Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Take the case of George III,’ she would say. ‘They thought he was mad for years. They subjected him to hellish tortures. And now they know he had porphyria and just giving him what his body lacked would have made him sane.’

  Perhaps she was right. But whatever vital substance she might lack, it now seemed that the deficiency had lately and by natural means made itself good. As Mopsa talked lucidly, and with a good deal of intelligent grasp of detail, of the tests and the complicated processes that would follow them, Benet thought her saner than she had been since she herself was a child. Even the glaze that lay on her greenish-blue eyes seemed to have lifted and been replaced by a more normal inner light.

  Mopsa was looking round the room. ‘Where’s your television?’

  ‘I haven’t got it.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t got a set at all? I should be lost without the TV, not that it’s very good in Spain. I was looking forward to English TV. Why haven’t you got it? It can’t be that you can’t afford it.’

  ‘I write when James is asleep, so that means I mostly write in the evenings and television wouldn’t be much use to me.’

  ‘He’s asleep now. Do you want to do some writing now? Don’t take any notice of me. I’ll keep quiet and read my book.’

  Benet shook her head. The peculiar conditions necessary for writing – some measure of solitude, a contemplative atmosphere, a certain preparation of the mind – she felt unable to explain to anyone not involved in the process, least of all Mopsa. Besides she was in the highly unusual position of someone who had written down some reminiscences and observations – in her case the time in India with Edward – made them into fiction largely for her own amusement and suddenly finds she has produced a bestseller. An immediate and enormous bestseller. Now she had to write something else, if not to match The Marriage Knot, at least to put up a creditable showing beside it. She was the author of what might prove to be a one-off success faced with the hurdle of the ‘second book’. It didn’t come easily even when she was feeling tranquil and James slept.

  That reminded her, he had been asleep for nearly two hours now. She went upstairs to look at him. He was still sleeping, his face rather flushed and his breathing rough. She could see Edward in his face, especially in the curve of his lips and the modelling of his forehead. One day, when he was grown up, he would have those ‘English gentleman’ looks Edward possessed, flaxen hair, steady blue eyes, strong chin – and perhaps something more than just looks, something more than his father had.

  Waiting for him to wake, she stood by the window and watched the setting sun. The sky would become red only after the sun had gone down. Now it was a dark gold, barred with grey, the waters of the Vale of Peace pond sparkling with points of light. A row of Monterey pines on the farther bank stood black and still against the yellow and grey marbling. A good place to live, a fine place for James to grow up in. She had chosen wisely.

  Was there some feature of that view, the row of pines perhaps, the sunset, or simply thinking of childhood and an environment for it, that brought back that awful afternoon with Mopsa? She hadn’t thought of it for years. Now she remembered it very clearly, though it was nineteen or twenty years ago, but did she remember what had really happened? It had been the first manifestation of Mopsa’s madness, her paranoid schizophrenia, that Benet had known. She was eight and the cousin who was with them only three or four. Mopsa had taken them into the dining room of the house they lived in in Colindale and locked the door and bolted it and then phoned Benet’s father at work to say she was going to kill the children and then herself. Or had Mopsa only threatened to remain shut in there with the children until some demand of hers was met? The true version was something between the two probably. Why, anyway, would a dining-room door have a bolt on it? But Benet could very clearly remember Mopsa taking knives out of a drawer, the little cousin screaming, Mopsa pulling heavy pieces of furniture, a sideboard, some other sort of cabinet, across the french windows. Most of all she remembered the door coming down, splintering first, and her uncle breaking through, then her father. They had brought no outside aid; shame and fear of consequences had no doubt prevented this. No one had been hurt and Mopsa had become quite calm afterwards so that one wouldn’t have guessed anything was wrong with her. Until she had started the compulsive stealing, that had been the next thing. It became impossible to say you wanted anything – anything within reason, that is – without Mopsa stealing it for you. Benet remembered her father admiring a record he had heard in someone’s house, a popular, even hackneyed classical piece, Handel’s Water Music most likely. Mopsa had gone to great pains to find that identical recording in a shop, and when she had found it, she stole it, though she could easily have afforded to buy it. She stole to make gifts to those she loved and the element of risk involved in the theft rendered her gift, so some psychiatrist had said, more valuable in her own eyes. Since then the manifestations of her condition had been many and various: sporadic violence, divorcement from reality, inconsequential ‘mad’ acts . . .

  James turned over, sat up and gave an angry yell, rubbing his eyes with his fists. His cries turned to coughing with a rattle in his chest. Benet picked him up and held him against her shoulder. His chest was a sounding box that made almost musical notes. An idea which had been taking shape of asking people round for drinks – a way of passing the evening and quite a good way now Mopsa was behaving so rationally – no longer seemed feasible. James had a bad cold and would need her attention all evening.

  The house felt very warm. She was glad she had had the central heating system overhauled before she moved in. Mopsa, unpacking her case, her bedroom door open, looked the epitome of a sensible, rather ordinary, housewife. No doubt it was a part she was acting, had perhaps been acting for years. Roles of various kinds had been common with her in the past, all of them seemingly having coalesced into this form. Or was this the real Mopsa, emerging at last from shed layers of psychotic personae?

  Now it was even as if her true name, the mundane Margaret, would have suited her better than that which evoked connotations of wildness and witchcraft, ancient familiars, ducking stools, eye of newt and toe of frog. It was not from Macbeth though but The Winter’s Tale that she had named herself when playing the part of Mopsa in a school production at the age of fifteen. Familiar with it as a mother’s name, as others might be with a Mary or Elizabeth, Benet nevertheless suddenly saw it as fantastic, incongruous, something that should have been disposed of at the same time as that fleece of blond hair. Mopsa’s face, a thin and pointed face, always witchlike, though in Benet’s childhood that of a young and beautiful witch, had undergone some blurring of the features that was perhaps part of an ageing process. The jawline was no longer hard and sweeping, the lips were less set. The dowdy haircut made her look very slightly pathetic but possibly no more so than any woman of her age who had no particular purpose in life and was not very well or much loved or needed.

  Benet was surprised to find her down in the kitchen making tea for herself. Mopsa generally expected to be waited on wherever she was. Once James was better, Benet thought, they would all go out together. He was almost old enough to be taken to places of interest, to begin anyway. Lunch somewhere nice after Mopsa had been for her hospital appointment and then if the weather were as good as it had been that day, they might go to Hampton Court. Little children became ill and well so quickly, she had already learned that. It wasn’t going to be easy getting through this evening. In a day or two she might come to find hiring a television set essential.

  ‘When is his bedtime?’ Mopsa said.

  ‘About six-thirty usually but it obviously isn’t going to be tonight.’

  ‘You spoil him.’

  Benet made no answer to that and Mopsa began to talk of the complexities of getting to the hospital where the first tests were to be carried out. It was such a long way and the underground system had ‘all changed’ since she had lived in London. She studied a tube map and a street guide. B
enet said of course she would take her by car, and if James wasn’t well enough to come, she would find someone to sit with him.

  When she had been living in her flat in Tufnell Park, a baby-sitter had sometimes been arranged but that was from the block of flats next door where teenage girls abounded, all wanting to earn. Here it was different. She knew no one. She didn’t even have friends with small children except Chloe who was currently away on holiday.

  Mopsa, never lacking in intuition of a kind, went part of the way towards reading her thoughts. ‘Can’t you find someone now? I should like us to go out to eat.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave him.’

  Benet decided to ignore Mopsa’s sullen look. Anyway it was becoming a question not of whether she should stay with James or leave him but of taking some more positive step. His forehead felt hot and damp. His breath strained and sometimes a honking sound came from his chest. He had made an attempt to play with the xylophone but had soon come back and climbed on to Benet’s lap, the difficulties he was having with breathing making him break into miserable choked cries.

  ‘I’m going to have to ring the doctor.’

  ‘It’s seven o’clock. Surely you wouldn’t bother an overworked man like that just because the baby’s got a cold.’

  ‘It’s a woman,’ Benet said and she said no more. In the old days it had always been useless getting cross with Mopsa, still less losing one’s temper. It threw her at once into a desperate frenetic panic. That was years ago now but old habits died hard. Benet reached for the phone and as she did so it rang.

  ‘That’ll be your father.’

  It was. Mopsa looked complacent. Signs of care and attentiveness towards herself always disproportionately gratified her.

  ‘Hallo, Dad, how are you?’ Benet had to move the mouthpiece away from James’s loud unhappy crying. ‘Sorry, that’s poor James giving tongue. He’s got a cold.’

  Though there had never been anything so dramatic as casting her off from the bosom of the family, though in fact no positive denunciation of her had ever been made, her father had been shocked and outraged by her pregnancy and the birth of James. The situation was made worse by her being an educated person and now a well-off one, living in a society where much was on offer to prevent the births of children outside wedlock. He had never yet actually referred to James by name. When James, as had lately happened, became interested in the telephone and wanted to speak to whomever was on the line, his grandfather had been embarrassed and had spoken gruffly, had barked out a series of hallos and goodbyes and positively panted to get back to Benet. Now when she explained about James’s cold, he said only, ‘Ah, well.’ An awkward pause followed. ‘How’s your mother? Got there all right, did she?’

  ‘She’s fine. Do you want to speak to her?’

  The pause was briefer this time but it was there. No doubt John Archdale had loved his wife once. Since then he had had a lot to bear. It wasn’t her fault, she was to be pitied, she was just as helplessly ill as if she suffered from multiple sclerosis, but now, instead of love, what he felt was duty; he bore a cross that yearly grew heavier. At the moment he was probably having a little well-earned respite with those expatriate cronies of his, a game of bridge, a drink in the bar of the Miramar. The sound of his wife’s voice would not make that evening pleasanter. Benet could do nothing.

  ‘I’ll just have a word,’ he said.

  From time to time in the past, Benet had heard her mother hurl at him a variety of epithets of which ‘bag of shit’ and ‘filthy murderer’ was among the mildest. Now Mopsa took the receiver and spoke into it in her sensible housewife role.

  ‘Hallo, dear.’

  There was a short interchange. Benet couldn’t help feeling indignant that James’s name wasn’t once mentioned. He was quiet now – that is, he had stopped crying – and leaned heavily against her, the rasps of breath louder than ever.

  ‘Yes, quite a nice flight. One thing you can say for air travel, it doesn’t go on for long, it’s soon over. I was met and brought here in style. Yes, in the morning, ten in the morning. You’d better phone again tomorrow, hadn’t you? I’ll say goodbye then.’

  She put the phone down and stood staring at Benet with James in her lap. That trembly look, rather as if she were going to cry, which Benet knew of old as presaging a change of mood, had settled on her face. Suddenly Mopsa began to speak in a high and rapid, though not mad, voice.

  ‘I wasn’t a good mother to you, Brigitte. I know that. I neglected you – well, I didn’t pay enough attention to you. I was ill, you see, I was ill long before you and Dad realized. It was this hormone or whatever it is that’s missing, it was missing then, it was affecting me. I wasn’t a good mother. I was a lost soul, you see. Can you forgive me?’

  Emotional outbursts from Mopsa always embarrassed Benet. She felt awkward, farouche, not least because of the use her mother always fell back on, in times of stress particularly, of the hated given name which, for once following in Mopsa’s footsteps, she had divested herself of immediately she left home. Benet was rather angular, long-legged, with pointed features and straight dark hair. How could she have borne to suffer afresh, with a new set of friends, the inevitable mirth and amazement consequent upon being called after Bardot?

  She was embarrassed but she had to conquer that embarrassment for poor, pathetic Mopsa’s sake. And Mopsa stood there waiting, hungry for love, for reassurance, her breathing fast and nearly as shallow as James’s.

  ‘Can you forgive me, Brigitte?’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive. You were ill. Besides, you weren’t a bad mother.’ Holding James, pressing him against her shoulder, Benet forced herself to get up and put the other arm round her mother. Mopsa was trembling, she quivered like a nervous animal. Benet held her arms round her mother and round James. She kissed Mopsa’s cheek. The skin was hot and dry and slightly pulsating. But Mopsa’s water-blue eyes were clear and steady and sane. ‘I haven’t anything to forgive, believe me,’ Benet said. ‘And now let’s forget it, shall we?’

  ‘I’d do anything in the world for you, anything to make you happy.’

  ‘I know.’

  Benet sat down by the phone again, settled James on her lap and dialled the doctor’s number.

  2

  ‘HE’S GOT CROUP’.

  An onomatopoeic word, roughly the sound James made when he breathed. Benet knew by the immensity of her relief – she could have thrown her arms round Dr McNeil’s neck – how worried she had been.

  ‘I thought that was something Victorian children got.’

  ‘They did. Children still do. Only we can do more for them these days.’ Causing Benet’s relief to plummet like a lead weight, the doctor said, ‘I’d like him to go to hospital.’

  ‘Is that absolutely necessary?’

  ‘To be on the safe side. They’ll have the equipment. I don’t suppose you could achieve a steam-filled room here, could you?’

  Dr McNeil was sixty, she was due to retire in a week or two. Was she old-fashioned? Benet wondered. A steam-filled room? She imagined a shower turned on full, crashing nearly boiling water into a bath, the door and window of the bathroom shut. But one of the bathrooms here didn’t have a shower at all and the other had one that was hopelessly furred up, waiting for a replacement.

  ‘What exactly is croup?’

  ‘If you had it, we’d call it laryngitis.’

  Benet left the doctor to make phone calls. She carried James down into the kitchen where Mopsa, very practical in apron and rubber gloves, was washing up cups and saucers. Relief had returned. Croup was only laryngitis.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Mopsa said.

  Benet would have preferred her mother to stay here but she didn’t know how to say so. And perhaps Mopsa shouldn’t be left alone, especially at night and in a strange place. It was unfortunate Mopsa happened to be here at this particular time. Benet could not help reflecting that, when people said they would do anything in the world to make you happy, they
never meant things like keeping in the background, not interfering, acceding to your small requests.

  At any rate this time Mopsa sat in the back of the car, holding James. The night was clear but moonless. Benet realized suddenly that it was Hallowe’en. She carried James, wrapped in a big fleecy blanket, into the big old vaulted Gothic vestibule of the hospital and then they were sent up to the ward in the lift.

  Not very familiar with hospitals – she had been in one only once and that when James was born – Benet had expected a long ward with beds close together and ranged along both sides. But Edgar Stamford Ward was all small rooms with a wide corridor down the centre. The building, she had heard, had once been the old workhouse, but this part must have been gutted to make the children’s department, for nothing nineteenth century remained except for the windows with their small panes and pointed arches. In James’s room, a tent over a cot into which steam was being pumped awaited James. The nurse called it a croupette. He had been in it for about ten minutes, protesting at first, then lying quietly and clutching Benet’s hand, when the doctor arrived to look at him. In the doorway he took off his hospital jacket and laid it across the sister’s desk.

  ‘They get white-coat phobia if we don’t do that,’ he said. ‘Won’t even go in the butcher’s with you.’ He smiled. ‘My name’s Ian Raeburn. I’m one of the registrars here.’

  There was a bed beside the cot. She was sitting on it. She had noticed it was made up with sheets and blankets.

  ‘Can I stay here with him?’

  ‘Sure you can if you want. That’s what the bed’s for. And you’ve got a bathroom next door. We’re rather proud in here of encouraging parents to stay – a change from the bad old days.’