The Fever Tree and Other Stories by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Ruth Rendell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1982-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

May and June

Their parents named them May and June because their birthdays occurred in those months. A third sister, an April child, had been christened Avril but she had died. May was like the time of year in which she had been born, changeable, chilly and warm by turns, sullen yet able to know and show a loveliness that couldn’t last.

In the nineteen thirties, when May was in her twenties, it was still important to get one’s daughters well married, and though Mrs Thrace had no anxieties on that head for sunny June, she was less sanguine with regard to May. Her elder daughter was neither pretty nor graceful nor clever, and no man had ever looked at her twice. June, of course, had a string of admirers. Then May met a young lawyer at a thé dansant. His name was Walter Symonds, he was extremely good looking, his father was wealthy and made him a generous allowance, and there was no doubt he belonged in a higher social class than that of the Thraces. May fell passionately in love with him, but no one was more surprised than she when he asked her to marry him.

The intensity of her passion frightened Mrs Thrace. It wasn’t quite nice. The expression on her face while she awaited the coming of her fiancé, her ardour when she greeted him, the hunger in her eyes – that sort of thing was all very well in the cinema, but unsuitable for a civil servant’s daughter in a genteel suburb.

Briefly, she had become almost beautiful. ‘I’m going to marry him,’ she said when warned. ‘He wants me to love him, doesn’t he? He loves me. Why shouldn’t I show my love?’

June, who was clever as well as pretty, was away at college training to be a schoolteacher. It had been considered wiser, long before Walter Symonds was thought of, to keep May at home. She had no particular aptitude for anything and she was useful to her mother about the house. Now, of course, it turned out that she had an aptitude for catching a rich, handsome and successful husband. Then, a month before the wedding, June came home for the summer holidays.

It was all very unfortunate, Mrs Thrace said over and over again. If Walter Symonds had jilted May for some unknown girl, they would have been bitterly indignant, enraged even, and Mr Thrace would have felt old-fashioned longings to apply a horsewhip. But what could anyone say or do when he transferred his affections from the elder daughter to the younger?

May screamed and sobbed and tried to attack June with a knife. ‘We’re all terribly sorry for you, my darling,’ said Mrs Thrace, ‘but what can anyone do? You wouldn’t marry a man who doesn’t love you, would you?’

‘He does love me, he does! It’s just because she’s pretty. She’s cast a spell on him. I wish she was dead and then he’d love me again.’

‘You mustn’t say that, May. It’s all very cruel, but you have to face the fact that he’s changed his mind.

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