by Ruth Rendell
“Well, no, it’s not very pleasant for me, either. I was fond of Jeff myself. But I knew what he was.”
Like a child being told frightening things, Fiona covered her ears. Not usually timid or shy, she found this woman overwhelming. The trouble was that even with her hands over her ears she could still hear.
“It was a thousand pounds. He told me himself. As I’m sure you know, he had lunch with me on the day he was killed. I’m certain this Araminta Knox couldn’t afford to lose that amount. Not living in a little back street in what’s practically Harlesden. Did he have money off you?”
“We were going to be married!”
“Well, hardly, my dear. He was married to Zillah Melcombe-Smith, aka Watling, aka Leach. I’ll tell you frankly that while he was with me I paid all the bills and let him have the use of my car. And gave him pocket money. He called it loans but I was never under any illusions of that sort. I suppose it was the same thing with you. When did you think your wedding was going to be, may I ask?”
“August,” said Fiona, “and no, you may not. I’d like you to go now, please.”
Natalie was quite willing to comply. She’d got a great deal: the furnishings of the house, the carpets and paintings, Fiona’s clothes and her general appearance, as well as a lot of admissions as to her feelings for Jeff. “You really ought to be gratified,” she said as a parting shot. “He must have left this Araminta for you, you know.”
“For my money,” said Fiona bitterly and then wished she hadn’t.
Once Natalie had gone, she began to cry. Ever since Jeff’s death, her illusions-as that woman called them-had gradually been stripped away. She would soon be left with nothing but her bare love, bruised and scarred as it was. After a while she dried her eyes, washed her face, and looked for Araminta Knox in the phone book. There she or someone called Knox was, at 39 Syringa Road, NW10. Why are we such inquisitive beings that even in great despair and sorrow curiosity impels us to seek answers that probe into old wounds?
She went next door, passing, of course, the offending gateposts on her way out. The informality of using the back door was gone, she was sure, forever and she was back to ringing the bell. They still kissed, she and Michelle, lips not quite touching cheeks. “I really came to ask you both to come in and have a drink with me. There’s something I have to tell you. Do come.”
They hadn’t done so for a long time. Not since, like a crass fool, she’d said that stupid thing to the police about their disliking Jeff. Michelle hesitated. Perhaps there was something in Fiona’s face, a look of beseeching, of tears hardly dried, that made her say, “All right. Just for half an hour.”
The first thing Michelle noticed when she came into Fiona’s living room was that there was something different about the mantelpiece. An expensive-looking alabaster and silver urn had joined the clock and the candlesticks. She said nothing. Fiona had put champagne on ice. “Is there something to celebrate?” Michelle asked.
“Nothing. When you’re feeling really down, you put out more flags, don’t you?”
Matthew extracted the cork skillfully, without spilling a drop. Raising her glass, Fiona said, “I want to ask your advice.” She told them what she knew of Araminta Knox.
“Have you told the police about her? Have you told them about the one who wrote you the begging letter?”
Fiona looked at Matthew in surprise. “Why would I do that?”
“It’s another suspect, isn’t it? Someone else for them to persecute instead of us.”
“I did what I told you I’d do about Linda Davies. I sent her the money. And it made me feel better, a bit better.”
Looking down at the glass in her hand, watching the bubbles rise, Michelle said, trying to keep her tone equable, “You sent her a thousand pounds? You sent her a check?”
“I thought she might not have a bank account so I sent notes, fifty-pound notes, packed into a padded bag. And I felt I was-well, righting the wrongs Jeff did. I’d begun to do that. I know what he was now, you see. I know he preyed on women”-she used Linda Davies’s expression, her voice rising-“and had no compunction about it. Rich women and poor women, it didn’t much matter to him so long as they kept him and put a roof of their own over his head. His death was a lucky escape for me, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, Fiona, I’m so sorry…”
“Perhaps that was my motive for murdering him. What do you think? A means of escape I hadn’t the courage to take any other way. The trouble is I still love him, just as much as I did when I thought he was honest and decent.”
After they had gone Fiona sat for a long while staring at the urn on the mantelpiece. She had thought of scattering Jeff’s ashes somewhere nearby, perhaps on Fortune Green, but these latest revelations about his life had changed her mind. The urn had cost her a small fortune, which was quite funny, really, if you were in the mood to be amused. She took it off the mantelpiece and, crawling on all fours, put it at the back of the dark cupboard under the stairs.
Chapter 32
WITH JOCK GONE and his mother gone, Minty grew more confident. Coming into the house gradually ceased to be an ordeal. When she went upstairs to bed or to have her bath, she no longer feared seeing Auntie and Mrs. Lewis in a bedroom doorway. Auntie’s absence had by now been of long duration. She hadn’t seen her since June-or was it May?
Like a member of a tribe placating the god, she faithfully put flowers on Auntie’s grave, though since confusing the original one with another, she had become much freer about where her offerings went. Any grave with an angel playing a musical instrument would do. The dead were everywhere, could go anywhere and, now Auntie had left the house, Minty had no doubt she ranged the cemetery from resting place to resting place. She was always careful, though, to choose a woman’s. Auntie, who had so much disliked marriage, would never lay herself down in the neighborhood of a man’s bones.
While she kept up the practice of bringing flowers every week, ranunculus and zinnias, carnations and by now chrysanthemums, she knew Auntie would be pacified. It was with a little shiver that Minty sometimes remembered how indignant she’d been at past failures in this particular regard. Never again. A life free of ghosts would be a life of peace.
The weather had become hot and sultry. Sometimes a thick mist of fumes and emissions hung over Harrow Road. Everything seemed dirtier and smellier than in winter and taking two baths a day was a regular thing for Minty. Fourteen months had passed since first she met Jock and nine since his death. Having barely thought of him for a long time, she was aware that he had re-entered her mind so that she wondered how it would have been if he’d lived. Would she have been happy? Would she have got pregnant like Josephine? It gave her something of a shock when she realized she’d have been Mrs. Lewis too. All the baths she took reminded her how he’d taken her savings and when he died, let his mother inherit them. What had become of that money now? She was as far off getting a shower installed as ever and now she began to wish she’d used the money for that purpose so that there had been nothing to give Jock.
Then, one warm morning that promised another hot day, when she’d had her bath and was dressing to go to work, she heard his voice. She heard him singing at her out of her bedroom wall. Not “Walk On By” this time but “Tea for Two.”
“Tea for two and two for tea…”
She was too frightened to make a sound. Then, as the phrase was repeated, followed by the next line, and he broke off to laugh, she managed to whisper, “Go away, go away.”
He seemed to take notice of what she said, for instead of addressing her again, he began talking to other, equally invisible, people: a group of nameless friends, with voices she’d never heard before and that mingled, indistinguishable from each other and uttering a rattle of meaningless words. Then Jock intervened, offering them a mint or making one of his strange jokes, the like of which Minty had never heard elsewhere. If she were to see him she thought it would be the death of her but she didn’t see him. She saw none of them and what
made her more terrified than she’d ever been was a sudden easily identifiable voice replying to him. His mother’s.
Like her son, she’d been banished only for a while. Minty shivered, touching wood, doing more than that, clutching it, holding hard on to the edge of a table, the frame of a door. She ought to have known you can’t get rid of ghosts so easily, you can’t stab them and kill them like those gangs killed real people. It wasn’t the way. Were they with her for life, these men and women she didn’t know? Jock’s family? That ex-wife of his, his relatives?
The post coming, the rattle of the letter box, the thump of something falling on the doormat, and the crash of the lid closing again, distracted her. A welcome interruption that sent her downstairs, still combing her wet hair. She never got much post. What came was mostly services bills and advertisements from estate agents wanting to sell her houses in St. John’s Wood. Like Auntie, when an unfamiliar envelope arrived she spent a long time scrutinizing it, studying the postmark, deciphering the handwriting, or frowning over the printing, before putting her thumb under the flap and opening it. Here was the usual junk mail and with it a mysterious package. It was a thick, padded brown envelope, the likes of which she’d never received before, and her name and address were written on a white label. It had cost more to send than ordinary first-class mail. Carefully, she slit the flap and opened it.
Inside was money. Twenty fifty-pound notes, held together with an elastic band. No letter, no card, nothing else. But she knew who it was from: Mrs. Lewis. She was dead but there must be someone still on earth she could get to do this for her, someone else she’d haunted and spoken to. Maybe Jock had had a brother or sister; he’d never said he hadn’t. Minty decided that was who it was, a brother who’d inherited the money Mrs. Lewis left. She’d not ignored the things Minty had said about giving back her money; they’d struck a nerve and when she appeared to her son she’d asked him what she ought to do.
Maybe that’s what they’d been talking about, that crowd whose anonymous voices had jabbered and whispered in the bedroom. Give her back the money, Mother, they’d been saying, and though she’d argued and perhaps Jock had argued too, the brother and his wife had told her it was only right to return the money. It was the only explanation. Not all Jock owed, though, only a thousand. Minty could hear-in her mind’s ear, not ghosts talking-that mean old Mrs. Lewis insisting on the smaller sum and winning her son over.
Mr. Kroot’s old cat was asleep in one of Sonovia’s armchairs. As usual, because it never sat sphinxlike as most cats do, but lay stretched out and slack, it looked dead. You had to examine it closely to discern the minuscule rise and fall of its thin side.
“It’s moved in, my deah.” Sonovia contemplated the cat with detachment. “It turned up on the doorstep and that was that. I must say, it’s easier giving it its food in here than going round to that dirty place. Ooh, the smell in that kitchen, you wouldn’t believe it. What Gertrude Pierce did with herself all the time she was here I never will know. Laf went in to see the old man, you know. Went into the hospital, I mean. I said not to. What have they ever done for us, I said. But he would do it.”
“Let bygones be bygones,” said Laf, the peacemaker. “I mean, I don’t know for a fact if he said that about going back to the jungle. It was repeated third-hand to me. It might have got sort of distorted on the way. He’s in a bad way, Minty. I took him a half-bottle of Scotch, he’s not supposed to have it in there, but you should have seen him. His whole face lit up. It’s a terrible thing to be old and alone.”
“I’m alone.” As she spoke Minty heard the voices returning, at first like the murmur of a crowd a long way off, then jostling each other and interrupting and sometimes laughing so that she couldn’t make out a single word. As if Laf and Sonovia weren’t there or didn’t matter, she said, “Well, I suppose I’ve always got people with me. Wish I didn’t. You can have too much of that.”
The Wilsons exchanged glances and Laf went to get the drinks. Sonovia and Minty went into the garden and sat down in the patio chairs, and Minty admired her neighbors’ hanging baskets. The garden was all dahlias and hollyhocks now, the lawn yellowing from the drought. Not a breath of wind stirred the boughs of the cherry tree. The sky was colorless, a sheet of unbroken whitish cloud in which the sun showed like a pool of dull yellow. Laf came out with a tray on which were tall glasses filled with amber liquid surfaced by maraschino cherries and chunks of apple and cucumber. Pimms was his summer craze. He offered the drinks proudly and handed round a dish of macadamia nuts.
“Not cold, are you, my deah?” Sonovia said to Minty, who had shivered. She’d just heard Jock’s voice say, “I can tell you’re an old-fashioned girl, Polo. There aren’t many around like you.”
“Something walked on my grave.” Minty was afraid to say it. She made herself, as if it were a way of forcing the ghost voice to go away. “Or maybe on Auntie’s, over in the cemetery.” She saw Sonovia and Laf exchange glances again, but she pretended she hadn’t. It couldn’t have been Jock’s voice; she’d banished him and he’d gone. She’d imagined it or the drink had brought it on. She shivered again and remembered what she’d come for in the first place. “You had the builders in last spring, doing something in the kitchen.”
“That’s right, Minty.” Laf was always relieved when she said normal, ordinary things, when she talked your language. He smiled encouragingly. “It was when we had the new units put in.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“That depends on what it is,” said Sonovia, but Laf said, “Of course we will. That goes without saying.”
“Well, then, will you tell them to come next door and look at my bathroom and work out what putting a shower in would cost?”
“Nothing easier. And when he comes Sonny will let him in and keep an eye on him while he’s there.”
When she’d first seen him-that is, seen his ghost-he hadn’t spoken. He’d been silent and somehow menacing, so that he’d frightened her the way he never had done when he was alive. She remembered very clearly how she’d come home from work and seen him sitting in that chair with his back to her, his hair dark brown, his neck brown, and his leather jacket black. His feet had shuffled back as if he’d meant to get up and that was when she’d shut her eyes because she was afraid to see his face. When she opened them again the ghost was gone but she knew he’d been there because when she felt the seat of the chair it was warm. She thought he might follow her upstairs but he hadn’t, he hadn’t been upstairs, not that time. Later on she saw him in that room again and in the hall and in her bedroom. She saw him in the shop. He’d never spoken.
Most people would say it was worse to see a ghost than to hear one. She wasn’t so sure. Auntie and Mrs. Lewis had chattered away and been very clearly visible. When Jock spoke to her it was against a background of voices muttering and whispering but only his words were understandable. The rest of it was like a twittering in a foreign language, it was like those Iranian people talked when they came out of the house opposite in a crowd. She’d rid herself of Jock’s ghost and his mother’s ghost by stabbing them with those long knives. But you couldn’t be free of sounds that way. You’d somehow have to block your ears.
Like the ghosts she could see, the ghosts she could hear weren’t there all the time. At night there was peace. Then she had silence in which to think. Stabbing the ghosts had maybe only got rid of the sight of them but she now knew it wasn’t permanent. It worked for a while but only a while, and when the ghosts came back they let their voices come first to warn her that soon she’d see them. Putting flowers on Auntie’s grave had been even more effective than the stabbings, for she’d never seen or heard Auntie again. Jock must have a grave somewhere, his mother must have a grave. If she could find out where those graves were she could put flowers on them as well.
When the voices had been with her for a week and Jock had said all the things to her that he used to say-Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, you’re an old-fashioned girl, Polo, it’s onl
y April Fools’ Day till twelve and after that it’s Tailpike Day, only two thousand, Minty, it’s our future that’s at stake-she went into the cemetery by her usual gate, stopping on the way to buy flowers from the man with the stall. It was a Saturday but there was hardly anyone about. This time she’d brought a bottle of water, cold from the kitchen tap, to refill the vase. She bought pale yellow chrysanthemums, the kind that have short petals in their centers and long, thin ones on their rims, and white gypsophila like snowflakes and alstro-somethings that she couldn’t pronounce.
Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life on December 15th, 1897, aged 53. Asleep in the arms of Jesus. Auntie’s grandmother. Minty had told herself this so often that now she believed it. She pulled out the dead flowers and poured away the smelly green water that had petals and a dead snail floating in it. There was enough fresh water to rinse the vase out before filling it. When the yellow and white and peach-colored flowers were arranged, she knelt down on Maisie Chepstow’s grave and did something she hadn’t done for a long time. She prayed to Auntie to take away Jock’s voice and the voices of the crowd that accompanied him wherever he was.
A bath when she got home. Laf didn’t come in with the paper until quite late in the afternoon. She hadn’t heard the voices since she offered up that prayer, but she was still going to ask. “How can you find out where someone’s grave is?”
“You’d have to know where they died. Maybe you could get the death certificate. People don’t have graves much these days, Minty. They get cremated so they’d be ashes. Why do you want to know?”
That business about the death certificate confused her. She knew she’d never be able to do those things, go to the right place, talk to the right people. Perhaps Laf would do it for her. “It’s Jock’s grave I want to find.” She wasn’t going to mention his mother. Not yet, anyway.
