by Ruth Rendell
‘Walter must have wanted them. When he was engaged to me we talked of having three.’
June looked upset but May could have talked of Walter all day long.
‘He was only sixty-five,’ she said. ‘That’s young to die these days. You never told me what he died of.’
‘Cancer,’ said June. ‘They operated but he never regained consciousness.’
‘Just like mother,’ said May. Suppose June had had cancer and had died, what would have happened then? Remembering Walter’s tender look and strong handclasp at her father’s funeral, May thought he would have married her. She twisted the ring on her little finger. ‘You were almost like a second wife, weren’t you? It must be a difficult position.’
‘I’d much rather not talk about it,’ said June, and with her handkerchief to her eyes she left the room.
May was happy. For the first time in forty years she was happy. She busied herself about the house, caring for June’s things, dusting and polishing, pausing to look at a picture and reflecting that Walter must often have looked at it. Sometimes she imagined him sitting in this chair or standing by that window, his heart full of regret for what he might have had. And she thought now, while he had been longing for her she, far away, had been crying for him. She never cried now, though June did.
‘I’m an old fool, I can’t help giving way. You’re strong, May, but I’m weak and I miss him so.’
‘Didn’t I miss him?’
‘He was always fond of you. It upset him a lot to think you were unhappy. He often talked about you.’ June looked at her piteously. ‘You have forgiven me, haven’t you, May?’
‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said May. She was a little surprised at herself but, yes, she had forgiven June. ‘I think you’ve been punished for what you did.’ A loveless marriage, a husband who talked constantly of another woman . . .
‘I’ve been punished,’ said June and she put her arms round May’s neck.
The strong and the weak. May remembered those words when a movement downstairs woke her in the night. She heard footsteps and the sound of a door being forced. It was the burglar she feared and had warned June about, but June would be cowering in her room now, incapable of taking any action.
May put on her dressing gown and went stealthily along the passage to June’s room. The bed was empty. She looked out of the window, and the moonlight showed her a car parked on the gravel drive and led down to the lane. A yellower, stronger light streamed from the drawing room window. A shiver of fear went through her, but she knew she must be strong.
Before she reached the head of the stairs she heard a violent crash as of something heavy yet brittle hurled against a wall. There was a cry from below, footsteps running. May got to the stairs in time to see a slight figure rush across the hall and slam the front door behind him. The car started up.
In his wake he had left a thin trail of blood. May followed the blood trail into the drawing room. June stood by her desk which had been torn open and all its contents scattered on to the table. She was trembling, tearful and laughing with shaky hysteria, pointing to the shards of cut glass that lay everywhere.
‘I threw the decanter at him. I hit him and it cut his head and he ran.’
May went up to her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘He didn’t touch me. He pointed that gun at me when I came in, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t bear to see him searching my desk, getting at all my private things. Wasn’t I brave? He didn’t get away with anything but a few bits of silver. I hit him and he heard you coming and he panicked. Wasn’t I brave, May?’
But May wasn’t listening. She was reading the letter which lay open and exposed on top of the paper the burglar had pulled out of the desk. Walter’s bold handwriting leapt at her, weakened though it was, enfeebled by his last illness. ‘My darling love, It is only a moment since you walked out of the ward, but nevertheless I must write to you. I can’t resist an impulse to write now and tell you how happy you have made me in all the years we have been together. If the worst comes to the worst, my darling, and I don’t survive the operation, I want you to know you are the only woman I have ever loved . . .’
‘I wouldn’t have thought I’d have had the courage,’ said June, ‘but perhaps the gun wasn’t loaded. He was only a boy. Would you call the police, please, May?’
‘Yes,’ said May. She picked up the gun.
The police arrived within fifteen minutes. They brought a doctor with them, but June was already dead, shot through the heart at close range.
‘We’ll get him, Miss Thrace, don’t you worry,’ said the inspector.
‘It was a pity you touched the gun, though. Did it without thinking, I suppose?’
‘It was the shock,’ said May. ‘I’ve never had a shock like that, not since I was a girl.’
A Needle for the Devil
The devil finds work for idle hands to do, as Mrs Gibson used to say to her daughter, and Alice had found that in her case the devil (or her own mysterious inner compulsions) led her to violence. As a child she would strike people who annoyed her and when she was fourteen she attacked her sister with a knife, though no harm was done. But if her hands itched to injure, they were also gifted hands and as she was taught to occupy them with handicrafts, the impulse to violence grew less. Or was sublimated, as she learned to say when she began training to be a nurse.
Only her mother had opposed Alice’s choice of a career. Perhaps it was only her mother who understood her. But her objections were overruled by Alice’s father, her headmistress, the school careers officer and Alice herself. And certainly Alice did well. There were no unfortunate incidents of the kind Mrs Gibson had feared.
Naturally, in her new life, she had had to abandon her handicrafts. One cannot keep a loom or a potter’s wheel in one’s room in the nurses’ residence. And there were many occasions when Alice would come off duty worn-out, not so much from lifting patients, making beds and running to and fro, as from the exercise of an iron self-control. The impulse to hit, pinch or otherwise manhandle a patient who had angered her had to be constantly suppressed.
Then the girl who shared her room came back from two days off duty wearing a knee-length white wool coat.
‘I love your coat,’ said Alice. ‘It’s gorgeous. It must have cost the earth.’
‘I made it,’ said Pamela.
‘You made it? You mean you knitted it?’
‘It wasn’t very difficult and it only took three weeks.’
Alice had never thought of knitting. Knitting was something one’s grandmother did or one’s aunts or pregnant women making layettes. But if Pamela could make the coat, which neither savoured of aunts nor was layette-like, she was very sure she could. And it might solve that problem of hers which had lately become so pressing that she was afraid she might have to leave without finishing her training.
Knitting has the advantage over sewing or weaving that it requires basically only a ball of wool and a pair of needles. It can be done in one’s lunch break, in a train, during night duty. It calms the nerves, occupies the hands, provides therapy – and supplies a wardrobe. Alice began knitting with enthusiasm and found that, because of its ubiquity and the way it can be taken up at any free moment, it answered her purpose better than any of her other crafts had done.
She progressed in her career, became a staff nurse, a sister, and by the time she was thirty had full charge of the men’s medical ward at St Gregory’s Hospital for Officers. It was there, three or four years later, that she first set eyes on Rupert Clarigate who had been brought in after having a heart attack.
Rupert Clarigate was fifty-two at the time of his coronary. He was a bachelor who had retired from the army two years before with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and had since been living very comfortably – too comfortably perhaps – on his handsome pension. Had he smoked less and walked more, eaten less lavishly of roast pheasant at his club and drunk less old Napoleon brandy afterwards he might not, according to his do
ctor, have been seized one night by a fierce pain down his left arm and up his left side and found himself a moment later lying on the floor, fighting for breath. His doctor was one of those who believe that a coronary patient should never be left unattended for the first few days after an attack. Hence, St Gregory’s and Sister Gibson. On his first morning in hospital he awoke to look into the sea-blue eyes of a slim young woman in a trim uniform whose blonde hair was half-covered by a starched white coif.
‘Good morning, Colonel Clarigate,’ said Alice. ‘My goodness, but aren’t you looking better this morning! It just shows what a good night’s sleep can do.’
Alice said this sort of thing to all her new patients but Rupert, who had never been in hospital before and had in fact been riotously healthy all his life till now, thought it was specially designed for him and that her tone was exceptionally sweet. He did not hear her, five minutes later, telling one of her students who had dropped a kidney dish that she was not only hopelessly unfitted to be a nurse but mentally retarded as well, because this diatribe was delivered in the cleansing department off the ward known as the sluice. He thought Alice must have a delightful disposition, always cheerful, always encouraging, endlessly patient, as well as being the sort of girl who looked as if she knew how to have a good time.
‘Who’s the lucky chap that’s taking you out tonight, sister?’ Rupert said as Alice put her head round the door before going off duty. ‘I envy him, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘No chap, Colonel,’ said Alice. ‘I’m going to have a quiet evening doing my knitting in front of the TV.’
Those statements were quite true. There was no chap. There had been in days gone by, several in fact, including one whom Alice would probably have married had she not once slapped his face (and thereby dislodged a filling from a molar) for teasing her. But she had been very young then and without her prop and resort. Since those days she had put her career before a possible husband and had become so used to the overtures and the flirtatious remarks of patients that she hardly took in what they said and scarcely thought of them as men.
Rupert Clarigate, however, was different. He was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen and he had such a wonderful head of hair. For although his face was still youthful and unlined, his hair was snow-white; white and thick and ever so slightly wavy, and since he had left the army it had been allowed to grow just long enough to cover the tops of his ears. It was the first thing Alice had noticed about him. She had always felt a peculiar antipathy to baldness, and though accustomed to the most repulsive sights and to washing a wound or cleaning an abscess without a flicker of distaste, it was still as much as she could do to wash a man’s bald pate or comb the hair which surrounded it. Rupert Clarigate looked as if he would never be bald, for not even a coin-sized bare spot showed amid the lush snowy mass.
Besides that, she liked his hearty jovial manner, the public school accent, the Sandhurst voice. The slightly lecherous admiration in his eyes, kept well under control, excited her. By the end of the first week of his stay she was in love, or would have said she was in love, having no criterion to judge by.
As for Colonel Clarigate, he had always intended to get married one day. A long-standing affair with another officer’s wife had kept him single till he was thirty-five and after that was over he felt too set in his ways to embark on matrimony. Too selfish, the other officer’s wife said. And it was true that Rupert could see no point in having a wife when he didn’t want to stay in in the evenings, had no desire for children, disliked the idea of sharing his income and in any case had his officer’s servant to wait on him and clean his quarters.
But he would marry one day – when he retired. Now retirement had come and he was living in the big inconvenient old house his parents had left him. There was no one to keep it clean. He ate rich food in expensive restaurants because there was no one at home to cook for him and he told himself he smoked too much because he was lonely. In fact, he had had his heart attack because he had no wife. Why should not pretty, efficient, kindly Sister Gibson be his wife?
Why not retire from nursing? thought Alice. Why should she not marry Colonel Clarigate and have a home of her own instead of a two-room flat that went with the job? Besides, she was in love with him and he had such beautiful thick hair.
He must be in love with Sister Gibson, thought Rupert, otherwise he would surely not feel so uneasy about her in the evenings when he was certain she must be out with some chap. This, he knew from his experience with the other officer’s wife, was jealousy and a proof of love.
He left the hospital after three weeks and went to convalesce in the country. From there he wrote to Alice nearly every day. When he came home again he took her to the theatre to see a slapstick sexy comedy at which they both laughed very much, and then to the cinema to see a reissue of Carry On Nurse which had them equally convulsed. On their third evening out together they became engaged.
‘People may say it was sudden,’ said Alice, ‘but I feel we know each other through and through. After all there’s no more intimate situation, is there, than that of nurse and patient?’
‘I can think of one,’ said Rupert with a wink, and they both fell about laughing.
His fifty-third birthday occurred about a month after their engagement and Alice knitted him a pullover. It was rust red, bordered at the welt and on the neckline with fine stripes of cream and dark green and it suited him well, for Rupert, in spite of his high living, had never become fat. Alice insisted on looking after him. She took him out for sensible walks and gently discouraged him from smoking. The Clarigate house was not to her taste so he set about selling it and buying another. The prospect of furnishing this house which was in a seaside resort on the south coast – they could live anywhere they chose, Rupert said, there was no need to stay in London – filled Alice with excited anticipation, especially as Rupert was giving her a free hand with his savings.
The marriage took place in May, three months after their first meeting.
It was a quiet wedding, followed by a small luncheon party. Mrs Gibson, now a widow, was present and so was Alice’s sister and that friend Pamela who had introduced her to the charms of knitting, and Pamela’s husband Guy, a freelance writer and author of mystery novels. On Rupert’s side were a cousin of his and his former commanding officer and Dr Nicholson, that conscientious medical man who had been responsible for sending him to St Gregory’s. The newly married couple left at three to catch the plane that was to take them to Barbados for their honeymoon.
Alice had never before been away on a holiday without taking her knitting with her. In Palma de Mallorca she had knitted a Fair Isle cap and gloves for her niece, in Innsbruck she had begun an Aran for her brother-in-law and in the Isles of Greece she had finished a slipover for herself. But some instinct as to the rightness or suitability of certain actions told her that one does not take knitting on one’s honeymoon, and indeed she found there would scarcely have been the opportunity to knit. One can hardly knit on a beach and they were mostly on the beach when they were not dining and dancing, for Rupert had been right when he assessed his wife as a girl who knew how to have a good time. Alice would have danced harder, eaten more heartily and stayed up even later were it not for her prudent care of her husband’s health. While Rupert, vigorous and virile as he was, might in some ways seem as young as she, there was no getting away from the fact that he had had one coronary and might have another. She was glad to see that he had given up smoking and if, towards the end of their stay, she noticed an edge to his temper, she put this down to the heat.
Furnishing the new house took up all her time once they were returned. There were carpets to choose and order, plumbing and heating and electrical engineers to call, upholsterers and curtain makers to be urged on. Alice worked briskly, refusing to allow Rupert to help, but taking him out each evening with her for a therapeutic stroll along the sea front. He looked fitter than he had in all the five months she had known him and he could ru
n upstairs now without shortness of breath.
It was on the morning after the day when the new carpets were fitted, after Alice had rearranged and polished the furniture, that she felt she could at last begin to relax. Rupert had gone to Dr Nicholson’s for his monthly check-up. She set out for the shopping centre to buy herself some wool. On the previous evening, while they were out for their walk, Rupert had pointed out a man leaning over the sea wall who was wearing just the kind of sleeveless pullover he would fancy for himself. Alice had said nothing but had smiled and squeezed his arm.
During the years that had passed since Pamela walked in wearing that white coat, Alice had become an expert at her craft. She knew all there was to be known about it. She understood the finer points of grafting, of invisible casting off, of the weaving in of contrasts. She knew every kind of yarn available from top heavyweight natural wool to two-ply cotton and exactly which needles to use with each. Without reference to charts she could tell you that an English size fourteen needle is equivalent to the European two millimetre and the American double O. She could with ease adapt a pattern to a different size or, if necessary, work without a pattern at all. Once she had seen a jumper or cardigan she could copy it and turn out a precisely identical garment. And besides all this, the whole area of knitting was an emotive one to her. She could not help regarding it as having been a life saver and therefore it had become far more to her than some other woman’s embroidery or crochet work. So it was natural that on entering a wool shop she should have a sensation of sick excitement as well as experiencing the deep pleasure felt, for example, by a scholar going into a library.
Woolcraft Limited she quickly judged a good shop of its kind and she spent a happy half-hour inside before finally choosing a pattern for a sleeveless pullover and six twenty-five gramme balls of a fine saxe blue wool and acrylic mixture.
There was no opportunity to begin that day. Rupert must have his lunch and then there would be an afternoon’s gardening for both of them and in the evening they were going to a dinner-dance in the Pump Room. But on the following afternoon, while Rupert was down the garden trimming the privet hedge, Alice drew out her first ball of blue wool and began.