A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

coffee. Eunice had never made coffee in her life except the instant kind. She didn’t ask how. She very seldom asked questions. Jacqueline assumed she was used to a percolator—Eunice didn’t disillusion her—while they used a filter, so she demonstrated the filter. Eunice watched. It was never necessary for her to watch any operation of this kind more than once for her to be able to perform it herself.
    “I see, madam,” she said.
    Jacqueline did the cooking. Jacqueline or George did the shopping. In those early days, while Jacqueline was out, Eunice examined every object in Lowfield Hall at her leisure. The house had been dirty by her standards. It brought her intense pleasure to subject it to a spring cleaning. Oh, the lovely carpets, the hangings, the cushions, the rosewood and walnut and oak, the glass and silver and china! But best of all was the kitchen with pine walls and cupboards, a double steel sink, a washing machine, a dryer, a dishwater. It wasn’t enough for her to dust the porcelain in the drawing room. It must be washed.
    “You really need not do that, Miss Parchman.”
    “I like doing it,” said Eunice.
    Fear of breakages rather than altruism had prompted Jacqueline to protest. But Eunice never broke anything, nor did she fail to replace everything on the exact spot from where she had taken it. Her visual memory imprinted neat permanent photographs in some department of her brain.
    The only things in Lowfield Hall which didn’t interest her and which she didn’t handle or study were the contents of the morning-room desk, the books, the letters from George in Jacqueline’s dressing table. Those things and, at this stage, the two shotguns.
    Her employers were overwhelmed.
    “She’s perfect,” said Jacqueline who, parcelling up George’s shirts for the laundry, had had them taken out of her hands byEunice, laundered exquisitely by Eunice between defrosting the fridge and changing the bed linen. “D’you know what she said, darling? She just looked at me in that meek way she has and said, ‘Give me those. I like a bit of ironing.’ ”
    Meek? Eunice Parchman?
    “She’s certainly very efficient,” said George. “And I like to see you looking so happy and relaxed.”
    “Well, I don’t have a thing to do. Apart from her once putting the green sheets on our bed and once simply ignoring a note I left her, I haven’t had a fault to find. It seems absurd calling those things faults after old Eva and that dreadful Ingrid.”
    “How does she get on with Eva?”
    “Ignores her, I think. I wish I had the nerve. D’you know, Miss Parchman can sew too. I was trying to turn up the hem of my green skirt, and she took it and did it perfectly.”
    “We’ve been very lucky,” said George.
    So the month of May passed. The spring flowers died away and the trees sprang into leaf. Pheasants came into the fields to eat the green corn, and the nightingale sang in the orchard. But not for Eunice. Hares, alert and quivering, cropped under the hedges, and the moon rose slowly behind the Greeving Hills, red and strange like another sun. But not for Eunice. She drew the curtains, put on the lamps and then the television. Her evenings were hers to do as she liked with. This was what she liked. She knitted. But gradually, as the serial or the sporting event or the cops and robbers film began to grip her, the knitting fell into her lap and she leant forwards, enthralled by an innocent childlike excitement.
    She was happy. If she had been capable of analysing her thoughts and feelings and of questioning her motives, she would have said that this vicarious living was better than any life she had known. But had she been capable of that, it is unlikely she would have been content with so specious a way of spending her leisure. Her addiction gives rise to a question. Wouldn’t some social service have immensely benefited society—and saved the lives of the Coverdales—had it recognised Eunice