Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  They came home simultaneously, she and the boy and Mopsa. Walking up the hill, she had already read the few paragraphs on an inside page of the newspaper. It wouldn’t have been a few paragraphs last Thursday, she thought, it would have been the front-page lead.

  Mopsa saw the paper under Benet’s arm. She came warily up the path and the steps, picking her way, almost wincing, as if it were hot sand she walked on instead of cold concrete. Benet held the door open for her, closed it quickly. She hadn’t yet tried calling the boy by his real name.

  ‘Jason,’ she said, ‘let me take your coat off, Jason.’

  Mopsa made a little sharp sound and covered her mouth. The boy gave Benet a radiant smile. He was Jason, the smile seemed to say, at last they had cottoned on, at last they knew.

  Benet took him into the living room. She knew Mopsa would follow her. She opened the paper and read aloud,

  ‘Six days after the disappearance of Jason Stratford, aged one year and eleven months, from a street in Tottenham, north London, a police spokesman said today that hopes of his being found alive are weakening. Jason was last seen in a street of houses scheduled for demolition near the North-eastern Canal at Winterside Down where he lived with his mother, Mrs Carol Stratford, 28, and Barry Mahon, 20, a carpenter.

  Mrs Stratford made an appeal for Jason’s return after the evening news on BBCI yesterday. “Jason would never have gone willingly with anyone,” she said. “He wasn’t used to strangers.”

  ‘The street was Rudyard Gardens,’ Benet said to Mopsa. It struck her sickeningly that it was she who had shown Mopsa the place. ‘When you came back from the hospital last Wednesday I suppose you took my route. Where did you find him? In a garden? Outside a shop?’

  ‘He was sitting on a wall,’ said Mopsa. She made her voice throb with pathos. She thrust her face close to Benet’s, the lips quivering. ‘All by himself. Left on a wall. No one wanted him. Then a dog came along, one of those big black Dobermanns, and it sniffed him and he was frightened. He was so frightened, he fell off the wall and I picked him up. No one was looking, no one saw me.’

  ‘Evidently not.’

  Mopsa put her hands on Benet. She laid trembling hands on her arms.

  ‘I did it for you, Brigitte. I said I’d do anything in the world for you. You lost your boy so I got you another one. I got you another boy to make up for losing James.’

  8

  JASON HAD BEEN gone for twenty-four hours, more than that, before they knew he was missing. That was almost the worst thing about it for Barry, that he could have been lost like that because one set of people thought he was with another set and the other set thought he was home with Carol. It was the hardest thing to explain to the police. Barry had just explained it for the umpteenth time. He sat in a room in the police station watching Detective Superintendent Treddick and Detective Inspector Leatham gather up their papers and get up from the table and leave him alone for yet another half-hour ‘to think things over, to think if there’s anything you want to add to what you’ve said’.

  There were things he wanted to add but he knew better than that. He knew what sort of construction they would put on it.

  ‘Get on all right with the boy, do you?’ they had asked him in an artless way, almost a light and casual way, only nothing they said was casual.

  ‘Of course I do. Fine,’ he had said.

  And that was true. But it was also true that he had wanted to be rid of him. Not for ever, not in that way, but just so that he could be alone with Carol. He recalled now what a relief it had been when Iris said to leave Jason with her overnight and how he had welcomed Beatie Isadoro’s laconic acceptance of another child in the house, provided the money was there. To have Carol to himself with no one shouting out or crying in the next room, that had made him go along with Carol in all her complex baby-minding arrangements. Sometimes his conscience had given him a twinge, though not enough of one to make him do anything about it. That day, for instance, when Karen Isadoro or her mother or Iris or whoever it had been lost Jason, his conscience had been awake and active then, telling him to do something. He had bludgeoned it asleep. Did that mean it was really he who was responsible for Jason’s disappearance? He hoped not, he didn’t want to think like that. He remembered the day very clearly. Last Wednesday.

  Ken Thompson and he were putting fitted furniture into the bedroom of a flat near Page Green. Considering the neighbourhood and the dilapidated state of the house, it didn’t seem worthwhile, but who were they to question it? The money was good. These days, jobs like that were getting fewer and farther between. Too many do-it-yourself shops flourished and there were too many do-it-yourself magazines about. Soon after one o’clock, they were finished but for the mirror which was still in the shop at Crouch End being cut to this fancy shape. Ken said they might as well knock off and he’d come back himself and do the mirror around four.

  Foreseeing they had no more than a morning’s work there, Barry had made up his mind, while doing a final bit of glasspapering, that he would take Jason out somewhere for the afternoon. He got on to the Isadoros from a phone box. It was Dylan, the second or third boy, who answered. Jason was just going out with Mum and Karen in the pushchair. Barry said OK, thanks, they’d pick him up around six. He had that familiar feeling, a mixture of guilt and relief, we all experience when prevented from doing a tedious duty. Of course he could have insised, he could have said he was coming straightaway to take Jason to the park or to the swings or whatever, but he didn’t say that. He told himself Jason was better off playing with kids than trailing about in the cold with him. It was cold. It was a gloomy grey November day with leaves blowing about everywhere and wet leaves underfoot.

  Barry’s free afternoon stretched before him. Carol didn’t go to the wine bar on Wednesdays. She worked all day for Mrs Fylemon and knocked off at five. He decided he would go and pick her up, not exactly call at the house but wait for her at the top of Fitzroy Park. That was more than three hours off. He crossed Green Lanes into Delphi Road and made his way to Lordship Avenue by way of the passage between Rudyard Gardens and Zimber Road, coming out at the big junction where the ABC Cinema was. The ABC were showing The Dark Crystal and the first programme was about to start. Barry liked films that frightened him, horror films that made the audience gasp and jump. He considered for a moment, then went in, buying himself twenty Marlboro on the way and being shown to the smokers’ side of the auditorium.

  While he was in there, Karen Isadoro, sent by her mother to buy a large loaf, must have been pushing Jason in the pushchair over the pedestrian crossing in Lordship Avenue towards Rudyard Gardens, towards the only baker’s open around there on a Wednesday afternoon. And when Barry had been in there half an hour, Karen had wheeled Jason back again, the loaf in a plastic carrier over the pushchair handles, and in Brownswood Common Lane rung Iris’s doorbell in Griffin Villas and found no one at home. Karen had revealed all this later, too many hours later, when with Leatham and the sergeant they had gone round to her school. Barry had known nothing of it at the time, it hadn’t cross his mind to think of it while watching The Dark Crystal.

  By the time the film was halfway through, Karen had encountered her friend Debbie in Lordship Avenue. That Wednesday was the last day of their half-term holiday. Debbie wanted Karen to go round the shops with her and buy a funny card for her mum’s birthday. They didn’t want Jason. Besides, Karen’s mother had said Mrs Knapwell would have him, Mrs Knapwell had promised to take over, she’d got enough on her plate without Carol Stratford’s kid day in and day out. They phoned Iris. Or rather they phoned the lady upstairs at Griffin Villas, a Mrs Love, because Iris hadn’t got a phone. Iris was still out.

  They took Jason into a newsagent’s. At this time, Barry calculated he must have been lighting his fourth cigarette. They took Jason into a sweetshop that also sold cards and he started to cry, wanting sweets, bawling when they said they had no money for sweets. Debbie said she was going to try down Halepike Lane, there was
a shop down there that sold funny cards, and she was going now. Karen could come if she wanted but she was to get shot of Jason first.

  Barry wasn’t clear quite what happened next. Who was? Everyone told conflicting stories, saving their own faces, trying to present themselves in the best possible light. Karen said she took Jason out of his pushchair and sat him on a wall in Rudyard Gardens while she went into the phone box there to phone Iris. She took him out of the pushchair because the greengrocer’s Dobermann dog was sniffing around and Jason was frightened of the dog which couldn’t reach him up on the wall. The trouble was, kids had broken the phone box inside and it didn’t work. So she’d left Jason on the wall and run round the corner, just a little way round the corner, and phoned Iris from the call box outside the greengrocer’s. She’d only got 10p – well, two 5p pieces – and Mrs Love took so long about the message . . .

  Iris had never got it. She’d got a message from Mrs Love, yes. Oh, there was no doubt about that. It was that Karen Isadoro had got Jason. She’d gone up with Mrs Love to talk to Karen on the phone and Karen had gone, the line was making a dialling tone.

  ‘I left a message,’ Karen said to the inspector. ‘I said to the lady upstairs to tell Jason’s nan Jason was sitting on the wall in Rudyard and to pop down for him.’

  ‘Did you really give that message?’ said Leatham. ‘You really and honestly told the lady that?’

  Karen stuck to it for a moment or two and then she started crying. ‘I meant to,’ she mumbled.

  ‘You meant to, but what did you really do?’

  ‘I hadn’t got no more money and the pips went . . .’

  She was only eight. What did they expect? What had he expected? Barry hadn’t thought much about it. He hadn’t thought about it at all sitting in the cinema, watching extraterrestrial reptilian creatures, smoking his sixth cigarette.

  Soon after four, the programme was over. Barry got a bus to Muswell Hill and another down the Archway Road. By then it was five to five, so he walked as fast as he could, running part of the way, up the steep hill into Highgate Village and through Pond Square into the Georgian grandeur of the Grove. At the entrance to Fitzroy Park, in the gateway that marks the private road, he waited for Carol. He lit a cigarette. He knew that when she appeared – having turned the bend in the lane which stretched before him, walking towards him between the high hedges, under the overhanging branches of trees – he would experience that movement of the heart and constriction of the throat that was almost a feeling of sickness, though a pleasurable discomfort, that he had each time he went to meet her or saw her coming from a distance or even, coming over the Chinese bridge, saw the lights on in her house. It was new to him, he had never had it before he met her, but he recognized it as a symptom of being in love, just as a man who has never had a heart attack knows the pain in his left arm and the iron grip on his chest for what they are.

  He had been there about ten minutes when she showed herself to him at the end of the tunnel of trees. His heart moved, seemed to turn over and then right itself with a small delicate lurch. She saw him and waved. He began to walk towards her. When they met, he put his arms on her shoulders and stood looking at her, her porcelain doll face sullen and rather tired, the gold coin curls clinging to a forehead on which the make-up had clogged and smeared. He took the holdall she carried from her. He didn’t like to see her with it. His mother said you could always tell a woman who went out cleaning by her carrier bag with overall and rubber gloves inside.

  ‘I’m knackered,’ Carol said. ‘The Prince of Wales’ll be opening. I’m dying for a drink.’

  ‘Have to make it a quick one then. We’ve got to fetch Jason. Beatie was a bit funny with me this morning about leaving him there so much.’

  Carol always flared. She didn’t like criticism. Well, she wasn’t alone in that, Barry thought.

  ‘She can get stuffed. She gets paid for it, doesn’t she? And bloody good money too. Anyway you needn’t worry about Jason. I phoned Madame Isadoro from Mrs F’s and Mum’s got him, had him since three, so we can have ourselves a ball, my dear.’ She took his arm and snuggled up. ‘Mrs F’s off to Tunisia for three weeks and she gave me my money in advance, fifty quid and a bonus for keeping the houseplants watered. How about that?’ She produced and waved at him a fifty-pound note, crisp, greenish-gold.

  ‘I’ve got money,’ Barry said stiffly. ‘I don’t want you spending your money.’

  ‘We had a turn-out of some of her stuff. There was this Zandra Rhodes dress she said I could have. I’ve got it in that bag. It’s something else again, I tell you. Fancy a woman her age thinking she could wear Zandra Rhodes.’

  And no doubt Beatie Isadoro genuinely had thought Jason was with Iris, had been safe with Iris since three. Karen thought so too. It wasn’t the first time she had left Jason in the street at an appointed place for his grandmother to find him. As for Iris, she had scarcely thought about it at all. Why should she? For all she knew she had been let off the hook for the afternoon. Jason was with Karen, with Karen’s family, in the security of the two overcrowded houses, and she had an unexpected free afternoon to unsqueeze her feet out of her high-heeled sandals, get a fag on, watch the TV, wait in peace for Jerry to come home and take her down the Bulldog.

  Barry and Carol had a drink in the Prince of Wales and then another and then they went over to the Flask. Carol said Dennis Gordon had said something about this new club at Camden Lock called the Tenerife, a drinking club with a disco; you just paid a two-pound membership fee at the door, and she wouldn’t mind trying it. They had something to eat in a steak house first, and Carol went into the Ladies and changed into the dress which was yellow and red and gold with a short skirt and huge balloon sleeves and a gold sash. She had her red boots on so it looked good, it looked marvellous.

  ‘You look great,’ said Barry. ‘I wish I’d thought to change, I feel a bit of a mess.’

  ‘You’re OK,’ Carol said indifferently. With overt narcissism, she gazed into a mirror on the wall of the restaurant at her glittering image.

  Barry had suggested they gave the lady upstairs at Iris’s a ring and say where they were and they would be late back. He was glad now he’d suggested that, though sorry he hadn’t pressed the point. Carol had dissuaded him and dissuaded him easily. He was already anticipating dancing with her, their bodies pressed close among the other hot young bodies, the blue and violet and red lights winking and spotting, the music a hot, throbbing, heavy sound.

  If he had got through to Iris, talked to Iris, what good would it have done? Jason was gone by then, gone three hours and more. And Iris would probably have been out anyway, and he would have thought she was doing what he always suspected her of doing but had never probed into too deeply – putting Jason to bed with a drop of whisky in his bottle and leaving him to go down the pub with Jerry.

  As it happened, it was nearly two before he and Carol got back. They had to have a taxi. Winterside Down was dead at that hour, though the yellow lamps on their stilts were still on, casting over the straight streets, the U-shaped streets, the single lonely tower and the sluggish strip of canal a phosphorescence that bleached everything to moonscape brown. The taxi wound through the chilly, yellowish-brown, treeless place. They had attempted to grow trees on Winterside Down but somehow they had quickly died natural deaths or kids had destroyed them. Overhead the sky was a reddish smoky ochre, uniform and starless. There had been a moon when they had been down at Camden Lock but the moon had gone now. Two of the motorbike boys without their machines loitered on the corner of Summerskill and Dalton. Barry wondered if they ever went to bed, sometimes he wondered if they were real. The colours of their plumage were drained by the lamps but he could tell from the shape and stance of them that they were Blue Hair and Hoopoe. They stared at the taxi. Their stillness and their silence, their apparently purposeless biding of time, gave them an air at once threatening and sinister.

  Carol had had a lot to drink. She didn’t want to wait to get up
stairs. In the half-dark, street-lamp-lighted living room, without drawing the curtains she pulled off the Zandra Rhodes dress and her tights and bra. Her body, which was very white, gleamed like marble. She lay on the settee and pulled Barry on to her and into her, her thighs and hips no longer marble-like but soft and moist as cream. There was sweat in pearls on her upper lip. Carol had a way of making little moans alternating with giggles when she made love. Barry held his mouth over hers to stop the rippling, gurgling laughter.

  She fell asleep. He had lit cigarettes for them but she was asleep. He picked her up and carried her to bed and then he went down again to fetch the dress and put it on a hanger.

  The first time the police really questioned him – the first time they had him down here at the station – they had wanted to know why, next morning, the Thursday morning, Barry hadn’t gone straight round to Iris’s to fetch Jason. Carol didn’t work on Thursday mornings till she started at the wine bar at eleven. Why hadn’t he fetched Jason – why, rather, hadn’t he tried to fetch Jason – from Iris’s and taken him home to his mother before he went to work? It was something he had often done in the past. The first time Inspector Leatham asked him, he simply said he didn’t know why, he was late, he left it to Carol. This time, half an hour ago, he had admitted to having had the worst hangover of his life that Thursday morning. With hammering going on in his head, with a dry mouth, hardly able to walk upright, he had staggered downstairs, drunk water out of the cold tap. If he was going to make it to the house in Alaxandra Park where Ken and he were due by nine sharp to start fitting bookshelves, he had to be out of Winterside Down by eight-twenty and out he was, grimly walking with hunched shoulders, his aching eyes screwed up against the cold. The last thing that concerned him was where Jason was or who was going to look after him that day. He didn’t think of Jason, he had forgotten him.