The Copper Peacock

by Ruth Rendell

  He asked her if she had seen a doctor. And when she said she hadn’t, she hadn’t the patience to sit waiting about for an hour or more just to get a prescription she’d have to pay for anyway, he thanked her for getting his lunch. ‘You’re welcome, love,’ she said, and ‘It’s all in the day’s work.’ He watched her test the tenderness of her cut lip with a questing tongue. ‘Ready for your coffee, are you, or d’you want to wait a bit?’

  He had it later in the living room, perusing his notebook, while she cleaned the dining-room. Things were just as he had left them when he went back except that she had closed the work of reference he had left open by the typewriter and had marked his place with a sheet torn from a scribbling block. Lunch that day was pâté sandwiches and there was a pear on the tray and a piece of walnut cake. Next time he got gruyère cheese, mandarin yogurt and a bunch of red grapes. It was something of a chore going out to buy pizza on the intervening days. The awful things that had happened to Judy’s face made him think she might be accident-prone and at first he waited to hear her drop things, but she moved almost soundlessly about the flat, putting her head round the door to tell him when she was going to use the vacuum cleaner, apologising in advance, and in the event getting it over as fast as possible. She made less noise about the place than Ann did, Ann who was exasperated by sweeping and dusting and who loudly cursed both tools and furniture. As soon as this thought came to him he felt guilty, so that night he took home a bottle of champagne and a begonia in a pot.

  Peter phoned one afternoon during Bernard’s third week there. It was early morning in Denver, Colorado, where he had arrived to spread the gospel of the Seeburg Diet. He wanted a book sent out to him. It was a book on calories and food-combining that Bernard would find on one of the shelves in the bedroom up on the right hand side.

  ‘Everything OK?’ he said. ‘How’s the poet? How are you getting on with Judy?’

  Bernard said the biography was progressing quite satisfactorily, thank you very much. Judy was fine, marvellous, very efficient. There seemed no point in adding that this morning, though her face had healed and the discoloration around her eye faded, he had noticed bruises on her left arm and a strip of plaster on her left hand. That was hardly the kind of thing to talk about with Peter.

  ‘She’s what my poet contemporaries would have called a treasure.’ His poet had in fact been attracted by servants, had a long-standing clandestine affair with his sister’s nursery maid.

  ‘Mind you say hello to her from me next time she comes.’

  Her hand was still plastered and her face looked as if bruised anew. Only it couldn’t be, he must be imagining this, or she was tired or one of those people whose skin marks at a touch. It couldn’t really be that the damaged eye had been injured again.

  ‘Peter said to say hello.’

  The handy Americanism was evidently new to her but she worked it out. ‘Sent his love, did he? You pass mine on next time he gives you a phone. I’ve got caviar for your sandwiches today, that lump fish really, but I reckon it tastes the same.’ She showed him the jar. ‘Lovely colour, isn’t it? More like strawberry jam.’

  ‘You’re good to me, Judy,’ he said.

  ‘Get off. Good to you! You appreciate it, that’s what I like, not like Peter, cottage cheese and beansprouts day after day for him. Still, what can you expect if you don’t have a kitchen?’

  He re-made his book islands once the front door had closed after her. The fate of his books, or rather the precariousness of the position of his bookmarks, no longer worried him. They were safe with Judy. Even if he failed to stack them before she came, they remained inviolate. And a strange thing had happened. He no longer wanted total silence and unobtrusiveness from her. He had arranged with her to bring his coffee at eleven when he would break off for ten or even fifteen minutes for a chat. Mostly he talked to her and she listened while he spoke about his biography and his aims and his past career, necessariy simplifying things for this untutored audience. A look of wonder, or simple lack of comprehension, came into her thin hungry face. She admired him, he was sure of it, and he was curiously touched by her admiration. He told himself it made him feel humble.

  And he had hardly realised before how much he liked gracious living. The turmoil of home, the chaos, he had accepted as an inevitable corollary of modern life. Peter’s flat was as he remembered his mother’s home, clean, orderly, the woodwork shining, the upholstery not stained with spilt milk and chocolate smears. In the bathroom it was not necessary to pick one’s way between the hazards of potty, disposable napkin packets, drying dungarees and a menagerie of plastic amphibians in order to reach the lavatory. It was peaceful and silent and it smelt, not of urine, milk and disinfectant, but of floor wax and the civilised dry bitter-sweetness of the chrysanthemums Judy had bought at the same time as the caviar.

  ‘You’re quite in love with her,’ said Ann.

  ‘Get off,’ said Bernard before he realised who he was quoting. ‘I only said she was a good housewife.’ She would hardly understand if he said he looked forward to ten-thirty, then to coffee time, to his conversation with this naive listener. It was more than he could understand himself, how an interruption had become a pleasure.

  Peter phoned from Chicago. It was just before seven in the morning there, so not yet one in London and Judy was still in the flat. Bernard thought Peter must be phoning so early to wish him a happy birthday and he felt quite touched. Ann hadn’t exactly forgotten what this day was, she had only forgotten to get him a present. But the reason for Peter’s call was to say the food-combining book had arrived and would Bernard send him the phial of homoeopathic pills from the bathroom cabinet.

  ‘I’m halfway through my life today,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Many happy returns. If I’d known I’d have sent you a card. Say hello to Judy for me.’

  ‘You don’t look forty,’ she said to him, standing in the doorway in her padded jacket.

  For a moment he didn’t know what she meant. When he did, he was mildly affronted, then amused. ‘Thirty-five,’ he said. ‘Halfway through man’s allotted span. You think I’ll make it to eighty, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t ought to have listened,’ she said. ‘Sorry. It was a bit of a cheek.’

  He had a curious impulse to put his arm round her thin shoulders and press her quickly close to him. But of course he couldn’t do that. ‘Get off,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t you listen? It wasn’t private.’

  She said good-bye and left and he put his books back on the floor. Rather reluctantly he returned to work. His subject had been acquainted with the great literary figures of his day and Bernard was about to write of his first meeting, while at university in Dublin, with James Joyce. Joyce, he reflected, had lived with and later married a servant – a chambermaid, wasn’t she? It had been a happy partnership between the giant of letters and his Nora, the nearly illiterate woman.

  Ham sandwiches and thinly sliced avocado, sesame seed biscuits, a glass of apple juice. For once he wasn’t hungry for it. What he would have liked – he suddenly saw the rightness of it – was to have taken Judy out to lunch. Why hadn’t he thought of it while she was still there? Why hadn’t he thought of it as a way of celebrating his birthday? Although she had been gone twenty minutes he went to the window and looked out to see if, by remote chance, she might still be waiting at the bus stop. There was no one in the bus shelter but an old man reading the timetable.

  They could have gone to the Italian restaurant round the corner. She was so thin, he wondered if she ever got a decent meal. He would have enjoyed choosing the dishes for her and selecting the wine. A light sparkling Lambrusco would have been just the thing to please her, and he would have put up with it even though it might be rather showy and obvious for him. But she had gone and it was too late. In her absence he felt restless, unable to concentrate. He had no phone number for her, no address, he didn’t even know her surname. If she didn’t come on Tuesday, if she never came again, he wouldn’t know ho
w to find her, he would have lost her for ever.

  This anxiety was absurd, for of course she did come. His weekend had been unpleasant, with Jonathan developing a virus infection and Ann announcing that she meant to go back to work in the spring. He had to stay at home on Monday to look after the sick child while Ann took the other for a dental appointment. The quietness and order of Peter’s flat received him, seemed to welcome him with a beckoning and a smile. Only another month and Peter would be home but he didn’t want to think of that.

  At ten-thirty Judy let herself in. She was always punctual. The bruises faded, the scars healed, she looked very pretty. He thought what an exceedingly good-looking woman she was with that flush on her cheeks and her eyes bright. Instead of going to his work table and his typewriter, he had waited for her in the living room, and when she came in he did something he normally did for women but had never done for her. He laid his book aside and stood up. It seemed almost to alarm her.

  ‘Are you OK, Bernard?’

  He smiled, nodded. He had never actually witnessed her arrival before and now he watched her remove her jacket, take indoor shoes out of her bag and put them on, remarking as she did so, reverting to the aspect of the place that endlessly amused her, that if Peter had had a kitchen she would have been able to change there. The scuffed boots she wore outdoors tucked inside the bag, she took from it a small package, a box it looked like, wrapped in silver-spotted pink paper. Her manner becoming awkward, she said to Bernard, thrusting the package into his hands, ‘Here, this is for you. Happy birthday.’

  She was blushing. She had gone a fiery red. Bernard untied the ribbon and took off the paper. Inside the box, on a piece of cotton wool, lay a metal object about six inches long and an inch wide. Its shaft was flat like the blade of a knife and attached to a hook on the top which curved backwards in a U-shape was a fascimile of a peacock with tail spread fan-wise, the whole executed in beaten copper and a mosaic of blue, green and purple glass chips. To Bernard it looked at first like some piece of cheap jewellery, a woman’s hair ornament or clip. He registered its tawdry ugliness, felt at a loss for words. What was it? He looked up at her.

  ‘It’s a bookmark, isn’t it?’ She spoke with intense earnestness. ‘You put it in your book to show where you’ve got to.’

  He was still mystified.

  ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ She picked up the book he had been reading, a memoir of the Stephen family who had also been acquainted with his poet. At the place he had reached, she inserted the copper knife blade and, closing the book on it, hooked the peacock over the top of the spine. ‘See how it works?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Thank you very much.’

  Confidingly, she said, ‘I couldn’t help seeing, while I’ve been working about, the way you’d always leave one of your books open and face-down. Well, you don’t like to turn down the corner of the page, do you, not when it’s a library book? It doesn’t seem right. So I thought, it’s his birthday, I know what I’ll do, I’ll get him one of these. I’d seen them in this shop, hadn’t I? One of those’d be just the thing for him and his books, I thought.’

  It was a curious kind of a shock. The thing was hideous. It seemed more of an affront because it was books it must inevitably be associated with, books which he had such a special dedicated feeling about. If it didn’t sound too silly and pretentious, he could almost have said books were sacred. The peacock’s tail, curved breast and stupid face glittered against the dull brown of the binding. The manufacturer had even managed to get red into it. The bird’s eyes were twin points of ruby red. Bernard took the book and his new bookmark into the dining-room. He found himself closing the door for the first time in weeks. Of course he would have to use the bloody thing. She would look for it, expect to see it every time she came. If he left one of his books face-downwards she would want to know why he wasn’t using his new bookmark.

  ‘You do like it, don’t you, Bernard?’ she said when she brought his coffee.

  ‘Of course I like it.’ What else could he say?

  ‘I thought you’d like it. When I saw it I thought that’s just the thing for Bernard.’

  Why did they always have to say everything twice, these people? She had seated herself as usual opposite him to wait for him to begin their conversation. But this morning he didn’t want to talk, he had nothing to say. It even seemed to him that she had somehow betrayed him. She had shown him how little his words meant to her, if in spite of everything he had said and shown himself to be, she could still have bought him this tasteless vulgar object. He knew he was being ridiculous but he couldn’t help feeling it. He took the coffee from her, feigning an absent manner, and returned to his typewriter.

  Honest with himself – he tried to be that – he admitted what had been in his mind. He had meant to make love to her. To what end? Was she to have been his Nora? He had never progressed so far, even in his thoughts. Simply he had thought of love and pleasure, of taking her about and giving her a good time. Was he mad? They were poles apart, a great gulf fixed between them, as she had proved by her gross misunderstanding of everything he was and stood for. Serve him right for having such aims and intents. It must be his subject who was taking him over, his poet who at sixteen boasted to Frank Harris of getting his mother’s kitchen-maid pregnant.

  He nodded absently to her when, ready to leave, she put her head round the door. Peter phoned from Philadelphia not long after she had gone, and after he had talked to him Bernard felt better about things. He was able to make quite an amusing story out of the presenting of the peacock bookmark. And Peter commiserated with him, agreeing that there was no doubt about it, he would have to use the thing, and prominently, for the duration of his stay. Naturally, Bernard said nothing about his now vanished desire for Judy, any more than he did when he repeated the tale to Ann that night. Ann had the advantage over Peter in that she could actually be shown the object.

  ‘It’s copper,’ she said, ‘and it doesn’t look mass-produced. It was probably quite expensive. You can’t actually use it, it’s dreadful.’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt her feelings.’

  ‘What about your feelings? Aren’t they important? If you don’t want to say straight out you can’t bear the thing, tell her you’ve left it at home or you’ve lost it. Let me have it and I’ll lose it for you.’

  Next day he followed her advice and left the bookmark at home. Judy didn’t say anything about it, though it was her day for dusting the bedroom and he had left his notebook in the bedroom, lying face-downwards on the stack of other books. She watered Peter’s plants and cleaned the windows. He didn’t take a break from work when she brought his coffee, only looked up and thanked her. But he could see she had her eye on the books which covered half the dining-table. He was sure she was looking for the peacock. He repeated his thanks in as dismissive a tone as he could manage and she turned at once and left the room. The sandwiches she left him for lunch were tinned salmon and cucumber with a strawberry yogurt and a chocolate bar. Bernard fancied the standard was less high than it had been.

  It was a relief to be without her as he always was on Thursdays. On Friday her face was once more the way it had been that first week, one eye black and swollen, her cheek bruised, her mouth cut. But he said nothing about it. He could see her gazing at all the books on the table and after she had left the room he went quietly to the door and through the crack watched her slowly move the stacked volumes to dust the surface of a cabinet. By now it must have registered with her that he disliked the bookmark and had no intention of using it.

  It was of course a mistake to be too friendly with these people, to put them on a level with oneself. He wasn’t used to servants and that was the trouble. Who was, these days? Returning to work, he felt a flash of envy for his poet who, though comparatively poor, had nevertheless kept a man and two maids to look after him.

  She spoke to him, as in the old days, when she brought his coffee. Tentatively, as if she thought him in a bad mood and she was
placating him, she said, ‘I’ve been in the wars a bit.’

  He glanced up, took in once again that awful damaged eye. How could he once have thought her pretty? The notion came to him that she was trying to tell him something, appeal to him. Was she perhaps going to ask yet again if he liked the bookmark? He put up his eyebrows, made a rueful face. ‘Close the door after you, will you, Judy?’

  Still, he had been wrong about the standard of lunch, having no fault to find with pastrami sandwiches, watercress salad and a slice of pineapple. Ann’s advice was sound. By not yielding he had shown the woman that imposing her atrocious taste on him wasn’t on. But he hadn’t bargained for what happened on the Tuesday. She didn’t come.

  For a little while, when eleven was past and he was sure she wasn’t coming, he felt awe at himself, at the stand he had taken. He had been strong and he had driven her away. Then he was pleased, he was relieved. Wasn’t it absurd, a woman coming in three times a week to clean up after someone who didn’t even sleep there, who scarcely ate there? Of course she would probably come back when Peter returned in three weeks’ time. It was him she was ostracising. She had taken offence because he wouldn’t give in to her and use her hideous gift.

  He had worked himself up a bit over her defection by the time he got home. ‘She could at least have phoned and made some excuse.’

  ‘They don’t,’ said Ann. ‘Those people don’t.’

  Any qualms he might have had about Judy’s turning up later were soon allayed. It was clear she wasn’t coming back. Bernard got into the way of buying himself something for his lunch on his way to the flat. He went without coffee. It wasn’t as if he was used to it, as if Ann had ever made it for him. He left his books lying about all over the floors, face-downwards or with pieces of paper inserted between the pages. Of course he hadn’t finished the life of his poet by the time Peter was due back, he wasn’t even a quarter of his way through, but he had made such a good start he felt he could continue at home in spite of Jonathan and Jeremy, in spite of chaos and noise. He had broken the back of it.