by Ruth Rendell
Of course he’d given chase, trying to see if the kids in the back were his children. There were two of them, a younger boy and an older girl, of that at any rate he’d been sure. But they hadn’t been looking in his direction, and they seemed too big to be his Eugenie and his Jordan. He thought with a pang that it was six months since he’d seen them and small children alter considerably in six months, growing taller, their faces changing. It couldn’t be, could it, that this Jims had a couple of kids and it was his two in the car? Gay men did sometimes have kids before they decided women weren’t for them. He had to be sure. Today he was going to find out.
Getting off the bus at Charing Cross, he went into a newsagent’s and looked through the sort of newspaper that tells its readers what’s happening in Parliament that day.
The newsagent watched him turning the pages, folding back the sheets. “Like they say, if you don’t want the goods don’t mess them about.”
Jeff had found what he wanted. It was Maundy Thursday and the Commons sat at eleven. He dropped the paper on the floor, said like some character from Victorian fiction, “Keep a civil tongue in your head, my man.”
The river sparkled in the sun. The spokes on the London Eye glittered silver against a cloudless blue sky. Jeff walked past the Houses of Parliament, crossed the road, and turned into Great College Street. From the bus window he’d noticed that The Talented Mr. Ripley was on at the Marble Arch Odeon. He might pop in later. Fiona wasn’t keen on the cinema. He pushed open the art nouveau oak-and-glass doors of Abbey Gardens Mansions and was a little disconcerted to see a porter sitting behind a desk in the flower-decked red-carpeted foyer. “Mr. Leigh,” he said, “to see Mr. Melcombe-Smith.”
Zillah wouldn’t know who it was, but she’d let in a strange man who came to call on Jims. He hoped. However, the porter didn’t attempt to phone through to her but indicated the lift with a surly nod. Up Jeff went and rang the bell of number seven. It was the old Zillah who came to the door, the unmade-up, hair-scraped-back, casual-clothes version, though the jeans were Calvin Klein and the top Donna Karan. She screamed when she saw him and clapped her hand over her mouth.
The children’s schools had broken up for Easter, and Eugenie and Jordan were out for a walk with Mrs. Peacock while their mother packed for the Maldives. That they weren’t there and neither was Jims gave her courage. “You’d better come in,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”
“No you didn’t, my dear. You thought I was telling you I was dead. It’s not the same thing. You’re a bigamist, you know.”
“So are you.”
Jeff sat down on a sofa. He lived in comfortable and elegant surroundings himself so he had no need to comment on hers. “You’re wrong there,” he said. “I’ve never actually been married to anyone but you. Admittedly, I’ve got engaged to three or four but marriage, no. You want to remember what they said to the old person of Lyme who married three wives at one time. When asked why a third, he replied “One’s absurd. And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”
“You’re despicable.”
“I wouldn’t call anyone names if I were you. How do you and Jimsy-wimsy get on about a bit of how’s-your-father? Or is it a marriage of convenience?” He looked about him as if hoping for the missing pair to emerge from out of the cupboard or under the table. “Where are my children?”
Zillah blushed. “I don’t think you’ve any right to ask. If they’d depended on you they’d be in care by now.”
He couldn’t deny it and didn’t try. Instead, “Where’s your loo?” he asked.
“Upstairs.” She couldn’t resist saying there were two. “One’s the door facing you and the other’s in my bathroom.”
“Jims, Jims, the rick-stick Stims, round tail, bobtail, well done, Jims.”
Jeff didn’t open the door at the top of the stairs but the one to the right of it. Two single beds, two sidelamps with colored butterflies on their shades, otherwise almost without furniture and very tidy. He nodded. Next to it was a room the same size but rather austere, not quite a monk’s cell but in that category. The door at the end of the passage opened on to what he suspected an estate agent would call the master bedroom. On the double divan were two open suitcases, the kind that unmistakably come from Louis Vuitton. The crocodile handbag beside them was also open. Jeff put his hand inside. Feeling in a side compartment, he came upon a Visa card, still in the name of Z. H. Leach. Then he went back into the living room and offered Zillah a Polo mint.
“No, thanks, as always.”
“I see you’re packing. Going somewhere nice?”
She told him, adding sulkily that it was their honeymoon. Jeff burst out laughing, roaring uncontrollably, tickled to death. He stopped as quickly as he’d begun. “You didn’t answer my question. Where are my children?”
“Out for a walk.” She invented, “With their nanny.”
“I see. A nanny. Jims-oh isn’t short of a penny or two, is he? And will you be taking them to the Maldives?”
Zillah would have liked to say yes, but Mrs. Peacock and the children might return at any time. She’d already had enough stick from Eugenie because she wasn’t taking them. “I told you,” she said, “it’s a honeymoon. My mother will be here to look after them.”
Jeff, who hadn’t sat down again but had been roving about the room, said, “I won’t stay to see them. It might be upsetting for them and me. But I don’t like the sound of what you’ve been saying, Zil. It strikes me neither you nor Jims really want my kids. You didn’t say a word about them to those newspapers, not a hint to that magazine that you’d got any kids-oh, yes, I read it, I made it my business to read it.” He paused. “Now, Fiona loves children.”
This casual remark had the effect he hoped for. “Who the hell’s Fiona?”
“My fiancée.” Jeff smiled wolfishly. “She’s a merchant banker. She’s got a very nice house in Hampstead.” He left out the West.
“I suppose the BMW belongs to her.”
“As you say. Her house would be an ideal home for children. Four bedrooms, garden, everything the heart could wish for. And I’m home all day to look after them while she earns the moolah to keep them in luxury.”
“What are you saying?”
“Frankly, my dear, I’m not sure yet. I haven’t thought it through. But I will and I very likely may come up with a plan. Like applying for sole custody, right?”
“You wouldn’t stand a chance!” Zillah shouted.
“No? Not if the court heard you’d committed bigamy?”
Zillah began to cry. There was a notepad on the table with tearoff pages in a silver case. He wrote down Fiona’s address and gave it to Zillah, pretty sure he could retrieve any letter that came to Jerry Leach. Then he left, whistling “Walk on By.” As he closed the front door behind him he could hear her loud sobs. Of course he’d no intention of taking the children away from her, but the threat was a useful weapon. And he wouldn’t mind getting his own back on Jims, who was certainly using Eugenie and Jordan as pawns in the game he was playing to prove himself an exponent of family values. Should he tell Fiona about it? Perhaps. A doctored version at any rate.
Still, where were his children? That story about the nanny might be an invention. If Zillah had dumped them, where had she dumped them? With her mother? He didn’t like it. Perhaps he’d call again next week when Nora Watling was there and find out the truth. If she was there-if that wasn’t a lie too.
Now for lunch at the Atrium. On Zillah’s credit card? A bit dangerous. She and Jims might be regular visitors. Jeff had an idea that a credit card had some sort of code on it that betrayed the sex of the customer using it. In an Italian restaurant in Victoria Street he put it to the test and had no problem. All was well. Imitating Zillah’s signature was no problem either; he’d often done it in the past. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the three-fifteen showing, had just begun when Jeff got to the cinema. The small, intimate theater was almost empty, just himself, two other men on their own, and a lone middle-aged
woman. It always amused him to see how they’d placed themselves, as far apart as possible, one of the men near the front on the extreme right, another, who looked very old, on the left halfway down and the third in the back row. The woman sat next to the aisle but as far as possible from the old man. It seemed to Jeff that human beings didn’t like their own kind much. Sheep, for instance, would all have huddled together in the center. He took his seat behind the woman-just to be different.
Matthew came home in the middle of the afternoon. Naturally, he’d had no lunch. Without Michelle to look after him and coax him, he’d never eat at all. But he looked well, very nearly a normal thin man. The recording for the television program had been highly enjoyable. “I loved it,” he said, just like the old Matthew she’d married. “I didn’t really expect to. I was full of gloomy forebodings.”
“You should have told me, darling.”
“I know, but I can’t unload all my burdens on you.”
She said in an unusually bitter voice, “You could. My shoulders are broad enough.”
He looked at her with concern, sat down next to her, and took her hands. “What is it, my love? What’s wrong? You’re pleased for me, I know that. This program may be the start of many. We’ll be richer, though I know you don’t care about that. What is it?”
She came out with it. She could no longer keep it to herself. “Why do you never say I’m fat? Why don’t you tell me I’m gross and bloated and hideous? Look at me. I’m not a woman, I’m a great obese balloon of flesh. I said my shoulders are broad enough-well, I hope yours are for what I’m saying. That’s my burden: my size, my awful, huge, revolting size.”
He was looking at her, but not aghast, not in horror. His poor, thin, wizened face was softened and changed by tenderness. “My darling,” he said. “My sweet, dearest darling. Will you believe me when I say I’ve never noticed?”
“You must have. You’re an intelligent man, you’re perceptive. You must have noticed and-and hated it!”
“What’s brought this on, Michelle?” he asked seriously.
“I don’t know. I’m a fool. But-yes, I do know. It’s Jeff, Jeff Leigh. Every time I see him he makes some sort of joke about my size. It was-well, this morning it was ‘stoking up the boilers?’ and the other day he said-no, darling, I can’t tell you what he said.”
“Shall I speak to him? Tell him he’s hurt you? I will, I shan’t mind doing that. You know me, aggressive bastard when I’m roused.”
She shook her head. “I’m not a child. I don’t need Daddy to tell the boy next door to stop it.” A little smile transformed her face. “I never thought I’d say this about anyone but I-I hate him. I really do. I hate him. I know he’s not worth it, but I can’t help it. Tell me about the television.”
He told her. She pretended to listen and made encouraging noises, but she was thinking how deeply she disliked Jeff Leigh, how certain she was that he was a petty crook and she wondered if she could find the strength to warn Fiona. As if she were her mother. Did people ever heed that kind of warning? She didn’t know. But she wasn’t Fiona’s mother and that would make a big difference.
When she had made a meal for Matthew (milkless tea, a Ryvita, two slices of kiwi fruit, and twelve dry-roasted peanuts), she went upstairs, of necessity holding on to the banisters with both hands, puffing at the top as she always did, and entered the bathroom. The scales were for Matthew. She had never stepped on them. How delighted they both were when Matthew weighed himself last week and the scales registered 100 pounds instead of the needle quivering on the 84-pound mark as it once had. Michelle kicked off her shoes, looking down at her legs and feet. They were beautiful, as lovely in shape as any of those models’, if not as long. Taking a deep breath, she stepped onto the scales.
At first she didn’t look. But she had to look, that was the point. Slowly she lowered her closed eyes, forced herself to open them. Her breath expelled in a long sigh, she took her eyes away from what it came to in kilos, in pounds. She weighed three times what Matthew did.
What had happened to her to make her do what she’d just done? Jeff Leigh had happened. That made Michelle smile. It was absurd to think of the person you hated as doing you good. For he had done her good. She put on her shoes, went down to the kitchen again and tipped the food she’d prepared for her tea, a big bread roll (in the absence of doughnuts) with strawberry jam, two shortcake biscuits, and a slice of fruitcake, down into the waste bin.
Chapter 12
THE HORRIBLE THING was that she’d begun to fancy Jims. Really to fancy him, a different matter altogether from the feeling she’d had when they were both teenagers. In those days it had been just an itch, coupled with resentment that here was one boy among all those she knew who wasn’t attracted to her. That in itself was enough to make her try to seduce him. But now things had changed.
Paradoxically, as she started to want to go to bed with him, so she liked him less. When they’d just been seeing each other every few weeks, having a drink together, talking over old times, Zillah would have said Jims was her best friend. Sharing a home with him made a huge difference. His peevishness was apparent, his selfishness, and, when there was no one else present, his absolute indifference as to whether she was there or not. If anyone called, one of his parliamentary pals, for instance, he was all over her, holding hands, looking into her eyes, calling her darling, pausing as he passed the back of her chair to drop a kiss on the nape of her neck. Alone with her he barely spoke. But this coldness, along with his appearance, his grace, his dark slenderness, and those large, dark eyes, fringed with black lashes like a girl’s, contributed to his appeal. Every day, it seemed, she sank deeper into wanting him very much.
In the Maldives it was worse. They shared a suite in which there were two bedrooms and two bathrooms, but Jims was seldom there, spending his nights in suite 2004, where Leonardo was. Ever cautious, he would sometimes return at eight in the morning, to be sitting opposite her at the glass table on the balcony, both in their white toweling robes, when the waiter brought their breakfast at nine.
“I wonder why you bother,” she said.
“Because you never know who else may be staying here. How do you know that redheaded woman we saw on the beach yesterday isn’t a journalist? Or that the very youthful couple, the topless girl and her boyfriend, aren’t media people? Of course you don’t. I have to be ever vigilant.”
Most women would be overjoyed, she thought, if their husbands could talk about a young girl going topless without a flicker of lust in their eyes, without the least deepening of their tone. In the mornings Jims lay on a sun lounger on the silver sands and Leonardo lay on another sun lounger beside him. But Zillah was there too on a third one. When she protested, saying she’d rather go in the pool or take a look at the village, such as it was, he reminded her of his reason for marrying her. And for giving her two homes, almost unlimited spending money, a new car, clothes, and security. He’d also, he said, become a father to her children. Zillah was beginning to understand that she’d taken on a job rather than a husband, while in exchange for all those worldly goods she’d abandoned her freedom.
Leonardo worked for a stockbroker in the City and was a high flyer at twenty-seven. From a family that, on the father’s side, had been staunch active Conservatives for the past hundred and fifty years, he was as mad about politics as Jims and the two talked Conservative party history, House of Commons procedure and personalities all day long, swapping anecdotes about Margaret Thatcher or Alan Clark. Leonardo was enthralled by John Major’s autobiography and constantly read bits out of it aloud to Jims. Zillah thought bitterly how unlike their dialogue was to the received opinion among the party mandarins she’d met as to the style in which gay men conversed.
She was worried as well. As to his vaunted role as Eugenie and Jordan’s father, so much for his saying he loved children. He’d barely spoken to either of them since their return from Bournemouth. When she’d mentioned this, he said he supposed Eugenie would b
e off to boarding school in a few months’ time. Then they’d get a live-in nanny for Jordan and he’d have the fourth bedroom converted into a nursery. She hadn’t said a word to him about Jerry. How could she? They were supposed never to have been married and he to have no rights over the children at all. Suppose Jerry did try to get the children? Suppose he renewed his threat to expose her as a woman who’d married one man while still married to another? Oh, it was so unfair! He’d utterly deceived her, sending her that letter saying he was dead.
And now, just to crown everything, she’d succumbed to Jims’s charms. In the dining room last evening, for the benefit of the other diners, he’d put his arm round her while they were waiting to be shown to their table and, once there, when he’d pulled out her chair for her, given her a soft little kiss on the lips. She’d actually heard some old woman nearby whisper to her companion how nice it was to see a couple so much in love. That kiss nearly finished Zillah off. She’d have liked to go upstairs and have a cold shower, but she had to sit here with Jims looking into her eyes and holding her hand across the table. Leonardo always took his dinner in his suite while watching, Zillah suspected, pornographic movies. Or maybe only videos of some Tory by-election coup.
The Daily Telegraph Magazine, the one with her interview in it, hadn’t yet come out. Unless it had on Easter Saturday. Zillah’s mother had strict instructions to look out for it and keep it if it appeared while she was away. The day before they left, she’d written to Jerry at the Hampstead address he’d given her, only it wasn’t Hampstead proper but West Hampstead, as she could tell by the postcode. Obscurely, this discovery made her feel a little better.
Zillah wasn’t accustomed to writing letters; she couldn’t remember when she’d written the last one. It had probably been to thank her godmother for sending her a five-pound note when she was twelve. The first effort she made looked very threatening when she read it over, so she started again. This time she threw herself on Jerry’s mercy, appealing to him not to expose her as a criminal, to remember what she’d been through, how he’d left her alone to fend for herself. That wouldn’t do either. She tore it up and finally wrote simply that he’d frightened her. She hadn’t meant to keep the children from their father. He could have access and visiting rights and anything he wanted if only he wouldn’t tell anyone she’d done what he knew she’d done. Without actually writing “bigamist” in case the letter fell into the wrong hands, she asked him please not to use “that word” anymore. It was cruel and unfair. This she sent.