Ruth Rendell - A Sleeping Life

Baker was on the phone when he walked in, chatting with such tenderness and such absorption that Wexford guessed he could only be talking to his wife. But the conversation, though it appeared only to have been about whether he would prefer fried to boiled potatoes for his dinner and whether he would be home by six or could make it by ten to, put him in great good humour. No, no calls had come in for Wexford. Loring had not returned, and he, Baker, thought it would be a good idea for the two of them to adjourn at once to the Grand Duke. Provided, of course, that this didn’t delay him from getting home by ten to six.

‘I’d better stay here, Michael,’ Wexford said rather awkwardly, ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘Be my guest, Reg. Here’s your young chap now.’

Loring was shown in by Sergeant Clements. ‘She came in at half past four, sir. I told her to expect you some time after six-thirty.’

He had no idea what he would say to her, though he might have if only Burden would phone. The word still haunted him. ‘Would you mind if I made a call?’ he said to Baker.

Humouring him had now become Baker’s line. ‘I said to be my guest, Reg. Do what you like.’ His wife and the fried potatoes enticed him irresistibly. ‘I’ll be off then.’ With stoical resignation, he added, ‘I daresay we’ll be seeing a good deal of each other in the next few days.’

Wexford dialled Sylvia’s number. It was Robin who answered.

‘Daddy’s taken Mummy up to London to see Auntie Sheila in a play.’

The Merchant of Venice at the National. She was playing Jessica, and her father had seen her in the part a month before. Another of those whispers hissed at him from the text – ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.’ To the boy he said:

‘Who’s with you, then? Grandma?’

‘We’ve got a sitter,’ said Robin. ‘For Ben,’ he added.

‘See you,’ said Wexford just as laconically, and put the receiver back. Clements was still there, looking, he thought, rather odiously sentimental. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘would you by any chance have a dictionary in this place?’

‘Plenty of them, sir. Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, you name it, we’ve got it. Have to have on account of all these immigrants. Of course we do employ interpreters, and a nice packet they make out of it, but even they don’t know all the words. And just as well, if you ask me. We’ve got French too and German and Italian for our Common Market customers, and common is the word. Oh, yes, we’ve got more Dick, Tom and Marias, as my old father used to call them, than they’ve got down the library.’

Wexford controlled an impulse to throw the phone at him. ‘Would you have an English dictionary?’

He was almost sure Clements would say this wasn’t necessary as they all spoke English, whatever the hoi polloi might do. But to his surprise he was told that they did and Clements would fetch it for him, his pleasure. He hadn’t been gone half a minute when the switchboard, with many time-wasting inquiries, at last put through a call from Burden. He sounded as if the afternoon had afforded him work that had been more distressing than arduous.

‘Sorry I’ve been so long. I’m not so tough as I think I am. But, God, the sights you see in these places. What it boils down to is that John Grenville West left the Abbotts Palmer when he was twenty…’

‘What?’

‘Don’t get excited,’ Burden said wearily. ‘Only because they hadn’t the facilities for looking after him properly. He isn’t a mongol at all, whatever your Mrs Parker said. He was born with serious brain damage and one leg shorter than the other. Reading between the lines, from what they said and didn’t say, I gather this was the result of his mother’s attempt to procure an abortion.’

Wexford said nothing. The horror was all in Burden’s voice already. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell me,’ said the inspector savagely, ‘that it was wrong to legalize abortion.’ Wexford knew better than to say at this moment that it was Burden who had always told himself, and others, that.

‘Where is he now?’

‘In a place near Eastbourne. I went there. He’s been nothing more than a vegetable for eighteen years. I suppose the Crown woman was too ashamed to tell you. I’ve just come from her. She said it was ever so sad, wasn’t it, and offered me a gin.’

The dictionaries Clements brought him, staggering under their weight, turned out to be the Shorter Oxford in its old vast single volume and Webster’s International in two volumes.

‘There’s a mighty lot of words in those, sir. I doubt if anyone’s taken a look at them since we had that nasty black magic business in the cemetery a couple of years back and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to spell mediaeval.’

It was the associative process which had led Rhoda Comfrey to give Dr Lomond her address as 6 Princevale Road, and that same process that had brought Sylvia’s obscure expression back to Wexford’s mind. Now it began to operate again as he was looking through the Addenda and Corrigenda to the Shorter Oxford.

‘Mediaeval?’ he said. ‘You mean you weren’t sure whether there was a diphthong or not?’ The sergeant’s puzzled frown made him say hastily, ‘You weren’t sure whether it was spelt i, a, e – or i, e, was that it?’

‘Exactly, sir.’ Clements’ need to put the world right – or to castigate the world – extended even to criticizing lexicographers. ‘I don’t know why we can’t have simplified spelling, get rid of all these unnecessary letters. They only confuse schoolkids, I know they did me. I well remember when I was about twelve…’ Wexford wasn’t listening to him. Clements went on talking, being the kind of person who would never have interrupted anyone when he was speaking, but didn’t think twice about assaulting a man’s ears while he was reading. ‘… And day after day I got kept in after school for mixing up “there” and “their”, if you know what I mean, and my father said… ’

Diphthongs, thought Wexford. Of course. That ae was just an anglicization of Greek eeta, wasn’t it, or from the Latin which had a lot of ae’s in it? And often these days the diphthong was changed to a single e, as in modern spelling of mediaeval. So his word, Sylvia’s word, might appear among the E’s and not the A’s at all. He heaved the thick wedge of pages back to the E section. ‘Eolienne’ – ‘a fine dress farbric’… ‘Eosin’ – ‘a red dye-stuff… Maybe Sylvia’s word had never had a diphthong, maybe it didn’t come from Greek or Latin at all, but from a name or a place. That wasn’t going to help him, though, if it wasn’t in the dictionaries. Wild ideas came to him of getting hold of Sylvia here and now, of calling a taxi and having it take him down over the river to the National Theatre, finding her before the curtain went up in three-quarters of an hour’s time… But there was still another dictionary.

‘Harassment, now,’ the sergeant was saying. ‘There’s a word I’ve never been able to spell, though I always say over to myself, “possesses possesses five s’s”.’

Webster’s International. He didn’t want it to be international, only sufficiently comprehensive. The E section. ‘Eocene’, ‘Eolienne’ – and there it was.

‘Found what you’re looking for, sir?’ said Clements.

Wexford leant back with a sigh and let the heavy volume fall shut. ‘I’ve found, Sergeant, what I’ve been looking for for three weeks.’

Rather warily, Malina Patel admitted them to the flat. Was it for Loring’s benefit that she had dressed up in harem trousers and a jacket of some glossy white stuff, heavily embroidered? Her black hair was looped up in complicated coils and fastened with gold pins.