Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  The repeated hollow ringing had a dull meaningless sound. Benet listened to the ringing, she let it ring on and on. An idea had come to her that Mopsa might simply have decided not to answer the phone but she would have to if it rang long enough. She let it ring forty times, fifty times, until going on any longer became absurd.

  The best that could have happened to Mopsa was that the change of scene, the new ways, being abandoned to look after herself, had been too much for her and she had wandered off in the manner of the Northampton escapade. Looking out at the clear hard blue sky and the racing wind, Benet hoped she hadn’t done it in her nightgown. But that was the best. There were other options. The overdose of sleeping pills and the rest of the brandy or the sleeping pill ten minutes before she took a bath or the barricading of herself in one of the rooms with a can of paraffin and a box of matches. Surely there hadn’t been any paraffin in the house or matches either for that matter . . .

  If she phoned the police, they would want her to go to the police station and fill in a ‘Missing Persons’ form. Of course she could ask them to come here and collect her key and let themselves into the house in the Vale of Peace. But would they do that? She must try, that was all. As soon as Mr Drew, the ear, nose and throat specialist, had been to see James, she would go back down the corridor and phone the police.

  He came at two, accompanied by Ian Raeburn and a couple of house officers. Mr Drew was shortish, thick-set, wearing a brown tweed suit and gold-rimmed glasses. James began crying at the sight of the white coats which the house officers hadn’t remembered to take off. When he cried, it made him choke.

  Drew was one of those doctors of the old school who never tell a patient or a patient’s next-of-kin anything if they can help it. If they can’t help it, they talk to them as if they were illiterate half-wits or simple-minded peasants. He said nothing at all to Benet, talked to Ian Raeburn in polysyllabic words of Greek aetiology, and walked out leading his little procession. James put out his arms to be picked up but the nurse said he had to stay inside the croupette. The hectic flush had faded from his cheeks and he had become pale again. His pulse was taken and Benet asked what it was.

  Was there ever a nurse born who would answer that question? ‘He’s not a very well little boy, are you, sweetheart?’

  When they were alone again, Benet put her hand inside the tent for him to hold. Her hand did not interest him. He let her take his, he suffered her touch. All his energies, all his will, seemed concentrated on maintaining his own breathing. Benet held his hand and came as close to him as she could. To leave him and phone the police, to leave him even for those few short minutes, she could see was out of the question. If Mopsa were wandering, she would be found, and if she were dead – well, she was dead and it was too late. Benet took James’s wrist and began to count his pulse beats, looking at her watch. A hundred, a hundred and ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty . . . He couldn’t have a pulse rate of a hundred and eighty a minute, she must have counted wrong. His forehead was cool and dry, his temperature was normal.

  So perhaps he was not so very ill. The first infection had passed off quickly so it was very likely this secondary one would too. If only he wouldn’t breathe in that awful way, puffing like a little weak, feverish, anxious bellows, the way she had never heard anyone breathe before. The door opened, the procession came back, Mr Drew leading it.

  ‘Now then, this is James, isn’t it? And you are the mother? I’m going to have to do a little operation on James to relieve his breathing.’

  Benet stood up. She felt as if a heavy stone, for some while lodged in her throat, were slowly rolling down through her body.

  ‘An operation?’

  ‘Nothing too serious. Just to relieve the breathing. For a few days he’ll be breathing through his neck instead of his nose and mouth.’

  The stone rolled out of her, leaving her with a sick, dry, bruised feeling. ‘Do you mean a tracheotomy?’

  Mr Drew looked at her as if she had no business to know the word, much less utter it. It was Ian Raeburn who answered.

  ‘It will be a tracheotomy, yes. The larynx in a child of James’s age is very narrow, only about four millimetres across. If you get a millimetre and a half swelling on one side and a millimetre and a half on the other you haven’t much space left to get air through. Now James’s larynx is closing up and we aren’t able to dilate it sufficiently with the ventilator.’

  A nurse came up with the form for her to sign consenting to the operation. Her hand wasn’t very steady.

  ‘Mr Drew is very experienced,’ Ian Raeburn said. ‘Only a week ago he had to do a tracheotomy on a child with diphtheria, so he’s had some recent practice.’

  ‘Can I be in the operating theatre with him?’

  ‘He’ll be under anaesthetic, he won’t know whether you’re there or not. Mr Drew would say he doesn’t want two patients on his hands.’

  It took her a moment to understand what he meant. ‘You mean I might be sick or I might pass out?’ She tried to smile. ‘It’s possible. How does one know?’

  He took her hand and held it. He held it tightly. ‘You can be just outside. It won’t take long.’

  The nurse unzipped the tent and lifted James out. Benet put out her arms to him, was about to say she would carry him herself when the door swung open and Mopsa walked into the room. Benet stared at her, stunned. She looked serene and happy, years younger. Her hair was covered by a pink and red scarf and she wore a rather dashing bright red coat.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone,’ Benet said. ‘I’ve been trying for hours.’

  ‘Have you really? I heard the phone ringing when I first woke up and then I thought it couldn’t be you, you’d be too occupied with him to bother about me. So I thought I’d find your spare car keys and come down here and get your car and practise driving. And that’s what I did. I’ve been doing it all morning. I’m quite an expert now.’

  Benet said nothing. It was better not. It was always best to control one’s temper with Mopsa. She turned away, first managing a strained smile. Her mouth felt dry and there was a pain pressing on the bone above her eyes. James, his skin bluish, was taking a breath every second now. For one brief instant she thought of, she pictured, that tiny narrow passage, no thicker than a darning needle, a thread, the stem of a daisy, through which all the air for James’s lungs and brain and heart must pass, and then she pushed the thought away with such force that she made a little sound, a stifled ‘ah!’ Mopsa looked at her. They were going up to the operating theatre in the lift, all of them.

  ‘Croup? He has to have an operation for croup? I can’t believe it. There must be something they’re not telling you.’

  Ian Raeburn said, ‘There is nothing more complicated than a swollen larynx.’

  Benet noticed a harsh, even ragged, edge to his voice she hadn’t heard there before. Did he too find Mopsa almost unbearably irritating? He went between the double doors into the theatre and the nurse carrying James went with him. Mr Drew was already there. Benet wondered if she should have insisted on going in there with James. He would be having the anaesthetic now though, it would soon be over . . . There was a kind of waiting room here, comfortless like all waiting rooms, with armless chairs and unread magazines. Four floors higher than the children’s ward, it overlooked a panorama of roofs and spires. The old workhouse windows showed a spread of the top of London with a horizon of Hampstead Heath, so green it hurt the eyes. The sunshine looked warm because it was so warm inside, a still, constant hospital heat, smelling faintly of limes.

  ‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?’ Mopsa said. ‘I mean he’s not in danger?’

  Benet felt sick. ‘As far as I know, this is just routine. I don’t really know any more about it than you do.’

  ‘Mrs Fenton’s sister had one of those trach-whatever-they-are things done. She had cancer of the throat.’

  I must not hate my mother . . .

  ‘Your father phoned when I got ba
ck last night. He was very worried about me. He’d been phoning all the evening. I didn’t say anything about James. I thought it best not to.’

  Pointless to argue about that. A waste of time even to attempt to find out why Mopsa thought it best not to. Benet picked up one of the magazines but the print was a black and white pattern, the illustrations meaningless juxtapositions of colours. She found herself thinking of the tree of hands, all the hands upraised, supplicating, praying.

  The double doors opened and Ian Raeburn came out. He stood there for a moment. Benet jumped up, still holding the magazine, her nails going through the shiny paper. His face was as grey as James’s had been. He took a step towards her, cleared his throat to find a voice and began apologizing, saying he was sorry, they were all sorry, beyond measure sorry. He stopped and swallowed and told her that James was dead.

  The floor rose up and she fell forward in a faint.

  5

  EVERY OTHER SATURDAY, Carol was allowed to have Ryan and Tanya home and sometimes they stayed overnight. It was usually Barry who went over to Four Winds at Alexandra Park to fetch them. Carol liked to have a lie-in on Saturdays. She had a bath every morning anyway, it was a rule of life with her, but on Saturdays she made a special ritual of it, putting avocado-and-wheatgerm bubble bath in the water and rubbing body lotion on herself afterwards, washing her hair and giving it a blow-dry and painting her nails. There wasn’t a mark on Carol’s body from having had three children. It was white and firm with taut muscles. The only scar of any kind Carol had was a curious curved pit on her back just below the left shoulder blade. She told Barry how she had come by it.

  ‘My dad did that when I was a kid. He was always belting us up, me and Maureen. I reckon we deserved it, kids can be a real pain in the arse. He went a bit too far that time though, didn’t he? That was his belt buckle done that, cut right through to the bone.’

  Barry had been horribly shocked. He would have liked to have got hold of Knapwell, wherever he was – he had walked out on his family when Carol was ten – and cut him to his bones with a steel buckle. He loved Carol even more for her generosity of spirit, her ability to forgive. Though how she could say any child deserved that, he didn’t understand. Carol didn’t like children much, he was forced to admit that. It was her misfortune really that she had had three of her own. Sometimes Barry worried that she might not want any more when he and she were married.

  The Isadoros were having Jason for the whole weekend and maybe they would keep him over the Monday. Beatie Isadoro’s youngest was about his age, a khaki-skinned fat girl with red kinky hair. Beatie was an Irishwoman from County Mayo but her husband was Jamaican and they had produced some interesting colour combinations among their seven children. Because she had plenty of room in her two adjacent houses, Beatie ran a kind of unofficial nursery and the older girls were expected to help when they weren’t at school. Beatie wasn’t registered with the council as a childminder or anything like that, but that was rather an advantage since it meant she didn’t charge as much as a registered childminder would have. To Barry the houses seemed full of kids, twenty or thirty of them, though there probably were not so many as that. He paid up, six pounds for the two days, which he thought exorbitant but Carol said was cheap at the price.

  Karen and Stephanie and Nathan Isadoro were watching a film on the video, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Barry was squeamish and didn’t look. There was a little fair-haired boy strapped in a pushchair and screaming his head off. No one took any notice of him and the video viewers didn’t even turn their heads. The Isadoros’ home always had a curious smell about it – a mixture of pimento, babies’ napkins and hot chocolate.

  Barry collected Tanya and Ryan and took them back to Summerskill Road. Carol was ready by then, wearing the tweed culottes Mrs Fylemon had given her, and a cream wool polo-neck sweater that showed off her figure. She had made up her face in a very clever way so that it looked luminous and glowing and not really made up at all. Her hair was in soft floppy curls and a true natural gold. Barry knew for a fact she didn’t tint it. They all went shopping at Brent Cross and had lunch in a hamburger place and then to the cinema to see a space fantasy film. Barry organized all that. Before he had come to live with her, Carol often hadn’t bothered to take the kids out, she had told him. It had all got on top of her and she hadn’t been able to cope. He had more or less taken charge of the children insofar as they needed to be taken charge of. He thought they liked him.

  Waiting for the bus home, Barry hoped people would look at them and think Carol was his wife and the kids his. He was young enough to hope that. Carol would catch sight of herself in shop windows and make a face because Ryan came nearly up to her shoulder, and she would say to Barry, ‘I must have been off my nut having him so young. Do you realize I could be a bloody grandmother before I’m forty?’

  It made Barry laugh to think of Carol being a grandmother. He put his arms round her and started kissing her there in the street and forgot about the kids watching them.

  Next day they had to go back to Four Winds. Tanya never wanted to go. She always screamed and stamped and sometimes she clung to Carol and had to be prised off. It made Barry wonder why they had to be in care if they were so happy in their home and with their mother.

  ‘You can ask the council to take your kids into care, you know,’ Carol said. ‘It doesn’t have to be that they take them away from you. I couldn’t cope after Dave died. I had to do something about the kids. I was desperate.’

  Less than two years after Dave’s death, she had Jason. Barry had never asked her much about that, he didn’t really want to know, he preferred to be in ignorance. He could probably even have convinced himself that Jason was Dave’s child. Only one day, when Carol was telling him off and calling him a little bastard, Iris said, ‘You didn’t ought to call him that, Carol. It’d be one thing if he wasn’t one but he is, isn’t he?’

  When they were married, Barry thought, they could apply to take the kids out of care. Carol could give up work too or at least she could give up working in the wine bar. Barry was ambitious. He had a good job as cabinet-maker and carpenter in a two-man business operating from Delphi Road. Or it would be a good job when this recession came to an end and things picked up a bit. They’d be able to move out of Summerskill Road then and maybe buy a place somewhere and be a real family. Sometimes Barry had a dream that was really a vision, it was so clear and solid, of a room in their house in the future, all of them sitting round the table eating Christmas dinner, all happy and wearing paper hats and laughing, and Carol in a sea-blue dress with their new baby on her lap.

  Barry knew it couldn’t all be roses. There were the children for one thing, they weren’t his and they never could be, and that wasn’t just nothing, that wasn’t something you could just dismiss. And there was Dave, always there, always smiling out of his plastic frame. Carol might look about seventeen but she wasn’t, she was eight years older than him and that much more experienced and sophisticated. And there was one other thing that troubled him sometimes.

  He was a gentle person, a bit too soft, he sometimes thought. He couldn’t stand seeing a kid get hurt. You had to smack them if they went too far, he knew that, but not hard and always on the leg or the behind. So when he saw Carol strike Tanya with a back-handed blow across the little girl’s face and head, using all the strength of her arm, strike her again and again after that, wielding her arm like a tennis player, he saw red and pulled Carol off and hit her himself to calm her down. That was the only reason he did it, to calm her down, like he’d been told you had to with hysterical people. There was no passion in it for him, no uncontrolled violence. He took her by the arm, and because he was young and strong, he held her hard, and struck her a sharp blow across the face.

  It was her reaction that troubled him. She stopped screaming at the child, she was quiet and that was all right. It wasn’t that. She cringed a little but she didn’t put her hand up to her face where his blow must have stung. He ha
d the curious sensation – and he didn’t know how he knew this then, he had no real evidence for it – that she was waiting for him to hit her again, that she wanted him to hit her again. She stood there in front of him, vulnerable, exposed, her hands hanging a little way from her body, breathing shallowly, her lips parted, sweat on her skin, waiting for more.

  Of course he hadn’t hit her again. He had told her he was sorry, he loved her, he wouldn’t hurt her, but he had had to do it to stop her when she was out of control like that.

  ‘I didn’t mind,’ she said and she gave him a curious sidelong look, a look that was sly and also faintly irritable.

  That night, when they made love, she tried to get him to strike her. It was a while before he realized, he didn’t know what she was doing, provoking him with her teeth and nails, jumping from the bed to run across the room and stand pressed against the wall with her arms covering her body, then kicking him when he came near, hissing at him, darting her head like a snake. She had to tell him because he didn’t understand.

  ‘Hit me, lover, hit me as hard as you can.’

  He couldn’t. He forced himself to pat her face, tap her shoulders a little harder with his fingers. That wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted blows, she wanted pain. Why? How could she? You would have thought she had suffered enough of that from that father of hers. Barry struck her. He beat her hard but only with his hands. He hated it. He had to tell himself it wasn’t Carol, it was someone he hated, and he shut his eyes to do it.