The Fallen Curtain

by Ruth Rendell

  So it was true, after all. Marjorie felt a spurt of real rage against Pauline. “I should have thought it was for my mother’s own doctor,” she blustered. “I don’t know what an outsider …”

  “An outsider?” She might have levelled at him some outrageous insult. “I am a close friend of your sister, Mrs Crossley, perhaps the only true friend she has. Please don’t speak of outsiders. Now if you have any feeling for your sister, I’m sure you’ll appreciate …”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Marjorie almost shouted. Her head was splitting now. “It’s no business of yours and I don’t want to discuss it.”

  She told George.

  “He said he was a close friend, her only true friend. They’re cooking this up together, George. He means to marry her, but he’ll get Mother out of the way first. He’ll foist Mother on to me and then they’ll get married and…. Oh, George, what am I going to do?”

  Not see Mother or Pauline, at any rate. Marjorie extended her headache over the next two visiting times, and after that she half-invented, half-suffered, a virus infection. Of course, she had to phone and explain, and it was with a trembling hand that she dialled the number in case that awful man should answer. He didn’t. Pauline was more abrupt than ever. Marjorie didn’t mention her doctor friend, though she fancied, just as she was replacing the receiver, that she heard the murmur of his voice in the background talking to Mother.

  It was George and Brian together who at last paid a visit to Mother’s house. Marjorie was in bed when they came back, cowering under the sheets and trying to make the mercury in her thermometer go above ninety-eight by burying it in her electric blanket.

  They hadn’t, they said, seen Pauline’s friend, but Nanna had been full of him, now entirely won over to him as a charming man, while Pauline, as she talked, had sat looking very close with an occasional flash of impatience in her eyes.

  “He’s got some Russian name,” said George, though he couldn’t remember what it was, and Brian kept talking nonsense about dogs and reactions and other things Marjorie couldn’t follow. “He lives in Kensington, got a big practice. One of those big houses on Campden Hill. You know where I mean. Pauline did a private nursing job in one of them years ago. Quite a coincidence.”

  Marjorie didn’t want to hear about coincidences.

  “Is he going to marry her?”

  “I reckon,” said Brian, “going from the way Nanna talks about what he says.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Auntie Pauline went off to get us coffee and while she was outside Nanna said he’s always telling her how lovely her daughter is and what a fine mind and how she’s wasted and all that.”

  “Nanna must have changed. She’s never had a good word to say for your auntie.”

  “She is changed,” said George. “She’s all for Pauline going off and leading her own life and her coming here to live with us. Dr Whatsit’s told her it would be a good idea, you see. And I must say, Marge, it might be the best thing in the long run. If Nanna sold her house and let us have some of the money and we had an extension built on …”

  “And I’ll be off to university in the autumn,” put in Brian.

  “I never did think it quite fair,” said George, “poor old Pauline having to bear the whole burden of Nanna on her own. It’s not as if they ever really got on and …”

  “Nanna’s an old love with people she gets on with,” said Brian.

  “I won’t do it, I won’t!” Marjorie screamed. “And no one’s going to make me!”

  For a little while no one attempted to. Marjorie prolonged her illness, augmenting it with back pains and vague menopausal symptoms, for as long as she could. Mother never used the telephone, and Marjorie could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times Pauline had phoned her in the past two years. Now there was no communication between the two houses. Marjorie began to go out again but she avoided going near Mother’s, and her own family, George and Brian and Susan, wishing perhaps to prevent a further outburst of hysterics, kept off the subject of her mother. Until one day George said, “I had a call at work from that doctor friend of Pauline’s.”

  “I don’t want to know, George,” said Marjorie. “It’s no business of his. I’ve told you I won’t have Mother here and I won’t.”

  “As a matter of fact,” her husband admitted, “he’s phoned me a couple of times before, only I didn’t tell you, seeing how upset it makes you.”

  “Of course it upsets me. I’m ill.”

  “No, you’re not,” said George with unexpected firmness. “You’re as right as rain. A sick woman couldn’t eat a meal like the one you’ve just eaten. It’s Pauline who’s ill, Marge. She’s cracking up. He told me in the nicest possible way; he’s a very decent chap. But we have to do something about it.”

  “Any other man,” said Marjorie tearfully, “would be thankful to have a wife who stopped her mother coming to live with them.”

  “Well, I’m not any other man. I don’t mind the upheaval and the extra expense. We’ll all do our bit, Brian and Sue too. Don’t you see, it’s our turn. Pauline’s had two years of it. The doctor says she’ll have another breakdown if we don’t, and God knows what might be the outcome.”

  “You’re all against me,” Marjorie sobbed, and because he was her husband and she didn’t much care what she said in front of him, “Pauline’s got pills from her nursing days, morphine and I don’t know what. There ought to be—what’s it called?—euthanasia. There ought to be a way of putting people like Mother out of their misery.”

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “There isn’t. Maybe dogs are luckier than people. There isn’t a geriatric hospital that’ll take her either. There’s no one but us, Marge, so you’d better turn off the waterworks and make up your mind to it.”

  She saw how it would be. It would take months for Mother to sell her house and get the money for an extension to theirs, a year perhaps before that extension was built. Even when it was built and Mother was installed, things would be bad enough. But before that … ! Her dining room turned into a bedroom, every evening spoiled by the business of getting Mother to bed, nights that would be even worse than when Brian and Susan were babies. And she wasn’t thirty any more. The television turned down to a murmur once Mother was in bed, her shopping times curtailed, her little afternoon visits to the cinema over for good. Marjorie wondered if she would have the courage to throw herself downstairs, break a leg, so that they would understand having Mother was out of the question. But she might break her neck….

  And all the while this was going on, Pauline would be living in the splendour of Campden Hill, Mrs Something Russian, with a new husband, an educated, important, rich man. Giving parties. Entertaining eminent surgeons and professors and what not. Going abroad. It was unbearable. She might lack the courage to throw herself downstairs, but she thought she could be brave enough to confront Pauline here and now and tell her No. No, I won’t. You took it on, you must go through with it. Crack up, break down, go crazy, die. Yes, die before I’ll ruin my life for you.

  Of course, she wouldn’t put it like that. She would be firm and kind. She would even offer to sit with Mother sometimes so that Pauline could go out. Anything, anything, except that permanency which would trap her as Pauline had been trapped.

  Things are never as we imagine they will be. No situation ever parallels our prevision of it. Marjorie, when she at last called, expected an irate, resentful Pauline, perhaps even a Pauline harassed by wedding plans. She expected Mother to be bewildered by the proposed changes in her life. And both, she thought, would be bitter against her for her long absence. But Mother was just the same, pleased to see her, anxious to get her alone for those little whispered confidences, even more anxious to know if she was better. Her purblind eyes searched Marjorie’s face for signs of debility, held her hand, pressed her to wrap up warm.

  Anyone less like a potential bride than Pauline Marjorie couldn’t have imagined. She s
eemed thinner than ever, and her face, bruise-dark, patchily shadowed, lined like raisin skin, reminded her of pictures she had seen of Indian beggars. Marjorie followed her into the kitchen when she went to make tea and gathered up her courage.

  “How have you been keeping, Pauline?”

  “All right. Just the same.” And although she hadn’t been asked, Pauline said, “Mother had me up four times in the night. She fell over in the passage and I had to drag her back to bed. The laundry didn’t come, so I did the sheets myself. It’s a job getting them dry when it’s raining like today.”

  “I was thinking, I could come in two evenings a week and sit with her so that you could go out. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t take some of the washing and do it in my machine. Come to that, I could take it all. Every week.”

  Pauline shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  “Yes, well, it’s all very well saying that,” said Marjorie, working herself up to the required pitch, “but if you keep on complaining like this, what am I to say?”

  “I don’t complain.”

  “Maybe not. But everyone else does. You know very well who I mean. I can’t take all this outside interference and just pretend it’s not happening.”

  “I shouldn’t call a husband outside interference.”

  For a moment Marjorie thought she was referring to George. Realisation of what she actually meant gave her the impetus she needed. “I may as well tell you straight out, Pauline, I’m not having Mother to live with us and that’s flat. I’ll do anything else in my power, but not that. No one can make me and I shan’t.”

  Pauline made no answer. They ate their tea in almost total silence. Marjorie couldn’t remember ever having felt so uncomfortable in the whole of her life. On the doorstep, as she was leaving, she said, “You’d better tell me which evenings you want me, and you can let me know when you want George to come round in the car for the washing.”

  “It makes no difference to me,” said Pauline. “I’m always here.”

  Of course, she didn’t phone. Marjorie knew she wouldn’t. And what was the point of going round in the evening when Pauline didn’t want to go out, when she was snug at home with her doctor?

  “We’re not having Mother,” she said to George. “That’s definite. I’ve cleared it all up with Pauline. She’s quite capable of carrying on if I help out a bit.”

  “That’s not what I was told.”

  “It’s what I’m telling you.” Marjorie hated the way he looked at her these days, with a kind of dull, distasteful reproach. “She’s done the washing for this week, and next week the laundry’ll do the sheets and the heavy stuff. I thought we might go over on Friday and collect their bits and pieces, put them in my machine.”

  So on Thursday Marjorie phoned. She chose the morning just in case that man might answer. Doctors are never free to make social calls in the morning. Pauline answered.

  “O.K. Tomorrow, if you like.”

  “It’s what you like, Pauline,” said Marjorie, feeling that her sister might at least have said thank you.

  She added that they would be there at seven. But by seven George hadn’t yet got home, so Marjorie dialled her mother’s number. It didn’t matter if he answered. Show him she wasn’t the indifferent creature he took her for. He did. And he was quite polite. Mr and Mrs Crossley couldn’t get there till eight-thirty? Never mind. He would still be there and would be delighted to meet them at last.

  “We’re going to get a look at him at last,” said Marjorie to George as he came in at the door. “Now don’t you forget, I expect you to back me up if we have any more nonsense about us having Mother and all that. United we stand, divided we fall.”

  Mother’s house was in darkness and the hall light didn’t come on when Marjorie rang the bell. She rang it again, and then George rang it.

  “Have you got a key?” said George.

  “In my bag. Oh, George, you don’t think…? I mean…?

  “I don’t know, do I? Let’s get this door open.”

  No one in the hall or in any of the downstairs rooms. Marjorie, who had turned on lights, began to climb the stairs with George behind her. Halfway up, she heard a man’s voice, speaking soothingly but with authority. It came from Mother’s room, the door of which was ajar.

  “It was the best thing, Pauline. I gave her two hundred milligrammes crushed in her milk drink. She didn’t suffer. She just fell asleep, Pauline.”

  Marjorie gave a little gasping whimper. She clutched George, clawing at his shoulder. As he pushed past her, she heard the voice come again, the same words repeated in the same lulling hypnotic tone.

  “I gave her two hundred milligrammes crushed in her milk drink. She didn’t suffer. It was the only thing. I did it for you, Pauline, for us….”

  George threw open the bedroom door. Mother lay on her back, her face waxen and slack in death, her now totally sightless eyes wide open. There was no one else in the room but Pauline.

  Pauline got up as they entered, and giving them a nod of quiet dignity, she placed her fingers on Mother’s eyes, closing the lids. Marjorie stared in frozen, paralysed terror, like one in the presence of the supernatural. And then Pauline turned from the bed, came forward with her right hand outstretched.

  In a deep, cultured, and authoritative voice, a voice whose hectoring manner on the telephone was softened now by sympathy for the bereaved, she said, “How do you do? I am Dr Pavlov. It’s unfortunate we should meet under such sad circumstances but…”

  Marjorie began to scream.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  “The Fallen Curtain” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published in the August 1974 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1974 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “A Bad Heart” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published under the title “Trapped” in the September 1973 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1973 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “You Can’t Be Too Careful” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published in the March 1976 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1976 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “The Double” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published under the title “Meeting in the Park” in the December 1975 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1975 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “Venus’ Fly-trap” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published under the title “Venus’s Fly-trap” in the January 1973 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1973 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “His Worst Enemy” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published under the title “The Clinging Woman” in the February 1975 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1975 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “The Fall of a Coin” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published in the June 1975 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1975 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “Almost Human” by Ruth Rendell. Originally published in the September 1975 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 1975 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted by permission of the author and arrangement with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

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