A Century of Great Suspense Stories

Burning End Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell is generally recognized as one of a handful of writers whose work has profoundly changed the crime genre. Whether with her psychological novels or her Inspector Wexford books, her style, insight, quiet but frequently tart wit, and constant confrontation with our modern moral dilemmas has elevated her books to their very own niche far above the average mystery effort. Her most recent novel is Harm Done. It has been argued that her short stories are even better than her novels. An enjoyable argument, really, because you have the pleasure of reading both and deciding for yourself.

After she had been doing it for a year, it occurred to Linda that looking after Betty fell to her lot because she was a woman. Betty was Brian’s mother, not hers, and Betty had two other children, both sons, both unmarried men. No one had ever suggested that either of them should take a hand in looking after their mother. Betty had never much liked Linda, had sometimes hinted that Brian had married beneath him, and once, in the heat of temper, said that Linda was “not good enough” for her son, but still it was Linda who cared for her now. Linda felt a fool for not having thought of it in these terms before.

But she knew she would not get very far talking about it to Brian. Brian would say — and did say — that this was women’s work. A man couldn’t perform intimate tasks for an old woman, it wasn’t fitting. When Linda asked why not, he told her not to be silly, everyone knew why not.

“Suppose it had been your dad that was left, suppose he’d been bedridden, would I have looked after him?”

Brian looked over the top of his evening paper. He was holding the remote in his hand but he didn’t turn down the sound. “He wasn’t left, was he?”

“No, but if he had been?”

“I reckon you would have. There isn’t anyone else, is there? It’s not as if the boys were married.”

Every morning after Brian had gone out into the farmyard and before she left for work, Linda drove down the road, turned left at the church into the lane, and after a mile came to the very small cottage on the very large piece of land where Betty had lived since the death of her husband twelve years before. Betty slept downstairs in the room at the back. She was always awake when Linda got there, although that was invariably before seven-thirty, and she always said she had been awake since five.

Linda got her up and changed the incontinence pad. Most mornings she had to change the sheets as well. She washed Betty, put her into a clean nightgown and clean bedjacket, socks, and slippers, and while Betty shouted and moaned, lifted and shoved her as best she could into the armchair she would remain in all day. Then it was breakfast. Sweet milky tea and bread and butter and jam. Betty wouldn’t use the feeding cup with the spout. What did Linda think she was, a baby? She drank from a cup, and unless Linda had remembered to cover her up with the muslin squares that had indeed once had their use for babies, the tea would go all down the clean nightgown and Betty would have to be changed again.

After Linda had left her and gone off to work, the district nurse would come, though not every day, not for certain. The Meals-on-Wheels lady would come and give Betty her midday dinner, bits and pieces in foil containers, all labelled with the names of their contents. At some point Brian would come. Brian would “look in.” Not to do anything, not to clear anything away or give his mother something to eat or make her a cup of tea or run the vacuum cleaner around — Linda did that on Saturdays — but to sit in Betty’s bedroom for ten minutes smoking a cigarette and watching whatever was on television. Very occasionally, perhaps once a month, the brother who lived two miles away would come for ten minutes and watch television with Brian. The other brother, the one who lived ten miles away, never came at all except at Christmas.

Linda always knew if Brian had been there by the smell of smoke and the cigarette end stubbed out in the ashtray. But even if there had been no smell and no stub she would have known because Betty always told her. Betty thought Brian was a saint and an angel to spare a moment away from the farm to visit his old mother. She could no longer speak distinctly, but she was positively articulate on the subject of Brian, the most perfect son any woman ever had.

It was about five when Linda got back there. Usually the incontinence pad needed changing again and often the nightdress too. Considering how ill she was, and partially paralysed, Betty ate a great deal. Linda made her scrambled egg or sardines on toast. She brought pastries with her from the cakeshop or, in the summer, strawberries and cream. She made more tea for Betty, and when the meal was over, somehow heaved Betty back into that bed.

The bedroom window was never opened. Betty wouldn’t have it. The room smelt of urine and lavender, camphor and Meals-on-Wheels, so every day on her way to work Linda opened the window in the front room and left the doors open. It didn’t make much difference but she went on doing it. When she had got Betty to bed she washed up the day’s teacups, emptied the ashtray and washed it, and put all the soiled linen into a plastic bag to take home. The question she asked Betty before she left had become meaningless because Betty always said no, and she hadn’t asked it once since having that conversation with Brian about whose job it was to look after his mother, but she asked it now.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we moved you in with us, Mum?”

Betty’s hearing was erratic. This was one of her deaf days.

“What?”

“Wouldn’t you be better off coming to live with us?”

“I’m not leaving my home till they carry me out feet first. How many times do I have to tell you?”

Linda said all right and she was off now and she would see her in the morning. Looking rather pleased at the prospect, Betty said she would be dead by the morning.

“Not you,” said Linda, which was what she always said, and so far she had always been right.

She went into the front room and closed the window. The room was furnished in a way which must have been old-fashioned even when Betty was young. In the center of it was a square dining table, around which stood six chairs with seats of faded green silk. There was a large, elaborately carved sideboard but no armchairs, no small tables, no books, and no lamps but the central light which, enveloped in a shade of parchment panels stitched together with leather thongs, was suspended directly over the glass vase that stood on a lace mat in the absolute center of the table.

For some reason, ever since the second stroke had incapacitated Betty two years before, all the post, all the junk mail, and every freebie news-sheet that was delivered to the cottage ended up on this table. Every few months it was cleared away, but this hadn’t been done for some time, and Linda noticed that only about four inches of the glass vase now showed above the sea of paper. The lace mat was not visible at all. She noticed something else as well.

It had been a warm sunny day, very warm for April. The cottage faced south and all afternoon the sunshine had poured through the window, was still pouring through the window, striking at the neck of the vase so that the glass was too bright to look at. Where the sun-struck glass touched a sheet of paper a burning had begun. The burning glass was making a dark charred channel through the sheet of thin printed paper.

Linda screwed up her eyes. They had not deceived her. That was smoke she could see. And now she could smell burning paper. For a moment she stood there, fascinated, marvelling at this phenomenon which she had heard of but had never believed in. A magnifying glass to make boy scout’s fires, she thought, and somewhere she had read of a forest burnt down through a piece of broken glass left in a sunlit glade.

There was nowhere to put the piles of paper, so she found another plastic bag and filled that. Betty called out something but it was only to know why she was still there. Linda dusted the table, replaced the lace mat and the glass vase, and, with a bag of washing in one hand and a bag of wastepaper in the other, went home to do the washing and get an evening meal for Brian and herself and the children.

The incident of the glass vase, the sun, and the burning paper had been so interesting that Linda meant to tell Brian and Andrew and Gemma all about it while they were eating. But they were also watching the finals of a quiz game on television and hushed her when she started to speak. The opportunity went by and somehow there was no other until the next day. But by that time the sun and the glass setting the paper on fire no longer seemed so remarkable and Linda decided not to mention it.

Several times in the weeks that followed Brian asked his mother if it wasn’t time she came to live with them at the farm. He always told Linda of these attempts, as if in issuing this invitation he had been particularly magnanimous and self-denying. Perhaps this was because Betty responded very differently from when Linda asked her. Brian and his children, Betty said, shouldn’t have to have a useless old woman under their roof, age and youth were not meant to live together, though nobody appreciated her son’s generosity in asking her more than she did. Meanwhile Linda went on going to the cottage and looking after Betty for an hour every morning and an hour and a half every evening and cleaning the place on Saturdays and doing Betty’s washing.

One afternoon while Brian was sitting with his mother smoking a cigarette and watching television, the doctor dropped in to pay his twice-yearly visit. He beamed at Betty, said how nice it was for her to have her devoted family around her, and on his way out told Brian it was best for the old folks to end their days at home whenever possible. If he said anything about the cigarette, Brian didn’t mention it when he recounted this to Linda.

He must have picked up a pile of junk mail from the doormat and the new phone book from outside the door, for all this was lying on the table in the front room when Linda arrived at ten to five. The paper had accumulated during the past weeks, but when Linda went to look for a plastic bag she saw that the entire stock had been used up. She made a mental note to buy some more and in the meantime had to put the soiled sheets and Betty’s two wet nightdresses into a pillowcase to take them home. The sun wasn’t shining; it had been a dull day and the forecast was for rain, so there was no danger from the conjunction of glass vase with the piles of paper. It could safely remain where it was.

On her way home it occurred to Linda that the simplest solution was to remove not the paper but the vase. Yet, when she went back next day, she didn’t remove the vase. It was a strange feeling she had, that if she moved the vase to the mantelpiece, say, or the top of the sideboard, she would somehow have closed a door or missed a chance. Once she had moved it she would never be able to move it back again, for though she could easily have explained to anyone why she had moved it from the table, she would never be able to say why she had put it back. These thoughts frightened her and she put them from her mind.

Linda bought a pack of fifty black plastic sacks. Betty said it was a wicked waste of money. When she was up and about she had been in the habit of burning all paper waste. All leftover food and cans and bottles got mixed up together and went out for the dustman. Betty had never heard of the environment. When Linda insisted, one hot day in July, on opening the bedroom windows, Betty said she was freezing, Linda was trying to kill her, and she would tell her son his wife was an evil woman. Linda took the curtains home and washed them but she didn’t open the bedroom window again, it wasn’t worth it, it caused too much trouble.

But when Brian’s brother Michael got engaged, she did ask if Suzanne would take her turn looking after Betty once they were back from their honeymoon.

“You couldn’t expect it of a young girl like her,” Brian said.

“She’s twenty-eight,” said Linda.

“She doesn’t look it.” Brian switched on the television. “Did I tell you Geoff’s been made redundant?”

“Then maybe he could help out with Betty if he hasn’t got a job to go to.”

Brian looked at her and shook his head gently. “He’s feeling low enough as it is. It’s a blow to a man’s pride, that is, going on the dole. I couldn’t ask him.”

Why does he have to be asked, Linda thought. It’s his mother. The sun was already high in the sky when she got to the cottage at seven-thirty next morning, already edging round the house to penetrate the front-room window by ten. Linda put the junk mail on the table and took the letter and the postcard into the bedroom. Betty wouldn’t look at them. She was wet through and the bed was wet. Linda got her up and stripped off the wet clothes, wrapping Betty in a clean blanket because she said she was freezing. When she was washed and in her clean nightdress, she wanted to talk about Michael’s fiancé e. It was one of her articulate days.

“Dirty little trollop,” said Betty. “I remember her when she was fifteen. Go with anyone, she would. There’s no knowing how many abortions she’s had, messed all her insides up, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“She’s very pretty, in my opinion,” said Linda, “and a nice nature.”

“Handsome is as handsome does. It’s all that makeup and hair dye as has entrapped my poor boy. One thing, she won’t set foot in this house while I’m alive.”

Linda opened the window in the front room. It was going to be a hot day, but breezy. The house could do with a good draught of air blowing through to freshen it. She thought: I wonder why no one ever put flowers in that vase, there’s no point in a vase without flowers. The letters and envelopes and newsprint surrounded it so that it no longer looked like a vase but like a glass tube inexplicably poking out between a stack of paper and a telephone directory.

Brian didn’t visit that day. He had started harvesting. When Linda came back at five, Betty told her Michael had been in. She showed Linda the box of chocolates that was his gift, his way of “soft-soaping” her, Betty said. Not that a few violet creams had stopped her speaking her mind on the subject of that trollop.

The chocolates had gone soft and sticky in the heat. Linda said she would put them in the fridge but Betty clutched the box to her chest, saying she knew Linda, she knew her sweet tooth, if she let that box out of her sight she’d never see it again. Linda washed Betty and changed her. While she was doing Betty’s feet, rubbing cream round her toes and powdering them, Betty struck her on the head with the bedside clock, the only weapon she had to hand.

“You hurt me,” said Betty. “You hurt me on purpose.”

“No, I didn’t, Mum. I think you’ve broken that clock.”

“You hurt me on purpose because I wouldn’t give you my chocolates my son brought me.”

Brian said he was going to cut the field behind the cottage next day. Fifty acres of barley, and he’d be done by midafternoon if the heat didn’t kill him. He could have seen to his mother’s needs, he’d be practically on the spot, but he didn’t offer. Linda wouldn’t have believed her ears if she’d heard him offer.

It was hotter than ever. It was even hot at seven-thirty. Linda washed Betty and changed the sheets. She gave her cereal for breakfast and a boiled egg and toast. From her bed Betty could see Brian going round the barley field on the combine, and this seemed to bring her enormous pleasure, though her enjoyment was tempered with pity.

“He knows what hard work is,” Betty said, “he doesn’t spare himself when there’s a job to be done,” as if Brian were cutting the fifty acres with a scythe instead of sitting up there in a cabin with twenty kingsize and a can of Coke and the Walkman on his head playing Beatles songs from his youth.

Linda opened the window in the front room very wide. The sun would be round in a couple of hours to stream through that window. She adjusted an envelope on the top of the pile, moving the torn edge of its flap to brush against the glass vase. Then she moved it away again. She stood, looking at the table and the papers and the vase. A brisk draught of air made the thinner sheets of paper flutter a little. From the bedroom she heard Betty call out, through closed windows, to a man on a combine a quarter of a mile away, “Hallo, Brian, you all right then, are you? You keep at it, son, that’s right, you got the weather on your side.”

One finger stretched out, Linda lightly poked at the torn edge of the envelope flap. She didn’t really move it at all. She turned her back quickly. She marched out of the room, out of the house, to the car.

The fire must have started somewhere around four in the afternoon, the hottest part of that hot day. Brian had been in to see his mother when he had finished cutting the field at two. He had watched television with her and then she said she wanted to have a sleep. Those who know about these things said she had very likely died from suffocation without ever waking. That was why she hadn’t phoned for help, though the phone was by her bed.

A builder driving down the lane, on his way to a barn conversion his firm was working on, called the fire brigade. They were volunteers whose headquarters was five miles away, and they took twenty minutes to get to the fire. By then Betty was dead and half the cottage destroyed. Nobody told Linda, there was hardly time, and when she got to Betty’s at five it was all over. Brian and the firemen were standing about, poking at the wet black ashes with sticks, and Andrew and Gemma were in Brian’s estate car outside the gate, eating potato crisps.

The will was a surprise. Betty had lived in that cottage for twelve years without a washing machine or a freezer and her television set was rented by Brian. The bed she slept in was her marriage bed, new in 1939, the cottage hadn’t been painted since she moved there, and the kitchen had last been refitted just after the war. But she left what seemed an enormous sum of money. Linda could hardly believe it. A third was for Geoff, a third for Michael, and the remaining third as well as the cottage, or what was left of it, for Brian.

The insurance company paid up. It was impossible to discover the cause of the fire. Something to do with the great heat, no doubt, and the thatched roof, and the ancient electrical wiring which hadn’t been renewed for sixty or seventy years. Linda, of course, knew better, but she said nothing. She kept what she knew and let it fester inside her, giving her sleepless nights and taking away her appetite.

Brian cried noisily at the funeral. All the brothers showed excessive grief, and no one told Brian to pull himself together or be a man, but put their arms round his shoulders and told him what a marvellous son he’d been and how he’d nothing to reproach himself with. Linda didn’t cry but soon after went into a black depression from which nothing could rouse her, not the doctor’s tranquillizers, nor Brian’s promise of a slap-up holiday somewhere, even abroad if she liked, nor people telling her Betty hadn’t felt any pain but had just slipped away in her smoky sleep.

An application to build a new house on the site of the cottage was favourably received by the planning authority, and permission was granted. Why shouldn’t they live in it, Brian said, he and Linda and the children? The farmhouse was ancient and awkward, difficult to keep clean, just the sort of place Londoners would like for a second home. How about moving, he said, how about a modern house, with everything you want, two bathrooms, say, and a laundry room, and a sun lounge? Design it yourself and don’t worry about the cost, he said, for he was concerned for his wife, who had always been so practical and efficient as well as easygoing and tractable, but was now a miserable, silent woman.

Linda refused to move. She didn’t want a new house, especially a new house on the site of that cottage. She didn’t want a holiday or money to buy clothes. She refused to touch Betty’s money. Depression had forced her to give up her job but, although she was at home all day and there was no old woman to look after every morning and every evening, she did nothing in the house and Brian was obliged to get a woman in to clean. Brian could build his house and sell it, if that was what he wanted, but she wouldn’t touch the money and no one could make her.

“She must have been a lot fonder of Mum than I thought,” Brian said to his brother Michael. “She’s always been one to keep her feelings all bottled up, but that’s the only explanation. Mum must have meant a lot more to her than I ever knew.”

“Or else it’s guilt,” said Michael, whose fiancé e’s sister was married to a man whose brother was a psychotherapist.

“Guilt? You have to be joking. What’s she got to be guilty about? She couldn’t have done more if she’d been Mum’s own daughter.”

“Yeah, but folks feel guilt over nothing when someone dies, it’s a well-known fact.”

“It is, is it? Is that what it is, doctor? Well, let me tell you something. If anyone ought to feel guilt, it’s me. I’ve never said a word about this to a soul. Well, I couldn’t, could I? Not if I wanted to collect the insurance; but the fact is it was me set that place on fire.”

“You what?” said Michael.

“It was an accident. I don’t mean on purpose. Come on, what do you take me for, my own brother? And I don’t feel guilty, I can tell you, I don’t feel a scrap of guilt, accidents will happen and there’s not a thing you can do about it. But when I went in to see Mum that afternoon, I left my cigarette burning on the side of the chest of drawers. You know how you put them down, with the burning end stuck out. Linda’d taken away the damned ashtray and washed it or something. When I saw Mum was asleep, I just crept out. Just crept out and left that fag end burning. Without a backward glance.”

Awed, Michael asked in a small voice, “When did you realise?”

“Soon as I saw the smoke; soon as I saw the fire brigade. Too late then, wasn’t it? I’d crept out of there without a backward glance.”