by Ruth Rendell
One day he said to her, ‘I can understand now why you tried to kill yourself. I mean, I can understand that anyone might want to.’
‘I think we understand each other perfectly in every way,’ she said. ‘But don’t let’s talk about it. I’ll never attempt it again.’
‘And I’m not the suicidal type, am I?’
‘You?’ She wasn’t alarmed, she didn’t take him seriously, never thought of him at all as a person except in relation to herself. At once he reproached himself. Lydia? Lydia, who had given over her whole life to him, who put his every need and wish before her own? ‘You wouldn’t have any reason to,’ she said gaily. ‘You know you’re loved. Besides, I should rescue you in time, just like you rescued me.’
His company had expanded and they were planning to open an office in Melbourne. After he had denied hotly that his wife was an invalid, that there was ‘some little trouble’ with his wife, the chairman offered him the chance of going to Australia for three months to get the new branch on its feet. Again he didn’t hesitate. He accepted. The firm would, of course, pay for his trip. He was working out, as he entered his house, how much Lydia’s air fare to Melbourne, her board in an hotel, her expenses, would amount to. Suicidal thoughts retreated. He could do it, he could just do it. Three months away, he thought, in a new country, meeting new people, and at the end of it, praise for his work and maybe an increase in salary.
She came out into the hall and embraced him. Her embraces at parting and greeting (though these occasions were no longer frequent) were as passionate now as when they first got engaged. He anticipated a small difficulty in that she wouldn’t much want to leave her home, but that could be got over. She would go, as she had often said, anywhere with him.
He walked into their huge living room. It was as immaculate as ever, but something was different, something had undergone a great change. Their red carpet had been replaced by a new one of a delicate creamy velvety pile.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked, smiling. ‘I bought it and had it laid secretly as a surprise for you. Oh, darling, you don’t like it?’
‘I like it,’ he said, and then, ‘How much did it cost?’
This was a question he hardly ever asked, but now he had cause to. She named a sum, much about the figure her trip to Australia would have cost.
‘We said we were saving it to get something for the house,’ she said, putting her arm round him. ‘It’s not really an extravagance. It’ll last for ever. And what else have we got to spend the money on but our own home?’
He kissed her and said it didn’t matter. It wasn’t really an extravagance and it would last for ever, for ever . . . They dined off Copenhagen china and Georgian silver and Waterford glass. On the table flowers were arranged, wasting their sweetness on the desert air. He must go to Australia, but she couldn’t come with him. He was afraid to tell her, gripped by a craven fear.
For weeks he put off telling her, and treacherously the idea came to him – why tell her at all? He longed to go, he must go. Couldn’t he simply escape, phone from the aircraft’s first stop, somewhere in Europe, and say he had been sent without notice, urgently? He had tried to phone her before but he couldn’t get through. She wouldn’t attempt suicide, he was sure, if she knew he was too far away to save her. And she’d forgive him, she loved him. But there were too many practical difficulties in the way of that, clothes, for instance, luggage. He must have been losing his mind even to think of it. Do that to Lydia? He wouldn’t do that to his worst enemy, still less to his beloved wife.
As it turned out, he didn’t get the chance. She was his secretary from whom a man, however many he keeps from his wife, can have no secrets. The airline phoned with a query and she found out.
‘How long,’ she asked dully, ‘will you be gone?’
‘Three months.’
She paled. She fell back as if physically ill.
‘I’ll write every day. I’ll phone.’
‘Three months,’ she said.
‘I was scared stiff of telling you. I have to go. Darling, don’t you see I have to? It would cost hundreds and hundreds to take you with me, and we don’t have the money.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, of course not.’
She cried bitterly that night but on the following morning she didn’t refer to his departure. They worked together as efficiently and companionably as ever, but her face was paper-white. Work finished, she began to talk of the clothes he would need, the new suitcases to be bought. In a sad, monotonous voice, she said that she would do everything, he mustn’t worry his head at all about preparations.
‘And you won’t worry about me on the flight?’
There was something about the way she said she wouldn’t, shaking her head and smiling as if his question had been preposterous, unreal, that told him. The dead cannot worry. She intended to be dead. And he understood that he had been absurdly optimistic in reassuring himself she wouldn’t attempt suicide when he was far away.
The days went by. Only one more before he was due to leave. But he wouldn’t leave. He knew that. He had known it for more than a week, and he was afraid of telling his chairman he wouldn’t as he had been afraid of telling her he would. Again he dreamed of prisons. He awoke to see his life as alternating between fear and captivity, fear and imprisonment . . .
The escape route from both was available. It was on the afternoon of the last day that he decided to take it. He had told neither his wife nor his chairman that he wasn’t going to Australia, and everything was packed, his luggage arranged in the hall with a precision of which only Lydia was capable. She had told him she was going out to fetch his best lightweight suit from the cleaners, the suit he was to wear on the following day, and he had heard the front door close.
That had been half an hour before. While she was out he was to go upstairs, she had instructed him sadly and tenderly, and check that there was no vital item she had left unpacked. And at last he went, but for another purpose. A lethal, not a vital, item was what he wanted – the bottle of sleeping pills.
The bedroom door was closed. He opened it and saw her lying on their bed. She hadn’t gone out. For half an hour she had been lying there, the empty bottle of pills still clutched feebly in her hand. He felt her pulse, and a firm but unsteady flicker passed into his fingers. She was alive. Another quarter of an hour, say, and the ambulance would have her in hospital. He reached for the phone extension and put his finger to the slot to dial the emergency number. She’d be saved. Thank God, once again, he wasn’t too late.
He looked down at her peaceful, tranquil face. She looked no older than on that day when she had come to him to thank him for saving her life. Gradually, almost involuntarily, he withdrew his finger from the dial. A heavy sob almost choked him and he heard himself give a whimpering cry. He lifted her in his arms, kissing her passionately and speaking her name aloud over and over again.
Then he walked quickly out of that room and out of the house. A bus came. He got on it and bought a ticket to some distant, outlying suburb. There in a park he didn’t know and had never visited, he lay on the grass and fell into a deep sleep.
When he awoke it was nearly dark. He looked at his watch and saw that more than enough time had passed. Wiping his eyes, for he had apparently cried in his sleep, he got up and went home.
The Vinegar Mother
All this happened when I was eleven.
Mop Felton was at school with me and she was supposed to be my friend. I say ‘supposed to be’ because she was one of those close friends all little girls seem to have yet don’t very much like. I had never liked Mop. I knew it then just as I know it now, but she was my friend because she lived in the next street, was the same age, in the same form, and because my parents, though not particularly intimate with the Feltons, would have it so.
Mop was a nervous, strained, dramatic creature, in some ways old for her age and in others very young. Hindsight tells me that she had no self-confidence but much self-esteem. She wa
s an only child who flew into noisy rages or silent huffs when teased. She was tall and very skinny and dark, and it wasn’t her hair, thin and lank, which accounted for her nickname. Her proper name was Alicia. I don’t know why we called her Mop, and if now I see in it some obscure allusion to mopping and mowing (a Shakespearean description which might have been associated with her) or in the monosyllable the hint of a witch’s familiar (again, not inept) I am attributing to us an intellectual sophistication which we didn’t possess.
We were gluttons for nicknames. Perhaps all schoolgirls are. But there was neither subtlety nor finesse in our selection. Margaret myself, I was dubbed Margarine. Rhoda Joseph, owing to some gagging and embarrassment during a public recitation of Wordsworth, was for ever after Lucy; Elizabeth Goodwin Goat because this epithet had once been applied to her by higher authority on the hockey field. Our nicknames were not exclusive, being readily interchangeable with our true Christian names at will. We never used them in the presence of parent or teacher and they, if they had known of them, would not have deigned use them to us. It was, therefore, all the more astonishing to hear them from the lips of Mr Felton, the oldest and richest of any of our fathers.
Coming home from work into a room where Mop and I were: ‘How’s my old Mopsy, then?’ he would say, and to me, ‘Well, it’s jolly old Margarine!’
I used to giggle, as I always did when confronted by something mildly embarrassing that I didn’t understand. I was an observant child but not sensitive. Children, in any case, are little given to empathy. I can’t recall that I ever pitied Mop for having a father who, though over fifty, pretended too often to be her contemporary. But I found it satisfactory that my own father, at her entry, would look up vaguely from his book and mutter, ‘Hallo – er, Alicia, isn’t it?’
The Feltons were on a slightly higher social plane than we, a fact I did know and accepted without question and without resentment. Their house was bigger, each parent possessed a car, they ate dinner in the evenings. Mr Felton used to give Mop half a glass of sherry to drink.
‘I don’t want you growing up ignorant of wine,’ he would say.
And if I were present I would get the sherry too. I suppose it was Manzanilla, for it was very dry and pale yellow, the colour of the stone in a ring Mrs Felton wore and which entirely hid her wedding ring.
They had a cottage in the country where they went at the weekends and sometimes for the summer holidays. Once they took me there for a day. And the summer after my eleventh birthday, Mr Felton said:
‘Why don’t you take old Margarine with you for the holidays?’
It seems strange now that I should have wanted to go. I had a very happy childhood, a calm, unthinking, unchanging relationship with my parents and my brothers. I liked Rhoda and Elizabeth far more than I liked Mop, whose rages and fantasies and sulks annoyed me, and I disliked Mrs Felton more than any grown-up I knew. Yet I did want to go very much. The truth was that even then I had begun to develop my passion for houses, the passion that has led me to become a designer of them, and one day in that cottage had been enough to make me love it. All my life had been spent in a semi-detached villa, circa 1935, in a London suburb. The Feltons’ cottage, which had the pretentious (not to me, then) name of Sanctuary, was four hundred years old, thatched, half-timbered, of wattle and daub construction, a calendar-maker’s dream, a chocolate box artist’s ideal. I wanted to sleep within those ancient walls, tread upon floors that had been there before the Armada came, press my face against glass panes that had reflected a ruff or a Puritan’s starched collar.
My mother put up a little opposition. She liked me to know Mop, she also perhaps liked me to be associated with the Feltons’ social cachet, but I had noticed before that she didn’t much like me to be in the care of Mrs Felton.
‘And Mr Felton will only be there at the weekends,’ she said.
‘If Margaret doesn’t like it,’ said my father, ‘she can write home and get us to send her a telegram saying you’ve broken your leg.’
‘Thanks very much,’ said my mother. ‘I wish you wouldn’t teach the children habits of deception.’
But in the end she agreed. If I were unhappy, I was to phone from the call-box in the village and then they would write and say my grandmother wanted me to go and stay with her. Which, apparently, was not teaching me habits of deception.
In the event, I wasn’t at all unhappy, and it was to be a while before I was even disquieted. There was plenty to do. It was fruit-growing country, and Mop and I picked fruit for Mr Gould, the farmer. We got paid for this, which Mrs Felton seemed to think infra dig. She didn’t associate with the farmers or the agricultural workers. Her greatest friend was a certain Lady Elsworthy, an old woman whose title (I later learned she was the widow of a Civil Service knight) placed her in my estimation in the forefront of the aristocracy. I was stricken dumb whenever she and her son were at Sanctuary and much preferred the company of our nearest neighbour, a Mrs Potter, who was perhaps gratified to meet a juvenile enthusiast of architecture. Anyway, she secured for me the entrée to the Hall, a William and Mary mansion, through whose vast chambers I walked hand in hand with her, awed and wondering and very well content.
Sanctuary had a small parlour, a large dining-living room, a kitchen and a bathroom on the ground floor and two bedrooms upstairs. The ceilings were low and sloping and so excessively beamed, some of the beams being carved, that were I to see it now I would probably think it vulgar, though knowing it authentic. I am sure that nowadays I would think the Feltons’ furniture vulgar, for their wealth, such as it was, didn’t run to the purchasing of true antiques. Instead, they had those piecrust tables and rent tables and little escritoires which, cunningly chipped and scratched in the right places, inlaid with convincingly scuffed and dimly gilded leather, maroon, olive or amber, had been manufactured at a factory in Romford.
I knew this because Mr Felton, down for the weekend, would announce it to whomsoever might be present.
‘And how old do you suppose that is, Lady Elsworthy?’ he would say, fingering one of those deceitful little tables as he placed on it her glass of citrine-coloured sherry. ‘A hundred and fifty years? Two hundred?’
Of course she didn’t know or was too well-bred to say. ‘One year’s your answer! Factory-made last year and I defy anyone but an expert to tell the difference.’
Then Mop would have her half-glass of sherry and I mine while the adults watched us for the signs of intoxication they seemed to find so amusing in the young and so disgraceful in the old. And then dinner with red or white wine, but none for us this time. They always had wine, even when, as was often the case, the meal was only sandwiches or bits of cold stuff on toast. Mr Felton used to bring it down with him on Saturdays, a dozen bottles sometimes in a cardboard case. I wonder if it was good French wine or sour cheap stuff from Algeria that my father called plonk. Whatever Mr Felton’s indulgence with the sherry had taught me, it was not to lose my ignorance of wine.
But wine plays a part in this story, an important part. For as she sipped the dark red stuff in her glass, blood-black with – or am I imagining this? – a blacker scaling of lees in its depths, Lady Elsworthy said:
‘Even if you’re only a moderate wine-drinker, my dear, you ought, you really ought, to have a vinegar mother.’
On this occasion I wasn’t the only person present to giggle. There were cries of ‘A what?’ and some laughter, and then Lady Elsworthy began an explanation of what a vinegar mother was, a culture of acetobacter that would convert wine into vinegar. Her son, whom the adults called Peter, supplied the technical details and the Potters asked questions and from time to time someone would say, ‘A vinegar mother! What a name!’ I wasn’t much interested and I wandered off into the garden where, after a few minutes, Mop joined me. She was, as usual, carrying a book but instead of sitting down, opening the book and excluding me, which was her custom, she stood staring into the distance of the Stour Valley and the Weeping Hills – I think she leant a
gainst a tree – and her face had on it that protuberant-featured expression which heralded one of her rages. I asked her what was the matter.
‘I’ve been sick.’
I knew she hadn’t been, but I asked her why.
‘That horrible old woman and that horrible thing she was talking about, like a bit of liver in a bottle, she said.’ Her mouth trembled. ‘Why does she call it a vinegar mother?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps because mothers make children and it makes vinegar.’
That only seemed to make her angrier and she kicked at the tree.
‘Shall we go down to the pond or are you going to read?’ I said.
But Mop didn’t answer me so I went down to the pond alone and watched the bats that flitted against a pale green sky. Mop had gone up to our bedroom. She was in bed reading when I got back. No reader myself, I remember the books she liked and remember too that my mother thought she ought not to be allowed to read them. That night it was Lefanu’s Uncle Silas which engrossed her. She had just finished Dr James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. I don’t believe, at that time, I saw any connection between her literary tastes and her reaction to the vinegar mother, nor did I attribute this latter to anything lacking in her relationship with her own mother. I couldn’t have done so, I was much too young. I hadn’t, anyway, been affected by the conversation at supper and I went to bed with no uneasy forebodings about what was to come.
In the morning when Mop and I came back from church – we were sent there, I now think, from a desire on the part of Mr and Mrs Felton to impress the neighbours rather than out of vicarious piety – we found the Elsworthys once more at Sanctuary. Lady Elsworthy and her son and Mrs Felton were all peering into a round glass vessel with a stoppered mouth in which was some brown liquid with a curd floating on it. This curd did look quite a lot like a slice of liver.