by Ruth Rendell
She never asked him for anything like that again. He tried to forget it, to put the memory of it out of his mind, and he nearly succeeded. Sometimes he thought that perhaps he had only dreamed he was beating Carol just as he had dreamed of seeing her strike Tanya. Since then, though, their love-making had been more strenuous, more savage really. Barry didn’t mind that. It was a change to find a woman who preferred it that way. But then Carol wasn’t like other women. She was one in a million . . .
After the children went back, they were alone. They went to bed. That was what they always did when they got the chance. When there were people there who were just going or when they were soon to be rid of the kids, Barry always had this sense of mounting excitement and, looking at Carol, he knew she had it too. It was all they could do to wait till the door closed. And yet such was the pleasure of anticipation that sometimes he hoped leave-takings would be prolonged or children’s departure delayed so that he might be kept a little longer on this pinnacle of breathless expectancy.
Once they were alone they fell into each other’s arms, desperate by then for love, kissing and licking and biting and holding, laughing for no reason unless it was at their own thraldom. In that big bed with Carol there was no one else in the world for him, no one and nothing beyond the invisible dome that seemed to enclose the bed. Carol told him that once or twice she had watched them in the big mirror, it excited her more, but he never had. His love was here and now, not even at that small remove.
They slept. They awoke in darkness, still embraced, damp and cool with their own and each other’s sweat. Carol got up first and washed and put on the black and white zig-zag dress. She painted her face with brushes, big ones for the foundation and the blusher and small fine ones for the eyelids and brows and outlining her lips. She combed her hair and wound the little tendril curls round her fingers. They were going out for a drink with Iris and Iris’s Jerry.
A big full moon was up, bright as a floodlight, competing with the harsh yellow that overhung Winterside Down. They went by way of the Chinese bridge where Barry’s graffiti still proclaimed his love and where it was light enough to see their own faces reflected in the calm glistening water of the canal. Their faces gazed back at them as from a mirror in a room which is dark but nevertheless faintly lit by light showing through an open door. Carol dropped her cigarette stub into the water. It was just heavy enough to fracture their images and, for a brief moment, distort them so horribly that Barry stepped back, removing his own. He had seen Carol’s beautiful face shudder and collapse and melt until it became a rubber mask representing some cartoon character, voracious, lecherous and coarse, while his own was a gargoyle with bloated lips and rolling wobbly eyes.
He put his arm round her, rubbed her cheek with his and kissed her lips. Carol put sealant on her lips so that you could kiss a hundred times without the lipstick coming off. They held hands walking down Winterside Down, past Maureen’s house with its curtains like fancy white lace aprons and the polished car outside. Iris and Jerry were already in the Old Bulldog, they had probably been there since it opened. Jerry was a smallish, fattish, pink-faced man, a heavy drinker but showing few signs of this. He was never drunk. His eyes looked as if they had been stewed in brine, they had a soggy yet shrivelled look, and his clothes smelled as if they had been rinsed out in gin. His favourite pastime next to going to the Old Bulldog was watching television with a tumbler of gin and water beside him.
People said Iris had once been even prettier than Carol. Barry found that hard to believe. She was fifty, thin as a skeleton and with long bony legs. She wore her dyed yellow hair shoulder-length to make herself look younger, and she always had very high-heeled sandals on, summer and winter, to show off her high insteps and her thin ankles. Barry guessed she had had a hell of a life with the brutish Knapwell. Yet she was always cheerful, carefree, making the best of a bad job. She smoked forty or fifty cigarettes a day and had a cough which turned her face purple with the strain. Iris couldn’t get down to anything without a cigarette.
‘Let me just get a fag on,’ she would say, or ‘I’ll have to have a cig first.’
Since Knapwell went, there had been (according to Carol) a man called Bill and one called Nobby, but they hadn’t lasted long and Jerry had been Iris’s companion for years now. He was a mysterious man who seldom spoke, showed no emotion, seemed to have no family of his own, and who preserved towards everything but gin and the television a sublime indifference. Even his real name was a mystery, for he had begun to call himself Knapwell within a year of moving in with Iris. He worked for Thames Water which made Barry laugh, considering Jerry’s tastes. Iris had a job in a small garment factory housed in what used to be the old Prado cinema.
Barry had a Foster’s and Carol a gin and tonic. She and Iris talked about childminding arrangements for the coming week. Maybe Maureen could be roped in for one day.
‘You have to be joking,’ said Iris. ‘Maureen’s doing up her lounge. She’s been all day stripping.’
‘I’ll have to take on another evening at Kostas’s, that’s all,’ said Carol. ‘It’s costing me a fortune.’
Jerry got up. ‘You going to have the other half?’ he said to Barry as if his lager hadn’t been the entire contents of a can but out of a bottle or jug. Knowing what they would want, he didn’t waste words on the women.
‘Let me get a fag on,’ said Iris. She smoked in thoughtful silence. Carol talked about taking on extra work. That troubled Barry who had been feeling happy and contented. He longed to earn more, make a lot of money, so that instead of working longer hours Carol could give up altogether and stay at home with the kids. ‘There’s always the council,’ Iris said suddenly. ‘You could try them, see what they come up with.’
Barry didn’t know what she meant for a minute but he could see Carol did. She took one of her mother’s cigarettes, lit it from Iris’s.
‘It may come to that. It just may.’
‘I’d like to do more myself,’ said Iris. ‘You know I’d bend over backwards to give you a helping hand. But if it means giving in my notice, I have to draw the line. I couldn’t let Mr Karim down. I’ve been there seven years or it will be come New Year and he, like, relies on me, doesn’t he, Jerry?’ She didn’t even wait for the confirmation. She knew it wouldn’t come. ‘You’ll have to play it by ear, I reckon,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Just go on from day to day.’
‘I couldn’t cope before, and if I can’t again, they’ll have to step in.’
Barry understood then. ‘It’s not going to come to that,’ he said. He felt that his voice was firm, authoritative, manly, the ruling voice the women were waiting for. ‘We’ll manage. I’ll manage.’
Carol had been holding his hand. She put her other arm round him, over his chest and held his shoulder. She leaned her head against chest. ‘You’re lovely,’ she said. ‘You’re so strong. Isn’t he lovely, Mum? He reminds me of Dave. Doesn’t he remind you of Dave?’
‘He does a bit,’ said Iris.
Barry knew there could be no higher praise. Feeling Carol’s soft warmth against him, a thread of excitement moved in his body. He began to look forward to the evening’s end, to their parting from Iris and Jerry on the pavement under the white moon, for him and Carol once more to be alone together.
6
THE DAYS BLENDED into one another without demarcation, without date, without weather, almost without light or dark. She lay, then sat, in her bedroom, the big room in the very top of the house in the Vale of Peace. Mopsa brought her food on trays, but when she saw Benet didn’t want to eat, could not eat, the food was replaced without demur by cups of tea, of instant coffee and, in the evenings, their coming preceded by no inquiries, tumblers of brandy and water.
Life had stopped. At first, because what had happened was unbelievable, it could not have happened, little children in the 1980s do not die – because of that, there was only shock which stunned and numbed. For a good deal of the stunned, numbed phase, Benet had been kep
t in hospital herself. In that same state, armed with sleeping pills and tranquillizers, she had been sent home to her chaotic house and Mopsa. There the shock began to wear off. It was like the anaesthetic wearing off after you have been to the dentist and the pain starts. Only no physical pain Benet had ever known was like this. Even when she was giving birth to James and had shouted out, her cries had been part pleasurable, compounded of effort and intent and joy as well as pain. Now she found herself holding both hands tight over her mouth to keep herself from screaming out her suffering. She sat or paced the room because when she lay down she could not keep from twisting and turning and digging her nails into the soft parts of herself. One afternoon she stuck a pin into her arm to have a different focus of pain.
Because she had no idea of time or its passing, it seemed to her that she had been a year in that room at the top of the house, tended by Mopsa, with Mopsa coming every hour to the door. Perhaps it had been no more than two days. She took a lot of barbiturates and a lot of Valium. The sleeping pills she put down the lavatory and pulled the flush on them. The oblivion they brought was not worth the awfulness of waking up, appreciating the light of morning, listening for the first morning sounds from James next door – and realizing there would be no morning sounds from him, there never would be. Never never never never never.
The Valium stopped her wanting to scream or wanting to put her hands over her mouth to stop the scream. It made her, while sitting quiet and still, consider in a low muddled way methods of suicide. She threw those pills away too. She stood by the window, high above the Vale of Peace, looking at a large white moon like a radiant pearl. Two years before, James had not existed, yet she was the same person she had been then, not much older, unchanged in appearance. She looked into the mirror and saw the same familiar regular features, almond-shaped dark eyes, high cheekbones, full folded lips. The dark brown, longish, implacably straight hair was the same and the clear sallow skin. Why then could she not be as she had been before he came into her life? It was such a short time ago. How could she have been so unimaginably affected, so transformed, in less than two years by another person and that person scarcely able to speak?
She did not want to think of him as a person, as himself, of the things he had done and said. That was the worst. That way unbearable panic lay, the kind of panic that comes from knowing one more step in that direction and the mind will break. She went downstairs, all the way down the long flight that wound through the middle of the house, and came into the basement room and sat in the window looking up at the garden wall and the street. She felt she would never go out there again. It was impossible to imagine going into the open air, walking, confronting other human beings.
Mopsa was at the kitchen end of the room, apparently making a cake. What was the use of it? Who would eat it? Mopsa wore an apron Benet had never seen before, a pink-and-white check gingham apron with straps that crossed over at the back. She had cleared every trace of James out of that room. The doors of the toy cupboard were closed. The highchair was gone. Upstairs Benet had closed her eyes while passing James’s bedroom door on her way to the bathroom. She had been afraid it might be open and its contents showing. Now she knew she need not have bothered to close her eyes. Mopsa would have seen to those things. Dimly, through that timeless time up there, she had perceived that Mopsa had been seeing to things, had seen to everything.
The things she could not name even in her own thoughts. The registration of death. The undertakers. The funeral. To herself she named them, shivering long and inwardly, with a euphemism she had once despised: the formalities. Poor mad Mopsa, who was mad no longer, who had taken up this terrible challenge better than the sanest of women, had seen to . . . the formalities. Vaguely, up in that high room, that dark tower, Benet had been aware of Mopsa going out, of the car starting, of doors closing and opening, of Mopsa returning, of Mopsa bustling, busy in her recording angel, amanuensis, indispensable role. And now, having turned to look at her daughter and give her a small, sad, pitiful smile, she was making a cake, beating eggs with a hand whisk into a creamy concoction in a glass bowl.
Mopsa had been – wonderful. That was the word one always used of someone who did what she had done in this situation – wonderful. Often Benet had heard the phone ringing. Mopsa had answered it, though Benet never heard what she said. It rang now. Mopsa rested the whisk against the side of the bowl and went to the phone and took up the receiver. She spoke to Antonia as if they were old friends, though to Benet’s knowledge they had never met. Her tone was chatty, pleasant, in no way tragic. Benet would certainly phone Antonia, Mopsa said. As soon as she was up and about and fit again, she would phone her. Yes, Mopsa would pass on the message.
Benet addressed the first question to her mother she had put since she had come home from the hospital. Her voice which had been silent for so long sounded strange to her. She walked over to Mopsa, her legs feeling weak as if she were convalescent.
‘Have there been many phone calls?’
Mopsa was sifting flour through a sieve. She worked neatly, without spilling. ‘Half a dozen. Quite a few. I didn’t count them.’
‘What have you told people?’
‘I’ve told them you’re not well enough to speak to anyone. I’ve told them you’re confined to your bed and can’t be expected to talk.’
It was the correct response, it was the prescribed, ideal, merciful way for anyone in Mopsa’s position to behave. Benet felt, creeping into the immense wide cold sea of her misery, a trickle of unease. She ignored it. It was nothing. Unease was nothing any more, of no importance, and never would be.
‘Have you spoken to Dad?’
‘He’s phoned every evening nearly.’ The complacent look touched the corners of Mopsa’s mouth. ‘He sent you his love.’
Poor Mopsa who was unstable, ill really, not like other women, other people’s mothers. A line came into Benet’s mind – there’s a part of my heart that’s sorry yet for thee . . . She said quietly, ‘It must have been very hard for you to tell him.’
The thin custardy stuff was poured into the tin. Mopsa had an air of frowning concentration. When it was done she expelled her breath with a puffing sound. She was like a schoolgirl making a cake for a home economics exam. She was like someone who had never made a cake before. Perhaps she hadn’t. Benet couldn’t remember cakes in Mopsa’s crazy days. She put the cake into the oven and slammed the door as if slamming it on something she would never return to, the final closing of the door of a house she was quitting for ever.
She turned to Benet, wiping clean hands down the front of her apron.
‘Oh, I didn’t tell him, Brigitte. I couldn’t tell him. He doesn’t ask, you see. It’s an embarrassing subject for him. He might have got over it if things had been different. But since he doesn’t ask, there’s no point in telling him, is there?’
‘He will have to know sometime.’
Mopsa didn’t say anything. She looked levelly into Benet’s eyes. At that moment, in her apron, a smudge of flour on one cheek, her hair silvery-gold with pins fastening it, she was exactly like other people’s mothers.
‘Have you told anyone?’ Benet said.
A hand went up and touched the flour smudge, a finger rubbed and flicked at it. Mopsa’s stare shifted from Benet’s face to the light switch on the far wall.
‘You haven’t told anyone at all, have you?’
Mopsa began to mumble. ‘I couldn’t, Brigitte. I didn’t want to upset myself. It’s bad for me to be upset.’
Benet shouted at her: ‘Who do you suppose is going to eat that bloody cake?’
She ran out of the room and up the stairs. Behind her she could hear Mopsa starting to snuffle and cry. She didn’t go back. She went on up the stairs, a feeling of pressure on the top of her head, a throbbing behind her eyes. She passed the open door to Mopsa’s bedroom and the photograph on Mopsa’s bedside table caught her eyes. It was a photograph of Edward. What was Mopsa doing with a photograph of Edward? Benet
hadn’t even known she possessed one. It was a head and shoulders shot, rather fuzzy, enlarged from a snap.
She went up the last flight and entered James’s bedroom. The cot was still there and the bare mattress. Apart from that, there was nothing to show the room had ever been occupied by a child. From the window you could see the row of pines behind the pond, the green strip of the Heath, a large white empty sky. She shut herself in her own bedroom. Should she tell Edward about James? Was there any point? He had only seen him once and that when he was two days old. He had come into the hospital and seen him and Benet and not known what to say.
‘You have utterly humiliated me’ was what at last he did say. He had glanced at the child and looked away.
‘It would have been better if you hadn’t come, Edward. You shouldn’t have come.’
She felt as bad about things as he did, in her own way. It had been wrong to use him, it had been wrong to set out to have a child by him when she had no intention of marrying him or even continuing to live with him. But it had not seemed like that at the time, it had seemed the obvious thing, even the moral thing. With that decision made, with the baby in her arms, even then she had not been able to ignore Edward’s beauty, a beauty that inevitably moved her. She had thought, why can’t that alone be enough for me, though I know there is nothing else, scarcely anything else to him at all? The world was full of men bound to women for no more reason than that those women were beautiful. Why couldn’t it be the other way round and be so for her?
He sat on the side of her bed and once more asked her to marry him. She said no, no, she couldn’t, please not to ask her again, it was impossible, they would both be unhappy, all three of them would be unhappy. He had got up and gone and she had never seen him again.
From somewhere or other, Mopsa had acquired a photograph of him and had it framed and put it by her bed. As if he were her son. Did it matter why? Did it matter, come to that, that Mopsa had not told anyone of James’s death? Did anything matter?
