Read A Sight for Sore Eyes Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Tags: #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Crime, #Mystery, #Fiction, #General & Literary Fiction, #Crime & mystery
A Sight for Sore Eyes (8 page)
Chapter 9
One night after his brother had been to see him, had sat by his bed for an hour while they both watched the ward television, Jimmy Brex died. The last of his viable arteries closed up, the substance which lined it finally thickened so that the thread-breadth passage shrank to hair's-breadth, to nothing, and Jimmy, gasping, in agony, fighting for blood, breath and oxygen, passed out of life. He was sixty-seven. The neighbours said he hadn't wanted to live after his wife died. His brother registered the death, summoned undertakers, fixed up the funeral and invited a chosen few home for a beer, whisky and crisps after the cremation. His son attended, though virtually silently, surveying the place that was now his, not thinking much of it, but gratified by the possession of property, any property. After everyone had gone, Teddy said to Keith, 'I'm not evicting you, you needn't think that. I know this has been your home all your life. But I'd like you to think about being gone by, say, Christmas.' It was October. Teddy's final year at the University of Eastcote had just begun. They were in the living-room, among the heavy crowded furniture, with its throws of coloured crochet, an antimacassar over the back of an armchair, a shawl draped across the settee. Lilies, a wreath of them, brought unexpectedly by someone, lay wilting in the dust on the coffee table. Keith, heavily sedated with Chivas Regal, but recovering fast and absolutely on the ball, favoured Teddy with a slow smile. His drooping jowls and the long, now grey, moustache, gave him the look of a benign walrus. His eyes remained sharp, the eyebrows flaring in Mephistophelean arcs. 'This house belongs to me,' he said. 'To me. It's mine. You needn't look like that. Well, I mean, you can if you like. It's all one to me. My dad left me this house. My mum had a life interest and when she died it reverted to me. That's the term, "reverted". OK?' 'You're lying,' Teddy said. He didn't know what else to say. 'Let me explain. I don't fuckin' see why I should, but I will. I might as well. Your dad, God rest his soul, poor sod, your dad wasn't my dad's son. My mum was carrying when he took up with her. Well, you can guess the rest. He was OK about it, but as for getting the house, well, you've got to draw the line, right?' 'I don't believe it,' said Teddy. 'Too bad. That's your problem. I got the deeds in the bank and that's more proof than anything you believe in. However...' Keith repeated the word which he seemed to like the sound of. 'However, I'm less of a bastard than what you are. Surprise, surprise. And since you're my nephew, or my half-nephew, not much doubt about that, I'm not turning you out the way you'd have got shot of me. You'd have kicked me out at Christmas, but as far as I'm concerned you can stop here so long as you're up at that fuckin' college. How about that?' Keith wasn't averse to further explanations. His father had told him the facts of Jimmy's paternity when Jimmy was twenty-three and he was twenty-one. Brex senior was a magnanimous man and had brought up the elder son as his own. Property, though, and the inheritance of property, was another matter. The house that he had saved for and for years had a mortgage on must go to his own natural son. 'I might make a will and leave it to someone else in the family,' said Keith. 'I reckon I've got a bunch of cousins somewhere. Or I might leave it to you. If you behave yourself. Show a bit of respect. Clean the place, bring me up a morning cuppa.' He started laughing at his own wit. 'Why was I never told?' 'Why wasn't you what? Do me a favour. Your mum and dad was alive, you want to remember that. I let them live here and now I'm letting you. You're fuckin' lucky if you did but know it. A lot of men in my position'd expect you to pay rent.' Teddy walked out, slamming the door behind him. He went into the dining-room and sat down on the floor by the woodpile. He had intended, if not tonight, tomorrow, to begin clearing out the living-room and his parents' bedroom. Maybe get someone in to clear it, a second-hand furniture dealer who might give him something for the bedroom suite and the battered sofa. That was not now possible, might never be possible. He felt overwhelmed by ugliness. Everything in the house was ugly with the exception of one or two objects in this room and these, his own drawings in their pale wooden frames, his row of books between the bookends he had carved now seemed to him pathetic. His tools weren't ugly, the workbench where the sideboard had been, the two planes, the rack of saws, the hammers and the drills, but they were simply utilitarian. The smell seemed more than usually pervasive, penetrating even here. It was too cold to open the windows. The house was a hideous dump, but he had thought it was his, it was all he had. Only he didn't have it. Keith did, Keith who was one of the ugliest things in it, whose bloated body and soggy face, begrimed hands and broken, yellowing teeth, offended him every time he saw him. For a little while he seriously considered leaving. But where could he go? At his university it was possible to live in one of the two overcrowded halls of residence, but not in one's third year. There was no way he could afford to rent even a single room. His grant was inadequate for just the bare living and travelling. It occurred to him - as a matter of interest, he didn't care that much -that never in his life had he bought a new garment or had one bought for him. He'd never been abroad or to a London theatre or into any restaurant more up-market than the Burger King. His plan, scarcely formed, taken for granted, had been to sell the house. Clear it out, do it up, paint the outside and sell it. It was probably worth about as little as any thirties-vintage semi anywhere in London, but it would still fetch thousands and thousands, maybe as much as forty thousand pounds. But it was Keith's. Teddy kept the ring in the pocket of his only other jacket, the zipper one that hung on a hook on the inside of the door. He held it in the palm of his hand and looked at it. He still hadn't had it valued. If he tried to sell it the jeweller would think he had stolen it. He could try pawning it. Teddy knew very little about pawning things but pawnshops existed, he had seen them, and he had an idea a pawnbroker would give him approximately half what the ring was worth. That would be a way of getting it valued. He wasn't going to sell it. He would never sell it. Money wasn't all that much of a serious problem, anyway. He could manage, he always had. While Keith continued to provide some of their food he wouldn't starve. And he could go on making things and learning to make things, and finish his course and get his degree. He had to make something for his degree submission, some artefact that would be a sample or demonstration of his particular skills. Most of the others would produce a coffee table or a desk and there was someone who was a gifted wood carver, who Teddy knew would be making a mermaid for a ship's figurehead. His talent was in inlaid work, but he also fancied himself as an artist in painted furniture. He would make a mirror. His would have a frame of pale wood, sycamore or the darker walnut, inlaid with holly and yew, painted blue and grey and gold. If only it didn't have to be here, in this place where everything his eye alighted on was a deformity or a vulgar affront. Outside the window even the Edsel was covered up in plastic under its fourlegged plastic-roofed shelter. Keith's motor bike had a black binliner over its handlebars and another covering its saddle. The place was a storehouse for plastic bags, there was even one drifting about on the concrete, where greyish blades of grass struggled up through the cracks. Another had plastered itself up against the chain-link fencing, its corners poking through into next door as if it were trving to escape. Teddy drew the curtains. Keith was asleep in the living-room. He had been drinking more since his brother died, you could say he was drinking for two, Jimmy's share as well as his own. Quite often he didn't go to bed, but came back from whatever job he had been doing, covered up the bike with the bin-liners and moved directly into the living-room with his two plastic bags, one containing the smaller and more portable of his plumber's tools, the other his preferred Chivas Regal and Guinness for the evening. The television went on, Keith uncapped his first can or bottle and lit his first cigarette for some hours. His customers refused to let him smoke in their houses. When he saw Teddy looking, he offered an explanation. 'I'm not leaving no drink in this place while I'm out working. I wouldn't trust you round my Chivas further than I could fuckin' throw you.' Teddy made no answer. What was there to say? He never touched alcohol and Keith knew it as well as he did himself. For some reason Keith, who in days gone by had behaved rather better to him than his parents had, since their departure had become abusive, foul-mouthed and unremittingly surly. Teddy didn't care. He made no conjectures either as to whether this happened because Keith had in fact loved his brother and missed him or was disturbed by having no one to look after him and, occasionally, to talk to. It was nothing to him. He watched Keith, sometimes from the open doorway, and especially when the whisky and the Guinness had done their work, not out of interest or sympathy or pity, but with a kind of fascinated disgust. Often he stood there for ten or fifteen minutes, just looking. Not only at Keith but at Keith's surroundings, absorbing the dreadful room, the curtains coming off their hooks and pinned together with some clip or clamp from Keith's tool bag, the dust so thick that it grew off surfaces like fur, the never-emptied ashtrays, the saucers, tin lids, glass jars full of ash and fag-ends, the sagging broken furniture and square of carpet on which the seemingly floral pattern was in fact made by drink stains, mud brown on sewage grey, the discarded lampshade and bare bulb hanging from a knotted lead, until his eyes finally fixed themselves on Keith himself. His snoring was worse now than sixteen years ago. He trumpeted, he snorted, and every few minutes jolted and jumped as if jabbed with an electric probe. Then the rhythmic snoring was reestablished, regular, long drawn-out, rattling through Keith's nasal passages and expelled in a kind of juddering whistle. Once - but once only - he came fully to his senses and sitting up yelled, 'What are you fuckin' lookin' at?' It never happened again. Keith was too stunned and bludgeoned by his favoured mixture. He lay with his mouth wide open, his arms hanging over the arms of the chair and his big round belly, covered by a moth-eaten green wool sweater, reared up like some grassy hill in which speculators have dug holes. He never used a glass but drank straight from the can. The whisky he poured into a yoghurt pot, though where it came from Teddy didn't know. Crazy to imagine anyone living here ever eating yoghurt. Usually one plastic bag lay on his knees, a couple of others on the floor beside him. Quite often he didn't even bother to take the whisky out of the bag it had been bought in, but pouring it out, lifted bottle and enveloping bag together. It might be midnight, but the television would still be on. Keith would be there all night. If he needed to pee he would never make it up the stairs to the bathroom but would stagger out into the front garden. Teddy often smelt it. The yuppies next door thought it was cats. Keith snorted and gave one of his violent galvanic starts. By coincidence the characters in the Accident and Emergency sitcom on the television were on the point of administering heartstimulating shocks to a patient on a trolley. Teddy switched it off and went to bed.
Chapter 10
The painting was two years old, already much acclaimed, and bought for a large sum, when Marc Syre threw Harriet Oxenholme out of the house. She had asked him once too often if he still loved her. His self-control, of which he had never had much, snapped. He fetched her such a swipe to the head that she fell over and lay sprawled on the badly stained carpet under the broken chandelier. Then he took hold of her by the hair, that massy, thick, curly red hair, and tried to drag her out of the room. But a hank of hair came away in his hand, so he dragged her by the shoulders instead. For once no other members of Come Hither were in the house, nor was their road manager, nor any of the groupies Marc was in the habit of bringing home for a night or just for a quickie on the drawing-room sofa. Harriet and Marc had been alone which was why, harking back to their passion and exclusivity which seemed so recent yet at the time so eternal, she had asked the fatal question. He hadn't knocked her unconscious, but she gave up the struggle. She let him drag her out of the house, it was easier than walking. Outside the front door she got up because she didn't fancy being bumped down the stone steps. He gave her a push and she staggered, though she didn't lose her footing. When he had gone back into the house and slammed the door she sat down on the paving stones and rubbed her head where the hair had come out. There was blood on her fingers, he had wounded her. It was autumn and the dense tapestry of leaves had changed from green to pale-yellow and bronze touched with dark-red. When a window upstairs was roughly flung open broken tendrils and torn foliage fluttered down. Marc started throwing out her clothes. She had to duck not to be hit by a flying boot. The red dress, the dress, came floating down like a great crimson butterfly or a snippet of that Virginia creeper, airily and as if it were enjoying itself. Then came a cardboard box. She got up and shouted at him, 'Give me a suitcase, you bastard! I'm not carrying my stuff in a bloody box.' She didn't think he would. She started puffing her clothes in the box which had once held bottles of Babycham. When had he ever had Babycham, for God's sake? The suitcase came flying out with its lid flapping open, to fall slam bang right on top of the single rose bush. She seized it in her arms, scratching herself on thorns. It was the dawn of the age of cheesecloth and she was always in the forefront of fashion, so there was a lot of it, limp, pale stuff, as feeble as she felt. She stuffed it into the suitcase and blood got on it from her fingers, streaking it with tie-dye patterns. Tears ran down her cheeks and she began to wail. The window went up again and there he was with a big pink-and-white china bowl balanced on the sill. Those Victorian jug-and-bowl sets were all the rage, so of course she'd had to have one. Marc had bought it for her like everything else and now he was going to empty its contents on to her head. She struggled to her feet, whimpering, dragging the suitcase behind her, and she was at the gate when the water came down in a cascade. The bowl followed, hitting the paving with such a crash that the people opposite came out into their front garden. Harriet didn't look at them. They had complained to the police in the past about Marc's goings-on and probably would again. It wasn't her problem. She had problems enough, what with no money and nowhere to go. Her parents lived in Shropshire, in the manor house of a village near the Long Mynd, and were what her mother called 'gentlefolks'. They hadn't exactly shown Harriet the door, but after she had been expelled from her public school and had taken to following Come Hither everywhere, camping in her sleeping bag on the doorstep of the recording studio in Hanging Sword Alley, then moving in with Marc, telling the newspapers how much she adored Marc, after all that they had more or less made it plain she wasn't welcome in Colling Magna. Even Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place being the Royal Academy's picture of the year hadn't changed their attitude. At that time Harriet hadn't cared whether they wanted to see her or not. It was rather a relief that they didn't, for it saved a lot of trouble. Now, though, they would have been useful. Colling Manor would have been somewhere to go to where they had to take you in. But what was the use of even thinking about it when she hadn't got the train fare or the coach fare? She hadn't any money at all and hadn't the energy to hitch. The only thing to do was get down to Camden Town and throw herself on the mercy of some friends of hers who lived in a squat in Wilmot Place. It was hard to tell if they were pleased to see her or fed up with her or what. They were all high on something most of the time anyway, and this made them dreamy and spaced-out, walking about slowly like very old zombies or staring into corners as if seeing things sitting there that no one else could see. Terry and John, who had renamed themselves Storm and Anther, offered her a spare mattress in a room already occupied by Anther himself and a woman called Zither, but told her it could only be for a few nights. They were keeping the space for Storm's guru, who was soon to join them from his ashram in Hartlepool. Harriet had to lug the suitcase upstairs herself. But she hadn't really expected things to be otherwise. The mattress, naturally, was on the floor and she sat down on it. The only other furniture in the room was a second mattress, also on the floor, which Anther shared with Zither. An Indian bedspread served as a window curtain. On one wall was pimied a large sheet of paper on which someone had written in a curious script and red pai~nt: Fourteen Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa. Harriet started to cry again, she couldn't help it. She had had nothing to eat since breakfast, or what passed for breakfast, at midday, and now she was very hungry. Storm and Anther and Zither might share their food with her and they might not. Come to that, they might not be going to eat at all. She would verv much have liked a drink. Along with a lot of other indulgences, she had got into the habit of drinking with Marc, but anything like that was out of the question here unless you were talking about mate or Boldo tea and Harriet wasn't. She could go on the streets, but she didn't know how to start. Did you just dress up and stand about until someone came up and asked you if you would? She might get beaten up by someone s pimp or by a client. Sooner or later it was going to have to be Colling Manor via the Ml in a lorry, but even then she'd have to have something to eat on the way. In gathering up the stuff Marc had thrown out of the window she hadn't looked closely at what she was puffing into the case, she'd been too upset. There was always the possibility he had thrown out something she could sell. He'd never given her much in the way of jewellery, the only item worth anything being a gold bracelet and that was probably still in the drawer at Orcadia Place. She undid the case despondently and lifted the lid. Cheesecloth. How had she ever come to accumulate so much of it? Shirts and tops and waistcoats and pants as if the original long dress and jacket had got together and had cubs. A creamy, crumpled, pallid mass, streaked with blood, that she never wanted to see again, her boots and a couple of pairs of shoes, a bunch of bruised red leaves that had somehow got mixed up with it. And under it all the dress she had worn when Simon Alpheton painted her, its finely pleated silk the exact same colour as her hair. No bracelet, no watch. Marc had paid a fortune for the red dress, which was appropriate, really, since the person who designed it was someone called Fortuny, and it hadn't even been new. She remembered now, Simon had got him to buy it, had even found it for her and for his picture. If someone had bought it second-hand maybe someone else would buy it third-hand. There were a few places she knew, she'd try them in the morning. The suitcase was empty now, but for the zipped-up compartment at the back and she hadn't opened that to put anything in there. It was Marc's case, not hers, and it was just possible he had left something in that compartment. A half-empty packet of cigarettes from the last time he used the case? She was dying for a cigarette. Harriet undid the zip. She gave a little squeak. The compartment was full of money. It wasn't fastened in wads but loose banknotes. She felt quite faint: weak and as if her head was rising out of her neck on a long stalk. After she had closed her eyes and counted to ten and opened them again and the notes were still there, she began counting again, the money this time. There were still pound notes in those days. Oncers. Most of the notes were pounds, but some were fives and a few were tens. Harriet counted. She forgot she was hungry and longing for a cigarette. She had never in all her life enjoyed counting anything so much and she was quite sorry when it came to an end. But not sorry about the sum. Two thousand and nine pounds. Her euphoria lasted about an hour. Downstairs she found Anther and Zither in the kitchen baking hashish cakes. They offered her one, but she shook her head. She didn't want anything at the moment that might change her consciousness, she liked it the way it was. i'm going up the road,' she said. 'Can I get you anything?' For answer they turned on her their strange spaced-out smiles but when she came back with two carriers full of purchases they each accepted a cigarette and a glass (a cracked cup) of wine. Harriet said she would be gone in the morning. 'That's OK,' said Anther. 'The holy rishi won't be here till Thursday.' 'I have to find a place of my own,' said Harriet. Her face felt sore where Marc had hit her and when she looked in the smearv mirror in the bathroom - it was a long time since she had been in a bathroom as squalid as this one and she had forgotten they existed - she saw her cheek that -had at first been bright pink was turning the colour of the Virginia creeper leaves. She went back to the room with her wine bottle and the chocolate she had bought. Her happiness was quickly being replaced by apprehension. Why was that money there? There were two possibilities, as far as she could see. One was that Marc hadn't wanted to leave her destitute and had put it there on purpose. He kept money all over the house, in drawers, under the bed, it was just the way he was, a crazy eccentric. Maybe he'd snatched up a bundle of cash and stuffed it into that compartment as a farewell gift. But in that case wouldn't he have put the bracelet in too? And would he have speeded her parting by chucking a bowl of water at her? No, she couldn't see it as a final uncharacteristically generous gesture on Marc's part. A more likely explanation was that he had put the notes in there the last time he went anywhere - to Spain it might have been, a month before - and simply forgotten about them. It could even be that the case was one of his 'banks' along with the drawers and the top of the wardrobe. No doubt it had slipped his mind, but he would soon realise. He would know she'd got his two grand and he'd come after it. Or his heavies would. Other musicians had minders, but Marc had heavies, she'd met one of them and he was aptly named, the biggest man she'd ever seen in her life. She had better disappear. The room Harriet found was in Notting Hill in the neighbourhood of Ladbroke Grove, known as 'the Grove' to its denizens, and the landlady waived references when Harriet produced a hundred pounds' deposit. She didn't see how anyone could find her there, but she was nervous whenever she went out. And she was lonely. All her friends were Marc's friends too. She had always liked Simon Aipheton, had quite fancied Simon, but she held back from getting in touch with him. He knew Marc, he might tell Marc, and then Marc would come like a shot after the swiftly dwindling two thousand pounds. Apprehensive she might be while out in the street, but she had still managed to spend. Buying things comforted her. She always felt more cheerful and less lonely when she came back to Chesterton Road with, for instance, a pair of boots, a floor cushion, a couple of the newest records in the charts, Vogue magazine and Forum and Cosino, gold nail varnish and an Indian dress. She even bought a wig, with vague ideas of disguise in mind, but she had so much hair of her own that she couldn't get it on. Never, since she was fifteen, had she gone so long without sex. Celibacy lasted two months until her landlady had the house painted. The man who was doing it appeared at her window one day on top of his ladder. Otto Neuling was the son of a German exprisoner of war and an English blonde, he was tall and well-built, with the colouring of Siegfried and the features of Paul Newman. He was younger than Harriet, just eighteen to her twenty-four, and he was to be the first in a long line of young lovers who belonged in the rough-trade genre as well as the youth category. After a heavy flirtation conducted at the window, Harriet invited him to step over the sill and come into the room. Otto had never heard of Simon Aipheton or Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place, was inarticulate, of limited intelligence and very virile. That suited Harriet fine. Sometimes she went drinking with him in the Sun in Splendour and once to Clacton on the back of his Honda. It would never occur to Marc, she thought, to look for her in Otto's company. When there was just under five hundred pounds left of Marc's money Harriet, wearing the red dress and carrying a Biba bag full of newly bought finery, was walking home along Holland Park Avenue. The only economy she practised was to stop taking taxis. The man approaching her with a dog on a lead was the kind to whom she never gave a second glance: old, certainly getting on for forty, with receding hair and glasses. She noticed the dog because it was an Irish setter with a coat the same colour as her hair. But neither was interesting enough to distract her from her favourite pastime of studying her own reflection in the shop fronts that she passed. He spoke to her. She had never seen him before, but he spoke her name. 'Harriet.' He said it in a tone of pleased satisfaction. She was wary. 'And how is Marc?' he said. If she had had a better understanding of human nature she would have detected a kind of serendipity in his manner, as of someone who has happily made an unexpected discovery. His smile should have told her and his raised eyebrows. As it was Harriet, the solipsist, immediately thought this man had been set on her, might even be a private detective or some kind of bailiff, sent to recover the money. She said shrilly, 'What do you want?' 'Please,' he said. 'I'm sorry. But you are Harriet, aren't you? Aipheton's Harriet in Orcadia Place? I would have known you anywhere.'