by Ruth Rendell
But as they were passing the church Rosamund suddenly turned to face him and asked him if he knew Aunt Julie now had a lady living with her to look after her. A companion, this person was called, said Rosamund. James hadn’t known – he had probably been absorbed in his own thoughts when it was discussed – and he was somewhat chagrined.
‘So what?’
‘So nothing. Only I expect she’ll open the door to us. You didn’t know, did you? It isn’t true you know things I don’t. I often know things you don’t, I often do.’
James did not deign to reply.
‘She said that if ever she got so she had to have someone living with her, she’d get Mirabel to come. And Mirabel wanted to, she actually liked the idea of living in the country. But Aunt Julie didn’t ask her, she got this lady instead, and I heard Mummy say Aunt Julie doesn’t want Mirabel in the house any more. I don’t know why. Mummy said maybe Mirabel won’t get Aunt Julie’s money now.’
James whistled a few bars from the overture to the Barber of Seville. ‘I know why.’
‘Bet you don’t.’
‘OK, so I don’t.’
‘Why, then?’
‘You’re not old enough to understand. And, incidentally, you may not know it but that thing you’ve got the raspberries in is a wine basket.’
The front door of Sindon Lodge was opened to them by a fat woman in a cotton dress with a wrap-around overall on top of it. She seemed to know who they were and said she was Mrs Crowley but they could call her Auntie Elsie if they liked. James and Rosamund were in silent agreement that they did not like. They went down the long passage where it was rather cold even on the hottest day.
Aunt Julie was in the room with the french windows, sitting in a chair looking into the garden, the grey cat Palmerston on her lap. Her hair was exactly the same colour as Palmerston’s fur and nearly as fluffy. She was a little wizened woman, very old, who always dressed in jumpers and trousers which, James thought privately, made her look a bit like a monkey. Arthritis twisted and half-crippled her, slowly growing worse, which was probably why she had engaged Mrs Crowley.
Having asked Rosamund why she had put the raspberries in a wine basket – she must be sure to take it straight back to Mummy – Aunt Julie turned her attention to James, demanding of him what he had been collecting lately, how were the hawk moth caterpillars and what sort of a school report had he had at the end of the summer term? A further ten minutes of this made James, though not unusually tender-hearted towards his sister, actually feel sorry for Rosamund, so he brought himself to tell Aunt Julie that she had passed her piano exam with distinction and, if he might be excused, he would like to go out and look at the mulberry tree.
The garden had a neglected look and in the orchard tiny apples, fallen during the ‘June drop’, lay rotting in the long grass. There were no fish in the pond and had not been for years. The mulberry tree was loaded with sticky-looking squashy red fruit, but James supposed that silkworms fed only on the leaves. Would he be allowed to help himself to mulberry leaves? Deciding that he had a lot to learn about the rearing of silkworms, he walked slowly round the tree, remembering now that it was Mirabel who had first identified the tree for him and had said how wonderful she thought it would be to make one’s own silk.
It seemed to him rather dreadful that just because Mirabel had had a baby she might be deprived of all this. For ‘all this’, the house, the gardens, the vaguely huge sum of money which Uncle Walter had made out of building houses and had left to his widow, was surely essential to poor Mirabel who made very little as a free-lance designer and must have counted on it.
Had he been alone, he might have raised the subject with Aunt Julie who would take almost anything from him even though she called him an enfant terrible. She sometimes said he could twist her round his little finger, which augured well for getting the mulberry leaves. But he wasn’t going to talk about Mirabel in front of Rosamund. Instead, he mentioned it tentatively to his mother immediately Rosamund, protesting, had been sent to bed.
‘Well, darling, Mirabel did go and have a baby without being married. And when Aunt Julie was young that was a terrible thing to do. We can’t imagine, things have changed so much. But Aunt Julie has very strict ideas and she must think of Mirabel as a bad woman.’
‘I see,’ said James, who didn’t quite. ‘And when she dies Mirabel won’t be in her will, is that right?’
‘I don’t think we ought to talk about things like that.’
‘Certainly we shouldn’t,’ said James’s father.
‘No, but I want to know. You’re always saying people shouldn’t keep things secret from children. Has Aunt Julie made a new will, cutting Mirabel out?’
‘She hasn’t made a will at all, that’s the trouble. According to the law, a great niece doesn’t automatically inherit if a person dies intestate – er, that is, dies . . .’
‘I know what intestate means,’ said James.
‘So I suppose Mirabel thought she could get her to make a will. It doesn’t sound very nice put like that but, really, why shouldn’t poor Mirabel have it? If she doesn’t, I don’t believe there’s anyone else near enough and it will just go to the state.’
‘Shall we change the subject now?’ said James’s father.
‘Yes, all right,’ said James. ‘Will you be going to the Women’s Institute the same as usual on Wednesday?’
‘Of course I will, darling. Why on earth do you ask?’
‘I just wondered,’ said James.
James’s father was on holiday while the university was down and on the following day he went out into the fruit garden with a basket and his weeder and uprooted the thornapple plant that was growing between the gooseberry bushes. James, sitting in his bedroom, reading The Natural History of Selborne, watched him from the window. His father put the thornapple on the compost heap and went hunting for its fellows, all of which he found in the space of five minutes. James sighed but took this destruction philosophically. He had enough in the brown paper bag for his needs.
As it happened, he had the house to himself for the making of his newest brew. His father announced at lunch that he would be taking the car into Bury St Edmunds that afternoon and both children could come with him if they wanted to. Rosamund did. Bury, though not London, was at any rate a sizeable town with plenty of what she liked, shops and restaurants and cinemas and crowds. Once alone, James chose an enamel saucepan of the kind which looked as if all traces of datura could easily be removed from it afterwards, put into it about a pint of water and set this to boil. Meanwhile, he cut up the green spiny fruits to reveal the black seeds they contained. When the water boiled he dropped in the fruit pieces and the seeds and leaves and flowers and kept it all simmering for half an hour, occasionally stirring the mixture with a skewer. Very much as he had expected, the bright green colour hadn’t been maintained, but the solid matter and the liquid had all turned a dark khaki brown. James didn’t dare use a sieve to strain it in case he couldn’t get it clean again, so he pressed all the liquor out with his hands until nothing remained but some soggy pulp.
This he got rid of down the waste disposal unit. He poured the liquid, reduced now to not much more than half a pint, into the medicine bottle he had ready for it, screwed on the cap and labelled it: datura stramonium. The pan he scoured thoroughly but a few days later, when he saw that his mother had used it for boiling the peas they were about to eat with their fish for supper, he half-expected the whole family to have griping pains and even tetanic convulsions. But nothing happened and no one suffered any ill effects.
By the time the new school term started James had produced a substance he hoped might be muscarine from boiling up the fly agaric fungus and some rather doubtful cyanide from apricot kernels. There were now ten bottles of poison on the top shelf of his bookcase. But no one was in the least danger from them, and even when the Fyfield household was increased by two members there was no need for James to keep his bedroom door locked, for Mirabel�
��s little boy was only six months old and naturally as yet unable to walk.
Mirabel’s arrival had been entirely impulsive. A ridiculous way to behave, James’s father said. The lease of her flat in Kensington was running out and instead of taking steps to find herself somewhere else to live, she had waited until the lease was within a week of expiry and had turned up in Great Sindon to throw herself on the mercy of Aunt Julie. She came by taxi from Ipswich station, lugging a suitcase and carrying the infant Oliver.
Mrs Crowley had opened the door to her and Mirabel had never got as far as seeing Aunt Julie. A message was brought back to say she was not welcome at Sindon Lodge as her aunt thought she had made clear enough by telephone and letter. Mirabel, who had believed that Aunt Julie would soften at the sight of her, had a choice between going back to London, finding a hotel in Ipswich or taking refuge with the Fyfields. She told the taxi to take her to Ewes Hall Farm.
‘How could I turn her away?’ James heard his mother say. Mirabel was upstairs putting Oliver to bed. ‘There she was on the doorstep with that great heavy case and the baby screaming his head off, poor mite. And she’s such a little scrap of a thing.’
James’s father had been gloomy ever since he got home. ‘Mirabel is exactly the sort of person who would come for the weekend and stay ten years.’
‘No one would stay here for ten years if they could live in London,’ said Rosamund.
In the event, Mirabel didn’t stay ten years, though she was still there after ten weeks. And on almost every day of those ten weeks she tried in vain to get her foot in the door of Sindon Lodge. Whoever happened to be in the living room of Ewes Hall Farm in the evening – and in the depths of winter that was usually everyone – was daily regaled with Mirabel’s grievances against life and with denunciations of the people who had injured her, notably Oliver’s father and Aunt Julie. James’s mother sometimes said that it was sad for Oliver having to grow up without a father, but since Mirabel never mentioned him without saying how selfish he was, the most immature, heartless, mean, lazy and cruel man in London, James thought Oliver would be better off without him. As for Aunt Julie, she must be senile, Mirabel said, she must have lost her wits.
‘Can you imagine anyone taking such an attitude, Elizabeth, in this day and age? She literally will not have me in the house because I’ve got Oliver and I wasn’t married to Francis. Thank God I wasn’t, that’s all I can say. But wouldn’t you think that sort of thing went out with the dark ages?’
‘She’ll come round in time,’ said James’s mother.
‘Yes, but how much time? I mean, she hasn’t got that much, has she? And here am I taking shameful advantage of your hospitality. You don’t know how guilty it makes me, only I literally have nowhere else to go. And I simply cannot afford to take another flat like the last, frankly, I couldn’t raise the cash. I haven’t been getting the contracts like I used to before Oliver was born and of course I’ve never had a penny from that unspeakable, selfish, pig of a man.’
James’s mother and father would become very bored with all this but they could hardly walk out of the room. James and Rosamund could, though after a time Mirabel took to following James up to the glory-hole where she would sit on his bed and continue her long, detailed, repetitive complaints just as if he were her own contemporary.
It was a little disconcerting at first, though he got used to it. Mirabel was about thirty but to him and his sister she seemed the same age as their parents, middle-aged, old, much as anyone did who was over, say, twenty-two. And till he got accustomed to her manner he hardly knew what to make of the way she gazed intensely into his eyes or suddenly clutched him by the arm. She described herself (frequently) as passionate, nervous and highly strung.
She was a small woman and James was already taller than she. She had a small, rather pinched face with large prominent dark eyes and she wore her long hair hanging loose like Rosamund’s. The Fyfields were big-boned, fair-headed people with ruddy skins but Mirabel was dark and very thin and her wrists and hands and ankles and feet were very slender and narrow. There was, of course, no blood relationship, Mirabel being Aunt Julie’s own sister’s granddaughter.
Mirabel was not her baptismal name. She had been christened Brenda Margaret but it had to be admitted that the name she had chosen for herself suited her better, suited her feyness, her intense smiles and brooding sadnesses, and the clinging clothes she wore, the muslins and the trailing shawls. She always wore a cloak or a cape to go into the village and James’s mother said she couldn’t remember Mirabel ever having possessed a coat.
James had always had rather a sneaking liking for her, he hadn’t known why. But now that he was older and saw her daily, he understood something he had not known before. He liked Mirabel, he couldn’t help himself, because she seemed to like him so much and because she flattered him. It was funny, he could listen to her flattery and distinguish it for what it was, but this knowledge did not detract a particle from the pleasure he felt in hearing it.
‘You’re absolutely brilliant for your age, aren’t you, James?’ Mirabel would say. ‘I suppose you’ll be a professor one day. You’ll probably win the Nobel prize.’
She asked him to teach her things: how to apply Pythagoras’ Theorem, how to convert Fahrenheit temperatures into Celsius, ounces into grammes, how to change the plug on her hair dryer.
‘I’d like to think Oliver might have half your brains, James, and then I’d be quite content. Francis is clever, mind you, though he’s so immature and lazy with it. I literally think you’re more mature than he is.’
Aunt Julie must have known for a long time that Mirabel was staying with the Fyfields, for nothing of that kind could be concealed in a village of the size of Great Sindon, but it was December before she mentioned the matter to James. They were sitting in front of the fire in the front sitting room at Sindon Lodge, eating crumpets toasted by Mrs Crowley and drinking Earl Grey tea, while Palmerston stretched out on the hearth rug. Outside a thin rain was driving against the window panes.
‘I hope Elizabeth knows what she’s doing, that’s all. If you’re not careful you’ll all be stuck with that girl for life.’
James said nothing.
‘Of course you don’t understand the ins and outs of it at your age, but in my opinion your parents should have thought twice before they let her come into their home and bring her illegitimate child with her.’ Aunt Julie looked at him darkly and perhaps spitefully. ‘That could have a very bad effect on Rosamund, you know. Rosamund will think immoral behaviour is quite all right when she sees people like Mirabel getting rewarded for it.’
‘She’s not exactly rewarded,’ said James, starting on the tea cakes and the greengage jam. ‘We don’t give her anything but her food and she has to sleep in the same room as Oliver.’ This seemed to him by far the worst aspect of Mirabel’s situation.
Aunt Julie made no reply. After a while she said, looking into the fire, ‘How d’you think you’d feel if you knew people only came to see you for the sake of getting your money? That’s all Madam Mirabel wants. She doesn’t care for me, she couldn’t care less. She comes here sweet talking to Mrs Crowley because she thinks once she’s in here I’ll take her back and make a will leaving everything I’ve got to her and that illegitimate child of hers. How d’you think you’d like it? Maybe you’ll come to it yourself one day, your grandchildren sucking up to you for what they can get.’
‘You don’t know people come for that,’ said James awkwardly, thinking of Rosamund.
Aunt Julie made a sound of disgust. ‘Aaah!’ She struck out with her arthritic hand as if pushing something away. ‘I’m not green, am I? I’m not daft. I’d despise myself, I can tell you, if I pretended it wasn’t as plain as the nose on my face what you all come for.’
The fire crackled and Palmerston twitched in his sleep.
‘Well, I don’t,’ said James.
‘Don’t you now, Mr Pure-and-holy?’
James grinned. ‘There’s
a way you could find out. You could make a will and leave your money to other people and tell me I wasn’t getting any – and then see if I’d still come.’
‘I could, could I? You’re so sharp, James Fyfield, you’ll cut yourself badly one of these fine days.’
Her prophecy had a curious fulfilment that same evening. James, groping about on the top shelf of his bookcase, knocked over the bottle of muscarine and cut his hand on the broken glass. It wasn’t much of a cut but the stuff that had been inside the bottle got onto it and gave him a very uncomfortable and anxious hour. Nothing happened, his arm didn’t swell up or go black or anything of that sort, but it made him think seriously about the other nine bottles remaining. Wasn’t it rather silly to keep them? That particular interest of his, no longer compelling, he was beginning to see as childish. Besides, with Oliver in the house, Oliver who was crawling now and would soon walk, to keep the poisons might be more than dangerous, it might be positively criminal.
His mind made up, he took the bottles down without further vacillation and one by one poured their contents away down his bedroom washbasin. Some of them smelt dreadful. The henbane smelt like the inside of his mouse cage when he hadn’t cleaned it out for a day.
He poured them all away with one exception. He couldn’t quite bring himself to part with the datura. It had always been his pride, better even than the nightshade. Sometimes he had sat there at his desk, doing his homework, and glanced up at the datura bottle and wondered what people would think if they had known he had the means in his bedroom to dispose of (probably) half the village. He looked at it now, recalling how he had picked the green spiny thornapples in the nick of time before his father had uprooted all the beautiful and sinister plants – he looked at it and replaced it on the top shelf. Then he sat down at the desk and did his Latin unseen.
Mirabel was still with them at Christmas. On Christmas Eve she carried up to Sindon Lodge the pale blue jumper, wrapped in holly-patterned paper, the two-pound box of chocolates and the poinsettia in a golden pot she had bought for Aunt Julie. And she took Rosamund with her. Rosamund wore her new scarlet coat with the white fur which was a Christmas present in advance, and the scarf with Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London printed on it which was another, and Mirabel wore her dark blue cloak and her angora hat and very high-heeled grey suede boots that skidded dangerously about on the ice. Oliver was left behind in the care of James’s mother.