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

me.”
    “I only ask because normal people don’t act the way she does. Seeing ghosts and not knowing any men before Jock and always wearing the same sort of clothes,
exactly
the same. And all the compulsive things.”
    “Now you mention it, that’s just what I was saying to your dad.”
    “I had a client like that. She was up on a charge of Actual Bodily Harm but she was doing most of the bodily harm to herself, cutting herself to relieve her tension, she said. She had so many compulsions she lost her job because she was too busy arranging things in the right order and going back ten or a dozen times to check, that she’d no time to do her work.”
    “You’d have to be mad to go on like that.”
    “Well, you said it, Mum,” said Corinne.

    Auntie said Agnes meant to call her Arabella. Then her best friend apart from Auntie had a baby—she was properly married—and named
her
Arabella, so Agnes settled on Araminta, it being that bit different. They’d once talked about names, she and Jock, and he’d said that though his name was John, his mother called him Jock because she came from Scotland. That was really all Minty knew about Mrs. Lewis, that she was Scottish and must have lived somewhere in Gloucester.
    Jock hadn’t had time to buy a van or start a business, so he must still have had all her money when he died. Where would it be now? Minty asked Josephine, not mentioning names, of course, but just saying what would happen to someone’s money if he died and hadn’t made a will like Auntie had? She knew he hadn’t made a will because he said so and said they must both make them after they were married.
    “It’d go to his next of kin, I suppose,” said Josephine.
    That wouldn’t be his ex-wife because she was ex. It would be old Mrs. Lewis.
She
ought to give Minty’s money back. It wasn’t rightfully hers; it’d only been a loan to Jock, not a gift, and not even a loan to Mrs. Lewis. You wouldn’t be far wrong if you said she’d stolen it. Minty often thought about Mrs. Lewis having the enjoyment of it. Living in her nice house in Gloucester, using Minty’s money at bingo, and buying luxuries in the shops, Belgian chocolates and cherry brandy. She’d intended to use the money to have a shower installed. You didn’t use so much water under a shower but you got cleaner. It would be easy having two showers a day and washing her hair at the same time. And it wasn’t a hosepipe on the taps she had in mind but a real shower cabinet you walked into with a glass door and tiled walls. She’d never have it now, or not for years and years.
    When Jock appeared again, sitting in the kitchen chair, she wasn’t as frightened as she’d been the first time. Maybe that was because he was vague and misty, almost transparent. You could see the green-painted bars on the back of the chair through his chest. She stood in front of him and asked him why he’d let his mother have her money. He didn’t answer— he never did—and he soon went away, doing his genie-vanishing-into-a-bottle act, disappearing like melting snow.
    But in the night he spoke to her. Or he
spoke.
It might not have been to her or to anyone. His voice woke her out of deep sleep, saying, “She’s dead, she’s dead . . .” That soft, sweet, brown voice. It didn’t sound sad, but then it never did. Whom did he mean by “she”? Not his ex-wife, she’d be too young. Minty lay in bed, thinking. The darkness was impenetrable when the curtains were drawn and the street lamps out. She looked for his ghost in vain, peering into the blind empty corners.
    It must have been his mother he meant. And he wouldn’t have been sad because old Mrs. Lewis would be joining him wherever he was. Minty closed her eyes again but it was a long time before she went back to sleep.

Chapter 4

    IN ZILLAH’S EXPERIENCE, men didn’t propose except in old-time novels. They just talked about “one day” when you and they got married or even “making a