by Ruth Rendell
On moving into the house, she had appropriated the large bottom drawer of a chest in their living room for her knitting materials. In it were all her many leftover balls of wool and ends of wool from a multiplicity of garments made over the years, her gauge, her tape measure, her bodkins for sewing up and her sewing-up skeins and, ranged in front, all her pairs of needles, a pair of every possible size and each pair in its long plastic envelope. Alice had selected a pair of number fourteens, the very finest size for beginning on the welt of Rupert’s pullover.
As she cast on the required number of one hundred and fifty stitches and felt the familiar thin metal pins against her hands and the soft, faintly fluffy yarn slip rhythmically between her fingers, a great calm descended upon Alice. It was like coming home after a long absence. It was like having a cigarette (she supposed) or a drink after a month’s abstention. It was wonderful. It seemed to set the seal on her happiness. Here she was married, with a charming husband whom she loved, very well off, living in the home of her dreams, and now she was settled in her new life, once more taking up the hobby that afforded her so much pleasure. She had knitted about half an inch, for the work was slow with such fine materials, when she heard Rupert come in from the garden and rinse his hands under the kitchen tap. Presently he walked into the room where she was.
He stood a yard or two in from the doorway and stared at her. ‘What are you doing, sweetie?’
‘Knitting,’ said Alice, smiling at him.
Rupert came and sat opposite her. He was fascinated. He knew there was such a thing as hand-knitting, or that there used to be, for he seemed to remember his mother mentioning it about forty years before, but he had never actually seen it being done. Alice’s fingers flicked up and down, making precisely the same movement about a hundred times a minute. And they seemed to move independently of the rest of Alice, of her body which was gracefully relaxed, of her eyes which occasionally met his, and of her mind too, he suspected, which might be wandering off anywhere.
‘I didn’t know you knitted,’ he said after a while.
‘Darling! Where do you think your red sweater came from? I told you I made it.’
Rupert had not given much thought to the provenance of the red sweater. ‘I suppose I thought you must have done it on a machine,’ he said.
Alice laughed heartily at this. She continued to knit. Rupert read the evening paper which had just been delivered. After a time he said, ‘Can I talk to you while you’re doing that?’
He sounded so like a little boy whose mother cannot be bothered with him that Alice’s heart was touched. ‘Darling, of course you can. Talk away! I’m a very practised knitter, you know. I can not only talk while I’m knitting, I can read, watch television – my goodness, I could knit in the dark!’ And she fixed her eyes on him, smiling tenderly, while her fingers jerked up and down like pistons.
But Rupert didn’t talk. He hardly said a word until they were out for their evening walk, and next day when she again took up the blue pullover she was once more conscious of his stare. After a while he lit a cigarette, his first for several weeks. Without a word he left the room and when she went into the kitchen to prepare their evening meal she found him sitting at the table, reading one of his favourite war memoirs.
It was not until Alice had had four sessions of work on the pullover and had completed six inches of the back, having changed by now to the slightly coarser needle, number twelve and made of red plastic, that Rupert made any further reference to her occupation.
‘You know, sweetie,’ he said, ‘there’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t buy our clothes ready-made. We’re not poor. I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I’m a tight-fisted sort of chap. Any time you want the money to buy yourself a blouse or a dress or whatever that is, you’ve only to say the word.’
‘This isn’t for me, Rupert, it’s for you. You said you wanted a pullover like the one we saw on that man on the sea front.’
‘Did I? I suppose I must have if you say so but I don’t recall it. Anyway, I can pop down to the men’s outfitters and buy one if I feel inclined, can’t I, eh? There’s no need for you to wear yourself out making something I can buy in ten minutes.’
‘But I like knitting, darling. I love it. And I think home-knitted garments are much nicer than bought ones.’
‘Must make your fingers ache, I should think,’ said Rupert. ‘Talk about wearing one’s fingers to the bone. I know the meaning of that phrase all right now, eh?’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ snapped Alice. ‘Of course it doesn’t make my fingers ache. I enjoy it. And I think it’s a great pity you’ve started smoking again.’
Rupert smoked five cigarettes that day and ten the next and the day after that Pamela and Guy came to stay for a fortnight’s holiday.
Rupert thought, and Alice agreed with him, that if you lived by the sea it was positively your duty to invite close friends for their summer holidays. Besides, Guy and Pamela, who hadn’t a large income, had two children at expensive boarding schools and probably would otherwise have had no holiday at all. They arrived, while their children were away camping, for the middle two weeks of August.
Pamela had not knitted a row since her daughter was two but she liked to watch Alice at work. She said she found it soothing. And when she looked inside the knitting drawer in the chest and saw the leftover hanks of yarn in such delectable shades, pinks and lilacs and subtle greens and honey yellows and chocolate browns, she said it made her feel she must take it up again, for clothes cost so much and it would be a great saving.
Guy was not one of those writers who never speak of their work. He was always entertaining on the subject of the intricate and complex detective stories he yearly produced and would weave plots out of all kinds of common household incidents or create them from things he observed while they were out for a drive. Alice enjoyed hearing him evolve new murder methods and he played up to her with more and more ingenious and bizarre devices.
‘Now take warfarin,’ he would say. ‘They use it to kill rats. It inhibits the clotting of the blood, so that when the rats fight among themselves and receive even a small wound they bleed to death.’
‘They give it to human beings too,’ said Alice, the nurse. ‘Or something very close to it. It stops clots forming in people who’ve had a thrombosis.’
‘Do they now? That’s very interesting. If I were going to use that method in a book I’d have the murderer give his victim warfarin plus a strong sedative. Then a small cut, say to the wrist . . .’
Another time he was much intrigued by a book of Alice’s on plants inadvisable for use in winemaking. Most illuminating for the thriller writer, he said.
‘It says here that the skunk cabbage, whatever that may be, contains irritant crystals of calcium oxalate. If you eat the stuff the inside of your mouth swells up and you die because you can’t breathe. Now your average pathologist might notice the swellings but I’d be willing to bet you anything he’d never suppose them the result of eating lysichiton symplocarpus. There’s another undetectable murder method for you.’
Alice was excited by his ingenuity and Pamela was used to it. Only Rupert, who had perhaps been nearer actual death than any of them, grew squeamish and was not sorry when the two weeks came to an end and Guy and Pamela were gone. Alice too felt a certain relief. It troubled her that her latent sadism, which she recognized for what it was, should be titillated by Guy’s inventions. With thankfulness she returned to the gentle placebo of her knitting and took up the blue pullover again, all eight inches of it.
Rupert lit a cigarette.
‘I say, I’ve been thinking, why don’t I buy you a knitting machine?’
‘I don’t want a knitting machine, darling,’ said Alice.
‘Had a look at one actually while I was out with old Guy one day. A bit pricey but I don’t mind that, sweetie, if it makes you happy.’
‘I said I don’t want a knitting machine. The point is that I like knitting by ha
nd. I’ve already told you, it’s my hobby, it’s a great interest of mine. Why do I want a big cumbersome machine that takes up space and makes a noise when I’ve got my own two hands?’
He was silent. He watched her fingers working.
‘As a matter of fact, it’s the noise I don’t like,’ he said.
‘What noise?’ said Alice, exasperated.
‘That everlasting click-click-click.’
‘Oh, nonsense! You can’t possibly hear anything right across the room.’
‘I can.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Alice.
But Rupert did not get used to it, and the next time Alice began her knitting he said: ‘It’s not just the clicking, sweetie, it’s the sight of your hands jerking about mechanically all the time. To be perfectly honest with you it gets on my nerves.’
‘Don’t look then.’
‘I can’t help it. There’s an awful sort of fascination that draws my eyes.’
Alice was beginning to feel nervous herself. A good deal of her pleasure was spoilt by those staring eyes and the knowledge of his dislike of what she did. It began to affect the texture of her work, making her take uneven stitches. She went on rather more slowly and after half an hour she let the nine-inch-long piece of blue fabric and the needles fall into her lap.
‘Let’s go out to dinner,’ said Rupert eagerly. ‘We’ll go and have a couple of drinks down on the front and then we’ll drive over to the Queen’s for dinner.’
‘If you like,’ said Alice.
‘And, sweetie, give up that silly old knitting, eh? For my sake? You wouldn’t think twice about doing a little thing like that for me, would you?’
A little thing, he called it. Alice thought of it not twice but many times. She hardly thought of anything else and she lay awake for a large part of the night. But next day she did no knitting and she laid away what she had done in the drawer. Rupert was her husband, and marriage, as she had often heard people say, was a matter of give and take. This she would give to him, remembering all he had given her.
She missed her knitting bitterly. Those years of doing an active job, literally on her feet all day, and those leisure times when her hands had always been occupied, had unfitted her for reading or listening to music or watching television. With idle hands, it was hard for her to keep still. Incessantly, she fidgeted. And when Rupert, who had not once mentioned the sacrifice she had made for him, did at last refer to her knitting, she had an only just controllable urge to hit him.
They were passing, on an evening walk, that men’s outfitters of which he had spoken when first he saw knitting in her hands, and there in the window was a heavyweight wool sweater in creamy white with on it an intricate Fair Isle pattern in red and grey.
‘Bet you couldn’t do that, eh, sweetie? It takes a machine to make a garment like that. I call that a grand job.’
Alice’s hands itched to slap his face. She not make that! Why, give her half a chance and she could make it in a week and turn out a far more beautiful piece of work than that object in the window. But her heart yearned after it, for all that. How easily, when she had been allowed to knit, could she have copied it! How marvellously would it have occupied her, working out those checks and chevrons on squared paper, weaving in the various threads with the yarn skilfully hooked round three fingers! She turned away. Was she never to be allowed to knit again? Must she wait until Rupert died before she could take up her needles?
It began to seem to Alice a monstrous cruelty, this thing which her husband had done to her. Why had she been so stupid as to marry someone she had known only three months? She thought she would enjoy punching him with her fists, pummelling his head, until he cried to her to stop and begged her to knit all she liked.
The change Rupert noticed in his wife he did not attribute to the loss of her hobby. He had forgotten about her knitting. He thought she had become irritable and nervous because she was anxious about his smoking – after all, none knew better than she that he shouldn’t smoke – and he made a determined effort, his second since his marriage, to give it up.
After five days of total abstention it seemed to him as if every fibre of his body cried out for, yearned for, put out straining anguished stalks for, a cigarette. It was worst of all in the pub on the sea front where the atmosphere was laden with aromatic cigarette smoke, and there, while Alice was sitting at their table, he bought a surreptitious packet of twenty at the bar.
Back home, he took one out and lit it. His need for nicotine was so great that he had forgotten everything else. He had even forgotten that Alice was sitting opposite him. He took a wonderful long inhalation, the kind that makes the room rock and waves roar in one’s head, a cool, aromatic, heady, glorious draw.
The next thing he knew the cigarette had been pulled out of his mouth and hurled into the fireplace and Alice was belabouring him with her fists while stamping on the remaining nineteen cigarettes in the packet.
‘You mean selfish cruel beast! You can keep on with your filthy evil-smelling addiction that makes me sick to my stomach, you can keep that up, killing yourself, while I’m not allowed to do my poor harmless useful work. You selfish insensitive pig!’ It was their first quarrel and it went on for hours.
Next morning Rupert went into town and bought a hundred cigarettes and Alice locked herself in her bedroom and knitted. They were reconciled after two or three days. Rupert promised to undergo hypnosis for his smoking. Nothing was said at the time about Alice’s knitting, but soon afterwards she explained quite calmly and rationally to Rupert that she needed to knit for her ‘nerves’ and would have to devote specific time to it, such as an hour every evening during which she would go and sit in their little-used dining room.
Rupert said he would miss her. He hadn’t got married for his wife to be in one room and he in another. But all right, he hadn’t much option, he supposed, so long as it was only an hour.
It began as an hour. Alice found she didn’t miss Rupert’s company. It seemed to her that they had said to each other all they had to say and all they ever would have. If there had been any excitement in their marriage, there was none left now. Knitting itself was more interesting, though when this garment was completed she would make no more for Rupert. Let him go to .his men’s outfitters if that was what he wanted. She thought she might make herself a burgundy wool suit. And as she envisaged it, longing to begin, the allotted hour lengthened into an hour and a half, into two.
She had almost completed the back of the pullover after two and a half hours concentrated work, when Rupert burst into the room, a cigarette in his mouth and his breath smelling of whisky. He snatched the knitting out of her hands and pulled it off the red plastic needles and snapped each needle in half.
Alice screamed at him and seized his collar and began shaking him, but Rupert tore the pattern across and unravelled stitches as fast as he could go. Alice struck him repeatedly across the face. He dodged and hit her such a blow that she fell to the floor, and then he pulled out every one of those two or three hundred rows of knitting until all that remained was a loose and tangled pile of crinkled blue yarn.
Three days later she told him she wanted a divorce. Rupert said she couldn’t want one as much as he did. In that case, said Alice, perhaps he would like to pack his things and leave the house as soon as possible.
‘Me? Leave this house? You must be joking.’
‘Indeed I’m not joking. That’s what a decent man would do.’
‘What, just walk out of a house I bought with my inheritance from my parents? Walk out on the furniture you bought with my life savings? You’re not only a hysterical bitch, you’re out of your mind. You can go. I’ll pay my maintenance, the law forces me to do that, though it’ll be the minimum I can get away with, I promise you.’
‘And you call yourself an officer and a gentleman!’ said Alice. ‘What am I supposed to do? Go back to nursing? Go back to a poky flat? I’d rather die. Certainly I’m staying in this house.’
They argued about it bitterly day after day. Rupert’s need overcame the hypnosis and he chain-smoked. Alice was now afraid to knit in his presence, for he was physically stronger than she, even if she had had the heart to start the blue pullover once again. And whom would she give it to? She would not get out of the house, her house which Rupert had given her for which, in exchange, she had given him the most important thing she had.
‘I gave up my knitting for you,’ she screamed at him, ‘and you can’t even give me a house and a few sticks of furniture.’
‘You’re mad,’ said Rupert. ‘You ought to be locked up.’
Alice rushed at him and smacked his face. He caught her hands and threw her into a chair and slammed out of the room. He went down to the pub on the sea front and had two double whiskies and smoked a packet of cigarettes. When he got back Alice was in bed in the spare room. Just as he refused to leave the house, so Rupert had refused to get out of his own bedroom. He took two sleeping tablets and went to bed.
In the morning Alice went into the room where Rupert was and washed his scalp and combed his beautiful thick white hair. She changed the pillowcases, wiped a spot off Rupert’s pyjama jacket and then she phoned the doctor to say Rupert was dead. He must have passed away in his sleep. She had awakened to find him dead beside her.
‘His heart, of course,’ said the doctor, and because Alice had been a nurse, ‘a massive myocardial infarction.’
She nodded. ‘I suppose I should have expected it.’
‘Well, in these cases . . .’
‘You never know, do you? I must be grateful for the few happy months we had together.’
The doctor signed the death certificate. There was no question of an autopsy. Pamela and Guy came to the cremation and took Alice back home with them for four weeks. When Alice left to return to the house that was now entirely hers they promised to take her at her word and come to stay once again in the summer. Alice was very comfortably off, for by no means all Rupert’s savings had been spent on the furniture, his life assurance had been considerable, and there was his army pension, reduced but still generous.