The Copper Peacock

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I was only seventeen then,’ she said. ‘I was still at school.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  Daniel was pushing a miniature Land Rover along the windowsill and along the skirting board and up the side of the doorframe, saying, ‘Brrm, brrm.’ He got up on to a chair, fell off and started screaming. Nell picked him up and held him in her arms.

  ‘You look so lovely,’ said Ivan. ‘You look like a Murillo madonna.’

  Ivan was the owner of the picture gallery in Mayfair and knowledgeable about things like that. He asked Nell if it wasn’t time for Daniel’s sleep but Nell said he was getting too old to sleep in the daytime and she usually took him out for a walk. ‘I shall come with you,’ said Ivan.

  It was August and business was slack – though not Charlotte’s business – and Ivan began taking days off more often. He told Charlotte he liked to be with Daniel as much as possible. Unless they weren’t put to bed till some ridiculously late hour of the night, children grew up hardly knowing their fathers.

  ‘Or their mothers,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘No one obliges you to work.’

  ‘That’s true. I’m thinking of giving up and then we wouldn’t need to keep Nell on.’

  Nell couldn’t drive. When she went shopping Ivan drove her. He came home specially early to do this. The house was a detached Victorian villa and the garage a converted coachhouse with a door which pulled down rather like a roller blind. When the car had been backed out it was tiresome to have to get out and pull down the door but leaving the garage open was, as Charlotte said, an invitation to burglars. Nell sat in the front, in the passenger seat, and Daniel in the back. In those days safety belts in the rear of cars had scarcely been thought of and child seats were unusual.

  It happened very suddenly. Ivan left the car in ‘park’ and the handbrake on and went to close the garage door. Fortunately for him, he noticed a pool of what seemed to be oil at the back of the garage on the concrete floor and took a step or two inside to investigate. Daniel, with a shout of ‘Brrm, brrm!’ but without any other warning, lunged forward across the top of the driver’s seat and made a grab for the controls. He flipped on the lights, made the full beam blaze, whipped the transmission into ‘drive’, sent sprays of water across the windscreen and tugged off the handbrake.

  The car shot forward with blazing lights. Nell screamed. She didn’t know how to stop it, she didn’t know what the handbrake was, where the footbrake was, she could only seize hold of laughing triumphant Daniel. The car, descending the few feet of slope, charged into the garage, slowing as it met level ground, sliding almost to a stop while Ivan stood on tip-toe, flattening himself against the wall.

  Nell began to cry. She was very frightened. Seeing Ivan in danger made her understand all kinds of things about herself and him she hadn’t realised before. He came out and switched off the engine and carried Daniel back into the house. Nell followed, still crying. Ivan took her in his arms and kissed her. Her knees felt weak and she thought she might faint, from shock perhaps or perhaps not. Ivan forced her lips apart with his tongue and put his tongue in her mouth and said after a moment or two that they should go upstairs. Not with Daniel in the house, Nell moaned.

  ‘Daniel is always in the bloody house,’ said Ivan.

  When Charlotte came home they told her what Daniel had done. They didn’t feel like talking, especially to Charlotte, but it would have looked unnatural to say nothing. Charlotte said Ivan should speak to Daniel, he should speak to him very gently but very firmly too and explain to him that what he had done was extremely naughty. It was dangerous and might have hurt Daddy. So Ivan took Daniel on his knee and gave him a lecture in a kind but serious way, impressing on him that he must never again do what he had done that afternoon.

  ‘Daniel drive car,’ said Daniel.

  It was the first sentence any of them had heard him speak and Charlotte, in spite of the seriousness of the occasion, was enraptured. They thought it wiser to tell no one else about what had happened but this resolve was quickly broken. Charlotte told her mother and her mother-in-law and Nell confessed to Charlotte that she had told her boyfriend. Nell didn’t in fact have a boyfriend but she wanted Charlotte to think she had. Their doctor and his wife came to dinner and they told them. Ivan knew he had repeated the story to the doctor (and the four other guests at the table) because it was an example of the intelligence of a child some people might otherwise be starting to think of as backward. When an opportunity arose, he told the two women who worked for him at the gallery and Charlotte told her boss and the girl who did her typing.

  In September Charlotte took two weeks’ holiday. Business hadn’t yet picked up at the gallery and they could have gone away somewhere but that would have meant taking Nell with them and Charlotte didn’t want to pay some extortionate hotel bill for her as well. She was going to stay at home with her son and Nell could have the afternoons off. Charlotte’s mother had said that in her opinion Nell was stealing Daniel’s affections in an indefensible way. Ivan took Nell to a motel on the A12 where he pretended they were a married couple on their way to Harwich en route for a weekend in Amsterdam.

  Nell had been nervous about this aspect of things at first but now she was so much in love with Ivan that she wanted him to be making love to her all the time. Every time she saw him, which was for hours of every day, she wanted him to be making love to her.

  ‘I shall have to think what’s to be done,’ said Ivan in the motel room. ‘We can’t just go off together.’

  ‘Oh, no, I see that. You’d lose your little boy.’

  ‘I’d lose my house and half my income,’ said Ivan.

  They got home very late, Ivan coming in first, Nell half an hour later by pre-arrangement. Ivan told Charlotte he had been working until eleven getting ready for a private view. She wasn’t sure that she believed him but she believed Nell when Nell said she had been to the cinema with her boyfriend. Nell was always out with this boyfriend, it was evidently serious, and Charlotte wasn’t sorry. Nell would get married and married women don’t remain as live-in mother’s helps. If Nell left she wouldn’t have to sack her. She was having strange feelings about Nell, though she couldn’t exactly define what they were, perhaps no more than fear of Daniel’s preferring the mother’s help to herself.

  ‘He’ll go to her before he goes to you,’ said Charlotte’s mother. ‘You want to watch that.’

  He was always on Nell’s lap, hugging her. He liked her to bath him. It was Nell who was favoured when a bedtime story was to be read, sweet-faced Nell with the soft blue eyes and the long fair hair. He seemed particularly to like the touch of her slim fingers and to press himself close against her. One Saturday morning when Nell was cutting up vegetables for his lunch, Daniel ran up behind her and threw his arms round her legs. Nell hadn’t heard him coming, the knife slipped and she cut her left hand in a long gash across the forefinger and palm.

  2

  The cut extended from the first joint of the forefinger, diagonally across to the wrist, following the course of what palmists call the life line. The sight of blood, especially her own, upset Nell. She had given one loud cry and now she was making frightened whimpering sounds. Blood was pouring out of her hand, spouting out in little leaps like an oil well she had seen on television. It dripped off the edge of the counter and Daniel, who wasn’t at all upset by the sight of it, caught the drips on his forefinger and drew squiggles on the cupboard door.

  Charlotte, coming into the kitchen, guessed what had happened and was cross. If Nell hadn’t encouraged Daniel in these displays of affection he wouldn’t have hugged her like that and she wouldn’t have cut herself. He should have been out in the fresh air hugging his mother who had a trowel, not a knife, in her hand. Charlotte had been looking forward to an early lunch so that she could spend the afternoon planting twelve Little Pet roses in the circular bed in the front garden.

  ‘You’ll have to have that stitched,’ she said. ‘You’ll
have to have an anti-tetanus injection.’ What Daniel was doing registered with her and she pulled him away. ‘That’s very naughty and disgusting, Daniel!’ Daniel began to scream and punch at Charlotte with his fists.

  ‘Shall I have to go to hospital?’ said Nell.

  ‘Of course you will. We’ll get that tied up, we’ll have to try and stop the bleeding.’ Ivan was in the house, upstairs in the room he called his study. It would be more convenient for Charlotte if she could get Ivan to drive Nell to the hospital, but unaccountably she felt a sudden strong dislike of this idea. It hadn’t occurred to her before but she didn’t want to leave Ivan alone with Nell again. ‘I’ll drive you. We’ll take Daniel with us.’

  ‘Couldn’t we leave him with Ivan?’ said Nell, who had wrapped a tea cloth tightly round her hand and was watching the blood work its way through the pattern, which was a map of Scotland. ‘We could tell Ivan and ask him to look after Daniel. Perhaps’, she added hopefully, ‘we won’t be very long.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere with my arrangements,’ said Charlotte very sharply.

  Nell started crying. Daniel, who was still crying into Charlotte’s shoulder, reached out his arms to her. With an exclamation of impatience, Charlotte handed him over. She washed the earth off her hands at the kitchen sink while Nell sniffled and crooned over Daniel. They took coats from the rack in the hall, Charlotte happening to grab an olive-green padded jacket her mother-in-law had left behind, and went out through the front door. The twelve roses lay in a circle along the edge of the flowerbed, their roots wrapped up in green plastic. Nell stood in the garage drive cuddling Daniel, the tea cloth not providing a very effective bandage. Blood had now entirely obscured Caithness and Sutherland. Looking down at it, Nell began to feel faint, and it was quite a different sort of faintness from the way she felt when Ivan started kissing her.

  Charlotte raised the garage door, got into the car and backed it out. She took Daniel from Nell and put him on the back seat where he kept a fleet of small motor vehicles, trucks and tanks and saloon cars. Already regretting that she had spoken so harshly to Nell, she opened the passenger door for her. Pale, pretty Nell in a very becoming thin black raincoat, had grown fragile from shock and pain.

  ‘You’d better sit down. Put your head back and close your eyes. You’re as white as a sheet.’

  ‘Brrm, brrm,’ said Daniel, running a Triumph Dolomite up the back of the driver’s seat.

  Since Ivan was in the house there was no need to close the garage door. It occurred to Charlotte that, antagonistic towards him though she felt, she had better tell him they were going out and where they were going. But before she reached the front door it opened and Ivan came out.

  ‘What’s happened? Why was everyone yelling?’

  She told him. He said, ‘I shall drive Nell to hospital. Naturally, I want to drive her, I should have thought you’d know that. I can’t understand why you didn’t come and tell me as soon as this happened.’

  Charlotte said nothing. She was thinking. She seemed to hear in Ivan’s voice a note of unusual concern, the kind of care a man might show for someone close and dear to him. And, incongruously, that look of his which had originally attracted her to him, had returned. More than ever he resembled some brigand or pirate who required for perfect conviction only a pair of gold earrings or a knife between his teeth.

  ‘There’s absolutely no need for you to go,’ he said in the rough way he had lately got into the habit of using to her. ‘It’s pointless a great crowd of us going.’

  Putting two and two together, seeing all kinds of things fall delicately into place, recalling lonely evenings and bizarre excuses, Charlotte said, ‘I am certainly going. I am going to that hospital if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Ivan got into the driving seat. He said to Nell, ‘Bear up, sweetheart, what a bloody awful thing to happen.’

  Nell opened her eyes and gave him a wan smile, pushing back with her good hand the curtain of daffodil-coloured hair which had fallen across her pale tearful face. In the back, Daniel put his arms round his father’s neck from behind and ran the Triumph Dolomite up the lapels of his jacket.

  ‘The least you could do is close the garage door,’ Charlotte shouted. ‘That’s all we need, to come back and find someone’s been in and nicked the stereo.’

  Ivan didn’t move. He was looking at Nell. Charlotte walked down the drive to the garage door. With her back to the bonnet of the car, she reached up for the recessed handle in the door to pull it down. The green padded jacket went badly with her blue cord trousers and it made her look fat.

  His hands on the steering wheel, Ivan turned slowly to look at her. Daniel was hanging on to his neck now, pushing the toy car up under Ivan’s chin. ‘Brrm, brrm, brrm!’

  ‘Stop that, Daniel, please. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Drive car,’ said Daniel.

  ‘All right,’ said Ivan. ‘Why not?’

  He put the transmission into ‘drive’, all the lights on, set the windscreen jets spouting, the wipers going, took off the handbrake and stamped his foot hard on to the accelerator. As the car plunged forward, Charlotte, who had pulled the door down to its fullest extent and was still bending over, sprang up, alerted by the blaze of light. She gave a loud scream, flinging out her hands as if to hold back the car. In that moment Nell, her eyes jerked open, her body propelled forward almost against the windscreen, saw Charlotte’s face as if both their faces had swung to meet each other. Charlotte’s face seemed to loom and grimace like a bogey in a ghost tunnel. It was a sight Nell was never to forget, Charlotte’s expression of horror, and the knowledge which was also there, the awareness of why.

  The weak hands, the desperate arms, were ineffectual against the juggernaut propulsion of the big car. Charlotte fell backwards, crying out, screaming. The bonnet obscured her fall, the wheels went over her, as the car burst through the garage door which against this onslaught was as flimsy as a roller blind.

  Fragments of shattered door fell all over the bonnet and roof of the car. A triangular shaped slice of it split the windscreen and turned it into a sheet of frosted glass. Nell was jumping up and down in her seat, making hysterical shrieks but on the back seat Daniel, who had retreated into the corner behind his father, was silent, holding a piece of the hem of his coat in his fingers and pushing it into his mouth.

  Blinded by the whitening and cobwebbing of the glass, Ivan recoiled from it, put his foot on the brake and pulled on the handbrake. The car emitted a deep musical note, like a rich chord drawn from a church organ, as it sometimes did when brought to a sudden stop. Ivan lifted his hands from the wheel, tossed his head as if to shake back a fallen lock of hair and rested against the seat, closing his eyes. He breathed deeply and steadily, like someone about to fall asleep.

  ‘Ivan,’ screamed Nell, ‘Ivan, Ivan, Ivan!’

  He turned his head with infinite slowness and when it was fully turned to face her, opened his eyes. Meeting his eyes had the immediate effect of silencing her. She whimpered. He put out his hand and touched the side of her cheek, not with his fingertips, but very gently with his knuckles. He ran his knuckles along the line of her jaw and the curve of her neck.

  ‘Your hand has stopped bleeding,’ he said in a whisper.

  She looked down at the bundle in her lap, a red sodden mass. She didn’t know why he said that or what he meant. ‘Oh, Ivan, Ivan, is she dead? She must be dead – is she?’

  ‘I’m going to get you back into the house.’

  ‘I don’t want to go into the house, I want to die, I just want to give up and die!’

  ‘Yes, well, on second thoughts it might be best for you to stay where you are. Just for a while. And Daniel too. I shall go and phone the police.’

  She got hold of him as he tried to get out. She got hold of his jacket and held on, weeping. ‘Oh, Ivan, Ivan, what have you done?’

  ‘Don’t you mean’, he said, ‘what has Daniel
done?’

  3

  When he came back from his investigations underneath the car, Ivan knelt on the driver’s seat. He brought his face very close to hers. ‘I’m going back into the house. I was in the house when it happened. I came running out when I heard the crash and as soon as I saw what had happened I went back in to call the police and an ambulance.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Nell.

  ‘Yes, you do. Think about it. I was upstairs in my study. You were alone in the car with Daniel, resting your head back with your eyes closed.’

  ‘Oh, no, Ivan, no. I couldn’t say that, I couldn’t tell people that.’

  ‘You needn’t tell them anything. You can be in a state of shock, you are in a state of shock. Telling people things will come later. You’ll be fine by then.’

  Nell put her hands up to her face, her right hand and the bandaged one. She peered out between her two fingers like a child that has had a fright. ‘Is she – is she dead?’

  ‘Oh, yes, she’s dead,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Oh my God, my God, and she said she was coming to the hospital if it was the last thing she did!’

  ‘Closing the garage door was the last thing she did.’

  He went into the house. Nell started crying again. She sobbed, she hung her head and threw it back against the seat and howled. She had completely forgotten Daniel. He sat on the back seat munching on the hem of his coat, his fleet of motor vehicles ignored. The people next door, who had been eating their lunch when they heard the noise of the car going through the garage door, came down the drive to see what was the matter. They were joined by the man from a Gas Board van and a girl who had been distributing leaflets advertising double glazing. It was a dull grey day and the front gardens here were planted with tall trees and thick evergreen shrubs. Trees grew in the pavements. No one had seen the car go over Charlotte and through the garage door, no one had seen who was driving.

  The people next door were helping Nell out of the car when Ivan emerged from the front door. Nell saw one of Charlotte’s feet sticking out from under the car and Charlotte’s blood on the concrete of the drive and the scattered bits of door and began screaming again. The woman from next door smacked her face. Her husband, conveniently doing the best part of Ivan’s work for him, said, ‘What an appalling thing, what a ghastly tragedy. Who would have thought the poor little chap would get up to his tricks again with such tragic results?’