by Ruth Rendell
‘I hope I’ll still recognise him.’
She was aware that Julian had made some sharp sarcastic reply to this, but the words were just words, meaningless, without power. At the sound of a movement from the living-room, she looked up and saw Bob framed in the doorway. His face and body were in shadow, a dark silhouette, and, poised there, his figure suggested a man on the brink of an abyss. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.
‘Bob . . .’
He made a queer little gesture with one of those shadowed hands as if staving something off. Then he moved out of her sight and she heard the door to the garden close.
‘Are you still there, Susan?’
‘Yes, I . . .’ How different this conversation with Julian would have been if she could have used it as the opportunity to tell him she was going to be married! In that moment she knew quite certainly she could never marry Bob. ‘I’ll see Greg any time he likes to come,’ she said calmly, and then, with the politeness of a distant business acquaintance, ‘It was good of you to phone. Good-bye.’
She sat by the phone for a long time, thinking how she and Bob were separated now only by two thin walls and ten feet of air. But those barriers were as impenetrable to her as the enclosures of his mind. She shivered a little because when they kissed or sat in silence she was almost happy with a happiness quenched at once by glimpses into that hooded mind.
17
Using his story of the lost book, David spent Saturday afternoon calling at every hotel on the South Devon coast between Plymouth and Salcombe and at each he drew a blank. Plymouth itself defeated him. He counted twelve hotels and guesthouses in the A.A. guide alone and, having tried four of them, he gave up. The Norths must have rented a house or stayed inland.
Must have? The chances were that they had been to North Devon, that they had been there in May or June. And Magdalene might have been telling the truth. It was not on a beach or a seafront restaurant that Bernard had met Louise but in fact in a suburban kitchen, drinking tea.
‘Had a good day?’ asked Mrs Spiller, slapping a plateful of pork pie and lettuce in front of him. ‘Pity it’s too early in the year for you to do the boat trip to Plymouth. But they don’t run till May. Mag always went on them boats. Still, I dare say you wouldn’t fancy it, you being the nervy type.’
He had never thought of himself as a neurotic. Perhaps the urgency and at the same time the fruitlessness of his quest was telling on him. ‘Is it a particularly perilous voyage?’ he asked sarcastically.
‘Safe as houses normally, only there was the Ocean Maid, after all, wasn’t there?’
The name rang a faint bell and then he vaguely recalled distasteful headlines and remembered reading in the papers of a catastrophe, similar to the Darlwyne tragedy, but with a happier ending. A glance at Mrs Spiller told him she was avid for conversation and he had no one else to talk to, nothing to do. ‘She was a pleasure boat,’ he said. ‘Didn’t she go aground off the coast here?’
Mrs Spiller took a cup from a side table and filled it from David’s teapot. ‘She was taking folks on trips from Torquay and Plymouth, calling in here and at Newton. Due back at six she was. The next thing we knew it was on the wireless she was missing.’ A few drops of tea fell on to her embossed lilac bosom. She took a paper napkin from a tumbler and scrubbed at the stain. ‘Drat that tea! What was I saying? Oh, yes, well, Mag had been a bit bored and lonely, not knowing what to do with herself, so I said, Why not go on the boat trip? and she did. I got her a real nice packed lunch and I saw her off on the boat myself, never thinking they’d go and run out of fuel and get themselves stranded overnight.
‘Just a pair of slacks and one of them thin tee shirts she had on. You’ve got a lovely figure, so why not show it off? I said. Mighty cold she must have got on that boat, though. Well, it got to six and it got to seven and still she hadn’t come and then we heard about it on the news. I was in a proper state, on the point of sending a wire to Bernard. You don’t know what to do in a case like that, do you? You don’t know whether you’re worrying them needlessly like. Especially as I’d egged Mag on to go, got her ticket and all. I blamed myself really.’
‘Didn’t he go on the trip, then?’ David put his knife and fork down and looked up, suddenly chilled.
‘Go on the trip? How could he? He was up in London.’
‘But I thought you said . . .’
‘You’re miles away tonight, Mr Chadwick, you really are. This was last year, last July. Mag came down on her own. You’re mixing it up in your mind with the other years when Bernard came with her. Anyway, as I said, I never wired him and it was all right and poor little Mag none the worse for what she’d been through. She didn’t let it keep her in for the rest of the time she was here. Palled up with some folks she’d met on the boat, she told me, and she was off with them every day. I was glad I hadn’t got Bernard down here all for nothing, I can tell you. You’ve gone quite white, Mr Chadwick. Not feeling queer, I hope?’
Magdalene hadn’t lied. Bernard had met Louise just as she had told him. Perhaps it was true also that she had never set eyes on North until the inquest, had never plotted with him to do a murder, never handed him a gun nor sat with him in The Man in the Iron Mask. Wasn’t it possible too that Sid and Charles had never seen them there together, but had concocted an amusing story to while away half an hour while they drank the drinks he had paid for?
On Sunday morning he packed his case and left the Swiss Chalet. Five miles inland he stopped for petrol in a village called Jillerton.
‘Clean your windscreen, sir?’
‘Thanks, and would you check the tyre pressures while you’re about it?’
‘Can you hang on five minutes while I see to this gentleman?’
David nodded and strolled across the village street. One day, he thought, he might look back to this weekend and laugh at himself. It had taken him a two-hundred-mile drive and surely two hundred questions besides two wasted days to find out that Bernard Heller had never been here at all.
There was only one shop in the street and, although it was Sunday, the door was open. David went inside aimlessly, eyeing the coloured car stickers, the pixie statuettes and the carved wooden stags, replicas of which he had seen for sale in Vienna, in Lacock, in Edinburgh and on the pavement by Oxford Circus underground. On a shelf behind this array of mass-produced bric-à-brac stood mugs and jugs in Devon pottery, hand-painted in cream and brown and not unattractive. He could think of no one but Susan Townsend to whom he wanted to give a present and if he bought her a souvenir she would probably send it back. The white roses might be wilting on his doorstep at this moment.
Some of the pottery was lettered with obscure proverbs and this he disregarded, but the mugs, plain and prettily shaped had a christian name written on each of them, Peter, Jeremy, Anne, Susan . . . There would have to be one for Susan, of course. What was wrong with him, what sentimental madness had seized him, that everywhere he looked he had to see her name or her face?
There was a plain one at the end of the shelf that he could buy his mother for her nightly hot chocolate. He lifted it, turned it round and saw that it wasn’t plain after all. In common with the rest it had a name written in elegant brown calligraphy.
Magdalene.
Could Bernard have ordered it for Magdalene on one of those previous visits of theirs, ordered it and neglected to collect it? He was setting it down again thoughtfully when a voice behind him said, ‘A very uncommon name, isn’t it, sir?’ David turned in the direction from which the deep Devon burr had come and saw an assistant who was perhaps his own age. ‘I’ve often said to my wife, we’ll never sell that one, not with a name like Magdalene.’ And, raising his voice, he called to someone in the room behind the shop, ‘I’m saying to this gentleman, we’ll never sell that mug Mr North ordered.’
‘Mr North?’
‘I remember because the circumstances were a bit—well, funny,’ said the assistant. ‘Last August it was, right in the height of the holid
ay season. Still, you won’t want to be troubled with that, sir. The gentleman won’t come back for it now, so if you’re interested . . . But no, not with a name like Magdalene.’
‘I’ll have it,’ David said in a bemused voice.
‘I call that handsome of you, sir. Ten and sixpence, if you please.’
‘You said there were funny circumstances.’
Wrapping paper in hand, the young man paused. ‘If you’re going to have it, I reckon you’re entitled to know. The gentleman was staying at the King’s Arms. That’s the inn on far side of the green and my uncle keeps it. Mr North ordered the mug for his wife, he said, but when he didn’t come for it and he didn’t come I had a word with uncle. ’Tis a Mrs Louise North, he says, not Magdalene. Queer that, we thought. Looks as if ’twere for a lady friend and the gentleman not quite above board.’
‘So you didn’t want to embarrass him by taking the mug over to the hotel?’
‘Proper embarrassing it would have been too, sir, seeing as the lady, his true wife that is, fell sick with one of these here old viruses the day after they came. ’Twould have set her back a bit to hear her husband was carrying on.’
‘Is the King’s Arms that smart-looking pub on the green, did you say?’
‘That’s it, sir.’
North had a fondness for smart little pubs. . . .
‘Rather unfortunate for them, Mrs North being ill like that,’ David said casually and, as he spoke, he remembered Magdalene Heller’s words. When Bernard met her she had been ill. . . . So it was after this holiday, then, they had met? ‘It must have spoilt their time here.’
‘Mr North didn’t let it get him down, sir.’ The assistant shrugged, perhaps at the villainy of mankind in general or London people in particular. ‘Went on that boat trip, he did, without his wife. The Ocean Maid, you’ll have read of in the London papers. He told me the tale when he came in to order that little mug, how they’d been drifting for hours, never knowing how close they were to the rocks. ‘Twould put you or me off our holiday properly, wouldn’t it, sir? But that Mr North he didn’t turn a hair. I said to my wife at the time, you can see it’d take a mighty big upheaval to get him down.’
Susan was almost sorry she was nearing the end of Foetid Flesh. In a way it had taken her mind off the tragedy next door and off Bob. Now her problems, only subconsciously present while she typed, would rush to fill the hours the finishing of the typescript must leave empty.
Page four hundred and two. The whole thing was going to run into four hundred and ten pages. Jane Willingale’s handwriting had begun to deteriorate in the last fifty sheets and even to Susan, who was used to it, some words were nearly indecipherable. She was trying to interpret something that looked like an obscure shorthand outline when Doris hammered on the back door and walked in with Richard.
‘You don’t mind if I leave him with you for a bit, do you, my dear? Just while we go for drinks with the O’Donnells. Bob was asked but he won’t go anywhere these days. If you ask me, he’s got persecution mania. Still, you’ll know more about what goes on in his mind than the rest of us, no doubt. The police were here for hours in the week. Did you see?’
‘Bob told me.’
‘And I heard him yelling at your Mrs Dring when I was passing yesterday. He’s in a very nasty nervous state. Many a time I’ve seen them like that in the nerve wards. I expect you know best, but if I were you I shouldn’t fancy being alone with him. White roses, I see. They’ll soon wilt up in this temperature. Unlike me. I could stay here all day, but I can see you want to get on. Pity it’s always so perishing at the O’Donnells’.’
The outline was “murder’. Susan typed it with a faint feeling of inexplicable distress. She heard Richard go upstairs and the sound of little cars trundled out on to the landing. Seven more pages to go. To decipher the last, almost hysterical rush, of Miss Willingale’s novel was going to demand all Susan’s concentration.
The children had moved their toys to the stairs now. She must be tolerant, she must control the admonition until they became really unbearable. Bump, bump, crash, whirr. . . . That was the latest tank plummeting to make a fresh dent in the hall parquet.
‘You’re making an awful racket,’ she called. ‘Can’t you go outside for a bit?’
‘It’s raining outside,’ Paul’s voice came indignantly.
‘You know you’re not to play on the stairs, anyway.’
She waded through a long sentence and turned the page. The writing had suddenly improved.
My darling,
You are in my thoughts night and day. Indeed, I do not know where dreaming ends and . . .
It didn’t make sense. But this wasn’t even Jane Willingale’s writing. It sloped more, the capitals were larger, the ink different.
Susan frowned and, taking a cigarette, inhaled deeply. Then, holding the sheets up to the light, she contemplated Bernard Heller’s love-letters.
18
‘Can we take the motorway outside?’ Paul asked, adding virtuously, ‘It’s stopped raining, but the grass is wet and I thought I ought to ask you.’
Susan hardly heard him. ‘What, darling?’
‘Can we take the motorway outside?’
‘The electricity won’t work outside and it’s too cold to leave the door open.’
Paul stuck out his lower lip. ‘It’s not fair. We can’t play on the stairs and we can’t come in here because you’re working. You’ve got your papers in an awful mess again and you’ve got ash all over them. If I mess them up you just get mad.’
So she had never burnt the letters. Perhaps in her heart she had always known she hadn’t, but she also knew that she had certainly not tucked them between the main body of Miss Willingale’s manuscript and the penultimate page. What reason would Doris have for doing such a thing, Doris or Mrs Dring?
‘Paul, you haven’t been playing with my papers again, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t!’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘I haven’t touched them,’ the little boy flared. ‘I swear I haven’t. Cross my heart. I haven’t been at your desk since the day before you were ill, the day you had to go to the trial about Mrs North.’ Self-righteous indignation turned his face a bright tear-threatening red. ‘You said if I touched them again you wouldn’t let me wear my watch and I didn’t touch them.’
‘You needn’t make a big thing out of it. I believe you.’
‘Except for once,’ he said defiantly, ‘the day you were first ill. I wanted to help. Your papers were in an awful mess. You’d left some of them on the coffee table so I put them back with the others, all tidy. I thought you’d be pleased!’
David was jubilant. He had been right, he hadn’t wasted his time. Beyond all doubt now, Robert North and Magdalene Heller had known each other since last summer.
He was jubilant, but there was much he didn’t understand. All along he had assumed that their meeting, knowledge of each other, love perhaps for each other had grown from the love affair between their marriage partners. Now it seemed that these two, the widow and the widower, had met first. North had gone alone on a boat trip and when it seemed they would be stranded at sea all night had been drawn towards Magdalene who was very likely the only other solitary passenger on that holiday voyage. David could picture her, a little frightened perhaps, but still flaunting her body in her trousers and her thin tee shirt, and he could picture North comforting her, lending her his coat.
But Bernard had been in London and Louise ill in bed.
Was it credible that on returning home North or Magdalene had brought the four of them together? Hardly, David thought. North had ordered the piece of pottery for her, had surely met her every day for the rest of his holiday. Mrs Spiller had spoken to him of her having ‘palled up’ with someone she met on the boat. By the end of their holiday, David was sure, they were already in love. North would never have introduced Magdalene to his wife nor she North to her husband.
How, then, had they con
trived that the others should meet?
David spent Monday morning in Knightsbridge among the antique shops, hunting for Chippendale furniture to dress the set of Mansfield Park. His search was fruitful and at half past twelve he crossed the street to the tube entrance on the corner of Hans Crescent.
A girl whose face seemed familiar came out of Harrods at that moment and bore down on him relentlessly. Recognition came with a sickening twist. It was ironical that he should encounter the second Mrs Townsend when more than anything in the world he wanted to see the first. The absurd coincidence made him smile and she took the smile as an enthusiastic greeting.
With a violent snort, she dumped an enormous coloured paper carrier on the pavement between them. ‘So you didn’t buy that place, then?’ she said with the loud directness he found repellent. ‘Did you know Greg was after it? Only he won’t cough up more than eight thou and God knows we’re on our beam ends. There’s wads of it going out every month to that woman in Matchdown Park and what’s left all goes on nosh.’ She drew breath noisily. ‘You wouldn’t believe what I’ve just had to pay for a lobster.’
David eyed her warily. She looked younger than ever this morning and particularly uncouth. The one-piece garment she wore—a dress? a coat?—was made of thick oatmeal-coloured material, striped here and there with grey and fringed at hem and wrists. It made her look like a squaw, the juvenile delinquent of the tribe.
‘My husband is bonkers about food,’ she said. ‘Here, you might as well carry that for me. It weighs a ton.’
In fact, it must have weighed close on half a hundredweight. As David lifted the bag, a protruding bundling of wrapping paper slipped and a large red claw sprang out. Elizabeth Townsend marched to the pavement edge.
‘Can I get you a taxi?’
‘You’re joking. I’m going on the bus.’ She glared at him. ‘D’you know what I’m going to have for my lunch? Yoghourt. That’s what I’ve come down to. And I love food, I just love it.’ She sighed and said crossly, ‘Oh, come on, before the lights change.’