Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  He thought he might as well have a look through the stack of papers on the two shelves of the writing desk. Nothing but reports of company meetings on the top one. What had she kept that lot for? Underneath was a copy of John Howard’s will, and one each of his birth certificate and death certificate. Freda’s birth certificate and her marriage certificate were there too, along with some car and house insurance stuff and other documents. Useless. About as much use to him as those company meeting reports.

  Terence found himself a sheet of writing paper and began to practise copying John Howard Phipps’s signature. He wrote John H. Phipps a dozen times and then tried doing it faster and with a fine flourish. The trouble would be when he had to do it under the eye of some post office clerk.

  Much later in the day, when he had been up to the King of Bohemia for a drink and had cooked himself baked beans and a fried egg for lunch and thought about trying the Golders Green circuit again, he sat down once more at the desk, pen in hand. After all, cashing those fourteen hundred pounds’ worth of savings certificates was his only hope, any idea of ringing up and returning to Jessica not being realistic.

  How old had John Phipps been? Her late husband’s age was not a subject Freda had ever brought up. There was nothing as far as he could see on or in the green book to indicate the holder’s age, unless there was some coded mark somewhere. It wouldn’t do to present this in the post office and then find out the holder was supposed to be sixty-five. He knew he was experiencing one of his failures of nerve.

  ‘The trouble with you, Terence Wand,’ Carol had once said to him, ‘is that you’ve got a well-known stomach complaint. No guts.’

  Anyway the man’s birth certificate was in among that lot somewhere. He pulled out the brown envelope in which he thought the certificates were contained and saw he had got the wrong one. This one was labelled: Title Deeds of 5 Spring Close, Hampstead.

  Terence looked at the envelope. He slid the documents out. The deeds, on thick, lined, parchment-like paper, listed only one owner of this house which had been purchased five years previously. Ownership might have been in the joint names of John Howard Phipps and Freda Phipps or Freda might have had the title altered when she inherited, but neither of these contingencies were so. John Howard, though deceased, still appeared as the sole owner.

  The magnitude of the idea which came into Terence’s mind and exploded there, the sheer daring criminality of it, made him feel sick with fear. He felt the sweat start in pinhead drops on his forehead. Cashing someone else’s National Savings would be nothing to this. It was impossible, he couldn’t dream of doing it – or could he?

  12

  JASON SAT IN James’s seat in the back of the car holding the white rabbit Mopsa had bought him. Benet put Mopsa’s suitcases in the boot along with Jason’s old pushchair that had been there ever since Mopsa stole him. He was looking fit and well, she thought, his colour less high, his expression more alert. Is it my imagination, she thought, or is he actually a bit better-looking? When Mopsa was gone, when in an hour or two Mopsa was gone and she had to face the music, or at least seriously contemplate and plan facing the music, nobody was going to be able to say Jason had suffered in her care. They could only congratulate her on the improvement in him.

  ‘This is going to be a red letter day for Daddy,’ said Mopsa. ‘Do you know we’ve never been separated so long in all our married life?’

  She had forgotten the long periods spent in psychiatric wards. This morning she was the epitome of sanity in her grey suit, a red chiffon scarf round her neck and lipstick to match but carefully blotted and powdered so as not to look too bold. As to her father’s reaction to this homecoming, Benet doubted if he faced the day with the enthusiasm Mopsa predicted. On the phone the other night he had been reproachful.

  ‘Surely you could have kept your mother with you for the month we planned on?’

  And Mopsa herself had not helped when she took the receiver and said in a plaintive voice that there was nothing really to keep her in London now all the tests had proved negative. She didn’t want to outstay her welcome.

  John Archdale’s voice was pregnant with unspoken miseries. You had her for three weeks, it implied, I have her for life. I don’t complain, I shoulder it, but all I asked was for four short weeks. It wouldn’t have hurt Mopsa in the circumstances, Benet thought, to tell the poor man that she was looking forward to coming home.

  Now of course, in the car, it was evident she was. The climate for one thing. The temperature would be twenty degrees higher than in England. And there would be the sunshine and her own cosy little home that Benet had only seen once and showed no sign of wanting to see again. She chattered on about the amenities of southern Spain in the winter when most of the tourists were gone, the expatriate couple from High Wycombe they played bridge with, the beach. Jason, it seemed, she had forgotten. For days she had virtually ignored him, leaving him to Benet’s care. Once she had referred to him as James.

  ‘Isn’t it time James was in bed?’

  The knife that was always poised, ready to rend Benet with reminders, struck home. But Mopsa had spoken unconsciously. She had never been much interested in James, still less in Jason, as a person. It seemed that, to her, they had blended and become one, little boys who were no more than tribal creatures sharing a group soul. Once only had Benet made another attempt to explain to Mopsa what she intended to do about Jason but Mopsa had merely shrugged.

  ‘I shan’t be here. Why tell me?’

  At Heathrow, at the newsagent’s within the check-in area, a pyramid of The Marriage Knot was on display. The sight of that familiar glossy cream paperback with the drawing of a woman in a jewelled headdress reminded Benet of what she was going to have to face when she handed Jason over. Mopsa was nobody; for Mopsa there would have been only a brief blaze of publicity, a day of notoriety. But she was Benet Archdale, a best-selling author, a famous name if not a famous face, already a personality. And she would never live it down. Whatever she might write, do, achieve, that she had once kidnapped a child would be forever remembered. If someone one day wrote her biography, it would be there. A chapter would be devoted to it. Her mother’s mental instability would be brought up, the fact that she had had a child and he had died. There was no need to wait for some biography in the distant future. All that would be in the newspapers at the end of the week.

  She bought a paper. The Jason affair was back on the front page, down near the bottom across two columns, another interview with Carol Stratford . . .

  ‘It’s your birthday!’ she exclaimed to Jason. ‘Oh, Jay, it’s your second birthday!’

  Jay was what she had taken to calling him. It was what he called himself. She picked him up and looked into his face.

  ‘How awful that it’s your birthday and we aren’t doing anything about it.’

  ‘He doesn’t know, does he?’ said Mopsa. ‘He’s too young to know what birthday means.’

  ‘Many, many happy returns of the day, Jay!’

  ‘It’s my birthday next week. I don’t notice you making a song and dance about that.’

  Mopsa had become cross and sulky. She was apprehensive about her flight now, swallowing Valium with black coffee. Jason had ice cream because it was his birthday. Watching him, Benet marvelled how her dislike of him had faded. How could she have disliked a little child anyway, scarcely more than a baby? If she could make them understand, if they didn’t deal too harshly with her, was it conceivable she might occasionally be allowed to visit him, to see how he was getting on?

  The flight to Malaga was called. Reluctant as Mopsa might be to get into an aircraft, she was nevertheless raring to go at the first call. The plane might leave without her. She might get into trouble for being late. After all, her ticket had only been purchased four days ago.

  Benet went as far with her as she could. They made their farewells at passport control. Mopsa who had been cold and carping these past days, flung her arms round Benet’s neck, kissing her ferve
ntly.

  ‘You don’t know how I miss you, Brigitte. I only had the one and it’s a bitter fate to be separated by so many hundreds of miles.’

  Benet said she would phone, she would write. She didn’t remind Mopsa that it was she who had created the separation, who had chosen to live in Spain. Mopsa didn’t say goodbye to Jason. She took notice of him. Benet was surprised how much she resented this, how deeply it embittered their parting. It’s because I know she would have been the same with James, she thought.

  I must not hate my mother . . .

  Mopsa went through the doorway. The last Benet saw of her, she was dropping her handbag on to the conveyor belt of the baggage scrutiny.

  Now she knew it was Jason’s birthday – the newspaper had quoted Carol Stratford as saying so and lamenting the party she wouldn’t be able to give him – Benet felt bound to buy him a present. Even though this might be his last day with her, he should have a birthday present. They would let him keep it afterwards. Why not?

  Jason didn’t make a choice. He would have chosen everything in the toyshop. The place recalled to Benet forcefully the playroom at the hospital. You could see where some of the toys in that playroom had come from. She remembered now how she had sat in that room, waiting for the phone to be free so that she could ring Mopsa, and how she had looked at the tree of hands. James had still been alive then. All the upraised hands had seemed to be pleading, but for what? For what?

  A rocking horse was what she bought. It was big and beautiful and dappled grey. The shop would deliver it to the Vale of Peace first thing in the morning but Benet didn’t want Jason to have to wait so long for it. The car was parked only a short way away. They took it with them, and set off to cross the road, Benet with her arms full of brown-paper-wrapped rocking horse. They were halfway over the pedestrian crossing when she saw Ian Raeburn on the other side.

  Benet had a curious feeling when she saw him. It was as if she had always known him – no, more than that, as if he were a close friend or member of her family whom to see here unexpectedly was a delightful surprise. She felt as if he belonged to that small group of persons who loved her, so that in a moment he would turn his head and see her and his whole face would light up with the pleasure of it. This feeling lasted no more than a few seconds. It came over her in a vivid spontaneous flash: an instant of pure happiness, the first she had had since James’s death. And it was immediately succeeded, or even overlapped, by apprehensiveness. The only thing was to hurry on past, to hope he hadn’t seen her. An appalled regret took hold of her. She stepped on to the kerb, the hand that held Jason’s tightening.

  Ian Raeburn was buying fruit, two kiwi fruit and a bag of small loose-skinned oranges. He took his change and turned to meet her eyes, to smile with instant recognition. He must wonder at me, she thought, standing here holding a child’s hand, I who lost my child. The explanation that had been Mopsa’s, that had been believable for a while, was ready and waiting.

  ‘I’m looking after him for a friend. I said I’d look after him while she went away.’

  ‘Let me carry that for you,’ he said.

  He took the rocking horse from her. Its painted hoofs were breaking through the paper.

  ‘Do you find it a help?’ he asked gently.

  He meant having Jason to care for, he meant having a child of the same sex and comparable age to James.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She surprised herself with this entirely truthful reply. ‘I honestly don’t know.’ A week ago she could only have shouted, No, no, never!

  ‘I phoned you a couple of times. Just to see how you were. I expect your mother told you.’

  Mopsa hadn’t. But what difference would it have made if she had?

  ‘My mother’s gone home now.’

  ‘Are you going to be all right alone?’

  She nodded. He lifted the boot lid and put the rocking horse inside beside the stolen pushchair. In a moment he would suggest they meet, he would ask to see her again, she knew that, she could sense it in the charged air between them. But that was impossible, she had no future, nothing after she had given Jason up. Ian Raeburn wouldn’t want to know her. She would be a lost woman, many would think her mad, mad as Mopsa.

  She bent down and picked up Jason. He enjoyed farewells and had begun to wave his hand and say goodbye.

  ‘A generous present for a friend’s child.’ Ian closed the boot lid. ‘Is he your godchild?’

  ‘It’s not for Christmas. Today’s his birthday.’

  Saying that was something she immediately regretted. It had slipped out. But suppose he too had read those paragraphs on the front page?

  His eyes were on her, gentle with understanding. And yet he didn’t understand at all. How could he? He only thought he did. We despise those who claim to understand us when in fact their comprehension is wide of the mark. She didn’t despise Ian but she wanted to get away from him. She said goodbye abruptly and got into the car.

  The phone was ringing as she came into the house. It was Antonia, inviting her to dinner. Did she find it easy getting babysitters for James in the new place?

  For a moment she couldn’t speak. Because of Mopsa’s lies, people were going to speak to her as if James were alive. Yet she found herself unable to tell Antonia the truth. Her voice sounded in her own ears remote, bemused, as she said no, she couldn’t go out, she knew no one here yet, had no idea what sitters might be available. Jason came to her and pulled at her sleeve, asking for the horse to be unwrapped. She rang off.

  He climbed on to the horse and rocked back and forth. The expression on his face made her smile, there was so much in it of delight, of wonder, of a sort of glee. She began to imagine the conversation that would take place between her and a policeman or policemen when she took him back. Any explanation she might give of Mopsa’s behaviour and then of her own subsequent behaviour now sounded insane to her, unreal – above all, unbelievable. Why hadn’t she brought Jason back as soon as she knew who he was? They would ask that. That would be one of the questions they would hammer over and over at her. And she would only be able to say it had been to stop Mopsa screaming. Looking back now, she couldn’t understand herself. Perhaps it was not only Mopsa whose mind had been unbalanced . . .

  There was no dialogue she could construct between herslf and the police that did not end in their charging her with abducting Jason. The facts, the evidence, were all against her. The Winterside area was known to her, she had once lived there. The car used was her car. She had recently lost her own child. And more than that. She had concealed – or so it would seem – her child’s death from all her friends.

  Benet gave Jason his tea, a rather special one because it was his birthday. She set him on her lap and read Beatrix Potter to him, The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-pan, although it was too old for him. He liked the pictures. He seemed to like them more and with a more intense enthusiasm than she thought most children of his age would. If I were his mother, she found herself thinking, I should imagine him growing up to be a painter.

  His mother . . . That pretty little blonde woman, that living doll. And the thuggish boy just out of his teens she lived with. They had to have him to back. There was no doubt about that. It was not for her, Benet, to judge them and pronounce sentence. All she could do was try to ensure that once the relief of having him back was past, they didn’t begin beating him again.

  The bruises were almost gone, she noticed as she lifted Jason into the bath. Only a faint yellowish staining remained at the base of his firm-fleshed rib cage. The burn hole would always be there, of course. It would be there when he was an old man. But she couldn’t prove it had been made by a cigarette. And the police wouldn’t want to believe it, she thought, they would rather not have the additional trouble of believing it.

  She put Jason to bed and tucked him in. The white rabbit had disappeared. They had both hunted all over the house for it and now Benet began to wonder if Mopsa had inadvertently taken it back to Spain with her. She thought,
she braced herself, and then she opened the toy cupboard and got James’s tiger cub out and gave it to Jason. Seeing him with it hurt but not agonizingly. He accepted it happily as a substitute for the rabbit and fell asleep with one of its round golden ears stuffed in his mouth.

  By this time she should have handed Jason back. Yesterday she had made a firm decision to take him to the police station by three o’clock this afternoon. She had even told herself she was looking forward to it. It was going to be a relief getting it over, being free of him, being alone again and responsible only for herself. She must have convinced herself then that they would accept her story of Mopsa’s part in it, of Mopsa’s almost total guilt. Another night must now pass before she could return him and that in itself, the fact that she had not handed him back immediately after Mopsa’s departure, must further militate against her innocence.

  Wandering downstairs again, walking about the basement room, alone for the first time since James had died, she knew quite suddenly that she was not going to take Jason to the police. The idea of it – realistically faced, fair and square – made her feel sick and horribly frightened. It was no good imagining conversations, anticipating ways of bringing the police round to her point of view. They weren’t like that, it wouldn’t be like that. Two minutes inside that police station and she would be turned into an insane criminal. And next day the newspapers would have everything. She would have to see in print the fact of James’s death.

  She wouldn’t do it.

  It was a relief to have decided. She felt quite limp and weak with relief. Jason would not be taken to the police, there would be no excuses, confessions, explanations, for her to make. Poor mad Mopsa would not be implicated.

  That did not mean Jason wasn’t to be returned. Of course he must be returned to his mother, his family, his home, and as soon as possible. Benet did something rare with her. She went upstairs to the drinks cupboard and poured herself a stiff double measure of whisky. Not since the days with Edward had she drunk whisky. She sat down in the window chair with her drink and began to think out ways of returning Jason, foolproof ways that were both safe and secret.