by Ruth Rendell
“Not what I’d expected, I must admit,” he said in the taxi.
“Not a nerd?”
“It would appear not. To be frank, I don’t in the least care what he’s like so long as he likes her and she likes him. The burning question of the hour is, will they get together to the extent of moving in together or, better still, get married?”
“It’s early days, Andrew.”
“Ah, but they are exactly the sort of people who would fall madly in love, marry in haste, and repent at leisure.”
“Don’t say that, please.”
“I’m sorry, my darling, but I do want your sister out of there. I don’t frankly know why she has to be there in the first place and nothing you tell me seems to me an adequate explanation. You earn twice what she does. You don’t need her share of the rent….”
“Oh, but, Andrew, I do. My mother does.”
“Yes, but if I were there she’d have my share. Or suppose you were to leave and move in with me? She need not be alone. Finding someone to share with her would be easy as pie.”
“It might be easy but it won’t do.”
“But it would do if it were this Edmund?”
Would it? He was very nice, Ismay thought, and he seemed sensible, mature. In some ways he reminded her of their father. Of course, he was a bit older than the rest of them. But was he mature enough, responsible enough, to take something like this on board, accept it, be sure his love was strong enough to encompass even this? Ismay felt very doubtful about Heather’s ability to love—to be in love, that is. Of course Heather loved her, there was no doubt about that. Indeed, there was a grim certainty about it. But would she love Edmund and love him enough to overcome the inevitable cooling off or settling down which must come after a year or two of marriage? Or must come, according to what Ismay had read. For her part, she knew she could never cool off Andrew or settle with him into a humdrum existence. Her passion and her devotion would endure until death. “Till death us do part” would have real meaning for her when she came to say those words at the altar or before the registrar…if only the saying of them might not be too long deferred.
The taxi drew up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, where the party was, and Ismay and Andrew walked in hand in hand.
Christmas was a grim affair in Chudleigh Hill. It made little difference if Edmund managed to fix things so that he worked on Christmas Day. In that case the celebrations would be postponed until Boxing Day. In the unlikely event of his succeeding in working Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and the following day, the Great Feast was put back to Christmas Eve. There was no escape. And should he manage to bring forward or defer the huge culinary excesses, the present giving, and the ecstatic watching of the Queen’s Speech (recorded on video), his mother’s bad-tempered reproaches, prolonged for hours, made his efforts to rearrange his days off hardly worthwhile. It was in vain that he told her he cared very little whether he celebrated Christmas or not. She simply said, “You don’t mean that. I can see how you love it—like a small boy again.”
This year he was taking December 25 off. He had given in. Over the preceding months he had stuck out so much for nights away with Heather, weekends with Heather, once a weekend in Paris with Heather, that giving in now seemed less wimpish than it otherwise would have. Besides, he was making plans. “Plotting,” his mother would have called it. Having had little to spend his earnings on over the barren years, having inherited money when his father died, he had enough in the bank to put down a good deposit on a flat in a “nice part” of London, almost to buy a flat outright in a less nice part. Heather never talked about the future, never said things like “We could do that in a couple of years’ time” or “One day we might go there.”
But when he told her how much he liked being with her, what a lot she was beginning to mean to him and even how he couldn’t imagine life without her, she smiled at him, gave him a kiss, and said, “Me too, Edmund.” So he was becoming sure that when he suggested the flat as a home for him and her together she would agree to that too. The difficulty was his mother.
He had lived with her too long. He had stayed here, with her, too long. To have made a break ten years before when he was twenty-three and she was fifty-two, that would have been the time. When a son remains under his mother’s roof for half the span of a lifetime, she thinks—she is almost entitled to think—he means to stay forever. Irene was fit and strong, and physically young for her age. She made herself old and feeble artificially. He knew that, but saying so outright wasn’t easy. Wasn’t kind; wasn’t filial. And meanwhile, here was Christmas looming, in the shape of endless visits to supermarkets, notably Marks and Spencer and Waitrose, but Safeway and Asda too. In the absence of a car, huge bags had to be carried (of course, all of them by him) into bus queues and onto buses or, occasionally, into taxis. When they got home he had to unload (because she was exhausted) quantities of food he mainly disliked, ingredients to be made into other things he disliked and as far as he could see, she didn’t much like. But this was Christmas fare and the guests would like it. Woe betide them if they didn’t, he thought.
He could see—had done for years, and his mother surely could see—that the people she invited didn’t want to come, would go to considerable lengths to avoid coming but couldn’t always achieve this. The ones who couldn’t find an excuse came under duress. They were her sister, his aunt Joyce; Joyce’s husband, Duncan Crosbie; an old relative called Avice Conroy; and Marion. Of those four, only Marion really wanted to come. Probably had nowhere else to go, Edmund thought unkindly. After all, her other rich lame ducks wouldn’t be celebrating the festive season. Old Mrs. Reinhardt would be having a spot of Hanukkah with her son in Edgware and Mr. Hussein was a Moslem. I wish I were, thought Edmund, not for the first time.
Cooking started on the twenty-second. With the exception, that is, of the Christmas pudding and the mince pies. The former had to be made a year before—a January treat for him, that would be—and the latter three weeks before. So much brandy went into them that they would probably keep for a thousand years without benefit of cryogeny and be a future archaeologist’s dream find.
It seemed to him that everyone was obliged to spend Christmas in the company of people they would rather not be with, not just Aunt Joyce, Uncle Duncan, and Avice Conroy. Heather and Ismay would be with their mother and the sister she lived with, Andrew Campbell-Sedge with his parents in Shropshire, and Edmund’s friend Ian Dell with his aged mother and an even more aged uncle in Leeds. All these people, he supposed, would rather be with someone else, Heather with him as he would have liked to be with her, Ismay surely with Andrew. Even Avice would have been happier at home with her rabbits. He knew from experience that she would fret about them all the time she was in the house in Chudleigh Hill.
Several years had passed since he stopped calling Joyce and Duncan “uncle” and “auntie,” but his mother continued to tell him it wasn’t respectful to use unadorned Christian names to people so much older than himself. They must be offended even if they never said so. As for her, she winced each time she heard this solecism committed. He saw her recoil when they arrived on Christmas morning with Avice Conroy and he greeted them with a simulated heartiness.
“Hello, Joyce. Hello, Duncan. How are you?”
They appeared unoffended and were still talking about the cost of the taxi they had been obliged to take in the absence of any public transport, all the way from Ealing, making a detour on the way to pick up Avice who lived in Pinner, when Marion arrived ten minutes later. Marion was oozing Christmas cheer, her arms full of Christmas presents, brilliantly wrapped and tied with silver and gold thread. One of them was a knuckle of bacon she had cooked herself to augment the dinner. Another, she announced, was not for giving away but a gift to herself from Mr. Hussein, on whom she had just called.
“He lives in a tiny little house in Hampstead. In Perrin’s Grove, as I’m sure you know.” Her listeners smiled uneasily. Living far away as they did, they had never
heard of Mr. Hussein and had no idea what kind of house he lived in. “He’s all alone, very isolated really. He needs someone to look after him. I sometimes wonder how he manages.”
“My next-door neighbors will make a terrific noise this afternoon,” said Avice. “The crashing and banging and the music are actually quite frightening. Susanna and Figaro huddle together in fear.”
“Mr. Hussein is always so well-dressed and smart but I wonder if he’s just putting a brave face on things.”
“I ask myself if I’m right to leave them. Going out hardly seems worthwhile when I worry about them so much.”
“Your pets are your jailers, Avice,” said Joyce. “That’s what I’d call not worthwhile, keeping those animals. Anyway, rabbits should be outdoors, in a hutch. Think of the droppings!”
“My rabbits are thoroughly house-trained, I’d have you know.”
“My friend Mrs. Reinhardt has a cat,” said Marion. “She puts it in a cattery at holiday time. That way she’s free as a bird with nothing to worry about. You won’t mind if I open Mr. Hussein’s present, will you?”
Edmund poured drinks and handed around plates of sausages on sticks, mini-pizzas, mini-quiches, smoked salmon on bread squares, and salmon roe on biscuits. Marion talked, mostly about Mr. Hussein, but also about Mrs. Reinhardt and that elderly lady’s irritable bowel syndrome, varicose veins, and impending knee replacement. She opened her present, but very slowly because the silver string had to be untied, not torn off, and wound around two of Marion’s fingers, “to come in useful at a later date.” The scarlet, holly-leaf-strewn paper had to be meticulously folded edge to edge, and finally a British Home Stores gift box of soap, bath essence, and cologne was disclosed.
Affronted by the lack of sympathy she had received, Avice said, “That didn’t cost him much.”
Plainly disappointed, Marion said that Mr. Hussein hadn’t much money to spend. It was all tied up in his house, which she knew for a fact was worth two million, small though it was. She worked for an estate agent so could calculate exactly what everyone’s house was worth. It was the thought that counted, anyway. The poor old man must have been all the way to Oxford Street to buy that. She thought it very kind and she elaborated on the themes of kindness, generosity, and present giving for several minutes. The scent of roasting turkey wafted through open doorways from the kitchen. While Marion proceeded to talk, now on the curious coincidence of so many religions celebrating a feast around the end of December, Edmund poured more drinks. He had made up his mind in advance that when someone said it was the thought that counted, he would leave them and phone Heather.
In the kitchen Irene’s temper was worsening. “I don’t know why she brought that ham. If ever there was a case of corn in Egypt!”
“Or coals to Newcastle,” he said. “I’m going to phone Heather. Better not leave them alone.”
“For heaven’s sake, haven’t I got my hands full?”
“You invited them, Mother,” said Edmund.
He went upstairs, phoned Heather at her mother’s house, and wished her a happy Christmas.
Sometimes Ismay thought that Guy had only married Beatrix in order to have access to her elder daughter. Hadn’t he said himself that he had seen her at Pamela’s house long before he ever saw Beatrix? Beatrix might have been attractive when their father had married her, but by the time he was dead and more years had passed she was already growing strange, a disheveled creature with wild eyes, long uncombed hair, and an apparent inability ever to make herself neat or smart or elegant. But handsome Guy had married her, against all likelihood. To live in the same house with Ismay, see Ismay every day, assume with Ismay the rights and privileges of a father?
After he was dead and they made their plans, she and their mother, plans to save Heather and protect her, Beatrix had grown even more strange. It was as if the decision they took and the consequent acting out of parts, of ignorance, grief, helplessness, was too much for her. Something fragile in her mind cracked. Something gave way and she began to justify what they had done (because of what Heather had done) by casting Heather as an avenging angel and herself as a kind of holy mother, one destined to bear this special child. Schizophrenia was diagnosed and as a result no one believed her when she said her younger daughter was a good spirit, appointed to stand with flaming sword between her sister and harm. When she failed to take her medication and could escape from Pamela’s guardianship, she wandered the streets of Clapham, declaiming, “And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain.”
Heather was sometimes the fifth angel and sometimes the second, the one “who poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man.” There was no doubt Beatrix was mad, but Ismay thought the author of Revelation was mad too, and probably in a worse state than her mother. Fortunately, Pamela usually managed to get Beatrix’s pills down her and, apart from the occasional foray into Saint John the Divine, she was quiet and dull and staring. The dosage had been carefully administered on Christmas morning well before Ismay and Heather came upstairs with bags full of presents and food, for Beatrix hadn’t cooked anything for years and Pamela called herself an expert in microwaving ready meals.
They had only been there five minutes when Edmund phoned. Ismay, unloading everything in the kitchen, a large glass of Sauvignon already beside her, heard Heather whispering, then laughing, then saying, “Me too.” This obvious response to a declaration of love was quite unlike her sister, or unlike how she used to be. Ismay knew she ought to be pleased for Heather and she was in one way. As far as she knew, her sister had never before had a happy love affair, one which wasn’t a case of one loving and the other permitting the loving, but mutual pleasure and happiness. It was developing in just the way these things did when they were going to lead to engagement and marriage. And then…?
In the living room Beatrix sat under the influence of a calming drug, a drowsy skeleton with shoulder-length gray hair and staring pale eyes, dressed in the kind of robes worn by Dürer’s Melancholia. She never drank alcohol, never seemed to want to, which was a blessing as it might have reacted with the drug. She was a prey to obsessions, the present one being gum chewing.
Pamela fought a losing battle with the dropped and squashed gum circles on the floor, scraping away from time to time with a blunt knife. She looked the way Beatrix might have looked if Heather hadn’t gone into the bathroom that day or perhaps if she had never married Guy in the first place. Pamela was an upright, well-built woman with a young face and white hair discreetly tinted blond, and alone since Michael’s departure, she made no secret of the fact that she wanted a lover. “I don’t mean a partner,” she said to her nieces. “That wouldn’t be possible, not with Beatrix the way she is.” And, seeing Ismay’s stricken look, “I’m perfectly happy living here with Beatrix. It’s fine. I don’t think I want to live with a man on a permanent basis but I—well, I would like someone.”
An industrious accountant, she had enough clients for her needs, and modern technology had made it possible for her to work from home. An aunt to her nieces when they were children, she had become a friend almost as if she were their contemporary. She got down on her knees and began scraping blackened gum off the floor. “It’s as bad as the pavement in Bedford Hill down here,” she said and laughed. Beatrix’s only sign that she had heard was a shifting of the handbag on her lap.
Heather came back into the room, looking pleased and happy. “I told him to ring off,” she said. “I thought Andrew might be trying to get you.”
Pamela, who knew nothing about what had happened twelve years before, asked Heather whom she had been talking to. Always calm and self-possessed, Heather said, “A friend.”
“A boyfriend?”
“Well, yes. There’s a difference, isn’t there?”
“A big difference,” said Pamela. “I envy you.”
The meal eaten on December 25, whether at o
ne p.m. or two or four, is always called dinner and never lunch. The turkey was precooked by Heather, the potatoes ready peeled by Heather, and the Brussels sprouts cleaned and washed. The bread sauce she had made at home the night before. Pamela, after going through the Spectator’s dating columns, drank a bottle of wine entirely to herself. Beatrix picked at her food, remarked that an angel had told her not to eat sprouts because, though they were like unto an emerald, they came from the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.
The Queen’s broadcast was listened to at Beatrix’s insistence, not watched, the washing up done by Ismay and Heather. Pamela fell asleep and Beatrix chewed gum. Ismay watched Heather to see if her eyes strayed to the French windows and the Bonnard, but they seemed not to. She even went into what had been the bathroom to place an open box of chocolates on the table there. When it got to five and Andrew hadn’t phoned, Ismay began to think whether she should phone him, but she didn’t much like the idea of one of his parents answering the phone. They had tea with Waitrose mince pies because Heather hadn’t had time to make any, and at seven she and Ismay went downstairs.
Ismay fretted rather. It wasn’t the first Christmas Andrew had failed to phone. Last year she had been seriously worried because he hadn’t been in touch for a week around that time, though he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why not. That wasn’t going to be repeated, was it? She lay awake a long time, thinking he still might call at midnight. When the phone rang at nine next morning she rushed to it, certain it was him. The voice was Edmund’s for Heather. Andrew finally phoned just after eleven.
“What happened to you? I was worried.”
“Really? Why ever? Such a crowd turned up, I didn’t get the chance. There was this chap Charlie Simber my father was at school with and he brought his daughters, and my uncle turned up with all his brood. Grandmama was her usual queenly self. Daddy wasn’t very well, and Ma said I should play the host. My God, it was exhausting. Have you done what you said and thought about moving in with me?”