The Water's Lovely

by Ruth Rendell

  The two choices before her seemed like two columns standing side by side in her mind. Written on one, like graffiti, were the words, TELL HIM, and on the other, NEVER TELL HIM. She asked herself, how can I ever make up my mind? Perhaps there might be a halfway house, a middle course. She knew she could never ask to see Edmund alone, then sit opposite him and tell him these things. There was no point in even considering this, ever thinking about it again. She couldn’t do it. At the last minute, when they had met in some pub or hotel lounge or café, she would smile and kiss his cheek—they had begun these brotherly-sisterly kisses—she would come up with some completely different subject, where the wedding was to be, how to arrange some surprise for Heather. She would never tell him. So what could the middle course be? Write to him? Then she imagined seeing him later, after the letter had been read. It was as impossible as the meeting.

  I could have this weighing on my mind for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, she thought. How to get rid of it without telling him face-to-face or taking the passive course and saying nothing? There must be something she could do. An idea came to her. She could record what she had to say, she thought, put it on tape, not give it to him but keep it. Get it off her mind, speak it aloud, then keep the tape until—what? There was always the chance—the curious, unlikely, but possible chance—that Heather herself would tell. Or they might split up. They hadn’t known each other long. But far from agreeing with Andrew’s rather callous forecast that they would marry in haste and repent at leisure, Ismay saw them as one of those rare monogamous couples who would never even consider straying from each other. They were like those creatures she had read about imprinted with the image of their mates. If that mate died the other would be eternally inconsolable.

  Making a tape seemed her only choice. Not ideal, perhaps cowardly, perhaps never to find its destined recipient, but just the same the sole possible solution. She could make it and wait. She admitted to herself that this was evading the issue, passing the buck. Of course, it was therapy for her. Perhaps that was all it would be. It would all be on tape and she wouldn’t have to agonize about it anymore. Psychotherapists sometimes advised their clients to take hold of unpleasant thoughts or beliefs or fears and put them away into boxes in their minds. You could put the person you didn’t get on with at work away in a box. You could put away a worry like that or an old but persistent unhappiness. The tape would be her box and she could put it away.

  When Ismay was fourteen—for her fourteenth birthday, in fact—Guy had given her a tape recorder. She had got everyone to talk into it, Beatrix and Heather and Pamela as well as Guy himself. Michael Fenster fancied himself as the lead tenor in the local amateur operatic society and he had sung an aria. Poetry was Beatrix’s choice and she had read a long poem of Tennyson’s. In time Ismay got tired of it. Almost the last thing she recorded was a long apology to her mother for having been rude to her. Rude to her in what way she couldn’t now remember, but she had said she was sorry at great length and said it on tape because she felt better about giving Beatrix the tape than saying the words to her. Tape recorders must be almost obsolete now. Only journalists used them. She hadn’t used hers for years and she didn’t know where it was, but it must be somewhere in the house and she could find it.

  She walked about the flat, searching for the tape recorder. It was just as likely to be upstairs, more likely, seeing that Heather’s and her bedrooms had been up there. It would be in a cupboard in one of those rooms. Pausing at her own bedroom window, she looked down into the street below and saw Pamela on her way out somewhere. Beatrix would be sitting with her ear to her radio, chewing gum or eating chocolate. She would take no notice if Ismay went up there and hunted for the tape recorder. Maybe she wouldn’t even see her; certainly she would show no curiosity as to what she might be doing. Ismay didn’t much like using her key to get in, but it was only for once. She could ring and ring the bell and Beatrix would never answer the door. Beatrix wouldn’t notice if someone broke the door down.

  Ismay looked first in the rooms that had been Heather’s and her bedrooms. They were Beatrix’s and Pamela’s now. They had been painted but not otherwise altered. Ismay looked inside the built-in cupboards, which were full of the older women’s clothes just as they had once been full of hers and Heather’s. No sign of the tape recorder. She tried the kitchen, though it was an unlikely place. As soon as she set foot inside the living room she knew where that recorder was going to be. When the conversion was made, cupboards and shelves had been built into the walls around the area where the bathroom had been. Open one of those doors and there it would be.

  Although Beatrix invariably ignored her, Ismay never liked to be in her mother’s presence without acknowledging her. It was as if she feared that if she did it once she would always do it and Beatrix would disappear, become worse than she was now, a nothing, a shadow, a ghost muttering madness. So she went up to her, kissed her cheek, and did something unusual with her. She took her mother’s hand and held it for a few seconds. The hand in hers seemed the limpest thing she had ever handled, cool but not cold, utterly relaxed and immobile, until suddenly it tensed shockingly and was snatched away.

  The tape recorder was where she thought it would be, in that changed place, in the box it had originally come in. She said, “Good-bye, Mum. See you later,” and went downstairs, carrying the box.

  In the bathroom was a shower cabinet in which Guy and Beatrix took their daily showers, but as he slowly recovered from his illness and no longer needed to be sponged down from a basin of water, Guy started taking an afternoon bath. It was more restful and relaxing. Standing up with hot water spraying him was still too much for him. The bath (or “tub” as Americans called it) wasn’t free-standing but flush against the wall on the right-hand side. The end nearest the doors was also against the wall but the other stood free, and between it and the interior wall was sometimes the space for the soiled-linen bin and sometimes, when Beatrix changed things around, for a chair or a dark-leaved ficus in a ceramic pot. The taps were in the middle of the long side of the bath. At the time of Guy’s recovery from his illness the chair stood in the space between bath end and door so that a bath towel could be hung over its back within easy reach of Guy when he got out of the water.

  Neither Ismay nor Heather ever went into that bathroom. Having their own, which they shared and was between their bedrooms, they had no need. The last time Ismay had been in there was after Bill Sealand died and Beatrix was so wretched and desperate that Ismay crept into bed with her for a few nights so that she shouldn’t be alone. Heather, as far as she knew, had never been in that bathroom. Of course she knew Guy was in the habit of taking a bath in the afternoons at about four. He had just begun coming downstairs afterward, wearing sandals and wrapped in a toweling dressing gown. It was on one of these descents of the stairs that he had kissed Ismay for the first time since the virus had struck.

  She waited for him at the foot of the stairs. First of all she clock-watched. It was always between four-thirty and four-forty that he came down. At about twenty past four she was in her bedroom and she heard the water begin to drain away down the plug hole. She waited a bit longer and then she went downstairs, treading very softly, and slipped into the little room Guy and her mother called their study. Beatrix was in the garden. She had been a keen gardener in those days.

  Heather was nearby, though she hadn’t known that at the time. She was also just inside a door, the living-room door, waiting. Because she had seen what was about to happen, or something like it, before? Perhaps. Ismay heard the bathroom door open and close, Guy cross the floor on bare feet to his bedroom, then come out again wearing sandals. She emerged nonchalantly from the study. A vase of flowers stood on a little console table against the wall between the living room and study doors. A pink chrysanthemum had fallen from the arrangement onto the polished surface of the table. Since that day, Ismay had always disliked chrysanthemums.

  She was replacing the flower when Guy b
egan to descend the stairs. She turned toward him, holding it up to her face.

  “Do you know how very charming you look?” he said in a voice she had never heard before, a voice that was no longer intense but light and gentle and charged with something she couldn’t define.

  “Do I?” she said like the child she was.

  He took the flower from her, lifted her face on one hand, and kissed her. But the kiss was different, light and somehow remote, just missing her mouth. Behind them, Heather made a sound, an intake of breath. Heather wasn’t out in the hall but standing concealed by the living room door, which stood just ajar. Guy must have known she was there, and that accounted for the kiss that was so different and so disappointing. Ismay broke away from him once she knew Heather had seen and later she understood how Heather must have interpreted this move: as dislike on her part of what was happening, as resisting Guy, perhaps as fear of him.

  Guy smiled, hugged her in a stepfatherly way, and gave back the flower. “You should wear it in your hair,” he said, “or behind one of your ears.”

  But she hadn’t. She wanted to explain to Heather but didn’t know how to begin. Heather wouldn’t understand. The fact was she didn’t understand what was happening herself and now that twelve years had passed she knew that this was part of why child abuse was wrong. Because children didn’t understand.

  None of that excused Heather, though. If Heather had killed Guy—and she must have killed him—because she had seen him kiss her sister in a sexual way, she was wrong, wrong, wrong and perhaps Ismay and Beatrix had been wrong all along in shielding her.

  Guy and she had gone into the living room after that. The pink chrysanthemum was back in the flower arrangement. Beatrix had come in from the garden with a pair of pruning shears in her hand and gone to make tea. As for Heather, she was sitting on the sofa reading a set book for holiday homework. It must be finished by the time school started on September 5, and she scarcely glanced up when they walked in.

  Three days later Guy was dead.

  Ismay recorded nothing of that. It wasn’t necessary.

  After the first awful dawning fear that Heather had done this thing, after seeing her wet clothes and that look in her eyes, she and her mother decided to test it themselves to see if it was possible. To see if a teenage girl could have done it. It was Beatrix’s idea, and at first Ismay said no. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, it was too horrible.

  “We must,” Beatrix said. “We must be certain.”

  Even then, aged fifteen, Ismay knew they would never be certain, whatever they did, because they could never precisely repeat the conditions of the drowning or reproduce the two people involved. All they could do they did. While Heather was out at a school friend’s house—that same Greta she had been going to visit on the fateful afternoon—Beatrix said they must carry out their plan. She was adamant about not getting naked into the bath. She had been prudish in just the same way when she and Ismay found Guy drowned. Even then, in extremis. “Don’t look,” she had hissed at Ismay. “He’s naked, don’t look at him.”

  She got into her red one-piece swimming suit and a ridiculous rubber bathing cap with waves and curls embossed on it and fastened the strap under her chin. Ismay positioned herself at the end of the bath behind the taps and waited. Beatrix finally got herself under the water, the hot steaming water that seemed to make her shiver and cringe.

  “Why are you wearing that?” Ismay had asked. “It’s grotesque.”

  “I’m not letting you see me naked.”

  “Oh, Mum, you’re mad.”

  Afterward, she wished many times she had never uttered those words.

  They didn’t speak, or if they did Ismay had forgotten. Her mother’s long thin white feet floated just under the taps. The toenails were painted red and the varnish had started to chip. Hating what she was doing, the play-acting part of it and its macabre side, Ismay took hold of Beatrix’s feet and in a strong fast movement lifted them up high above the surface of the water. Beatrix’s head plummeted backward and plunged below the water, her arms and hands thrashing. She tried to pull her legs backward and as she did so bubbles rose in streams from her end of the bath. The beating arms and struggling feet sent cascades of water over Ismay’s dress. Her mother was under there for no more than fifteen seconds before she let her go.

  “I thought you were going to drown me, too,” Beatrix said, coughing and spluttering.

  Ismay was drenched, her blouse clinging to her chest. There was water everywhere. The towel draped over the chair at the head of the bath was soaked, and the bath mat was sodden. “I’m three inches shorter than Heather,” Ismay had said, “and I weigh about fourteen pounds less, but I could do it. It was easy.” She began to cry, shivering in her wet clothes. She had thought then, my mother was strong and well but Guy was weak; he’d been ill.

  “What shall we do?”

  Ismay, the tears running down her face, thought her mother shouldn’t have asked her that. It was a question no woman of thirty-nine should ask a fifteen-year-old.

  She need not tell Edmund that part. When he had heard the tape, he would ask her questions and she would tell him. If he didn’t simply ignore it, pretend it didn’t exist. Who knew? She sat down on the sofa, put the tape recorder on the coffee table, and switched it on. First she tested it, then she began.

  “My stepfather was called Guy Rolland. He was thirty-three when he married my mother and she was thirty-eight.” That was the bit she played back. Her voice sounded clear and steady, better than she had dared hope. “My father had been dead for three years. When Heather was thirteen and I was fifteen, Heather got it into her head that Guy was abusing me. Nothing had really happened apart from some kissing and a little—well, a very little—fondling, but Heather thought I was in danger from Guy. All I thought was that he was very fond of me, as I was of him.” That wasn’t completely true, but Edmund wouldn’t want to know about her sexual feelings for Guy. Better to let him think she had none. It would look better for Heather. “What Heather did she did to protect me. Not from revenge, I don’t think that, but to protect me from—rape, I suppose. This would never have happened, I’m sure of that, if Heather had told me what she was afraid of, but she never told me.

  “When Guy and my mother had been married for about two years, Guy got a very bad virus. He was ill for three weeks and there was some idea of taking him into the hospital because he wasn’t responding to treatment. Just as our GP was talking of getting him a bed in the hospital, Guy started to get better. My mother had barely left the house for a fortnight, she had been at home caring for him, but by that Thursday—it was the end of August—he seemed nearly well again, though without much strength. My mother wanted to take me out to buy a school uniform, some items of school uniform—a skirt and blazer, it was. It was the summer holidays. We went out at about two in the afternoon, leaving Heather at home because she was going around to a friend’s house. Apparently, soon after we went out, the friend—Greta—phoned to say not to come because she had to go out with her parents, so Heather was alone in the house with Guy.

  “They had never liked each other. Heather always had as little to do with him as possible and although he tried to be nice to her at first, he gave up on that. What happened in the house between the friend phoning and, say, four p.m. I don’t know. I suppose Heather knows but no one else can. At about four Guy got up to have a bath. Since he’d been getting better he’d regularly had a bath at around that time, and then would put on his dressing gown and come downstairs to sit with us and have a meal before going back to bed. Sometimes he’d sit in the garden. It was hot weather. So on that Thursday he got up to have his bath in the en suite bathroom which opened off the bedroom he shared with my mother. There were French windows then from the bathroom onto a balcony, but of course it’s all changed now.

  “I don’t know where Heather was, possibly in her own bedroom, adjacent to his. Probably she came out when she heard him get out of bed. She would have heard
him walk rather slowly into the bathroom and run the bath. When she was sure he was in the bath she went into the bathroom. Perhaps he didn’t see her—she would have gone in very quietly—but when he did I expect he shouted out, asked her what the hell she was doing, told her to get out. She took hold of his feet in her hands and pulled them upward. I don’t know if you know what happens when someone does that. Your head goes under. Guy’s head went under and no doubt he struggled and thrashed about but he was weak from the flu. You’d try to get hold of the sides of the bath with your hands and pull your head out, but that takes strength and Guy was very weak….”

  Was a lot of that conjecture? How could she be sure of exactly what Heather had done? Perhaps only because there could be no other way. She stopped the tape recorder and went out of the flat into the hall. It was very different now from what it had been when the house was in single occupation. A wall had been put up to divide the hall into two, half leading directly to the stairs and the upstairs flat. The other half was the lower flat’s hallway. Their own front door was halfway along the wall, and both flats shared the common front door. She stood in this hall by the front door and looked up the stairs. They were unchanged. Here her mother and she had come in from shopping. A table stood there once, a console table, usually with a bowl of flowers on it. They had put their shopping bags down on the floor by this table and, hearing a footstep, had looked up the stairs and seen Heather.

  Ismay went back inside and switched the tape recorder on again.

  “Heather came downstairs. She was wearing a pink cotton dress and the front of it was wet, the bodice and the skirt. Her shoes were wet. I don’t remember what she said. Maybe she didn’t say anything. My mother said, ‘Why are you so wet, Heather? Where have you been?’

  “Then Heather said, ‘I’ve been in the bathroom. You’d better come.’ We went upstairs. My mother went first. She told me afterward she thought one of the pipes was leaking. We’d had trouble with it before. We went into the bathroom. I don’t remember if there was water everywhere. I suppose there must have been. The bath was full of water and Guy was in it. He was lying under the water and he was dead.”