A Spot of Folly

by Ruth Rendell

  Alarmed and apprehensive, he called Philip, who was out, and then the driving school to be told that Mrs Gilmour’s instructor was out too. She couldn’t be out with both of them and yet …

  He got home by six. It was raining. A trail of wet footmarks led from the elevator to the door of their flat like the prints left by someone who has been called unexpectedly from a bath. And then, even before he saw the damp and draggled figure, still and silent in front of the balcony windows, he knew where she had been, where she had been every day.

  But instead of calming his jealousy, this revelation somehow increased it and he began shouting at her, calling her a slut, a failure as a wife, and telling her he regretted their marriage.

  The insults seemed to pass over her. She coughed a little. She said dully, remotely, ‘You must go alone. I’m not well.’

  ‘Of course you’re not well, mooning your life away in that foul garden. All right, I’ll go alone, but don’t be surprised if I don’t come back!’

  Geoffrey drank more than he would have if she had been with him. A taxi brought him home to Palomede Square just after midnight and he went up the elevator, not drunk but not quite sober either. He opened their bedroom door and saw that the bed was empty.

  There were no lights on in the flat except the hall light which he had just put on himself. She had left him. He picked up the phone to dial her mother’s number and then he thought, no, she wouldn’t go to her mother. She would go to that driver chap or to Philip.

  Philip lived in a flat in the next house. Geoffrey came down the steps into the square and was on the pavement, striding to the next doorway, when he stopped and stared into the garden. At first he thought it was only a pale tree trunk that he could see or a bundle of something dropped behind the stone table. He approached the railings slowly and clasped his hands round the cold wet iron. It was a bundle of clothes, but the clothes enwrapped the seated and utterly still figure of his wife. He began to tremble.

  She wore the lilac dress, its skirt sodden with water and clinging to the shape of her legs, and over it her mink coat, soaked and spiky like a rat’s pelt. She sat with her hands spread on the table, one gloved, the other bare, her face blank, wax-white, lifted to the rain which fell steadily upon her and dropped sluggishly from the naked branches.

  He opened the gate and went up to her without speaking. She recoiled from him but she didn’t speak either. He dragged her from the seat and brought her out of the garden and into the house, half carrying her. In the elevator she began to cough, sagging against the wall, water dripping from her hair which hung in draggles under the slackened scarf that wrapped it, water streaming down her face.

  Heat met them as he unlocked the door of the flat. Transiently, he thought as he pushed her inside, what have we come to, we who were so happy? A drunken autocrat and a half-crazed slattern. What has come over us?

  The warmth of the radiator against which she leaned made steam rise from her hair and coat. What have we come to, he thought, and then all tender wistfulness vanished, spiralling away down some long corridor of time, taking with it everything that remained of himself and leaving another in possession.

  The lamp in the square lit the flat faintly with a sickly yellow radiance. He put on no lights. ‘I demand an explanation,’ he said.

  ‘I cannot explain. I have tried to explain it to myself but I cannot.’ Beneath the coat which she had stripped off, over the soaked and filthy dress, she wore an ancient purple and black wool shawl, moth-eaten into holes.

  ‘What is that repellent garment?’

  She fingered it, plucking at the fringes. ‘It is a shawl. A shawl is a perfectly proper article of dress for a lady to wear.’

  Her words, her antiquated usage, brought him no astonishment. They sounded natural to his ears.

  ‘Where did you obtain such a thing? Answer me!’

  ‘In the market. It was pretty and I needed a shawl.’

  He felt his face swell with an onrush of blood. ‘To be more fitting for your low lover, I daresay? You need not explain why you absent yourself from my household, for I know why. You have assignations in that garden, do you not, with your paramours? With my young coachman and that scribbler fellow Sarson?’

  ‘It is not true,’ she whispered.

  ‘Do you give me the lie, Isabella? Do you know that I could have a Bill of Divorcement passed in Parliament and rid myself of you? I could keep all your fortune and send you back to your papa at Cranstock.’

  She came to him and fell on her knees. ‘Before God, Mr Hewson, I am your honest wife. I have never betrayed you. Don’t send me away, oh, don’t!’

  ‘Get up.’ She was clinging to him and he pushed her away. ‘You have disgraced yourself and me. You have committed the worst sin a woman can commit, you have neglected your duties and brought me into disrepute before my friends.’

  She crept from him, leaving a trail of water drops on the carpet.

  ‘I shall think now what I must do,’ he said. ‘I want no scandal, mind. Perhaps it will be best if I remove you from this.’

  ‘Do not take me from my garden!’

  ‘You are a married woman, Isabella, and have no rights. Pray remember it. What you wish does not signify. I am thinking of my reputation in society. Yes, to take you away may be best. Go now and get some rest. I will sleep in my dressing room and we will tell the servants you are ill so that there may be no gossip. Come, do as I bid you.’

  She gathered up her wet coat and left the room, crying quietly. The lamp in the square had gone out. He searched for a candle to light him to bed but he could not find one.

  Philip Sarson came into the porters’ office to collect his morning paper. ‘A bit brighter today,’ he said.

  ‘We can do with it, sir, after that rain.’

  ‘Mrs Gilmour not out in the garden this morning?’

  ‘They’ve gone away, sir. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘I haven’t seen so much of them lately,’ said Philip. ‘Gone away for Christmas, d’you mean?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. Seven a.m., they went. I’d only just come on duty.’ The head porter looked disapproving. ‘Mr Gilmour said she was ill but she could walk all right. Tried to get into the garden, she did, only he’d taken the key away from her. She got hold of the gate and he pulled her off very roughlike, I thought. It’s not the sort of thing you expect in this class of property.’

  ‘Where have they gone? Do you know?’

  ‘They took his car. Italy, I think he said. Yes, it was. I saw Naples on their luggage labels. Are you all right, sir? All of a sudden you look quite ill.’

  Philip made no reply. He walked down the steps, across the square, and looked through the railings into the garden. A small white glove, sodden and flat as a wet leaf, lay on the seat. He shivered, cursing the writer’s imagination that led him into such strange and improbable fancies.

  In the Time of his Prosperity

  The pyramid was separated from the lawn by a sheet of water, its reflection doubling it, adding a triangle to a triangle, with nothing between but a long, thin tongue of green. But while the pyramid was still as a rock, its image trembled when a breeze touched the water and dimpled the surface. Behind were trees, a dense screen of them, between the grey, step-sided stone temple and the sky.

  Temple was Paul Hazlitt’s word for it. Even then he called it that. It was four-sided, and each side took the form of a flight of nine deep steps. On the side facing him, the steps were bisected by a staircase, steep and composed of many treads, which led up to a stone house on the top, a mausoleum or an altar. It looked very old, as if it had stood there since ancient times, yet there was no moss on its northern aspect and no lichen on its roof.

  He gazed at the reality and at its quivering silvery image, and saw what he had not at first noticed, two little islands in the lake, one with a tree growing on it, one bare and green. A small rowing boat was moored at the nearer shore. The temple’s reflection shook with sudden violence as a gust o
f wind snatched at it. Paul exclaimed aloud. The man who was to employ him, the man on whose account he was there, said, ‘If the pyramid of Tezcatlipoca impresses you, come into the house and I will show you wonders.’

  All this I knew from the first, because it is recorded in Paul’s diary, though to call it a diary is to aggrandize it. It was small and thin, with a space three inches by one-and-a-half allotted for each day. The account of Paul’s arrival at Mandate Benedict is the longest entry, one of only three to hold more than the bare details of an appointment or a comment on the weather.

  It seems to have been the first he ever kept, this black, leather-bound book for the year 1963. My father gave it to him because it was one of seven that had come in the post that Christmas. A diary for me, a diary for each of my brothers. I don’t know what happened to the rest except for the one that went to Paul. I remember his effusive thanks, his disproportionate pleasure, but he was like that, ardent, enraptured by small things. He had come down from Oxford six months before and was living with us in London, looking for a job.

  His grandmother died about that time. He went up north and was with her for a week before her death. She was the last close relative he had, for his parents were long dead, and we were distant enough, my father his second cousin and the rest of us, of course, removed even further. That winter he settled down with us and became part of our family.

  He had an art-history degree and was supposed to be clever. I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. ‘Handsome, not beautiful,’ my mother said. ‘A man can’t be beautiful.’

  But Paul was. His face had the sweetness of a girl’s and the firm regularity of a man’s. He was dark and his eyes were dark blue. He was tall and slender and straight-backed, but the most remarkable thing about his appearance – and I remember this clearly after what is, after all, quite a long time – was its flawlessness.

  It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? This is a man of twenty-two I am talking about. Perhaps it is tasteless to quote this now but I must. I must use those words and say that he was ‘without a single corporal blemish’. Of course, I don’t precisely know this, I never saw him totally naked, but I did see him in swimming trunks one day when we all went to the pool, and I watched him for a long time as, after coming out of the water, he lay on a towel in the sun. There were no scars on his body. That in itself is not unusual – there are none on mine – but Paul had no moles, either, not one.

  These days he could have worked as a model, as a way of making a living before something more suited to his gifts came along. His grandmother had left him nothing. If there had been any insurance money from his parents’ deaths, it was all gone by then. But in those days modelling was for girls to do, not men. And Paul seemed unaware of his looks. I never saw him glance covertly into a mirror; he took no special trouble over his appearance.

  He had a beautiful speaking voice. I would have liked him to read aloud to me but I lacked the courage to ask him. Sometimes he played our Bechstein, though he always denied his ability when we praised him, and he never sat down at the piano without first being asked or asking permission. His manners were gentle. I never saw him lose his temper.

  I have made him out a paragon, but this he was not, as we were all soon to realize. Even then we knew he was secretive, carefully keeping to himself what he did when out of our sight, telling us he was going out but not where he was going. He was secretive and a little sly, but he was not very subtle about it. Even then I understood that he expected people to believe whatever he told them. I suppose he was naive. Perhaps young people still were at that time, for isn’t 1963 called the year when sex was discovered? He called my parents ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’. If he never actually used adjectives like ‘ripping’ and ‘super’, I once heard him say after some outing or gathering that he had had a smashing time. The diary – I had better call it that – has the entry for 10 February, ‘Fantastic Sunday lunch at Auntie Joan’s!’ and for 8 March, ‘A real job offer, can’t believe my luck!’ He was liberal throughout with that mark of exclamation journalists call the ‘screamer’. You could hear it in his speech, too, in his enthusiasms and his fervour.

  But the job, I must get back to that. He already had one, of sorts, in a gallery in Vigo Street, where he was paid a little if he sold a painting and nothing if he did not. For all that, my father said that what Declan Roche did was unethical, to go into the Peacock Gallery and pretend to buy a picture when his true purpose was to tempt away an employee. Tempt him first with an invitation to dine, for after hum-ing and ha-ing over this painting (of a jaguar hunt somewhere in Central America) and eyeing Paul openly all the while, Roche had asked him to have dinner with him that evening. Even I, and I was six years younger than Paul, would have seen through that one. But in the event I would have been wrong, for Roche appeared as innocent as Paul himself, and more open.

  The offer he made was genuine and was enticing enough: For making an inventory of certain artefacts Paul would receive a real salary, as much as the curator of the Peacock was paid, and perquisites that seemed unbelievable: a flat, the use of a car. The disadvantage was that the contract was only for one year, from April to April, but as my mother said, it might well be extended if Paul ‘gave satisfaction’.

  That expression of hers, absurd, with a faintly lewd connotation, yet old-fashioned, stuck in my mind to surface again years later when I met Rosie Thornton. To make me ask myself, did he give satisfaction? And what kind of satisfaction might that have been?

  But it was a long time before I asked those questions, before any speculations were made about Paul except the aggrieved kind: Why did he do it? What made him change? For we were offended. We were hurt. My father had given him the hospitality of his house for months, my mother had fed him, my brothers had befriended him, and as for me – I suppose I had had a powerful teenage crush on him. And he had repaid us by writing my father two short letters and by fleeing to Mexico as soon as his contract with Roche came to an end.

  Instead of the phone call to tell us he was leaving, instead of the postcard, came the diary. Paul had left it behind at Mandate House and Roche had sent it on. His accompanying letter presupposed that we knew where Paul was and when he had gone, but it also made excuses for his former employee. It was only natural, Roche wrote, that Paul, after his experience at Mandate House and with a year’s salary of which he had spent very little, should wish to go off and see the remains of the Aztec civilization for himself.

  ‘He might have let us know,’ my mother said.

  And my father spoke those words that are some of the saddest in the language. ‘We were mistaken in him.’

  It seemed so unlike Paul. Had the warmth all been a sham, then? Under the gentle manners and the sweetness, for there is no other word for it, under the impetuous delight taken in quite ordinary things, the bubbling fervour and the simple joy, had there been a cynical opportunist who used us and cast us aside when our usefulness was over? That kind of thing is always hard to take, no less hard when you are middle-aged than when you are as young as I was. We want gratitude, even when we say we don’t expect it.

  My parents ignored the diary. Why send it to them? To keep it for a man who might come back one day or might not? In any case, they wouldn’t have dreamt of reading it. They wouldn’t have read anyone’s diary. I was less honourable. One day I found it on my father’s desk, and it was then that I came upon that longest entry, the one about the pyramid reflected in the lake and Roche promising to show Paul wonders. I was seventeen by then and I should have known better, but I succumbed to temptation. I found the letter written to my father in May and the letter written in August and I read those, too. My excuse must be that I had been in love, in the throes of first love, and rejection made me sore at heart.

  The only other entries in the diary that were more than bare memoranda were devoted to descriptions of the objects in Roche’s house. Some of the objects, that is, for as Paul points out at once, the collection was vast, it fi
lled whole big rooms of this big house, priceless artefacts crowded or even tumbled together like junk in an attic. It was his task to set them in some sort of order, to catalogue them, to arrange them. In the first letter he wrote to my father he lists some of them more precisely: the fifteenth-century skull carved from rock crystal – ‘like glass, like contemporary work in glass’ – the figurine of the Goddess of the Jade Petticoat, the jade plaques, the carved yoke that was an accoutrement of Tezcatlipoca, God of the Smoking Mirror, the clay cups, the palmate stone of the sacrificed man. But above all he names the greatest of Roche’s wonders, the Mandate Codex.

  It meant nothing to me then. This was years before I married Michael and came to live here at this university and learned from my husband something about those things. I barely knew what a codex was and would very likely have defined the word as meaning ‘cipher’ or ‘system’. I skimmed through what Paul said about it and passed on to his trivial daily entries: ‘Rained all day,’ ‘Started to learn Nahuatl!,’ ‘Spanish improving,’ ‘Went into Exeter with D.R. and Andrew,’ ‘Hair quite long! As fashion decrees!,’ ‘Rain has come back.’ In the August letter are more details of the collection, identified and specified in his catalogue. His handwriting was beautiful, too, small but not too small, shapely, mature, a fit vehicle to describe the ceramic flutes, the mantles of agave fibre, a feathered serpent in stone, a monkey vase in obsidian. And he was learning the flute, something apparently he had always wanted to do, for unfortunately there was no piano in Mandate House, and he must have music. His Spanish teacher, Rafael, was also a virtuoso on the flute. Everyone was tremendously nice to him, it was not a place in which to be lonely, he was scarcely if ever alone …

  No more letters came, not even a postcard. The nearest we got to news of Paul, and it was not very near, was a profile of Declan Roche than appeared in a Sunday newspaper. He was sixty-five then, unmarried, though he had had three wives, from the last of whom he was divorced in 1960. Paul was mentioned as the ‘young art historian’ who had set Roche’s ‘fabulous collection of Inca antiquities’ – even in those days I knew they had got that wrong – in the order in which it could be seen at the present time.