by Ruth Rendell
He addressed himself as he often did: ‘What are we going to do about that, Fowler?’
Some inner adviser told him to look in cupboards and sure enough there was plenty of food in cans. He made himself a supper of a tinned steak pie, which he heated in the microwave, artichoke hearts, bean sprouts and reconstituted dried potato. It was ten o’clock. He put his dishes in the sink and went back downstairs with his third gin and there, feeling virtuous, he swept up the broken glass into a dustpan. The temperature had fallen about fifteen degrees and the room was icy. If he was going to sleep in there he had better do something about the window. He patched it with sheets of newspaper, which he secured with sellotape, and after watching a programme on the television about a lot of fat people going on holiday to Miami, went to bed in Marion’s clean sheets.
After the best night’s sleep he had had for years – he seldom slept in so comfortable a bed – he got up at midday. It took him ages to find keys to the new lock but he did in the end, five of them on a plastic key-holder hidden in a drawer where Marion kept her jewellery. Fowler thought it base to steal a woman’s jewellery so he left it where it was and took just one of the keys. The chances were she wouldn’t remember whether there had been five or only four.
An occasionally sentimental man, he mused for a while as he ate eggs and baked beans, on his childhood with Marion, how loving she had been, how fond of him. One particular incident came back to him when he remembered her saying to a lady their mother knew, ‘This is my little brother. I do love him lots.’ A tear fell on to the glistening surface of one of the fried eggs. In case she came back before he returned tonight he ought to leave her something to make up for breaking that window.
Fowler fished about in the ancient drawstring bag he had found on a skip a few weeks before, and came out with a pedometer discarded in a bin in South Molton Street and a flagon of cologne. The cologne had been used up but its container was very pretty, an ornament in itself. Marion didn’t care too much for ornaments, she said they were just more things that needed dusting. Why waste this one on her? Fowler had found a bottle in the back of her bedside cabinet with a label on it which immediately put out inviting signals. He decanted the contents into the cologne flagon, having first taken a sip. Just what no doctor would order. Now to fetch his backpack and see if he had something with which to effect a substitution.
The first time Marion stayed in her house overnight, Avice went nervously to bed, disliking the idea of someone who was almost a stranger sleeping in the next room. In all the forty years she had lived there only her friend Deirdre, domiciled on the Isle of Man, had slept there and then not often. There must have been something unacceptable to rabbits about Deirdre for Figaro and Susanna stayed in the garden all the time she was there. They accepted Marion. Only too well, as she noticed next day when Marion told her they let her stroke them and fondle their long ears. Avice felt a spasm of jealousy. How could they, after all she’d done for them? But it proved Marion was a suitable person to look after them and, by extension, a suitable person to occupy that spare room. Moreover, she got up at six, opened the rabbit flap and swept up any scattering of little black droppings that might have accumulated during the night. By the time Avice came down, Figaro and Susanna had been fed and their water bowls filled.
For the next two nights Marion went back to her own home, returning with presents, two fleecy paw-printed towels and a bag of salad leaves from the farmers’ market in the Finchley Road. Rarely given to demonstrations of affection, Avice kissed her on the cheek and listened with unusual patience to Marion’s tale of how her flat had been broken into and her bed slept in while she was away. Marion knew very well that Fowler was the culprit and that it was Fowler’s blood all over her clean sheets. No doubt he had cut himself while breaking her window but she wasn’t going to tell Avice all that, only that a break-in had taken place. She didn’t want her new employer thinking she came from a family of criminals but she liked her to believe her rabbit carer suffered her own misfortunes.
She stayed that night and the next, angry with Fowler and not at all sure he might not be back in Lithos Road even now. In spite of having an unusually good memory, she couldn’t remember if, when she changed the locks, she had been given five new keys or six. In a decimal system five seemed the more likely number, one for her to keep in her bag and four extras in the drawer. But six was half a dozen and an even number and somehow more the kind of number a locksmith would prefer. She just didn’t know. Four remained in the drawer and she had one in her handbag. But had there been five in the drawer and had Fowler taken one? Or only four in the drawer all along? It was no good, she couldn’t remember. She could phone the locksmith and ask. Explaining would be too embarrassing. She could have the locks changed again. But no, not again.
Marion couldn’t get to sleep. No matter how often she wielded the dustette the currants reappeared. If her brilliant idea worked, they needn’t think she’d observe the condition. Those two would be off to a fur farm within days. And on the subject of her will, why hadn’t Avice said anything about Mr Karkashvili’s visit? Perhaps she, Marion, would have to start the ball rolling.
The trouble with Avice was that she wasn’t – well – communicative. She talked a lot about rabbits, the many she had kept in her long life, but very little about her past, any friends she might have had or her family. Marion had known Mrs Pringle for only a year but by the time she left she knew all about her children and the late Mr Pringle, all the houses she had lived in, Mr Pringle’s business dealings, the cars he had possessed and the various holidays they had been on together. Avice had television but she didn’t watch it much. She listened to the radio and she read paperback novels, which she brought back to the house in batches of six or eight from West End bookshops. When she was reading with rabbits hopping about round her feet she didn’t like being talked to. She appeared extremely fond of silence.
Marion began to list in her mind the kind of openings Avice could make which would give the ball its initial push. Any reference to her declining health, for instance (if it was declining), to her advanced age, to wills, to intestacy, to funerals (other people’s of course, not her own), to rabbits’ longevity, to Fur and Feather magazine, to inheritance tax or to those exempt from it and to solicitors. Marion waited. She pranced off home, scuttled back, shopped for Avice, fed the rabbits and swept up after them, sat watching them while Avice went in the tube to Hatchards to buy books and Waitrose to buy fish, and nothing was said by Avice about any of the subjects on the list. And then, one day in the middle of May, a letter came for her with an Isle of Man postmark.
Reading it, Avice broke her silence to speak on the only subject that would have loosened her tongue at that hour of the morning. ‘My old friend Deirdre has died. This is from her cousin. Imagine – isn’t that sad? – she’s left behind her lovely cat and the cousin doesn’t want it. Have you ever heard anything so callous.’
The leap of something in her chest, that breathless jumping, followed by brief light-headedness, which always came to Marion at times of excitement, made her momentarily dizzy. These symptoms also raised her voice a few decibels. Squeaking a little, she said, ‘Couldn’t you take the cat?’
‘Oh, no. Good heavens, no. Poor sweet thing but how would it react to Figaro and Susanna?’
Eat them, thought Marion. Her voice restored to normal, Marion said, ‘Was your friend – er, well off? I mean, was she comfortable?’
‘Fairly, I suppose,’ said Avice with the condescension of someone who owns a street of houses in Manchester. ‘She had her savings. Why?’
Marion drew a deep breath. ‘What your friend really ought to have done’, she said, ‘was leave some of her money to – well, to someone on condition they took care of the cat after she passed away.’
Avice raised her eyebrows. She hardly seemed as gripped by the suggestion as Marion had hoped. But give her time. The idea had been planted and needed a while to germinate.
‘If
Deirdre had intended to do such a thing who would this “someone” have been? Not me. I wouldn’t have been interested. And obviously not the cousin.’
Bugger Deirdre, thought Marion. Let’s talk about you. ‘No doubt there’d be difficulties but nothing that couldn’t be got over.’
‘This “someone” might renege on her undertaking and turn the poor cat out or even, unthinkable as it is, have him or her put to sleep.’
Marion felt herself blushing. This had been exactly her own thought when she broached the subject. ‘Oh, well, it was just an idea,’ she said.
Still, Avice would think about it now, Marion thought. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. And she’d know she must make up her mind in the next two weeks before Mr Karkashvili came.
Ismay had almost forgotten the existence of the tape. She had ceased to care what had happened that day in August when Guy drowned. If she thought about it, it was to wonder why she had so involved herself in that whole business. It was nothing to do with her. She had been living in a dream world, a fantasy place where she imagined she could have told a man his wife had killed a man. Reality was now, this cold unhappy region where she was alone, a solitary forsaken woman.
Looking along the shelf for an old Emmy Lou Harris tape, she found Rainy Season Ragas and put it in her handbag. Next time she went out she would throw it away. She would dispose of it – out of her life and out of danger of falling into the wrong hands, any hands. Most evenings now she spent upstairs with Pamela and Beatrix. Occasionally she went over to Edmund and Heather but, although they made her welcome, she always felt she was intruding on their private bliss and that if they could be completely honest about it – of course they couldn’t – they would prefer her not to come. After all, what was she but the spectre at the feast, the mourner at the wedding party?
Pamela always seemed pleased to have her company, doleful though it was. As for Beatrix, she was either glued to her radio or making her biblical comments about man-faced horses with women’s hair and stings in their tails in a quiet wavering voice. Ismay sat down beside her mother and picked up the Evening Standard Pamela had been out to fetch. The lead story was about a man who had been attacking young girls in west London. Solely for the sake of the alliteration, it seemed, he had been given the absurd name of the West End Werewolf. So far, though an attempt had been made to strangle one of them, no girl had been seriously harmed. Ismay wasn’t much interested. She turned the page, then another and another, and saw Andrew’s face.
‘And they had a king over them,’ said Beatrix gently and with a knowing smile, ‘which is the angel of the bottomless pit.’
He was in what looked like a club and next to him was Eva Simber. Both were smiling but at each other, not the camera. Rather than simply happy, they looked involved with each other, as if they shared a secret no one but the two of them would ever know. Andrew held a cigarette in his left hand. The other rested against Eva’s long slender neck and seemed to be caressing it. Ismay found she could read no more than the first words of the caption, ‘Socialite Eva Simber’ … The print blurred and became a jumble, an obscure foreign language.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Pamela.
She couldn’t bear the thought of discussing that picture. Pamela would be sympathetic, indignant, kind, but still she couldn’t bear it. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
Pamela began talking about the romance walking. ‘I’ve met this man. His name is Ivan Roiter and he reminds me a bit of Michael.’
‘Is that a good thing?’ Ismay made herself recall that Michael Fenster was the man Pamela was living with, was engaged to, at the time of Guy’s death. ‘Do you want to be reminded of him?’
Pamela flushed deeply. ‘I loved him, you know. Perhaps I’m only saying that Michael was my type and so is Ivan. But, there. He hasn’t asked me out yet. I may never hear from him again. If he does I must admit I don’t look forward to telling him about Beatrix. About me living with her, I mean.’ Pamela thought, but not aloud, of the two or three men who had been put off from the start by what one of them had called ‘your crazy sister’. ‘I always find it hard to believe she went this way just because Guy died.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose she was in love with him.’ More than that Ismay wasn’t going to explain. She didn’t care. She cared about nothing but Andrew, Andrew’s absence from her life and presence in Eva’s Simber’s. She said it again: ‘She was in love with him,’ and the simple utterance of that phrase, words which inevitably carry a charge of emotion, brought the tears rushing to her eyes almost without warning, rush and spill over on a sob. She turned her face into the chair cushion and wept.
‘Oh, darling,’ Pamela cried. ‘I’m so sorry, so very very sorry. Was it something I said?’
‘Oh, no, oh, no. I’m always – always on the edge of tears. The least little thing. I didn’t want you to see … Have you looked at the paper yet?’
Pamela took it and looked at the photograph of Andrew with Eva Simber. She put her arm round Ismay and held her niece’s wet face against her shoulder. ‘Darling, darling …’
Helping herself in a slow methodical way from a box of chocolates, her ear pressed to the radio, Beatrix took absolutely no notice of her daughter’s tears. As far as she was concerned, there might have been no tears, no words spoken, no pain. After a while she shut the lid of the box, pushed the radio away and closed her eyes. The handbag slid off her lap on to the floor.
CHAPTER 13
Yesterday’s Evening Standard had described her as a socialite. Eva knew what the word meant – she was a frequent reader of Hello! and OK! magazines – but she would have preferred to have been described simply as ‘lovely’ or ‘captivating’. She dropped the paper on the floor and got ready for her run.
The term ‘jogging’ was unacceptable to Eva. It sounded like a heavy-footed animal, a hippo perhaps, or just a big person with thick ankles and a stomach. Others might jog; she ran – on light feet in Ruco Line silver trainers and very short shorts and a T-shirt as white as snow. Eva had a number of white and pale-coloured T-shirts which, instead of washing, she had dry-cleaned and which she threw away after the third wearing. Around St James’s Park she ran each morning except Thursdays. On Thursdays she went swimming in the morning and to yoga in the afternoon.
Eva had never had a job or earned anything. She had no need to. When she came home from her Swiss finishing school her father handed over to her a portfolio of reliable but fairly adventurous stock and bought her the flat, which was the ground and first floors of a house in a street that ran parallel with the Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was very kind of Daddy, of course, but a pity it was in Pimlico. The only place to live really was Mayfair or, just possibly, Notting Hill, the Kensington end and well away from the route of the Carnival.
The diaphanous scraps she wore, see-through shifts, transparent drapery with hemlines to the middle of her slender white thighs, revealed the shape of the body beneath, milk-white as a marble statue. Eva’s hair was no darker than barley stems, reaching to the middle of her narrow straight back, and she was as attenuated as a twelve-year-old, with tiny breasts and a stalk for a waist. She might have been a child star playing Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. When she went running she braided her hair, not into two but six plaits so that afterwards, when she undid them, her hair was crinkled from crown to tip like a Spanish infanta’s. It framed her small flying-fox face in a pale golden mist.
Running round St James’s Park, she followed the same route each day. If she had diverged from this itinerary she would have been afraid of getting lost. Although she lived in London and considered nowhere else in the British Isles a possible place to live, she knew only Bond Street and a few streets in Knightsbridge. When she ran, a bottle of pure spring water was all she carried. She paid no attention to the trees or flowers, scarcely noticed Buckingham Palace ahead of her and if anyone had asked her if you could see the London Eye from the bridge or if there were really pelicans, she couldn’t have answered. The conten
ts of her mind occupied her, whether she would have time for a pedicure as well as a facial later in the day, how little she could manage to eat when she had lunch with Mummy at Fortnum’s and why they wouldn’t let her have True, her Labrador, with her in London.
It was nearly nine when she returned to her car, the smart Mercedes Daddy had given her for Christmas, which she had left in Birdcage Walk. A parking ticket was on the windscreen. Daddy had said he would pay her parking fines but he had been difficult about it lately, she had so many. Still, she soon forgot it. After all, it was only a ticket. She never took parking offences seriously unless she was actually clamped.
She was back in the flat, unweaving the braids, when the phone rang. Andrew, probably. She let it ring twelve times. Keeping men in suspense was her policy. Eva always answered it with her name, which she thought distinguished.
‘Eva Simber.’
The voice was a woman’s. Strange because the only woman who rang on the landline was Mummy. ‘My name is Heather Litton. You won’t have heard of me. You don’t know me.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Eva. ‘Look, I’ve just come in from my run and I need a shower. What do you want?’
‘My sister is called Ismay. Ismay Sealand. You’ll have heard of her.’
Cautious now, Eva said in a way the Swiss finishing school would have deplored, ‘So what?’
‘You’re going out with Andrew Campbell-Sedge, aren’t you? No, I know you are. He was Ismay’s boyfriend. They were practically engaged.’
When she paused, Eva said, ‘So?’
‘Are you in love with him?’