by Ruth Rendell
It was cold, in spite of the two wall heaters with their thin, glowing elements. The curtains to the cabinet were open and you could see a green and black tartan blanket thrown over the chair Mrs. Fitter would sit in. This time Dolly was not asked to assist the medium with her dressing. Graciously, as to a favored novice, Mrs. Leebridge gave her the black clothes to hand round among the audience. Again Miss Finlay pulled the black tights inside out, her face drawn into a frown of concentration. Roberta Fitter was rather a long time getting ready, and a murmur of relief went up from the twenty or so people there when at last she appeared in the shapeless dress and the black Chinese slippers, crossed the stage with bowed head and hunched shoulders, and sat in the chair, drawing the blanket around her knees.
“It’s no trouble to her, going into a trance, is it?” Miss Finlay whispered. “It’s a knack I could do with. I find it more and more difficult getting off to sleep these days.”
“Sssh,” said Mrs. Leebridge.
When the lights were turned off, it was much darker in the hall than it had been in August. It was so dark, pitchy black, that at first Dolly thought they would be able to see nothing. Then Mrs. Collins put on the red lamp by the cabinet. It was a relief. The brief blackness, the icy cold blackness, had for a moment been alarming, bringing her a choking feeling of panic. Her hands, though in fur-lined mittens, still felt as cold as when she was walking along the street. She moved them about, rubbing the fingertips together. The red lamp gleamed but not warmly, not with the suggestion of a glowing brazier, but rather as a red warning light may shine in the darkness on a lonely road.
The curtains were drawn and the medium lost to view. Mrs. Collins came on to the front of the stage and suggested they sing the “Indian Love Call.” Miss Finlay put up her hand like a child in school and said she didn’t think it was the right sort of Indian. So they sang “The Volga Boatmen” once again, out-of-tune elderly voices mostly, cracked voices but for Dolly’s clear soprano, and after a chorus or two the curtains opened and the thin, turbaned figure of Hassan appeared between them.
“Good evening, friends.”
One or two people said good evening. The curtains seemed to move and he was gone, though it was too dark to see him go. The fidgeting among the audience ceased and there was silence, stillness, the dark and the cold. Someone had switched off the wall heaters. Their light would have been a distraction but the air seemed to be growing steadily and rapidly icier. Miss Finlay, her hands in woollen gloves, was pulling the front of her coat down to cover her calves. Dolly glanced to her right and she could just see, now her eyes had become used to the dark, that the woman who sat next to her was holding hands with the man on her other side. They were not young or good-looking or well-dressed, they were just an ordinary, middle-aged, working-class, married couple, but they had each other and each had the other’s hand to hold. Dolly hunched her shoulders, tense with increasing, incomprehensible alarm. If nothing happened in the next few minutes she wouldn’t be able to stand it, she would have to leave. Someone coughed slightly, a nervous clearing of the throat.
Then, when it felt as if you could have cut the cold, tense air with a knife, Hassan spoke from the cabinet:
“Is there someone here who has lost a gentleman who liked growing things? A market gardener perhaps? A gentleman with green fingers?”
The audience was silent.
“He’s waiting to come through,” Hassan’s voice said. “A florist, could it be?”
A woman behind Dolly piped nervously, “My husband had his own greengrocery business.”
“That’s the voice!”
The curtains quivered. A figure appeared in something whitish that caught the red gleam from the lamp. It suddenly struck Dolly, for the first time it truly came to her, how terrible and wonderful it was, how it changed your whole life and way of looking at things, to have spirits brought to you thus from the abode of the dead. She trembled and stared.
“Is it you, Stan?” the woman said. Dolly heard the chair behind her creak and scrape as the greengrocer’s widow got to her feet. Her voice was yearning. “I’ve missed you so, Stan. Put out your hand to me, won’t you put out your hand?”
The specter extended a long thin hand that quivered. The arm, from which draperies fell back, passed in its own miasma of coldness close to Dolly’s face and she gazed at it, that skinny, sinewy arm, very thin for a man’s. The woman leaned forward between Dolly and her neighbor and reached out her own hand as if to try and touch the outstretched fingers but the spirit retreated with a slow twirling movement, glided away without even a whisper of sound from its trailing wrappings, and slipped between the curtains.
The widow was still standing up, still half-leaning across the people in front of her. “He didn’t speak to me, he didn’t speak a word. I wonder if he’s angry. They say they know everything on the Other Side. I wonder if he knows I couldn’t keep the business going. I did try but it was too much for me. Oh, Stan, why didn’t you speak to me … ?”
“Silence, please, friends,” said Mrs Collins. “We must have quiet.”
The woman’s voice dropped to a whisper and then was hushed. People seemed stilled by the cold, paralyzed by it. Dolly was so cold now she was hugging herself for warmth. But there seemed no warmth left anywhere to find and the cold as deep now as in the place where those shrouded figures came from and returned to.
Hassan’s voice came hollowly from the cabinet.
“I have a lady waiting to come through. She’s a lady who died before her time. An operation perhaps or a wound in the lower parts.”
Dolly kept absolutely still. Her mother had had two abdominal operations before she died. She waited for the lemon scent to come and, when there was no lemon scent, for someone else to claim the woman. Somehow she knew her mother would not come without that heralding breath of perfume. It was not Edith who waited there on the edge of the living world for Hassan to lead her over the threshold.
And now she was becoming afraid. Someone surely would claim the woman. Please, please claim her, Dolly mouthed silently.
“A young lady,” Hassan’s voice persisted. “There’s somebody here who must have lost a young lady that passed over in November.”
Then Dolly knew no one would claim her, for she knew who it was and knew it was for her. Perhaps she had really known for a long time now and that was why she was shivering with cold. Her teeth would have chattered if she had not held them clenched.
She gathered her strength. Her teeth chattered as soon as she parted them but she spoke. “Is it for me?”
“That’s the voice!”
“Myra,” Dolly said, “is it you?”
The curtains parted and Myra came out of them. She wore a long white robe like all the specters did but the red light gleamed on her red hair, and when Dolly saw the dabble of blood on her skirts, the flickering spotting of red, she jumped up and screamed aloud. She couldn’t help herself. The scream came involuntarily from her throat and she went on screaming until Mrs. Collins seized her and clamped a hand over her mouth.
Myra had retreated swiftly. The cabinet was open and Roberta Fitter sat there, staring wildly about her like a madwoman. Someone in the audience called out:
“Put the lights on!”
“No, you don’t,” said Mrs. Leebridge. “You’ll kill her. Look at her! Look what that girl’s done.” She went almost fearfully to the cabinet and took one of Mrs. Fitter’s hands in hers. “The ectoplasm rushing back like that, it’s a wonder she’s not all burned up.”
Dolly broke away from Mrs. Collins’s grasp and ran out of the hall. She knew there was no escaping Myra now and Myra was waiting for her in the porch, not visible, not tangible—unless that tremor against her face was her cold touch—but a voice that spoke in Myra’s accents.
“I may as well walk home with you, Doreen.”
Dolly pushed open the door and went out. It had begun to snow lightly, a fine icy powder. She began to walk home through the snow with Myra
by her side.
14
The cleaver and the knives, Diarmit Bawne’s elemental weapons, lay gathering dust. They were still in the Harrods bag on the floor in a corner of the room and he never looked at them. They did not belong to him but to Conal Moore who had been a thief and a murderer and who, when the police were after him, had run away home to Ireland.
Conal Moore had a sister and brother-in-law in Kilburn who refused to speak to him and did not want to know him because of his criminal behavior. For this reason, too, no one would have anything to do with him, would not recognize his existence, except the police. The worst of his crimes had been to hide in a tunnel on the old railway line and kill a girl who came through and cut her head off. After that, there was no help for it but to run away back to County Clare. But before he left he had had the sense to leave his room and some of his belongings in the care of a responsible citizen called Diarmit Bawne.
Only Diarmit knew he was in Ireland and knew he had killed the girl. Only Diarmit knew where the weapons he had used were. He intended to make a statement about all this to the police, lay all the facts about Conal Moore before them and hand over to them the Harrods bag of knives, but at the moment he was too busy to get around to it. Unlike Conal Moore, he was a responsible hard-working person with a job and he didn’t have the time to devote to all these outside things.
Conal had been a mass of nerves, afraid of all kinds of things. One of the things he had been afraid of was that they would demolish the house while he was in it and he would be buried in the rubble. Diarmit couldn’t help laughing to himself when he thought of anyone believing a thing like that. For one thing, the men would have seen him if he had put his head out of the window and shouted. He had been a small insignificant creature, Diarmit remembered, but not that small, not so small you couldn’t see him. He, Diarmit, could wear his clothes, after all, did wear them every day. It wasn’t that he much cared for the idea of wearing a murderer’s clothes, especially the dark red trousers and shirts Conal had worn so that they should not show bloodstains, but it was a terrible waste not to wear them. Waste not, want not, as his mother used to say. Diarmit Bawne had no family now, he was alone in the world, standing on his own feet, but Conal Moore had a dozen or so brothers and sisters living all over Ireland and in London and Liverpool and Birmingham. He was their responsibility now, they must do the best they could for him, for Diarmit had done enough, looking after his home and his clothes and his possessions, not many would do as much.
It was only two or three weeks after Conal had run away that Diarmit had got himself the job in the Greek’s shop that was part butcher’s, part delicatessen. It was only a short walk from Mount Pleasant Green. The Greek could understand very little of what Diarmit said and Diarmit could understand about as much of what the Greek said, but this suited them both. Formerly the Greek had always employed other Greeks who talked all day to him in his own tongue. He wanted someone who would leave him to the quiet and solitude he liked. Diarmit never tried to talk to him much; they had nothing in common and he was busy with his own thoughts. He had begun thinking a lot about Conal Moore.
With his lazy ways, his nerves, the crazy way he had of thinking people were going to knock him over and trample on him, Conal would have made a bad impression on Georgiou, he would never have got the job. Probably he hadn’t got a job at home in Ireland. People like that were always out of work, living on the dole or, worse, on the charity of their families. Conal had thought he was going to do that with his relations in Kilburn but his brother-in-law had been too tough a nut to crack. None of his family wanted him any more, they had had enough to last them a lifetime. It seemed likely to Diarmit that Conal would never be seen again. He would either disappear quietly among the wilds of County Clare and his crimes disappear with him or else he would be caught and spend the rest of his life in prison. Either way they would all be rid of him. Sometimes Diarmit thought that perhaps he wouldn’t go to the police after all. What had the police ever done for him? They hadn’t even had the common courtesy to come back and tell him how their case against Conal was progressing. Besides, he would have to tell them everything he knew about Conal and that would take hours, take all day, for he knew him as he knew himself, and quite frankly he was getting a bit sick of him, he often thought he’d like to banish him from his mind altogether.
Georgiou had once employed two assistants and a girl part-time but he did so no longer; times were hard and wages high. There were just himself and Diarmit in the shop. The lease came up for renewal in the summer and Georgiou knew his rent was going up, though he did not yet know by how much. “Sky-high” was what the tenants of the other shops in the row said. Georgiou would not fight it, he said to his wife, he would make the landlords a reasonable offer and if they wouldn’t have it, too bad. People talked about the rents going up double, he couldn’t pay double, if that happened he’d retire. He was past sixty anyway. No one said any of this to Diarmit. What business was it of his? He was only an employee and if Georgiou retiring meant he had no job, too bad.
Diarmit sat in his window in the evenings and looked across the green at the block of sheltered flats going up next to the hall. Progress had been slow but they were nearly done now. The roof was on. His own mother was dead, God rest her, but Conal’s was alive and wouldn’t one of those flats be just the thing for her? But Conal would never think of a thing like that, too feckless, too lacking in responsibility.
Sometimes Diarmit gave the room a good clean. The first time he did this he was appalled at the mess Conal had left behind him. Bits of stale food dropped behind things and now coated in mold, a heap of dried-up, mildewed teabags on a newspaper under the bed, dirty clothes in piles, a drawer that had once had biscuits in it now full of mouse droppings.
Once he had cleaned up Conal’s mess, he felt really clean in himself and he felt free. Keeping the room and himself that way had become very important to him. Now he would have liked to clean his mind of Conal too, but that was much harder than cleaning a room. Try as he did, he found himself dwelling on Conal when he lay down to sleep, on the way to work, at work and on the way back, when he sat at the window, watching the green and the new flats and the hall where all those cranky people came. He would think of Conal’s past and his present, imagining him in the green west and weaving about him long strange fantasies.
And by night he often had a Conal dream in which the other man sometimes appeared bound and gagged and led by a halter, and sometimes, more often, toiling up a hillside, bearing a heavy sack on his shoulders.
15
Harold sat in the breakfast room, surrounded by mementoes of Myra, writing his novel. It had come to him some months before, round about the time of Pup’s twentieth birthday, that with his surely unrivaled knowledge, it would be a good idea for him to attempt a work of historical fiction. He wrote in longhand on pads of pale blue Basildon Bond. His subject was the unsavory life of that least exemplary of the sons of George III, Ernest Duke of Cumberland, who was said to have committed incest with his sister and murdered his valet. Harold was treating these allegations as fact. He was in the middle of Chapter Five in which the young prince and the Princess Amelia began their guilty liaison.
He read nothing now but works on and novels about the children of George III. He read them at home and he read them in the shop when the new assistant was attending to customers and Pup wasn’t about. Pup was often absent these days, up at the new branch he had opened in Crouch Hill. In an armchair very like the one at home, Harold sat in the storeroom, which was now stuffed full of Pup’s word processors, and read about the English court in the late eighteenth century. His writing, what he should write next and how the plot should develop, filled his waking thoughts so that he became quieter than ever and apparently morose. This withdrawal into himself was attributed to the loss of Myra and some said that poor Harold was beginning to break up.
He had told no one what he was doing. In the days before he was a writer and had m
erely been a reader, he had never talked about what he read. He didn’t expect others to be interested in what he did; he wasn’t interested in them. His children, in these past months, had become rather shadowy to him. He was aware that Dolly was in the house, that meals appeared and housework was done, but he seldom said much to her. She had her own friends, he thought when he thought about it at all.
Ron and Eileen Ridge came round to ask him if he felt like starting bingo again. They would call for him, they would like to. Dolly admitted them to the house and called out to her father, rather than showing them straightaway into the breakfast room. This gave Harold the chance to hide the Basildon Bond away out of sight and be discovered brooding in his sanctuary.
“You’ve got to come out of yourself sooner or later, Harold,” said Eileen in a mildly scolding tone. “You owe it to Myra’s memory.”
Harold nodded vaguely.
“I know you’ll say you’ve got your daughter and that’s perfectly true.”
“She has her own friends,” said Harold.
Mrs. Collins, Wendy Collins, Miss Finlay, Mrs. Leebridge. Dolly had never much liked the last two, which was just as well, since she never saw them any more. The Adonai Spiritists had closed their doors to her.
“I couldn’t take the responsibility, could I?” said Mrs. Collins while Dolly was measuring Wendy for a trouser suit. “You might have another of your fits and then where should I be?”
“I didn’t have a fit.”
“Whatever it was, dear. You can kill a medium like that. Mrs. Fitter was under the weather for days. And all because you were privileged to catch a glimpse of young Mrs. Yearman.”
Dolly said nothing about its having been more than a glimpse. It was only Pup she had told about hearing the tap of Myra’s high heels following her up the path that night and up the steps to the door. Only he knew how she heard Myra’s whisper as well as Edith’s now. Once or twice, with gooseflesh on her arms, she had felt Myra’s hand lift up the curtain of hair and a finger run across the nevus.