Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  At the end of the passage, looking out of a window, Flora stood in a nightgown with a shawl over it. Pringle, who sometimes read ghost stories, saw her as the Grey Lady of Fen Hall. She was in the dark, the better to see the forked lightning that had begun to leap on the horizon beyond the river.

  ‘I love to watch a storm,’ she said, turning and smiling at them.

  Mr Liddon had snapped a light on. ‘Where are these boys to sleep?’

  It was as if it didn’t concern her. She wasn’t unkind but she wasn’t involved either. ‘Oh, in the drawing room, I should think.’

  ‘We have seven bedrooms.’

  Flora said no more. A long roll of thunder shook the house. Mr Liddon took them downstairs and through the drawing room into a sort of study where they helped him make up beds of cushions on the floor. The wind howled round the house and Pringle heard another tile go. He lay in the dark, listening to the storm. The others were asleep, he could tell by their steady breathing. Inside the bag it was quite warm and he felt snug and safe. After a while he heard Mr Liddon and Flora quarrelling on the other side of the door.

  Pringle’s parents quarrelled a lot and he hated it, it was the worst thing in the world, though less bad now than when he was younger. He could only just hear Mr Liddon and Flora and only disjointed words, abusive and angry on the man’s part, indifferent, amused on the woman’s, until one sentence rang out clearly. Her voice was penetrating though it was so quiet:

  ‘We want such different things!’

  He wished they would stop. And suddenly they did, with the coming of the rain. The rain came, exploded rather, crashing at the windows and on the old sagging depleted roof. It was strange that a sound like that, a loud constant roar, could send you to sleep . . .

  She was in the kitchen when he went out there in the morning. John and Hodge slept on, in spite of the bright watery sunshine that streamed through the dirty diamond window panes. A clean world outside, new-washed. Indoors the same chaos, the kitchen with the same smell of fungus and dirty dishcloths, though the windows were open. Flora sat at the table on which sprawled a welter of plates, indefinable garments, bits of bread and fruit rinds, an open can of cat food. She was drinking coffee and Tabby lay on her lap.

  ‘There’s plenty in the pot if you want some.’

  She was the first grown-up in whose house he had stayed who didn’t ask him how he had slept. Nor was she going to cook breakfast for him. She told him where the eggs were and bread and butter. Pringle remembered he still hadn’t returned her frying pan which might be the only one she had.

  He made himself a pile of toast and found a jar of marmalade. The grass and the paths, he could see through an open window, were littered with broken bits of twig and leaf. A cock pheasant strutted across the shaggy lawn.

  ‘Did the storm damage a lot of things?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Tony got up early to look. There may be more poplars down.’

  Pringle ate his toast. The cat had begun to purr in an irregular throbbing way. Her hand kneaded its ears and neck. She spoke, but not perhaps to Pringle or the cat, or for them if they cared to hear.

  ‘So many people are like that. The whole of life is a preparation for life, not living.’

  Pringle didn’t know what to say. He said nothing. She got up and walked away, still carrying the cat, and then after a while he heard music coming faintly from a distant part of the house.

  There were two poplars down in the plantation and each had left a crater four or five feet deep. As they went up the lane to check on their camp, Pringle and John and Hodge had a good look at them, their green trunks laid low, their tangled roots in the air. Apart from everything having got a bit blown about up at the camp and the stuff they had left out soaked through, there was no real damage done. The wood itself had afforded protection to their tent.

  It seemed a good time to return the frying pan. After that they would have to walk to Fedgford for some sausages – unless one of the Liddons offered a lift. It was with an eye to this, Pringle had to admit, that he was taking the pan back.

  But Mr Liddon, never one to waste time, was already at work in the plantation. He had lugged a chain saw up there and was preparing to cut up the poplars where they lay. When he saw them in the lane he came over.

  ‘How did you sleep?’

  Pringle said, ‘OK, thanks,’ but Hodge, who had been very resentful about not being given a hot drink or something to eat, muttered that he had been too hungry to sleep. Mr Liddon took no notice. He seemed jumpy and nervous. He said to Pringle that if they were going to the house would they tell Mrs Liddon – he never called her Flora to them – that there was what looked like a dump of Victorian glass in the crater where the bigger poplar had stood.

  ‘They must have planted the trees over the top without knowing.’

  Pringle looked into the crater and sure enough he could see bits of coloured glass and a bottleneck and a jug or tankard handle protruding from the tumbled soil. He left the others there, fascinated by the chain saw, and went to take the frying pan back. Flora was in the drawing room, playing records of tinkly piano music. She jumped up, quite excited, when he told her about the bottle dump.

  They walked back to the plantation together, Tabby following, walking a little way behind them like a dog. Pringle knew he hadn’t a hope of getting that lift now. Mr Liddon had already got the crown of the big poplar sawn off. In the short time since the storm its pale silvery-green leaves had begun to wither. John asked if they could have a go with the chain saw but Mr Liddon said not so likely, did they think he was crazy? And if they wanted to get to the butcher before the shop closed for lunch they had better get going now.

  Flora, her long skirt hitched up, had clambered down into the crater. If she had stood up in it her head and shoulders, perhaps all of her from the waist up, would have come above its rim, for poplars have shallow roots. But she didn’t stand up. She squatted down, using her trowel, extracting small glass objects from the leafmould. The chain saw whined, slicing through the top of the poplar trunk. Pringle, watching with the others, had a feeling something was wrong about the way Mr Liddon was doing it. He didn’t know what though. He could only think of a funny film he had once seen in which a man, sitting on a branch, sawed away at the bit between him and the tree trunk, necessarily falling off himself when the branch fell. But Mr Liddon wasn’t sitting on anything. He was just sawing up a fallen tree from the crown to the bole. The saw sliced through again, making four short logs now as well as the bole.

  ‘Cut along now, you boys,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to waste the day mooning about here.’

  Flora looked up and winked at Pringle. It wasn’t unkind, just conspiratorial, and she smiled too, holding up a small glowing red glass bottle for him to see. He and John and Hodge moved slowly off, reluctantly, dawdling because the walk ahead would be boring and long. Through the horse tails, up the bank, looking back when the saw whined again.

  But Pringle wasn’t actually looking when it happened. None of them was. They had had their final look and had begun to trudge up the lane. The sound made them turn, a kind of swishing lurch and then a heavy plopping, sickening, dull crash. They cried out, all three of them, but no one else did, not Flora or Mr Liddon. Neither of them made a sound.

  Mr Liddon was standing with his arms held out, his mouth open and his eyes staring. The pile of logs lay beside him but the tree trunk was gone, sprung back roots and all when the last saw cut went through, tipped the balance and made its base heavier than its top. Pringle put his hand over his mouth and held it there. Hodge, who was nothing more than a fat baby really, had begun to cry. Fearfully, slowly, they converged, all four of them, on the now upright tree under whose roots she lay.

  The police came and a farmer and his son and some men from round about. Between them they got the tree over on its side again but by then Flora was dead. Perhaps she died as soon as the bole and the mass of roots hit her. Pringle wasn’t there to see. Mr Li
ddon had put the plantation out of bounds and said they were to stay in camp until someone came to drive them to the station. It was Michael Porter who turned up in the late afternoon and checked they’d got everything packed up and the camp site tidied. He told them Flora was dead. They got to the station in his Land-Rover in time to catch the five-fifteen for London.

  On the way to the station he didn’t mention the bottle dump he had told them about. Pringle wondered if Mr Liddon had ever said anything to Flora about it. All the way home in the train he kept thinking of something odd. The first time he went up the lane to the camp that morning he was sure there hadn’t been any glass in the tree crater. He would have seen the gleam of it and he hadn’t. He didn’t say anything to John and Hodge, though. What would have been the point?

  Three years afterwards Pringle’s parents got an invitation to Mr Liddon’s wedding. He was marrying the daughter of a wealthy local builder and the reception was to be at Fen Hall, the house in the wood. Pringle didn’t go, being too old now to tag about after his parents. He had gone off trees anyway.

  Father’s Day

  Teddy had once read in a story written by a Victorian that a certain character liked ‘to have things pleasant about him’. The phrase had stuck in his mind. He too liked to have things pleasant about him.

  It was to be hoped that pleasantness would prevail while they were all away on holiday together. Teddy was beginning to be afraid they might get on each other’s nerves. Anyway, it would be the last time for years the four of them would be able to go away in October for both Emma and Andrew started school in the spring.

  ‘A pity,’ Anne said, ‘because May and October are absolutely the best times in the Greek Islands.’

  She and Teddy had bought the house with the money Teddy’s mother had left him. The previous year they had been there twice and again last May. They hadn’t been able to go out in the evenings because they had no babysitter. Having Michael and Linda there would make it possible for each couple to go out every other night.

  ‘If Michael will trust us with his children,’ said Teddy.

  ‘He isn’t as bad as that.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was bad. He’s my brother-in-law and I’ve got to put up with him. He’s all right. It’s just that he’s so nuts about his kids I sometimes wonder how he dares leave them with their own mother when he goes to work.’

  He was recalling the time they had all spent at Chichester in July and how the evening had been spoilt by Michael’s insisting on phoning the baby-sitter before the play began, during the interval and before they began the drive home. And when he wasn’t on the phone or obliged to be silent in the threatre he had talked continually about Andrew and Alison in a fretful way.

  ‘He’s under a lot of stress,’ Linda had whispered to her sister. ‘He’s going through a bad patch at work.’

  Teddy didn’t think it natural for a man to be so involved with his children. He was fond of his own children, of course he was, and anxious enough about them when he had cause, but they were little still and, let’s face it, sometimes tiresome and boring. He looked forward to the time when they were older and there could be real companionship. Michael was more like a mother than a father, a mother hen. Teddy, for his sins, had occasionally changed napkins and made up feeds but Michael actually seemed to enjoy doing these things and talking about them afterwards. Teddy hoped he wouldn’t be treated to too much Dr Jolly philosophy while on Stamnos.

  Just before they went, about a week before, Valerie Wilton’s marriage broke up. Valerie had been at school with Anne, though just as much Linda’s friend, and had written long letters to both of them, explaining everything and asking for their understanding. She had gone off with a man she met at her Commercial French evening class. Apparently the affair had been going on for a long time but Valerie’s husband had known nothing about it and her departure had come to him as a total shock. He came round and poured out his troubles to Anne and drank a lot of scotch and broke down and cried. For all Teddy knew, he did the same at Linda’s. Teddy stayed out of it, he didn’t want to get involved. Liking to have things pleasant about him, he declined gently but firmly even to discuss it with Anne.

  ‘Linda says it’s really upset Michael,’ said Anne. ‘He identifies with George, you see. He’s so emotional.’

  ‘I said I wasn’t going to talk about it, darling, and by golly I’m not!’

  During the flight Michael had Alison on his lap and Andrew in the seat beside him. Anne remarked in a plaintive way that it was all right for Linda. Teddy saw that Linda slept most of the way. She was a beautiful girl – better-looking than Anne, most people thought, though Teddy didn’t – and now that Michael was making more money had bought a lot of new clothes and was having her hair cut in a very stylish way. Teddy, who was quite observant, especially of attractive things, noted that recently she had stopped wearing trousers. He looked appreciatively across the aisle at her long slim legs.

  They changed planes at Athens. It was a fine clear day and as the aircraft came in to land you could see the wine jar shape of the island from which it took its name. Stamnos was no more than twenty miles long but the road was poor and rutted, winding up and down over low olive-clad mountains, and it took over an hour for the car to get to Votani at the wine jar’s mouth. The driver, a Stamniot, was one of those Greeks who spend their youth in Australia before returning home to start a business on the money they have made. He talked all the way in a harsh clattering Greek-Strine while his radio played bouzouki music and Alison whimpered in Michael’s arms. It was hot for the time of year.

  Tim, who was a bad traveller, had been carsick twice by the time they reached Votani. The car couldn’t go up the narrow flagged street, so they had to get out and carry the baggage, the driver helping with a case in each hand and one on his head. Michael didn’t carry a case because he had Andrew on his shoulders and Alison in his arms.

  The houses of Votani covered a shallow conical hill so that it looked from a distance like a heap of pastel-coloured pebbles. Close to, the buildings were neat, crowded, interlocking, hung with jasmine and bougainvillea, and the hill itself was surmounted by the ruins, extravagantly picturesque, of a Crusaders’ fortress. Teddy and Anne’s house was three fishermen’s cottages that its previous owner had converted into one. It had a lot of little staircases on account of being built on the steep hillside. From the bedroom where the four children would sleep you could see the eastern walls of the fortress, a dark blue expanse of sea, and smudgy on the horizon, the Turkish coast. The dark came quickly after the sun had gone. Teddy, when abroad, always found that disconcerting after England with its long protracted dusks.

  Within an hour of reaching Votani he found himself walking down the main street – a stone-walled defile smelling of jasmine and lit by lamps on iron brackets – towards Agamemnon’s Bar. He felt guilty about going out and leaving Anne to put the children to bed. But it had been Anne’s suggestion, indeed Anne’s insistence, that he should take Michael out for a drink before supper. A whispered colloguy had established they both thought Michael looked ‘washed out’ (Anne’s expression) and ‘fed up’ (Teddy’s) and no wonder, the way he had been attending to Andrew’s and Alison’s wants all day.

  Michael had needed a lot of persuading, had at first been determined to stay and help Linda, and it therefore rather surprised Teddy when he began on a grumbling tirade against women’s liberation.

  ‘I sometimes wonder what they mean, they’re not “equal”,’ he said. ‘They have the children, don’t they? We can’t do that. I consider that makes them superior rather than inferior.’

  ‘I know I shouldn’t like to have a baby,’ said Teddy irrelevantly.

  ‘It’s because of that,’ said Michael as if Teddy hadn’t spoken, ‘that we need to master them. We have to for our own sakes. Where should we be if they had the babies and the whip hand too?’

  Teddy said vaguely that he didn’t know about whip hand but someone had said that the
hand which rocks the cradle rules the world. By this time they were in Agamemnon’s, sitting at a table on the vine-covered terrace. The other customers were all Stamniots, some of whom recognized Teddy and nodded at him and smiled. Most of the tourists had gone by now and all but one of the hotels were closed for the winter. Hedonistic Teddy, wanting to have things pleasant about him, hadn’t cared for the turn the conversation was taking. He began telling Michael how amused he and Anne had been when they found that the proprietor of the bar was called after the great hero of classical antiquity and how ironical it had seemed, for this Agamemnon was small and fat. Here he was forced to break off as stout smiling Agamemnon came to take their order.

  Michael had no intention of letting him begin once more on the subject of Stamniot names. He spoke in a rapid violent tone, his thin dark face pinched with intensity.

  ‘A man can lose his children any time and through no fault of his own. Have you ever thought of that?’

  Teddy looked at him. Notions of kidnapping, of mortal illness, came into his head. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It could happen to you or me, to any of us. A man can lose his children overnight and he can’t do a thing about it. He may be a good faithful husband, a good provider, a devoted father – that won’t make a scrap of difference. Look at George Wilton. What did George do wrong? Nothing. But he lost his children just the same. One day they were living with him in his house and the next they were in Gerrards Cross with Valerie and that Commercial French chap and he’ll be lucky if he sees them once a fortnight.’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ said Teddy. ‘He couldn’t look after them though, could he? He’s got to go to work. I mean, I see it’s unfair, but you can’t take kids away from their mother, can you?’

  ‘Apparently not. But you can take them from their father.’