by Ruth Rendell
Trust Tamsin Selby to be talking to a man, Joan thought, as she came out of her gate, holding Cheryl by the hand.
‘Wave to your Daddy.’
The child was more interested in the man and the dog on The Green. Telling herself that she had meant to go that way in any case, Joan followed her reluctantly.
Patrick had never been one to waste words on the weather and other people’s health. His eyes, which had been fixed with a kind of calculating disgust on Edward Carnaby, now turned upon Joan, taking in the details of her limp cotton dress, her sunburned arms and the brown roots of her hair where the rinse was growing out.
‘Isn’t it hot?’ She was uncomfortable in his presence and felt the remark had been foolish. In fact, it was no longer particularly hot. A faint breeze was stirring the waters of the pond, ruffling it to match the mackerel sky.
‘I don’t know why English people make a cult of grumbling about the weather,’ he said. He looked very Teutonic as he spoke and she remembered someone had told her he had spent his childhood in Germany and America She laughed awkwardly and made a grab for Cheryl’s hand. He had made it so clear he didn’t want to talk to her that she jumped and blushed when he called her back.
‘How’s business?’
‘Business?’ Of course he meant Denholm’s business, the factory. ‘All right, I suppose,’ she said, and then because ever since before tea there had been a vague, half-formed worry nagging at her mind, ‘Den says things have been a bit slack lately.’
‘We can’t all get Harwell contracts.’ He touched the trunk of a great oak and with a small smile looked up into its branches. ‘They don’t grow on trees. It’s a matter of work, my dear Joan, work and single-mindedness. Denholm will have to watch his step or I’ll be taking over one of these days.’
She said nothing. Malice quirked the corners of his thin mouth. She looked away from him and at the dog. Then she saw that he, too, was staring in the same direction.
‘Expansion is life,’ he said. ‘Give it a few months and then we’ll make things hum.’
Shivering a little, she drew back from him, feeling a sudden chill that seemed to come not from the scurrying wind but from the man himself.
‘We’re late, Cheryl. It’s past your bedtime.’
‘She can come with me,’ said Patrick, his curious smile broadening. ‘I’m going that way.’
The green Ford had moved away from the Hallows gate but Tamsin was still there, watching. As the man and child walked off towards the chalets, Joan suddenly thought she would go and speak to Tamsin, demand the explanation she knew Patrick would never give to her. But Tamsin, she saw, was in no mood for talking. Something or someone had upset her and she was retreating up the willow drive, her head bent and her hands clenched beneath her chin. Joan went home and put the children to bed. When she came downstairs Denholm was asleep. He looked so like Jeremy, his eyes lightly closed, his cheek pink and smooth against the bunched-up cushion, that she hadn’t the heart to wake him.
Edward Carnaby kept on turning back and waving all the way down to the Manor gates. Tamsin stared after him, unable to smile in return. Her knees felt weak and she was afraid she might faint. When she reached the house she heard Queenie bark, a single staccato bark followed by a howl. The howls went on for a few seconds; then they stopped and all was silent. Tamsin knew what the howls meant. Patrick had tied up the dog to go into someone’s house.
She went upstairs and into the balcony room. In the faint bloom on the dressing-table Patrick had written with a precise finger: Dust this. She fell on the bed and lay face-downwards.
Half an hour had passed when she heard the footsteps and at first she thought they were Patrick’s. But whoever it was was coming alone. There was no accompanying tip-tap of dog’s claws on stone. O God, she thought, I shall have to tell him. Otherwise Patrick might, there in front of everyone at the party.
The doors were unlocked. There was nothing to stop him coming in, but he didn’t. He knocked with the prearranged signal. What would he do when he knew it all? There was still a chance she could persuade Patrick. She put her fingers in her ears, willing him to go. He knocked again and it seemed to her that he must hear through glass and wood, stone walls and thick carpets, the beating of her heart.
At last he went away.
‘Damnation!’ she heard him say from beneath her as if he were looking through the lounge window. The footsteps hurried away down the avenue and out through the footpath on to the Nottingham road. The gate swung, failed to catch and flapped against the post, bang, swing, bang. Tamsin went into the room where the men had put the parcel. She broke her nails untying the string but she was crying too much to notice.
3
There are perhaps few things more galling to one’s amour propre than to act in a covert, clandestine way when no such discretion is necessary. Oliver Gage was a proud man and now, creeping round the Hallows paths, tapping signals on the glass doors, he felt that someone had made a fool of him.
‘Damnation!’ he said, this time under his breath.
She had obviously gone out with him. Pressure had been put on her. Well, so much the better if that meant she had been preparing the ground. He would make his intentions clear at the party.
He went out into The Circle and made the humiliating detour necessary before he could find his car that he had parked on the ride off the main road. When he entered Linchester for the second time that night it was by the Manor gates and he drove into his own garage drive with a sense of disgruntled virtue and the shame he always felt when he returned to his house. Oliver lived in one of the largest houses on Linchester but it was too small for him. He hated it already. Every Friday night when he came up from his four days in London the sight of the house, magnified perhaps in his mind during his absence, sickened him and reminded him afresh of his misfortunes. For, as Oliver grew older, the sizes of his houses diminished. This was not due to a reversal in his financial life. One of the executives of a national daily, his income now topped the seven thousand mark, but only about a third of this found its way into Oliver’s pocket. The rest, never seen by him yet never forgotten, streamed away via an army of solicitors and bank managers and accountants into the laps of his two discarded wives.
When he had married Nancy—pretty, witty Nancy!—and built this, the smallest of his houses to date, he had forgotten for a few months the other pressures on his income. Was not love a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Now, a year later, he reflected that the gods were just and of his pleasant vices had made instruments to plague him.
He unlocked the door and dropped his keys on to the hall table between the Flamenco doll and the Cherry Herring bottle that Nancy by the addition of a shade stuck all over with hotel labels had converted into a lamp. In all his matrimonial career Oliver had never before given houseroom to such an object. He hated it but he felt that, in ensuring it was the first thing his eye fell on when he entered his home, providence was meting out to him a stern exquisite justice.
Nancy’s sewing machine could be heard faintly from the lounge. The querulous whine of the motor fanned his ill-temper into rage. He pushed open the reeded glass door and went in. The room was tightly sealed and stifling, the windows all closed and the curtains drawn back in the way he loathed, carelessly, with no attention to the proper arrangement of their folds. Those curtains had cost him thirty pounds.
His wife—to himself and to one other Oliver occasionally referred to her as his present wife—lifted her foot from the pedal which controlled the motor and pushed damp hair back from a face on which sweat shone. Shreds of cotton and pieces of coloured fluff clung to her dress and littered the floor. There was even a piece of cotton dangling from her bracelet.
‘My Christ, it’s like an oven in here!’ Oliver flung back the french windows and scowled at Bernice Greenleaf who was walking coolly about the garden next-door, snipping the dead blossoms off an opulent Zephirine Drouhin. When she waved to him he changed the scowl i
nto a rigid smirk. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ he asked his wife.
She pulled a cobbled strip of black and red silk from under the needle. ‘I’m making a dress for Tamsin’s party.’
Oliver sat down heavily, catching his foot in one of the Numdah rugs. (‘If we have wood block flooring and rugs, darling,’ Nancy had said, ‘we’ll save pounds on carpeting.’)
‘This I cannot understand,’ Oliver said. ‘Did I or did I not give you a cheque for twenty pounds last Tuesday with express instructions to buy yourself a dress?’
‘Well …’
‘Did I or did I not? That’s all I ask. It’s a perfectly simple question.’
Nancy’s babyish, gamine face puckered. A curly face, he had called it once, tenderly, lovingly, touching with a teasing finger the tip-tilted nose, the bunchy cheeks, the fluffy fair eyebrows.
‘Well, darling, I had to have shoes, you see, and stockings. And there was the milk bill …’ Her voice faltered. ‘I saw this remnant and this pattern …’ She held an envelope towards him diffidently. Oliver glowered at the coloured picture of the improbably tall women in cylindrical cotton frocks. ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’
‘It will be quite ghastly,’ Oliver said coldly. ‘I shall be covered with shame. I shall be mortified. Tamsin always looks wonderful.’
As soon as the words were out he regretted them. Now was not the time. Nancy was going to cry. Her face swelled as if the skin itself was allergic to his anger.
‘Tamsin has a private income.’ The tears sprouted. ‘I only wanted to save you money. That’s all I think about, saving you money!’
‘Oh, don’t cry! I’m sorry, Nancy!’ She almost fell from her chair into his lap and he put his arms round her with the distaste that was part of his marital experience, the distaste that always came as love ebbed. Every bit of her was damp and clinging and unbearably hot.
‘I do want to economise, darling. I keep thinking of all that money going out month after month to Jean and Shirley. And what with both the boys at Bembridge …’ Oliver frowned. He disliked the reminder that he had been unable to afford to send the sons of his first marriage to Marlborough. ‘And Shirley always so greedy, insisting on sending Jennifer to a private school when state education is so good these days.’
‘You know nothing at all about state education,’ Oliver said.
‘Oh, darling, why did you have to marry such unattractive women? Any other women would have got married again. Two such disastrous—well, tragic marriages. I lie awake at night thinking about the inroads on our income.’
She was off on a well-worn track, the Friday night special. Oliver let her talk, reaching to the mantelpiece for a cigarette from the box.
‘And I haven’t got anything exciting for your dinner,’ she finished on a note of near-triumph.
‘We’ll go out to eat, then.’
‘You know we can’t afford it. Besides I’ve got to finish this filthy dress.’ She struggled from his lap back to the sewing machine.
‘This,’ said Oliver, ‘is the end.’ Nancy, already involved once more in fitting a huge sleeve into a tiny armhole, ignored him. She was not to know that it was with these words that Oliver had terminated each of his previous marriages. For him, too, they sounded dreadfully like the mere echoes of happy finalities. Must Nancy be his till death parted them? More securely than any devout Catholic, any puritan idealist, he had thought himself until recently, bound to his wife. Hercules had climbed his last tree. Unless—unless things would work out and he could get a wife with money of her own, a beautiful, well-dowered wife …
He stepped across the rugs, those small and far from luxuriant oases in the big desert of polished floor, and poured himself a carefully-measured drink. Then he sat down and gazed at their reflections, his and Nancy’s, in the glass on the opposite wall. Her remarks as to the unattractiveness of his former wives had seemed to denigrate his own taste and perhaps even his own personal appearance. But now, as he looked at himself, he felt their injustice. Anyone coming in, any stranger would, he thought bitterly, have taken Nancy for the cleaning woman doing a bit of overtime sewing, her hair separated into rough hanks, her face greasy with heat and effort. But as for him, with his smooth dark head, the sharply cut yet sensitive features, the long hands that held the blood-red glass … the truth of it was that he was wasted in these provincial, incongruous surroundings.
Nancy got up, shook her hair, and began to pull her dress over head. She was simply going to try on the limp half-finished thing but Oliver was no fool and he could tell from the way she moved slowly, coquettishly, that there was also intention to tempt him.
‘If you must strip in the living room you might pull the curtains,’ he said.
He got up and put his hand to the cords that worked the pulley, first the french windows, then at the long Georgian sashes at the front of the house. The silk folds moved to meet each other but not before, through the strip of narrowing glass, he had seen walking past the gate, a tall fair man who rested a freckled hand on a dog’s head, a man who was strolling home to a beautiful well-dowered wife …
With this glimpse there came into his mind a sudden passionate wish that this time things might for once go smoothly and to the advantage of Oliver Gage. He stood for a moment, thinking and planning, and then he realised that he had no wish to be here like this in the darkness with his wife, and he reached quickly for the light switch.
It was fully dark, outside as well as in, when Denholm awoke. He blinked, passed his hands across his face and stretched.
‘Ah, well,’ he said to his wife, ‘up the wooden hill.’
She had meant to save it all for the morning, but the hours of sitting silently beside the sleeping man had told on her nerves. His expression became incredulous as she began to tell him of the meeting on The Green.
‘He was pulling your leg,’ he said.
‘No, he wasn’t. I wouldn’t have believed him only I know you’ve been worried lately. You have been worried, haven’t you?’
‘Well, if you must know, things have been a bit dicey.’ She listened as the bantering tone left his voice. ‘Somebody’s been building up a big stake in the company.’ Only when he was talking business could Denholm shed facetiousness and become a man instead of a clown. ‘It’s been done through a nominee and we don’t know who it is.’
‘But, Den,’ she cried, ‘that must be Patrick!’
‘He wouldn’t be interested in us. Selbys are glass, nothing but glass and we’re chemicals.’
‘He would. I tell you, he is. He’s got that contract and he means to expand, to take you over. And it does rest with him. The others are just—what do you call it?—sleeping partners.’
She would have to say it, put into words the grotesque fear that had been churning her thoughts the entire evening.
‘D’you know what I think? I think it’s all malice, just because you once hit that dog.’
The shot had gone home, but still he hesitated, the jovial man, the confident provider.
‘You’re a proper old worry-guts, aren’t you?’ His hand reached for hers and the fingers were cold and not quite steady. ‘You don’t understand business. Business men don’t carry on that way.’
Did they? he wondered. Would they? His own holding in the firm had decreased precariously as his family had increased. How far could he trust the loyalty of those Smith-King uncles and cousins? Would they sell if they were sufficiently tempted?
‘I understand people,’ Joan said, ‘and I understand you. You’re not well, Den. The strain’s too much for you. I wish you’d see Dr. Greenleaf.’
‘I will,’ Denholm promised. As he spoke he felt again the vague indefinable pains he had been experiencing lately, the continual malaise. ‘I’ll have a quiet natter to him tomorrow at the party.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
Denholm did. Even if it was cold and there wasn’t enough to drink, even if they made him dance, it would be wonderful just
to get away for one evening from baby-feeding at ten, from Susan who had to have a story and from Jeremy who never slept at all until eleven.
‘But we’ve got a sitter,’ he said and he sighed as from above he heard his son’s voice calling for a drink of water.
Joan went to the door. ‘You’ll have to talk to Patrick. Oh, I wish we didn’t have to go.’ She went upstairs with the glass and came down again with the baby in her arms.
Trying to console her, Denholm said weakly, ‘Cheer up, old girl. It’ll be all right on the night.’
4
When he had been married to Jean, when indeed he had been married to Shirley, he had always been able to pay a man to clean the car. Now he had to do it himself, to stand on the gravel like any twenty-five pound a week commuter, squelching a Woolworth sponge over a car that he was ashamed to be seen driving into the office underground car park. There was, however, one thing about this morning slopping to be thankful for. Since he was outside he had been able to catch the postman and take the letters himself. With a damp hand he felt the letter in his pocket, the letter that had just come from his second wife. There was no reason why Nancy should see it and have cause to moan at him because of its contents. Those begging letters were a continual thorn in his flesh. Why should his daughter go on holiday to Majorca when he could only manage Worthing? Such a wonderful chance for her, Oliver, but of course she, Shirley, couldn’t afford the air fare or equip Jennifer with a suitable wardrobe for a seven-year-old in the Balearics. Fifty pounds or perhaps seventy would help. After all, Jennifer was his daughter as well as hers and she was his affectionate Shirley.
He dropped the sponge into the bucket and bent down to polish the windscreen. Over the hedge he saw that his neighbour was opening his own garage doors, but although he liked the doctor he was in no mood for conversation that morning. Resentment caught at his throat like heartburn. Greenleaf was wearing another new suit! Gossip had it that the doctor was awaiting delivery of another new car. Oliver could hardly bear it when he compared what he thought of as the doctor’s miserable continental medical degree with his own Double First.