by Ruth Rendell
But perhaps Maud wouldn’t be able to gossip or write letters much longer. Stanley fingered the phial in his pocket. She often said it was only her tablets that kept her alive and maybe it wouldn’t be more than a few days when her system reacted violently to a concentration of saccharine instead of its usual anticoagulant intake.
Stanley walked home slowly, stopping outside the Jaguar showrooms to eye speculatively a dark red E-type.
4
“These tablets,” said Maud, “have a very funny taste. Sweetish. You’re sure they made up the prescription right, Vee?”
“It’s your regular prescription, Mother. The one old Dr. Blake wrote out before he retired. I took it to the chemist like I always do.” Vera picked up the carton and looked at it just to make sure Maud wasn’t taking vitamins or diuretics by mistake. No, it was the Mollanoid all right. Mrs. M. Kinaway, the label said, two to be taken three times a day, and there was the little smear the chemist’s thumb had made because he hadn’t waited for the ink to dry before handing it to her. “If you’ve got any doubts,” she said, “why don’t you let me make you an appointment with Dr. Moxley? They say he’s ever so nice.”
“I don’t want him. I don’t want young boys messing me about.” Maud sipped her breakfast tea and swallowed her second tablet. “I daresay I’ve made the tea too sweet, that’s what it is. Anyway, they’re not doing me any harm, whatever’s in them. To tell you the truth, I feel better than I have done for months, not so tired. There’s the postman now. Run down like a good girl and see if there’s anything from your auntie Ethel.”
The telephone bill and a letter with the Brixton postmark. Vera decided she wouldn’t open the bill until she got home. All right, that was being an ostrich, but why not? Ostriches might stick their faces in the sand but they did all right, galloping about in Australia or wherever it was and they didn’t get old before their time. I wouldn’t mind being an ostrich or anything, come to that, thought Vera as long as it was a change from being me.
She grabbed her coat from the hook in the hall and trailed up the stairs again, buttoning it as she went. Maud was up, sitting on the side of her bed buffing her fingernails with a silver-backed polisher.
“It’s only ten to,” said Maud. “You can spare the time to hear what Auntie Ethel has to say. You never know what news she’s got.”
What news did she ever have? Vera didn’t want to chance being late just to hear that Ethel Carpenter’s cyclamen had got five flowers on it or her landlady’s little niece had the measles. But she waited just the same, tapping her feet impatiently. Anything to keep the peace, she thought, anything to put Mother in a good mood.
“What d’you think?” said Maud. “Auntie Ethel’s going to move. She’s giving up her room and getting one near here. Listen to this: ‘I heard of a nice room going in Green Lanes just half a mile from you, dear, and popped over to see it on Saturday.’ Why didn’t she call, I wonder? Oh, here it is, she says—yes, she says, ‘I would have looked you up but I remembered you always have your rest in the afternoon and it seemed a shame to disturb you.’ Ethel always was considerate.”
“I must go, Mother.”
“Wait just one minute … ‘I wouldn’t want to come when Vee was out and you say she works Saturdays.’ Et cetera, et cetera … Oh, listen, Vee. ‘My landlady has got a student to take my room from April 10th, a Friday, and as she has been so good to me and I don’t want to put her out, and Mrs. Paterson in Green Lanes can’t take me till the Monday, I was wondering if Vee could put me up for that weekend. It would be such a treat to see you and Vee and have a nice long chat about old times….’ I’ll write back and say yes, shall I?”
“I don’t know, Mother.” Vera sighed and gave a hopeless shrug. “What will Stanley say? I wouldn’t want you and Auntie Ethel getting at him all the time.”
“It’s your house,” said Maud.
“That sort of thing now. That’s the very thing I mean. I’ll have to think about it. I must go.”
“I’ll have to let her know soon,” Maud called after her. “You put your foot down. Stanley’ll have to lump it.”
He was bound to have heard that, she thought, lying in bed in the next room as he no doubt was. The prospect of the ensuing battle excited her and she felt a surge of well-being comparable to that she used to feel long ago on Sunday mornings when she was looking forward to her weekly walk with George.
It was wrong, of course, to enjoy quarrelling. George would have told her to keep the peace at any price. But George had never lived in the same house as Stanley Manning and if he had he would have approved of her tactics. He would have seen the importance of rescuing Vera.
Maud went over to the dressing table and took her framed photograph of George out of a drawer. The slight sentimentality which the sight of it aroused in her was mixed with that exasperation she had so often felt for her husband when he was alive. Without a doubt she missed him, and if he could have been resurrected, would have welcomed him back but still she had to admit that in some ways he had been a drag on her, too weak, too scrupulous and much too inclined to let things drift. Ethel now was a different person altogether. Ethel had had to fight for things all her life, just as she had.
Maud put the photograph away. Nothing could have pleased her more than the news contained in the letter. With Ethel just down the road, and very likely popping in every day, the conquest of Vera would be accomplished in a matter of weeks. Ethel had such a grasp on things, such bustling strength. She would talk to Vera and when Vera saw that an outsider, an uninvolved observer, agreed with her mother, she would surrender and bow to circumstances with all George’s resignation.
Stanley would be left alone. It made Maud almost chuckle aloud to think of him dependent only on what he could earn for himself, cooking his own meals and sinking into the squalor which Maud felt was his natural habitat. Not that he would be allowed to occupy this house. He must find himself a room somewhere. But all that could be gone into once Vera was out of his influence. And then perhaps they could settle Ethel in here. Life had treated Ethel badly and it would be such a joy to give her a home of her own at last and see her smiling, maybe even weeping, with gratitude. Maud’s heart swelled, full of the pleasure of philanthropy.
The unemployment benefit which the Labour Exchange paid out to Stanley was a good deal in excess of the sum he had mentioned to Vera. He needed the surplus for himself, for he was spending a fortune on Shu-go-Sub as well as a fair amount on almost daily visits to the pictures to get out of Maud’s way. Hoping to see a considerable decline in her health by this time, he was bitterly disappointed to notice that rather than enfeebled, she seemed actually stronger, more vital looking and younger than before he had begun emptying Shu-go-Sub tubes into the Mollanoid carton. If only she would exert herself more, go for walks or carry heavy weights. Letter writing wasn’t likely to raise her blood pressure.
Entering the house that evening after a pleasant three hours watching a double horror bill, he was sure there was something going on. Those two were hatching a plot between them, perhaps the very thing he most dreaded, the enticement of Vera. They had stopped talking the minute he walked in the back door and Vera looked as if she had been crying.
“I’ve been tramping the streets since one,” he said, “looking for work.”
“Work’s not easy to come by when you’ve no qualifications,” said Maud. “Can’t they find you anything down at the Labour?”
Stanley took the cup of tea Vera handed him and shook his head gloomily.
“Something will turn up, dear.”
“Doesn’t matter to him one way or the other, does it?” said Maud. “He’s got someone to keep him. Have you given Vee that money you owe her?”
Since he had been substituting saccharine for Maud’s tablets, Stanley had moderated his attitude to her, calling her “Ma” and giving in over the television programmes, much as it went against the grain. But now his self-control snapped.
“You mind your o
wn business, Maud Kinaway. That’s a private matter between me and my wife.”
“What concerns Vera concerns me. That’s her money that she earned. Haven’t you ever heard of the Married Women’s Property Act? Eighteen seventy-something that went through Parliament. More than a hundred years a woman’s had a right to her own money.”
“I suppose you were sitting in the Ladies’ Gallery when it was passed,” said Stanley.
The blood rushed into Maud’s face. “Are you going to sit there and let him speak to me like that, Vera?”
Vera wasn’t sitting at all, but scuttling between the living room and the kitchen with plates of sausages and mashed potato. “I’m so used,” she said not quite truthfully, “to hearing you two bicker that it goes right over my head. Come and sit down, do. We want to be finished and cleared away before ‘Augusta Alley’ comes on.”
Prickly and resentful, Maud and Stanley sat down. Neither of them had done a stroke of work all day and their stored-up energy showed in their eyes and the zest with which they both fell on their food. Vera picked at a sausage and left half her mashed potato. It was no good, she hadn’t any appetite these days and she began to wonder if Maud hadn’t been right when she said she was heading for a nervous breakdown. Sleep didn’t refresh her and she was as tired in the mornings as when she went to bed. Having Auntie Ethel here for a long weekend wouldn’t help either, as Maud would want a great fuss made over her best friend’s entertainment, a clean cloth on the table every day, homemade cakes and then, of course, there would be the spare room to get ready.
Maud must have read her thoughts or else she hadn’t been thinking of anything else all day, for she said as she spooned up a second helping of potato, “Have you told Stanley yet?”
“I haven’t had a chance, have I? I only got in half an hour ago.”
“Told me what?” said Stanley.
Maud swallowed two tablets and made a face. “We’re having my friend Ethel Carpenter to stay here.”
“You what?” Stanley was much relieved, in fact, to hear that was all it was, for he had expected an announcement of Vera’s imminent departure. But now that the greater evil was at least temporarily postponed, the lesser seemed outrageous and he got up, flinging back his chair, and drawing himself up to his full height of five feet five.
“Only for two or three days,” said Vera.
“Only. Only two or three days. Here am I, up to my neck in trouble, no job, no peace in my own home, and you tell me I’ve got to have that old cow….”
“Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare use that foul language in my presence!” Maud was on her feet as well now, clutching her stick. “Ethel’s coming here and that’s that. Vera and me, we’ve made up our minds. And you can’t stop us. Vera could have you evicted tomorrow if she liked, turned out in the street with just the clothes you stand up in.”
“And I,” said Stanley, thrusting his face close up to hers, “could have you put in an old folks’ home. I don’t have to have you here, nobody can make me.”
“Criminal!” Maud shouted. “Jailbird! Pig!”
“Two can play at that game, Maud Kinaway. Mean old hag! Poisonous bitch!”
“Lazy no-good wastrel!”
Watching them from the end of the table, Vera thought that any minute they would come to blows. She felt quite calm. If they did strike each other, if they killed each other, she thought she would feel just the same, just as enervated, disembodied and empty of everything but a cold despair. With a dignity neither of them had ever seen in her before, she got up and said in the steady emotionless voice of a High Court judge:
“Be quiet and sit down.” They stopped and turned to look at her. “Thank you. It’s quite a change for either of you to do anything I ask. Now I’ve got something to say to you. Either you learn to live together like decent people …” Maud tapped her stick. “Shut up, Mother. As I said, either you behave yourselves in future or I’m going.” Vera turned away from the flash of triumph in Maud’s eyes. “No, Mother, not with you, and not off somewhere with Stanley either. I shall go away by myself. This house doesn’t mean a thing to me. I can earn my own living. God knows, I’ve had to do it long enough. So there you are. One more row and I pack my bags. I mean it.”
“You wouldn’t walk out on me, Vee?” Stanley whined.
“Oh, yes, I would. You don’t love me. If I hadn’t got a wage coming in and—and what I’ll get from Mother one day, I wouldn’t see you for dust. And you don’t love me either, Mother. You just love power and playing God and being possessive. All your life you’ve got your own way but for the once, and you can’t bear it that once somebody beat you at your own game.”
Vera paused for breath and stared into the two flabbergasted faces. “Yes, I’ve shaken you both, haven’t I? Well, don’t forget what I said. One more row and off I go. And another thing. We’ll have Auntie Ethel here but not because you want her, Mother. Because I do. She’s my godmother and I’m fond of her, and as you’re always pointing out, this is my house. Now we’ll have the television on. ‘Augusta Alley,’ and you can watch it in peace, Mother. Stanley won’t disturb you. He knows I mean what I say.”
After that she went out into the kitchen and, although she had won and silenced them, although they were now sitting sullenly in front of the screen, she laid her head on the table and began to sob. Her strength wasn’t like Maud’s, constant, implacable, insensitive, but intermittent and brief as her father’s had been. She doubted whether she had enough of it to make good her threat.
Presently, when she had stopped crying, she washed the tea things and went upstairs. There, in front of her dressing table, she had a good hard look at herself in the glass. Crying hadn’t helped. Of course, her face wasn’t usually as blotchy and patched with red, but the wrinkles were always there and the brown bruise shadows under her eyes, and the coarse white hairs among the sandy ones, dull pepper-coloured hair that had once been red-gold.
It was understandable that Stanley no longer loved her, that he only kissed her now during the act of love and sometimes not even then. There came into her mind the memory of those afternoons they had spent in the country, London’s country of commons and heaths, before they were married and when she had conceived the child that died before it could be born. It seemed like another life, and the man and the woman who had ached for each other and had clung together gasping in the long grass under the trees, other people.
Strange how important passion was to the young. Beside it, suitability and prudence and security went for nothing. How she and Stanley had laughed at James Horton with his bank account and his church membership and his modest ambition. He’d be a bank manager now, she thought, living in a fine house and married to a handsome woman in her early forties, while she and Stanley … She had wasted her life. If James saw her now he wouldn’t even recognise her. Miserably she stared at her own worn and undesirable reflection.
Downstairs, Maud and Stanley watched “Augusta Alley,” the old woman with a triumph that showed on her face in a perpetual smug smile, her son-in-law impassively, biding his time.
5
Everyone has his escape, his panacea, drugs, drink, tobacco or, more cheaply and innocently, the steady and almost mechanical habit of reading light fiction. Stanley liked a drink and a smoke when he could afford them and he had always been a reader, but the true and constant consolation of his life came from doing crossword puzzles.
Almost every paperback issue of crossword books as well as the fuller and fatter annuals reposed in his bedroom bookcase along with a much-thumbed copy of Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary. But the white squares in these books had long been filled in and, in any case, the solving of these problems afforded him less pleasure than completing a fresh puzzle each day, one which arrived virgin white on the back page of the Daily Telegraph and which, if the answers eluded him, could only be solved by waiting, sometimes almost breathlessly, for the following morning’s issue.
He had been doing the T
elegraph puzzle every day for twenty years and now there was no longer any question of not finishing it. He always finished it and always got it right. Once, some years back, he had found it necessary, like most crossword enthusiasts, to abandon the puzzle when it was half complete and take it up some hours later to find that the elusive clues had clarified during the interim. But even this small frustration had passed away. He would sit down With the paper—he never bothered to read the news—and generally every clue had been solved twenty minutes later. Then an immense satisfaction bathed Stanley. Self-esteem washed away his pressing problems, every worry was buried, sublimated in those interlocking words.
It was no sorrow to him that his wife and his mother-in-law showed not the slightest interest in this hobby of his. He preferred it that way. Nothing can be more irksome, more maddening, to the amateur of crosswords than the well-meaning idiot who, anxious to show off his etymological knowledge, demands from his armchair to be told how many letters in fifteen down or what makes you think four across is yelp and not bark.
Stanley had never forgotten George Kinaway’s efforts in this direction, his feebly hearty, “Haven’t you finished that puzzle yet?” and his groping determination to supply straightforward answers to clues whose fascination lay in their almost lunatic subtlety. How explain to such a fool as he that “One who is willing” (nine letters, five blanks, T, three blanks) is obviously Testatrix and not Volunteer? Or that “One way or the other, he is tops in the Moslem world” (three letters) is the palindrome Aga and not Bey?
No, those women knew their limitations. They thought it was a silly kid’s game—or said they did because it was all Greek to them—but at least they didn’t interfere. And these days Stanley needed his puzzles more than ever. The one high spot in his day was the half-hour, perhaps at lunch time, perhaps in the evening, when he could escape from his worries, and suddenly far away from Vera and her mother, lose himself in the intricacies or words and plays upon words.