A Spot of Folly

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Quiet and peaceful!’ he said.

  She linked her arm through his and touched his cheek with one gentle finger.

  ‘I don’t want to be a gadabout all the time, Geoffrey, and I’ve never been very wild. Don’t you like me the way I am?’

  He put his arms round her, emotion almost choking him. ‘I love everything about you. I must be the luckiest man in London.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Philip when, two hours later, Marion resumed her praises of the garden. ‘It is peaceful. I used to sit out there a lot last summer, working on my book, Great-Grandfather’s London. I’ve passed many a happy hour in that garden.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re practically a great-grandfather yourself,’ Geoffrey retorted. ‘I want Marion to go out with her contemporaries.’

  ‘Very few of her contemporaries can afford to live in Palomede Square, Geoff. But I’m glad you like it, Marion. I’m thinking of writing a book about the square itself. I’ve unearthed some fascinating stories and a lot of famous people have lived here.’ Philip named a poet, an explorer and a statesman. ‘These houses were built in 1840 and I think that 130 years of comings and goings ought to make a good read.’

  ‘I’d like to hear some of those stories one day,’ said Marion.

  In her long black skirt she looked like a schoolgirl dressed up for charades. She must get out and buy clothes, Geoffrey thought, spend a lot of money. He could afford it.

  Philip had begun to read from his manuscript and during the pauses, while Marion asked questions, Geoffrey thought – perhaps because they had all been mentally transported back more than 100 years – of those Victorian dresses which were once more so fashionable for the very young. He imagined Marion in one of them, a ruched and flounced gown with a high, boned collar and long puff sleeves. In his mind’s eye he saw her as a reincarnation of a nineteenth-century ingenue crossing the square, her blonde hair combed high, walking with delicate tread toward the garden.

  Smiling at Philip, nodding to show he was still listening, he got up to draw the curtains. But before he pulled the cords, he looked out beyond the balcony to the empty square below, with its lemony spots of lamplight and its neglected, leafy, umbrageous centre. Between the canopy of the ilex and the dusty yellow-spotted laurel he made out the shape of the stone cable and, beside it, the seat that looked as if it had never been occupied.

  The corners of the garden were now deep caverns of shadow and nothing moved but a single leaf which, blown prematurely from the plane tree, scuttered across the sour green turf like some distracted insect. He pulled the curtain cords sharply, wondering why he suddenly felt, in the company of his loved wife and his old friend, so ill at ease.

  ‘How was your driving lesson, darling?’

  ‘It was nice,’ she said, smiling up at him with a kind of gleeful pride. ‘He said I was very good. When I came back I sat in the garden learning the Highway Code.’

  ‘Why not sit on the balcony? If I’d been at home today I’d have sunbathed all afternoon on that balcony.’

  She said naively, ‘I do wish you could be home all day,’ and then, as if feeling her way with caution, ‘I like the garden best.’

  ‘But you don’t get any light there at all. It must be the gloomiest hole in London. As far as I can see, no one else uses it.’

  ‘I’ll sit on the balcony if you want me to, Geoffrey. I won’t go in the garden if it upsets you.’

  ‘Upsets me? What an extraordinary word to use. Of course it doesn’t upset me. But the summer’s nearly over and you might as well make the best of what’s left.’

  While they had been speaking, standing by the windows which were open onto the balcony, she had been holding his arm. But he felt its warm pressure relax and when he looked down at her he saw that her face now had a vague and distant look, a look that was both remote and secretive, and her gaze had travelled beyond the balcony rail to the motionless treetops below.

  For the first time since their wedding he felt rejected, left out of her thoughts. He took her face in his hand and kissed her lips.

  ‘You look so beautiful in that dress – sprigged muslin, isn’t it? – like a Jane Austen girl going to her first ball. You didn’t wear that for your driving lesson?’

  ‘No, I changed when I came in. I wanted to put it on before I went into the garden. Wasn’t that funny? I just had this feeling I ought to wear it for the garden.’

  ‘I hoped,’ he said, ‘you were wearing it for me.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, and now he felt that she was with him once more, ‘I can understand it upsets you when I go into the garden. I quite understand. I know it could affect some people like that. Isn’t it strange that I know? But I won’t go there again.’

  He didn’t know what she meant or why his simple distaste for the place – a reasonable dislike that was apparently shared by the other tenants – should call for understanding. But he loved her too much to bother with it, and the vague unease he felt passed when she told him she had telephoned one of her bridesmaid friends and been invited to a gathering of young people. It gratified him that she was beginning to make a life of her own, planning to attend with this friend a course of classes. He took her out to dinner, proud of her in her flounced lilac muslin, exultant at the admiring glances she drew.

  But he awoke in the night to strange terrors which he couldn’t at first define. She lay with one arm about his shoulders but he shook it off almost roughly and went quickly to get a glass of water as if, distressingly, mystifyingly, he must get away from her for a moment at all costs.

  Sitting in the half-dark drawing room, he tried to analyze this night fear and came up with one short sentence: I am jealous. Never in his life had he been jealous before and the notion of jealousy had never touched their marriage. But now in the night, without cause, as the result of some forgotten dream perhaps, he was jealous. She was going to a party of young people, to classes with young people. Why had he never before considered that some of those contemporaries whom he encouraged her to associate with would necessarily be young men? And how could he, though rich, successful, though still young in a way, compete with a youth of twenty?

  A sudden impulse came to him to draw back the curtains and look down into the garden, but he checked it and went back to bed. As he felt her, warm and loving beside him, his fears went and he slept.

  ‘That’s a very young chap teaching Marion to drive,’ said Philip who worked at home all day, gossiped with the porters and knew everything that went on. ‘He doesn’t look any older than she.’

  ‘Really? She didn’t say.’

  ‘Why should she? He won’t seem young to her.’

  Geoffrey went up the steps. He had forgotten his key.

  ‘Is my wife in, Jim?’ he said to the head porter. ‘If not you’ll have to open up for me.’

  ‘Mrs Gilmour is in the garden, sir.’

  ‘In the garden?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Madam’s spent every day this week in the garden. The gardener’s no end pleased about it, I can tell you. He said to me only this morning, “The young lady” – no disrespect, sir, but he called her the young lady – “really appreciates my garden, more than some others I could name.”’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Geoffrey as he and Philip went down into the square. ‘I really don’t. She promised me she wouldn’t go there again. I honestly do think she might keep the first promise she’s made to me. It’s a bit bloody much.’

  Philip looked curiously at him. ‘Promised you she wouldn’t go into the garden? Why shouldn’t she?’

  ‘Because I told her not to, that’s why.’

  ‘My dear old Geoff, don’t get so angry. What’s come over you? I’ve never known you to get into such a state over a trifle.’

  Through clenched teeth Geoffrey said, ‘I am not accustomed to being disobeyed,’ but even as he spoke, as the alien words were ground out and Philip stood still, thunderstruck, he felt the anger that had overcome him without a
ny apparent will of his own seep away, and he laughed rather awkwardly. ‘God, what a stupid thing to say! Marion!’ he called. ‘I’m home.’

  She had been sitting on the seat, a book on the table in front of her. But she hadn’t been reading it, for although it was open, the pages were fast becoming covered with fallen leaves. She turned a bemused face toward him, blank, almost hypnotized; but suddenly she seemed to regain consciousness. She picked up her book, scattered the leaves, and ran toward the gate.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone into the garden,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to but it looked so lovely and I couldn’t resist. Wasn’t it funny that I couldn’t resist?’

  He had meant to be gentle and loving, to tell her she was always free to do as she pleased. The idea that he might ever become paternalistic, let alone autocratic, horrified him. But how could she talk of being unable to resist as if there were something tempting about that drab autumnal place?

  ‘I really don’t follow you,’ he said. ‘It’s a mystery to me.’ If tempered with a laugh, if accompanied by a squeeze of her hand, his words would have been harmless. But he heard them ring coldly and – worse – he felt glad his reproof had gone home, satisfied that she looked hurt and a little cowed.

  She sighed, giving the garden a backward glance in which there was something of yearning, something – was he imagining it? – of deceit. He took her arm firmly, trying to think of something that would clear the cloud from her face, but all that came out was a rather sharp, ‘Don’t let’s hang about here. We’re due at my cousin’s in an hour.’

  She nodded compliantly. Instead of feeling remorse, he was irritated by the very quality that had captivated him, her childlike naivety. A deep and sullen depression enclosed him, and while they were at his cousin’s party he spoke roughly to her once or twice, annoyed because she sat silent and then, illogically, even more out of temper when she was stirred into a faint animation by the attentions of a boy her own age.

  From that evening onward he found himself beginning to look for faults in her. Had she always been so vague, so dreamy? Had that idleness, that forgetfulness, always been there? She had ceased to speak of the garden. All those jaded leaves had fallen. The thready plane twigs hung bare, the evergreens had dulled to blackness, and often in the mornings the stone table, the seat and the circle of grass were rimed with frost. The nights drew in at four o’clock and it was far too cold to sit in the open air.

  Yet when he phoned his home from his office, as he had increasingly begun to do in the afternoons, he seldom received a reply. Nothing had come of that plan to go to classes and she said she never saw her friend. Where, then, was she when he phoned?

  She couldn’t be having daily driving lessons, each one lasting for hours. He might have asked her but he didn’t. He brooded instead on her absences and his suppressed resentment burst into flames when there was no dinner prepared for their guests.

  ‘They’ll be here in three-quarters of an hour!’ He had never shouted at her before and she put up her hand to her lips, shrinking away from him.

  ‘Geoffrey, I don’t know what happened to me but I forgot. Please forgive me. Can’t we take them out?’

  ‘People will begin to think I’ve married some sort of crazy child. What about last week when you “forgot” that reception, when you “forgot” to write and thank my cousin after we’d dined there?’

  She had begun to cry.

  ‘All right,’ he said harshly. ‘We’ll take them to a restaurant. Haven’t much choice, have we? For God’s sake, get out of that bloody dress!’

  She was again wearing the lilac muslin. Evening after evening when he got home he found her in it – the dress he had adored but which was now worn and crumpled, with a food spot at the waist.

  He poured himself a stiff drink. He was shaking with anger. The arguments in her favour he had put forward when she forgot the reception – that there had been a dozen gatherings which she hadn’t forgotten but had graced – now seemed invalid in the face of this neglect.

  But when she came back into the room his rage went. She wore a dress he hadn’t seen before, of scarlet silk, stiff and formal yet suited to her youth, with huge sleeves, a tight black and gold embroidered bodice, and long skirt. Her hair was piled high and she walked with an unfamiliar aloofness that was almost hauteur.

  His rage went, to be replaced oddly and rather horribly by an emotion he hadn’t supposed he would ever feel toward her – a kind of greedy lust. He started forward, slopping his drink.

  ‘Damn, Isabella, but you’re a fine woman!’

  Incredulously, she stopped and stood still. ‘What did you say?’

  He passed his hand across his brow. ‘I said, “God, Marion, you’re a lovely girl.”’

  ‘I must have misheard you, I really thought … I feel so strange, Geoffrey, not myself at all sometimes and you’re not you. You do still love me?’

  ‘Of course I love you. Kiss? That’s better. My darling little Marion, don’t look so sad. We’ll have a nice evening and forget all about this. Right?’

  She nodded but her smile was watery, and the next day when he phoned her at three there was no reply although she had told him her driving lesson was in the morning.

  Philip looked very comfortable and at home in the armchair by the window, as if he had been there for hours. Perhaps he had. Was it possible that she was out with him, Geoffrey wondered, on all those occasions when he phoned and got no answer?

  The dress he had come to hate was stained with mud at the hem as if she had been walking. Her shoes were damp and her hair untidy. Maybe she devoted her mornings to the ‘very young chap’ and her afternoons to this much older one. The husband, he had always heard, was the last to know.

  She sat down beside him on the sofa, very close, almost huddled with him. Geoffrey moved slightly aside. What had happened to her gracious ways, that virginal aloofness, which had so taken him when he first saw her in her father’s house? And he recalled, while Philip began on some tedious story of Palomede before the square was built, how he had ridden over to Cranstock to call on her father and she had been there with her mother in the drawing room, the grey-brown head and the smooth fair one bent over their work. At a word from her father she had risen, laying aside the embroidery frame, and played to them – oh, so sweetly! – on the harpsichord …

  He shook himself, sat upright. God, he must have been more tired than he had thought and had actually dozed off. When had she ever done embroidery or played to him anything but records? And where had he got the name Cranstock from? The Craigs lived in Sapley and her father was dead.

  The brief dream had been rather unpleasant. He said sharply, ‘Anyone want a drink?’

  ‘Nothing for me,’ said Philip.

  ‘Sherry, darling,’ said Marion. ‘Did you say a manor house, Philip?’

  ‘Remember all these inner suburbs were villages in the early part of the nineteenth century, my dear. The Hewsons were lords of the manor of Palomede until the last one sold the estate in 1838.’

  His ill temper welling, Geoffrey brought their drinks. What right had that fellow to call his wife ‘my dear,’ and who cared, he thought, returning to catch Philip’s words, if some Hewson had been a minor poet or another had held office in Lord Liverpool’s government?

  ‘The last one murdered his wife.’

  ‘In that garden,’ said Geoffrey rather nastily, ‘and they took him up the road to Tyburn and hanged him.’

  ‘No, he was never brought to trial, but there was a good deal of talk and he was never again received in society. He married a wife half his age and suspected her of infidelity. She wasn’t quite sane – what we’d now call mentally disturbed – and she used to spend hours wandering in the manor gardens. They extended over the whole of this square, of course, and beyond. He accused her of having trysts there with her lovers. All imagination, of course – there was no foundation for it.’

  Geoffrey said violently, ‘How can you possibly know that? How
can you know there was no foundation?’

  ‘My dear Geoff! Because the young lady’s diary happens to have come into my hands from a great-niece of hers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t believe a word of it!’

  ‘Possibly not, but you haven’t read it. There’s no need to get so cross.’

  ‘No, please don’t, darling.’

  He shook off the small hand which touched his sleeve. ‘Be silent, Marion! You know nothing about such matters and shouldn’t talk of them.’

  Philip half rose. He said slowly, ‘And you accuse me of being Victorian! What the hell’s got into you, Geoffrey? I was simply telling Marion a tale of old Palomede and you fly into a furious temper. I think I’d better go.’

  ‘Don’t go, Philip. Geoffrey’s tired, that’s all.’ Her lips trembled but she said in a steady voice, ‘Tell us what became of Mr Hewson and his wife.’

  The historian said stiffly, ‘In the end he took her away to Italy where she was drowned.’

  ‘You mean he drowned her?’

  ‘That’s what they said. He took her out in a boat in the Bay of Naples and he came back but she didn’t. After that he was blackballed in his clubs and even his own sister wouldn’t speak to him.’

  ‘What God-awful romantic tripe,’ said Geoffrey. He was watching his wife, taking in every slatternly detail of her appearance and thinking now of the City banquet he and she were to attend in the week before Christmas. All summer during their engagement he had looked forward to this banquet, perhaps the most significant public occasion of his year, and thought how this time he would have a beautiful young wife to accompany him. But was she beautiful still? Could she, changed and waiflike and vague as she had become, hold her own in the company of those mannered and sophisticated women?

  He phoned her on the afternoon of that dim December day, for she had had a slight cold in the morning, had awakened coughing, and he wanted to be sure, firstly that she was well enough to go, and secondly that she would be dressed and ready on time. But the phone rang into emptiness.