Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

Later that day, at about four, she was expecting Olive Fordyce and her niece for tea. The niece she had never met, but Olive said it would be cruel never to let her see where Gwendolen lived, she was "absolutely mad about" old houses. Just to spend an hour in St. Blaise House would make her ecstatic. Gwendolen wasn't doing anything special, apart from rereading LePere Goriot . She'd go out in a minute and buy a swiss roll from the Indian shop on the corner and maybe a packet of custard creams.

The days when that wouldn't have been good enough were long gone. Years had passed since she had baked or cooked anything more than, say, a scrambled egg, but once every cake eaten in this house, every pie and flapjack and eclair, had been made by her. She particularly remembered a certain swiss roll, the pale creamy-yellow sponge, the raspberry jam, the subtle dusting of powdered sugar. The professor wouldn't tolerate bought cakes. And tea was the favorite meal of all three of them. Tea was what you asked people to partake of if you asked them at all. When Mrs. Chawcer was so ill, was slowly and painfully dying, her doctor on his regular visits was always asked to stay to tea. Her mother upstairs in bed and the professor giving a lecture somewhere, Gwendolen found herself alone with Dr. Reeves.

Falling in love with him and he with her, she convinced herself, were the most important events of her life. He was younger than she was but not much, not enough, Gwendolen thought, for her mother to put him beyond the pale on grounds of age. Mrs. Chawcer disapproved of marriages in which the man was more than two years younger than the woman. In appearance Dr. Reeves was boyish with dark curly hair, dark but fiery eyes and an enthusiastic expression. Though thin, he ate enormously of Gwendolen's scones with Cornish cream and homemade strawberry jam, Dundee cake and flapjacks, while she picked delicately at a Marie biscuit. Men didn't like seeing a girl guzzle, Mrs. Chawcer said-had almost stopped saying now her daughter was over thirty. Before tea, between mouthfuls and afterward, Dr. Reeves talked. About his profession and his ambitions, about the place in which they lived, the Korean War, the Iron Curtain, and the changing times. Gwendolen talked about these things too, as she had never talked to anyone before, and sometimes about hoping to see more of life, making friends, traveling, seeing the world. And always they talked about her mother dying, how it wouldn't be long, and what would happen afterward.

Doctors' handwriting is notoriously unreadable. Gwendolen scrutinized the prescriptions he wrote for Mrs. Chawcer, trying to decipher his first name. At first she thought it was Jonathan, then Barnabas. The nearest she got was Swithun. Cunningly, she turned the conversation on to names and how important or unimportant they were to their possessors. She liked hers, so long as no one called her Gwen. No one? Who were these people who might inadvertently create for her a diminutive? Her parents were the only ones who didn't call her Miss Chawcer. She said none of this to Dr. Reeves but listenedavidly for his contribution.

Out it came. "Stephen's the sort of name that's always allright to have. Fashionable at the moment. For the first time, actually. So, one day, maybe, folks will guess I'm thirty years younger than I am."

He always called people "folks." And he said "guess" the American way, meaning "think." Gwendolen loved these idiosyncrasies. She was delighted to find out his name. Sometimes, in the solitude of her bedroom, she mouthed to herself interesting combinations: Gwendolen Reeves, Mrs. Stephen Reeves,G. M. Reeves. If she were American she could call herself Gwendolen Chawcer Reeves; if from parts of Europe, Mrs. Doctor Stephen Reeves. To use the servants' word, he was courting her. She was sure of that. What would be the next step? An invitation out somewhere, her mother would probably say. "Wil lyou come with me to the theater, Miss Chawcer? Do you ever go to the pictures, Miss Chawcer? May I call you Gwendolen?

Her mother no longer said anything. She was comatose with morphine. Stephen Reeves came regularly and every time he had tea with Gwendolen. One afternoon, across the cakestand, he called her Gwendolen and asked her to call him Stephen. The professor usually came home to keep an eye on his daughter as they were finishing their portions of Victoria sponge, and Gwendolen noticed that Dr. Reeves reverted to Miss Chawcer when her father was present.

She sighed a little. That was half a century ago and now it wasn't Dr. Reeves but Olive and her niece who were expected for tea. Gwendolen hadn't invited them for this day, shewouldn't have dreamt of it. They had asked themselves. If she hadn't been tired at the time and even more tired of Olive's company she would have said no. Wishing she had, she went up to the bedroom that had once been her mother's, where in fact her mother had died, but not the one where she had tried out those name combinations, and put on a blue velvet dress with a lace insert at the neckline, once but no longer called a modesty vest. She added pearls and a brooch in the shape of a phoenix rising from the ashes and put her mother's engagement ring on her right hand. She wore it every day and at night put it in the jewel box of silver and chased mirror glass, which had also been her mother's.

The niece didn't come. Olive brought her dog instead, a small white poodle with ballet dancer's feet. Gwendolen was annoyed but not much surprised. She had done this before.The dog had a toy with it like a child, only this plaything was avery life like white plastic bone. Olive ate two slices of the swiss roll and a great many biscuits and talked about her niece's daughter while Gwendolen thought what a good thing it was the niece hadn't come or there would have been two of them talking about this paragon, her achievements, her wealth, her lovely home, and her devotion to her parents. As it was, her day was spoiled. She should have been alone, to think about Stephen, to remember-and perhaps to plan?

Olive was wearing a trouser suit in bright emerald green and a lot of mock-gold jewelry. Kitsch, Gwendolen called it to herself. Olive was too fat and too old to wear trousers or anything in that color. She was proud of her long fingernails and had lacquered them the same scarlet as her lipstick. Gwendolen stared at lips and nails with the critical and mocking eye of a young girl. She often wondered why she had friends when she rather disliked them and didn't want their company.

"When my great-niece was fourteen she was already five feet ten inches tall," said Olive. "My husband was alive then. 'If you grow any more,' he said to her, 'you'll never find a boyfriend.The boys won't go out with a girl taller than them.' And what do you think happened? When she was seventeen and over six feet she met this stockbroker. He'd wanted to be an actor but they wouldn't have him because he was six feet six, far too tall for the theater, so he went into stockbroking and made a packet. The two of them were quite an item. He wanted to marry her but she had her career to think of."

"How interesting," said Gwendolen, thinking of Dr. Reeves who had once said she was a nice girl and he was awfully fond of her.

"Girls don't have to get married these days like we did." She seemed to have forgotten Gwendolen's single status and went on blithely, "They don't feel they're left on the shelf. There's no status to marriage anymore. I know it's a bold thing to say but if I was young again, I wouldn't get married. Would you?"

"I never did," said Gwendolen austerely.

"No, that's true," Olive said as if Gwendolen might have been in some doubt about it. "Maybe you did the right thing all along."

But I would have married Stephen Reeves if he'd asked me, Gwendolen thought after Olive had gone and she was clearing up the tea things. We would have been happy, I would have made him happy, and I'd have got away from Papa. But he had never asked her. Once he had said he was fond of her, Papa seemed to have made a point of being there, though he could not have overheard. When her mother was dead Stephen signed the death certificate and said that if they wanted Mrs. Chawcer cremated they would need a second doctor's signature, so he'd ask his partner to come round.