Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell Page B

been switched off and the boy stood in front of it, screaming in distress, weeping bitter tears, belabouring the screen with his fists.
    â€˜What on earth is the matter?’
    â€˜He didn’t like me turning off the TV.’
    â€˜Why did you?’ Benet had to shout above his crying. She picked him up and tried to soothe him. He sobbed and beat her shoulder.
    Mopsa didn’t answer her. She was wearing her defiant, insouciant, nothing-really-matters face.
    â€˜What a silly noise,’ she said to the boy. She got up and turned the television on again, altering the channel, Benet noticed, before she did so. A picture came, a pair of shire horses pulling a plough across a meadow.
    The boy struggled to get down. He went up to the set and did a curious thing. He put his fingers on the screen and then round the rim of the screen as if he were trying to open it, to get inside or find something that was inside. That was what it looked like to Bent. He gave up the attempt after a moment or two and his oddly mature face,his little man’s face, looked sad, resigned. He sat down again, not on the settee beside Mopsa but on the floor quite near to the television and he leaned forward, watching it intently.
    Benet took the newspaper downstairs. There was a lot in it about Leonid Brezhnev. She was more interested in reading the home news but she couldn’t find much of that and presently she saw why not. Pages three and four were missing. Someone – Mopsa – had cut them out.
    If Benet were to ask her why, she would only deny it. And although she knew Mopsa must have done it, she could not absolutely prove it. It might have happened in the newsagent’s – there was the remote possibility of that. The phone began to ring. She thought she had better answer it, though it was nearly two weeks since she had answered the phone. She had to start answering the phone again sometime. She had to start doing the explaining that Mopsa had failed to do, been afraid to do.
    The voice was her father’s. How was she? Was she recovered from the flu? How was Mopsa?
    â€˜She’s fine,’ Benet said and she added with a vindictiveness she almost at once regretted, ‘She’ll be home very soon.’
    He hadn’t asked about James. What would she have said if he had? She had felt antagonistic towards him because he hadn’t asked about James, though James was dead, though she could not have answered if he had asked. He should have asked, it was cruel of him not to, crueller than he knew. She went up to fetch Mopsa. The boy was still sitting on the floor, still staring at the screen, though the horses were long gone and replaced by a man in sequins tango-ing with a microphone.
    Benet heard her mother talking on the phone like a young girl in a bygone time, the Twenties perhaps, who had been rung up by some undergraduate or subaltern she had met at a tennis party. She sounded coy, petulant, flirtatious. With this man she had been married to for thirty years, she was coquettish, provocative. She giggled andgave a little scream of delight. Benet put on her coat and tied a scarf round her head and went out. She walked up the hill and down Heath Street and looked at a display of
The Marriage Knot
in paperback in the window of the High Hill Bookshop. There was a photograph of herself set in the midst of the arrangement. It had been taken when she was pregnant, though there was no sign of this through the folds of the dark loose dress she wore.
    Go back two and a half years, she told herself, go back to the time before he was conceived. Go back to that. He was never conceived, it never happened. You didn’t say to Edward, I’m going to have a baby but that makes no difference, it still won’t work, it doesn’t change things. You said a straight goodbye: Edward, it’s over, we’ve come to the end. There was no baby, there never was. Hadn’t Edward himself said there couldn’t