A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  Next day was Saturday. He had thought he wouldn’t sleep, but he slept late, awakened by the bright sunlight of a clear blue-skied winter’s noon. Or perhaps by the phone. He went to answer it, wondering what he would do if it were the police, alerted by the yuppies next door. But it was someone for Keith, a woman who couldn’t turn off her hot tap and who wanted a plumber urgently.

  “Mr. Brex has retired,” Teddy said. It was true in a way.

  “Retired?”

  “That’s right. We all come to it in the end, even workaholics like Mr. Brex.” He was—incredibly after last night—enjoying this. “He’s gone to live in a cottage in Liphook.”

  Not surprisingly, the customer wasn’t interested. “Well, can you come?”

  “Afraid not,” said Teddy. “I’m a craftsman. I suggest you consult the Yellow Pages.”

  After he put the phone down he started laughing. He felt immeasurably, incredibly, better than he had done at that small-hours waking. The story would do for everyone who phoned for Keith. Was there such a place as Liphook? He didn’t really know, the name had come to him out of the air, but he had better find out. Almost immediately the phone rang again, and again he gave his version of Keith’s departure from plumbing and from north London.

  There was going to be a lot of this. Old customers and potential clients would probably call around, too. But there was no chance of anyone guessing what had happened to Keith or where he was now. Troubles lay ahead, he could see that. For instance, could he leave the body there indefinitely? Could he take over the house and go on living in it as if it were his? Perhaps it was his now. And where was the money to come from to pay for everything?

  In Keith’s bedroom he found a dog-eared, much-thumbed map of the British Isles. Keith must have used it when he went on those car rallies. He looked for Liphook and finally spotted it in Sussex not far from Midhurst. Fortuitously, he had found quite a suitable place for Keith to have retired to. He imagined the squat little bungalow with pantiled roof or even one of those cottages that had started life as railway carriages. Knowing Keith, the latter would be his choice. It would stand on a raft of concrete bordered by walls of breeze blocks with a garage of corrugated asbestos for the Edsel.… Only the Edsel was here, with Keith inside it.

  Teddy abandoned fantasies and began on the room. He tore all the Post-its off the windowpanes and the tallboy. He filled three plastic bags with Keith’s clothes, two with his empty bottles and cans and three more with his car magazines and cigarette cartons. The six pairs of boots went into a cardboard crate which had held the magazines. Not until the room was empty of all but Keith’s newly stripped bed, tallboy and single chair, and the bags and box were out on the doorstep to await Monday morning’s refuse collection, did he turn his attention to the money he had taken off Keith’s body.

  He counted it. Five hundred and sixty-five pounds. His hands were shaking again. He clenched his fists and breathed deeply until the shaking stopped. Some of that money he would spend on advertising, on offering his services as a joiner and cabinetmaker. He had no idea how to do it, but he could learn.

  The tail of the Edsel with its flaring fins seemed closer to his windows than it had done in the past. It occurred to him then that he would have to learn to drive. Money would have to be spent on driving lessons. Some time, and not too far distantly, he must be able to drive this car away.

  He dreamed again that night, but not of the sideboard-turned-mansion this time. This dream was of the thing occupying the Edsel’s boot six feet away from his sleeping brain, of its gradual metamorphosis over the weeks and months into a waxen effigy, a skeleton, a bag of dust; until, having driven the monstrous pale-yellow car out of London and through Surrey and Sussex in the direction of Liphook, he parked and opened the boot and found inside the bags a tiny shriveled thing like a dried-up insect, which he picked up between forefinger and thumb and threw into the ditch.

  By the middle of February Teddy had begun work on the mirror. He had decided on sycamore rather than walnut because the color and the grain were so beautiful, its pattern like multitudinous strands of wavy blond hair. He worked meticulously and quite slowly, cutting the triangles for his inlay accurately to a fraction of a millimeter, aiming at perfection. And he worked in peace and quiet and fresh air. The smell of smoke had disappeared from everywhere but the front room. Keith’s tallboy he had brought down here, sanded down the greasy cigarette-burned surface and, having lightly stained the mahogany, French-polished it.

  When he had filled more bags and boxes for the refuse collection, this time from his parents’ bedroom, he went down the road to the newsagent’s. The glass case beside the door contained no advertisements of the kind he was looking for, so he bought two newspapers the newsagent recommended, the Ham and High and the Neasden Times.

  The Ham and High had what he wanted. The “Services” section of the small ads was divided into specific sections: Building and Decorating, Chimney Sweeps, Gardening and Landscaping, Health and Beauty. Under Household Clearance a company offered “Large, small clearances, clothes, oddments, anything, good prices paid.” “Rubbish disposal” was also on offer, but no mention was made of payment—except from the customer. In the next column a driving school offered lessons for “competitive fees” with “rapid test passing” guaranteed. “Rapid,” Teddy thought, could mean anything, six weeks or two years. But he called the house clearance number and the driving school number in the hope that money received from one would pay for the other.

  Next he came to some unexpected services. “Articles for sale” occupied a lot of space and so did “Massage.” Carpenters were on offer in plenty, he counted twelve advertisements. Shelving systems and wardrobes were what they offered, as well as fitting kitchens and replacing doors. Someone calling himself a cabinetmaker specialized in desks and one ad was from a pair of women joiners.

  Teddy couldn’t see the advantage of having a woman build one’s cupboards and the ad made him feel obscurely uneasy. But the rest cheered him up. People obviously did do this and must make a living at it or they wouldn’t go on advertising, would they? He was sure he could do a better job than most of them.

  Time enough to compose his own advertisement when the mirror was finished. Perhaps in May. Maybe he would describe himself as an expert, as one of these joiners did, and put in the qualification he would have by that time. Would he also put “friendly and reliable service”? In his case, “thorough and dependable” might be better.

  Meanwhile, he had enough money to get by on. He folded the Ham and High carefully and put it in the top drawer of the refurbished tallboy.

  “Max and Mex House Clearances” took away the main bedroom furniture and gave him fifty pounds for it. He had expected at least a hundred and he protested, but the house clearers said it wouldn’t fetch that and what about their profit? They quoted the Ham and High and said they weren’t really in the business of rubbish disposal.

  To have rid himself of the front-room furniture would have been risky, for his grandmother still came around, if rarely. Probably the last time had been before Christmas. It was as well he had kept it, for she turned up the day after “Max and Mex” had been.

  Without much interest in the thought processes of others and having none in their emotions, he had never asked himself how Agnes Tawton must have reacted to surviving a husband, an only daughter and her son-in-law; to having no one in the world but him. After all, he had no one but her. He didn’t ask now, only felt a vague disquiet as she surveyed the clean and tidy front room, the neat, scrubbed kitchen.

  “Keith’s been busy,” she said.

  It was the only solution she could conceive of, that Keith, having been made uncomfortable by the disorder all these years, had tidied up once his brother and sister-in-law were gone. She trotted through the rooms, looking curiously about her. An armchair seat cushion was lifted up and its interior scrutinized for cigarette ash and dirty tissues. She ran a twisted arthritic finger along the lintel of th
e back door, seemed nonplussed that her hand came away clean. “I reckon he’ll put you out now,” she said. “He’s got the right. This house was never your dad’s. I don’t suppose you knew that.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but as a matter of fact I did.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, disappoint. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Shame,” said Teddy. “I was counting on finding a corner for myself under your roof.”

  Agnes’s reply was lost in the shrill pealing of the doorbell. Teddy had been anticipating the arrival of the driving instructor for the past ten minutes. He opened the door and let the man in. Now to get rid of Agnes.

  She had made her way into his room and was standing at the French windows, looking out. Teddy had only ever had one children’s book, a collection of anthropomorphic animal stories and she had given it to him. He thought she looked like an illustration from that book, a toad in hat and coat, for instance, or a housewife mole. She turned around, asked him if he was going to introduce her and, when he didn’t, held out her hand and said, “I’m Mrs. Tawton, I’m his grandma.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the driving instructor. “Call me Damon.” Then he saw the Edsel. “That belong to you?” he said to Teddy.

  “It’s his uncle’s,” said Agnes.

  “D’you mind if I go out and take a closer look?”

  Teddy minded very much, but he could hardly say so. They all went outside by way of the back door, Agnes, though about half a century Damon’s senior, tripping along faster than he. The March day was no warmer than January had been. An icy wind struck their faces and Agnes was obliged to keep a grip on her sugarloaf-shaped red hat.

  “Keith not on his bike then,” she said.

  It was one of those remarks that, though merely pointing out what must be obvious to all, seem loaded with menace. Teddy felt the bike as a threat to himself. If Keith had gone to work, as his grandmother must believe, the bike would be with him. If he had retired, as all his erstwhile customers believed, the bike would be with him or have been sold; it would certainly not be in this garden.

  But Agnes answered her own speculations. “Too cold for him,” she said and, with an edge of spite, “He’s past tearing about on them things at his age.”

  Teddy wondered if learning to drive a car also taught you to drive a motorbike. He didn’t feel he could ask. Damon was gazing with adoration at the Edsel and had moved too close to it for Teddy’s comfort. He had actually laid one hand on the boot lid.

  “That is a beauty. That is a vehicle as would do a ton and twenty when it was new,” he said. “Maybe would today, the little darling. You can see it’s been kept in lovely condition.” It was as if he were talking about a horse, Teddy thought. “Mind you, with its fuel consumption in the low teens, it’s not for everyone.”

  “A poor man’s car, would you say?” said Teddy.

  “Come again?”

  “Owning it would keep you poor.”

  “Oh, yes. Very good. You got it.”

  Was there a smell? No, there was nothing. It had been very cold and must be as icy as a fridge inside there. He thought he saw Agnes’s nose twitching like a rabbit’s. He said, “Shall we get going, then?”

  Damon offered Agnes a lift home. She declined it. She wasn’t going in any car driven by her grandson, she said, not when he’d never been at the wheel before. It didn’t do to have your bones broken at her age.

  Teddy got into the driving-school car and when Damon had finished telling him about switching on the ignition and moving the gear shift from neutral into first, he asked if getting his license would also entitle him to ride a motorbike. Damon said no it wouldn’t, no group D types, whatever that meant, and began enumerating all the varieties of vehicle Teddy would be able to drive, including invalid carriages and heavy goods vehicles up to a certain tonnage. Teddy turned on the ignition, let in the clutch and stalled the engine.

  By the middle of April he had finished the mirror and submitted it. He was in love with it, it was so beautiful and so flawless, as he tended to fall in love with objects, ornaments, pictures, Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place, for instance, and the diamond ring. After he had packed it with the greatest care in bubble wrap and polystyrene—another of his bugbears among plastics but essential here—it was a wrench to let it go. After it had been exhibited at the Eastcote College degree show, would he ever be able to bring himself to sell it? To part with it?

  He willingly sold Keith’s motorbike. A friend of the yuppies came around one day, said he had seen the old Enfield from a window next door and Megsie said the man that owned it had retired and moved away, and the bike might be for sale.

  “Megsie?”

  “Next door,” said the friend, surprised. “Megsie and Nige. You know.”

  He hadn’t, but he did now. How did they know? How did this Megsie know? Somehow or other the news must have filtered through from one of Keith’s customers to whom he had told this story. Luckily, he had kept the registration certificate for the bike that he had found, before throwing out Keith’s few papers. Then he had to name a sum. It was necessary to pretend that Keith had asked him to sell the bike and therefore had suggested a possible price. The Enfield was as old as the hills. Though Keith had changed cars three times in Teddy’s lifetime, he had always ridden the same bike.

  Firmly, as if he knew what he was doing, Teddy asked a hundred pounds. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew he had underestimated. Megsie’s friend was all smiles and eagerness. The Enfield probably had some sort of vintage value, but it was too late now and Teddy had a great sense of relief in just seeing it go. It had been a hideous object, an offense to the eye, as in his estimation all motorbikes were.

  If only he could as easily rid himself of the Edsel! The end of April was warm. Feeling the increasing heat of the sun and watching the temperature rise, he grew more and more anxious about the contents of the Edsel’s boot. By day he dared not spend much time hovering over the big yellow car, but in the night, when the street was in darkness and Megsie and Nige had turned out their bedroom light, he opened the French windows and put his face close up against those flaring fins.

  His sense of smell was very good, but he couldn’t tell if he was smelling something or imagining a smell. Keith used to say the Ford Edsel was a very well-built car and the way this boot closed must be like a hermetic seal. The air was fresh and the night cool. There was a smell, but it was of diesel mingling with the scent of flowering trees, cherries and prunuses, one of which grew in every garden but the Brexes’. He closed the windows and slept until disturbed by that recurring dream of the wooden mansion that shimmered out of the darkness, more crenellated and turreted and battlemented than before. No longer doll’s-house size, but big enough to push aside the walls of his room, it had lost also its immobility and seemed to tremble and swell, its façade and towers shivering like an image under water.

  When the great door under the central arch opened and someone or something came out he woke up, crying out. Whoever had emerged he couldn’t see, hadn’t wanted to see, it was just a tiny indistinct shape. He lay still, breathing deeply, savoring his return to reality and hoping his cry had not reached Megsie and Nige next door.

  He took his driving test in June and passed. Once he had his license he considered phoning Damon at the driving school and asking for one more lesson—this time at the wheel of the Edsel.

  But there were terrible drawbacks to this plan. The smell, if smell there was, might not be discernible in the garden, but could permeate the interior of the car. Particularly if moving it shifted the body in the boot. Or if neither he nor Damon could get the car back again into the narrow garden, if it had to be left in the street. It was an enormous car and certainly Damon had never driven anything in its class. And what if—the worst possibility this, but real enough—they were involved in some minor accident. This could happen through no fault of his or Damon’s, but simply by someone driving too fast behind
them and going into the back of the Edsel. It hardly bore contemplating.

  Over and above all this was his reluctance to phone Damon, or anyone, to place himself in something close to a making-friends situation. One thing would lead to another, the Edsel-driving experiment to a drink in some pub, to coming back here or even an invitation to Damon’s place. That was how it went, or how he thought it went, and he didn’t need it. He didn’t want a friend moving into his life, discovering things. He would have to take the Edsel out on his own. One day, but not yet. And then he must think of how to rid himself of the car as well as its contents, be free of this pale-yellow mobile coffin.

  Damon had called the Edsel a beauty and over the fence the other day Nige had said it was “a lovely job.” But to Teddy it was hideous, as ugly as the sideboard had been and even uglier than that, for the sideboard had been made of wood, a natural substance, and the Edsel was a confection of tortured metal, painted an offensive color. The color of puke, he thought, tormenting himself, the color of contaminated water, of certain alcoholic drinks, of piss. He longed to be rid of it, but longed almost as much to discover the condition of what lay under that boot lid.

  It was sealed in plastic. But the plastic had seams in it, it wasn’t airtight. Would that make a difference? Would there be a smell or only if the binding tape were loosened? How bad would it be? He didn’t know, he had no idea. Like meat on which flies have crawled? Like the inside of their dustbin used to be before Keith’s death? What did a dead body smell like?

  But more than that, more than anything, he was afraid to look inside. He was afraid of what he might see. Reality would not be like the dream he had had, the one where he opened the boot and found only a shriveled gray doll.

  14

  In the first flush of love Franklin Merton had bought Harriet one present after another. A lot of jewelry, that went without saying, and an ocelot coat. The wearing of furs was soon to provoke hatred on the streets, but not in the early seventies. He would have bought her Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place, but he couldn’t afford it. Rich as he was by anyone’s standards, by that time the painting was beyond his means.