Ruth Rendell: Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

The time Agnes came was just after two and when it got to four Auntie began to wonder what had happened to her. Of course, she knew very well that when people say they’ll be back in an hour they don’t actually return for two or three hours; they’re just saying it to make you feel better, so she wasn’t worried. But she was when it got to six and seven. Luckily, what few shops there were in the area stayed open round the clock, so she asked the lady next door-that was before Laf and Sonovia came-to keep a lookout for Agnes and she took Minty in the pram and bought baby porridge and more milk and a bunch of bananas. Auntie’d never had any children of her own but she was a great believer in bananas as nourishing, the easiest to eat of all fruits, and liked by everyone.

“Personally,” she’d said, “I’d regard anyone who turned up their nose at bananas with the deepest suspicion.”

Agnes didn’t come back that day or the next. She never came back. Auntie made a bit of an effort to find her. She went round to Agnes’s parents’ place and found her mum had never been in hospital, she was as fit as a fiddle. They didn’t want the baby, no thanks, they’d been through all that when theirs were little and they weren’t starting again. Agnes’s dad said he reckoned she’d met someone who’d take her on but not the kid as well and this was her way of solving that problem.

“Why don’t you hold on to her, Winnie? You’ve none of your own. She’d be company for you.”

And Auntie had. They gave her the baby’s birth certificate and Agnes’s dad put two ten-pound notes in the envelope with it. Sometimes, when she’d got fond of Minty and looked on her as her own, Auntie worried a bit that Agnes would come back for her and she wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. But Agnes never did and when Minty was twelve the mum who hadn’t been in the hospital came round one day and said Agnes had been married and divorced and married again, and had gone to Australia with her second husband and her three kids and his four. It was quite a relief.

Auntie had never adopted Minty or fostered her or any of those things. “I’ve no legal right to you,” she often said. “It’d be hard to say who you belong to. Still, no one’s showing any signs of wanting to take you away, are they? Poor little nobody’s child you are.”

Minty left school when she was sixteen and got a job in the textile works in Craven Park. Auntie had brought her up to be very clean and though she’d been promoted to machinist, she didn’t like the fluff and lint that got everywhere. In those days everyone smoked and Minty didn’t like the smell or the ash either. Auntie knew the people who ran the dry cleaners. It wasn’t Immacue then but Harrow Road Dry-Cleaning and an old man called Mr. Levy owned it. Minty stayed there for the next eighteen years, at first when Mr. Levy’s son took over, then when it became Quicksilver Cleaners, finally working for Josephine O’Sullivan. Her life was very simple and straightforward. She walked to work in the mornings, worked for eight hours, mostly ironing, and walked home or got the 18 bus. The evenings she spent with Auntie, watching TV, eating their meal. Once a week they went to the cinema.

Auntie was quite old when her voices began. Both her sisters had died by then but it was their voices she heard. Kathleen told her she ought to go to the pub after the cinema, take Minty, it was time Minty had a bit of life, and to make it the Queen’s Head, it was the only one round there that was properly clean. She used to go in there with George when they were courting. Auntie was a bit doubtful but the sisters were insistent and after she and Minty had been to see Heavenly Creatures the two of them went shyly into the College Park pub, the Queen’s Head. It was clean, or as clean as you could get. The barman was always wiping down the surfaces and with a clean cloth, not some old rag.

Edna didn’t talk about pubs or having a good time. She kept telling Auntie to concentrate and she’d see her dead husband Wilfred. He was dying to “get through,” whatever that meant, though why Auntie should want to when she’d never been able to stand Wilfred Cutts she didn’t know. Then God started talking to Auntie and the sisters took a back seat. Young Mr. Levy said, “When you talk to God it’s praying, but when God talks to you it’s schizophrenia.”

Minty didn’t laugh. She was frightened of having God in the house, always telling Auntie He was training her to be the angel of the Lord and not to eat red meat. Auntie had always been a great one for the royal family and she could remember Edward VIII renouncing the throne for love of a woman, so it wasn’t surprising when his voice joined God’s. He told her he’d got a son, born in secret in Paris, and then he’d had a son and she was to tell the queen she’d no business being where she was and this King Edward X ought to wear the crown. Auntie was arrested trying to get into Buckingham Palace and they wanted to put her away, but Minty wasn’t having that. While she had her health and strength Auntie was staying put.

“She’s been like a mother to me,” she said to young Mr. Levy, who said she was a good girl and it was a shame there weren’t more like her.

In the end Auntie had to go, but she didn’t live long in the geriatric ward. She’d made a will a long time ago and left Minty the house in Syringa Road, and all the furniture and her savings, which amounted to £1,650. Minty didn’t tell anyone the amount but let it be known Auntie had left her money. It proved Auntie’d loved her. When she added it to her own savings the total came to £2,500. Any sum over a thousand pounds was real money, Minty thought, proud of what she’d amassed. It was after that that she collected Auntie’s ashes from the undertakers and buried them in Maisie Chepstow’s grave.

A long time passed before she went back to the pub. The following week Laf and Sonovia hadn’t wanted to see the film so she’d gone alone; she didn’t mind that, it wasn’t as though she wanted to talk in cinemas. Wisely, she went to the six-ten showing when hardly anyone else did. There were only eight people in the seats besides herself. She liked being alone with no one to whisper to her or pass her chocolates. On the way back she dropped into the Queen’s Head and bought an orange juice. Why, she couldn’t have said. The pub was half empty, it seemed less smoky than usual, and she found a table in the corner.

All her life Minty had never spoken to a man who wasn’t someone’s husband or her employer or the postman or bus conductor. Those sorts of people. She’d never seriously thought of having a boyfriend, still less of getting married. When she was younger Sonovia used to tease her a bit and ask her when she was going to get a man of her own, and Minty always said she wasn’t the marrying kind. Auntie’s mysterious but horrific account of her marital experience had put her off. Besides, she didn’t know any unattached men and none showed any signs of wanting to know her.

Until Jock. Not the first but the second time she went into the pub she saw him looking at her. She was sitting at that same corner table on her own, dressed as she always was in a clean pair of cotton trousers and a long-sleeved T-shirt, her hair newly washed and her nails scrubbed. The man she stole cautious glances at was tall and well built, long-legged in blue jeans and a dark-blue padded jacket. He had a handsome face and a nice tan; he looked clean and his brown hair was short and trim. Minty had almost finished her orange juice. She stared into the golden grainy dregs of it, to avoid looking at the man.

He came over, said, “Why so sad?”

Minty was too scared to look at him. “I’m not sad.”