The Copper Peacock by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Ruth Rendell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1994-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Dying Happy

I was sitting by his bedside. He had a pure white room all to himself.

‘This place reminds me of something that happened to a friend of mine.’

‘What friend?’ I said.

‘You didn’t know him. He’s dead now anyway. Or dead to all intents and purposes.’ He gave me a sly sideways look. It was a look that dared me to ask what the last remark meant. I didn’t ask and he said, ‘I’ll tell you about him.’ He put his head back on the pillow and looked at the white ceiling. ‘A long time ago, twenty years at least, he had a relationship with this woman.’

I had to interrupt. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘I have a relationship with you. Come to that, I have a relationship with the milkman.’

‘Well, an affair then. I hate the word too. I picked it up from Miriam.’ Miriam was his wife. ‘An affair,’ he said. ‘A love passage. He was married of course. But he was in love with this woman, about as much in love as anyone can be, I gather. Fathoms deep. He was a very romantic man. He didn’t tell his wife but of course she found out and put a stop to it.’

‘What was her name?’ I said.

‘The girl friend? Susanna. Her name was Susanna. She wasn’t any younger than his wife or better-looking or cleverer or anything. And none of them were young, you know. Even then, at the time, they weren’t young. I said he put a stop to it but that was only for a while. They started up again in secret and this time when the wife found out Susanna herself stopped it. She said it wasn’t fair to any of them and she didn’t answer his phone calls or his letters or anything and after a while it sort of petered out as these things do. Anyway, this was all of twenty years ago, as I said.

‘His wife would bring up Susanna’s name every time they disagreed. You can imagine. And he wasn’t above comparing his wife unfavourably with Susanna if she annoyed him. But after a time they stopped mentioning her, though my friend never stopped thinking about her. He said that never a day passed without him thinking of her. And she came into his dreams. He got to look forward to those dreams because he said at least that way he got to see her sometimes.’

‘The poor devil,’ I said.

‘Yes, well, he was romantic.’

It was nearly as white outside as in. There was snow on the ground and lumps of snow on the tree branches. He turned his face to the dazzling snow, screwing up his eyes. ‘He got some awful thing the matter with him. I’m speaking about the present day now more or less. They gave him a limited time to live, a matter of months, you know how they won’t commit themselves. He got it into his head he had to see Susanna before he died. He had to see her, he could die happy or at least contented if he could see her.

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