A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  Keith stuck memos to himself on pink and blue Post-its all over the windowpanes and the front of the tallboy. They had phone numbers of clients on them and addresses of sanitary goods suppliers. And on one wall were pinned photographs (cut out of library books) of Keith’s heroes: Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, originators of the motor vehicle, and of Ferdinand Porsche standing beside his People’s Car in Hitler’s Germany. Their prim, serious faces and spotless dress made a ludicrous contrast with the squalor of the room.

  Next door, Jimmy now slept alone. The bed was a larger version of his brother’s. Jimmy had had a nose-bleed over one of the pillows; to judge by the color and texture of the stain, some weeks before. It may have been this which attracted the flies, a dozen or so of which danced and bobbed against the closed window while a bluebottle, as big as a bee, zoomed frenziedly in diagonals across the room. Teddy looked inside the wardrobe. His mother’s clothes smelled of old sheep. The tracks made by moth grubs already showed on the lumpy woollen surfaces and moth cocoons, grayish-white like mildew, nestled between the stitches.

  It was the colors she had used that fascinated and repelled Teddy. He knew something about color and had been taught more. He knew, for instance, that what may look beautiful in nature, a primrose against dark-green ivy leaves, a blue butterfly on a pink rose, is less aesthetically acceptable in art or in textiles. Eileen had put lime-green next to scarlet and ocher beside purple, turquoise vied with peach and crimson jostled powder-blue. These conjunctions of colors hurt his eyes and made anger well up once more inside him.

  He moved to the dressing table and stood there for a while, his hands pressing down on its glass-topped surface, his eyes closed. His back was to the bed now, but it was present in his mind. In here they must have, occasionally must have, at least once must have, since he was born five years after they were married perhaps often must have, had sex. From what people had said at school he knew that everyone finds the idea of their parents having sex unimaginable, but in the case of his it was more unimaginable than usual. It made him shudder. He had slept in here till he was four, he vaguely remembered it, so perhaps they had done it in his presence.

  He kept his eyes shut. At twenty he was a virgin and not ashamed to be. If anyone had asked he would have admitted it proudly. He had read somewhere, in a newspaper probably, that “saving oneself,” preserving a state of virginity, was becoming fashionable. For once he didn’t mind being a follower of fashion. As for saving himself for something or someone, the idea of marriage was ludicrous; marriage was this bedroom, those people, the smoke and the moths and the dining room furniture. But he could imagine keeping himself pure and intact for—what? A creature as fair and untouched as himself.

  Turning around sharply, he opened his eyes and stared at his reflection. The fly-spotted mirror was losing its silvering in a kind of greenish ulceration around the edges, but this only served to throw his beauty into a starker relief. His likeness to his uncle Keith he had never observed and this was just as well; he would have repudiated it with fury. He saw only a face and figure he never tired of admiring, that square jaw, those eyes and cheekbones, that perfect nose and mouth, that black silk hair and the slim, strong body, hips and pelvis too narrow, it seemed, to contain all that was inside them.

  Yet it was scarcely vanity. There was no idea in his mind of improving on his looks or dressing for them or using them. He simply derived pleasure from the contemplation of himself as he did from looking at any object of beauty. He would no more want to flaunt himself or thrust himself upon anyone than he would want to set up a beloved piece of sculpture in the front garden or invite people in to look at a treasured painting on his wall. He was his. He was the only person he cared for as much as he cared for things.

  The flawlessness was marred only by the damage to his left hand. He had got into the habit of holding his hand with the little finger curled around and tucked into the palm. These days, or in circumstances where parents felt some responsibility for a child, they would have found that bit of finger and taken it with them to Accident and Emergency, and it would have been invisibly stitched on again. This lack of care, of interest, was another reason for hating them. He lowered his eyes and contemplated the clutter on the dressing table. Nothing had been moved, nothing had been dusted, since his mother died. The place was kept as it had always been, as a shrine might be, but out of indifference, not devotion.

  An old Mason-Pearson hairbrush, its stiff black bristles clogged with Eileen’s equally wiry but graying hair, a scent bottle in which the perfume had grown yellow and viscid with age, a comb whose teeth were gummed together with dark-gray grease, a cardboard box that had once held Terry’s All Gold chocolates, a glass ashtray containing pins, hairgrips, scraps of cottonwool, a dead fly, the top of a ballpoint pen and, horribly, a piece of broken fingernail. And all this sitting on a grayed and stained crocheted lace mat, rumpled in the middle and curled at its fringed edges, like an island in a dusty sea after a nuclear explosion.

  Teddy nearly swung out his arm to sweep it all on to the floor. His father wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t see anything amiss for years, forever. Something stopped him doing that, simple curiosity as to what was inside the box. If it was still what had originally been there he imagined them coated in mold, the ghosts of chocolates, pale phantom cubes and hemispheres and shell-shapes.

  But the chocolates had long been eaten. This box was where Eileen had kept her jewelry. Teddy had never seen her wear any of it, ropes of pearls with peeling surfaces, a green glass necklace, a scottie dog brooch, a copper bracelet for keeping rheumatism at bay—it said so, engraved on it—a necklace apparently woven out of plastic-covered thread. Then he saw what it actually was. So you could crochet jewelry too.

  He tipped out the lot. Right at the bottom, like an orchid planted in a bed of thistles, was a ring.

  Just as his mother had done, all those years ago, in the ladies’ room at Broadstairs, he saw its worth. Not its probable value, as she had done, but its beauty. He laid it in the palm of his hand and turned it this way and that for the diamond to catch the light. The diamond was large and deeply glowing and richly flashing, with rainbows skimming its facets and rainbows cast from it to dance up and down the dirty wall. Inside the setting of the diamond and the sparkling shoulders, the ring was clogged with the same kind of epidermal detritus as Eileen’s comb. He curled his lip in disgust at the dark grease caking the gold band and delicately fashioned sockets. Where had it come from? Had she ever worn it?

  It ought to be cleaned, he would find out how you cleaned a diamond ring. But first, after these explorations, he would have a bath.

  The neighbors, abandoning slanderous gossip and unkind judgments as people do when tragedy strikes, said that Jimmy’s not lasting long after his wife’s death went to show what a devoted couple they were. They couldn’t live without each other. Not that Jimmy had died, but he had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance after suffering a heart attack in the pub.

  He had been standing at the bar with a pint of draft Guinness in front of him, talking to anyone who would listen about race relations in north London. Or, more precisely, about the conduct of the newsagent of Indian extraction, though born in Bradford, who had sold out of copies of the Sun before Jimmy managed to visit his shop. “So I said to Paki the blackie,” said Jimmy, using the witty sobriquet he believed was his own invention, “I said to him, you’re not in Cal-bloody-cutta now, you know, you’re not among the snake-charmers and the cow-buggerers no more, and he went—well, not white, not that, do me a favor—no, he went the color of the curry he has with his fuckin’ chips and …”

  Pain cut off whatever Jimmy had intended to say next. He clutched the upper part of his left arm with his right hand, an action which seemed firstly to pull him forward, then double him up, and to release a low groan from his slackening mouth. The groan rose to a throaty howl as Jimmy buckled at the knees and collapsed, sprawling, to the floor.

  Though existing for
a long time without a telephone, the Brexes had acquired one ten years before, largely for Keith’s plumbing business. Keith was on the phone, talking to a woman who had water coming through her bathroom ceiling, when a policeman came to the door. Keith was in a dilemma, whether to go to the aid of the bathroom woman or get down to the hospital. He came into the dining room where Teddy was sitting on his bed, drawing a design for a footstool. “The whole family’s breaking up,” he moaned. “You’d best get down there and see your dad. You can come on the back of the bike with me and I’ll drop you off on my way to Cricklewood.”

  “No, thanks,” said Teddy. “I’m busy.”

  The footstool would be beautiful, a creation of simple lines and smooth, gleaming surfaces. He closed his eyes, imagining a future life from which all ugliness was banished.

  7

  Back at college a few days later, Teddy attended a lecture on the Joyden School. It was given by a visiting professor and he wasn’t obliged or even expected to attend. “Fine art” had no part in his course, but he admired the work of Michael Joyden, Rosalind Smith and Simon Alpheton, samples of which he had seen reproduced in a Sunday supplement, and he wanted to hear what Professor Mills had to say about it.

  As always spotlessly clean, with newly washed hair and scrubbed fingernails, Teddy was dressed in his usual immaculate near-rags. He had no money for clothes and shopped, when he had to, at Oxfam and the Sue Ryder used-clothing shop. His mother had always dressed him from these establishments, he was used to it and took no interest in what he wore. On this day he had on blue jeans, like everyone else in the lecture hall of the Potter Building, a snowy though shabby T-shirt and a dark-blue sweatshirt that had been bought new from C & A by the Sue Ryder donor twelve years before.

  The girl who sat down next to him gave him one of those appraising looks he was accustomed to. She was pretty enough. He took virtually no interest in people’s characteristics or attitudes or opinions, but he always noticed whether they were good-looking or the reverse. This one had a bright, sharp-featured face and a neat little body, but to use a phrase of his grandmother’s, she looked shop-soiled. As if, he thought with an inner shudder, she had been through too many grubby hands and tumbled on too many beds as smelly as Keith’s.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He nodded at her.

  “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  He raised his swallow’s-wing eyebrows.

  “I’d remember you, believe me,” she said flirtatiously. “There are some people you don’t forget.”

  “Is that so?” It was an interrogatory he often used and it meant very little. He forgot everyone except those he was obliged to be with in daily proximity. “Tell me something.”

  She was smiling now. “Anything!”

  “How would you clean a ring?”

  “What?”

  “How would you clean a diamond ring?”

  “For God’s sake, I don’t know.” She gave him a resentful glance, but seemed to be considering the question. She shrugged. “My gran puts hers in gin. Leaves it in a glass of gin overnight.”

  The lecturer was coming on to the podium.

  “Right,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Teddy had wondered how Professor Mills would show examples of the paintings and not, he hoped, by sticking reproductions up on a board. To his relief he saw that slides were to be used. The lights in the auditorium were dimmed a little and the first picture appeared on the screen. It was Michael Joyden’s Come Hither Blues and Teddy hadn’t seen it before. The pop group with whom Joyden and Alpheton had been friends, and whose music they had loved, appeared on the canvas in swirls of color and flashes of light, so that strangely you could almost hear the picture.

  The girl muttered something about not being able to see to make notes. Teddy ignored her. Professor Mills talked about Joyden and Smith and the influence of the Fauvists, their bold style and use of brilliant color. While Rosalind Smith demonstrated this influence perhaps more than any other member of the Joyden School, Alpheton owed more to Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard than to Matisse and Rouault. Some called his work retrograde, but the lecturer claimed for it a striking modernity comparable at least to Hockney or Freud.

  Teddy barely knew who most of these people were. Lucien Freud he knew, but thought his work ugly, no matter how good it might be. He had seen a reproduction of one of Alpheton’s paintings on a flier put through the Neasden letter-box and now here it was again, as large as life up on the screen: Music in Hanging Sword Alley.

  Come Hither again, this time the four musicians leaned languidly against a concrete wall of the building where the recording studio was, their instruments at their feet. Marc Syre, the lead guitarist, had his mouth wide open, his head hanging backward and his long hair streaming down his back. The date of the painting, Professor Mills said, was 1965.

  “My mum’s got all their old singles,” whispered the girl. “She was a Come Hither groupie—can you believe it?”

  Teddy shrugged. He wasn’t interested in music of any kind. All those people were probably dead by now, anyway. People recorded in paint, that was another thing. Like this next one, Alpheton’s masterpiece, the most famous of the Joyden School, the one that was in the Tate, the one that was in all books of modern art and found its way into superior calendars. Until now Teddy had only seen it in that Sunday magazine, but it was really on its account that he had come to this lecture.

  Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place. The two young people were in a sunlit garden or courtyard in front of what looked like a tree. But a tree without trunk or branches, more a curtain of leaves. All this was mere background to the man and the woman who stood a little apart, joined to each other by his extended right hand, her left, the fingertips lightly linked. He was dark, bearded, long-haired, dressed in dark blue, she a red-haired beauty, with a russet curling mane, the precise same shade as her long Regency dress. Their eyes were concentrated on each other with, it seemed, a tender love and yearning. Passion informed the painting so that after all these years and in spite of the million eyes that had looked on it and the thousand commentaries made on it, this couple’s love remained fresh and eternally enduring.

  “Marc Syre, as your parents no doubt could tell you,” said Professor Mills, “was a member of Come Hither and as such made himself a fortune which enabled him, as early as nineteen sixty-five, the date of this work, to occupy this house in St. John’s Wood and enjoy this rus in urbe. Believe me, there is a Georgian house behind all those ivy or vine leaves, or whatever they are. Harriet Oxenholme was what we should call today his live-in girlfriend.

  “But we need not concern ourselves unduly with these people, who are important only insofar as Simon Alpheton was their friend and they became, by a most happy chance for subsequent generations, his subjects. What we must look at is Alpheton’s arresting use of color, his subtle handling of light and his curious ability to convey with extreme economy powerful emotion and, indeed, sexual passion. He had in mind, of course, as template or exemplar, Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, but before we discuss that, let us first look at the play of light and shade …”

  Teddy decided to take himself down to the Tate Gallery and confront the real thing. He thought about leaves and carving leaves, something like what Grinling Gibbons did, but modern, leaves for today. A picture frame of leaves or a mirror—yes, why not make a mirror?

  When the lecture was over and the lights went up again the girl next to him looked at the notes she had struggled to make. “Would you call that picture erotic?” she asked him.

  “Mills did.”

  “Did he? Then I will. I’m Kelly. What’s your name?”

  “Keith,” said Teddy.

  “What happened to your finger, Keith?”

  He said gravely, “My uncle bit it off.”

  This time she didn’t believe. She giggled. “Would you feel like coming out for a drink, Keith?”

  “I’ve got a tutorial,” said Teddy.

  He got
up and walked away without a backward glance. Why had he lied instead of just saying no? He’d say it next time. Of course he hadn’t a tutorial and he had no essay to write. No one seemed to care in his course whether you ever wrote anything or not. He was going home to perform a task, or begin to perform a task, he had for several years longed to do. His uncle would be out, putting in a power shower in a flat in Golders Green and afterward visiting Jimmy in hospital. Keith, who had never shown much affection for his brother in the past, or indeed for anyone, had become a faithful visitor at Jimmy’s bedside. So no one would be at home to see or to hear.

  The Edsel, a delicate pale-yellow and spotless, its engine several times rebuilt, stood on the extended concrete pad under the new carport with its four metal posts and its gleaming roof of corrugated polytetrafluoroethylene. It was—or seemed—the largest of any cars Keith had had, too large to be parked horizontally across the garden, its bonnet and grid like a pursed mouth facing the back fence, its huge finned boot with high taillights close up against the French windows. Next to it, underneath where the motorbike stood when Keith was at home, was a long slick of oil. The carport, designed to shelter a big car, had taken up even more of the space than the original pad and Teddy’s tool collection was crowded up into a corner, in the right angle where two fences met.

  He lifted up the plastic sheeting and shook off the water which the previous night’s rain had left in its folds. Underneath, from a box and then from their newspaper wrappings, he took a saw, a hacksaw, chisels of varying sizes, and a hammer. Mr. Chance had owned nothing so crude as an ax, but they had one Grandma Brex had used in distant wood-chopping days. Teddy found it, damp and blunt, among the welter of mold-coated rubbish under the sink.