by Ruth Rendell
She was happy. If she had been capable of analysing her thoughts and feelings and of questioning her motives, she would have said that this vicarious living was better than any life she had known. But had she been capable of that, it is unlikely she would have been content with so specious a way of spending her leisure. Her addiction gives rise to a question. Wouldn’t some social service have immensely benefited society—and saved the lives of the Coverdales—had it recognised Eunice Parchman’s harmless craving? Give her a room, a pension, and a television set and leave her to worship and to stare for the rest of her life? No social service came into contact with her until it was far too late. No psychiatrist had ever seen her. Such a one would only have discovered the root cause of her neurosis if she had allowed him to discover her illiteracy. And she had been expert at concealing it since the time when she might have been expected to overcome it. Her father, who could read perfectly well, who in his youth had read the Bible from beginning to end, was her principal ally in helping her hide her deficiency. He, who should have encouraged her to learn, instead conspired with her in the far more irksome complexities not learning entailed.
When a neighbour, dropping in with a newspaper, had handed it to Eunice, “I’ll have that,” he had been used to say, and looking at the small print, “Don’t strain her young eyes.” It came to be accepted in her narrow circle that Eunice had poor sight, this solution generally being the one seized upon by the uneducated literate to account for illiteracy.
“Can’t read it? You mean you can’t see?”
When she was a child she had never wanted to read. As she grew older she wanted to learn, but who could teach her? Acquiring a teacher, or even trying to acquire one, would mean other people finding out. She had begun to shun other people, all of whom seemed to her bent on ferreting out her secret. After a time this shunning, this isolating herself, became automatic, though the root cause of her misanthropy was half forgotten.
Things could not hurt her, the furniture, the ornaments, the television. She embraced them, they aroused in her the nearest she ever got to warm emotion, while to the Coverdales she gave the cold shoulder. Not that they received more of her stoniness than anyone else had done. She behaved to them as she had always behaved to everyone.
George was the first to notice it. Of all the Coverdales, he was by far the most sensitive, and therefore the first to see a flaw in all this excellence.
6
They sat in church on Sunday morning and Mr. Archer began to preach his sermon. For his text he took “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things.” Jacqueline smiled at George and touched his arm, and he smiled back, well satisfied.
On the following day he remembered those exchanged smiles and thought he had been fatuous, perhaps overcomplacent.
“Paula’s gone into hospital,” Jacqueline said when he came home. “It’s really rather awful the way they fix a day for your baby to be born these days. Just take you in and give you an injection and hey presto!”
“Instant infants,” said George. “Has Brian phoned?”
“Not since two.”
“I’ll just give him a ring.”
They were dining, as they often did when alone, in the morning room. Eunice came in to lay the table. George dialled, but there was no reply. A second after he put the phone down it rang. After answering Paula’s husband in monosyllables, after a final “Call me back soon,” he walked over to Jacqueline and took her hand.
“There’s some complication. They haven’t decided yet, but she’s very exhausted and it’ll probably mean an emergency Caesarean.”
“Darling, I’m so sorry, what a worry!” She didn’t tell him not to worry, and he was glad of it. “Why don’t you phone Dr. Crutchley? He might reassure you.”
“I’ll do that.”
Eunice left the room. George appreciated her tactful silence. He phoned the doctor, who said he couldn’t comment on a case he knew nothing about, and reassured George only to the extent of telling him that, generally speaking, women didn’t die in childbirth any more.
They ate their dinner. That is, Giles ate his dinner, Jacqueline picked at hers, and George left his almost untouched. Giles made one small concession to the seriousness of the occasion and the anxiety of the others. He stopped reading and stared instead into space. Afterwards, when the suspense was over, Jacqueline said laughingly to her husband that such a gesture from Giles was comparable to a pep talk and a bottle of brandy from anyone else.
The suspense didn’t last long. Brian called back twice, and half an hour after that was on the line to say a seven-pound boy had been delivered by Caesarean operation and Paula was well.
Eunice was clearing the table. She must have heard it all, George’s “Thank God!” Jacqueline’s “That’s wonderful, darling. I’m so happy for you,” Giles’s “Good,” before he took himself off upstairs. She must have heard relief and seen delight. Without the slightest reaction, she left the room and closed the door.
Jacqueline put her arms round George and held him. He didn’t think about Eunice then. It was only as he was going to bed, and heard faintly above him the hum of her television, that he began to think her behaviour strangely cold. Not once had she expressed her concern during the anxious time, or her satisfaction for him when the danger was past. Consciously he hadn’t waited for her to do so. At the time he hadn’t expected a “I’m so glad to hear your daughter’s all right, sir,” but now he wondered at the omission. It troubled him. Lack of care for a fellow woman, lack of concern for the people in whose home one lived, were unnatural in any woman. Well done, thou good and faithful servant … But that had not been well done.
Not for the world would George have spoken of his unease to Jacqueline, who was so happy and contented with her employee. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted a loquacious servant, making the family’s affairs her affairs and being familiar. He resolved to banish it from his mind.
And this he did quite successfully until the christening of the new baby, which took place a month later.
Patrick had been christened at Greeving, Mr. Archer was a friend of the Coverdales, and a country christening in summer is pleasanter than one in town. Paula and Brian and their two children arrived at Lowfield on a Saturday at the end of June and stayed till the Sunday. They had quite a large party on the Saturday afternoon. Brian’s parents and his sister were there, the Roystons, the Jameson-Kerrs, an aunt of Jacqueline’s from Bury and some cousins of George’s from Newmarket. And the arrangements for eating and drinking, carried out by Eunice under Jacqueline’s directions, were perfect. The house had never looked so nice, the champagne glasses been so well polished. Jacqueline didn’t know they possessed so many white linen table napkins, had never seen them all together before and all so freshly starched. In the past she had sometimes been reduced to using paper ones.
Before they left for the church Melinda came into the drawing room to show Eunice the baby. He was to be called Giles, and Giles Mont, aghast at the idea now, had been roped in to be godfather before he realised what was happening. She carried him in in the long embroidered christening robe that she herself, her brother and sister, and indeed George himself, had once worn. He was a fine-looking baby, large and red and lusty. On the table, beside the cake, was the Coverdales’ christening book, a volume of listed names of those who had worn the robe, when and where they had been baptised and so on. It was open, ready for this latest entry.
“Isn’t he sweet, Miss Parchman?”
Eunice stood chill and stiff. George felt a coldness come from her as if the sun had gone in. She didn’t smile or bend over the baby or make as if to touch his coverings. She looked at him. It wasn’t a look of enthusiasm such as George had seen her give to the silver spoons when she laid them out on the saucers. Having looked at him, she said:
“I must get on. I’ve things to see to.”
Not one word did he or Jacqueline rec
eive from her during the course of the afternoon when she was in and out with trays as to the attractiveness of the child, their luck in having such a fine day, or the happiness of the young parents. Cold, he thought, unnaturally cold. Or was she just painfully shy?
Eunice was not shy. Nor had she turned from the baby because she was afraid of the book. Not directly. She was simply uninterested in the baby. But it would be true to say that she was uninterested in babies because there are books in the world.
The printed word was horrible to her, a personal threat to her. Keep away from it, avoid it, and from all those who will show it to her. The habit of shunning it was ingrained in her; it was no longer conscious. All the springs of warmth and outgoing affection and human enthusiasm had been dried up long ago by it. Isolating herself was natural now, and she was not aware that it had begun by isolating herself from print and books and handwriting.
Illiteracy had dried up her sympathy and atrophied her imagination. That, along with what psychologists call affect, the ability to care about the feelings of others, had no place in her make-up.
General Gordon, in attempting to raise the morale of the besieged inhabitants of Khartoum, told them that when God was handing out fear to the people of the world, at last He came to him. But by that time God had no more fear to give, so Gordon was created without fear. This elegant parable may be paraphrased for Eunice. When God came to her, He had no more imagination or affect to give.
The Coverdales were interferers. They interfered with the best intentions, those of making other people happy. If it were not such an awful thing to say of anyone (to quote one of Giles Mont’s favourite authors), one could say that they meant well. They were afraid of being selfish, for they had never understood what Giles knew instinctively, that selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
“I’m worried about old Parchment Face,” said Melinda. “Don’t you think she has a terrible life?”
“I don’t know,” said Giles. Melinda was paying one of her rare visits to his room, sitting in fact on his bed, and this both made him happy and threw him into a panic. “I haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, you—you never notice anything. But I can tell you she does. She’s never once been out, not all the time she’s been here. All she does is watch television. Listen, it’s on now.” She paused dramatically and turned her eyes up to the ceiling. Giles went on with what he had been doing when she first came in, pinning things up on the cork tiles with which he had covered half one of the walls. “She must be terribly lonely,” said Melinda. “She must miss her friends.” She grabbed Giles by the arm and swung him round. “Don’t you care?”
Her touch gave him a shock and he blushed. “Leave her alone. She’s all right.”
“She’s not. She can’t be.”
“Some people like being alone.” He looked vaguely round his room, at the heap of orange clothes, the muddle of books and dictionaries, the stacks of half-finished essays on subjects not in the Magnus Wythen curriculum. He loved it. It was better than anywhere else except possibly the London Library where he had once been taken by a scholarly relative. But they won’t let you rent a room in the London Library, or Giles would have been at the top of their housing list. “I like being alone,” he said.
“If that’s a hint to me to go …”
“No, no, it isn’t,” he said hastily, and resolving to declare himself, began in a hoarse thrilling voice, “Melinda …”
“What? Where did you get that awful poster? Is she supposed to have a green face?”
Giles sighed. The moment had passed. “Read my Quote of the Month.”
It was written in green ink on a piece of paper pinned to the cork wall. Melinda read it aloud. “Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped around us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mama have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before?”
“Good, isn’t it? Samuel Butler.”
“You can’t have that on the wall, Step. If Daddy or Jackie saw it, it’d absolutely freak them out. Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be doing classics.”
“I may not do anything,” said Giles. “I may go to India. I don’t suppose,” greatly daring, “you’d want to come too?”
Melinda made a face. “I bet you don’t go. You know you won’t. You’re just trying to get off a subject that might involve you, I was going to ask you to come down with me and confront Daddy and make him do something about her. But I bet you’ll say you won’t.”
Giles pushed his fingers through his hair. He would have liked to please her. She was the only person in the world he cared much about pleasing. But there were limits. Not even for her would he defy his principles and flout his nature. “No,” he said, and gloomily, almost sorrowfully, contorting his face in a kind of hopelessness. “No, I won’t do that.”
“Mad,” said Melinda and bounced out.
Her father and Jacqueline were in the garden, in the midsummer dusk, surveying what Jacqueline had done that day. There was a heavy sweet scent from the first flowers on the tobacco plants.
“I’ve been thinking, my darlings. We ought to do something about poor old Parchment Face, take her out, give her an interest.”
Her stepmother gave her a cool smile. In some respects Jacqueline could fill the wasp role her son had meted out to her. “Not everyone is such an extrovert as you, you know.”
“And I think we’ve had enough of that Parchment Face business, Melinda,” said George. “You’re no longer the naughtiest girl in the sixth.”
“Now you’re evading the issue.”
“No, we’re not. Jackie and I have been discussing that very thing. We’re quite aware Miss Parchman hasn’t been out, but she may not know where to go, and it’s difficult without a car.”
“Then lend her a car! We’ve got two.”
“That’s what we’re going to do. The chances are she’s too shy to ask. I see her as a very shy woman.”
“Repressed by a ruling class,” said Melinda.
It was Jacqueline who made the offer.
“I can’t drive,” said Eunice. She didn’t mind saying this. There were only two things she minded admitting she couldn’t do. Hardly anyone in her circle had been able to drive, and in Rainbow Street it had been looked on as a rather bizarre accomplishment for a woman. “I never learnt.”
“What a pity! I was going to say you could borrow my car. I really don’t know how you’ll get around without transport.”
“I can go on the bus.” Eunice vaguely supposed a red double decker trundled around the lanes with the frequency of the 88 in Tooting.
“That’s just what you can’t do. The nearest bus stop’s two miles away, and there are only three buses a day.”
Just as George had detected a flaw in his housekeeper, so now Eunice sensed a small cloud threatening her peaceful life. This was the first time any Coverdale had shown signs of wanting to change it. She waited uneasily for the next move, and she didn’t have to wait long.
Progenitor of Coverdales, George was the arch-interferer of them all. Employees were hauled into his office at T.B.C. and advised about their marriages, their mortgages, and the higher education of their children. Meadows, Higgs, and Carter matrons were accustomed to his entering their cottages and being told to get the dry rot people in, or why not grow a few vegetables on that piece of ground? Ever such a nice man was Mr. Coverdale, but you don’t want to take no notice of what he says. Different in my gran’s time. The squire was the squire then, but them old days are gone, thank God. George went on interfering—for the good of others.
He bearded the lion in its den. The lion looked very tame and was occupied in womanly fashion, ironing one of his dress shirts.
“Yes, sir?” Her tabby-cat hair was neatly combed, a
nd she wore a blue and white checked cotton dress.
All his life George had been looked after by women, but none of them had ever attempted the formidable task of washing, starching, and ironing a “boiled” shirt. George, if he ever thought about it at all, supposed that there was a special mystique attached to these operations, and that they could only be performed in a laundry by a clever machine. He smiled approvingly.
“Ah, I can see I’m interrupting an expert at a very skilled task. You’re making a fine job of that, Miss Parchman.”
“I like ironing,” said Eunice.
“I’m glad to hear it, but I don’t suppose you like being confined at Lowfield Hall all the time, do you? That’s what I’ve come to talk about. My wife tells me you’ve never found time in your busy life to learn to drive a car. Am I right?”
“Yes,” said Eunice.
“I see. Well, we shall have to remedy that. What would you say to driving lessons? I shall be happy to foot the bill. You’re doing well by us and we’d like to do something for you in return.”
“I couldn’t learn to drive,” said Eunice, who had been thinking hard. The favourite excuse came out. “My sight wouldn’t be up to it.”
“You don’t wear glasses.”
“I should do. I’m waiting for my new pair.”
In-depth questioning elicited that Eunice should have glasses, had been in need of new ones when she came to Greeving, had “let it slide,” couldn’t, even with glasses, read a number plate or a road sign. She must have her eyes tested forthwith, said George, he would see to it himself and drive her into Stantwich.
“I feel rather ashamed of myself,” he said to Jacqueline. “All the time the poor woman was as blind as a bat. I don’t mind telling you now we know the reason for it, but I was beginning to find that reserve of hers quite off-putting.”
Alarm showed in her eyes. “Oh, George, you mustn’t say that! Having her has made such a difference to my life.”
“I’m not saying a thing, darling. I quite understand she’s very shortsighted and was much too diffident to say so.”
