Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell Page A

exactly what he would look like when he was grown-up, a craggy-faced fair man, tall and big-built, ugly till he smiled. Some grown man she knew must be like that, or some woman with thick lips and blond hair. Not Constance Fenton. Barbara Lloyd? She didn’t think so. She had forgotten what Barbara Lloyd looked like, but now Barbara’s face came clearly back to her, moon-like with low forehead and tip-tilted nose. He probably looked like his father whom she had never seen. There was something faulty in that reasoning. He reminded her of someone she
had
seen, someone she knew.
    She knew she would get no more sleep. In a dressing gown, wrapped in a blanket, she sat in the study room among the books, the boy’s remarkable drawings on her lap, willing the morning to come, yet not much wanting the morning. At about five she made herself tea.
    It didn’t start to get light until after seven-thirty. A coldgrey twilight seemed to flow out of the cloudy sky, the green Heath, the pond, into the Vale of Peace. There had been no sign of the sun for many days. A boy was delivering newspapers from a canvas bag on his cycle handlebars. Benet watched him. It came to her that she hadn’t seen a newspaper for several weeks.
    The boy was due to go home on Wednesday and it was Sunday now. Benet went out by herself. She walked down to South End Green. The world was green and grey and chilly, a feeling in the air of November hopelessness, but at the same time it seemed unreal, spaced away from her at a remove and she encased in a capsule of glass. She found a newsagent’s open and bought a Sunday paper but she didn’t read it. She took it home and put it on the table in the basement room, but still she didn’t read it and later on she couldn’t find it. Mopsa must have removed it to her bedroom.
    Mopsa and the boy watched television. Benet sat with them. She looked for things to do that she had never done with James, walking on the Heath, sitting in the study, watching television. Mopsa seemed uneasy to have her there – perhaps she was troubled by Benet’s inconsistency in saying she would never watch television and then doing so – but she became easier once the news headlines had been read.
    Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, had died and there was a lot about his funeral. Benet watched for about ten minutes. The boy was holding on to a white rabbit toy Mopsa must have bought him. He sat with his knees slightly apart, holding the rabbit but having absent-mindedly taken it from his mouth like a man with a cigar. His lips were compressed, his eyes fixed on the screen. Benet got up and went upstairs to the boy’s room. There was nothing in the room but the bed he had been sleeping in and a small chest of drawers. She looked in those drawers but they were as empty as when she had bought that chest a year before. No suitcase had been sent with him, none of the inevitable carrier bags and holdalls of clothes and toys andparaphernalia that accompany small children whenever they travel. On top of the chest lay the Mothercare and Marks & Spencer carriers Mopsa had brought home. The clothes in them had been new. Mopsa had bought them. In one of the bags an unworn garment still remained, a pair of brown velour pants.
    His clothes might be in Mopsa’s room. Benet looked in Mopsa’s room but there were no children’s clothes anywhere. The
Sunday Times
that she had bought that morning lay curiously tucked between the two pillows on Mopsa’s bed. She wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t opened the drawer in the bedside table and, in doing so, very slightly rucked up the bed cover.
    Holding the newspaper, she began to go downstairs again. The boy’s screams broke out of silence, they sounded as if they came from someone terribly injured. Benet ran down the stairs, seeing Mopsa’s eyes, remembering the barricaded room and the knives. She opened the living-room door. The television had