Free Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell Page B

the corners of Mopsa’s mouth. ‘He sent you his love.’
    Poor Mopsa who was unstable, ill really, not like other women, other people’s mothers. A line came into Benet’s mind – there’s a part of my heart that’s sorry yet for thee . . . She said quietly, ‘It must have been very hard for you to tell him.’
    The thin custardy stuff was poured into the tin. Mopsa had an air of frowning concentration. When it was done she expelled her breath with a puffing sound. She was like a schoolgirl making a cake for a home economics exam. She was like someone who had never made a cake before. Perhaps she hadn’t. Benet couldn’t remember cakes inMopsa’s crazy days. She put the cake into the oven and slammed the door as if slamming it on something she would never return to, the final closing of the door of a house she was quitting for ever.
    She turned to Benet, wiping clean hands down the front of her apron.
    â€˜Oh, I didn’t tell him, Brigitte. I couldn’t
tell
him. He doesn’t ask, you see. It’s an embarrassing subject for him. He might have got over it if things had been different. But since he doesn’t ask, there’s no point in telling him, is there?’
    â€˜He will have to know sometime.’
    Mopsa didn’t say anything. She looked levelly into Benet’s eyes. At that moment, in her apron, a smudge of flour on one cheek, her hair silvery-gold with pins fastening it, she was exactly like other people’s mothers.
    â€˜Have you told anyone?’ Benet said.
    A hand went up and touched the flour smudge, a finger rubbed and flicked at it. Mopsa’s stare shifted from Benet’s face to the light switch on the far wall.
    â€˜You haven’t told anyone at all, have you?’
    Mopsa began to mumble. ‘I couldn’t, Brigitte. I didn’t want to upset myself. It’s bad for me to be upset.’
    Benet shouted at her: ‘Who do you suppose is going to eat that bloody cake?’
    She ran out of the room and up the stairs. Behind her she could hear Mopsa starting to snuffle and cry. She didn’t go back. She went on up the stairs, a feeling of pressure on the top of her head, a throbbing behind her eyes. She passed the open door to Mopsa’s bedroom and the photograph on Mopsa’s bedside table caught her eyes. It was a photograph of Edward. What was Mopsa doing with a photograph of Edward? Benet hadn’t even known she possessed one. It was a head and shoulders shot, rather fuzzy, enlarged from a snap.
    She went up the last flight and entered James’s bedroom. The cot was still there and the bare mattress. Apart from that, there was nothing to show the room had ever beenoccupied by a child. From the window you could see the row of pines behind the pond, the green strip of the Heath, a large white empty sky. She shut herself in her own bedroom. Should she tell Edward about James? Was there any point? He had only seen him once and that when he was two days old. He had come into the hospital and seen him and Benet and not known what to say.
    â€˜You have utterly humiliated me’ was what at last he did say. He had glanced at the child and looked away.
    â€˜It would have been better if you hadn’t come, Edward. You shouldn’t have come.’
    She felt as bad about things as he did, in her own way. It
had
been wrong to use him, it
had
been wrong to set out to have a child by him when she had no intention of marrying him or even continuing to live with him. But it had not seemed like that at the time, it had seemed the obvious thing, even the moral thing. With that decision made, with the baby in her arms, even then she had not been able to ignore Edward’s beauty, a beauty that inevitably moved her. She had thought, why can’t that alone be enough for me, though I know there is nothing else, scarcely anything else to him at all? The world was full of men bound to women for no more