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

inside of the door a dozen or so children had written, or had had written for them, their names underneath the heading:
We have had our tonsils out
. The dominating collage was a piece of bizarrerie, the brainchild evidently of someone with a B.Ed and flair, a mural whose paper base sheet filled half a wall.
    Benet, when she had seen it the day before, had immediately dubbed it a tree of hands. She had liked it then, it had even made her smile. Now it seemed to her sinister,Daliesque, haunting, something about which one might have bad dreams. On the white paper base sheet had been drawn a tree with a straight brown trunk and branches and twigs, and all over the tree, on the branches, nestling among the twigs, protruding like fungus from the trunk, were paper hands. All were exactly the same shape, presumably cut out by individual children using a template of an open hand with the fingers spread slightly apart. And the children must have been allowed to decorate them as they pleased, for some were gloved, some tattooed, some ladies’ hands with red nails and rings, one in mittens and another in mail, mostly white but some black or brown, one the stripped bone hand of a skeleton. And now to Benet all those hands seemed to be held upwards, to be straining upwards in silent supplication as if imploring mercy. They reached out from the tree begging for relief or freedom or perhaps for oblivion. They were horrible. There was an essentially mad quality about them. She found that she had got up from the low chair and gone close to the tree of hands to stare at it with fascinated repulsion. As soon as she realized how hypnotically she was staring, she pulled herself away and went, out into the corridor to the phone which was now free.
    The repeated hollow ringing had a dull meaningless sound. Benet listened to the ringing, she let it ring on and on. An idea had come to her that Mopsa might simply have decided not to answer the phone but she would have to if it rang long enough. She let it ring forty times, fifty times, until going on any longer became absurd.
    The best that could have happened to Mopsa was that the change of scene, the new ways, being abandoned to look after herself, had been too much for her and she had wandered off in the manner of the Northampton escapade. Looking out at the clear hard blue sky and the racing wind, Benet hoped she hadn’t done it in her nightgown. But that was the best. There were other options. The overdose of sleeping pills and the rest of the brandy or the sleeping pillten minutes before she took a bath or the barricading of herself in one of the rooms with a can of paraffin and a box of matches. Surely there hadn’t been any paraffin in the house or matches either for that matter . . .
    If she phoned the police, they would want her to go to the police station and fill in a ‘Missing Persons’ form. Of course she could ask them to come here and collect her key and let themselves into the house in the Vale of Peace. But would they do that? She must try, that was all. As soon as Mr Drew, the ear, nose and throat specialist, had been to see James, she would go back down the corridor and phone the police.
    He came at two, accompanied by Ian Raeburn and a couple of house officers. Mr Drew was shortish, thick-set, wearing a brown tweed suit and gold-rimmed glasses. James began crying at the sight of the white coats which the house officers hadn’t remembered to take off. When he cried, it made him choke.
    Drew was one of those doctors of the old school who never tell a patient or a patient’s next-of-kin anything if they can help it. If they can’t help it, they talk to them as if they were illiterate half-wits or simple-minded peasants. He said nothing at all to Benet, talked to Ian Raeburn in polysyllabic words of Greek aetiology, and walked out leading his little procession. James put out his arms to be picked up but the nurse said he had to stay inside the croupette.