by Ruth Rendell
“He’s a television actor, or he is when he can get work. He so terribly wants to be a household word. The trouble is his face is wrong. Oh, I don’t mean he isn’t good-looking. He was born too late. He looks just like Valentino and that won’t do these days. John’s going to be just like him. He’s very like him now.”
Matthew Lawrence … it rang some sort of bell. “I think I may have seen his picture in the papers,” said Burden.
She nodded earnestly. “Squiring Leonie West about, I expect. She used to be photographed wherever she went.”
“I know her. She’s a ballet dancer. My daughter’s crazy about ballet. As a matter of fact, I think that’s where I’ve seen your ex-husband, in pictures with Leonie West.”
“Matthew and Leonie were lovers for years. Then he met me. I was a drama student and I had a small part in a television series he was in. When we got married he said he wouldn’t see Leonie any more, but he really only married me because he wanted a child. Leonie couldn’t have children, otherwise he’d have married her.”
She had been speaking in a very cool practical voice, but now she sighed and fell silent. Burden waited, no longer tired, even more interested than usual in other people’s life stories, although this one perturbed him strangely.
After a while she went on. “I tried to keep our marriage going and when John was born I thought we had a chance. Then I found out Matthew was still seeing Leonie. At last he asked me to divorce him and I did. The judge expedited the decree because there was a child on the way.”
“But you said Leonie West couldn’t …”
“Oh, not Leonie. He didn’t marry her. She was years older than he was. She must be well into her forties by now. He married a girl of nineteen he met at a party.”
“Good God,” said Burden.
“She had the baby, but it only lived two days. That’s why I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them now. This one just must be all right.”
Burden couldn’t keep his feelings to himself any longer. “Don’t you bear any malice?” he said. “I should have thought you’d hate him and his wife and that West woman.”
She shrugged. “Poor Leonie. She’s too pathetic now to hate. Besides, I always rather liked her. I don’t hate Matthew or his wife. They couldn’t help themselves. They did what they had to do. You couldn’t expect them all to spoil their lives for me.”
“I’m afraid I’m rather old-fashioned in these things,” said Burden. “I believe in self-discipline. They spoiled your life, didn’t they?”
“Oh, no! I’ve got John and he makes me very very happy.”
“Mrs. Lawrence …”
“Gemma!”
“Gemma,” he said awkwardly. “I must warn you not to bank too much on Monday. I don’t think you should bank on it at all. My chief—Chief Inspector Wexford—has absolutely no faith in the veracity of this letter. He’s sure it’s a hoax.”
She paled a little and clasped her hands. “No one would write a letter like that,” she said innocently, “if it wasn’t true. Nobody could be so cruel.”
“But people are cruel. Surely you must know that?”
“I won’t believe it. I know John is going to be there on Monday. Please—please don’t spoil it for me. I’m holding on to it, it’s made me so happy.”
He shook his head helplessly. Her eyes were beseeching, imploring him to give her one word of encouragement And then, to his horror, she fell on her knees in front of him, seizing both his hands in hers.
“Please, Mike, tell me you think it’ll be all right. Just say there’s a chance. There could be, couldn’t there? Please, Mike!”
Her nails dug into his wrists. “There’s always a chance …”
“More than that, more than that! Smile at me, show me there’s a chance.” He smiled, almost desperately. She sprang up. “Stay there. I’m going to make coffee.”
The evening was dying away. Soon it would be quite dark. He knew that he should go away now, follow her outside and say briskly, “Well, if you’re all right, I must be on my way.” Staying here was wrong, entirely overstepping the bounds of his duty. If she needed company it ought to be Mrs. Crantock or one of those strange friends of hers.
He couldn’t go. It was impossible. What a hypocrite he was with his talk of self-discipline. Jean? he said, savouring her name experimentally. If Jean had been at home there would have been no staying, no need for control.
She came back with the coffee and they drank it in the dusk. Soon he could hardly see her and yet somehow he felt her presence more forcefully. In one way he wanted her to turn on the light, but at the same time he prayed that she wouldn’t and thus destroy the atmosphere, warm, dark and scented with her scent, a tension and yet a peace.
She poured him more coffee and their hands touched. “Tell me about your wife,” she said.
He had never told anyone. He wasn’t the kind of man to open his heart and relieve his soul. Grace had tried to draw him out. That idiot Camb had tried and, in a more subtle and tactful way, Wexford himself. And yet he would have liked to tell someone, if only the right listener could be found. This beautiful kind woman wasn’t the right listener. What would she with her strange past, her peculiar permissiveness, understand of his notions of monogamy, his one-woman life? How could he talk to her of his simple gentle Jean, her quiet existence and her abominable death?
“It’s all over now,” he said shortly. “Best forgotten.” Too late he realised the impression his words had made.
“Even if you haven’t been too happy,” she said, “you don’t just miss the person, you miss love.”
He saw the truth of it. Even for him it was true. But love wasn’t quite the word. There was no love in those dreams of his and Jean never entered them. As if to deny his own thoughts, he said harshly, “They say you can find a substitute, but you can’t. I can’t.”
“Not a substitute. That’s the wrong word. But someone else for another way of love perhaps.”
“I don’t know. I have to go now. Don’t put on the light.” Light would show her too much, his face after suppressed pain had worked on it, and, worse than that, the hunger for her he could no longer hide. “Don’t put on the light!”
“I wasn’t going to,” she said softly. “Come here.”
It was a little light kiss on the cheek she gave him, such as a woman may give a man she has known for years, the husband of a friend perhaps, and, returning it, touching her cheek, he still meant to kiss her in the same way with a comradely reassurance. But he felt his heart beating and hers beside it as if he had two hearts of his own. Their mouths met and his long control broke.
He kissed her with everything he had, crushing her in his arms and forcing her back against the wall, his tongue thrusting down into her mouth.
When he let her go and moved away shivering, she stood still with her head bowed, saying nothing. He opened the front door and ran from her, not looking back.
7
Sunday, the morning of his lie-in. He had passed a horrible night, filled with dreams so disgusting that if he had read them in some work on psychology—the kind that Grace was always on about—he would have had no difficulty in believing they were the product of a diseased and perverted mind. Even thinking of them made him shudder with shame.
If you lie wakeful in bed when it is already light you have to think. But of what? Jean who was gone for ever? Dreams that made you wonder if inside you were as bad as all those local deviates? Gemma Lawrence? What a fool he had been to kiss her, to stay sitting there with her in the dark, to get involved!
He got up quickly. It was only seven-thirty when he came into the kitchen and no one else was about. He made a pot of tea and took a cup in to each of the others. It was another beautiful clear day.
Grace sat up in bed and took the teacup. She wore a nightgown just like Jean’s. Her morning face was a little puffy with sleep, dreamy and vague just as Jean’s had always been. He hated her.
“I have to go out,” he said
. “Work.”
“I didn’t hear the phone,” said Grace.
“You were asleep.”
His children didn’t stir when he put their teacups beside them. They were heavy sleepers and it was only natural. Burden knew all that, but it seemed to him that they no longer cared for him. Their mother was dead but they had a mother substitute, a mother facsimile. It was all one to them, he thought, whether their father was there or not.
He got out his car and drove off, but with no clear picture of where he was going. Perhaps to Cheriton Forest to sit and think and torture himself. But instead of taking the Pomfret road he found himself heading towards Stowerton. All the control he had left was needed to stop him going towards Fontaine Road, but he kept his control and turned instead into Mill Lane.
It was here that the red Jaguar had been seen. Behind those trees the young duffel-coated man with the small hands had strolled picking leaves. Were they connected, the car and the youth? And was it possible in this wicked and cynical world that the leaf-picker kept rabbits—perhaps he had been picking leaves for his rabbits—and needed a child only for the pleasure of that child’s company and the sight of its happy face when a small eager hand stroked thick smooth fur?
On such a morning even this improbable and Peter Pan-like notion seemed feasible. In the distance, ahead of him, he could hear the bells of St. Jude, Forby, ringing for early Communion. He knew now where he was going. He rounded a bend in the road and Saltram House came suddenly and gloriously into view.
Who would have supposed, looking at it from this distance as it proudly crowned the hill, that those windows were not glazed, those rooms not inhabited, but that the great stone edifice was merely a shell, the skeleton, so to speak, of a palace? It was golden-grey in the morning sun, a palladian house, late eighteenth century, and in its splendid proportions it seemed both to smile and to frown on the valley below.
Fifty years old now, the tale of its destruction was known to everyone in Kingsmarkham. During the First World War it had been. Whoever had owned the house, and this was now forgotten, had given a house party and his guests had gone out on to a flat area of the roof to watch a Zeppelin pass over. One of them had dropped a cigar butt over the parapet and the butt had set fire to the shrubs below. There was nothing now behind those blank exquisite windows, nothing but trees and bushes which had grown up out of the burnt foundations to thrust their branches where once women in Paris gowns had walked, looking at pictures and trailing their fans.
He started the car again and drove slowly up to the iron gates where the drive to Saltram House began. On the left of the gates stood a small one-storey white house with a thatched roof. A woman was in the garden, picking mushrooms from the lawn. Mrs. Fenn, he supposed. She hadn’t lived there in the days when he and Jean used to come picnicking in the grounds. The lodge had stood empty for years.
Of course, these grounds would have been thoroughly searched back in February and then again by the search parties on Thursday night and Friday. But did the searchers know the place as he knew it? Would they know the secret places as he knew them?
Burden opened the gates and they creaked dully on their hinges.
Wexford and his friend Dr. Crocker, the police doctor, sometimes played golf together on Sunday mornings. They had been friends since boyhood, these two, although Wexford was the senior by seven years and the doctor was a spry lean fellow who looked quite young when seen from a distance, whereas Wexford was a huge man, gone to seed and stout, with dangerously high blood pressure.
It was on account of this hypertension that Crocker had suggested the Sunday golf sessions and prescribed a rigorous diet. Wexford lapsed from his diet twice a week on average, but he didn’t greatly object to the golf, although his handicap was disgracefully around thirty-six. It got him out of going to church with his wife.
“You wouldn’t fancy a little drop of something?” he asked wistfully in the club bar.
“At this hour?” said Crocker, the disciplinarian.
“It’s the effect that counts, not the hour.”
“If my sphyg wasn’t about the best you can buy,” said the doctor, “it would have busted last time I took your blood pressure. I kid you not, it would have snapped in sheer despair. You wouldn’t put a thermometer under the hot tap now, would you? What you need isn’t alcohol but a few brisk swings under the pro’s eagle eye.”
“Not that,” Wexford pleaded. “Anything but that.”
They went on to the first tee. His expression inscrutable, Crocker watched his friend fumbling in his golf bag and then he handed him a five iron without a word.
Wexford drove. The ball disappeared, but nowhere in the direction of the first hole. “It’s so bloody unfair,” he said. “You’ve been at this ridiculous pastime all your life and I’m a mere novice. It’s giving me a hell of an inferiority complex. Now if we were to fetch someone else in on this, Mike Burden, for instance …”
“Do Mike good, I daresay.”
“I worry about him,” said Wexford, glad of a respite before having to witness one of the doctor’s perfect drives. “I wonder sometimes if he isn’t heading for a nervous breakdown.”
“Men lose their wives. They get over it. D’you know what? Mike will marry his sister-in-law. It’s right on the cards. She looks like Jean, she acts like Jean. Mike can marry her and almost say monogamous. Enough of this nonsense. We’re here to play golf, remember.”
“I mustn’t go too far from the club-house. They may want to reach me at any time if anything comes up about that missing boy.”
It was a genuine anxiety on Wexford’s part and not an excuse, but he had cried wolf on the golf course too often. The doctor grinned nastily. “Then they can come and fetch you. Some members of this club can actually run, you know. Now watch me carefully.” He took his own well-seasoned five and drove with beautiful precision. “On the green, I fancy,” he said complacently.
Wexford picked up his bag, sighed, and he strode manfully up the fairway. He murmured under his breath and with feeling towards the doctor’s back, “‘Thou shalt not kill but needs’t not strive, officiously to keep alive.’”
The aspect of the house which faced the road and in front of which Burden now parked his car was the back or, more properly, the garden front. There could be no doubt from this distance that Saltram House was a shell. He went up to one of the stone-faced windows and stared through it into the still, dim and silent depths. Elder trees and young oaks—for how old is a mature oak?—thrust their way up out of sand and rubble. The scars of the fire had long faded, their blackness washed away by fifty winters of rain. The leaves were golden now and rattling yellow, lying in their thousands on broken stone and massed rubble. The house had been like this when he and Jean had first come here and the only change was that the trees were taller, nature more rampant and more arrogant in her conquest, and yet it seemed to him that the ruin was personal, symbolic of his own.
He never read poetry. He seldom read anything. But like that of most people who don’t read, his memory was good and sometimes he remembered the things Wexford had quoted to him. Under his breath, wonderingly, he whispered:
“Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That time will come and take my love away …”
He didn’t know who had said it, but whoever it was knew all right. He swung away from the back of the house. There was no entering it this way. You entered by the front, clambering through what had once been an Italian garden.
To the right and left of him neglected parkland fell away. Whom did it belong to? Why did no one farm it? He didn’t know the answers, only that this was a still and beautiful desert where grass grew long and wild and trees that man, not nature, had planted, cedars and ilexes and the tall slender ginko biloba, the Chinese maidenhair tree, raised proud trunks and prouder branches from an alien soil. It was a wilderness, desperately sad in that it should have been tended, was designed to be tended, but those who loved to tend it had been remove
d by ruining time. He thrust aside branches and brambles and came to the incomparably more beautiful front of Saltram House.
There was a great pediment crowning it with a frieze of classical figures and beneath this, above the front door, a vertical sun-dial, sky blue with figures of gold, which the wind and rain had scarred but not spoiled. From where he stood Burden could see the sky through the bones, as it were, of the house, pieces of sky as blue as the sun-dial.
It was no longer possible, and hadn’t been for years, to walk into the Italian garden or up to the house without climbing. Burden scrambled over a five-foot-high wall of broken stone, through the cracks of which brambles and bryony had thrust their tendrils.
He had never seen the fountains playing, but he knew there had once been fountains here. Twelve years ago, when he and Jean had first penetrated as far as this, two bronze figures holding vases aloft had stood on either side of the overgrown drive. But vandals had come since then and torn the statues from their plinths, greedy perhaps for the lead from which the fountain pipes were made.
One figure had been that of a boy, the other of a girl in delicate drapery. The boy had disappeared, but the girl lay among the weeds, and the long-leaved grey mullion with its yellow flowers pushed its stalks between her arm and the curve of her body. Burden bent down and lifted the statue. It was broken and half-eaten away by verdegris and underneath it the ground was quite bare, a blank area of earth oddly and unpleasantly in the shape of a small human body.
He replaced the mass of metal which had once been a fountain and climbed the broken steps that led up to the door. But as soon as he stood on the threshold, at the point where in the past guests had entered and given their cloaks to a servant, he saw that there was no concealing a body here, not even the small body of a five-year-old.
For everything in Saltram House, cupboards, doors, staircase, even to a great extent dividing walls, was gone. There remained scarcely anything of the works of man. True, the towering and somewhat sinister walls of the house soared above him, but even these, which had once been painted and adorned with frescoes, were now hung everywhere with ivy, and they sheltered from the wind a young forest of rich growth. Elders and oaks, birch and beech saplings had forced their way from the rich burnt soil and some of them now rivalled the walls themselves in height. Burden was looking down into a copse which the breeze, entering by the window holes, ruffled gently. He could see the roots of these trees and see too that nothing lay amongst them.