No More Dying Then

by Ruth Rendell

  “You seem to know a lot about it, Mr. Rivers.”

  “I made it my business to. Yes, sir! Rosie and me have corresponded regularly since Stell went missing. I’ll tell you another thing. Before he came out to Karachi and messed up my married life Mr. Ivor Swan was living with his uncle and the aunt. Only she died while he was there. You’ll know what I mean when I say she died very suddenly.”

  “Will I?”

  “You’re a detective. I’d have thought that’d make you sit up. Swan thought he was coming in for some money, but it all went to uncle.”

  “I don’t think I need detain you any longer, Mr. Rivers,” said Wexford, who was beginning to think Rosalind Swan had decidedly bad taste in men. The dislike he felt for Swan was nothing to the loathing this man aroused in him. He watched Rivers buttoning his raincoat and waited for him to say something to the effect that he mourned the child whom nobody seemed to have wanted. The words came at last and in curious form.

  “It was a bit of a shock hearing she was dead,” Rivers said briskly, “but she’d been dead to me for a couple of years, anyway, in a manner of speaking. I guess I’d never have seen her again.” He made for the door, not at all abashed by Wexford’s scowl. “A newspaper’s offered me two thousand for my exclusive story.”

  “Oh, I should take it,” said Wexford in a level voice. “It will be some recompense for your tragic loss.”

  He went to the window. It was still raining. The children who went home to lunch were issuing from Queen Street where the primary school was. Usually on wet days they managed the journey as best they could. Today, the first day of the second half of term, not one went unaccompanied, not one lacked the shelter of an umbrella, which seemed to Wexford to have a deeper significance than that of protecting small heads from the drizzle.

  Routine checking occupied Burden’s afternoon. It was only just after six when he got home. For almost the first time since Joan’s death he was anxious to be at home and with his children, particularly with his daughter. All day long he had been thinking of her, her image driving away Gemma’s, and as he made himself more and more familiar with the circumstances of Stella’s life and death, he kept seeing Pat alone and frightened and cruelly overpowered and—dead.

  It was she who rushed to let him in almost before his key was in the lock. And Burden, thinking he saw in her eyes some special alarm, some unusual need for comfort, bent swiftly and put his arms round her. Had he only known it, Pat had quarrelled with her aunt and natural ally and was turning for support to the only other available grown-up.

  “What is it, darling?” He saw a car stopping, a hand beckoning, a figure stepping out into the wet dusk. “Tell me what’s happened?”

  “You’ve got to tell Auntie Grace she’s not to meet me from school. I’m at the high school, I’m not an infant. I was humiliated.”

  “Oh, is that all?” With relief came gratitude. He laughed at Pat’s rebelliously pouting lower lip, tugged at her ponytail, and went out to the kitchen to thank Grace for her forethought. What a fool he had been to worry when he had such a guardian!

  But he felt a need to stay close by his daughter that evening. All through their meal and afterwards, while he was helping John with his geometry—Pythagoras’ theorem which “old Mint-face” insisted on the third form knowing by the next day—his thoughts and his eyes wandered to Pat. He had failed in his duty to her, failed, through the indulgence of selfish grief, to watch over her and interest himself in her activities as he should have done. Suppose she were taken from him as Stella Rivers, her contemporary, had been taken?

  “In a right-angled triangle,” he said mechanically, “the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”

  Grace hadn’t failed. He watched her covertly while John drew his diagram. She was sitting in a dark corner of the room, a table lamp throwing a small pool of light on to the letter she was writing. Suddenly it occurred to him that she must thousands of times have sat in just that attitude, at a lamplit desk in a long quiet hospital ward, writing the night’s report and, while all the time aware that she was surrounded by people who depended on her, yet at the same time detached from them and contained. She wrote—indeed she did everything—with a beautiful economy of movement, an absence of fuss or flutter. Her training had taught her this efficiency, this almost awe-inspiring reliability, but instead of spoiling her delicate feminine quality, had somehow enhanced it. They had had wisdom and prevision, he thought, those parents-in-law of his, when they named her Grace.

  And now his gaze encompassed both his daughter and his sister-in-law, the child moving up to her aunt and standing beside her within the same circle of light. They were very alike, he saw, with the same strong gentle face and the same light gauzy hair. They were both like Jean. The image of Gemma Lawrence coarsened beside them, became harsh-coloured, red and white and strained. Then it dwindled away, leaving a vacant space for his daughter and her aunt to fill with the wholesome beauty he understood.

  Grace, he realised, was just the type of woman he most admired. There was the delicate prettiness he loved combined with the competence he needed. Couldn’t she, he asked himself, be Jean all over again? Why not? Couldn’t she be his Rosalind Swan, as loving, as devoted, as all-in-all to him, without the other woman’s silly affectations? Usually, when they parted for the night, Grace simply got up out of her chair, picked up her book and said, “Well, good night, Mike. Sleep well,” and he said, “Good night, Grace. I’ll see that everything’s locked up.” That was all. They never even touched hands, never stood close beside each other or let their eyes meet.

  But tonight, when the time came for them to separate, why shouldn’t he take her hand and, saying something of what her goodness had meant to him, take her gently in his arms and kiss her? He glanced at her again and this time both Grace and Pat turned to him and smiled. His heart seemed to swell with an easy warm happiness, very different from the storm of feelings Gemma Lawrence aroused in him. That had been a kind of madness, nothing more than lust brought about by frustration. How unimportant it seemed now!

  Pat loved her aunt. If he married Grace she would return to him entirely. He put out his hand to his daughter and she, her earlier annoyance with him forgotten, skipped over to the sofa where he was sitting and snuggled close against him, her arms hard around his neck.

  “Shall I show you my scrapbook?”

  “What have you got in it?” said John, his eyes on the proof of his theorem. “Pictures of caterpillars?”

  “Caterpillars are my summer hobby.” Pat spoke with great dignity. “You’re so ignorant you wouldn’t know, but in the winter they go into their chrysalises.”

  “And even you couldn’t collect pictures of chrysalises. Here, let’s see.”

  “You shan’t! You’re not to! It’s mine!”

  “Leave her alone, John. Put that book down.”

  John said in disgust, “It’s only dancers, old ballet dancers.”

  “Come and show me, love.”

  Pat resumed her semi-suffocation of her father. “Can I have ballet lessons, Daddy? I do want to. It’s the great ambition of my life.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Grace was smiling at him, her letter completed. They smiled at each other like fond parents, happy in conspiracy, in contemplation of what they would do for their children.

  “You see,” said Pat, “it’ll be too late if I don’t start now. I know I should have to work and work, but I don’t mind that because it’s my great ambition, and perhaps I could get a scholarship and be in the Bolshoi and be a prima ballerina assoluta like Leonie West.”

  “I thought,” said her brother, “you were going to be a research scientist”

  “Oh, that. That was ages ago, when I was a child.”

  A cold shadow had touched Burden. “Who did you say?”

  “Leonie West. She’s gone to live in absolute retirement in her flat and her house at the seaside. She broke her
leg skiing and couldn’t dance any more, but she was the most wonderful dancer in the world.” Pat considered. “Anyway, I think so,” she said. “I’ve got masses and masses of pictures of her. Shall I show you?”

  “Yes, darling, if you like.”

  There were indeed masses and masses of pictures. Pat had cut them out of magazines and newspapers. Not all of them were of Leonie West, but most were.

  In the distant shots she was a beautiful woman, but time and perhaps too the exigencies of continual strenuous dancing showed the toll they had taken in close-ups. For Burden that heavily painted heart-shaped face with its smoothly parted black hair held no magic, but he made appreciative comments to please his daughter as he turned the pages.

  There were stills of ballet films, shots of the star at home, at social functions, dancing all the great classical roles. He was nearly at the end now.

  He said, “They’re very nicely arranged, dear,” to Pat, and turned to the last photograph.

  A fan of Leonie West would have seen only her, a magnificent figure in a floor-length cloak stiff with gold enbroidery. Burden hardly noticed her. He was looking, his heart knocking dully, at the crowd of friends from which she had emerged. Just behind the dancer, holding a man’s arm and smiling listlessly with a kind of shy anxiety, was a red-haired woman swathed in a black-and-gold shawl.

  He didn’t need the caption to tell him anything, but he read it. “Pictured at the first night of La Fille Mal Gardee at Covent Garden is Miss Leonie West with (right) actor Matthew Lawrence and his wife Gemma, 23.” He said nothing, but closed the book quickly and leaned back, shutting his eyes, as if he had felt a sudden pain.

  No one took any notice of him. John was repeating the proof of his theorem, learning it by heart. Pat had taken her book away to restore it to some secret treasure chest. It was nine o’clock.

  Grace said, “Come along, my dears. Bed.”

  The usual argument ensued. Burden put in the stern words which were expected of him, but he felt no enthusiasm, no real care whether his children got the required amount of sleep or not. He picked up the evening paper which he hadn’t yet read. The words were just a black-and-white pattern, hieroglyphics as meaningless as they would be to someone who has never learned to read.

  Grace came back from kissing Pat good night. She had combed her hair and put on fresh lipstick. He noticed and he felt a shrinking distaste. This was the same woman that, half an hour before, he had considered wooing with a view to making her his second wife. He must have been mad. Suddenly he saw clearly that all his imaginings of the evening had been madness, a fantasy of his own conjuring, and what they had made to appear as madness was his reality.

  He could never marry Grace, for in gazing at her, studying and admiring her, he had forgotten what any happy marriage must have, what Rosalind Swan so evidently had. He liked Grace, was at ease with her. She was his ideal of what a woman should be, but he hadn’t a particle of desire for her. The thought of attempting to kiss her, of going further than a kiss, caused a shrivelling in his flesh.

  She had brought her chair closer to the sofa where he sat and, laying aside her book, looked expectantly at him, waiting for the conversation, the adult exchange of views, which all day long she was denied. His feeling for her was so slight, his acceptance of her as someone content with the world he had provided for her so great, that it hardly occurred to him she would be hurt by anything he did.

  “I’m going out,” he said.

  “What, now?”

  “I’ve got to go out, Grace.”

  He saw it now. Am I so boring? her eyes said. I have done everything for you, kept your house, cared for your children, borne with your moods. Am I so boring that you can’t sit quietly with me for one single evening?

  “Please yourself,” she said aloud.

  11

  The rain had stopped and a thick mist settled on the countryside. Water clung to the trees in heavy drops and fell dully and regularly so that it seemed as if it were still raining. Burden swung the car into Fontaine Road and immediately made a U-turn out again. He was suddenly loth to let his car be seen outside her house at night. All the street would be on watch, ready to spread rumours and tell tales.

  Finally he parked at the bottom of Chiltern Avenue. A footpath, skirting the swings field, joined this cul-de-sac with its neighbour, Fontaine Road. Burden left the car under a street lamp whose light the fog had dimmed to a faintly glowing nimbus and walked slowly towards the path. Tonight its entrance looked like the opening to a black tunnel. There were no lights on in the adjacent houses, no sound in the darkness but that of water dripping.

  He walked along between bushes whose branches with their wet dying leaves splashed his face and dragged softly at his clothes. Half-way through he found the torch he always carried and switched it on. Then, just as he reached the point where a gate in Mrs. Mitchell’s fence opened into the path, he heard pounding feet behind him. He swung round, directing his torch beam back the way he had come and on to a white face framed in flying wet hair.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  The girl must have recognised him, for she almost threw herself into his arms. He recognised her too. It was Mrs. Crantock’s daughter, a child of about fourteen.

  “Did something frighten you?” he asked.

  “A man,” she said breathlessly. “Standing by a car. He spoke to me. I got in a panic.”

  “You shouldn’t be out alone at night.” He shepherded her into Fontaine Road, then thought better of it. “Come with me,” he said. She hesitated. “You’re all right with me.”

  Back through the black tunnel. Her teeth were chattering. He raised his torch and brought it like a searchlight on to the figure of a man who stood beside the bonnet of Burden’s parked car. The duffel coat he wore with its raised hood gave him enough of a sinister air to alarm any child.

  “Oh, it’s Mr. Rushworth.” She sounded shamefaced.

  Burden had already recognised the man and saw he was recognised too. Frowning a little, he walked towards the husband of the woman who had failed to notify the police after Mrs. Mitchell’s warning.

  “You gave this young lady a bit of a scare.”

  Rushworth blinked in the glare of the torch. “I said hallo to her and something about it being an awful night. She scooted off like all the devils in hell were after her. God knows why. She knows me by sight, at any rate.”

  “Everyone round here is a bit nervous at present, sir,” said Burden. “It’s wiser not to speak to people you don’t really know. Good night.”

  “I suppose he was taking his dog out,” the girl said as they came into Fontaine Road. “I didn’t see his dog, though. Did you?”

  Burden hadn’t seen a dog. “You shouldn’t be out alone at this time of night.”

  “I’ve been round to my friends. We were playing records. My friend’s father said he’d see me home, but I wouldn’t let him. It’s only a couple of minutes’ walk. Nothing could happen to me.”

  “But something did, or you thought it did.”

  She digested this in silence. Then she said, “Are you going to see Mrs. Lawrence?”

  Burden nodded, and, realising she couldn’t see his nod, said a bald, “Yes.”

  “She’s in an awful state. My father says he wouldn’t be surprised if she did something silly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you know. Committed suicide. I saw her after school in the supermarket. She was just standing in the middle of the shop, crying.” A true daughter of the bourgeoisie, she added with some disapproval, “Everyone was looking at her.”

  Burden opened the gate to the Crantocks’ garden. “Good night,” he said. “Don’t go out alone after dark any more.”

  There were no lights in Gemma’s house and for once the front door was shut. Very likely she had taken one of Lomax’s sleeping tablets and gone to bed. He peered through the stained glass and made out a faint gleam of light coming from the kitchen.
She was still up, then. He rang the bell.

  When the gleam grew no brighter and still she didn’t come, he rang the bell again and banged the lion’s-head door knocker. Behind him, from the branches of the untended trees, came the incessant drip drip of water. He remembered what Martin had said about her drinking and then what the Crantock girl had said and, having rung the bell once more in vain, he made for the side entrance.

  The path was nearly as overgrown as the gardens of Saltram House. He pushed away wet holly and slimy creeper, soaking his hair and his raincoat. His hands were so wet that he could hardly turn the handle on the back door, but the door wasn’t locked and at last he got it open.

  She was slumped at the kitchen table, her head on her outflung arms, and in front of her was an unopened bottle, labelled: “Chianti-type wine, produce of Spain. This week’s offer, 7P off.” He went up to her slowly and laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “Gemma …”

  She said nothing. She didn’t move. He pulled up another chair, pulled it close to her, and took her gently in his arms. She rested against him, not resisting, breathing shallowly and fast, and Burden forgot all his agony of the past week, his battling against temptation, in an overwhelming selfish happiness. He could hold her like this for ever, he thought, warmly and wordlessly, without passion or desire or the need for any change.

  She lifted her head. Her face was almost unrecognisable, it was so swollen with crying. “You didn’t come,” she said. “For days and days I waited for you and you didn’t come.” Her voice was thick and strange. “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” It was true. He didn’t know, for now his resistance seemed the height of pointless folly.