Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Jeff used his mobile as seldom as possible, making most calls on Fiona’s phone. He lifted the receiver and rang his bookmaker, placing a bet on a horse called Feast and Famine running at Cheltenham. His almost uncanny success on the racecourse owed more to instinct and serendipity than knowledge of horseflesh. It enabled him to pick up a nice little weekly income. He was in need, however, of a larger sum immediately. Fiona still hadn’t got an engagement ring and the sort he usually picked up for twenty quid in Covent Garden market or off a stall outside St. James’s Piccadilly wouldn’t do for this top-quality woman. Once he’d run a most successful scam, offering-through an advertisement and on receipt of a five-pound note-a brochure on how to be a millionaire within two years. He’d made a small fortune before applicants began writing furious letters asking where their brochure was. But he couldn’t repeat the exercise. Imagine the post he’d get and Fiona’s face when she rumbled him.

Zillah had been right when she’d decided her husband would not blackmail her. To his credit, demanding money with menaces had never crossed Jeff’s mind. The engagement ring would have to come from another source. Fleetingly, he thought of Minty. Funny little thing. She was the cleanest woman he’d ever slept with. Even if he hadn’t met Fiona and quickly picked up on her wealth, he’d have had to drop Minty. What man would fancy the bed smelling of Wright’s Coal Tar soap every time he’d had a bit of a cuddle? Still, he might have got her to take out that mortgage on the house before he left her. Why hadn’t he? Because he was a decent bloke at heart, he told himself, and making one fiancée pay for another fiancée’s engagement ring was too low even for him.

Jeff had a look around the house for money. There never was any, he knew that by now, but he never quite gave up hope. Fiona didn’t seem to have any cash. It was what came of being in banking, he supposed, everything on paper, cards, computers. She’d once told him she dreamed of a day when cash as such would disappear and be replaced by paying and being paid by iridian means or a fingerprint. He looked in a tea tin in the kitchen that seemed to serve no purpose but to contain money, though it never did, and through the pockets of Fiona’s many coats. Not even a twenty-pence piece. Still, he had enough to get along on and when Feast and Famine came in first, as it undoubtedly would, he’d net five hundred.

When he’d drunk his coffee and eaten his sandwiches, Jeff went out. Even on such a fine day it would take too long to walk to Westminster, but he did get as far as Baker Street before taking a bus. He had no doubt that the woman he’d seen yesterday, driving and nearly crashing the silver Mercedes, was Zillah. This was the first time he’d been sure. The glimpses he’d caught of a dark woman at a window in Abbey Gardens Mansions might have been her and might not. When he’d last seen her in Long Fredington (and bade her farewell, though she didn’t know it) her hair was scraped back and fastened with an elastic band, and she’d been wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. This woman, the one in Abbey Gardens, looked like an Oriental princess, all big hair and jewelry, and some kind of low-cut satin top. It was a matter of chance that he’d seen her the day before. He hadn’t brought Fiona’s BMW; it was too much hassle parking it. He’d done it like today on foot and by bus and, after hanging about for a long time, ended up outside that flash restaurant and been leaning against the wall wondering what to do next. And she’d come along in that car out of Millbank.

Of course he’d given chase, trying to see if the kids in the back were his children. There were two of them, a younger boy and an older girl, of that at any rate he’d been sure. But they hadn’t been looking in his direction, and they seemed too big to be his Eugenie and his Jordan. He thought with a pang that it was six months since he’d seen them and small children alter considerably in six months, growing taller, their faces changing. It couldn’t be, could it, that this Jims had a couple of kids and it was his two in the car? Gay men did sometimes have kids before they decided women weren’t for them. He had to be sure. Today he was going to find out.

Getting off the bus at Charing Cross, he went into a newsagent’s and looked through the sort of newspaper that tells its readers what’s happening in Parliament that day.

The newsagent watched him turning the pages, folding back the sheets. “Like they say, if you don’t want the goods don’t mess them about.”

Jeff had found what he wanted. It was Maundy Thursday and the Commons sat at eleven. He dropped the paper on the floor, said like some character from Victorian fiction, “Keep a civil tongue in your head, my man.”

The river sparkled in the sun. The spokes on the London Eye glittered silver against a cloudless blue sky. Jeff walked past the Houses of Parliament, crossed the road, and turned into Great College Street. From the bus window he’d noticed that The Talented Mr. Ripley was on at the Marble Arch Odeon. He might pop in later. Fiona wasn’t keen on the cinema. He pushed open the art nouveau oak-and-glass doors of Abbey Gardens Mansions and was a little disconcerted to see a porter sitting behind a desk in the flower-decked red-carpeted foyer. “Mr. Leigh,” he said, “to see Mr. Melcombe-Smith.”

Zillah wouldn’t know who it was, but she’d let in a strange man who came to call on Jims. He hoped. However, the porter didn’t attempt to phone through to her but indicated the lift with a surly nod. Up Jeff went and rang the bell of number seven. It was the old Zillah who came to the door, the unmade-up, hair-scraped-back, casual-clothes version, though the jeans were Calvin Klein and the top Donna Karan. She screamed when she saw him and clapped her hand over her mouth.

The children’s schools had broken up for Easter, and Eugenie and Jordan were out for a walk with Mrs. Peacock while their mother packed for the Maldives. That they weren’t there and neither was Jims gave her courage. “You’d better come in,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”

“No you didn’t, my dear. You thought I was telling you I was dead. It’s not the same thing. You’re a bigamist, you know.”

“So are you.”

Jeff sat down on a sofa. He lived in comfortable and elegant surroundings himself so he had no need to comment on hers. “You’re wrong there,” he said. “I’ve never actually been married to anyone but you. Admittedly, I’ve got engaged to three or four but marriage, no. You want to remember what they said to the old person of Lyme who married three wives at one time. When asked why a third, he replied “One’s absurd. And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”

“You’re despicable.”

“I wouldn’t call anyone names if I were you. How do you and Jimsy-wimsy get on about a bit of how’s-your-father? Or is it a marriage of convenience?” He looked about him as if hoping for the missing pair to emerge from out of the cupboard or under the table. “Where are my children?”

Zillah blushed. “I don’t think you’ve any right to ask. If they’d depended on you they’d be in care by now.”

He couldn’t deny it and didn’t try. Instead, “Where’s your loo?” he asked.

“Upstairs.” She couldn’t resist saying there were two. “One’s the door facing you and the other’s in my bathroom.”

“Jims, Jims, the rick-stick Stims, round tail, bobtail, well done, Jims.”

Jeff didn’t open the door at the top of the stairs but the one to the right of it. Two single beds, two sidelamps with colored butterflies on their shades, otherwise almost without furniture and very tidy. He nodded. Next to it was a room the same size but rather austere, not quite a monk’s cell but in that category. The door at the end of the passage opened on to what he suspected an estate agent would call the master bedroom. On the double divan were two open suitcases, the kind that unmistakably come from Louis Vuitton. The crocodile handbag beside them was also open. Jeff put his hand inside. Feeling in a side compartment, he came upon a Visa card, still in the name of Z. H. Leach. Then he went back into the living room and offered Zillah a Polo mint.