by Ruth Rendell
Thinking about Jims being stricken by disaster brought her a lot of pleasure. She knew for a fact he had no morning papers delivered to Fredington Crucis House and wouldn’t, in any case, have seen this one, which he habitually referred to as a “backstreet rag.” The likelihood was that he’d be ten minutes into his appointments before he found out. Some hard-done-by citizen of Toneborough, anxious about his council tax, his hound puppy-walking, or his incapacity benefit, would be bound to bring a copy of the rag with him. She hadn’t felt so happy since she walked up the aisle to marry him at St. Mary Undercroft.
Just as the newspaper dropped onto the doormat at seven o’clock, Jordan woke up and started crying. Zillah picked him up, stuck him in his high chair-surely he shouldn’t still be in a high chair?-gave him orange juice and what he ought not to have, what would rot his teeth and set him on the path to obesity, a chocolate bar. Then she lay on the sofa and looked at the paper.
The front page almost frightened her. A very large headline read: THE GAY MP, TWO WEDDINGS, AND A FUNERAL. The picture of her was one she hadn’t seen before. It must have been taken in those halcyon days when she was being photographed all the time and had perhaps been previously rejected because it was unflattering. For once, Zillah didn’t mind. She looked distraught, as if she hardly knew which way to turn. Her face was half covered by one hand and stray locks of hair, greasy-looking, protruded between the splayed fingers. That was the day, she remembered now, when she hadn’t been expecting the photographer. To the left of it, in a kind of before and after arrangement, was the pre-first wedding picture of her and Jims, both of them smiling, relaxed, happy.
There was virtually no text. For that she had to turn to page three. There, too, was one of her own Maldives shots, Jims unmistakably Jims, his hand on the bare thigh of an unrecognizable young man with his face half turned away and in shadow. The trickle of fear returned. What would he do when he read it? What would he do to her? Was he reading it now or was he still blissfully asleep at Fredington Crucis House, unaware of what awaited him? She read her own words: “I honestly thought I was free to remarry. Poor Jeff”-she’d never called him that in all their life together-
“told me we were legally divorced. Then when he was killed and I found out my mistake I realized I was-tragically-freed by his death. Our marriage had not been a happy one, down to his frequent affairs with other women. Just the same, his murder was a devastating blow, as was discovering the other side to James’s nature. That happened when he brought his lover on our honeymoon…”
Mrs. Melcombe-Smith cries a lot these days. She was once more in tears when I asked her what she thought the future held for her and the MP for South Wessex. “All this has been horrendous but I will stand by him,” she said. “I don’t care what he’s done. I love him and I truly believe that in his heart he loves me.”
There was a good deal more but that line about standing by Jims, words she had certainly uttered to Natalie Reckman, she now reread with new eyes. When she said them she hadn’t given much thought to what she meant. It was just what wives in her sort of position traditionally said. She’d read it repeated in newspapers many times over the years. But now she thought of the reality. She rather liked the idea of seeing herself in the role of devoted and supportive wife, a woman who has been bitterly ill-used but who forgives and pours out renewed love. Not that this new part she contemplated playing would deflect her from appearing on A Bite of Breakfast. She wasn’t bound to forgive immediately…
In the few short months that had passed since her first wedding to Jims she had almost entirely lost her ignorance of how the media operate, but she still wasn’t aware that the newspaper she didn’t see until 7 A.M. might be read by rival journalists the night before. So she believed she had several hours in which to prepare herself before the pack of reporters and photographers presented themselves on the doorstep of Abbey Gardens Mansions. Jordan was crying again. She gave him cereal and a mug of milk. He put his hands into the milk as if it were a finger bowl and began a low keening that was halfway between a moan and a song.
Eugenie came down from her bedroom, demanding to know why everyone was up so early and what were all those people doing outside in the street. Zillah went to the window. They were here already, waiting for her. She wouldn’t attempt to exclude them this time, she wouldn’t hide herself or escape via the garage. They were welcome. She thought of all the women she’d heard of recently who’d broken into television or modeling careers or simply become celebrities of unspecified talent, through nothing more than getting themselves into the media for taking their clothes off in public or demonstrating against something or being victims. How much more success could a beautiful bigamist, widow of a murder victim, and wife of a newly outed gay MP, hope to enjoy?
But the pack mustn’t see her yet. Give her an hour in which to transform herself. Zillah ran her bath and took Jordan into it with her to shut him up.
Chapter 26
ALL SATURDAY MORNING Sonovia kept her eye on the street and Mr. Kroot’s in particular, but Gertrude Pierce didn’t go home. She kept darting into her front room to look in case she missed her.
Laf came in, carrying a mug of coffee. “Why are you sitting there looking out of the window?”
“Nothing exciting ever happens in Syringa Road.”
“You should be thankful. What d’you want to happen?”
Sonovia ignored him. Mr. Kroot’s front door was opening. The old black cat came out and the door shut.
“D’you want to go out tonight?”
“Anything you like, only don’t bother me now, you’re spoiling my concentration.” Sonovia often reproached herself for not having been more vigilant when Jock Lewis was on the scene. How she regretted not ever seeing his face!
Laf looked up films in the paper. There was nothing on he and Sonovia would fancy. Besides, though he’d been a few times, he’d never enjoyed the cinema like he used to since the Jeffrey Leach murder. It was a funny thing for an officer of the Metropolitan Police to think, he ought to be hardened and indifferent, but the fact was that he always expected the flash of a knife when the person in front of him or behind got up, or thought he might trip over a body in the dark. Why not go to the theater instead? Laf had only been twice in his life, once to The Mousetrap when he was a kid and later on, for his fortieth birthday, to Miss Saigon. How about An Inspector Calls? It sounded as if it might be about the police and therefore he’d get irritated if they got the police procedure wrong. On the other hand, he’d be able to tell Sonovia afterward just how inaccurate it had been. There were little bits of description of the play for each theater. Laf read that this one was an “acclaimed psychological thriller.” It didn’t sound bad. He got on the phone and booked three seats for eight-fifteen. Sonovia would be amazed and as for Minty…Laf looked forward to seeing Minty’s face when he told her.
Just as Sonovia was on the watch for Gertrude Pierce, so Minty was waiting for the reappearance of Mrs. Lewis. She was ironing. The light-green-and-dark-green striped shirt was on the top of the pile. It couldn’t be more than ten days since she’d ironed it. The man it belonged to must be very fond of it, maybe it was his favorite. She spread it out on the ironing board, feeling the cotton. It was just damp enough but not so damp that steam rose from it when she applied the iron.
She’d ironed shirts for Jock, not many and not often, but when he’d stayed the night she wouldn’t let him put the same one on in the morning. Next time he’d come over she’d handed him the clean shirt and he’d said he’d never seen such good ironing as hers. That was the day he’d taken her bowling. It was the most amazing evening of her life. She slipped the cardboard collar round the neck of the green shirt and as she slid it into its cellophane bag, a tear slipped down her cheek and splashed on to the shiny transparent stuff. Minty wiped it off and washed her hands. On second thoughts, she washed her face as well. The poky little room smelled of detergent and heat, a scent she couldn’t define because it wasn’
t a burning smell but something like a really hot summer’s day. She was alone, there was no one watching her and arguing about her. The ghosts had been absent all the morning. She started on the last shirt but two, a white one with a very pale pink check.
Sonovia got bored with waiting. It wasn’t as if anything else happened down the street that was worth looking at, apart from those two yobs revving up their motorbikes for an unnecessarily long time and that Iranian woman coming out in the chador that enveloped her from head to foot in black folds, leaving only her tired eyes free. Her three children looked like anyone else’s, dressed in jeans and T-shirts and sandals. Sonovia couldn’t understand it.
“When in Rome do as the Romans do,” she said when Laf came in.
“Pardon?”
“Our mothers never got themselves up like that after they came here. They adapted.”
“Your mum never dressed like a nun either,” said Laf sarcastically, “so far as I recall. In case it’s of any interest, Mrs. Pierce is sitting in the old man’s back garden in a deckchair. So you can come off watch. Want a beer? I’m going to have one.”
Sonovia accepted the beer but sat there ten minutes longer, just to prove she was relaxing, not waiting for Gertrude Pierce. She was just getting up, thinking about making lunch for her and Laf, when Minty came along. The last thing she wanted was for Minty to find out for herself Gertrude Pierce was still here, which she would do as soon as she looked out of her kitchen window, so she waved and mouthed, “She’s not gone. She’s in the back.”
Minty nodded and made a face, a sympathetic face that registered disgust and fellow feeling at the same time. Inserting her key in the lock, she felt the usual apprehension and braced herself. There was no one and nothing there. It was funny, she was getting to be able to tell if the house was empty of them the minute she came into the hall. Anyway, they weren’t her immediate worry. For some reason, Josephine had kissed her when she left and she could still feel her scent on her skin and the smear of her lipstick as well as her own tears. But first she went through to the kitchen and looked out of the window at the two of them next door, Gertrude Pierce and Mr. Kroot in old-fashioned striped deckchairs. They’d put a rickety table with a green baize top between them and on it they were playing cards. The black cat with its aged gray muzzle lay on the grass, looking as if it were dead. But it often looked like that and it never was dead. Minty could hardly remember a time when that cat hadn’t been there, its face like an old whiskered person’s, its walk growing stiffer. A bumble bee drifted down close to its ears. They twitched and its tail flicked. Gertrude Pierce swept up the cards into a pack and shuffled them.
Had Mr. Kroot’s cat been in the cemetery again, walking over where her grave would be? Or trailing arthritically over Auntie’s two graves? Upstairs now, Minty ran her bath. She hardly ever had a bath these days without thinking about her money and how she could have bought a shower with it. She dropped her clothes onto the floor in a heap. They’d been clean on that morning, of course, but to her they smelled of Josephine and the litter-strewn street and the diesel fumes from lorries and taxis and all the cigarettes people smoked between here and Immacue and the butts they left on the pavement. She scrubbed herself with the nailbrush, not just her hands but her arms and legs and feet as well. The skin was bright pink under the water. Then she used the back brush. She dipped her head in and shampooed her hair, digging into her scalp with her fingertips. Kneeling up, she rinsed her head under the running tap. If only she had that shower!
As she was drying herself, another towel wrapped round her head turban-wise, something told her they were back. Not in here. To do her justice, Auntie wouldn’t bring a stranger in; she had her own ideas of modesty and Minty hadn’t been seen without her clothes since she was nine. They were outside the door. Let them wait. Minty used her deodorant not just under her arms but on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands. She dressed in white cotton trousers and a white T-shirt with pale blue stripes. Both were “left-behinds” from Immacue, among those garments that their owners for some reason failed to collect and that, after six months, Josephine sold at two pounds apiece. Minty got a discount and only paid two for both. She wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it if they’d only been dry-cleaned but these were washable, had many times been washed, and the trousers she’d boiled, which reduced their size and made them fit better. She combed her hair, wrapped up her soiled clothes in the towels, and, drawing a deep breath, flung open the door.
They were outside, a couple of yards away in the doorway of Auntie’s bedroom. Minty touched all the wood she could reach, pink wood and white wood and brown, but they didn’t go away. Mrs. Lewis was much clearer and more solid today than Auntie was. She looked like a real person, the sort of old woman you might see in the street, coming back from the shops. In spite of the warmth of the day she wore a winter coat of dark red wool, a color Minty particularly disliked, and she had a dark red felt hat jammed down over her ears. So they could change their clothes wherever it was they came from, Minty thought, marveling.
Auntie, behind Jock’s mother and much taller than she was, appeared rather shadowy, something you only thought you saw and had to look at again to make sure. But she thickened and grew sharper as Minty’s eyes fixed on her. Minty remembered once, when she was a child, some relative or friend, it might have been Kathleen’s husband or Edna’s, who took photographs and developed his own film. It was Edna’s, she remembered now, recalling him for other mysterious, never fully understood, reasons. She’d seen him develop the film and watched the blank sheet in its pool of liquid gradually turn into a picture. Auntie was like that, growing from a vague shapelessness into a picture of herself.
Her arms full of damp towels and clothes, Minty stared at them and they stared back at her. This time she was the first to speak. She addressed Auntie. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with her if you knew what she owed me. Her son borrowed all my money and yours too, what you left me, and she could have paid it back; she had the time, but she never did.”
Auntie said nothing. Mrs. Lewis went on staring. Shrugging, turning away, Minty went downstairs. She put the clothes and the towels in the washing machine, started it, and washed her hands, thinking how she’d have held that stuff at arm’s length if it hadn’t been for encountering those two on the landing. Mrs. Lewis had come down behind her, but she’d come alone. Auntie was gone. Had she taken Minty’s words to heart?
Minty wasn’t going to eat her lunch with that old woman watching her. She’d rather starve. Mrs. Lewis moved about the kitchen, looking down at the cupboards and up at the shelves. If she was thinking Minty wasn’t a good enough household manager, wouldn’t have made a suitable wife for her son, she had another think coming. Everything in that kitchen was spotless.
Mrs. Lewis lifted the lid off the teapot and looked inside the bread bin. “She keeps it nice, I will say.”
“Say what you like,” said Minty. “I couldn’t care less. Why didn’t you give me back my money?”
No answer, of course. The old woman was close beside her now. Minty had a brilliant idea. She pulled open the cutlery drawer and seized the knife, the twin to the one she used in the cinema. The knife in her hand, she drew back her arm and lunged, but Mrs. Lewis had gone, faded into the wall or swallowed up by the floor.
It seemed then that just threatening got rid of them. But Minty didn’t immediately put the knife back. She washed the blade because she felt it was contaminated, though it had touched nothing. Then she carved some slices from a piece of ham and chopped some lettuce and tomato. The knife needed washing again and this time she put it right into the sink with plenty of hot water and detergent. It might be necessary, she thought as she dried it, to carry this knife with her as she had the one she’d used, find a more efficient way of carrying it, though wrapped up and laid along the side of her leg under her trousers would do. She poured herself a nice fresh glass of cold milk.
Her lunch was just finished and all the
crockery in hot water when the doorbell rang. Laf, it would be, with the papers. “You want a cup of tea?” she asked, letting him in.
“Thanks, love, but I won’t stop. Where d’you think we’re going tonight, me and Sonny and you? We’re going to a show. In the West End.”
“In a cinema, d’you mean?” She wasn’t going back to that Marble Arch one, whatever he said. That was just the place Mrs. Lewis and Auntie were likely to be, haunting the spot where Jock had last appeared. “I don’t know, Laf.”
“In a theater,” he said. “It’s a thriller about the police.”
“Well, I can’t say no, can I?”
“Of course you can’t. You’ll love it.”
She wouldn’t be able to wear those clothes, that was for sure. Not after carrying those dirty towels and the trousers and top she’d taken off. Shame, because these white trousers were really nice. Anyway, she’d have to undress to put the knife down the side of her leg and once she’d got that far it was only another step to have a bath. She washed the dishes, took the papers outside, and sat in a clean cane chair she’d scrubbed, and with a cushion whose cover she’d washed and ironed. This made her feel very superior to Mr. Kroot and Gertrude Pierce, who’d stopped playing cards and eaten their lunch on the green baize table, sandwiches and Fanta by the look of it, for they’d piled up the dirty dishes on a tray and left it on the grass right by the cat’s nose, a real magnet for flies. Minty looked once but never again.
