by Ruth Rendell
“The working classes are absurd about things like that,” said Jacqueline, who would have suffered agonies struggling with contact lenses, would have bumped into walls rather than wear glasses. They both felt immensely satisfied with George’s discovery, and it occurred to neither of them that a purblind woman could hardly have cleaned the windows to a diamond brilliance or watched the television for three hours every evening.
7
At forty-seven, Eunice had better sight than Giles Mont at seventeen. Sitting beside George in the car, she wondered what to do if he insisted on coming into the optician’s with her. She was unable to concoct any excuse to avoid this happening, and her experience was inadequate to teach her that middle-aged conservative landowners do not generally accompany their middle-aged female servants into what is virtually a doctor’s surgery. A sullen puzzled resentment simmered within her. The last man who sought to make her life insupportable had got a pillow over his face for his pains.
A slight fillip came to her spirits at the sight, at last, of shops, those familiar and wonderful treasure houses that had seemed left behind forever. They got an even greater lift when George showed no sign of accompanying her into the optician’s. He left her with a promise to be back in half an hour and the instruction to have any bill sent to him.
Once the car had gone, Eunice walked round the corner where she had noticed a confectioner’s. She bought two Kit-Kats, a Mars bar, and a bag of marshmallows, and then she went into a teashop. There she had a cup of tea, a currant bun, and a chocolate éclair, which made a nice change from cassoulets and vine leaves and all those made-up dishes she got at Lowfield Hall. The picture of respectability was Eunice on that Saturday morning, sitting upright at her table in her navy-blue Crimplene suit, nylon stockings, Annie Cole’s mother’s court shoes, an “invisible” net on her hair. No one would have supposed her mind was racing on lines of deception—deception that comes so easily to those who can read and write and have I.Q.s of 120. But at last a plan was formed. She crossed the road to Boots’ and bought two pairs of sunglasses, not dark ones but faintly tinted, one pair with a crystal blue frame, the other of mock tortoise shell. Into her handbag with them, not to be produced for a week.
The Coverdales seemed surprised they would be ready so quickly. She was taken to Stantwich the second time by Jacqueline, who luckily didn’t go with her into the optician’s because of the impossibility of parking on a double yellow line. It was bad enough having to pay the fines incurred by Giles. Eunice bought more chocolate and consumed more cake. She showed the glasses to Jacqueline and went so far as to put the crystal blue pair on. In them she felt a fool. Must she wear them all the time now, she who could see the feathers on a sparrow’s wing in the orchard a hundred feet away? And would they expect her to read?
Nobody really lives in the present. But Eunice did so more than most people. For her, five minutes’ delay in dinner now was more important than a great sorrow ten years gone, and to the future she had never given much thought. But now, with the glasses in her possession, occasionally even on her nose, she became very aware of the printed word which surrounded her and to which, at some future time, she might be expected to react.
Lowfield Hall was full of books. It seemed to Eunice that there were as many books here as in Tooting Public Library where once, and once only, she had been to return an overdue novel of Mrs. Samson’s. As small flattish boxes, she saw them, packed with mystery and threat. One entire wall of the morning room was filled with bookshelves, in the drawing room great glass-fronted bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace, and more shelves filled the twin alcoves. There were books on bedside tables, magazines and newspapers in racks. And they read books all the time. It seemed to her that they must read to provoke her, for no one, not even schoolteachers, could read that much for pleasure. Giles was never without a book in his hand. He even brought his reading matter into her kitchen and sat absorbed in it, his elbows on the table. Jacqueline read every novel of note, and she and George re-read their way through Victorian novels, their closeness emphasised by their often reading some work of Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot at the same time, so as later to discuss a character or a scene together. Incongruously, it was the student of English literature who read the least, but even so Melinda was often to be found in the garden or lying on the morning-room floor with one of Mr. Sweet’s grammars before her. This was not from inclination but because of a menace from her tutor—“If we’re going to make the grade we shall have to come to grips with those Anglo-Saxon pronouns before next term, shan’t we?” But how was Eunice to know that?
She had been happy, but the glasses had destroyed her happiness. She had been content with the house and the lovely things in the house, and the Coverdales had hardly existed for her, so little notice had she taken of them. Now she could hardly wait for them to go away on that summer holiday they were always talking about and planning for.
But before they went, and they were not going until the beginning of August, before their departure set her free to expand, to explore, and to meet Joan Smith, three unpleasant things happened.
The first was nothing in itself. It was what it led up to that bothered Eunice. She dropped one of Geoff Baalham’s eggs on the kitchen floor. Jacqueline, who was there, said only, “Oh dear, what a mess!” and Eunice had cleaned it up in a flash. But on the following morning she went up to turn out Giles’s bedroom, always a formidable task, and for the first time she allowed herself to look at his cork wall. Why? She could hardly have answered that herself, but perhaps it was because she was now equipped to read, made vulnerable, as it were, to reading, and because she had now become aware of the oppressive number of books in the house. There was a message on the wall beside that nasty poster. “Why” it began. She could read that word without much difficulty when it was printed. “One” she could also read and “eggs.” Giles evidently meant it for her and was reproaching her for breaking that egg. She didn’t care for his reproaches, but suppose he broke his silence—he never spoke to her—to ask her why. Why hadn’t she obeyed his “why” message? He might tell his stepfather, and Eunice was on tenterhooks whenever George looked at her unbespectacled face.
At last the message was taken down, but only to be replaced by another. Eunice was almost paralysed by it, and for a week she did no more in Giles’s room than pull up the bedclothes and open the window. She was as frightened of those pieces of paper as another woman would have been had Giles kept a snake in his room.
But not so frightened as she was of Jacqueline’s note. This was left on the kitchen table one morning while Eunice was at the top of the house making her own bed. When she came downstairs, Jacqueline had driven off to London to see Paula, to have her hair cut, and to buy clothes for her holiday.
Jacqueline had left notes for her before, and had wondered why the otherwise obedient Miss Parchman never obeyed the behests in them. All, however, was explained by her poor sight. But now Eunice had her glasses. Not that she was wearing them. They were upstairs, stuffed into the bottom of her knitting bag. She stared at the note, which meant as much to her as a note in Greek would have meant to Jacqueline—precisely as much, for Jacqueline could recognise an alpha, an omega, and a pi just as Eunice knew some capital letters and the odd monosyllabic word. But connecting those words, deciphering longer ones, making anything of it, that was beyond her. In London she would have had Annie Cole to help her. Here she had no one but Giles, who wandered through the kitchen to cadge a lift to Stantwich, to moon about the shops and spend the afternoon in a dark cinema. He didn’t so much as glance at her, and she would rather do anything than ask help from him.
It wasn’t one of Eva Baalham’s days. Could she lose the note? Inventiveness was not among her gifts. It had taken all her puny powers to convince George that the optician’s bill hadn’t come because she had already paid it, liked to be independent, didn’t want to be “beholden.”
And then Melinda came in.
E
unice had forgotten she was in the house, she couldn’t get used to these bits of kids starting their summer holidays in June. Melinda danced in at midday, pretty healthy buxom Melinda in too tight jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, yellow hair in Dutch-girl pigtails, her feet bare. The sun was shining, a wind was blowing, the whole kitchen was radiated with fluttering dancing sunbeams, and Melinda was off to the seaside with two boys and another girl in an orange and purple painted van. She picked up the note and. read it aloud. “What’s this? ‘Please would you be awfully kind and if you have the time press my yellow silk, the one with the pleated skirt. I want to wear it tonight. It’s in my wardrobe somewhere up on the right. Thank you so much, J.C.’ It must be for you, Miss Parchman. D’you think you could do my red skirt at the same time? Would you?”
“Oh yes, it’s no trouble,” said the much-relieved Eunice with quite a broad smile for her.
“You are sweet,” said Melinda.
August came in with a heat wave, and Mr. Meadows, the farmer whose land adjoined George’s, began cutting his wheat. The new combine harvester dropped bales of straw shaped like slices of Swiss roll. Melinda picked fruit, along with the village women, in the cherry orchards, Giles put up a new Quote of the Month, again from Samuel Butler, Jacqueline weeded the garden and found a thorn-apple, poisonous but beautiful and bearing a single white trumpet flower among the zinnias. And at last it was time to go away, August 7.
“I won’t forget to send you a card,” said Melinda, recalling as she did from time to time that it was her duty to cheer old Parchment Face up.
“You’ll find any numbers and addresses you may want in the directory by the phone.” This from Jacqueline, while George said, “You can always send us a telegram in case of emergency.”
Useless, all of it, had they but known it.
Eunice saw them off from the front door, wearing the crystal blue glasses to allay admonition. A soft haze lay over Greeving at this early hour, a haze thickened by smoke, for Mr. Meadows was burning the stubble off his fields. Eunice didn’t linger to appreciate the great purple dahlias, drenched with dew, or listen to the cuckoo’s last calls before his departure. She went quickly indoors to possess what she had looked forward to.
Her purpose didn’t include neglecting the house, and she went through her usual Friday routine, but with certain additional tasks. She stripped the beds, threw away the flower arrangements—more or less dead, anyway, nasty messy things, dropping petals everywhere—and hid, as best she could, every book, magazine, and newspaper. She would have liked to cover the bookcases with sheets, but only madness goes that far, and Eunice was not mad.
Then she cooked herself a dinner. The Coverdales would have called it lunch because it was eaten at one o’clock. They were not to know how dreadfully their housekeeper had missed a good solid hot meal eaten in the middle of the day. Eunice fried (fried, not grilled) a big steak from the deep freeze, fried potatoes too, while the runner beans, the carrots, and the parsnips were boiling. Apple pudding and custard to follow, biscuits and cheese and strong black tea. She washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. It was a relief not to be obliged to use that dishwasher. She never had liked the idea of dirty plates with gravy or crumbs all over them hanging about in there all day, even though the door was shut and you couldn’t see them.
Mrs. Samson used to say that a woman’s work is never done. Not even the most house-proud could have found more work to be done in Lowfield Hall that day. Tomorrow she would think about taking down the morning-room curtains, but not today, not now. Now for a thoroughgoing indulgence in, an orgy of, television.
August 7 was to be recorded as the hottest day of the year. The temperature rose to seventy-eight, eighty, until by half past two it touched eighty-five. In Greeving, jam-making housewives left their kitchens and took the sun on back doorsteps; the weir on the river Beal became a swimming pool for little Higgses and Baalhams; farm dogs hung out their tongues; Mrs. Cairne forgot discretion and lay on her front lawn in a bikini; Joan Smith propped her shop door open with a box of dog biscuits and fanned herself with a fly swat. Eunice went upstairs, drew her curtains, and settled down in deep contentment with her knitting in front of the screen. All she needed to make her happiness perfect was a bar of chocolate, but she had long ago eaten up all those she had bought in Stantwich.
Sport first. People swimming and people racing round stadiums. Then a serial about much the same sort of characters as those Eunice had known in Rainbow Street. A children’s programme, the news, the weather forecast. She never cared much for the news, and anyone could see and feel what the weather was and was going to be. She went downstairs and fetched herself jam sandwiches and a block of chocolate ice cream. At eight o’clock her favourite programme of the entire week was due to begin, a series about policemen in Los Angeles. It is hard to say why Eunice loved it so much. Certainly she confounded those analysts of escape channels who say that an audience must identify. Eunice couldn’t identify with the young police lieutenant or his twenty-year-old blonde girl friend or with the gangsters, tycoons, film stars, call girls, gamblers, and drunks, who abounded in each adventure. Perhaps it was the clipped harsh repartee she liked, the inevitable car chase and the indispensable shooting. It had irked her exceedingly to miss an episode as she had often done in the past, the Coverdales seeming deliberately to single out Friday as their entertaining night.
There was no one to disturb her this time. She laid down her knitting the better to concentrate. It was going to be a good story tonight, she could tell that from the opening sequence, a corpse in the first two minutes and a car chase in the first five. The gunman’s car crashed, half mounting a lamppost. The car door opened, the gunman leapt out, across the street, firing his gun, dodging a policeman’s bullets, into the shelter of a porch, pulling a frightened girl in front of him as his shield, again taking aim.… Suddenly the sound faded and the picture began to dwindle, to shrink, as it was sucked into a spot in the centre of the screen like black water draining into a hole. The spot shone like a star, a tiny point of light that burned brightly and went out.
Eunice switched it off, switched it on again. Nothing happened. She moved knobs on the front of it and even those knobs on the back they said you should never touch. Nothing happened. She opened the plug and checked that the wires were all where they ought to be. She took out the fuse and replaced it with one from her bedlamp.
The screen remained blank, or rather, had become merely a mirror, reflecting her own dismayed face and the hot red sunset burning through a chink between the closed curtains.
8
It never occurred to her to use the colour set in the morning room. She knew it was usable, but it was theirs. A curious feature of Eunice Parchman’s character was that, although she did not stop at murder or blackmail, she never in her life stole anything or even borrowed anything without its owner’s consent. Objects, like spheres of life, were appointed, predestined, to certain people. Eunice no more cared to see the order of things disturbed than George did.
For a while she hoped that the set would right itself, start up as spontaneously as it had failed. But each time she switched it on it remained blank and silent. Of course she knew that when things went wrong you sent for the man to put them right. In Tooting you went round to the ironmonger’s or the electric people. But here? With only a phone and an indecipherable list of names and numbers, a useless incomprehensible directory?
Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The milkman called and Geoff Baalham with the eggs. Ask them and have them tell her to look such and such a number up in the phone book? She was cruelly bored and frustrated. There were no neighbours to pass the time of day with, no busy street to watch, no buses or tea shops. She took down the curtains, washed and ironed them, washed paintwork, shampooed the carpets, anything to pass the slow, heavy, lumbering time.
It was Eva Baalham, arriving on Wednesday, who discovered what had happened, simply as a result of asking Eunice if she had watched the big figh
t on the previous evening. And Eva only asked that for something to say, talking to Miss Parchman being a sticky business at the best of times.
“Broke down?” said Eva. “I reckon you’ll have to have that seen to then. My cousin Meadows that keeps the electric shop in Sudbury, he’d do that for you. I tell you what, I’ll leave doing they old bits of silver till Friday and give him a ring.”
A long dialogue ensued with someone called Rodge in which Eva enquired after Doris and Mum and “the boy” and “the girl” (young married people, these last, with children of their own) and finally got a promise of assistance.
“He says he’ll pop in when he knocks off.”
“Hope he doesn’t have to take it away,” said Eunice.
“Never know with they old sets, do you? You’ll have to have a look at the paper instead.”
Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.
Rodge Meadows came and he did have to take the set away.
“Could be a couple of days, could be a week. Give me a ring if you don’t hear nothing from Auntie Eva. I’m in the book.”
Two days later, in the solitude and silence and boredom of Lowfield Hall, a compulsion came over Eunice. Without any idea of where to go or why she was going, she found herself changing the blue and white check dress for the Crimplene suit, and then making her first unescorted assay into the outside world. She closed all the windows, bolted the front door, locked the door of the gun room, and started off down the drive. It was August 14. If the television set hadn’t broken down she would never have gone. Sooner or later one of her own urges or the efforts of the Coverdales would have got her out of that house, but she would have gone in the evening or on a Sunday afternoon when Greeving Post Office and Village Store, Prop. N. Smith, would have been closed. If, if, if … If she had been able to read, the television might still have held charms for her, but she would have looked the engineer’s number up in the phone book on Saturday morning, and by Tuesday or Wednesday she would have had that set back. On Saturday, the fifteenth, Rodge did, in fact, return it, but by then it was too late and the damage was done.