Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  It was too late now to go back to his parents’ house. Carol would he home in half an hour. This was the first time he had been out in the evening since coming out of hospital. He had sworn he wouldn’t go out until he had the means of protecting himself. Blue Hair and Hoopoe and Black Beauty had taken a tooth from him and cracked two of his ribs and for a while the doctors thought they had ruptured his spleen. They weren’t going to get the chance of that again. He fingered the gun in its grey rag wrapping inside the plastic carrier. It was cumbersome to carry but he would take it with him everywhere he went now. He smiled to himself, thinking how he would fire over their heads and see them run.

  The day after he was taken into hospital, the police had come to see him, a sergeant and a constable he hadn’t seen before. They asked him if he knew his attackers, and he hesitated for only a second or two before saying no. No, he couldn’t identify them, he wouldn’t recognize them again, he didn’t know their names or where they came from. What was the use of telling? Blue Hair and the rest wouldn’t go to jail. They’d be given suspended sentences or sent to psychiatrists and the first thing they’d do was revenge themselves on him.

  ‘I never saw them,’ he said. ‘It was pitch dark. I never had sight nor sound of them till they were on me.’

  He could tell from the look on the sergeant’s face that he thought what had happened only rough justice. The police couldn’t touch Barry, they hadn’t the evidence, so where was the harm if a bunch of yobbos gave him the private treatment? A few more questions were put to him but their tone was half-hearted. Maybe the doctors also thought he had killed Jason. And if his spleen really had been ruptured, maybe they’d have let him die and seen it as the best thing.

  He and Carol would have to get away, they’d have to move. Perhaps they could get an exchange with a council house in another area. Crouch End, he would like, or Palmer’s Green, but no further west than that, nowhere remotely near Hampstead. Wherever they lived it would be as far as possible away from Terence Wand.

  Had she seen him while Barry was in hospital? He didn’t know and he hadn’t asked. In spite of the pain – his body had felt as if on fire and racked with stabbings for days – Carol’s care for him, her shocked horror at his injuries, had brought him a blissful happiness. That first day she came in at visiting time, ran to him and threw herself on to the bed and into his arms with a little hysterical cry. The pressure on his bruised side and arm and thighs had been an intense agony but his joy had outweighed the pain. He hadn’t uttered a sound of protest even though she lay on top of him clutching at him with her fingers, and he only whispered to her to get up when the sister was coming and he was embarrassed.

  After that first day she hadn’t been able to come in all that often. Visiting times were also the times she had to be at work. Naturally he understood that. He had lain there thinking about Terence Wand and wondering if the police had ever done anything about that letter he had sent them. It had been in some ways a silly letter to write. After all, it wasn’t of taking away Jason that he suspected Terence Wand, was it?

  Maureen came in one evening. He was surprised to see her. She wore her long raincoat and her hair was scraped back in an elastic band. She didn’t ask him how he was. His right arm, with the pyjama sleeve rolled up, was lying outside the bedclothes and she lifted it up by the wrist as if it were some inanimate object, a branch, say, or a piece of piping, and examined impassively the by then brown and yellowish bruises.

  ‘At any rate,’ she said, ‘you’re still here.’

  She meant he wasn’t dead.

  ‘They didn’t murder me, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Mum says the trouble was he came between you.’

  ‘Who did?’ he said, though he knew. ‘Who came between who?’

  ‘Jason.’

  He looked at her, at the plain round face that was still somehow Carol’s face with a broadening here, a flattening there, just sufficient to deny it beauty. The vacant blue eyes met his. What she said took his breath away, a frequent effect of Maureen’s utterances.

  ‘Maybe it’s just as well. Maybe it’s all to the good. The fact is no one wanted him and he’s best out of the way.’

  He knew then that she also believed him a murderer. The difference was that she believed but didn’t care. She continued to stare at his bruised arm and made as if to pick it up again. He had a creepy feeling that she was capable of taking it by elbow and wrist and snapping the forearm bone in two. Quickly he withdrew it under the sheet and after a while she got up and left, saying as she went, ‘I wouldn’t hurry to come out if I was you.’

  He had sometimes wondered what that meant. Coming out of hospital, he knew. He was not welcome in the hostile world of Winterside. The revenge taken on him somehow confirmed his guilt. People still spoke to him but no one used his name and their eyes looked at him as if he were different from they, as if the unspeakable thing he was accused of doing set him apart from even the worst of them for ever. That Carol stuck to him, that he still lived in Carol’s house, was a wonderful thing, something to be treasured. He was stupidly grateful. Stupidly, he thought now, because he had done nothing, had never laid a finger on Jason, had in fact been one of the few who were really fond of him. They were all wrong in their suspicions and he was right. Even if no one in the world believed in his innocence, he would still be innocent, he still would not have killed Jason. Yet he was learning how hard it is to stand alone, how hard to hold to the truth in isolation, so that one even begins to doubt if it is truth. Several times in hospital and back at home he had dreamed he was in the garden of one of those condemned houses in Rudyard Gardens, burying Jason’s body.

  Awake, it was a street he always avoided. Getting off the bus, he walked down Delphi Road, past lighted houses, some of which still had Christmas trees and decorations in their windows. Two or three boys in leathers were sitting on the seat outside the public library. The muscles of Barry’s stomach tightened, there was a constriction in his throat. He took the gun out of the carrier and put it inside his zipper jacket. He thought he would slit the pocket lining so that he could keep the gun in there and easily reach for it.

  But the boys on the seat were not Blue Hair or Hoopoe or any of them. They were strangers who scarcely looked at him, who hadn’t yet learned to know by sight the murderer of Jason Stratford. He made himself enter Winterside Down by the Chinese bridge and the path across the grass, the way he had gone on the night they attacked him. Sooner or later it had to be faced and sooner was best. The gun made a difference.

  The night was less dark than that other night and it was much earlier. The grass had a sheen on it in the moonlight and frost painted the tops of the fences phosphorescent. With a leap of the heart he saw that lights were on in Carol’s house. Just to make certain he counted the houses as he came across the green to where the footpath ran between the houses, one, two, three, four – yes, eighth from the corner the lights were on.

  And the passage between the fences was empty. He walked quickly through, keeping himself from actually running, passing the place where they had knocked him down, wondering if in daylight the stains of his own blood were still there on the concrete and the fence.

  He didn’t show Carol the gun or even tell her about it. She might have reproached him for spending the money when he was out of work. She was watching television with her feet up, a bottle of red wine from which she had drunk a couple of glasses beside her. He poured himself a glass of wine and sat down next to her. She let him kiss her and her mouth quivered a little under his.

  The dress she was wearing was the black and white zig-zag one. Her black lacy tights he remembered her saying she had pinched from a stand in a fancy newsagent’s up in Highgate. Had she also stolen the watch on her left wrist that looked as if it were made of diamonds?

  There was a long angry bruise on her arm where the sleeve was rucked up. The watch covered the end of the bruise. Barry remembered with a kind of inner wince that time she ha
d wanted him to strike and hurt her, how she had seemed to enjoy pain. She was laughing now at something on the television, reaching for her cigarettes. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to ask her about the bruise and the watch any more than he had brought himself to ask her where she was that night the motorbike boys nearly killed him.

  20

  TERENCE LAY IN bed on the futon with Mrs Goldschmidt. Both of them had fallen asleep and she still was. Waking, he didn’t know where he was and scarcely who he was, let alone who the naked blonde with her face buried in the pillow was. For a few seconds he guessed Carol Stratford but that was wishful thinking. This was Mrs Goldschmidt – or Rosemary as he knew from the contract and only from the contract – with whom he had gone to bed some hours before. She slept on, occasionally giving a light girlish snore. Terence now wished very deeply and passionately that he had not succumbed to her.

  She had called unexpectedly. Terence was increasingly alarmed by these surprise callers. After a morning spent writing a reference for the bank for John Howard Phipps in the name of Terence Wand, he naturally expected when the doorbell rung that it was the police. His stomach squelched. He made himself go to the door and open it, clenching his teeth but unclenching them into a sickly smile when he saw who it was. She wore a pale green knitted dress with, over it, a fur coat made of innumerable tiny skins as if uncounted thousands of mouse-size creatures had given their lives to make it.

  This time there was no ambiguity about the reason for her visit. She walked upstairs, Terence following. At the top she put her arms round him and kissed him with silent voracity. She proceeded to the room where the futon was, took off her coat and let it fall to the floor. It lay there like a slumbering bear. Terence had a feeling of being borne helplessly along on one of fate’s tides. Sometimes he thought it was his timidity which attracted him to them, what Freda had called his ‘feebleness’, which made him theirs to do as they like with, to boss or mother or eat up.

  Mrs Goldschmidt ate him up. But what choice did he have? If he had said no perhaps she would have gone home to her husband and told him not to sign the contract, she had changed her mind. He had had some experience of the fury of women scorned. On the other hand, he couldn’t now help thinking, she might be one of those who confessed to their husbands, in which case Goldschmidt’s own fury would stop him signing.

  He looked at her despondently. Rosemary. The name didn’t suit her. His gaze had its effect and she opened her eyes, got up and made her way to the en suite guest bathroom. Terence put on his underpants and went downstairs. He put the whisky bottle and a bottle of Perrier from the fridge and two glasses on to a tray. At the point where the stairs turned at a right angle, he paused and looked out of the window into the court. The lights on the catalpa had been taken down the week before. Someone had dropped a white plastic carrier on to the cobbles and the wind was blowing it about, in and out between the light and the dark, finally pasting it up against one of the low walls. The sky was a brownish-purple with a few smudged stars showing. Terence hadn’t set foot out all day but it looked cruelly cold. Under the arch a young man was standing, looking up at the house and towards Terence so that it seemed to him as if their eyes met. He quickly turned his away. The watcher resembled the younger of the two policemen who had called on him but he couldn’t be positive they were the same.

  Mrs Goldschmidt was dressing, the lights on and the window blind up. Terence pulled down the blind.

  ‘I thought you’d like a drink, Rosemary.’

  ‘Katie.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Terence.

  ‘I’m called Katie.’

  He nodded, remembering her second name was Catalina. It didn’t suit her any better than Rosemary. She slid her feet into bronze high-heeled shoes.

  ‘Would you consider parting with any of the furniture?’

  He was nonplussed. He lifted his shoulders helplessly.

  ‘Only I’d take that futon off you if the price was OK.’

  They had their drinks. Terence screwed his courage to the sticking place and asked her if she and her husband had yet signed their contract. It was waiting at home, she said. It had come by the second post that morning and they were going to sign it tonight. In fact she thought she had better get off home and sign it. Terence wasn’t going to quarrel with that. She wrapped herself in the multi-mouse coat, remembered about the futon and wrote him a cheque. He was glad of the money, though it did rather give him the feeling he was being paid more directly than usual for his services.

  The first time Jason picked up the phone to answer it himself the caller was Ian. It was Ian who heard him shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, there’s a man!’ So that was all right. The next time it was John Archdale from Marbella, and when she came to the phone, Benet thought she heard wonder in her father’s voice and a kind of relief. He would accept the fact of the child now, no longer think of him as some sort of monster or skeleton in the family cupboard.

  The first night she spent with Ian, she felt guilty because Jason was in the house. Waking very early with Ian’s arms still round her, still holding her close to him spoons-fashion, she thought at once of Jason, of how it would be if he were to walk in and see them there together. It was strange because she wouldn’t have felt like that if James had lived and it had been he sleeping in the next room. When she had had a child, she had not planned on remaining celibate until he was old enough to leave home. She got up and went into Jason’s room.

  Immediately it struck her how he had changed. His own mother doubtless would know him still. No one else would. She had had his hair cut the day before and the trim symmetry of the cut changed him from a toddler into a little boy. Yet in an odd way, she thought, he looked younger. His body was thinner and taller but his face had become more soft and full. Except to a mother’s knowing intuitive eye, Jason Stratford had disappeared as entirely as might a person who has had plastic surgery. In that moment she knew he would never be Jason to her again. Letting down the side of the cot, she bent over him and kissed his firm, round, pink cheek.

  When she came back with the tea on a tray, the cot was empty and he was in bed with Ian. Her life seemed suddenly full to overflowing and she caught her breath. She hesitated only for a moment before getting into bed with them, Jay between them, snuggling up.

  In the middle of the morning the phone rang. It stopped so she knew Jay had answered it. But when she came downstairs the receiver was back and Jay was playing the xylophone. She asked him who had phoned.

  He smiled. He used a made-up word, a combination perhaps of ‘ugly’ and ‘ghastly’. ‘Gugly,’ he said.

  With a faint sinking of the heart, she guessed what he meant. ‘Jay, do you put the phone back without telling Mummy if you don’t like the person’s voice?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jay and he nodded vigorously to give more emphasis. ‘Gugly man.’

  That made Benet laugh though it left her uneasy. Probably she had been wrong in thinking he had answered the phone only twice before. There might have been many times when he hadn’t liked the sound of the caller so had simply replaced the receiver. Any brusqueness or even embarrassment would do it, she thought. She took Jay on her knee and explained carefully to him that he must always tell her when someone phoned. If she were upstairs and the bell was switched off there, she might not hear it and then she wouldn’t know who had called her. Did he understand?

  Later in the day the publicity director from her publishers phoned. They wanted her to go on a promotional tour of the United States in May to coincide with the American paperback publication of The Marriage Knot. Benet asked if he had phoned before. Yes, once, he said in his rather sharp, abrupt voice, but her little boy had answered and then cut them off.

  Benet was immediately relieved, though she didn’t quite know why.

  The woman whose shape he had seen at Terence Wand’s window Barry was certain wasn’t Carol. She was dressing, raising white arms above her head and her hair was short and blond. There were too many hou
rs in the day for him and not enough to do with them. Or that was what he told himself was his reason for taking himself over to Hampstead.

  He hadn’t been able to get another job, though Carol had. An additional one to Mrs Fylemon and the wine bar. Part-time hotel receptionist. Barry was a little over-awed. It seemed such a middle-class thing, verging on a profession really. He scarcely knew anyone who had been trained for anything, who sat at a desk answering the phone and filling in forms.

  ‘Did you answer an advert, love?’ he said to her. ‘You never told me.’

  She was vague. ‘This guy who runs it saw me in the wine bar. He told Alkmini he thought I was a model.’

  Serving drinks on trays? Barry thought this but he didn’t say it aloud.

  She had her Diagem watch on and a ring with a red stone she said she’d got at Christmas at Iris’s. It was like no ring Barry had ever seen come out of a cracker. ‘He said he’d be willing to pay the earth to have someone like me at the Rosslyn Park.’

  ‘I hope he is,’ said Barry.

  To look in and see her, he should have turned left out of the tube station, not right and up the hill towards the Heath. But he hadn’t come to Hampstead to see Carol. Why would he do that? She’d think he was checking up on her. He turned right and went up the hill and into Spring Close instead. It was soon afterwards that he had seen the woman dressing. That was why he hadn’t stopped there long. Once he had seen her, he left, a bit excited and a bit embarrassed. It wasn’t Carol, he knew it wasn’t Carol, and surely he ought to know, he had seen her dressing and undressing often enough. Yet when he was in the tube again and later when he was crossing Bevan Square, he couldn’t help asking himself how he was so sure it wasn’t Carol. What single thing was there about that woman he could positively say made her not Carol? Wasn’t it just that he didn’t want her to be Carol?