The Saint Zita Society

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘No one uses phone directories any more,’ said Lucy. ‘This is the age of the cellphone or hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘Mr Still wants someone to mend the banister.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother. He’s probably forgotten all about it by now. He’s a chronic amnesiac.’

  Lucy tottered downstairs, waved once and slammed the front door behind her. Her bedroom was in its usual chaotic state before Zinnia got to work on it, the bed a sprawl of discarded clothes, the sheets scattered with ash and crumbs, the breakfast tray she had taken up two hours before cluttered with smeary plates and coffee dregs in which fag ends floated. Montserrat, no believer herself in the virtues of cleanliness, almost admired Lucy’s ability to turn a neatly laid tray of prettily packaged foodstuffs into a filthy tip like the contents of a waste bin ravaged by urban foxes. She looked in vain inside the clothes cupboards and the drawers for the Yellow Pages, abandoned the room to Zinnia and went on up to the nursery floor.

  Rabia was teaching Thomas to feed himself. He sat in his high chair with a spoon in each hand, digging away at a bowl of goo. The spoon in his right hand was used to transfer the goo to his mouth, more or less haphazardly, the other to fling its contents on to the floor or as far across the room as he could reach. Montserrat, who disliked children, had seldom seen a more disgusting sight.

  ‘He is so clever and good, aren’t you, my sweetheart?’ Rabia was kept busy, crawling about, wiping up messes on floor, wall and skirting board.

  Thomas laughed, goo leaking out of his open mouth. ‘Love Rab,’ he said, wiping a spoon on his nanny’s hair.

  Montserrat could have sworn tears of joy had come into Rabia’s eyes.

  ‘Where can I get someone to mend the banister, Rabia?’

  ‘Maybe Yellow Pages.’

  ‘Yeah, but I can’t find them.’

  ‘My cousin Mohammed, he is very, very good carpenter. Better than carpenter, joiner.’

  ‘How can I find him? You know his mobile number?’

  ‘Of course, Montsy,’ said Rabia. ‘I have it by heart.’ She gave it to Montserrat, then expecting the other girl to forget, wrote it down on the shopping-list pad. ‘I have all relations’ and friends’ numbers in my memory.’

  ‘Wow, I wish I had.’

  ‘Yes, it is a gift.’ Rabia smiled modestly, picked up Thomas and hugged him, contriving to smear his mouth all across her blouse. ‘Now we shall both have to put clean clothes on, my darling. Will that be fun?’

  Evidently it would, for Thomas roared with laughter.

  A message had to be left on Mohammed’s voicemail. He called back when Montserrat was in the Dugong, having a drink with Jimmy and Henry.

  ‘I am coming on Saturday the sixth,’ said Mohammed.

  ‘The sixth of November?’

  ‘That is the next sixth, isn’t it? Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.’

  ‘You mean someone’s got to be in all day?’ Montserrat knew that someone would be her. ‘Can’t you say morning or afternoon?’

  ‘You take it or leave it, my dear. You will get top-class job.’

  ‘Oh, OK, if I must,’ said Montserrat.

  The paediatrician at number 3 would require Jimmy no more that day so his driver was having a stiff gin and tonic. Henry, needed by Lord Studley in Whitehall at five thirty, thought it best to stick to elderflower water. He could have a real drink with Huguette that evening, possibly a few glasses of burgundy and a nip or two of Campari which was what Montserrat was having with orange now.

  ‘If anything goes wrong at number 7,’ she was saying, ‘and Rabia is separated from that child, she’ll break her heart.’

  ‘What d’you mean, goes wrong?’ Henry thought the elderflower water would be improved by a spot of gin but he dared not.

  ‘Well, if they split up. You never know, do you? Lucy wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of Rabia.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ said Jimmy. ‘I hear she’s getting married to that guy who drives the flowerpot van.’

  Montserrat didn’t like her news to be capped, especially by something more positive and dramatic. She got up, said she’d see them at the next Saint Zita Society meeting which couldn’t be long delayed now that June and the Princess were back from Florence. And there they were, their taxi drawing up outside number 6. It was one of those big taxis, like a little bus with sliding doors, and obviously needful for the quantity of luggage which began to spill out on to the pavement. Montserrat hurried down the area steps in case she was asked to help with carrying it in.

  In common with Damian and Roland, the Princess and the noble family of Studleys, neither Lucy nor Preston Still ever did anything in the house which could be categorised as a menial or horny-handed task. The paediatrician, on the other hand, much to Jimmy’s disgust, rather enjoyed knocking a nail in here and there, mending a fuse, or putting a washer on a tap. Jimmy would have agreed with the sentiments in Belloc’s verse:

  Lord Finchley tried to mend the electric light

  Himself. It struck him dead and serve him right.

  It is the business of the wealthy man

  To give employment to the artisan.

  There were of course exceptions to this rule and on Saturday morning Preston Still, having twice grabbed at the faulty banister, felt it wobble in his hands and nearly let him fall down the basement stairs, carefully examined the structure of banisters and rail with a view to doing a temporary repair. Sixth of November! Couldn’t something better than that have been arranged?

  Montserrat said it couldn’t and stood by, watching him.

  He had always supposed, he said, that the banister, wooden, probably walnut, pale grey-brown and polished, was a solid piece, the length of a tree’s height, but of course it wasn’t, it was cunningly put together by some kind of interlocking system, maybe consisting of four pieces in all. You could only see the joins if you looked closely. This construction, he said to Montserrat, made mending a loose rail much easier. As if to prove it he took hold of the banister itself and began tugging it.

  By this time Lucy had appeared. Instead of the yellow suit, she was dressed in white shorts, a white T-shirt and white trainers, the smooth brown skin of her long legs making a nice contrast. With her, looking disgruntled, were her daughters, similarly attired.

  ‘We’re all going for a run round the park, aren’t we, girls?’ The girls made no reply but Hero pulled a face. ‘So we thought we’d come and see what Daddy was doing on our way.’

  ‘Now you’ve seen,’ said Preston sourly, ‘you can get going.’

  ‘No, but, darling, what are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to mend the banister,’ said Rabia who had appeared behind her with Thomas in his pushchair. ‘Better to wait for my cousin Mohammed who is coming very kindly on a Saturday and therefore giving up his day of rest.’

  Preston ignored her. He was vigorously shaking the banister. There was a noise halfway between a groan and a crunch and the whole section of polished wood came away in his hands. He nearly fell over backwards, uttering an expletive which made Matilda say in the tone listeners thought would one day land her a job as headmistress of a girls’ public school, ‘Daddy, you’re not supposed to say words like that in front of us. You should remember Thomas is only sixteen months old.’

  ‘I’m sorry, kids,’ said Preston, still clutching the section of banister. ‘I really am. I shouldn’t have said that.’ His eyes turned to his son and rested there, growing anxious. ‘Is that a rash I can see on his neck, Rabia?’

  ‘I am sure it is not, Mr Still.’

  ‘What’s that redness, then?’

  ‘It is because his scarf is red. Now see when I move it.’

  Thomas began to chortle because he thought he was being tickled. His neck appeared white as milk away from the scarf.

  ‘Oh, well, you know best. If there’s any doubt about it you’ll run him along to Dr Jefferson, won’t you?’

  All but Montserrat melted away, Lucy driving her daughter
s before her like an aggressive shepherd with his flock. Rabia had to carry the pushchair down the steps on her own. It was rather cold and rain was forecast. But indoors the habitual heat prevailed and Preston, sitting on the stairs where he had wrenched the loose rail out of the section of banister, said irritably, ‘All it needs is some glue. Have we got any glue?’

  ‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Well, have a look, will you? And, Montserrat, would you make me a cup of coffee?’

  ‘It’ll have to be instant.’

  She made the coffee. Zinnia never came on Saturdays. Perhaps Preston would have forgotten about the glue by this time. There was none in the any of the cupboards under the kitchen’s two sinks. He had moved, was now sitting in a (reproduction) eighteenth-century French chair halfway along the gallery, the banister and its one intact rail on his lap, the other in his right hand. Montserrat, walking slowly to avoid spilling the coffee, wondered why Lucy had married him, he was so hairy. At ten in the morning – she had heard him shaving at eight – he already had a five o’clock shadow seven hours too early. His body and his legs must be a sight to behold. Like a gorilla! And he had a small but increasing belly. No wonder Lucy preferred Rad Sothern even if he was about six inches shorter.

  ‘Now you’ve done that,’ he said, letting her put the coffee cup on the floor, ‘perhaps you’ll go out and buy some glue.’

  Montserrat knew that ‘perhaps’ meant nothing. ‘Go where?’

  ‘You must know where there are some shops. I don’t. I have a job which takes up all my time, in case you’ve forgotten. Ask people. Look in the phone book.’

  She had been there before. She’d just go and she’d ask. Preston emptied his pockets of notes and coins and handed it to her. The rain had started and she took one of the large umbrellas from the stand in the hall. The whole exercise would have been insupportable had she not been able to picture Lucy and the girls umbrella-less and getting very wet. Rabia wouldn’t care while Thomas had a hood on his pushchair to keep him dry. Montserrat counted the money Preston had given her for the glue, nearly thirty pounds. He must be mad. She found an ironmonger’s on the Pimlico Road, bought two kinds of glue that the man behind the counter recommended just to be on the safe side. She didn’t want to be sent out again.

  It appeared that Preston had given up. Her trip had been in vain and what to do with two useless tubes of adhesive?

  ‘Oh, put it somewhere. Maybe that Mohammed will have a use for it.’

  Montserrat knew he wouldn’t. She waited till Preston had disappeared along the gallery and up the big curving staircase and then she examined the shakily replaced section of banister and the two rails. Before he started both rails had been undamaged. Now the top end of one of them was jagged enough to reveal the raw wood. Montserrat shook her head and laughed silently. He had left his coffee cup on the carpet by that chair he had sat in. She went back and fetched it, not too resentful. After all, he hadn’t asked for his change back and she was the better off by twenty-five pounds. By this time she was feeling so cheerful that she forgot her usual carefulness and started to run down the basement stairs, grabbing the banister as she went. He had left it so shaky, much worse than before he messed about with it, that she fell over and only just managed to save herself by clutching at the edge of the stair carpet.

  Beginning work on the agenda for the next Saint Zita meeting the same day as she returned from Florence, June included in the matters to be discussed the really revolting question of the little plastic bags of dog excrement and the problem of noise in Hexam Place after 11 p.m. Various notes from members had come while she was away. She had no objection to an item requesting a debate on the smoking habits of members and where they should be able to indulge it. June already agreed that if an employer might smoke indoors why should an employee not do likewise? A request from Thea for permission to be granted to sit on the front steps of one’s own home (this heavily underlined) especially when one was not a servant, June decided to exclude. Let her raise it under Any Other Business. The date of the meeting was to be lunchtime on 29 October. June quickly made the first item Rules to be Formulated.

  The Princess was watching Avalon Clinic, this evening’s episode heavily featuring Rad as Mr Fortescue. June joined her on the sofa, bringing with her two stiff gin and tonics and a bowl of pistachios. Until now, apart from various minor flirtations, Mr Fortescue had mostly been presented in his role as hardworking gynaecologist but now he appeared as embarking on a love affair with the glamorous sister from Estonia. Both were married to other people which complicated matters delightfully.

  ‘Thea told me you can get a boxed set of the first series,’ whispered June when Mr Fortescue was off the screen for fifteen seconds. ‘Shall I?’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow. Don’t talk, please. How many times do I have to tell you? He’s just coming back.’

  Gussie, fetched from the boarding kennels in a taxi, snuggled up on the Princess’s lap, from where June had to dislodge him for his evening walk round the block. Descending the steps, whom should she see on the other side of the street but Mr Fortescue himself sneaking out of the basement door at number 7. June waved to her great-nephew, seeing no reason why she should conspire with them in their intrigue. Rad just raised one hand in a feeble wave. From the basement window of number 8 Miss Grieves also watched Rad leave. Two hours before she had watched him arrive.

  Studying wheelchair advertisements in the newspaper, the Princess turned briefly from the page. ‘Don’t forget to get that canned set tomorrow, will you? You won’t remember if you don’t write it down.’

  ‘Boxed,’ said June absently.

  For Rabia a weekend at the Stills’ country house was always something to look forward to. Until they took her to Gallowmill Hall she had never seen anything of the English countryside, let alone stayed there, slept there. She had discovered in herself a rapturous love of the fields and woods, the little stream which ran through the grounds and where there were ducks and moorhens, sometimes a swan and once an otter. Butterflies, red and black and white, abounded. Thomas could lie on a blanket on the lawn while the sun shone above and fluffy clouds drifted across a pearly-blue sky.

  It was some weeks since her first visit but now they were going again and, Lucy told Rabia, such a stay would be impossible without her. Who else could manage the children? So indispensable was she that in the car going down – a rented minibus so that all could be accommodated – Lucy apologised to her nanny for the house being so near to London and in Essex.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only Hertfordshire, but Essex makes people laugh as soon as you utter the name, doesn’t it, Press?’

  ‘Not the people I utter it to,’ said Preston.

  Rabia didn’t know what they were talking about so she just smiled. Thomas had fallen asleep next to her. If she could only be with him until he grew up or they sent him away to one of those wicked boarding schools, if only she could be with Thomas she would want nothing else, no second husband, no home of her own. If only. The girls were bickering. They had been made to wear trainers for the country instead of their new shoes and had shuffled their feet out of them as soon as the minibus was off.

  ‘Your shoes stink,’ said Matilda.

  Hero pinched her on the arm. ‘It’s yours that stink. My sweat doesn’t smell, I’m not old enough. You are.’

  ‘If you pinch me again I’ll kick you.’

  ‘Now that is enough.’ Rabia admonished them because their mother never bothered. ‘We want none of that while we go away to enjoy ourselves.’

  They obeyed her, they usually did. It took half an hour to get out of London and on to the M25, then along a turning through Epping Forest where there was little traffic and the air smelt fresh. The day was bright and cold, the woods golden, leaves falling or blowing off in the gusts of wind. Gallowmill Hall was approached by a long drive between yellow trees, half of whose leaves lay underfoot. In the meadow on the left-hand side a stag an
d three or four hinds, property of the deer farmer who rented a few of Preston’s acres, grazed on the lush green grass. A hawk hovered overhead.

  Thomas woke up, whimpering, and put his arms round Rabia’s neck as Preston drew up on the sweep in front of the house. If Lucy described it to her friends as ‘nothing much to look at, one of those two-a-penny late-eighteenth-century places’, to Rabia it was a gorgeous palace. That one family could live in such a place, and not even live but just come there sometimes to stay a couple of nights, was to her unbelievable, a dream. But it was real. The previous time they had been there, when the children were in bed, she had crept downstairs and come outside to touch the grey-gold stonework, half expecting it to dissolve in her hand. It was real. The rooms with their high ceilings and pale green or ivory walls were real, and the sweeping staircase, twice as wide as the one in Hexam Place, its banisters filagree silver, that too was real. The paintings were real and of real people in silk and satin, grandfathers and grandmothers of Mr Still and their grandfathers and grandmothers. And to think that when her father took her back to Pakistan when she was sixteen to meet her future husband, relatives had asked her if it was true that everyone in United Kingdom was equal.

  They had brought all the food for the weekend with them, bags and crates and cool boxes of it, all delivered by M&S and Ocado the day before. Rabia helped Mr Still carry it in. She got the girls to help too because Lucy couldn’t, she said she was tired, being driven out here always exhausted her. Rabia had plenty to do, lunch to be got for one thing, then Thomas put down for his afternoon nap, but she went out later for a walk in the grounds. The girls refused to come with her; their quarrel in the past now, they preferred to play computer games in the bedroom they shared. They might as well have been in London. Rabia saw rabbits and a squirrel, something in the distance that might have been a badger but she couldn’t be sure, she had never seen one before. The gardener she had encountered on her previous visit. He had stared then at her long black gown and her hijab but this time he was used to her appearance and seemed to understand that she spoke English and wasn’t crazy or fierce, and greeted her with an ‘Afternoon, missus’.