by Ruth Rendell
Gravity is the force that powers the trebuchet, a great weight being attached to a pivoted beam near the heavy end. As the slender end is depressed the weight begins to rise, thus building a store of energy, and upon release the weight falls, sharply impelling upwards the long slender arm. A missile held in a sling at the end of this arm could be thrown great distances …
Such devices and engines of destruction he had written of! Stone clubs, iron blades, crossbows and battering rams, ballistae, muzzle loaders and harquebuses, flintlocks, bayonets, mines, grenades, chlorine, napalm. No nation had ever perfected a weapon and not used it.
‘Except germ warfare,’ she had said. They could talk about that, still could. ‘No country has ever used germs against another. I find that comforting.’
‘Sorry to disillusion you then,’ said Mark. ‘The Germans have. They infected the horses of Romanian cavalry with glanders in 1914.’
In the next room a child called out. Cressy. Holidaying on the island, they woke early, they wanted to be out and about. She knew her train of thought would soon change, would thankfully veer away for another twenty-four hours to immediate domestic concerns, the children, Mark, the house, the garden and the day ahead. Cressy was out of bed, sitting on the floor, the contents of the toy chest sprawled around her. She had pulled back the curtains to let the sun in and drive Tim, head and all, under a cocoon of bedclothes.
The fine weather was in its second week now. You didn’t expect it so it was all the more precious, a kind of bonus. The mainland was visible only on very clear days after rain and then as a dark blue line through which the artist has smudged his thumb. Today the horizon was lost in a pearly mist. The tiny islands, too small for habitation, lay scattered on the flat gleaming sea like fallen leaves on a sheet of marble. She looked down on to the garden, the fuchsia hedges, the roses in their second blooming, a dark purple clematis bearing so many hundreds of flowers that it hung over the wall like a curtain of tapestry, densely embroidered. Visitors marvelled at the lushness of it and had to be reminded that the west coast of Scotland was a warm place, that tropical gardens grew on Rum and palm trees at Gairloch. They forgot that the Gulf Stream came up here. Mark had written a thriller about the Gulf Stream, about a bathymetrist who found a way to divert its course and holding the countries of the Northern Hemisphere to ransom by his threats to do so. It was curious that the success of that book had enabled them to take a lease on this house and come up to stay here every July and August.
Tim surfaced from under the blankets and she took both children downstairs with her. At once the day impinged. There was the cat to be let in and the dog to be let out. Breakfast to get. Baking today and the bread to be made, kneaded, set to rise. She opened the windows, remembering the funny thing Tim had said about the air the first time they came, though they had known what he meant, that it was like spring water.
‘Can I be the one to go and wake Daddy?’
Cressy had got in first. They vied with each other for this doubtful privilege, longed for perhaps because their requests were always refused unless there were some specific reason for getting Mark up before eight.
‘No one is going to wake Daddy. He needs his sleep. He was working till late last night.’
Cressy accepted this without demur. Tim said he would like a fried egg.
‘Could you fry my cornflakes?’
‘No, I couldn’t.’
‘Why does it mean it’s going to rain when cats wash behind their ears?’
‘It doesn’t,’ said Tim.
‘Yes, it does. It always rains when Chloe washes behind her ears.’
‘She isn’t washing behind her ears now. She’s asleep.’
‘There you are,’ said Cressy. ‘That proves it.’
It was a safe place, the island, without a cliff ledge or treacherous stream, surrounded by a sea that was limpidly shallow for a great way out. There was only one other house, a granite place with turrets where Willie Strachan their landlord lived. The island belonged to Willie, everything in this small kingdom belonged to him, the white pony in the meadow and the herd of goats, the motorboat he went in to the mainland every Monday. Everything except us, said Cressy, and Chloe and Jack. Willie would walk across from the big house soon, she thought, bringing the things he had promised to get for them, fresh fruit and yesterday’s newspaper and batteries for the radio. She began to knead the bread dough, pummelling it with her knuckles and the heel of her hand, the sun falling on her in a cloak of hot brightness.
Mark walked in. He came up behind her, put his arms round her and kissed the corner of her mouth. She turned to him, smiling.
‘Isn’t it a wonderful day?’
He nodded. ‘I haven’t been in bed all this time. I’ve been down to the sea. Willie didn’t come back last night. His boat’s not there.’
‘He doesn’t always, not if the weather’s bad.’
That made Cressy laugh. Tim said, ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold? Aren’t you cold Cressy? It’s raining, it’s snowing.’
Cressy took this up with mock shivers and shouts about thunder and hailstones. They mimed sheltering from a storm, cowering and warding off imagined danger with their hands.
‘Please don’t do that!’
They were unaccustomed to their mother speaking sharply and their faces fell. They got up awkwardly.
‘I’m sorry but I don’t like to see you do that. Come along, it’s time you were off outside.’
Mark closed the door behind them. ‘That wasn’t like you, Miriam. They were only playing.’
She said nothing. She covered the bowl of dough with a cloth and set it aside to rise. Back at the window, while Mark ate his breakfast, she looked out across the sea, searching for the boat that when it came would sear across that flat gleaming sheet like a diamond scoring glass. The sky was a blue bowl filled with light. The clarity of the air was such that it was as if everything, the still trees, the roses, even the pony and the prancing dog, were made of glass, spun, blown or stretched in filaments. She had to think then, spoiling the delight of it, that glass was of all substances the most easily broken.
Mark went off to work on his new book. It was about a scientist whose spaceship entered the magnetosphere where the northern lights are produced as, so to speak, an image on a gigantic screen, and how, for enormous financial gain, he had found a way to harness the auroral atoms. All the time they had been up here they had hoped to see the aurora, for as Mark said, how could he write about it unless he had seen it? And then, last night for the first time, they had. Miriam went out into the garden, down the lawn between the fuchsia hedges, to the spot where they had stood. ‘A distinct greenish-white curtain-shaped light,’ the encyclopaedia said, or a rayed band or corona, or crimson sometimes in the poleward sky. North-east of them it had certainly been but the light had been white and very brilliant and not much more than momentary, unfurling and flooding and bathing the heavens with an enormous radiance, dying quite soon to a red glow, to darkness. Empty the sky now was and empty the sea, the sun already fiercely hot. She went on across the meadow of flowering grasses, down to the beach where the children were.
He had written his 2,000 words for the day. They had their lunch outside, going without dessert because Willie hadn’t brought the strawberries. A butterfly kept settling on Cressy’s bright-red bathing costume, hung on a bush to dry, mistaking it for a flower. Miriam said it was a Red Admiral, though it wasn’t, but velvet black with a white and scarlet pattern.
‘I suppose he’s decided to stay a day or two in Mallaig,’ said Mark. ‘That would happen just when the television’s gone wrong.’
Groans from Cressy and Tim, cries of protest.
‘We can phone the man,’ said Tim.
‘You forget that when we phone the man we have to go and fetch him or Willie does.’
‘I do wish we had a boat,’ said Cressy.
Miriam was more intent on accounting for Willie’s absence. ‘As a matter of fact I can see clouds comi
ng up on the skyline.’
Mark could too. ‘Behold, there ariseth out of the sea a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.’
She looked at him queerly. ‘Is that the Bible? Before the flood or something?’
‘I don’t think so, only rain coming to Elijah.’
And to us before the day is out, he thought later, as the hand expanded to an arm, to massive shoulders and whole bodies of cloud, at last to an amorphous coating, thick and black, hiding the sky. Inevitably up here that meant rain. If it confined the children indoors they would need television. He tried to phone the engineers on the mainland but the phone was dead. When Willie came back they could use the phone at the house.
But would he come now? By teatime the light was dim. A false dusk had come. Miriam got the children to bed and Mark walked outside. In spite of the thick crust of cloud the sea was glassily calm still, yet with a swell it seemed to rock it from beneath like water carried in an overfull dish. The weather was exactly that which preceded a summer storm except in one respect. Usually in these conditions the blossoming shrubs and plants looked brighter in colour, more intensely activated in light, so that they glowed with a pale luminosity. This evening, though, iridescence was lacking and the lilacs and reds and rich pinks leeched of colour and silky sheen, only the sea gleaming like the scaly skin of some great reptile.
Sunset would come late. He went back outside at ten but he couldn’t see a pinpoint of it, no thin streak or split in the piled cumulus. On the mainland shore were a few twinkling lights. Fallen stars, Cressy had once called them, gazing from her bedroom window. Mark, who had been feeling uneasy, was tremendously buoyed up by the sight of these fallen stars.
Going in, he said to Miriam, ‘Do you know where the radio is? There might be something on it about this freak weather.’
He felt that she clutched at that, relieved that this was why he wanted the radio. ‘It’s in the living room, in the cupboard.’
If I could get some news, he thought, I wouldn’t mind finding out what’s happening in Germany. Of course it will all have calmed down by now, these things always do. He found the radio and carried it out to the kitchen, expecting to find Miriam still there but she had gone. It was odd how the memory came to him, flashing up suddenly, triggered by he didn’t know what, of himself as a boy and the crisis over Cuban missiles at its height, and every time his father switching on for the news his mother going out of the room on some excuse. Ostriches, ostriches all. Later on, for a while, he’d gone on marches, even sat down outside the gates of some base whose name he’d forgotten – but what good did it do? Only if the great mass of the people, the majority would rise and cry with one voice, No! Only then would something be done.
But you were one of them, an inner voice uttered, and the whole is the sum of its parts. He told it to shut up and switched on the radio. There was crackling and a hissing sound, the interference that sounds like paper tearing, an ensuing silence and out of it, dear and slow, a woman’s voice:
‘Oh God, help us all …!’
That was all he was to hear. The pounding rushing noise which followed sounded as if the waves of the sea were being recorded. He went to find Miriam.
‘I got a bit of a radio play and then the battery gave out.’
She nodded. ‘Still, that’s good, isn’t it?’ It was a curious thing to say, meaningless unless you understood ostrich psychology.
‘Would you like a nightcap? There’s some rather good cognac. I had Willie get us a bottle.’
She looked at him quickly, then away. ‘I don’t think so, Mark. I’ll have a hot drink.’
Neither of them could get to sleep. It had grown cold. Mark thought of Tim and Cressy miming winter weather in the hot sun at breakfast time, an accurate prevision if ever there was one, and he got up at half-past midnight, went into their room and put extra blankets on them. The night was pitch black and on the distant coast the twinkling lights had gone out, the fallen stars had been extinguished – but there hardly would be lights at this hour. It was not at all warm in the bedroom yet a condensation that was more than a mist, that was running water drops, had formed on the window panes.
We are safe enough here, he said to himself, not specifying even in his thoughts. This will be a sanctuary, a kind of deep shelter. The aurora’s white corona flowered again in his mind’s eye, the voice emerging from torn paper, crying for God’s help fell again on his ear, but there could be no talking of those things to Miriam. While they remained unuttered they would still hover uneasily in their thin disguises, as a phenomenon of the magnetosphere, as an actress reading a part.
‘Are you awake?’
Miriam sat up. ‘Has it got very cold or is it my imagination?’
‘It’s pretty cold.’
‘I suppose it’s been raining. That would make it cold.’
‘I don’t think it’s been raining.’ He hesitated. ‘Shall we take a sleeping pill? There’s no point in lying awake.’
‘We haven’t got any sleeping pills.’
‘Well, yes, we have as a matter of fact. I got some from the doctor a while back.’
He had a look of embarrassment. She turned away her face. Everything must be all right because their lights were working. Then she remembered that their electricity supply came off Willie’s generator. Mark gave her a capsule and she swallowed it. The way sleep came was blissful, sensuous, like warm sweet milk pouring into an empty cup. She had no dreams. Afterwards, next day, she was to think that it was as if death had come already, or rather, that they were having a rehearsal for death so that they would know what it was like.
The children had to wake them up, they slept so late. The morning was dark, the sky leaden. Mark said he didn’t suppose Willie would come today either and was going on to say more, about the weather and the sea, but Miriam’s look of grim scorn, of contempt almost, silenced him. Tim and Cressy put on coats and scarves and boots and went outside. Mark felt that perhaps he should stop them, he should keep them in, but he could find no words to speak that weren’t terrifying, wouldn’t admit his fear.
He sat at the breakfast table, eating nothing. Somehow he knew Miriam had eaten nothing either, though there were crumbs on the children’s plates. They had the kitchen light on. He had said nothing since that remark about Willie and she had said nothing to him and he felt he might never speak to her again, for he couldn’t say what he wanted to, he was too afraid, and everything else seemed not worth saying. After a while she got up and put her coat on and holding the dog by his collar, went out into the garden. Mark went after her because he didn’t want to be alone.
A preternaturally high tide had washed the shores of the island during the night, leaving behind it shoals of dead fish and corpses of birds. With serious faces and in silence Tim and Cressy contemplated these hecatombs sacrificed to an unknown god. They were too cold to linger, their teeth chattering. They slipped and slithered as they climbed back up the slope, as the turf was coated with a white rime.
‘It must have snowed,’ said Tim but he didn’t think it had, for the stone-paved path was clear and dry as a bone.
‘Did snow make the fishes dead?’
‘Why do you always ask me? I don’t know everything.’
The pony lay on its side in the frosty field. Tim couldn’t see the goats anywhere and somehow he didn’t want to. That could wait for later. He had a strange new feeling, the first of its kind he had ever had, that he must stop Cressy going nearer to the pony, because of his seniority he must protect her. This was a word his parents used and now he understood it. His age of reason had started, these were its doomed beginnings.
‘Come on. Mummy said not to be long.’
They came upon their mother and father in the garden. Whatever it was that had blasted the birds and the fish had blown its cold breath on the roses. They hung down their brown and shrivelled heads. The fuchsia blossoms were encased in capsules of ice like glass beads. The Red Admiral still clung to a petal, frozen there
, glued by a white lacy adhesive of ice.
Miriam was saying over and over that frost was impossible unless the sky was clear. Mark didn’t answer her or attempt to argue about it. What did it matter, that rule of meteorology, when here the frost was? A cold windless silence prevailed. The mainland shore was no longer visible, for the sky, lowering, curdled and dark like smoke, seemed to have fallen over the horizon, making a blurred fusion of water, land and fog. Miriam, in a thin high voice, began speaking words he recognised as coming from his thesis. He heard her with horror, kneeling down on the icy ground as she spoke, putting an arm round each child, drawing them to him.
‘As the slender end is depressed the weight begins to rise, thus building a store of energy, and upon release the weight falls, sharply impelling upwards the long slender arm. A missile held in a sling at the end of this arm could be thrown great distances …’
‘Let’s go in,’ he said, though he knew that indoors it was to be no warmer and soon scarcely lighter.
In the kitchen the cat sat washing behind her ears and the dog whined softly. No sooner had Mark closed the door than the fallen heavens opened and the hail began, a crashing of ice stones that pounded upon the house, a cataract of ice plates and ice nuggets that descended on the frost-bitten garden, masking it in glittering broken glass. It was Tim who said that, peering out until it got too dark to see.
‘It’s like broken glass, the world is made of broken glass.’
‘Rain of glass,’ said Cressy, stroking the cat. ‘And that proves it. It does mean it’s going to rain.’ She hugged herself. ‘Mummy, I’m cold. ’
And Mark, who had been staring out at his deep shelter, his shelter in the deep, came away from the window and his tongue freed at last, touched Miriam’s white face, spoke into her ear:
‘This is it. They have done it.’
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