by Ruth Rendell
Zillah put the phone down and looked out of the window. Jerry was standing at the entrance to the underground car park. She rushed out of the flat and down in the lift but when she came out into Great College Street he’d gone. He must have put his car into the car park. She ran down the slope and into the depths. There was no sign of him and no dark blue BMW. Perhaps he’d been on foot because of the difficulties of parking. He could have got on a bus or walked to the tube while she was leaving the flat. What did he want? He could be thinking of blackmailing her. Five hundred a month or I tell all. But as far as she knew Jerry had never descended to blackmail in the past and wouldn’t begin with her. She went back across the road and, because she’d forgotten her key, had to get the porters to let her in.
The interviews over or canceled, it was time to fetch the children. Jims and Zillah drove down to Bournemouth on Saturday. It was a pleasant drive, for once the roads not congested and it wasn’t raining. They stopped for lunch at a smart new restaurant in Casterbridge, down by the river and the millrace, because Jims didn’t want to stay long enough to sample her mother’s cooking. Neither Eugenie nor Jordan seemed pleased to see them.
“Want to stay with Nanna,” said Jordan.
His sister patted him on the head. “We like the seaside. Children need fresh air, you know, not traffic plumes.” She meant “fumes” but no one corrected her.
“I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay a bit longer,” said Jims hopefully.
“I’m afraid there is, James.” Nora Watling was never afraid to speak her mind. “I’m tired. I need some peace. I’ve raised one family and I’m not in the business of raising another at my age.”
“No one wants us,” said Eugenie cheerfully. “It’s not very nice to be an unwanted child, is it, Jordan?”
Jordan didn’t understand but burst into howls just the same. When Jims looked at his watch at three-thirty and said they might as well be going, Nora was deeply offended. The children had had their lunch but she insisted on stuffing them with crisps, ice cream, and Black Forest cake before they left. On the way back to London, Jordan was sick all over Jims’s gray leather upholstery.
But once they were home, Eugenie had started at her new school, and a place in a fashionable “progressive” nursery been found for Jordan, peace reigned. It was possible to leave Abbey Gardens Mansions very discreetly by taking the lift down to the basement car park and driving out by the exit into a turning off Great Peter Street. A journalist would have had to be very vigilant and an early riser to spot Zillah taking the children to school at nine in the morning, the silver Mercedes slipping out by the back way. But there were no journalists. The media seemed to have lost interest. A couple of weeks went by and the newspapers ignored young Mr. and Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. Zillah had expected to be pleased about that if it happened, but now she began wondering what had become of the piece that nice Charles Challis was writing. She and Jims were going on their honeymoon on Easter Saturday. It would be just her luck to be away when it appeared.
“What do you mean, just your luck?” Jims had been unreasonably irritable lately. “I’d say you’ve been pretty lucky up till now.”
“It was just a figure of speech,” said Zillah pacifically.
“A highly inappropriate one, if I may say so. Have you arranged with Mrs. Peacock yet?”
“I’ll do it now.”
But Mrs. Peacock wasn’t able to stay at Abbey Gardens Mansions for the ten days Jims and Zillah would be in the Maldives, or indeed for any part of that time. Zillah, she said, had left it too late. Only the day before she’d fixed up to go on a coach tour of Bruges, Utrecht, and Amsterdam.
“I hope she freezes to death,” said Zillah. “I hope she poisons herself on tulip bulbs.”
“Tulip bulbs aren’t poisonous,” said Jims coldly. “Squirrels prefer them to nuts. Have you never noticed?”
She had to ask her mother. Nora Watling exploded. The children had been in London less than three weeks and now she was expected to have them back again. Hadn’t Zillah understood what she’d said about not wanting to raise a second family?
“You and Daddy could come here. The children are at school all day. You could do some sightseeing, go on the Millennium Wheel.”
“We haven’t been on the wheel,” said Eugenie. “We haven’t even been to the Dome.”
“Nanna will take you,” said Zillah, covering up the mouthpiece. “Nanna will take you anywhere you want to go.”
Of course Nora Watling agreed to come. She could hardly do otherwise. Having remarked scathingly that some people would put their children in a kennel or a cattery if they had the chance, she said she and Zillah’s father would arrive on Good Friday.
“I wish you wouldn’t teach them to call their grandmother Nanna,” said Jims. “It’s highly inappropriate for the stepchild of a Conservative MP.”
“Not a stepchild, not a stepchild,” screamed Jordan. “Want to be a real child.”
On Monday morning, a week later than expected, the Challis interview with Zillah appeared. Or something appeared. There was no photograph and the piece devoted to Zillah was about two inches long. It was part of a two-page feature on MPs’ wives, their views and occupations, and it was written in a breezy, satirical style. She was made to look a combination of feather-headed butterfly and ignoramus.
Zillah, new bride of James Melcombe-Smith, shares her husband’s interest in politics if not his persuasion. Not for her the retention of Section 28 or that ancient bastion of the law, trial by jury. Sweep them away, is her policy. Where have we heard that before? Why, from none other than the Labour Party. “People on juries aren’t lawyers,” she told me, tossing back a lock of raven hair. (Mrs. Melcombe-Smith looks a lot like Catherine Zeta-Jones.) “My husband would like to see an end to this waste of the taxpayers’ money.” He, of course, is the Conservative member for South Wessex, known to his constituents and other pals as “Jims.” They will be fascinated by his wife’s views.
Jims was less angry about this than might have been expected. He muttered a bit and predicted he’d shortly be due for an unpleasant interview with the chief whip. But these were not the sort of slips and revelations he feared, and he doubted whether more than a handful of the landowners and (in his own phrase) peasants read “that rag.” Zillah said she was sorry but she didn’t know anything about politics. Was there a book she could read?
Later that day she saw Jerry again. She was in the car, fetching the children from school, and had just turned out of Millbank when she spotted him outside the Atrium. Her first thought was for the children and the trouble that would ensue if they saw him. But both were looking in the other direction, admiring two orange-colored dogs with curly tails like pigs.
“Can I have a dog, Mummy?” asked Eugenie.
“Only if you look after it yourself.” Zillah’s mother had said the same thing to her when she asked that same question twenty-two years before. She had got the dog and looked after it for three days. Remembering, she went on, “No, of course you can’t have a dog. A dog in a flat?”
“We used to live in a house. It was nice and we had friends. We had Rosalba and Titus and Fabia.”
“Want Titus,” said Jordan, but instead of screaming he began quietly to sob.
As Zillah waited in the middle of the street to turn right into the car park under Abbey Gardens Mansions, she saw Jerry running along the pavement toward her. Without looking to her left she began to turn, causing the van coming from the left to brake violently and the driver, already galvanic with road rage, put his head out of the window and let forth a stream of obscene abuse. Zillah went on down the ramp into the car park.
“Mummy, did you hear the word that man said? Nanna said that if I used that word I’d come to a bad end. Will the man come to a bad end?”
“I hope so,” Zillah said viciously. “Stop crying, Jordan. Do you think you two could manage to call Nanna Granny?”
Eugenie shook her head slowly from
side to side. “That would make her into another person, wouldn’t it?”
Zillah didn’t answer. She was confirmed in her belief that her daughter would be called to the Bar at an early age.
There was no more sign of Jerry. Jims again came home very late. In the morning he told her his new friend Leonardo Norton would also be in the Maldives while they were there, staying, in fact, in the same hotel.
Chapter 11
“YOU COULD COME with me to the Television Centre,” Matthew said. “I’d like that.”
But Michelle said no, she wouldn’t. “You’ll be better off without having me to worry about, darling.” The truth was she couldn’t face the stares and surreptitious giggles of all those long-legged girls and young men in jeans. Jeff Leigh’s “Little and Large” jibe still rankled.
It was heartening to see Matthew set off for the tube station, walking along almost like a normal person, his shoulders back and his head high. Michelle dusted the living room and vacuumed the carpet. As she lumbered around, breathless, her heart thudding, she tried to recapture what it had felt like to be a normal person herself, to have an ordinary body. Not like a model girl, not even like Fiona, but to be an average rounded woman, wearing a size fourteen. Usually, when Matthew was there, as he almost always was, she stifled such thoughts, pushing them away, pretending she wasn’t thinking them. This was the first time in how long-five years? seven?-that she had been alone in the house. There’s nothing like being on your own for having space to think.
Michelle stood still in the middle of the room and felt her body, really felt what it was like, from her three chins to the cushions on her upper thighs. First with her brain, then with her hands, growing at last fully aware of the mountain of flesh in which her delicate and fastidious mind and her loving heart had their being. She closed her eyes and in the darkness seemed to see Matthew as he might be if restored to health and herself as she was, or nearly as she was, when first they married. And into that dream came a hint, like a winged insect, a fragile wisp, fluttering across her closed lids, of the old desire they had once had for each other, the passion that sprang from physical beauty and energy. Could it ever be recaptured? The love was there, just the same. Surely with that love present, they could return somehow to making love…
It was a long time since Michelle had been able to bend down. They had had to get rid of the vacuum cleaner they used to have, the kind with a long hose you pull along like a little dog, because she couldn’t bend down enough to fetch it out of the cupboard and put it back. The upright one they had now was better, but only marginally, because to connect the attachments, she had to make the huge effort of lifting the cleaner by its handle onto a chair and performing this operation at thigh level. Afterward she had to stand still for a moment, one hand pressed against the mountain of her bosom. But once she’d got her breath back, she managed to screw in the nozzle on the brush hose and finish the cleaning of the room. Then she went out shopping.
Not to Waitrose this time but nearer home to the Atlanta supermarket at West End Green. She put kiwi fruit into the trolley, Ryvitas, and a large pack of dry roasted peanuts, but as, almost automatically, she took a big bag of doughnuts from the shelf, her hand was stayed in midair and very slowly she put it back again. The same with the thick wedge of Cheddar cheese and the Cadbury’s Milk Flakes. She was bracing herself not to succumb but to leave the cheesecake where it was in the chilled foods cabinet when a voice behind her said, “Stoking up the boilers, are we? Maintaining the avoirdupois?”
It was Jeff Leigh. Strange things were happening to Michelle in Matthew’s absence. Her mind was in a turmoil as she thought thoughts she hadn’t had for a dozen years and looked at people she was used to with new eyes. For instance, she was seeing Jeff as if for the first time and perceiving him as very good-looking, that it was obvious why women found him attractive. And equally obvious that his charm was spurious and his looks skin-deep. Any reasonable person, not blinded by a love that must be mostly physical desire, would dislike and distrust him. She didn’t answer his question but asked him where Fiona was.
“At work. Where else?”
“To keep you in the luxury to which you’re accustomed, I suppose.” Michelle surprised herself, for she couldn’t remember saying such a thing or using such a tone in all her life before.
“It always amazes me,” he said, smiling genially, “how you women scream for equality with men but you still expect men to keep you and never to keep them. Why? In an equal society some men would keep women and some women keep men. Like Matthew keeps you and Fiona keeps me.”
“Everyone ought to work.”
“Excuse me, Michelle, but when did you last set foot in a nursery for a living?”
After she’d walked off in silence he was sorry he’d said that. It was cheap. Also it would have been funnier to have said something more about her shape and weight. Something on the lines of applying for a post with the Fattist Society, if she was in need of a job. Jeff bought the half-pint of milk he needed for his morning coffee and the smoked salmon sandwiches which would be his lunch and went home to think about the hours ahead before Fiona came home.
For years now Jeffrey Leach had planned each day with care. He gave an impression of casual insouciance but in fact he was meticulous, well-organized, and industrious. The trouble was that he couldn’t exactly tell people how hard he really did work, for most of what he did was dodgy or downright illegal. Yesterday, for instance, he’d driven himself to an Asda store and, presenting at the checkout the J. H. Leigh credit card he’d found to pay for their week’s groceries, had asked for cash back. The weary girl, who’d been on for three hours, asked how much. Jeff, who’d been going to say fifty, asked for a hundred pounds. She handed it over and he wished he’d asked for two. Yet she’d looked long and hard at the card before giving him the money, so that he’d heard a little warning bell tinkling.
Home now, he took the card out of his wallet and, resolutely but not without regrets, cut it into six pieces with Fiona’s kitchen scissors. These he put into the waste bin, careful to cover them with an empty cornflake packet and a pair of Fiona’s laddered tights. Better safe than sorry even if safety was going to cost him. The card had served him well as cards go, and as cards go it went. He’d get another somehow or other. Maybe Fiona would get him one. American Express was always writing letters telling their clients to apply for cards for family members. A live-in lover was a family member, wasn’t he? For the life of him he couldn’t see how he was actually to marry Fiona unless he got up his nerve and committed bigamy like Zillah. He’d give more thought to that when August approached.
Jeff used his mobile as seldom as possible, making most calls on Fiona’s phone. He lifted the receiver and rang his bookmaker, placing a bet on a horse called Feast and Famine running at Cheltenham. His almost uncanny success on the racecourse owed more to instinct and serendipity than knowledge of horseflesh. It enabled him to pick up a nice little weekly income. He was in need, however, of a larger sum immediately. Fiona still hadn’t got an engagement ring and the sort he usually picked up for twenty quid in Covent Garden market or off a stall outside St. James’s Piccadilly wouldn’t do for this top-quality woman. Once he’d run a most successful scam, offering-through an advertisement and on receipt of a five-pound note-a brochure on how to be a millionaire within two years. He’d made a small fortune before applicants began writing furious letters asking where their brochure was. But he couldn’t repeat the exercise. Imagine the post he’d get and Fiona’s face when she rumbled him.
Zillah had been right when she’d decided her husband would not blackmail her. To his credit, demanding money with menaces had never crossed Jeff’s mind. The engagement ring would have to come from another source. Fleetingly, he thought of Minty. Funny little thing. She was the cleanest woman he’d ever slept with. Even if he hadn’t met Fiona and quickly picked up on her wealth, he’d have had to drop Minty. What man would fancy the bed smelling of Wright’s Coa
l Tar soap every time he’d had a bit of a cuddle? Still, he might have got her to take out that mortgage on the house before he left her. Why hadn’t he? Because he was a decent bloke at heart, he told himself, and making one fiancée pay for another fiancée’s engagement ring was too low even for him.
Jeff had a look around the house for money. There never was any, he knew that by now, but he never quite gave up hope. Fiona didn’t seem to have any cash. It was what came of being in banking, he supposed, everything on paper, cards, computers. She’d once told him she dreamed of a day when cash as such would disappear and be replaced by paying and being paid by iridian means or a fingerprint. He looked in a tea tin in the kitchen that seemed to serve no purpose but to contain money, though it never did, and through the pockets of Fiona’s many coats. Not even a twenty-pence piece. Still, he had enough to get along on and when Feast and Famine came in first, as it undoubtedly would, he’d net five hundred.
When he’d drunk his coffee and eaten his sandwiches, Jeff went out. Even on such a fine day it would take too long to walk to Westminster, but he did get as far as Baker Street before taking a bus. He had no doubt that the woman he’d seen yesterday, driving and nearly crashing the silver Mercedes, was Zillah. This was the first time he’d been sure. The glimpses he’d caught of a dark woman at a window in Abbey Gardens Mansions might have been her and might not. When he’d last seen her in Long Fredington (and bade her farewell, though she didn’t know it) her hair was scraped back and fastened with an elastic band, and she’d been wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. This woman, the one in Abbey Gardens, looked like an Oriental princess, all big hair and jewelry, and some kind of low-cut satin top. It was a matter of chance that he’d seen her the day before. He hadn’t brought Fiona’s BMW; it was too much hassle parking it. He’d done it like today on foot and by bus and, after hanging about for a long time, ended up outside that flash restaurant and been leaning against the wall wondering what to do next. And she’d come along in that car out of Millbank.