The Copper Peacock

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Do you know, Cyril, this will be the first holiday I’ve had since I started this place,’ Mrs Trevor was saying. ‘Well, come to that, the first since I stopped working for you-know-who.’

  Cyril Biggs knew very well who and was no more anxious to speak the name of the famous romantic novelist than was her erst while home help. This attitude, on both their parts, brought him a pang of guilt, for would he have ever known Mrs Trevor but for Louise Mitchell? This job, this temporary roof over his head, would certainly not have come about without her. Gazing down at the decapod among the weeds and branched coral below, he subtly changed the subject.

  ‘I wonder that you chose to go on a Caribbean cruise, though. Won’t it be rather a case of coals to Newcastle?’

  ‘What very unfortunate and hackneyed metaphors you do pick on, Cyril,’ said Mrs Trevor sharply. ‘You always have. What do you know about cruises, anyway?’

  A meek man, or one who had that reputation, Cyril only smiled. He could have said something about the days of his employment on a cruise ship but he did not, though as he watched the crab’s sideways progress among darting jewel-bright chimaera he remembered the flying fish which had pursued the ship and his friend who supervised the ladies’ cloakroom next door with her collection of newts she called salamanders. He also recalled the food on the Calypso Queen, the leavings of which had come his way and hers.

  ‘The green-carapaced crab,’ he said dreamily, ‘whose meat is sweet to eat.’

  ‘None of that, please. Part of my pleasure in running this place is in knowing these innocent creatures are safe from the fisherman’s net and the treacherous lobster pot. You don’t eat fish, do you, Cyril?’

  ‘Not this sort at any rate,’ said Cyril, his eyes now on some variety of many-tentacled octopus or squid. ‘Why does nothing live in the biggest tank?’

  ‘I’m hoping to acquire a shark,’ said Mrs Trevor. ‘Possibly even Carcharhinus milberti. Now you know what you have to do, don’t you, Cyril? You close at five and then you come up here and feed the innocent creatures. Specific feeding instructions are all in the book. You turn off the lights but not the aeration and in certain cases cover the tanks with their lids. Is that understood?’

  Cyril said it was and what about cleaning out the tanks? Some, he had noticed, were much overgrown with green algae which had even covered the back of the stone crab.

  ‘Carlos will come in and do that. It’s a specialist job. You’re the kind of person who would use Persil Automatic.’

  He knew she was angry with him for what he had said about crabmeat and not for the first time castigated himself for his tactless ways. They went downstairs and Mrs Trevor resumed her seat behind the ticket window so that Shana from the rink could get back to her duties. Cyril, in the cosy sitting-room at the rear of the aquarium, found his instruction book The Care of Cold-Blooded Aquatic Vertebra and Crustaceae on a shelf between Story and Structure and Louise’s novel Open Windows. But he did not read it, he looked unseeing at the pages.

  As usual in one of his reveries, he trudged across familiar ground. Biggs was not such a bad name. It was an improvement on Smalls, for instance, with its connotations of underclothes. Several saints had been called Cyril. He had looked them up in encyclopaedias. There were Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and Saint Cyril of Alexandria, both Doctors of the Church. There was that Saint Cyril who was responsible for christianising the Danubian Slavs, and who invented the Cyrillic writing system. It is not everyone who can boast of sharing his name with an alphabet.

  Was it his name which had doomed him to obscurity, and worse, to mockery? People laughed when they heard he was an insurance claims inspector, as if someone called that could hardly be anything else. But his venture at changing his name and adopting another profession had met with disaster. ‘Maxwell Lawrie’ sounded distinguished. For a time his books featuring Vladimir Klein, international espionage agent, had brought him success and promised fame. Glasnost had put an end to all hope there, for who cares for spies when there may soon be nothing and no one left to spy on?

  You cannot get back into insurance when you have been absent from it for so long, but Cyril had not even tried. Before he came back to Southend and Malvina’s Marine Museum, he had been living on alms given him by the Espionage Authors’ Benevolent Association in a hotel room in Madagascar Road, NW2, paid for by Brent Council. There he had often sat and wondered what might be the destiny of one called Cyril Biggs. Surely there must be more than to be the prototype of the dull little man in the novel, the one with thinning hair and the ugly wife, the one with shoes always dull with the dust of mean streets. He sensed sometimes that he had never had his full potential realised, though he did know what that potential might be.

  Malvina Trevor left for Southampton as soon as the Aquarium closed. She had dressed herself in a grey-green suit with a frilly blouse. Once her taxi had disappeared round the corner of Seoul Road, Cyril went up to the tank room and carefully scattered fish food into the tanks. He switched off the lights, but not the aeration and heating plant, and where instructed closed the lids. It was a complex routine which, once learned, became simple. Day after day it was repeated. From ten till five Cyril sat at the ticket window. At five-thirty he fed the fish and closed up the tank room. On two days a week Shana came in to relieve him and several times Ruta Yglesias asked him in to supper.

  Louise Mitchell was there on one occasion, for the sisters had always been close, and their mother with them. On another Ruta had invited some people called Ann and Roger, whose surname Cyril no more learned than he did the christian name of another guest, Mrs Greenaway. But it was quite a party and, to his surprise, Cyril enjoyed himself. He was not really gloomy by nature, only shy and lacking confidence. Before Malvina returned, and she would be back in less than a week, Cyril made up his mind to return to Ruta’s hospitality.

  Giving dinner parties was not something he was accustomed to. For days he agonised over what he should give Ruta, Mrs Church and Mavis Ormitage to eat. With Shana ensconced behind the ticket window, he roved the front at Southend, eyeing the fish stalls, and in equal doubt and confusion paced between the freezers in the Presto supermarket. Food was expensive, or that kind was. The price of crabs and lobsters horrified him. He informed the stone crab in the Aquarium of the amount asked for its fellow when ‘dressed’ and offered for sale on the stalls. The crab’s reply was to scamper sideways across its weedy coralline floor. I wonder if it is really green-carapaced, thought Cyril, or if its back is the reddy-pink colour of those I saw this afternoon. It is hard to tell because of the algae which covers it.

  The main course was to be pasta, the kind the Italians call alle vongole because it has small scallops mixed up in it. Cyril bought the pasta at Daleth Foods but naturally the Orthodox Jews who ran it would have nothing to do with seafood. The shellfish came from his favourite stall on the front – it was the cheapest – where he also bought a large dressed crab. Cyril mixed its sweet meat with Hellmann’s mayonnaise to make it go further and everyone pronounced it delicious. But when Mavis made a remark about its being rather strange to eat shellfish with ‘all that lot swimming about in there’, he felt uncomfortable. Had he been wrong to choose this menu? Had he made himself look a fool?

  ‘Does that mean zoo keepers must be vegetarians then, Mavis?’ asked Mrs Church.

  Mavis giggled. ‘You know what I mean. If you had supper with a zoo keeper you wouldn’t imagine you were eating lion chops but here – well, you know what I mean.’

  They all did and Cyril could not help noticing that Ruta left a great many of her vongole on the side of her plate. What had induced him to make a lime mousse in a fish shape for pudding? It must have been seeing the copper mould in the window of the shop at the end of the parade where Mr Cybele sold antique scoops. Mr Cybele had lent him the fish mould and the pale green shape looked pretty. Unfortunately no one wanted to eat it after what Mavis Ormitage had said.

  Cyril felt that his party had been a failure. T
hat, of course, was nothing new. Most of his ventures, large and small were failures. The arrival in the morning of Carlos with his tank-cleaning equipment distracted his mind from unhappy reminiscing. Cyril hung a notice on the Aquarium door, announcing that it would be closed till after lunch. He inspected the tanks before re-opening. The improvement in their appearance was quite wonderful. Everything sparkled, fresh and gleaming. Every aquatic vertebra looked rejuvenated – except the stone crab whose carapace was still overgrown with dense green fur.

  Its appearance troubled him. When he went about his feeding routine he put one finger into the water, touched the shell and found he could easily scrape some of the crust of algae off with his fingernail. Carlos had cleaned the biggest tank in the middle of the room as well and Cyril, closing the lid on the crab, wondered when the new shark would arrive. Before Malvina’s return or after? She was coming back in two days’ time. Ruta and Mrs Church were driving to Southampton in Mrs Church’s new Audi to fetch her.

  Cyril slept badly that night. He saw himself as a social misfit. He wondered about his future, which seemed to have no existence beyond Malvina’s return. A great crowd came to the Aquarium in the morning and entrance had to be restricted. Visitors had heard about the cleaning operation and for the first time Cyril saw a queue at the front door. When the last visitor had left at five he paced up and down the sitting-room, uncertain what to do, torn by conflicting demands. Then, impulsively, he rushed upstairs. He lifted the large, algae-coated decapod out of its tank, took it to the bathroom and washed it under the running tap. It was the work of a moment. The crab’s carapace was indeed green, a pure soft emerald green with a curious design like an ideograph in a dark purplish shade on its back.

  Tenderly, Cyril restored it to its home. The crab scuttled through its woodland of weed across its coral floor, attended by a little shoal of fish coloured like jewels. If Malvina enquired, he decided, he would tell her it had somehow happened during Carlos’s operations. But surely she would be delighted? Cyril suddenly found himself hyper-anxious to please Malvina, to confront her with perfection, to have attained, so to speak, supererogatory heights of achievement. Merely to have done the appointed job was not enough. He spent most of Saturday night sweeping and vacuum-cleaning the aquarium, tank room and the rest of the house, and on Sunday morning wrote in his best lettering a label for the biggest tank: Carcharhinus milberti, the Sandbar Shark, which he followed by a careful description of its habitat and habits.

  Mrs Trevor came back at seven in the evening, dressed exactly as she had been when she left. She entered the aquarium alone and trembling with anger. Cyril had expected Ruta and Mrs Church to be with her but evidently they had thought it wisest to make themselves scarce. Malvina gave each tank a rapid penetrating glance, the stone crab a longer look. She went upstairs and Cyril followed. So far she had not uttered a word and Cyril had received no reply to his enquiries as to her health and enjoyment of her trip. In the tank room she stood looking down at the stone crab, turned to face Cyril and said in shrill tones,

  ‘How dare you?’

  Putting the blame on Carlos forgotten, Cyril stammered that the crab was not harmed, indeed seemed happier for the cleansing operation.

  ‘Don’t give me that. Don’t even think of trying it. I know what you have done. Ruta and her mother told me all about the seafood extravaganza you served up to them – and the ingredients used. This particular decapod, I have no doubt, was purchased or stolen from the tank of one of the fish restaurants on the front. Monterroso’s, most probably.’

  ‘It isn’t true, Malvina. They’re lying. I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I’m not a fool, you know. It isn’t even the same variety. Look at the colour! You’re too ignorant to know that there are no less than 4,500 species of crab, aren’t you? You thought, when you slaughtered that innocent creature to make mayonnaise, that one crab was very like another. Well, I shall expose you. I shall publish the whole story in the Southend Times. Needless to say, I shan’t pay you. I shall not take you on as my permanent assistant, as was in my mind.’

  Cyril did not think. He did not hesitate. He gave her a shove and she fell into the biggest tank with a scream and a loud splash. If he saw her floundering there, he might soften, he thought, for he had never been hard-hearted, so he put the lid on, went downstairs and out to the beach. In all his life he had never felt so happy, so free and so fulfilled. As he walked along the mudflats with the sea breezes in his hair, he understood his destiny and the meaning of his name.

  He was not a novelist’s character, no figment of fiction, but one to inspire literature in his own right. One day books would be written about him, his past, his history, his obscurity, his striving for an identity, and his name: Cyril Biggs, the Marine Museum Murderer. Newspapers would give him headlines and television a favoured position in the six o’clock news. At Madame Tussaud’s, in the Chamber of Horrors, he would be placed by a water tank while a plastic facismile of his victim floated within. He had found his vocation.

  That night Cyril slept better than he had done for years. It was Shana’s day to sit at the receipt of custom. Such news travels fast and, looking out of an upstairs window, Cyril was not surprised to see a queue winding its way from the front door the length of the parade. Presently he crept down to the tank room.

  He did not lift the lid from the biggest tank but edged discreetly along the wall and peered into the stone crab’s home, peered through sparkling, ever-bubbling jade-coloured water and gleaming spotless glass to the crowds beneath. There, pressed closely around the biggest tank were Louise Mitchell, Ruta Yglesias, Fenella, Mrs Church and Mrs Greenaway, Henry Bennett with the Ruler and his painted queen, the three Jewish grocers, Veronica Spencer and her husband Tim, Margaret Cavendish, Jane, several Italian boys in T-shirts and a host of others not recognisable to Cyril. Some were reading the label he had made for the Sandbar shark but those who could get close had their faces pressed against the glass, contemplating what was within.

  They were polite middle-class people and as each had seen her or his fill, there was a stepping back and a parting to allow those behind to look. In one of these reshuffles, the tank was briefly revealed to Cyril’s view and he saw floating inside it, flippers gently pulsating with the movement of the water, a vast grey-green shape with a frill about its neck like the ruff of a salamander.

  An Unwanted Woman

  ‘It’s not a matter for the police.’

  He had said it before, to his wife, if not to this woman. The affair of Sophie Grant, bizarre, nearly incomprehensible, was outside the range of his experience. Deeply conservative, convinced of the superiority of past ways to those of the present, he was inclined to blame events on the decadence of the times he lived in. He repeated what he had said, adding, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

  Jenny’s friend, who was not crying yet, who seemed on the verge of crying or even screaming, a desperate woman, said in the voice she could only just control, ‘Then who am I to turn to? What can I do?’

  ‘I’ve already suggested the Social Services,’ said Jenny, ‘but it’s true what Hilary says, all they can do is take her into care, apply for a care order.’

  ‘She’s not in need of care,’ Hilary said with bitterness, with venom. ‘She doesn’t need protecting. It’s me, I’m the one who’s suffering. I ought to be taken into care and looked after.’ She had her voice and herself under control again. Her wineglass was empty. She took hold of it and after a small hesitation, held it up. ‘I’m sorry, Jenny. I need it. It’s not as if it was the hard stuff.’

  Jenny refilled the glass with Frascati. Hilary had got through half the bottle. They were sitting in the living room of the Burdens’ house in Glenwood Road, Kingsmarkham. It was just after nine on a winter’s evening, Christmas not far off as evinced by the first few cards, greetings from the super-punctual, on the mantelpiece. A wooden engine, gaily painted, a worn rabbit and a Russian doll, its interlocking pieces separated, lay on the carpet
, and these several objects Jenny now began picking up and dropping into a toy chest. Hilary watched her with increasing misery.

  ‘I know I’m a nuisance. I know I’m disturbing you when you’d like a quiet evening on your own. I’m sorry, but you – well, Jenny – you’re all I’ve got. I don’t know who else to talk to. Except to Martin and he – sometimes I think he’s glad. Well, he’s not, I shouldn’t say that, but when she was there she was so hateful to him, it must be a relief. You see –’ She looked away from them, ‘– I’m so ashamed. That’s why I can’t tell other people, because of being ashamed.’

  Burden thought he would have a drink, if only to make Hilary feel better. He fetched himself a beer from the fridge. When he came back Jenny had her arm round Hilary and Hilary had tears on her face.

  ‘What is there to be ashamed of?’

  ‘A woman whose child doesn’t want to live with her? What sort of a mother can she be? What sort of a home has she got? Of course I’m ashamed. People look at me and they think, what was going on in that house? They must have been abusing her, they must have ill-treated her.’

  ‘People don’t know, Hilary. Hardly anyone actually knows. You’re imagining all this.’

  ‘I can see it in their eyes.’

  Buoyed up by his drink, resigned to the ruin of his evening, Burden thought he might as well go the whole hog. Get it first-hand, though he could do nothing. Nothing could come of it but the slight relief to Hilary Stacey of relating it once again.

  Jenny said suddenly, ‘Does her father know?’

  ‘Her father wouldn’t care. It’s once in a blue moon he writes to her, she hasn’t heard from him for months.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened, would you, Hilary? Jenny’s told me but I’d like you to.’ He was painfully aware of sounding like a policeman. On the other hand, she had wanted a policeman. ‘Tell me from the beginning.’