Free Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell

couldn’t cope before, and if I can’t again, they’ll have to step in.’
    Barry understood then. ‘It’s not going to come to that,’ he said. He felt that his voice was firm, authoritative, manly, the ruling voice the women were waiting for. ‘We’ll manage.
I’ll
manage.’
    Carol had been holding his hand. She put her other arm round him, over his chest and held his shoulder. She leaned her head against chest. ‘You’re lovely,’ she said. ‘You’re so strong. Isn’t he lovely, Mum? He reminds me of Dave. Doesn’t he remind you of Dave?’
    â€˜He does a bit,’ said Iris.
    Barry knew there could be no higher praise. Feeling Carol’s soft warmth against him, a thread of excitement moved in his body. He began to look forward to the evening’s end, to their parting from Iris and Jerry on the pavement under the white moon, for him and Carol once more to be alone together.

6
    THE DAYS BLENDED into one another without demarcation, without date, without weather, almost without light or dark. She lay, then sat, in her bedroom, the big room in the very top of the house in the Vale of Peace. Mopsa brought her food on trays, but when she saw Benet didn’t want to eat, could not eat, the food was replaced without demur by cups of tea, of instant coffee and, in the evenings, their coming preceded by no inquiries, tumblers of brandy and water.
    Life had stopped. At first, because what had happened was unbelievable, it could not have happened, little children in the 1980s do not die – because of that, there was only shock which stunned and numbed. For a good deal of the stunned, numbed phase, Benet had been kept in hospital herself. In that same state, armed with sleeping pills and tranquillizers, she had been sent home to her chaotic house and Mopsa. There the shock began to wear off. It was like the anaesthetic wearing off after you have been to the dentist and the pain starts. Only no physical pain Benet had ever known was like this. Even when she was giving birth to James and had shouted out, her cries had been part pleasurable, compounded of effort and intent and joy as well as pain. Now she found herself holding both hands tight over her mouth to keep herself from screaming out her suffering. She sat or paced the room because when she lay down she could not keep from twisting and turning and digging her nails into the soft parts of herself. One afternoon she stuck a pin into her arm to have a different focus of pain.
    Because she had no idea of time or its passing, it seemedto her that she had been a year in that room at the top of the house, tended by Mopsa, with Mopsa coming every hour to the door. Perhaps it had been no more than two days. She took a lot of barbiturates and a lot of Valium. The sleeping pills she put down the lavatory and pulled the flush on them. The oblivion they brought was not worth the awfulness of waking up, appreciating the light of morning, listening for the first morning sounds from James next door – and realizing there would be no morning sounds from him, there never would be. Never never never never never.
    The Valium stopped her wanting to scream or wanting to put her hands over her mouth to stop the scream. It made her, while sitting quiet and still, consider in a low muddled way methods of suicide. She threw those pills away too. She stood by the window, high above the Vale of Peace, looking at a large white moon like a radiant pearl. Two years before, James had not existed, yet she was the same person she had been then, not much older, unchanged in appearance. She looked into the mirror and saw the same familiar regular features, almond-shaped dark eyes, high cheekbones, full folded lips. The dark brown, longish, implacably straight hair was the same and the clear sallow skin. Why then could she not be as she had been before he came into her life? It was such a short time ago. How could she have