The Water's Lovely (v5)

by Ruth Rendell

  No one answered. Heather turned to her and said, ‘Edmund and I want to thank you for doing this for us. It’s been lovely. And now we’d like to open our presents.’

  Their taxi stuffed full of bedlinen, a breakfast set, an electric mixer, an espresso coffee maker and Irene’s gift of a microwave, Heather and Edmund were driven home to Chudleigh Hill.

  ‘We ought to have brought your mother with us,’ Heather said.

  ‘Creep,’ said Edmund, kissing her.

  ‘It’s better than being enemies, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, much. Did you mean that about moving out?’

  ‘Of course. We’ll start looking tomorrow – if you still want to.’

  When they heard Irene go out, taken to the cinema and a meal by Joyce and Duncan, they came cautiously downstairs as if they were children entering a forbidden room. ‘Or as if we think she hasn’t really gone out,’ said Edmund, ‘or got Duncan to drop her off by the back entrance.’

  In the hall Heather stood still and looked up at him as if she had a very daring question to ask. ‘Could we not go out ourselves, Ed? Could we eat something here? Would you mind?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit but I insist on the champagne. Back upstairs then?’

  ‘I’d like to stay here for a few minutes. Well, half an hour. As long as it takes.’

  Heather walked into Irene’s living room and took off her coat. She kept it over her arm as if she were afraid that to leave it lying over a chair would leave some trace of it behind for her mother-in-law to discover.

  ‘Here, give me that,’ Edmund said and took the coat out into the hall.

  When he came back Heather was standing in front of the bookcase. ‘I can’t find it,’ she said. ‘I suppose she hasn’t got it.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘That book I told you about. Tess of the d’Urbervilles.’

  ‘Why? Do you want to read it again?’

  She didn’t answer. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Sit opposite me.’

  ‘I’ll sit beside you.’

  ‘No. Sit opposite me. You see, you might sit next to me and then move away. And that would be the worst thing in the world.’

  ‘Heather,’ he said, ‘what is this? What’s going on? D’you think we could go upstairs again and have our champagne? This is our wedding day.’

  She nodded slowly, her lips pursed, as if she were thinking of something that must be done and done now, this evening, something she would love to put off but could no longer avoid. ‘This book,’ she said, ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles, it’s about a poor girl who’s had an affair with a rich man who seduced her. Well, he raped her really. And she falls in love with man called Angel Clare – can you imagine a man called Angel? – and they get married. And on the night after their wedding – like ours tonight – he confesses to her about some lover he’s had and she thinks it’s all right for her to confess her lover to him but it’s not. He won’t forgive her and he leaves her. That night.’

  Edmund didn’t laugh but he felt like laughing. ‘Darling Heather,’ he said, ‘when was this? A hundred and fifty years ago? What do people care about that sort of thing now? They’re proud of it. That nurse at the hospice, what’s her name, Rebecca, was going about the other day doing a sort of survey as to which of the girls had slept with the most men. Besides,’ he added, ‘we’ve already told each other about our lovers – and we wouldn’t make a very good showing on Rebecca’s list.’

  ‘That’s not what I want to tell you about,’ Heather said, her face more serious than he had ever seen it. ‘You see, Angel says whatever it is she has to tell him it will be all right. It doesn’t matter. But when she does tell him it matters. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ said Edmund, leaning towards her and taking her hand, ‘it will be all right.’

  ‘Will it? Will it?’ Suddenly she jumped up, keeping hold of his hand, pulling him up with her. ‘It’s not worth telling you. It’s too stupid. Let’s go out after all. Can we?’

  ‘You can do what you like on your wedding day.’

  CHAPTER 12

  The woman next door, whose name was Sharon, was walking round the garden with her sister, holding her arm, nodding and murmuring ‘Yes’ and ‘If you say so’, while Beatrix moaned that nations shall see their dead bodies three days and shall not suffer them to be put into graves. Beatrix shouted when she saw Pamela and asked her if she had eaten up the little book she had seen in the angel’s hand and was it sweet in her mouth but bitter in her belly? Sharon looked very disgruntled. Pamela tried to explain that Beatrix had swallowed her pill that morning the way she had been for the past week and that this was an unexpected departure.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Sharon said. ‘I found her wandering in the street shouting all that rubbish about dead bodies and whatever.’

  Later, reaching under a chest of drawers for Ivan Roiter’s card, which she had dropped on the floor, Pamela felt, glued to the underside of the bottom shelf, a series of uneven lumps. She crouched down and peered. There were ten of them and they were chewing gum, each one containing a whitish capsule. All the lumps were rock hard except one which was still spongy. There was no mystery now about the street wandering and the declaiming.

  Now she would have to decide whether, without cruelty, she could ban chewing gum altogether. Wouldn’t Beatrix just find some other way to avoid swallowing her capsule? She was quiet now. The spongy lump of gum must have been yesterday’s, not today’s, for Pamela had stood over her, watching the movement of her throat as the capsule and the water went down. But still she dared not leave her.

  Would she be able to do so for long enough to go out with Ivan Roiter ever again? One day. Maybe next week when she had got Beatrix back into her ideal regime of taking a pill every day. She looked at the card. On it, under his name, was the single word ‘Actuary’. That meant they should have something in common, though on their walk they hadn’t discussed any aspects of accountancy or the solving of monetary problems. It was a good address printed on the lower right-hand corner of the card, a flat in a street in Putney. The insurance company he worked for was in the City in Fetter Lane.

  She hadn’t a card with her to give him but he had written down her phone number. They had walked along one of the rides on the outer rim of Epping Forest and he had bought her a cup of tea. Having had to hurry with her lunch, she would have liked at least a biscuit but when the waitress came Ivan said, ‘Nothing to eat, thanks,’ in the sort of tone that seems to imply that eating between meals is unwise. He was straight-backed and thin, which she found attractive, as she did his strong features, white teeth and intensely blue eyes. Whether he was attracted to her was hard to tell, though if he wasn’t she hardly supposed he would have asked for her phone number.

  He talked about himself a lot and she noticed, she couldn’t help noticing, that whenever she said ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’ or ‘I like’ he smiled politely and quickly brought the conversation back to himself. It was rather as if he allowed her a requisite time to speak of her own concerns – say one minute – and then returned to his. And he did complain a great deal. Not about her of course. Of her he only said he’d like to see her again. It was the state of society he grumbled about, the incidence of petty crime, rudeness and lack of respect, asylum seekers and beneficiaries of income support.

  But I do find him attractive, she said to herself wistfully, and he seems to like me. After all, I’m not going to marry him. I only want someone to be with sometimes.

  The contents of the kitchen drawer (among the oven and freezer operating instructions) had already been explored and the relevant parts of Avice’s last will committed to memory, Marion now turned her attention to other possible hiding places. Avice had gone out at eleven and would hardly be back before four even if Joyce and Duncan Crosbie brought her home. With that excitement which is almost sexual, dizzying, palpitating, Marion set about searching desks, cabinets and drawers.
r />   Figaro and Susanna were left behind. They had never learned how to climb stairs. Their presence in the room, lolloping aimlessly, was strangely disquieting. It seemed to her that they watched her at her clandestine tasks. Though they understood nothing, they were aware of what she was doing. Their mild brown eyes rested blankly on her when she took letters out of envelopes, glanced at invoices, examined forms. Avice, whose anthropomorphism was excessive, often remarked that if her pets could talk they would have some amazing tales to tell.

  Her search yielded only one useful piece of information. After leaving no drawer unopened and no cupboard door untouched, she had found just one letter of interest. The postcard from one of the will beneficiaries and the letter from the other told her merely that the weather on the Isle of Man had been ‘horrendous’ and the nephew’s wife was expecting a baby in July. Marion was interested only in the letter from Mr Karkashvili, Avice’s solicitor. In it he accepted her invitation to lunch followed by will altering at a date in May. Nothing in the short letter mentioned the details of any new provisions Avice might be making, only that she would be doing so. Marion restored it to its envelope, idly wondering, as she often did in this situation, if paper took fingerprints.

  Downstairs, the rabbits having lost interest and disappeared through their flap, Marion made herself lunch with a gin and tonic to precede it and a glass of wine as accompaniment. The result was that she fell asleep but she was a light sleeper, as such people often are, and was roused to full wakefulness by the sound of Duncan Crosbie’s car. It wouldn’t have been in Marion’s nature to be found reclining on a sofa, bleary-eyed, so when Avice walked in she was prancing about plumping up cushions, putting rabbit pellets and greenery into dishes and running to refill water bowls.

  ‘How did the wedding go?’

  ‘Well, of course, we weren’t actually at the wedding. It was a nice lunch but it might have been just any lunch, if you know what I mean. Edmund wouldn’t have any speeches. How are Figaro and Susanna?’

  ‘Out having a lovely time in the sunshine,’ said Marion fondly.

  While she was dozing a wonderful idea had come to her. Not only was it brilliant but it was practical too and foolproof. She was so pleased with it that she longed to put it to Avice straight away but she stopped herself. This must be subtly handled. She would wait for Avice to raise the subject first. Not Marion’s plan, of course, that would be too much of a coincidence, but the general matter of her will, perhaps by mentioning Mr Karkashvili’s projected visit.

  Getting to speak to Andrew, which had been so difficult for Ismay, Heather found easy. She left a message on his landline and, to her surprise, he called her back. But she wasn’t desperate, she wasn’t in love with him. He didn’t use her Christian name. No one could be as icy as Andrew, his tone more distant than if he had been talking to a stranger.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  Go back to my sister. ‘I wanted to tell you that – well, Issy’s very unhappy. I thought that if you felt bad about her but you felt – well, that she wouldn’t have you back, if you felt awkward about it, I want you to know that she would. She loves you. She would have you back.’

  She had never before spoken to him at such length. A near-silence had always been observed between them and now he was silent. For so long that she thought he had replaced the receiver and was on the point of putting hers down when he said, ‘I can’t do that. It’s over.’

  In a small sad voice Heather said, ‘Are you with Eva now?’

  ‘That’s not your business, but if you mean is she with me at this moment, no. If on the other hand you mean is she my girlfriend, yes. Absolutely. Considering you and your swain were the cause of my leaving, I think this is a piece of impertinence.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Heather spoke so loudly that Edmund heard her before he came into the room. She shouted, ‘It had nothing to do with us and you know it!’

  She put down the receiver and turned to him a flushed face. ‘Don’t tell me not to get in a state. Don’t tell me he isn’t worth it.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Edmund, laughing. ‘But you could forget him and let me know what you think of the flat.’

  Heather took several deep breaths. After a moment she said, ‘It’s a much classier area than we had in mind. I mean, it’s practically Belgravia.’

  ‘It’s Victoria, it’s over a shop and it’s very small.’

  ‘Five hundred pounds a month, Ed. That’s quite a lot of money.’

  ‘With luck we won’t be there long.’

  ‘With luck,’ said Heather. ‘You say there’s a park near to it?’

  ‘Well, it’s near the park, St James’s Park, no less.’

  ‘It means we’ll have to put off our honeymoon even longer.’

  ‘I know. We’ll have to have our honeymoon in Victoria Station.’

  His mother remained very still when he told her. She looked like a character in a myth or fairy story in which people are turned to stone, petrified where they sit. Irene had been threading beads on to a string and now she sat with her needle poised between forefinger and thumb, the half-completed necklace held in the other hand an inch or two from her lap. Gradually she turned on him her Hecuba face, desolate from the loss of husband, children and power.

  He said, though she hadn’t spoken, ‘I’m only going to live a couple of miles away.’

  ‘It isn’t the distance,’ she said, speaking slowly and deliberately. ‘It’s the callous indifference to my feelings. After I offered you the chance to live here for good. I suppose she put you up to it.’

  ‘On the contrary, it was originally my idea.’

  ‘At your wedding,’ Irene said as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘I said to you to give up the flat, to stay here. I made you a distinct and, most people would say, very generous offer. And this is how you treat it. I’m not proud, Edmund, and I am forgiving. I’ll go further. I’ll have half this house converted into a self-contained home for you and – your wife.’ Her temporary surge of affection for Heather had already died. ‘Even though she isn’t the woman I would have chosen for you, I’ll do it. Whatever anyone could accuse me of, it isn’t selfishness.’

  ‘No, Mother, no one’s accusing you of anything. I’m to blame. I’ve decided to go and I’m going.’ Remembering that the woman his mother would have chosen for him was Marion Melville, he added, ‘It will be fine. You must be our first guest.’

  Her hands started to move as she thrust the needle through the hole in the next bead. She looked at the work, not at him. ‘You seem to forget that I’m not strong. You always have. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that it’s only because I don’t give in to it, I don’t let it take me over, that I’m not totally incapacitated. But the fact remains that I couldn’t possibly make it to Victoria. That is out of the question.’

  ‘We will come and see you here. We’ll come regularly. We aren’t deserting you.’

  Depressed, Edmund was learning that when you have been afraid of someone for years, under her thumb, and deceiving yourself that you give in to her only for a quiet life, once you begin to assert yourself it’s a start, not a constant. From time to time you go right back to where you began. You get tired, you yield and you shrink. You never really get over it, for you have been formed and moulded into this shape over the long years. A few months, a single year, of showing strength and asserting himself, wasn’t enough to rise above the subservience of years. He would just have to keep on struggling.

  Heather said to him, ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but if I can’t get anywhere with Andrew, why shouldn’t I try Eva herself?’

  Fowler had done his best to be law abiding. He had sat on Marion’s doorstep for four hours, waiting for her to come home, and had only moved into the back when a woman from further down Lithos Road told him that if he stayed there she was calling the police. The back regions next door were neat and pretty but these were squalid, a yard of broken concrete slabs, a garden in which
weeds had grown up through the piles of builders’ junk left there a dozen years before. Fowler, settling himself on the steps which led down to a long-disused privy, thought he had never seen such gigantic weeds, some of them surely ten feet tall and with the leaves you see on exotic house plants, the kind of thing you expected in a rainforest but not in London NW6.

  Marion had had her locks changed. Fowler was genuinely upset to find his sister would go to such lengths to keep him out. A tear or two had trickled down his cheeks when he discovered that the key he had had cut no longer fitted. But he had waited long enough. Where was she? Was it possible she had found a boyfriend and wouldn’t return all night? This was a novel idea Fowler rather liked. The boyfriend would have a home of his own, Marion might move in and his long-held dream of living here be realised.

  Meanwhile, he was very hungry. What money he had he had spent on skunk and not very good skunk at that. Its effects had worn off even before he reached Lithos Road. He longed for a drink or two or three. The sun had set long before and it was starting to get dark. She was his last hope. Next to a water butt in which the larvae of mosquitoes cavorted on the scummy surface, a short flight of steps led down to the basement area. Fowler went down and took stock of available means of ingress. The back door had four panes of glass in it. It also had bolts top and bottom. Regretfully he turned to the only window down here, the one in Marion’s bedroom. Breaking it would let the cold in. It might be May but the nights were very chilly, not even frost free. Still, she should have thought of that before she changed the locks. Needs must when the devil drives. Fowler unwound the scarf he wore, very long and of red wool never washed in its twenty years of existence, wrapped it several times round his right hand and arm, and gave the window a hard punch. He was in Marion’s bedroom, cut and scratched but not seriously, five minutes later.

  The bed looked as if it hadn’t been slept in for a week. Fowler couldn’t have said how he could tell but he was sure of it. He went upstairs, found to his satisfaction that she had acquired a new bottle of gin, not Bombay Sapphire but nearly as good, and poured himself a liberal measure. That was better. On his last visit the fridge had been half full. This time there was nothing in it and the door was left open for it to defrost.