by Ruth Rendell
Mark took the suggestion about Colin with his old belligerence.
‘I’m boring, I suppose?’
He drank nothing but beer during the meal. Wine, John had often reflected, doesn’t seem to go with spices and curries. It had been somehow taken for granted that they would end the evening at Mark’s flat, though this would mean John’s taking a taxi home unless Mark were still sober enough to drive him. Silence prevailed while they were eating and John was able to relax a little. It was still broad daylight and the evening had become much warmer with one of those unheralded rises in temperature that sometimes occurred at about this time of day in late spring. Mark said as he started the car:
‘Do you know what day tomorrow is?’
‘It’s May the twenty-second.’
‘It’s Cherry’s birthday,’ Mark said. ‘She would have been thirty-five.’
John felt a sinking of the heart. Not because he had forgotten Cherry’s birthday, he would have remembered it next day, and it wasn’t important anyway, remembering her birthday. But he sensed that Mark had used this ploy to bring the conversation back to her or, rather, to resume where they had left off last Monday.
‘She might have had teenage children by now,’ Mark said.
He was driving up the steep road that skirted Hartlands Gardens, the terraces of which, hung with blossoming trees and others in full fresh leaf, fell away to the house in its parkland and to the city below, its spires and towers and grey slate roofs, the curling river, the green everywhere among the brick and stone. The sky, now the sun had gone, was melon-coloured, a very pale red-gold.
Suddenly Mark began speaking rapidly, a high-voiced gabble. ‘The first time I ever came to your home, to your parents’ house, I thought it was wonderful, I’d never known anywhere like it. Everybody was so nice to everyone else, polite and kind and sort of praising everyone. I’d had a rotten childhood. My parents never spoke to each other unless they had to. I never heard them say anything pleasant to each other, not ever. My father was always telling me horrible things about my mother behind her back, how hopeless she was and stupid and how he had married her when he was too young to know any better. And my mother used to tell me he’d ruined her life and hint at appalling sorts of sexual mistreatment. I went away to college and never went back, I just lived in furnished rooms after that. I’d never known what a real home was till I met Cherry and she took me to Geneva Road. Do you know one of the first things that happened when I got there? Your father came home from work. He put his arm round your mother and said, “How’s my sweetheart?” I’ve never forgotten that. I never will. I thought, one day I’ll marry Cherry and we’ll be like that. We’ll still be like that when we’re old.’
‘We were an exceptionally happy family. All that changed, of course.’
Mark took no notice. ‘Your father asked Cherry’s opinion of something. He asked her what she thought. It was some international thing, something out of the paper, not women’s stuff. I couldn’t believe it. And she answered him very intelligently but it was the way she answered I’ll never forget. He was sitting down and she laid her hand on his shoulder and her cheek against his hair. She called him Daddy. She was eighteeen but she still said Daddy. I thought she was lovely. I was breathless and sort of frightened because I thought she was too good for the likes of me and I might so easily lose her.’
Mark threw back his head and broke into a horrible kind of staccato laughter, cold and humourless and self-mocking. He banged his foot on the accelerator and the car shot into the Fonthill Court car park, juddering and squeaking to a halt.
Mark opened the first bottle before he had even sat down. He went straight into the kitchen with it. John sat in the window looking at the clear sky whose colour was now a greenish gold, already punctured by a few bright winking stars. It gave him a strange feeling sitting there, so exposed, so out on a perch, as if he might suddenly be precipitated off the edge. In the gardens below the thickening foliage was a deep, dense and mysterious green. The flickering tower pointed up to the stars, to the transparent slice of moon.
John didn’t know why, he was sure there was no cause for it, but he had a sense of panic, as of something awful being about to happen. In that moment – for there was a precise moment at which he became aware of this feeling – he knew that he ought to get up and go. He ought to go out and find Mark, tell him he felt ill or had remembered some appointment, run out into the street and find a taxi or walk down and get the bus. Mark would be offended and might never speak to him again but what would that really matter? John knew his being there wouldn’t really save Mark from having a breakdown if such a thing was imminent. And he desperately wanted to go. If that window had opened on to a lawn, would he have stepped out quietly and vanished without a word to Mark?
Convention held him back. Mark had said he was ruled by convention and it was true. Abruptly to leave someone who was opening a bottle of wine for the two of you to share was something he couldn’t do. It must be surely that he would prefer to face whatever was coming to him than provoke a scene with Mark or have to stand up to him. But nothing was coming to him, it was all nonsense, all imagination . . .
Mark walked in with the bottle on a tray and two glasses already filled. The dishes of nuts and crisps John served were never provided here. John put out his hand for the glass with a sense that it was too late now. Whatever was going to happen would happen.
Mark said, ‘D’you want a light on?’
The sky was so glowing still, the city such a bright galaxy of lights, that John had scarcely noticed how dim it had grown indoors. He looked into the shadows of the room, then up at Mark. It was a distorted face that he saw, its expression that same staring look of horror.
‘I suppose so,’ John said. ‘It will be dark soon.’
Mark drank his glass of wine at what seemed to be one swallow. He immediately refilled the glass, his hand trembling, slopping the wine.
‘I don’t want lights,’ he said in a fierce belligerent way. ‘I want the dark. You’ll have to sit in the dark whether you like it or not.’
John shrugged. ‘OK.’ The wine was sharp. He was aware of its cold passage down through his chest and of a tremor of nausea. ‘Look at that sky,’ he said. He had to say something. ‘Look at that wonderful clear colour. It’s going to be a fine day tomorrow.’
‘It’s going to be a fine day tomorrow,’ Mark mocked him. He was still standing. He was standing over John. ‘It’s enough to make anyone puke the way you go on. Clichés and small talk. You’re programmed, did you know that? You’re a floppy disk the Great Computer Programmer has put a file of words and phrases on. Two hundred for average daily use. That’s a good name for you, floppy disk. I think I’ll call you that. It implies feebleness and learned responses in the right proportions. Christ, no wonder that wife of yours left you. What did you say to her every night before you went to bed, floppy? “It’s going to be a fine day tomorrow. Me for Bedford. Up the wooden hill”?’
John knew that he hadn’t blushed but had turned very pale. Mark was still standing there, shaking all over now. And suddenly, to John’s horror, he fell on his knees. He fell on his knees at John’s feet and lifting up his face, holding up his hands, muttered at first incoherently, then all, too articulately, that he was sorry, that he didn’t know what had come over him, that he was a bastard.
‘I don’t know why I say these things. I take it all out on you. I can’t go on like this, behaving like this. I’ll crack if I don’t tell you. It’s been weeks since I’ve known I’ve got to tell you, that’s why I got in touch in the first place, but I’m a coward, I couldn’t do it. So I insult you instead. Say you forgive me.’
An inkling of his own value, that he too had his rights, that he shouldn’t be Mark’s punching bag, held John back. He wouldn’t say it. Why should he, after the things Mark had said? Mark had attacked him without provocation in his most vulnerable part. Instead he said:
‘What is this you’ve got to t
ell me?’
‘Please forgive me, John. Later on you won’t be able to forgive me.’
‘Get up,’ John said. ‘Don’t kneel there.’
Mark slid back across the floor. He sat on the floor with his back to a chair and his face in shadow. The second glass of wine was swigged down like the first and looking with open eyes at John, he said:
‘I killed her.’
‘What? You did what?’
‘I killed her,’ Mark said. ‘I killed Cherry.’
5
FERGUS CAMERON WAS glad it was all over. He could never attend a Sports Day at Rossingham without remembering that terrible Sports Day in 1953, a week after the Coronation, when he had been beaten in the putting the shot event by a rank outsider from Churchill. Everyone knew he would win, he had no rivals, yet here quite suddenly was this newcomer from a new house – Churchill was then only four years old – and as soon as the shot flew from his hand Fergus knew it was all up with him. Strange how it still rankled after more than thirty years. Hobhouse, the Churchill man’s name had been, but his boys didn’t come here, he wouldn’t be here.
Fergus remembered how he had congratulated Hobhouse and with his heart full of bitterness and rage, held out his hand and grinned while an inner voice whispered to him that it was winning and losing which mattered and to hell with playing the game. A lot of water had flowed under Rostock, Alexandra, St Stephen’s and Randolph since then.
‘I pity that one’s son,’ he whispered to Lucy, indicating an amazing woman who looked like a magazine cover with purposely tangled stripy hair and a dress that was a knitted tube of emerald green with an armour-plated belt round the middle.
‘I’ve a notion boys don’t mind as much as they used to,’ said Lucy.
‘Human nature doesn’t change.’
‘You know who it is anyway, darling. It’s Mrs Mabledene who’s married to the garage man. She’s a hairdresser. Well, she’s got a hairdressing shop.’
She began a conversation with the O’Neills’ aunt. Their parents were back in Saud. The tent had been decorated with hanging baskets, white flowers and green foliage, the Pitt colours, by Mrs Lindsay. Angus appeared with a tray of teacups and tuckshop cake. He had rather distinguished himself by coming third in the long jump while Mungo, hardly famous for his sports prowess, had at least been among the first five in the mile. Mungo, whom Fergus hadn’t yet spoken to, now joined them rather breathlessly. He was still wearing his green and white striped tee-shirt and shorts, though Angus had changed into grey flannels and blazer as befitted a prefect.
‘That lady in the green dress is Mrs Mabledene,’ said Angus, starting on madeira cake. ‘Don’t you think she’s very beautiful? She is my idea of an English beauty.’
‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’ exclaimed Fergus.
‘Why? You mean you don’t think she’s beautiful?’
‘I certainly do not but that isn’t what I meant. Please don’t take this amiss, Angus, but I do think it a most peculiar and unnatural comment for a male person of your age to make.’
‘Hardly unnatural, darling. Anyway, I’m always telling you times change. Your sons aren’t carbon copies of you.’
Mungo had been sitting in a kind of bursting silence as if unless a lid were quickly removed he would explode. Now he said on rather a high monotone:
‘Did you get planning permission, Dad?’
‘What?’ Fergus seemed confused. He looked from the younger to the elder of his sons with an almost distressed bewilderment, and then back again at Mungo’s intense staring face.
‘Did you get planning permission? For the surgery extension? Did they say you could do it?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes. Of course they did. Weeks ago now. I told you I’d had a letter before you went back to school.’
Mungo said warily, ‘And that was all right, was it?’
‘What do you mean all right? Of course it was. Why shouldn’t it be?’
‘I just wondered.’ Mungo wondered whether he dared, then decided he must. ‘You didn’t ever hear any more?’
Angus flicked him a look. With a face as blank as Charles Mabledene’s Mungo gazed innocently at his father.
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ Fergus said, ‘I had a second letter, not exactly confirming the first but saying what amounted to the same thing. These departments, you know, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. But I thought it was rather strange. Still, the main thing is we can go ahead. Why are you interested? I can’t imagine why it should interest you.’
Angus said quickly, ‘Mrs Mabledene won’t be able to have her salon there after all.’
Fergus forgot the suspicious circumstances of Mungo’s inquiry in his anxiety to know how Angus could be aware of events in the life of a woman twenty years his senior, a woman whom he appeared to admire and had called beautiful. Was it possible that his seventeen-year-old son . . .? Could he possibly have . . .? Worry dug lines all over Fergus’s face.
‘I have my spies,’ said Angus.
Traditionally, after the Sports, on the Saturday evening, the long Summer Half began. Rossingham would be down until the following Monday week. Before joining his parents and Angus in the car, Mungo picked up the message Charles Mabledene had left him in the cricket pavilion drop. It was in the June code, based on the first lines of William Crisp’s Spytrap. ‘Dragon to Leviathan. Agree safe house Sunday 7 p.m.’
The flood of relief, which had come when his father told him of the arrival of a second letter of permission, settled now into a steady feeling of satisfaction. Very likely Dragon was all right. Most probably Autoprox had come to a dead end simply because there were no witnesses of the car park incident and not for the more sinister reason that Moscow Centre had been secretly forewarned. Walking back from the cricket field, Mungo found himself remembering the time of Charles Mabledene’s defection, those glorious weeks with Guy Parker’s code book in his possession, Stern’s rage. Stern had been beside himself with anger . . . Mungo stopped in his tracks and stood still for a moment on the steps of Pitt.
How did he know Stern had been so angry? Because Charles Mabledene had told him so. There had been no other source. Dragon had told him that when Stern had heard that one of his best men, whom he had thought a mere sleeper in enemy territory, had defected, he had ‘gone mad’. But he had had nothing more than that to go on. For all he knew Dragon might have made it all up. He might have made it all up because in fact he had not come over at all, he was not even a double agent, but still working entirely for Eastern Intelligence. And who was to say that Guy Parker’s code book was not simply a plant? True, the codes from it had continued to be used for a week or two but possibly only for the passing of information Stern wanted him to have. It could all be a colossal con . . .
‘You look as if you’re at a loose end, Mungo,’ said the voice of Mr Lindsay.
Mungo looked up at the window behind which was the Lindsays’ living room. ‘Just going home, sir.’
‘A negotiis publicis feriatus, eh? Have a good holiday.’
‘You too, sir.’
There was a rumour that the Lindsays went to a health farm every holiday. No doubt they needed it. Mungo went upstairs, collected one small suitcase, and made his way towards the car park.
6
REVELATIONS THAT OVERTURN a world can also change a man. John felt himself radically changed by Mark Simms’s confession and by Mark’s reasons for doing what he had done. He realized that all his life up till now – and this in spite of Cherry’s death – he had acted as if the world were a quiet ordinary place in which people followed a routine of work and duty, lived by rules, loved and made marriages which endured, in which at best a cheerful acceptance and at worst a stoical resignation prevailed. Now he felt that he saw things differently. He saw the world as a dangerous place, the seemingly ordinary men who lived in it as dangerous, and himself as potentially so. The events of that evening in Mark’s flat he had many times relived. He had
gone over and over in his mind the things Mark had said. At first, though, he had tried to forget, had tried to close his mind and give himself up to innocent things, to his own flowers at this most beautiful season of the gardener’s year. But the real events, the real words, bored through, like worms, like termites.
Also there was the impulse to take his knowledge to the police, though this was gradually receding. He was almost sure now that he wouldn’t go to the police, for he couldn’t see what good that would do to anyone. There was only himself left of the people who had been close to Cherry – unless you counted Mark. For his own part, he couldn’t imagine deriving any satisfaction from knowing Mark had been arrested and brought to trial. At the time of the confession his feelings, though, had been very different. There had been a moment when he had wanted to kill him.
Facing John, crouched on the floor with his back against the legs of a chair, Mark had made that incredible confession. His face was in shadow but his eyes gleamed. A trickle of wine ran from the corner of his mouth.
‘I killed her. I killed Cherry.’
‘You mean,’ John said, staring, breathing shallowly, ‘you physically murdered her? You killed her with your own hands?’
‘What other way is there of killing someone?’ Then Mark seemed to understand what John implied, that he might only figuratively have killed her. With unkindness, for instance, or by neglect. ‘No, I mean 1 murdered her, I strangled her.’
‘But why?’ John cried out. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Oh, I don’t believe you. You’re making it up.’
‘I tell you, I killed Cherry. I strangled her on the Beckgate Steps.’
‘Were you mad or something? Had you gone mad?’
Mark was quiet and still. It was almost dark in the room by then. He wiped the trickle of wine off his chin. John said:
‘Are you really telling me you killed my sister?’
‘How many times do I have to say it?’
