Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell Page A

lifeboat people. But it wasn’t this that finished things for him, or triggered things off, however you liked to put it. It was the sneering tone in which she told him, her right index finger pointing at his chest, that he was no good, he had failed. She had kept him in comfort and luxury for decade after decade, she had instructed him, taught him everything he knew, yet in spite of this, his literary criticism had not had the slightest effect on authors’ standards or effected the least improvement in fiction. He had wasted his time and his life through cowardice and pusillanimity, through mousiness instead of manliness.
    It was the word “mousiness” that did it. His hands moved across the table to rest on
Piranha
to
Scurfy;
he lifted it in both hands and brought it down as hard as he could on her head. Once, twice, again and again. The first time she screamed, but not again after that. She staggered and sank to her knees and he beat her to the ground with volume 8 of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
She was an old woman: she put up no struggle; she died quickly. He very much wanted not to get blood on the book— she had taught him books were sacred—but there was no blood. What was shed was shed inside her.
    Regret came immediately. Remorse followed. But she was dead. He buried her in the wide flower bed at the end of the garden that night, in the dark without a flashlight. The widows on either side slept soundly— no one saw a thing. The ivies grew back and the flowerless plants that liked shade. All summer he had watched them slowly growing. He told only two people she was dead, Glenys Next-door and his cousin Frank. Neither showed any inclination to come to the “funeral,” so when the day he had appointed came he left the house at ten in the morning, wearing the new dark suit he had bought, a black tie that had been Daddy’s, and carrying a bunch of spring flowers. Sandra On-the-other-side spotted him from her front-room window and, approving, nodded somberly while giving him a sad smile. Ribbon smiled sadly back. He put the flowers on someone else’s grave and strolled round the cemetery for half an hour.
    From a material point of view, living was easy. He had more money now than Mummy had ever let him have. Daddy’s royalties were paid into her bank account twice a year and would continue to be paid in. Ribbon drew out what he wanted on her direct-debit card, his handwriting being so like hers that no one could tell the difference. He had been collecting her retirement pension for years, and he went on doing so. It occurred to him that the Department of Social Security might expect her to die sometime and the bank might expect it too, but she had been very young when he was born and might in any case have been expected to outlive him. He could go on doing this until what would have been her hundredth birthday and even beyond. But could he live without her? He had “made it up to her” by keeping her bedroom as a shrine, keeping her clothes as if one day she would come back and wear them again. Still, he was a lost soul, only half a man, a prey to doubts and fears and self-questioning and a nervous restlessness.
    Looking down at the floor, he half-expected to see some mark where her small slight body had lain. There was nothing, any more than there was a mark on volume 8 of
Britannica.
He went downstairs and stared out into the garden. The cypress he had associated with her, had been near to seeing as containing her spirit, was down, was lying on the grass, its frondy branches already wilting in the heat. One of the two fat shrubs was down too. Damian and the young one were sitting
on Mummy’s grave,
drinking something out of a vacuum flask and smoking cigarettes. Mummy would have had something to say about that, but he lacked the heart. He thought again how strange it was, how horrible and somehow wrong, that the small child’s name for its mother was the same as that for an embalmed Egyptian corpse.
    In