The Fever Tree and Other Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  Pamela had not knitted a row since her daughter was two but she liked to watch Alice at work. She said she found it soothing. And when she looked inside the knitting drawer in the chest and saw the leftover hanks of yarn in such delectable shades, pinks and lilacs and subtle greens and honey yellows and chocolate browns, she said it made her feel she must take it up again, for clothes cost so much and it would be a great saving.

  Guy was not one of those writers who never speak of their work. He was always entertaining on the subject of the intricate and complex detective stories he yearly produced and would weave plots out of all kinds of common household incidents or create them from things he observed while they were out for a drive. Alice enjoyed hearing him evolve new murder methods and he played up to her with more and more ingenious and bizarre devices.

  ‘Now take warfarin,’ he would say. ‘They use it to kill rats. It inhibits the clotting of the blood, so that when the rats fight among themselves and receive even a small wound they bleed to death.’

  ‘They give it to human beings too,’ said Alice, the nurse. ‘Or something very close to it. It stops clots forming in people who’ve had a thrombosis.’

  ‘Do they now? That’s very interesting. If I were going to use that method in a book I’d have the murderer give his victim warfarin plus a strong sedative. Then a small cut, say to the wrist . . .’

  Another time he was much intrigued by a book of Alice’s on plants inadvisable for use in winemaking. Most illuminating for the thriller writer, he said.

  ‘It says here that the skunk cabbage, whatever that may be, contains irritant crystals of calcium oxalate. If you eat the stuff the inside of your mouth swells up and you die because you can’t breathe. Now your average pathologist might notice the swellings but I’d be willing to bet you anything he’d never suppose them the result of eating lysichiton symplocarpus. There’s another undetectable murder method for you.’

  Alice was excited by his ingenuity and Pamela was used to it. Only Rupert, who had perhaps been nearer actual death than any of them, grew squeamish and was not sorry when the two weeks came to an end and Guy and Pamela were gone. Alice too felt a certain relief. It troubled her that her latent sadism, which she recognized for what it was, should be titillated by Guy’s inventions. With thankfulness she returned to the gentle placebo of her knitting and took up the blue pullover again, all eight inches of it.

  Rupert lit a cigarette.

  ‘I say, I’ve been thinking, why don’t I buy you a knitting machine?’

  ‘I don’t want a knitting machine, darling,’ said Alice.

  ‘Had a look at one actually while I was out with old Guy one day. A bit pricey but I don’t mind that, sweetie, if it makes you happy.’

  ‘I said I don’t want a knitting machine. The point is that I like knitting by hand. I’ve already told you, it’s my hobby, it’s a great interest of mine. Why do I want a big cumbersome machine that takes up space and makes a noise when I’ve got my own two hands?’

  He was silent. He watched her fingers working.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it’s the noise I don’t like,’ he said.

  ‘What noise?’ said Alice, exasperated.

  ‘That everlasting click-click-click.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense! You can’t possibly hear anything right across the room.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Alice.

  But Rupert did not get used to it, and the next time Alice began her knitting he said: ‘It’s not just the clicking, sweetie, it’s the sight of your hands jerking about mechanically all the time. To be perfectly honest with you it gets on my nerves.’

  ‘Don’t look then.’

  ‘I can’t help it. There’s an awful sort of fascination that draws my eyes.’

  Alice was beginning to feel nervous herself. A good deal of her pleasure was spoilt by those staring eyes and the knowledge of his dislike of what she did. It began to affect the texture of her work, making her take uneven stitches. She went on rather more slowly and after half an hour she let the nine-inch-long piece of blue fabric and the needles fall into her lap.

  ‘Let’s go out to dinner,’ said Rupert eagerly. ‘We’ll go and have a couple of drinks down on the front and then we’ll drive over to the Queen’s for dinner.’

  ‘If you like,’ said Alice.

  ‘And, sweetie, give up that silly old knitting, eh? For my sake? You wouldn’t think twice about doing a little thing like that for me, would you?’

  A little thing, he called it. Alice thought of it not twice but many times. She hardly thought of anything else and she lay awake for a large part of the night. But next day she did no knitting and she laid away what she had done in the drawer. Rupert was her husband, and marriage, as she had often heard people say, was a matter of give and take. This she would give to him, remembering all he had given her.

  She missed her knitting bitterly. Those years of doing an active job, literally on her feet all day, and those leisure times when her hands had always been occupied, had unfitted her for reading or listening to music or watching television. With idle hands, it was hard for her to keep still. Incessantly, she fidgeted. And when Rupert, who had not once mentioned the sacrifice she had made for him, did at last refer to her knitting, she had an only just controllable urge to hit him.

  They were passing, on an evening walk, that men’s outfitters of which he had spoken when first he saw knitting in her hands, and there in the window was a heavyweight wool sweater in creamy white with on it an intricate Fair Isle pattern in red and grey.

  ‘Bet you couldn’t do that, eh, sweetie? It takes a machine to make a garment like that. I call that a grand job.’

  Alice’s hands itched to slap his face. She not make that! Why, give her half a chance and she could make it in a week and turn out a far more beautiful piece of work than that object in the window. But her heart yearned after it, for all that. How easily, when she had been allowed to knit, could she have copied it! How marvellously would it have occupied her, working out those checks and chevrons on squared paper, weaving in the various threads with the yarn skilfully hooked round three fingers! She turned away. Was she never to be allowed to knit again? Must she wait until Rupert died before she could take up her needles?

  It began to seem to Alice a monstrous cruelty, this thing which her husband had done to her. Why had she been so stupid as to marry someone she had known only three months? She thought she would enjoy punching him with her fists, pummelling his head, until he cried to her to stop and begged her to knit all she liked.

  The change Rupert noticed in his wife he did not attribute to the loss of her hobby. He had forgotten about her knitting. He thought she had become irritable and nervous because she was anxious about his smoking – after all, none knew better than she that he shouldn’t smoke – and he made a determined effort, his second since his marriage, to give it up.

  After five days of total abstention it seemed to him as if every fibre of his body cried out for, yearned for, put out straining anguished stalks for, a cigarette. It was worst of all in the pub on the sea front where the atmosphere was laden with aromatic cigarette smoke, and there, while Alice was sitting at their table, he bought a surreptitious packet of twenty at the bar.

  Back home, he took one out and lit it. His need for nicotine was so great that he had forgotten everything else. He had even forgotten that Alice was sitting opposite him. He took a wonderful long inhalation, the kind that makes the room rock and waves roar in one’s head, a cool, aromatic, heady, glorious draw.

  The next thing he knew the cigarette had been pulled out of his mouth and hurled into the fireplace and Alice was belabouring him with her fists while stamping on the remaining nineteen cigarettes in the packet.

  ‘You mean selfish cruel beast! You can keep on with your filthy evil-smelling addiction that makes me sick to my stomach, you can keep that up, killing yourself, while I’m not allowed to do my poor harmless useful work. Y
ou selfish insensitive pig!’

  It was their first quarrel and it went on for hours.

  Next morning Rupert went into town and bought a hundred cigarettes and Alice locked herself in her bedroom and knitted. They were reconciled after two or three days. Rupert promised to undergo hypnosis for his smoking. Nothing was said at the time about Alice’s knitting, but soon afterwards she explained quite calmly and rationally to Rupert that she needed to knit for her ‘nerves’ and would have to devote specific time to it, such as an hour every evening during which she would go and sit in their little-used dining room.

  Rupert said he would miss her. He hadn’t got married for his wife to be in one room and he in another. But all right, he hadn’t much option, he supposed, so long as it was only an hour.

  It began as an hour. Alice found she didn’t miss Rupert’s company. It seemed to her that they had said to each other all they had to say and all they ever would have. If there had been any excitement in their marriage, there was none left now. Knitting itself was more interesting, though when this garment was completed she would make no more for Rupert. Let him go to his men’s outfitters if that was what he wanted. She thought she might make herself a burgundy wool suit. And as she envisaged it, longing to begin, the allotted hour lengthened into an hour and a half, into two.

  She had almost completed the back of the pullover after two and a half hours concentrated work, when Rupert burst into the room, a cigarette in his mouth and his breath smelling of whisky. He snatched the knitting out of her hands and pulled it off the red plastic needles and snapped each needle in half.

  Alice screamed at him and seized his collar and began shaking him, but Rupert tore the pattern across and unravelled stitches as fast as he could go. Alice struck him repeatedly across the face. He dodged and hit her such a blow that she fell to the floor, and then he pulled out every one of those two or three hundred rows of knitting until all that remained was a loose and tangled pile of crinkled blue yarn.

  Three days later she told him she wanted a divorce. Rupert said she couldn’t want one as much as he did. In that case, said Alice, perhaps he would like to pack his things and leave the house as soon as possible.

  ‘Me? Leave this house? You must be joking.’

  ‘Indeed I’m not joking. That’s what a decent man would do.’

  ‘What, just walk out of a house I bought with my inheritance from my parents? Walk out on the furniture you bought with my life savings? You’re not only a hysterical bitch, you’re out of your mind. You can go. I’ll pay my maintenance, the law forces me to do that, though it’ll be the minimum I can get away with, I promise you.’

  ‘And you call yourself an officer and a gentleman!’ said Alice. ‘What am I supposed to do? Go back to nursing? Go back to a poky flat? I’d rather die. Certainly I’m staying in this house.’

  They argued about it bitterly day after day. Rupert’s need overcame the hypnosis and he chain-smoked. Alice was now afraid to knit in his presence, for he was physically stronger than she, even if she had had the heart to start the blue pullover once again. And whom would she give it to? She would not get out of the house, her house which Rupert had given her for which, in exchange, she had given him the most important thing she had.

  ‘I gave up my knitting for you,’ she screamed at him, ‘and you can’t even give me a house and a few sticks of furniture.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Rupert. ‘You ought to be locked up.’

  Alice rushed at him and smacked his face. He caught her hands and threw her into a chair and slammed out of the room. He went down to the pub on the sea front and had two double whiskies and smoked a packet of cigarettes. When he got back Alice was in bed in the spare room. Just as he refused to leave the house, so Rupert had refused to get out of his own bedroom. He took two sleeping tablets and went to bed.

  In the morning Alice went into the room where Rupert was and washed his scalp and combed his beautiful thick white hair. She changed the pillowcases, wiped a spot off Rupert’s pyjama jacket and then she phoned the doctor to say Rupert was dead. He must have passed away in his sleep. She had awakened to find him dead beside her.

  ‘His heart, of course,’ said the doctor, and because Alice had been a nurse, ‘a massive myocardial infarction.’

  She nodded. ‘I suppose I should have expected it.’

  ‘Well, in these cases . . .’

  ‘You never know, do you? I must be grateful for the few happy months we had together.’

  The doctor signed the death certificate. There was no question of an autopsy. Pamela and Guy came to the cremation and took Alice back home with them for four weeks. When Alice left to return to the house that was now entirely hers they promised to take her at her word and come to stay once again in the summer. Alice was very comfortably off, for by no means all Rupert’s savings had been spent on the furniture, his life assurance had been considerable, and there was his army pension, reduced but still generous.

  It was an amazingly young-looking Alice, her hair rinsed primrose, her figure the trimmest it had been in ten years, who met Guy and Pamela at the station. She was driving a new white Lancia coupé and wearing a very smart knitted suit in a subtle shade of burgundy.

  ‘I love your suit,’ said Pamela.

  ‘I made it.’

  ‘I really must take up knitting again. I used to be so good at it, didn’t I? And think of the money one saves.’

  On the following evening, a Sunday, after they had spent most of the day on the beach, Pamela again reverted to the subject of knitting and said her fingers itched to start on something straightaway. Alice looked thoughtful. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the chest and took out the saxe blue wool.

  ‘You could have this if you like, and this pattern. You could make it for Guy.’

  Pamela took the pattern which had apparently been torn in half and mended with sticking tape. She looked at the hanks of wool. ‘Has some of it been used?’

  ‘I didn’t like what I’d done so I undid it. The wool’s been washed and carded to get the crinkles out.’

  ‘If you’re thinking of making that for me,’ said Guy, ‘I’m all for it. Splendid idea.’

  ‘All right. Why not? Very fine needles it takes, doesn’t it? Have you got a pair of fourteens, Alice?’

  A shadow passed across Alice’s face. She hesitated. Then she picked up the plastic envelopes one by one, but desultorily, until Pamela, fired now with enthusiasm, dropped on her knees beside her and began hunting through the drawer.

  ‘Here we are. Number fourteen, two millimetres, US double O . . . There’s only one needle here, Alice.’

  ‘Sorry about that, it must be lost.’ Alice took the single needle from her almost roughly and made as if to close the drawer.

  ‘No, wait a minute, it’s bound to be loose in there somewhere.’

  ‘I’m sure it isn’t, it’s lost. You won’t have time to start tonight, anyway.’

  Guy said, ‘I don’t see how you could lose one knitting needle.’

  ‘In a train,’ said Pamela, peering into each needle packet. ‘It could fall down the side of the seat and before you could get it out you’d be at your station.’

  ‘Alice never goes in trains.’

  ‘I suppose you could use it to unblock a drainpipe?’

  ‘You’d use a big fat one for that. Now if this situation happened in one of my books I’d have it that the needle was a murder weapon. Inserted into the scalp of a person who was, say drugged or drunk, it would penetrate the covering of the brain and the brain itself, causing a subdural haemorrhage. You’d have to sharpen the point a bit, file it maybe, and then of course you’d throw it away afterwards. Hence, you see, only one number fourteen needle in the drawer.’

  ‘And immediately they examined the body they’d find out,’ said his wife.

  ‘Well, you know, I don’t think they would. Did you know that almost all men over middle age have enough signs of coronary disease for a pathologist, unl
ess he was exceptionally thorough, to assume that as the cause of death? Of course your victim would have to have a good head of hair to cover up the mark of entry . . .’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, let’s change the subject,’ said Pamela, closing the drawer, for she had noticed that Alice, perhaps because of that tactless reference to coronaries, had gone very white and that the hands which held the wool were trembling.

  But she managed a smile, ‘We’ll buy you a pair of number fourteens tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and perhaps I’ll start on something new as well. My mother always used to say that the devil finds work for idle hands to do.’

  Front Seat

  Along the sea front, between the pier and the old town, was a row of wooden seats. There were six of them, regularly spaced on the grass, and they faced the dunes, the sea wall, and the sea. To some people, including Mrs Jones, they were known by name as Fisher, Jackson, Teague, Prendergast, Lubbock and Rupert Moore. It was on this last, the one that was curiously known by the Christian as well as the family name of the man it commemorated, that Mrs Jones invariably chose to sit.

  She sat there every day, enjoying the peace and quiet, looking at the sea and thinking about the past. It was most pleasant on mild winter days or on those days of summer when the sky was overcast, for then the holiday visitors stayed in their cars or went off to buy prawns and crabs and expensive knick-knacks. Mrs Jones thought how glad she was that last year, when Mr Jones had been taken from her, she had bought the house in the old town, even though this had meant separating herself from her daughter. She thought about her son in London and her daughter in Ipswich, good loving children that they were, and about her grandchildren, and sometimes about her good fortune in having a comfortable annuity as well as her pension.

  But mostly, sitting on Rupert Moore, between Fisher and Teague, she thought about the first man in her life to whom even now, after so long, she always referred to as her darling. She had so accustomed herself to calling him this that to her the endearment had become his name. My darling, thought Mrs Jones, as some other old woman might have thought of John or Charlie or Tom.