Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

She felt quite pleased with herself. The photographs wouldn’t be too bad. She often thought the casual look suited her better than formality. Malina phoned after they’d gone and said she’d managed to cancel everything but Charles Challis. How had the interview gone?

“It was marvelous. He was so nice .”

“Good. Well done, you.” Malina didn’t say that the journalist in question was known in the Groucho Club as Poisoned Chalice.

Zillah put the phone down and looked out of the window. Jerry was standing at the entrance to the underground car park. She rushed out of the flat and down in the lift but when she came out into Great College Street he’d gone. He must have put his car into the car park. She ran down the slope and into the depths. There was no sign of him and no dark blue BMW. Perhaps he’d been on foot because of the difficulties of parking. He could have got on a bus or walked to the tube while she was leaving the flat. What did he want? He could be thinking of blackmailing her. Five hundred a month or I tell all . But as far as she knew Jerry had never descended to blackmail in the past and wouldn’t begin with her. She went back across the road and, because she’d forgotten her key, had to get the porters to let her in.

The interviews over or canceled, it was time to fetch the children. Jims and Zillah drove down to Bournemouth on Saturday. It was a pleasant drive, for once the roads not congested and it wasn’t raining. They stopped for lunch at a smart new restaurant in Casterbridge, down by the river and the millrace, because Jims didn’t want to stay long enough to sample her mother’s cooking. Neither Eugenie nor Jordan seemed pleased to see them.

“Want to stay with Nanna,” said Jordan.

His sister patted him on the head. “We like the seaside. Children need fresh air, you know, not traffic plumes.” She meant “fumes” but no one corrected her.

“I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay a bit longer,” said Jims hopefully.

“I’m afraid there is, James.” Nora Watling was never afraid to speak her mind. “I’m tired. I need some peace. I’ve raised one family and I’m not in the business of raising another at my age.”

“No one wants us,” said Eugenie cheerfully. “It’s not very nice to be an unwanted child, is it, Jordan?”

Jordan didn’t understand but burst into howls just the same. When Jims looked at his watch at three-thirty and said they might as well be going, Nora was deeply offended. The children had had their lunch but she insisted on stuffing them with crisps, ice cream, and Black Forest cake before they left. On the way back to London, Jordan was sick all over Jims’s gray leather upholstery.

But once they were home, Eugenie had started at her new school, and a place in a fashionable “progressive” nursery been found for Jordan, peace reigned. It was possible to leave Abbey Gardens Mansions very discreetly by taking the lift down to the basement car park and driving out by the exit into a turning off Great Peter Street. A journalist would have had to be very vigilant and an early riser to spot Zillah taking the children to school at nine in the morning, the silver Mercedes slipping out by the back way. But there were no journalists. The media seemed to have lost interest. A couple of weeks went by and the newspapers ignored young Mr. and Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. Zillah had expected to be pleased about that if it happened, but now she began wondering what had become of the piece that nice Charles Challis was writing. She and Jims were going on their honeymoon on Easter Saturday. It would be just her luck to be away when it appeared.

“What do you mean, just your luck?” Jims had been unreasonably irritable lately. “I’d say you’ve been pretty lucky up till now.”

“It was just a figure of speech,” said Zillah pacifically.

“A highly inappropriate one, if I may say so. Have you arranged with Mrs. Peacock yet?”

“I’ll do it now.”

But Mrs. Peacock wasn’t able to stay at Abbey Gardens Mansions for the ten days Jims and Zillah would be in the Maldives, or indeed for any part of that time. Zillah, she said, had left it too late. Only the day before she’d fixed up to go on a coach tour of Bruges, Utrecht, and Amsterdam.

“I hope she freezes to death,” said Zillah. “I hope she poisons herself on tulip bulbs.”

“Tulip bulbs aren’t poisonous,” said Jims coldly. “Squirrels prefer them to nuts. Have you never noticed?”

She had to ask her mother. Nora Watling exploded. The children had been in London less than three weeks and now she was expected to have them back again. Hadn’t Zillah understood what she’d said about not wanting to raise a second family?

“You and Daddy could come here. The children are at school all day. You could do some sightseeing, go on the Millennium Wheel.”

“We haven’t been on the wheel,” said Eugenie. “We haven’t even been to the Dome.”

“Nanna will take you,” said Zillah, covering up the mouthpiece. “Nanna will take you anywhere you want to go.”

Of course Nora Watling agreed to come. She could hardly do otherwise. Having remarked scathingly that some people would put their children in a kennel or a cattery if they had the chance, she said she and Zillah’s father would arrive on Good Friday.

“I wish you wouldn’t teach them to call their grandmother Nanna,” said Jims. “It’s highly inappropriate for the stepchild of a Conservative MP.”

“Not a stepchild, not a stepchild,” screamed Jordan. “Want to be a real child.”

On Monday morning, a week later than expected, the Challis interview with Zillah appeared. Or something appeared. There was no photograph and the piece devoted to Zillah was about two inches long. It was part of a two-page feature on MPs’ wives, their views and occupations, and it was written in a breezy, satirical style. She was made to look a combination of feather-headed butterfly and ignoramus.

Zillah, new bride of James Melcombe-Smith, shares her husband’s interest in politics if not his persuasion. Not for her the retention of Section 28 or that ancient bastion of the law, trial by jury. Sweep them away, is her policy. Where have we heard that before? Why, from none other than the Labour Party. “People on juries aren’t lawyers,” she told me, tossing back a lock of raven hair. (Mrs. Melcombe-Smith looks a lot like Catherine Zeta-Jones.) “My husband would like to see an end to this waste of the taxpayers’ money.” He, of course, is the Conservative member for South Wessex, known to his constituents and other pals as “Jims.” They will be fascinated by his wife’s views.

Jims was less angry about this than might have been expected. He muttered a bit and predicted he’d shortly be due for an unpleasant interview with the chief whip. But these were not the sort of slips and revelations he feared, and he doubted whether more than a handful of the landowners and (in his own phrase) peasants read “that rag.” Zillah said she was sorry but she didn’t know anything about politics. Was there a book she could read?

Later that day she saw Jerry again. She was in the car, fetching the children from school, and had just turned out of Millbank when she spotted him outside the Atrium. Her first thought was for the children and the trouble that would ensue if they saw him. But both were looking in the other direction, admiring two orange-colored dogs with curly tails like pigs.

“Can I have a dog, Mummy?” asked Eugenie.

“Only if you look after it yourself.” Zillah’s mother had said the same thing to her when she asked that same question twenty-two years before. She had got the dog and looked after it for three days. Remembering, she went on, “No, of course you can’t have a dog. A dog in a flat?”