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

Parchman’sharmless craving? Give her a room, a pension, and a television set and leave her to worship and to stare for the rest of her life? No social service came into contact with her until it was far too late. No psychiatrist had ever seen her. Such a one would only have discovered the root cause of her neurosis if she had allowed him to discover her illiteracy. And she had been expert at concealing it since the time when she might have been expected to overcome it. Her father, who could read perfectly well, who in his youth had read the Bible from beginning to end, was her principal ally in helping her hide her deficiency. He, who should have encouraged her to learn, instead conspired with her in the far more irksome complexities not learning entailed.
    When a neighbour, dropping in with a newspaper, had handed it to Eunice, “I’ll have that,” he had been used to say, and looking at the small print, “Don’t strain her young eyes.” It came to be accepted in her narrow circle that Eunice had poor sight, this solution generally being the one seized upon by the uneducated literate to account for illiteracy.
    “Can’t read it? You mean you can’t
see?
”
    When she was a child she had never wanted to read. As she grew older she wanted to learn, but who could teach her? Acquiring a teacher, or even trying to acquire one, would mean other people finding out. She had begun to shun other people, all of whom seemed to her bent on ferreting out her secret. After a time this shunning, this isolating herself, became automatic, though the root cause of her misanthropy was half forgotten.
    Things could not hurt her, the furniture, the ornaments, the television. She embraced them, they aroused in her the nearest she ever got to warm emotion, while to the Coverdales she gave the cold shoulder. Not that they received more of her stoniness than anyone else had done. She behaved to them as she had always behaved to everyone.
    George was the first to notice it. Of all the Coverdales, he was by far the most sensitive, and therefore the first to see a flaw in all this excellence.

6
    They sat in church on Sunday morning and Mr. Archer began to preach his sermon. For his text he took “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things.” Jacqueline smiled at George and touched his arm, and he smiled back, well satisfied.
    On the following day he remembered those exchanged smiles and thought he had been fatuous, perhaps overcomplacent.
    “Paula’s gone into hospital,” Jacqueline said when he came home. “It’s really rather awful the way they fix a day for your baby to be born these days. Just take you in and give you an injection and hey presto!”
    “Instant infants,” said George. “Has Brian phoned?”
    “Not since two.”
    “I’ll just give him a ring.”
    They were dining, as they often did when alone, in the morning room. Eunice came in to lay the table. George dialled, but there was no reply. A second after he put the phone down it rang. After answering Paula’s husband in monosyllables, after a final “Call me back soon,” he walked over to Jacqueline and took her hand.
    “There’s some complication. They haven’t decided yet, but she’s very exhausted and it’ll probably mean an emergency Caesarean.”
    “Darling, I’m so sorry, what a worry!” She didn’t tell him not to worry, and he was glad of it. “Why don’t you phone Dr. Crutchley? He might reassure you.”
    “I’ll do that.”
    Eunice left the room. George appreciated her tactful silence. He phoned the doctor, who said he couldn’t comment on a case he knew nothing about, and reassured George only to the extent of telling him that, generally speaking, women didn’t die in childbirth any more.
    They ate their dinner. That is, Giles ate his dinner, Jacqueline picked at hers, and George left his almost untouched. Giles made one small concession to the