Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

“My deah,” said Sonovia, her normal vitality restored, “to tell you the truth, I was actually quite glad to have this outfit cleaned, I should have had it done myself. After I’d let you have it I remembered there was this nasty ketchup stain on the hem.”

“That’s all right,” said Minty. “That soon came off.”

Laf smiled broadly. “So what we want is that you come to the pictures with us tonight. Not Marble Arch, not after that poor chap getting murdered, but we thought Whiteley’s and Saving Grace . How about it?”

“I don’t mind. What sort of time?”

“We reckoned on the five-fifteen showing and then we can all have a pizza afterward. Now, how about a kiss for me?”

The knife she’d wrapped up she put into a carrier bag, one of the anonymous plain blue ones the corner shops gave you, and walked the hundred yards to the bin in Harrow Road where she’d put her stained clothes. But the bin was full to overflowing, as it often was on a Sunday, bags of rubbish all round it, spilling out their contents on to the pavement. Minty wasn’t going to contribute to that, it was disgusting. She went home again and had her lunch, washing her hands before and after she ate it.

She seemed to remember a group of bins somewhere down Kilburn Lane and she walked a long way up there looking for them. In the end she had to make her way quite a distance down Ladbroke Grove, past the tube station, before she found what she was looking for: clean bins and no mess spilling from them. She opened the lid of a bin. It smelled nasty owing to people like Mr. Kroot not wrapping their rubbish up properly. On the top was a bright green Marks and Spencer’s carrier with nothing dirtier in it than something wrapped up in tissue paper, a couple of cereal packets, and an unused loaf of bread still in its cellophane packing. She didn’t too much mind being associated with any of that, so she thrust the knife in its blue bag in between the loaf and the cornflakes, and closed the lid.

On the way back she stopped for a while and looked down over the bridge to the railway track. The tube wasn’t really a tube at all here but underground trains doing this bit of the track above ground, and it was also the main line to places in the west of England. Here, she knew, just down there below her, the local train and the Gloucester express had collided. Many people had died in that crash, including her Jock. One of the trains caught fire and that was the one, she supposed, he’d been in.

He’d been visiting his mother. Minty thought of her as very old and bent, with wispy gray hair, walking with a stick, or maybe someone like Mr. Kroot’s sister. She ought to have been in touch with Jock’s fiancée, ought really to have come to see her. Minty imagined a nice letter from old Mrs. Lewis, saying how sad it was and inviting her to come and stay. She wouldn’t have gone, of course she wouldn’t. The house was very likely dirty and without much hot water. But she should have been asked. Of course, it was plain why she hadn’t been asked. Once she was in that house or even once she’d answered a letter, Mrs. Lewis would have had to give back the money.

It had begun to rain. Minty shook her head at it, though she knew it would take no notice. As soon as she got home she ran a bath. She scrubbed her fingernails and her toenails and Auntie’s voice said, suddenly coming out of nowhere, “Rain’s filthy stuff. It comes down through miles of dirty air.”

Minty said, “When I’m in here I’m private. Leave me alone,” but Auntie took no notice.

“Getting rid of that knife was wise,” she continued. “It was harboring untold millions of germs.” Was Auntie actually addressing her at last? She seemed to be. “I’ve just seen Jock’s mother. You didn’t know Mrs. Lewis was here with me, did you?”

“Go away.” Minty thought she’d die if Mrs. Lewis manifested herself.

The rain was coming down in sheets when she went downstairs. The house seemed empty. It felt cold, the air gray like twilight. Laf came round at four under a big umbrella with palm trees on it and said he’d be taking the car, it was pouring so. God knew where he’d park but he’d do his best. Auntie’s words had upset Minty. Auntie and Mrs. Lewis might come into the cinema. She started feeling nervous. And there was no wood to touch in a cinema, it was all plastic and cloth and metal.

Kind and gracious, proud of her newfound humility, Sonovia went ahead into their row, smiling over her shoulder. “There you are, my deah, you sit between us. You got the popcorn, Laf?”

He had and it was clean and dry, quite fit for Minty to eat. The cinema was filling up, all the seats in front of them occupied. There was no room for Auntie and Jock’s mother. The lights dimmed and suddenly the screen was filled with the bright flashing colors and ear-splitting noises she associated with her banishing of Jock. Minty delicately picked out the smaller pellets of popcorn and relaxed.

When she did get to see Mrs. Lewis she’d ask what had happened to her money and make the old woman answer. Maybe she’d write it down. They never answered when you spoke to them but they might if it was all down on paper. As the big picture started she was planning what she’d write, how she’d push the paper in front of Mrs. Lewis’s face, and it was quite a long time before she lifted her eyes to the screen.

JIMS GAVE VERY little more thought to what Zillah had told him of the police’s intention to call on him on Monday morning. He’d be at home, so of course he’d see them, it was his duty as a citizen; he’d answer their routine questions and later he’d stroll across to the Commons. Unaccustomed to spending much time at home, he found this Sunday evening almost unbearably tedious. Leonardo had invited him to a gay club, the Camping Ground in Earl’s Court Square, and Jims would have loved to accompany him but knew where to draw the line. Instead, with Eugenie sitting beside him making critical comments, he watched as much of a Jane Austen costume drama on television as he could bear and went to bed early.

Something woke him at four o’clock in the morning. He sat up in bed in his solitary and rather austere bedroom, remembering that he hadn’t spent the entire weekend in Casterbridge and Fredington Crucis, as last evening he had taken for granted and sent to the back of his mind. Now it resurfaced, but in a different form. On Friday afternoon he’d driven back to London to recover the mislaid notes for his hunting speech. And he couldn’t simply tell the police that, because the notes hadn’t been in his own home in Abbey Gardens Mansions but in Leonardo’s house in Chelsea. A faint but consistent sheen of sweat broke out across Jims’s face, down his neck, and across his smooth golden chest. He switched the light on.

They would want to know why those papers were in Glebe Terrace and even if he could somehow satisfy them on that point, would inquire why, having recovered them, he failed to go home and spend the night with his new wife in Westminster. It wasn’t as if she was away somewhere-they knew she was at home because they had phoned her there, as she’d told him last night. They’d want to know why, instead, he’d passed the night under the same roof as Leonardo Norton, of the well-known London and Wall Street stockbrokers Frame da Souza Constantine. Various options presented themselves. He could omit to tell them he’d returned to London. Or he could tell them he had returned in the afternoon, had found Zillah asleep, and-unwilling to disturb her-had recovered the papers and gone straight back to Dorset. Or he could say he’d come home late in the evening, found the papers, spent the night with Zillah, and left again very early in the morning before the police came. This would necessitate Zillah’s lying for him. He thought it likely she’d agree, and the children didn’t count since they’d both have been in bed asleep.