The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  “This may be particularly true,” put in Burden, “when the flattered looks free and independent, self-supporting and successfully feminist, and the flatterer is disturbed, dependent, always seeking role models and someone to adore.”

  “I see evidence of that psychology course Freeborn made you take.”

  “Maybe, and why not?”

  The barman came back with their order and two packets of a different variety of crisps. “On the house, gentlemen,” he said kindly. “I see you’ve drawn the curtains. Shut out the floods, eh?”

  “Floods?”

  “The river’s rising just like it did in the winter. Those old curtains haven’t been drawn since they went up in 1972 and it shows, doesn’t it?”

  Wexford shut his eyes. “I just hope my garden’s all right.” He waited till the barman had gone back to his coach party. “Still, as far as I know we’ve still got the sandbags. To return to Joanna, she didn’t know of Giles’s existence at that time, just that Katrina had two children. Katrina gave up being school secretary and now neither of them was at Haldon Finch but they went on seeing each other and eventually Joanna went to Katrina’s house.”

  “I take it that all this time Joanna was managing to indulge her sexual tastes with young boys? These were the ‘men’Yvonne Moody had seen going to the house and they had ostensibly come there for private tuition?”

  “That’s right. Then, at Antrim, Joanna met Giles Dade. He was fourteen at the time but that wasn’t too young for her. A stumbling block was his commitment to religion, first to the Anglicans, then to the Church of the Good Gospel. But Joanna had offered her services to the Dades as a child-sitter, the best possible way she thought she could get to know Giles. Oddly, like a lot of teachers, she wasn’t very good with children. Sophie disliked her from the first, Giles, in the grip of religious mania, simply wasn’t much interested, and Joanna did nothing to win their trust or their affection. I gather she just gazed at Giles and started touching him, his arm or his shoulder or running a finger down his back, and he didn’t understand what on earth it meant.

  “That was one of her problems. Another was that though the Dades occasionally went out in the evenings they never went away overnight. Joanna simply wasn’t getting anywhere and her suggestion to Roger Dade that his son might like to come to her for private tuition also failed. Dade might be a bully and a tyrant, but he recognized a good brain when he came across one. In this case, two. He knew both his children were academically clever—in a way he never had been— and perhaps he was even stricter because of this, he was determined their talents wouldn’t be wasted, they must be encouraged to get on. But not with Joanna Troy. Her services simply weren’t called for. Giles had taken a French GCSE when he was only fourteen and got an A star. German wasn’t on his curriculum. What could Joanna teach him?

  “French conversation. Or so she thought. She began coming round—at her own invitation—to instigate French conversation with him, to watch videos in French and encourage him to read French classics. It wasn’t a very successful move because Giles had changed courses since then and was working hard at Russian along with history and politics. French he had done with for the time being. That Giles is very quick at languages was shown, I think, by his picking up Swedish in a matter of weeks, and at that time it was Russian—a very difficult language—he was concentrating on. His spare time, such as it was, he devoted to the Gospel Church. In a few months’ time he was due to be received into that church after he had attended the Congregation in Passingham woods and made his confession.”

  Burden said ruefully, “He had very little to confess then, I suppose.”

  “Nothing more than a bit of backsliding about going to church and possibly lack of respect to his parents, something else the Good Gospelers were very hot on. But in the spring the Dades went away for the night. It was the annual dinner and dance of Roger’s firm’s parent company and, for a change, it wasn’t held in Brighton but in London. They would have to stay overnight. I don’t know if Joanna overheard them discussing this and offered her services or if Katrina asked her. The only thing that matters is that Roger and Katrina went to this function and Joanna stayed the night with Giles and Sophie.

  “It was a Saturday and one of those Saturday evenings rather than Sunday mornings when the Good Gospelers held their weekly service. Giles told me that Joanna, who arrived at about five, tried to stop him going. She insisted on speaking French to him in order to stop Sophie understanding, a stratagem you can imagine maddened the volatile Sophie, who also has a very good brain—only her talents lie in the areas of math and science, not languages.

  “Giles, who is considerably more sophisticated now, had very little idea of why Joanna insisted on sitting close up to him and talking to him—in French—in what he describes as ‘a wheedling way.’ He’s quite open and frank, and he says the way she behaved reminded him of actresses flirting on television, ‘making up to men, ’ as he puts it. In real life he had known nothing like it but it made him uneasy. Still, he went to church but he had to come home again.

  “It was only half past nine but apparently both Joanna and Sophie had gone to bed. He went up to his bedroom, relieved not to have to talk to Joanna anymore. Much as he dislikes his parents, he found them infinitely preferable to Joanna Troy. He undressed, went to bed, and sat up memorizing grammar from a Russian textbook in preparation for a lesson on the Monday morning. Joanna came in without knocking. She was wearing a dressing gown which she undid without a word and dropped to the floor. He says he sat there, staring blankly at her. But something happened which he describes as ‘horrible.’ He doesn’t know, I quote, ‘how it could have happened.’ He was aroused, and violently so. Things were utterly beyond his control. He hated Joanna then, but he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. I think we both know what he meant and further explanation isn’t necessary. He was only fifteen and this was his first experience.

  “He held out his arms to her, he couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t himself, he says, and for a while he really believed he’d been possessed by a demon—to use Good Gospelers’ language. Joanna got into bed with him and the rest is obvious—in the circumstances inescapable.”

  Chapter 28

  WEXFORD DREW BACK A CORNER of curtain and they watched the coach party leave, stumbling toward their single-decker through deepening puddles, through stair-rod-straight rain, coats protecting hairdos, umbrellas up, one man with a newspaper over his head. It was a copy of the Evening Courier.

  “I’m going to phone Dora.”

  The message service was switched on. He cursed modern innovations, thinking how extremely mystified his own parents would have been by a man’s ability to phone home, be spoken to by his own self, and then address that self with an abusive expletive which would be recorded for himself to hear whenever he chose. Burden listened with an impassive face while he spoke these thoughts aloud, then said, “Go on with all that sexy stuff about Giles and Joanna.”

  “Ah, yes. I think Giles felt at first as most boys of his age would: astonishment, a certain amount of fear, gratification that things had— well, worked, and even pride. He was still enjoying the situation when Joanna came back early next morning and a couple of weeks later when Joanna came for the evening while the Dade parents went out. Sophie was in the house but in her room. However, in the following week she challenged Giles about it and he told her. There was no risk, she’d have been no more likely to tell Roger or Katrina than he would.

  “But her knowledge of the affair, if we can call it that, eventually gave her that daunting sexual sophistication which made me believe for a while that she must have been abused and that her father was abusing her. No one was. She was just privy to Giles’s activities then and his changed attitude later.”

  “His changed attitude?”

  “Oh, yes. You see, at first he made no connection between what was going on between him and Joanna and his religious affiliation. Or so he tells me. The
y were in separate compartments of his life. Then, one Sunday morning, he was in church when brother Jashub preached a sermon on sexual purity. That was in early June. You might say if you were a Good Gospeler and given to biblical metaphor, that the scales fell from his eyes. Moreover, he had been told that he must make his public confession at the Confessional Congregation in July. Suddenly he saw that what had seemed a wonderful enhancement of his life, great fun at its lowest and sublime at its highest, was just a squalid sin. He would have to end it and make Joanna understand.

  “He was only fifteen. He began by canceling an apppointment he had to go to Joanna’s house. He never had been there, this was to be a first, and he told her it was too risky for him. His mother would find out. As luck would have it, the Dade parents weren’t going anywhere in the evenings so Joanna’s services wouldn’t be called for. The Congregation date came and he was taken to Passingham Hall woods. There was a shortage of cars and various participants were starting from their places of work, not from home, so he was escorted to Passingham by train and thence by taxi, from which he acquired his knowledge of how to get to Passingham Park station. For the return journey there were plenty of cars and drivers willing to take him back. He came back in a car with four Good Gospelers. It must have been a right squeeze.”

  Burden interposed, “Do you feel like eating something? I don’t mean these so-called nibbles. Shall I see if this place can rustle up a sandwich?”

  While he consulted a menu the barman had brought, Wexford went out into the porch. The rain had eased a little. He picked someone’s umbrella out of the stand, thinking how awkward it would be if the owner panicked and accused him of stealing it. But he would only be a minute. He stepped out onto the forecourt, avoiding puddles.

  What had he expected? That the Kingsbrook Bridge would be under water? Certainly the river had risen and become once more a rushing torrent. This was the point at which Sophie had thrown her T-shirt over the parapet. Conditions must have been very much the same as now, the water rising but the bridge still passable, rain descending so steadily it seemed it must never cease. Giles had driven on, gaining confidence with every mile, Joanna’s body in the boot of the car. Did he think, when he was on his way to dispose of it in Passingham woods, of the journey he had made home from there on that previous occasion? Had they, that sententious bunch in Nun Plummer’s car, cited for him the example of the virginal Joseph resisting with iron chastity Potiphar’s wife? I bet they did, Wexford thought. They weren’t Catholics, so the temptation of St. Anthony wouldn’t have come into it . . .

  He ran back into the hotel, opened and shut the umbrella to shake off the raindrops, and replaced it in the stand.

  Burden was back in the snug with more lager—time to watch it now—and toasted sandwiches ordered. “So he confessed all that in public, did he?” he said.

  “In front of a howling mob, you might say,” Wexford said. “Singing and dancing, as Shand-Gibb’s housekeeper put it. His only comfort must have been that no names were mentioned. They had allowed that. He was absolved, of course, on the usual grounds that his behavior mustn’t be repeated. And he was assigned a mentor to guide and watch over him. One of the elders to see he didn’t sin again.

  “He didn’t intend to. That congregation had shaken him, as it might have shaken someone three times his age. Once again he told his sister about it, but he said nothing to Joanna, he just did his best to avoid her and he was successful. At what cost to himself we don’t know but I can guess at. In October his grandmother Matilda Carrish came to stay. An uncomfortable visit, I imagine, owing to the dislike of Katrina for her mother-in-law and Matilda’s contempt for Katrina. I think she only went there because she was worried about Sophie. Why she thought she had any grounds for worry I don’t know and now we never shall know. Perhaps it was only that as a child she herself had been sexually abused by her own father and she suspected Roger of having the same proclivities. She was wrong, but we suspected the same and we were wrong too.

  “Was the subject discussed between her and Sophie? Sophie is such an accomplished liar that it may be impossible to find out. I think of myself” —Wexford looked rueful, raising his eyebrows—“as a good lie detector, but that child runs rings round some of the worst villains in that department I’ve ever interrogated. Pity you can’t do GCSEs in mendacity, she’d be in the A star category. Maybe she inherited her talent from her paternal grandma, who was no slouch at lying herself.

  “Anyway, what Matilda did succeed in doing was establish a strong bond between herself and her son’s children. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that in those three days they came to love her. Here was a grown-up person who took them seriously, who wasn’t always yelling at them or weeping over them, and who perhaps said before she left that if they ever needed her she’d be there. They only had to phone. One phone call would fetch her. Needless to say maybe, Giles said nothing to her about the Joanna business. Why would he? He was trying to put it behind him.”

  Wexford ate a sandwich and then another. As he savored the hot melted butter, the rare but not too rare roast beef, the capers and raw red onion, he felt he could see his waistline expanding. Few writers on the subject seemed to point out that delicious food makes you fat, and the kind no one wants to eat doesn’t. There must be a reason for this, but he didn’t know what it was.

  “Get to the crucial weekend, Reg,” said Burden.

  “The crucial weekend, yes. When his mother told him Joanna would be coming while she and his father were away, Giles was seriously worried. Since the Congregation he had become far more conscious of the need for chastity than he ever had been before. Well, he had scarcely been at all conscious of it before. Now he agreed that continence must be a good thing, something worth adhering to until he got married. He had heard several more sermons on the subject and the Good Gospel elders, starting with lectures in the car home from Passingham, had taken it upon themselves to keep him up to the mark. Incredible as it sounds, they even instituted a couple of one-to-one tutorials. One of these was conducted by Pagiel Smith and the other by Hobab Winter. Brother Jashub was also around quite a bit, dispensing admonitions and threats. They all made extramarital sex into a far worse sin than cruelty, untruthfulness, fraud, and even murder.

  “Up till that time Giles had never specifically named his sexual partner to any of them,” Wexford went on. “But now he was growing more and more worried by the day. She was coming to stay in a fortnight’s time, in a week, in a few days. After church on Sunday, the nineteenth of November, he spoke to the Reverend Mr. Wright, and told him everything. Joanna would be coming to stay in his home in the absence of his parents on the following Friday. Jashub called a council of elders, all of them bent on keeping Giles pure.”

  “That poor kid,” said Burden.

  He passed Wexford the sandwiches. Taking one, Wexford thought how, as long as he could remember back in their relationship, when there had been four sandwiches, Burden had had one and he had had three and when there had been eight he had had six and Burden had had two. This happened now and it was no doubt the reason why he was always thinking of battling with his weight if not actually battling with it, while Burden remained thin as a teenager. He sighed.

  “As we know, the Dade parents went away on Friday the twenty-fourth in the morning and Joanna came in the late afternoon. One part of Giles hoped she would have forgotten everything that had passed between them, but we won’t be surprised to learn that the other part of him longed for her to remember. She remembered all right, came to his room on the Friday evening, and the rest was inevitable. Not without a struggle on Giles’s part, though. He told her what he now believed, that this was very wrong, and she laughed at him. In a couple of weeks he’d be sixteen and what they were doing would no longer be illegal. She had misunderstood.

  “Sophie knew all about it. She had watched Joanna’s advances to Giles throughout the evening and translated them neatly for my benefit into passages between Joanna and �
�Peter.’ His name, of course, was an invention, unconsciously adopted from the author of that recipe article. It didn’t take much imagination as it must be one of the commonest names there are. She didn’t know that two real Peters were connected with the case, and if she had I dare say she’d only have thought it funny.”

  “What happened next day?”

  “All that shopping and cooking described to me by Sophie was rubbish. She got the dinner menu out of a newspaper supplement that wasn’t published until a week before she resurfaced. Not quite clever enough, but still she’s only thirteen, there’s plenty of time for improvement and by the time she’s twenty she’ll be the most expert spinner of fictions we’re ever likely to see. Far from accompanying Joanna and Sophie on this food-buying spree and having lunch out with them, Giles went round to Jashub Wright’s, told him what had happened and that he was fearful of its happening again. What should he do? Resist, he was told, be strong. There’s something ridiculous these days about the image of a young highly sexed man keeping himself chaste for what is a wholly imaginary concept of the man we call Jesus—who never said a word about sex outside marriage—but not to these people. Giles was to resist in His name and he would get help.

  “By the time he got back to Antrim, the rain had begun. He looked forward with dread to the evening ahead of him. Remember there was no ‘Peter, ’ there was no dinner guest and no elaborate meal. There were just the three of them, each in his or her way tense about what was to come: Sophie curious and excited, Joanna preparing to break down a resistance that only added spice to the whole affair, Giles struggling to keep her at a distance, desperately wishing, he says, that he had the practical aid of a lock on his bedroom door.”