by Ruth Rendell
“It’s alive,” said Mop. “It’s a sort of animal.”
Lady Elsworthy told her not to be a little fool and Mrs Felton laughed. I thought my mother would have been angry if a visitor to our house had told me not to be a fool, and I also thought Mop was really going to be sick this time.
“We don’t have to have it, do we?” she said.
“Of course we’re going to have it,” said Mrs Felton. “How dare you speak like that when Lady Elsworthy has been kind enough to give it to me! Now we shall never have to buy nasty shop vinegar again.”
“Vinegar doesn’t cost much,” said Mop.
“Isn’t that just like a child! Money grows on trees as far as she’s concerned.”
Then Lady Elsworthy started giving instructions for the maintenance of the thing. It must be kept in a warm atmosphere. “Not out in your chilly kitchen, my dear.” It was to be fed with wine, the dregs of each bottle they consumed. “But not white wine. You tell her why not, Peter; you know I’m no good at the scientific stuff.” It must never be touched with a knife or metal spoon.
“If metal touches it,” said Peter Elsworthy, “it will shrivel and die. In some ways, you see, it’s a tender plant.”
Mop had banged out of the room. Lady Elsworthy was once more bent over her gift, holding the vessel and placing it in a suitable position where it was neither too light nor too cold. From the garden I could hear the drone of the lawn mower, plied by Mr Felton. Those other two had moved a little away from the window, away from the broad shaft of sunshine in which we had found them bathed. As Peter Elsworthy spoke of the tender plant, I saw his eyes meet Mrs Felton’s and there passed between them a glance, mysterious, beyond my comprehension, years away from anything I knew. His face became soft and strange. I wanted to giggle as I sometimes giggled in the cinema, but I knew better than to do so there, and I went away and giggled by myself in the garden, saying, “Soppy, soppy!” and kicking at a stone.
But I wasn’t alone. Mr Felton came pushing the lawn mower up behind me. He used to sweat in the heat and his face was red and wet like the middle of a joint of beef when the brown part has been carved off. A grandfather rather than a father, I thought him.
“What’s soppy, my old Margarine? Mind out of my way or I’ll cut your tail off.”
It was August and the season had begun, so on Sunday afternoons he would take the shotgun he kept hanging in the kitchen and go out after rabbits. I believe he did this less from a desire to eat rabbit flesh than from a need to keep in with the Elsworthys, who shot every unprotected thing that flew or scuttled. But he was a poor shot and I used to feel relieved when he came back empty-handed. On Sunday evenings he drove away to London.
“Poor old Daddy back to the grindstone,” he would say. “Take care of yourself, my old Mop.” And to me, with wit, “Don’t melt away in all this sunshine, Margarine.”
That Sunday Mrs Felton made him promise to bring a dozen more bottles of wine when he returned the following weekend.
“Reinforcements for my vinegar mother.”
“It’s stupid wasting wine to make it into vinegar,” said Mop. I wondered why she used to hover so nervously about her parents at this leave-taking time, watching them both, her fists clenched. Now I know it was because, although she was rude to them and seemed not to care for them, she longed desperately to see them exchange some demonstration of affection greater than Mrs Felton’s apathetic lifting of her cheek and the hungry peck Mr Felton deposited upon it. But she waited in vain, and when the car had gone would burst into a seemingly inexplicable display of ill-temper or sulks.
So another week began, a week in which our habits, until then routine and placid, were to change.
Like a proper writer, a professional, I have hinted at Mrs Felton and, I hope, whetted appetites, but I have delayed till now giving any description of her. But, having announced her entry through the mouths of my characters (as in all the best plays), I shall delay no more. The stage is ready for her and she shall enter it, in her robes and with her trumpets.
She was a tall, thin woman and her skin was as brown as a pale Indian’s. I thought her old and very ugly, and I couldn’t understand a remark of my mother’s that I had overheard to the effect that Mrs Felton was “quite beautiful if you like that gypsy look.” I suppose she was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Her hair was black and frizzy, like a bush of heather singed by fire, and it grew so low on her forehead that her black brows sprang up to meet it, leaving only an inch or so of skin between. She had a big mouth with brown thick lips she never painted and enormous eyes whose whites were like wet eggshells.
In the country she wore slacks and a shirt. She made some of her own clothes and those she made were dramatic. I remember a hooded cloak she had of brown hessian and a long evening gown of embroidered linen. At that time women seldom wore cloaks or long dresses, either for evening or day. She chain-smoked and her fingers were yellow with nicotine.
Me she almost entirely ignored. I was fed and made to wash properly and told to change my clothes and not allowed to be out after dark. But apart from this she hardly spoke to me. I think she had a ferocious dislike of children, for Mop fared very little better than I did. Mrs Felton was one of those women who fall into the habit of only addressing their children to scold them. However presentable Mop might make herself, however concentratedly good on occasion her behaviour—for I believe she made great efforts—Mrs Felton couldn’t bring herself to praise. Or if she could, there would always be the sting in the tail, the “Well, but look at your nails!” or “It’s very nice but do you have to pick this moment?” And Mop’s name on her tongue—as if specifically chosen to this end—rang with a sour slither, a little green snake slipping from its hole, as the liquid and the sibilant scathed out, “Alicia!”
But at the beginning of that third week a slight change came upon her. She was not so much nicer or kinder as more vague, more nervously abstracted. Mop’s peccadillos passed unnoticed and I, if late for a meal received no venomous glance. It was on the Tuesday evening that the first wine bottle appeared at our supper table.
We ate this meal, cold usually but more than a bread and butter tea, at half past seven or eight in the evening, and after it we were sent to bed. There had never before been the suggestion that we should take wine with it. Even at the weekends we were never given wine, apart from our tiny glasses of educative sherry. But that night at sunset—I remember the room all orange and quiet and warm—Mrs Felton brought to the table a bottle of red wine instead of the teapot and the lemon barley water, and set out three glasses.
“I don’t like wine,” said Mop.
“Yes, you do. You like sherry.”
“I don’t like that dark red stuff. It tastes bitter. Daddy won’t let me have wine.”
“Then we won’t tell Daddy. If it’s bitter you can put sugar in it. My God, any other child would think it was in heaven getting wine for supper. You don’t know when you’re well off and you never have. You’ve no appreciation.”
“I suppose you want us to drink it so you can have the leftovers for your horrible vinegar thing,” said Mop.
“It’s not horrible and don’t you dare to speak to me like that,” said Mrs Felton, but there was something like relief in her voice. Can I remember that? Did I truly observe that? No. It is now that I know it, now when all the years have passed, and year by year has come more understanding. Then, I heard no relief. I saw no baser motive in Mrs Felton’s insistence. I took it for granted, absurd and somehow an inversion of the proper course of things though it seemed, that we were to drink an expensive substance in order that the remains of it might be converted into a cheap substance. But childhood is a looking-glass country where so often one is obliged to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
I drank my wine and, grudgingly, Mop drank two full glasses into which she had stirred sugar. Most of the rest was consumed by Mrs Felton, who then poured the dregs into the glass vessel for the refreshment of t
he vinegar mother. I don’t think I had ever drunk or even tasted table wine before. It went to my head, and as soon as I was in bed at nine o’clock I fell into a profound thick sleep.
But Mop was asleep before me. She had lurched into bed without washing and I heard her heavy breathing while I was pulling on my nightdress. This was unusual. Mop wasn’t exactly an insomniac but, for a child, she was a bad sleeper. Most evenings as I was passing into those soft clouds of sleep, into a delightful drowsiness that at any moment would be closed off by total oblivion, I would hear her toss and turn in bed or even get up and move about the room. I knew, too, that sometimes she went downstairs for a glass of water or perhaps just for her mother’s company, for on the mornings after such excursions Mrs Felton would take her to task over breakfast, scathingly demanding of invisible hearers why she should have been cursed with such a restless, nervy child, who, even as a baby, had never slept a peaceful night through.
On the Tuesday night, however, she had no difficulty in falling asleep. It was later, in the depths of the night (as she told me in the morning) that she had awakened and lain wakeful for hours, or so she said. She had heard the church clock chime two and three; her head had ached and she had had a curious trembling in her limbs. But, as far as I know, she said nothing of this to her mother, and her headache must have passed by the middle of the morning. For, when I left the house at ten to go with Mrs Potter to an auction that was being held in some neighbouring mansion, she was lying on a blanket on the front lawn, reading the book Mr Felton had brought down for her at the weekend, Fifty Haunted Houses. And she was still reading it, was deep in “The Mezzotint” or some horror of Blackwood’s, when I got back at one.
It must have been that day, too, when she began to get what I should now call obsessional about the vinegar mother. Several times, three or four times certainly, when I went into the dining room, I found her standing by the Romford factory antique on which Lady Elsworthy’s present stood, gazing with the fascination of someone who views an encapsulated reptile, at the culture within. It was not to me in any way noisome or sinister, nor was it even particularly novel. I had seen a dish of stewed fruit forgotten and allowed to ferment in my grandmother’s larder, and apart from the fungus on that being pale green, there was little difference between it and this crust of bacteria. Mop’s face, so repelled yet so compelled, made me giggle. A mistake, this, for she turned on me, lashing out with a thin wiry arm.
“Shut up, shut up! I hate you.”
But she had calmed and was speaking to me again by suppertime. We sat on the wall above the road and watched Mr Gould’s Herefords driven from their pasture up the lane home to the farm. Swallows perched on the telephone wires like taut strings of black and white beads. The sky was lemony-green and greater birds flew homeward across it.
“I’d like to put a spoon in it,” said Mop, “and then I’d see it shrivel up and die.”
“She’d know,” I said.
“Who’s she?”
“Your mother, of course.” I was surprised at the question when the answer was so obvious. “Who else?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s only an old fungus,” I said. “It isn’t hurting you.”
“Alicia! Aleeciah!” A sharp liquid cry, the sound of a sight, and the sight wine or vinegar flung in a curving jet.
“Come on, Margarine,” said Mop. “Supper’s ready.”
We were given no wine that night, but on the next a bottle and the glasses once more appeared. The meal was a heavier one than usual, meat pie with potatoes as well as salad. Perhaps the wine was sweet this time or of a finer vintage, for it tasted good to me and I drank two glasses. It never occurred to me to wonder what my parents, moderate and very nearly abstemious, would have thought of this corruption of their daughter. Of course it didn’t. To a child grown-ups are omniscient and all-wise. Much as I disliked Mrs Felton, I never supposed she could wish to harm me or be indifferent as to whether or not I were harmed.
Mop, too, obeyed and drank. This time there was no demur from her. Probably she was once again trying methods of ingratiation. We went to bed at nine and I think Mop went to sleep before me. I slept heavily as usual, but I was aware of some disturbance in the night, of having been briefly awakened and spoken to. I remembered this, though not much more for a while, when I finally woke in the morning. It was about seven, a pearly morning of birdsong, and Mop was sitting on the window seat in her nightdress.
She looked awful, as if she had got a bad cold coming or had just been sick.
“I tried to wake you up in the night,” she said.
“I thought you had,” I said. “Did you have a dream?”
She shook her head. “I woke up and I heard the clock strike one and then I heard footsteps on the path down there.”
“In this garden, d’you mean?” I said. “Going or coming?”
“I don’t know,” she said oddly. “They must have been coming.”
“It was a burglar,” I said. “We ought to go down and see if things have been stolen.”
“It wasn’t a burglar.” Mop was getting angry with me and her face was blotchy. “I did go down. I lay awake for a bit and I didn’t hear any more, but I couldn’t go back to sleep and I wanted a drink of water. So I went down.”
“Well, go on,” I said.
But Mop couldn’t go on. And even I, insensitive and unsympathetic to her as I was, could see had been badly frightened, was still frightened, and then I remembered what had wakened me in the night, exactly what had happened. I remembered being brought to brief consciousness by the choking gasps of someone who is screaming in her sleep. Mop had screamed herself awake and the words she had spoken to me had been, “The vinegar mother! The vinegar mother!”
“You had a nightmare,” I said.
“Oh, shut up,” said Mop. “You never listen. I shan’t ever tell you anything again.”
But later in the day she did tell me. I think that by this time she had got it into some sort of proportion, although she was still very frightened when she got to the climax of what she insisted couldn’t have been a dream. She had, she said, gone downstairs about half an hour after she heard the footsteps in the garden. She hadn’t put a light on, as the moon was bright. The dining-room door was partly open, and when she looked inside she saw a hooded figure crouched in a chair by the window. The figure was all in brown, and Mop said she saw the hood slide back and disclose its face. The thing that had made her scream and scream was this face which wasn’t a face at all, but a shapeless mass of liver.
“You dreamed it,” I said. “You must have. You were in bed when you screamed, so you must have been dreaming.”
“I did go down,” Mop insisted.
“Maybe you did,” I said, “but the other bit was a dream. Your mother would have come if she’d heard you screaming downstairs.”
No more was said about the dream or whatever it was after that, and on Saturday Mr Felton arrived and took us to the Young Farmers’ Show at Marks Tey. He brought me my parents’ love and the news that my eldest brother had passed his exam and got seven O Levels, and I was happy. He went shooting with Peter Elsworthy on Sunday afternoon, and Peter came back with him and promised to drive me and Mop and Mrs Felton to the seaside for the day on Tuesday.
It was a beautiful day that Tuesday, perhaps the best of all the days at Sanctuary, and I, who, on the morning after Mop’s dream, had begun to wonder about making that deceitful phone call from the village, felt I could happily remain till term began. We took a picnic lunch and swam in the wide shallow sea. Mrs Felton wore a proper dress of blue and white cotton which made her brown skin look like a tan, and had smoothed down her hair, and smiled and was gracious and once called Mop dear. Suddenly I liked Peter Elsworthy. I suppose I had one of those infatuations for him that are fused in young girls by a kind smile, one sentence spoken as to a contemporary, one casual touch of the hand. On that sunny beach I was moved towards him by inexplicable feelings, moved into
a passion the sight of him had never before inspired, which was to die as quickly as it had been born when the sun had gone, the sea was left behind, and he was once more Mrs Felton’s friend in the front seats of the car.
I had followed him about that day like a little dog, and perhaps it was my unconcealed devotion that drove him to leave us at our gate and refuse even to come in and view the progress of the vinegar mother. His excuse was that he had to accompany his mother to an aunt’s for dinner. Mrs Felton sulked ferociously after he had gone and we got a supper of runny scrambled eggs and lemon barley water.
On the following night there appeared on our table a bottle of claret. The phone rang while we were eating, and while Mrs Felton was away answering it I took the daring step of pouring my wine into the vinegar mother.
“I shall tell her,” said Mop.
“I don’t care,” I said. “I can’t drink it, nasty, sour, horrible stuff.”
“You shouldn’t call my father’s wine horrible when you’re a guest,” said Mop, but she didn’t tell Mrs Felton. I think she would have poured her own to follow mine except that she was afraid the level in the vessel would rise too much, or was it that by then nothing would have induced her to come within feet of the culture?
I didn’t need wine to make me sleep, but if I had taken it I might have slept more heavily. A thin moonlight was in the room when I woke up to see Mop’s bed empty. Mop was standing by the door, holding it half open, and she was trembling. It was a bit eerie in there with Mop’s long shadow jumping about against the zigzag beams on the wall. But I couldn’t hear a sound.
“What’s the matter now?” I said.
“There’s someone down there.”
“How d’you know? Is there a light on?”
“I heard glass,” she said.
How can you hear glass? But I knew what she meant and I didn’t much like it. I got up and went over to the doorway and looked down the stairs. There was light coming from under the dining-room door, a white glow that could have been from the moon or from the oil lamp they sometimes used. Then I too heard glass, a chatter of glass against glass and a thin trickling sound.