by Ruth Rendell
‘Why, Stephen! How nice.’
He put up his hand to his forehead, felt on his fingertips the drops of sweat. There was a fierce drumming in his head. To explain the gesture, his robot voice said, ‘Lord, isn’t it hot?’
‘Lovely,’ said Brenda Evans. ‘It just suits me. On our way back from Europe you and me must have a real cosy get-together. I’m dying to meet your wife. Linda, isn’t it? But Stephen, believe me, there just hasn’t been a minute what with Ma taking a notion to die like that. Though in one way it couldn’t have been more convenient, with me on the spot and not having to be fetched over.’ Whatever she had become, she was clearly still a Naulls. ‘They didn’t want to have the funeral till Monday but your uncle Stanley insisted. It has to be before my sister leaves for Paris, France, he said, so of course they gave way.’
The robot said, ‘Well, have a jolly good holiday.’
‘We deserve it. It’s twenty-two years since Fred or me set foot outside of Canada. Now, dear, tell me how’s your father?’
‘He’s fine. Fit as a fiddle. Still at the same old trade, you know.’
‘And you’re his right-hand man. I bet you’ve made yourself indispensable, eh?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Stephen began to laugh. He couldn’t stop once he had begun and he rocked about on the sofa, sobbing with laughter, his chest aching with it, water running out of his eyes. He could see she was staring at him but he couldn’t stop. At last he got up and ran out of the room, colliding with auntie Midge and the Bracebridges coming in. Both his hands and his handkerchief were over his face and they thought he was crying.
‘Stephen was always very good to his nanna,’ said Mrs Bracebridge.
Afterwards they understood he was too upset to stay for the lunch. Stephen had meant to go to work in the afternoon, and when he left the crematorium he drove back by way of the market square, he even slowed briefly as he passed Whalbys’, but he didn’t stop. While his mother was in the town he didn’t want to face Dadda in case he too had heard of her arrival. Dadda’s reaction was beyond his imaginings, he didn’t want to try to think about it.
He changed his clothes and went out on to the moor, keeping as best he could to the shady places, the Vale of Allen and the eastern side of the hill. The air was heavy and humid, there had been no rain for twenty-four days, but although the sky was still a pale, dazzling blue, it was hung all round the horizon with white clouds mottled with indigo.
It was far too early for Rip to come. Surely he would never come in all this heat and light. Why had he called him that? It had been quite involuntary, calling the man, the girls’ killer, the denizen of the cavern, by the name of his imaginary friend. Yet it was a good name, it had the right daredevil, ruthless, fearsome sound. Rip. When he had killed Ann Morgan it had been broad daylight, though, but the moor no doubt as deserted as it now was.
Stephen took shelter from the sun inside the George Crane Coe and lay down on the dry brittle grass. The peaty soil had turned to dust and ran away through his fingers like salt. A throb of thunder made itself felt, vibrating through his body like a tiny earthquake tremor. He lay on the ground inside the broken tower, waiting for Rip to come.
Someone had bought the grey parrot and the rabbits. Apart from themselves, there was no living thing left in the shop but the snake. They were closed, the blind on the door was down. Nick sat on the edge of the counter, Lyn on the drum of corn. He was looking at her intently and she wondered if he could possibly guess or tell. But no, he was a vet, not a doctor, and she a woman, not a dog. The thought made her smile a little.
‘I love you, Lyn,’ he said. ‘I shall come back for you. I’ll come every weekend until I can make you say you’ll leave him and go with me.’
So he would, she thought, for a week or two or three. But two hundred miles away and with new things around him, he wouldn’t go on coming. He would forget.
‘I’m not leaving until Monday. When you change your mind I’ll be waiting by the phone.’
‘I shan’t change my mind,’ she said. ‘Shall we go out for a last walk or a drink or something?’
‘It won’t be a last walk, we’re not going to talk in terms of last things. Lyn, we’ve only just begun to know each other.’
She got up. Though she was as thin as ever, her body felt heavy with the child. They walked out of the shop into the sultry heat. As they passed the glass cases in the window an unpleasant thing happened. The snake, which scarcely ever moved, which had always when Lyn had seen it lain stretched out or coiled, suddenly reared up the forepart of its body, hissed and lashed its head at the glass. Its tongue flickered and Lyn drew back against Nick’s arm with a shudder.
12
The heavy atmosphere, charged with the threat of the coming storm, was inside the house as well as outside. Lyn felt it as soon as she woke up. She looked at the white sky of low cloud and felt the weight of the air and remembered that the evening before she had parted for the last time from Nick. Stephen was still asleep beside her. He looked very young as he slept and there was a droop to the corners of his mouth.
It was already very hot, though the sun was only a white puddle of light in a mass of cloud. She got up and had a bath, made tea and took a cup to Stephen. He sat up and took it from her with a hearty ‘Thanks awfully, darling,’ but he was absent and preoccupied. He seemed miles away from her on some distant thought plane. She longed to throw herself on someone’s compassion, tell them everything and ask for comfort. She had never been able to confide in her mother, Joanne was in hospital, only Stephen remained. Stephen was drinking his tea and looking out on to the moor, the scorched and shrivelled grass, the dull pale sky.
She left him and went downstairs. Peach came up to her and rubbed his head and soft golden shoulder against her leg. She picked him up and walked about with him in her arms. In six months she would have the baby, at least she would have that. Loneliness would pass when she had the baby. It was just that it was impossible to imagine the week ahead, all the weeks, without Nick. Peach purred in her arms. She set him down on the window sill, stared at the still, pale, brooding sky.
How many times, she wondered, had Stephen come to her for comfort? She thought of the last time, when his grandmother had died. Would he comfort her in the same way? Somehow she didn’t think so, she had never asked him or tried. The idea of the plan she had made came back to her, that she had been going to present to Stephen in cold practical terms. She was afraid she would cry as soon as she began to speak. Yet she had to tell him. Suddenly she realized she had no idea at all how he would take it.
She heard him get up and move about upstairs. She put the kettle on and set things on the table for breakfast. A small wave of nausea came gently up through her chest when she looked at the butter, the cream curds on the milk. These days she never ate breakfast. The nausea passed and when Stephen came in she was sitting at the table, drinking tea.
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him then, but still she held back. She had realized something, that for weeks, months perhaps, Stephen hadn’t spoken to her at breakfast, hadn’t had a real conversation with her at any time. Unhappiness or anxiety was making her acutely sensitive. The voice in which he announced to her that he would go into his study now to write his piece for the Echo sounded to her like the noises made by a talking machine.
She washed the dishes. Sometimes she leant against the sink and closed her eyes. She dropped a cup and it broke into three pieces and the handle with a crash as loud to her as an explosion. If she went to the door she could just hear the irregular tapping of Stephen’s typewriter. She stood in the doorway listening to it, the few seconds of tapping, the pause, the tapping again. Rehearsing what she would say to him, she went upstairs and started to make the bed. The typewriter had been quiet for a long time but now it started again. She knew she would never say any of those cool decisive things. Her hands began to shake the way they did before she had known Nick.
All was silence from the s
tudy. She almost knocked on the door, but she told herself that was her husband in there, not to be a fool. He was sitting at the desk, looking at what he had just written, a handsome, dark, strongly built man. She thought she had never seen a better-looking man than Stephen. He turned on her those dark blue eyes that today had a curiously empty look.
‘What is it, darling?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
She shook her head, she was at breaking point. It would have been better to have sat down but she remained standing and she put out her hand to him. Again she said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Well?’
‘Stephen, I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.’ She was breathless and the words came out jerkily. ‘I’m going to have a baby in February. The man, the father, I did love him, I loved him very much, but I shan’t see him again. It’s over. You and I — we could never — you know what I mean, but the baby can be ours.’
He had flushed. When Stephen flushed his face became a dark brooding crimson.
‘You’d like a baby, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘You’d feel it was ours, and we do love — we are fond of each other, aren’t we, Stephen?’
He answered her in the machine voice, the robot voice. ‘You’re having me on.’
‘You know I wouldn’t. It’s all true. I’m sorry if it’s been a shock.’
‘A shock …’ he repeated. He got up and went to the window and turned his back on her. ‘You really said those things? I’m not dreaming?’
‘Stephen …’ She laid her hand on his arm, though so lightly that it just brushed the sleeve of his shirt.
He flung it off violently. He turned round. What she heard then was so frightening she could have screamed. She clenched her hands. He spoke in a tone she had never heard from him before. And another voice came to her out of the past, the voice of her brother, then six, shouting at their mother when she told her son and daughter that Joanne was about to be born. Stephen used the same words, precisely the same, and he uttered them with the child’s shrill rage.
‘If you bring a baby into this house I’ll kill it!’
She didn’t scream. She controlled herself, strangling her voice, ‘Stephen, listen to me …’
‘I’ll kill it, d’you hear me?’ His face was nearly black with blood and the high voice shook. ‘I’ll kill it, I’ll cut it into pieces, I’ll drown it, I’ll trample it to death.’
She gave a gasp of pain. He raised his right hand and caught her a ringing blow with all his force across the side of her face and head. Lyn staggered backwards and fell. She crashed on to the floor, knocking over in her fall the round polished table on which the bust of Tace stood.
She cried out at the shaft of pain in her back and side but her first thought was for the child. With a moan she pulled herself into the crouching position and clasped her arms round her body.
Stephen, kneeling on the floor, holding the head of Tace, examining the crack which had appeared in the papier-mâché cranium, made a low murmur of distress. Lyn shuddered. She got carefully to her feet, tensed to await the result of her fall, the feel of warm blood flowing down between her legs. But there was nothing, or there was nothing yet. Her heart pounded on a racing stumbling beat.
He was still on his knees, trying to bring the sides of the crack together, throwing back his head in despair when the brittle stuff parted farther and a piece split away. For a moment it seemed as if he had forgotten her. But now his eyes turned on her again and he cried in that same shrill and childish voice, ‘You broke my statue!’
She looked at him in horror, her hands up to her face. Then she ran out and shut herself in her bedroom, locking the door.
The first flash of lightning of that day showed itself in the house in Tace Way as no more than the flicker a match makes when it is lighted and immediately blown out. And the sound of it, the thunder, came many seconds afterwards, thudding distantly. The storm was still a long way off. But it discoloured the sky as a dye discolours soapsuds, an inky flow seeping into the clouds.
For a long while Stephen stayed in his room, trying to mend the head of Tace. He thought about nothing but how he had to mend the crack and insert the broken piece before the breakage became worse and perhaps beyond repair. Ideally, Dadda was the man to call on here. Stephen did the best he could with the two kinds of glue he kept in his room, a simple gum and cement for use on various kinds of non-wood surfaces. Some of the papier-mâché at the edges of the crack had already crumpled and fallen away into a pulpy dust. When he had glued the pieces together, though not at all to his satisfaction, he placed the bust on a sheet of paper on his desk to dry in a shaft of weak, sultry sunshine.
He went out of the house and up onto the moor. It was too hot and too dry to bother with walking boots and he kept on his sandals. The air felt full of electricity. It was as if nature awaited the lighting of a fuse in order to explode. The Foinmen stood up pale and gleaming, silver monoliths, against a sky that now had a dark clotted aspect. Its pallor had darkened to a purplish-grey.
With his head bowed, Stephen walked up the avenue and laid himself down on the Altar. He lay with his face, his mouth, against the dry scented turf. The thunder rolled and he heard it as if it were from boulders trundled under the earth.
There was a continuous thunder in his head also, and he thought it was because he had struck Lyn, yet done no more than strike her. Remembering the child that was inside her, the child which he saw as already six years old, strong and happy, waiting in there until the time came to escape and triumph, made him beat with his fists on the limestone slab.
Presently he sank down on his face again with the calmness of despair, his mouth pressed against the warm hairy skin of the moor. There was some comfort in that, some solace in the scent that came off the grass, the warm earth. He would have liked to lie there for ever in the warm closeness, never to go back. An urge to be always alone now overcame him, to be a recluse as Dadda was, cut off by a purposeful act of will from the torturers of the world. He longed to find the house empty when he got back, his life cleansed of her as it now was of Helena and Brenda. Never to see her again was a hope he felt physically hungry for.
The ponderous, electric-charged air seemed to grow steadily more weighty. The moor was holding its breath for the rain to come. And all around now the thunder made an irregular drumbeat on the perimeter of the moor. But Stephen continued to lie there, listening to that other, lighter but steadier, drumming inside the confines of his head. The moor was like a vast warm bed, the atmosphere a blanket. He was aware of the first drop of rain as a splash on his extended left hand.
But no downpour followed. A few more splashes fell, haphazard silver ampoules, and then it was dry again. Stephen laid his head on his folded arms and longed for sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come, though he lay there for a long time, hearing the double throbbing, his own and nature’s, until a crash of thunder, as loud and sharp as a series of rifle shots, burst over his head. Almost immediately it was followed by a tree of forked lightning bursting into branches against the black clouds behind Big Allen, then by another crash of thunder. It had grown dark while he lay there, as dark as twilight. He looked at his watch and saw that he had been out on the moor for three hours but it was still only 2.30 in the afternoon.
He was reluctant to go home, more reluctant than he had ever been. Suppose she were still there, to come and cling to him … Like those druids of old or whoever they were that had placed the Foinmen here, he found himself murmuring a prayer to the Giant that she would be gone. A splash of rain struck the great monolith and trickled down the stone. Even then he would have stayed, but for the lightning. Five years before in a storm on the moor a shepherd had been struck by lightning out in the broad expanse of Bow Dale.
The lightning was springing in flares now over the Vale of Allen. Stephen began to walk away with slow dragging steps towards the crinkle-crankle path. He was halfway dow
n Chesney Fell when the rain began in earnest. It was as if the thunder had finally shot open the sky and released a deluge. There was nothing he could do but walk on down, hurrying now, and let the million bright rods of rain soak through his shirt and his jeans and pour down his skin. His hair streamed forward over his face and he combed it back with dripping fingers. He saw the lightning strike a rearing boulder ahead of him, strike it with a vivid flash and a crack like a bullet, and the stone seemed to shiver under the onslaught. The storm was directly over his head, a battle raging in the sky.
Down on the road he felt safer. He knew better than to take shelter under a tree, it was too late anyway to take shelter now. There was no one about, the village was deserted. The rain came down in a steady crashing cascade and in Tace Way people had put lights on inside their houses as if it were evening. The gutters streamed with gurgling rivers. There were no lights on in his own house and he took heart and hurried this last lap, past his car, down the sideway to the back door.
It wasn’t quite closed. A corner of the doormat was turned up and caught between the frame and the door, preventing it from closing. His heart ran into a fast irregular beat. He kicked off his sandals and pushed open the door and went in, padding across the kitchen floor to the open doorway into the living room.
He stopped. In the false dusk he could see Lyn standing close up against the front window, her back to him, looking out at the darkness and the rain. Her fair hair, long and hanging loose and covering half her back, had a higher burnish in the weak light than in strong. It gleamed like spun metal. She hadn’t heard him come in. His body galvanized, tensing as a runner’s does at the starting line. He saw the window and the womanly shape against it and the woman’s hair, and then the shape blurred, its outlines becoming fuzzy, mirage-like. He shuddered once. A dazzlement half-blinded him and fused the past and the recent past and the present, and he took a running bound, barefooted across the room, seized Lyn by the throat, grasped her neck till his nails met round it, and dug in his fingers.
