by Ruth Rendell
It was all my fancy, no doubt. But she was ever alert, keeping watch. For what? To prevent my discovery of her secrets? She was a mistress of the art of secrecy. I think she loved it for its own sake. At mealtimes she locked the sewing-room door. Perhaps she hung the key around her neck. Certainly she always wore a long chain, though what was on the end of it I never saw, for it was tucked into the vee of her dark dress. The study was never locked up but all the papers inside it were. One day, from the doorway, I saw the safe. I saw my grandfather take down the painting of an old man in a red coat and with a wig, and move this way and that a dial in the wall behind it.
On Fridays Evie put all the week’s newspapers out for the dustmen. She brought them out of the drawing room and she brought them downstairs, a sizeable pile which I sometimes went through in the hope of finding clues. Windows had been cut out of most of them, sometimes from the sports pages, sometimes from the arts section, from the home news and the foreign news. Once, in possession of a mutilated copy of The Times, I managed by great guile and considerable labour, to persuade Mrs Poulter to bring me an identical undamaged copy which she helped herself to from another house where she cleaned. But the cut-out pieces had been only a report of a tennis tournament and a photograph of a new kind of camellia exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show.
You might think my grandparents would have wanted to send me to boarding school as soon as I was old enough to go. They didn’t. I would have like to go away to school, I would have liked to go away anywhere, but Mrs Poulter said they couldn’t afford the fees. That house cost a lot to keep up. Evie went on driving me to school, four miles to the grammar school and back in the morning and four miles in and four miles back in the afternoon. She must have been in her seventies by then. She always brought the Basenji with her in the back of the car, for although she might have left him alone in that house she would never quite risk leaving him with my grandmother.
I used to badger and badger her about my mother but she would never answer. She told me frankly that she dared not answer. But at last, driven mad by my pestering, she must have said something to my grandmother, for one morning at the breakfast table after my grandfather had left, after I had brought the post in including one of the letters in the blue envelopes, my grandmother turned to face me in a slow portentous way. Her tone remote, she said, ‘These letters which you have been so curious about for years come from a friend of mine I was at school with. Her handwriting is rather immature, don’t you think?’
I think I blushed. I said quite feverishly, ‘Tell me about my mother.’
The tone didn’t change or the look. ‘Her name is Alexandra. I seldom hear anything of her. I believe she has married.’
‘Why didn’t she have me adopted?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Naturally I can’t answer for her. I doubt if she ever knew what she was doing. I would have had you adopted if it had been in my power. The mother’s consent is needed in these matters.’
‘Why didn’t she want me? Why did she go away?’
‘I shan’t answer any more questions,’ my grandmother said. ‘It would take too long and I should upset myself. You’ll know one day. When we’re dead and gone you’ll know. All about your mother and what little is known of your father, about the murder, if it was murder, and everything else. And you can tell Evie from me that if she gives you any information about what is no business whatsoever of hers I shan’t see it my duty to give her or that dog of hers houseroom any longer.’
I passed this message on to Evie. What else could I do? My grandmother always meant what she said, she was a fearful woman, a cold force to be reckoned with. But the murder – what was the murder? In the ten years before I was born there had been two in the part of the country where we lived. A woman had killed her husband and then herself. A young man, not a local, had been found dead at the wheel of his car which was parked at the edge of a wood. He had been shot through the head. They never found who did it. I didn’t have to ask Mrs Poulter about these things, they were common knowledge, but I did ask her what they had to do with us.
‘They weren’t even near here, pet,’ she said. ‘The woman who killed her husband and gassed herself, she’d only been living in her house six months. And that young fellow – what was he called? Wilson? Williams? – he drove here from London, he was a stranger.’
She was more easily able to explain what my grandmother meant when she said I would know everything one day, when they were dead and gone.
‘They’re going to leave you this house and its contents. I know it for a fact. He got me in there to be a witness to their wills.’
‘But they don’t even like me,’ I said.
‘You’re their flesh and blood. They like you as much as they like anyone, pet. Anyway it’s no big deal, is it? Who’d want it? Great white elephant, it’s not worth much.’
Not then, perhaps, not then.
When I was fifteen and the Basenji was twelve and Evie getting on for eighty, my grandfather went out into the wood with his gun one morning and shot himself. They said it was an accident. After the funeral my grandmother got a carpenter in from London and had him build her three cupboards in the sewing room. She had the kind of doors put on them which security firms recommend nowadays for the front doors of London flats, reinforced with steel and with locks that when turned caused metal rods to bolt into the doorframe. Into these cupboards she placed the contents of my grandfather’s wall safe and all the documents that were in his study. She probably put her own completed scrapbooks in there too, for I never saw her at work with scissors and paste again and there was no more mutilation of books.
There were rumours, and more than rumours, that my grandfather had been in some kind of trouble. Converting his clients’ money to his own use or persuading elderly women to make wills in his favour – something of that sort. I suppose that when he went out into the wood that morning it was because he was afraid of criminal proceedings. His death must have averted that. His secrets were in the papers my grandmother hid away. She changed after he was dead, becoming even more cold and remote, and the few acquaintances she had used to see, she shunned. It was a cold house, though she had never seemed to feel it. She did then. Evie began lighting a fire in the grate and for some reason unknown to me it was my grandfather’s cigarette lighter she used to light it, a silver object in the shape of an Aladdin lamp which stood in the centre of the mantelpiece. For a while my grandmother continued to leave the sewing-room door open and when I passed and looked in the fire would be alight and she would be writing. She was always writing. Memoirs? A diary? A novel?
Records of births, marriages and deaths were kept at Somerset House then. When I reached the age my mother was when I was born I went by train to London and looked her up in the appropriate great tome. Alexandra was her name, as my grandmother had said (she never told lies) and she had married, as she also said, a man called Jeremy Harper-Green. They had two children, the Harper-Greens, a boy of six and a girl of four. I think it was when I saw this that I understood I would never meet my mother now.
The Basenji was the first to die. He was fifteen and he had had a good life. Evie and I buried him at the bottom of the garden which was on the side of a hill and from which you could look across the beautiful countryside of Derbyshire and see in the distance the landscape Capability Brown made at Chatsworth. It was winter, the woods dark and the hillsides covered in snow. I dug the grave but Evie was there with me in the intense cold, the biting wind. She caught a cold that night which turned to pneumonia and a week later she was dead too.
There was nothing to keep me after that. I packed up everything I owned into two suitcases and went to the sewing room and knocked on the door. For the past year she had kept that door closed. She said, ‘Who is it?’ not ‘Come in’, though it could only have been me or a ghost, for Evie was dead and she had given Mrs Poulter the sack six months before for what she called ‘filling the child’s head with lies and scandals’.
After that she shook hands with me as if I were a caller who had dropped in for half an hour. She didn’t get out of her chair. She shook her head in a rueful way and said, not to me but as if there were someone else standing in the doorway to hear her, ‘Who would have thought it would have gone on for eighteen years?’
Then she picked up her pen and turned back to whatever it was she was writing.
That was nearly thirty years ago. The friend with the employment agency got me a job. I stayed with her until I found a room of my own. I have prospered. I am managing director of my own company now and if I am not rich I am comfortably off. My marriage lasted only a short time but there is nothing very unusual in that. Children I never wanted and I have none. Five Basenjis have been my companions through the years, one who lived to be twelve, a pair who reached ten and eleven years respectively, and the five-year-olds that are with me now. They have been more to me than lovers or children.
Mrs Poulter told me my grandmother had bequeathed the house to me in her will. The chance of this inheritance I believed I lost for ever on the day I left, closed the sewing-room door behind me and went down the stairs to the front door. I never heard from my grandmother again, wrote no letters and received none. By then, for she was something over sixty when I went, I believed she was very likely dead. I seldom thought of her. I have worked hard at blocking off the misery of my early years.
The solicitor’s letter coming one Monday morning four years ago told me she had died and left me the house. The funeral had taken place. I wondered who had seen to the arrangements. The Harper-Greens? If they expected a legacy they were disappointed, for it all came to me, the house and everything in it, the grounds from which you could see the sweeping meadows and the woods of Chatsworth.
Now I should know the answers to all those questions, the solutions to many mysteries. I drove up there one morning in autumn, my Basenjis who were puppies then with me in the back of the estate car. Was the truth that she had loved me all along, valued me in her cold inexpressive way? Or had she simply not bothered to change her will because, though she cared nothing for me, there was no one else she cared for more? I inclined towards this view. As I drove through the shires and the dukeries, the keys to the house beside me on the passenger seat, I allowed myself to speculate about those things I had long forbidden myself to think of, my grandparents’ strange loveless marriage, my mother’s refusal to have me adopted, yet willingness to abandon me to a fate she had already experienced, the identity of my father. Which of those murdered men was he? Or was he neither? What then was my family’s connection with a murder? What retribution would have caught up with my grandfather if he had waited and faced it instead of going out into the woods with his gun?
We let ourselves into the house, the dogs and I. It was dusty and the ceilings hung with cobwebs but the smell that met me as I walked up the stairs was the smell of paper, old paper turned yellow with time and packed away in airless places. The sewing-room door was not locked. There were ashes in the grate and the silver Aladdin’s lamp lighter still on the mantelpiece. A sheet of paper lay on the blotter on the table that was big enough to seat twelve. There were nine or ten lines of writing on it, the final sentence broken off in the middle, a fountain pen lying where my grandmother had dropped it and a splutter of ink trailing from the last, half-completed word. It was a kind of awe I felt and a growing dismay. The miseries I thought I had succeeded in forgetting began to crowd back and those earliest memories.
With the keys from the bunch I held I unlocked the burglar-proof cupboard doors. It was all there, all the secrets, in fifty scrapbooks, in a thousand letters received and a thousand copies of letters sent, in a hundred diaries, in deeds and agreements and contracts, in unnumbered handwritten manuscripts. The smell of paper, or perhaps it was the smell of ink, was acrid and nauseating. The dogs padded about the room, sniffing in corners, sniffing along skirting boards and around chair legs, sniffing and holding up their heads as if in thought, as if considering what it was they had smelt.
I began emptying the cupboards. Everything would have to be examined page by page, word by word, and in this house, in this room. How could I take it away except in a removal van? I imagined the misery of it, the enclosing oppression as sad and dreadful things were slowly revealed. The tears came into my eyes and I began to weep as I knelt there on the floor with the piles of paper all round me. The dogs came and licked my hands as dogs licked the sores of Lazarus.
Presently I got up and went to the fireplace and took my grandfather’s silver lighter off the mantelpiece. I struck it with my thumb and the flame flared orange and blue. The Basenjis were watching me. They watched me as I applied the lighter to the pile of paper and the flame began to lick across the first sheet, lick, die, smoulder, lick, crackle, burst into bright flame.
I picked up the dogs, one under each arm, and ran down the stairs. The front door slammed behind me. What happened to the keys I don’t know, I think I left them inside. I didn’t look back but drove fast away and back to London.
It had been insured but of course I didn’t claim on the insurance. The land belongs to me and I could have another house built on it but I don’t suppose I ever shall. Two years ago a tour company wrote to me and asked if they might bring parties to look at the burnt-out shell as part of a scenic Derbyshire round trip. So now, I am told, the coach that goes to Chatsworth and Haddon Hall and Bess of Hardwick’s house, follows the winding road up the hill to my childhood home and shows off to tourists the blackened ruin and the incomparable view.
I will never forget the way the police told me my house had burned down. Later they hinted at arson and this is how the guide explains the destruction to visitors. But that same evening when I had only been back a few hours, the police came and spoke to me very gently and carefully. I must sit down, keep calm, prepare myself for something very upsetting.
They called it bad news.
Mother’s Help
The little boy would be three at the end of the year. He was big for his age. Nell, who was his nanny but modestly called herself a mother’s help, was perturbed by his inability, or unwillingness, to speak. It was very likely no more than unwillingness, for Daniel was not deaf, that was apparent, and the doctor who carried out tests on him said he was intelligent. His parents and Nell knew that without being told.
He was inordinately fond of motor vehicles. No one knew why, since neither Ivan nor Charlotte took any particular interest in cars. They had one of course and both drove it but Charlotte confessed that she had never understood the workings of the internal combustion engine. Their son’s passion amused them. When he woke up in the morning he got into bed with them and ran toy trucks and miniature tractors over the pillows, shouting, ‘Brrm, brrm, brrm . . .’
‘Say “car”, Daniel,’ said Charlotte. ‘Say “lorry”.’
‘Brrm, brrm, brrm,’ said Daniel.
One of the things he liked to do was sit in the driver’s seat on Ivan’s knee or Charlotte’s and, strictly supervised, pull the levers and buttons that worked the windscreen wipers, the lights, put the automatic transmission into ‘drive’, make the light come on that flashed when the passenger failed to wear a seat belt, lift off the handbrake, and, naturally, sound the horn. All the time he was doing these things he was saying, ‘Brrm, brrm, brrm.’ The summer before he was three he said ‘car’ and ‘tractor’ and ‘engine’ as well as ‘br
rm, brrm, brrm.’ He had been able to say Mummy and Daddy and Nell for quite a long time. Soon his vocabulary grew large and Nell stopped worrying, though Daniel made no attempt to form sentences.
‘It may be because he’s an only child,’ she said to Ivan one evening when she came down from putting Daniel to bed.
‘And likely to remain one,’ said Ivan, ‘in the circumstances.’
He kept his voice low. Charlotte had stayed late at work but she was home now, taking off her raincoat in the hall. Because Charlotte was there Nell made no reply to this cryptic remark of Ivan’s. She tried to smile in a reproachful way but failed. Charlotte went upstairs to say good night to Daniel and in a little while Ivan went up too. Alone, Nell thought how handsome Ivan was and how there was something very masterful, not to say ruthless, about him. The idea of Ivan’s ruthlessness made her feel quite excited. Charlotte was the sort of woman people call ‘attractive’, without meaning that they or any others in particular, were attracted by her. Nell guessed that she was quite a lot older than Ivan or perhaps she just looked older.
‘I wish I’d met you four years ago,’ Ivan said one afternoon when Charlotte was at work and he had taken the day off. He had been married nearly four years. Nell had seen the cards he and Charlotte got for their third wedding anniversary.
