Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell

reason than that those women were beautiful. Why couldn’t it be the other way round and be so for her?
    He sat on the side of her bed and once more asked her to marry him. She said no, no, she couldn’t, please not to ask her again, it was impossible, they would both be unhappy, all three of them would be unhappy. He had got up and gone and she had never seen him again.
    From somewhere or other, Mopsa had acquired a photograph of him and had it framed and put it by her bed. As if he were her son. Did it matter why? Did it matter, come to that, that Mopsa had not told anyone of James’s death? Did anything matter?
    Strangely, she remembered dreams she had had which she had not known were dreams at the time but had believed, while she was living through them, to be real.Suppose she were dreaming now and due to wake and find it had been the most terrible nightmare of her life but still only a nightmare, find that it was morning and James was waking up in the room next door?
    She went back in there and looked at the neat bareness Mopsa had made of it. Grief fills up the room of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me . . .
    Next morning there was a note from Mopsa on the hall table.
I have gone to lunch with Constance Fenton
, it read.
Back about four
. Mopsa hadn’t bothered to leave her notes on other days. Or had she? There was a small wastepaper basket under the table. It was full of screwed-up pieces of paper. Benet began flattening them out. They were all notes from Mopsa, daily notes.
I have gone to the hospital. I have gone to the registrar. I have gone to see Sims & Wainwright
. Benet did not want even to guess who Sims & Wainwright might be. She was touched, she felt guilty, that Mopsa had written all those notes and, seeing them ignored, had patiently retrieved each one and thrown it away before writing the next.
    She opened the door of the room that was to be her place to work in, the room Mopsa inevitably called the study. What else, after all, could you call it? When last she had been in there, books had lain in heaps all over the floor. Mopsa had put them away. She had put them on the shelves, in no sort of order, some of them even upside down. And into the roller of the typewriter she had inserted a clean fresh sheet of paper as if inviting Benet to begin work. Benet wondered if she would ever work again. The idea seemed grotesque. How could she, in her own devastation, ever hope to render on to paper the emotions of others?
    In the basement room she sat by the window. A woman went by, then a child with a dog on a lead. Benet made herself a cup of tea for something to do and drank it to pass the time. The time until what? She wondered about the rest of her life, how she could contemplate it, what shecould possibly do with it. After a while she put a coat on and went out of the house and on to the Heath. It was a cold day with a cold wind blowing. The air was as clear as if this were some remote unspoiled place on the edge of the world where pollution and fog and fouled atmosphere never came. Acres of London roofs and spires and towers lay below her clear as a painting on glass, only faintly blurred with blue at the horizon. Clouds lay over Highgate and the north, piled, frothy, full of rain. She went back.
    The phone rang three or four times. She didn’t answer it. She ate a very small piece of bread and butter and half an apple, afraid she would be sick if she ate any more. After that she went back to the window and sat there, wishing she hadn’t thrown Ian Raeburn’s sleeping pills away. She sat and thought about James because there was nothing and no one else to think about. She had written a book and had a child and now the child was dead and she would never write again. It seemed like something that was happening to someone else because it was too bad, too terrible to be happening to her. Yet it was. The someone else was she herself and it was all for her alone