The Saint Zita Society

by Ruth Rendell

  This time he did it, he made the sun shine, and Dex set off for Hexam Place with the big cloth bag in which he carried his small gardening tools. The large ones Dr Jefferson let him keep in the area cupboard at number 3. It was late in the year for mowing the lawns at number 3 and number 5 but Dex thought it dry enough to attempt it. He called Peach for help as he was walking down the Buckingham Palace Road because a bunch of evil spirits passed him, all of them young, all of them blank-faced and one with red hair. They laughed at him and clutched each other and he was afraid. Instead of answering, Peach made a brrr-brrr sound that went on and on. Dex stopped it, though he disliked doing this because it seemed rude. But perhaps Peach knew what the trouble was because the evil spirits didn’t touch him but ran away over Ebury Bridge. The sun was strong now, shining brightly out of a deep blue sky.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The meeting of the Saint Zita Society took place at lunchtime and mainly concerned a particularly horrible habit increasingly indulged in by dog walkers, though not of course June and Gussie. While these offenders obeyed the requirement to scrape up their animal’s excrement into a plastic bag, instead of taking the bag home with them, they tied a knot in the top of it and left it at the roots of one of the trees in the pavement. Such nasty little bags were sometimes to be seen at the roots of every tree in Hexam Place.

  This was a subject that aroused a lot of anger in Saint Zita members, of whom Henry, Beacon, Sondra, Thea and Jimmy were present round the table in the Dugong. It was unanimously decided to write a letter to Westminster City Council and another, slightly differently worded, to the Guardian. Thea was chosen to write the letters, rather to Beacon’s resentment. She might have a degree but he was positive it wasn’t as good as his nor obtained from as good a university as the University of Lagos. Could he have been rejected or even not considered for the job because he was African? However, he said nothing – for now, he thought – and walked along Hexam Place a few paces behind June instead of accompanying her.

  Making sure Beacon was looking, June went up the steps of number 6 to the front door and let herself in, taking her time about it. Zinnia was clearing up after the Princess’s lunch.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ said the Princess.

  ‘Of course not. At my age!’

  ‘I don’t know what difference age makes. My grandmother drank more heavily the older she got. She was paralytic in her seventies and unconscious in her eighties. Have you done whatever it is you have to do on the computer to fix us in for our flight?’

  ‘Check us in, madam,’ said June. ‘It’s too early. We’re not going till Sunday.’

  ‘I’d have thought the earlier you did it the better.’

  Then you’d have thought wrong. ‘They won’t let you do it till twenty-four hours before the flight.’

  ‘How ridiculous,’ said the Princess. ‘When we get back I’m thinking of getting myself a wheelchair. I could get out then. I’m dying of boredom stuck in here. You could push me.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t, madam. I’m too old to push other old people about. If you want a wheelchair you’ll have to get one you drive yourself.’

  ‘Well, when you chart us in for the flight could you look up wheelchairs on dongle?’

  Zinnia was giggling. She had the Caribbean ready sense of humour and irrepressible laugh. June frowned at her and said she would see. She couldn’t be bothered to correct her employer’s two new errors but maybe next time such a mistake was made she’d asked the Princess if she’d like a computer lesson from Thea next door. Imagine how that would go down! She hunted around for Gussie, found him asleep under the piano and put him on the lead. The two of them carried out a survey of the tree roots in Hexam Place and adjacent streets. Even when composing the relevant item on the agenda, June hadn’t suspected there were quite so many of those disgusting little bags. Gussie enjoyed his part in the research, amazed at being allowed to sniff the excrement repositories as much as he liked. June counted twelve in Hexam Place alone. While photographing the most obtrusive on her mobile, her activities were watched by a passing dog walker who stared at her in horror, picked up his Pekinese and ran off towards Eaton Square.

  They were going to Florence. They always went to Florence for a week in October and to Verona for a week in May. From this fortnight in Italy June had managed to pick up a little Italian and had bought herself an Italian dictionary and a phrasebook. HSH the Princess Susan Hapsburg spoke no Italian despite her year and a half living with Luciano. That evening, over drinks, they described to Rad Sothern how they would pass their week.

  ‘She thinks she’s an egghead,’ said the Princess, ‘goes to museums and churches and whatever.’

  Rad was too young to know what ‘egghead’ meant. ‘So what do you do, Your Highness?’

  ‘Well, Mr Fortescue, since you ask, I manage to get about on foot a little. It’s the sunshine, you know, it does me good. I go to dress shops and jewellery shops and spend money and sit outside cafés and watch the world go by. She’s happy enough to join me when there’s any drink going, I can tell you.’

  Not deigning to rebut this, June went to the window and looked up and down Hexam Place. The only car parked in the street was Montserrat’s VW. ‘Your friend taking you out for a drive, is she?’

  ‘Not so far as I know.’ Rad sounded rather uncomfortable.

  ‘I thought you might be going over to Wimbledon Common. It’s a fine night. Maybe it’s more cosy at home.’

  Rad said a hasty goodbye, wished them a nice holiday and made his way across the street to number 7 where he went down the area steps and for a moment disappeared from view. It looked to Miss Grieves on the basement stairs of number 8 as if he must have retreated into the cupboard which faced the basement door. That dark girl who was a friend of Thea’s soon appeared, flooding the area with light from the basement. In her day and for a good many days afterwards no girl would have met her boyfriend dressed in dirty jeans with their bottoms turned up, an old biker’s jacket and a man’s vest. Rad emerged from where he had been hiding and followed her in. They didn’t kiss. Weird, thought Miss Grieves. Not to say bloody mad.

  Maybe he’d stay the night. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. The Stills seemed very easy-going with their staff. Miss Grieves went back to her evening drink, half English Breakfast tea and half whisky, and lit a cigarette. Back at the window an hour later she saw Beacon arriving in the Audi, turning, parking behind that girl’s car. She could see him quite clearly by the light from a street lamp slip on a headset and move his right thumb round the circle on an iPod. Even the colour of the iPod could be seen, an iridescent peach.

  Now if he gets a call to go and get Preston Still from Victoria or Euston or somewhere, thought Miss Grieves, what’s the betting that as soon as the car moves off that girl will have Rad out of there before you can say ‘mystery’? But why? Maybe Lucy Still doesn’t mind her having a lover in her room but Preston does. A far cry it was, all of it, from the days when she had been maid-of-all-work to Lady Pimble in Elystan Place. She dragged a chair to the window so that she could keep on looking in comfort. Whatever Beacon was listening to it seemed to be keeping him in a state of rapture, his head back against the Audi’s headrest, his lips parted in a beatific half-smile. Gossip was that he only had hymns on his iPod, ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, Lead us’, and all that stuff. Bloody insane. It could go on all night …

  But suddenly the headset was pulled off, the iPod discarded and Beacon was talking on his mobile. Seconds later the Audi was moving off southwards. Victoria it must be, thought Miss Grieves. And sure enough, Montserrat must have been watching – wasn’t there any sex going on with those two? – for Beacon hadn’t been gone five minutes when the basement door opened and Rad emerged, shoved by the girl, her hand in the middle of his back. He ran up those stairs like all the devils in hell were after him and legged it up the street. Miss Grieves wondered what he’d do if she went out there and asked him what the hurry was
. But she didn’t go. It took her a good ten minutes to climb those stairs.

  Thea decided to have a second cigarette while she was out there. She was sitting on the third step from the top of the steps up to the front door of number 8. It was either that or stand shivering in the wet back garden. She picked another Marlboro from the pack and lit it, inhaling deeply. The only ‘staff’ in Hexam Place to smoke were Henry (in his room with the window wide open and him hanging half out of it), Zinnia (in her own home and in the street) and Miss Grieves (as much and as often as she liked in her own flat with all the windows shut). Damian and Roland were anti-smoking fanatics. That was the way Thea put it, or sometimes ‘anti-smoking fascists’. If they had ever had anything to do with Miss Grieves they would have known about her smoking and done their best to stop it with threats and maybe promises but they didn’t know because they had never been inside her flat or smelt her. Miss Grieves reeked of stale cigarette smoke, providing a lesson to Thea. Before going into Damian and Roland’s part of the house she took the dress or suit she had been wearing to the dry-cleaner’s, had a hot bath and washed her hair.

  They had gone to work an hour before or Thea wouldn’t have dared sit here to smoke her cigarette. She watched Beacon sitting in the Audi, waiting for Preston Still. He was late this morning. Perhaps he wasn’t going to his office in Old Broad Street but off to another of those eternal conferences in Birmingham or Cardiff. Henry had departed with Lord Studley before she had started on her first cigarette. The only interesting thing to happen this morning was the departure of the Princess and June for Heathrow and somewhere in Italy. Their taxi was due at ten thirty, June had told her, and it duly arrived, five minutes early which was par for the course with that company. From where she sat Thea couldn’t see the front door of number 6 but she could just see the bottom steps, the driver go up them and June appear with him after a couple of minutes. The amount of baggage those two old women took with them! June was hauling some of it along behind her, bump, bump, bump down the steps with her, the driver balancing a huge suitcase on his right shoulder like a furniture remover. The Princess never carried anything except her handbag. She minced down the steps in the high heels and on two sticks. Thea thought they must be the only pair of heels she owned, red snakeskin with toes pointed enough to stab someone. June went back for the rest of the bags and they got into the taxi.

  Thea was watching it disappear northwards, sucking on the stub of her cigarette, when Damian appeared from nowhere, opened the gate and advanced to the foot of the steps.

  ‘When the cat is away,’ he said in his snooty accent, ‘the mice will play. I thought I caught a whiff on you the other day.’

  ‘I can’t give up. I have tried.’

  ‘It’s not so much the smoking, though if you’ll forgive the cliché, it is a filthy habit. No, it’s sitting on the steps I mind. Like some slag on a council estate. Still, since you’re here perhaps you’ll go inside and find my briefcase for me. Unaccountably I forgot it.’

  Thea could have said it wasn’t unaccountable, he was always forgetting things, but she didn’t. She found the briefcase on the table just inside the front door and brought it to him.

  ‘Thank you. You do have your uses.’

  He walked off to pick up a taxi in Ebury Bridge Street. Thea lit a third cigarette, walked round the house into the back garden where the paths and the lawn were invisible under a thick wet layer of fallen leaves. Unidentifiable toadstools that looked like hunks of purple liver poked their heads through the brown mush. It had begun to rain again. Thea sheltered under the gingko tree, scraped the mud off her shoes on its trunk and thought she might get smoking or ‘the smoking question’ put down as an item on the agenda of the next Saint Zita meeting. Where were smokers to smoke, for instance? In the street? Surely not. Perhaps someone’s flat or studio room might be turned into a smoking room like you got at certain airports. That reminded her that she couldn’t put anything on the agenda as June had departed on her holidays.

  ‘Never pass a weed,’ said Abram Siddiqui, stooping down to pull up a dandelion growing among the chrysanthemums. He explained to his daughter, who in any case had heard it before, ‘This means not to walk past it but to pull it out so that you do not actually pass it.’

  ‘Yes, Father, I remember. We have so many weeds in our garden – well, Mr Still’s garden – that you could not help passing them. There are only weeds and not any plants.’

  Thomas, in his pushchair, was making friendly overtures to a customer’s German shepherd, holding out his arms and shouting, ‘Doggy, doggy.’

  Rabia picked him up and his cajoling turned to screams of protest. She carried him towards the temperate house where the café was while pushing the buggy with her free hand, said, ‘Thomas, be quiet now. Stop screaming and stop kicking or you will have no chocolate biscuit with your drink.’

  Abram looked on approvingly but waiting, Rabia knew, to see if she carried out her threat. Orange juice came for the still-yelling Thomas and coffee for Rabia and her father. The biscuits on offer today were a particularly delicious variety. Seated in what Rabia called a ‘grown-up chair’, Thomas was now sobbing and reaching out for the biscuit plate. The woman with the German shepherd passed by on the other side of the glass wall.

  ‘No, Thomas. Drink your juice.’

  Rabia moved the plate out of his reach but otherwise ignored his pleas. Abram, pleased with her handling of the biscuit crisis, said, ‘Khalid told me he saw you when he came to take the Christmas-tree booking. He said, but very respectfully, Rabia, that you are beautiful and dressed like a good Muslim lady.’

  ‘It is not his business, Father, to talk about how I am dressed.’

  ‘It was very respectful. I am your father and I know what is proper. I could not object. There are not many like Khalid, I can tell you, Rabia.’

  ‘There may be ten thousand for all I know. They are nothing to me. And now Thomas is behaving like a good boy and there are not any like him he is so good.’ She reached over, took his face in her hands and kissed his fat pink cheek. ‘Now we will go home. And on the way home we shall buy some biscuits just like those and you shall have one at teatime.’

  ‘It is good to hear you do not let him eat in the street,’ said Abram rather sourly. ‘Children must not be allowed to eat in the street in any circumstances.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  What Montserrat saw in the mirror was a petite young woman, slim but not thin, with beautiful breasts and rounded hips, shapely legs and fine ankles. The face she saw was oval, the skin very white, the eyes large and very dark brown, the features symmetrical and the hair a dense mass of black curls. Did she know anyone with as fine a head of hair as hers?

  Thea and Henry and Beacon saw a short young woman, about twelve pounds overweight, with oversized breasts (Thea), quite good legs (Henry), far too pale, looked ill (Beacon), nothing special about her features except that the eyes were attractive, if too starey. All agreed that her hair was her best feature; a true black, Beacon said, glossy as ebony, but he only admired the looks of his own ethnic group. Unfortunately, he said, she hadn’t a very nice nature.

  ‘On the make,’ said June. ‘You know how they say of people – mostly dead people, I must say – that she’d have done anything for anybody. Well, that Montsy wouldn’t do anything for anybody unless it was to her advantage. You’ll see.’

  Montserrat’s father and Lucy Still’s father had been at school together and remained friends, though Charles Tresser had lost all his money in some banking scandal while Robert Sanderson got richer and richer. Charles happened to mention that his daughter had dropped out of the university he had got her into with some difficulty and Robert suggested the problem of where she was to go and how to earn her living would be solved by her going to work for his daughter who was expecting her third child. That was how Montserrat came to be an au pair and called Lucy by her first name. What she was supposed to do she had never been told. Zinnia did the housework, Rabia
looked after the new baby and the girls when they needed looking after, Beacon drove the Audi. Lucy had no car but took taxis everywhere. Montserrat had the one-bedroom basement flat which would have been Beacon’s if he had chosen to live in it instead of with Dorothee, William and Solomon.

  If her duties had never been specified, she soon knew that she would be expected to perform those vaguely secretarial tasks that weren’t to Lucy’s taste. Sending for a plumber when one was required, informing credit card companies that a card was lost, asking for help from the provider when Lucy’s computer failed to work. Much the same as the ‘little jobs’ that Thea carried out for Damian and Roland for free. Montserrat found this tedious but she mostly did it. Her conscience had never troubled her when she found she was expected to admit, escort upstairs and eventually dismiss Lucy’s lover. While living with her mother in Barcelona when she wasn’t living with her father in Bath, she saw her mother’s lovers come and go and in some cases a secret was made of their visits. This was normal, she thought. She never thought it beneath her dignity or degrading to take the twenty-pound note Lucy tucked into her jeans pocket when she brought Rad along to the bedroom or the fifty-pound note he thrust into her hand when she saw him out of the basement door.

  Now, on a morning in October, she found herself asked, not by Lucy who cared nothing for such things, but by Mr Still on his way to get into the Audi, if she would find someone to mend the loose banister at the top of the basement stairs.

  ‘Some sort of builder, d’you mean?’

  ‘Try the Yellow Pages,’ said Preston Still, sounding impatient. ‘I don’t know. Just do it.’

  Montserrat couldn’t find the Yellow Pages. For one thing, she didn’t know where to look, so she opened every drawer and cupboard she came to and was emerging from one of the spare rooms when she met Lucy coming out of her bedroom. Lucy was wearing a pale yellow suit the same colour as her hair with a skirt some eight inches above her knees, lacy tights and shoes with five-inch heels. Montserrat asked her if she knew where the Yellow Pages were.