by Ruth Rendell
‘It will never happen again, Andrew. They’re going tomorrow. They take over their new flat tomorrow.’
The phone rang. The voice of Marion Melville said, ‘Hello?’ This is the ultimate, my Apocalypse, my hell, thought Ismay. This is where I lie down and scream. Of course she didn’t. ‘I can’t talk now. Can you call back?’ She put the phone down.
‘Was that your sister?’
‘No.’
‘I find it hard to believe anything you say. Let me just say to you, I’m going out now. Alone. I don’t know when I’ll be back if ever. I can’t live under the same roof with those people.’
Last time he had gone she had cried. She had wept uncontrollably, sobbed through the night, lain on the floor crying bitterly. For some reason it was different now. She said aloud to the empty room, I can’t bear it, and then she began to bear it, dry-eyed, still, staring at his roses, the fresh, the dead and the dying, all in one vase, kept like that because she couldn’t bring herself to throw away those that had faded.
For the first time for years, Beatrix showed a flicker of emotion when her sister came into the room. She held out her hand to Pamela who, uncertain whether to take it in a handshake or clutch it, lifted it instead to her lips. Beatrix looked at her hand, frowning, and touched the spot where Pamela’s lips had rested. Then she offered her a chocolate.
‘Well, I’ve never known you do that before,’ Pamela said.
Beatrix nodded to Michael in a moderately friendly fashion.
‘This must be your doing, Edmund,’ Pamela said. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of going.’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Edmund. ‘We must. We’ve waited to get into our flat for nearly nine months.’
Heather brought them a bottle of champagne and four glasses. ‘To celebrate your homecoming.’ She glanced at Pamela in a meaningful way, said, ‘Perhaps something … ?’
‘Not exactly,’ Pamela said. ‘Michael has asked me to marry him. He says he’ll live here with me and Beatrix or we can live in his house and bring Beatrix, but I won’t do that.’
‘She says she won’t put that burden on me. It wouldn’t be a burden. I’ve always been fond of Bea.’
‘I hope he’ll stay with me. I hope he’ll be my – I won’t say boyfriend – my lover. And for ever or whatever we mean by that.’
Edmund raised his glass. ‘To you. I was going to recommend marriage. I like it. But I know when I’m beaten.’
The mail order dressing gown and the picture of the sultan with his bride were received by Barry with a gratitude that exceeded Marion’s expectations. He insisted on putting on the dressing gown over his shirt and trousers and only removed it to change before they went out. Marion had a good look round the living room while he was upstairs. The books, which she had never examined before, were mostly histories of India and biographies of British and Indian luminaries. But there were also a number of works on forensics, a couple of accounts of pathologists’ investigations and quite a lot of true crime, especially wife murder. Having a suspicious mind and, in common with her brother Fowler, unsuppressed criminal tendencies, she wondered for the first time how Mrs Fenix had met her death. It might be prudent to ask. Come to that, what had Barry done before he retired? She fancied Irene had told her he had been a civil servant.
Barry came out and drove her to St John’s Wood to the new Indian restaurant called Pushkar. He wore a white jacket over his pinstriped trousers and a white cap, which Marion could have accepted without embarrassment but for the presence of so many authentic Indian diners. It seemed to her that two or three of them exchanged amused smiles. He was rather taken aback when she asked him about his wife’s death, said, ‘Heart,’ and reverted to the subject of the mail order dressing gown. She thought he ought to take his hat off while they ate but relaxed a little when she saw that no one else had done so.
In spite of its auspicious beginning, it wasn’t turning out one of their more successful evenings. Barry had only once called her kitten, he was strangely silent and seemed nervous. As they ate beef madras and sag gosht she racked her brains for something to say, asked him how he liked the lilac cashmere sweater, got a smile and the response ‘Smashing’, and once more had to cope with the unusual silence.
‘There’s something I want to ask you, Barry,’ she said.
The look he gave her was preoccupied.
‘It’s – well, what sort of work did you used to do when you …’ She had got muddled and tried again. ‘I mean, what was your … ?’
Barry cut her short. ‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ he said and his voice was low and serious.
He must have somehow found out about her demands for money from Ismay Sealand or even her attempts with the morphine. If he had it was all up with her. She said nothing. She just looked at him with the winsome timid eyes of the small animal with whom he identified her.
He swallowed and his face reddened. He picked up a fork from the table and set it down again. ‘Marion,’ he said and paused, looking away.
‘Yes?’ She knew what it meant to feel her heart was in her mouth.
It was coming now. She waited, breathless. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me?’
She was forty-two and it was her first proposal. She had been working towards this end but had no idea what to do now she had got there. Her instinct was to scream with joy but she managed to restrain herself. Slowly, trembling, she nodded her head. She nodded in a quite uncharacteristic way, almost shyly, as if she were awestruck. What might have happened next she later speculated but before Barry could speak or act an Indian man had come up to their table and was addressing her. It was Mr Hussein.
‘Good evening, Miss Melville.’
Collecting herself, Marion was pretty sure he hadn’t come up to them with simply greeting her in view. Until now he had generally been rude to her. He had been about to reprove Barry for some incorrectness of dress but seeing her there had deterred him.
‘Won’t you introduce me to your friend?’
‘Not a friend, sir,’ said Barry. ‘No longer that. Her future husband. Miss Melville has just done me the honour of accepting my hand in marriage.’
In the manner of his son, Mr Hussein looked as if he was suppressing an almost uncontrollable mirth. Marion didn’t know why. She thought Barry’s little speech quite moving. He and Mr Hussein chatted for a few moments about the name of the restaurant, which appeared to be a place in India. Barry had of course never been to Pushkar but he knew quite a lot about it.
‘Beautiful lake,’ he said, ‘and the Snake Mountain.’
Mr Hussein’s lips twitched. ‘Not forgetting the internationally renowned Camel Fair.’
‘Miss Melville and I may go there for our honeymoon.’
‘Ideal,’ said Mr Hussein with a broad smile. ‘Of course you’re aware that, as it is a holy place to the Hindus, alcohol, meat and even eggs are banned there. Unlike’, he added before strolling back to Mrs Iqbal, ‘this restaurant.’
Knowing it was an imprudent thing to do, a mad thing to do, Ismay had walked about on Clapham Common half the night. Nothing happened. The people she encountered took no notice of her. One of them was Fowler Melville, in unfamiliar waters, but he didn’t know her and she didn’t know him and they walked in opposite directions to each other like a white-sailed frigatoon and a dirty British coaster passing in the night.
She went to work in the morning, more dead than alive, afraid to phone Andrew on his mobile, even more afraid to phone Seb Miller in Fulham and ask him yet again where Andrew was. When she got home a message awaited her. It must be from Andrew, it had to be – please, God. It was from Marion Melville, a jauntier than usual, confident voice.
‘OK, two hundred this week, please. Same time, same place tomorrow. Mind you call me to confirm.’
Suppose Andrew had been there and had taken the call or listened to the message? But even if he had been there and taken it, that would be better than his not being there at all. Anything w
ould be better than being without him. Late in the evening she remembered that this was the day Heather and Edmund were moving out. They would be in their own home now. With their two keys each, their new things and their new phone. She had written down the number and she ought to phone them. For a long time she sat by the phone, doing nothing. Pam must be upstairs but she didn’t phone her either. At nine she walked down the road to take two hundred pounds out of the cash machine. A foolish act after dark but she no longer cared about things like that.
In bed but unlikely to sleep, she began wondering if he had another girl somewhere, a girl kept in reserve for times like this. Someone he could phone, after weeks of absence, and say, ‘Hi, it’s me. Can I come over?’ Since he came back things were different from what they had been before he went away. He had been sweeter to her and more autocratic, while she had been less able to stand up for herself. She was more in love with him than ever. She finally slept, only to dream he was back, that he had come into the room to tell her Heather was dead.
She took the tube to Waterloo and walked on to Hungerford Bridge from the South Bank. Marion also took the tube but for her it was a free ride as she used the Freedom Pass she had picked up at Embankment station. Having employed the ‘oyster’ card to get through the barrier at Finchley Road, she began to worry once she was in the train that inspectors might get on. Then it would be all up with her, as she plainly wasn’t Hilary Cutts, aged sixty-three. Of course, inspectors seldom did get on, she could remember it happening only once. What bothered her more than this precise anxiety was that she was worrying at all. She never worried. Perhaps it was because she had read in Fowler’s Big Issue that all oyster card details were now kept on a data base. Well, getting out at Baker Street where she had to change lines would be the solution. That and not getting into the Bakerloo Line train.
It came in and she got into it. No inspectors did but she jumped out at Charing Cross just the same to be on the safe side. Remember the data base. She skipped along the Strand and dropped the Freedom Pass into a waste bin. A pity, but using it was too risky. What a funny thing it would be if Fowler found it. He’d be bound to bring it to her. He always did, like a cat bringing home a mouse to its owner. She was still laughing to herself when she met Ismay on the bridge.
The girl looked like a famine victim or a camp survivor, pale, wan, her eyes dark-ringed. Marion said a sprightly ‘Good morning’ and put out her hand for the money, her left hand so that Ismay could see the ring on the third finger, a beautiful ruby ring Barry said came from Delhi. An envelope was put into it in silence. ‘As you can see, I got engaged since I last saw you. I shall soon be Mrs Barry Fenix. I’m telling you so as you know who it is when I’m giving you a ring.’
Whatever reaction Marion hoped to provoke in her victim, it wasn’t to make her break into a flood of tears and run away across the bridge. Marion shrugged, smiling, catching the eye of several passers-by to show them how mature, sensible and restrained she was.
Ismay got a bus home. She had been back no more than ten minutes when Andrew walked in. She gave a little involuntary cry. She allowed him to hold her in his arms and kiss her but that was all she did, resting her head limply against his shoulder, trembling from so many tears. When she finally lifted her head she made herself say, and the effort was enormous, ‘Andrew, we have to talk.’
‘Oh, darling,’ he said, ‘not that awful cliché, please. I can’t bear it. Come on, do something about your poor face. I’m taking you out to lunch at the Fat Duck.’
CHAPTER 26
‘We’ve had an invitation to Marion Melville’s engagement party,’ Heather said to her husband. He was putting up bookshelves in their new living room. ‘The man she’s marrying lives next door to your mother. Did you know about it?’
‘I know my mother hoped he was marrying her.’
‘You don’t want to go, do you?’
‘Wild horses might drag me. Especially if you were riding them. When I’ve finished here we’ve got to talk about our honeymoon.’
He didn’t finish there because a phone call from his mother, gasping that she was having a panic attack, fetched him to Chudleigh Hill, and in fact the shelves were destined never to be completed or to contain a single book. Irene was lying on the floor with, beside her, the party invitation which had either fallen or been placed there. Edmund felt her pulse, listened to her heart and said there was nothing wrong with her. He helped her to her feet while she muttered to him that he wasn’t a doctor.
‘It’s breach of promise,’ she said when she was seated in an armchair. ‘I shall definitely go. To this travesty of an engagement party, I mean. I shall tell everyone how he – well, he …’
‘Trifled with your affections,’ Edmund said. ‘No you won’t. Because if you continue to make these threats I shall tell Barry he’d be wise to cancel the party or postpone it and not invite you next time. And I’ll tell him why. Is that clear?’
She looked up at him, perplexed, and he knew that at last he had won. He threw the invitation into the waste bin. ‘Heather and I’, he said, ‘would like it very much if you’d come to tea tomorrow. I know you’ll remember it’s Heather’s home and you’re the guest. See you about four.’
She said, ‘That will be nice, dear.’
Leaving her, he thought a little kindness was called for before they parted or perhaps he was simply reverting to his old cowardice. ‘It’s a secret where we’re going for our honeymoon but I can tell you. In the strictest confidence. No one else knows, least of all Heather.’
It was pathetic, her very obvious joy. ‘I won’t tell her.’
‘It’s a place called Kanda. In Sumatra. Beaches and sunshine and beautiful green forest. Quite exotic for two people who have never been east of Greece.’
The invitation to Mr Hussein and Mrs Iqbal was accepted, Mr Hussein remarking to her that it would be ‘good for a laugh’. His sons were not invited. Marion had admitted to Barry that she had a brother but said he was a recluse, almost a hermit. He wouldn’t come if asked. She invited Avice Conroy, reasoning that there was nothing damaging Avice could say about her except that she had invented a sick father and no one said that sort of thing at parties. Avice sent an abusive letter declining and telling Marion she had changed her will.
Marion made her by now regular phone call to Ismay. It was answered by a man she guessed to be the boyfriend she had seen on her visit to Clapham. She put the phone down without speaking and before trying again considered what the consequences might be if the boyfriend, who sounded a masterful man, were to squeeze the truth out of Ismay and take steps. He might. He was a lawyer, she had said. And Ismay was a poor little thing with no spirit. Take no risks, Marion, but keep trying till you get her. She realised she was addressing herself by name the way Fowler had once told her was his habit. Her evening attempt was answered by Ismay and, mindful of the additional expenses she must incur as a bride, she again asked for two hundred pounds.
The ‘talk’ with Andrew had never happened. Ismay thought of all the psychotherapists and counsellors and agony aunts she had heard of who advised their clients to ‘talk it through’, never apparently understanding that there are some people, many people, who refuse to do this, who simply dismiss the suggestion with a ‘there’s nothing to talk about’ and clam up or walk away. Andrew was one of them. More than anything she would have liked to sit down with him and tell him frankly how she felt, how terribly his departures made her suffer, and receive from him some explanation, some reason for his using her the way he did. I must be a masochist, she thought, and knew he would tell her she was. Would he admit he could be sadistic? She should also, she confessed to herself, sit down with Heather and finally, after all these years, get the truth from her about Guy’s death. And Eva’s death. This was beginning to seem more of a possibility than talking to Andrew.
If Marion Melville continued with her demands for money – and there seemed no reason why she shouldn’t – the time would come when she would
have to talk to Heather. Somehow she knew her sister wouldn’t lie to her. If she asked her directly Heather would tell her the truth. And then what to do with the truth when she had heard it? Go to the police? Her thoughts went back to those late summer days when Guy was newly dead and the police had questioned her mother, Heather and herself. They had been gentle with her and Heather, asking nothing about their relations with their stepfather but concentrating on their whereabouts that afternoon. Two police officers, detective constables, and their superior had briefly appeared to speak to her mother. She couldn’t remember their names except that the inspector’s had been a bird’s. Sparrow or Swift or Parrot. No, none of those. The policemen had believed them when they said they had all been out together, shopping for school uniform. Beatrix, cleverly, had said Heather had been with them but hadn’t actually gone into the shop but waited outside.
They would probably be retired by now, those policemen. Why was she thinking of them now when she hadn’t for years? Because, if the tape found its way into their hands, she would have to meet them again or their successors. It hardly bore thinking of, yet it was almost preferable to the tape being handed to Andrew. When he had heard it he would leave and this time he wouldn’t come back. But the police would come once he had spoken to them.
Her savings were almost used up. One more envelope containing two hundred pounds to Marion Melville and that would be the end. The end of all our lives, mine and Heather’s and Edmund’s, her mother’s and Pam’s and maybe even Michael’s. Not Andrew’s, though. Andrew would leave and find himself a new little blonde. Achieving all this was in Marion’s power. Nothing could stop her. Paying out thousands of pounds would keep her silent while it continued – but it couldn’t continue. The money wasn’t there.
‘You don’t want him to meet me, do you?’ said Fowler. ‘It’s not very kind, not when I’ve brought you a whole box of floppy discs.’