Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Jims thought the police fools, anyway, and probably too much in awe of him, landed gentry as he was, to trouble him again. He was so young, so good-looking, and so rich . That night he dreamed a new version of a dream he’d sometimes had in the past, but this time when he came down the steps of Number Ten Downing Street to the waiting cameramen he had Zillah on his arm, the youngest and most beautiful First Lady in living memory. God was in His heaven, thought Jims, and everything more or less right with the world.

ZILLAH RATHER SURPRISED herself by discovering how little she cared about Jerry’s death. Could she ever have loved him? It made the years she’d spent more or less with him seem a waste of time. Of course, she’d got the children out of them, there was that. Back into the routine of driving them to and from their schools, she felt a sublime indifference toward everyone but herself and them. With a free morning before her to do as she liked, she put the police out of her mind, she even forgot Jims and the difficulties he seemed deliberately to create for her, and reveled in just being alone for three hours. She celebrated by buying a Caroline Charles dress and a Philip Treacy hat to wear at a royal garden party.

Whenever she bought clothes, Zillah formed a picture in her mind of herself wearing the new garment in some particular, usually glamorous, scenario. Sometimes she would be accompanied by a man-up until she married him it was often Jims-and sometimes, very occasionally, by her children dressed in equally ravishing outfits. It was an innocent form of fantasizing that gave her a lot of pleasure. As she alighted from a taxi in Great College Street, the rosebud-sprigged dress in a bag in one hand, the pink straw hat in a bandbox, she was imagining herself on a sunny lawn with a glass of champagne in her hand. She had just curtsied with exceptional grace to the Queen and was listening to the admiring words of a young and handsome hereditary peer who was obviously deeply attracted to her. The events of the past few days had almost been erased from her mind.

It was twenty past eleven. She just had time to go up to flat seven, hang up the dress, put the hat away, and have a quick cup of coffee before driving off to fetch Jordan. She ran up the steps to the art nouveau double doors, pushed them open, and tripped into the foyer. There, sitting on one of the gilt and red velvet chairs, was the journalist who had been so rude to her and had written that horrible piece for the Telegraph magazine.

Zillah could hardly understand how a woman would choose to wear the same black suit on two consecutive visits to the same person. And not even vary her shoes or her jewelry. That same curiously shaped gold ring was on her right hand. “Were you waiting for me?” She barely paused in her rush to the lift. “I have to go out again immediately to fetch my son from school.”

“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. I’ll wait.”

Zillah went up in the lift. While she was hanging up the dress she thought maybe she ought to have asked the woman-Natalie Reckman was her name, how could she have forgotten even for a moment?-to come upstairs and wait for her. But journalists really weren’t the sort of people to leave alone in one’s home. They might do anything, pry into one’s private drawers, read one’s letters. They were worse than Malina Daz or, come to that, poor Jerry. She no longer fancied coffee. A brandy would have been more beneficial but she wasn’t going to start down that road. Instead of returning to the foyer, she went all the way down in the lift to the basement car park, and fifteen minutes later had picked up Jordan and brought him back.

It was now half an hour since she’d seen Natalie Reckman and she was tempted simply to carry on with her day as if she hadn’t seen her. She microwaved a couple of chicken nuggets for Jordan’s lunch, poured him a glass of orange juice, and sat him at the table. While she was making herself a sandwich the house phone rang. The porter’s voice said. “Shall I send Miss Reckman up, madam?”

“No-yes, I suppose so.”

The journalist might not have changed her outfit, but her manner had undergone a transformation. Gone was the cool intellectual approach and in its place a warm friendliness. “Zillah, if I may, I’m very anxious to have another chat with you. It’s so good of you to see me.”

Zillah thought she hadn’t had much choice. “I was just going to have my lunch.”

“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Natalie, as if she’d been asked. “But I wouldn’t say no to a glass of that delicious-looking orange juice. Is this your little boy?”

“That’s Jordan, yes.”

“He is so exactly like his father, the spitting image.”

Zillah tried to remember if there had been any photographs of Jerry in the papers, apart from the one she took of him with baby Eugenie, but she was sure there hadn’t been. He’d never allowed anyone to take his picture. “Did you know my-Jerry-that is, Jeff?”

“Very well indeed at one time.”

Natalie was sitting down now, nursing her orange juice. Her tone was subtly changing again and her manner sharpening. She gave Zillah one of the searching stares that had been so much a feature of her previous visit. “How otherwise do you think I knew you’d been married to him and had two children? You did read my article about you, Zillah?”

“Oh, yes, I read it.” Zillah took a hold on her courage. “If you want to know, I thought it very unkind.”

Natalie laughed. She drank the juice and set the glass on the table. It was rather too near Jordan for his taste and he pushed it out of his way with a petulant shove. The glass fell onto the floor and broke. He let out a howl of dismay and, picked up by his mother, beat his fists against her chest, shouting an emotional demand he hadn’t given expression to for weeks, “Jordan wants Daddy!”

Rather in the manner of a social worker, a children’s officer perhaps, Natalie shook her head sorrowfully. She got down on her knees and began picking up broken glass.

“Oh, leave it!”

Natalie shrugged. “As you like. I only read of your husband’s death yesterday. I’ve been in Rome, working.”

What did she care? She set Jordan down on the floor with a box of bricks and two miniature cars but he immediately got up and ran to her, embracing her knees with sticky hands. Then Zillah took in what Natalie had said. “He wasn’t my husband.”

“Are you sure?”

Zillah forgot the stickiness on her legs, the pool of orange juice on the floor, the mess on the table, the time, Jims, her new dress and hat-everything. A cold shiver, like an ice cube dropped on the back of her neck, ran down her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, Zillah, it’s a funny thing but I spent a long time yesterday, I and my assistant actually, looking through quite a lot of records. We were trying to trace your divorce from Jeff, and the extraordinary thing was that we couldn’t find it.”

“What business was it of yours, I’d like to know?”

“Goodness, your teeth are chattering-are you cold? It’s very warm in here.”

“I’m not cold. Oh, for God’s sake go and play with something, Jordan. Leave Mummy alone.” Zillah lifted up a white face in which frightened eyes glittered. “I asked you what business you had to go rooting through my private affairs?”

“Do you really think your affairs, as you quaintly call them, are so private? You’ve been in all the papers. Don’t you think your readers have a right to know what you get up to?”

“You journalists are all the same, you’ll do anything and say anything. Now I’d like you to go, please.”

“I shan’t be staying much longer, Zillah. I was just hoping you could help me, perhaps give me a firmer date for when your divorce actually took place. I-and, incidentally, the police-had the idea it was some time last spring but that doesn’t seem to be so.” Natalie had no idea whether the police were pursuing the same line of inquiry as her own and it was only by chance that she was correct. “Still, I’m sure you can set us right. Was it perhaps the year before?”