A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  The rain was coming down in sheets. He ran for cover to the Edsel. By three minutes to three he was at the appointed meeting place. Somewhat abated now, the rain pattered steadily on the car roof. He began making new plans for fixing the flagstone into the manhole. The wire netting would be pinned in initially and act as a kind of sling or hammock …

  She was often a little late. He couldn’t understand anyone being even a minute late, but he accepted it from Francine. Still, today she wasn’t a mere minute or even five minutes late. He had been sitting there for nine minutes now. Why say three o’clock if you mean three-fifteen? Rain had emptied the street of people. The dreariness of a wet Sunday afternoon pervaded the place, enough to depress anyone forced to look at those big, semidetached, thirties-vintage houses, without a light in a single window, the dripping trees, the gray gloom, passing cars sending a spray up out of the gutters.

  A quarter of an hour later he was going mad. He, who was always punctual or early, was tortured more than most people by enforced waiting. At twenty to four he drove up to her house, drove past it and around the block. There was no sign of her, no sign of any life, only the rain and the black, glassy puddles lying everywhere. He parked again, on the opposite side of the road.

  She had promised, guaranteed, undertaken, to come and she had failed to appear. He knew why and he was covered with shame and bitterness. Whatever she had said—and all those loving words, meant to reassure, came back to him—she despised him. She was contemptuous of his background, his voice, his home and above all, of his failure as a man.

  Sitting there in the car, he cursed her under his breath, she was a bitch, a cow, a stupid snob, a liar and a cheat. But by four o’clock he had been swallowed up in the pit of his own pain. A rage and misery disproportionate to the offense she had committed engulfed him. He wanted to destroy things and now he remembered a long-forgotten fact, how in that playpen he had broken things in a vain bid for attention. A memory of his low-pitched grizzling came back to him and his shouts for one of them to look at him, speak to him. His strong baby’s hands had torn the heads off toys and the wheels off toys until there were no more, and no one replaced them.

  There was nothing to shatter here and if there had been, if he had been at home or at Orcadia Cottage, he valued things too much to break them. Things were what mattered. He knew he would never see her again. She had chosen this way to leave him. James, or someone like James, who had money and the right voice and the right family, had prevailed with her. Even now, he thought, her slender white body was bared for James. She would never again look in his mirror and see his ring reflected there.

  The feelings Teddy had were all new to him. Not the anger, that was usual enough, but the sensation he couldn’t define, as of being injured. It was new, yet he could recall distant previous instances, long ago, when he was a small child. Those old feelings of hurt rose up in him now. They had lain there for years, slumbered there, an ancient sore, which Francine’s defection awakened. In Francine’s broken promise, her failure to come, he felt anew all the pain of his mother’s refusal to care for him, talk to him, touch him.

  Securing Francine in her bedroom did more for Julia than she had expected. It brought her, temporarily, relief from the raging anxiety that at present governed and dictated everything she did. When she knew Francine must have realized she was locked in, she crept upstairs as quietly as she could—actually crawled up on the thick carpet on all fours—and sitting on the landing, listened outside Francine’s door. She heard her open the window, but there was nothing else to hear. No calling for help, no appeals. She had thought Francine might start crying, but if she was she must be stifling the sounds.

  Relief. It was all right. She was pleased that there was no protest, no rebellion. Francine had accepted her lot, had recognized Julia’s mastery, her right to control, and had bowed to superior authority. Julia sat in the dining room and drank the rest of the wine she and Francine had had with their lunch. It was a celebration of her victory, her success. When the bottle was empty she poured herself a small brandy.

  Nothing stayed the same for long in Julia’s always troubled mind. Silence from Francine, which she had taken for acceptance, might only mean she was working on a way of escape. Soon it would be dark. It was raining steadily. Julia put on a raincoat and took an umbrella. She reflected that she had no need to be covert about this, it didn’t matter in the least if Francine saw her.

  The bus shelter was empty. He had gone. He knew when he was beaten. Julia went through the side gateway. First she looked into the big shed on the left-hand side of the garden. At one time they had kept a ladder, the extending kind, in the shed. Or the builder who had been working on the house had. It was gone now, she was glad to see, and the little pair of steps presented no danger. She went out into the rain, under her umbrella, and looked up at Francine’s window. It was closed now. About six feet below the bottom of the window frame a variegated yellow and green ivy grew up against the wall. Julia closed her umbrella, getting wet was of no importance, and began tearing the ivy off the wall. She pulled and wrenched and tore at the tough tendrils and tender shining leaves until the ivy lay in shreds around her feet.

  Removing this possible aid to climbing out of the window brought Julia her second phase of relief. It was getting dark now, would soon be night. She went back indoors. The phone was ringing. It would be Jonathan Nicholson, calling to know why Francine hadn’t come to meet him in the bus shelter. Julia picked up the receiver and said in her iciest tone, “She is not coming.”

  Richard’s voice said, “What did you say?”

  “I’m sorry,” Julia said, “I thought it was someone else.”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  Julia had no answer for that and before she could think of one the noise started upstairs. Francine must have heard the phone ringing and begun to hammer on the door, not just with her hands, with some heavy object. She was shouting too—Julia thought she had never heard her shout before—calling, “Help me, help me!”

  Julia put her hand over the mouthpiece, muttered through it, “This is a very bad line.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “The builders next door,” said Julia. “On a Sunday, too, it’s a disgrace.” She knew her voice was slurred and thick with drink. Perhaps he would think that also was due to the bad line. “We’re both fine,” she said. “The girl is fine. She was going out with Jonathan Nicholson in his red sports car, she was going to his home in Fulham. But she didn’t because it’s pouring with rain.”

  “If I didn’t know you better, Julia, I’d say you’d been drinking.”

  Julia giggled. “Francine and I did share a bottle of sauvignon with our lunch.”

  When he had rung off she sat down and recovered her composure. The noise from above had stopped. Julia went upstairs again and listened. Not a peep, not a creak. Perhaps she had fallen asleep for want of anything else to pass the time. Julia, too, was very tired. She shouldn’t drink brandy, it wore her out. She made her way down again, walking wearily, saw from the hall clock that it was after six-thirty, nearly a quarter to seven. She felt at ease now, tranquil and sleepy, too calm to be in need of food. Francine would be growing hungry and it pained Julia to think of her deprivation. But it couldn’t be helped, they must both suffer for her earlier disobedience, her recalcitrance.

  Julia walked idly about the house. Pacing was past, she would never pace again. Her legs felt weak and back in the living room she fell to her knees. Crawling on her hands and knees was a more comfortable way of getting about. She crawled clockwise around the room once, then turned around and crawled around it counterclockwise. The sofa, over which at some point during the day Francine had draped a woollen throw, looked particularly inviting. Julia kicked off her shoes, clambered up on to the sofa and, pulling the throw over her, fell into an exhausted sleep.

  33

  Who had made that phone call Francine didn’t know. Her father, possibly, or Noele or
Susan or some other of Julia’s friends, or Holly or Isabel—or even Teddy. It didn’t much matter who it was so long as she could make them hear her prisoner’s sounds of pleading to be set free. But of course they didn’t hear or else they believed whatever Julia had invented to account for the noise.

  To beat on the door she had used the first thing her eye lighted on, her tennis racket. It had been leaning up against the wall, but now she went to put it back in the place where it was kept, along with a box of tennis balls, her track suit, her running shorts and trainers, in the drawer at the bottom of her wardrobe. As she pushed in the drawer it scraped on something underneath. Francine reached under the drawer with one hand and drew out her mobile phone.

  She punched out Teddy’s number. She felt a surge of faith in him, trust of him. He would get her out.

  * * *

  Julia’s action in locking Francine up and hiding her mobile under the wardrobe had neither shocked nor much surprised Teddy. He expected people to behave bizarrely, madly. In his experience most of them did. A quiet, orderly life of routine and normalcy he had never known. Human beings, in his estimation, were wilder than animals and far uglier. Only Francine stood apart and she was not quite real, she was too beautiful for reality and too pure.

  His resentment and hatred of her were forgotten. She hadn’t left him, she hadn’t been with James, but locked up in her bedroom by her wicked stepmother. It was what happened to princesses. He drove out to Ealing along the North Circular Road. The Sunday evening traffic was light and the Edsel attracted a lot of attention. He cursed the frequency of traffic lights where he had to stop and endure comments and admiring stares.

  On the phone she had told him she would throw her front-door key out of the window. “I’ll do it now,” she had said, “so that I can tell you where it’s fallen.”

  He was rather disappointed at such an easy solution to the problem. He had pictured himself breaking into the house or at least climbing up a ladder to fetch Francine down. She had come back to the phone and said the key was on the lawn, not under her window but a bit to the left. “The side gate won’t be locked. You come through that way, but be very quiet and just pick the key up off the grass.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I don’t want Julia to hear,” she said.

  The Edsel he parked in a side turning and walked the hundred yards or so to her house. To his surprise it was all in darkness. He felt a certain curiosity. Houses always interested him, all houses. He was looking forward to seeing the inside of this one. The side gate was unlocked, as she had said it would be. He looked up at the rear of the house, where behind an upper window a light was on, but not a very powerful light and the curtains appeared to be drawn.

  Half expecting her to be waiting for him, watching for him, her face at that window, he felt a pang of disappointment. But he couldn’t call out, he had promised to be very quiet and he would be. Hampered by the darkness, he looked for the key in vain for a while, found it at last hidden by a clump of longer, very wet, grass. It, too, was wet and he wiped it carefully on his sleeve.

  The key went very smoothly and almost soundlessly into the front-door lock and the door swung open silently. It was dark inside, but not totally, for from around the corner of a passage a low-wattage lamp shone faintly. It showed him a hallway, all the doors to it closed but one which stood ajar. The floor was carpeted, the walls papered in a showy brocade design he disliked on sight. A large colored china jar in one corner was full of dried flowers with dusty, fluffy heads.

  He set his foot on the lowest tread of the stairs, hesitated and turned back. Francine wouldn’t be expecting him immediately, he had got here faster than he had expected. He put out his hand to the door that stood ajar, pushed it a little wider open and went in. Darkness in here, but the curtains were not drawn across and light from the street came in. An ugly room, he thought, the kind of furnishings he most disliked. Suburban, bourgeois, Ideal Home Exhibition. Fitted carpet and rugs on top of it, a fat floral three-piece suite, reproduction tables, a nest of tables, a glass-fronted china cabinet.

  The back of the sofa was toward him. He had walked past before he saw that a woman was lying on it, fast asleep. The wicked stepmother. The cause of all Francine’s troubles and of his, too, for she kept Francine from him. A strange, but immediately convincing, idea came to him. That it was this woman who caused his impotence, like a witch who sucks out men’s strength and seizes their souls and saps their power.

  She was fat and pale, with a pallor quite unlike Francine’s rose-petal whiteness. The light from the street showed him her plump white hands and the rings set deeply in her flesh. The woollen thing that half covered her reminded him of the shawls his mother used to crochet. It awakened in him a slow, intense surge of anger.

  Without thinking much, without pausing or asking himself why, he reached out his hands toward her. But he knew he couldn’t bring himself to touch her. His knees would give way or he would be sick if he did. He withdrew his hands and looked around him, around the room. Cushions were everywhere, soft, fat cushions, covered in velvet or silk.

  When you have killed twice it is easy to do it a third time. He picked up a big velvet cushion, rectangular and as far as he could tell in this light, red, and held it up a foot from her face. Tightening his grip on the edges of it, he slowly pressed the cushion down on to her face.

  She stirred, but otherwise remained immobile. He fetched more cushions, piled them on her, pressed down hard with his hands, leaned on the cushions, then knelt on them. Under him and through the mass of silk and feathers, he felt her struggle, heard sounds. Her legs moved and her heels thudded against the sofa arm. With all his strength he kept up the pressure, for more than seconds, for minutes, five minutes, until he knew. Strange how he knew and that he would need to feel no pulse, search for no breath. Life had gone and he felt its departure as plainly as if it had taken wing and flown away through that window.

  He had managed it without touching her. You could take life at one remove, by remote control almost. All you had to do was hold the channel changer and at a distance blank out the screen. It was as easy as that. Should he tell Francine? Not yet. One day perhaps, but not yet. He lifted off the cushions, one after another, replacing them on the chairs from which he had taken them. Her face was revealed, the mouth slack, the eyes staring. In the half-dark he thought he detected a blueness about her features, but it was hard to tell. Still without touching her, he drew the woollen cover up to her chin. Then he closed the door and went upstairs to Francine.

  “You were so long!” she whispered from behind her door. “Why were you so long?”

  “I came as soon as I could,” he said.

  “Have you found a key to my room?”

  He had forgotten that, though she had told him. “Where do you think it is?”

  “It might be in the downstairs cloakroom or her bedroom; I don’t think there are any other keys in the house. Where’s Julia?”

  “Downstairs. She’s asleep.”

  He heard Francine give a little laugh. He took the key out of another bedroom door and the one out of the cloakroom door. That fitted. She came into his arms, hugging him, laughing with relief.

  She was wearing the white dress. He pulled the pins out of her hair to let it hang loose. When she was the way he liked her to look, he picked up her suitcase and they crept down the stairs, so as not to wake Julia. He would have liked to tell her that there was no waking Julia and never would be, but he had already decided not to do this, so he went along with the pantomime of tiptoeing and whispering until they were out of the house and crossing the road to where the Edsel was parked.

  Then Francine broke into a flood of words. She talked more than he had ever known her to—and if the truth were told, more than he wanted. But he let her continue without interruption, how Julia had seemed to go mad, how she had hidden her mobile, locked her in her room, told ridiculous lies on the phone and apparently invented a boyfriend f
or Francine called Jonathan Something. That was the only thing that interested Teddy.

  “Who is he? Do you know him?”

  “Teddy, he doesn’t exist. Don’t you understand? Julia invented him. Julia’s mad.”

  He didn’t really understand, but he felt calm and free, and very nearly happy. Francine was coming with him, she would stay with him now, there was no other place for her to be. She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t go anywhere else. She had been Julia’s prisoner, but now she was his; he had killed Julia for her.

  The first thing she wanted when they got to Orcadia Place was food. It was nine and she hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. There were eggs in the fridge and bread and cheese, and she made herself a meal, but she wouldn’t drink his wine. He gave her the liqueur chocolates and she ate one that had cherry brandy in it, but she wouldn’t have another. All she wanted was to talk, go over and over it: why had Julia done it, what was wrong with Julia? Teddy had no opinion and didn’t care. It was the aspect of Francine he liked least, this desire of hers to talk and discuss and speculate and conjecture and wonder.

  When he thought she must have talked enough, even for her, he gave her the dress. He wanted her to put it on, but she wouldn’t.

  “It’s beautiful and I love it,” she said, “but I don’t want to wear it now. We’re not going anywhere, we’re just at home on our own—well, not exactly at home but together and relaxed, it’s not the occasion for your lovely dress.”