by Ruth Rendell
Letting fall the beige damask curtain and returning to the fireside – a realistic-looking gas fire of smouldering yet everlasting coals and logs with flickering flames – Marion bustled about, feeling Irene’s forehead, refilling her water carafe, fetching echinacea drops and cough lozenges, and finally thrusting a thermometer into her mouth.
‘You’d have thought Edmund would have done all this,’ said Marion.
‘Hmm-mm-hmm-hmm.’
‘After all, he is a nurse.’
‘Mm-hmm-hmm,’ more vehemently.
The thermometer reading was normal.
‘It can’t be!’
‘Maybe there’s something wrong with it. I’ll try again later, shall I? Or shall I run out and see if I can get another one from the all-night pharmacist? Or I could run home and fetch mine.’
‘Would you, Marion? You’re so good to me. I’m beginning to think of you as my daughter, you know. Or – dare I say it? – my might-have-been daughter-in-law.’
Marion ran to the station, changed her mind and ran home through the winding streets to the Finchley Road. She ran everywhere, just as she talked all the time. Though she had made an attempt at courting him, Edmund’s defection hadn’t troubled her as much as Irene believed. What she wanted was not a young man’s desire but the devotion and admiration of elderly people with money. As well as Irene, she had old Mr Hussein and old Mrs Reinhardt, her sights on a couple of others and she had had old Mrs Pringle, only old Mrs Pringle had died last year. If she hadn’t bequeathed her enormous house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue to Marion, she had left her a large sum of money and some very nice jewellery. This had enabled Marion to buy the ground floor and basement flat of the house in Lithos Road she now entered to find a thermometer. Since she was obsessively neat – a place for everything and everything in its place – she found it at once in the bathroom cabinet on the shelf next to the brown bottle of morphine sulphate, and she skipped back to get the tube this time, one stop to West Hampstead and Irene.
Heather would be shy and perhaps nervous, Edmund had believed. She might even be a virgin. As he made his way by Jubilee Line and Northern Line to Clapham, the joyful anticipation he had felt earlier in the week began to fade and he wondered if she was so inexperienced that he would have to – no, surely not, teach her. The idea was enough to chill him in highly undesirable ways. For one thing, he was sure he was incapable of educating a woman in the art of love and for another, suppose she was unresponsive and frightened. He told himself, as the train came in to Clapham South, that he wasn’t in love with her – maybe it would be easier if he were – and that if this split them up rather than consolidating their relationship, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There were other women to be found. Marion wasn’t the only alternative.
But as he climbed the steps under the glass canopy he remembered the kiss she had given him and that look of utter trust when she took his hand. Here at the top the lower doorbell said, I. and H. Sealand, the upper one, Sealand and Viner. He pressed the bell and as he waited found quite suddenly that he was longing to see her, that when she answered the door he would take her in his arms.
Things were very different from what he expected while in the train. Once he was over his amazement, he found himself with a passionate partner, enthusiastic and uninhibited. Not silent and calm as she was when they were out together or she was busy in the kitchens of the hospice, but yielding yet active, sweetly tireless and delightfully greedy, promising an inventiveness to come. If education were needful, she was the teacher, not he.
‘The first time is never good,’ she said at some satiated moment. ‘Or that’s what they say. But ours was, very good.’
From thinking of her as the ‘blocking tackle’ that defended him from Marion, a girl with a good figure and not much to say for herself, he had come to be enchanted by her. Leaving her on Sunday afternoon with passionate embraces – he had no wish to meet the sister and her boyfriend – he found himself making a date for the Monday evening and the Tuesday. Both made faces in mock despair over having nowhere to go, then laughed at their own absurdity.
‘Issy has Andrew here for the night,’ Heather said. ‘You could come here.’
‘Could I?’ he said. ‘I’d love to.’
He couldn’t tell her of the scene with his mother he must face. A thirty-three-year-old man under his mother’s thumb is a comic figure, emphatically not the dashing lover. But he wasn’t really under his mother’s thumb any more, was he? He still had a way to go, he could see that, and he must persevere. Remembering his two nights with Heather brought him such luxurious delight that he seemed to gain strength and when he let himself into the house in Chudleigh Hill he was determined to speak out at once.
Unfortunately, Marion was there. The minute he walked into the living room she ran out of it to return very rapidly with a tray on which was a hot drink for his mother, a fairy cake on a plate, two aspirins on a saucer, a bottle of inhalant with dropper, a tin of Fisherman’s Friend and tissues in a box as glittery and brightly coloured as a Christmas decoration.
‘Aren’t you rather gilding the lily?’
He could see that his mother was far better than she had been on Friday. She said nothing but looked at him with raised eyebrows.
Marion managed an uncertain smile at his waspishness and began administering her remedies, chattering away. ‘Have you had a lovely time, Edmund? What did you do?’
What a question! Made love, he thought. Fell in love. Had two days and two nights of bliss …
‘It’s been so frightfully cold, hasn’t it? I met Mr Hussein while I was out this morning and I said to him, this cold must be worse for you than for the rest of us, I said, coming from such a hot place. And do you know what he said? He said, I come from the north, from Ladakh – I think it was Ladakh, though it might have been Lahore, some name like that – and it’s far colder there than it ever gets here, he said. I was amazed. You think of India being hot all the time, don’t you? Well, I know I do. It’s going to get milder tomorrow, no frost at any rate.’
When she paused to draw breath, he rushed in with his announcement, afraid that if he left it till Marion was gone he would never make it. ‘I shall be away overnight on Tuesday too.’ On Monday, he had decided, he would go to the flat in Clapham but leave before midnight. His courage increasing with every word, ‘I am taking Heather out to dinner and I shall be spending the night with her.’
‘I see.’
His mother’s words dropped like pebbles into still water. Even Marion was silenced.
Irene had flushed a deep red. ‘Do you think it’s very nice’, she said, ‘to speak about a young woman in those terms? Personally, I doubt if ever in the history of the world it has been acceptable for a man to talk about a respectable girl like that. Spending the night with her, indeed. Now I’ve heard everything.’
Marion giggled. She stood, screwing back the cap on the inhaler bottle. ‘Yes, I must say it rather took my breath away,’ she said in a conversational tone. ‘I couldn’t help thinking to myself, how would I feel if my – well, my sweetheart, I suppose – talked about me like that. I wouldn’t like it. I’d feel so embarrassed. I think these things call for a certain amount of discretion, don’t you?’
‘Since you ask,’ said Edmund, made strong and brave by the delights of a full sex life, ‘I don’t give a stuff what you think. You should mind your own business.’
A little shriek from Marion and a loud ‘Heavens above!’ from his mother drove Edmund from the room. He went upstairs, furiously angry but doing his best to stay calm. From downstairs he could hear Marion’s feet tap-tapping swiftly about. God knew what she could be doing. He unpacked his bag, thinking about Heather, her eyes sleepy with satisfied love, her rounded white arms resting softly round his neck. The front door was lightly closed, the kitten heels clack-clacked down the path to the gate, then up Chudleigh Hill. All sorts of frightfulness awaited him downstairs but he went down; first to the dining room where the dri
nk was kept. Instead of pouring himself a vodka and tonic (at five in the afternoon) he resisted that bracing elixir and strolled into the living room. His mother was lying on the sofa with her eyes shut. Without opening them, she said, ‘After being so grossly abused, I doubt if Marion will ever come near me again.’
‘Oh, yes, she will,’ he said. ‘A pack of pitbulls couldn’t keep her away.’
CHAPTER 4
If only it were possible to tell how serious it was. With any of Ismay’s girlfriends it would have been quite a different matter. They would have talked about the affair in every possible aspect, how good he was in bed, but how attentive he was too, how generous, how well-mannered, how funny, how laid-back, how faithful he was likely to be. With Heather this was impossible. To enquiries she would respond with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or more likely a ‘don’t know’, and if Ismay became persistent with ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Issy. You don’t mind, do you?’
Had she always been like this? Before she did what she did, or probably did what she did, was what Ismay meant. Before she came down these stairs in her wet shoes and her wet dress. She had never been very talkative as a child but withdrawal came later, along with coolness and control. It was impossible to say – Ismay thought that even a psychiatrist couldn’t say – whether Guy had caused this or if it had come about because of what Heather herself had done.
She was upstairs now with Pamela and her mother. ‘Bea’s very quiet,’ Pamela said. ‘She’s taken against the telly and she’s listening to the radio all the time. Shall we have coffee or a drink or something? I was prepared to force her to take her tablet this morning but I didn’t have to. She was as quiet as a lamb.’
She let Ismay into the hall which had been a first-floor landing in the old house. ‘Why is it that people who’ve got what poor Mum’s got always go to such lengths not to take their medication?’
‘Apparently, they’re afraid it will change their consciousness.’
‘But that’s the point, isn’t it? You’d think they’d want to change their consciousness, seeing how miserable it makes them.’
Pamela shrugged. They went into the kitchen, which had been Heather’s bedroom before the conversion. Her head was so full of Heather and Edmund that for a moment Ismay almost forgot that Pamela knew nothing about Guy’s death except that he had drowned in the bath when weak from illness. She nearly said she was worried about leaving Edmund in ignorance but she stopped herself in time.
While Pamela put on the coffee Ismay put her head round the door and said hello to her mother. Sitting in her usual chair, listening to the radio, turned very low, the useless, unused handbag in her lap, Beatrix ignored her. Ismay sighed. She thought how good it would be if she could talk to someone about all this Heather business. Andrew was out of the question. He disliked Heather and had, as he said, ‘no time for her’. Her mother was what Pamela called ‘away with the fairies’. As for Pamela herself, now was too late to start telling her even if it wouldn’t be an unbelievably rash thing to do. This was something she had to keep to herself, argue out with herself, come to a decision alone.
All that should matter to her now was to assess how far Heather’s relationship with Edmund had gone and how far it was likely to go. She couldn’t let the man marry Heather, perhaps not even let him become engaged to Heather, without telling him. But her heart quailed at the thought of coming out with it, all of it in its bare awfulness, not to mention the part she and her mother had played.
She and Pamela took their coffee into the living room where Beatrix sat. She leaned a little towards the radio, which stood on the top shelf of a low bookcase, and inclined her head towards it, her ear pressed up against its grey laminated surface. Ismay knew it would be quite useless to suggest turning the radio on a little louder or moving her chair closer. She went up to her mother and kissed the uplifted cheek. Beatrix took no notice of her. She seldom did, though she sometimes shouted out the more violent passages from the Book of Revelation at any of them indiscriminately. None of them was religious and Ismay had never seen her mother read the Bible but now, mysteriously, she was able to quote long passages from it.
When their father died Heather had suffered intensely. They had both missed him but Ismay not half as much as Heather. Both were too young for the possibility of their mother remarrying to cross their minds. They would just be alone, the three of them, with Pamela coming round to see them quite often or they all going to Pamela’s. The only change that Ismay could remember was when Pamela met a man called Michael Fenster and Beatrix was always saying how nice he was and they were bound to be married.
But it wasn’t Pamela who got married. It was Beatrix. Unsuitably, incomprehensibly, to the last man in the world anyone would have considered possible.
Ismay’s mobile rang while she was there. Of course it was Andrew. He had already phoned her twice that day but that wasn’t unusual. Pamela smiled, but fondly, when she realised who it was and heard Ismay say, ‘In an hour then. Love you.’
Beatrix, as usual, behaved as if there were no one in the room with her and no phone conversation had taken place. She moved her head away from the murmuring radio. ‘Before the throne,’ she said in a mild tone, ‘there was a sea of glass like unto crystal; and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.’
‘Yes, Mum, I know.’ Ismay, who had heard that one before several times, used to wonder about those beasts, apparently with eyes in the back of their heads, but she accepted them now. ‘You don’t need me here, do you?’ she said to Pamela.
‘Absolutely not. You know she’s no trouble while she’s like this. I could go out and be gone for hours and she’d still be sitting there like that. Are you going to meet Andrew somewhere?’
‘At a pub.’
Pamela talked about her latest date, this time with a man she had met through an Internet chat room ‘for the more mature’. For the first time in years, Ismay thought, she mentioned Michael, only saying she wished she could meet someone like him. Ismay remembered how Michael had treated her, living with her and getting engaged to her and then walking out a week before they were to be married. She kissed her mother’s unresponsive cheek and, while Pamela talked, glanced towards the single glass door. She always did this, she couldn’t help herself.
Where there was now polished floor with scattered rugs, a small table and wing chair, the bath had once stood up against the wall. Where there was a circular table with painted surface had been the shower cabinet. Under the picture of Madame Bonnard drying herself the basin had stood and the bronze curlicued towel rail. At the end of the bath a cane chair had been there for a bathrobe to be draped across its back. It wasn’t always there but it had been that afternoon …
Did the others think like this? Did they remember when they looked at this extension of the room that the conversion had been done to hide what had once been there? To make it utterly different, just as houses where murderers had lived and bodies been concealed were razed to the ground and gardens planted where they had been?
She hadn’t heard a word Pamela had said, though she made replies, a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ and a ‘why not?’, drank her coffee, gave Madame Bonnard another glance and went off to meet Andrew. It was a coincidence, she thought, that Pamela had mentioned Michael whom she had been thinking about just half an hour before. He had been Guy’s friend, she thought as she walked along the edge of the Common, or at any rate, he had worked with Guy, and it had been he and Pamela who had introduced Guy to Beatrix. Ismay couldn’t remember what Michael had looked like. Dark, she thought, not very tall. Not as good-looking as Guy. He never appeared in that recurring dream, the one where Guy was dead under the water, or in other dreams peopled by her mother and Pamela and Heather, and once the older of the two policemen.
Six months after Pamela and Michael arranged that meeting Beatrix married Guy. He was a few years younger than she and people thought weird, dowdy Beatrix lucky to ge
t him. She was, and always had been, one of those women who look like witches, young fey witches with pointed features and wispy hair when they are young, and grey witches in trailing garments hung on their skinny frames when they are older. Heather disliked Guy from the first and he seemed to make no efforts to endear himself to her. With Ismay it was a different story. He said he regarded himself as her father, wanted her to call him daddy but didn’t try to force it when she was reluctant to do so. Ismay had often wondered since if he realised why calling him daddy wasn’t acceptable to her. Perhaps he thought this usage would be painful to her since her real father had been dead so short a time. This was not, of course, the reason.
He showed her a lot of affection. For instance, he often took her to sit on his knee. This, which would have been inappropriate for Heather who was nearly as tall as he and with a womanly shape, seemed simply charming towards slight, dainty Ismay, though she was the elder. He kissed her goodbye when he went to work in the morning and kissed her in greeting when he came home. He called her his sweetheart and his angel.
‘You can’t like it when he does that,’ Heather said, referring to the kisses.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Ismay.
One day he told her something he said was a secret. She must never tell anyone. He had seen her long before he met her mother. Both girls were staying with Pamela, and he and Michael and several others were her guests for dinner. Ismay and Heather hadn’t been able to sleep and had come down to say there was a wasp in their room. Did she remember? No, he knew she wouldn’t. But he had seen her and never forgotten the little blonde child who had come downstairs crying.
Even when she was nearly fifteen she could look very innocent and younger than she was. Guy was thirty-four but could be taken for ten years younger. He was attractive to women, a source of jealous misery to Beatrix, his wife. Ismay sat on his knee and when they all went out together she held his hand. Sometimes he kissed her when no one else was present and then the kisses were different from those given and received under Beatrix’s and Heather’s eyes. Until one day Heather saw. She saw Guy kiss Ismay on the mouth, her face held in his hands in the dark hall, and Ismay pull away, turn and run. She was close to fifteen when that happened and Heather was thirteen, five feet seven inches tall with a straight back, full breasts, muscular arms and considerable physical strength. Ismay had run away because Heather had seen, not because she disliked the kiss. She thought now, not for the first time, that Andrew was like Guy to look at. If you saw them together you might have taken them for brothers. But of course no one could ever see them together.
