by Ruth Rendell
They’d gone. It was because she’d done it. She’d been up to Fortune Green that morning with a bunch of flowers, a nice clean bowl that Auntie’d once used for her Christmas puddings, and water in a fruit juice bottle with a plastic screw top. The bottle had been washed out when she’d drunk the juice and put in Dettol with the hot water to make sure it was really clean. It was easy getting to West Hampstead on the train from Kensal Rise. She’d bought the flowers from outside the cemetery in Fortune Green Road.
Why hadn’t his brother put Jock’s ashes in there? Come to that, why West Hampstead at all? So far as she knew, Jock had never lived there, never even been there. The answer must be that the brother did. The flowers she’d bought were Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod, there wasn’t so much of a selection at this time of the year. It wouldn’t be long before the leaves began to fall. She could feel a nip in the air. On the green she stood under a tree and looked about her, wondering where the ashes had fallen. She squatted down and examined the ground, not actually touching it because that would have dirtied her hands, but just peering about her, searching. A woman passing with a dog stopped and asked her if she’d lost something. Minty shook her head fiercely, though it was true, she had lost something, or someone, and she was looking for what was left of him.
Her scrutiny eventually rewarded her with the sight of something pale sprinkled over a patch of bare earth where for some reason the grass didn’t grow. A cigarette had been stubbed out close by. This she kicked out of the way with the toe of her shoe. She put the bowl precisely where the grayish powder lay most thickly, poured in the water, and arranged the flowers. They looked very nice. She could almost fancy she heard his voice say, “Thanks, Polo. You’re a good girl.” It was only her imagination, the result of her thinking what he might say, not his actual voice speaking. She put the bottle along with the wrapping from the flowers into a litter bin and walked back down the hill to West Hampstead station.
Matthew was opening his letters. His post increased almost daily. Fifteen had come that morning, some sent on by BBC Television, others from the agent he’d been obliged to engage. A lot of them were straightforward fan letters, some included questions about health and eating habits their writers expected him to answer, some-a very few-were abusive, asking him who he thought cared about a man too stupid to eat wholesome food when half the world was starving or wanting to know where he found “the obscene freaks” who appeared on his program. There was an invitation from the Eating Disorders Association asking him to become one of their patrons. He answered all his letters except the abusive ones and these he threw away quickly lest their contents prey on his mind.
Today there were no nasty letters. He almost wished there had been, for a few insults might have temporarily taken his mind off Michelle’s health or its reverse. Twice he typed in her name instead of that of the recipient and once, instead of cancel-this to a man wanting to know if he should keep going his subscription to a slimmer’s magazine-he wrote cancer. Before pressing the back space, he looked at the word and shuddered. Using the euphemism he despised when others uttered it, he asked himself what he’d do “if anything happened” to her. The bald term he couldn’t use, not even in his thoughts. And as he excised the letter which made all the difference, the r that changed an innocuous word into one of foreboding and dread, he spoke her name in a whisper and then more loudly. “Michelle,” he said. “Michelle.”
She answered him. She’d just that moment let herself in by the front door. “I’m here, darling.”
Her face was flushed and she looked excited. “I’ve something to tell you. It’s good news-can’t you tell? Well, I think you’ll say it’s good. I did the test at home, I did it a month ago but I still didn’t believe. I thought my hormones were all confused, I thought maybe it didn’t work on someone of my age, but the doctor says yes and I’m fine. I should be fine, there’s no reason why not…”
He’d gone as white as in the worst days of his starvation. “What are you saying?”
She stood in front of him and he got to his feet. He put out his arms and she moved slowly into them. “Matthew, he or she will be born in March. You are pleased, aren’t you? You are glad?”
He held her and kissed her. “When I can truly believe it, this will be the happiest day of my life.”
Chapter 35
THE CROWD OF people were invisible but they were there in force. They thronged through her head, their voices audible as soon as she was alone and sometimes when she wasn’t. Jock wasn’t there. Minty hadn’t heard him since she put those flowers on his ashes. The last time was when he came walking down the stairs, but she heard his voice, clearer and louder than the others. These were people she knew and people she had never met or even heard of. Not Auntie, never her, and not Mrs. Lewis anymore, but Bert, who’d married Auntie, and Jock’s brother’s wife, Auntie’s sisters, Edna and Kathleen, and their husbands, and more whose names she didn’t know. Yet.
She hadn’t known Jock’s sister-in-law’s name until Bert told Kathleen. “This is Jock’s sister-in-law, Mary, Kathleen,” he’d said and Auntie’s sister said she was pleased to meet her.
Then it was Edna’s turn to meet this Mary. At least Auntie’s voice wasn’t among theirs and Minty knew this was because of the praying and the flowers on her grave. Jock’s wasn’t, for the same reason. She couldn’t do those things for the others, she couldn’t spend her life hunting for graves of dead people, which might be anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. Their invisibility was only temporary. After a while they began to take shape and form, Bert first, thin and insubstantial, not much more than a darkness that shouldn’t have been there. How did she know it was Bert? She’d never seen him, never heard his voice, she wasn’t even born when he came into Auntie’s life and went out of it, but she knew.
Kathleen and Edna were weak and transparent, and sometimes she saw them as shadows only. Mary too, another inhabitant of her life she’d never seen and one she’d never even heard mentioned. The daughter-in-law Mrs. Lewis loved and welcomed when she came to join her. Sunlight had penetrated the gap between the half-closed curtains and onto its brightness their three shadows fell, but without bodies to cast them.
The evening she went to the cinema with Laf and Sonovia-their first visit for a long time-all the ghost voices stayed at home or went away to wherever they lived when they weren’t bothering her and all the ghost shapes were swallowed up by the night and the bright lights. It might be because she was with real living people that they left her alone. On the other hand she’d seen Kathleen several times while she was with the Wilsons and there was the time when Jock had actually followed her into Sonovia’s bedroom when she’d tried on the blue dress. It was hard to know. Most of the time she was confused and bewildered.
She had other worries to plague her. Josephine had started talking about giving up the shop and being a full-time housewife and mother, though there was no sign as yet of motherhood. Ken had been offered a partnership in the Lotus Dragon and had accepted it. There was no real need for her to work. Minty wasn’t to trouble her head about it. Whoever took over would be bound to keep her on. “No one can iron shirts the way you do, Minty,” said Josephine. “They’d be mad to let you go.”
That word “mad” always made Minty nervous. Someone had said it to her on the bus when she’d told the voice that was hissing and whispering at her to go away. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to ignore Mary Lewis, who had her ghost lips to her ear and was saying she’d have to have computer skills and business qualifications for them to keep her on. Being skilled at ironing wasn’t enough these days. “I don’t know. Suppose they give up the shirt service? Suppose they just do dry-cleaning?”
“They’d have to be mad.” Josephine was very keen on that word. “Don’t worry. I may decide to stick it out a few more years. Till I fall for a baby, anyway.”
Minty ran her hand down the length of the new knife she still wore strapped to her right leg. She’d ha
ve felt half-dressed without it now, though she sometimes wondered what she was going to use it for. Mary would have been a good candidate, only Minty had only seen her shadow, a thin woman with long hair and long legs. But she no more appeared in the shape of a real human being than the aunts did or the uncles. They just chattered away among themselves, the best of friends, when they weren’t talking to her. Except for Mary, who was always rowing with Kathleen.
She didn’t know which was better, seeing them and hearing them or just hearing them. She tried to find things to do that they’d hate, walking the streets, getting in a jam-packed tube train, going down to Oxford Street, where there was always such a dense crowd strolling aimlessly along the pavements that you could lose yourself among the people. For a while their voices would go away but they always came back to persecute her. The evening she went out with Sonovia and Laf the cinema was full of people; it was a good job Laf had booked, there wasn’t an empty seat that she could see. The ghost voices who talked to her when she went alone to the pictures in the afternoon had disappeared. Every time this happened she couldn’t cure herself of hoping they were gone forever. She sat listening for them, savoring the quiet, oblivious to what was coming out of the screen, until Sonovia asked her in a whispered hiss if she was in a trance.
When Josephine was in the shop and when Ken dropped in, when one customer after another came in, her head was mostly silent. That was why she’d stopped going home at lunchtime. She knew they’d be there and it would be like walking in among a mass of chattering people, all expectant, all waiting for something, like the theater audience before the curtain went up on An Inspector Calls. She didn’t want to be their play, their show, but over that she had no control.
Food was the reason she went home that Thursday lunchtime. She’d forgotten her sandwiches, though she’d made them, chicken and lettuce and tomato on white bread, wrapped them in greaseproof paper and polyethylene, and put them in the fridge. Left them in the fridge. It was something she’d never have done normally but that morning she’d rushed out of the house to escape Mary’s voice and Uncle Wilfred’s. She walked, though she’d gone to Immacue on the 18 bus. It was a nice, sunny day, autumnal though and with a nip in the air. A year ago she’d have been looking forward to going out with Jock in the evening, not dreaming that the train he was coming on from Gloucester would crash and kill him. He’d be saying his funny things to her. I went into the garden to fetch a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie and there I met a great she-bear who said, What, no soap? And promptly married the barber. There, she’d remembered it word for word.
It was a long walk and being used to it made it no shorter. Past the Flora pub and the Church of the Redeemer of God, past the eastern entrance to the cemetery, Kensal Green tube station, the garage, the boarded-up shops, the seat and flower bed where she’d got rid of Mrs. Lewis. She turned off Harrow Road before the western gate of the cemetery was reached and into Syringa Road. Her key went into the lock and she turned it, knowing what she’d find inside, voices and the sounds as of a crowd jostling each other.
The hall was still and, for a moment, she thought the whole place was silent. She closed her eyes, enjoying the peace. Then the voices began as whispers, Mary and Edna arguing, as they always did, Kathleen muttering about Jock’s ashes being in Brompton Cemetery. Just because Laf told her that story about Fortune Green didn’t mean they weren’t in Brompton. They were up in the far northeast corner and she could see the gravestone, Kathleen said, she could see his name on it and the dates of his birth and death. Edna broke in and said it was morbid living by a cemetery, she knew the effect it had had on her. If she had her time over again she’d move somewhere else.
Minty took a few steps toward the kitchen. Then she stopped, listening. A terrible thing had happened, the thing she knew couldn’t happen. She heard Jock singing upstairs. Just walk on by. Wait on the corner…
His voice had lightened and risen a little. Perhaps that was what happened when ghosts sang. Their voices thinned and blurred as their bodies did. This time, she was sure, she’d see him. Maybe he’d come walking down the stairs, the way he had before. It hadn’t worked, the giving him flowers, he hadn’t liked them or it was the wrong place. She’d chosen the wrong place, armfuls of flowers should have been scattered everywhere on the grass, on the earth, on the paths, it wasn’t like a grave. She began touching wood, the banisters, the doors, the door frames, white wood and pink wood and brown wood. Her hands were shaking and she sobbed.
The singing stopped. He called out, “Are you there?”
His voice had changed. It was lighter and quicker, not chocolate mousse any more, but it was his voice. And at last he was talking to her. While he was alive she thought she’d never want him to stop talking, she couldn’t get enough of his voice, but now she could. Not for the world, not for rest from all the other voices, could she have brought herself to answer him. How could you love someone so much and then hate him if it was the same person? She’d die if she answered him or the house would fall down or the world end. Perhaps this was the beginning of his moving back with her, speaking to her, taking shape when he chose or being a shadow on the wall when the sun shone.
She held on to brown woodwork with both hands. The flowers hadn’t worked; only one thing really worked, at least for a time. Slowly she took her hands away, they were icy cold against the bare skin of her waist. She lifted up her T-shirt, undid the waistband of her trousers, and withdrew the knife from its wrappings, holding it daggerwise. Her whole body was trembling now.
Perhaps because she hadn’t answered him, he called again. The same words: “Are you there?”
She turned round and stepped back to stand at the foot of the stairs, holding the knife behind her. This time she’d do the job properly, even if she had to do it every few months… When he appeared at the top, the shock, though she expected it, was almost too much for her. Her vision blurred and she stared upward into a dark fog through which he came walking down the stairs. And then, with a shaking hand, she stabbed haphazardly at his body, again and again, wild thrusts and glancing blows. At his first scream the doorbell rang, a long, imperious, shattering ring.
Minty dropped the knife and gave a whimpering cry. Very quickly it came to her what she’d done. The man was real. He wore jeans and a black leather jacket but he wasn’t Jock. Real blood was coming from his body, seeping bright scarlet through his blue shirt. He lay half on the floor, half on the two lowest stairs, groaning and holding with a cut hand a wound just below his waist and exposing another on his upper arm. She’d tried to kill a real man. No voice had told her to do it; she’d told herself.
The bell rang and rang, and someone was kicking at the door panels. If Minty waited a moment before opening the door it was because she couldn’t move, she couldn’t walk. But she did walk, she staggered and fell against it, she fumbled at the doorknob and at last it came open.
“What’s happening here? What’s going on?”
And then Sonovia saw the wounded man and the knife which had fallen across his thighs. She let out a series of short sharp screams, her hands up as if warding off blows. Laf came running out from next door. Minty was too afraid to think of anything but escape. Her strength came back, running through her like some fiery drink, she jumped over the little low fence between her garden and the Wilsons’ and ran down the road just as Laf turned in through her gate.
He called for help. He phoned 911 and his own DI. It was a piece of luck for the man on the floor that Laf was at home, on a day off, for Sonovia, usually so calm and practical, was in the throes of full-blown, old-fashioned hysterics. What was needed now, more than the police, was an ambulance. It arrived within four minutes and the man who had come to give Minty an estimate for her shower was carried out on a stretcher. This was a routine, not a necessary, measure. Shock, more than his superficial wounds, had laid him low.
But the police knew now, Laf knew, who was responsible for the cinema death and that of Eileen Dring.
“You couldn’t really call them murders,” Laf said to Sonovia later that day, when she’d calmed down and they were having a shock-remedy drink. “Not really. She didn’t mean to harm real people. She didn’t know.”
“I just hope the doctors realize that. Thank the Lord, poor Pete’s going to be okay.”
“What made you ring her doorbell, Sonny? Some sixth sense?”
“Not at all, my deah. I couldn’t claim to have that. I was at the window and I saw her come home, which was most unexpected, and I thought I’ll just pop in and tell her Pete’s there in case it gives her a shock.”
“What did she come home for?”
“It breaks your heart, it really does. After the ambulance had been and gone I was dying for a drink of cold water and that stuff that comes out of the tap-well, you don’t know what it’s been through, do you? I looked in her fridge and there were her sandwiches, all nicely wrapped up and waiting for her to fetch them. It brought the tears to my eyes, Laf.” And Sonovia began to cry, sobbing against Laf’s shoulder.
“She’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll be best for her this way,” though he was by no means sure of this, any more than he had been when they found Minty three hours before.
It was Sonovia who’d said where she might be found.
“Her auntie’s grave is in there.” It couldn’t be, but what was the point of showing the poor thing up as a liar now?
Daniel and his wife and child had come over by then, to be with Sonovia and comfort her. So Laf had gone out with the DI and a detective sergeant and two women officers to search for Minty. The afternoon had grown very warm, sultry and amber-colored, the air heavy and dusted with gold, as it sometimes is in September. They went into the cemetery by the western gate half an hour before it was due to close. The man selling flowers said he’d seen Minty hours ago, she’d come running, out of breath and shivering, but she’d bought more from him than ever before, and she was a regular customer. Chrysanthemums she’d had and Michaelmas daisies, pink and purple asters, and the most expensive things he had, white lilies and pink ones. He’d never have believed she could afford them…
