by Ruth Rendell
Without admitting it even to herself, Jacqueline Coverdale liked handsome men and plain women. She got on well with Melinda but not so well as she got on with the less attractive Paula and Peter’s jolie laide wife, Audrey. She suffered from what might be called a Gwendolen complex, for, like Wilde’s Miss Fairfax, she preferred a woman to be “fully forty-two and more than usually plain for her age.” Eunice Parchman was at least as old as herself, very likely older, though it was hard to tell, and there was no doubt about her plainness. If she had belonged to her. own class, Jacqueline would have wondered why she didn’t wear make-up, undergo a diet, have that tabby-cat hair tinted. But in a servant, all was as it should be.
In the face of this respectful silence, confronted by this, to her, entirely prepossessing appearance, Jacqueline forgot the questions she had intended to ask. And instead of examining the candidate, instead of attempting to find out if this woman were suitable to work in her house, if she would suit the Coverdales, she began persuading Eunice Parchman that they would suit her.
“It’s a big house, but there are only three of us except when my stepdaughter comes home for the weekend. There’s a cleaner three days a week, and of course I should do all the cooking myself.”
“I can cook, madam,” said Eunice.
“It wouldn’t be necessary, really. There’s a dishwasher and a deep freeze. My husband and I do all the shopping.” Jacqueline was impressed by this woman’s toneless voice that, though uneducated, had no trace of a Cockney accent. “We do entertain quite a lot,” she said almost fearfully.
Eunice moved her feet, bringing them close together. She nodded slowly. “I’m used to that. I’m a hard worker.”
At this point Jacqueline should have asked why Eunice was leaving her present situation, or at least something about her present situation. For all she knew, there might not have been one. She didn’t ask. She was bemused by those “madams,” excited by the contrast between this woman and Eva Baalham, this woman and the last pert, to pretty au pair. It was all so different from what she had expected.
Eagerly she said, “When could you start?”
Eunice’s blank face registered a faint surprise, as well it might.
“You’ll want a reference,” she said.
“Oh yes,” said Jacqueline, reminded. “Of course.”
A white card was produced from Eunice’s large black handbag. On it was written in the same handwriting as the letter that had so dismayed Jacqueline in the first place: Mrs. Chichester, 24 Willow Vale, London, S.W. 18, and a phone number. The address was the one which had headed Eunice’s letter.
“That’s Wimbledon, isn’t it?”
Again Eunice nodded. No doubt she was gladdened by this erroneous assumption. They discussed wages, when she would start, how she would travel to Stantwich. Subject, of course, Jacqueline said hastily, to the reference being satisfactory.
“I’m sure we shall get on marvellously.”
At last Eunice smiled. Her eyes remained cold and still, but her mouth moved. It was certainly a smile. “Mrs. Chichester said, could you phone her tonight before nine? She’s an old lady and she goes to bed early.”
This show of tender regard for an employer’s wishes and foibles could only be pleasing.
“You may be sure I shall,” said Jacqueline.
It was only twenty past two and the interview was over.
Eunice said, “Thank you, madam. I can see myself out,” thus indicating, or so it seemed to Jacqueline, that she knew her place. She walked steadily from the room without looking back.
If Jacqueline had had a better knowledge of Greater London she would have realised that Eunice Parchman had already told her a lie, or at least acquiesced in a misapprehension. For the postal district of Wimbledon is S.W. 19 not S.W. 18, which designates a much less affluent area in the borough of Wandsworth. But she didn’t realise and she didn’t check, and when she entered Lowfield Hall at six, five minutes after George had got home, she didn’t even show him the white card.
“I’m sure she’ll be ideal, darling,” she enthused, “really the kind of old-fashioned servant we thought was an extinct breed. I can’t tell you how quiet and respectful she was, not a bit pushing. I’m only afraid she may be too humble. But I know she’s going to be a hard worker.”
George put his arm round his wife and kissed her. He said nothing about her volte-face, uttered no “I told you so’s.” He was accustomed to Jacqueline’s prejudices, succeeded often by wild enthusiasm, and he loved her for her impulsiveness, which in his eyes made her seem young and sweet and feminine. What he said was, “I don’t care how humble she is or how pushing, as long as she takes some of the load of work off your hands.”
Before she made the phone call Jacqueline, who had an active imagination, had formed a picture in her mind of the kind of household in which Eunice Parchman worked and the kind of woman who employed her. Willow Vale, she thought, would be a quiet tree-lined road near Wimbledon Common, number 24 large, Victorian; Mrs. Chichester an elderly gentlewoman with rigid notions of behaviour, demanding but just, autocratic, whose servant was leaving her because she wouldn’t, or couldn’t afford to, pay her adequate wages in these inflationary times.
At eight o’clock she dialled the number. Eunice Parchman answered the phone herself by giving the code correctly, followed by the four digits slowly and precisely enunciated. Again calling Jacqueline madam, she asked her to hold the line while she fetched Mrs. Chichester. And Jacqueline imagined her crossing a sombre overfurnished hall, entering a large and rather chilly drawing room where an old lady sat listening to classical music or reading the In Memoriam column in a quality newspaper. There, on the threshold, she would pause and say in her deferential way:
“Mrs. Coverdale on the phone for you, madam.”
The facts were otherwise.
The telephone in question was attached to the wall on the first landing of a rooming house in Earlsfield, at the top of a flight of stairs. Eunice Parchman had been waiting patiently by it since five in case, when it rang, some other tenant should get to it first. Mrs. Chichester was a machine tool operator in her fifties called Annie Cole who sometimes performed small services of this kind in exchange for Eunice agreeing not to tell the Post Office how, for a year after her mother’s death, she had continued to draw that lady’s pension. Annie had written the letter and the words on the card, and it was from her furnished room, number 6, 24 Willow Vale, S.W. 18, that Eunice now fetched her to the phone. Annie Cole said:
“I’m really very upset to be losing Miss Parchman, Mrs. Coverdale. She’s managed everything so wonderfully for me for seven years. She’s a marvellous worker, an excellent cook, and so house-proud! Really, if she has a fault, it’s that she’s too conscientious.”
Even Jacqueline felt that this was laying it on a bit thick. And the voice was peculiarly sprightly—Annie Cole couldn’t get rid of Eunice fast enough—with an edge to it the reverse of refined. She had the sense to ask why this paragon was leaving.
“Because I’m leaving myself.” The reply came without hesitation. “I’m joining my son in New Zealand. The cost of living is getting impossible here, isn’t it? Miss Parchman could come with me, I should welcome the idea, but she’s rather conservative. She prefers to stay here. I should like to think of her settling in a nice family like yours.”
Jacqueline was satisfied.
“Did you confirm it with Miss Parchman?” asked George.
“Oh, darling, I forgot. I’ll have to write to her.”
“Or phone back.”
Why not phone back, Jacqueline? Dial that number again now. A young man returning to his room next to Annie Cole’s, setting his foot now on the last step of that flight of stairs, will lift the receiver. And when you ask for Miss Parchman he will tell you he has never heard of her. Mrs. Chichester, then? There is no Mrs. Chichester, only a Mr. Chichester who is the landlord, in whose name the phone number is but who himself lives in Croydon. Pick up the phone now,
Jacqueline …
“I think it’s better to confirm it in writing.”
“Just as you like, darling.”
The moment passed, the chance was lost. George did pick up the phone, but it was to call Paula, for the report on her health he had received from his wife had disquieted him. While he was talking to her, Jacqueline wrote her letter.
And the other people whom chance and destiny and their own agency were to bring together for destruction on February 14? Joan Smith was preaching on a cottage doorstep. Melinda Coverdale, in her room in Galwich, was struggling to make sense out of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Giles Mont was reciting mantras as an aid to meditation.
But already they were gathered together. In that moment when Jacqueline declined to make a phone call, an invisible thread lassoed each of them, bound them one to another, related them more closely than blood.
3
George and Jacqueline were discreet people and they didn’t broadcast their coming good fortune. But Jacqueline did mention it to her friend Lady Royston, who mentioned it to Mrs. Cairne when the eternal subject of getting someone to keep the place clean came up. The news seeped through along the ramifications of Higgses, Meadowses, Baalhams, and Newsteads, and in the Blue Boar it succeeded as the major topic of conversation the latest excesses of Joan Smith.
Eva Baalham hastened, in her oblique way, to let Jacqueline know that she knew. “You going to give her telly?”
“Give whom—er—television?” said Jacqueline, flushing.
“Her as is coming from London. Because if you are I can as like get you a set cheap from my cousin Meadows as has the electric shop in Gosbury. Fell off the back of a lorry, I reckon, but ask no questions and you’ll get no lies.”
“Thank you so much,” said Jacqueline, more than a little annoyed. “As a matter of fact, we’re buying a colour set for ourselves and Miss Parchman will be having our old one.”
“Parchman,” said Eva, spitting on a windowpane before giving it a wipe with her apron. “Would that be a London name, I wonder?”
“I really don’t know, Mrs. Baalham. When you’ve finished whatever you’re doing to that window, perhaps you’d be good enough to come upstairs with me and we’ll start getting her room ready.”
“I reckon,” said Eva in her broad East Anglian whine. She never called Jacqueline madam, it wouldn’t have crossed her mind. In her eyes, the only difference between herself and the Coverdales was one of money. In other respects she was their superior since they were newcomers, and not even gentry but in trade, while her yeomen ancestors had lived in Greeving for five hundred years. Nor did she envy them their money. She had quite enough of her own and she preferred her council house to Lowfield Hall, great big barn of a place, must cost a packet keeping that warm. She didn’t like Jacqueline, who was mutton dressed as lamb and who gave herself some mighty airs for the wife of the owner of a tin can factory. All that will-you-be-so-good and thank-you-so-much nonsense. Wonder how she’ll get on with this Parchman? Wonder how I will? Still, I reckon I can always leave. There’s Mrs. Jameson-Kerr begging me to come on her bended knees and she’ll pay sixty pence an hour.
“God help her legs,” said Eva, mounting the stairs.
At the top of the house a warren of poky attics had long since been converted into two large bedrooms and a bathroom. From their windows could be seen one of the finest pastoral views in East Anglia. Constable, of course, had painted it, sitting on the banks of the river Beal, and as was sometimes his way he had shifted a few church towers the better to suit his composition. It was lovely enough with the church towers in their proper places, a wide serene view of meadows and little woods in all the delicious varied greens of early May.
“Have her bed in here, will she?” said Eva, ambling into the bigger and sunnier of the bedrooms.
“No, she won’t.” Jacqueline could see that Eva was preparing to line herself up as secretary, as it were, of the downtrodden domestic servants’ union. “I want that room for when my husband’s grandchildren come to stay.”
“You’ll have to make her comfortable if you want her to stop.” Eva opened a window. “Lovely day. Going to be a hot summer. The Lord is on our side, as my cousin as has the farm always says. There’s young Giles going off in your car without so much as by your leave, I reckon.”
Jacqueline was furious. She thought Eva ought to call Giles Mr. Mont, or at least, “your son.” But she was glad to see Giles, who was on half term, leave his voluntary incarceration at last to get some fresh air.
“If you’d be so kind, Mrs. Baalham, we might start moving the furniture.”
Giles drove down the avenue between the horse chestnut trees and out into Greeving Lane. The lane is an unclassified road, just wide enough for two cars to pass if they go very slowly. Blackthorn had given place to hawthorn, and the hedges were creamy with its sugary scented blossom. A limpid blue sky, pale green wheat growing, a cuckoo calling—in May he sings all day—an exultation of birds carolling their territorial claims from every tree.
Pretending that none of it was there, refusing, in spite of his creed, to be one with the oneness of it, Giles drove over the river bridge. He intended to get as little fresh air as was compatible with going out of doors. He loathed the country. It bored him. There was nothing to do. When you told people that they were shocked, presumably because they didn’t realise that no one in his senses could spend more than a maximum of an hour a day looking at the stars, walking in the fields, or sitting on river-banks. Besides, it was nearly always cold or muddy. He disliked shooting things or fishing things out of streams or riding horses or following the hunt. George, who had tried to encourage him in these pursuits, had perhaps at last understood the impossibility of the task. Giles never, but never, went for a country walk. When he was compelled to walk to Lowfield Hall from the point where the school bus stopped, about half a mile, he kept his eyes on the ground. He had tried shutting them, but he had bumped into a tree.
London he loved. Looking back, he thought he had been happy in London. He had wanted to go to a boarding school in a big city, but his mother hadn’t let him because some psychologist had said he was disturbed and needed the secure background of family life. Being disturbed didn’t bother him, and he rather fostered the air he had of the absent-minded, scatty, preoccupied young intellectual. He was intellectual all right, very much so. Last year he had got so many O Levels that there had been a piece about him in a national newspaper, he was certain of a place at Oxford, and he knew as much Latin, and possibly more Greek, than the man who professed to teach him these subjects at the Magnus Wythen.
He had no friends at school, and he despised the village boys, who were interested only in motorcycles, pornography, and the Blue Boar. Ian and Christopher Cairne and others of their like had been designated his friends by parental edict, but he hardly ever saw them as they were away at their public schools. Neither the village boys nor those at school ever attempted to beat him up. He was over six feet and still growing. His face was horrible with acne, and the day after he washed it his hair was again wet with grease.
Now he was on his way to Sudbury to buy a packet of orange dye. He was going to dye all his jeans and T-shirts orange in pursuance of his religion, which was, roughly, Buddhism. When he had saved up enough money he meant to go to India on a bus and, with the exception of Melinda, never see any of them again. Well, maybe his mother. But not his father or stuffy old George or self-righteous Peter or this bunch of peasants. That is, if he didn’t become a Catholic instead. He had just finished reading Brideshead Revisited and had begun to wonder whether being a Catholic at Oxford and burning incense on one’s staircase might not be better than India. But he’d dye the jeans and T-shirts just in case.
At Meadows’ garage in Greeving he stopped for petrol.
“When’s the lady from London coming, then?” said Jim Meadows.
“Mm?” said Giles.
Jim wanted to know so that he could tell them in the p
ub that night. He tried again. Giles thought about it reluctantly. “Is today Wednesday?”
“ ’Course it is.” Jim added, because he fancied himself as a wit, “All day.”
“They said Saturday,” said Giles at last. “I think.”
It might be and it might not, thought Jim. You never knew with him. Needed his head seeing to, that one. It was a wonder she let him out alone at the wheel of a good car like that. “Melinda’ll be home to get a look at her, I reckon.”
“Mm,” said Giles. He drove off, rejecting the green stamps.
Melinda would be home. He didn’t know whether this was pleasing or disquieting. On the surface, his relationship with her was casual and even distant, but in Giles’s heart, where he often saw himself as a Poe or Byron, it simmered as incestuous passion. This had come into being, or been pushed into being, by Giles six months before. Until then Melinda had merely been a kind of quasi sister. He knew, of course, that since she was not his sister or even his half sister there was nothing at all to stop their falling in love with each other and eventually marrying. Apart from the three years’ age difference, which would be of no importance later on, there could be no possible objection on anyone’s part. Mother would even like it and old George would come round. But this was not what Giles wanted or what he saw in his fantasies. In them Melinda and he were a Byron and an Augusta Leigh who confessed their mutual passion while walking in Wuthering Heights weather on the Greeving Hills, a pastime which nothing would have induced Giles to undertake in reality. There was little of reality in any of this. In his fantasies Melinda even looked different, paler, thinner, rather phthisic, very much of another world. Confronting each other, breathless in the windswept darkness, they spoke of how their love must remain forever secret, never of course to be consummated. And though they married other people, their passion endured and was whispered of as something profound and indefinable.
