by Ruth Rendell
‘You can persuade them,’ said June. ‘You can appeal to their public-spiritedness.’ She suggested that an outing to ‘a show’ should be discussed at the next meeting and a date fixed. The kind of fidgety apathy that often settles on meetings that continue for too long was causing eyes to close, shoulders to slump, and pins and needles to cramp legs. Everyone was relieved to agree to the outing, especially as it was not to be raised again until October. The meeting was over and serious drinking began.
While sticking to his no-spirits rule, Henry had drunk his wine and was in need of something stronger. Eyebrows were raised when he ordered a Campari and soda, and go easy on the soda. Ahead of him was an ordeal which he both looked forward to and dreaded, but there was no escape from it. Huguette expected to see him, and knowing that her father was away on a two-day parliamentary visit to Brussels, also knew that Henry could not be on call to drive the Beemer. She would have to wait in vain, for he had another engagement in the Studley family at nine.
Beacon was the first to leave. His call had come through. Mr Still was on a train heading for Euston, not Victoria, and was due to arrive in twelve minutes. This was also a cue for Montserrat who watched him go, checked that the Audi had left and ran upstairs at number 7 to knock on Lucy’s door and warn Rad to be out of there in three minutes at the most. When she had escorted him down to the drawing-room floor, down the steep and narrow staircase to the basement and the area, and seen him disappear in the direction of Sloane Square, she ran all the way to the top. Thomas, for once, was asleep, the girls were watching television while they got ready for bed and Rabia was having a cup of tea.
Number 11, home of the Studleys, was the largest house in Hexam Place, not only bigger but different from those in the terraces, being detached, and with more elaborate rails round its balconies. You entered it between fluted columns and through double doors. Above these doors French windows opened from the principal bedroom on to a large balcony on which stood palm trees and pampas in Grecian urns. This window, though fastened and locked, somehow made the bedroom seem more exposed and less secure than if a solid wall had been there, and this was why Oceane Studley preferred to visit Henry than have him visit her.
He was back from the Dugong at ten to nine, quickly changing the sheets on his bed, pulling down the blinds and setting out out the wine glasses. She would bring the wine, she always did. Not that it had happened more than twice – this would be the third time. He hadn’t time for a shower but he’d had one that morning. That would have to do. Henry couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to see Oceane or if he wouldn’t really prefer his mobile to ring and it to be her saying she couldn’t make it. The truth was that all the time she was here in his room he was terrified. It was due only to his youth, he supposed, that he could function at all and not be inhibited by fear. Things were quite different with Huguette because they did it in Huguette’s flat which was a mile away and not her dad’s, though no doubt her dad paid the rent. The whole of this house was Lord Studley’s, Henry’s room as much as the master bedroom, and even when he knew his employer was in Brussels he was still afraid of spies. Letting himself in here this evening, he had encountered Sondra on the stairs and though she had been perfectly pleasant he couldn’t rid himself of the idea that she had been keeping an eye on him.
The trouble was that Oceane was a very attractive woman and not yet forty. Henry thought her basically more attractive than her daughter but Huguette was young and that was a great advantage. Anyway, while he hadn’t even thought about refusing Huguette he had been afraid to say no to Oceane. Henry was unacquainted with the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife but the plot was obvious to anyone who imagined the scenario. You say no, thanks, you’d rather not, and she tells her husband who happens to be your boss that you made a pass at her.
He was coming to the end of envisaging this outcome when the door opened and Oceane came in. She never knocked. Whatever else he might be to her, Henry was her husband’s driver. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘are you in a seventh heaven to see me?’ She pressed her pelvis against him and stuck her tongue in his mouth.
Henry responded. He hadn’t really any option.
Montserrat knew all about it. She made it her business to know who was having an affair with whom, who was skiving off and who was borrowing a Beemer or a Jaguar when such a loan was strictly forbidden. She had never blackmailed anyone but she liked to keep the possibility of a modified sort of blackmail in reserve. The only friend she had in Hexam Place was Thea and the only member of the Saint Zita Society who possessed a car of their own was herself, keeping her rather old VW in a garage in the mews that belonged to number 7.
Attempts at persuading Rabia to join the society had failed. ‘You wouldn’t have to drink anything. I mean, you wouldn’t have to drink anything alcoholic. You’d just sit at a table and talk. And then you could come with us to shows.’
Rabia said she couldn’t afford it and if she asked her dad if she could go into a pub he would say no.
‘Why tell him?’
‘Because he’s my father,’ said Rabia in her simple direct way. ‘I no longer have a husband to tell me what to do.’ Ignoring Monserrat’s rolling eyes, she offered her another cup of tea.
Monserrat said she’d rather have a glass of wine and she didn’t suppose Rabia would let her bring the bottle up here. ‘No, that’s right,’ said Rabia. ‘I’m sorry but this is the children’s place,’ and she went to see to Thomas who had begun whimpering.
June and the Princess and Rad Sothern, who was June’s great-nephew, were having coffee in the drawing room at number 6. The Princess only tolerated this relative of June’s because he was a professional man, an actor and a celebrity. Besides this, he was very good-looking and played Mr Fortescue, the orthopaedic surgeon, in one of her favourite hospital sitcoms. Mr Fortescue was an important character in Avalon Clinic, appeared every week and was a famous face when seen crossing Sloane Square. June was fond of him in a half-hearted way but she was well aware than he only came round when he had nothing better to do. She had seen him admitted to number 7 by the basement door and disapproved of his having an affair with Montserrat whom she thought of as sly. It puzzled her how he had ever managed to meet the Stills’ au pair. As far as she knew, Rad’s only contact with the occupants of number 7 had been when the Princess had introduced him to Lucy Still at a party the Princess had given in this house a few months before.
The Princess addressed him as ‘Mr Fortescue’ because she thought this was funny. Rad had told her not to but she took no notice. The conversation was always centred on gossip. Film and TV gossip, not Hexam Place scandal-mongering as this might be rather close to the bone for Rad. June knew he came to number 6 as often as he did not because of his fondness for the Princess but so that when he was seen the neighbours would think his visits were to his great-aunt rather than to Montserrat.
The Princess, as always, wanted him to tell her about the private lives of the cast of Avalon Clinic and he obliged with a diluted version. It seemed to satisfy her.
‘Can I offer you a brandy, Mr Fortescue?’
‘Why not?’ said Rad.
None was offered to June but she helped herself just the same. She was tired and she still had to walk Gussie round the block. Rad wouldn’t leave for hours if she didn’t give him what she called a nudge, though it was rather more than that. ‘Time you went, Rad. HSH wants to go to bed.’
Gussie was put on his lead and Rad, in June’s habitual phrase, was seen off the premises, out of the front door and down the steps. It was a fine night but growing cold. Rad picked up a taxi in Ebury Bridge Road and June and Gussie walked on round the block. It was very late but some lights were on in bedrooms, while Damian and Roland were still up in their living room, though the blinds were down. There was no one about, no one to see June let herself in by the front door, so she and Gussie entered the house by the more comfortably negotiated stairs to the basement.
Thea lived in the
top flat at number 8, Damian and Roland occupying the ground and first floors. Roland did some of the cleaning in a grudging way and Thea did what he didn’t do, but no one cleaned for Miss Grieves in the basement. She couldn’t afford it. Thea already shopped for her and sometimes took her the kind of food that was an improvement on Meals on Wheels but now she also pushed the vacuum cleaner around and dusted the ancient furniture. It was one of the many tasks she performed unasked because she felt she ought to. For the same reason she did what they called ‘little jobs’ for Damian and Roland, staying in to open the door when a plumber was coming or the postman with a parcel, phoning Westminster City Council whenever a complaint was to be made, putting out their recycling, changing light bulbs and mending fuses. She disliked doing these things but didn’t see how she could stop now. Nor was she proud of her goodness in helping her neighbours. If only doing these things made her happy, if she could acquire a consciousness of virtue, a sense of satisfaction in performing useful and unpaid services, but all it amounted to was a weary fed-upness and sometimes resentment. She just did it in a weary fed-up sort of way.
Montserrat always seemed to have someone but, as for her, it was two or three years since she had had a boyfriend. The years were passing, as her married sister Chloe told her, or in Roland’s words, quoted from something or other, time’s winged chariot was hurrying near. She sometimes thought that if any man asked her out, so long as he wasn’t positively ugly or gross, she would say yes. He was becoming a dream lover, this faceless man, as she envisaged him arriving in a nice car to take her for a drive and then for lunch, and she saw herself waving to him from the window, saying goodbye for now to Damian and Roland, and running down the stairs to the front door.
There was no one she knew, however vaguely, to fill this role. On her way to work in the Fulham Road she would look at the passengers on the bus or the men who passed her on foot and wonder. What did you have to do, how did you have to look, to gain the attention of this one or that? She had known once and put her knowledge into practice. They had married other people, those men. Probably she would end up like Miss Grieves, single and solitary, an aged crone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Abram Siddiqui was walking along the aisle between shrubs and conifers, checking that everything was in its proper place and everything clearly labelled. He was tall and sturdy, handsome like the majority of those from that part of the world where he was born, with a strong aquiline face rather softened by his black beard. For work he dressed like an English country gentleman, even though the Belgrave Nursery was in the heart of Victoria, and today he wore fawn-coloured cavalry twill trousers, a brushed cotton check shirt with dark green knitted tie, and a lighter green tweed jacket with leather pads on the elbows.
If half his mind was intent on checking that the full complement of cypresses, macrocarpas and thujas were in stock, the other half was thinking about his daughter Rabia. He was worrying about her and the sad disappointed life she led, and she so pretty and modest and quiet, when, turning the corner into the next aisle, the one between the ericas and the lavenders, he saw her coming towards him from the Warwick Way entrance. She was pushing a new pushchair, the grandest Abram had ever seen, a coach fit for a prince, but she looked rather small to be in charge of such a splendid equipage and such a big lusty boy. Rabia wore a long black skirt and grey blouse, a spotted black scarf tied round her head in such a way as to hide all her hair and cover the neckline of the blouse.
‘It is a whole week time since I’ve seen you, Father. Are you too busy for Thomas and me this morning?’
‘Come, my daughter,’ said Abram in Urdu, ‘we will take him into the hothouse and let him look at the tropical fish.’
Thomas crowed with delight at the fish, red and green and yellow-striped fish and blue fish sparkling like jewels, as they wove their way between the fronds of green weed and the pillars of artificial coral. Abram picked a red flower from a branch and gave it to him to hold, assuring Rabia that it would do him no harm if he put it in his mouth.
‘I was thinking of you before you came,’ he said to his daughter. ‘I worry that these people you work for will corrupt you. I worry that they are ungodly and immoral.’
He seemed to have guessed, as he so often did, at the problem which these days was often in her mind. But she was sure she was not yet ready to consult him, if she would ever be. Strange then that a man so sensitive should believe that his attempts to get her to marry again, to let him find her a husband, should be so wide of the mark. He took her to the nursery’s café, bought her a cup of coffee and an ice cream for Thomas, choosing a tub rather than a cornet because he liked children to be kept clean and tidy. Rabia tied a huckaback napkin round Thomas’s neck and fed him the ice cream by means of a silver sugar spoon.
Her father moved on to a different tack. ‘Rabia, you know you don’t have to work. I am not a rich man but I am what they call in UK comfortably off. You come home and stay at home and I can keep you. It would be a pleasure to me.’
She was looking at Thomas and he saw such love and yearning come into her eyes that he had his answer. ‘I know you have suffered. There is no worse suffering for a woman than to lose her children, but only marry and there will be more children. Yes, my daughter, more children will come. There is a good man who works for me here. No, he is not in today, he is driving one of the vans. He is your auntie Malia’s sister-in-law’s brother; he has seen you and admired you as any sensible man must. And he is not your cousin, or even a relative, so your fears – mind you, I don’t believe in them – of something to do with a gene mix-up, that you could forget. I will speak to him for you and a meeting can soon be arranged. Rabia, you are thirty years old but you look no more than twenty-one or -two …’
She let him finish. She removed the ice cream from Thomas’s mouth with a cleansing wipe, took another to clean his hands, and kissed the top of his head before she answered. In a calm, quiet voice she said, ‘I cannot go through that again, Father. You are right about the suffering and I can’t go through it again. As for living with you, you are so kind, you always are, but it won’t do. I am best with children, I love these children, and you are best on your own with your nice friends and your good neighbours.’
‘Come then,’ he said, and she knew he had given up – but only for now. It would begin again next time she saw him. ‘I have customers to attend to.’
They were mostly women. The older ones wore Knightsbridge clothes and Bond Street jewellery, their hair dyed the colour of freshly squeezed orange juice or like the mahogany in Lucy’s drawing room. The young women all looked like Lucy Still in tight jeans made for teenagers, white T-shirts and shoes with four-inch heels. One had taken hers off, put them in the trolley she was pushing towards ‘Bulbs and Corms’ and was hobbling along barefoot. Thomas had fallen asleep, thumb in mouth. Rabia pushed him home, walking slowly, enjoying the sunshine.
Montserrat was outside the house, standing beside her car, talking to Henry. On the ground between them was an object that looked to Rabia like a cross between a boat and a coffin. Henry told her it was his and neither a coffin nor a boat but a box to go on a car roof rack and contain extra baggage or camping equipment.
‘Montsy’s going to buy it.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Montserrat. ‘That depends if the price is right. Why you want to get rid of it is another thing.’
‘Because I had to get rid of my car.’
‘You fasten it to the roof rack on your car and put stuff in it and drive off somewhere,’ said Rabia. ‘Where are you going, Montsy? You go to your mother in Spain?’
‘Not this time. I’ll be skiing in France and I’ll put my skis in it and all the gear I’ve bought. You wait till you see my new ski pants.’
Bought with the money Lucy gave her and Rad Sothern gave her, Rabia thought uncomfortably. A twenty-pound note here and a fifty-pound note there. Of course she said nothing. It wasn’t her business – unless it was her business and her moral dut
y to say something to someone. Back to that again. It always came back to that, however much she argued with herself.
‘You want to come to a lunchtime meeting of the Saint Zita Society?’ said Montserrat. ‘It’s an extraordinary general meeting and it’s to be in the Dugong’s garden so you can bring Thomas and when Henry starts asking an inflated price like he’s bound to, you can take my side and support me.’
‘Lucy would be angry.’
‘Lucy won’t know.’
Rabia smiled and began dragging the heavy pushchair up the steps of number 7. Henry ran up to give her a hand, calling back to Montserrat that he couldn’t take less than seventy-five pounds.
‘You’re joking. It’s about a hundred years old.’
‘If you don’t mind, I paid two hundred for it in 2005.’
‘Fifty,’ said Monserrat.
‘Seventy.’
‘Fifty-five.’
‘Now look who’s joking.’
June appeared at the front door of number 6 and, in spite of the rheumatism, tripped down the steps like someone half her age. ‘You two are making as much noise as a gang of yobs in Brixton. This is supposed to be one of the most select neighbourhoods not just in the UK but in the Western world. HSH has got a headache.’
‘I can give you a couple of paracetamol for her but it’ll cost you,’ said Henry, laughing.
June ignored him. ‘We shall have to raise this question of street noise at the meeting. I’ll put it on the agenda.’
Henry put the roof box inside the basement door of number 11 and then they all trooped off to the Dugong. Thea, Jimmy and Beacon, both once more on the wagon because Mr Still would want fetching from the City at four and Dr Jefferson from Great Ormond Street at five, were already there, drinks for all already bought. In October it wasn’t warm enough to sit outside, so they crowded round the biggest table in the saloon bar and June read the minutes of the last meeting, adding that this was an extraordinary general meeting called because of the full agenda.