A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  “I would have,” said Julia, and then she said, “What’s this about a job?”

  He looked unhappy. “Waitressing, I think it is. In that little coffee and sandwiches place at the other end of the High Street.”

  “She can’t be a waitress. How could you let her? Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “I can’t stop her, Julia. She’s an adult. Besides, she must do something and the job with Noele didn’t work out. We’ve been through all this before.”

  “Men will put their filthy hands all over her,” said Julia in a strange high voice. “Up her skirt and down her blouse. They will slobber over her. They’ll fondle her. And she won’t say no, not she, she won’t know how to, she won’t want to, she’s too highly sexed. The reality is that there’s such a thing as nymphomania, you know, even if it’s not politically correct to say it. I’d call her a classic case of nymphomania.”

  Richard looked at his wife in horror. He thought he could see a shifting in her face, a curious lopsidedness, and the iris of her left eye seemed to loll into the corner of the white. When she had finished speaking her lips wobbled. He could think of nothing to say to her. She stared at him, then wheeled around and left the room.

  The ridiculous thought came to him that she couldn’t be mentally disturbed because she had been a psychotherapist. As if such people must be exempt from the disorders they treated. But she couldn’t be disturbed, she couldn’t be, he said over and over to himself. Not Julia, who had always been—he uttered the disloyalty in his mind—so boringly sane.

  An image of Jennifer came to him. It was the nearest he had ever come to seeing a ghost, this conjuring of his first wife before his eyes. She was in the room and yet she was not, a floater on his retina, a cobweb dangling in his vision. He closed his eyes. He wanted her as a little boy wants his mother. To hold him and hug him. To protect him from madwomen with obscene sexual fantasies.

  If, in that last year they had together, he had loved Jennifer as he once had and had awakened love in her, would she ever have died? For instance, he could have got home earlier that evening, just as he could have all those evenings. With him in the house she would have been safe. He couldn’t have said how he knew this, for the murderer had come looking for money derived from drug dealing and would have killed anyone who got in his way, but he did know it. By instinct or intuition, he knew.

  He opened his eyes and Jennifer’s ghost had melted away as swiftly as it had materialized, and when he next saw Julia she was her old calm and rational self. She intended to go up to Oxford again in a few days, she would take Francine with her, and if they settled on a house it might be time to put this one on the market. He was tired, he was perhaps rather overwrought. It must have been his imagination that an insane woman had come in here and harangued him, accusing his sweet and gentle child of sexual hysteria. Or he had dreamed it during the sleep he fell into after his lunch, just as he had dreamed Jennifer’s visitation.

  “I didn’t get the job,” Francine said.

  Teddy was relieved. “You don’t want a job like that. It’s beneath you.”

  “I have to do something. I have to learn about going out to work and earning money. That’s part of the point of this gap year. The café didn’t think I was tough enough for the job—they didn’t quite say that, but it’s what they meant.”

  “You’re not tough enough and you never can be.”

  He had met her in the Edsel half a mile up the road. Now he was going to surprise her, if she would let him, if she failed to notice the change from the route he usually took. But her knowledge of London geography was elementary and when he turned off Park Road for Lisson Grove she noticed only the street name.

  “Eliza Doolittle came from Lisson Grove,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. It’s a play by Shaw. She came from this street. Professor Higgins could tell by her accent.”

  “Accents matter a lot to you, don’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Forget it.”

  A cloud had passed across his pleasure. It hung there, dulling things.

  She put her hand on his knee. “Where are we going, Teddy?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “This isn’t the way to your house.”

  “It’s the way to a house.”

  From Grove End Road he turned into Melina Place, crossed the mews into Orcadia Place. They would leave the car here, he said, there was a parking space provided for the house. No one would come and clamp it. He handed her out of the car, which was something he had never done before, and they walked around the corner.

  When she saw the house the expression on her face was far from what he had expected, or rather, what he had hoped for. She seemed to look warily at its ancient bricks, its latticed windows, the Della Robbia plaque, the curtain of leaves, now crimson and gold. As they came up to the front door and he took the key out of his pocket, took it out with pride as if he really did own this place, a terrible thing happened. In fact, it was an ordinary thing, a nothing, but to his bewilderment it was terrible for her.

  A butterfly, a poor bedraggled thing, the last of summer, fluttered from one of the dark-red leaves. Its wings were transparent in places where the velvety dust had worn away, but it was still distinctly a black butterfly with a bright-red and white border to its wings. It half flew, half staggered on the wing to flutter limply against Francine’s shoulder. She recoiled with a cry, warding it off with her hands.

  “Oh, no, oh, no, please—I can’t—no!”

  He caught her in his arms, drawing her back. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “That thing, that’s a red admiral. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry to be such a fool.”

  The butterfly was on the ground, feebly moving its wings. Teddy stamped on it. He thought this decisive action, obviously necessary, would please Francine. It was clearly what she wanted.

  She burst into tears. “You didn’t have to kill it, the poor thing, the poor thing!”

  He muttered, “It was going to die anyway. Why do you care so much? It was only an old butterfly,” and he unlocked the front door.

  She stepped inside, her head bent and her hands covering her face. It was not an auspicious beginning for their arrival at Orcadia Cottage.

  And it took a little while before things became better. Francine’s face wore the same wary look when she looked around the hall and was taken by him into the drawing room, the dining room, shown the curved white staircase. She had been silent from the moment they entered and he closed the front door behind them. Her face was red and her eyes swollen from crying, and for the time being she was not the beauty he worshiped and loved above everything to gaze at. The perfection of her white skin was spoiled and she sniffed once or twice in a too human way. He had never supposed her capable of sniffing. Added to his dismay at her clothes, the jeans again and a heavy dark sweater, these new doubts half panicked him.

  That she was making efforts for his sake escaped him. He didn’t see her brace herself. The smile she forced he saw as wholly natural wonderment at the interior of this place.

  “Whose house is it, Teddy? Why are we here?”

  He had prepared his answer. “I’m doing a job, plastering, stonework. The woman who owns it has let me live here while that’s going on. It’s a kind of lease really. She won’t be back.”

  “But she will be one day?”

  He dredged up a phrase he had read or heard somewhere. “Maybe in the not unforeseeable future.” He laughed. “Or the unforeseeable future. Anyway, it’s not our problem. It’s ours for now. Come upstairs.”

  The house reminded her of the cottage where they had lived and where her mother had died. It was quite different really, not so old for one thing, and inside far more elaborately and expensively furnished. That house had been silent with the quietness of the country, while even inside here you could hear the distant throb of traffic, the hum of London. But s
he had felt the similarity, some identifying atmosphere, from the first moment she and Teddy had stepped on to the flagstones of that enclosed court that was the front garden. All those leaves, the red and yellow creeper that blanketed the house, they had had one like it on their cottage. Then had come the unpleasant though ridiculous incident of the red admiral, to remind her further, and Teddy’s brutal act which for a few moments had seemed utterly to alienate him from her.

  She had wept and hoped he would comfort her, but he had only been impatient. She sensed that he was disappointed in her reaction and she did her best to show an enthusiasm she didn’t feel. Somehow, in spite of her lack of experience, she understood that because of his failure with her he was under an increasing strain and she sensed that here, in this place he so obviously deeply admired, he would triumph. It was to be, she supposed, in this splendid film star bed, the kind of thing you saw in photographs in glossy house interiors magazines, all white silk draperies and gilding and insertions of classical paintings.

  “Do you like it?” he kept saying, and “What do you think of it?”

  She wanted to say, because it was true, that she had liked his house, the way it was done. The word, she imagined, was “minimalism.” In that case, the expression for this must be “baroque.” But she said none of it. “It’s lovely.”

  “I wanted to see you in this bed. I thought it was made for you, this whole room, this bed. Please.”

  A strange feeling took hold of her. It was as if she were learning things she couldn’t, at her age and with her very limited experience, possibly know. Yet the knowledge was very strong and deeply troubling. For example, an understanding was there that her first love affair shouldn’t be conducted in this way, that there was something perilous about it, something damaging to her and to him. And this, too, that she was not a thing of perfect beauty, an icon, an ornament to be adored, but a real and very young woman.

  What would he do if he tried and tried but, after everything was the ideal way he wanted it, still failed? What would she do? She felt cold and reluctant, but she took off her clothes and got into the bed, expecting him to join her. Instead he stood watching her with an expression of almost cruel concentration. It was late in the afternoon, dusk almost, and the room was dim and shadowy. She rather liked this twilight that kept some things half secret but now that she was in the bed, positioned by him to face herself in the mirror, the bedclothes drawn from off her so that she was white and naked in that white silk place, he switched on all the lights, making a violent blaze.

  She recoiled from it, blinking her eyes. Her hands had closed into fists and in the mirror she saw a frightened girl with huge eyes and a look on her face of appeal, almost a cry for rescue. But she did nothing and said nothing, only let him watch her, drink in his fill of her. For a moment—and she would have hated this—she thought he would fall on his knees like someone before the image of a goddess. Instead, though after a long time, he turned off the brightest of the lights, undressed and came into the bed beside her.

  Then followed the gentle kissing and caresses she loved. She had even told him it was enough for her, though this wasn’t strictly true. He had told her quite roughly that she was lying, that must be rubbish, she didn’t have to be kind to him, only be with him. But it was her nature to be kind and when, now, he tried again and failed again, she held him in her arms with great tenderness and kissed him and stroked his hair.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” she said, “just lie here and go to sleep.”

  In the late evening when they woke he became more cheerful. He showed her the rest of the house, wanted to know again and again if she liked it, if she really liked it. And he seemed resigned to her going home early so long as she promised to come back the next day. He walked her to the tube at St. John’s Wood, it wasn’t far, kissed her on the pavement outside the station with all the mastery and power of the successful lover. It was only nine o’clock. She would be home in good time.

  It was a new feeling Teddy had. When he was a child, long, long ago, he had known it, but it had passed away with time because it was useless. It saved him from nothing, secured him nothing, brought him no comfort and nothing was changed by it. He couldn’t afford to have it, so in his desperate battle to survive it had been cast aside. Or buried deep. But now it had surfaced. The feeling was fear.

  He was very afraid. Of himself, mostly. His body which, apart from that mutilated finger, was such a perfect and trouble-free machine, not only obeying him in everything he asked of it, but performing superlative acts beyond what was expected—look how he had lifted Keith’s body and how he had moved the stone—now failed lamentably and in an area where at his age and with his strength it should most have gratified him.

  For a few moments that afternoon he had come close to hating Francine. It was easy for her, everything was easier for her. His desire for her filled every part of his body and his mind, flooded him with urgency and longing and utter need, so that everything else emptied itself out and drained away. Why was it, then, that while he looked at her and adored he was erect and strong, a current flowing through his veins, but as soon as they touched and she was in his arms he wilted and shrank like a poisoned tree?

  Slowly he walked back to Orcadia Place. He would spend the night there, sleep in that bed. If she had stayed, eventually all would have been well, he thought. He thought it resentfully, though by now he had forgotten his near-dislike of her in the memory of how beautiful she had looked in that room, better even than he had anticipated.

  Before meeting her that afternoon he had put the finishing touches to the brickwork. Alone now, in the silent and otherwise dark house, he began the task of plastering. It was far from the simple job he had thought. In fact, try as he would, taking it slowly and methodically, using the tools he had bought, the diamond-shaped plasterer’s trowel and the rectangular one, he was unable to achieve an absolutely smooth and regular surface.

  It irked him to fail at something which fools like the men his father had worked with did easily every day. But those men had had years of practice and to him it was new. Still, he refused to be content with a botched job and, scraping off the plaster, began again. This time was better. Practice was all. At last the result was close to what he aimed at, acceptable even to a perfectionist like him. Tomorrow he would paint the wall he had made and do it before he went to fetch Francine.

  After he had taken a bath in that free-standing claw-footed tub, he found that his mind was still stirred up with a million thoughts and fancies. He was sure he would be a real man, a potent man, if he had more money. At the back of his mind, however much he resisted it, was the fear that Francine despised him. For his class, his accent, his home background and his poverty. How could you make satisfactory love to a woman who felt only contempt for you?

  Picking up his clothes from the floor—he would wash them next day in the Orcadia Cottage machine—he felt in his jeans pocket and brought out the small leather-bound address book that had been in Harriet’s handbag. Strange, he thought he had thrown it away when he discarded the bag. Returning to the white silk bed where he and Francine had lain that afternoon, he flicked through the pages of the address book, but only one name meant anything to him: Simon Alpheton. He dropped the address book on the floor.

  It was two in the morning. Several clocks in the house told him so, but in silence; none of them chimed the hour.

  29

  The woman who accompanied Franklin Merton on his holidays, and who had by this time been his companion on several of these trips, he had met in the Green Park one sunny afternoon in June. Met, that is, meaning encountered, for they had first been introduced to one another some forty-five years earlier.

  Franklin was on his way from Green Park tube station down the Queen’s Walk to have lunch with a friend at his club in St. James’s when he saw ahead of him, gambolling on the grass, an Irish setter. As such dogs invariably did, this one reminded him of O’Hara, whom he had been obliged to relinquish t
o Anthea when he went off with Harriet. In subsequent years he often thought it had been a poor exchange.

  The dog came up to him, Franklin put out his hand in a gentle and friendly way, the dog approached, and in that moment a woman appeared, as it seemed, from nowhere. It was Anthea.

  He hadn’t seen her for eighteen years. In the decade prior to that he had only seen her twice. He knew she had married two years after their divorce, that her husband had been well off, that he had died and left her a house somewhere in May-fair. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “What’s the dog called?”

  “De Valera.”

  She had worn very well, he thought. She must be sixty-five or -six but she looked younger than Harriet. A comfortably plump woman, she had a smooth, unlined round face and her gray hair, untinted, shone like newly polished silver. If she wore makeup it was discreetly applied. The only signs of her wealth were the large diamond rings on both her hands, for the tweed suit she wore, though obviously once expensive, had seen better days. She put out her hand and when the dog came to her, held him by the collar as if to keep him from the cajolements of strangers.

  “Come and have a drink,” said Franklin.

  “What, now?”

  “I know a nice little pub off St. James’s Square.”

  “So do I,” said Anthea. “Probably the same one. We always had a lot of tastes in common. How’s your wife?”

  As Franklin returned a rather clipped answer to this question he was thinking that she would refuse his invitation. He found himself quite intensely minding this. “Do come,” he said.

  She put the dog on the lead. In the pub they gave De Valera a bowl of water and there returned to Franklin’s mind a similar scene in a pub when he was nearly thirty years younger, but then the woman was Harriet and the dog was O’Hara. He also remembered, rather later, the friend he was meeting and he phoned the club and said he had flu.

  After a couple of dry martinis Anthea said, “I’ll just take Dev back to Half Moon Street and then I’d like to give you lunch.”