by Ruth Rendell
Taking down the books from the top shelf, he came upon an object whose existence he had almost forgotten – the bottle labelled datura stramonium. That was something he need not hesitate to throw away. He looked at it curiously, at the clear greenish-brown fluid it contained and which seemed in the past months to have settled and clarified. Why had he made it and what for? In another age, he thought he might have been an alchemist or a warlock, and he shook his head ruefully at the juvenile James who was no more.
So many of these books held no interest for him any longer. They were kids’ stuff. He began stacking them in a ‘wanted’ and an ‘unwanted’ pile on the floor. Palmerston sat on the window sill and watched him, unblinking golden eyes in a big round grey face. It was a good thing, James thought, that he. had ceased keeping mice before Palmerston arrived. Perhaps the mouse cage could be sold. There was someone in his class at school who kept hamsters and had been talking of getting an extra cage. It wouldn’t do any harm to give him a ring.
James went down to the living room and picked up the receiver to dial Timothy Gordon’s number; the phone was dead. There was no dialling tone but a silence broken by occasional faint clicks and crepitations. He would have to go up the lane to the call box and phone the engineers, but not now, later. It was pouring with rain.
As he was crossing the hall and was almost at the foot of the stairs the doorbell rang. His mother had said something about the laundry coming. James opened the door absentmindedly, prepared to nod to the man and take in the laundry box, and saw instead Mirabel.
Her car was parked on the drive and staring out of its front window was Oliver, chewing something, his fingers plastering the glass with stickiness. Mirabel was dressed up to the nines, as Aunt Julie might have said, and dressed very unsuitably for the weather in a trailing, cream-coloured pleated affair with beads round her neck and two or three chiffon scarves and pale pink stockings and cream shoes that were all straps no thicker than bits of string.
‘Oh, James, you are going to be an angel, aren’t you, and have Oliver for me just for the afternoon? You won’t be on your own, Rosamund’s in, I saw her looking out of her bedroom window. I did try to ring you but your phone’s out of order.’
Mirabel said this in an accusing tone as if James had purposely broken the phone himself. She was rather breathless and seemed in a hurry.
‘Why can’t you take him with you?’ said James.
‘Because, if you must know, Gilbert is going to buy me something rather special and important and I can’t take a baby along.’
Rosamund, under the impression that excitement was afoot, appeared at the bend in the staircase.
‘It’s only Mirabel,’ said James.
But Mirabel took the opportunity, while his attention was distracted, of rushing to the car – her finery getting much spotted with rain in the process – and seizing the sticky Oliver.
‘You’d like to stay with James and Rosamund, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?’
‘Do we have to?’ said Rosamund, coming downstairs and bestowing on Oliver a look of such unmistakeable distaste that even Mirabel flinched. Flinched but didn’t give up. Indeed, she thrust Oliver at James, keeping his sticky mouth well clear of her dress, and James had no choice but to grab hold of him. Oliver immediately started to whine and hold out his arms to his mother.
‘No, darling, you’ll see Mummy later. Now listen, James. Mrs Hodges’s daughter is going to come for him at five-thirty. That’s when she finishes work. She’s going to take him back to her place and I’ll pick him up when I get home. And now I must fly, I’m meeting Gilbert at three.’
‘Well!’ exploded Rosamund as the car disappeared down the drive.
‘Isn’t she the end? Fancy getting lumbered with him. I was going to do my holiday art project.’
‘I was going to turn my room out, but it’s no good moaning. We’ve got him and that’s that.’
Oliver, once the front door was closed, had begun to whimper.
‘If it wasn’t raining we could go in the garden. We could take him out for a walk.
‘It is raining,’ said James. ‘And what would we take him in? Mum’s basket on wheels? The wheelbarrow? In case you hadn’t noticed, dear Mirabel didn’t think to bring his push chair. Come on, let’s take him in the kitchen. The best thing to do with him is to feed him. He shuts up when he’s eating.’
In the larder James found a packet of Penguin biscuits, the chocolate-covered kind, and gave one to Oliver. Oliver sat on the floor and ate it, throwing down little bits of red and gold wrapping paper. Then he opened the saucepan cupboard and began taking out all the pots and pans and the colander and the sieves, getting chocolate all over the white Melamine finish on the door. Rosamund wiped the door and then she wiped him which made him grizzle and hit out at her with his fists. When the saucepans were spread about the floor, Oliver opened all the drawers one after the other and took out cutlery and cheese graters and potato peelers and dishcloths and dusters.
James watched him gloomily. ‘I read somewhere that a child of two, even a child with a very high IQ, can’t ever concentrate on one thing for more than nineteen minutes at a time.’
‘And Oliver isn’t two yet and I don’t think his IQ’s all that amazing.’
‘Exactly,’ said James.
‘Ink,’ said Oliver. He kicked the knives and forks out of his way and came to James, hitting out with a wooden spoon. ‘Ink.’
‘Imagine him with ink,’ said Rosamund.
‘He’s probably not saying ink. It’s something else he means only we don’t know what.’
‘Ink, ink, ink!’
‘If we lived in London we could take him for a ride on a bus. We could take him to the zoo.’
‘If we lived in London,’ said James, ‘we wouldn’t be looking after him. I tell you what, I reckon he’d like television. Mirabel hasn’t got television.’
He picked Oliver up and carried him into the living room. The furniture in there was dark brown leather and would not mark so it seemed sensible to give him another Penguin. James switched the television on. At this time of day there wasn’t much on of interest to anyone, let alone someone of Oliver’s age, only a serial about people working at an airport. Oliver, however, seemed entranced by the colours and the movement, so James shoved him into the back of an armchair and with a considerable feeling of relief, left him.
There was a good deal of clearing up to be done in the kitchen. Oliver had got brown stains on two tablecloths and James had to wash the knives and forks. Rosamund (typically, he thought) had vanished. Back to her art project, presumably, making some sort of collage with dried flowers. He put all the saucepans back and tidied up the drawers so that they looked much as they had done before Oliver’s onslaught. Then he thought he had better go back and see how Oliver was getting on.
The living room was empty. James could soon see why. The serial had come to an end and the bright moving figures and voices and music had been replaced by an old man with glasses talking about molecular physics. Oliver wasn’t anywhere downstairs. James hadn’t really imagined he could climb stairs, but of course he could. He was a big strong boy who had been walking for months and months now.
He went up, calling Oliver’s name. It was only a quarter past three and his mother wouldn’t be back from the village hall until four-thirty at the earliest. The rain was coming down harder now, making the house rather dark. James realized for the first time that he had left his bedroom door open. He had left it open – because Palmerston was inside – when he went downstairs to phone Timothy Gordon about the mouse cage, and then Mirabel had come. It all seemed hours ago but it was only about forty minutes.
Oliver was in James’s bedroom. He was sitting on the floor with the empty datura bottle clutched in his hands, and from the side of the mouth trickled a dribble of brown fluid.
James had read in books about people being rooted to the spot and that was exactly what happened at that moment. He seemed anchored where
he stood. He stared at Oliver. In his inside there seemed to swell up and throb a large hard lump. It was his own heart beating so heavily that it hurt.
He forced himself to move. He took the bottle away from Oliver and automatically, he didn’t know why, rinsed it out at the washbasin. Oliver looked at him in silence. James went down the passage and banged on Rosamund’s door.
‘Could you come, please? Oliver’s drunk a bottle of poison. About half a pint.’
‘What?’
She came out. She looked at him, her mouth open. He explained to her swiftly, shortly, in two sentences.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Phone for an ambulance.’
She stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Oliver. He had put his fists in his eyes, he was rubbing his eyes and making fretful little sounds.
‘D’you think we ought to try and make him sick?’
‘No. I’ll go and phone. It’s my fault. I must have been out of my tree making the stuff, let alone keeping it. If he dies . . . Oh, God, Roz, we can’t phone! The phone’s out of order. I was trying to phone Tim Gordon but it was dead and I was going to go down to the call box and report it.’
‘You can go to the call box now.’
‘That means you’ll have to stay with him.’
Rosamund’s lip quivered. She looked at the little boy who was lying on the floor now, his eyes wide open, his thumb in his mouth. ‘I don’t want to. Suppose he dies?’
‘You go,’ said James. ‘I’ll stay with him. Go to the call box and dial nine-nine-nine for an ambulance and then go into the village hall and fetch mum. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Rosamund, and she went, the tears running down her face.
James picked Oliver up and laid him gently on the bed. There were beads of perspiration on the child’s face but that might have been simply because he was hot. Mirabel had wrapped him very warmly for the time of year in a woolly cardigan as well as a jumper and a tee-shirt. He had been thirsty, of course. That was what ‘ink’ had meant. ‘Ink’ for ‘drink’. Was there the slightest chance that during the year since he had made it the datura had lost its toxicity? He did not honestly think so. He could remember reading somewhere that the poison was resistant to drying and to heat, so probably it was also resistant to time.
Oliver’s eyes were closed now and some of the bright red colour which had been in his face while he was watching television had faded. His fat cheeks looked waxen. At any rate, he didn’t seem to be in pain, though the sweat stood in tiny glistening pinpoints on his forehead. James asked himself again why he had been such a fool as to keep the stuff. An hour before he had been on the point of throwing it away and yet he had not. It was useless to have regrets, to ‘job backwards’, as his father put it.
But James was looking to the future, not to the past. Suddenly he knew that if Oliver died he would have murdered him as surely, or almost as surely, as if he had fired at him with his father’s shotgun. And his whole life, his entire future, would be wrecked. For he would never forgive himself, never recover, never be anything but a broken person. He would have to hide away, live in a distant part of the country, go to a different school, and when he left that school get some obscure job and drag out a frightened, haunted existence. Gone would be his dreams of Oxford, of work in some research establishment, of happiness and fulfilment and success. He was not overdramatizing, he knew it would be so. And Mirabel . . . ? If his life would be in ruins, what of hers?
He heard the front door open and his mother come running up the stairs. He was sitting on the bed, watching Oliver, and he turned round slowly.
‘Oh, James . . . !’
And James said like a mature man, like a man three times his age, ‘There’s nothing you can say to me I haven’t already said to myself.’
She touched his shoulder. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I know you.’ Her face was white, the lips too, and with anger as much as fear. ‘How dare she bring him here and leave him with two children?’
James hadn’t the spirit to feel offended. ‘Is he – is he dying?’
‘He’s asleep,’ said his mother and she put her hand on Oliver’s head. It was quite cool, the sweat had dried. ‘At least, I suppose he is. He could be in a coma, for all I know.’
‘It will be the end of me if he dies.’
‘James, oh, James . . .’ She did something she had not done for a long time. She put her arms round him and held him close to her, though he was half a head taller than she.
‘There’s the ambulance,’ said James. ‘I can hear the bell.’
Two men came up the stairs for Oliver. One of them wrapped him in a blanket and carried him downstairs in his arms. Rosamund was sitting in the hall with Palmerston on her lap and she was crying silently into his fur. It seemed hard to leave her but someone had to wait in for Mrs Hodges’s daughter. James and his mother got into the ambulance with Oliver and went with him to the hospital.
They had to sit in a waiting room while the doctors did things to Oliver – pumped his stomach, presumably. Then a young black doctor and an old white doctor came and asked James a whole string of questions. What exactly was the stuff Oliver had drunk? When was it made? How much of it had been in the bottle? And a host of others. They were not very pleasant to him and he wanted to prevaricate. It would be so easy to say he hadn’t known what the stuff really was, that he had boiled the thornapples up to make a green dye, or something like that. But when it came to it he couldn’t. He had to tell the bald truth, he had to say he had made poison, knowing it might kill.
After they had gone away there was a long wait in which nothing happened. Mrs Hodges’s daughter would have come by now and James’s father would be home from where he was teaching at a summer seminar. It got to five-thirty, to six, when a nurse brought them a cup of tea, and then there was another long wait. James thought that no matter what happened to him in years to come, nothing could actually be worse than those hours in the waiting room had been. Just before seven the young doctor came back. He seemed to think James’s mother was Oliver’s mother and when he realized she was not he just shrugged and said as if they couldn’t be all that anxious, as if it wouldn’t be a matter of great importance to them:
‘He’ll be O.K. No need for you to hang about any longer.’
James’s mother jumped to her feet with a little cry. ‘He’s all right? He’s really all right?’
‘Perfectly, as far as we can tell. The stomach contents are being analysed. We’ll keep him in for tonight, though, just to be on the safe side.’
The Fyfield family all sat up to wait for Mirabel. They were going to wait up, no matter what time she came, even if she didn’t come till two in the morning. A note, put into the letter box of Sindon Lodge, warned her what had happened and told her to phone the hospital.
James was bracing himself for a scene. On the way back from the hospital his mother had told him he must be prepared for Mirabel to say some very unpleasant things to him. Women who would foist their children on to anyone and often seemed indifferent to them were usually most likely to become hysterical when those children were in danger. It was guilt, she supposed. But James thought that if Mirabel raved she had a right to, for although Oliver had not died and would not, he might easily have done. He was only alive because they had been very quick about getting that deadly stuff out of him. Mirabel wouldn’t be able to phone Ewes Hall Farm, for the phone was still out of order. They all had coffee at about ten and James’s father, who had gone all over his room to make sure there were no more killing bottles and had given James a stern but just lecture on responsibility, poured himself a large whisky.
The yellow Volvo came up the drive at twenty to twelve. James sat tight and kept calm the way he had resolved to do while his father went to answer the door. He waited to hear a shriek or a sob. Rosamund had put her fingers in her ears.
The front door closed and there were footsteps. Mirabel walked in, smiling. She had a big diamond on the third finger o
f her left hand. James’s mother got up and went to her, holding out her hands, looking into Mirabel’s face.
‘You found our note? Of course you must have. Mirabel, I hardly know what to say to you . . .’
Before Mirabel could say anything James’s father came in with the man she was going to marry, a big teddy bear of a man with a handlebar moustache. James found himself shaking hands. It was all very different from what he had expected. And Mirabel was all smiles, vague and happy, showing off her engagement ring on her thin little hand.
‘What did they say when you phoned the hospital?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t phone? But surely you . . . ?
‘I knew he was all right, Elizabeth. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself telling them he’d drunk half a pint of coloured water, did I?’
James stared at her. And suddenly her gaiety fell from her as she realized what she had said. Her hand went up to cover her mouth and a dark flush mottled her face. She stepped back and took Gilbert Coleridge’s arm.
‘I’m afraid you underrate my son’s abilities as a toxicologist,’ said James’s father, and Mirabel took her hand down and made a serious face and said that of course they must get back so that she could phone at once.
James knew then. He understood. The room seemed to move round him in a slow circle and to rock up and down. He knew what Mirabel had done, and although it would not be the end of him or ruin things for him or spoil his future, it would be with him all his life. And in Mirabel’s eyes he saw that she knew he knew.
But they were moving back towards the hall now in a flurry of excuses and thank yous and good nights, and the room had settled back into its normal shape and equilibrium. James said to Mirabel, and his voice had a break in it for the first time: ‘Good night. I’m sorry I was so stupid.’
She would understand what he meant.
May and June
Their parents named them May and June because their birthdays occurred in those months. A third sister, an April child, had been christened Avril but she had died. May was like the time of year in which she had been born, changeable, chilly and warm by turns, sullen yet able to know and show a loveliness that couldn’t last.
