by Ruth Rendell
Liza was shy at first. If Mrs. Spurdell had been kind and friendly she might have found things easier, but this fat old woman with the surly expression made her speak abruptly and perhaps too precisely.
“You don’t sound the sort of person I was looking for,” Mrs. Spurdell was moved to say. “Frankly, you sound more as if you’d be off to university than looking for a daily’s job.”
Liza thought about that one. It gave her ideas but of course she didn’t voice them. She said, “If I can work for you I’d do it properly.”
Mrs. Spurdell sighed. “You’d better see the rest of the house. It might be too much for you.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
But Liza went upstairs with Mrs. Spurdell, walking behind her. The caterpillar waist and hips and the wobbly fat legs threatened to make her giggle, so she made herself think about sad things. The saddest thing she could contemplate was Eve in prison. Her thoughts flew to Eve and she experienced a moment or two of sharp fear.
Mrs. Spurdell’s bedroom was all in pink. A white fluffy rabbit sat in the middle of the pink satin bed. Another bedroom was blue and a third a kind of peach color. Liza began to hope and hope she would get the job because there were so many things here she longed to look at more closely, to study and speculate about. Then Mrs. Spurdell took her into a room she said was Mr. Spurdell’s study and Liza saw the books. There was a whole bookcase full of them. There was a box full of white paper on the desk and pens and pencils in a jar made of some kind of green-veined stone.
She saw a few more books in the gloomy chamber Mrs. Spurdell called the dining room, about twenty of them on a shelf. At once Liza began to feel differently about the house. It was no longer simply grotesque and ridiculous. It was a place with books in it and paper and pencils.
“I can keep this clean,” she said. “It won’t be too much for me.”
“I’ll start you on a trial basis. You look very young.”
But not so young as I am, Liza thought. The amount Mrs. Spurdell offered her seemed very low indeed. Even to her, ignorant as she was, it seemed low. She would have to be strong and speak up. To her surprise she heard herself say very firmly to Mrs. Spurdell that two pounds fifty an hour wouldn’t be enough, she wanted three pounds. Mrs. Spurdell said certainly not, she wouldn’t consider it, and that left Liza at a loss. There seemed nothing for it except to go, but when she got up, having no idea that this was bargaining or even what bargaining was, Mrs. Spurdell said to wait a minute and all right, but to remember it was on a trial basis. Two mornings a week and one afternoon and she could start next week. Tomorrow, please, said Liza.
“Goodness me,” said Mrs. Spurdell in a voice that implied Liza would fail in her undertaking, “you are keen.”
For the rest of the day she wandered about the town, doing all sorts of adventurous things, going into a pub and then a cinema. Some of them made her heart beat faster, but she did them. They served her in the pub, though somewhat suspiciously. It seemed she could just pass for eighteen. The film she saw shocked her deeply. She was also electrified by it. Were there such places? Were there huge cities of stone buildings taller than any tall tree, where the streets were gleaming loops on stilts, where a million cars went to and fro and chased each other and men made violent assaults on women? But she took it calmly when a man screamed and died, his blood spraying onto the wall behind him. After all, she had seen the real thing.
The rest of it she found hard to believe. Reluctantly, she decided it must belong in a genre of entertainment Eve had mentioned in their English literature lessons: science fiction. H. G. Wells, she thought vaguely, and John Wyndham, whose names she had heard but whose works she had never read.
If she had access to Eve she could have asked. She asked Sean instead while they were going home in the car.
“That’s Miami.”
“What do you mean, that’s Miami? What’s Miami?”
He was never much good at explaining. “It’s a place, isn’t it? In America. You seen it on TV.”
“No.” One day she’d tell him why she hadn’t. “Have you been there?”
“Me? Come on, love, you know I never been there.”
“Then you don’t know, do you? They might have made it up. They might have built it in a—in a studio. Like toys.”
“Them guys firing guns, they wasn’t toys.”
“No, they were actors. They didn’t really die, it wasn’t real blood, it couldn’t be, so how d’you know the rest wasn’t made up too?”
He had no answer for that. He could only keep saying, “’Course it’s real, everyone knows it’s real.”
As they were going up into the caravan, she said, “If it’s real I’d like to go there, I’d like to see.”
“Chance’d be a fine thing,” said Sean.
Because life is like that—you see or hear something new to you early in the day and then later the same information comes up again in quite another context—Miami was on the television that evening. Not Miami, L.A., said Sean, but it looked the same to her. Probably, then, such places existed just as, in another program, the great castle called Caernarvon and the place called Oxford.
“Eve was there,” she said, answering the bell that rang in her head.
“What was she doing there?”
“She was at a school. It’s called a university. Mrs. Spurdell thought I was going to one, she said so.”
“Your mum was at Oxford University?”
She was genuinely puzzled. “Why not?”
“Come on, love, she was having you on.”
“No, I don’t think so. She had to leave it, I don’t know why, something to do with me being born.”
Sean didn’t say anymore, but she had the impression he wanted to, that he was struggling to say something but didn’t know how to put it. At last he said, “I don’t want to upset you.”
“You won’t.”
“Well, then, d’you know who your dad was?”
Liza shook her head.
“Okay, sorry I asked.”
“No, it’s all right. It’s just that she doesn’t know, Eve doesn’t know.”
She could see that she had shocked him. The spraying bullets on the screen and the spurting blood didn’t affect him, nor did the violated women or the bombs that flattened a city, but that Eve was ignorant of the identity of her child’s father, that shook him to the core. He was bereft of speech. She put her arm around him and held him close.
“That’s what she said, anyway.” She tried to reassure him. “I’ve got my own ideas, though. I think I know who it was, whatever she said.”
“Not that Bruno?”
“Oh, Sean. She didn’t know Bruno till I was nine. Shall I go on telling you about him?”
“If you want.” He said it gruffly.
“Well, then. He stayed and varnished the picture. He’d brought all the stuff with him in his bag. I didn’t think Eve would let him do it but she did. I didn’t think she’d speak to him but I was wrong there too. She asked him how he’d ever come to paint Shrove House and he said he’d seen it from the train.
“Not with the sun setting behind it you didn’t, she said, you must have been looking eastward. Ah, but I could tell how wonderful it would be from the other side, he said, so I came down here one summer evening and made a start. I was here a good many summer evenings. I didn’t see you, Eve said, and he said, I didn’t see you. If I had I’d have been back sooner.”
It was as if Sean hadn’t heard a word since she said that about not knowing who her father was. “She must have had one bloke after another,” he said, “one one night and another the next or even the same day. That’s really disgusting. That’s a terrible what-d’you-call-it to bring a child up in, especially a girl.”
“Environment,” she said. “Why especially a girl?”
“Oh, come on, Liza, it’s obvious.”
“Not to me,” she said, and then, “Don’t you want to hear about Bruno Drummond?”
T
EN
THE second time he came, the important time, was the day Liza saw the death’s-head moth. It was June.
He was thirty-one and lived in the town, in rooms over Mullins the greengrocer’s. His father was dead but his mother was still alive up in Cheshire. Once he had had a wife but she had left him and was living in somewhere called Gateshead with a dentist.
Liza, who was listening to this, said, “What’s a dentist?”
Bruno Drummond gave her the sort of look that meant he thought she was teasing him and said something about expecting she’d been to one of those a few times. But Mother said, “A kind of doctor who looks after your teeth.”
The reason for his visit, he said, was to paint the valley with the train, and perhaps he had done some painting earlier, but he called at the gatehouse soon after ten in the morning, stayed to lunch, and was still there in the evening. Instead of a chair he sat on the floor. He related the story of his life.
“I should never have married,” he said. “I don’t believe in marriage but I allowed myself to be persuaded. Marriage is really the first step in getting swallowed up in the killing machine.”
“What do you mean, the killing machine?” said Mother.
“Society, slavery, conformity, the poor ox that treads out the corn, walking round and round all day long, and muzzled too, most likely. I’m an anarchist. Now you’ll say, what sort of an anarchist is it that marries and gets a civil service job to pay the mortgage? Not exactly a card-carrying one. My defense is that I got out of it after three years of hell.”
“Were you really a civil servant?”
“On a low rung. Of course I’d been to art school. As a matter of fact, I was at the Royal College. When I was married I worked in the DSS benefit office in Shrewsbury.”
“So how do you live now?”
“I paint, that’s what I always wanted to do, but it’s not lucrative. Then I paint houses too, rooms, that is. I’ll tell you how I got into that. Someone, a woman, asked me what I did and I said, I paint, so she said, would you come and paint my dining room? I’d like to have spat in her face, the fool. But then I thought, well, why not? Beggars can’t be choosers. And I’ve been doing it on a regular basis ever since—more or less, I’m opposed to regularity of any kind. I don’t pay tax, I don’t pay National Insurance. I suppose somewhere someone’s got a record of me and keeps sending me demands to my old address. But they don’t know where I am, no one does but my mother, even my ex-wife doesn’t. That’s freedom and the price I pay is relatively small.”
“What price is that?” said Mother.
“Never having any money.”
“Yes, that’s freedom,” said Mother. “Some would call it a very high price.”
“Not me. I’m different.”
Bruno played his guitar after that and sang the Johnny Cash song about finding freedom on the open road and men refusing to do what they were told. Liza could tell Mother liked him, she was looking at him the way she had sometimes looked at Mr. Tobias. Perhaps she liked his voice and the way he pronounced words, unlike the way anyone else did. Liza remembered Hugh with the beard, his fuzzy cheeks and upper lips. Bruno looked as if no hair had ever or could ever grow on his smooth girlish face.
In the summer the solanum plant that climbed over the back of the gatehouse showed its blue flowers at Liza’s window. Mother called it the flowering potato because it and potatoes and tomatoes all belonged to the same family. When she came up to bed that evening Liza knelt on the bed up at the window and saw, a few inches from her eyes, the death’s-head moth, immobile and with its wings spread flat, on one of the solanum leaves.
The moth book had told her Acherontia atropos likes to feed on potato leaves. It also told her how rare a visitor to the British Isles this moth is. But she was in no doubt about it, this was no Privet Hawk. No other moth had that clear picture of a skull on its back between its forewings, a pale yellowish death’s-head with black eyeholes and a domed forehead. This was the moth Drechsler had put into his painting, the one at Shrove on whose frame the key was kept.
She knew Mother would want to see it too. Mother might be quite cross, at the very least disappointed, if she didn’t tell her about Acherontia outside the window. She went down and opened the door. Bruno was softly twanging his guitar and they each had a glass of red wine. They didn’t look very busy, but Mother said she couldn’t come now, Liza ought to be in bed, and if it really was a death’s-head moth it would no doubt reappear the next day.
But the next morning it was gone, never to be seen again. Because she had found Mr. Tobias in Mother’s bed after just such an evening, with wine and food and enjoyment, she expected to see Bruno there in the morning. She was older now, she approached the door more tentatively and pushed it open with care. Mother was alone and when Liza went to the window she saw that the little orange car was gone.
The day gone by, the first time Mother had been indifferent to the things she cared for, she called the Day of the Death’s-head.
It was over a week before they saw Bruno again and that was the day Mother went into the town on the bus. She had a list with her, and most of the items on it were the kind of things you bought at a fruit and vegetable shop. Liza had seen pictures in a baby’s book when she was little. A greengrocer’s was the correct word, Mother said.
“Can I come?”
Mother shook her head.
“All right, but I don’t want to be left here in my bedroom. It’s boring.”
“You can go in the library or the morning room at Shrove if you prefer that. It’s up to you.”
“The morning room.”
Because it was much lighter and from the windows you could see the trains go by, Mother must have thought. Or because the famous people from history were there in their glass case. Perhaps, though, she was thinking about Bruno Drummond, and not about Liza at all.
After Mother had gone and she had seen a train going south and had studied once more the wedding photograph of Mr. Tobias in a sleek dark suit and Mrs. Tobias in a large hat and spotted dress, she drew aside the curtain to reveal the stepladder. It was just as she had left it.
She carried it across the room and set it up close beside the picture of the flowers and the death’s-head moth. She took great care to press down the top step, which would lock the ladder and make it safe. It was possible, of course, that the key was no longer there. Mother had been in this room many times since Liza had seen her place it on top of the picture frame and it was a wonder she had never come upon the hidden steps. Climb up and find out.
The key was there. Liza jumped down, unlocked the door, and opened it. She stood in front of the box thing with the window on the front and studied it. There were knobs and switches underneath the window, rather like the knobs and switches on Mother’s electric stove. Liza pressed or turned them one after another but nothing happened.
She understood about electricity. Their old heater wouldn’t work unless it was plugged into the point and the switch pressed down. Here the plug was in but the point not switched on. She pressed the switch down. Still nothing. Try the routine of pressing or turning all those knobs and switches.
When she turned the largest knob nothing happened but when she pushed it in a buzzing sound came out of the box and, to her extreme astonishment, a point of light appeared in the window. The light expanded, shivering, and gradually a picture began to form, gray and white and dark gray, the colors of the etchings on the morning room walls, but recognizably a picture.
And not a still picture, as an etching was, but moving and happening, like life. There were people, of about her own age, not speaking but dancing to music. Liza had heard the music before, she could even have said what it was, something called Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.
Briefly, she was afraid. The people moved, they danced, they threw their legs high in the air, they were manifestly real, yet not real. She had taken a step backward, then another, but now she came closer. The children continued to dance. On
e girl came to the center of the stage and danced alone, spinning around with one leg held out high behind her. Liza looked around the back of the box. It was just a box, black with ridges and holes and more switches.
A lot of print, white on black and gray, came up on the window, then a face, then—most alarming of all—a voice. The first words Liza ever heard come out of a television set she could never remember. She was too overawed by the very idea of a person being in there and speaking. She was very nearly stunned.
But that feeling gradually passed. She was afraid, she was shocked, she was filled with wonder, then she was pleased, gratified, she began to enjoy it. She sat down cross-legged on the floor and gazed, enraptured. An old man and a dog were going for a walk in a countryside very like the one she knew. Sometimes the old man stopped and talked and his face got very large so that she could see all the furrows in his face and his white whiskers. Next there was a woman teaching another woman to cook something. They mixed things up in a bowl, eggs and sugar and flour and butter, and no more than two minutes later, when the first woman opened the oven door, she lifted out the baked cake, all dark and shiny and risen high. It was magic. It was the magic Liza had read about in fairy stories.
She watched for an hour. After the cooking came a dog driving sheep about on a hillside, then a man with a lot of glass bottles and tubes and a chart on the wall, not one word of which she could understand. She went into the morning room to look at the clock. Mother couldn’t get back before five and it was ten past four now. Liza sat down on the floor again and watched a lot of drawings like book illustrations moving about, a cat and a mouse and a bear in the woods. She watched a man telling people the names of the stars in the sky and another one talking to a boy who had built a train engine. If it had been possible, she could have watched all night. But if Mother came back and caught her she would never be able to watch it again, for she had intuited that the door was kept locked because Mother didn’t want her to watch it at all.