate I’ll put the stuff in the dishwasher before I go out.”

  Only the last part of these remarks really registered with Julia. Francine was going out. Julia got up from the table, cut herself a thick slice of bread, buttered it, spread greengage jam on it and began stuffing it into her mouth, using both hands. She didn’t look at Francine so had no idea if the girl was watching her.

  Of course, Francine was not going out. She might think she was, but she was mistaken. Jonathan Nicholson could wait for her over there in that bus shelter for hours, for hours on end, or hide behind the fence or even in someone’s dustbin, but Francine wouldn’t come. For she, Julia, had had enough. She had borne with Francine’s behavior for months now, for years, going out whenever she pleased, coming home when she liked, using the house as a hotel, and deliberately torturing Julia. It wasn’t thoughtlessness or a young girl’s ignorance of how to behave, or a disturbed mind, Julia knew that now. It was purposeful malice and wickedness.

  But she had done it for the last time. Julia said aloud, her mouth full, “The worm has turned.”

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Nothing,” said Julia, and liking the sound of it she said it several times more, “nothing, nothing, nothing …”

  Francine left the room. She didn’t go upstairs. Julia listened to hear what she was doing. Going into the laundry room, by the sound of it, ironing something. Ironing a dress to wear when she went out. Only she wasn’t going out. Julia would see to that.

  She phoned Noele, she phoned Amy Taylor. Amy had a son of seventeen and a fifteen-year-old daughter and they talked for a while about the problems of living with teenage children. Amy said her daughter had stayed out till two in the morning without any warning, without giving her a sign she meant to do such a thing, and Julia said, how dreadful, and one thing she would say for Francine, she wouldn’t dare do that.

  The conversation cheered her up. She made coffee for herself and Francine, and for once she didn’t feel like eating anything, the delicious espresso coffee was enough on its own. Bustling about, tidying the living room, dusting, she sang to herself the songs of her own adolescence. Francine, in the kitchen, heard the melody of “Mending Love” and remembered her mother’s record that she had broken and being sent to her room and the man coming …

  Once Julia knew Francine was occupied with preparing lunch, she had seen her tearing lettuce and stripping peel from an avocado, she made her preparations. Carrying a clean bath sheet and a clean bath towel, she took the key out of the laundry-room door and the key out of the cloakroom door and went upstairs. She had calculated that one of them was bound to fit the lock on Francine’s bedroom door. It was always so in houses such as this, one key fitted half the locks and the other the rest of them. The key from the cloakroom door slid into the keyhole in Francine’s bedroom door and turned smoothly. Julia put the key into her skirt pocket.

  Then she opened Francine’s door very softly and went into the room. She saw the mobile phone lying on the bedside cabinet. Obviously, she should take that away. As she came out of the bathroom she heard Francine on the stairs so had time to do no more than drop the mobile and push it under the wardrobe with her toe. “Just putting clean towels in your bathroom,” she said.

  Francine had the roast chicken and baked potatoes on the table by just after one. The salad looked very pretty with its slices of pale green avocado and strips of red pepper against the dark-green romaine lettuce in a glass bowl. Julia hadn’t intended opening a bottle of wine, but she suddenly felt expansive, she must be kind to Francine and it would, after all, be a mercy if she passed part of the afternoon in sleep.

  I don’t like doing this, said Julia to herself, but I must. Now I know what the Victorians meant when they beat their children and said, this hurts me more than it hurts you.

  Francine would only have one glass of
wine, but she poured a second one for Julia and then a third. “Are you going out this afternoon?” she asked. “Is anyone coming?”

  Her guilt was talking, thought Julia. “I shall be quite alone.”

  “I heard you talking to Noele and I thought maybe she was coming over.”

  “If you’re going to do as you said, Francine,” said Julia, “and clear up, I wish you’d get on with it. Or do you want to leave it to me?”

  “No, I’ll do it,” said Francine.

  She washed up the roasting pan and the salad bowl. She put the dishes and plates and glasses and cutlery in the dishwasher and the soap powder in, closed the door and switched the machine on. Then she asked Julia if she would like her to make coffee. Julia said, “I’ve had quite enough coffee for one day.”

  She sat in an armchair and looked at the Sunday paper. There was a scandalous story about an artist called Simon Alpheton turning homosexual and a picture of him with his arm around a young man. Both were smiling. Julia thought how easy life was for some people. As soon as Francine had gone upstairs to change, she ran out into the front garden. Jonathan Nicholson was already there, sitting in the bus shelter with a young woman. He had brought a woman with him to make his appearance seem respectable. There was no end to his craft and deviousness. He had a baseball cap on and big leather boots.

  Julia stared at him but he refused to look in her direction. Of course she had no doubt he had seen her. He would soon find out who was in control here. He could wait all afternoon and all evening, too, in that drafty bus shelter and she hoped he got flu for his pains.

  She went inside and closed the front door. At the foot of the stairs she stood and listened. When she heard the sound of water running in Francine’s shower she went upstairs and paused only for a moment, a few seconds, outside Francine’s door in which to take a deep breath and brace herself, before turning the key in the lock.

  32

  The locking of her door passed unheard by Francine. She was in her bathroom, wrapped in the clean bath sheet after her shower, with a k.d. lang CD on rather loudly. Probably too loudly for Julia’s comfort, she was thinking, and she stepped across the room to turn down the volume.

  She heard Julia going downstairs. Her tread had become heavy. Francine went back into her bathroom, plugged in the hair-drier, switched it on to full power and set about drying her hair. Then she put on the white dress because Teddy liked it. A coat, or at any rate her leather jacket, would have to go over it because, though mild, the temperature was no more than ten degrees. To let her hair hang loose or plait it? In the end she decided on neither, but twisted it up into a geisha’s knot and fixed it in place with long silver pins.

  Teddy was expecting her at three. He would pick her up two hundred yards down the road as he had been doing lately. She put on shoes with high heels because Teddy liked them, decided they were only possible if no walking was to be done and found comfortable boots instead. Then she tried the door handle. The door wouldn’t open.

  It must be stuck. She turned the handle to the right and to the left. She pushed and pulled it, but the door wouldn’t budge. For a moment she failed to understand. There were no keys in the house except for the one that locked the downstairs cloakroom. No one needed to lock doors, they all respected each other’s privacy, or she had thought they did. But if there was no key there was a keyhole. She had never noticed it before, not in all her ten years in this house. A keyhole without a key? She pulled one of the silver pins out of her hair and poked it into the keyhole. No key. If she knelt down and squinted through the hole she could see out to the other side, the landing and a gleam of light from the landing window.

  By now she knew what had happened and she was hit by shock. No one had laid a hand on her, but it was as if she had been assaulted. No one had used force on her, but it was as if she had been shackled. Without attempting to find a voice, without even opening her mouth, she thought that the shock had deprived her of the power of speech as it had once before. For a moment she was afraid to try and then she did, she spoke, though not loudly enough to be heard beyond the confines of her room. “Julia, Julia …”

  To be able to talk was in itself a huge relief. She asked herself if she should begin shouting, screaming to be let out, please, Julia, please let me out, let me out, please, Julia.… Her natural dignity held her back from that. Nor would she hammer on the door. She sat down on her bed, she took off her jacket. At least she could phone Teddy. Her mobile phone, which was Julia’s gift, was the best present she had ever had. There was an irony there that in other circumstances would have made her smile.

  The mobile should have been on the bedside cabinet, but it wasn’t. Julia had taken it, of course she had. Francine now recalled her encounter with Julia on the threshold of her bedroom before lunch and Julia saying she had been putting clean towels into her bathroom. That must have been when she removed the mobile to prevent her prisoner phoning anyone. Francine had a quick, sinking sensation of despair. But she got up and went to the window and opened the casement.

  People in books got out of windows down ivy obligingly placed at strategic levels or they took the sheets off their beds, knotted them and climbed down the rope thus made. But no one told you what you anchored the rope to at this end or what to do if you had a duvet on your bed and only one sheet. Besides, it was frighteningly far down, Francine couldn’t calculate how far, but enough to cause you to break bones if you fell.

  In the garden next door but one a woman was working, planting bulbs. Francine knew her as a pleasant but not very sociable neighbor. Certainly she was not numbered among Julia’s friends and Francine doubted if she had ever been in the house. Should she call out to her? What would she say? “My stepmother has locked me in my bedroom and taken away my phone. Could you please …?”

  Could you please what? Call the police? You don’t call the police because someone has locked you in your bedroom. “My stepmother” sounded like a character in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The whole idea of calling for help was humiliating and somehow ridiculous. While Francine was thinking along these lines, still leaning out of the window, the woman brushed earth off her gloved hands, picked up the now empty trug basket in which the bulbs had been and went into her own house.

  Francine closed the window. It had begun to rain, a gentle pattering at first, then a downpour. With the rain a good deal of light faded. She switched on a bed lamp. What was she supposed to do about eating and drinking? And how long did Julia intend to keep her here? All day? All night?

  Because he didn’t want Francine to see those words that defaced the Edsel’s boot lid, or he didn’t want her to see them again, Teddy went out on Sunday morning and found a place where they sold him a can of pale-yellow spray paint called Primrose Dawn. On the way back he stopped at a cash dispenser in West End Lane and drew a further two hundred pounds out of Harriet Oxenholme’s bank account. A wineshop next door was open. He bought Australian Chardonnay for Francine and a box of liqueur chocolates because he thought she might expect him to give her presents.

  Maneuvering the Edsel into the mews, he saw, standing in the middle of the cobbled area, the woman who had waved to him from a car on the night Harriet died. He recognized her at once. And she, putting the little dog she had been exercising on to its lead, seemed to recognize him.

  “Hello,” she said, and then, rather ominously, “We meet again.”

  “That’s right.” What else could he say?

  “Harriet well, is she?”

  There was no mistaking the note of spite in her voice. What was she getting at? What did she know? Fear flickered through him. “She’s fine,” he said firmly.

  “Tell her Mildred said hello.”

  It was a disturbing encounter. He waited until she had gone and then he rubbed down the area of bodywork on the Edsel with emery paper and wiped down the surface. Mildred reappeared at her own gate, carrying a black plastic rubbish bag. She left the gate open, the bag propping it. That must mean the contra
ctors Westminster Council used to collect householders’ rubbish would come on Monday morning as well as Thursday morning. He had better put a bag out. Not doing so would only attract attention to himself.

  He sprayed on a thin coat of paint. While it was drying he had lifted up the manhole cover and tried slipping his oak frame into place. Here was a setback. The frame was fractionally too small. Any pressure on it—such as the weight of a flagstone—and it would drop through. He asked himself angrily how he had come to make such an easily avoidable mistake. Now he would have to make that frame all over again or find some other way. How about wire netting stretched across to form a kind of basket? That might do it. He would have to buy some wire netting or even a piece of chain-link fencing.

  By now it was time to apply a second coat of spray paint to the Edsel. It didn’t look too bad, not perfect, but at least those offensive letters were obliterated. Orcadia Cottage was due for a clean. He vacuumed and polished, cleaned the bathroom basin and bath and shower, put out the rubbish bag, made himself some lunch and scrupulously cleaned the kitchen afterward.

  He put the bottle of wine in the fridge. It wouldn’t be right for her to drink too much wine, but he would permit her one glass. A lot of clothes shops would be open, so if he went out in plenty of time he could buy her the black velvet dress on the way to meet her. Then she could wear it when they came back here. He considered postponing the purchase of the dress until she was with him, but dismissed that idea as pointless. He knew her size and it was his taste that counted.

  It had begun to rain. He put the manhole cover back.

  The DIY place was in a shopping mall. Coming out with his roll of heavy-duty wire netting, he saw the dress in the window of a boutique between the pharmacy and the video rental place. Figured velvet, not black but the darkest of greens, the green of a pine forest, sleeveless, with a scooped neckline cut so that it hung in three folds. It cost eighty pounds, a huge amount, but it was worth every penny, and he imagined Francine wearing it, reclining on the sofa in the Orcadia Cottage drawing room. She should have Harriet’s gold bracelets on her arms and hold a black ostrich feather in her hand.