Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

The last address Zillah had for him was in Harvist Road, NW10. Sometimes she got out the piece of paper on which he’d written it down and just stared at it, thinking. There was no phone number. At last she phoned Directory Enquiries. Without a name they couldn’t or wouldn’t help her. One afternoon, leaving Mrs. Peacock with the children, she went up to Harvist Road on a Bakerloo Line train to Queen’s Park. The place reminded her of her student days when she and Jerry had shared a room in a house near the station. They’d been very happy for a while. Then she got pregnant and they married, but things were never the same.

“ Needles and pins, needles and pins ,” said Jerry, quoting his old granny, “ when a man marries his trouble begins .” They were on their two-day honeymoon in Brighton. Then he said, “I quite like being married. I may do it a few times more.”

She smacked his face for that but he only laughed. Now she was looking for him to find out if he was willing to stay dead. His name wasn’t on a bell at the street number he’d given her. When she banged the lion head knocker an elderly woman came to the door and said, “I’m not interested in double glazing,” before she’d even spoken.

“And I’m not selling it. I’m looking for Jerry Leach. He used to live here.”

“He called himself Johnny, not Jerry, and he doesn’t live here now. Hasn’t since last year. Months and months. The answer to your next question is no, I don’t know where he’s gone.”

The door was shut in her face. She walked across the road and sat down on a seat in Queen’s Park, gazing at the green expanse. A black girl and a white girl, walking past, looked curiously at her short-skirted linen suit and high heels, put their heads together and giggled. Zillah ignored them. It was evident that Jerry didn’t want his whereabouts known. She must make up her mind he’d gone forever. What would he think when he saw her and Jims’s photograph in the paper? Perhaps he didn’t read them. But he’d be bound to find out sooner or later if this thing Jims called a reshuffle took place before the wedding. Because by then Jims might be a minister and on account of his youth and good looks and her youth and good looks, a target for the media. Jerry was a rotten provider and generally hopeless with money, and unfaithful and callous, but not wholly bad. He was the last man to try and rubbish her chances. If he saw she’d made a good marriage and done well for herself, he’d most likely laugh and say, “Good luck, girl, I won’t stand in your way.” Besides, he’d be relieved she wouldn’t nag him any longer for child support. Not that he’d ever given her any, there being no blood in a stone.

That silly joke of his kept running through her head. She hadn’t thought of it for years until Eugenie came out with it the other day. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drownded. Who was saved ? Perhaps he actually was dead. But no. She reminded herself that whatever she pretended or told Jims, Jerry was her legally wedded husband. She’d have been the first to be officially informed. He was her husband and she was his wife. Uneasily, she remembered that for some reason, now forgotten, Jerry had required and got the old form of marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer . There had been a bit about whom God had joined together let no man put asunder, and keeping only unto him as long as they both lived. Moreover, she was going to have to go through all that again at St. Mary Undercroft, where she didn’t exactly know but could guess that they’d have the same old service. And the vicar (or whatever-the canon?) would say those awful words about answering as they would at the dreadful day of judgment that no just cause or impediment stood in the way of their getting married. Zillah didn’t really believe in the dreadful day of judgment but the sound of it struck superstitious terror into her just the same. Jerry, wherever he was, was six feet and 182 pounds of just cause and impediment. Why did she always have to marry men who wanted their weddings to be in church?

After a while she got up and wandered back to the tube station. The trouble with thrusting unpleasant thoughts from your mind is that the thrusting can never be absolute and each time they come back it seems to be with redoubled threat. There were her parents to worry about too. She hadn’t yet told them Jerry was dead. Nor had she informed them that the official version of their relationship was that they’d never been married at all. Ostensibly, they’d be giving the wedding reception. Jims, of course, would be paying. She wondered how she was going to stop her mother telling the leader of the Opposition, not to mention Lord Strathclyde, how she used to take little Zillah with her when she went making beds and washing dishes up at the big house and the five-year-old was sometimes allowed to play with seven-year-old James.

The train came. The carriage she got into was full of yardies from Harlesden drinking lager out of cans, reminding her of the world she’d soon be leaving behind forever. At Kilburn Park she moved carriages and went on to Oxford Circus. The best remedy she knew for nerves and depression was shopping, a taste she’d never till now been able to indulge. It was amazing how quickly she’d taken to it and how much she enjoyed it. Already, after only a few weeks, she knew the names of all the designers, was beginning to get a good idea of what their clothes looked like and how one differed from another. If only academic subjects were so easily learned she might have got herself some qualifications by this time. Married to Jims, she wouldn’t need them.

Emerging from Browns some hour and a half later, laden with bags, she felt enormously happy and carefree, wondering why she’d been down in the dumps earlier. She took a taxi back to Battersea. The children were having tea, the table presided over by the babysitter.

“Mrs. Peacock says you’re going to marry Jims,” said Eugenie, “but I said you can’t because you’re married to Daddy.”

“My mistake, Mrs. Leach, I thought they knew.”

“Mummy marry Daddy,” said Jordan. “Marry him tomorrow.” He picked up his plate and banged it on the table, overturning a mug of orange juice in the process, which set him off screaming, “Jordan wants Daddy! Wants him now!”

Zillah fetched a cloth and began mopping up the mess while Mrs. Peacock sat tight, her eyes traveling from Zillah to the Browns and Liberty bags and back again. “Is there any tea left in the pot, Mrs. Peacock?”

“It’ll be cold by now.”

THIS WOULD BE the first wedding Minty had ever been to. She was never beset by the ordinary woman’s anxieties, so she worried not at all about what to wear and whether she ought to buy a hat. If Jock hadn’t stolen her savings, she’d have bought Josephine and Ken a present, but now she had only her wages with nothing left over for luxuries, which included gifts. Would he have paid her back if he’d lived? Was he returning, his ghost appearing the way it did, not to take her away with him but because he wanted to pay his debt?

She hadn’t seen him again since that night in the cinema, but she’d brooded about the things Sonovia and Laf had said. The cat walking on her grave. She couldn’t help thinking about it, her burial ground maybe up in that huge, awful cemetery in the far north of London where Auntie’d once taken her to her sister Edna’s funeral. It wouldn’t be like Auntie’s resting place, nice and cozy under the big dark trees and near to her home, only just the other side of the high wall, but one of a bleak row of white tombstones, each indistinguishable from the rest, her name that had been engraved upon it obliterated by the wind and rain. But would her name be engraved on it? Who would do that for her? There was no one now Auntie was gone and Jock was gone.