One Across, Two Down

by Ruth Rendell

  “You can’t!” Stanley shouted, one triumph left to him. “You can’t keep it. That bank account’s a joint account. I can draw the lot out tomorrow if I like and, by God, I will!”

  Vera said quietly, “I didn’t pay it into the joint account. That account was more or less closed, anyway, thanks to you overdrawing on it. I opened a new one this morning, a private account for me only.”

  21

  Vera picked up the cases and carried them downstairs. Stanley remained sitting on the bed, the hot sun striking the back of his neck through the closed windows. Again he was aware of a sense of unreality, of nightmare. Nightmare. He said the word over and over to himself. Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare … “Nasty dream of a nocturnal charger”? Christ, not that again!

  His left eye had begun opening and shutting involuntarily, tic, tic, tic. Stanley swore and clenched his hands. He listened. She was moving about downstairs. She hadn’t gone yet. He’d have to talk to her, make her see reason.

  She was standing in front of the dining room mirror, applying lipstick.

  It is hard to say nice things to someone you hate. Stanley hated Vera at that moment far more than he had ever hated Maud. But the things had to be said. Most men will say anything for twenty-two thousand pounds.

  “You’ve been the only woman in my life, Vee. Twenty years I’ve been devoted to you. I’ve taken everything for your sake, your parents insulting me and then your mother moving in here. I’m a middle-aged man now. I’ll go to pieces without you.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ve always been in pieces. Having me here never made you pull yourself together yet. God knows, I tried and now I’m sick of trying.”

  He began to plead. He would have gone down on his knees but he was afraid she’d walk away and leave him there on all-fours like an animal. “Vee,” he said, pulling at her sleeve, “Vee, you know I’m making a go of this business, but I have to have a bit of capital.” It was the wrong thing to say. He could tell that from the look on her face, the contempt. Like a really distraught husband, he moaned at her, “Vee, you’re all I’ve got in the world.”

  “Let’s call a spade a spade,” said Vera, “My money’s all you’ve got in the world.” She pulled on a pair of navy-blue gloves and sat down on an upright chair as if she were waiting for something or someone. “I’ve thought about that,” she said. “I’ve thought and thought about it all. And I’ve decided it wouldn’t be right to leave you without anything.” She gave a heavy sigh. “You’re so hopeless, Stan. Everything you touch turns out a mess except crosswords puzzles. You’re never held a job down yet and you won’t hold this one. But I wouldn’t like to think of you penniless and without a roof over your head, so I’m going to let you have this house. You can keep it or sell it, do what you like. If you’re silly to sell it and hand the money over to that Pilbeam—well, that’s your business.”

  “Christ,” said Stanley, “thanks for bloody nothing.” She was going to give him this house! She was taking everything that was his and leaving him this end-of-a-terrace slum. And suddenly what she was doing and that she meant it came fully home to him. Vee, his wife, the one person he was sure he could keep under his thumb and manipulate and get round and persuade that black was white, Vee was selling him down the river. He said wildly, “You don’t think I’m going to let you get away with it, do you? Let you go just like that?”

  “You haven’t got much choice,” Vera said quietly, and suddenly there was a sharp knock on the door. “That’ll be the driver of the car I’ve hired.”

  She bent down to pick up her cases. Stupefied, Stanley would have liked to kill her. As she lifted her face, he struck her hard with the flat of his hand, first on one cheek, then the other. She made a whimpering sound and tears began to flow over the marks his hand had made but she didn’t speak to him again.

  After the car had gone he wept too. He walked about the room, crying, and then he sat down and pounded the sofa arm with his fists. He wanted to scream and break things but he was afraid the neighbours would hear him.

  Crying had exacerbated the twitch in his left eye. It continued to water and pulsate after he had stopped crying. He tried holding the lid still in two ringers but it went on moving in spite of this as if it wasn’t part of his body at all but a trapped fluttering insect with a life of its own.

  He had lost the money. He had lost it, all of it. And now, his face working terrifyingly and uncontrollably, he realised amid the turmoil of his thoughts that for almost the whole of his adult life the acquiring of that money had been his goal, its possession the dawning of a golden age. At first he had thought of it in terms of only a thousand or two, then eight or nine, finally twenty with a bonus of two added. But always it had been there, a half-concealed, yet shimmering crock at the end of a rainbow. To possess it he had stayed with Vera, put up with Maud and, he told himself, never bothered to carve out a career. He had wasted his life.

  He thought of it all but not calmly and panic kept returning by fits and starts, making him catch his breath in loud rasping gasps. At last he knew the true meaning of living in the present. Everything behind him was waste and bitterness while ahead there was nothing. Worse than nothing, for now that Vera knew of his attempt on Maud’s life and the police had somehow been alerted, now that Pilbeam would have to know that all his vaunted capital amounted to just the roof over his head, how could he even contemplate the passing of another hour, another minute?

  He stared at the clock, watching, though not of course, actually seeing, the hands move. That was what his life had been, a slow, indiscernible disintegration towards the present utter collapse. And each moment, apparently leaving the situation unchanged, was in reality leading him inexorably towards the end, something which, though inconceivable, must be even worse than present horror.

  A little death would make the unbearable present pass. With jumping twitching hand, he felt in his pocket. Eight pounds remained out of the ten he brought home on Friday. The pubs wouldn’t yet be open but the wine shop in the High Street would. He staggered into the kitchen and rinsed his face at the sink.

  Outside it was even hotter than indoors but the feel of fresh air made him flinch. Walking was difficult. He moved like an old man or like one who had been confined to bed after a bad illness. There were only a few people about and none of them took any notice of him and yet he felt that the streets were full of eyes, unseen spies watching his every movement. In the wine shop it was all he could do to find his voice. Speaking to another human being, an ordinary reasonably contented person, was grotesque. His voice came out high and weak and he couldn’t keep his hands from his face as if, by continually wiping it, smoothing the muscles, he could still those convulsive movements.

  The assistant, however, was accustomed to alcoholics. His own face was perfectly smooth and controlled as he took the five pounds from Stanley for two bottles of Teacher’s and another pound for cigarettes.

  Back at the house he drank a tumblerful of the whisky, but without enjoying it. Instead of making him feel euphoric, it merely deadened feeling. He took one of the bottles and a packet of cigarettes upstairs with him and lay on the bed, wishing in a blurred, fuddled way that it was winter and not nearly midsummer so that the dark might come early. Stanley found he didn’t like the light. It was too revealing.

  Words came unbidden into his mind and he lay on his back splitting them and anagramming them and evolving clues. He found he was saying the words and the clues out loud, slurring them in a thick voice. But the twitch, temporarily, was gone, He went on talking to himself for some time, occasionally reaching for the bottle and then growing irritable because the drink was making him forget how to spell and lose the thread of words in black spirals which had begun to twist before his eyes.

  A whole night of deep sleep, total oblivion, was what he needed, but instead he awoke at nine with a headache that was like an iron hand clamped above his eyebrows. It was still light.

  The dream he had just had was still viv
idly with him. It hadn’t been what one would call a nasty dream, not in the sense of being actually frightening or painful, and yet it belonged nevertheless in the category of the worst kind of dreams a human being can have. When we are unhappy we are not made more so by nightmares of that unhappiness; our misery is rather intensified when we dream of that happy time which preceded it and of people, now hateful or antagonistic, behaving towards us with their former affability.

  Such had been Stanley’s recent experience. He had dreamed he was back in the Old Village Shop distributing largesse to Pilbeam and had seen again Pilbeam’s joy. Now, wide awake, he realised that four hours before, thinking he had reached the depths, he had underestimated his situation. Not only had he been robbed of his expectations and left penniless; he had also given his partner a cheque for a thousand pounds and another, to be handed to the decorator, for one hundred and seventy-five. Both those cheques would bounce, for the money was all Vera’s, stashed away in a private account.

  There seemed no reason to get up. He might as well lie there till lunchtime. Somewhere he could hear water running, or thought he could. The night had been so full of dreams, dream visions and dream sounds that it was hard to sort out imagination from reality.

  He had forgotten to wind the clock and its hands pointed to ten past six. It must be hours later than that. Pilbeam would wonder why he hadn’t come in but Stanley was afraid to telephone Pilbeam.

  His head was tender and throbbing all over. At the moment he wasn’t twitching and he didn’t dare think about it in case thinking started it up again. He lay staring at the ceiling and wondering whether there was any point in going down to fetch the Telegraph, when a sharp bang at the front door jolted him into sitting up and cursing. Immediately he thought of the police, then of Pilbeam. Could it be his partner, come already to say the cheques were no good?

  He rolled out of bed and looked through the crack in the curtains, but from there he couldn’t see under the porch canopy. Although there was no lorry in the street, it occurred to him that his visitor might be one of the builders. Whoever it was knocked again.

  His mouth tasted foul. He slid his feet into his shoes and went downstairs without lacing them. Then he opened the door cautiously. His caller was Mrs. Blackmore.

  “I didn’t get you out if bed, then?” Presumably she inferred this from the fact that he was still wearing his day clothes, although these were rumpled and creased. “I just popped in to tell you the pipe from your tank’s overflowing.”

  “O.K. Thanks.” He didn’t want to talk to her and he began to close the door.

  She was back on the path by now but she turned and said, “I saw Mrs. Manning go off yesterday.”

  Stanley glowered at her.

  “She looked proper upset, I thought. The tears was streaming down her face. Have you had another death in your family?”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “I thought you must have. I said to John, whatever’s happened to upset Mrs. Manning like that?”

  He opened the door wider. “If you must know she’s left me, walked out on me. I slapped her face for her and that’s why she’d turned on the waterworks.”

  That wives sometimes leave their husbands and husbands strike their wives was no news to Mrs. Blackmore. Speculating about such occurrences had for years formed the main subject of her garden fence chats, but no protagonist in one of these domestic dramas had ever before spoken to her of his role So baldly and with such barefaced effrontery. Rendered speechless, she stared at him.

  “That,” said Stanley, “will give you something to sharpen your fangs on when you get nattering with old mother Macdonald.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that!”

  “Dare? Oh, I dare all right.” Savouring every luscious word, Stanley let fly at her a string of choice epithets, finishing with, “Lazy, fat-arsed bitch!”

  “We’ll see,” said Mrs. Blackmore, “what my husband has to say about this. He’s years younger than you, you creep, and he hasn’t ruined his health boozing. Ugh, I can smell it on your breath from here.”

  “You would, the length of your nose,” said Stanley and he banged the door so hard that a piece of plaster fell off the ceiling. The battle had done him good. He hadn’t had a real ding-dong like that with anyone since Maud died.

  Maud … Better not think about her or he’d be back on the bottle. He wouldn’t, he’d never think of her again unless—unless the police made him. His eye was still twitching but he was getting used to it, “adapting” himself, as some quack of Moxley’s ilk would put it. One thing, the police hadn’t come yet. Would they search the house before they started on the garden? Stanley decided that probably they would. Not that there was anything for them to find, as Vera was sure to have taken that carton of Shu-go-Sub away with her. Might as well check, though …

  He went into the room where Vera had spent her last night in Lanchester Road. The carton with the little smear on its label was still beside the bed. Stanley could hardly believe his eyes. What a fool Vera was! Without that no one could prove a thing. The police wouldn’t even get a warrant to dig up the garden.

  Stanley took the cap off the carton and flushed the tablets down the lavatory. Then he ran the basin and the bath taps. Often this simple manoeuvre had the effect of freeing the jammed ballcock and making it rise as it should do as the water came in from the main. He listened. The outfall pipe had stopped overflowing.

  The phone bell made him jump, but he didn’t consider not answering it. Letting it ring and then wondering for hours afterwards who it had been would be far worse. He picked up the receiver. It was Pilbeam and Stanley swallowed hard, feeling cold again.

  But Pilbeam didn’t sound angry. “Still under the weather, old boy?” he asked.

  “I feel rotten,” Stanley mumbled.

  “Bit of a hypochondriac you are, me old love. You don’t want to dwell on these things. Still, I’m easy. Take the rest of the week off, if you like. I’ll pop round to see you sometime, shall I?”

  “O.K.,” Stanley said. He didn’t want Pilbeam popping round but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Just the same, the call had put new heart into him, that and his discovery and destruction of the tablets. Maybe those cheques wouldn’t bounce. That man, Frazer, the bank manager, was a good guy, a real gentleman. He mightn’t like it but surely he’d pay up. What was a mere £1,175. to him? Probably that private account business was just a polite sop to silly women like Vera. He and she were still man and wife, after all. Frazer had seen them together and given them a cheque book each. Those two cheques would come in and Frazer wouldn’t think twice about them. He’d pay up and then perhaps he’d write to Stanley and caution him not to be too free with writing cheques. Absurd, really, how low he’d let himself get yesterday. Panic and shock, he supposed. Very likely Vera would come back, asking for his forgiveness.

  There was someone knocking at the door again. John Black-more, come to do battle on his wife’s behalf. The fool ought to know better, ought to thank his stars someone with more guts than he had had put his wife in her place at last.

  Stanley had no intention of answering the door. He listened calmly to the repeated hammering on the knocker and then he watched Blackmore return to his own house. When he went downstairs again he found a scribbled note on the mat:

  “You have got it coming to you using language like that to my wife. You came from a slum and are turning this street into one. Don’t think you can get away with insulting women.

  J. BLACKMORE.”

  This note made Stanley laugh quite a lot. Slum indeed! His father’s cottage was no slum. He thought once more of the green East Anglian countryside, but no longer of going back there as a conquering hero. Go back, yes, but as the prodigal son, to home and peace and forgiving love….

  Through the kitchen window he could see that water was again beginning to stream from the outfall pipe. It looked as if he would have to go up into the loft. Vera had always se
en to things of this kind but Stanley had acquired, mostly from her accounts, a smattering of the basic principles of plumbing. He fetched the steps from where she had left them, mounted them and pushed up the trap-door. It was dusty up there and pitch dark. He went back for a torch.

  This was the first time he had ever been in the loft and he was surprised to find it so big, so quiet and so dark. Vera had said you must stand on the cross-beams and not between them in case you put your foot through the plaster, and Stanley did this, encountering on his way to the tank, the skeleton of a dead bird lying in its own feathers. It must have come in under the eaves and been unable to find its way out. Stanley wondered how long it had been there and how long it took for newly dead flesh to rot away and leave only bones behind.

  He lifted off the tarpaulin which covered the tank and plunged his arm into the water. The ball on the end of its hinged arm was some nine inches down. He raised it and heard the cocks close with a soft thump.

  Having washed his hands in a dribble of water—he didn’t want the ballcock to stick again—he fetched the paper and took it back to bed with him to do the crossword. As if he were a real invalid, he slept most of the day away and during the afternoon, dozing lightly, he several times thought he heard someone at the door. But he didn’t go down to answer it and when he finally left the bedroom at half-past six there was no one about and the builders’ equipment hadn’t been moved. By now he was lightheaded with hunger so he ate some bread and jam. This place, he thought, is more like Victoria station in the rush hour than a private house. There was someone at the door again. Blackmore. He’d heard a car draw up. Adrenalin poured into Stanley’s blood. If he wanted a fight he could have it. But first better make sure it was Blackmore.