Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I haven’t much choice, have I?’ she said.

  Mopsa was looking tired. She had dark bags under her eyes and hollows in her cheeks. Looking after a two-year-old was too much for her. Benet wondered if she had been up in the night with the boy, if he woke up in the nights and cried and wanted his mother and Mopsa had to deal with that. She didn’t feel much sympathy, she had no room for pitying anyone but herself.

  The boy was back in his denim dungarees today and his red plastic sandals. Benet thought she had seldom seen a nastier kind of footwear for a child. It made her wonder afresh about Barbara Lloyd. The boy clambered up and down the staircases. He seemed safe enough on them, climbing up on all-fours and down by sliding on his bottom. He spoke very little, never for the mere pleasure of making comprehensible sounds. When he wanted something, really wanted it, he expressed himself in the third person, calling himself Jay. Never James or Jim or Jem but always Jay. He was extraordinarily self-contained and somehow self-sufficient. Benet, hunched up in her window chair in the basement, had to acknowledge that he was no trouble.

  She hadn’t seen him for half an hour so she bestirred herself unwillingly and went upstairs to look for him. He had got into the study room. There he had found a half-empty box of heavyweight A4 typing paper, helped himself to a dozen sheets and was drawing on them with a blue ink felt-tipped pen. He sat on the floor with the paper spread out in front of him and resting on the stiff cover of Benet’s book of days. Whether this was by accident or design it was impossible to tell, but it was obviously a sensible thing to do. And although he had got a lot of ink on his hands and arms and dungarees and the book of days, the drawings he had made were not scribbles, they were recognizable drawings of things, of a man, a woman, a house, of something that looked like a bridge.

  Benet picked up one of the pictures and looked closely at it. She was astonished. It seemed to her more like something one would expect of a six-year-old and she remembered children’s drawings on the wall of the playroom where the tree of hands poster was. The memory of sitting in that playroom came back to her with a pain so sharp that she dropped the drawing and turned away, clenching her hands.

  The boy said, ‘Jay wants drink.’ He was trying to put the cap back on the felt-tipped pen.

  Benet did it for him. She picked him up to carry him upstairs, performing this action almost without thinking, automatically. Immediately she wanted to drop him again, she had such a sensation of recoil. But she couldn’t do that. He was a person, he had his feelings, and none of it was his fault. She took him upstairs and filled a bottle with apple juice for him.

  When Mopsa came back, Benet suggested they should rent a television set. The boy had obviously been used to watching television. When he had first come, he had gone about the room looking for it in much the same way as Mopsa had on her first day. ‘It would make things easier for you,’ Benet said.

  Why wasn’t Mopsa more enthusiastic? Benet had expected a delighted response, even a suggestion that they should all go out in the car now and see about it. But there had been a worn look about Mopsa since her return, something almost frightened or hagridden, rather as if, while she was away, she had seen or heard something to dismay her. Yet whatever processes had been gone through at the Royal Eastern, they had been routine and simple and not alarming. She told Benet that and Benet believed her. She screwed up her face, making a muzzle mouth.

  ‘You don’t like television.’

  ‘I shan’t watch it. You and your little charge can have it upstairs in the living room.’

  Still there was no show of enthusiasm and Benet said no more about it, but Mopsa must have taken to heart what she had said for a television set appeared, was brought over from a rental centre in Kilburn and installed in the living room. Its big grey pupil-less eye gleamed out from the corner among the still-unpacked crates. At half-past four Mopsa and the boy ensconced themselves on the settee in front of it, Mopsa with a cup of tea and the boy with apple juice, this time in a cup. Benet went past the open door and looked at them, but did not go inside.

  Afterwards she dated what happened from the arrival of the rented television set. That seemed to mark the demarcation line between the wretched limbo she had lived in and what came after it, a time of discovery, of stupefaction, of fear. Yet for a day or two after the television came, nothing much did happen and it would all have happened whether the television had come or not.

  For a long time, petrified as a cameo in her mind remained that glimpse, that picture, of skinny, witch-like, galvanic Mopsa, sitting on the edge of the sofa – the way she always sat, poised, tense, as if ready to spring – and the little boy beside her, as snug in stretchy velour as a puppy in its skin, his thumb in his mouth, his other hand firmly holding on to a thick blue pottery mug. This image later seemed to her the last image in a cycle of despair or one that stood at the beginning of being afraid.

  That night she did without the Soneryl. She dreamed of the tree of hands. James and she were walking on the Heath. She was pushing the empty pushchair and James was walking beside her, holding her hand. In life they had never been on the Heath together but this was a dream. They crossed a clearing by a sandy path and came into another piece of woodland, sunlit, high summer, the trees in fresh green leaf except for one in the centre of the copse which grew hands instead of leaves, red-nailed hands, gloved hands, hands of bone and hands of mail.

  James was enraptured by the tree. He went up to it and put his arms round its trunk. He put his own hands up to touch its lowest hands. And Benet was reaching up to pick a hand for him, a lady’s white hand with a diamond ring on it, when his crying penetrated the dream, broke into it, so that the tree grew faint, the sunshine faded and she was awake, out of bed, going to James.

  Before she saw the empty room, she remembered. Her body twisted and clenched itself. She closed her eyes for a moment, made the necessary effort and went down the top flight to where the crying was coming from, the small bedroom next to Mopsa’s. The room was in darkness. The boy stopped crying when she put the light on and picked him up. Had he been used to light in his room? Had light perhaps come into where he slept from a street lamp?

  She switched on the bedside light, covering the shade with a folded blanket. Sucking his thumb, he fell asleep while she stood and watched him. She found now that she was really looking at him properly for the first time and found, too, that his face reminded her of someone. Who that someone was she didn’t know. But this boy was very very like some adult person she knew or used to know. Generally speaking, the ‘prettier’ the child, the less he or she resembles an adult. Prettiness, loveliness in very young children is equated not with any individuality of looks but with a conformity to an ideal babyhood appearance, a kind of amalgam of a Raphael cherub, Peter Pan and a Mabel Lucy Atwell infant. The sleeping boy looked quite unlike any of these. His nose was straight and bold, his chin long, his mouth full and symmetrically curved, his eyebrows already marked in sweeping lines. You could see exactly what he would look like when he was grown-up, a craggy-faced fair man, tall and big-built, ugly till he smiled. Some grown man she knew must be like that, or some woman with thick lips and blond hair. Not Constance Fenton. Barbara Lloyd? She didn’t think so. She had forgotten what Barbara Lloyd looked like, but now Barbara’s face came clearly back to her, moon-like with low forehead and tip-tilted nose. He probably looked like his father whom she had never seen. There was something faulty in that reasoning. He reminded her of someone she had seen, someone she knew.

  She knew she would get no more sleep. In a dressing gown, wrapped in a blanket, she sat in the study room among the books, the boy’s remarkable drawings on her lap, willing the morning to come, yet not much wanting the morning. At about five she made herself tea.

  It didn’t start to get light until after seven-thirty. A cold grey twilight seemed to flow out of the cloudy sky, the green Heath, the pond, into the Vale of Peace. There had been no sign of the sun for many days. A boy was delivering newsp
apers from a canvas bag on his cycle handlebars. Benet watched him. It came to her that she hadn’t seen a newspaper for several weeks.

  The boy was due to go home on Wednesday and it was Sunday now. Benet went out by herself. She walked down to South End Green. The world was green and grey and chilly, a feeling in the air of November hopelessness, but at the same time it seemed unreal, spaced away from her at a remove and she encased in a capsule of glass. She found a newsagent’s open and bought a Sunday paper but she didn’t read it. She took it home and put it on the table in the basement room, but still she didn’t read it and later on she couldn’t find it. Mopsa must have removed it to her bedroom.

  Mopsa and the boy watched television. Benet sat with them. She looked for things to do that she had never done with James, walking on the Heath, sitting in the study, watching television. Mopsa seemed uneasy to have her there – perhaps she was troubled by Benet’s inconsistency in saying she would never watch television and then doing so – but she became easier once the news headlines had been read.

  Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, had died and there was a lot about his funeral. Benet watched for about ten minutes. The boy was holding on to a white rabbit toy Mopsa must have bought him. He sat with his knees slightly apart, holding the rabbit but having absent-mindedly taken it from his mouth like a man with a cigar. His lips were compressed, his eyes fixed on the screen. Benet got up and went upstairs to the boy’s room. There was nothing in the room but the bed he had been sleeping in and a small chest of drawers. She looked in those drawers but they were as empty as when she had bought that chest a year before. No suitcase had been sent with him, none of the inevitable carrier bags and holdalls of clothes and toys and paraphernalia that accompany small children whenever they travel. On top of the chest lay the Mothercare and Marks & Spencer carriers Mopsa had brought home. The clothes in them had been new. Mopsa had bought them. In one of the bags an unworn garment still remained, a pair of brown velour pants.

  His clothes might be in Mopsa’s room. Benet looked in Mopsa’s room but there were no children’s clothes anywhere. The Sunday Times that she had bought that morning lay curiously tucked between the two pillows on Mopsa’s bed. She wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t opened the drawer in the bedside table and, in doing so, very slightly rucked up the bed cover.

  Holding the newspaper, she began to go downstairs again. The boy’s screams broke out of silence, they sounded as if they came from someone terribly injured. Benet ran down the stairs, seeing Mopsa’s eyes, remembering the barricaded room and the knives. She opened the living-room door. The television had been switched off and the boy stood in front of it, screaming in distress, weeping bitter tears, belabouring the screen with his fists.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’

  ‘He didn’t like me turning off the TV.’

  ‘Why did you?’ Benet had to shout above his crying. She picked him up and tried to soothe him. He sobbed and beat her shoulder.

  Mopsa didn’t answer her. She was wearing her defiant, insouciant, nothing-really-matters face.

  ‘What a silly noise,’ she said to the boy. She got up and turned the television on again, altering the channel, Benet noticed, before she did so. A picture came, a pair of shire horses pulling a plough across a meadow.

  The boy struggled to get down. He went up to the set and did a curious thing. He put his fingers on the screen and then round the rim of the screen as if he were trying to open it, to get inside or find something that was inside. That was what it looked like to Bent. He gave up the attempt after a moment or two and his oddly mature face, his little man’s face, looked sad, resigned. He sat down again, not on the settee beside Mopsa but on the floor quite near to the television and he leaned forward, watching it intently.

  Benet took the newspaper downstairs. There was a lot in it about Leonid Brezhnev. She was more interested in reading the home news but she couldn’t find much of that and presently she saw why not. Pages three and four were missing. Someone – Mopsa – had cut them out.

  If Benet were to ask her why, she would only deny it. And although she knew Mopsa must have done it, she could not absolutely prove it. It might have happened in the newsagent’s – there was the remote possibility of that. The phone began to ring. She thought she had better answer it, though it was nearly two weeks since she had answered the phone. She had to start answering the phone again sometime. She had to start doing the explaining that Mopsa had failed to do, been afraid to do.

  The voice was her father’s. How was she? Was she recovered from the flu? How was Mopsa?

  ‘She’s fine,’ Benet said and she added with a vindictiveness she almost at once regretted, ‘She’ll be home very soon.’

  He hadn’t asked about James. What would she have said if he had? She had felt antagonistic towards him because he hadn’t asked about James, though James was dead, though she could not have answered if he had asked. He should have asked, it was cruel of him not to, crueller than he knew. She went up to fetch Mopsa. The boy was still sitting on the floor, still staring at the screen, though the horses were long gone and replaced by a man in sequins tango-ing with a microphone.

  Benet heard her mother talking on the phone like a young girl in a bygone time, the Twenties perhaps, who had been rung up by some undergraduate or subaltern she had met at a tennis party. She sounded coy, petulant, flirtatious. With this man she had been married to for thirty years, she was coquettish, provocative. She giggled and gave a little scream of delight. Benet put on her coat and tied a scarf round her head and went out. She walked up the hill and down Heath Street and looked at a display of The Marriage Knot in paperback in the window of the High Hill Bookshop. There was a photograph of herself set in the midst of the arrangement. It had been taken when she was pregnant, though there was no sign of this through the folds of the dark loose dress she wore.

  Go back two and a half years, she told herself, go back to the time before he was conceived. Go back to that. He was never conceived, it never happened. You didn’t say to Edward, I’m going to have a baby but that makes no difference, it still won’t work, it doesn’t change things. You said a straight goodbye: Edward, it’s over, we’ve come to the end. There was no baby, there never was. Hadn’t Edward himself said there couldn’t be?

  ‘I don’t believe you, Benet. You’re lying. You wouldn’t do that, even you wouldn’t do that . . .’

  She bought herself a cup of coffee and a sandwich and sat alone in a corner watching the people who were all in couples or in groups. It was strange, she thought, that you couldn’t see she was pregnant in that photograph. James had been born three months later but you couldn’t see she was pregnant. It was almost an omen.

  They were both in bed asleep when she got back. She looked for the missing pages from the Sunday Times but she couldn’t find it. Probably it also was in Mopsa’s room, under the mattress perhaps.

  Mopsa had two more visits to pay to the Royal Eastern, one on Monday morning and one on Friday. She left the boy with Benet and went off at nine-thirty. Benet sat him on the floor in the basement with some sheets of paper in front of him and three felt-tipped pens in different colours. He was wearing the brown velour pants and a yellow jersey and his bright pale yellow hair, newly washed, stood out like a sunburst. After a while he asked for a drink, calling himself Jay, or something that sounded more like Jye. What words he did speak were uttered in unmistakable cockney. Barbara Lloyd herself probably talked cockney, she had left school at sixteen, Benet thought unfairly. Who knew what sort of background this husband of hers came from? Benet knew she was being mean-spirited and snobbish. She couldn’t help it. Despair and desperation had returned to her in the night and clung to her like heavy wet clothes.

  When the phone rang, she considered letting it ring. It wouldn’t be her father this time. It would be Antonia or Chloe or Mary or Amyas Ireland or someone she would have to tell the truth to.

  The boy looked round and said, ‘Phone ring.’
/>   ‘I know. I can hear it.’

  ‘Ring ring,’ said the boy and he made brrr–brrr sounds like a telephone bell.

  Benet picked up the receiver, steeling herself.

  ‘Is that you, Benet? This is Constance Fenton. Is your mother all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think so. Quite all right. She’s out at the moment.’

  ‘Only she did make a half-promise to come over yesterday, and when she didn’t come and didn’t phone, we rather wondered. There’s usually someone here to answer the phone. I’m out at work, of course, but Barbara’s been here with Christopher . . .’

  Benet interrupted her. Her throat had dried and her voice sounded thin. ‘I thought your grandson was called James.’

  ‘No, dear. Christopher. Christopher John after his father.’

  ‘My mother hasn’t been over at all then?’

  ‘We talked on the phone, that’s all. But we should so like to see her so if you could ask her just to give us a ring when she has a moment . . .’

  Benet murmured the necessary things. She felt curiously weak and enfeebled. She could see the boy busily drawing away in red felt-tip. Even from this distance you could recognize a woman, a dog, a tree. She said goodbye to Mrs Fenton, put the receiver down, sat there with closed eyes, pushing her fingers through her hair.

  Presently she got up and went upstairs and searched Mopsa’s room. The missing newspaper pages were probably with her in her handbag. Benet found the boy’s red coat in his bedroom. Mopsa had evidently washed it. When she was halfway downstairs a curious idea came to her, not at all a rational idea, that he shouldn’t wear it, that it marked him out, that it made him immediately recognizable. Whoever he was. She went all the way up to the top again and made herself open the cupboard door in James’s room where all his clothes were. She had bought him a duffle coat in thick brown tweed for the winter but he had never worn it. It had been on the large side to allow for growth. She made herself not think, merely do. She took the coat off its hanger and carried it downstairs and dressed the boy in it. They were going out to buy a paper. She didn’t know how it would be, walking out with a child in a pushchair, a boy the same age as James. It wouldn’t kill her though, that was for sure, it wouldn’t kill her and she had to know.