The Fever Tree and Other Stories by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

moved by that – he wasn’t going to be moved at all. Once he’d packed those things, he’d be off to spend the next three months touring Europe. A free man, free for the sights and the fun and the girls, for a last fling of wild oats. After that, back to Patricia and a home and a job and responsibility. It was a glowing future which this hysterical woman wasn’t going to mess up.
    â€˜Shut up, Betsy, for God’s sake,’ he said. He shook her roughly by the shoulder, and then he went out because it was now eleven and he could get a drink.
    Betsy made herself some coffee and washed her swollen eyes. She walked about, looking at the ornaments and the books, the glasses and vases and lamps, which he would take from her tomorrow. It wasn’t that she much minded losing them, the things themselves, but the barrenness which would be left, and the knowing that they would all be Patricia’s.
    In the night she had got up, found his wallet, taken out the photographs of Patricia, and torn them up. But she remembered the face, pretty and hard and greedy, and she thought of those bright eyes widening as Patricia unpacked the tea chests, the predatory hands scrabbling for more treasures in the trunk. Doing it all perhaps before Maurice himself got there, arranging the lamps and the glasses and the ornaments in their home for his delight when at last he came.
    He would marry her, of course. I suppose she thinks he’s faithful to her, Betsy thought, the way I once thought he was faithful to me. I know better now. Poor stupid fool, she doesn’t know what he did the first moment he was alone with her, or what he would do in France and Italy. That would be a nice wedding present to give her, wouldn’t it, along with all the pretty bric-a-brac in the trunk?
    Well, why not? Why not rock their marriage before it had even begun? A letter. A letter to be concealed in, say, that blue-and-white ginger jar. She sat down to write. Dear Patricia – what a stupid way to begin, the way you had to begin a letter even to your enemy.
    Dear Patricia: I don’t know what Maurice has told you about me, but we have been living here as lovers ever since he arrived. To be more explicit, I mean we have made love, have slept together. Maurice is incapable of being faithful to anyone. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why, if he didn’t want me, he didn’t stay in a hotel. That’s all. Yours – and she signed her name and felt a little better, well enough and steady enough to take a bath and get herself some lunch.
    Six tea chests and a trunk arrived on the following day. The chests smelled of tea and had drifts of tea leaves lying in the bottom of them. The trunk was made of silver-coloured metal and had clasps of gold-coloured metal. It was rather a beautiful object, five feet long, three feet high, two feet wide, and the lid fitted so securely it seemed a hermetic sealing.
    Maurice began to pack at two o’clock. He used tissue paper and newspapers. He filled the tea chests with kitchen equipment and cups and plates and cutlery, with books, with those clothes of his he had left behind him a year before. Studiously, and with a certain grim pleasure, he avoided everything Betsy might have insisted was hers – the poor cheap things, the stainless steel spoons and forks, the Woolworth pottery, the awful coloured sheets, red and orange and olive, that he had always loathed. He and Patricia would sleep in white linen.
    Betsy didn’t help him. She watched, chain-smoking. He nailed the lids on the chests and on each lid he wrote in white paint his address in Australia. But he didn’t paint in the letters of his own name. He painted Patricia’s. This wasn’t done to needle Betsy but he was glad to see it was needling her.
    He hadn’t come back to the flat till one that morning, and of course he didn’t have a key. Betsy had refused to let him in, had left him down