Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

“Why am I too big to be carried, Mummy?”

“You just are. Miles too big,” said Zillah. “Four is the upper limit. No one over four gets carried.”

Jordan burst into loud wails. “Don’t want to be four! Want to be carried.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Zillah, “I am carrying you, you halfwit.”

“Not a fwit, not a fwit! Put me down, Jordan walk.”

He trudged along, very slowly, trailing behind. Eugenie took Zillah’s hand, smiling smugly over her shoulder at her brother. The sinking sun disappeared behind a dense wall of trees and it suddenly became viciously cold. Jordan, snuffling and whimpering, rubbing at his eyes with muddy fists, sat down in the road, then lay down on his back. It was at times like these that Zillah wondered how she had ever got into this mess in the first place. What had she been thinking of to get involved with a man like Jerry at the age of nineteen? What had induced her to fall in love with him and want his children?

She picked Jordan up and, in the absence of any handkerchief or tissue, wiped his face with a woolen glove she found in her pocket. A bitter wind had got up from nowhere. How could she hesitate about saying yes to Jims? She was suddenly visited by fear that maybe he wouldn’t phone for his answer on Thursday, maybe he’d find some other woman who wouldn’t keep him waiting. That Icon or Ivo Carew’s sister Kate. If it weren’t for Jerry…She was going to have to sit down when she’d got this lot to bed and seriously think about what Jerry was up to and what that letter meant.

It took three times as long to get back to Willow Cottage with the children as it had taken her to get to the Old Mill House on her own. Twilight was closing in. The front door opened directly into the living room, where the bulb in the light had gone. She hadn’t a replacement. The cottage wasn’t centrally heated, of course it wasn’t. It belonged to a local landowner and had been let at a low rent to various more or less indigent people for the past fifty years. No improvements had been made to it in that time, apart from perfunctory painting carried out by tenants and mostly left unfinished. Thus, the inside of the front door was painted pink, the cupboard door black, and only an undercoat in uncompromising gray had been applied to the door to the kitchen. Electrical fittings consisted mostly of partly eroded cables passing, looped and knotted, from ten- and five-amp points, obsolete in the rest of the European Union and rare in the United Kingdom, to extension leads connected to a lamp, a fan heater, and a very old 45-rpm record player. The furniture consisted of rejects from the “big house,” where Sir Ronald Grasmere, the landlord, lived. It had been discarded forty years before, was old then, and had come from the housekeeper’s room.

The kitchen was worse. It contained a sink, a gas cooker circa 1950, and a refrigerator that looked huge because its walls were nearly a foot thick, though its usable interior quite a small space. Originally it must have been a very good one, for it had lasted more than sixty years. There was no washing machine. Zillah stripped off the children’s clothes and put jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, and Jordan’s anorak to soak in cold water in the sink. She switched on the fan heater and put a match to the fire she had laid earlier. It was strange how Jims never seemed to notice the state of the place or the inadequacy of the fittings or, come to that, the cold. At any rate, he never mentioned them. Did this augur well for a life companion or not? Of course, he was a pal of Sir Ronald. If she married him she and Jims would no doubt occasionally have Sir Ronald to dine. Perhaps in the members’ dining room…

As she began making scrambled eggs for the children’s tea, Zillah decided that if she did marry Jims, no way was she going to do the cooking in the future. Or any housework as long as she lived. Who was it said, “I’ll never be hungry again?” Oh, yes, Scarlett O’Hara. If only she had a video in this bloody bloody place and the film of Gone With the Wind , she’d play it tonight after the kids were in bed. If she married Jims she’d be able to watch videos every night. What an ambition! But she’d also be able to have unlimited babysitters and go to the cinema and the theater and nightclubs, shop all day long, have facials and her hair done at Nicky Clarke, and stay at health farms and be a lady who lunched at Harvey Nichols.

Was she going to marry him, then? Had she made up her mind?

The children would be able to play video games and have computers instead of watching whatever rubbish was currently on television: Baywatch or something of that ilk. Not great in black-and-white. She’d better bathe them. Jordan had mud on his feet and in his hair. But Jims was gay . Besides, there was another pressing reason, not just for not marrying him but for not marrying anyone.

The letter had come in October of the previous year. For about five minutes, if that, she’d believed what it said and that it came from the people it said it did. Maybe that was because she’d wanted to believe it. But had she wanted to? Not entirely. Anyway, that hardly mattered, for she’d soon seen it was an obvious nonsense. Jerry hadn’t been on a Great Western train going from Gloucester to London. He’d left her and the kids and Willow Cottage ten minutes before that train collided with the other one and driven himself off somewhere or other in his battered Ford Anglia, which was twenty years old if it was a day.

The letter purported to come from the Great Western. In fact, since she was his wife and still was on the day of the train crash, she’d have been the first to hear of his death and not ten days afterward. Not in a phony letter that cried out to be disbelieved, but from the police. They’d very likely have wanted her (or someone she named) to go and identify the remains. There’d have been a funeral. So after the first five minutes she hadn’t believed the letter. But she’d wondered who’d written it and what Jerry was up to. Certain things seemed clear. He’d arranged for the letter to be sent to her and this must mean that he wanted her not necessarily to think he was dead, but to act as if he were dead. What he was really saying was: “This is to show you I’m off, I won’t be troubling you again. Just act as if I was dead. Shack up with someone, get married if you like. I won’t interfere or put a spoke in your wheel.” Was he saying that? She couldn’t think what he’d meant if he hadn’t meant that.

Of course, he was always a joker. And his jokes weren’t even clever or particularly funny. Zillah, Zillah, the rick-stick Stillah, round tail, bobtail, well done, Zillah. Pinch, punch, first of the month, no returns. If he happened to be sleeping with her on the night of the last of the month-it didn’t happen that often-he’d always awakened her with those words and the corresponding gestures. “No returns” meant the rules of the game stopped her pinching and punching him back. There was another one about going into the garden and meeting a great she-bear who said, “What, no soap?” She couldn’t remember the rest of it. Once, long ago, she must have found him funny. And his country singing and his minteating.

They’d not really lived together since Jordan was born and not much before that, and she’d never been such a fool as to think she was the only one. But she had thought she was the preferred one. “All other girls apart, first always in my heart,” as he’d once told her and she, being young, had taken it seriously. It was probably a line from Hank Williams or Boxcar Willie. Disillusionment set in when he was always somewhere else and about as bad a provider as could be. What was the good of setting the Child Support Agency on his track when he never earned anything?