by Ruth Rendell
‘Shall we change the subject now?’ said James’s father.
‘Yes, all right,’ said James. ‘Will you be going to the Women’s Institute the same as usual on Wednesday?’
‘Of course I will, darling. Why on earth do you ask?’
‘I just wondered,’ said James.
James’s father was on holiday while the university was down and on the following day he went out into the fruit garden with a basket and his weeder and uprooted the thornapple plant that was growing between the gooseberry bushes. James, sitting in his bedroom, reading The Natural History of Selborne, watched him from the window. His father put the thornapple on the compost heap and went hunting for its fellows, all of which he found in the space of five minutes. James sighed but took this destruction philosophically. He had enough in the brown paper bag for his needs.
As it happened, he had the house to himself for the making of his newest brew. His father announced at lunch that he would be taking the car into Bury St Edmunds that afternoon and both children could come with him if they wanted to. Rosamund did. Bury, though not London, was at any rate a sizeable town with plenty of what she liked, shops and restaurants and cinemas and crowds. Once alone, James chose an enamel saucepan of the kind which looked as if all traces of datura could easily be removed from it afterwards, put into it about a pint of water and set this to boil. Meanwhile, he cut up the green spiny fruits to reveal the black seeds they contained. When the water boiled he dropped in the fruit pieces and the seeds and leaves and flowers and kept it all simmering for half an hour, occasionally stirring the mixture with a skewer. Very much as he had expected, the bright green colour hadn’t been maintained, but the solid matter and the liquid had all turned a dark khaki brown. James didn’t dare use a sieve to strain it in case he couldn’t get it clean again, so he pressed all the liquor out with his hands until nothing remained but some soggy pulp.
This he got rid of down the waste disposal unit. He poured the liquid, reduced now to not much more than half a pint, into the medicine bottle he had ready for it, screwed on the cap and labelled it: datura stramonium. The pan he scoured thoroughly but a few days later, when he saw that his mother had used it for boiling the peas they were about to eat with their fish for supper, he half-expected the whole family to have griping pains and even tetanic convulsions. But nothing happened and no one suffered any ill effects.
By the time the new school term started James had produced a substance he hoped might be muscarine from boiling up the fly agaric fungus and some rather doubtful cyanide from apricot kernels. There were now ten bottles of poison on the top shelf of his bookcase. But no one was in the least danger from them, and even when the Fyfield household was increased by two members there was no need for James to keep his bedroom door locked, for Mirabel’s little boy was only six months old and naturally as yet unable to walk.
Mirabel’s arrival had been entirely impulsive. A ridiculous way to behave, James’s father said. The lease of her flat in Kensington was running out and instead of taking steps to find herself somewhere else to live, she had waited until the lease was within a week of expiry and had turned up in Great Sindon to throw herself on the mercy of Aunt Julie. She came by taxi from Ipswich station, lugging a suitcase and carrying the infant Oliver.
Mrs Crowley had opened the door to her and Mirabel had never got as far as seeing Aunt Julie. A message was brought back to say she was not welcome at Sindon Lodge as her aunt thought she had made clear enough by telephone and letter. Mirabel, who had believed that Aunt Julie would soften at the sight of her, had a choice between going back to London, finding a hotel in Ipswich or taking refuge with the Fyfields. She told the taxi to take her to Ewes Hall Farm.
‘How could I turn her away?’ James heard his mother say. Mirabel was upstairs putting Oliver to bed. ‘There she was on the doorstep with that great heavy case and the baby screaming his head off, poor mite. And she’s such a little scrap of a thing.’
James’s father had been gloomy ever since he got home. ‘Mirabel is exactly the sort of person who would come for the weekend and stay ten years.’
‘No one would stay here for ten years if they could live in London,’ said Rosamund.
In the event, Mirabel didn’t stay ten years, though she was still there after ten weeks. And on almost every day of those ten weeks she tried in vain to get her foot in the door of Sindon Lodge. Whoever happened to be in the living room of Ewes Hall Farm in the evening – and in the depths of winter that was usually everyone – was daily regaled with Mirabel’s grievances against life and with denunciations of the people who had injured her, notably Oliver’s father and Aunt Julie. James’s mother sometimes said that it was sad for Oliver having to grow up without a father, but since Mirabel never mentioned him without saying how selfish he was, the most immature, heartless, mean, lazy and cruel man in London, James thought Oliver would be better off without him. As for Aunt Julie, she must be senile, Mirabel said, she must have lost her wits.
‘Can you imagine anyone taking such an attitude, Elizabeth, in this day and age? She literally will not have me in the house because I’ve got Oliver and I wasn’t married to Francis. Thank God I wasn’t, that’s all I can say. But wouldn’t you think that sort of thing went out with the dark ages?’
‘She’ll come round in time,’ said James’s mother.
‘Yes, but how much time? I mean, she hasn’t got that much, has she? And here am I taking shameful advantage of your hospitality. You don’t know how guilty it makes me, only I literally have nowhere else to go. And I simply cannot afford to take another flat like the last, frankly, I couldn’t raise the cash. I haven’t been getting the contracts like I used to before Oliver was born and of course I’ve never had a penny from that unspeakable, selfish, pig of a man.’
James’s mother and father would become very bored with all this but they could hardly walk out of the room. James and Rosamund could, though after a time Mirabel took to following James up to the glory-hole where she would sit on his bed and continue her long, detailed, repetitive complaints just as if he were her own contemporary.
It was a little disconcerting at first, though he got used to it. Mirabel was about thirty but to him and his sister she seemed the same age as their parents, middle-aged, old, much as anyone did who was over, say, twenty-two. And till he got accustomed to her manner he hardly knew what to make of the way she gazed intensely into his eyes or suddenly clutched him by the arm. She described herself (frequently) as passionate, nervous and highly strung.
She was a small woman and James was already taller than she. She had a small, rather pinched face with large prominent dark eyes and she wore her long hair hanging loose like Rosamund’s. The Fyfields were big-boned, fair-headed people with ruddy skins but Mirabel was dark and very thin and her wrists and hands and ankles and feet were very slender and narrow. There was, of course, no blood relationship, Mirabel being Aunt Julie’s own sister’s granddaughter.
Mirabel was not her baptismal name. She had been christened Brenda Margaret but it had to be admitted that the name she had chosen for herself suited her better, suited her feyness, her intense smiles and brooding sadnesses, and the clinging clothes she wore, the muslins and the trailing shawls. She always wore a cloak or a cape to go into the village and James’s mother said she couldn’t remember Mirabel ever having possessed a coat.
James had always had rather a sneaking liking for her, he hadn’t known why. But now that he was older and saw her daily, he understood something he had not known before. He liked Mirabel, he couldn’t help himself, because she seemed to like him so much and because she flattered him. It was funny, he could listen to her flattery and distinguish it for what it was, but this knowledge did not detract a particle from the pleasure he felt in hearing it.
‘You’re absolutely brilliant for your age, aren’t you, James?’ Mirabel would say. ‘I suppose you’ll be a professor one day. You’ll probably win the Nobel prize.’
She a
sked him to teach her things: how to apply Pythagoras’ Theorem, how to convert Fahrenheit temperatures into Celsius, ounces into grammes, how to change the plug on her hair dryer.
‘I’d like to think Oliver might have half your brains, James, and then I’d be quite content. Francis is clever, mind you, though he’s so immature and lazy with it. I literally think you’re more mature than he is.’
Aunt Julie must have known for a long time that Mirabel was staying with the Fyfields, for nothing of that kind could be concealed in a village of the size of Great Sindon, but it was December before she mentioned the matter to James. They were sitting in front of the fire in the front sitting room at Sindon Lodge, eating crumpets toasted by Mrs Crowley and drinking Earl Grey tea, while Palmerston stretched out on the hearth rug. Outside a thin rain was driving against the window panes.
‘I hope Elizabeth knows what she’s doing, that’s all. If you’re not careful you’ll all be stuck with that girl for life.’
James said nothing.
‘Of course you don’t understand the ins and outs of it at your age, but in my opinion your parents should have thought twice before they let her come into their home and bring her illegitimate child with her.’ Aunt Julie looked at him darkly and perhaps spitefully. ‘That could have a very bad effect on Rosamund, you know. Rosamund will think immoral behaviour is quite all right when she sees people like Mirabel getting rewarded for it.’
‘She’s not exactly rewarded,’ said James, starting on the tea cakes and the greengage jam. ‘We don’t give her anything but her food and she has to sleep in the same room as Oliver.’ This seemed to him by far the worst aspect of Mirabel’s situation.
Aunt Julie made no reply. After a while she said, looking into the fire, ‘How d’you think you’d feel if you knew people only came to see you for the sake of getting your money? That’s all Madam Mirabel wants. She doesn’t care for me, she couldn’t care less. She comes here sweet talking to Mrs Crowley because she thinks once she’s in here I’ll take her back and make a will leaving everything I’ve got to her and that illegitimate child of hers. How d’you think you’d like it? Maybe you’ll come to it yourself one day, your grandchildren sucking up to you for what they can get.’
‘You don’t know people come for that,’ said James awkwardly, thinking of Rosamund.
Aunt Julie made a sound of disgust. ‘Aaah!’ She struck out with her arthritic hand as if pushing something away. ‘I’m not green, am I? I’m not daft. I’d despise myself, I can tell you, if I pretended it wasn’t as plain as the nose on my face what you all come for.’
The fire crackled and Palmerston twitched in his sleep.
‘Well, I don’t,’ said James.
‘Don’t you now, Mr Pure-and-holy?’
James grinned. ‘There’s a way you could find out. You could make a will and leave your money to other people and tell me I wasn’t getting any – and then see if I’d still come.’
‘I could, could I? You’re so sharp, James Fyfield, you’ll cut yourself badly one of these fine days.’
Her prophecy had a curious fulfilment that same evening. James, groping about on the top shelf of his bookcase, knocked over the bottle of muscarine and cut his hand on the broken glass. It wasn’t much of a cut but the stuff that had been inside the bottle got onto it and gave him a very uncomfortable and anxious hour. Nothing happened, his arm didn’t swell up or go black or anything of that sort, but it made him think seriously about the other nine bottles remaining. Wasn’t it rather silly to keep them? That particular interest of his, no longer compelling, he was beginning to see as childish. Besides, with Oliver in the house, Oliver who was crawling now and would soon walk, to keep the poisons might be more than dangerous, it might be positively criminal.
His mind made up, he took the bottles down without further vacillation and one by one poured their contents away down his bedroom washbasin. Some of them smelt dreadful. The henbane smelt like the inside of his mouse cage when he hadn’t cleaned it out for a day.
He poured them all away with one exception. He couldn’t quite bring himself to part with the datura. It had always been his pride, better even than the nightshade. Sometimes he had sat there at his desk, doing his homework, and glanced up at the datura bottle and wondered what people would think if they had known he had the means in his bedroom to dispose of (probably) half the village. He looked at it now, recalling how he had picked the green spiny thornapples in the nick of time before his father had uprooted all the beautiful and sinister plants – he looked at it and replaced it on the top shelf. Then he sat down at the desk and did his Latin unseen.
Mirabel was still with them at Christmas. On Christmas Eve she carried up to Sindon Lodge the pale blue jumper, wrapped in holly-patterned paper, the two-pound box of chocolates and the poinsettia in a golden pot she had bought for Aunt Julie. And she took Rosamund with her. Rosamund wore her new scarlet coat with the white fur which was a Christmas present in advance, and the scarf with Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London printed on it which was another, and Mirabel wore her dark blue cloak and her angora hat and very high-heeled grey suede boots that skidded dangerously about on the ice. Oliver was left behind in the care of James’s mother.
But if Mirabel had thought that the presence of Rosamund would provide her with an entrée to the house she was mistaken. Mrs Crowley, with a sorrowful expression, brought back the message that Aunt Julie could see no one. She had one of her gastric attacks, she was feeling very unwell, and she never accepted presents when she had nothing to give in return. Mirabel read a great deal, perhaps more than had been intended, into this valedictory shot.
‘She means she’ll never have anything to give me,’ she said, sitting on James’s bed. ‘She means she’s made up her mind not to leave me anything.’
It was a bit – James sought for the word and found it – a bit degrading to keep hanging on like this for the sake of money you hadn’t earned and had no real right to. But he knew better than to say something so unkind and moralistic. He suggested tentatively that Mirabel might feel happier if she went back to her designing of textiles and forgot about Aunt Julie and her will. She turned on him in anger.
‘What do you know about it? You’re only a child. You don’t know what I’ve suffered with that selfish brute of a man. I was left all alone to have my baby, I might have been literally destitute for all he cared, left to bring Oliver up on my own and without a roof over my head. How can I work? What am I supposed to do with Oliver? Oh, it’s so unfair. Why shouldn’t I get her money? It’s not as if I was depriving anyone else, it’s not as if she’d left it to someone and I was trying to get her to change anything. If I don’t get it, it’ll just go to the government.’
Mirabel was actually crying by now. She wiped her eyes and sniffed. ‘I’m sorry, James, I shouldn’t take it out on you. I think I’m just getting to the end of my tether.’
James’s father had used those very words earlier in the day. He was getting to the end of his tether as far as Mirabel was concerned. Once get Christmas over and then, if James’s mother wouldn’t tell her she had outstayed her welcome, he would. Let her make things up with that chap of hers, Oliver’s father, or get rooms somewhere or move in with one of those arty London friends. She wasn’t even a relation, he didn’t even like her, and she had now been with them for nearly three months.
‘I know I can’t go on staying here,’ said Mirabel to James when hints had been dropped, ‘but where am I to go?’ She cast her eyes heavenwards or at least as far as the top shelf of the bookcase where they came to rest on the bottle of greenish-brown liquid labelled: datura stramonium.
‘What on earth’s that?’ said Mirabel. ‘What’s in that bottle? Datura whatever-it-is, I can’t pronounce it. It isn’t cough mixture, is it? It’s such a horrible colour.’
Six months before, faced with that question, James would have prevaricated or told a lie. But now he felt differently about those experiments of his, and he also
had an obscure feeling that if he told Mirabel the truth and she told his mother, he would be forced to do something his own will refused to compel him to and throw the bottle away.
‘Poison,’ he said laconically.
‘Poison?’
‘I made it out of something called Jimson’s Weed or thornapple. It’s quite concentrated. I think a dose of it might be lethal.’
‘Were you going to kill mice with it or something?’
James would not have dreamt of killing a mouse or, indeed, any animal. It exasperated him that Mirabel who ought to have known him quite well, who had lived in the same house with him and talked to him every day, should have cared so little about him and been so uninterested in his true nature as not to be aware of this.
‘I wasn’t going to kill anything with it. It was just an experiment.’
Mirabel gave a hollow ringing laugh. ‘Would it kill me? Maybe I’ll come up here while you’re at school and take that bottle and – and put an end to myself. It would be a merciful release, wouldn’t it? Who’d care? Not a soul. Not Francis, not Aunt Julie. They’d be glad. There’s not a soul in the world who’d miss me.’
‘Well, Oliver would,’ said James.
‘Yes, my darling little boy would, my Oliver would care. People don’t realize I only want Aunt Julie’s money for Oliver. It’s not for me. I just want it to give Oliver a chance in life.’ Mirabel looked at James, her eyes narrowing. ‘Sometimes I think you’re the only person on earth Aunt Julie cares for. I bet if you said to her to let bygones be bygones and have me back, she’d do it. I bet she would. She’d even make a will if you suggested it. I suppose it’s because you’re clever. She admires intellectuals.’
‘If I suggested she make a will in Oliver’s favour, I reckon she just might,’ said James. ‘He’s her great-great-nephew, isn’t he? That’s quite a good idea, she might do that.’
He couldn’t understand why Mirabel had suddenly become so angry, and with a shout of ‘Oh, you’re impossible, you’re as bad as the rest of them!’ had banged out of his room. Had she thought he was being sarcastic? It was obvious she wanted him to work on Aunt Julie for her and he wondered if she had flattered him simply towards this end. Perhaps. But however that might be, he could see a kind of justice in her claim. She had been a good niece, or great-niece, to Aunt Julie, a frequent visitor to Sindon Lodge before the episode of Francis, a faithful sender of birthday and Christmas cards, or so his mother said, and attentive when Aunt Julie had been ill. On the practical or selfish side, getting Mirabel accepted at Sindon Lodge would take her away from Ewes Hall Farm where her presence frayed his father’s temper, wore his mother out, made Rosamund sulk and was beginning to bore even him. So perhaps he would mention it to Aunt Julie on his next visit. And he began to plan a sort of strategy, how he would suggest a meeting with Oliver, for all old people seemed to like babies, and follow it up with persuasive stuff about Oliver needing a home and money and things to make up for not having had a father. But, in fact, he had to do nothing. For Mrs Crowley had been offered a better job in a more lively place and had suddenly departed, leaving Aunt Julie stiff with arthritis and in the middle of a gastric attack.
