Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Just as Sonovia was on the watch for Gertrude Pierce, so Minty was waiting for the reappearance of Mrs. Lewis. She was ironing. The light-green-and-dark-green striped shirt was on the top of the pile. It couldn’t be more than ten days since she’d ironed it. The man it belonged to must be very fond of it, maybe it was his favorite. She spread it out on the ironing board, feeling the cotton. It was just damp enough but not so damp that steam rose from it when she applied the iron.

She’d ironed shirts for Jock, not many and not often, but when he’d stayed the night she wouldn’t let him put the same one on in the morning. Next time he’d come over she’d handed him the clean shirt and he’d said he’d never seen such good ironing as hers. That was the day he’d taken her bowling. It was the most amazing evening of her life. She slipped the cardboard collar round the neck of the green shirt and as she slid it into its cellophane bag, a tear slipped down her cheek and splashed on to the shiny transparent stuff. Minty wiped it off and washed her hands. On second thoughts, she washed her face as well. The poky little room smelled of detergent and heat, a scent she couldn’t define because it wasn’t a burning smell but something like a really hot summer’s day. She was alone, there was no one watching her and arguing about her. The ghosts had been absent all the morning. She started on the last shirt but two, a white one with a very pale pink check.

Sonovia got bored with waiting. It wasn’t as if anything else happened down the street that was worth looking at, apart from those two yobs revving up their motorbikes for an unnecessarily long time and that Iranian woman coming out in the chador that enveloped her from head to foot in black folds, leaving only her tired eyes free. Her three children looked like anyone else’s, dressed in jeans and T-shirts and sandals. Sonovia couldn’t understand it.

“When in Rome do as the Romans do,” she said when Laf came in.

“Pardon?”

“Our mothers never got themselves up like that after they came here. They adapted.”

“Your mum never dressed like a nun either,” said Laf sarcastically, “so far as I recall. In case it’s of any interest, Mrs. Pierce is sitting in the old man’s back garden in a deckchair. So you can come off watch. Want a beer? I’m going to have one.”

Sonovia accepted the beer but sat there ten minutes longer, just to prove she was relaxing, not waiting for Gertrude Pierce. She was just getting up, thinking about making lunch for her and Laf, when Minty came along. The last thing she wanted was for Minty to find out for herself Gertrude Pierce was still here, which she would do as soon as she looked out of her kitchen window, so she waved and mouthed, “She’s not gone. She’s in the back.”

Minty nodded and made a face, a sympathetic face that registered disgust and fellow feeling at the same time. Inserting her key in the lock, she felt the usual apprehension and braced herself. There was no one and nothing there. It was funny, she was getting to be able to tell if the house was empty of them the minute she came into the hall. Anyway, they weren’t her immediate worry. For some reason, Josephine had kissed her when she left and she could still feel her scent on her skin and the smear of her lipstick as well as her own tears. But first she went through to the kitchen and looked out of the window at the two of them next door, Gertrude Pierce and Mr. Kroot in old-fashioned striped deckchairs. They’d put a rickety table with a green baize top between them and on it they were playing cards. The black cat with its aged gray muzzle lay on the grass, looking as if it were dead. But it often looked like that and it never was dead. Minty could hardly remember a time when that cat hadn’t been there, its face like an old whiskered person’s, its walk growing stiffer. A bumble bee drifted down close to its ears. They twitched and its tail flicked. Gertrude Pierce swept up the cards into a pack and shuffled them.

Had Mr. Kroot’s cat been in the cemetery again, walking over where her grave would be? Or trailing arthritically over Auntie’s two graves? Upstairs now, Minty ran her bath. She hardly ever had a bath these days without thinking about her money and how she could have bought a shower with it. She dropped her clothes onto the floor in a heap. They’d been clean on that morning, of course, but to her they smelled of Josephine and the litter-strewn street and the diesel fumes from lorries and taxis and all the cigarettes people smoked between here and Immacue and the butts they left on the pavement. She scrubbed herself with the nailbrush, not just her hands but her arms and legs and feet as well. The skin was bright pink under the water. Then she used the back brush. She dipped her head in and shampooed her hair, digging into her scalp with her fingertips. Kneeling up, she rinsed her head under the running tap. If only she had that shower!

As she was drying herself, another towel wrapped round her head turban-wise, something told her they were back. Not in here. To do her justice, Auntie wouldn’t bring a stranger in; she had her own ideas of modesty and Minty hadn’t been seen without her clothes since she was nine. They were outside the door. Let them wait. Minty used her deodorant not just under her arms but on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands. She dressed in white cotton trousers and a white T-shirt with pale blue stripes. Both were “left-behinds” from Immacue, among those garments that their owners for some reason failed to collect and that, after six months, Josephine sold at two pounds apiece. Minty got a discount and only paid two for both. She wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it if they’d only been dry-cleaned but these were washable, had many times been washed, and the trousers she’d boiled, which reduced their size and made them fit better. She combed her hair, wrapped up her soiled clothes in the towels, and, drawing a deep breath, flung open the door.

They were outside, a couple of yards away in the doorway of Auntie’s bedroom. Minty touched all the wood she could reach, pink wood and white wood and brown, but they didn’t go away. Mrs. Lewis was much clearer and more solid today than Auntie was. She looked like a real person, the sort of old woman you might see in the street, coming back from the shops. In spite of the warmth of the day she wore a winter coat of dark red wool, a color Minty particularly disliked, and she had a dark red felt hat jammed down over her ears. So they could change their clothes wherever it was they came from, Minty thought, marveling.

Auntie, behind Jock’s mother and much taller than she was, appeared rather shadowy, something you only thought you saw and had to look at again to make sure. But she thickened and grew sharper as Minty’s eyes fixed on her. Minty remembered once, when she was a child, some relative or friend, it might have been Kathleen’s husband or Edna’s, who took photographs and developed his own film. It was Edna’s, she remembered now, recalling him for other mysterious, never fully understood, reasons. She’d seen him develop the film and watched the blank sheet in its pool of liquid gradually turn into a picture. Auntie was like that, growing from a vague shapelessness into a picture of herself.

Her arms full of damp towels and clothes, Minty stared at them and they stared back at her. This time she was the first to speak. She addressed Auntie. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with her if you knew what she owed me. Her son borrowed all my money and yours too, what you left me, and she could have paid it back; she had the time, but she never did.”

Auntie said nothing. Mrs. Lewis went on staring. Shrugging, turning away, Minty went downstairs. She put the clothes and the towels in the washing machine, started it, and washed her hands, thinking how she’d have held that stuff at arm’s length if it hadn’t been for encountering those two on the landing. Mrs. Lewis had come down behind her, but she’d come alone. Auntie was gone. Had she taken Minty’s words to heart?