Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

  First thing in the morning he would go there and ask his discreet question. Equally discreetly the girl would let him know what the account contained by writing the sum on a scrap of paper and passing it face-downwards to him under the grille. Not tomorrow, though. Tomorrow, he remembered, would be Christmas Day.

  Next week, then. He still had to think how he was going to establish somewhere or other a bank account for John Howard Phipps. The mean underhandedness of the solicitors had staved off the need for an account for a while but only a while. The banker’s draft for the balance of the £132,000 Goldschmidt would produce on 15 February had to be paid in somewhere. Terence couldn’t ask his solicitors to convert it into cash for him. Or, rather, he could but he knew he wouldn’t dare, he wouldn’t take the risk.

  And then suddenly he saw. He saw how it could be done. He was gazing into the clear golden liquid in his glass with its light swirl of foam, as if into a crystal. It became the elixir of life or a fount of wisdom. He drank it down and asked for another.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said to the girl behind the bar, though he didn’t go so far as to buy her a drink.

  The dream of a Christmas Party for Jason had come to no more in the end than three infant guests and their mothers confronted by more food than twice as many could have eaten and a bewildering display of decorations and presents. But it had been a success too. They had enjoyed themselves, and Chloe and her two-year-old daughter Kate who hadn’t seen James for six months were in no doubt Jason was him. The others, a boy and girl and their mothers living in the Vale of Peace, had of course no idea there was any doubt about it. They all called him Jay, though Chloe raised an eyebrow at the diminutive.

  When they had all gone home and Jason was in bed, Benet sat in the basement room among the dirty plates and cups, the present wrappings and the glittering litter and looked at the two trees, the Christmas tree hung with lights and the tree she had painted on the wall and adorned with green and yellow and scarlet hands. Each hand had held – or had had cunningly hooked on to it – a tiny present for Jason: a toy car, an orange, a marble, a magnet, a packet of nuts. She knew she had gone overboard with excess. A more temperate climate must prevail in future. She mustn’t spoil him just because they had so blissfully found each other. But this first Christmas with him, she had been unable to help herself. It had been a celebration of her own joy as much as for his pleasure. Pleasure for him there had been, enormous delight. She thought for the rest of her life she would remember his slowly dawning gleeful smile, his advance upon the tree and his last-minute glance up at her for permission to help himself to what the hands held. Nevertheless it was for herself she had done it, to see that look on his face, to exult. Since that day in the library she had been warm with joy – literally warm. It was as if she couldn’t feel the cold of dark sleety December. Often she found herself going out wearing only a light jacket, she was so heated by inner happiness.

  For the rest of that day when she had taken him to and snatched him from the Winterside library and for a day or two afterwards, she had been beset by fear amounting sometimes to terror that she had betrayed them both, had been detected, and that the police would come. And her fear had no longer been for publicity or disgrace or retribution but solely that Jason would be taken from her. But when no one came and when at the same time all references to Jason seemed to disappear from the newspapers, a happy calm succeeded the fear. She moved into a lovely never-never land which had no past and no future beyond next week and which allowed for no thought about the impossibility of continuing like this or the inevitability of eventual discovery. She was happy, she was serene and she was working. She knew that no rebuff and no rejection could hurt her and it was in this frame of mind that she rang the hospital and asked for Ian Raeburn to invite him to the Vale of Peace.

  He came that same evening. Jason had been in bed about an hour. It was curious what happened. Benet had never had such an experience before. It was as if they both knew what they must do, as if this was the way they had greeted one another for a long time now. They went into each other’s arms and kissed passionately. What they were doing surprised them equally. They hadn’t expected this, it had seemingly been involuntary, and they looked into each other’s faces and smiled. But the smiles were brief because passion, until it is old and customary, is not amused. They held each other and kissed and Benet knew they wouldn’t speak or explain or excuse but go up, still holding each other, to her bedroom up that long staircase. Only Jason cried. He screamed out in his frightened nightmare voice:

  ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

  It broke what had existed between her and Ian. Running up the stairs to Jason, she knew it had broken it only for a while, that one day soon what they had begun would proceed to consummation, but not this evening, not now. She picked up Jason and held him against breasts that ached, a body where half-forgotten little pulses beat. But when she came downstairs and found Ian in the basement room, it was only to take his hands and sit beside him. And it was better so, better to go forward with caution into what she began to feel might be for a lifetime.

  He asked her if she were fostering the boy called Jay with a view to adopting him and she clutched at this straw and said yes. Yes, she was.

  ‘He isn’t a replacement for James. It isn’t that at all. I don’t know if you can understand.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘It’s as if I had two sons and one of them died. I’ll never forget him and there’ll always be an empty space in life where he used to be. An empty chair at the table, if that doesn’t sound too sentimental.’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘I suppose the truth is you can’t replace someone. You can just have other people. I won’t say my feeling for Jay is greater or less than my feeling was for James. It’s not even different. It’s the same kind of love but for a different person.’

  ‘I’m glad for you,’ Ian said. ‘You’ve done something very wise and clever for yourself, haven’t you?’

  She had a momentary shivery feeling of what would he think if he knew the real facts? It passed, swallowed by her happiness.

  ‘We’re going to see each other all the time now, aren’t we, Benet?’

  ‘All the time,’ she said.

  ‘And this is it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think this is it, don’t you?’

  They laughed at each other. Benet said, ‘Every evening?’

  ‘Every lunchtime and every afternoon,’ he said. ‘Just for the next fortnight anyway. I’m on nights.’

  ‘And I was forgetting I’m writing a novel.’

  ‘Could I make you forget that?’ he said.

  Since then they had met every day – with Jason. Ian had had to go home for Christmas to his parents in Inverness. At nine he would phone her. She began clearing up the basement room with the radio playing light country music. The new novel was going well. She wrote contentedly at night after Jason was asleep, sometimes until midnight. Of course there would have to be some changes there when Ian came back and went on day duty . . . In the glass, pausing with a tray of crockery in her hands, she saw a fuller and younger-looking face, though there were a few white hairs among the dark, about an inch long they were or two months’ growth, and she knew they had come when James died.

  She picked up the phone and dialled her parents’ number in Spain to wish them a happy New Year. Mopsa answered.

  ‘It’s unlucky before the Eve itself,’ said Mopsa.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Benet astonished herself by speaking so robustly. ‘I’ll probably be out on the Eve enjoying myself.’

  There was a silence. Then, ‘I only wish I had it in me to be as selfish as that.’ Mopsa paused for a reply and when none came said, ‘How is James?’

  Benet’s heart turned over, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. It was to her father only that she had spoken when last they had been in touch a week before Christmas and he, of course, couldn’t be expected to know. But Mopsa! I must not hate my mother . . .
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  But the explanation was simply that Mopsa had forgotten. Her actions in the matter of kidnapping Jason had not been well-received, still less applauded, so in the way she always reacted to any censure or criticism she had blocked the whole experience off with whatever mechanism of her curious mentality handled these things. She had forgotten. Memory for her had always been like the writing on a blackboard, which any kind of unease would wipe away at a single stroke.

  ‘He’s well,’ Benet managed to say. ‘We’ve had a party.’

  ‘I don’t remember getting an invitation.’

  ‘Well, of course not. You’d hardly come eight hundred miles to a children’s party.’

  ‘When your father’s managing director’s daughter got married in Santiago, she sent us an invitation and that was more like eight thousand miles.’

  Benet knew the uselessness of pursuing this. She spoke to her father who sounded tired and subdued. Mopsa refused to come back to the phone. She said the line was so bad it hurt her ears.

  I must not hate my mother . . .

  And suddenly, at last, Benet understood that she didn’t hate Mopsa any more. That she would never have to adjure herself with those words any more. She would be eternally grateful to her and that was only a step from love. For without Mopsa she would never have had Jason. Mopsa had stolen him for her, knowing with a wisdom unsuspected in her that given long enough Benet would come to love him. And to this end she had risked what was most frightful to her, incarceration – indeed, forced imprisonment – in a mental hospital. She had stolen Jason and given him to Benet and, rather than be the only witness to this abduction, had with her methodical madness forgotten all about it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Benet said to her father. ‘Say goodbye to her for me. And give her my best love.’

  The chill damp limbo that occupies the spaces between the high holidays of Christmas was making itself felt in Finchley High Road. On this the twenty-ninth of December, half the shops were still closed but not of course the banks. Buoyed up by a small whisky and two Valiums, Terence found ample parking space in Regent’s Park Road for Freda Phipps’s car. The few people about with shopping bags looked bemused, stunned by recent festivities.

  Terence walked along rather slowly. He had passed the Westminster Bank and Lloyds and the Midland and Barclays and was beginning to fear (also in a way to hope) that there was no branch of the Anglian-Victoria here, that the phone book had been wrong or the branch had moved, when he saw it ahead of him, its A and V monogram on the orange signboard sticking out between the post office and a building society. He hesitated. He stood gazing into the darkened and barred window of a men’s boutique as if the dimly discerned yellow pullover and beige cords in its shadowy depths held an obsessive fascination for him. There was no help for it, he had to go into the bank. It was either going in there or else giving up the whole thing, abandoning the project.

  Eleven-thirty and the pubs were open. He was rather well-off for actual cash, having, since the discovery in Jessica’s suitcase, bought a good deal of his food, meals out and drinks on the still-valid Barclaycard. He could easily have run to a couple of Scotches. But he was scared of slurring his speech or of making a mess of John Howard Phipps’s signature should he be asked to produce it.

  What could they do to him in the bank after all but refuse him? They weren’t going to send for the police because he asked for a bank account in the name of Phipps. It wasn’t a crime to call yourself by a different name from your own, you could call yourself what you liked in this country. And he had found a foolproof way of getting round that reference business, hadn’t he? They could do nothing but refuse him . . .

  Terence had often tried these methods of combating paranoia, these recognized ways of reassuring oneself by repeating such handy aphorisms as ‘Most of the things you’ve worried about have never happened’ and ‘There is nothing to fear but the fear itself’ and ‘They can’t eat you’ and so on. But they had never helped much, they had never seemed to get through. They were just things you said which sounded good. They didn’t probe into the core of fear, still less start the process of breaking it up. There in Finchley High Road, in the grey gloom of a post-Christmas morning, a dreadful wave of depression flowed over Terence as he understood, staring unseeing at a pair of fawn trousers, that he was going to be beset by fear all his life, live in it and be paralysed by it, and there wasn’t enough Valium and whisky in the world to keep it at bay. It wasn’t worth it, he thought, there was no way it was worth it. But what did he mean by that? What was worth what? Did he mean that life itself wasn’t worth the fear it took to live it?

  Thinking along those lines wouldn’t do at all. He had no alternative now anyway, he’d gone too far. He had signed the contract and committed himself. In for a penny, in for a pound, in for one hundred and thirty-two thousand pounds. He walked into the bank and in a hoarse sentence, split by a clearing of his throat, asked to see someone about opening an account.

  ‘Phipps,’ he said when they asked his name.

  He was told to take a seat and did so in one of the orange leather chairs that stood about. After a minute or two someone came out and said the assistant manager would see him. Terence went into a very small office, also done up in orange, and shook hanks with a man who said his name was Fletcher.

  ‘I want to open a bank account.’ Terence’s voice was back to normal though his body felt rather as if he were treading water. ‘With fifty pounds,’ he said, aware of what a small sum this sounded these days. It was the utmost he had been able to amass out of three weeks’ Social Security.

  Fletcher looked, if anything, relieved. It occurred to Terence that perhaps he had thought his visitor was a customer who had wanted an overdraft. ‘That shouldn’t present too many problems, Mr Phipps.’

  He produced a form which Terence scanned quickly, his throat constricting afresh. There was nothing really to dismay him. A specimen signature was required and, under Fletcher’s eye, Terence signed ‘John Howard Phipps’ with a hand that desperate concentration made steady.

  Then came the bit about furnishing the name and address of a referee.

  ‘You could apply for a reference,’ said Terence, ‘to someone who has an account at your Golders Green branch. Would that be all right?’

  ‘I should think that would do very well, Mr Phipps.’

  So Terence wrote in the space provided, ‘Mr Terence C. Wand’, and underneath it, ‘14 Gibbs House, Brownswood Common Lane, London N15’, which was his mother’s address.

  19

  THE GUN WASN’T the kind of thing Barry had expected. A pistol of some sort, he had speculated vaguely, a revolver, the kind of thing Dennis Gordon must have shot his wife with. This looked more like a rifle someone had messed about with and made a botched job of at that. But the man called Paddy was prepared to take £40 for it and Barry knew that wasn’t much for a real gun.

  ‘You’re sure it works?’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ said Paddy.

  The room he lived in was one of the nastiest places Barry had ever been into. He hadn’t known such places existed in the Hornsey where he had been brought up and where his parents still lived. It had no furniture but a mattress on the floor and an old meat safe with a wire front, and it smelt of unwashed clothes and hamburgers and urine. It was from this meat safe that Paddy had brought the gun.

  ‘What sort is it?’ Barry asked warily.

  He wanted to be told one of those famous names familiar to all lovers of violent movies and fiction – Luger, Smith & Wesson, Beretta.

  Paddy gave him a sidelong look.

  ‘It’s a sawn-off shotgun, isn’t it?’ he said.

  He was a big burly fair man, not a bit Irish to look at and surnamed Jones. Or so he said. He hadn’t much of an Irish accent either, Barry thought. His voice was a zombie drone. But he guessed that Paddy wouldn’t have talked to him in the pub or brought him back here or be offering him the gun if he hadn’t heard Barry’s Irish name an
d noted in him the black hair and blue eyes and white skin of Connemara.

  Barry thought of himself as English – well, British. And sawn-off shotguns he equated with terrorism. But he had to have the gun, he was never going to cross Winterside Down after dark again unarmed. A replica wouldn’t satisfy him. His brother had said to get himself one of those replicas, they’d never know the difference, but Barry himself would know, he had thought. Besides, they cost nearly as much as the real thing.

  ‘I don’t suppose we could try it out?’

  ‘Like where? In here? Down the High Street?’

  Barry had thought of Alexandra Park but even that wasn’t really big enough for experimenting with guns. When fired it would no doubt make a terrible noise.

  ‘You have to trust me,’ said Paddy.

  He suddenly looked – well, political was the word. Like one of those Irish National Liberation Army people whose faces were always being shown on the news. Barry took the thin roll of notes out of his jacket pocket. They were practically all he had in the world, nearly all his last week’s pay, and it was his last week now Ken Thompson had gone bust and been obliged to send him away.

  Paddy wrapped the gun in a piece of rag, part of an old grey vest. He put it into Barry’s hands as if he were making him a rare and delicate gift.

  He said simply, in his dead voice, ‘Kill English.’

  That made Barry’s blood run cold, those light eyes staring at him and that numb tone and the deadly hate in it. He couldn’t get out of the house fast enough but he made himself move nonchalantly until he was beyond Paddy’s sight. The last thing he saw of the vendor of weaponry was that chunky puffy face with the unblinking pig eyes watching him over the banisters as he went down all those flights of stairs.