A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  10

  The painting was two years old, already much acclaimed, and bought for a large sum, when Marc Syre threw Harriet Oxenholme out of the house.

  She had asked him once too often if he still loved her. His self-control, of which he had never had much, snapped. He fetched her such a swipe to the head that she fell over and lay sprawled on the badly stained carpet under the broken chandelier. Then he took hold of her by the hair, that massy, thick, curly red hair, and tried to drag her out of the room. But a hank of hair came away in his hand, so he dragged her by the shoulders instead.

  For once no other members of Come Hither were in the house, nor was their road manager, nor any of the groupies Marc was in the habit of bringing home for a night or just for a quickie on the drawing-room sofa. Harriet and Marc had been alone which was why, harking back to their passion and exclusivity which seemed so recent yet at the time so eternal, she had asked the fatal question.

  He hadn’t knocked her unconscious, but she gave up the struggle. She let him drag her out of the house, it was easier than walking. Outside the front door she got up because she didn’t fancy being bumped down the stone steps. He gave her a push and she staggered, though she didn’t lose her footing. When he had gone back into the house and slammed the door she sat down on the paving stones and rubbed her head where the hair had come out. There was blood on her fingers, he had wounded her.

  It was autumn and the dense tapestry of leaves had changed from green to pale yellow and bronze touched with dark red. When a window upstairs was roughly flung open, broken tendrils and torn foliage fluttered down. Marc started throwing out her clothes. She had to duck not to be hit by a flying boot. The red dress, the dress, came floating down like a great crimson butterfly or a snippet of that Virginia creeper, airily and as if it were enjoying itself. Then came a cardboard box.

  She got up and shouted at him, “Give me a suitcase, you bastard! I’m not carrying my stuff in a bloody box.”

  She didn’t think he would. She started putting her clothes in the box which had once held bottles of Babycham. When had he ever had Babycham, for God’s sake? The suitcase came flying out with its lid flapping open, to fall slam bang right on top of the single rose bush. She seized it in her arms, scratching herself on thorns.

  It was the dawn of the age of cheesecloth and she was always in the forefront of fashion, so there was a lot of it, limp, pale stuff, as feeble as she felt. She stuffed it into the suitcase and blood got on it from her fingers, streaking it with tie-dye patterns. Tears ran down her cheeks and she began to wail.

  The window went up again and there he was with a big pink-and-white china bowl balanced on the sill. Those Victorian jug-and-bowl sets were all the rage, so of course she’d had to have one. Marc had bought it for her like everything else and now he was going to empty its contents on to her head. She struggled to her feet, whimpering, dragging the suitcase behind her, and she was at the gate when the water came down in a cascade. The bowl followed, hitting the paving with such a crash that the people opposite came out into their front garden.

  Harriet didn’t look at them. They had complained to the police in the past about Marc’s goings-on and probably would again. It wasn’t her problem. She had problems enough, what with no money and nowhere to go. Her parents lived in Shropshire, in the manor house of a village near the Long Mynd, and were what her mother called “gentlefolks.” They hadn’t exactly shown Harriet the door, but after she had been expelled from her public school and had taken to following Come Hither everywhere, camping in her sleeping bag on the doorstep of the recording studio in Hanging Sword Alley, then moving in with Marc, telling the newspapers how much she adored Marc, after all that they had more or less made it plain she wasn’t welcome in Colling Magna. Even Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place being the Royal Academy’s picture of the year hadn’t changed their attitude.

  At that time Harriet hadn’t cared whether they wanted to see her or not. It was rather a relief that they didn’t, for it saved a lot of trouble. Now, though, they would have been useful. Colling Manor would have been somewhere to go to where they had to take you in. But what was the use of even thinking about it when she hadn’t got the train fare or the coach fare? She hadn’t any money at all and hadn’t the energy to hitch. The only thing to do was get down to Camden Town and throw herself on the mercy of some friends of hers who lived in a squat in Wilmot Place.

  It was hard to tell if they were pleased to see her or fed up with her or what. They were all high on something most of the time anyway, and this made them dreamy and spaced-out, walking about slowly like very old zombies or staring into corners as if seeing things sitting there that no one else could see. Terry and John, who had renamed themselves Storm and Anther, offered her a spare mattress in a room already occupied by Anther himself and a woman called Zither, but told her it could only be for a few nights. They were keeping the space for Storm’s guru, who was soon to join them from his ashram in Hartlepool.

  Harriet had to lug the suitcase upstairs herself. But she hadn’t really expected things to be otherwise. The mattress, naturally, was on the floor and she sat down on it. The only other furniture in the room was a second mattress, also on the floor, which Anther shared with Zither. An Indian bedspread served as a window curtain. On one wall was pinned a large sheet of paper on which someone had written in a curious script and red paint: Fourteen Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa. Harriet started to cry again, she couldn’t help it.

  She had had nothing to eat since breakfast, or what passed for breakfast, at midday, and now she was very hungry. Storm and Anther and Zither might share their food with her and they might not. Come to that, they might not be going to eat at all. She would very much have liked a drink. Along with a lot of other indulgences, she had got into the habit of drinking with Marc, but anything like that was out of the question here unless you were talking about maté or Boldo tea and Harriet wasn’t.

  She could go on the streets, but she didn’t know how to start. Did you just dress up and stand about until someone came up and asked you if you would? She might get beaten up by someone’s pimp or by a client. Sooner or later it was going to have to be Colling Manor via the M1 in a lorry, but even then she’d have to have something to eat on the way. In gathering up the stuff Marc had thrown out of the window she hadn’t looked closely at what she was putting into the case, she’d been too upset. There was always the possibility he had thrown out something she could sell. He’d never given her much in the way of jewelry, the only item worth anything being a gold bracelet and that was probably still in the drawer at Orcadia Place. She undid the case despondently and lifted the lid.

  Cheesecloth. How had she ever come to accumulate so much of it? Shirts and tops and waistcoats and pants as if the original long dress and jacket had got together and had cubs. A creamy, crumpled, pallid mass, streaked with blood, that she never wanted to see again, her boots and a couple of pairs of shoes, a bunch of bruised red leaves that had somehow got mixed up with it. And under it all the dress she had worn when Simon Alpheton painted her, its finely pleated silk the exact same color as her hair. No bracelet, no watch. Marc had paid a fortune for the red dress, which was appropriate, really, since the person who designed it was someone called Fortuny, and it hadn’t even been new. She remembered now, Simon had got him to buy it, had even found it for her and for his picture.

  If someone had bought it second-hand maybe someone else would buy it third-hand. There were a few places she knew, she’d try them in the morning. The suitcase was empty now, but for the zipped-up compartment at the back and she hadn’t opened that to put anything in there. It was Marc’s case, not hers, and it was just possible he had left something in that compartment. A half-empty packet of cigarettes from the last time he used the case? She was dying for a cigarette.

  Harriet undid the zip. She gave a little squeak. The compartment was full of money. It wasn’t fastened in wads but loose banknotes. She felt quite faint: weak
and as if her head were rising out of her neck on a long stalk. After she had closed her eyes and counted to ten and opened them again and the notes were still there, she began counting again, the money this time.

  There were still pound notes in those days. Oncers. Most of the notes were pounds, but some were fives and a few were tens. Harriet counted. She forgot she was hungry and longing for a cigarette. She had never in all her life enjoyed counting anything so much and she was quite sorry when it came to an end. But not sorry about the sum. Two thousand and nine pounds.

  Her euphoria lasted about an hour. Downstairs she found Anther and Zither in the kitchen baking hashish cakes. They offered her one, but she shook her head. She didn’t want anything at the moment that might change her consciousness, she liked it the way it was. “I’m going up the road,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”

  For answer they turned on her their strange spaced-out smiles but when she came back with two carriers full of purchases they each accepted a cigarette and a glass (a cracked cup) of wine. Harriet said she would be gone in the morning.

  “That’s okay,” said Anther. “The holy rishi won’t be here till this Thursday.”

  “I have to find a place of my own,” said Harriet.

  Her face felt sore where Marc had hit her and when she looked in the smeary mirror in the bathroom—it was a long time since she had been in a bathroom as squalid as this one and she had forgotten they existed—she saw her cheek that had at first been bright pink was turning the color of the Virginia creeper leaves. She went back to the room with her wine bottle and the chocolate she had bought. Her happiness was quickly being replaced by apprehension. Why was that money there?

  There were two possibilities, as far as she could see. One was that Marc hadn’t wanted to leave her destitute and had put it there on purpose. He kept money all over the house, in drawers, under the bed, it was just the way he was, a crazy eccentric. Maybe he’d snatched up a bundle of cash and stuffed it into that compartment as a farewell gift. But in that case wouldn’t he have put the bracelet in too? And would he have speeded her parting by chucking a bowl of water at her?

  No, she couldn’t see it as a final uncharacteristically generous gesture on Marc’s part. A more likely explanation was that he had put the notes in there the last time he went anywhere—to Spain it might have been, a month before—and simply forgotten about them. It could even be that the case was one of his “banks” along with the drawers and the top of the wardrobe. No doubt it had slipped his mind, but he would soon realize. He would know she’d got his two grand and he’d come after it. Or his heavies would. Other musicians had minders, but Marc had heavies, she’d met one of them and he was aptly named, the biggest man she’d ever seen in her life.

  She had better disappear.

  The room Harriet found was in Notting Hill in the neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove, known as “the Grove” to its denizens, and the landlady waived references when Harriet produced a hundred pounds’ deposit. She didn’t see how anyone could find her there, but she was nervous whenever she went out. And she was lonely.

  All her friends were Marc’s friends too. She had always liked Simon Alpheton, had quite fancied Simon, but she held back from getting in touch with him. He knew Marc, he might tell Marc, and then Marc would come like a shot after the swiftly dwindling two thousand pounds. Apprehensive she might be while out in the street, but she had still managed to spend. Buying things comforted her. She always felt more cheerful and less lonely when she came back to Chesterton Road with, for instance, a pair of boots, a floor cushion, a couple of the newest records in the charts, Vogue magazine and Forum and Cosmo, gold nail varnish and an Indian dress. She even bought a wig, with vague ideas of disguise in mind, but she had so much hair of her own that she couldn’t get it on.

  Never, since she was fifteen, had she gone so long without sex. Celibacy lasted two months until her landlady had the house painted. The man who was doing it appeared at her window one day on top of his ladder. Otto Neuling was the son of a German ex-prisoner of war and an English blonde, he was tall and well-built, with the coloring of Siegfried and the features of Paul Newman. He was younger than Harriet, just eighteen to her twenty-four, and he was to be the first in a long line of young lovers who belonged in the rough-trade genre as well as the youth category.

  After a heavy flirtation conducted at the window, Harriet invited him to step over the sill and come into the room.

  Otto had never heard of Simon Alpheton or Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place, was inarticulate, of limited intelligence and very virile. That suited Harriet fine. Sometimes she went drinking with him in the Sun in Splendor and once to Clacton on the back of his Honda. It would never occur to Marc, she thought, to look for her in Otto’s company.

  When there was just under five hundred pounds left of Marc’s money Harriet, wearing the red dress and carrying a Biba bag full of newly bought finery, was walking home along Holland Park Avenue. The only economy she practiced was to stop taking taxis. The man approaching her with a dog on a lead was the kind to whom she never gave a second glance: old, certainly getting on for forty, with receding hair and glasses. She noticed the dog because it was an Irish setter with a coat the same color as her hair. But neither was interesting enough to distract her from her favorite pastime of studying her own reflection in the shop fronts that she passed.

  He spoke to her. She had never seen him before, but he spoke her name. “Harriet.”

  He said it in a tone of pleased satisfaction. She was wary. “And how is Marc?” he said.

  If she had had a better understanding of human nature she would have detected a kind of serendipity in his manner, as of someone who has happily made an unexpected discovery. His smile should have told her and his raised eyebrows. As it was Harriet, the solipsist, immediately thought this man had been set on her, might even be a private detective or some kind of bailiff, sent to recover the money. She said shrilly, “What do you want?”

  “Please,” he said. “I’m sorry. But you are Harriet, aren’t you? Alpheton’s Harriet in Orcadia Place? I would have known you anywhere.”

  “Is that all?” she said and breathed again.

  “I’ve been in love with that picture for two years. Maybe I should say I’ve been in love with the girl in that picture.”

  You’ve got a bit of a bloody nerve, thought Harriet. She didn’t say it aloud. She looked at him, properly this time, and with renewed interest. He wasn’t too bad. Quite tall and he hadn’t got a belly, in spite of his age. Nice hands, reasonable teeth and a lovely dog. She stroked the dog’s silky red head. “What’s his name?”

  “O’Hara.”

  “You’re sure Marc didn’t send you?”

  He burst out laughing. “I don’t even know who he is—a pop singer, right?”

  “He’s very famous,” she said indignantly.

  “I’m sure. I only know him from the picture, but then I’m not very with it. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we go and have a cup of tea?”

  “I’d rather have a drink,” said Harriet.

  The Prince of Wales had just opened for the evening. They both had Tequila Sunrises, which he told the barman how to make. A bowl of water was put on the floor for O’Hara. He told her his name was Franklin Merton and he lived in Campden Hill Square. That made Harriet prick up her ears and she asked if he had a flat there. No, a house, he said, and what about her? She couldn’t think of anything to say, there wasn’t anything, she was just Harriet Oxenholme who had been painted by Alpheton.

  “A lily of the field?”

  She didn’t know what he meant and thought him a little mad. But rich. She never asked people what they did for a living because this wasn’t something that much concerned her and when he said that he looked after people and made sure they were safe, she thought disappointedly that he must be a social worker.

  “I’m in insurance,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m married.”
/>   “Right.”

  She gave him an innocent, carefree smile. How could his being married interest or trouble her? Marriages, anyway, as for as she could tell, were made to be broken. But he was rich and she, in only a few weeks, was due to be poor again.

  “You look wonderful in your Fortuny dress,” he said. “If I just pop home first with the dog, will you have dinner with me?”

  She detected a curious coldness in his strained smile, but she didn’t, then, see it as sinister.

  11

  It was always there. The other girls she knew, her friends, Miranda and Isabel and Holly, also had memories of the eighth year of their lives to look back on, memories which would be everlastingly recalled. The puppy her parents had given her for her birthday, in Miranda’s case; in Holly’s, falling off her pony and breaking her leg; for Isabel it was her brother being born. She, Francine, had her memory too: the murder of her mother.

  Why did you remember some details and not others? Had anyone ever explained that satisfactorily? Why did you—and you clearly did—falsify memory?

  All the circumstances of being sent to her room and waiting there, bored and fretful, remained with her. The butterfly she had caught and put outside the window. Red admirals were a common sort of butterfly, perhaps the commonest British kind, and motifs and logos of it were used everywhere. Probably most people didn’t notice the red admiral on the cereal packet, the book cover, the bubble bath. She did. She’d even seen one on a T-shirt. The ring at the doorbell she remembered and getting inside the cupboard and pulling the door closed with her small seven-year-old fingers.

  But not the cry of “No!” and the screaming. She only knew about it because Julia said she had told it to the police. Julia kept her memories alive. She had no recollection of finding her mother, of sitting with her, getting her blood on herself, waiting there till her father came. Julia said it was better for her to confront what had happened, so Julia reminded her. Otherwise all that would completely have gone from her mind.