Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  Benet again tried to lift her up. Jason opened the door and stood there, looking in warily. It suddenly seemed to her unforgivable that they should detain him here and then subject him to this sort of thing. She picked him up and told him it was all right, there was nothing to be frightened of, though she was by no means sure if this were true. She wasn’t sure if locking Mopsa up where she couldn’t do any more damage and cause any more chaos might not be the best thing for everyone. Mopsa was sobbing now, crawling and groping to hoist herself up on a chair. She’s my mother, Benet thought, I can’t send my own mother into a madhouse. A feeling of helplessness took hold of her, a sense that she was inadequate to handle the situation Mopsa had got her into. And holding Jason like this, snuggled up against her, the way she had been used to holding her own child, was suddenly so repugnant she could have opened her arms with a violent rejecting gesture and dropped him.

  Of course she didn’t do that. She set him down as gently as she could. The urge that had come to her when Mopsa first brought him home now returned. Why shouldn’t she leave, go off to a hotel somewhere, go abroad even, and leave them here together to sort out Mopsa’s mess? Phone the police from an airport and tell them where Jason Stratford was?

  Sitting on an upright chair, Mopsa wound her feet round its legs. She wrung her hands, pulling at her thumbs with her fingers.

  ‘I haven’t got a driving licence.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It ran out before we went to live in Spain. I never got another one. Your father said it wasn’t safe to let me drive.’ Mopsa’s manner had become a spiteful little girl’s. ‘They’ll know I haven’t got a licence. I’ll tell them I can’t drive. They can see I’m not strong enough to lift a big boy like that.’ Because Benet wasn’t answering she began to drum with her heels. ‘Why would I take him? I don’t like children. I didn’t take him, I didn’t and you can’t make me say I did! How dare you say I took him!’

  Now, too late, Benet saw she should have said nothing to Mopsa about going to the police. She should simply have gone. Put Jason in the pushchair, said she was going shopping and gone. Speaking firmly to Mopsa, speaking one firm sentence to her, had this terrible effect. She had been told it had, though she had never actually seen it happen before.

  ‘I didn’t take him, Brigitte. I didn’t.’

  ‘No, you didn’t take him.’

  ‘You took him and tried to put the blame on me.’

  ‘All right,’ Benet said. ‘As you like, anything you say.’

  I must not hate my mother . . .

  She fetched two Valium for Mopsa and made her a cup of coffee. Jason would be hungry even if she and Mopsa were not, he would want his lunch. She opened the oven door. There was a cake tin inside. A tide of hysteria welled up inside her when she saw it. Mopsa had put that cake in the oven last week but she had never turned the oven on. Little circles of pale green mould grew on the uncooked but dry crust of the cake mixture. Benet ran the cold tap and threw water over her face. It kept the hysteria down, it left her with a slight headache. She had no idea what she was going to do and she pushed it out of her mind, concentrating on lunch, on keeping Mopsa calm and the boy contented.

  Jason had a sleep and then they all went out for a walk on the Heath. Benet realized that ever since she had known who Jason was she had been hourly expecting the police to phone or call, that while she was out she expected policemen to come out from behind bushes. The doorbell rang after they had been back about ten minutes and she knew it was going to be two policemen in plain clothes, an older one and a young one, one of whom would produce a warrant card and put a foot in the door. She braced herself, hesitating for a second before she opened the door. It was a Jehovah’s Witness, an ingratiating young woman with a child not much older than Jason.

  Mopsa’s day had exhausted her. She fell asleep on the settee watching television. The last item on the news was of police dragging the canal at Winterside Down. In the background Benet recognized the rears of the houses in Winterside Road where she and Mary and Antonia had lived and where Tom Woodhouse had lived next door. It seemed to mean nothing to Jason. If he recognized the Chinese bridge and the green lawns and the tower he gave no sign of it. He seemed more interested in Mopsa’s sleep behaviour. Her mouth was slightly open and every so often she gave a tiny light snore. Jason was listening for the next snore, and when it came, he turned to Benet and laughed.

  It was his bedtime. She supposed she would have to bath him. Why not? Tomorrow morning she would take him to the police without telling Mopsa. She would take him to the police and explain about Mopsa as sensibly and rationally as she could, and whatever the consequences might be, they must both face them. As it was, she had probably done a dreadful thing in keeping Jason from his mother a day longer than was necessary. She thought of James and of how she would have felt.

  Jason sat on her lap in the bathroom and she took off his clothes. He was impatient to get into the water. She stripped off his vest. She caught her breath and made a little sharp sound.

  Old bruises, yellowish now, covered the left side of his back, the side of his body and the underside of his left arm. There was also on the arm an abraded area which had scabbed. Besides this, on his back, a little to the right of the spine, was a big scar not yet whitened, that looked as if made by some metal object with sharp edges, and above it, almost at the shoulder, reachable if the collar of a shirt or jumper were pulled down, the deep scar of a small circular burn. Once while living in the Winterside Road attic, Benet had seen a man, reputed to be on hard drugs, unaware of what he was doing, stub out a cigarette on the back of his own hand. It had made a mark like that.

  She lifted him into the water. Unable to bear the sight of his back, she turned her face away. To her own astonishment, because what she had seen first shocked her, then filled her with undirected anger, tears came into her eyes and began to fall. A violent emotion of quite a different kind from grief had triggered off the crying that had to come. At last she was crying for James. She laid her arms on the edge of the washbasin and her head on her arms and cried.

  Jason stood up, banging the water and shouting, ‘No, no, no, no!’

  He hated her crying. She rubbed her face with a towel and took deep breaths. Watching her carefully, he waited until she was done with all that, until she was calm again, and then he picked the soap out of the soapdish and handed it gravely to her, indicating she was to wash him. His very mature face was intensely serious.

  Up in the other bathroom were all James’s bath toys. Washing Jason, going carefully over the bruised places, she supposed he would have enjoyed playing with them. But she would not have enjoyed seeing him play with them, to say the least, the very least. In spite of the bruises, the scarred back, her dislike of him returned. He had caused her so much trouble, it would be a relief to be rid of him, whatever the consequences of handing him over.

  Early in the morning, before Jason and Mopsa were even awake for all she knew, she was down at Hampstead station buying a newspaper. The missing boy story rated three paragraphs on an inside page. Jason’s mother was mentioned as having two other children, both in the care of the local authority. She had been a widow for nearly four years and for the past six months had been living with a man eight years her junior. There was nothing in the story about the possibility of murder or anyone being charged or even that it was expected someone would be charged.

  She found a café open and sat in there drinking coffee and reading the paper and trying to eat toast. It reminded her of those distant days when she had lived in Winterside Road, had been trying to make it as a freelance journalist, before she met Edward, before James was dreamt of. Dropping into cafés had been a feature of her routineless life then, of her days in which time and its pressures were of minor significance. Yet she was not back in that time, she could not by any effort of the imagination unmake James.

  When the High Hill Bookshop opened, she went in, found the sociology section and b
ought two paperbacks called The Battered Child Syndrome and The Endless Chain: Some Aspects of Child Abuse. The feeling that the police were waiting for her, watching her, tailing here even, had gone. She felt quite different from the way she had yesterday, the world looked different. She had had a hideous dream she wanted to forget of Mopsa being made to confess by sadistic policemen who were torturing her with lighted cigarettes.

  Back in the Vale of Peace, Jason was sitting on the floor of the basement room drawing something that might have been a woman with curly hair. Mopsa was working over the room with spray polish and a cloth, humming to herself Herbert’s hymn about who sweeps a room but for Thy laws makes it and the action fine. She broke off to say, though quite calmly, that she and Jason had wondered where Benet was, they had been worried, they hadn’t been able to think where she had got to.

  What am I going to do? Benet thought. I need time to think. Am I going to see my mother in court – and incidentally the fact that she is my mother all over the papers? Am I going to see her committed? I don’t think I can face the beginning of it, let alone see it through. She sat in the chair by the window and started reading The Battered Child Syndrome. The case histories were painful to read about and ultimately depressing. One of the longest and most detailed was one of a boy to whom the author, to conceal his true identity, had given the after all common name of James. Mopsa put her blue raincoat on and tied her head up in a scarf and took Jason out for a walk.

  The phone rang twice but Benet didn’t answer it. It was impossible to imagine at the moment speaking to anyone in that world outside, to anyone not involved with Mopsa and Jason. Or to anyone – and that was everyone – who did not know about James.

  ‘When were you thinking of going home?’

  Mopsa looked injured. ‘I suppose you want to get rid of me.’

  ‘Do you have to go to the hospital again?’

  ‘On Friday morning.’

  ‘Then if you went home on Saturday it might be the best thing. I don’t want to be unkind, Mother, it isn’t that I want to be rid of you. But we have to do something about this child. I thought, for your sake, I’d wait till you were on the plane and then I’d hand him over to the police. I’ll wait until you’ve gone. And if it’s any comfort to you, I’m pretty sure we don’t have an extradition treaty with Spain. They couldn’t get you back.’

  ‘But I’ve got a return ticket and it’s for next Wednesday week.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a seat on a plane for Saturday.’

  ‘Fancy having so much money you can just buy plane tickets like other people go on a bus,’ said Mopsa.

  Benet made no answer to this. She was already marvelling at her own behaviour. How had it come about that yesterday morning there had been no doubt in her mind that Jason must immediately be returned to his family, while now she was calmly resolved on keeping him for a further four days? For Mopsa’s sake? Yes, partly. To expose Mopsa to the humiliation, the terrors and indignities of appearing in court would serve no useful purpose, social or moral. All it could ensure – and there was a good deal of doubt about this – was that Mopsa would receive treatment. But she was receiving treatment already, or plans were afoot for her to receive treatment. That was what those tests at the Royal Eastern were about. But there was another reason for not handing Jason back in haste.

  All day yesterday, while reasoning with Mopsa, while trying to keep Mopsa calm and on an even keel, she had been thinking about Jason’s mother, about that woman of precisely her own age who had appealed on television for the return of her son. It was wrong of her, monstrously cruel, to keep that woman in suspense an hour, a moment, longer. And then she had bathed Jason and seen his scars. Since then she had read those books. Was she going to send him back to that?

  It was not so much Carol Stratford she had in mind when she thought along these lines as the twenty-year-old boyfriend. Barry Mahon. There were young stepfathers or mothers’ young boyfriends in a good many of those case histories. Benet had a picture in her mind of Barry Mahon, a big, good-looking probably illiterate hulk. Impatient with children. Given to violence. Maybe a drinker. She told herself she had no grounds for thinking this way – but didn’t she have? Hadn’t she seen the scar of a cigarette burn and the scar made by some metal tool?

  She needed time to think. Those four days she had would give her time to think how she would handle Jason’s return. Someone was going to have to be alerted about the violence that was being meted out to Jason. She wouldn’t be in a very strong position to press this home, but somehow she was going to have to, so that he was never sent back to that.

  Against Carol Stratford she hardened her heart. Mopsa was her concern and she herself was her concern and Jason who had been a defenceless victim, but not Carol Stratford whose other two children had already been taken away from her legally and justly . . .

  10

  JASON HAD BEEN missing for a week. Wednesday had come round again and he had been gone a whole week. Barry had to go back to work. It might have been different if Jason had been his own child or if he had been married to Carol. As it was, he had no real excuse for leaving Ken to carry on on his own. Jobs were hard to come by too. It wasn’t that he thought Ken would replace him but rather that he might just decide he didn’t need a partner at all.

  He asked Carol to marry him. It wasn’t the first time, more like the fourth or fifth. They weren’t as close as they had been, he felt that, he felt as if she had slipped a little away from him since Jason went. For one thing, they hadn’t made love. He didn’t like to touch her, it seemed wrong unless she made it plain she wanted him. The doctor had given her sleeping pills and she was asleep sometimes before he got into bed. Often he just sat there looking at her while she slept, for a whole hour he sat watching her and wondering what experiences were chronicled inside that sleeping brain under the soft blond baby curls. Thinking like that made him feel distanced from her, a stranger, as if she might wake up and ask him who he was and what he was doing in her bedroom.

  That first evening he got home, he found her dressed up again and with make-up on. She looked like the Carol he had always known. There was nothing now to stop them going out in the evening. He thought that but he didn’t say it aloud, he was shocked that he might have said it. They had the Turkish takeaway he had brought in with him and the wine he had bought on the way.

  ‘Let’s get married, Carol,’ he said. ‘If we make up our minds now we could be married in three weeks.’

  She didn’t answer him. Slowly she lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

  ‘If I was your husband, I could look after you better. I could shoulder some of this.’

  ‘I don’t see what difference it makes,’ she said.

  He tried to persuade her. After a bit she said illogically, unfairly, ‘It’s not your kid that’s missing, that’s probably got himself murdered.’

  She had hurt him. She could hurt him more easily than anyone. But he stood up to it. ‘As good as,’ he said. ‘It’d be as good as mine if we were married.’

  She made him a devastating reply that silenced him.

  ‘A baby’s part his mother and part his father and that’s all there is to it. You can’t alter that.’

  He quoted that back to her next day. It was early evening and they were on their way back from the doctor’s. The doctor had said to come back and see him next week and Carol had and got tranquillizers. She held on to his arm as they came into Winterside Down. It was the first time for a week she had touched him of her own volition and he was ashamed of feeling so happy.

  ‘Do you really feel that, what you said, about the kids being part of their father? I mean, I expect you feel that about Dave, I can understand that. You’d sort of see Dave in Ryan and Tanya . . .

  ‘I could see Jason’s father in him then, couldn’t I?’

  Why had he asked? Why had he mentioned it? Until he met Carol, Barry had not known how serenity and contentment and peace can be cut off by a dozen indifferently uttered
words. But I’ve no right to be happy, he thought, and it’s only fair she’s punishing me for it. He felt her hand tighten on his arm and he thought she was reassuring him, even saying she was sorry. He turned his face to hers. She was looking ahead of her at Beatie Isadoro walking towards them with Kelly in the pram and Karen and Dylan walking alongside.

  Carol hadn’t seen Beatie since Jason’s disappearance. Beatie’s vast shape in a pink mac over a green smock over a brown striped dress or skirt took up most of the pavement.

  ‘Get out of my way, you fat cow,’ said Carol.

  Beatie stared at her. ‘The police come up to me today,’ she said. ‘I told them a thing or two about the marks I seen on that poor little baby you neglected.’

  Barry didn’t know what she meant. His parents had almost pulled themselves up into the middle class, and among the middle-class attitudes he had grown up with was dread of a scene in public. But before he could get Carol away, she had thrown herself on Beatie, punching and scratching. Karen screamed. Barry got hold of Carol and pulled her away but not before she had drawn blood on one of Beatie’s slab-like cheeks and Beatie had kicked her on the shin. Carol sobbed in Barry’s arms. People in front gardens and on doorsteps watched them, silent, impassive, curious. Most of them had not been born in England, but they had absorbed, sponge-like and as unconsciously as sponges, English ways of reacting. They watched with vague cold curiosity. Barry took Carol home, holding his arm round her as if she had been taken ill. On the corner of Shinwell Close, the motorbike boys stood, Hoopoe, Blue Hair and the Jamaican that Barry had heard someone call Black Beauty. He felt their eyes following him and Carol, though he wouldn’t look back.

  It was lucky they had the tranquillizers. They calmed Carol down. She was talking on the phone to Alkmini at the wine bar when Iris called in with Maureen. They had brought the evening paper with an article in it about all the children in the London area who had gone missing and never been found in the past five years. Jason’s disappearance had sparked it off. Jason’s name was the first to be mentioned.