by Ruth Rendell
and a big straw hat piled with daisies, golden tendrils curling on her forehead and escaping to hang to her shoulders. ‘Mr Wexford, I knew you would come but I’m delighted just the same. And this is Mrs Wexford? How do you do? Aren’t we lucky to have this glorious day? You must meet my husband.’ She looked about her, then scanned the horizon. ‘I don’t seem to be able to see him just at the moment. But come, let me introduce you to some very dear friends of ours that I know you’ll love.’ As one of those women who never bother much with women, she turned her full gaze on Wexford and her fullest smile, a radiant beaming from lips painted geranium with a fine brush and teeth capped to Wedgwood whiteness. ‘And who will love you,’ she added. The very dear friends turned out to be an aged man, wrinkled and shrunken, with the face of an ancient guru but dressed in denim and Western boots, and a girl some fifty years younger. Anouk Khoori, a genius at picking up and remembering names and one who swiftly dispensed with surnames, said, ‘Reg and Dora, I’ve been longing for you to meet Alexander and Cookie Dix. Cookie, darling, this is Reg Wexford who is a terribly important police chief.’ Cookie? How on earth did anyone get a name like that? She was getting on for a foot taller than her husband, dressed like the Princess of Wales at Ascot, but with waist-length black hair. ‘Is that sort of like a sherriff?’ she said. Anouk Khoori gave a long thrilling peal of laughter and on this laughter, as to a cue provided by herself, floated away. Wexford had astonished himself by his reaction to her, one of physical repulsion. But why should this be? She was beautiful, or many would say so, healthy and strong, extravagantly clean, deodorized, powdered, perfumed. Yet the touch of her hand made him shrink and her scent near him was like a foetid breath. Dora was making an effort to talk to Cookie Dix. Did she live nearby? What did she think of the neighbourhood? He could make small talk as well as anyone but he could no longer see the point. The shrunken old man stood silent and faintly scowling. He reminded Wexford of a horror film he’d watched one night when he couldn’t sleep. There had been a mummy in it which the experimenter had unwrapped, succeeded up to a point in reanimating, and brought along to just such a garden party as this one. ‘Have you seen Anouk’s diamonds?’ Cookie said suddenly. Dora, who had been talking gently about the weather in July, how it never really got warm in England until July, was surprised into silence. ‘The ones she’s wearing now cost a hundred grand alone. Can you believe that? There’s ten times that in the house.’ ‘Goodness,’ said Dora. ‘You may well say goodness.’ She bent forwards, necessarily stooping in order to push her face close to Dora’s, but instead of whispering spoke in her usual clear tones. ‘The house is hideous. Don’t you think so? Pitiful, really, they think it’s based on some Nash design for a house that was never built, but it’s not, is it, sweetness?’ The mummy barked. It was exactly what had happened in the horror film, only at this point people had dispersed screaming. ‘My husband is a very famous architect,’ said Cookie. She extended her neck and pushed her face at Wexford. ‘If we were people in a book, me telling you about the diamonds would be a clue, there’d be a robbery while we’re out here, and you’d have to question all these people. There are five hundred people here, did you know that?’ Wexford laughed. He rather liked Cookie Dix, her naive manner and her metre-long legs. ‘At least, I’d say. Still, I doubt if they’ve left the house unguarded.’
‘They have but for Juana and Rosenda.’ Unexpectedly, the mummy began to sing in a cracked tenor, to a tune from the Mikado, ‘Two little maids from the Philippines, one of them hardly out of her teens . . .’ ‘I’d have thought they’d have a staff,’ Dora said faintly. ‘They used to have another one, as a matter of fact she was the sister of our one, but the rich are so mean, haven’t you noticed? Well, darling Alexander isn’t and God knows he’s loaded.’ The mummy’s face cracked. At just such a ghastly smile the women in the movie had started screaming. ‘Mostly they have caterers in,’ said Cookie. ‘Their servants don’t stay. Well, these two do. The money’s rotten but they need it to send home.’ For some reason Cookie dropped her voice. ‘Filipinos do.’ ‘Filipinas,’ said the mummy. ‘Thank you, sweet. You’re such a stickler. I call him my stickler sometimes. Shall we go and have some tea?’ Together they walked down the green slope, deflected from the prospect of tea by the kind of sideshows considered suitable for this type of charity benefit function. A good- looking dark woman in a kind of ankle-length white sweater was conducting a raffle for Fortnum and Mason hampers. A young man in a smock with an easel and palette was doing instant portraits for a fiver a time. Under a long yellow banner with CIBACT on it in black, a man had his twin daughters on display, little fair-haired girls in white frilled organdie and black patent leather shoes with instep straps. Punters were invited to guess the age of Phyllida and Fenella and whoever came nearest to the correct birth date got the child-size white teddy bear that sat on the counter between them. ‘Vulgar, you see,’ said Cookie. ‘That’s their trouble. They don’t know the difference.’ Dora glanced at the docile children. ‘You mean the raffle is all right and perhaps the artist but not the teddy bear thing?’ ‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I mean. Sad, really, when you’ve got everything.’ At last Alexander Dix expressed himself, otherwise than in song. Wexford thought his voice what a French speaker’s would be if he had lived till the age of thirty in, say, Casablanca, and the rest of his life in Aberdeen. ‘Nothing else is to be expected when you are a child of the gutters of Alexandria.’ Presumably he was referring to Wael Khoori. Interested, Wexford was about to ask for more when something happened that always happens at parties. A couple appeared from nowhere and bore down upon the Dixes with cries of astonishment and greeting, and as also is always true, their former companions were forgotten. Wexford and Dora were abandoned, still standing in front of Phyllida, Fenella and the teddy bear. ‘Better do something for CIBACT, I suppose,’ Wexford said, producing a ten pound note. ‘What do you say? I’ll guess they’re five and their birthday was June the first.’ ‘I don’t like to look too closely. They’re not animals at Smithfield or something. I see what that Cookie meant. Oh, all right, I’ll say they’re five but they’ll be six in September, September the fifth.’ ‘Older,’ said a voice from behind Dora. ‘Six already. Probably six-and-a-half.’ Wexford turned round to see Swithun Riding. His wife looked very small beside him. There was a greater disparity in their heights than that between Wexford and Dora or, come to that, between Cookie Dix and the diminutive architect. Susan said, ‘Do you know my husband?’ Introductions were made. Unlike his son, Swithun Riding responded. He smiled and uttered the usual archaism that was once an enquiry as to another’s health. ‘How do you do?’
Wexford handed his money to the twins’ father and repeated his estimate of their age. ‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Riding. ‘Have you no children yourself?’ The question was uttered in a tone both indignant and arrogant. Good manners had swiftly fallen away. Riding seemed to imply the discovery in Wexford of a wanton and antisocial partiality to total contraception. ‘He’s got two,’ said Dora rather sharply. ‘Two girls. And he’s got a good memory.’ ‘Well, Swithun’s a paediatrician, after all,’ said Swithun’s wife in mild reproach. Her husband ignored her. A twenty pound note was handed over, no doubt as a sign of social and perhaps parental superiority, and Swithun Riding offered his estimate as six- and-a-half. ‘They were six on February the twelfth,’ he hazarded but in so firm a voice as to suggest that whatever might be Phyllida and Fenella’s official birthday, this was what their natural birthday should be. The Ridings, joined by the burly Christopher in shorts and polo shirt and a fair-haired girl of about ten, set off in the direction of a plant stall. This was enough to turn Dora in the opposite direction towards the tea tent. Tea was a lavish affair, twenty different kinds of sandwiches, scones with raspberry jam and clotted cream, chocolate cake, coffee and walnut cake, passion cake, pecan pie, eclairs, cream slices, brandy snaps, strawberries and cream. ‘Just the kind of thing I like,’ said Wexford, joining the queue. It was a very long
queue, a serpent of guests that wound round the inside perimeter of the yellow and white striped tent, and it was the kind of queue seldom seen, as different as could be from a line of dispirited ill-dressed people waiting for a bus or worse, as Wexford had seen recently in Myringham, at a dossers’ soup kitchen. The tea tent at Glyndebourne was probably the nearest you’d get to this one. He’d been there once and, uncomfortable in a dinner jacket at four in the afternoon, had lined up for smoked salmon sandwiches just as he was doing now. But there a good many like himself had dressed themselves in ancient evening clothes, dinner jackets just post-war, old women in black lace from the forties, while here it was as if a Vogue centrefold had turned into a video. Dora said the woman in front of them was wearing a suit from Lacroix while Caroline Charles dresses were thick on the ground. She added abstractedly, ‘Don’t eat the clotted cream, Reg.’ ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he lied. ‘I suppose I can have a bit of pecan pie? And a couple of strawberries?’ ‘Of course you can but you know what Dr Akande said.’ ‘Poor devil’s got more on his mind at the moment than my cholesterol count.’ All the tables in the marquee were occupied. As he had predicted, the Chief Constable was here, sitting at a table with his thin red-headed wife and two friends. Wexford quickly dodged out of the line of sight and he and Dora took their trays outside. They found themselves reduced to a low wall for seats and the top of a balustrade for a table, and were setting out the food when a voice behind Wexford said, ‘I thought it was you! I’m so pleased to see you because we don’t know anyone here.’ Ingrid Pamber. Behind her was the wild-haired Jeremy Lang, carrying a tray that sagged under its load of sandwiches, cake and strawberries. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Ingrid. ‘You’re thinking what on earth are that pair doing here up among the nobs.’ Fortunately, she didn’t know what he was thinking. If he hadn’t made it a rule long ago never to admire other women while accompanied by his wife, never to do this even in his
own thoughts, he would have been dwelling appreciatively on her pink and white skin, that hair as satiny as a racehorse’s coat, that figure and the charming tilt to her mouth. As it was, he told himself she was ten times prettier in her white top and cotton skirt than Anouk Khoori or Cookie Dix or the woman who ran the hamper raffle. Then he banished covert admiration and said that though this hadn’t been the enquiry he had in mind, how did she in fact come to be there? ‘Jerry’s uncle’s a pal of Mr Khoori. They live next door to each other in London.’ The uncle. So the uncle was real. ‘I see.’ Since Khoori’s London was unlikely to be too far distant from Mayfair, Belgravia or Hampstead, the uncle must be a rich man. Up to a little more thought-reading but this time with greater accuracy, Ingrid said, ‘Eaton Square,’ and then, ‘May we join you? It’s great to have someone to talk to.’ He introduced Dora, who said graciously, ‘Share our wall.’ Ingrid began chatting about the happiness of having a fortnight off work, all the places she and Jeremy had been to, some rock concert, the theatre at Chichester. While she talked she managed to mop up a great deal of food. How did the thin eat so much and get away with it? Girls like Ingrid, boys like this bony Jeremy shovelling in scones plastered with their own thickness in clotted cream. They never seemed to think about it, they just ate it. Better for him anyway to contemplate food and dwell on its effects than about this charming girl who was now with abundant grace and courtesy complimenting Dora on her dress. This afternoon her eyes seemed a brighter blue than ever, almost the colour of a kingfisher’s plumage. She wanted to know if they had gone in for guessing the twins’ age. Jeremy had said it was silly but she had made him have a go because she did so want to win the teddy bear. She laid her white hand on Wexford’s sleeve. ‘I’m mad about cuddly toys. I can’t remember – did we go into the bedroom when you came to the flat?’ The serpent uncoiling in the garden, that was what it was like. Graceful and courteous she might be, but poison was there too, a tiny sac of it under her tongue. Dora was looking surprised but no more than that. Jeremy, taking the second plate of passion cake, said, ‘Of course he didn’t go into the bedroom, Ing. Why would he have? There’s not room to swing a cat in there.’ ‘Or a teddy bear.’ Ingrid giggled. ‘I’ve got a golden spaniel my dad bought me in Paris when I was ten and a pink pig and a dinosaur that came from Florida. The dinosaur doesn’t sound cuddly but he is, maybe the most cuddly, isn’t he, Jerry?’ ‘Not as cuddly as me, though,’ said Jeremy and he helped himself to a brandy snap. ‘You met my uncle Wael yet?’ ‘Not yet. We spoke to Mrs Khoori.’ ‘I suppose I still call him uncle. Don’t know really. Until the other day I hadn’t spoken to him since I was eighteen. I’ll introduce you if you want.’ Neither Wexford nor Dora did much want but could hardly say so. Jeremy brushed crumbs off his jeans and got up. ‘You stay there, Ing,’ he said kindly, ‘and finish up the eclairs. You know how you love eclairs.’ Finding Wael Khoori took a long time and involved walking all the way round the outside of Mynford New Hall. Wexford spotted the Chief Constable, this time heading in the direction of some rather sophisticated coconut shies. It seemed likely that he might avoid an encounter. Jeremy said that when they arrived that afternoon he had expected a house that looked like one of his uncle Wael’s Crescent supermarkets with what he called ‘minaret things’ or else something like Abu Dhabi airport. Instead there was this boring
Simisola
Georgian place. Had Mr and Mrs Wexford ever seen Abu Dhabi airport? While Dora listened to a description of this Arabian Nights extravaganza and tourist snare, Wexford glanced up at the windows of the new house with a vague idea in mind of seeing the face of either Juana or Rosenda looking out. It was a big house for two young women to manage. Mrs Khoori didn’t look the sort of woman to make her own bed or wash up the breakfast things. There must be twenty bedrooms and no doubt bathrooms to go with them. What must it be like to be obliged to travel half across the world in order to feed your children? The sky was beginning to cloud over and above the downs had dulled to a threatening purple. A little breeze whistled out of the woodland as they began to descend the slope. Wexford disliked the idea of climbing it again, he was growing weary of this hunting for a host who by rights should have sought them out. And he was thinking of saying so, though in politer terms, when Jeremy suddenly looked round and waved to the people behind them. Three men, two of them walking arm-in-arm. It would have looked less odd, Wexford thought, if each had been in a burnous and galabeah, but all were in western clothes and one was unmistakeably Anglo-Saxon, pink-skinned, fairish, bald. The others were both overweight and tall, taller even than Wexford. Each had the handsome Semite’s face, hook-nosed, narrow-lipped, the eyes close-set. Plainly they were brothers, the younger man with a badly pock-marked brown skin, but the other’s was no darker than an Englishman’s with a tan while his hair, copious and rather long, was white as snow. He seemed about ten years older than his wife but she on the other hand might be older than she looked. The last thing Wael Khoori wanted at this moment, in the midst perhaps of some business discussion, was to be accosted by this nephew-by-courtesy and introduced to people he didn’t want to meet. This was clear from his abstracted and then mildly irritated expression. One thing, he knew Jeremy well, there had been no exaggeration there, though Wexford wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. He called him ‘dear boy’ like some Victorian godparent. They were presented to Khoori as ‘Reg and Dora Wexford, friends of Ingrid’s’, which Dora said afterwards she thought a bit much. Khoori behaved as the Royal Family are said to do when meeting strangers. But his manner as he asked his banal questions was impatient rather than gracious, he was in a hurry to get on. ‘Have you come far?’ ‘We live here,’ Wexford said. ‘Like it, do you? Pretty place, very green. Had tea yet? Have some tea, my wife tells me it’s tip-top.’ ‘Right,’ said Jeremy, ‘I might have some more.’ ‘You do that, dear boy. Kind regards to your uncle when you see him.’ To Wexford and Dora, he trotted out the old formula, ‘Nice to have met you. Come again.’ Linking arms with both companions, neither of whom had been in
troduced, he steered them away into a shrubbery as dense as a maze. Jeremy said confidingly as they walked back to the marquee, ‘Got a funny voice, hasn’t he? Did you notice? Estuary English, I suppose, and a hint of cockney.’ ‘It can’t be, though.’ ‘Well, it can actually. His brother that’s called Ismail talks the same. They had an English nanny and he says she came from Whitechapel.’ ‘So he didn’t grow up in the gutters of Alexandria?’ said Dora.
‘Where did you get that idea? His parents were quite aristocratic, Uncle William says, his dad was a Bey or a Khalifa or one of those things, and it was Riyadh. Hi, Ing, sorry we’ve been so long.’ ‘They gave the result of the competition,’ Ingrid said, ‘and I didn’t get the bear and nor did you. It was 368 got it. Well, they didn’t get it, because no one came up with the ticket. Why do people go in for things and then not look to see if they’ve won?’ Dora said they must be going and, varying Khoori’s formula, that she was very glad they had met. Wexford said goodbye. ‘We should have offered them a lift, you know. Jeremy told me they hadn’t got their car with them, it’s in for repairs.’ ‘I bet he did,’ Wexford said. That would be a fine thing, driving them back to Kingsmarkham, perhaps be invited in for a cup of tea and then have Dora in her innocence ask them round next week to spend the evening. ‘You must meet my daughter Sylvia . . .’ He could imagine it all. He took his wife’s arm affectionately. She had got out her ticket and was looking at it as they passed the twins’ stall, from which the children had disappeared, though their father – and the teddy bear – remained. ‘Three-six-seven,’ she said. ‘Missed it by one.’ She turned to look at Wexford. ‘Reg, you must either have three-six-six or three-six-eight.’ He had the winning ticket, of course he had. By some kind of awful intuition he had known it since Ingrid’s announcement. The correct answer to the question of the twins’ ages was 1 June, on which date Phyllida had been born five years before at two minutes to midnight, and 2 June, birth date of Fenella at ten minutes past. No one had come up with that and Wexford was nearest with 1 June. ‘Let me give it back. You can raffle it for the cause.’ ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ said the twins’ father nastily. ‘I’ve had as much of that bloody thing as I can stand. You take it or else I chuck it in the river and pollute the environment.’ Wexford took it. The teddy bear was as big as a child of two. He knew what he would have to do with it, wanted to do this and didn’t want to. Dora said, ‘You could . . .’ ‘Yes, I know. I will.’ They were eating again, taking Khoori’s advice and having some more tea. Most people were leaving, so they had acquired the best table, outside the marquee, under the shade of a mulberry tree. Wexford set the teddy bear on the empty chair between them. Ingrid’s brilliant eyes were wide, covetous, yearning. How could eyes which absorbed light and never gave it off produce a beam of peacock blue? Or was it of deep ice? ‘He’s yours if you want him.’ ‘You don’t mean it!’ She had sprung to her feet. ‘Oh, you’re wonderful! You’re so kind! I shall call her Christabel!’ Whoever heard of a female teddy bear? He knew what would happen next. It did – before he could get away. She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. Dora watched enigmatically. Jeremy continued eating coffee walnut cake. Ingrid’s body, which was delightfully and distressingly plump and slim at the same time, clung a little too long and a little too close to his own. He took her hands, removed them gently from his neck and said, ‘I’m glad you’re pleased.’
