by Ruth Rendell
“The picture of devotion,” mumbled Mrs. Gogarty. “The very picture.”
“Can you get home on your own okay?”
The big white face quivered in a nod.
“Won’t mind the dark?”
“It’s been dark,” she said, “since four,” and she held up for his inspection an amulet she wore round her neck. It wasn’t on account of marauders or the glassy pavements that the dark menaced her.
Finn covered Lena up and stayed with her through the night. Before dawn he gave her another injection and she lay quiet and almost without breath as if she were already dead. He didn’t know what a doctor would have given her, and he wasn’t going to call one. A doctor would want to have Lena committed and he wasn’t having that, besides listening curiously to her ravings about murder.
These began again in the morning. It was far too late for Finn to produce any trumped-up proofs to exonerate himself. She didn’t know him. He wasn’t her son but the fiend who had killed Queenie and who had killed since then a hundred women. She screamed so loudly that one of the people from downstairs came up and said he was calling the police if it didn’t stop.
Finn got hot milk with phenobarbitone in it down her throat. Because it didn’t work at once he forced brandy into her. He was terrified he might overdo it and kill her, but he had to silence those cries. They had been through so much together, he and she, fighting the world, exploring the unseen, approaching strange spiritual agents. She cried herself to sleep and he sat beside her, looking inscrutably at that pale twisted face, holding her big veined hand in his big hand, the nearest he had ever got to tenderness with a living creature.
On the Sunday she walked round and round the room, feeling up the walls with her fingertips as if she were blind, lifting every ornament and feeling it and sniffing it. When she was asleep he took the bird and bird-cage down to his room. She would kill the bird, twist it to death in her strong hands as she had the last one, and then break her heart over its death. He gave her phenobarbitone every day until her eyes focussed again and rested on him and a voice that was more or less normal came out of her cracked and swollen lips.
“Don’t let them take me away.”
“Come on,” said Finn. “Would I?”
She cried and she couldn’t stop. She cried for hours, tossing this way and that, burying her face in her hands, throwing her head back and forwards, crying until it seemed that all the madness had been washed away in tears.
X
“Three cheers for the Three Musketeers!” said Norman Tremlett, waving and slightly spilling his gin and tonic.
He had said this every Christmas for the past ten years and probably would say it every Christmas for the rest of his life if given the opportunity. He referred, of course, to himself, Martin, and Adrian Vowchurch. Adrian smiled his thin, tolerant, resigned smile at Norman and handed him a dish of Japanese rice crackers. Although these had been available as cocktail snacks almost as long as Martin (and therefore Norman too) could remember, Norman affected to find them an extremely avant-garde novelty, examined them clownishly, and expressed as his opinion that they were really made out of insects. Everyone knew the Japanese ate insects. His own father had been offered chocolate-covered ants while in Tokyo on a business trip.
Norman always behaved like this at parties. Nobody minded because he was basically so kind and good-natured. He and Adrian and Martin had been at school together and each, in his particular field, had later entered his father’s firm. Norman was a surveyor and Adrian a solicitor. Norman, as well as his Three Musketeers joke, sometimes called them the Triumvirate. It gave Martin considerable deep pleasure and a feeling of power to think that his closest friends were his solicitor and his surveyor, and he was sure they felt the same about him being their accountant. He handled the Tremlett and Vowchurch financial affairs, and when he had bought his flat, Norman had made the preliminary survey and Adrian had handled the conveyance.
Of the three of them only Adrian had so far married. Because of Francesca, Martin felt closer to him this year than he had done for a long time. Adrian had married a girl with a lot of family money and they lived in a smart little house in Barnsbury. They gave the sort of parties Martin liked, not too many people and nearly all people one knew, proper drinks not plonk, a buffet meal but a real one with courses. There wasn’t any loud music or dancing, and the guests stood around in groups talking. Martin couldn’t help thinking that Tim would probably be having a Christmas party and that it would be very different from this one, dark, noisy, and with goings-on it was better not to think of. Finding himself briefly alone with Adrian, Martin said on an impulse,
“There’s a girl I’d, like to bring to meet you and Julie-next time you have a party.”
“That’ll be for Julie’s birthday in March,” his thin face taking on the sharp intense look it did when he was pleased. “It’s serious?”
“About as serious as could be.” Martin looked over his shoulder. “She has to get a divorce, she’ll want to …” He was breaking their rule about never consulting each other on social occasions. “Well, I’ll get her to come along and see you, shall I?”
Adrian said very sympathetically, “Anything I can do to help, you know that. And Martin-congratulations, I’m awfully glad.”
Congratulations seemed a bit premature. They had only known each other for a month. But he was sure, he was certain that no one else would ever suit him as Francesca did. And if, before he could get her entirely as his own, there had to be a divorce and sordidness and haggling over property and maybe trouble with his family, well-he must go through it and endure it, knowing it was all worth while with Francesca at the end of it.
Russell was to take Lindsay to Cambridge by train on Friday evening, having first collected her from the nursery. Martin was going to pick Francesca up at the shop. He had wondered several times why he had queried her saying that Russell’s parents lived in Cambridge. Of course she must know where her own parents-in-law lived. It must have sounded to her as if he doubted her, as if he thought she had been lying. When he phoned her at the shop he apologised for what he had said, he couldn’t imagine why he had thought they lived in Oxford, he didn’t want her to think he was accusing her of any sort of deception. Francesca only laughed and said she had forgotten all about it, she hadn’t been in the least upset.
The weather had been growing steadily colder since Christmas, it had snowed and thawed and frozen. Mr. Cochrane, wearing a fur hat that made him look like a bespectacled Brezhnev, arrived late for him, at twenty-five to nine, announcing bitterly that he had fallen over on the ice and thought he had broken his arm. However, since he had intercepted the postman and was holding a letter in his right hand and his attache case in his left, Martin decided he must be exaggerating. Mr. Cochrane made a sling for his arm out of his woolly scarf. He didn’t mention his sister-in-law beyond uttering the single word “Terrible!” when Martin asked after her. He made a disgusted reconnaissance of the flat, running his fingers through dust on the woodwork and muttering that some folks were useless when they had to look after themselves. Martin took no notice. He was reading the letter.
Dear Mr. Urban,
I am very sad to have to tell you that my father died on December 11. He seemed quite well and in good spirits the previous evening but was found dead in his armchair when the home help came in at nine. Apparently, he had just been going through his post and your cheque was found beside him. I am at a loss to know why you should have sent my father a cheque for what seems an enormous sum to me, but I am returning it with apologies for not having sent it back sooner.
Yours sincerely,
Judith Lewis.
Martin was horrified. Had he, in effect, killed poor Mr. Deepdene with kindness? It rather looked like it. Mr. Deepdene had been seventy-four and perhaps his heart hadn’t been very sound, and although he had known the money was coming, the actual arrival of the cheque would be a different matter from hopeful, perhaps doubtful, anticipa
tion of it. Martin imagined him opening the envelope, taking out the brief one-line note, then the cheque, and his aged tired heart suddenly-what exactly did happen in a heart attack?-well, whatever it was, his heart failing and stopping with the wonderful, unbelievable shock of it, his body falling back into the armchair, the cheque fluttering from his lifeless hand …
“You want to mind how you go on that ice, Martin,” shouted Mr. Cochrane above the vacuum cleaner. “You want to watch your step, it’s very treacherous, look at my arm. I reckon I’ve dislocated something, put something out, so don’t be surprised if I don’t turn up next week, Martin.”
The death of Mr. Deepdene troubled Martin for most of the day. A client, an up-and-coming country singer, took him out to lunch, but he didn’t really enjoy himself and he didn’t feel he was being very lucid as he tried to explain, over coffee, why the cost of setting up a music room in the singer’s Hampstead home might be tax deductible while a swimming pool certainly would not be. He kept imagining Mr. Deepdene, whom he saw as small and bent and frail, reading the sum delineated on that cheque and then the pain thundering up his arm and his chest.
Was he wrong to do what he was doing or attempting to do? Was he playing God without the wisdom and experience essential to a god? All he had done with his philanthropy so far, it seemed to him, was frighten an old woman into insomnia and shock an old man to death. There was, of course, Suma Bhavnani, but for all he knew Suma Bhavnani might have died on the operating table. Yet surely his project was so simple, just to provide homes for a handful of needy people who suffered particularly from London’s housing shortage. He wrote a letter of sympathy to Judith Lewis and that made him feel better-or perhaps it was knowing that in an hour he would be with Francesca which made him feel better. Mr. Deepdene, after all, might well have had a heart attack whether he had sent him a cheque or not. He was old, past his three score and ten, and it was what people called a lovely way to go, dying like that in the midst of life …
Bloomers was glowing with flame-coloured light, its window banked with pots of pink cyclamen. Francesca came out to him, wearing the rose-velvet dress. She must have just changed, after the other girl had gone, especially for him. If it could be said that Martin disliked anything at all about Francesca, it was her clothes. Most of the time she wore jeans, flounced skirts with hems that dipped, shapeless tunics, “antique” blouses, shawls, big loose cardigans, scarves with fringes. She dressed like the hippies used to, a pair of scuffed seven-league boots poking out under a skirt of wilted flower-sprigged cotton. These things couldn’t spoil her beauty, they merely disguised it. But in the rose velvet her beauty was enhanced, you could see the fragile wandlike shape of her, her tiny waist, her long legs, and the rose colour was exactly that of her cheeks. She put her arms round him and kissed him with tenderness.
As soon as they were in the flat he gave her her Christmas present. The cut-glass bottles with the silver stoppers had come to seem inadequate somehow, so after lunch with the country singer he had bought some Ma Griffe cologne with which to fill them. It was odd, but although she admired the bottles and said they were pretty, beautiful really, she’d, never seen anything so delicate, he sensed that she was disappointed. He asked her directly, but she said no, not a bit, it was just that she hadn’t got anything for him and she felt bad about that.
After they had had dinner-steaks which he grilled and a salad which she made-he asked her if Russell would expect her to phone him, but she said she and Russell had had a violent quarrel and weren’t on speaking terms.
“It was about you, Martin. I told him I was in love with someone else.”
Martin held her hands. She came closer to him on the sofa and laid her head on his shoulder. “You’re going to leave him and get a divorce and marry me, aren’t you?”
“I want to, I don’t know …”
“There’s nothing to stop you. I love you and you say you love me …”
“I do love you, Martin!”
“You could stay here. We could go up there tomorrow and fetch your things and you need never go back there again.”
She said nothing but put her arms round him. Later, in the bedroom, he watched her undress. She seemed to have no self-consciousness about this, no false modesty, and no desire provocatively to show off. She undressed rather slowly and concentratedly, like a young child. Her body was extraordinarily white for someone with such dark hair and eyes, her waist a narrow stem, her ankles and feet finely turned. She managed to be extravagantly thin, yet curvy and without angularity. He thought of fairy girls in Arthur Rackham drawings-and then, laying her clothes on a chair, she turned her left side to him.
Her upper arm was badly bruised and there was a kind of red contusion on her forearm. But that was as nothing to the bruising on her hip, black and blue and swollen, and all down the side of her thigh to her knee.
“Francesca …!”
He could tell she wished he hadn’t seen. She tried ineffectively to cover her body with her arms.
“How on earth did that happen to you?” The explanation would never have occurred to him, he had never lived in that sort of world, if he hadn’t seen the ashamed misery in her eyes and remembered what she had said about a quarrel. “You don’t mean that Russell …?”
She nodded. “It’s not the first time. But this-this was the worst.”
He took her very gently in his arms and held the bruised body close to his. “You must come to me,” he murmured. “You must leave him, you must never go back.”
But on the following day she wouldn’t let him fetch her things from the house in Fortis Green Lane. At the end of the week-end she must go home again as they had arranged, she must be home before Russell and Lindsay returned. Martin didn’t persist. The last thing he wanted was to spoil the three precious days they had together. On Saturday afternoon they went shopping in Hampstead. Martin had never before been round dress shops with a woman and he found it boring and alarming, both at the same time. Francesca admired extravagantly a coat and dress in grey suede, a pair of tapered pants in cream leather, and a dress that seemed quite impractical to Martin, being made of transparent knife-pleated beige chiffon. Francesca didn’t notice prices, he knew that, she was naive about that sort of thing like a child in a toyshop. It crossed his mind to buy her the coat and dress, but then he saw it was three hundred pounds and he didn’t have that much in his current account. Besides, what would Russell say-what would Russell do?- if she brought something like that home with her? In the end, because she looked so wistful, he asked her to let him buy her the little short-sleeved jumper which was the latest thing to catch her fancy. Martin thought fifteen pounds a ridiculous amount to pay for it, but that didn’t matter if it made Francesca happy.
They went to the theatre and then to supper at Inigo Jones. Norman Tremlett called in unexpectedly in the morning at about ten-thirty. Francesca had only just got up and she came out of the bathroom in her dressing gown. It was very obvious she had nothing on underneath it. Martin saw with a good deal of pride and pleasure that Norman’s eyes were going round in excited circles like a dog’s following the movements of a fly. He stayed for coffee. Francesca didn’t bother to go and dress. She was quite innocent of the sensation she was causing and sat there talking earnestly about the play they had seen as if Norman were her brother or she wearing a tweed suit and a pair of brogues.
“You’re a dark horse,” Norman whispered admiringly as Martin saw him out. “I never would have thought it of you. D’you often do this sort of thing?”
Deep down, Martin rather loved being treated as a Casanova. But it wasn’t right to allow it, it was a reflection on Francesca, on her-well, virtue, if that term still had any meaning today.
“We’re going to be married.”
“Are you? Are you really? That’s perfectly splendid.” Norman hesitated on the doorstep. “At the wedding,” he said, “I suppose-I suppose you’ll have Adrian for your best man?”
Martin laughed. “It wo
n’t be that sort of wedding.”
“I see. Right. That’s fine. Only if you do need any-well, anyone, you know what I mean-well, you know where to come.”
On New Year’s Day Francesca wore the jumper he had bought her. It showed up the bruises on her arm and she wrapped herself in one of her shawls. At four o’clock she said she ought to go. She would pack her things and go and get a taxi in Highgate High Street. Russell and Lindsay would be home by six at the latest.
“Of course I’m going to drive you home, Francesca.”
“Darling Martin, there’s no need, really, there isn’t. It’s been snowing again and it’s bound to freeze tonight and you might have a skid. You don’t want to damage your nice car.”
“The taxi might skid and damage nice you. Anyway, I insist on taking you. I’m not going to be put off this time. Russell won’t be there to see us arrive if that’s what worries you. I’m going to drive you home, and if you try to stop me I shall just put you in the car by force. Right?”
“Yes, Martin, of course. I won’t argue any more. You’re so sweet and kind to me and I’m a horrid ungrateful girl.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re an angel and I love you.”
He had never thought much about the house she lived in, but now that he was going to see it he felt the stirrings of curiosity. He had probably driven along Fortis Green Lane in the past, but he couldn’t recall it. It was Finchley really, that area, borders of Muswell Hill. While Francesca was packing her case he looked it up in the London Atlas. There was no telling from that whether the district was seedy terraces, luxury suburban or given over to council housing. She came out and he helped her into the blue-and-red-striped coat with the hood.
“If I’d, known it was going to be so cold,” she said, “I’d have brought my fur.” She gave him one of her serious, very young, smiles. “I’ve got an old fur coat that was my grandmother’.s”
