by Ruth Rendell
“Oh, Christ!” Stanley moaned. “All right, all right,” he said, “I’m coming.”
The ringing stopped. He opened the door.
“Mr. Manning? Oh, good evening. I’m Caroline Snow. I’m so sorry I’m late. I had a job finding your house.”
Stanley gaped at her. For a moment his terror had left him. It wasn’t fear which made him speechless. He had seen such creatures as she before, of course, seen them on television in the Miss World contests or on the covers of the magazines Vera sometimes bought, even sometimes seen near copies of them driving up to the pumps at the Superjuce garage. But no one like this had ever until now rung the bell at 61, Lanchester Road.
“Isn’t it hot? May I come in? Oh, thank you so much. I’m afraid I’m being a terrible nuisance.”
“That’s all right,” Stanley mumbled.
He followed her into the dining room. Even from behind she looked nearly as good as from in front. Her long pale blonde hair covered her shoulders in a thick gold veil. Stanley didn’t think he had ever seen such a straight back or such legs, legs which were so long and smooth and exquisite that it was almost painful to look at them.
When she was in the room and had turned to face him he wondered how he could ever have thought her back view was as nice. Her skin was tanned a smooth, even and satiny brown, much darker than her hair. Swedish or something, Stanley thought feebly. His eyes met sea-green eyes, as cool and calm as northern waters, and a wave of perfume floated over him so that he felt slightly faint.
“Can I get you a cup of tea?” he said.
“That would be great.”
He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. It wasn’t just the beauty of that face that had made him stare at her. He stared because he felt it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to him. Somewhere he had seen it, or a face very like it though somehow changed and spoiled, in the recent past. In a film? In the paper? He couldn’t remember.
“First I’d better explain,” said Caroline Snow when he went back to her, “why I’ve come.”
“Well, I did wonder,” said Stanley.
“Naturally, you did. But I didn’t feel I could talk about something so—well, personal and private on the phone. Did you know your kettle’s boiling?”
Stanley got up and went out to turn it off. He meant to go on being tactful and polite but when he came back he found himself blurting out involuntarily, “Who are you?”
She smiled. “Yes, well, that’s the embarrassing part. I may as well tell you and get it over. I’m Ethel Carpenter’s granddaughter.”
14
“You can’t be,” Stanley said. “She wasn’t ever married.”
“I know, but she had a baby at seventeen just the same.”
Stanley, who had held his mouth open ever since Caroline Snow’s revelation, now closed it, swallowing some air. At last he said, “Now you mention it, I did know. My wife must have told me.”
Caroline Snow said, “I think I’d better tell you the whole story.”
“O.K.,” said Stanley, resigning himself. Having got so far, he’d better know the worst. “I’ll get the tea.” Her granddaughter, he thought miserably as he poured on the boiling water. Almost as bad as a policewoman.
She smiled at him. Stanley thought she looked less pretty when she smiled, for her teeth were uneven. She also looked much more like Ethel Carpenter and now Stanley knew whose face hers had reminded him of.
“Let’s have it, then,” he said.
“My people live in Gloucester,” Caroline Snow began, “but I’m at training college in London. I’m training to be a teacher and I’m in my second year. Well, we had to do a special study this term, Greek myths or genealogy, and I chose genealogy.” Stanley looked at her suspiciously. He knew quite well what genealogy was, for his passion for crossword puzzles had given him a large vocabulary and, in any case, he was fond of words. But he couldn’t see what genealogy had to do with teaching kids to read and write and he wondered if Caroline Snow was lying. “Honestly, I’d have chosen the myths if I’d known what I was letting myself in for. Our lecturer wanted us all to make family trees, one for the paternal side and another for the maternal. You do follow what I mean?”
“Of course I do,” said Stanley, offended. “I’m not ignorant.”
“I didn’t mean that. Only it’s a bit complicated. Well, doing Dad’s tree was easy because all his people came from a village outside Gloucester and I got hold of the parish records and everything. I got that all finished by half-term. Then I came to Mummy’s. She was very shy about it, didn’t want to give me any help at all, which isn’t a bit like Mummy. She’s a marvellous person, absolutely terrific. You’d adore her.”
“I daresay,” said Stanley. When was she going to come to the point? The last thing he wanted was to hear about marvellous adorable Mummy whom he was sure he’d loathe at sight.
Caroline Snow crossed her long legs and lit a cigarette. Gimlet-eyed, Stanley watched the packet returned to her handbag with mounting rage. “Anyway, to cut a long story short, I rather nagged Mummy about it all and then she told me. She said she was illegitimate. I’d always understood her parents were dead and that’s why she’d been brought up in an orphanage, but she said she’d just told me that. The truth is her mother’s still alive and she never knew who her father was. Well, at last I got it all out of her.
“Her mother was Ethel Carpenter, a housemaid who’d had her when she was only seventeen. My mother was brought up by Ethel’s aunt until she was seven and then the aunt got married and the new uncle sent Mummy to this orphanage. Wasn’t it awful? Mummy never saw her own mother and for years the only member of her family she did see was a cousin who came to visit her. He was Ethel’s cousin actually and he was very kind to Mummy.
“Well, Mummy had brains, thank goodness, and went to training college—the same one as I’m at actually—and when she was teaching in a school in Gloucester she met Dad and married him and they lived happily ever after. It’s rather a terrible story, though, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Stanley watched her stub out her cigarette. “I don’t see where you come into it,” he said.
“I’ve had my grandmother on my conscience,” said Caroline Snow. “I felt so bad about her, you see. Mummy’s never wanted to meet her. I suppose she thought it would be too heartbreaking for both of them. But now I’ve come so far I’ve just got to find her. Think what it would mean to her, Mr. Manning, a poor lonely old woman suddenly finding she’d got a whole family of her own.”
Stanley could well understand Mummy’s feelings, although most of his sympathy went to Mr. Snow. That’d be a fine thing, he thought, having the good luck to marry an orphan and then getting an old mother-in-law thrust on you when you were middle-aged. Probably have to part out with money for her too. If I were in his shoes, Stanley said to himself, I’d smack that girl’s bottom for her. Interfering little bitch of a do-gooder.
“I’d give the whole idea up if I were you,” he said aloud. “It stands to reason, if she’d wanted a family she’d have hunted all you lot up long ago.” It was, he thought, a good line to take, charitable to the unfortunate Mr. Snow as well as opening up a let-out for himself. He warmed to it. “She won’t want to be reminded of her past, will she? The disgrace and all? Oh, no, you give it up. I reckon your dad’d say the same. It’s always a mistake, stirring things up. Let sleeping dogs lie is what I say.”
“I’m afraid I disagree with you,” Caroline Snow said stiffly. “You must read the papers. You know what a terrible problem we have in this country with our old people, how lonely some of them are and how friendless. I’d never forgive myself if I gave up now.” She smiled, giving him an indulgent look. “Anyway, you don’t really mean it. Mrs. Huntley told me you’d had your own mother-in-law living with you for years and having to be looked after. You didn’t abandon her now, did you? And now she’s dead you’ve got nothing to reproach yourself with. Well, I don’t want to reproach myself either.”
Th
is little speech temporarily took Stanley’s breath away. He gaped at her, frowning. Her zeal and her innocence were beyond his understanding. He cleared his throat. “How did you get on to Mrs. Huntley?”
Serene again, Caroline Snow said, “The cousin who used to visit Mummy in the orphanage is still alive, although he’s a very old man. I went to see him first and he said he’d lost touch with my grandmother but he knew her last place had been with some people called Kilbride. I found them and they told me she had a room with a Mrs. Huntley.”
“And she put you on to us?”
“Well, she said you’d know where my grandmother was, on account of she and Mrs. Kinaway being such close friends. And she said my grandmother had been coming to stay here with you but she’d changed her mind and now she’s got lodgings in Croughton with a Mrs. Paterson but she’d forgotten the address. I thought—I thought if you could just give me that address I’d go round now and introduce myself and … Oh, I feel so nervous and excited! I’m quite sick with nerves. Just imagine, Mr. Manning, what she’ll think when she sees me. I’m going to tell her she’ll never be alone again. We’ve got quite a big house in Gloucester and I want Daddy to turn the attics into a flat for her. I want to take her home myself and show her her new home and just see her face.”
I’d like to see Daddy’s, thought Stanley. Poor sod. It was one thing for this silly little piece, arranging people’s lives for them. She wouldn’t be there to listen to Ethel banging on the floor with her stick and demanding meals at all hours and monopolising the T.V., she’d be living it up in London at her college. That poor devil, he thought with indignation. It was his, Stanley’s, duty to prevent anything like that happening, his bounden duty…. He was so outraged that for a moment he had forgotten the impossibility of Snow’s house ever being invaded by a mother-in-law. Then, suddenly, he remembered. Ethel was dead, all that remained of her some fifteen feet away from them in an urn on the mantelpiece. It didn’t matter where Caroline Snow went or where she looked, for Ethel had vanished from the face of the earth.
“Mrs. Paterson’s address is 52, Green Lanes,” he said, “but I don’t think you’ll find her there. My wife said she’d found somewhere new.”
Caroline Snow wrote down the address. “Thank you so much,” she said fervently. “I’m sure I’ll be able to trace her now. But wasn’t it odd her telling Mrs. Huntley she was coming here and then suddenly changing her mind?”
Stanley frowned. “When you’ve had as much experience of old people as I have,” he said with feeling, “you won’t be surprised by any of the funny things they do.”
She got up, first looking at him in rather a woe-begone way, her ardour perhaps a little dampened, and then eyed herself critically in the mirror. “I wonder if I look at all like her? I’m the image of Mummy and Mummy’s supposed to look like her.”
“Yeah, you do a bit,” said Stanley.
Caroline Snow swung round to face him. “Then, you do know her? You have seen her?”
Stanley could have bitten his tongue out.
“She was at my wedding,” he muttered.
“Oh, I see.” She picked up her bag and Stanley saw her to the door. “I’ll let you know how I get on,” she said.
From his bedroom window Stanley watched her hurrying along in the direction of Green Lanes. Somewhere he had once read that most of the things one has worried about have never happened. How true that was! When the girl had disappeared from view he finished mowing the lawn in the half-light, whistling an old tune which he later realised had been Tennyson’s “Maud.”
Vera was enjoying her holiday. She had met some nice people, a married couple about her own age and who were also staying at Mrs. Horton’s. They insisted on taking her about with them in their car, along the coast to Beachey Head and inland to Arundel Castle, and they laughed and asked Vera if she thought they were on their honeymoon when she demurred and suggested she was intruding. They wanted her to share their table but Vera wouldn’t do that. She ate alone, sitting in the window and watching holidaymakers coming up from the beach, and she enjoyed her food, relishing every scrap because she hadn’t had to cook it herself.
There was only one thing that troubled her and that was that neither her new friends, the Goodwins, nor Mrs. Horton had once asked about Stanley, where he was and why he hadn’t come with her. Vera felt rather piqued. She couldn’t help thinking that in the early days of her marriage when Maud had still come to Bray for holidays, she had poisoned Mrs. Horton’s mind against Stanley. I shan’t mention him, if that’s the way they want it, Vera said to herself. She felt no pressing need to talk about him. Now he was far away, she found she hardly thought about him and this made her so guilty that she sent him a postcard every day.
At a loss to know how to amuse herself one wet afternoon, Mrs. Goodwin took Vera up to her bedroom where she washed and set her hair, made up her face, and, while Vera was waiting for the set to dry, turned the hem of Vera’s blue and white spotted dress up two inches.
“You’ve got very nice legs. Why not show them off?”
“At my age?” said Vera.
“Life begins at forty, my dear. You’ll look ten years younger, anyway, when I’ve finished with you.”
Vera did. She stared in wonderment and unease at her new self, at the bouffant golden-brown hair, the pale blue eyelids and the pink mouth Mrs. Goodwin had created with a lip-brush. The dress barely reached her knees. Feeling half-naked, she went down to dinner and hid herself in her alcove away from the other diners.
She was waiting for Mrs. Horton’s maid to bring her second course, when a man came into the dining room and wandered about, evidently looking for someone. Vera watched his reflection in the window. She was so busy staring at this that she nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand touched her shoulder. She turned and looked upwards, flushing slightly.
He was a stranger, quite unfamiliar to her, a man of fifty perhaps with a rather haggard face, fair hair gone pepper and salt, a long lean man with an anxious, even forbidding, look. Vera half-rose. She must have done something wrong. Forgotten to pay for her deck chair perhaps….
“I’m sorry” she hesitated, stammering. “What—er …?”
He smiled at her and it made him look much younger.
“Hallo, Vee.”
“I don’t think … I don’t know you, do I?”
“You used to know me. I know I’ve changed. You haven’t, not very much. I’d have recognised you anywhere. May I sit down?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
He pulled up a chair, offered her a cigarette. Vera shook her head.
“My aunt told me you were here. I meant to come yesterday but, I don’t know … I suppose I was shy. It’s been so long. How are you?”
Confidence suddenly came to Vera and a poise she didn’t know she possessed.
“I’m very well, thank you, James. It’s good to see you.”
“Oh, Vee, you don’t know how glad I am to see you,” said James Horton.
15
Gradually, as the week went on, Stanley’s small panic receded. For the first few evenings he sat close to the phone, the crossword puzzle on his knees, expecting a call from Caroline Snow. But no call came. In fact nothing came from the world outside at all but daily postcards from Vera. She wrote that she was having a wonderful time, meeting new people, going out and about with them every day. Stanley felt very bitter towards her and resentful.
As soon as she got back she could go down to that Finbow and get Maud’s money out of him. It was downright diabolical, solicitors hanging on to other people’s rightful inheritances for weeks on end.
“How’s your head, Stan?” said Pilbeam when he phoned on Thursday.
“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” said Stanley.
“Bet there was Sunday morning. One sniff of a barmaid’s apron and you’re out like a light.”
“I told you,” said Stanley, “it was no good ringing me this week. I’ll have the money on Tuesday
like I said.”
“You never did, in point of fact, me old love. But let it pass. Tuesday, you said?”
“That’s a promise.”
“I sure am glad to hear that, Stan. I’ve been out knocking today—got a lend of a van—and some of the things I’ve picked up’ll make your hair curl.” It was a funny thing about Pilbeam, Stanley thought. The mere sound of the man’s voice brought him vividly before one, snub nose, sausage-like finger and all. “How about a sniftah in the Lockkeeper’s tomorrow night, so as I can get a clearer picture of the state of your finances?”
Stanley was obliged to agree. Pilbeam would get a clear picture of his finances all right when he turned up in the Lockkeeper’s with all he had left of last Friday’s pay, ten bob.
The whole Macdonald family and the two Blackmores were outside the Macdonalds’ gate, admiring Fred Macdonald’s new car, when Stanley left the house to keep his appointment. He would have marched past them without a word but the Macdonald boy, Michael, barred his way, holding both arms outstretched.
“Look what my dad’s just brought home, Mr. Manning.”
“Very nice,” said Stanley, but still they wouldn’t let him get away. Macdonald got out of the car and invited Stanley to take his place and examine the arrangements for the automatic gear change. Unable to think of an excuse, Stanley got sulkily into the car and contemplated the control panel.
“No more wearing my left foot out on the clutch in a traffic jam,” said Macdonald jubilantly. “Comfortable, isn’t she? I’ve only got one complaint. When I sink into that I’ll fall asleep behind the wheel.”
The women were nattering nineteen to the dozen, scuttling around the car and pointing out the mirror-like gloss on its bodywork, the vast capacity of its boot and the workmanship of its chrome. Mrs. Macdonald was swollen with pride. Wait till they see my Jag, Stanley thought, after this tin can. Then they’ll laugh on the other side of their faces.
