Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

day or two? It would have to be fixed so that Mopsa didn’t know it was a put-up job. What was the use of even thinking of such a thing when she didn’t know where Mopsa was? Ian Raeburn was looking at her, not a doctor-to-patient’s-mother look at all. Benet thought she recognized that look as of a man taking aninterest in her as a woman. No man had done that for two-and-a-half years, there hadn’t been the opportunity or, on her part, the wish for it. He was rather a personable man, she noticed for the first time – tall, thin, inclined to be but not markedly sickle-faced, his hair a reddish-blond. She wondered what he was going to say.
    â€˜You are
the
Benet Archdale, aren’t you?’
    â€˜I suppose so. Yes, I am.’
    So much for his being interested in her as a woman. She almost laughed.
    â€˜I liked your book very much. It must be the worst cliché a writer hears when people say they don’t have time for reading. I made time to read it and I hope my patients didn’t suffer.’
    She was so warmed and delighted by what he said that it carried her for a few moments above her worries over Mopsa and James. It was somehow as gratifying as getting her first good review had been. She smiled with pleasure. How could she have been so foolish, so female in the worst possible way, as to fancy she would have preferred sexual attention to
that
?
    â€˜How do you come to know so much about India?’
    â€˜I was there for six months with James’s father. He was planning a series of articles about an Indian mystic.’ She began telling him about Acharya the Learned One and his 40,000-mile walk.
    A nurse came in to say he was wanted. Could he come now? Benet had forgotten to ask him if it would be all right for her to go home for an hour to look for Mopsa. But now she could see that this would in any case be impossible for her. James couldn’t be left. He lay on his back, listlessly holding the tiger cub. His eyes were wide open, unblinking in their distress at the shallow noisy breaths he was forced to take. At this time yesterday she had been in the children’s playroom with him while he trundled a wheelbarrow full of bricks and drew on the blackboard.
    They said now that he had a virus infection. There was a drug to treat it but it was very new and still only in usein certain teaching hospitals. It might be thirty-six hours before James began to respond to the drug. After a while he cried to be taken out of the tent. Benet lay on the bed and held him against her, rocking him gently. It was wrong to keep him out of the tent. The more he was kept in there, even against his will, the more quickly he would recover. And he must recover soon, he must be up and about and playing by tomorrow so that she could put an end to the imprisonment that kept her from her responsibilities to Mopsa. Somehow she knew that one day he would see it that way too, he would share in the burden his mother and grandfather had. She imagined him a teenager, becoming responsible, and talking to him about his grandmother, teaching him to understand.
    If Mopsa were still alive when James was a teenager. If she were still alive now . . . He fell asleep, lying against her, and she put him gently back into the tent, hating that breathing of his, physically hurt by it. But he was sleeping and the vaporizer was steaming up the tent and the antiviral drug had begun its work. She left him and went back down the corridor to the phone.
    A young woman with a child on her lap was using it. The playroom door was open so she went in and sat on one of the chairs for five-year-olds that were set round the table. There was a Wendy house in the playroom, a bookcase of books, boxes of toys, a cage with two gerbils in it and, all over the walls, posters and drawings and collages. Paper cut-out witches riding up the window panes on paper cut-out broomsticks reminded her of Mopsa, though she needed no reminding. On the