by Ruth Rendell
But instead of leaving the chamber, he sat down on the mattress and gave himself up to enjoyment of the silence and the peace. He ate a biscuit, just one. He switched off the torch and lit his own candle, standing it in the saucer. It was a wonderfully relaxed and comfortable place to be in, and in spite of the possibility of the man’s arriving at any time, a place which felt peculiarly safe and secure. Reclining there with his eyes closed, he asked himself how long it had been since he had felt as safe and, yes, as happy as this. More than twenty years. And when he had gone back along the winze and climbed the shaft he was surprised to find how long he had been in the mine, for the sun had set and dusk had come, though the sky was still a clear flame-pink, streaked at the horizon with long bars of black cirrus.
Goughdale had a sinister appearance at this hour, more so than the Foinmen about which there was always an air of sanctity. The heaps of stones, the skeleton of the windlass, the coe, black silhouettes in the silvery-grey dale, all seemed apt for concealing shadows and flitting forms. And there was such a stillness, an immobility as profound as the silence in the mine. Nothing moved. Even the sheep had been taken away to pasture elsewhere.
There would be no moon tonight, however clear the sky, no more than a sliver of crescent. Stephen thought he had better go home by the road and he set off to walk across the dale towards the east. The sky was deepening to purple and filling with stars. It was a nuisance Lyn being at home, waiting for him, when if he had been on his own he could have camped out here, night after night until the meeting point came. He was growing out of Lyn, growing beyond her and the domestic ties that kept him in a job and in a valley. He drew in deep breaths of the summer night air. Suppose he were to look back now and see a figure on the hillside, a figure that showed up in the twilight only because of the gleam of its white aran?
He did look back. Nothing stirred on the slope of Big Allen or in the dale. And when he had come among the gorse bushes in the vale and turned round for the last time it had grown too dark to see anything at all.
11
The headlights lit up the whole bedroom and made twin rivers of light run down the walls. For a while a diesel engine throbbed, then died away, though the lights remained. Lyn, who had been lying awake, thought at once of the police. She looked at her watch and saw it was a little after five, the dawn coming. The two murders and the fact that Stephen had been questioned made her think it might be the police.
She got up and went to the window. An ambulance was parked outside the Simpsons’ house and as she watched her sister came out. She wasn’t carried out, she walked, holding on to Kevin’s arm, laughing with the driver. Her labour must have begun, Lyn thought, and she laid her hands gently over her own flat stomach in the thin nightdress.
Stephen slept. Lyn watched the ambulance turn round in the horseshoe at the top of Tace Way, then move off towards the village and Hilderbridge. The sun was coming up now, spreading a flush across the milky blue sky, promising another day of heat. She lay down for another hour beside Stephen, thinking about Joanne, thinking about herself. In February, sometime about the middle of February, and perhaps also at dawn, it would be she the ambulance came for, she who walked out to it on her husband’s arm. That part she couldn’t imagine. When she saw herself holding a man’s arm it was always Nick’s arm she held. After a while she got up, went downstairs to make tea and was immediately very sick.
Stephen took the news about Joanne impassively.
‘Talking of hospitals, darling, I think I’ll just pop in and see my grandmother after work. I’ve got the poor old dear on my conscience.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Lyn asked him.
He never did want her to, she didn’t know why. ‘Lord, no, what a drag for you and in all this heat. She wouldn’t know you anyway, darling. She mixes us all up.’
‘Just as you like.’
He wanted her to be there when he wanted her, not otherwise. He was capable of leaving her for hours on end, days, but she must be there waiting when he got back. She had to be his rock, his haven, his mother. These things she had never completely understood about Stephen until she had known Nick.
Perhaps it would change when they had a child in the house. Stephen ought to be a good father, to be good with a child, he was in many ways so much a child himself still. It was as if some part of him, when he was a boy, had stopped growing. But which part? Not his strong tall body. Not his active brain. Unless it was that curious undefined object that was mentioned in the Bible or you heard old people talk about, the soul.
The dark night had been closing in on Dadda, slowly but inexorably, for some days now. He had come to Tace Way for lunch on Sunday but he had brought no gifts, had eaten little, had folded himself into that chair in the corner, and so deep was his wretchedness that he hadn’t even narrowed his eyes or shaken his head at the sight of Peach sitting with overflowing tail and hind paws on the chestnut leaf table. While the Newmans were there he hadn’t spoken and he had left early.
Depression rarely prevented him from working. Work, if not a cure, if not even an alleviation, was still all he could do, the only possible occupation for him, while the blackest period of the black time lasted. But now he had become almost inactive. An oval walnut table was before him and the wadded lint dipped into the french polish, but his fingers could scarcely form the figures of eight on the prepared surface. Stephen came upon him seated immobile, the lint in his hand, his sombre eyes staring sightlessly, a Samson idle at the mill.
For days he would be like that. Then, suddenly, a fever for work, for making up for lost time, would over-take him, and with it an explosive temper to be vented on Stephen. Afterwards, presents, lavishly bestowed, to take away his guilt. At the moment he was too far gone, Stephen thought, to reproach him for all the days he had taken off lately. He knew better than to speak to him and went on upstairs to his upholstering which had rather mounted up during the past weeks.
It was cool in Whalbys’ works, almost windowless and in a corner of the square where the sun scarcely penetrated. Dadda took himself off next door in the middle of the afternoon, and Stephen, who hadn’t stopped for lunch, thought he might as well go too. There was visiting at Hilderbridge General from three till five. After that he would go up on the moor and wait in the dale until dark. He would conceal himself as he had been doing for several evenings past in the George Crane Goe and wait, even if he had to wait until midnight, for the denizen of the chamber to appear. The moon was now beyond it first quarter and would offer partial light.
Half Market Square was in shadow, half in sunlight. Passing from the shadow into the light was a daunting experience, so hot and powerful was the sun. It was a screen of hot metal, dropped with a clang, that must be wrenched aside, it was a scorching breath on the skin. Stephen couldn’t remember such hot weather as this, such another August, unless it was when he was a child that first summer after his mother went and Rip came. There had been a heatwave then and another five years later when he was searching for Apsley Sough with Peter Naulls, but neither could have measured up to this one.
His car had been parked in the sun and the steering wheel was too hot to touch. He had to hold it with his handkerchief. He opened all the windows, looked at the very pale blue, white-hot sky. The drought had persisted for twenty days now and there were notices up telling people not to use hoses. Stephen drove along the High Street into North River Street and turned into the hospital car park.
It wasn’t until he was climbing the stairs which led to the geriatric wards that he remembered the jellies. He had forgotten to buy them and the nearest shops were half a mile away. It couldn’t be helped. There was just a chance one of her other visitors had brought her jellies since last he had, though it seemed unlikely, they never did.
The old women were all up. With lolling heads, with gnarled hands clutching shawls and blankets to them — for the heat was nothing to them, their skins and veins impenetrable — they were bundled into chairs so that
movement might be maintained and bed sores prevented. All the windows were wide open, the flowered curtains drawn back, and the heat shimmered in the long room as if the hospital stood on the brink of an open furnace.
Stephen saw from the doorway that his grandmother already had two visitors. His aunt Joan and presumably some friend of his aunt Joan’s. He wasn’t entirely sorry to see them, for alone he never knew what to say, and there was also the matter of the forgotten jellies.
As soon as she saw him Mrs Pettitt jumped to her feet. She and her companion and Helena Naulls were all sitting in chairs on this side of Helena’s bed but Mrs Pettitt alone was facing him. She jumped up and there came over her face a look of shock. It was rather a violent reaction to his unexpected arrival at four in the afternoon, but Stephen wasn’t much interested in Naulls behaviour, or in any human behaviour, come to that. He said, ‘Hello, Auntie Joan,’ and went up to kiss his grandmother.
She wasn’t one of those whose heads were lolling. There was far more life in her than when he had last seen her. She was leaning forward, both hands clasping the arms of the chair, and in her eyes, as he withdrew his face, he saw a gleam of malice so sharp that it made him step backwards. It was a gleam as cruel as any he had seen there in the old days at Chesney Lodge, and it was as if the senility which had brought to her a softening and a sweetening of the personality had in a flash fallen away.
Before kissing her he had made some sort of apology for forgetting her jellies and now he thought that what he saw in that flat white face and small blue eyes was only simple anger. But from behind him there came a whispered, almost a whimpered, ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ from his aunt Joan, and he turned round. The other woman, a plump woman in her late fifties with hair dyed cornfield gold, was giggling the way schoolgirls do, holding a handkerchief up to her mouth.
Until then Mrs Naulls had remained silent, though eager in her silence, very nearly trembling as she clung to the chair and slipped forward on to the extreme edge of it. She seemed to be trying to speak, to be struggling to get the words out, but now she succeeded and uttered in a high cracked voice, brittle with malevolence, a typical Naulls phrase. For years, all his life, Stephen had known Naullses to telephone — if they had telephones — and ask you if you knew who this was, or to show you letters and ask you to guess who they were from. Now his grandmother said to him, ‘I don’t suppose you know who that is.’
The fat woman stopped laughing and covered her mouth entirely with her hand. The explaining was left to Mrs Pettitt who plunged into the middle of things.
‘You were the last person we expected to walk in at this hour, Stephen. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I mean, I didn’t even know they were coming till I got this cable, and then here she was, and Fred and Barbara. Well, of course she wanted to come in and see your nan first thing what with them all going off on this five-countries tour Saturday which is why they’re here at all. I mean, I don’t want you to think you’d have been kept in the dark, it’s just that everything’s been like such a rush …’
He didn’t need her added, ‘… hasn’t it, Brenda?’ to know who it was. She was as fat as Helena had been before the processes of age had pared her down and shrivelled her. Now that she had moved her hand away he saw her face exactly like Helena’s, only a painted Helena, shaded in various beiges and touched up with scarlet and black. She wore a tight shiny jacket and skirt in some fussy, damask, transatlantic material with a frilly braid trimming, and in the armpits were spreading dark stains of sweat.
He wanted to cry, ‘I don’t believe it!’ but a robot voice spoke for him: ‘Good Lord! Good Lord!’
There was a silence that seemed endlessly to endure. The curtains swayed in the faint hot breeze. Sweat broke out in little beads on Stephen’s forehead and upper lip and prickled his skin. Brenda Evans broke the silence.
‘Long time no see.’
From the sigh she gave it seemed Joan Pettitt had been holding her breath. ‘Now, then, would you have known him, Brenda?’
‘He’s grown a bit.’
Helena uttered a thin shriek of laughter. Having pulled herself as far forward on her chair as she could without sending it skittering from under her, she reared herself up on to her feet and stood there, swaying, chuckling softly. It was perhaps the first time she had stood unaided for a year. She looked radiantly happy, as if she had waited all her life for this, as if she had seen Naples and now had nothing left to see. She swayed, giggling, turning her head to look from one to the other of them. And then Stephen saw what he knew he would remember all his own life, the fearsome spectacle of someone suffering an apoplectic stroke.
Her laughter ceased on a retching sound and her face contorted in a spasm. It was as if she had been struck from behind with a massive but invisible hammer. Her hands flew up and she pitched forward on to the floor with a slithering crash.
Mrs Pettitt jumped up and screamed. Brenda Evans shouted, ‘Oh, my! Oh, my!’ and put her hand up over her mouth. A patient shouted and a nurse came running.
Stephen walked out of the ward like a man in a dream.
That evening, within an hour of each other, Chantal Tanya Simpson was born and Helena Beatrice Naulls died. Lyn was invited across the road to drink champagne with Kevin and her parents, but she didn’t go. She had come home to find Stephen in a state of shock, scarcely able to speak, although Helena was still alive then. Joan Pettitt phoned with the news that she had died and Lyn broke it to him gently. It seemed neither to relieve him nor make him worse.
He sat beside her, holding her hand so tightly that the bones ached. She had never felt his need of her so strongly. It was as if he were drawing a current out of her, recharging himself from some source of comfort in herself. For a long while he didn’t speak. Then he began talking about his grandmother, about how hard her life had been and how terrible the latter part of it, how awful her death. Lyn had never heard him talk about anyone like that before. She hadn’t thought he cared much for old Mrs Naulls but had visited her out of duty and in the hope of finding out more about her relationship with his grandfather. This outpouring of love and pity was strange from Stephen. And uneasily Lyn began to feel that he wasn’t really talking about his grandmother at all, but that it was someone else he meant when he talked about suffering and cruelty and neglect.
He knelt down on the floor and laid his head in her lap, clasping her body in his arms. He had hardly ever before touched her so closely and intimately. Lyn sighed. She put her hand on his head and stroked his hair. Nowadays, her body and perhaps her mind too in a constant process of change, she felt less able to be Stephen’s support. It ought to have been a mutual thing, for she needed his support as well. The temptation to tell him about the baby and her idea of their future was suddenly very strong, the words were waiting on her breath. She suppressed them. Stephen had gone very white and his eyes were closed. She seemed to see Nick’s face, eager and smiling, the antithesis of this life in death, and as she bent over Stephen, murmuring softly to him, the tears came into her eyes and ran down her face.
Great ceremonial attended Naulls funerals and expense was never spared. Naullses were so intent on being buried or burnt with dignity and display that some of them saved up all their lives for their own funerals. Arthur Naulls, from the age of fourteen when he became gardener’s boy at Chesney Hall, had put aside a penny a week into some insurance scheme to this end, though when the time came, as his son Stanley had remarked with a sneer, it hadn’t amounted to nearly enough.
For his widow there were to be four black Daimlers to follow the hearse. The clans would gather first at uncle Leonard’s and partake later of a doleful banquet at the Bracebridges’, and in between there would be the old Prayer Book funeral service at Holy Trinity as well as a service in the chapel at Byss Crematorium. Mother couldn’t have died at a better time of the year for flowers, said Mrs Pettitt in classic Naulls style.
Leonard Naulls, the only really prosperous one, lived in west Hilderbri
dge in a district called Callowford. All the other Naullses lived round about, but Leonard’s house was the biggest and in the smartest street. Stephen got there early. He brought a sheaf of red dahlias and carnations with him and put them with the other flowers in the hall. His aunt Midge kissed him and told him how good it was of him to come, he had always been good to his grandma, and then she went back upstairs to finish adjusting her black crimplene turban. He had already seen his uncle Leonard walking slowly round the garden with his sister Joan and his brother-in-law Sidney Pettitt, showing them the flowerbeds. Showing visitors the garden, even though they were one’s own siblings, even though they could see it daily from their own windows, was a Naulls habit, indulged in on solemn occasions. Stephen noticed that the photograph of his cousin Peter, which last time he had been in this house had stood on the hall table, was gone. He pushed open the door into the living room.
This room had french windows overlooking the lawn and the meagre herbaceous borders. Standing in front of them, her back to Stephen, looking out at the gloomy strolling figures, was Brenda Evans. She was alone. Her round plump form was swathed in clinging pleated black and she had high-heeled black patent leather shoes on, stockings with black seams, one of which was very crooked. She hadn’t yet put her hat on. A shiny small black straw, probably bought specially for the occasion, lay on the arm of the settee beside her. Her yellow hair was newly done, yellow, incurved, glossy, like a chrysanthemum.
She hadn’t heard him come in. Stephen stood in the doorway, looking at a woman’s back, a woman standing at a window. A great many things seemed to happen to him as he stood there. Impressions passed in clear bright pictures across the screen of his mind, a pile of coins at eye level on a table, his hands round an old woman’s stringy throat, thin blue air mail letters dropping into the post box on Chesney Green, letters that would never be answered.
A hot dazzling blur fell over Stephen’s sight, he was blinded to everything except that curvy shape, its outlines fuzzy now, the window behind it, and because of the bright light, the green of the lawn transposed to its opposite in the spectrum, blood-red. His hands went up, the fingers bent as if to claw. He was poised for the leap at her. She heard his breath drawn in and she turned round.
