by Ruth Rendell
The Isadoros lived in two, they were such a big family. The council had put an arch between the hallways so that you could go through from one house to the other without going outside. Carol’s was just an ordinary single house, part of a terrace, one of the oldest. When you came into Winterside Down by way of the Chinese bridge, the first part of the estate you saw was the back of that terrace, and if Carol was at home, you could see her lights on. It seldom happened that Barry came home later than Carol, but if he did, or thought he was going to be later, he would look for her lights as soon as he came to the crown of the bridge. Her house was the eighth from where the path came into Summerskill Road. He would count, two-four-six-eight, and if the lights were on feel a surge of joy, a leaping of the heart.
Mostly he got home first. It had been home to him for the past six months, not the kind of place he would have chosen to live in, but home because Carol was there. When she worked evenings at the wine bar, he didn’t come the Chinese bridge way but by the main turn-in from Lordship Avenue. Sometimes the Isadoros looked after Jason in the daytime and sometimes his grandmother, Iris, did or, rarely, his aunt Maureen. Barry called round at Iris’s place on his way home, but Jason had fallen asleep watching the TV and Iris had put him to bed. He might as well stop the night, why not? She was having him in the morning anyway.
Barry walked home across Bevan Square. He went into the tobacconist, open till eight, and bought twenty Marlboro. He had never used to smoke, but being with Carol so much and Carol’s family, he was on to twenty a day now. The square was paved in pinkish-red with flowerbeds surrounded by low brick walls and with a statue in the middle of it that looked like a piece of car bodywork from a scrapheap but was by quite a famous sculptor and called The Advance of Man. A smell of garlic and fat hung about the Turkish takeaway. The eldest Isadoro girl and a boy Barry didn’t know sat on one of the flowerbed walls, eating kebab and chips out of paper cones.
It was dark, the place painted with the brownish-yellow light from the sodium lamps that stood on concrete stilts above Winterside Down. The light turned everything to khaki and yellow and black. Of the boys who huddled or lounged over their motorbikes all round the statue, one had red and yellow hair in a crest like a hoopoe’s and another had dyed his blue, but the light turned all to yellow-brown and glittered like crumbling gold leaf on their black leathers. Those boys were not much younger than Barry, they were almost his contemporaries, but he felt immeasurably older than his twenty to their seventeen or eighteen. In taking on Carol, in becoming, so to speak, the father of a ready-made family, he had leaped half a dozen years.
Her husband’s photograph, in a plastic frame from Woolworth’s, stood on the shelf over the living-room radiator. It was the only photograph in the house. Dave. He was dead, killed when the lorry he had been driving went over a mountainside in Yugoslavia. A tall, thin, dark-haired man, Dave had been, with blue eyes and an Irish mouth. Barry didn’t look like him but they belonged to the same type, Carol’s type. Soon after they had first met and he had gone home with her, Carol had told him he was her type and shown him the photograph of Dave.
Barry dusted the photograph. He dusted the few ornaments in the room and the phone and the back of the television set and then he got the vacuum cleaner out and vacuumed the bit of carpet that had been Iris’s before she went mad (as she put it) and had wall-to-wall. He kept the house clean for Carol, it was the least he could do. Before he had moved in, it had been a tip which was only what you’d expect in the home of someone who had three kids and two jobs.
There was nothing demeaning or emasculating to Barry in house-cleaning. His mother, had she known, would have sneered and called it woman’s work. But Barry belonged to a generation in which the girls resented menial tasks even more than the boys. He might take it for granted that his mother cleaned and washed and polished but not the woman he lived with. Why should she? She worked as hard as he did.
He cleaned the hall as well and stripped the bed and changed the sheets. The only nice furniture in the house was in this bedroom, Carol’s bedroom and now his too. The cupboard which Dave had built in when they first moved here and the house was new had its doors made of mirror. It was on the wall facing the bed. Carol liked to sit up in the mornings and look at herself. It brought her a childlike pleasure that warmed Barry’s heart to look at herself in mirrors.
Barry put the sheets and pillowcases into a plastic carrier with a pile of smelly napkins of Jason’s and took the lot round to the laundrette in Bevan Square. Blue Hair and Hoopoe and the rest of them were still there but clustered now round an old American car, a Studebaker, parked on the edge of the precinct with its windows open and its radio playing loud rock music. Barry felt old, but in a way he felt proud too and responsible. He and Carol had met in a laundrette, though not this one. His mother’s washing machine had broken down and he had taken a couple of pairs of jeans to do himself. Carol had come in with two loads. She had had Ryan and Tanya home for the weekend and Four Winds didn’t like it if you sent the kids back with a lot of dirty washing.
Those two big children – he had thought they were her brother and sister. He had thought her the same age as himself or younger. It wasn’t possible she was twenty-eight. Maureen said Carol had a face like a doll and in a way that was true, but dolls were made that way, to look like beautiful children, that was the idea, wasn’t it? Carol’s face was round and her upper lip very short, her skin pink and white china and her hair the kind of golden curls that cluster baby-like over forehead and temples, ring curls, coin curls, damp-looking like a child’s. And her sea-blue eyes had met his and she had smiled.
He fell in love with her, he often thought afterwards, even before she spoke. When she did speak, it was to see if he had any change for her second machine. He hadn’t – who ever has enough in a laundrette? But he told her where change was to be come by.
‘Get your sister to go next door but one to the paper shop. They’ve always got change.’
She looked at him sideways, charmingly. She lowered her long dark curling lashes.
‘Flattery could get you a long way, d’you know that?’
He hadn’t known what she meant, and when she explained, he couldn’t believe it. It was hard for him to believe his luck too, that he had met Carol and she liked him. Two days later he was in her house and he was asking who the man in the photograph was and she was saying: ‘You’re the same type really. I always say that’s my type.’
Rolling up the clean sheets, stuffing them back into the bag, he set off home to wait for her. After six months he still got exciting thinking about her coming home, waiting for the sound of her key in the lock. Still? It was stronger now than it had been at first. Best of all, he liked coming home at night over the Chinese bridge – on whose wooden parapet he had joined the other graffitists and printed in aerosol paint: Barry loves Carol – and counting the houses and seeing the lights in the eighth one and knowing she was there, longing for him as he was longing for her.
Just before eleven-thirty he thought he heard a car outside but he must have been mistaken because Carol never had a taxi or a mini-cab, they couldn’t afford it. It was coincidence, that was all, that a minute or two after he heard the car Carol’s key turned in the lock. He had been watching television and he turned it off as she came in.
She had had quite a bit to drink. Who wouldn’t have, working six hours in a wine bar? It was only human nature. Her cheeks were flushed pink and her greeny-blue eyes very bright. She came a little way into the room and took an extravagant pose, lifting up her arms, turning slowly round to twirl the skirts of the black and white zig-zag striped dress above her red boots.
‘That’s new,’ said Barry. ‘Where did you get that?’
Carol began to laugh. ‘Nicked it. How about that?’ She pulled him into the armchair and sat on his knee. ‘Mrs Fylemon went out to have lunch with her mum so I whipped round quick with the Hoover and got done by two and then I got on the bus and went down Shopper
’s Heaven. There’s this new boutique I’ve had my eye on. They only let you take two things in the changing room with you. The girl said how many had I got there and I said two though I’d got three. I’d put a black one on the hanger over this one. I put this one on and my jumper and skirt over it and I didn’t hang about. I took the other two back and said they were too big and just sailed out though I was laughing inside fit to kill myself.’
‘That was clever,’ said Barry admiringly. ‘I wouldn’t like you to get caught, love.’
Carol stroked his hair, and rubbed his nose with her nose. ‘I won’t get caught. I’m too careful.’ Her fingers moved over the nape of his neck. ‘Dennis Gordon was in Kostas’s. He kept on about my dress, wanted to know if I’d ever done any modelling. Modelling, I said, what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You don’t like him, do you, Carol?’ said Barry.
‘He’s okay. I don’t fancy him if that’s what you mean. He was a pal of Dave’s. He reminds me a bit of Dave, him being on the lorries too. D’you know, he told Kostas he makes so much doing the Turkey run he can’t afford to live here really, he ought to live in one of them tax havens. How about that?’
‘I wish he would. I wish he’d go and live in Jersey or Ireland or somewhere.’
‘I believe you’re jealous, Barry Mahon!’
‘I’m not ashamed to admit it. Wouldn’t you be jealous of me?’
She snuggled close to him, put her lips against his ear. ‘I reckon. Let’s go to bed, lover.’
His voice grew hoarse. ‘I won’t say no to that.’
On the stairs she remembered Jason.
‘Stopping the night with your mum,’ said Barry.
That was a relief to her. She danced into the bedroom and peeled the new dress over her head. Underneath it she wore only tights, black, see-through. Carol seldom wore a bra, she didn’t need to, her breasts were as firm as the buds of large white flowers.
‘You’re going to marry me, aren’t you, Carol?’ he said, holding her, touching the warm, damp, creamy flesh. The bedlamp was on, the clean sheets turned back.
‘Maybe,’ said Carol, teasing. ‘I reckon. Some day. You’ve got a pretty face and Christ knows you’re a great stud.’
‘But you do love me?’
‘Haven’t I said?’
Barry had had quite a lot of girls before he met Carol but he might truthfully have said that, before he made love to her, he had never made love. It was something different, it was something he hadn’t known there could be. And it was not without its frightening side, for the passion he felt and its fulfilment brought him not so much satisfaction as awe. He lost himself in Carol and found something he couldn’t name. He underwent a mystical experience such as he imagined you might feel under the influence of certain kinds of drugs of a curious mind-altering intensity, but this experience had no side-effects except to heighten his love.
When, afterwards, they composed themselves for sleep, Carol curled up against him and held his hand in her hand between her breasts. He was supremely happy then, he was happier than he had ever been in his life.
4
WHEN SHE HAD tried to phone Mopsa again and there was still no answer, Benet walked back to James’s room and found Ian Raeburn with him. Once more he had taken off his white coat so as not to create a phobia in James. He had his stethoscope held against the small, rapidly rising and falling chest.
‘He seems to have got a secondary infection,’ he said, emerging from the glistening folds of the croupette. ‘It’s not responding to the antibiotic. I’m sorry to disappoint you but you won’t have him home for a while yet.’
Benet had known it but it was still a blow to have it confirmed. She sat down on the bed and put one hand up to her forehead.
‘You’re not worried, are you?’ he said.
‘Oh, not about James, no. I know he’s being looked after here. It’s my mother. My mother’s staying with me and she’s not very well and she really shouldn’t be left on her own.’
But she had left her and where was she now? He asked no questions about Mopsa. Perhaps he had already discerned it was mental instability she was talking about.
‘Couldn’t you find someone else for your mother to stay with? To take a load off your mind?’
The Fentons? Could she ring Constance Fenton and ask her to have for Mopsa for a day or two? It would have to be fixed so that Mopsa didn’t know it was a put-up job. What was the use of even thinking of such a thing when she didn’t know where Mopsa was? Ian Raeburn was looking at her, not a doctor-to-patient’s-mother look at all. Benet thought she recognized that look as of a man taking an interest in her as a woman. No man had done that for two-and-a-half years, there hadn’t been the opportunity or, on her part, the wish for it. He was rather a personable man, she noticed for the first time – tall, thin, inclined to be but not markedly sickle-faced, his hair a reddish-blond. She wondered what he was going to say.
‘You are the Benet Archdale, aren’t you?’
‘I suppose so. Yes, I am.’
So much for his being interested in her as a woman. She almost laughed.
‘I liked your book very much. It must be the worst cliché a writer hears when people say they don’t have time for reading. I made time to read it and I hope my patients didn’t suffer.’
She was so warmed and delighted by what he said that it carried her for a few moments above her worries over Mopsa and James. It was somehow as gratifying as getting her first good review had been. She smiled with pleasure. How could she have been so foolish, so female in the worst possible way, as to fancy she would have preferred sexual attention to that?
‘How do you come to know so much about India?’
‘I was there for six months with James’s father. He was planning a series of articles about an Indian mystic.’ She began telling him about Acharya the Learned One and his 40,000-mile walk.
A nurse came in to say he was wanted. Could he come now? Benet had forgotten to ask him if it would be all right for her to go home for an hour to look for Mopsa. But now she could see that this would in any case be impossible for her. James couldn’t be left. He lay on his back, listlessly holding the tiger cub. His eyes were wide open, unblinking in their distress at the shallow noisy breaths he was forced to take. At this time yesterday she had been in the children’s playroom with him while he trundled a wheelbarrow full of bricks and drew on the blackboard.
They said now that he had a virus infection. There was a drug to treat it but it was very new and still only in use in certain teaching hospitals. It might be thirty-six hours before James began to respond to the drug. After a while he cried to be taken out of the tent. Benet lay on the bed and held him against her, rocking him gently. It was wrong to keep him out of the tent. The more he was kept in there, even against his will, the more quickly he would recover. And he must recover soon, he must be up and about and playing by tomorrow so that she could put an end to the imprisonment that kept her from her responsibilities to Mopsa. Somehow she knew that one day he would see it that way too, he would share in the burden his mother and grandfather had. She imagined him a teenager, becoming responsible, and talking to him about his grandmother, teaching him to understand.
If Mopsa were still alive when James was a teenager. If she were still alive now . . . He fell asleep, lying against her, and she put him gently back into the tent, hating that breathing of his, physically hurt by it. But he was sleeping and the vaporizer was steaming up the tent and the antiviral drug had begun its work. She left him and went back down the corridor to the phone.
A young woman with a child on her lap was using it. The playroom door was open so she went in and sat on one of the chairs for five-year-olds that were set round the table. There was a Wendy house in the playroom, a bookcase of books, boxes of toys, a cage with two gerbils in it and, all over the walls, posters and drawings and collages. Paper cut-out witches riding up the window panes on paper cut-out broomsticks reminded her of Mopsa, though
she needed no reminding. On the inside of the door a dozen or so children had written, or had had written for them, their names underneath the heading: We have had our tonsils out. The dominating collage was a piece of bizarrerie, the brainchild evidently of someone with a B.Ed and flair, a mural whose paper base sheet filled half a wall.
Benet, when she had seen it the day before, had immediately dubbed it a tree of hands. She had liked it then, it had even made her smile. Now it seemed to her sinister, Daliesque, haunting, something about which one might have bad dreams. On the white paper base sheet had been drawn a tree with a straight brown trunk and branches and twigs, and all over the tree, on the branches, nestling among the twigs, protruding like fungus from the trunk, were paper hands. All were exactly the same shape, presumably cut out by individual children using a template of an open hand with the fingers spread slightly apart. And the children must have been allowed to decorate them as they pleased, for some were gloved, some tattooed, some ladies’ hands with red nails and rings, one in mittens and another in mail, mostly white but some black or brown, one the stripped bone hand of a skeleton. And now to Benet all those hands seemed to be held upwards, to be straining upwards in silent supplication as if imploring mercy. They reached out from the tree begging for relief or freedom or perhaps for oblivion. They were horrible. There was an essentially mad quality about them. She found that she had got up from the low chair and gone close to the tree of hands to stare at it with fascinated repulsion. As soon as she realized how hypnotically she was staring, she pulled herself away and went, out into the corridor to the phone which was now free.
