by Ruth Rendell
A weak and innocent creature, he met Joan when she was to a hairdresser’s in Harlesden for a tint and perm. One side of this establishment was for the ladies, the other a barber’s shop, but there was much coming and going on the part of the assistants, and Norman often stopped for a chat with Joan while she was under the dryer. She was almost the first woman he had looked at, certainly the first he had asked out. But she was so kind and sweet and friendly, he didn’t feel at all intimidated. He fell violently in love with her and asked her to marry him the second time he found himself alone with her. Joan accepted with alacrity.
Norman had no idea how she had earned her living, believing her story that she had taken in typing and occasionally been a free-lance secretary. They lived with his mother. After a year or two of furious daily quarrels with old Mrs. Smith, Joan found the best way of keeping her quiet was to encourage her hitherto controlled fondness for the bottle. Gradually she got Mrs. Smith to the stage of spending her savings on half a bottle of whisky a day.
“It would kill Norman if he found out,” said Joan.
“Don’t you tell him, Joanie.”
“You’d better see you’re in bed then when he comes home. That poor man idolises you, he puts you on a pedestal. It’d break his heart to know you were boozing all day, and under his roof too.”
So old Mrs. Smith, with Joan’s encouragement, became a self-appointed invalid. For most of each day she was in bed with her whisky, and Joan helped matters along by crushing into the sugar in her tea three or four of the tranquillisers the doctor had prescribed for her own “nerves.” With her mother-in-law more or less comatose, Joan returned by day to the old life and the flat in Shepherds Bush. She made very little money at it, and her sexual encounters had become distasteful to her. A remarkable fact about Joan was that, though she had had sexual relations with hundreds of men as well as with her own husband, she had never made love for pleasure or had a “conventional” illicit affair except with the baker’s roundsman. It is hard to know why she continued as a prostitute. Out of perversity perhaps, or as a way of defying Norman’s extreme working-class respectability.
If so, it was a secret way, for he never found her out. It was she eventually who boldly and ostentatiously confessed it all to him.
And that came about as the result of her conversion. Since she was fourteen, and she was now nearly forty, she had never given a thought to religion. But all that was necessary to turn her into a raving Bible-thumper was a call at her front door by a man representing a sect called the Epiphany People.
“Not today, thanks,” said Joan, but having nothing better to do that afternoon, she glanced through the magazine, or tract, he had left on the doorstep. By one of those coincidences that are always happening, she found herself on the following day actually passing the Epiphany People’s temple. Of course it wasn’t really a coincidence. She had passed it a hundred times before but had never previously noticed what it was. A prayer meeting was beginning. Out of curiosity Joan went in—and was saved.
The Epiphany People were a sect founded in California in the 1920s by a retired-undertaker called Elroy Camps. Epiphany, of course, is January 6, the day on which the Magi are traditionally supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem to bear witness to the birth of Christ and to bring him gifts. Elroy Camps and his followers saw themselves as “Wise Men” to whom a special revelation had been granted: that is, they and only they had witnessed the divine manifestation, and hence only they and a select band of the chosen would find salvation. Indeed, Elroy Camps believed himself to be a reincarnation of one of the Magi and was known in the sect as Balthasar.
A strict morality was adhered to, members of the sect must attend the temple, pay a minimum of a hundred proselytising house calls a year, and hold to the belief that within a very short time there would be a second Epiphany in which they, the new wise men, would be chosen and the rest of the world cast into outer darkness. Their meetings were vociferous and dramatic, but merry too with tea and cakes and film shows. New members were called upon to confess their sins in public, after which the rest of the brethren would burst into spontaneous comment and end by singing hyms. Most of these had been written by Balthasar himself.
The following is an example:
As the Wise Men came riding in days long gone by,
So we ride to Jesus with hearts held up high;
Bearing our sins as they bore him presents,
That shall be washed white in his holy essence.
At first it seems a mystery why all this should have made an appeal to Joan. But she had always loved drama, especially drama of a nature shocking to other people. She heard a woman confess her sins, loudly proclaiming such petty errors as bilking London Transport, fraudulent practice with regard to her housekeeping money, and visits to a theatre. How much better than that could she do! She was forty, and even she could see that, with her faded fair hair and fine pale skin, she hadn’t worn well. What next? A grim obscure domesticity in Harlesden with old Mrs. Smith, or the glorious publicity the Epiphany People could give her. Besides, it might all be true. Very soon she was to believe entirely in its truth.
She made the confession of the year. It all came out. The congregation were stunned by the revelation of Joan’s excesses, but she had been promised forgiveness and she got it, as much as the woman who had travelled on the tube without a ticket got it.
Joan, the faithless wife, opened her heart to a stunned and disillusioned Norman. Joan, the evangelist, went from house to house in Harlesden and Wood Lane and Shepherds Bush, not only distributing tracts but recounting to her listeners how, until the Lord called her, she had been a “harlot” and a scarlet woman.
“I was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour,” said Joan on the doorstep. “I had a golden cup in my hand full of the abominations and filthiness of my fornication. I was the hold of every unclean spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
It wasn’t long before some wit was making snide cracks while in the barber’s chair about unclean and hateful birds. In vain did Norman ask his wife to stop it. He had suffered enough in learning of her former mode of life without this. The street buzzed with it and the boys called after him as he went to work.
But how do you reproach a woman who has reformed, who counters every reproof with a total agreement? “I know that, Norm, I know I was steeped in lowness and filth. I sinned against you and the Lord. I was a lost soul, plunged in the abominations of iniquity.”
“I just wish you wouldn’t tell everyone,” said Norman.
“Balthasar said there is no private atonement.”
Then old Mrs. Smith died. Joan was never at home and she was left all day in a cold and filthy house. She got out of bed, fell, and lay on the floor for seven hours in only a thin nightgown. That night, not long after Norman had found her, she died in hospital. Cause of death: hypothermia. In other words, she had died of exposure. Again the street buzzed, and it was not only schoolboys who called after Norman.
His mother had left him the house and a thousand pounds. Norman was one of those people—and they are legion—whose ambition is to keep a country pub or shop. He had never lived in the country or run a grocer’s, but that was what he wanted. He underwent training with the Post Office, and at about the same time as the Coverdales bought Lowfield Hall, he and Joan found themselves proprietors of Greeving Village Store. Greeving, because the only other Epiphany Temple in the country was in Nunchester.
The Smiths ran the store with disastrous inefficiency. Sometimes it opened at nine, sometimes at eleven. The post office was, of course, open during its prescribed hours, but Joan (for all her virtuous protestations to Eunice) left Norman in sole charge for hours and he couldn’t leave his cubbyhole behind the grille to serve other customers. Those who had been regulars drifted away. The rest, compelled through carlessness to allegiance, grumbled ferociously. Joan investigated the mails. It was her duty, she said, to find out the sinners who surrounded her. She steamed open e
nvelopes and reglued them. Norman watched in misery and despair, longing for the courage to hit her and hoping against all odds and his own nature that he would one day find it.
They had no children and now Joan was passing through what she called an “early change.” Considering she was fifty, it might have been thought that her menopause was neither early nor late but right on time.
“Norm and I always longed for kiddies,” she was in the habit of saying, “but they never came. The Lord knew best, no doubt, and it’s not for us to question His ways.”
No doubt He did. One wonders what Joan Smith would have done with children if she had had them. Eaten them, perhaps.
10
For a long time George Coverdale had suspected one of the Smiths of tampering with his post. Only a week before he went on holiday an envelope containing a letter from his son Peter showed a glue smear under the flap, and a parcel from the book club to which Jacqueline subscribed had obviously been opened and retied with string. But he hesitated to take action without positive proof.
He hadn’t set foot in the shop or used the post office since the day, some three years before, when, in front of an interested audience of farm labourers’ wives, Joan had gaily reproached him for living with a divorced woman and exhorted him to abandon his sinful life and come to God. After that he had posted his letters in Stantwich and given Joan no more than a stiff nod when he met her in the village. He would have been appalled had he known she had been in his bedroom, fingered his clothes, and toured his house.
But when he and his family returned from holiday there was no sign that Eunice had defected from her established ways.
“I don’t believe she’s been out of the house, darling,” said Jacqueline.
“Yes, she has.” Village gossip always reached them by way of Melinda. “Geoff told me. He got it from Mrs. Higgs, the Mrs. Higgs who rides the bike, she’s his grandma’s sister-in-law. She saw her out for a walk in Greeving.”
“Good,” said George. “If she’s happy pottering about the village, I won’t press her about the driving lessons. But if you should get it via the bush telegraph that she’s got hankerings to learn, perhaps you’ll let me know.”
Late summer, early autumn, and the vegetation seemed to become too much for man and nature itself to control. The flowers grew too tall and too straggly, the hedges overbrimmed with leaves, with berries and tendrils of the bryony, and the wild clematis, the Old Man’s Beard, cast over all its filmy fluffy cloak. Melinda went blackberrying, Jacqueline made bramble jelly. Eunice had never before seen jam being made. As far as she had known, if it didn’t exactly descend like manna from heaven, at least it was only available in jars from a shop. Giles picked no blackberries, nor did he attend the Harvest Festival at St. Mary’s. On the cork wall he pinned a text of his own, a line that might have been written for him: Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading, and he went on struggling through the Upanishads.
Pheasant shooting began. Eunice saw George go into the gun room, take the shotguns down from the wall and, leaving the door to the kitchen open, clean and load them. She watched with interest but in innocence, having no idea of their being of future use to her.
George cleaned and loaded both guns, but not because he had any hope of Giles accompanying him on the shoot. He had bought the second gun for his stepson, just as he had bought the fishing tackle and the fat white horse, now eating its head off down in the meadow. Three autumns of apathy and then downright opposition on Giles’s part had taught George to abandon hope of making him a sportsman. So the second gun was lent to Francis Jameson-Kerr, stockbroker son of the brigadier.
Pheasants were plentiful, and from the kitchen window, then from the kitchen garden where she went to cut a cabbage, Eunice watched the three of them bag four brace and a hen bird. A brace for the Jameson-Kerrs, a brace each for Peter and Paula, the remaining birds for Lowfield Hall. Eunice wondered how long the bloodied bundles of feathers were to be hung in the back kitchen before she had the pleasure of tasting this hitherto unknown flesh. But she wasn’t going to ask, not she. A week later Jacqueline roasted them, and as Eunice tucked into the thick slice of breast on her plate, three little round pellets of shot rolled out into the gravy.
The shopping was always done by Jacqueline, or a list phoned by Jacqueline to a Stantwich store and the goods later collected by George. It was a chronic source of anxiety to Eunice that one day she might be called on to phone that list, and one Tuesday in late September this happened.
The phone rang at eight in the morning. It was Lady Royston to say that she had fallen, thought she had broken her arm, and could Jacqueline drive her to hospital in Colchester? Sir Robert had taken one car, her son the other, and then, having taken it into her head to begin picking the apple crop at the early hour of seven-thirty, she had climbed the ladder and slipped on a broken rung.
The Coverdales were still at breakfast. “Poor darling Jessica,” said Jacqueline, “she sounded in such pain. I’ll get over there straight away. The shopping list’s ready, George, so Miss Parchman can phone it through when the shop opens, and then perhaps you’ll be an angel and pick it up?”
George and Giles finished their breakfast in a silence broken only by George’s remarking, in the interest of being a good stepfather, that such a brilliant start to the day could only indicate rain later. Giles, who was thinking about an advertisement he had seen in Time Out asking for a tenth passenger in a mini-bus to Poona, said “Could it?” and he didn’t know anything about meteorology. Eunice came in to clear the table.
“My wife’s had to go out on an errand of mercy,” said George, made pompous by Eunice’s forbidding presence, “so perhaps you’ll be good enough to get on to this number and order what’s on the list.”
“Yes, sir,” said Eunice automatically.
“Ready in five minutes, Giles? Give it till after nine-thirty, will you, Miss Parchman? These shops don’t keep the early hours they did in our young days.”
Eunice stared at the list. She could read the phone number and that was about all. By now George had disappeared to get the Mercedes out. Giles was upstairs. Melinda was spending the last week of her holiday with a friend in Lowestoft. The beginning of a panic stirring, Eunice thought of asking Giles to read the list to her—one reading would be enough for her memory—on the grounds that her glasses were somewhere up at the top of the house. But the excuse was too feeble as she had an hour in which to fetch those glasses herself, and now, anyway, Giles was crossing the hall in his vague sleepwalking way, leaving the house, slamming the front door behind him. In despair, she sat down in the kitchen among the dirty dishes.
All her efforts went into rousing some spark out of that atrophied organ, her imagination. By now an inventive woman would have found ways of combating the problem. She would have said she had broken her reading glasses (and trodden on them to prove it) or feigned illness or fabricated a summons to London to the bedside of a sick relative. Eunice could only think of actually taking the list to the Stantwich store and handing the list to the manager. But how to get there? She knew there was a bus, but not where it stopped, only that the stop was two miles distant; not when it ran or where precisely it went or even where the shop was. Presently habit compelled her to stack the dishes in the washer, wipe clean the surfaces, go upstairs to make the beds and gaze sullenly at Giles’s Quote of the Month, which would have had a peculiarly ironical application to herself had she been able to understand it. Nine-fifteen. Eva Baalham didn’t come on Tuesdays, the milkman had already been. Not that Eunice would have dared expose herself by asking for enlightenment from these people. She would have to tell Jacqueline that she had forgotten to phone, and if Jacqueline came back in time to do it herself … She glanced up again at the cork wall, and then into her mind came a clear picture of having stood just here with Joan Smith.
Joan Smith.
No very lucid plan had formed. Eunice was just as anxious for Joan Smith not to know her secret as
for Eva or the milkman or Jacqueline not to know it. But Joan too had a grocer’s shop, and once the list was in her hands, there might be a way. She put her best hand-knitted cardigan on over her pink cotton frock and set off for Greeving.
“Long time no see,” said Joan, sparkling. “You are a stranger! This is Norman, my better half. Norm, this is Miss Parchman from the Hall I was telling you about.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Norman Smith from behind his grille. Enclosed by bars, he had the look of some gloomy ruminant animal, a goat or llama perhaps, which has too long been in captivity to recall its freedom but still frets dully within its cage. His face was wedge-shaped, white and bony, his hair sandy grey. As if he were sustaining the cud-chewing image, he munched spearmint all day long. This was because Joan said he had bad breath.
“Now to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” said Joan. “Don’t tell me Mrs. Coverdale’s going to patronise our humble abode at last. That would be a red-letter day.”
“I’ve got this list.” Looking vaguely about her at the shelves, Eunice thrust the list at Joan.
“Let me see. We have got the plain flour and the oats, that I do know. But, my goodness, kidney beans and basil leaves and garlic!” The bad shopkeeper’s excuse came to Joan’s aid. “We’re waiting for them to come in,” she said. “But, I tell you what, you read it out and I’ll check what we do have.”
“No, you read it. I’ll check.”
“There’s me being tactless again! Ought to remember your eye trouble, didn’t I? Here goes, then.”
Eunice, checking and finding only two items available, knew that she was saved, for Joan read the list out in a clear slow voice. It was enough. She bought the flour and the oats, which would have to be hidden, would have to be paid for out of her own money, but what did that matter? A warm feeling for Joan, who had saved her again, welled in Eunice. Dimly she remembered feeling something like this long ago, ages ago, for her mother before Mrs. Parchman became ill and dependent. Yes, she would have the cup of tea Joan was offering, and take the weight off her feet for ten minutes.
