by Ruth Rendell
“Well, I don’t know,” she giggled. “Not really. I’m not really OK. I’m in an awful mess. And Mother’s being very sniffy. Mother’s being horrible, actually.”
Her rueful smile showed him this was only half-meant. Foolish this was, he knew it every time, but when he looked at her like this he could never help admiring afresh the beautiful, fair, sensitive face that would with luck defy time, the long, pale, soft hair, the eyes as clear as a child’s and as blue, but not a child’s. There was no wedding ring on her left hand, but often she wore no rings, just as she nearly always kept her fancy clothes for public or publicity appearances. The jeans she wore were shabby compared with Burden’s. She had on a blue sweater of a similar shade and a string of wooden beads.
“Now you’re home, darling,” said Dora, “we can all have a drink. I’m sure I need it. In fact …” she looked from one to the other with a certain tact, with a knowledge that they might care for two minutes alone together, “… I’ll get it.”
Sheila fell back into the chair she had jumped out of. “Aren’t you going to ask me why? Why, why, why everything?”
“No.”
“You have a blind faith in the rightness of everything I do?”
“You know I don’t.” He was tempted to say of the husband she had left, “I liked Andrew,” but he didn’t say it. “What are we talking about, anyway? Which of your sensational acts?”
“Oh, Pop, I had to cut the wire. It wasn’t done hysterically or without thinking or for publicity or in defiance or anything. I had to do it. I’ve been psyching myself up to it for ever so long. People take notice of what I do, you see. I don’t just mean me, I mean anyone in my position. They kind of say, ‘If Sheila Wexford does it there must be some meaning to it, there must be a point if a famous person like her does it.’ “
“What happened?” He was genuinely curious.
“I bought a pair of wire-cutters in a DIY place in Covent Garden. There were ten of us, all members of PANDA—Players AntiNuclear Direct Action—only I was the only well-known one. We went to a place in Northamptonshire called Lossington and we went in three cars, mine and two others. It’s an RAF station where they have obsolete bombers. The importance of the place doesn’t matter, you see, it’s the gesture …”
“Of course I see,” he said a little impatiently.
“There was this bleak plain with a couple of concrete huts and some hangars and grass all round and mud and a wire fence gone rusty—miles of it, and high enough not to lose tennis balls if you were playing inside. Well, we all stood up against the wire and each of us cut a bit and a great flap of wire came down, then we went to the nearest town and the police station and walked in and told them what we’d done and …”
Dora came in with their drinks on a tray—beer for Wexford, wine for herself and her daughter. Having heard the last words, she said, “You might have given a little more thought to your father.”
“Oh, Pop, the first idea was for us to cut the wire at RAF Myringford, but I stood out against that because of you, because it was on your patch. I did think of you. But I had to do it, I had to—can’t you understand?”
His temper for an instant got the better of him. “You’re not Antigone, however much you may have played her. You’re not Bunyan. Don’t keep saying you had to do it. Do you really believe your cutting the wire round an obsolete bomber station or whatever is going to lead to a total ban on nuclear arms? I don’t like them, you know, I don’t believe anyone likes them; I’m afraid of them. When you and Sylvia were little I used to be—oppressed with fear for you. And if they’ve kept the peace for forty-five years, that doesn’t mean a thing; it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll keep it for ninety. But I know better than to suppose this kind of thing is going to affect government.”
“What else can we do?” she said simply. “I often think I don’t believe that either, but what else can we do? They all think that banning Cruise missiles solves everything, but they’re getting rid of less than ten per cent of the world’s arsenal. The alternative is apathy, is pretending everything’s solved.”
“You mean that ‘for evil to triumph,’ “ Wexford said, “ ‘it is only necessary for good men to do nothing’?”
But Dora followed sharply with, “Or do you mean that between the early warning and the bomb going off you’ll have ten minutes in which to congratulate yourself on not being an ostrich?”
Sheila sat up, was silent for a while. It was as if what her mother said had not touched her, had gone unheard. Then she said very quietly, “If you’re a human being, you have to be against nuclear weapons. It’s a … a sort of definition. Like … like mammals suckle their young and insects have six legs. The definition of a human being is one who hates and fears and wants to be rid of nuclear weapons. Because they’re the evil, they’re the modern equivalent of the devil, of Antichrist—they are all we’ll ever know of hell.”
After that, as he remarked to Dora while Sheila made a mysterious secret phone call, there didn’t seem any more to be said. Or not for the present. Dora sighed. “She says Andrew’s right wing and only interested in capitalism and he doesn’t have an inner life.”
“Presumably she knew that before she married him,” Wexford said.
“She isn’t in love any more and that always makes a difference.”
“It’s not so much a depraved society that we live in as an idealistic one. People expect to remain in love with their partners all their lives or else break up and start again. Are you still in love with me?”
“Oh, darling, you know I love you very much, I’m devoted to you, I’d be lost without you, I—”
“Exactly,” said her husband, laughing, and he went outside to get himself another beer.
NOTHING HAD BEEN SAID ABOUT SHEILA STAYING the night. She had arrived at four and in the usual course of things would have started back for London at about nine. It was less than an hour’s drive. But the phone call she had made changed her mind, or so it seemed. She came back into the room looking pleased, looking happier than she had since Wexford arrived home, and announced that if they didn’t mind—this with the self-confidence of the always-beloved child to whom parents’ “minding” was unknown—she would stay until tomorrow, she might even stay until after lunch tomorrow.
“Mother’s the only person I know who still cooks roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday lunch.”
Wexford thought that asking her where she was living now could hardly be construed as interference, but he resisted saying how much he had liked the house in Hampstead.
“I had to move out, didn’t I? I couldn’t go on living in Downshire Hill, in Andrew’s house that he’d paid for, and turn him out. Someone told him it was worth two million.” She sat down on the floor, hugging her knees. “I can’t cope with that kind of money. I’ve got this flat in Bloomsbury, Coram Fields, and it’s OK, it’s really quite grand.” She flashed a smile at her father. “You’ll like it.”
Dora had the Radio Times on her lap. “Nearly time for Lady Audley. I don’t want to miss it, so if you don’t like watching yourself I’ll have to send you to bed.”
“Oh, Mother. Do you really imagine I haven’t seen it? I don’t mind watching it again with you, but of course I saw a preview. Look, I must rush outside though and move my car so that Pop can put his in. No, I’ll move mine and put his in. It doesn’t matter if I miss the beginning of—”
“I’ll move the cars,” Wexford interposed. “We’ve got five minutes. Keys, please, Sheila.”
She fished them out of her jeans pocket. His car was a little wide for the garage and he had made his offer less out of altruism than for fear of getting the new Montego scraped. Dora switched on the television. The wind had dropped and the night was dark and quiet, rather misty, each streetlamp a yellow blur. Between his garden and the empty site next door that had never been built on, the fence was sagging, in places laid flat on the flowerbed where the wind had felled it. The last few leaves on the cherry t
ree in his front lawn had been shrivelled by early frost and still clung to the nearly bare branches. Leaves lay everywhere, dark and wet, a blackened coating on path and pavement. Someone had found a child’s Fair Isle glove on this mat of leaves and laid it on top of the low wall. The street was deserted. In a bay window opposite, between dark evergreen shrubs standing like sentries, between open curtains, he saw the blue glow of a screen suddenly flooded with colour and his daughter’s face filling it in close-up.
Sheila hadn’t locked the Porsche. Wexford opened the door and got into the driving-seat. It was an irony that his much cheaper and less prestigious car had automatic transmission, while this one had a manual gearbox. Presumably Sheila preferred it that way. The Montego had been his for only six months and it was the first automatic car he had ever possessed, but even so he was coming near to forgetting about letting in clutches and shifting handles. So much so that when he switched on the ignition he failed to notice she had left the car in bottom gear. It jumped—being a powerful sports car it bounded like a spirited horse—and stalled. Wexford grinned to himself. So much for his conviction that he was the more careful driver. Another two inches and the Porsche would have hit his garage doors.
He moved the gear lever into neutral and switched on the engine once more. His foot on the clutch pedal, he was moving the lever into reverse when he became aware of a feeling of unparalleled strangeness, an unaccountable sensation of being more than usually alert and alive. It was as if he were young again, a young man with the vigour and carefree nature of youth. Some strengthening elixir seemed to surge through his veins. On this damp, dark night when he was tired at the end of a long hard day, he was visited with a renewal of youth and power, a springiness in muscle and nerves like a young athlete’s.
All this was momentary. It came in a flash that was also a piercing ray of enlightenment. Did he hear anything? The ticking mechanism as of a clock—or was that imagination, some vibration in his brain? The thrusting gear slid into the reverse position, made contact, and without knowing why, without a pause for reasoning, he flung open the car door and precipitated himself with all his force horizontally out as the roar came behind him, the earthquake, the loudest most violent explosion he had ever known.
It happened simultaneously, all of it—the bomb going off, the leap from the doomed car, the fierce blinding pain as he struck his head on something cold and upright and hard as iron …
5
AFTER DOROTHY SANDERS HAD BEEN DRIVEN HOME, Burden meant to go to the Irelands’ house at Myringford. But he would be too late now to see his son put to bed, too late to enjoy (as Wexford, quoting, had once expressed it) “… those attractions by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks and a great deal of noise.” His wife didn’t expect him until later and the house would be full of visiting relatives.
Instead, after a lapse of ten minutes or so and without giving any warning of his intention, he followed Dorothy Sanders. Something in her son’s appearance and manner told him this wasn’t the kind of young man who went out on Saturday nights. And indeed it was Clifford himself who opened the door to him. His was a shut-in face, masklike and inexpressive, with a pudginess about the features. He spoke lifelessly, showing no apparent surprise at another visit from a policeman. Burden was rather curiously reminded of a dog owned by a former neighbour of his. The owner had been inordinately proud of its submission, its total obedience, the subservience with which it had responded to his severe training. And one day, without warning, without any apparent prior change in its character, it had savaged a child.
Clifford, however, seemed to have the right idea and was leading Burden into that back room to which, on the inspector’s previous visit with Wexford, he had retreated to watch television, when his mother opened the living-room door and said in her slow harsh voice to come in, as there could be nothing the policeman had to say to her son which she couldn’t hear.
“I’ll have a word with Mr. Sanders on his own for the time being, if you don’t mind,” Burden said.
“I do mind.” She was rude in a way that wasn’t even defiant; it was uncompromising, straight rudeness, with a straight look into her interlocutor’s eye. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be there. This is my house and he’ll need me to get his facts straight.”
Clifford neither blushed nor turned pale; he did not even wince. He simply stared ahead of him as if thinking of something deeply sad. Long, long ago Burden had learned that you do not let the public get the better of you. Lawyers, yes, inevitably sometimes, but not the untrained public.
“In that case, I’ll ask you to accompany me to the police station, Mr. Sanders.”
“He won’t go. He’s not well, he’s got a cold.”
“That’s unfortunate, but you leave me no choice. I’ve my car here, Mr. Sanders. If you’d like to get your coat on? It’s a nasty damp night.”
She yielded, going back into the room she had come from and slamming the door with calculation, not from temper. Burden resisted the hackneyed maxim that bullies give way if you stand up to them, but he had found nevertheless that it was usually true. Would Clifford profit by his example? Probably not. It had gone too far with him; he needed help of a more expert kind. And it was of this that Burden first asked him when they were seated in the bleak dining room, furnished only with table, hard upright chairs and television set. On one wall hung a mirror, on another a large dark and very bad painting in oils of a sailing vessel on a rough sea.
“Yes, I go to Serge Olson. It’s a sort of Jungian therapy he does. Do you want his address?”
Burden nodded, noted it down. “May I ask why you go to … Dr. Olson, is it?”
Clifford, who showed no signs of the cold his mother claimed for him, was looking at the mirror but not into it. Burden would have sworn he was not seeing his own reflection. “I need help,” he said.
Something about the rigidity of his figure, his stillness and the dullness of his eyes stopped Burden pursuing this. Instead he asked if Clifford had been to the psychotherapist on Thursday afternoon and what time he had left.
“It’s an hour I go for, five till six. My mother told me you knew I was in the car park—I mean, that I put the car there.”
“Yes. Why didn’t you tell us that at first?”
He shifted his eyes, not to Burden’s face but to the middle of his chest. And when he answered Burden recognized the phraseology, the manner of speech, as that which people in therapy—no matter how inhibited, reserved, disturbed—inevitably pick up. He had heard it before. “I felt threatened.”
“By what?”
“I’d like to talk to Serge now. If I’d had some sort of warning I’d have tried to make an appointment with him and talk it through with him.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with me, Mr. Sanders.”
Burden was apprehensive for a moment that he was to be confronted with total silence against which even an experienced detective can do little. Sounds from Mrs. Sanders could now be heard. She was in the kitchen, moving about, making an unnecessary noise by putting crockery down heavily and banging instead of closing cupboard doors. Whatever she was doing it seemed to be contrived to disturb. He winced at the sound of something breaking as it fell from her hands on to a stone floor. And then he heard another sound—he had got up to stand by the window—and this was far distant, the dull roar of an explosion. He stood quite still, his ear to the glass, listening to the reverberations die away. But he thought no more of it once Clifford began to speak.
“I’ll try and tell you what happened. I should have told you before, but I felt threatened. I feel threatened now, but I’d be worse if I didn’t tell you. I left Serge’s place and I drove to the car park to pick up my mother. I saw there was a dead person lying there before I parked the car. I went to look at it—when I had parked the car, I mean—because I meant to call the police. You could se
e the person had been killed; that was the first thing you could see.”
“What time was this?”
He shrugged. “Oh, evening. Early evening. My mother wanted me there at a quarter-past six. I think it was before that; it must have been, because she wasn’t there and she’s never late.”
“Why didn’t you call the police, Mr. Sanders?”
He looked at the picture on the wall, then at the dark shiny window. Burden saw his reflection in it, impassive, one would have said devoid of feeling.
“I thought it was my mother.”
Burden turned his eyes from the reflected image in the dark glass. “You what?”
With patience, in a heavy, almost sorrowful way, Clifford repeated what he had said. “I thought it was my mother.”
And she had thought it was her son. What was the matter with the pair of them that each expected to find the other dead? “You thought Mrs. Robson was your mother?” There was a slight resemblance between the two women, Burden thought wonderingly—that is, to a stranger there might be. Both were of an age, thin, grey-haired, dressed in the same kind of clothes of the same sort of colour … but to a son?
“I knew it wasn’t really my mother. Well, after the first shock I knew. I can’t explain what I felt. I could tell Serge, but I don’t think you would understand. First I thought it was my mother, then I knew it wasn’t and then I thought someone was doing it to … to mock me. I thought they had put it there to get at me. No, not quite that. I said I couldn’t explain. I can only say it made me panic. I thought this was an awful trick they were persecuting me with, but I knew it couldn’t be. I knew both things at the same time. I was very confused—you don’t understand, do you?”
“I can’t say I do, Mr. Sanders. But go on.”
“I said I panicked. My ‘shadow’ had taken me over completely. I had to get out of there, but I couldn’t just leave it lying there like that. Other people would see it like I had.” Dark colour had come into his face now and he held his hands clasped tightly. “I had an old curtain in the boot of the car I’d used to cover the windscreen in cold weather. I covered it up with that.” Suddenly he shut his eyes, screwing them up as if to drive away the sight, to blind himself. “It wasn’t covered, you understand, when I found it, not when I found it. I covered it up and then I went away, I ran away. I left the car and ran out of the car park. Someone was in the lift, so I ran up the stairs. I went home, I ran out into the street at the back and then home.”