The Water's Lovely

by Ruth Rendell

  “Can you spare the change for a cup of tea, guv?”

  “Oh, shut up. I’ll never forgive you for that.”

  She found something blue, a length of ribbon. Maybe she could tie it around her leg like a garter. What could she borrow?

  “Shall I come along and give you away?” asked Fowler.

  “You don’t need anyone to give you away in a civil ceremony.”

  “I’ll be a witness then.”

  “We’ve got our witnesses.”

  “I’ll be there. You can count on me. Waiting on the steps to throw confetti.”

  “You can have the bloody flat,” Marion screamed.

  She had a bath and put on a diaphanous white slip of a dress. He liked her best in black or white. What was he going to say to her? The idea came into her head that it was something about Eva. That he was still mourning Eva, she had been so sweet and good—something like that. But he had never yet shown signs of mourning her. It could be something different. He had said it was her special day. She did her face, combed her newly washed hair, and went back into the bedroom.

  “You are so beautiful,” Andrew said. “Who would look at another woman if you were there?”

  You did, she thought, but she didn’t say it. Not on this special day. It was seven and their dinner was due in half an hour. While Andrew opened the champagne she thought about Eva and the boy they were saying had probably killed her—a paranoid schizophrenic, a madman, a poor deluded creature?—and then she thought how Pam had once said you could never trust a man who opened champagne without spilling a drop. Andrew withdrew the cork with practiced dexterity, a foamless maneuver. But she already knew she couldn’t trust him, didn’t she? He handed her one of the tall flutes.

  “To you,” he said. “To us.” And then, taking her left hand, “Will you marry me, Ismay? Will you be my wife?”

  “Do you remember,” Heather said, “the day we were married, I said something to you about Tess of the d’Urbervilles and her marrying a man called Angel and them confessing to each other? And you said no one does that anymore. You meant about sexual things. Maybe they don’t, but I didn’t mean that. I meant something else, but I couldn’t tell you. I lost my nerve.”

  Edmund said, “There’s no need to tell me anything.”

  “There is. I’m going to tell you now. I must.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  It should have driven everything else out of her mind and for a while it did. Her ring was so beautiful, the solitaire diamond so big that for a moment or two she doubted if it could be real.

  “Of course it’s real,” he said, laughing. As if any serious person, anyone who was anyone, would give a girl anything but the most precious of stones!

  She was dizzy with happiness, thoughts of Eva gone, the nineteen-year-old Kieron Thorpe gone, or apparently gone. Even then, though, she knew they hovered under the threshold of her conscious mind. Did there always have to be a worm in the bud?

  Andrew put the announcement of their engagement in the Daily Telegraph. She read it over and over, it was so wonderful to see their names coupled together: Andrew Jefferson, son of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell-Sedge, and Ismay Lydia, elder daughter of Mrs. and the late Mr. James Sealand. But in opening the newspaper to find the engagements page, she saw another photograph of Eva beside the proceedings in the magistrates’ court where Kieron Thorpe had been committed for trial.

  A feeling came to her that this exciting time, this glorious time of being congratulated and fêted and loved, must be limited, would fade soon and gradually depart. And then she must confront Heather. At last, after all this time, she must know and act. Would that be the end of her engagement, the end of everything joyous and good and life-enhancing?

  Something blue was her shoes, something old the skirt, and something new the tights she bought in Church Street market for fifty pence. A string of pearls she had pinched from Avice she told herself she intended to give back so that it would do for something borrowed. Brides should turn up a little late for their weddings so as to seem shyly reluctant, but Marion’s nerves saw to it that she was on time, even a little early. Barry’s sister and the policeman called Ambury were the witnesses. The wedding passed uneventfully. Her sensations were those not uncommon to brides who are desperate to be married—that is to have the ceremony performed and the union made legal—more than to be loved and desired, a feeling of unreality, of a dream too good to be true, of faintness. Coming down the steps from the registrar’s office she had to cling to Barry’s arm and even so almost tripped on the hem of the frilly pink skirt. She saw the world, streets, buildings, people, faces, a dog, trees, cars, and buses through a pale golden haze, not entirely the consequence of the sun shining through November mist. She had done it. She had married this wealthy man with his Mercedes and his two-million-pound house, and she would never again be in want. Cheating and petty thievery could be put behind her. Lying and prevarication too. The time had come when she could afford to be good and she would be, a shining example of goodness, especially to people like Irene Litton and that sister of hers. They would admire her. She would be called a lovely woman. That Mrs. Fenix, she’s a lovely woman.

  In the taxi she snuggled up to Barry and said, “Can I tell you something, darling?”

  “What’s this then, a confession?”

  God knew what he thought was coming. “I don’t know what you’ll think,” she said, prolonging his suspense.

  “You’d better try me, kitten.” He sounded quite anxious. Maybe he thought she was a bigamist or having a lesbian affair.

  “Well, sweetness, I’ve given the flat to my brother Fowler. He’s got nowhere and nothing and you and I—well, we’ve got so much.”

  His arm already around her waist, Barry gave it a squeeze, the fact that she had promised to consult him forgotten. “You’re an angel, do you know that? The most generous woman I know.”

  He and she and Alan Ambury and Barry’s sister Noreen had “tiffin” at a Sri Lankan restaurant with a wedding cake and flowers everywhere. Having done the gracious hostess bit for ten minutes, Marion escaped to the ladies’. Fowler had moved into the flat the moment she left it. She phoned him on her mobile.

  “I’ve done it. I’m Mrs. Fenix,” she said.

  “Congratulations. I never thought you would. Not when it came to the crunch.”

  “Nor did I,” said Marion.

  Admiring Ismay’s ring, Heather said she was happy for her. She knew how much she loved Andrew. They had been together for a long time and must know each other really well. Ismay noticed that “for her” and that her sister failed to say that Andrew was nice or someone she’d like for a brother-in-law, and she didn’t blame her for that. Heather never lied. Or, rather, Heather had never lied since she went along with their mother’s lying and said a downright no to Detective Inspector Fenix’s question as to whether she’d been at home that afternoon. Since then she had always told the truth—so she would tell it now.

  “I saw the announcement in the paper. Marilyn at work showed it to me. She said you must be very grand and I said, no, you weren’t but Andrew was.”

  “Quite right.”

  Ismay was suddenly overwhelmed with love for her sister. What did it matter what she had done thirteen years earlier? She had been a child, hardly into her teens. No, it didn’t matter much, but it mattered what she had done last summer. What she did for me, she thought, for me. And it worked, what she did. It brought Andrew back and now I’m engaged to him and I’ll be his wife, and when we’ve been married for half a century I’ll look back and remember my sister gave me this. No, I won’t. I’ll remember Kieron Thorpe who served fifteen years in prison for what she did for me.

  “I brought a bottle of wine. Shall we have some?”

  As Ismay opened it and filled two glasses she thought how much she needed it to help her through what she was about to do. For now she knew she must do it and today, tonight, before Heather and Edmund went away.

  “Does A
ndrew know you’ve come here?”

  “Of course he does, Heather. He’s not set against you like that. He’ll come around.” To her truthful sister she had told a lie and another to Andrew. He didn’t know where she was. He thought she was at a friend’s office-leaving party. I need this wine. I shouldn’t live like this, but I do and when I’m married to Andrew I always shall. To brace myself for the lies I shall have to tell him. To fortify myself against the lies he will tell me. For his infidelities and for my daily stress. It’s that or Saint-John’s-wort or Prozac—or worse. “Heather,” she said, “can we talk? I have to ask you something.”

  “All right. What is it? If it’s about Andrew, yes, I’ll come to your wedding. I’ll even be a bridesmaid—a matron-of-honor, they call them when the bridesmaid’s married—and I’ll be as nice as I can to Andrew, but, you know, Issy, I can’t answer for Ed.”

  “It’s not about Andrew. It’s about Eva Simber.”

  Heather raised her clear and calm blue eyes to Ismay’s, innocent, childlike eyes. “Oh, yes, poor Eva. I see they’ve got someone for killing her. He’s only nineteen.” She paused, then said, “I met her, you know.”

  “You asked her to give Andrew up.”

  Heather looked surprised that she knew. “Yes, I did. That was the point of talking to her. She wasn’t my sort of person and I certainly wasn’t hers.”

  Ismay was breathless now. Hyperventilating was what they called it and now she knew what it meant. It affected her voice, which came out at the first attempt in a whisper. She tried again. She was staring at Heather and she took a deep breath, unclenched her hands, and spread them flat on her knees. She tried to speak evenly. The words she used, just the words themselves, shocked her. “Did you kill her, Heather? Did you?”

  In Heather’s incredulous stare she had her answer, but she persisted. “Did you?”

  “Did I kill Eva?” Heather spoke roughly. “Are you mad?”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “Of course I’m angry when you ask me something like that. What sort of a question is that? Of course I didn’t kill her,” Heather said. She seldom got cross, but when she did Ismay was afraid of her anger. “Why do you ask a thing like that? I can’t believe it. You think I’d go into a park and strangle someone? You think I’d plan something like that? Do something like that? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mum had asked me that but not you.”

  Ismay said in a small, almost humble, voice, “You never tell lies, do you?”

  “I suppose I do sometimes, little ones, like saying I can’t go out somewhere when I can, that sort of thing, but no, I try not to.”

  “You know why I thought you’d killed Eva?”

  “For the reason I’d talked to her, I suppose. To make her give Andrew up.”

  “That, yes. I thought you’d killed her for me.”

  “Well, thank you very much. I’m not a psychopath. Just for your information, Issy, I think she was on the point of giving him up the last time I talked to her. Next time she’d have agreed, I’m pretty sure she would have, only there wasn’t a next time because Kieron Thorpe killed her.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ismay.

  “You didn’t suspect any of your friends of killing her, did you? You didn’t think Pam might have. You suspected me. You thought it was me because of Guy.”

  It was what she had waited for these past thirteen years. The truth would come now, she knew it. It should be happening at home in the house Andrew was going to take her away from, not here in this new, pretty, newly furnished flat. Truth can be told everywhere, she said to herself, it has no home, and she wondered if she had made that up or was quoting from something she had read.

  “You did kill Guy, didn’t you? You did drown him? I haven’t been wrong all these years? It wasn’t Michael, was it? Michael wasn’t in the house that afternoon?”

  Heather looked steadily at her. Her face was no longer indignant or incredulous but sad, as if she had carried a great sorrow for years and perhaps she had. “No, you haven’t been wrong,” she said. “Michael—God, no.” A silence fell. They sat there like two people who have just met and can’t speak the other’s language. Then Heather said, “I think you’ve just been wrong about why.”

  “You did it for me. Because you thought I needed protecting from Guy. You thought I didn’t like the way he came on to me. But I did. I encouraged him. I was fifteen—what did I know? Then he got ill. He was very ill, you know, he had a terribly high fever. Mum thought he was going to die. I must have been very selfish. I just saw it as keeping him from me. I used to hope he’d come to my room at night and get into bed with me and his illness—well, it postponed that. You haven’t got much patience when you’re a teenager.”

  “I know that,” said Heather. “I mean I know all that, what you’re saying.”

  She had gone very white. Heather was normally very healthy-looking with tanned skin and pink cheeks, but now all that color seemed to have drained away. Lines appeared between her eyebrows and above her cheekbones. She aged ten years. Ismay watched her hands curl into fists and clench hard. “I know how you felt about Guy,” she said, “and how he felt about you.”

  “You can’t have. You were thirteen.”

  “I know because he told me. I don’t know how to put this, Issy, but he wasn’t—well, a good person. People used to say someone like him was wicked, but ‘wicked’ means something else now. It means nice or extraordinary. Guy wasn’t either of those things. He was a pedophile.”

  Ismay didn’t know why she was appointing herself his defender. She felt Heather was being unjust. “You can’t call a man a pedophile because he fancies a fifteen-year-old who sets out to attract him. I really did do that. I sort of lay in wait for him. If he came on to me, I came on to him.”

  She hesitated, realizing suddenly that she was doing it, she was talking about it to Heather. The impossible was happening, the something she had known she would never do. Here she was, doing that impossible and Heather was answering, white-faced, stricken Heather with her clenched hands and eyes that stared. “I suppose I was in love with him,” she said. “He was a sort of forerunner of Andrew. Andrew looks a bit like him, don’t you think?”

  “More than a bit,” said Heather. She let herself slump forward, dropping her shoulders in a conscious effort to relax. Her voice was steadier. “That was why I found it so hard to talk much to him. I found it hard to be ordinarily nice to him and of course he noticed. But sometimes I’d find him sitting in the flat and I’d fancy for a moment it was Guy sitting there.” She looked suddenly cold but didn’t quite shiver. “I really hated Guy,” she said.

  “Would you tell me what happened that day?”

  “The day I drowned him?” It was horrible to hear her say it so openly in that stark, cold voice. “Can I have some more wine, please? I said that to my mother-in-law once and she said she’d never known a guest in her house ask for anything before. Sorry, I’m stalling.”

  “But you did drown him?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course I did. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you now and I won’t put it off any longer.” Heather took a long, slow draft of her wine and shivered a little. Then she began. “You remember I was going to go out that afternoon. I was going to play table tennis at my friend Greta’s. Guy was in bed. I suppose he was asleep. I don’t know. I never went into that room when he was in it. Greta phoned and said not to come because she had to go with her mother to see her gran in hospital. I went out into the garden. Do you remember that swing seat we had? I sat on that with a book I was reading. It was Tess of the d’Urbervilles and I thought it was the most boring book I’d ever read. But I did finish it—oh, yes, I finished it. Somehow I can’t leave a book I’ve started unfinished.

  “The French windows to the balcony were open and just before four I saw Guy come out onto the balcony in his dressing gown. He saw me and he called out, ‘Hi, Heather. Lovely day, isn’t it?’ It was, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t look up. A bit after that I hear
d the water running. I’ll always hear that sound, Issy, the running of water, the flowing of water. It’s not that I don’t like water, the sea, swimming and all that, but it seems to have an importance in my life sort of out of proportion. Anyway, I sat there, trying to read that sad, miserable book, and soon I heard the running water stop and I knew Guy must be in the bath.

  “The day before when Guy was downstairs I’d been in their room to borrow a comb because I couldn’t find mine. While I was there I must have taken my cardigan off and left it on a chair. It was a warm day but starting to cool down and I needed my cardigan. Nothing would have made me go into that room when I knew Guy was there, but he wasn’t. He was in the bath.

  “I went upstairs and into their bedroom. I couldn’t see my cardigan. Mum had put it in my bedroom, but I didn’t know that then. The door to the bathroom was wide open. He must have heard me, though I was careful not to make a noise. He called out, ‘Heather, would you bring the shampoo in here, please?’ I didn’t want to. I didn’t believe he’d wash his hair in the bath. But I did take it in. I don’t know why.”

  “He was in the bath and he called you in? A girl of thirteen? Heather, is that true?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s true. This is all true. You know I won’t lie. I went in and he was in the bath and the bath was full of foam. You know how it is with a foam bath. You can’t see the person’s body. I remember I was thankful for that. You could later—when the foam went. I put the shampoo on the shelf thing by the taps, not looking at him, and then he said something to me. Something awful or I thought it was at the time. It was when you think how old I was. I mean, how young. I thought, I’ll stop this now, now before it’s too late, and I picked up his feet and lifted them up high and his head went under—and you know the rest.”

  Chapter Thirty

  It was very silent in there, high up above London. From the window in daylight you could see tall landmarks, the dome of Saint Paul’s, the Post Office Tower, and in the distance on a fine clear day the silver-gray shine of the river with an unidentifiable bridge over it. Tonight, in the winter dark, it was just a spread of lights, some still, some winking in varied colors, one which flashed brightly every few seconds. Ismay walked away from the window and sat down again.