by Ruth Rendell
He lay awake most of the night, thinking about her and wondering and sometimes feeling rather sick.
Lately he had been in the habit of phoning her every day, but he let the next day and the next go by without speaking to her. Francesca didn’t work on Thursdays. She had told him she spent her Thursdays shopping and cleaning the house and taking Lindsay out. Perhaps she did. He wondered if anything she had told him was true. He went to dinner with his parents, the usual Thursday night Three Bears get-together. His mother said a neighbour of hers had seen him shopping in Hampstead with a very pretty dark girl, but Martin shook his head and said she was mistaking him for someone else.
In the morning he phoned Adrian Vowchurch and explained the arrangement he had come to with Richard Gibson. Adrian gave no sign of surprise at hearing that Martin had fifteen thousand pounds to lend or that he proposed to lend it free of interest. Martin had an appointment with a client at eleven. It was while he was talking to this man that Francesca phoned. He had to promise to call her back in half an hour, and for that half-hour endeavour to quiet his excitement and his fear while he explained to the client how, if he would spend thirty days out of the country on business each year, he might get thirty-three hundred and sixty-fifths of his income free of tax. When he was alone his hand actually trembled as he picked up the receiver.
The explanation of the Annabel affair was so simple and obvious that he cursed himself for doubting her and for his three days of self-torture.
“Darling, Annabel moved away just after Christmas. She lives in Mill Hill now.”
“But they hadn’t even heard of her in any of those houses I called at.”
Her voice was soft and sweetly indulgent. “Now you called at the house where the old lady lives?”
“I just said so, and at the next two down.”
“But you didn’t call at the fourth down?”
“Is that where she lives?”
“Lived, Martin,” said Francesca. “Oh, Martin, did you really think I’d, been lying to you and deceiving you? Don’t you trust me at all?”
“It’s because we’re not really together,” he said. “It’s because I hardly ever see you. Days and days go by and I don’t see you. It makes me wonder all the time about what you’re doing and your other life. Francesca, if I put my flat up for sale and buy a house for you and me and Lindsay, would you come and live with me just till the sale went through?”
“Martin, darling …”
“Well, would you? It needn’t be for more than three months and then we could all go and live in the house. Say you will.”
“Let’s not talk about it on the phone, Martin. I’m wanted in the shop, anyway.”
He would have sent her flowers but that would have been coals to Newcastle, corn in Egypt. Instead, he took her a box of hand-made chocolates when he went to call for her at the shop on Monday. He parked the car in Hillside Gardens at a quarter to six and walked down through the cold misty dark to the shop. The grey fog in which its orange light gleamed fuzzily gave it the mysterious look of an enchanted cavern. Francesca wasn’t alone. Lindsay was with her, perched up on the counter and occupied in pulling the fronds off a head of pampas grass.
“The nursery was closed,” Francesca said. “Their heating’s broken down. I thought of phoning you-but I did want to see you even if it couldn’t be for long.”
He held her in his arms. “You’ve had a hard day. Come to me and you needn’t work, you can be at home with Lindsay all the time. I’ll buy us a house.”
“Listen,” she said, “I had a long talk with Russell. He says he’ll divorce me after two years’ separation, but the trouble is Lindsay. Russell adores her. You have to understand that. And he says-he says”-her lips trembled and she had difficulty in bringing out her next words-“that if I-take her to live with you-he’ll ask the divorce judge for custody of-of her-and-and-he’d, get it!”
“Francesca, I think that’s nonsense. Why would he?”
“He knows about these things, Martin. He’s studied the law.”
“I thought he was a history teacher.”
“Well, of course he is, but he’s studied the law as well. He says he’s been as much a mother to Lindsay as I have, fetching her from the nursery and getting her tea and putting her to bed, and he says the judge would see he could look after her on his own like he often has, and he’d, be leading a moral life while I’d, be taking her to live in two rooms with my lover!”
Lindsay threw the pampas grass on to the floor and began whimpering. Francesca started to say more about what Russell would do if she took his child to live under Martin’s roof, but Lindsay stamped across the counter and pinched her mother’s lips together. She said to Martin, though not in a friendly way,
“We’re going home in a taxi.”
“Francesca, let me drive you home. You’ll never get a taxi out there, and the fog’s getting thicker.”
“Really, no, Martin.” Francesca struggled and mumbled like Papageno with his padlock. “Stop it, Lindsay, I’ll put you on the floor.”
“But why won’t you let me drive you? We’ll be there in ten minutes.” Martin hesitated. “Anyway, think of me, it would give me ten minutes of your company.”
“I want to see my daddy,” said Lindsay.
“Is it Russell seeing me that worries you? I promise to drop you a hundred yards from the house. How’s that?”
“All right, Martin,” said Francesca in the sweet meek voice he loved. “You drive us home. I don’t mean to be ungrateful, it’s very very kind of you.”
XII
The drive took much longer than ten minutes because of the dense fog. The sky itself, smoky, choking, gloomy white, seemed to have fallen through the dark on to the upper reaches of Highgate. Each car was guided by the tail lights of the one in front, lights that looked as if their feeble glow came through cloudy water.
Lindsay sat on Francesca’s knee, helping herself to chocolates out of the box Martin had brought. She liked most of the flavours but not violet cream or liqueur cherry, and when she had taken a bite out of these she pushed the remains into Francesca’s mouth. Silver paper went all over the floor of Martin’s nice clean car.
Francesca could see Martin was offended at this cavalier treatment of his present, but she didn’t care about that. He didn’t like Lindsay and he showed it, and to Francesca this was so monstrous that whenever she felt like giving the whole business up and just getting out or telling the truth, she thought of how he looked at and spoke to Lindsay and she hardened her heart and went on. He was looking at her like that now while they were stopped at a red traffic light. It was the kind of look a polite host gives to a guest’s uninvited dog.
“You see, Martin, she’d, soon make a mess of your lovely tidy flat.”
“Maybe, but things would be different if we had a house. We could have a big kitchen and a playroom; we’d, have a garden. Look, I can see that’s valid, what you said about it’s not being right to let your child sleep on a couch in the living room. So suppose I put the flat on the market tomorrow and start to look for a house for the three of us and you stay with Russell just until the house is ready to move into. How does that sound?”
“I don’t know, Martin.”
“Well, darling, will you think about it? Will you, please, because I ask you and I want it so much? You see, I don’t know what else to suggest. You do want to come and live with me, don’t you?”
It was so cold and foggy and she had a long awkward journey ahead of her. She hadn’t the nerve to say no. She touched his arm and smiled.
“Well, then. You won’t live with me at the flat and you won’t come and stay there with me till we can get a house, so I’m asking you to think about this idea. Will you think about it, darling?”
“I really don’t think I’ll ever …” Francesca started to say when Lindsay clamped a chocolate-smeary hand over her mouth. She didn’t have to finish because Martin was parking the car. They had arrived.
&n
bsp; She put Lindsay out on to the pavement and got out herself. It was very cold and wet out there, rain penetrating the fog in large icy drops. Martin wanted her to kiss him so she put her head back in through the window and held up to him red lips that a raindrop had already splashed.
“I’ll phone you in the morning, Francesca.”
“Yes, do,” said Francesca vaguely. She was holding on to Lindsay with one hand and clasping the chocolate box against herself with the other. Lindsay was pulling and stamping.
“And you’ll have come to a decision? You’ll decide it’s yes, won’t you?”
Francesca had more or less forgotten what she was meant to be deciding. Again she said she didn’t know, but she managed a radiant smile, keeping her options open. Martin drove off waving, though with that hurt look on his face which so exasperated her.
When the car was out of sight she started to walk along Fortis Green Lane in the opposite direction to that which Martin had followed. He had put them down outside number 26 and when they reached 54, Francesca stopped for a moment and looked curiously at the house. It was unlit. On its doorstep was a bottle of milk with a cover over it to stop birds pecking at the cream.
“Mummy carry,” said Lindsay.
“Must I?”
“Must. Lindsay carry sweeties.”
“That’s an offer I can’t refuse.”
Francesca picked her up and Lindsay gave her a wet sticky kiss on the cheek and waved the chocolate box about. Perhaps it would be a good idea to turn up Hill Avenue? Francesca rejected it and tramped on. The pavement was coated with greyish-black, soupy, liquid mud that splashed up her legs. She realised that what she had thought was rain was in fact condensed fog dripping from the tall bushes in front gardens. She felt like one of those women who abound in Victorian fiction, women who are discovered at the beginning of a chapter wandering over heaths or stumbling along city streets at night and in the most inclement weather with a child in their arms. Very likely she looked like one of them too in her lace-up boots and long skirt and woolly shawl wound round her head and her grandmother’s old fur coat, spiky and dewed with drops of fog. In spite of the cold and the heavy weight of the little girl and her own tiredness, Francesca suddenly laughed out loud.
“Not funny,” said Lindsay crossly.
“No, it isn’t, you’re quite right, it isn’t a bit funny. You’ll find out when you’re grown-up that we don’t always laugh just because things are funny. There are other reasons. I must be mad. Why did I let him bring us up here, Lindsay? I suppose I was so utterly pissed-off with seeing that look on his face. One thing I do know, I’m not going to see him any more. I’m not going on with it, this is the end, this is it. And Daddy can go-go jump in a pond!”
“Lindsay wants Daddy.”
“Yes, well, he won’t get home till after we do even at this rate, so shut up. I want my daddy, I want my daddy, you’re a real pain sometimes.”
“I want my daddy,” said Lindsay. She screwed up a chocolate paper and threw it into someone’s garden.
“We’re going to have a bus ride first. You’ll like that, you never go on buses. Come on, hoist up a bit. Can’t you sort of sit on my hip?”
Lindsay replied by dropping the box and pinching Francesca’s lips together. Francesca picked up the box which was now much splashed with mud and growled through Lindsay’s fingers and pretended to bite. Lindsay screamed with laughter, took her hand away an inch and clamped it back again.
“Come on, you crazy kid, we’ll freeze to death.”
By now they had come out into Coppetts Road and Francesca was looking about her for bus stops when a taxi, which had perhaps dropped an inmate or a visitor, came out of the gates of Coppetts Wood Hospital with its light on. The driver didn’t seem to know the whereabouts of Samphire Road, N4, even when Francesca said it wasn’t far from Crouch Hill Station, but he agreed to let her direct him. Lindsay started screaming that she’d, been promised a bus, she wanted a bus, and she made so much noise that Francesca could tell, by the back of his neck, that the driver was wincing. She stuffed Lindsay with more chocolates to shut her up and then they played the growl and snap game most of the way home. The fare was two pounds which Francesca could ill afford.
The pavements here were even stickier and more slippery than in Finchley. It was a depressed, semi-derelict region to which the taxi had brought them, a place where whole ranks of streets had been demolished to make way for new council building. Acres of muddy ground stood bare between half-dismantled ruins, and some of the streets had become mere narrow lanes running between temporary fences ten feet high. Even in the driest weather the roadways were muddy, smeared with clay from the tyres of tractors and lorries. There was an air of impermanence, of dull, unhopeful expectancy, as of the squalid old giving place to a not much more inviting new.
But Samphire Road was sufficiently on the borders of this resurgent neighbourhood for it and the streets which joined it and ran parallel to it, to be left alone. Samphire Road, with its rampart-like houses of cardboard-coloured brick, its grave-sized front gardens, its ostentatious treelessness, was to be allowed to live out its century undisturbed and survive until at least 1995. Sulphur-coloured lamplight turned the fog into just such a pea-souper as Samphire Road had known in its youth.
Francesca unlocked the front door of number 22, painted some years before the shade of raw calves’ liver, and let herself and Lindsay through an inner door into the hall of the ground floor flat. Inside it was as cold as only an old house can be that has no central heating and has been empty for ten hours, and when the month is January. It was damp as well as cold, with a damp to make you cringe. Francesca put lights on and humped Lindsay into the kitchen where she lit the gas oven and switched on an electric wall heater. Breakfast dishes were still stacked in the sink. She unwrapped Lindsay’s layers of clothes and then her own layers, spreading her fur coat over the back of a chair to dry. The two of them squatted down in front of the open oven and held out their hands to the pale bluish-mauve flames.
After a while Lindsay said her feet were cold, so Francesca went to look for her furry slippers. In the hall it was as cold as out in the street. There were only two other rooms in the flat, the front room where there were two armchairs and a dining table and a piano and a sofa that converted into a double bed, and the bedroom at the back where Lindsay slept. Francesca drew the curtains across the huge, draughty, stained-glass french windows and lit the gas fire. The gas fire had to be on for at least an hour before she could put Lindsay to bed in that ice box. The slippers were nowhere to be seen, so Francesca went into the other room (known as the sitting room but where no one could have borne to sit between November and April) and found the slippers under the piano. The bed wasn’t made. It hadn’t been made for several days and it hadn’t been used as a sofa more than half a dozen times since Lindsay was born. Lindsay said, “Where’s my daddy?” “Gone to some meeting about historic Hornsey.” “I’m not going to bed till my daddy comes.” “Okay, you don’t have to.” Francesca made her scrambled eggs and buttered fingers of brown bread. She sat at the table drinking tea while Lindsay plastered chocolate spread on bread and biscuits and even on to a piece of Swiss roll. Lindsay adored chocolate spread, they had had to take sandwiches of it for their lunch. Francesca wiped it off Lindsay’s chin and the tablecloth and the wall where a blob of it had landed. She was thinking about Martin. It was like heaven being in the flat in Cromwell Court and in that warm car and eating in the Villa Bianca. She loved comfort and luxury and longed wistfully after them, perhaps, she thought, because she had never known them, had been too busy living to look for them before. That weekend with Martin had shaken her, the warmth and ease, so that, in spite of the boredom, she had actually thought of becoming the girl he thought she was. Not just sweet and obedient and passive and clinging and Victorian, but the girl who was going to get a divorce and marry Martin and live with him forever …
“There’s my daddy,” said Lindsay.
“Hi,” said Francesca.
“Hi.” He picked up the little girl, held her in the air, then hugged her to him. “And how’s my sweetheart? How did you get on in Mummy’s shop? I bet they made you manageress.” He sang to the tune of the Red Flag, “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the boss’s job at last!”
“Oh, Tim,” said Francesca, “we’ve had an awful evening out in the sticks. Wait till you hear!”
XIII
“So I just don’t see the point of carrying on with it,” said Francesca. She and Tim confronted each other across the kitchen table and across the greasy pieces of paper and copy of the Post which had wrapped the fish and chips brought in by Tim for their supper. The kitchen was now very warm and smoky, the windows running with condensation. Lindsay had been put to bed ten minutes before. “Can I have another cigarette, please? I can’t smoke when I’m with him-it doesn’t go with the image and it nearly kills me, I can tell you.”
Tim gave her a cigarette. He frowned a little, pushing out his red lips, but he spoke quite lightly in his usual faintly ironic drawl. “Yes, but, honey, why suddenly throw your hand in now? Why now when everything is going so extremely well? I mean, even in our wildest fantasies we didn’t foresee he’d, fall for you quite so heavily. Or has he?” Tim’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe mah honey chile wasn’t being strictly truthful when she said Livingstone wanted to marry her.”
