A Judgement in Stone

by Ruth Rendell

  “She’s not a secretary, darling,” she said, echoing the words he had used to her when she had hesitated about engaging Eunice. “You mustn’t expect too much of her.”

  “Too much! Is it too much to ask someone to find four clearly labelled sheets of paper and hand them over to a driver? Besides, it isn’t that which I mind so much. I never really knew what dumb insolence meant before, it was just a phrase. I know now. She doesn’t give the number or our name when she answers the phone. If a pig could say hallo it would sound just like Miss Parchman.”

  Jacqueline laughed, smudging her mascara.

  “And to put the phone down on me! Why didn’t she answer when I called back? Of course the phone rang, it’s just nonsense to say it didn’t. And she was positively rude to me when I spoke to her about it.”

  “I’ve noticed she doesn’t like doing things which are—well, outside what she thinks of as her province. It’s always the same. If I leave her a note she’ll do what it asks but a bit truculently, I always think, and she doesn’t like making phone calls or answering the phone.” She spoke quite blithely as if laughing off “men’s nonsense,” humouring and soothing him because his cold was now worse than hers.

  George hesitated, put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s no good, Jackie, she’ll have to go.”

  “Oh no, George!” Jacqueline spun round on her stool. “I can’t do without her. You can’t ask that of me just because she let you down over those papers.”

  “It isn’t just that. It’s her insolence and the way she looks at us. Have you noticed she never calls us by our names? And she’s dropped that sir and madam. Not that I care about that, I’m not a snob,” said George, who did and was, “but I can’t put up with bad manners and lying.”

  “George, please give her one more chance. What would I do without her? I can’t face the thought of it.”

  “There are other servants.”

  “Yes, old Eva and au pairs,” said Jacqueline bitterly. “I had some idea what it would be like at our Christmas party. I didn’t enjoy it if you did. I was doing the food all day and running around all night. I don’t think I spoke to anyone except to ask if they wanted another drink.”

  “And for that I have to put up with a servant who would have been a credit to the staff at Auschwitz?”

  “One more chance, George, please.”

  He capitulated. Jacqueline could always win him over. Could he pay too high a price, he asked himself, to see his beloved wife happy and relaxed and beautiful? Could he pay too much for peace and domestic comfort and a well-run elegant home? Was there anything he wouldn’t part with for that?

  Except my life, he might have answered, except my life.

  He intended to react by taking a firm line with Eunice; in accordance with his calling, to manage and direct her. He wasn’t a weak man or a coward, and he had never approved the maxim that it is better to ignore unpleasantness and pretend that it does not exist. She must be admonished when she returned his smile and his “good morning” with a scowl and a grunt, or he would have a quiet talk with her and elicit from her what the trouble was and how they had failed.

  He admonished her only once, and then jocularly. “Can’t you manage a smile when I speak to you, Miss Parchman? I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that grim look.”

  Beseechingly, Jacqueline’s eyes met his. Eunice took no notice apart from slightly lifting her shoulders. After that he said no more. He knew what would happen if he tried a tête-à-tête with her. “There’s nothing wrong. It’s no use talking about it because there’s nothing.” But he realised, if Jacqueline did not, that they were conciliating Eunice Parchman, allowing her to manage and direct them. For Jacqueline’s sake and to his own self-disgust, he found himself smiling fatuously at his housekeeper whenever they encountered each other, asking her if her room was warm enough, if she had enough free time, and once if she would mind staying in on a certain evening when they had guests for dinner. His warmth was met by not a shred of reciprocation.

  February came in with a snowstorm.

  Only in pictures and on television had Eunice seen real country snow before as against the slush which clogged the gutters of Tooting. It had never occurred to her that snow was something that could bother people or change their lives. On the morning of Monday, February 1, George was up before she was and, with an unwilling sleepy Giles, clearing in the long drive two channels for the wheels of the Mercedes. The first light had brought Mr. Meadows out with his snow plough into the lane. A shovel and boots and sacks were put into the car’s boot, and George and Giles set off for Stantwich with the air of arctic explorers.

  Against a livid sky the great flakes whirled, and the landscape was blanketed but for the dark demarcations of hedges and the isolated blot of a skeleton tree. No going out for Jacqueline that day or the next or the next. She phoned to cancel her appointment with the hairdresser, her lunch with Paula, the evening engagements. Eva Baalham didn’t bother to phone and say she wasn’t coming. She just didn’t come. You took that sort of thing for granted in East Anglia in February.

  So Jacqueline was imprisoned with Eunice Parchman. Just as she was afraid to use her car, so were her neighbours who might have used theirs afraid to call on her. Once she would have seen the coming of the snow as a possible topic of conversation between herself and Eunice, but now she knew better than to try. Eunice accepted the snow as she accepted rain and wind and sunshine. She swept the paving outside the gun-room door and the front steps without comment. Silently she went about her work. When Jacqueline, unable to repress herself, exclaimed with relief at the sound of George’s car successfully returned through the thickening drifts, she reacted no more than if this had been a normal day of ordinary weather.

  And Jacqueline began to see George’s point of view. Being snowbound with Eunice was more than disconcerting. It was oppressive, almost sinister. She marched doggedly through the rooms with her duster and her polishing cloths. Once, when Jacqueline was seated at the desk writing to Audrey, the half-filled sheet of paper was lifted silently from under her nose while a duster was wiped slowly across the surface of inlaid leather and rosewood. It was as if, Jacqueline said later to her husband, she were a deaf patient in a home for the handicapped and Eunice a ward maid. And even when the work was done and Eunice departed upstairs to watch afternoon serials, she felt that it was not the snow alone which pressed a ponderous weight on the upper regions of Lowfield Hall. She found herself treading carefully, closing doors discreetly, sometimes just standing in the strange white light that is uniquely the reflection thrown back from snow, gleaming, marmoreal, and cold.

  She was not to know, never dreamed, that Eunice was far more afraid of her than she was intimidated by Eunice; that the incident of the Coverdale history papers had made her retreat totally into her shell, for if she were to speak or allow them to speak to her, that archenemy of hers, the printed word, would rise up and assail her. Reading in an armchair pulled close to a radiator, reading to please Eunice and keep clear of her, Jacqueline never guessed that she could have done nothing to please Eunice less or arouse her more to hatred.

  Every evening that week she needed twice her usual allowance of sherry to relax her before dinner.

  “Is it worth it?” said George.

  “I talked to Mary Cairne on the phone today. She said she’d put up with positive abuse, let alone dumb insolence, to have a servant like Miss P.”

  George kissed his wife but couldn’t resist a dig. “Let her try it then. It’s nice to know Miss P.’ll have somewhere to go when I sack her.”

  But he didn’t sack her, and on the Thursday, Thursday, February 4, something happened to distract them from their discontentment with their housekeeper.

  17

  Things were getting too much for Norman Smith. He also was snowbound with a fellow being who was uncongenial to him, only the fellow being was his wife.

  Norman had often in the past told Joan she was mad, but in much the sa
me way as Melinda Coverdale told Giles Mont he was mad. He didn’t intend to imply she was insane. But now he was sure she literally was mad. They still shared a bed. They belonged in that category of married people who share a bed without thinking about it, who would have shared a bed even if they were not on speaking terms. But often now Norman woke in the night to find Joan absent, and then he heard her in some other part of the house laughing to herself, laughing maniacally, or singing snatches of Epiphany hymns or reciting prophecies in a shrill uneven voice. She had ceased altogether to clean the house or dust the goods in the shop or sweep the shop floor. And each morning she bedizened herself in bits of bizarre clothing saved from her Shepherds Bush days, her face painted like a clown’s.

  She ought to see a doctor. Norman knew quite well that she was in need of treatment for her mind. A psychiatrist was the sort of doctor she ought to see, but how to get her to one? How to go about it? Dr. Crutchley held surgery twice a week in Greeving in a couple of rooms in a converted cottage. Norman knew Joan wouldn’t go of her own volition, and he couldn’t imagine going for her. What, sit in that waiting room among coughing and snuffling Meadowses and Baalhams and Eleighs, and then explain to a tired and harassed doctor that his wife sang in the night and bawled bits from the Bible at his customers and wore knee socks and short skirts like a young girl?

  Besides, the worst manifestation of her madness he couldn’t confess to anyone.

  Lately she seemed to think she had a right, godlike or as God’s censor, to investigate any of the mail that passed through Greeving Post Office. He couldn’t keep the mail sacks from her. He tried locking them up in the outside lavatory, but she broke the lock with a hammer. And now she was an expert at steaming open envelopes. He winced and trembled when he heard her telling Mrs. Higgs that God had punished Alan and Pat Newstead by killing their only grandchild, information Joan had culled out of a letter from the distraught father. And when she imparted to Mr. Meadows of the garage that George Coverdale was in debt to his wine merchant, he waited till the shop was empty and then he struck her in the face. Joan only screamed at him. God would have vengeance on him, God would make him a leper and an outcast who dared not show his face in the haunts of men.

  This was one of her prophecies which was to prove only too true.

  On Friday, February 5, when the thaw had begun and the lane between Greeving and Lowfield Hall could be negotiated without a struggle, George Coverdale walked into the village store at nine in the morning. That is, he walked in after he had banged peremptorily on the front door and fetched Norman, who was still at breakfast, out to open up.

  “You’re early, Mr. Coverdale,” said Norman nervously. It was seldom that George had set foot on that threshold, and Norman knew his coming boded ill.

  “In my opinion, nine is not early. It’s the time I usually reach my place of business, and if I shan’t do so this morning it’s because the matter I have to discuss with you is too serious to postpone.”

  “Oh yes?” Norman might have stood up to George, but he quailed when Joan, her yellow hair in curlers, her skin-and-bone body wrapped in a dirty red dressing gown, appeared in the doorway.

  George took an envelope from his briefcase. “This letter has been opened and reseated,” he said, and he paused. It was horrible to him to think of Joan Smith spreading about the village that his wine merchant was threatening him with proceedings. And it was made all the more horrible by the fact that the letter was the result of a computer mistake. George, having paid his bill in early December when it was due, had argued the whole thing out with the retailer by phone and obtained a fulsome apology for his error. But he scorned to defend himself to these people. “There are smears of glue on the flap,” he said, “and inside I found a hair which I venture to suggest comes from the head of your wife.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Norman muttered. He had unwittingly used Eunice Parchman’s phrasing, and this inflamed George.

  “Perhaps the postmaster at Stantwich will. I intend to write to him today. I shall lay the whole matter before him, not forgetting previous occasions when I have had cause for suspicion, and I shall demand an official enquiry.”

  “I can’t stop you.”

  “Very true. I merely felt it was just to tell you what I mean to do so that you have warning in advance. Good morning.”

  All this time Joan had said nothing. But now, as George moved towards the door, distastefully eyeing the dusty packets of cornflakes and baskets of shrunken mouldy vegetables, she darted forward like a spider or a crab homing on its prey. She stood between George and the door, against the door, her sticklike arms spread against the glass, the red wool sleeves falling back from flesh where the subcutaneous tissue had wasted away. She lifted her head and screamed at him:

  “Generation of vipers! Whoremonger! Adulterous beast! Woe to the ungodly and the fornicators!”

  “Let me pass, Mrs. Smith,” said George levelly. Not for nothing had he seen service under fire in the Western Desert.

  “What shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue? Sharp arrows of the mighty with coals of juniper.” Joan waved her fist in his face. “God will punish the rich man who taketh away the livelihood of the poor. God will destroy him in his high places.” Her face was suffused with blood, her eyes white with the pupils cast up.

  “Will you get your wife out of my way, Mr. Smith!” said George, enraged.

  Norman shrugged. He was afraid of her and powerless.

  “Then I will. And if you care to sue me for assault, you’re welcome.”

  He pushed Joan and got the door open. Outside in the car, Giles, the least involved of people, was actually watching with interest. Joan, only temporarily worsted, ran after George and seized his coat, shouting gibberish, her dressing gown flapping in the icy wind. And by now Mrs. Cairne had appeared at her window, Mr. Meadows by his petrol pumps. George had never been so embarrassed in his life, he was shaking with distaste and repulsion. The whole scene was revolting to him. If he had witnessed it in the street, an angry man, a half-dressed woman clinging to his coat, shouting abuse at him, he would have turned the other way, vanished as fast as possible. And here he was, one of the protagonists.

  “Be quiet, take your hands off me,” he found himself shouting back at her. “This is outrageous!”

  And then at last Norman Smith did come out and get hold of his wife and manhandle her back into the shop. Afterwards, Meadows of the garage said he slapped her, but George didn’t wait to see. With what shreds of dignity remained to him, he got into the car and drove off. For once he was glad of Giles’s detachment. The boy was smiling distantly. “Lunatic,” he said before lapsing back into his own mysterious thoughts.

  The incident upset George for the day. But he wrote his letter to the Stantwich postmaster without mentioning the scene of the morning or even that he had particular grounds for suspecting the Smiths.

  “Let’s hope we’re going to have a quiet weekend,” he said to Jacqueline. “What with battling to work through all this snow every day and then this fracas this morning, I feel I’ve had enough. We’re not going anywhere, are we, or having anyone in?”

  “Just to the Archers’ tomorrow afternoon, darling.”

  “Tea with the rector,” said George, “is just the kind of somniferous non-event I can do with at present.”

  Melinda was not expected home, and Giles didn’t count. It was rather like having a harmless resident ghost, Jacqueline sometimes thought sadly. It stalked the place, but it didn’t bother you or damage things, and on the whole it kept quietly to the confines of the haunted room. She wondered from whose writings he had taken the Quote of the Month: I hope never again to commit a mortal sin, nor even a venial one, if I can help it.

  It was the last quotation Giles was ever to pin to his cork wall, and perhaps it was appropriate that the lines he had chosen, from Charles VII of France, were said to be their author’s dying words.

  But, as it happened, Melinda did come hom
e. Since January 5 she hadn’t been back to Lowfield Hall, and her conscience was troubling her. Of course she would go home for the thirteenth, for that was George’s birthday, but it seemed awful to stay away for five weeks. Also there was the matter of the tape recorder. George’s present was her most prized possession, and because of it she was the envy of her college friends. Melinda didn’t like to say no to people who asked to borrow it, but when someone took it to a folk concert and afterwards left it all night in an unlocked car, she thought the time had come to remove it from harm’s way.

  Without having told anyone she was coming, she arrived in Stantwich as the dull red sun was setting, and at Gallows Corner after dark. She was just a little too late for Geoff Baalham, who had passed that way ten minutes before, and it was Mrs. Jameson-Kerr who picked her up and told her George and Jacqueline had gone to tea at the rectory.

  Melinda went into the house through the gun room and immediately upstairs to find Giles. But Giles also was out. He had taken the Ford and, after a session with Father Madigan, gone to a cinema. The house was warm, spotless, exquisitely tidy and silent. Silent, that is, but for the muted tumult throbbing through the first-floor ceilings from Eunice Parchman’s television. Melinda put the tape recorder on her chest of drawers. She changed into a robe she had made herself out of an Indian bedspread, put a shawl over her shoulders and a string of limpet shells around her neck, and well pleased with the result, went down to the morning room. There she found a stack of new magazines which she took into the kitchen. Ten minutes later Eunice, coming down to remove from the deep freeze a chicken casserole for the Coverdales’ supper, found her seated at the table with a magazine open in front of her.

  Melinda got up courteously. “Hallo, Miss Parchman. How are you? Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve just made it.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Eunice, the nearest she ever got to a gracious acceptance of any offer. She frowned. “They’re not expecting you.”