by Ruth Rendell
“Where did you get that awful woman?” Audrey said to Jacqueline later. “My dear, she’s creepy. She’s not human.”
Jacqueline flushed as if she personally had been insulted. “You’re as bad as George. I don’t want to make a friend of my servant, I want her the way she is, marvellously efficient and unobtrusive. I can tell you, she really knows her job.”
“So do boa constrictors,” said Audrey.
And thus they came to Christmas.
George and Melinda brought holly in to decorate Lowfield Hall, and from the drawing-room chandelier hung a bunch of mistletoe, the gift of Mr. Meadows in whose oaks it grew. More than a hundred cards came for the Coverdales, and these were suspended on strings in a cunning arrangement fixed up by Melinda. Giles received only two personal cards, one from his father and one from an uncle, and these, in his opinion, were so hideous that he declined to put them up on his cork wall where the Quote of the Month was: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Melinda made paper chains, bright red and emerald and shocking blue and chrome yellow, exactly the kind of chains she had made every year for fifteen years. Jacqueline took much the same view of them as her son did of his cards, but not for the world would she have said so.
On the day itself the drawing room was grandly festive. The men wore suits, the women floor-length gowns. Jacqueline was in cream velvet, Melinda in a 1920s creation, rather draggled dark blue crepe de chine embroidered with beads which she had bought in the Oxfam shop. They opened their presents, strewing the carpet with coloured paper and glitter. While Jacqueline unwrapped the gold bracelet that was George’s gift, and Giles looked with something nearing enthusiasm on an unabridged Gibbon in six volumes, Melinda opened the parcel from her father.
It was a tape recorder.
15
Everyone was drinking champagne, even Giles. He had been prevailed upon by his mother to come downstairs and was morosely resigned to staying downstairs all day. And it would be worse tomorrow when they would be having a party. In this view Melinda concurred—all those cairns and curs and roisterers—and she sat on the floor next to him, telling him how wonderful Jonathan was. Giles didn’t much mind this. Byron, after all, was never perturbed by the existence of Colonel Leigh, and Christmas would be bearable if such conclaves with Melinda became the rule. He fancied that the others had noticed their closeness and were overawed by the mystery of it.
Far from noticing anything about her son except that he was there for once, Jacqueline was thinking about the one absent member of the household.
“I really do feel,” she said, “that we ought to ask Miss Parchman to sit down to lunch with us.”
A spontaneous groan from all but Melinda.
“A female Banquo,” said Audrey, and her husband remarked that Christmas was supposed to be for merrymaking.
“And for peace and good will,” said George. “I don’t find the woman personally congenial, as you all know, but Christmas is Christmas and it’s not pleasant to think of her eating her lunch out there on her own.”
“Darling, I’m so glad you agree with me. I’ll go and ask her and then I’ll lay another place.”
But Eunice was not to be found. She had tidied the kitchen, prepared the vegetables, and gone off to the village store. There in the parlour, undecorated by holly or paper garlands, she and Joan and a gloomy sullen Norman ate roast chicken, frozen peas, and canned potatoes, followed by a Christmas pudding from the shop. Eunice enjoyed her meal, though she would have liked sausages as well. Joan had cooked some sausages but had forgotten to serve them, and Norman, made suspicious by a peculiar smell, found them mouldering in the grill pan a week later. They drank water, and afterwards strong tea. Norman had got some beer in, but this Joan had deposited in the bin just before the dustmen called. She was in raptures over the salmon-pink jumper Eunice had knitted for her, rushed away to put it on, and preened about in it, striking grotesque model girl attitudes in front of the fingermarked mirror. Eunice received an enormous box of chocolates and a fruit cake from stock.
“You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you, dear?” said Joan.
And so it happened that Eunice also spent Boxing Day with the Smiths, leaving Jacqueline to cope with food and drink for the thirty guests who came that evening. And the effect on Jacqueline was curious, twofold. It was as if she were back in the old days when the entire burden of the household work had been on her shoulders, and in Eunice’s absence she appreciated her almost more than when she was there. This was what it would be like permanently if Eunice were to leave. And yet for the first time she saw her housekeeper as George and Audrey and Peter saw her, as uncouth and boorish, a woman who came and went as she pleased and who saw the Coverdales as so dependent on her that she held them in the hollow of her hand.
The New Year passed, and Peter and Audrey went home. They had asked Melinda to go back with them for the last week of her holiday, but Melinda had refused. She was a very worried girl. Each day that passed made her more anxious. She lost her sparkle, moped about the house, and said no to all the invitations she got from her village friends. George and Jacqueline thought she was missing Jonathan and tactfully they asked no questions.
For this Melinda was deeply thankful. If what she feared was true—and it must be true now—they would have to know sometime. Perhaps it might be possible to get through this, or out of this, without George ever suspecting. Children understand their parents as little as parents understand their children. Melinda had had a happy childhood and a sympathetic devoted father, but her way of thinking was infected by the attitude of her friends to their parents. Parents were bigoted, prudish, moralistic. Therefore hers must be, and no personal experience triumphed over this conviction. She guessed she was George’s favourite child. All the worse. He would be the more bitterly disappointed and disillusioned if he knew, and his idealistic love for her would turn to disgust. She imagined his face, stern and yet incredulous, if he were even to suspect such a thing of his youngest child, his little girl. Poor Melinda. She would have been flabbergasted had she known that George had long supposed her relationship with Jonathan to be a fully sexual one, regretted it, but accepted it philosophically as long as he could believe there was love and trust between them.
Every day, of course, she had been having long phone conversations with Jonathan—George was to be faced with a daunting bill—but so far she hadn’t breathed a word. Now, however, on January 4, she knew she must tell him. This wasn’t as bad as telling her father would be, but bad enough. Her experience of this kind of revelation had been culled from novel and magazine reading and from old wives’ gossip in the village. When you told the man he stopped caring for you, he dropped you, didn’t want to know, or at best shouldered his responsibility while implying it was all your fault. But she had to tell him. She couldn’t go on carrying this frightening secret another day on her own, especially as, that morning, she had been violently sick on waking.
She waited until George had gone to work and Jacqueline and Giles to Colchester in the second car, Jacqueline supposing that while she was shopping her son would be visiting a friend—a friend at last!—though, in fact, he was to receive his first instruction from Father Madigan. Eunice was upstairs making beds. There were three telephones at Lowfield Hall, one in the morning room, an extension in the hall, and another extension by Jacqueline’s bed. Melinda chose the morning-room phone, but while she was getting enough courage together to make her call it rang. Jonathan.
“Hold on a minute, Jon,” she said. “I want to close the door.”
It was at that precise moment, while Jonathan was holding the line and had briefly laid down the receiver to light a cigarette, while Melinda was closing the morning-room door, that Eunice lifted the receiver on Jacqueline’s bedroom extension. She wasn’t spying. She was too uninterested in Melinda and too repelled by her attentions deliberately to eavesdrop. She picked up the receiver because you cannot properly dust a telephone without doing so. But as
soon as she heard Melinda’s first words she was aware that it would be prudent to listen.
“Oh, Jon, something awful! I’ll come straight out with it, though I’m scared stiff to tell you. I’m pregnant. I know I am. I was sick this morning and I’m nearly two weeks overdue. It’ll be frightful if Daddy or Jackie find out, Daddy would be so let down, he’d hate me, and what am I going to do?”
She was nearly crying. Choked by tears that would soon spill over, she waited for the stunned silence. Jonathan said quite calmly, “Well, you’ve got two alternatives, Mel.”
“Have I? You tell me. I can’t think of anything but just running away and dying!”
“Don’t be so wet, lovey. You can have an abortion if you really want …”
“Then they’d be sure to know. If I couldn’t get it on the National Health and I had to have money or they wanted to know my next of kin or …”
By now Melinda was hysterical. Like almost all women in her particular situation, she was in a blind unreasoning panic, fighting against the bars of the trap that was her own body. Eunice screwed up her nose. She couldn’t stand that, lot of fuss and nonsense. And perhaps it was something else as well, some unconscious sting of envy or bitterness, that made her lay the receiver down. Lay it down, not replace it. It would be unwise to do that until after their conversation was over. She moved away to dust the dressing table, and thus she missed the rest.
“I don’t like the idea of abortion,” said Jonathan. “Do get yourself together, Mel, and calm down. Listen, I want to marry you, anyway. Only I thought we ought to wait till we’ve got our degrees and jobs and whatever. But it doesn’t matter. Let’s get married as soon as we can.”
“Oh, Jon, I do love you! Could we? I’d have to tell them even though we’re both over eighteen, but, Jon …”
“But nothing. We’ll get married and have our baby and it’ll be great. You come up to Galwich tomorrow instead of next week and I’ll hitch back and you can stay with me and we’ll make plans. Okay?”
It was very much okay with Melinda who, having wept with despair, was now bubbling with joy. She would go to Jonathan next day and tell George she’d be staying with her friend in Lowestoft. It was awful lying to him, but all in a good cause, better that than let him know, wait till they’d published the banns or got the licence. And so on. She wasn’t sick on January 5. Before she had packed her case she knew her fears had been groundless, the symptoms having resulted from anxiety and their cessation from relief. But she went just the same, and had a taxi from the station to Jonathan’s flat, she was so impatient to tell him she wasn’t going to have a baby after all.
Being in possession of someone else’s secret reminded Eunice of the days of blackmailing the homosexual and, of course, Annie Cole. It was a piece of information which Joan Smith would have delighted to hear, Joan who rather resented the way Eunice never told her anything about the private lives of the Coverdales. She wasn’t going to tell her this either. A secret shared is no longer a secret, especially when it has been imparted to someone like Joan Smith, who would whisper it to what customers she still retained in no time. No, Eunice was going to keep this locked in her boardlike bosom, for you never knew when it might come in useful.
So, on the following night, when she climbed into the van that was waiting for her in Greeving Lane, she gave nothing away.
“I noticed the Coverdale girl went back to her college yesterday,” said Joan. “Bit early, wasn’t it? All set for a week of unbridled cohabitation with that boy friend she’s got, I dare say. She’ll come to a bad end. Mr. Coverdale’s just the sort of hard man to cast his own flesh and blood out of the house if he thought they’d been committing fornication.”
“I don’t know,” said Eunice.
Twelfth Night, January 6, Epiphany, the greatest day in the calendar for the disciples of Elroy Camps. The meeting was sensational—two really uninhibited confessions, one of them rivalling Joan’s own, an extempore prayer shrieked by Joan at the top of her voice, five hymns.
Follow the star!
Follow the star!
The Wise Men turn not back.
Across the desert, hills, or foam,
The star will lead them to their home,
White or brown or black!
They ate seed cake and drank tea. Joan became more and more excited until, eventually, she had a kind of seizure. She fell on the floor, uttering prophecies as the spirit moved her, and waving her arms and legs about. Two of the women had to take her into a side room and calm her down, though on the whole the Epiphany People were rather gratified than dismayed by this performance.
Only Mrs. Elder Barnstaple, a sensible woman who came to the meetings for her husband’s sake, seemed disquieted. But she supposed Joan was “putting it on.” Not one of that company guessed at the truth, that Joan Smith was daily growing more and more demented and her hold on reality becoming increasingly tenuous. She was like a weak swimmer whose grasp of a slippery rock has never been firm. Now her fingers were sliding helplessly down its surface, and currents of madness were drawing her into the whirlpool.
She hardly spoke as she drove the van home, but from time to time she let out little bursts of giggles like the chucklings of something unhuman that haunted those long pitch-dark lanes.
16
Bleak midwinter, and the frosty wind made moan. Eva Baalham said that the evenings were drawing out, and this was true but not that one would notice. The first snow fell in Greeving, a dusting of snow that thawed and froze again.
On the cork wall, from St. Augustine: Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty so ancient and so new, too late came I to love Thee! For Giles the road to Rome was not entirely satisfactory as Father Madigan, accustomed until recently to Tipperary peasants, expected from him their ignorance and their blind faith. He didn’t seem to understand that Giles knew more Greek and Latin than he and had got through Aquinas before he was sixteen. In Galwich Melinda was blissfully happy with Jonathan. They were still going to get married but not until she had taken her degree in fifteen months’ time. To this end, because she would need a good job, she was working quite hard, between making love and making plans, at her Chaucer and her Gower.
The cold pale sun pursued a low arc across a cold pale sky, aquamarine and clear, or appeared as a puddle of light in a high grey field of cloud.
January 19 was Eunice’s forty-eighth birthday. She noted its occurrence but she told no one, not even Joan. It was years since anyone had sent her a card or given her a present on that day.
She was alone in the house. At eleven the phone rang. Eunice didn’t like answering the phone, she wasn’t used to it and it alarmed her. After wondering whether it might not be better to ignore it, she picked up the receiver reluctantly and said hallo.
The call was from George. Tin Box Coverdale had recently changed their public relations consultants, and a director of the new company was coming to lunch, to be followed by a tour of the factory. George had prepared a short history of the firm which had been established by his grandfather—and had left his notes at home.
He had a cold and his voice was thick and hoarse. “The papers I want you to find are in the writing desk in the morning room, Miss Parchman. I’m not sure where, but the sheets are clipped together and headed in block capitals: Coverdale Enterprises from 1895 to the Present Day.”
Eunice said nothing.
“Now I’d appreciate it if you’d hunt them out.” George let out an explosive sneeze. “I beg your pardon. Where was I? Oh yes. A driver from here is already on his way, and I want you to put the papers into a large envelope and give them to him when he comes.”
“All right,” said Eunice hopelessly.
“I’ll hold the line. Have a look now, will you? And come back and tell me when you’ve found them.”
The desk was full of papers, many of them clipped together and all headed with something or other. Eunice hesitated, then replaced the receiver without speaking to George again. Immediately the
phone rang. She didn’t answer it. She went upstairs and hid in her own room. The phone rang four more times and then the doorbell. Eunice didn’t answer that either. Although she wasn’t celebrating her birthday, it did strike her that it was very disagreeable having this happen today of all days. A person’s birthday ought to be nice and peaceful, not upset by this kind of thing.
George couldn’t understand what had happened. The driver came back empty-handed, the consultant left without the Cover-dale history. George made a sixth call and at last got hold of his wife, who had been in Nunchester having her hair tinted. No, Miss Parchman wasn’t ill and had just gone out for a walk. The first thing he did when he got home was find the papers on the very top of the pile in the writing desk.
“What happened, Miss Parchman? It was of vital importance to me to have those papers.”
“I couldn’t find them,” said Eunice, laying the dining table, not looking at him.
“But they were on the top. I can’t understand how you could miss them. My driver wasted an hour coming over here. And surely, even if you couldn’t find them, you could have come back and told me.”
“They cut us off.”
George knew that was a lie. “I rang back four times.”
“It never rang,” said Eunice, and she turned on him her small face, which now seemed to have increased in size, to have swollen with resentment. Hours of brooding had filled her with gall, and now she used to him the tone her father had so often heard in the last weeks of his life. “I don’t know anything about any of it.” For her, she was quite voluble. “It’s no good asking me because I don’t know.” The blood crept up her throat and broke in a dark flush across her face. She turned her back on him.
George walked out of the room, impotent in the face of this refusal to take responsibility, to apologise or even discuss it. His head was thick with his cold and felt as if stuffed with wet wool. Jacqueline was making up her face in front of her dressing table mirror.
