The Bad Sister (21 page)

Nor was it just that the search for Mrs Hyde, as notorious by now as the absconding Lord Lucan in his day, was a part of the national consciousness. It was, Robina said, her own sense of shame – blame others though she might – at having been unable to predict the day of the murder. ‘The Zeitgeist is not to my liking,' she said, rueful but with an intimation once more of the enigmatic look and smile. ‘I don't like the priggish Jean Hastie – and I don't like the viragos poor Mara has got caught up with. All the fault of men. I cannot believe that. However—' Robina became her sharp self again and delivered one of her fatally glancing comments. ‘A snoop is always a snoop. That is what I thought of Jean Hastie.'

Apparently Frances Crane, already ensconced in Robina Sandel's shabby ‘through' room overlooking the gardens, got on well with Jean from the start. Frances, as a doctor – and a specialist in the ailments of children – had enough in her working day, I suppose, of an ‘immature' approach to
things, to find Mara a little trying and Jean Hastie a welcome relief. Whatever the reason, the two women were soon settled on a battered leather sofa by the window. It was a horribly dark night, as Robina Sandel remembers, and she had gone so far as to light a candle and place it on a low table by the new acquaintances. It was one of those fat Christmas candles – her niece Tilda had brought it over from Austria when she came – and the flame, reflected in the window, showed up the gloom of a February afternoon only too well, the bare chestnut tree and forked ash outside groaning and straining in a deathly parody of the leaping light inside. There was a lot of rain – Mara remembers that because later she tried to film in the gardens and was blown back in again, soaked – and a wind that seemed to be trapped in the stretch between Rudyard and Nightingale Crescents, howling round, as Robina said with that Germanic, ghoulish humour, ‘like a woman or a lost soul'.

Jean Hastie was asking Frances about Eliza Jekyll, whose gallery opening she had just witnessed. (Robina says that at this point two ‘regulars' of No. 19 came in and made themselves comfortable at the street end of the room, with a bottle of claret produced by Tilda.) These details are essential, I believe, as the new arrivals, one a stockbroker who had lived in her ground-floor flat four houses down for six years, and the other a landscape gardener only recently arrived to take up a studio flat with private garden on the far side of the communal expanse, in Rudyard Crescent, were witnesses to subsequent events. Robina remembers that the stockbroker, Monica Purves, lit up a cigar and pulled one of the giant brass ashtrays Tilda has to keep polished close to her on the coffee table between them. Jean Hastie, who seems to have had a particularly strong sense of smell, wrinkled her nose at this, despite being at the far end of the room from them, and asked if a window could be opened somewhere.

‘I suppose,' Robina said, ‘that that was where the trouble started. Two factions, if you like, declared themselves at that moment and stayed implacably opposed until they
were forced to part – by the lateness of the hour, the necessity of getting up and going to work the next morning – or the sheer weariness that overcomes an argument when it finally becomes clear that neither side will budge an inch.' It was then, Robina emphasized, that grounds for her suspicions of Jean Hastie were first properly laid; and though she could never have guessed, as she was the first to point out, the exact nature of Mrs Hastie's mission in the south, there was something of an air of espionage about her. And Robina didn't like that at all.

The inevitable subject of the local rapist having come up (the four women were sitting together, now, since Monica Purves's offer to open the side window at the rear end of the room, with its pitch black view of boarding and sodden shrub, had brought them all to the garden end of the room) it soon led on to the topic of women in general; and the change (if any) in society's attitude to physical violence and social discrimination against them. Monica Purves, still puffing on her cigar, put her legs in pinstriped trousers up on the brass fender (another of Tilda's polishing tasks) that guarded the fine old wooden fireplace at the garden end of the room. There was a log fire burning, Robina said, because a number of trees had blown down a few weeks ago and Monica had sawn them up and brought them round. It was about the time, as she remembered very well, of the rapist's last attack in the area. Someone had grabbed his sleeve – they'd got as near as that to catching him! – and he'd got away all the same, dodging through the copse of silver birches on the western side (where the land was boggy and wet, this time of year, and residents didn't let their children play) and out into the street, somehow. A shred of a bomber jacket had been left behind, Robina added, on a branch of an ash that had gone down later in the storms. Monica had enjoyed ceremonially burning it in the fireplace of No. 19.

The conversation, as if drawn by a momentum of its own, now moved to the nature of Ms Jekyll, followed by a heated appraisal of the nature of Mrs Hyde. It was strange,
Robina reflected, that the characteristics of these two women, barely known to anyone present, should have brought a civilized talk almost to boiling point; but that it did was incontrovertible; it was as if, she said, these two not particularly newsworthy characters stood for all the divisions we are in the midst of suffering in this country. ‘I don't know who really began it,' Robina went on to say, ‘but you can bet your bottom dollar it was something Mara said that got someone's hackles up in the first place.'

As far as one can make out, the argument was well under way before the incident, as poor Tilda, frightened out of her wits, termed it, of ‘the ghost in the garden'. Mara had spoken with derision of Eliza Jekyll – typical of Mara, as her friends will say sorrowfully – for her contradictory character likes to bite the hand that feeds it. ‘Eliza is the kind of woman who gives women a bad name,' Mara said. She was perched by now on the leather top of the fender, Monica Purves's black expensive-looking laceups crossed beside her. ‘She's the kind of woman who believes she is a post-feminist. Whatever that means. Except I'll tell you what it means – getting what you want in the old way while pretending you care for equality and other old-fashioned concepts. A fink, in other words.'

Robina put in a word here, before things got heated (or rather, she hoped to deflect the confrontation). Already the young landscape gardener, Carol Hill, was shifting restlessly in the upright chair next to Jean Hastie's and Frances Crane's armchairs. Jean herself, catching the look in the gardener's eye, was shaking her head vehemently.

‘I don't agree,' Monica Purves said. ‘Eliza Jekyll is an example of a woman achieving in the world without losing her basic feelings of compassion towards humanity. Did you know, for example, that Eliza is a sponsor of the local Homeless Women Trust? She organizes meetings for Legacy for the Homeless, where an elderly person may will his or her house to the Foundation, and benefit from tax relief in the meantime—'

‘Yes. And personally as well,' Carol Hill put in. ‘Since I
moved into my flat here I've heard the children these homeless women bring round, playing all day in Eliza's flat. Surely that counts for more than just attending meetings?'

‘Soon you'll be telling me she's running a Green Investment Trust, where the rich can put their money in wild flowers or butterflies or something,' Mara snapped at the stockbroker. ‘Capitalism is the cause of Eliza Jekyll's prosperity. And capitalism will continue to bring her prosperity while others starve.'

It was at this point that Jean Hastie spoke up. Her voice, with its quiet burr, wasn't easily audible at first – and Dr Frances Crane, who had been sitting back during this exchange with a slightly worried expression on her face, held up her hand to stop the next bass outburst from Monica Purves. ‘Jean came down from Scotland to see Eliza, I believe,' Frances Crane said, ‘as well as researching for your book, isn't that right?' And she turned to her new friend with an almost apologetic expression on her face – as if the state of affairs in London was indeed very different from that obtaining in the fresher air north of the border.

‘I haven't seen Eliza Jekyll for many years,' Jean said quietly, when Mara, too, had been persuaded to hold her tongue. ‘We were at the same digs once – at Headington Hill, outside Oxford—'

‘Digs!' Mara couldn't restrain a snort of laughter. ‘That sounds pretty antediluvian to me. So you didn't know her when she was married, then?'

‘Married?' Jean Hastie turned in her chair. ‘I didn't even know—'

‘It didn't last long,' Frances Crane put in quickly, as if already trying to protect her recently found ally. ‘He – the man she married, I mean – has been living out of the country for years.' And, with a disapproving glance in Mara's direction, she said, ‘I really can't see what Eliza Jekyll's marital status has got to do with this conversation.'

‘I agree.' Monica Purves tossed the end of her cheroot into the fireplace and stood up. ‘A friend of a friend of mine
did her divorce, as a matter of fact. The trouble was, she said, that Eliza Jekyll was a lot too soft on the bastard. Let him get away with murder, old Kate said.'

Robina's account is that she went at this point to replenish the drink tray and to call Tilda in the kitchen. Robina is proud of the mini-pizzas she hands out to those who drop in at No. 19; and if they dig a little deeper in their pockets for the extras, all the better. Certainly Monica Purves had no lack of funds, as Robina rather shamefacedly said. With London the way it is nowadays, you can do with every bob you earn. And as if unconsciously to underline a ‘decent' way of thinking and talking that had, like Jean Hastie's memories of a distant past when Eliza had been studying art at a school in Oxford and Jean had been studying law, long disappeared, Robina added apologetically that No. 19 did, after all, need a new roof. You couldn't tell these days if you were always going to have a roof over your head, when it came down to it. The house might be hers – but for how long could you borrow against its very fabric, eating into walls and foundations as you struggled to stay on?

When the reasons for the providing of tasty snacks and charging for them had been gone through – for Robina was a hospitable character and didn't like to charge her regulars at all, when she sat and drank with them as well – the rest of the story of that evening was permitted to proceed. She'd found Tilda in the small room off the basement kitchen where she'd been temporarily housed since the arrival of a paying guest, Jean Hastie, who would take Tilda's room in the mansard extension at the top of the house. Robina's niece was packing up her things in a big hold-all and choking back tears as she did so. A tray of pizzas gave off a particularly pungent burnt smell from the oven next door, Robina said, and at first she imagined the girl was crying because she was guilty at having neglected them. Then she saw that matters were more serious than that. Tilda was afraid, she said. It was that woman Mrs Hyde who had frightened her. And the other woman, too – Mara
Kaletsky, with her wild talk of revenge and her gruesome descriptions of the methods of the rapist. She said Mrs Hyde was going to kill the man. It would be soon, Mara said. At the time of his next attack. She had told Tilda to be very careful. ‘But even if you're not in he cuts up your things,' Tilda sobbed. ‘Your photos … your underwear … everything.'

It next turned out that Tilda had come down to the basement to fetch the appetizers when she had seen, through the open door of her bedroom, a pile of old clothes in a tangle on the floor. Heightened imagination – fear – ‘well, they can do a lot to the way you see something,' as Robina, no innocent in these matters, remarked drily. She added, remembering perhaps the country she had left and the growth and easy acceptance of fear there when she had been a child younger than Tilda, that she'd thought then how good it would be if something – anything almost – would just remove the menace of the rapist from their midst. ‘It's been a long time,' as she told the newspaper reporters when, inevitably, they came to prise a ‘story' from her three days later. And – as if her niece's accommodation had anything to do with the whole grisly affair: ‘I wouldn't have put Tilda downstairs, you understand, if a friend of Mara's, Jean Hastie, hadn't been coming to stay. Tilda was upstairs all the time since she came to England. I just moved her down until …' At this point Robina Sandel's voice, or the transcript obtainable from the
Recorder
, dies out altogether. Did she really think she was in some way responsible for the events which succeeded the evening of 9th of February? Everyone knew, of course, that she was not. But guilt and hysteria, brought back in one long gulp from Robina's childhood, made a confession of a simple domestic transfer of rooms. (It's possible, some say, that it was the presence of Tilda – the sight of her in the basement room, maybe, when she stood by Robina's cheap pink unlined curtains, that brought things to a head that week. But how can it ever be proved? And, if Tilda's stay below stairs was indeed the catalyst, wasn't some kind of action
exactly what was wanted then … as Robina Sandel had been the first to say?)

Maybe it was because everyone seemed to be against Mara Kaletsky that evening – with the possible exception of the landscape gardener, Carol Hill, seen to be moved by Mara's vehement defence of Mrs Hyde – that the young film-maker and artist decided to go ahead with her ‘project', despite the appalling climatic conditions, claiming afterwards that she had known all along what she would find out there in the garden.

The door leading from the passage to the flight of wooden steps outside had blown open in the wind; and this caused, as far as one can make out, a quite uncontrollable sensation of panic and hysteria among the women. You could practically feel the fear, Robina said; and Mara going out through that door, leaving it to bang behind her in the wind, didn't help matters at all. It was as if a collective terror was brewing, and was responsible, perhaps, for turning the ordinary sight of an ordinary woman into a vision of particular horror.