Sins of the Fathers

by Ruth Rendell

  Victor's Piece, dry and rotten in drought, smelt wet and rotten now the rain had come. It smelt of fungus and dead things. There were probably rats under these knotted flaking floorboards. He closed the door and walked a little way down the passage, wondering where she was and why she had not come out to him when she heard the door. Then he stopped, for he was facing the back door where Painter's raincoat had hung, and there was a raincoat hanging there now.

  Certainly nothing had hung there on his previous visit to the house. He moved up to the raincoat fascinated and rather horrified.

  Of course, it was obvious what had happened. Someone had bought the place at last, the workmen had been in and one of them had left his raincoat. Nothing to be alarmed about. His nerves must be very bad.

  "Mrs. Primero," he said, and then, because you do not call women with whom you have secret assignations by their surnames, "Imogen! Imogen!"

  There was no answer. And yet he was sure he was not alone in the house. What about knowing her if you were deaf and blind, jeered a voice within him, what about knowing her by her essence? He opened the dining room door, then the drawing room. A damp cold smell came to meet him. Water had leaked under the window sill and formed a spreading pool, dark in colour, hideously evocative. This and the rusty veining on the marble of the fireplace recalled to him splashed blood. Who would buy this place? Who could bear it? But someone had bought it for there was a workman's coat hanging behind the door...

  Here she had sat, the old woman, and bade Alice go to church. Here she had sat, her eyes closing easily into sleep, when Mrs. Crilling had come tapping at the window. Then he had come, whoever he was, with his axe and perhaps she had still been sleeping, on and on over the threats and the demands, over the blows of the axe, on and on into endless sleep. Endless sleep? Mors janua vitae. If only the gateway to life had not been through an unspeakable passage of pain. He found himself praying for what he knew was impossible, that God should change history. Then Mrs. Crilling tapped on the window.

  Archery gave a start so violent and galvanic that he seemed to feel a hand squeeze his heart with slippery fingers. He gasped and forced himself to look.

  "Sorry I'm late," said Imogen Ide. "What a ghastly night."

  She should have been on the inside, he thought, pulling himself together. But she had been outside, tapping, tapping, because she had seen him standing there like a lost soul. This way it altered the aspect of things, for she had not hidden the car. It stood on the gravel beside his own, wet, silver, glittering, like something alive and beautiful from the depths of the sea.

  "How did you get in?" she said in the hall.

  "The door was open."

  "Some workman."

  "I suppose so."

  She wore a tweed suit and her pale hair was wet. He had been silly enough—bad enough, he thought—to imagine that when they met she would run to him and embrace him. Instead she stood looking at him gravely, almost coldly, two little frown lines between her brows.

  "The morning room, I think," she said. "There's furniture in there and besides it doesn't have—associations."

  The furniture consisted of two kitchen stools and a caneback chair. From the window, heavily encrusted with grime, he could see the conservatory to whose walls of cracked glass the tendrils of a dead vine still clung. He gave her the chair and sat down on one of the stools. He had a strange feeling—but a feeling not without a charm of its own—that they had come here to buy the house, he and she, had come early and were reduced to wait thus uncomfortably until the arrival of the agent who would show them round.

  "This could be a study," he would say. "It must be lovely on a fine day."

  "Or we could eat in here. Nice and near the kitchen."

  "Will you be able to bear getting up in the morning to cook my breakfast?" (My love, my love...)

  "You were going to explain," she said, and of course, there would never be a shared bed or a shared breakfast or any future at all. This was their future, this interview in a damp morning room, looking at a dead vine.

  He began to tell her about Charles and Tess, about Mrs. Kershaw's belief. Her face grew even harder and colder when he came to the bit about the inheritance and before he had finished, she said: "You really meant to pin the murder on Roger?"

  "What could I do? I was torn between Charles," he said, "and you." She shook her head quickly, the blood running into her face. "I beg you to believe I didn't try to know you because you were his wife."

  "I believe you."

  "The money ... his sisters ... you didn't know about that?"

  "I knew nothing. Only that they existed and that he never saw them. Oh God!" She screwed up her face pushed her hands over her cheeks, across her eyes and up to the temples. "We've been talking about it all day. He can't see that he was morally obliged to help them. Only one thing matters to him, that Wexford won't take it seriously as a motive for murder."

  "Wexford saw him himself that night at the crucial time in Sewingbury."

  "He doesn't know or he's forgotten. He's going to go through hell until he can pluck up courage to ring Wexford. Some people might say that's his punishment." She sighed. "Are his sisters very badly off?"

  "One of them is. She lives in a single room with her husband and her baby."

  "I've got Roger to agree to let them have what they should have had in the first place, three thousand, three hundred odd each. I think I'd better go to see them myself. He won't even notice it's gone. It's funny, you know, I knew he was unscrupulous. You can't make that amount of money without being, but I didn't know he'd stoop to that."

  "It hasn't made you...?" He hesitated, wondering what he had destroyed.

  "Never feel the same about him again? Oh, my dear, you are funny. Listen, I'll tell you something. Seven years ago it was and the month of June. My face was on the cover of six separate magazines that month. The most photographed girl in Britain."

  He nodded, puzzled and out of his depth.

  "If you reach a peak there's nothing left but to go downhill. In June of the next year I had my face on one magazine. So I married Roger."

  "You didn't love him?"

  "I liked him, you know. He saved me in a way and all the time I'm saving him." Archery knew what she meant, recalling her soft tranquillity in the Olive dining room, her hand touching a mourner's trembling arm. He expected always from her calm serenity and he was shocked when she raged suddenly: "How was I to know there was a middle-aged clergyman waiting for me—a clergyman with a wife and a son and a guilt complex as big as a mountain?"

  "Imogen!"

  "No, you're not to touch me! It was stupid to come here and I should never have done it. Oh God, how I hate these sentimental scenes!"

  He got up and walked as far from her as the little room allowed. It had stopped raining but the sky was sludge-coloured and the vine was as dead as a doornail.

  "What will they do now," she said, "your son and this girl?"

  "I don't think they know themselves."

  "And you, what will you do?"

  " 'Go to the wife of my bosom,' " he quoted, " 'the same as I ought to go.' "

  "Kipling!" She gave a hysterical laugh, and he was pained by the depths he was discovering too late. "Kipling! That's all I need."

  "Good-bye," he said.

  "Good-bye, dear Henry Archery. I've never known what to call you. Do you know that?" She lifted his hand, kissed the palm.

  "Perhaps it's not a name for dalliance," he said ruefully.

  "But it sounds well with Rev. in front of it."

  She went out, closing the door soundlessly behind her.

  "Jenny kissed me," he said to the vine. Jenny could just be short of Imogen. "So what?"

  Presently he came out into the hall and he wondered why the place seemed emptier and more lifeless than before. Perhaps it was his own fresh sense of loss. He turned towards the back door and then he saw. It was not an imagined but an actual diminishing. The raincoat had gone.

  Had it
ever been there or was his fancy, morbid and hypersensitive, creating hallucinations? It was a vision that might naturally come to someone involved as he was in Painter's story. But if the raincoat had never been there what would account for those penny-sized puddles on the floor, made surely by rain rivulets running from a sleeve?

  He had no belief in the vulgar supernatural. But now as he stood looking at the hook where the raincoat had hung, he remembered how he had jumped at the tap on the window and had likened the marble veining to blood. It was not impossible that some evil hung over places such as this, fermenting the imagination and re-creating on the mind's retina images from a past tragedy.

  The door was glazed in square panes. All were dirty yet all glinted faintly in the evening light—all but one. He peered, then smiled wryly at his absurd fancies. The glass had been completely removed from the frame nearest to the lock. An arm could have passed through it to turn the key and slide back the bolts.

  It was unbolted now. He stepped out on to the flagged yard. Beyond, the garden lay enveloped in thin wet mist. The trees, the bushes, the lush blanket of weed sagged under their weight of water. Once he would have felt the responsible citizen's anxiety as to the whereabouts of whoever had broken that window, might even have considered going to the police. Now he was simply apathetic, indifferent.

  Imogen filled his mind, but even on this subject, his thoughts were no longer passionate or ashamed. He would give her five more minutes to get away and then he would return to the Olive. Mechanically he stooped down and for something to do began carefully picking up the shards of broken glass, stacking them against the wall where no one, not even the burglar, might tread on them.

  His nerves were bad, he knew that, but surely that was a footfall, the sound of indrawn breath.

  She was coming back! But she must not—it was more than he could stand. The sight of her would be joy, but anything she said could only mean a fresh parting. He set his teeth, tightened the muscles of his hands and before he could stop himself his fingers had closed on a sliver of glass.

  The blood came before the pain. He stood up, looking stupidly in that empty place, and he turned to meet the tap-tap of high heels.

  Her scream burst in his face.

  "Uncle Bert! Uncle Bert! Oh, my God!"

  His hand was all bloody but he put it out, the hurt hand and the other to catch Elizabeth Crilling as she fell.

  "You ought to have it stitched," she said. "You'll gel tetanus. You'll have an awful scar."

  He wrapped the handkerchief more tightly about the wound and sat grimly on the step watching her. She had come round in seconds but her face was still white. A little gust of wind flicked through the tangled mass of green and showered them with water drops. Archery shivered.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  She lay back in the chair he had fetched her from the morning room, her legs stretched out and limp. He noticed how thin they were, thin as the legs of an Oriental, the stockings wrinkled at the ankles.

  "I've had a row with my mother," she said.

  He said nothing, waiting. For a moment she remained inert, then her body seemed to snap forwards, a trap with a steel spring. Instinctively, he shifted a little away from her, for she had brought her face towards his, her hands clutching each other between knees and breast. Her mouth moved before the words found sound.

  "Oh Christ!" He kept still, controlling his inevitable reaction to the oath. "I saw you with blood on you," she said "and then you said it, what he said. 'I've cut myself.' " A great shudder rocked her as if she had been grasped and shaken by an invisible force. Amazed, he watched her slacken again and heard her say in cold contrast, "Give me a cigarette." She tossed her bag to him. "Light it!" The flame guttered in the damp air and the tugging wind. She cupped her thin hands with their big knuckles around it. "Always snooping, aren't you?" she said, drawing back. "I don't know what you thought you'd find, but this is it."

  Bewildered, he found himself staring at the garden, up at the overhanging gables, down at the wet broken paving.

  "Me, I mean," she said with savage impatience. "You've been telling tales to the police about me and you don't even know what it's all about." Again she snapped forward and shamelessly—he was horrified— pulled up her skirt and exposed her thigh above her stocking top. The white skin was covered all over with needle punctures. "Asthma, that's what it's about. Asthma tablets. You dissolve them in water—and that's a hell of a job on its own—and then you fill up a hypodermic."

  Archery did not think himself easily shocked. But he was shocked now. He felt the blood run into his face. Embarrassment silenced him, then gave place to pity for her and a kind of diffiused indignation with humanity.

  "Does it have any effect?" he asked as coolly as he could.

  "It gives you a lift, if you follow me. Much the same as you get from singing psalms, I expect," she jeered. "There was this man I lived with, he put me on to it. I was in the right place for getting supplies, you see. Until you sent that bastard Burden down and he put the fear of God into my mother. She's got to get a new prescription every time she wants them now and she's got to collect them herself."

  "I see," he said, and hope went. So that was what Mrs. Crilling had meant. In prison there would be no tablets, no syringe, and because she had become addicted to them she would have to reveal her addiction or...

  "I don't think the police can do anything to you," he said, not knowing whether they could or not.

  "What would you know about it? I've got twenty left in a bottle so I came here. I've made myself a bed upstairs and..."

  He interrupted her. "It's your raincoat?"

  The question surprised her, but only for a moment, then scorn returned to make her look twice her age.

  "Sure it is," she said scathingly. "Whose did you think it was, Painter's? I went out for a bit to get something from my car, left the door on the latch and when I came back you were here with that tarty piece." He kept his eyes on her, controlling himself. For the only time in his life he felt an urge to strike another person's face. "I didn't dare come back for a bit," she said, returning to the only other mood she had, a self-pitying childishness. "But I had to get my raincoat—the tablets were in the pocket." She inhaled deeply and flung the cigarette away from her into the wet bushes.

  "What the hell were you doing, returning to the scene of the crime? Trying to get under his skin?"

  "Whose skin?" he whispered urgently.

  "Painter's of course. Bert Painter's. My Uncle Bert." She was defiant again, but her hand shook and her eyes glazed. It was coming now. He was like a man awaiting bad news, knowing it was inevitable, knowing even exactly that it was going to be, but still hoping that there would be some detail, some fact to mitigate it. "That night," she said, "he stood there just like you. Only he was holding a piece of wood and there was blood on it and all over him. 'I've cut myself,' he said. 'Don't look, Lizzie, I've cut myself.' "

  *16*

  When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places seeking rest and finding none. He saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. —The Gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

  She told it in the second person, "You did this," "You did that." Archery realised he was hearing what no parent and no psychiatrist had ever heard, and he marvelled. The peculiar use of the pronoun seemed to draw his own mind into the child's body so that he could see with her eyes and feel with her overweening terror.

  She sat in the damp dusk on the spot where it had all begun for her, utterly still now. Only her eyelids moved. Sometimes, at agonising moments in the narrative, she would close her eyes then open them again with a slow exhalation of breath. Archery had never been to a seance—would indeed have disapproved of such a thing as being theologically untenable—but he had read of them. Elizabeth Crilling's steady outpouring of terrible events told in a flat monotone was reminiscent, he thought, of mediumistic revelation. She was coming to the end now and a weary relief cross
ed her face as of one shedding a load.

  "...You put your coat on, your best coat because it was your best frock, and you ran across the road, down the sideway and past the greenhouse. Nobody saw you because there was no one about. Or was there? Surely that was the back door closing softly.

  "You came very quietly around the side of the house and then you saw it was only Uncle Bert who had come out of the house into the garden.

  " 'Uncle Bert, Uncle Bert! I've got my best frock on. Can I go and show it to Tessie?'

  "Suddenly you were very frightened, more frightened than you had ever been in all your life, because Uncle Bert was breathing in such a funny way, gasping and coughing like Daddy did when he had one of his attacks. Then he turned round and there was red stuff all over him, on his hands and all down the front of his coat.

  " 'I've cut myself,' he said. 'Don't look, Lizzie. I've just cut myself.'

  " 'I want Tessie! I want Tessie!'

  " 'Don't you go up there!'

  " 'You're not to touch me. I've got my new dress on. I'll tell my mummy.'

  "He just stood there with the red stuff on him and his face was like the face of a lion, big thick mouth, thick nose, curly tawny hair. Yes, it was like the lion in that picture book Mummy said you must not look at...

  "The red stuff had splashed on to his face and trickled to the corner of his mouth. He brought that dreadful face down close to yours and shouted righl at you: 'You tell her, Lizzie Crilling, you stuck-up little snob, and d'you know what I'll do? Wherever I am—wherever, d'you hear me?—I'll find you and I'll give you what I gave the old girl.' "

  It was over. He could tell that by the way she came out of her trance, sat up and gave a kind of moan.

  "But you went back," Archery murmured. "You went back with your mother?"

  "My mother!" Weeping would not have surprised him. This violent bitter laughter did. On a high discordant peal, she stopped suddenly and rushed into her answer. "I was only five, only a kid. I didn't know what he meant, not then. I was much more frightened of letting her know I'd been over there." He noted that "her" and knew intuitively she would not mention her mother by name again. "You see, I didn't even know it was blood and I reckon I must have thought it was paint.