Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  She had never looked to the future beyond a day or two. ‘I suppose I thought he would change as he grew older and no one would recognize him. I thought of taking him away, a long way away . . .’ Had she? She realized she was thinking of it now. ‘I don’t think anyone but his mother would know him now.’ She was trying to keep cool but her voice cracked. Her voice was hoarse with fear. Edward was looking at her like a judge, leaning forward, frowning.

  ‘What steps were you going to take to protect yourself?’

  ‘What do you mean, steps? I’d kidnapped him, abducted him. I haven’t any rights at all, I know that.’

  Jay chose that moment to put down his crayon and come to her, holding up his arms to be lifted on to her lap. The feel of him in her arms made her give a little sobbing cry which she stifled with her hand. Jay began to hug and squeeze her with a small child’s surprising strength.

  ‘Jay, you’re choking me, no, darling . . .’ She was determined not to cry in front of either of them. Her face and eyes felt burning and swollen. ‘Please, Edward, tell me what you’re going to do?’

  He said rather scornfully, ‘You make me sound like a blackmailer.’

  Wasn’t he one? She understood that was what she had been thinking. ‘Edward . . .’

  ‘I knew you’d taken against me but I didn’t know you rated me as low as that.’

  She held Jay. It was as if people had actually come to take him from her but she knew they wouldn’t do it by main force, they wouldn’t physically tear him away. At the same time she was aware of the picture of demented, misplaced maternity she must be presenting to Edward. Gently yet with a more gargantuan effort than she ever remembered giving to any task, she made herself lift Jay down and set him on the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she found herself saying, ‘but you frightened me. You must mean to do something or you wouldn’t have come here.’

  ‘Don’t you think he ought to have a father?’

  ‘No doubt he has one somewhere. I’ve never thought much about it.’

  Edward was looking at her with a curious emotional intensity. His face was sharpened with it.

  ‘You see yourself as his mother. If I were your husband we could be his parents. We’d be highly suitable adoptive parents, Benet. You’ve got money and this house. We’re the right sort of age. Neither of us has been married before. I’d say we’d quite easily get an adoption order made if we applied to the court.’

  ‘You must want to marry me an awful lot,’ she said dryly.

  ‘That’s right. I do.’

  Her eyes rested reflectively on Jay. I wonder how long it would be before you started beating him up, she thought. You hate children.

  ‘It’s impossible anyway. He’s not up for adoption, he’s got parents. I stole him. I thought you understood that, that’s what you’ve been telling me.’

  Edward said, ‘I spent the whole of yesterday in the newspaper library at Colindale reading up on the Jason Stratford case. It’s obvious his mother doesn’t give a damn for him. Her other two children are in care and Jason would have gone the same way in a year or two. She’s a barmaid and her boyfriend’s out of work. Don’t you think there’s a good chance she’d sell Jason to you?’

  Hope came back, intruding itself, wriggling in like a small finger pushing through a crevice. She saw a clean innocent above-board world in which everyone knew the truth and everyone was happy, the death of James proclaimed and the existence of Jay announced, she and Edward having drunk perhaps some blinding love potion, living together and seeing each other as they once had with the eyes of illusion. The finger crept in and a door closed on it, not with a slam but with decisive firmness.

  ‘I thought of offering her twenty thousand.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem much,’ Benet said drearily. ‘It seems very little for him. I paid five times that for this house.’ She felt the warning signs of an hysteria she rigidly suppressed. ‘A house in Hampstead costs five times what a child costs. There’s something wrong with that somewhere, Edward.’

  ‘Could you go up to fifty thousand if I had to?’

  Everything I have, she thought. This house, all the money from all my sales, everything I have. Of course. It goes without saying. Why doesn’t he know that?

  ‘Suppose she won’t have anything to do with it? Suppose she just goes to the police?’

  ‘That’s a risk you have to take.’

  ‘Why do I, Edward? Why do I have to take any more risks? You could walk out of here now and put it out of your mind and we need never meet again.’

  ‘To put it at its most basic, leaving out emotion, I’d know, wouldn’t I? All the time you’d know I knew. Why don’t you think about it, Benet? You can have three days. I’ve made a date to meet Carol Stratford but she doesn’t know why, she only knows it’s something to do with money and she likes money.’

  ‘You were very sure,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘I was sure, yes.’

  Three days to get away in, three days in which to escape with Jay. She felt almost glad that he had given her a chance. The police wouldn’t have done that.

  The night Carol didn’t come home at all Barry phoned the Rosslyn Park Hotel at midnight. He had drunk a whole bottle of wine and was past caring what people thought of him. There were always bottles of wine in the house these days, brought home by Carol. The answering voice told him Carol wasn’t working late, they hadn’t given her a bed for the night because of the snow and the bad roads – a straw clutched at by Barry – she hadn’t been working that evening and in fact she didn’t work there at all. Barry fell asleep at last on the sofa in the living room.

  He didn’t see her all next day. Late in the afternoon a man with a posh voice phoned and asked for her. Barry was going to ask if he was Terence Wand but the man put the phone down before he had the chance. After he had been to the Job Centre to see if there was anything going, but of course there wasn’t, he went for a long walk for something to do, the gun knocking lightly against his chest as he tramped the streets.

  Carol was there when he woke up next morning. She was in bed with him – that is, they were in the same bed. She lay on the extreme edge of the mattress and it was only the way the bedclothes were tucked tightly in that kept her from falling out. It was late in the morning, ten or eleven, he thought. He went down to make tea.

  The first things that caught his eye when he went back into the bedroom were the diamond watch and the ring with the red stone in it that she had taken off and laid on the bedside table. She was awake now, lying on her back, her blue eyes wide open.

  ‘Hi,’ she said and then, when she saw the tea tray, ‘Are there any cigs in the house?’

  He shrugged. He didn’t know. Mysteriously he had given up smoking a week or two before without willing it or scarcely even noticing it had happened. One day he had been smoking twenty or thirty and next he hadn’t smoked at all. He didn’t miss it.

  Carol said in Iris parlance, ‘You’ve got a face like a wet week. What’s got into you? If it’s on account of me getting back late, we had an emergency at the Rosslyn Park. I missed the last bus and I had to wait for a lift.’

  ‘You don’t work there,’ Barry said. ‘You’ve never worked there.’

  ‘OK, so I don’t.’ She was still in a good humour. He could smell stale brandy on her breath after all those hours but her face was a little girl’s, dewy, satiny, pink and white and innocent. She sat up and he saw that she was quite naked, her breasts resting softly on top of the sheet. ‘If you didn’t ask questions,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t get lies. What’s it to you anyway where I go? You’re not my husband. You’re as bad as bloody Dave, you are. Where were you? Who were you with? Where’ve you been?’

  He felt he was on the brink of terrible revelations. Never before had she given him a hint that Dave had been anything but totally loving and beloved. An intense red colour showed in two spots on her cheekbones.

  ‘I don’t ask you to account for your movements,�
�� she said in a higher voice. ‘I don’t follow you about, spying on you. I don’t ask where you’ve been morning, noon and night, by Christ I don’t!’

  ‘Carol,’ he said, ‘you were with that fella that’s Jason’s father, weren’t you? He’s a rich man, I know that. You didn’t nick that watch and you didn’t get that ring out of a cracker at your mum’s.’

  She got out of bed. There was a bruise of loving teeth marks on the side of her neck. He thought for some reason of the bruises on Jason who had that same fine white skin.

  ‘Run my bath, will you?’ she said.

  Her hard voice, both mocking and commanding, made him tremble. But he didn’t move. He stared at her standing there naked with her mouth set and her fists clenched and for the first time he noticed imperfections in her, the droop of flesh on her inner thighs, the childbearing stretch marks. It was as if lengths of old grey elastic had been inserted in the white silk skin.

  ‘He’s Jason’s father, isn’t he?’ he said.

  As if she’d had a fuse and he’d lit it, Carol blew up. She was little and a woman and naked but she wasn’t afraid of him. She came to him and put up her arms and clutched his shoulders and yelled into his face. She yelled into his face in Iris’s raucous broken voice.

  ‘You want to know? Is that what you want? You want to know who his father is? Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t know who his fucking father is. I don’t know and nobody bloody knows. The week I reckon I fell for him, I had eight men in seven days and it could be any one of them. See? Any one of them or maybe one of the seven or eight I had the next week. I don’t know and I don’t fucking care.’

  ‘Carol,’ he said. ‘Carol . . .’ He got hold of her by the neck, squeezing the sore place where someone’s teeth had bitten. ‘That isn’t true, say it isn’t.’

  ‘Of course it’s true. Take your hands off me!’

  He slackened his hold. He was aghast as if he had opened some forbidden door and seen carnage inside. She twisted out of his grasp and ran out of the room. He heard the surge and splash of the bath taps turned on too hard. Suddenly he was afraid she would lock herself away from him in the bathroom. He followed her and stood in the doorway, holding the door.

  She was bending over the bath, pouring in a trickle of herbal essence. A smell that was like a mixture of rosemary and Dettol rose from the steaming water. As she turned round slowly, straightening up and standing up, to look at him, he was hit by a wave of powerful desire for her. In spite of what she had just told him, he wanted her. It was humiliating and in a way shocking but he wanted to take her in his arms and drop that warm, naked, white body among the tumbled towels on the floor, caring nothing for the sea-watery smell on it of another man.

  ‘What happened to us?’ he cried. ‘What went wrong, Carol? Can’t we make it right? It’s not too late. I love you, I want to marry you, I still do.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ she said and she spat the words. ‘“Still do”,’ she said. ‘I like that. I should co-co. I expect you “still do”. I expect you still think I’d marry the man who murdered my Jason.’

  ‘What?’ he said. It was as if she had struck him. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard.’

  If she had struck him, he could have handled it, but not this. Had his ears really sent that message to his brain?

  He spoke like a child unjustly accused of some classroom crime. ‘You can’t think that. Not you. You know I didn’t, I couldn’t have. Whatever the rest of them say, you know I couldn’t have.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ she said, ‘only I was too dumb to see it.’ She turned off the taps with a squeak. There was a jug standing on the bath rim she used for washing her hair. He was too stunned to realize what she was doing when she bent over and dipped the jug into the hot water.

  She jumped up with a very swift twisting movement and flung the jugful of water into his face. He gasped. She pushed at him with both hands and slammed the bathroom door.

  23

  EVERY DAY SHE saw Ian, and each time they met, she meant to tell him. She intended to confess everything and throw herself on his mercy. A small voice inside her whispered that if she did that two people would know, not just Edward. Or by tomorrow Edward and Carol Stratford.

  Besides, Ian would immediately advise her to give Jay up, hand him over to the police. He was that sort of man. He wouldn’t connive at what she was doing. The irony was that she wouldn’t want the sort of man who would connive at what she was doing. That was another reason why she didn’t want Edward.

  Ian was on night call and she was glad of it. Her nights were nearly sleepless but sometimes she slept, always started awake by a violent dream. Edward came back on Sunday evening. She found him in the study room reading a page of manuscript.

  ‘How did you get in?’

  He smiled and held up a bunch of keys. The smile wasn’t triumphant or presumptuous, still less menacing. He had come home again, it said, he was taking it for granted he was accepted back.

  ‘You don’t look well, Benet.’

  She shrugged. She said nothing.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ He tried to put his arms round her. She stood stiffly in his arms. ‘If she says yes, we’re in business, and if she says no, you’re no worse off than before.’

  ‘If she says no, she’ll also tell the police.’

  ‘People like her are very loath to tell the police anything, Benet. I’ve read the newspaper stories, remember. It was a day and a night after he’d disappeared before she went to the police.’

  ‘I don’t want you to see her, Edward,’ Benet said. ‘I want you to go away and leave us alone. If I was prepared to give her money . . .’

  He let her go. ‘Don’t turn me into a blackmailer.’

  She went into the living room, took out two glasses and the whisky bottle. She poured one for him and one for herself. Her hands were shaking. Jay was upstairs asleep, two floors away at the top of the house, yet she sensed all around her his even, tranquil breathing.

  I will take him away, she thought. I’ll take him away where no one can find us. Edward’s plan would never work, his reasoning was faulty, for if Carol said no, the police would trace Jay through Edward, and if Carol said yes, Jay would inevitably have to be produced and for a time returned to her. If for a time, why not for good, since the buying of a child was illegal? Edward would offer her a sum of money to agree to the adoption, and the balance when the adoption was completed. She would take the first payment, Benet thought, and then go to the police. I will take him away to avoid that happening, I will take him out of the country, a long long way, to the Far East perhaps. I’ll use my money to hide him, not to buy him.

  She handed Edward his glass. ‘You must do as you please,’ she said. ‘Do whatever you like.’

  After he had gone, she marvelled that she, who was a middle-class, law-abiding person, who until a few months ago had envisaged her only possible brushes with the police as being the outcome of traffic offences, should have become – and so easily and inevitably – a kidnapper, a felon and a fugitive. She went upstairs and into Jay’s room and looked at him. He had tossed and turned in his sleep, thrown off the covers and slipped his pyjama top off one shoulder. Even in the half-dark she could see the burn hole the cigarette had made, an inch away from his spine. She overcame an hysterical need to pick him up and clutch him. Gently she covered him up. She began in a haphazard feverish sort of way to pack clothes into suitcases.

  By the first post, next morning, Jay’s passport came. She had forgotten about that, she had forgotten they couldn’t leave the country without it. Still she hadn’t decided where to go. The suitcases had been packed in a panic without thought as to whether their destination would have a hot or cold climate. Impossible, in the here and now, to imagine sunshine, warmth, clear skies! A light dry powdery snow had begun to fall. She found her own passport and put it in her handbag with Jay’s new one. Jay woke up late. She dressed him and gave him his breakfast.
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  ‘Snow,’ he said, pressing his face against the window. ‘Make a snowman.’

  ‘We’re going a long way from the snow, Jay.’

  She wrapped him up in his duffel coat, put his boots on, wool hat, warm scarf. While she loaded the car, he played with snow, throwing handfuls into the air. The cold reddened his cheeks and the tip of his nose and she remembered its similar effect on Edward’s face. An idea came to her that was suddenly appalling and she thrust it away with a violent act of inhibition.

  By Monday morning Carol still hadn’t come back. It was St Valentine’s Day. Buying a birthday card for Carol soon after they had first met, Barry had thought about this day, had looked forward to it and even made a mental note of the particular Valentine’s card he would buy to send her. A card did come for her by the morning’s post in a large pale pink envelope. Barry opened it, looking for Terence Wand’s name, but it was signed only with a row of crosses.

  Snow was falling in a steady fine mist. By midday Winterside Down was white once more and the house filled with pale, radiant, reflected light. Carol had been gone since Saturday. Round and round in his mind went the things she had said. That there had been a hundred, a thousand, men in her past no longer really mattered. He could bear that. But that she too could accuse him of being Jason’s killer, she who had met him on the afternoon Jason disappeared and run to him and kissed him and pirouetted in her new dress!

  He hated her for that. Nothing mattered, not the men, not the lies, not her using him as if he were her servant, but that mattered. While she believed in him, he hadn’t cared about the rest who didn’t. He sat in the living room that glowed with snow light and thought of what she had said about not marrying the man who had murdered her Jason. An overwhelming desire took hold of him to be away from her, never to see her again, to be away for ever from Winterside Down and back in the comfort and caring of his parents’ house. It was childish, it was immature, he knew that, but he didn’t care, that was what he wanted.

  But at the same time he didn’t. At the same time he loved her. He was learning on St Valentine’s Day something that had never hinted itself to him before, that it is possible to hate fiercely and love fiercely at the same time. When he made this discovery he made a sound. He heard himself groan aloud and at once, though there was no one to see or hear, he clapped his hand over his mouth.