by Ruth Rendell
As a little thank you, he read, for being a Peach customer we’d like to give you 10 free calls.
He was very pleased, not so much for the cost-saving as for the care for him this showed. In his world not many people had cared for him; Dr Mettage perhaps, and Dr Jefferson had been good to him. But he felt that Peach really cared. After all, he hadn’t asked for these messages, this kindness, it had just come, preceded by the little tune. Peach loved him.
Joe Chou helped Rocksana move in and stayed the night but didn’t apparently intend to live here with her.
‘The Princess wouldn’t have it anyway,’ said June. Her employer had never taken a stand on any moral issue but it did no harm to tell the new tenant the rules, formulated by herself. ‘Not unless the rent goes up fifty per cent,’ she added.
‘Joe’s just got himself a flat over the restaurant. He wouldn’t want to give that up.’
June got up at two o’clock in the morning to check on the will. The Princess had been in bed for five hours, Rocksana for perhaps one. Creeping up the top flight every quarter-hour in the hope of the crack of light under Rocksana’s bedroom door going out, she had made three such journeys, dragging her rock-bound right arm behind her until she met total darkness. It was nearly three when she entered the drawing room and looked for the will. Either the old one or a new one was what she expected but what she found was no will at all. Impossible to tell whether a fresh one had been made. Possibly it had and Mr Brookmeadow had taken it away with him to have a copy made; possibly a copy would come back. But perhaps the old will had not been superseded, June was still the legatee, and Mr Brookmeadow had suggested there was no point in her keeping it at number 6 Hexam Place when it would be more secure with its fellow in the safe in Northumberland Avenue. There was no knowing.
If there was a new will Mrs Neville-Smith had been one of the witnesses but who was the other? Not Zinnia. She had gone long ago and would have been up at number 4 cleaning for Sohrab and Lambda by the time Mr Brookmeadow arrived. There was of course a third possibility. A new will could have been made with June no longer the sole heir but with Rocksana and even possibly Zinnia herself as additional beneficiaries. Humbled by stress and anxiety, June thought she wouldn’t much object to that, she was not entirely averse to sharing, she could bear it. In a rather more resigned frame of mind, she went back to bed.
In spite of his being a paediatrician, ninety-nine per cent of whose patients were under the age of ten, most of the residents of Hexam Place called for Dr Jefferson when in need of medical attention. He lived in the same street, he was a doctor and everyone agreed he was very nice. Before the separation from his wife, Preston Still had regularly rung his doorbell (or sent someone else to do it) when one of his children had a temperature or a rash; Damian Philemon phoned when he or Roland had a sore throat and Bibi Lambda asked for a repeat prescription for her contraceptive pill. Even Simon Jefferson, the mildest of men, remarked to Jimmy that this was a bit much.
He never said no and wouldn’t have considered saying no when June presented herself at his front door and told him she had found the Princess unconscious on the bathroom floor. Dr Jefferson accompanied her back to number 6 where Rocksana told him, to everyone’s surprise, that she had attempted the FAST test for stroke, examining the Princess’s face for distortion, attempting to get her to raise her arm and to speak, none of which had results.
‘Best call an ambulance. It looks like a stroke, in which case time is of the essence.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Princess never regained consciousness. June could see little point in visiting her when she wouldn’t know if anyone was there or not but Rocksana thought otherwise.
‘They, like, know you’re there,’ she said to Zinnia, ‘even if they can’t hear or speak.’
She went every day and sat by the Princess’s bed. June was made very uneasy. She hunted through the medicine chest in the Princess’s bathroom and seemed to recall a bottle of sleeping pills that had been there for at least twenty years but was there no longer. A search of Rocksana’s flat revealed neither the pills nor the bottle but June put this down to Rocksana’s cunning. Three days after she had been admitted to the hospital the Princess had a second stroke and died. Rocksana wept bitterly. June put on the Princess’s mink coat and a hat made of lesser quality fur because the weather was still very cold, and walked up to number 3.
Doing this took a good deal of nerve. It was only knowing that a fortune might be at stake that kept June to her resolve. Dr Jefferson was a doctor, he lived in the same street, he was famously kind and easy-going. He would listen. But she was afraid. Her mouth went dry as she rang the front doorbell. The butter-coloured Lexus was parked at the kerb, so there was no escape now. He was there.
Jimmy was there too. It was he who answered the door. He didn’t exactly ask her what she wanted but as good as.
‘Oh, hi, June. What brings you here?’
‘That’s for Dr Jefferson’s ears only,’ said June in a very stiff but hoarse tone.
‘Sounds like you’ve got a bad cold. Maybe you shouldn’t be out.’
June made no reply. It was the first time she had ever been inside the house. Through the half-open drawing-room door she could see the place was very elegantly furnished, so without waiting for Jimmy to show her the way, she went in there and sat down on the kind of chair she thought of as French, with curly gilded arms and legs and red silk upholstery. The sitting down was not entirely a gesture of defiance aimed at Jimmy but also because she feared her legs were about to give way from nerves.
Dr Jefferson kept her waiting only two minutes. He wore a sympathetic look, a gentle half-smile, said, ‘I was sorry to hear about the Princess. I’m afraid you’ll feel it deeply.’
‘Yes, well – yes, of course I do. We’d been together sixty years.’
‘Dear oh dear, that’s a long time. Now what can I do for you?’
June came out with it bluntly. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have done it at all. ‘I want to know if we can have a post-mortem.’
‘A post-mortem? And why would you want that?’
Always one to fall back on drama in difficult situations, June said, ‘I suspect foul play.’
‘I am not hearing this,’ said Dr Jefferson in a very cold voice.
Outside the half-open door Jimmy heard her on the subject of the pill bottle, the Princess’s good health right up to the minute she was found lying on the floor, Rocksana’s arrival at number 6 and her ‘worming her way into the Princess’s affections’.
‘I think she persuaded the Princess to change her will. Why else would Mr Brookmeadow have come to tea? And it would have been changed in Miss Castelli’s favour. You’ll see.’
June had more to say but her voice had faltered and she put her left hand up to her mouth, for Dr Jefferson’s face had changed. He had gradually come to look quite different, to look in fact like another person. Now he was no longer the kindly genial man who was the favourite of mothers at Great Ormond Street Hospital and whom their children seemed to prefer over their own fathers, but the just judge, stern and uncompromising. Two deeply etched parallel lines appeared between his eyebrows and his thin lips were thrust forward. Jimmy, within earshot but unable to see through door and wall, gleefully awaited the explosion. None came.
Dr Jefferson spoke very quietly. ‘It’s best to give you the benefit of the doubt, June. You have lost your employer and closest friend, you are plainly not well yourself. As a doctor, I suggest you go home to bed, have a good rest and let’s hear no more of this nonsense.’
With that, half of it inaudible, Jimmy had to be content. He appeared at the appropriate time to show June out, saying as he watched her make her way unsteadily down the path, ‘Didn’t I say you shouldn’t be out with that cold you’ve got?’
Back in the kitchen Dex was waiting patiently for Jimmy’s return to give him his money. Jimmy had absent-mindedly put the envelope in his pocket. He retrieved it and handed it
over, rather relieved that when Dex thanked him he didn’t also manage one of his spine-chilling smiles. Careful to lock the back door before leaving to drive Dr Jefferson to Great Ormond Street, Jimmy was back again after about a quarter of an hour. It was too early for lunch but Jimmy felt in need of a snack. The knife block had six slots, the bread knife occupying the one at the top on the left. The slot on the right, which a smaller, very sharp fruit knife usually occupied, was empty. Strange, thought Jimmy, but not particularly sinister. It must be all these appearances of that woman on TV, the one who found the knife that killed Thea in her bag, getting to him. That couldn’t be the missing one, could it? No, because he was sure that slot had been filled yesterday.
He began cutting bread, spreading the slice with butter and laying a thick wedge of Cheddar on it. Eating drove the knife question from his mind and he concentrated on missing Thea.
Putting off her resignation from day to day, Rabia decided she must postpone the writing of that letter no longer. It was Mr Still who had interviewed her and engaged her but Mr Still was gone, a divorce was imminent, and it seemed that Lucy alone was her employer now. Of this she wasn’t quite sure but surely it was Lucy to whom her notice should be given. Mr Still lived somewhere else and she didn’t know how to find out where. Lucy would know, of course, but Lucy would want to know why she asked. Montserrat might know; Rabia was reluctant to ask her. So she put it off from day to day.
There was another reason for this postponement, she knew that. While she told no one in the Still family that she would be leaving, she was still Thomas’s nanny, as close to Thomas as ever. Secretly, privately, she could go on telling herself what she knew was true, that she was Thomas’s best-beloved, of all the people in his world he loved her best. Once she was gone, once she had announced that she was going, this would cease to be true. It would have to cease, for Thomas’s own sake. He must not be made unhappy by her departure. If this were possible, he must be disturbed as little as could be by her leaving him. Rather to her surprise, when she put this into words – to herself only, silently to herself – she began to cry. Rabia had believed that her tears when Nasreen died were the last she would ever shed. And so it had been until now.
She was crying for a child who wasn’t dead, who wouldn’t die until he was an old, old man, and who wasn’t her own. She must lose him, there was no escaping that. She must lose him, marry Khalid and maybe have children of her own. Drying her tears, she took out from the dressing-table drawer in her bedroom the pad of writing paper she had bought specially for this purpose and the envelope with the first-class stamp already stuck on it, and settled down to write her resignation to Lucy. It took her a very long time. The three children slept. Rabia wrote one draft after another before she was satisfied.
The letter in its envelope but destined to lie on her dressing table for several days before she would give it to Lucy, she went into Thomas’s room and sat for a long time by his bed, watching him while he slept.
June too was crying. It was only natural, she told herself between sobs, that she should weep for the Princess, her long-term employer but also her dearest friend. They had been inseparable, each other’s confidante, knowing each other’s business inside out. Gussie also cried or howled, searching the house for his dead mistress, although during his lifetime the Princess had scarcely been into any room but the one where she slept and the one where she watched television. He searched and paced and howled and wasn’t much comforted by June’s hugging him and saying, ‘It’s just as bad for me, you know.’
But it wasn’t. June confessed to herself after a day of this that she was crying not for her loss but because Dr Jefferson had rebuked her. If the reproof had come from someone well known for rudeness and shortness of temper she would have thought little of it, but from a man famous for his mildness and easy-going kindness to all and sundry, that was scarcely to be borne. So she cried. Her only comfort came from the sympathy meted out to her by the neighbours who, calling to express their sympathy, recognised genuine grief in her swollen eyes and tear-stained cheeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
You had the funeral and then the people who had been to it all gathered in the drawing room and Mr Brookmeadow read the will. This belief of June’s was grounded in her sporadic reading of sensation literature. The first of February was the day of the funeral and she was planning ahead. The dining room should be allotted to the solicitor who would sit at the head of the table while those considered particularly interested took the seats along the sides. Rocksana Castelli, June thought, Zinnia St Charles. Did witnesses have to be there? She might invite Damian but would he come? Most unlikely. His own civil partnership now was to take place two days later and though this hardly precluded attendance at the funeral of a neighbour, she thought that, if challenged, he would plead pressure of personal business.
Dr Jefferson’s unprecedented outburst at her suggestion of homicide on the part of Rocksana, on the part of anyone in fact, had shocked her to the core. Had shocked her so much that she felt it in her bones, so that when she kept her appointment to have the plaster removed from her arm, she asked the doctor if the pain she felt all over her was the onset of arthritis.
‘At your age,’ he said not very pleasantly, ‘everyone has some arthritis.’
It was nice getting her arm back but not enough to make her forget Dr Jefferson’s behaviour. His explosion had frightened her, the way few demonstrations of anger could have. Her erstwhile belief she now saw as mistaken, a natural consequence of suffering bereavement. That was why she invited Rocksana to be present at the will-reading. If Rad’s girlfriend now inherited the Princess’s house and fortune she had decided she would not contest it.
Burns’s contention that the best-laid plans of mice and men often go wrong is usually taken to mean that the plans are good and their destruction bad but in June’s case the reverse was true. On the morning of the funeral she received a letter. It told her that under the will of HSH the Princess Susan Angelotti, known as Hapsburg, apart from minor bequests to Mrs Zinnia St Charles and Miss Matilda Still, her goddaughter, the residue of her estate, being the house known as number 6 Hexam Place SW1 and the sum of four million, six hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds, mainly in stock and bonds, was to pass to her, June Eileen Caldwell. There were some subdued congratulations and expressions of his pleasure in the sad circumstances and he was hers sincerely, John Brookmeadow.
June read it again. She wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. The will had been taken out of that drawer only to be remade with the inclusion of Zinnia’s name and that of the little minx Matilda Still, and someone else had witnessed it. For the first time in many years, certainly for the first time since her death, June felt affection amounting to love for the Princess that brought tears to her eyes. She was glad that, admittedly to impress the neighbours and not to look mean, she had ordered a huge bouquet of white lilies, white freesias, narcissi and gypsophila. The florist brought it as she was reading Mr Brookmeadow’s letter for the third time and it joined the mountain of flowers piled up in the hall. June, who was still in her dressing gown, went up to her bedroom and dressed herself in the deepest black she had, selecting the Princess’s mink coat to wear over it. After all, it was hers now, along with everything else.
Matilda received few letters. Rabia had become the personal postman at number 7 since Mr Still’s departure and it was she who brought Mr Brookmeadow’s letter upstairs. Matilda was eating Coco Pops in the nursery with Hero.
‘You can read it.’
‘ “Please, Rabia, will you read this letter?” ’ Rabia corrected her. ‘If you want me to read it that’s what you say.’
‘Oh, OK. Please, Rabia, will you read this letter?’
A lawyer was writing, telling Matilda that the Princess had left her five thousand pounds. If Rabia had ever heard the words ‘To him that hath shall be given’, she would now have thought them apt and true. But they came from the wrong holy book and she did her best to a
void resentful or envious thoughts.
‘I didn’t know she was my godmother,’ was all Matilda said for five minutes. Then, ‘I shall add it to my running away money. I’ve probably got enough now to start my packing.’
Rabia said nothing. She didn’t believe in the running away scheme and the chances that Matilda would be allowed to get her hands on so large a sum were remote in the extreme. Holding Thomas by the hand, she took the girls downstairs to wait for the school bus. It was rather less cold, another pale grey day. The bus came at the same time as Mr Still’s car. Hero called out, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ and Rabia marvelled, not for the first time, as the little girl ran to him, that children love bad fathers as much as good ones, their need for a parent is so great.
Mr Still went up the steps to the front door, rather unwillingly holding Thomas’s hand, and once she had seen the girls on to the bus, Rabia followed them. Opening the front door, she asked him if he had had the letter she had eventually posted. His shrug and shake of the head told her that he hadn’t. It was lost, she supposed. She would have to write it again, resign again. Should she tell him about the Princess’s legacy? Perhaps.
‘The Princess has left Matilda some money.’
‘Really? I didn’t know she knew Matilda.’
‘She was her godmother,’ said Rabia, although she knew very little about what this meant. Up in the nursery, she showed Mr Still the solicitor’s letter.
‘Good heavens,’ he said, once more shaking his head. ‘I can’t attend to that now. I’ve some important documents to pick up.’ He cast a perfunctory glance at his little son. ‘Is that a bruise on his forehead?’
Rabia didn’t say it was where his sister Hero had hit him with a tooth mug. No need to make more trouble when she could deal with what already existed. Anyway, she would soon be gone. With Thomas on her knee she watched Mr Still from the window while he ran to the Audi, his arms full of papers. On the other side of the street, that gardener man called Dex, who sometimes came to the garden centre, was also watching him.