01 A Dark-Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell (as Barbara Vine)

Author:Ruth Rendell (as Barbara Vine) [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I was so used to thinking of Laurel Cottage as Vera’s house that it came as a shock to hear my father tell my mother that he supposed it would be sold now and the proceeds divided between Vera, Eden and himself. That, of course, was the way my grandmother had left it. My father had waived his right because Vera needed somewhere in which to make a home for Eden, and then the war had come, disrupting everything. The sale of Laurel Cottage might with luck realize fifteen hundred pounds and my father talked a lot about how he would use his five hundred share – build on to the house perhaps, move house, buy a car, re-furnish the living-room, go to Switzerland and see my mother’s relations – spending it in imagination several times over. For a bank manager, which he had just become, he was naïve about money.

Harder-headed and altogether more realistic, my mother never believed in that money from the start. She was a woman who had no compunction about saying, I told you so. ‘See if I’m not right’ was another phrase of hers and she usually was.

‘When your mother died, I told you to sell the house. Gerald would have got a house for Vera and Eden could have lived with us. Things would have been very different if that had happened.’

They would, indeed.

‘Eden wouldn’t have been made too big for her boots for one thing,’ said my mother. ‘It doesn’t do people any good to be idolized.’

My father said in an unpleasant tone that there was not much risk of that round here. It was interesting to speculate what it would have been like having Eden as a sort of big sister. I had no idea this had ever been proposed. Would it have interfered with what George Eliot calls ‘the stealthy convergence of human lots’, altering the course of things, so that Vera on her seventy-eighth birthday might have come along to tea with me with Helen last week? And might Eden have been there, too, a sprightly, blonded sixty-three? Might Francis have strolled in among us to throw a word of disaster in that way he always had, as Ate flung the golden apple among the party guests? And Jamie, his name unchanged and his own, not a self-appointed exile? Who knows? I think somehow that things would have been much the same, given the war and the personalities of the players in the drama.

Eden never wrote. Vera often did and continued to mention Eden as being in Scotland and still in the WRNS. My father never wavered in his custom of reading her letters aloud at the breakfast table, and as I heard details of Eden’s life relayed, though I didn’t doubt my own eyes, I began to think she had been guilty of no greater subterfuge than that of coming to London on leave without visiting us or seeing Vera. We were enduring V1 attacks which only came to an end when the Allies overran the Vi launching sites in the Pas de Calais.

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