Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Gertrude Pierce-was that her name?-was as surprised to see Minty as Minty was to see her. “I’d no idea you worked here.” Implicit in her remark was the unspoken If I had I’d never have come in . Her voice was low, with a sort of growl in it and an accent Minty couldn’t place. Very recently, perhaps on the way here, she’d had her hair color touched up and it was as red and glossy as the scarlet satin jacket she deposited on the counter along with a green woolly jumper and a pair of purple trousers. Minty could smell them from six feet away. She wrinkled up her nose, a change of expression Gertrude Pierce wasn’t slow to notice. “If you don’t want to do them I’ll take them elsewhere.”

Josephine wouldn’t like her to turn away business. “We’ll do them.” Minty had to answer her, but the thought of Auntie finding out that she’d actually spoken to Mr. Kroot’s sister made her tremble. Her hand shook as she worked out the cost of dry-cleaning, wrote the sum down on a card and the name “Mrs. Pierce,” and passed it across the counter. “Ready by Saturday.”

Gertrude Pierce studied the card with suspicion and something like wonder. It was as if she speculated as to what divining powers or superhuman insight Minty must possess to have known her name. “I’ll have my carrier back, thank you.”

It lay on the counter, a black bag bruised and scratched by the hundred occasions on which it had been used since the assistant at Dickins and Jones put newly bought goods into it for the first time. Minty pushed it an inch or two nearer Gertrude Pierce. Mr. Kroot’s sister waited, perhaps for her to bring it over and curtsy, Minty thought. She went into the ironing room and slammed the door. Presently she heard heavy footsteps and the exit bell ring.

“I told you not to speak to her,” said Auntie. “I could hardly believe my ears. You should have pretended she wasn’t there, not given her the satisfaction.”

“I’d like to pretend you’re not there.” With Josephine absent, she could answer back as much as she liked. “I want you to go away for good and take Jock’s old mum with you.”

“You put nice flowers on my grave like you used to and I’ll think about it. Tulips are over, whatever the florist may say. I suppose roses are too much money.”

“Nothing’d be too much to get rid of you,” said Minty rashly.

And when she left for home at five-thirty she bought roses, a dozen white ones, expensive enough but cheaper than they would have been at the cemetery gates. It was a dull evening and just inside the gates, the building she’d never noticed before with its pillars and porticoes in weathered gray stone looked as if it had been there for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Minty, who’d last week seen a television program about ancient Rome, wondered if it dated from that time. It was a smaller version of the great gloomy crematorium and, like it, its doors were shut. Inside, the air would be dark and smelly and always cold. She shut her eyes and turned her back on it. She didn’t know why she’d come down this way at all, this wasn’t the way to Auntie’s grave.

That was because she’d come in by the eastern entrance instead of the western. She’d never done that before. For once, she’d bought flowers at a shop, not at the gates. Suddenly it seemed very important to her to “give” Auntie the flowers. Auntie had asked for them and specifically for roses. Was the grave up along this aisle or that? The cemetery was so big with so many paths, some of them winding, so many tombs that looked the same. Some of the trees were evergreens that might more suitably have been called everblacks, their leaves were always dark and dull. Others had limp green leaves hanging down. Only the grass and the tiny flowers in it, yellow and white, were bright and varying from season to season.

It was still broad daylight and would be for hours, even if that light was half obscured by cloud. She should be heading for the crematorium and the western gate but didn’t know how. She walked down one aisle and up another, turned right and then left again. She’d know the grave when she saw it, by the name on it of course, but first by the angel, covering his eyes with one of his hands and in the other holding the broken violin. The trouble was that the cemetery was full of stone angels, every other tomb seemed to have an angel on it, some holding scrolls, some stringed instruments, though these were mostly harps, some on which the angel wept with bowed head. Minty began to feel like weeping herself. She knew she ought to go out of the gate she’d come in by and re-enter by the other, but that would mean passing the man who sold flowers. He might think she’d stolen hers when he wasn’t looking or even taken them from someone else’s grave, a not uncommon proceeding, she’d heard.

Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life December the 15th, 1897, aged 53. Asleep in the arms of Jesus . She knew the inscription by heart and she remembered telling Jock the corpse or the bones or the dust which lay below had been those of Auntie’s grandmother. None of that mattered. All that did was that she had buried Auntie’s ashes in that grave. By now she was down by the canal with the small Roman place ahead of her, and she turned once more. There were so many graves in here and so few people to look after them that grass and moss and ivy crept over and covered everything, hiding stone and obscuring engraved names. She had never seen a cat in here, though she imagined them invading the place by night, but now one appeared, long, thin, and gray, picking its way delicately over anonymous mounds, diving into an ivy-tangled cavern between the roots of a tree when it saw her.

An angel holding something loomed ahead of her at the point where the aisle met a path at right angles. This must be it, this was where, kneeling on the earth, she had looked up and seen Jock’s ghost approaching. Even before she had reached it she saw that the angel was the same, with the same covered eyes and holding the same broken violin. But when she pushed aside ivy tendrils and read what was engraved on the stone she saw that it was different. This wasn’t Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, but Eve Margaret Pinchbeck, only daughter of Samuel Pinchbeck, fled to her Savior, October the 23rd, 1899 . Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, thought Minty. Have a Polo, Polo. How could two graves be so alike yet not belong to the same person? Maybe the person who made statues all that long, long time ago, maybe in those Roman times, made lots of them the same.

Perhaps it would do. And if Auntie’s ashes weren’t here that might not be so important. Something different on this woman’s grave was the stone vase that was part of the molding round the base of the platform the angel stood on. It was dry, and green moss crept close up to its lips. As she had done before, Minty found flowers on a nearby grave, flowers that were withering, threw them into the bushes, and used the water they had been standing in to fill the mossy bowl. She arranged the roses, breaking off their stems to shorten them, and in doing so tore her hands on their thorns. The blood-letting relieved her in a strange way she hadn’t experienced before, though the dirt that must be on the rose stems was distressing. There should be a water tap somewhere in here, there probably was, but she didn’t know where.

She stood up and turned round, walking on, away from the gasometer. That must be the right direction for the western gate. Yet it wasn’t. She began to be frightened. Suppose she could never find the way out, but must wander on for hours, searching for years maybe, forever among the overgrown graves with cats walking over them and making live people shiver. This was surely a place of ghosts, with the myriad dead lying everywhere beneath the ground, but hers weren’t here. There was only dimness and a kind of heavy peace, and in the distance the hum of traffic on Harrow Road. No other people, alive or phantom, no birds singing. She came suddenly into an open place with the huge colonnaded temple that was the crematorium before her. It was always frightening but from this angle more so with its high blank wall and the gathering gray clouds behind it, the wilderness of the neglected place coming close up to its footings. Minty imagined its great door swinging open, its stained-glass window shattering, and ghosts coming blindly out, their hands upraised and their robes streaming. She began to run.