One Across, Two Down

by Ruth Rendell

  Dr. Moxley didn’t ring the bell. He used the knocker and it made a tumultuous metallic clatter through the house. Maud turned over, sighing, as if she knew she had been reprieved. For a moment, watching her, Stanley thought it was all up with him. His plan had failed. But still she slept and still her hand hung limp over the side of the bed. Holding his hand to his chest, as if he feared his lurching, actually painful, heart would burst through his rib cage, Stanley went down to admit the doctor.

  He was a boyish-looking man with a shock of black hair, a stethoscope hanging round his neck.

  “Where is she?”

  “In here,” said Stanley, his voice throaty. “I thought it better not to move her.”

  “Really? I’m not a policeman, you know.”

  Stanley didn’t like that at all. He was beginning to feel sick. He shuffled into the room after the doctor, aware that his face was covered in sweat.

  Dr. Moxley knelt down on the floor. He examined the body of Ethel Carpenter and felt the back of her neck.

  “My mother-in-law,” said Stanley, “had a stroke four years back and …”

  “I know all that. I looked up Dr. Blake’s notes before I came out. Help me to lift her on to the couch.”

  Together they got the body on to the couch and Dr. Moxley closed her eyes.

  “Have you something to cover her with? A sheet?”

  Stanley couldn’t bear another moment’s delay.

  “Was it a stroke, Doctor?”

  “Er—yes. A cerebral thrombosis. Seventy-four, wasn’t she?”

  Stanley nodded. Ethel Carpenter, he remembered, had been a bit younger than that, three or four years younger. But doctors couldn’t tell, couldn’t tell could they? They couldn’t tell that precisely. Apparently they couldn’t.

  Now the doctor was doing what Stanley had longed for, getting a small pad out of his briefcase and a pen from his breast pocket.

  “What about that sheet, then?”

  “I’ll get it,” Stanley mumbled.

  “While you’re doing that I’ll write out the death certificate for you.”

  The sheets were kept in the linen cupboard in the bathroom. Stanley pulled one out, but, before he could go downstairs again the sickness overcame him, accompanied by a fresh outbreak of sweat, and he vomited into the washbasin.

  The first thing he saw when he came back into the lounge was Ethel Carpenter’s ringless left hand dropping from the couch. Christ, she was supposed to be a married woman… The doctor had his back to her and was writing busily. Stanley unfolded the sheet and draped it over the body, tucking the hand into its folds.

  “That’s right,” said Dr. Moxley more pleasantly. “This is an unfortunate business for you, Mr. Manning. Where’s your wife?”

  “At work.” Give me the certificate, Stanley prayed. For God’s sake, give it to me and go.

  “Just as well. You must tell yourselves that she’d had a long life, and certainly it was a quick and probably painless death.”

  “We can’t any of us go on forever, can we?” said Stanley.

  “Now you’ll need these.” Dr. Moxley handed him two sealed envelopes. “One is for the undertaker and the other you must take with you when you go to register the death. You follow all that?”

  Stanley wanted to say, I’m not stupid just because I don’t talk la-di-da like you, but instead he simply nodded and put the envelopes on the mantelpiece. Dr. Moxley gave a last inscrutable glance at the sheeted body and strode out, his stethoscope swinging. At the front door he stopped and said, “Oh, just one thing …”

  His voice was terribly loud, ringing as if he were addressing an audience instead of just one man. A cold shiver ran through Stanley, for the doctor’s expression was suddenly thoughtful. He looked like a man who has recalled some vital step he has omitted to take. Holding the door ajar, he said, “I didn’t ask whether you wanted burial or cremation.”

  Was that all? Stanley hadn’t thought of it either. He wished he dared ask the doctor to keep his voice down. In a tone so low that it was almost a whisper, he said, “Cremation. That was her wish. Definitely cremation.” Burn Ethel, destroy her utterly, and then there could never be any questions. “Why d’you want to know?” he asked.

  “In cases of cremation,” said Dr. Moxley, “two doctors are required to certify death. It’s the law. Leave it to me. I imagine you’ll be having Wood’s, the undertakers, and I’ll ask my partner…”

  “Dr. Blake?” Stanley said before he could stop himself.

  “Dr. Blake has retired from practice,” said Moxley a shade coldly. He gave Stanley a penetrating look, reminiscent of Mrs. Blackmore, and then he banged out of the house, crashing the front door.

  Enough to wake the dead, Stanley thought. It was a quarter to four. Time enough to get on to the undertakers when he had hidden Ethel’s body and dealt with Maud…. The corpse under the sheet might get by a doctor who had never seen Maud before, but it wouldn’t get by Vera. Vera must see Maud and, needless to say, she must see Maud dead.

  He pulled back the sheet and rolled it up. Then he put his hands under Ethel Carpenter’s arms and dragged her half on to the floor. He was a small thin man and her weight was almost too much for him. He stood up, gasping, and his eye lighted on the black handbag which stood beside the chair she had been sitting in. That would have to be hidden too.

  He opened the bag and a wave of something sweet and sickly tickled his nostrils. The scent came from a half-empty packet of violet cachous. Stanley vaguely remembered seeing these things, sweets used as breath fresheners, in glass bottles in sweetshops before the war when he had been a boy. Sometimes his mother used to buy them at the village shop or when they went into Bures for a day out. He thought they had long elapsed into disuse along with aniseed balls and Edinburgh rock and now their scent, assailing him unexpectedly, brought back his old home to him, the green river Stour where he had fished for loaches and miller’s thumbs, the village between a fold in the shadow hills, an ancient peace.

  He took out a violet cachou and held it between finger and thumb. A powerful perfume of violets and strong sugar came to him and he held it to his nose. Seventeen he’d been when he’d run away from them all, his parents, his brothers, the river and the fishing. Off to make his fortune, he’d told them, sick with envy and resentment of his two brothers, one halfway through a good apprenticeship, the other off to college. I’ll be back, he’d said, and I’ll be worth more than the lot of you. But he never had gone back and the last time he’d seen his father was at the Old Bailey where they’d sent for him to be present at his son’s trial.

  Things were different now. That fortune had taken nearly thirty years to make but now it was almost made. Just one more little step to take … And when he’d got the money, maybe next week, he’d go up to Bures in his car and surprise them all. “How about a spot of fishing?” he’d say to his brother, the master printer, and he’d bring out his shining new tackle. “Put it away,” he’d say to his brother, the secondary school teacher, when he felt in his pocket for a handful of silver. The envy and the resentment would be theirs then when his mother took him about to the neighbours boasting of her most successful son…

  Stanley put the cachou back in the packet and the vision dimmed. The only other thing of interest in the bag was a fairly thick wad of pound notes, bound with an elastic band. Ethel’s savings, he supposed, money to pay her new landlady advance rent.

  No need to destroy those with their dead owner.

  He was counting the notes when he heard a very faint sound above him, a stair creaking. His fantasies had temporarily calmed him but now the sweat started again all over his face. He took a step backwards to stand trembling like a small animal guarding its kill in the face of a larger advancing predator.

  The door opened and Maud came in, leaning on her stick.

  8

  Maud screamed.

  She didn’t stop to argue with Stanley or question him. What she saw before her told her exactly w
hat had happened. For twenty years she had been expecting her son-in-law to repeat the violence for which he had been sent to prison. It had been an elderly woman then; it was an elderly woman now. As before. Stanley had attacked an old woman for her money but this time he had gone further and had killed her.

  She raised her stick and advanced upon him. Stanley dropped the wad of notes and backed against the open piano. His hands, crashing down on the keys, struck a deep resounding chord. Maud made for his face, but Stanley ducked and the blow caught him agonisingly between his neck and his shoulder blade. He fell to his knees but staggered up again almost at once and hurled one of the green glass vases at her.

  It struck the wall behind Maud’s head and sent a shower of emerald slivers spraying across the room.

  “I’ll kill you for this!” Maud screamed. “I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

  Stanley looked around for more missiles, edging between the couch and the piano, but before he could snatch up the second vase, Maud struck him again, this time on the top of his head, and caught him as he staggered with a series of violent blows to the body. For a moment the room went black and he saw shapes whirling against the blackness, red squares and triangles and cascading stars.

  Maud would beat him to death. Horror and rage had given her an unexpected strength. Sobbing now, crouched in a corner, he turned his shoulder to receive the coming blow and as it struck him he seized the tip of the stick.

  It struggled in his grasp like something alive. Stanley pulled himself up on it, hand over hand. He was stronger than she, for he was male and thirty years younger, and he pulled himself to his feet until he was face to face with Maud.

  Still they didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. They had said it all in those four years and now all that was left was a crystallisation of mutual loathing. It throbbed in Maud’s breathless grunts and in Stanley’s hiss. Once again they might have been alone in the world or outside the world, on some unpeopled unfurnished plane where there was no emotion but hatred and no instinct but self-preservation.

  For each of them there was one desire, possession of the stick, and they concentrated on it in a savage, but for some moments, equal tug-of-war. Then Stanley, seeming to retreat from a very slightly advantageous position, kicked hard at Maud’s shins and with a cry she let the stick fall and rattle to the floor.

  Stanley picked it up and hurled it across the room. He made a leap for her throat, seizing her neck in both hands. Maud gave a hoarse gasp. As Stanley’s hard fingers dug into her carotid artery, she kneed him in the groin. They both cried out simultaneously, Stanley sobbing with pain, and fell apart.

  He jerked back on his heels, ready to spring again, but Maud was enfeebled without the stick she had depended on for years. Her arms flailing, she had nothing to break her fall, and as she toppled her head struck the jutting edge of the marble mantelpiece.

  Stanley crept over to her on all fours and looked down, his heart drumming, at the consummation of all his wishes.

  Vera didn’t cry or even speak at all when he broke the news to her but her face went very white. She nodded her head, accepting, as he told her how Maud had been in the lounge, just standing by the mantelpiece and looking at the wedding photograph, when suddenly she had felt bad, touched her forehead and fallen to the floor.

  “It was bound to happen sooner or later,” he ended.

  “I’ll go up and see her,” said Vera.

  “As long as it won’t upset you.” He had expected this, after all, and provided for it. He followed her up the stairs.

  Vera cried a little when she saw Maud.

  “She looks very peaceful.”

  “I thought that myself,” Stanley said eagerly. “She’s at peace now, I thought.”

  They spoke in whispers as if Maud could hear them.

  “I wish you’d rung me at the shop.”

  “I didn’t see any point in upsetting you. It wasn’t as if there was anything you could do.”

  “I wish I’d been here.” Vera bent over and kissed Maud’s cold forehead.

  “Come on,” said Stanley. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  He wanted to get her out of there as quickly as possible. The curtains were drawn and the room dim, only a wan filtered light playing on Maud’s features and the medicine store by the bed. But let Vera shift that pillow an inch and she’d see the gash on Maud’s head under the grey curls.

  “I suppose I ought to watch by the bed all night.”

  “You what?” said Stanley, alarmed, forgetting to whisper. “I never heard such rubbish.”

  “It used to be the custom. Poor mother. She loved me really. She meant things for the best. The doctor said it was another stroke?”

  Stanley nodded. “Come on down, Vee. You can’t do any good hanging about in here.”

  He made a pot of tea. Vera watched him, murmuring the same things over and over again as recently bereaved people do, how unbelievable it was but really only to be expected; how we must all die but still death came as a shock; how glad she was that her mother had had a peaceful end.

  “Let’s go into the other room. It’s cold out here.”

  “All right,” said Stanley. As soon as she saw the table she’d remember and start asking questions, but he was ready, for her. He picked up their two cups and followed her.

  “My God,” said Vera, opening the dining room door, “Auntie Ethel! I forgot all about Auntie Ethel.” She looked at her watch and sat down heavily. “It’s nearly six. She’s late. She was coming at five. Not like Auntie Ethel to be late.”

  “I don’t reckon she’ll come now.”

  “Of course she’ll come. She wrote and said definitely she was coming. Oh, Stan, I’ll have to break it to her. She’ll take it hard, she was ever so fond of Mother.”

  “Maybe she won’t come.”

  “What’s the good of saying that?” said Vera. “She’s late, that’s all. I couldn’t eat a thing, could you?”

  Stanley was famished. The mingled scents of the salmon and the chicken were working on his salivary glands and he felt sick with hunger, but he shook his head, putting on a maudlin expression.

  As well as hungry, he felt utterly exhausted and he couldn’t relax until he was out of danger. Vera had seen her mother and hadn’t been suspicious; there was no reason why she should go into the spare room where the body of Ethel Carpenter lay under the bed, concealed by the overhanging bedspread. So far so good.

  “I can’t think what’s happened to Auntie,” said Vera fretfully. “D’you think I ought to ring her landlady in Brixton?”

  “She’s not on the phone.”

  “No, but I could get on to the cafá on the corner and ask them to take a message.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” said Stanley. “You’ve got enough on your plate without bothering about Ethel Carpenter.”

  “No harm in waiting a bit longer, I suppose. What time are the undertakers coming in the morning?”

  “Half ten.

  “I’ll have to ring Doris and say I shan’t be in to work. Though God knows how they’ll manage with the other girl away on holiday.”

  Stanley almost choked over his tea. “I can see to the undertakers, Vee. You don’t want to be here when they come.”

  “I don’t want to … But my own mother, Stan!”

  “If you want to go in, you go in. You leave everything to me.”

  Further discussion was prevented by the doorbell ringing. Vera came back with Mrs. Blackmore who, though Stanley had imparted the news to no one, was by this time in full possession of the facts. Perhaps the doctor’s doorstep speech had been overheard by her. Whatever her source, she had, she told Vera, already passed on what she called the “sad tidings” to Mrs. Macdonald and various other cronies in the neighbourhood. So confident was she of her intuition in matters of this kind that she had not thought it necessary to wait for confirmation. A black coat thrown hastily over her floral overall, she announced that she had come to pay her last respe
cts to Mrs. Kinaway. In other words, she wanted to view the body.

  “Only yesterday I was having such a lovely talk with her over the fence,” she said. “Well, we’re all cut down like flowers, aren’t we?”

  Distastefully eyeing Mrs. Blackmore’s inquisitive rabbity face and her bunched hair, Stanley reflected that the only flower she reminded him of was the deadly nightshade. Still, better let them all come and gawp at Maud now than sneak in on her substitute at the undertakers’. A watchful guardian of his dead, ready to intercept any tender hand which might try to smooth back Maud’s hair, he went upstairs with the two women.

  Five minutes after Mrs. Blackmore, loudly declaring her willingness to do “anything I can, dear. Don’t hesitate to ask,” had gone, both Macdonalds arrived with a bunch of violets for Vera.

  “Sweet violets for mourning,” said Mrs. Macdonald sentimentally. Their scent reminded Stanley of Ethel Carpenter’s handbag. “We don’t want to see her, Mrs. Manning. We want to remember her as she was.”

  After that Vera and Stanley were left alone. It unnerved Stanley to realise that his wife was waiting for Ethel Carpenter but he could do nothing about that. Presently, without a word, Vera took away the cutlery that had been laid by her mother.

  “You’d better eat something,” she said.

  At ten o’clock when Ethel Carpenter still hadn’t come, she cleared the table and they went to bed. She had a last look at Maud from the doorway but she didn’t go in again. They put the light out and lay side by side, not touching, each wide awake.

  Vera fell asleep first. Every nerve in Stanley’s body was tingling. What was he going to do if Vera didn’t go into work in the morning? He’d have to make her go out. Perhaps he could get her to go and register the death…. That wouldn’t leave him much time for all he had to do.

  Soon after midnight he too slept and immediately, or so it seemed to him, began to dream. He was walking by the river, going home, and he had walked all the way from London like a tramp, his possessions in a bundle on his back. It seemed that he had been walking for years, but he was nearly there now. Soon he would reach the point where the river described a great meander and at this point his village would come into view, the church spire first and then the trees and the houses. He could see them now and he quickened his pace. For all his apparent poverty, the pack on his back and his worn-out shoes, he knew they would be glad to see him and welcome him home with congratulations and tears of joy.