by Ruth Rendell
‘I would prefer you not to call me that,’ said Vedast, and for the first time Wexford heard an edge of temper to his voice.
‘You’d prefer me to go away, but I shan’t do that,’ Wexford flashed back. ‘You said you were dying to hear and you shall hear.’ He leaned back, pleased at the unease his words had provoked in Nell, pleased by Tate’s cringing. ‘You left your friend,’ he said to Vedast, ‘and went to London. For you the idyll was over. Soon afterwards she went to London too, but by then you were beyond her reach. And yet she never forgot you. She told her friends and she pretended, perhaps to herself as well as to her friends, that you had always remained lovers and between you was some enduring bond.’ Wexford glanced at Burden and inclined his head, giving the inspector honour for this idea which at first he had ridiculed. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘nearly a decade passed by before you saw each other again. In that time you had become very famous, many exciting things had happened to you. Very little had happened to her. She was a waitress in a club and she remained a waitress.
‘It was a pity you ever went into that club. If you hadn’t, Dawn might at this moment be making wedding plans with her fiancé. Why did you go?’
Vedast shrugged. ‘This bloke asked us. We hadn’t anything better to do.’
‘You could hardly have done worse.’
‘I didn’t kill her. I never touched her.’
Wexford turned towards the Tates, to Godfrey Tate whose bloodshot eyes were wide open and staring.
21
‘I shall now go back,’ said the chief inspector, ‘to one of your exciting happenings, although I don’t believe you’ll regard it as a highspot when you come to write your memoirs. I refer to your meeting with Mrs Tate, and to describe that I must return to the other love story.’
A glance from Vedast was enough to make Nell get up and switch on the rose-shaded lamps. She moved stiffly, tripping over the red grip and cursing. Vedast gave her his empty glass and she refilled it. He took it without thanks like a duke receiving the drink he has ordered from a parlourmaid.
‘Ice, Nello,’ he said.
She spooned two cubes out of a pool of water in a bowl on the cabinet. Tate was crouched over his brandy, gazing into the golden liquid. The rosy light played on him, muting the harsh blackness of his hair. Nell gave Vedast his glass again, keeping her hands clasped round it so that his fingers would brush hers as he took it. They brushed them as a stranger’s might without lingering. She seemed desperate to stay beside him, to remain with him on the cool, darkening balcony whose rail, reddened by the setting sun, was now a black filagree trellis behind the mound of dead blossoms.
‘Go away, Nello. You fidget me.’
She hung her head, crept just inside the window and dropped on to an upright chair, her arms hanging limply by her sides.
‘That’s right, Mrs Tate, sit where I can see you. You’re a very good-looking woman, but you’ve changed a good deal since you were a bride for the first time. For one thing, you’ve tinted your hair. I don’t suppose you ever wear dark red these days, do you?
‘Mr Dunsand liked your short dark hair. He liked you in simple, wifely dresses. I understand from what information was gathered today in Myringham that you were known as a quiet little thing, a good cook, fond of flowers, of home-making, but inclined to be bored with the society you moved in. They were all so much older than you, those faculty wives, weren’t they? You would have preferred the company of your husband’s students. Those coffee mornings, those empty afternoons, were very dull for you. But they were nothing to the evenings when, after you had prepared the kind of meal Mr Dunsand liked, you had to sit for hours alone with him, the record player switched off, and plan together your annual holiday, plan your budget, decide what new equipment or furniture you could afford that year.
‘To Mr Dunsand it was the very essence of contentment. I expect you played your part well. Women like you, born sycophants, usually do, and all the time they wait quietly for the means of escape. Your chance came when Zeno Vedast, your idol, gave a concert in Myringham. I don’t suppose Mr Dunsand wanted you to go to that concert. The idea of his wife, the wife who depended on him utterly for her support, disporting herself among a bunch of teenagers at a pop concert, can hardly have appealed to him. No, he couldn’t have liked to think of you raving among his own students, but you went. If you hadn’t gone, Dawn Stonor would be alive today, making wedding plans with her fiancé.
‘I don’t think you threw yourself under Mr Vedast’s car deliberately—you wouldn’t have the courage—let’s say it was an unconscious urge you couldn’t control or resist.
‘Mr Vedast had put you in a private room at the hospital. How you must have prayed for Mr Vedast himself to appear with the grapes and the chocolates! You didn’t know him. You don’t know him now. He sent his minion, and it was any port in a storm for you, Mrs Tate. But you’re not unique, don’t think it. Many a master in the past has married a likely wench off to his servant so that he can have the enjoying of her without any of the trouble.’
‘You’ve no right to insult me!’ Nell flared. She waited for her husband to defend her. When he said nothing, while Vedast smiled and sipped his orange juice, she said, ‘Why shouldn’t I have left my husband? Why shouldn’t I have got married again? I’m not the only one. I was sick to death of living with Len.’
Vedast turned. He said smoothly, ‘Like the judges say, this isn’t a court of morals, Mr Wexford.’
‘Oh, but it is. It must be because it can’t be a court of justice.’
‘In that case …’ Nell got up. ‘In that case, I’m going. Let’s go, Zeno. He can’t keep us here.’
‘Do as you like, Nello.’ Vedast gave her a sly sidelong glance. She couldn’t do as she liked. She never had been able to. ‘You go if you want,’ he said in the voice, usual with him, that was both gentle and unkind. ‘I’m staying. I’m fascinated. How about you, Goffo, are you going to take your wife away or stay and support your old mate?’
‘Mr Tate stays,’ said Burden sharply.
Wexford just glanced at him, raising his eyebrows. ‘Let us have an intermission,’ he said. ‘An interval to relax in. If my voice were better, I’d offer to sing you a song, but in this company …’ He hesitated, then said, ‘You all know the song. It was written at the time of Mrs Tate’s second marriage. It would be ingenuous in me to suppose it doesn’t illustrate a true story, render someone’s real suffering. That’s why it was written. Poets,’ he said, ‘are said to make little songs out of their great sorrows. You …’ His eyes went to the window, ‘… amused yourself and feathered your luxurious nest by making a song out of someone else’s.’
Vedast jerked round. He came into the room, his yellow eyes sharp and narrow.
‘I’ll sing it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my voice.’
Wexford nodded. He could tell what Burden was thinking, that his son, that any fan at the festival, would have given a week’s wages, a month’s grant, a term’s pocket money, to have been in their shoes. Vedast, who could command thousands for one concert, was going to sing in private for them. He felt a little sick.
In the pale rosy light, the soft kind light, Vedast looked very young, a teenager himself. He stood in a corner of the room, resting his bare elbows on a shelf from which rose-buds hung, young, fresh rose-buds dead before they opened from dehydration. He waited in the silence of the evening, the silence of the forest which surrounded them. The first word came loud like a note vibrating from a string, then the clear, light voice dropped a little, filling the room with sweet bitterness.
Nell watched the singer adoringly, tapping in time to the tune throughout the first verse, the first chorus. Wexford frowned at her and she tossed her head, flinging herself back petulantly against a cushion. His sickness was passing. He listened to the words as if he had never heard them before, as if he had never fully understood the depth of their meaning.
‘Remember me and my life-without-life,
>
Come once more to be my wife,
Come today before I grieve,
Enter the web of let-me-believe.
So come by, come nigh,
come try and tell why
some sigh, some cry,
some lie and some die …’
There was no applause. Vedast dropped his head. Then he flung it back, shaking his hair.
‘Thank you,’ said Wexford crisply. ‘It’s all in that song, isn’t it? All Mr Dunsand’s sorrow is there. He pleaded with you, I imagine, not to break with him entirely, not to leave him utterly without life, to let him believe sometimes, very occasionally, that you were still his wife. And you repeated these conversations to Mr Vedast, giving him such a good idea for a song.’
Tate looked up, frowning, a trickle of brandy coursing down his chin. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
‘Why did you agree to what Mr Dunsand asked?’
‘I didn’t want to hurt him too much,’ Nell muttered.
A dull, humourless laugh escaped from Burden and it was echoed, surprisingly, by Tate. Wexford didn’t laugh. ‘Mrs Tate, is that you talking? You? When have you ever minded whom you hurt, you who are an expert treader on other people’s dreams? If you won’t tell me why, I shall have to guess.’
‘It was to nark me,’ Tate interrupted.
‘But you didn’t know until after the festival,’ Wexford said quickly.
Bewildered, Tate said, ‘That’s true. She’d been seeing him two or three times a year, going to his house and bloody well sleeping with him. I blacked her eye for her.’
‘So you told me. And you gave me a key. Only it wasn’t the key to Mr Dunsand’s house in The Pathway. It opens the front door of his former home in Myringham. Mrs Tate had never been to The Pathway house. She knew it only because Mr Dunsand described it to her over the phone as the middle house of the three. But he sent her a key, intending that she should keep up the custom of the Myringham days.’
Tate said slowly:
‘What custom? What are you on about?’
‘I believe you, Mr Tate, when you say you knew nothing of these visits of your wife’s until after the festival when, frightened of what she had done but not frightened enough to confess everything, she told you she had been seeing her first husband. I believe you are entirely innocent of this crime, in no way an accessory. You had been kept in the dark as you are, I daresay, about many things.’ Tate shrugged awkwardly. The level of golden liquor in the bottle was going steadily down. He poured himself some more in silence. ‘Nor do I think you would have been a party to any of this had you known about it,’ said Wexford.
‘Mr Vedast wasn’t in the dark. He knew. Mrs Tate told him she had promised these—shall I say loans?—loans of herself to Mr Dunsand. And so I come back to why. Why did she do it? You’re not a very happy woman, are you, Mrs Tate? Apparently you have everything you wanted, but only apparently. I think that very soon after your second marriage you saw what you had got, luxury and excitement, yes, but at what a price. Another not very inspiring husband—forgive me, Mr Tate—though a complaisant one, a condescending master, kind when you were obedient. So you agreed to Mr Dunsand’s request for the sake of the contrast. Those few evenings, those nights, you spent with him, showed you that what you had was at least preferable to your former married life. After a night in Myringham you could go back to London, to Europe, to Bermuda, your loins girded, as it were, with the memory of the alternative.’
‘Is that true, Nello? I never knew that.’
‘I’m glad to be able to tell you something you don’t know, Mr Vedast. But you knew of the part she played while she was there, didn’t you? I’m sure Mrs Tate told you all the details, the props, the costume required, shall I say? I’m sure she told you of the setting of the little play they enacted two or three times a year, the activities, following always the same pattern, in which the actors indulged, marriage à la mode Dunsand. Indeed, I know she did. Had she not, you wouldn’t have been able to play your—your practical joke.’
Nell said, ‘I want a drink, Godfrey.’
‘Get it yourself.’
She did so, clattering the bottle neck against the glass, spilling vermouth on to the pale embroidery on her white linen skirt. It made a red stain like blood.
Wexford said, ‘I expect you thought all this very amusing, Mr Vedast, until there was a threat of the performance of this play interfering with your own plans. About a month ago Mrs Tate told you that she would be paying her first visit to Mr Dunsand’s new home on the afternoon of Monday, June sixth. But that didn’t suit you, for you and Mr and Mrs Tate would only just have returned from Manchester where you had a concert engagement.’
Tate shook his head. ‘No, that’s not right,’ he said. ‘He meant to stay over till the Monday. It was me said at the last moment it’d be too tiring for him.’
‘Ah.’ Wexford sighed. ‘Even better—or worse. When Mrs Tate first confided in you, you intended that she and you and Mr Tate would all be away from the South on June sixth.’ He looked at Nell, at the red stain on her dress which she had not attempted to remove, at the red colour that burned her face. ‘Why didn’t you just change the date of your appointment with your first husband, Mrs Tate? Surely you could have put it off for a few days?’
For a moment she looked as if she were searching in her mind for an excuse. She put out a trembling hand to Vedast who ignored her, who smiled, his head on one side.
‘Because that would have “hurt” Mr Dunsand?’ Wexford went on relentlessly. ‘Or did you do what you always do, obeyed Mr Vedast?’
In a small, thin voice, she said, ‘I left it to Zeno.’
‘You left it to Zeno. He was to get in touch with Mr Dunsand, was he? He, a world-famous singer, a pop idol, was to phone Mr Dunsand and tell him you couldn’t make it but would, say, Wednesday do instead?’
She was near to tears. She held her hands crushed together so that the peeling nails dug into the flesh. ‘You know it wasn’t like that. You know you’re just tormenting me.’
‘Not everyone is as zealous as you, Mrs Tate, about the feelings of others. Not everyone is as anxious as you to go through life without doing hurt. But it’s true that I know what happened.’ Wexford got up and walked over to Vedast who had taken up a Yoga position, a half-Lotus, on the floor by the open window. He stood over the singer, looking down, his own grey eyes meeting the amber ones.
‘No, Mr Vedast,’ he said. ‘To a person of your temperament it was far more amusing to keep the date, changing not the day but the female protagonist.’
Tate broke the silence.
‘What d’you mean? I don’t follow you. Female whatsit, what does it mean?’
Wexford came over to him. He spoke gently. ‘It means, Mr Tate, that your employer saw a way of getting Mrs Tate out of her appointment, and perhaps all further similar appointments, and at the same time of playing one of his favourite jokes.
‘He decided to send a substitute for your wife to The Pathway. First, I suspect, he thought of sending a call girl. But why go to all that trouble when he could send Dawn Stonor whose acquaintance he had renewed some weeks before and whom he had telephoned on May twenty-third?’
22
Wexford sat down in the centre of the room. ‘I don’t know why you phoned Dawn the last night,’ he went on, addressing himself directly to Vedast. ‘I think your motive was akin to Mrs Tate’s motive for visiting her former husband. Probably at the Townsman Club you contrasted Dawn’s humble situation with your successful one, remembering how you came from similar beginnings, how you had had even chances of money, fame, glory—but you had achieved them and she had not.
‘On May twenty-third Mr and Mrs Tate were away. You were bored. Perhaps you even felt insecure. Why not phone Dawn, do a little slumming, so that afterwards you might have the pleasure of appreciating what you are and what you might have been? I daresay that phone conversation had the desired effect on you. You were quickly tired of her eagern
ess and you rang off, having vaguely suggested you see each other “sometime” but not, in fact, ever intending to see her again.
‘During that week, I believe, Mrs Tate told you of the visit she planned to make to Mr Dunsand’s new house. On the phone you had already, I think, boasted to Dawn of the house you were yourself thinking of buying near Kingsmarkham. Why not play a joke, the biggest joke of your career?’
‘My thought processes,’ said Vedast, ‘don’t work quite like that. Stop hovering, Nello. Go and sit down somewhere.’
The only spot in the room where she wanted to be was at his side. She looked at the sofa where her husband sat hunched, at the two occupied chairs, at the empty chairs which were either near her husband or near the policemen. And like an insect with bright antennae, bright wings, she fluttered desperately, hovered, as Vedast had put it, finally alighting—her heels were high, her shoes platformed—on another spot of carpet as near to him as she had been when he had shooed her away. The insect had come back to the flame.
Wexford had paused when the interruption came but, apart from hesitating briefly, he took no notice of her.
