by Ruth Rendell
The summer was hotter and dryer than the previous one had been, and the soft fruit harvest was exceptionally good. But this year there was no Aunt Julie to cast a cynical eye over baskets of raspberries. And Jimson’s Weed, datura, the thornapple, did not show itself in the Fyfields’ garden or, apparently, in any part of Great Sindon. A ‘casual’, as the wild plant book described it, it had gone in its mysterious way to ground or else wandered to some distant place away over the meadows.
Had it appeared, it would have exercised no fascination over James. He had his thirteenth birthday in June and he felt immeasurably, not just a year, older than he had done the previous summer. For one thing, he was about six inches taller, he had ‘shot up’ as his mother said, and sometimes the sight in a mirror of this new towering being could almost alarm him. He looked back with incredulous wonder on the child he had been, the child who had boiled noxious fruits and leaves in a pot, who had kept white mice in a cage and caterpillars in a box. He had entered his teens and was a child no more.
Perhaps it was his height that led directly to the drama – ‘the absolutely worst day of my life’, Rosamund called it – or it might have been Mrs Hodge’s operation or even the fact, that, for once in a way, the Women’s Institute met on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday. It might have been any of those factors, though most of all it happened because Mirabel was inevitably and unchangingly Mirabel.
The inhabitants of Ewes Hall Farm knew very little about her life since they hardly ever saw her. It came as a surprise to Elizabeth Fyfield to learn how much time Mrs Hodges had been spending sitting in with Oliver or minding him in her own home. It was Mrs Hodges’s daughter who told her, at the same time as she told her that her mother would be three weeks in hospital having her hysterectomy and another goodness knows how many convalescing. Mirabel would have to look elsewhere for a babysitter.
She looked, as they might have known she would, to the Fyfields.
Presenting herself on their doorstep with Oliver on one arm and a heavy shopping basket on the other, she greeted James’s mother with a winsome, nervous smile. It might have been last year all over again, except that Oliver was a little boy now and no longer a baby. James, home for the long summer holidays, heard her sigh with despair and break into a long apology for having ‘neglected’ them for so long. The fact was she was engaged to be married. Did Elizabeth know that?
‘I hope you’ll be very happy, Mirabel.’
‘Gilbert will make a marvellous father,’ said Mirabel. ‘When I compare him with that stupid, immature oaf, that Francis, it just makes me – oh, well, that’s all water under the bridge now. Anyway, Elizabeth dear, what I came to ask you was, do you think James or Rosamund would do some baby-sitting for me? I’d pay them the going rate, I’d pay them what I pay Mrs Hodges. Only it’s so awful for me never being able to go out with my fiancé, and actually tomorrow I’m supposed to be meeting his parents for the first time. Well, I can’t take a baby of Oliver’s age to a dinner party, can I?’
‘Rosamund’s out of the question,’ said James’s mother, and she didn’t say it very warmly. ‘She’s only eleven. I couldn’t possibly let her have sole charge of Oliver.’
‘But James would be all right, wouldn’t he? James has got so tall, he looks almost a grown man. And James is terribly mature, anyway.’
His mother didn’t answer that. She gave one of those sighs of hers that would have effectively prevented James asking further favours. It had no effect on Mirabel.
‘Just this once. After tomorrow I’ll stay at home like a good little mum and in a month Mrs Hodges will be back. Just from seven till – well, eleven would be the absolute latest.’
‘I’ll sit with Oliver,’ said James’s mother.
Mirabel’s guarantee came to nothing, however, for far from staying home with Oliver, she turned up at Ewes Hall Farm three days later, this time to leave him with them while she went shopping with Gilbert’s mother. She was gone for four hours. Oliver made himself sick from eating toffees he found in Rosamund’s room and he had uprooted six houseplants and stripped off their leaves before James caught him at it.
Next time, James’s mother said she would put her foot down. She had already promised to sit with Oliver on the coming Saturday night. That she would do and that must be the end of it. And this resolve was strengthened by Mirabel’s failure to return home until half-past one on the Sunday morning. She would have told Mirabel so in no uncertain terms, Elizabeth Fyfield told her family at breakfast, but Gilbert Coleridge had been there and she had not wanted to embarrass Mirabel in front of him.
On the Tuesday, the day to which the Women’s Institute meeting had been put forward, the fine weather broke with a storm which gave place by the afternoon to steady rain. James was spending the day turning out the glory-hole. He had been told to do it often enough and he had meant to do it, but who would be indoors in a stuffy bedroom when the sun is shining and the temperature in the eighties? That Tuesday was a very suitable sort of day for disposing of books one had outgrown, tanks and cages and jars that were no longer inhabited, for throwing away collections that had become just boxfuls of rubbish, for making a clean sweep on the path to adulthood.
Taking down the books from the top shelf, he came upon an object whose existence he had almost forgotten – the bottle labelled datura stramonium. That was something he need not hesitate to throw away. He looked at it curiously, at the clear greenish-brown fluid it contained and which seemed in the past months to have settled and clarified. Why had he made it and what for? In another age, he thought he might have been an alchemist or a warlock, and he shook his head ruefully at the juvenile James who was no more.
So many of these books held no interest for him any longer. They were kids’ stuff. He began stacking them in a ‘wanted’ and an ‘unwanted’ pile on the floor. Palmerston sat on the window sill and watched him, unblinking golden eyes in a big round grey face. It was a good thing, James thought, that he had ceased keeping mice before Palmerston arrived. Perhaps the mouse cage could be sold. There was someone in his class at school who kept hamsters and had been talking of getting an extra cage. It wouldn’t do any harm to give him a ring.
James went down to the living room and picked up the receiver to dial Timothy Gordon’s number; the phone was dead. There was no dialling tone but a silence broken by occasional faint clicks and crepitations. He would have to go up the lane to the call box and phone the engineers, but not now, later. It was pouring with rain.
As he was crossing the hall and was almost at the foot of the stairs the doorbell rang. His mother had said something about the laundry coming. James opened the door absent-mindedly, prepared to nod to the man and take in the laundry box, and saw instead Mirabel.
Her car was parked on the drive and staring out of its front window was Oliver, chewing something, his fingers plastering the glass with stickiness. Mirabel was dressed up to the nines, as Aunt Julie might have said, and dressed very unsuitably for the weather in a trailing, cream-coloured pleated affair with beads round her neck and two or three chiffon scarves and pale pink stockings and cream shoes that were all straps no thicker than bits of string.
‘Oh, James, you are going to be an angel, aren’t you, and have Oliver for me just for the afternoon? You won’t be on your own, Rosamund’s in, I saw her looking out of her bedroom window. I did try to ring you but your phone’s out of order.’
Mirabel said this in an accusing tone as if James had purposely broken the phone himself. She was rather breathless and seemed in a hurry.
‘Why can’t you take him with you?’ said James.
‘Because, if you must know, Gilbert is going to buy me something rather special and important and I can’t take a baby along.’
Rosamund, under the impression that excitement was afoot, appeared at the bend in the staircase.
‘It’s only Mirabel,’ said James.
But Mirabel took the opportunity, while his attention was distracted, of rushing to the car – her fin
ery getting much spotted with rain in the process – and seizing the sticky Oliver.
‘You’d like to stay with James and Rosamund, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?’
‘Do we have to?’ said Rosamund, coming downstairs and bestowing on Oliver a look of such unmistakable distaste that even Mirabel flinched. Flinched but didn’t give up. Indeed, she thrust Oliver at James, keeping his sticky mouth well clear of her dress, and James had no choice but to grab hold of him. Oliver immediately started to whine and hold out his arms to his mother.
‘No, darling, you’ll see Mummy later. Now listen, James. Mrs Hodges’s daughter is going to come for him at five-thirty. That’s when she finishes work. She’s going to take him back to her place and I’ll pick him up when I get home. And now I must fly, I’m meeting Gilbert at three.’
‘Well!’ exploded Rosamund as the car disappeared down the drive.
‘Isn’t she the end? Fancy getting lumbered with him. I was going to do my holiday art project.’
‘I was going to turn my room out, but it’s no good moaning. We’ve got him and that’s that.’
Oliver, once the front door was closed, had begun to whimper.
‘If it wasn’t raining we could go in the garden. We could take him out for a walk.
‘It is raining,’ said James. ‘And what would we take him in? Mum’s basket on wheels? The wheelbarrow? In case you hadn’t noticed, dear Mirabel didn’t think to bring his push chair. Come on, let’s take him in the kitchen. The best thing to do with him is to feed him. He shuts up when he’s eating.’
In the larder James found a packet of Penguin biscuits, the chocolate-covered kind, and gave one to Oliver. Oliver sat on the floor and ate it, throwing down little bits of red and gold wrapping paper. Then he opened the saucepan cupboard and began taking out all the pots and pans and the colander and the sieves, getting chocolate all over the white Melamine finish on the door. Rosamund wiped the door and then she wiped him which made him grizzle and hit out at her with his fists. When the saucepans were spread about the floor, Oliver opened all the drawers one after the other and took out cutlery and cheese graters and potato peelers and dishcloths and dusters.
James watched him gloomily. ‘I read somewhere that a child of two, even a child with a very high IQ, can’t ever concentrate on one thing for more than nineteen minutes at a time.’
‘And Oliver isn’t two yet and I don’t think his IQ’s all that amazing.’
‘Exactly,’ said James.
‘Ink,’ said Oliver. He kicked the knives and forks out of his way and came to James, hitting out with a wooden spoon. ‘Ink.’
‘Imagine him with ink,’ said Rosamund.
‘He’s probably not saying ink. It’s something else he means only we don’t know what.’
‘Ink, ink, ink!’
‘If we lived in London we could take him for a ride on a bus. We could take him to the zoo.’
‘If we lived in London,’ said James, ‘we wouldn’t be looking after him. I tell you what, I reckon he’d like television. Mirabel hasn’t got television.’
He picked Oliver up and carried him into the living room. The furniture in there was dark brown leather and would not mark so it seemed sensible to give him another Penguin. James switched the television on. At this time of day there wasn’t much on of interest to anyone, let alone someone of Oliver’s age, only a serial about people working at an airport. Oliver, however, seemed entranced by the colours and the movement, so James shoved him into the back of an armchair and with a considerable feeling of relief, left him.
There was a good deal of clearing up to be done in the kitchen. Oliver had got brown stains on two tablecloths and James had to wash the knives and forks. Rosamund (typically, he thought) had vanished. Back to her art project, presumably, making some sort of collage with dried flowers. He put all the saucepans back and tidied up the drawers so that they looked much as they had done before Oliver’s onslaught. Then he thought he had better go back and see how Oliver was getting on.
The living room was empty. James could soon see why. The serial had come to an end and the bright moving figures and voices and music had been replaced by an old man with glasses talking about molecular physics. Oliver wasn’t anywhere downstairs. James hadn’t really imagined he could climb stairs, but of course he could. He was a big strong boy who had been walking for months and months now.
He went up, calling Oliver’s name. It was only a quarter past three and his mother wouldn’t be back from the village hall until four-thirty at the earliest. The rain was coming down harder now, making the house rather dark. James realized for the first time that he had left his bedroom door open. He had left it open – because Palmerston was inside – when he went downstairs to phone Timothy Gordon about the mouse cage, and then Mirabel had come. It all seemed hours ago but it was only about forty minutes.
Oliver was in James’s bedroom. He was sitting on the floor with the empty datura bottle clutched in his hands, and from the side of the mouth trickled a dribble of brown fluid.
James had read in books about people being rooted to the spot and that was exactly what happened at that moment. He seemed anchored where he stood. He stared at Oliver. In his inside there seemed to swell up and throb a large hard lump. It was his own heart beating so heavily that it hurt.
He forced himself to move. He took the bottle away from Oliver and automatically, he didn’t know why, rinsed it out at the washbasin. Oliver looked at him in silence. James went down the passage and banged on Rosamund’s door.
‘Could you come, please? Oliver’s drunk a bottle of poison. About half a pint.’
‘What?’
She came out. She looked at him, her mouth open. He explained to her swiftly, shortly, in two sentences.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Phone for an ambulance.’
She stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Oliver. He had put his fists in his eyes, he was rubbing his eyes and making fretful little sounds.
‘D’you think we ought to try and make him sick?’
‘No. I’ll go and phone. It’s my fault. I must have been out of my tree making the stuff, let alone keeping it. If he dies . . . Oh, God, Roz, we can’t phone! The phone’s out of order. I was trying to phone Tim Gordon but it was dead and I was going to go down to the call box and report it.’
‘You can go to the call box now.’
‘That means you’ll have to stay with him.’
Rosamund’s lip quivered. She looked at the little boy who was lying on the floor now, his eyes wide open, his thumb in his mouth. ‘I don’t want to. Suppose he dies?’
‘You go,’ said James. ‘I’ll stay with him. Go to the call box and dial nine-nine-nine for an ambulance and then go into the village hall and fetch mum. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Rosamund, and she went, the tears running down her face.
James picked Oliver up and laid him gently on the bed. There were beads of perspiration on the child’s face but that might have been simply because he was hot. Mirabel had wrapped him very warmly for the time of year in a woolly cardigan as well as a jumper and a tee-shirt. He had been thirsty, of course. That was what ‘ink’ had meant. ‘Ink’ for ‘drink’. Was there the slightest chance that during the year since he had made it the datura had lost its toxicity? He did not honestly think so. He could remember reading somewhere that the poison was resistant to drying and to heat, so probably it was also resistant to time.
Oliver’s eyes were closed now and some of the bright red colour which had been in his face while he was watching television had faded. His fat cheeks looked waxen. At any rate, he didn’t seem to be in pain, though the sweat stood in tiny glistening pinpoints on his forehead. James asked himself again why he had been such a fool as to keep the stuff. An hour before he had been on the point of throwing it away and yet he had not. It was useless to have regrets, to ‘job backwards’, as his father put it.
But James was looking to the future, not to
the past. Suddenly he knew that if Oliver died he would have murdered him as surely, or almost as surely, as if he had fired at him with his father’s shotgun. And his whole life, his entire future, would be wrecked. For he would never forgive himself, never recover, never be anything but a broken person. He would have to hide away, live in a distant part of the country, go to a different school, and when he left that school get some obscure job and drag out a frightened, haunted existence. Gone would be his dreams of Oxford, of work in some research establishment, of happiness and fulfilment and success. He was not overdramatizing, he knew it would be so. And Mirabel . . . ? If his life would be in ruins, what of hers?
He heard the front door open and his mother come running up the stairs. He was sitting on the bed, watching Oliver, and he turned round slowly.
‘Oh, James . . .!’
And James said like a mature man, like a man three times his age, ‘There’s nothing you can say to me I haven’t already said to myself.’
She touched his shoulder. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I know you.’ Her face was white, the lips too, and with anger as much as fear. ‘How dare she bring him here and leave him with two children?’
James hadn’t the spirit to feel offended. ‘Is he – is he dying?’
‘He’s asleep,’ said his mother and she put her hand on Oliver’s head. It was quite cool, the sweat had dried. ‘At least I suppose he is. He could be in a coma, for all I know.’
‘It will be the end of me if he dies.’
‘James, oh, James . . .’ She did something she had not done for a long time. She put her arms round him and held him close to her, though he was half a head taller than she.
‘There’s the ambulance,’ said James. ‘I can hear the bell.’
Two men came up the stairs for Oliver. One of them wrapped him in a blanket and carried him downstairs in his arms. Rosamund was sitting in the hall with Palmerston on her lap and she was crying silently into his fur. It seemed hard to leave her but someone had to wait in for Mrs Hodges’s daughter. James and his mother got into the ambulance with Oliver and went with him to the hospital.