The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell Page A

himself. It is extremely difficult, Ismay had found out, to drown oneself in the bath, or anywhere else, come to that. Then her mother had said Heather wouldn’t have had the physical strength to do it. She was not yet fourteen. But Heather was as tall and strong as a grown woman. Momentarily closing her eyes, Ismay saw her sister coming down the stairs once more, her eyes staring and her pink dress wet, drops of water on her shoes.
    Weak as he was, he had struggled. He must have thrashed about in the water; for the bathroom was wet. Not wet as if water had come through the ceiling or a flood had come up through the floor, but wet enough. Heather’s dress was wet down the front and the skirt was wet. She wasn’t soaked. Could she have been in that bathroom and drowned a struggling man without getting soaked? If only she could remember twelve years later just how wet Heather’s dress had been, how wet her shoes. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t remember if Heather had seemed frightened or shocked but she retained an impression of Heather’s calmness and of her steady voice.
    The two choices before her seemed like two columns standing side by side in her mind. Written on one, like graffiti, were the words,
Tell him
and on the other,
Never tell him
. She asked herself, how can I ever make up my mind? Perhaps there might be a halfway house, a middle course. She knew she could never ask to see Edmund alone, then sit opposite him and tell him these things. There was no point in even considering this, ever thinking about it again. She couldn’t do it. At the last minute, when they had met in some pub or hotellounge or café, she would smile and kiss his cheek – they had begun these brotherly-sisterly kisses – she would come up with some completely different subject, where the wedding was to be, how to arrange some surprise for Heather. She would never tell him. So what could the middle course be. Write to him? Then she imagined seeing him later, after the letter had been read. It was as impossible as the meeting.
    I could have this weighing on my mind for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, she thought. How to get rid of it without telling him face-to-face or taking the passive course and saying nothing? There must be something she could do. An idea came to her. She could record what she had to say, she thought, put it on tape, not give it to him but keep it. Get it off her mind, speak it aloud, then keep the tape until – what? There was always the chance – the curious, unlikely, but possible chance – that Heather herself would tell. Or they might split up. They hadn’t known each other long. But far from agreeing with Andrew’s rather callous forecast that they would marry in haste and repent at leisure, Ismay saw them as one of those rare monogamous couples who would never even consider straying from each other. They were like those creatures she had read about imprinted with the image of their mates. If that mate died the other would be eternally inconsolable.
    Making a tape seemed her only choice. Not ideal, perhaps cowardly, perhaps never to find its destined recipient, but just the same the sole possible solution. She could make it and wait. She admitted to herself that this was evading the issue, passing the buck. Of course, it was therapy for her. Perhaps that was all it would be. It would all be on tape and she wouldn’t have to agonise about it any more. Psychotherapists sometimes advised their clients to take hold of unpleasant thoughts orbeliefs or fears and put them away into boxes in their minds. You could put the person you didn’t get on with at work away in a box. You could put away a worry like that or an old but persistent unhappiness. The tape would be her box and she could put it away.
    When Ismay was fourteen – for her fourteenth birthday, in fact – Guy had given her a tape recorder. She had got everyone to talk into it,