Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

never having a break, and he’d have to get an au pair so that she could go out and train for something. So he said - though I think she’s exaggerating there - that he wasn’t going to pay a girl wages to do what it was his wife’s job to do. She’d only train for something and then not be able to get a job because of the unemployment. Anyway, all this developed into a great analysis of their marriage and the role men have made women play and how she was sacrificing her whole life. You can imagine. So this morning she told him that if she was only a nurse and a housekeeper she’d go and be a nurse and housekeeper with her parents - and here she is.’
       ‘Where is she now?’
       ‘In the living room, and Robin and Ben are in the garden. I don’t know how much they realize. Darling, don’t be harsh with her.’
       ‘When have I ever been harsh with my children? I haven’t been harsh enough. I’ve always let them do exactly as they liked. I should have put my foot down and not let her get married when she was only eighteen.’
       She was standing up with her back to him. She turned round and said, ‘Hallo, Dad.’
       ‘This is a sad business, Sylvia.’
       Wexford loved both his daughters dearly, but Sheila, the younger, was his favourite. Sheila had the career, the tough life, had been through the hardening process, and had remained soft and sweet. Also she looked like him, although he was an ugly man and everyone called her beautiful. Sylvia’s hard classical features were those of his late mother-inlaw, and hers the Britannia bust and majestic bearing. She had led the protected and sheltered existence in the town where she had been born. But while Sheila would have run to him and called him Pop and thrown her arms round him, this girl stood staring at him with tragic calm, one marmoreal arm extended along the mantlepiece.
       ‘I don’t suppose you want me here, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’d nowhere else to go. I won’t bother you for long. I’ll get a job and find somewhere for me and the boys to live.’
       ‘Don’t speak to me like that, Sylvia. Please don’t. This is your home. What have I ever said to make you speak to me like that?’
       She didn’t move. Two great tears appeared in her eyes and coursed slowly down her cheeks. Her father went up to her and took her in his arms, wondering as he did so when it was that he had last held her like this. Years ago, long before she was married. At last she responded, and the hug he got was vice-like, almost breath-crushing. He let her sob and gulp into his shoulder, holding her close and murmuring to this fugitive goddess, all magnificent five feet ten of her, much the same words that he had used twenty years before when she had fallen and cut her knee.

    More negative results awaited him on Monday evening. The phone calls were still coming in, growing madder as time went by. No newspaper in the country knew of Rhoda Comfrey either as an employee or in a freelance capacity, no Press agency, no magazine, and she was not on record as a member of the National Union of Journalists. Detective Constable Loring had left for London by an early train, bound for the leather shop in Jermyn Street.
       Wexford wished now that he had gone himself, for he was made irritable by this enforced inactivity and by thoughts of what he had left behind him at home. Tenderness he felt for Sylvia, but little sympathy. Robin and Ben had been told their father was going away on business and that this was why they were there, but although Ben accepted this, Robin perhaps knew better. He was old enough to have been affected by the preceding quarrels and to have understood much of what had been said. Without him and Ben, their mother would have been able to lead a free, worthwhile and profitable life. The little boy went about with a bewildered look.
       That damned water rat might have provided a diversion, but the beast was as elusive as ever.