Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell

that and Benet believed her. She screwed up her face, making a muzzle mouth.
    â€˜You don’t like television.’
    â€˜I shan’t watch it. You and your little charge can have it upstairs in the living room.’
    Still there was no show of enthusiasm and Benet said no more about it, but Mopsa must have taken to heart what she had said for a television set appeared, was brought over from a rental centre in Kilburn and installed in the living room. Its big grey pupil-less eye gleamed out from the corner among the still-unpacked crates. At half-past four Mopsa and the boy ensconced themselves on the settee in front of it, Mopsa with a cup of tea and the boy with applejuice, this time in a cup. Benet went past the open door and looked at them, but did not go inside.
    Afterwards she dated what happened from the arrival of the rented television set. That seemed to mark the demarcation line between the wretched limbo she had lived in and what came after it, a time of discovery, of stupefaction, of fear. Yet for a day or two after the television came, nothing much did happen and it would all have happened whether the television had come or not.
    For a long time, petrified as a cameo in her mind remained that glimpse, that picture, of skinny, witch-like, galvanic Mopsa, sitting on the edge of the sofa – the way she always sat, poised, tense, as if ready to spring – and the little boy beside her, as snug in stretchy velour as a puppy in its skin, his thumb in his mouth, his other hand firmly holding on to a thick blue pottery mug. This image later seemed to her the last image in a cycle of despair or one that stood at the beginning of being afraid.
    That night she did without the Soneryl. She dreamed of the tree of hands. James and she were walking on the Heath. She was pushing the empty pushchair and James was walking beside her, holding her hand. In life they had never been on the Heath together but this was a dream. They crossed a clearing by a sandy path and came into another piece of woodland, sunlit, high summer, the trees in fresh green leaf except for one in the centre of the copse which grew hands instead of leaves, red-nailed hands, gloved hands, hands of bone and hands of mail.
    James was enraptured by the tree. He went up to it and put his arms round its trunk. He put his own hands up to touch its lowest hands. And Benet was reaching up to pick a hand for him, a lady’s white hand with a diamond ring on it, when his crying penetrated the dream, broke into it, so that the tree grew faint, the sunshine faded and she was awake, out of bed, going to James.
    Before she saw the empty room, she remembered. Her body twisted and clenched itself. She closed her eyes for a moment, made the necessary effort and went down the topflight to where the crying was coming from, the small bedroom next to Mopsa’s. The room was in darkness. The boy stopped crying when she put the light on and picked him up. Had he been used to light in his room? Had light perhaps come into where he slept from a street lamp?
    She switched on the bedside light, covering the shade with a folded blanket. Sucking his thumb, he fell asleep while she stood and watched him. She found now that she was really looking at him properly for the first time and found, too, that his face reminded her of someone. Who that someone was she didn’t know. But this boy was very very like some adult person she knew or used to know. Generally speaking, the ‘prettier’ the child, the less he or she resembles an adult. Prettiness, loveliness in very young children is equated not with any individuality of looks but with a conformity to an ideal babyhood appearance, a kind of amalgam of a Raphael cherub, Peter Pan and a Mabel Lucy Atwell infant. The sleeping boy looked quite unlike any of these. His nose was straight and bold, his chin long, his mouth full and symmetrically curved, his eyebrows already marked in sweeping lines. You could see