by Ruth Rendell
“You’ll just have to phone that Stantwich place,” said Joan, who thought she saw it all, that Eunice had come to the village store off her own bat. “Use our phone, go on. Here’s your list. Got your glasses?”
Eunice had. The ones with the tortoise-shell frames. While Joan bustled about with the teacups she made her call, almost dizzy with happiness. Appearing to read aloud what she in fact remembered brought her a pleasure comparable to, but greater than, the pride of a traveller who has one idiomatic French phrase and chances to bring it out successfully at the right time without evoking from his listener a single question. Seldom did it happen to her to prove she could read. And, putting the phone down, she felt towards Joan the way we do feel towards those in whose hearing we have demonstrated our prowess in the field where we least possess it—warm, prideful, superior yet modest, ready to be expansive. She praised the “lovely old room,” ignoring its untidy near squalor, and she was moved so far as to compliment Joan on her hair, her floral dress, and the quality of her chocolate biscuits.
“Fancy them expecting you to hump all that lot back,” said Joan, who knew they hadn’t. “Well, they say he’s a hard man, reaping where he has not sown and gathering where he has not stored. I’ll run you home, shall I?”
“I’d be putting you out.”
“Not at all. My pleasure.” Joan marched Eunice through the shop, ignoring her husband, who was peering disconsolately inside a sack as into a nosebag. The old green van started after some heavy manipulation with the choke and kicks at the accelerator. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”
The van coughed its way up the lane. Joan took Eunice to the front door of Lowfield Hall. “Now, one good turn deserves another, and I’ve got a little book here I want you to read.” She produced a tract entitled God Wants You for a Wise Man. “And you’ll pop along to our next meeting with me, won’t you? Sunday night. I won’t call for you, but you be in the lane at half five and I’ll pick you up. Okay?”
“All right,” said Eunice.
“Oh, you’ll love it. We don’t have a prayer book like those church people, just singing and love and uttering what comes into our hearts. And then there’s tea and a chat with the brethren. God wants us to be joyful, my dear, when we have given our all to Him. But for those who deny Him there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Did you knit your cardigan yourself? I think it’s smashing. Don’t forget your flour and your oats.”
Well content, Joan drove back to Norman and the store. It might seem that she had nothing to gain from friendship with Eunice Parchman, but in fact she was badly in need of a satellite in the village. Norman had become a cipher, not much more than a shell of a man, since his wife’s revelations of what his early married life had truly been. They hardly spoke these days, and Joan had given up pretending to her acquaintances that they were an ideal couple. Indeed, she told everyone that Norman was her cross, though one that it was her duty as his wife to bear, but that he had turned his back on God and so could be no companion for such as she. God was displeased with him. Therefore she, as His handmaid, must concur in that displeasure. These pronouncements, made publicly along with others implying that Joan had the infallibility of God’s personal assistant, had put off such Higgses, Baalhams, and Newsteads as might have become her friends. People said good morning to her but otherwise ostracised her. They thought she was mad, as she probably was even then.
She saw Eunice as malleable and green. And also, to do her justice, as a lost sheep who might be brought to the Colchester fold. It would be a triumph for her, and pleasant, to have a faithful admiring attendant to introduce to the Epiphany People and be seen by unregenerate Greeving as her special pal.
Eunice, flushed with success, turned out the morning room, and was actually washing down its ivory-painted walls when Jacqueline came back.
“Heavens, what a rush! Poor Lady Royston’s got a multiple fracture of her left arm. Spring cleaning in September? You’re an indefatigable worker, Miss Parchman. I hardly like to ask if you saw to my shopping list.”
“Oh yes, madam. Mr. Coverdale will pick it up at five.”
“That’s marvellous. And now I’m going to have an enormous sherry before my lunch. Why don’t you have a break and join me?”
But this Eunice refused. Apart from a rare glass of wine at a relative’s wedding or funeral, she had never tasted alcohol. This was one of the few things she had in common with Joan Smith who, though fond enough of a gin or a Guinness in her Shepherds Bush days, had eschewed liquor on signing the Epiphany pledge.
God Wants You for a Wise Man necessarily remained unread, but Eunice went to the meeting where no one expected her to read anything. She enjoyed the ride in Joan’s van, the singing and the tea, and by the time they were back in Greeving a date had been made for her to have supper with the Smiths on Wednesday, and they were Joan and Eunice to each other. They were friends. In the sterile existence of Eunice Parchman, Mrs. Samson and Annie Cole had a successor.
Melinda went back to college, George shot more pheasants, Jacqueline planted bulbs and trimmed the shrubs and cheered up Lady Royston, Giles learned gloomily that the tenth place in the bus to Poona had been filled. Leaves turned from dark green to bleached gold, the apples were all gathered and the cob nuts ripened. The cuckoo had long gone, and now the swallows and the flycatchers departed for the south.
On Greeving Green the hunt met and rode down the lane to kill two hours later in Marleigh Wood.
“Good morning, Master,” said George at his gate to Sir Robert Royston, George who would call him Bob at any other time.
And “Good morning, sir,” said Bob in his pink coat and hard hat.
October, with its false summer, its warm sadness, mists and mellow fruitfulness and sunshine turning to gold the haze that lingered over the river Beal.
11
Melinda would have learned that when Eunice went out, as she now frequently did, it was to visit Joan Smith, and that when she set off in the dusk on Sunday evenings the Smiths’ van was waiting for her at the end of the drive. But Melinda was back at college and had returned to her father’s house only once in the month since her departure. And on that one occasion she had been very quiet and preoccupied for her, not going out but playing records or sitting silent and deep in thought. For Melinda had fallen in love.
So although every inhabitant of Greeving who was not an infant or senile followed with close interest the Parchman-Smith alliance, the Coverdales knew nothing about it. Often they didn’t know that Eunice wasn’t in the house, so unobtrusive was she when there. Nor did they know that when they went out Joan Smith came in and passed many a pleasant evening with Eunice, drinking tea and watching television on the top floor. Giles, of course, was invariably in. But they took care not to speak on the stairs, the thick carpet muffled the sound of an extra set of footsteps, and they passed unseen and unheard by him into Eunice’s bedroom where the incessant drone of the television masked the murmur of their voices.
And yet that friendship would have foundered in its earliest days had Eunice had her way. The warmth she felt for Joan cooled when her delight over the deciphering of the shopping list subsided, and she began to look on Joan, as she had always looked on most people, as someone to be used. Not to be blackmailed for money this time, but rather to be placed in her power as Annie Cole had been, so that she could always be relied on as an interpreter and trusted not to divulge her secret if she discovered it.
It looked as if Eva Baalham had delivered Joan into her hands.
Eva was disgruntled these days because, although she now had more rewarding employment with Mrs. Jameson-Kerr, her working hours at Lowfield Hall had been reduced to one morning a week. And this demotion she blamed on Eunice, who did with ease all the jobs she used to groan over and, if the truth were admitted, did them a lot better. As soon as she thought she saw a way of needling Eunice she set about doing so.
“I reckon you’re very pally with that Mrs. Smith then.”
“I don’t know,” said Eunice.
“Always in and out of each other’s places. That’s what I call very pally. My cousin Meadows that’s got the garage, he saw you out in her van last week. Maybe there’s things about her you don’t know.”
“What?” said Eunice, breaking her rule.
“Like what she was before she came here. A street woman, she was, no better than a common prostitute.” Eva wasn’t going to destroy the esoteric quality of this by saying it was generally known. “Used to go with men, and her husband never knew a thing, poor devil.”
That night Eunice was invited to the Smiths’ for supper. They ate what she liked and never got at Lowfield Hall, eggs and bacon and sausages and chips. Afterwards she had a chocolate bar from the shop. Norman sat silent at the table, then departed for the Blue Boar where, out of pity, some Higgs or Newstead would play darts with him. Bumper cups of tea were served. Joan leaned confidingly across the table and began to preach the gospel according to Mrs. Smith. Having finished the last square of her fudge wafer, Eunice seized her opportunity.
She interrupted Joan in her louder, more commanding voice. “I’ve heard something about you.”
“Something nice, I hope,” said Joan brightly.
“Don’t know about nice. That you used to go with men for money, that’s what I heard.”
A kind of holy ecstasy radiated Joan’s raddled face. She banged her flat bosom with her fist. “Oh, I was a sinner!” she declaimed. “I was scarlet with sin and steeped in the foulest mire. I went about the city as an harlot, but God called me and, lo, I heard Him! I shall never forget the day I confessed my sins before the multitude of the brethren and opened my heart to my husband. With true humility, dear, I have laid bare my soul to all who would hear, so that the people may know even the blackest shall be saved. Have another cup, do.”
Amazement transfixed Eunice. No potential blackmail victim had ever behaved like this. Her respect for Joan became almost boundless and, floored, she held out her cup meekly.
Did Joan guess? Perhaps. She was a clever woman and a very experienced one. If it were so, the hoisting of Eunice with her own petard must have brought her enormous amusement without in the least alienating her. After all, she expected people to be sinners. She wasn’t a Wise Man for nothing.
The yellow leaves were falling, oak and ash and elm, and the redder foliage of the dogwood. What flowers remained had been blackened by the first hard frost, and fungus grew under hedges and on fallen trees, the oyster mushroom and the amethyst agaric. Rethatching began on James Newstead’s cottage, his garden filled with the golden straw from a whole wheat field.
George in dinner jacket and Jacqueline in a red silk gown embroidered with gold went to Covent Garden to see The Clemency of Titus and spent the night at Paula’s. The Quote of the Month was from Mallarmé: The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books. But Giles, far from having read all the books, was deep in Poe. If, as seemed likely, he was never going to make it to India, he might ask Melinda to share a flat with him when they had completed their educations. A Gothic mansion flat was what he had in mind, in West Kensington, say, a kind of diminutive House of Usher with floors of ebon blackness and feeble gleams of encrimsoned light making their way through the trellised panes.
But Melinda, unknown to him, was in love. Jonathan Dexter was his name and he was reading modern languages. George Coverdale had often wondered, though never spoken his thoughts aloud even to Jacqueline, whether his younger daughter was as innocent as her mother had been at her age. But he doubted it, and was resigned to her having followed the current trend of permissiveness. He would, in fact, have been surprised and pleased had he known Melinda was still a virgin, though anxious if he had guessed how near she was to changing that irrevocable condition.
Now that the ice was, as it were, broken, Eunice often went out walking. As she had roved London, so she roved the villages, marching from Cocklefield to Marleigh, Marleigh to Cattingham, through the leaf-strewn lanes and, as St. Luke’s little summer gave place to the deep of autumn, daring the still dry footpaths that crossed the fields and skirted the woods. She walked purposelessly, not pausing to look, through breaks in the trees, at the long blue vistas of wooded slopes and gentle valleys, hardly noticing the countryside at all. Here it was the same for her as it had been in London. She walked to satisfy some craving for freedom and to use up that energy housework could not exhaust.
She and Joan Smith never communicated by phone. Joan would arrive in the van when she was sure Lowfield Hall was empty but for Eunice. Whatever friend she visited, Jacqueline must pass through Greeving, and she seldom passed without being observed by Joan from the village store. And then Joan would drive up to the Hall, make her way in through the gun room without knocking, and within two minutes Eunice had the kettle on.
“Her life’s just one round of amusement. Sherry-partying with that Mrs. Cairne she is this morning. One can just imagine what goes on in the mind of God when He looks down on that sort of thing. The wicked shall flourish like the green bay tree, but in the morning they were not, nay, they were not to be found. I’ve got four calls to make in Cocklefield this morning, dear, so I won’t stop a minute.” By calls Joan didn’t mean store or postal deliveries, but proselytising visits. As usual, she was armed with a stack of tracts, including a new one got up to look like a comic and artfully entitled Follow My Star.
So fervid an Epiphany Person was she that often when Eunice called, during her walks, at the store only Norman was found to be in charge. And then, from behind the bars of his cage, he shook his head lugubriously.
“She’s off out somewhere.”
But sometimes Eunice called in time to be taken with Joan on her rounds, and from the passenger seat in the van she watched her friend preaching on cottage doorsteps.
“I wonder if you have time to spare today to glance at a little book I’ve brought …”
Or around the council estates that clung to the fringe of each village, red brick boxes screened from the ancient settlement by a barrier of conifers. Occasionally a naïve householder asked Joan in, and then she was gone some time. But more often the door was shut in her face and she would return to the van, radiant with the glow of martyrdom.
“I admire the way you take it,” said Eunice. “I’d give them as good as I got.”
“The Lord requires humility of His servants, Eun. Remember there are some who will be carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom and some who will be tormented by the flame. Don’t let me forget to stop at Meadows’, we’re nearly out of petrol.”
They presented a strange sight, those two, to the indignant watcher as she dropped Follow My Star into her dustbin. Joan so spindly with bones like those of a starved child pictured in a charity appeal, her religion having done nothing to conquer her ingrained habit, almost unconscious now, of getting herself up in whore’s garb: short skirt, black “glass” stockings, down-at-heel patent shoes, great shiny handbag, and fleecy white jacket with big shoulders. Her hair was like an inverted bird’s nest, if birds ever built with golden wire, and on her pinched little face the make-up was rose and blue and scarlet.
Eunice might have been chosen as the perfect foil to her. She had added to her wardrobe since coming to Lowfield Hall only such garments as she had knitted herself, and on those chilly autumn days she wore a round woolly cap and a scarf of dark grey-blue. In her thick maroon-coloured coat, she towered above Joan, and the contrast was best seen when they walked side by side, Joan teetering and taking small rapid steps, Eunice Junoesque with her erect carriage and steady stride.
In her heart, each thought the other looked a fool, but this did not alienate them. Friendship often prospers best when one party is sure she has an ascendancy over the other. Without letting on, Eunice thought Joan brilliantly clever, to be relied on for help whenever she might be confronted by reading matter, but mutton dressed as silly young lamb all the same, a hopeless housewife and a slattern. Without letti
ng on, Joan saw Eunice as eminently respectable, a possible bodyguard too if Norman should ever attempt to carry out his feeble threat of beating her up, but why dress like a policewoman?
Joan made Eunice presents of chocolate each time she came to the shop. Eunice had knitted Joan a pair of gloves in her favourite salmon pink and was thinking of beginning on a jumper.
All Saints’, November 1, was Jacqueline’s forty-third birthday. George gave her a sheepskin jacket, Giles a record of Mozart concert arias. Melinda sent a card with a scrawled promise of “something nice when I get around to coming home.” The parcel, containing a new novel, which arrived from Peter and Audrey had obviously been opened and resealed. George marched off to Greeving Post Office and Village Store and complained to Norman Smith. But what to say in answer to Norman’s defence that the book on arrival was half out of its wrappings and that his wife had repacked it herself for safety’s sake? George could only nod and say he wouldn’t take it further—for the present.
That week he went for his annual checkup to Dr. Crutchley and was told his blood pressure was up, nothing to worry about but you’d better go on these tablets. George wasn’t a nervous man or one who easily panicked, but he decided he had better make his will, a proceeding he had been procrastinating about for years. It was this will which has given rise to the litigation that still continues, that keeps Lowfield Hall ownerless and deserted, that has soured the lives of Peter Coverdale and Paula Caswall and keeps the tragedy fresh in their minds. But it was carefully drawn up, with all forethought. Who then could have foreseen what would happen on St. Valentine’s Day? What lawyer, however circumspect, could have imagined a massacre at peaceful Lowfield Hall?
A copy of the will was shown to Jacqueline when she got home from a meeting of the parish council.