Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

her go to work, Mum,” Daniel said. “See she lies down and rests, and you could make her a warm drink. I’d better go or I’ll be late for surgery.”
    Minty lay down till the afternoon and Sonovia brought her several warm drinks, sweet tea and her own recipe for cappuccino. Luckily, her neighbor had a key to 39 or Minty wouldn’t have been able to get back in again. Whether Laf ever did check she never found out. She thought that maybe she’d dreamt Sonovia saying that. Jock was dead all right or the train people wouldn’t have written. Josephine was very nice about her taking time off work. After all these years when she’d been as regular as clockwork, she said it was the least she could do. Minty got a lot of sympathy. Sonovia personally made an appointment for her with a counselor, and old Mr. Kroot on the other side, who hadn’t spoken for years, got his home help to put a card with a black border through her letter box. While Josephine sent flowers, Ken brought round a dish of lemon chicken with fried rice and Butterfly’s Romance. He wasn’t to know she never ate stuff from restaurant kitchens.
    For five days she wept nonstop. Touching wood or praying should have stopped it but it didn’t have any effect. All that time she only had one bath a day, she was so weak. It was remembering the money that stopped her crying. Ever since she had the letter she hadn’t thought about it but she did now. It wasn’t so much that it was her savings that were all gone but the money that Auntie had left her and which she’d seen as a sacred trust, something to be looked after and treasured. She might as well have thrown it down the drain. As soon as she felt able to go out again, she bathed and washed her hair, put on clean clothes, and took her engagement ring to a jeweler in Queensway.
    He looked at the ring, examined it through a magnifying glass, and shrugged. It might be worth twenty-five pounds but he couldn’t give her more than ten. Minty said, in that case she’d hold on to it, thank you very much. It took only a few more weeks for her love for Jock to turn sour and change into resentment.

    Laf told Sonovia no Jock or John Lewis was numbered among the rail crash victims, no one with a name even remotely like that. He got on to Great Western and found that sending letters of that kind wasn’t their policy and, in any case, the woman who signed the letter didn’t exist. Laf knew very well that news of a death in those circumstances would come via the police. A couple of police officers would have come to Minty’s door. He’d very likely have been one of them himself. If, of course, they’d known of her existence. How would anyone have known? Minty wasn’t married to Jock, she wasn’t even living with him. The woman they’d have contacted was Jock’s mother—if he had a mother, if any of what he’d told Minty was true.
    “It’s tipped her over the edge,” said Sonovia.
    “What d’you mean, over the edge?”
    “She’s always been peculiar, hasn’t she? Come on, Laf, face it, a normal person doesn’t have two baths a day and wash her hands every ten minutes. And how about jumping over the cracks in the paving stones like a kid? Have you seen her touching wood when she’s scared of something?”
    Laf looked troubled. When something upset him, his face, the same dark rich chestnut brown as his shoes and as glossy, fell into a mass of pouches, his underlip protruding. “He made a fool of her and when he got himself a better proposition he was off. Or the idea of marriage scared him. One thing’s for sure, he wasn’t killed in any train crash, but we won’t tell her that. We’ll take her out with us a bit more. Get her out of herself.”
    So Minty, who’d been shown the world by Jock and liked it, who’d late in life discovered sex and been going to get married, had her social life reduced to a once-a-fortnight cinema visit with her next-door neighbors. She never said another word to them