The Fever Tree and Other Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  She gave him the keys. When he had gone she put her letter in the ginger jar. She hoped he would close the trunk at once, but he didn’t. He left it open, the lid thrown back, the new padlock dangling from the gold-coloured clasp.

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’ he said.

  ‘Go and find your own bloody food! Go and find some other woman to feed you!’

  He liked her to be angry and fierce; it was her love he feared. He came back at midnight to find the flat in darkness, and he lay down on the sofa with the tea chests standing about him like defences, like barricades, the white paint showing faintly in the dark. Miss Patricia Gordon . . .

  Presently Betsy came in. She didn’t put on the light. She wound her way between the chests, carrying a candle in a saucer which she set down on the trunk. In the candlelight, wearing a long white nightgown, she looked like a ghost, like some wandering madwoman, a Mrs Rochester, a Woman in White.

  ‘Maurice.’

  ‘Go away, Betsy, I’m tired.’

  ‘Maurice, please. I’m sorry I said all those things. I’m sorry I locked you out.’

  ‘O.K., I’m sorry too. It’s a mess, and maybe I shouldn’t have done it the way I did. But the best way is for me just to go and my things to go and make a clean split. Right? And now will you please be a good girl and go away and let me get some sleep?’

  What happened next he hadn’t bargained for. It hadn’t crossed his mind. Men don’t understand about women and sex. She threw herself on him, clumsily, hungrily. She pulled his shirt open and began kissing his neck and his chest, holding his head, crushing her mouth to his mouth, lying on top of him and gripping his legs with her knees.

  He gave her a savage push. He kicked her away, and she fell and struck her head on the side of the trunk. The candle fell off, flared and died in a pool of wax. In the darkness he cursed floridly. He put on the light and she got up, holding her head where there was a little blood.

  ‘Oh, get out, for God’s sake,’ he said, and he manhandled her out, slamming the door after her.

  In the morning, when she came into the room, a blue bruise on her forehead, he was asleep, fully clothed, spread-eagled on his back. She shuddered at the sight of him. She began to get breakfast but she couldn’t eat anything. The coffee made her gag and a great nauseous shiver went through her. When she went back to him he was sitting up on the sofa, looking at his plane ticket to Paris.

  ‘The men are coming for the stuff at ten,’ he said as if nothing had happened, ‘and they’d better not be late. I have to be at the airport at noon.’

  She shrugged, She had been to the depths and she thought he couldn’t hurt her any more.

  ‘You’d better close the trunk,’ she said absent-mindedly.

  ‘All in good time.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I’ve got a letter to put in yet.’

  Her head bowed, the place where it was bruised sore and swollen, she looked loweringly at him. ‘You never write letters.’

  ‘Just a note. One can’t send a present without a note to accompany it, can one?’

  He pulled the ginger jar out of the trunk, screwed up her letter without even glancing at it, and threw it on the floor. Rapidly yet ostentatiously and making sure that Betsy could see, he scrawled across a sheet of paper: All this is for you, darling Patricia, for ever and ever.

  ‘How I hate you,’ she said.

  ‘You could have fooled me.’ He took a large angle lamp out of the trunk and set it on the floor. He slipped the note into the ginger jar, rewrapped it, tucked the jar in between the towels and cushions which padded the fragile objects. ‘Hatred isn’t the word I’d use to describe the way you came after me last night.’

  She made no answer. Perhaps he should have put a heavy object like that lamp in one of the chests, perhaps he should open up one of the chests now. He turned round for the lamp. It wasn’t there. She was holding it in both hands.

  ‘I want that, please.’

  ‘Have you ever been smashed in the face, Maurice?’ she said breathlessly, and she raised the lamp and struck him with it full on the forehead. He staggered and she struck him again, and again and again, raining blows on his face and his head. He screamed. He sagged, covering his face with bloody hands. Then with all her strength she gave him a great swinging blow and he fell to his knees, rolled over and at last was stilled and silenced.

  There was quite a lot of blood, though it quickly stopped flowing. She stood there looking at him and she was sobbing. Had she been sobbing all the time? She was covered with blood. She tore off her clothes and dropped them in a heap around her. For a moment she knelt beside him, naked and weeping, rocking backwards and forwards, speaking his name, biting her fingers that were sticky with his blood.

  But self-preservation is the primal instinct, more powerful than love or sorrow, hatred or regret. The time was nine o’clock, and in an hour those men would come. Betsy fetched water in a bucket, detergent, cloths and a sponge. The hard work, the great cleansing, stopped her tears, quieted her heart and dulled her thoughts. She thought of nothing, working frenziedly, her mind a blank.

  When bucket after bucket of reddish water had been poured down the sink and the carpet was soaked but clean, the lamp washed and dried and polished, she threw her clothes into the basket in the bathroom and had a bath. She dressed carefully and brushed her hair. Eight minutes to ten. Everything was clean and she had opened the window, but the dead thing still lay there on a pile of reddened newspapers.

  ‘I loved him,’ she said aloud, and she clenched her fists. ‘I hated him.’

  The men were punctual. They came at ten sharp. They carried the six tea chests and the silver-coloured trunk with the gold-coloured clasps downstairs.

  When they had gone and their van had driven away, Betsy sat down on the sofa. She looked at the angle lamp, the onyx pen jar and ashtray, the ginger jar, the alabaster bowls, the hock glasses, the bronze paperknife, the little Chinese cups, and the Lowry that was back on the wall. She was quite calm now and she didn’t really need the brandy she had poured for herself.

  Of the past she thought not at all and the present seemed to exist only as a palpable-nothingness, a thick silence that lay around her. She thought of the future, of three months hence, and into the silence she let forth a steady, rather toneless peal of laughter. Miss Patricia Gordon, 23 Burwood Park Avenue, Kew, Victoria, Australia 3101. The Pretty, greedy, hard face, the hands so eager to undo that padlock and prise open those golden clasps to find the treasure within . . .

  And how interesting that treasure would be in three months’ time, like nothing Miss Patricia Gordon had seen in all her life! It was as well, so that she would recognize it, that it carried on top of it a note in a familiar hand: All this is for you, darling Patricia, for ever and ever.

  An Outside Interest

  Frightening people used to be a hobby of mine. Perhaps I should rather say an obsession and not people but, specifically, women. Making others afraid is enjoyable as everyone discovers who has tried it and succeeded. I suppose it has something to do with power. Most people never really try it so they don’t know, but look at the ones who do. Judges, policemen, prison warders, customs officers, tax inspectors. They have a great time, don’t they? You don’t find them giving up or adopting other methods. Frightening people goes to their heads, they’re drunk on it, they live by it. So did I. While other men might go down to the pub with the boys or to football, I went off to Epping Forest and frightened women. It was what you might call my outside interest.

  Don’t get me wrong. There was nothing – well, nasty, about what I did. You know what I mean by that, I’m sure I don’t have to go into details. I’m far from being some sort of pervert, I can tell you. In fact, I err rather on the side of too much moral strictness. Nor am I one of those lonely, deprived men. I’m happily married and the father of a little boy, I’m six feet tall, not bad-looking and, I assure you, entirely physically and mentally normal.

  Of course I’ve tried to analyse mys
elf and discover my motives. Was my hobby ever any more than an antidote to boredom? By anyone’s standards the life I lead would be classed as pretty dull, selling tickets and answering passengers’ queries at Anglo-Mercian Airways terminal, living in a semi in Muswell Hill, going to tea with my mother-in-law on Sundays and having an annual fortnight in a holiday flat in South Devon. I got married very young. Adventure wasn’t exactly a conspicuous feature of my existence. The biggest thing that happened to me was when we thought one of our charters had been hi-jacked in Greece, and that turned out to be a false alarm.

  My wife is a nervous sort of girl. Mind you, she has cause to be, living where we do close to Highgate Wood and Queens Wood. A woman takes her life in her hands, walking alone in those places. Carol used to regale me with stories – well, she still does.

  ‘At twenty past five in the afternoon! It was still broad daylight. He raped her and cut her in the face, she had to have seventeen stitches in her face and neck.’

  She doesn’t drive and if she comes home from anywhere after dark I always go down to the bus stop to meet her. She won’t even walk along the Muswell Hill Road because of the woods on either side.

  ‘If you see a man on his own in a place like that you naturally ask yourself what he’s doing there, don’t you? A young man, just walking aimlessly about. It’s not as if he had a dog with him. It makes your whole body go tense and you get a sort of awful crawling sensation all over you. If you didn’t come and meet me I don’t think I’d go out at all.’

  Was it that which gave me the idea? At any rate it made me think about women and fear. Things are quite different for a man, he never thinks about being afraid of being in dark or lonely places. I’m sure I never have and therefore, until I got all this from Carol, I never considered how important this business of being scared when out alone might be to them. When I came to understand it gave me a funny feeling of excitement.

  And then I actually frightened a woman myself – by chance. My usual way of going to work is to cut through Queens Wood to Highgate tube station and take the Northern Line down into London. When the weather is very bad I go to the station by bus but most of the time I walk there and back and the way through the wood is a considerable short cut. I was coming back through the wood at about six one evening in March. It was dusk, growing dark. The lamps, each a good distance apart from each other, which light the paths, were, lit, but I often think these give the place a rather more bleak and sinister appearance than if it were quite dark. You leave a light behind you and walk along a dim shadowy avenue towards the next lamp which gleams faintly some hundred yards ahead. And no sooner is it reached, an acid yellow glow among the bare branches, than you leave it behind again to negotiate the next dark stretch. I thought about how it must be to be a woman walking through the wood and, yes, I gloried in my maleness and my freedom from fear.

  Then I saw the girl coming. She was walking along the path from Priory Gardens. It came into my head that she would be less wary of me if I continued as I had been, marching briskly and purposefully towards Wood Vale, swinging along and looking like a man homeward bound to his family and his dinner. There was no definite intent present in my mind when I slackened my pace, then stopped and stood still. But as soon as I’d done that I knew I was going to carry it through. The girl came up to where the paths converged and where the next lamp was. She gave me a quick darting look. I stood there in a very relaxed way and I returned her look with a blank stare. I suppose I consciously, out of some sort of devilment, made my eyes fixed and glazed and let my mouth go loose. Anyway, she turned very quickly away and began to walk much faster.

  She had high heels so she couldn’t go very fast, not as fast as I could, just strolling along behind her. I gained on her until I was a yard behind.

  I could smell her fear. She was wearing a lot of perfume and her sweat seemed to potentiate it so that there came to me a whiff and then a wave of heady, mixed-up animal and floral scent. I breathed it in, I breathed heavily. She began to run and I strode after her. What she did then was unexpected. She stopped, turned round and cried out in a tremulous terrified voice: ‘What do you want?’

  I stopped too and gave her the same look. She held her handbag out to me. ‘Take it!’

  The joke had gone far enough. I lived round there anyway, I had my wife and son to think of. I put on a cockney voice. ‘Keep your bag, love. You’ve got me wrong.’

  And then, to reassure her, I turned back along the path and let her escape to Wood Vale and the lights and the start of the houses. But I can’t describe what a feeling of power and – well, triumphant manhood and what’s called machismo the encounter gave me. I felt grand. I swaggered into my house and Carol said had I had a Premium Bond come up?

  Since I’m being strictly truthful in this account, I’d better add the other consequence of what happened in the wood, even though it does rather go against the grain with me to mention things like that. I made love to Carol that night and it was a lot better than it had been for a long time, in fact it was sensational for both of us. And I couldn’t kid myself that it was due to anything but my adventure with the girl.

  Next day I looked at myself in the mirror with all the lights off but the little tubular one over our bed, and I put on the same look I’d given the girl when she turned in my direction under the lamp. I can tell you I nearly frightened myself. I’ve said I’m not bad looking and that’s true but I’m naturally pale and since I’m thin, my face tends to be a bit gaunt. In the dim light my eyes seemed sunk in deep sockets and my mouth hung loose in a vacant mindless way. I stepped back from the glass so that I could see the whole of myself, slouching, staring, my arms hanging. There was no doubt I had the potential of being a woman-frightener of no mean calibre.

  They say it’s the first step that counts. I had taken the first step but the second was bigger and it was weeks before I took it. I kept telling myself not to be a fool, to forget those mad ideas. Besides, surely I could see I’d soon be in trouble if I made a habit of frightening women in Queens Wood, on my own doorstep. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remembered how wonderful I’d felt that evening, how tall I’d walked and what a man I’d been.

  The funny thing was what a lot of humiliating things seemed to happen to me at that time, between the Queens Wood incident and the next occasion. A woman at the air terminal actually spat at me. I’m not exaggerating. Of course she was drunk, smashed out of her mind on duty-free Scotch, but she spat at me and I had to stand there in the middle of the ticket hall with all those tourists milling about, and wipe the spittle off my uniform. Then I got a reprimand for being discourteous to a passenger. It was totally unjust and, strictly speaking, I should have resigned on the spot, only I’ve got a wife and son and jobs aren’t easy to come by at present. There was all that and trouble at home as well with Carol nagging me to take her on holiday with this girl friend of hers and her husband to Minorca instead of our usual Salcombe fortnight. I told her straight we couldn’t afford it but I didn’t like being asked in return why I couldn’t earn as much as Sheila’s Mike.

  My manhood was at a low ebb. Then Sheila and Mike asked us to spend the day with them, Carol, Timothy and me. They had been neighbours of ours but had just moved away to a new house in one of those outer suburbs that are really in Essex. So I drove the three of us out to Theydon Bois and made my acquaintance with Epping Forest.

  There are sixty-four square miles of forest, lying on the northeastern borders of London. But when you drive from the Wake Arms to Theydon along a narrow road bordered by woodland, stretches of turf and undergrowth, little coppices of birch trees, you can easily believe yourself in the depths of the country. It seems impossible that London is only fourteen or fifteen miles away. The forest is green and silent and from a car looks unspoilt, though of course it can’t be. We passed a woman walking a very unguard-like dog, a tiny Maltese terrier . . . That gave me the idea. Why shouldn’t I come out here? Why shouldn’t I try my frightening act out
here where no one knew me?

  Two days after that I did. It was spring and the evenings stayed light till nearly eight. I didn’t take the car. Somehow it didn’t seem to me as if the sort of person I was going to be, going to act, would have a car. The journey was awful, enough to deter anyone less determined than I. I went straight from work, taking the Central Line tube as far as Loughton and then a bus up the hills and into the forest. At the Wake Arms I got off and began to walk down the hill, not on the pavement but a few yards inside the forest itself. I didn’t see a woman on her own until I had reached the houses of Theydon and begun the return trip. I had gone about a hundred yards up again when she came out of one of the last houses, a young girl in jeans and a jacket, her hands in her pockets.

  It was clear she was going to walk to the Wake Arms. Or so I thought. For a while I walked, keeping step with her, but unseen among the hawthorn and crab apple bushes, the tangle of brambles. I let us get a quarter of a mile away from the houses before I showed myself and then I stepped out on to the pavement ahead of her. I turned round to face her and stood there, staring in the way I’d practised in the mirror.

  She wasn’t nervous. She was brave. It was only very briefly that she hesitated. But she didn’t quite dare walk past me. Instead she crossed the road. There’s never much traffic on that road and so far not a single car had passed. She crossed the road, walking faster. I crossed too but behind her and I walked along behind her. Presently she began to run, so of course I ran too, though not fast enough to catch her up, just enough to gain on her a little.

  We had been going on like that for some minutes, the Wake Arms still a mile off, when she suddenly doubled back, hared across the road and began running back the way she had come. That finished me for chasing her. I stood there and laughed. I laughed long and loud, I felt so happy and free, I felt so much all-conquering power that I – I alone, humble, ordinary, dull me – could inspire such fear.