One Across, Two Down

by Ruth Rendell

  “He may have been to prison just the once, but how many times would he have been back there if all those people he works for hadn’t been soft as butter? You know as well as I do he’s been sacked twice for helping himself out of the till.”

  Getting to her feet, Vera said, “I’m tired, Mother, I want to go to bed and I’m not staying here if all you can do is abuse my husband.”

  “Ah, Vee …” Maud put out a hand and managed to make her wrist quiver as she did so. “Vee, don’t be cross with me. I had such high hopes for you and look at you now, a poor old drudge tied to a man who doesn’t care whether you live or die. It’s true, Vee, you know it is.” Vera let her hand rest limply in her mother’s and Maud squeezed it tenderly. “We could have a lovely house, dear. We’d have fitted carpets and central heating and a woman in to clean every day. You’re still young. You could learn to drive and I’d buy you a car. We could go for holidays. We could go abroad if you like.”

  “I married Stanley,” said Vera, “and you always taught me marriage is for keeps.”

  “Vee, I’ve never told you how much I’ve got. If I tell you, you won’t tell Stanley, will you?” Vera didn’t say anything, and Maud, though seventy-four and for many years married herself, hadn’t yet learnt that it is no good telling secrets to a married person if you want them to remain secrets. For, no matter how shaky the marriage and how incompatible the partners, a wife will always confide other people’s confessions in her husband and a husband in his wife. “My money’s mounted up through the years. I’ve got twenty thousand pounds in the bank, Vera. What d’you think of that?”

  Vera felt the colour drain out of her face. It was a shock. Never in her wildest dreams had she supposed her mother to have half that amount, and she was sure it had never occurred to Stanley either.

  “It’s a lot of money,” she said quietly.

  “Now don’t you tell him. If he knew what I was worth he’d start thinking up ways to get rid of me.”

  “Please, Mother, don’t start that all over again. If anyone heard you they’d think you were going daft in the head. They would.”

  “Well, they can’t hear me. I’ll say good night now, dear. We’ll talk about it again tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Mother,” said Vera.

  She didn’t think any more about what her mother had said on the lines of taking her away from Stanley. She had heard it all before. Nor was she very much concerned that Maud suspected Stanley of murderous inclinations. Her mother was old and the old get strange ideas into their heads. It was silly and fantastic but it wasn’t worth worrying about.

  But she did wonder what Stanley would say when—and that would have to be when she was less tired—she told him how much money Maud had in the bank. Twenty thousand! It was a fortune. Still thinking about it, and thinking how even one-twentieth part of it would improve the house and make her lot so much lighter, Vera stripped off her clothes and rolled exhausted into bed.

  2

  Maud was an old woman with dangerously high blood pressure and one cerebral thrombosis behind her, but she wasn’t affected in her mind. The ideas she had that her son-in-law might kill her if he got the chance weren’t the fruit of senile maunderings but notions of human behaviour formed by Maud in her impressionable teens.

  She had gone into service at the age of fourteen and much of the talk in the kitchen and the servants’ hall had dealt with unscrupulous persons whom her fellow servants suspected of murder or the intention of murder for gain. Cook often insisted that the valet in the big house across the square would poison his master as soon as the time was ripe merely for the sake of the hundred pounds promised to him in the old man’s will, while the butler countered this with horrible tales of greedy heirs in the great families that had employed him. Maud listened to all this with the same receptive ear and the same gullibility as she listened to the vicar’s sermons on Sundays.

  It seemed that from the butler down to the tweeny, no servant was without a relative who at some time or another had not considered popping arsenic in a rich aunt’s tea. A favourite phrase in the servants’ hall, on the lines of Eliza Doolittle’s statement, was:

  “It’s my belief the old man done her in.”

  And it was Maud’s sincere belief that Stanley Manning would do her in if he got the chance. Enlightening Vera as to the extent of her fortune had been a temptation she hadn’t been able to resist, but when she awoke on the following morning she wondered if she had been unwise. Vera would very likely tell Stanley and there was nothing she, Maud, could do about it.

  Nothing, that is, to silence Vera. Much could perhaps be done to show Stanley that, though he might kill her, he wouldn’t profit from his iniquities. With these things uppermost in her mind, Maud ate the breakfast Vera brought to her in bed and when her daughter and son-in-law had left for work, got up, dressed and left the house. With the aid of her stick she walked the half-mile to the bus stop and went down into town to consult a solicitor whose name she had found in Stanley’s trade directory. She could easily have bought her own wool and seen to the servicing of her electric blanket at the same time and saved Vera’s feet, but she didn’t see why she should put herself out for Vera when the silly girl was being so obstinate.

  Back in the house by twelve Maud ate heartily of the cold ham, salad, bread and butter and apple crumble pie Vera had left her for her lunch and then she settled down to write her weekly letter to her best friend, Ethel Carpenter. Like most of the letters she had written to Ethel since she came to live in Lanchester Road, it dealt largely with the idleness, ill manners, bad temper and general uselessness of Stanley Manning.

  There was no one, Maud thought, whom she could trust like she could trust Ethel. Even Vera, blindly devoted to that good-for-nothing, couldn’t be relied on like Ethel who had no husband, no children and no axe to grind. Poor Ethel had only her landlady, owner of the house in Brixton where she occupied one room, and Maud herself.

  Ah, you valued a friend when you’d been through what she and Ethel had been through together, thought Maud as she laid down her pen. How long ago was it they’d first met? Fifty-four years? Fifty-five? No, it was just fifty-four. She was twenty and the under housemaid and Ethel, little, innocent seventeen-year-old Ethel, the kitchen maid at that sharp-tongued cook’s beck and call.

  Maud was walking out with George Kinaway, the chauffeur, and they were going to get married as soon as their ship came in. She had always been a saver, had Maud, and whether the ship came in or not they’d have enough to get married on by the time she was thirty. Meanwhile there were those delicious quiet walks with George on Clapham Common on Sundays and the little garnet engagement ring she wore round her neck on a bit of ribbon, for it wouldn’t have done at all to have it on her finger when she did out the grates.

  She had George and something to look forward to but Ethel had nothing. No one knew Ethel even had a follower of her own or had ever spoken to a man, bar George and the butler, until her trouble came on her and Madam turned her out of the house in disgrace. Ethel’s aunt took her in and everyone treated her like dirt except Maud and George. They weren’t above going to see her at the aunt’s house on their evenings off, and when the child came it was George who persuaded the aunt to bring it up and George who contributed a few shillings every week to its maintenance.

  “Though we can ill afford it,” said Maud. “Now if she’d only stop being a little fool and tell me who the father is …”

  “She’ll never do that,” said George. “She’s too proud.”

  “Well, they do say that pride goeth before a fall and Ethel’s taken her fall all right. It’s our duty to stick by her. We must never lose touch with Ethel, dear.”

  “If you say so, dear,” said George, and he got Madam to take Ethel back just as if she were a good girl without a stain on her character.

  Those were hard days, Maud thought, leaning back her head and closing her eyes. Twelve pounds a year she got until the Great War came and made peop
le buck up their ideas. Even when the master raised her wages it was hard going to get a home together and in the end it was George’s good looks and nice manners that gave them their start. Not that there had ever been anything wrong between him and Madam—the very idea!—but when she died George was in her will, and with the two hundred and fifty he got and what Maud had saved they’d bought a nice little business down by the Oval.

  Ethel always came to them for her holidays and when Vera was born Ethel was her godmother. It was the least she could do for Ethel, Maud confided in George, seeing that she’d been deprived of her own daughter and wasn’t likely ever to get a husband of her own, second-hand goods as she was.

  What with George’s charm and Maud’s hard work the shop prospered and soon they could think themselves comfortably off. Vera was sent to a very select private school and when she left at the late (almost unheard-of) age of sixteen, Maud wouldn’t let her get a job or serve in the shop. Her daughter was going to be a lady and in time she’d marry a nice gentlemanly man, a bank clerk or someone in business—Maud never told people her husband kept a shop. She always said he was “in business”—and have a house of her own. Meanwhile she gave Vera all the money she wanted within reason for clothes and once a year they all went down to Brayminster-on-Sea—dear old Bray, as they called it—and stayed at a very genteel boarding-house with a view of the sea. Sometimes Ethel went with them and she was just as pleased as they when her goddaughter found favour in the sight of the boarding-house keeper’s nephew, James Horton.

  James had the very job Maud envisaged as most desirable in a son-in-law. He worked in the Brayminster branch of Barclay’s Bank, and when during the winter months he occasionally came up to London and took Vera on the river or to the theatre matináe, Maud smiled on him and began discussing with George what they could do for the young couple when they fixed the day. A deposit on a house and two hundred for furniture was Ethel Carpenter’s recommendation and Maud thought this not unreasonable.

  Four years older than Vera, James had been a petty officer in the Royal Navy during the war. He had a nice little sum on deposit at the bank, was a dutiful son and churchgoer. Nothing could be more suitable.

  Maud had old-fashioned ideas and thought young people should only be allowed to know each other if they had been properly introduced or if their parents were old friends. It was with horror, therefore, that she learned from Mrs. Campbell, the wife of the fishmonger down the road, that Vera had been seen about in the company of the young barman at the Coach and Horses whom, Mrs. Campbell alleged, she had met at a dance.

  It was all George’s fault, Maud told Ethel. If she had had her way, Vera would never have been allowed to go to that dance. She had tried to put her foot down but for once George had asserted himself and said there was no harm in Vera going with a girl friend and what could be more respectable than the Young Conservatives’ annual ball?

  “I’m sure I don’t know what James will say when he hears about it,” Maud said to Vera.

  “I don’t care what he says. I’m sick of James, he’s so boring. Always on about going to bed early and getting up early and saving money and keeping oneself to oneself. Stanley says you’re only young once and you might as well enjoy yourself. He says money’s there to spend.”

  “I daresay he does when it’s someone else’s. A barman! My daughter sneaking out with a barman!” Although she sometimes permitted George to enjoy a quiet pint in the Bunch of Grapes with Mr. Campbell on Friday nights, Maud had never in her life set foot in a public house. “Anyway, it’s got to stop, Vee. You can tell him your mother and father won’t allow it.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” said Vera, who, though her father’s daughter in looks and generally in temperament, had inherited a spark of her mother’s spirit. “You can’t stop me. You’re always on about me getting married but how can I get married when I never meet any men? Girls can’t meet men when they don’t go out to work.”

  “You met James,” said Maud.

  Afterwards she wasn’t sure which was the worst moment of her life, the time when Mrs. Campbell told her Stanley Manning had served two years for robbery with violence or the time when Vera said she was in love with Stanley and wanted to marry him.

  “Don’t you dare talk of marrying that criminal!” Maud screamed. “You’ll marry him over my dead body. I’ll kill myself first. I’ll put my head in the gas oven. And I’ll see to it you won’t get a penny of my money.”

  The trouble was she couldn’t stop Vera meeting him. For a time nothing more was said about marriage or even an engagement but Vera and Stanley went on seeing each other and Maud nearly worried herself into a nervous breakdown. For the life of her, she couldn’t see what Vera saw in him.

  In all her life she had only known one man she could fancy sharing her bed with and by this yardstick she measured all men. George Kinaway was six feet tall with classic Anglo-Saxon good looks apart from his weak chin, while Stanley was a little man, no taller than Vera. His hair was already thinning and always looked greasy. He had a nut-brown face that Maud prophesied would wrinkle early and shifty black eyes that never looked straight at you. Well aware of who wore the trousers in the Kinaway household, he smiled ingratiatingly at Maud if ever he met her in the street, greeting her with an oily, “Good morning, Mrs. Kinaway, lovely morning,” and shaking his head sadly when she marched past him in cold silence.

  She wouldn’t have him in the shop or the flat above it and she consoled herself in the knowledge that Stanley worked in his bar every evening. The main disadvantage of Vera not having a job was that she was at liberty to meet Stanley during the day, and barmen work peculiar hours, being free for most of the morning and half the afternoon. But Maud thought that “anything wrong,” by which she meant sexual intercourse, only ever took place between ten and midnight—this belief was based on her own experience, although in her case she regarded it as right and proper—and it was during those two hours that Stanley was most busily occupied. It was with horror and near-incredulity, therefore, that she learnt from a weeping Vera that she was over two months pregnant.

  “Poor Ethel all over again,” sobbed Maud. “That such a disgraceful thing should happen to my own child!”

  But foolish and wicked as Vera had been, she mustn’t be allowed to suffer as Ethel had suffered. Vera should have her husband and her house and a decent home for her baby. Vera should be married.

  Instead of the big wedding Maud had dreamed of, Vera and Stanley were married quietly with only a dozen close relatives and friends as guests and they went straight off home to the little terraced house in Lanchester Road, Croughton. There was little Maud could do to humiliate Stanley but she had seen to it that when she and George put up the money for the house, the deeds were in Vera’s name and Stanley was made to understand that every penny must be paid back.

  They had been married three weeks when Vera had a miscarriage.

  “Oh my God,” said Maud at the hospital bedside, “why ever were we so hasty? Your father said we should wait a bit and he was right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Three weeks we should have waited …”

  “I’ve lost my baby,” said Vera, sitting up in bed, “and now you’d like to take my husband away from me.”

  When she was well again, Vera took a job for the first time in her life to pay back the money she owed her parents. For Maud was adamant. She didn’t mind giving Vera a cheque now and then to buy herself a dress or taking her out and giving her a slap-up lunch, but Stanley Manning wasn’t getting his hooks on her money. He must pull up his socks, make a decent living and then Maud would think again….

  As soon as she realised this would never happen, she set out to get Vera away from him, a plan which was far more tenable now she actually lived in the same house with her daughter. She pursued it in two ways: by showing her how difficult her present life was, making it even more difficult and maintaining an atmosphere of strife: and by holding out the inducements
of an alternative existence, a life of ease and peace and plenty.

  So far she had met with little success. Vera had always been stubborn. Her mother’s daughter, Maud thought lovingly. The little bribes and the enticing pictures she had painted of life without Stanley hadn’t made a chink in Vera’s armour. Never mind. The time had come to put the squeeze on. It hadn’t escaped Maud’s notice that Vera had turned quite pale at the mention of that twenty thousand pounds. She’d be thinking about that now while she stood in that dreadful place, shoving re-texed, moth-proofed coats into polythene bags. And tonight Maud would play her trump card.

  Thinking about it and the effect it would have made her sigh contentedly as she laid her head back against the pillows and switched on the second bar on the electric fire with her good foot. Vera would realise that she meant business and Stanley … Well, Stanley would see it was useless getting any ideas about helping his mother-in-law out of this world.

  Funny, really. Stanley wanted to get rid of her and she meant to get rid of Stanley. But she was going to get in first. She had him by the short hairs. Maud smiled, closed her eyes and fell at once into deep sleep.

  3

  Of the fifty motorists who pulled in for petrol at the Superjuce garage that day only five got service from Stanley. He didn’t even hear the hooters and the shouts of the half-dozen out of the other forty-five who bothered to wait. He sat with his back to them in his little glass booth, dreaming of the twenty thousand pounds Maud had in the bank and which Vera had told him about at breakfast.

  When George Kinaway had died, Stanley had waited excitedly for the contents of the will to be made known to him. He could hardly believe his ears when Vera told him there was no will, for everything had been in her mother’s name. Impatient like most people of his kind, he prepared for another long bitter wait and his temper grew sourer.