Free The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell Page A

course I do.’ Ismay was bored by the kind of practical things that interested Heather. ‘I do know,’ she said, though she didn’t really. ‘If he likes this house so much why doesn’t he come and live here? They’re engaged. It’s normal to live together when you’re engaged.’
    Their grandmother was alive then. ‘Gran says he respects Mum too much for that.’ Heather laughed. ‘I should think that if you respected someone you’d want to live with them. Won’t he respect her after they’re married?’
    â€˜He doesn’t love her,’ Ismay said. She had never put that into words before. Now she did she knew it was true.
    â€˜Perhaps he won’t marry her then. I hope he won’t. We were better without him, just you and me and Mum.’
    Ismay and Heather went to the wedding but they weren’t bridesmaids. Beatrix liked the idea but Heather refused even to think of it. She hated dressing up. Once Guy was in the house, living there as much as they did, Heather changed. As she entered her teens she became the archetypical teenager, moody, intractable and isolated. She wanted no one’s company but Ismay’s and she clung to Ismay, associating herself with her in every possible area of life. ‘I’ almost disappeared from her vocabulary as ‘we’ took over. It was ‘we don’t want any breakfast’ and ‘we didn’t sleep well last night’ and sometimes even ‘we’ve got a cold’. One day, when Guy was talking to Ismay about what sort of job she thought she would have when her education was finished and where she would like to live, Heather said, ‘We shall live together. We always will.’
    The first time Ismay sat on Guy’s knee was when he offered to help her with her homework. It was chemistry and she had to learn some of the periodic table. Guy, who had done chemistry to A level, called her over for them to study the book together. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Sit on my knee.’
    Beatrix was there and so was Heather, a look of horror distorting her face. Ismay sat on Guy’s knee and immediately remembered that she had never sat on her father’s. Close beside him, yes, his arm round her, in bed with him and her mother when she was little, on the arm of his chair, leaning against him, but never on his knee. If she had, would she have felt like she did sitting on Guy’s? She thought not, she recoiled from the idea, because, with Guy’s arm round her, his lean thighs under her slender delicate thighs, she felt – not something new, not quite that, but a sensation she had once or twice had when watching on television the kind of film put on after the nine o’clock watershed.
    If she had told Heather about that feeling, about her sensation of some indefinable excitement, would Guy be alive today? It didn’t bear thinking of. She had never told Heather and certainly never said a word to her mother. As far as Heather knew, she disliked Guy’s putting his arm round her, kissing her, calling her his sweetheart and his angel. She didn’t dislike it. Because she was so young, necessarily without experience, she thought she must be in love with Guy and only knew she hadn’t been once he was dead. He attracted her and she desired him, that was all.
    It was interesting, she often thought later, how everyone had a type which they were drawn to above all others. She had guessed the type that attracted Heather would be a man who resembled their father or at least had hisqualities. That was why, when she first met Edmund she almost committed the awful solecism of bursting out laughing with delight. He was the same height and build as Bill Sealand and though with quite different features and hair colour, had the same sort of voice and manner. Because of all that, she knew he would be right for Heather, just as she knew Andrew was right for