Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

WITH JOCK GONE and his mother gone, Minty grew more confident. Coming into the house gradually ceased to be an ordeal. When she went upstairs to bed or to have her bath, she no longer feared seeing Auntie and Mrs. Lewis in a bedroom doorway. Auntie’s absence had by now been of long duration. She hadn’t seen her since June-or was it May?

Like a member of a tribe placating the god, she faithfully put flowers on Auntie’s grave, though since confusing the original one with another, she had become much freer about where her offerings went. Any grave with an angel playing a musical instrument would do. The dead were everywhere, could go anywhere and, now Auntie had left the house, Minty had no doubt she ranged the cemetery from resting place to resting place. She was always careful, though, to choose a woman’s. Auntie, who had so much disliked marriage, would never lay herself down in the neighborhood of a man’s bones.

While she kept up the practice of bringing flowers every week, ranunculus and zinnias, carnations and by now chrysanthemums, she knew Auntie would be pacified. It was with a little shiver that Minty sometimes remembered how indignant she’d been at past failures in this particular regard. Never again. A life free of ghosts would be a life of peace.

The weather had become hot and sultry. Sometimes a thick mist of fumes and emissions hung over Harrow Road. Everything seemed dirtier and smellier than in winter and taking two baths a day was a regular thing for Minty. Fourteen months had passed since first she met Jock and nine since his death. Having barely thought of him for a long time, she was aware that he had re-entered her mind so that she wondered how it would have been if he’d lived. Would she have been happy? Would she have got pregnant like Josephine? It gave her something of a shock when she realized she’d have been Mrs. Lewis too. All the baths she took reminded her how he’d taken her savings and when he died, let his mother inherit them. What had become of that money now? She was as far off getting a shower installed as ever and now she began to wish she’d used the money for that purpose so that there had been nothing to give Jock.

Then, one warm morning that promised another hot day, when she’d had her bath and was dressing to go to work, she heard his voice. She heard him singing at her out of her bedroom wall. Not “Walk On By” this time but “Tea for Two.”

“ Tea for two and two for tea…”

She was too frightened to make a sound. Then, as the phrase was repeated, followed by the next line, and he broke off to laugh, she managed to whisper, “Go away, go away.”

He seemed to take notice of what she said, for instead of addressing her again, he began talking to other, equally invisible, people: a group of nameless friends, with voices she’d never heard before and that mingled, indistinguishable from each other and uttering a rattle of meaningless words. Then Jock intervened, offering them a mint or making one of his strange jokes, the like of which Minty had never heard elsewhere. If she were to see him she thought it would be the death of her but she didn’t see him. She saw none of them and what made her more terrified than she’d ever been was a sudden easily identifiable voice replying to him. His mother’s.

Like her son, she’d been banished only for a while. Minty shivered, touching wood, doing more than that, clutching it, holding hard on to the edge of a table, the frame of a door. She ought to have known you can’t get rid of ghosts so easily, you can’t stab them and kill them like those gangs killed real people. It wasn’t the way. Were they with her for life, these men and women she didn’t know? Jock’s family? That ex-wife of his, his relatives?

The post coming, the rattle of the letter box, the thump of something falling on the doormat, and the crash of the lid closing again, distracted her. A welcome interruption that sent her downstairs, still combing her wet hair. She never got much post. What came was mostly services bills and advertisements from estate agents wanting to sell her houses in St. John’s Wood. Like Auntie, when an unfamiliar envelope arrived she spent a long time scrutinizing it, studying the postmark, deciphering the handwriting, or frowning over the printing, before putting her thumb under the flap and opening it. Here was the usual junk mail and with it a mysterious package. It was a thick, padded brown envelope, the likes of which she’d never received before, and her name and address were written on a white label. It had cost more to send than ordinary first-class mail. Carefully, she slit the flap and opened it.

Inside was money. Twenty fifty-pound notes, held together with an elastic band. No letter, no card, nothing else. But she knew who it was from: Mrs. Lewis. She was dead but there must be someone still on earth she could get to do this for her, someone else she’d haunted and spoken to. Maybe Jock had had a brother or sister; he’d never said he hadn’t. Minty decided that was who it was, a brother who’d inherited the money Mrs. Lewis left. She’d not ignored the things Minty had said about giving back her money; they’d struck a nerve and when she appeared to her son she’d asked him what she ought to do.

Maybe that’s what they’d been talking about, that crowd whose anonymous voices had jabbered and whispered in the bedroom. Give her back the money, Mother, they’d been saying, and though she’d argued and perhaps Jock had argued too, the brother and his wife had told her it was only right to return the money. It was the only explanation. Not all Jock owed, though, only a thousand. Minty could hear-in her mind’s ear, not ghosts talking-that mean old Mrs. Lewis insisting on the smaller sum and winning her son over.

Mr. Kroot’s old cat was asleep in one of Sonovia’s armchairs. As usual, because it never sat sphinxlike as most cats do, but lay stretched out and slack, it looked dead. You had to examine it closely to discern the minuscule rise and fall of its thin side.

“It’s moved in, my deah.” Sonovia contemplated the cat with detachment. “It turned up on the doorstep and that was that. I must say, it’s easier giving it its food in here than going round to that dirty place. Ooh, the smell in that kitchen, you wouldn’t believe it. What Gertrude Pierce did with herself all the time she was here I never will know. Laf went in to see the old man, you know. Went into the hospital, I mean. I said not to. What have they ever done for us, I said. But he would do it.”

“Let bygones be bygones,” said Laf, the peacemaker. “I mean, I don’t know for a fact if he said that about going back to the jungle. It was repeated third-hand to me. It might have got sort of distorted on the way. He’s in a bad way, Minty. I took him a half-bottle of Scotch, he’s not supposed to have it in there, but you should have seen him. His whole face lit up. It’s a terrible thing to be old and alone.”

“I’m alone.” As she spoke Minty heard the voices returning, at first like the murmur of a crowd a long way off, then jostling each other and interrupting and sometimes laughing so that she couldn’t make out a single word. As if Laf and Sonovia weren’t there or didn’t matter, she said, “Well, I suppose I’ve always got people with me. Wish I didn’t. You can have too much of that.”

The Wilsons exchanged glances and Laf went to get the drinks. Sonovia and Minty went into the garden and sat down in the patio chairs, and Minty admired her neighbors’ hanging baskets. The garden was all dahlias and hollyhocks now, the lawn yellowing from the drought. Not a breath of wind stirred the boughs of the cherry tree. The sky was colorless, a sheet of unbroken whitish cloud in which the sun showed like a pool of dull yellow. Laf came out with a tray on which were tall glasses filled with amber liquid surfaced by maraschino cherries and chunks of apple and cucumber. Pimms was his summer craze. He offered the drinks proudly and handed round a dish of macadamia nuts.