The water's lovely : a novel

The water's lovely A novel

Ruth Rendell, 1930-2015

Book - 2007

Ismay, Heather and their mother still live in the house where her stepfather drowned in the bathtub. They don't discuss his death or the changes made to the house because of it, but secrets hang in the air and truth emerges.

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MYSTERY/Rendell, Ruth
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Subjects
Sisters > Fiction.
Drowning victims > Fiction.
Mystery fiction.
Published
New York : Crown Publishers 2007.
Language
English
Main Author
Ruth Rendell, 1930-2015 (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
340 pages
ISBN
9780307381361
  • Chapter 1.
  • Weeks went by when Ismay never thought of it at all. Then something would bring it back or it would return in a dream. The dream began in the same way. She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle of it was a glassy lake. The white thing in the water floated toward her, its face submerged, and her mother said, absurdly, "Don't look!" Because the dead thing was a man and was naked and she was a girl of fifteen. But she had looked and in the dreams she looked again, but at Guy's drowned face. She had looked at the dead face and though she would forget from time to time what she had seen, it always came back, the fear still there in the dead eyes, the nostrils dilated to inhale water, not air.
  • Heather showed no fear, no emotion of any kind. She stood with her arms hanging by her sides. Her dress was wet, clinging to her breasts. No one spoke then, neither in the reality nor in the dreams, neither of them said a word until their mother fell on her knees and began crying and laughing and babbling nonsense.
  • When she came home the house was a different place. She had known, of course, that it would be two self-contained flats, the upper one for her mother and Pamela, the lower one for her and Heather, two pairs of sisters, two generations represented. In her last term at university, four hundred miles away in Scotland, what she hadn't understood was that part of the house would disappear.
  • It was Pamela's idea, though Pamela didn't know why. She knew no more of what had happened than the rest of the world knew. In innocence and well-meaning, she had planned and carried out these drastic changes. She showed Ismay the ground-floor flat and then she took her upstairs.
  • "I'm not sure how much Beatrix understands," she said, opening the door to what had been the principal bedroom, the room they had walked through to find the drowned man. "I can't tell how much she remembers. God knows if she even realizes it's the same room."
  • I can hardly realize, thought Ismay. The shock of it silenced her. She looked around her almost fearfully. It was one room now. The door to the bathroom had been--where? The French windows to the balcony were gone, replaced by a single glass door. The whole place looked larger, nearer to the dream room, yet less spacious.
  • "It's better this way, isn't it, Issy?"
  • "Oh, yes, yes. It's just that it was a shock." Perhaps it would have been better to sell the house and move. But how else would she and Heather afford a flat to share? "Has Heather seen it?"
  • "She loves all the changes. I don't know when I've seen her so enthusiastic about anything." Pamela showed her the two bedrooms that had once been hers and Heather's, the new kitchen, the new bathroom. At the top of the stairs she paused, holding on to the newel post and turning her eyes on Ismay almost pleadingly. "It's ten years ago, Issy, or is it eleven?"
  • "Ten. Coming up to eleven."
  • "I thought changing things like this would help you finally to put it behind you. We couldn't go on keeping that room shut up. How long is it since anyone went in there? All those ten years, I suppose."
  • "I don't think about it much anymore," she lied.
  • "Sometimes I think Heather's forgotten it."
  • "Perhaps I can forget it now," said Ismay and she went downstairs to find her mother, who was in the garden with Heather.
  • Forgetting isn't an act of will. She hadn't forgotten, but that conversation with Pamela, that tour of her old home made new, was a watershed for her. Though she dreamed of drowned Guy that night, gradually her mind-set changed and she felt the load she carried ease. She stopped asking herself what had happened on that hot August afternoon. Where had Heather been? What exactly had Heather done--if anything? Was it possible anyone else had been in the house? Probing, wondering, speculating had been with her for ten years and at last she asked herself why. Suppose she found out, what could she do with the truth she had discovered? She wasn't going to share with Heather, live with Heather, to protect her from anything, still less "save" her. It was just convenient. They were sisters and close. She loved Heather and Heather certainly loved her.
  • She and Heather downstairs, her mother and Pamela on the top floor. The first time Ismay saw her mother in the new living room, in the corner she had made for herself with her radio, her footstool, the handbag she carried everywhere, she watched her to see if her vague dazed glance wandered to the end of the room that was most radically changed. It never did. It really was as if Beatrix failed to understand this was the same room. Heather went up there with her when Pamela invited the two of them for drinks, and it was as Pamela said. She behaved as if she had forgotten, even going up to the new glass door and opening it to check if it was raining. She closed it and came back, pausing to look at a picture Pamela had newly hung on the wall where the towel rail used to be and Beatrix's bowl of colored soaps had stood. Ironically, the only thing to remind you it had once been a bathroom was that picture, a Bonnard print of a nude drying herself after a bath.
  • If they could forget or dismiss it or accept it, whichever it was, she must too. She had. She was almost proud of herself for doing what people said you had to do: move on. The next time she was up there with her mother, sitting with her while Pamela was out, she got up and walked across the polished floor, stepped over the two rugs, stood in front of the table where the shower cabinet used to be, and picked up a glass paperweight patterned with roses. Holding it up to the light, she felt her heart beating faster. The beat steadied, became rhythmic and slow, and, with deliberation, she turned to look at the place where Guy had died.
  • Beatrix had turned on her radio, had contorted her body as she always did, leaning to the left, so that she was almost resting her head on the shelf where the radio was, her ear pressed against it. If she noticed where Ismay was she gave no sign of it, managing a distracted smile when her daughter smiled at her.
  • Not long after that she found her job in public relations and Heather hers in catering. They got on well, they always had. Besides, long ago and almost unconsciously, Ismay had appointed herself, not Heather's guardian, never that, but her companion. Not exactly to watch over her, not in the commonplace phrase to "keep an eye on her," but just to be there and to see. Each time she came home, each time they met during those four years apart, she had watched and inquired and listened to what Heather had to say. She never thought much about the future, the inevitable separation which must come one day--must come or be avoided at a terrible cost to both of them.
  • Living together, they never discussed the changes to the house, still less what had happened on that August day when she was fifteen and Heather was two years younger. If they had, Ismay would have had to ask the question she had never asked. Each of them paid her share of the rent to Beatrix. It was what she lived on.
  • A year went by and half another. Ismay fell in love. To Pam, who listened, and to her mother, who never seemed to care or even hear, she described it as falling fathoms deep in love. There had never been a passion like her passion for Andrew Campbell-Sedge. Heather also listened but had nothing to tell her in return. Heather's love affairs, if she had any, must have been brief, superficial, and lukewarm. In Andrew's presence she hardly spoke and Ismay knew why. She was silent with the people she disliked, but there was more to it than that.
  • Andrew looked like Guy. He belonged to the same type. He might have been Guy's younger brother. Was that why she loved him and Heather didn't love him? The night she understood that, Ismay had the dream again but it was Andrew's face she saw under the clear, pale-green water.
  • Chapter 2.
  • Marion was there when Edmund came home from work. That was the second time this week. His mother said, "Marion kindly did my shopping for me, so I asked her to stay and eat with us. I knew you'd be pleased."
  • Did she? Why did she? As far as he could remember he had never expressed an opinion of Marion, apart from saying some months past that it was a mystery to him why women dyed their hair that unnatural shade of dark crimson. She smiled at him and sat at the table, starting to chat in her lively way about all the old people she visited and loved to help--"We'll all be old one day, won't we?"--the National Health Service and her late mother's deferred hip operation, sedatives and analgesics and alternative medicine. She thought it was his "field," she aimed to please him. Later on he would have to walk her to the station. It was only at the bottom of the hill, but he couldn't let her go alone through the dark streets. She would chat all the way about how marvelous his mother was in spite of her health problems.
  • His mother had produced avocado with shrimp, followed by spaghetti carbonara. "Absolutely delicious, Irene," said Marion, no mean cook herself in her own estimation. She had brought a Bakewell tart with her as a gift. "If I shut my eyes I might be in Bologna."
  • I wish you were, thought Edmund. So it was "Irene" now. Last time she was here they had still been on "Mrs. Litton" terms. Marion's hair was redder and darker than it had been at the beginning of the week and her little marmoset face more brightly painted. He had never known a woman to be such a fidget. She couldn't sit still for five minutes but was up and down, bouncing about on her little stick legs and her kitten heels.
  • "You mustn't think you have to come with me," she said to him when she had served and cleared away the coffee. Another first time.
  • "It's no trouble," said his mother as if she were doing it herself. "Suppose something happened. He'd never forgive himself."
  • She smiled. She made a conspiratorial face at Marion, a sort of can't-you-see-he's-longing-to-go-with-you face. And then he knew. Marion was intended for him. His mother's chosen present for him. Not from the first probably, not from when they first knew each other a year or two years back, but for perhaps six months. Like a fool he hadn't seen it coming. He saw it now. She was older than he but maybe by no more than five or six years. She was to be his girlfriend, then his fiancee, in a year or two his wife, a wife who would happily share a house with his mother.
  • Desperate situations call for desperate measures. He walked Marion down the hill, listening with only half an ear to her prattle about his mother's arthritis and her courage (as if Irene were ninety instead of sixty-two), then the latest doings of old Mr. Hussein and old Mrs. Reinhardt. All the while he was thinking what steps to take. Outside the station, as she thanked him for his escort, she lifted her face quite close to his. Did she expect a kiss? He stepped back, said good night, and left her.
  • "Such a sweet woman," said his mother. "Girl, I should say." She paused to let this sink in. "We've got a new neighbor. I saw him move in today. A Mr. Fenix. Marion says he paid over a million for that house and she should know."
  • Next day, at the hospice, he reviewed his fellow nurses. The women were all married or living with a boyfriend. At his mid-morning break he went downstairs to the catering department, for a slice of gingerbread or a piece of strudel to go with his coffee. The Jean Langholm Hospice was known for the high standard of its food. As Michelle, one of the cooks, said, "Let's face it, folks come here to die. The least you can do is make their last meals cordon bleu."
  • She was helping Diane prepare vegetables, cleaning broccoli and scrubbing carrots. Heather, the chef, was making wafer-thin pancakes for lunch. Edmund went up to Heather, as he sometimes did, to ask her how she was and tell her about Mr. Warriner, a cancer patient on his ward in whom she had shown an interest. She simply smiled at the first inquiry and nodded at the news of Mr. Warriner. She was a quiet girl and plain-faced, calm and reposeful, sturdy and full-bodied without being fat. She always looked as if she had just had a bath and washed her hair. Her eyes were the blue of willow-pattern china, and her beautiful thick fair hair was cut in a short bob with bangs. She asked him if he had come for his cake and could she offer him an almond slice or a piece of Battenberg. Edmund chose the Battenberg cake, then he said, "Would you like to come out for a drink one evening?"
  • She was surprised to be asked. He could see that. "All right," she said.
  • "Well, this evening?"
  • She didn't have to think. She stared at him. "If you like."
  • "What time do you finish here?"
  • "Six."
  • "I'll come down for you at six."
  • It would mean hanging about upstairs for an hour, but never mind. He could have a chat with Mr. Warriner about his son and his dog and his once-splendid stamp collection. However awful the evening might be, however many long silences and glum stares, it wouldn't be Marion and her blather. It wouldn't be a step into the trap his mother and Marion were setting for him.
  • "What do you think," said Ismay. "Heather has a boyfriend."
  • Andrew, pouring wine, was so astonished that he let the glass overflow. Ismay ran and fetched a towel from the bathroom. He laughed and kissed her. "Who is this hero?"
  • "Oh, Andrew, that's not kind. She is my sister. I love her if you don't."
  • From the Hardcover edition.
Review by New York Times Review

IT'S no wonder that the postwar noir thriller is making a comeback. With its fugitive heroes, undefined agents of menace and pervasive air of paranoia, the bleak formula is an ideal one for our modern-day age of anxiety. The one drawback to the classic model - as comes through in Lee Vance's overplotted but relentlessly readable debut novel, RESTITUTION (Knopf, $23.95) - is having to pick (and discard) new signifiers of corruption from among the many contemporary offerings. Vance, a retired general partner of Goldman Sachs, tries to cram all the sins of Western civilization into his fast and furiously paced morality story about a narcissistic investment banker who learns humility when he is set up as the chief suspect in his wife's murder. That leads to a vengeance plot involving Wall Street chicanery, Russian greed, Nazi war crimes, international terrorism, biological warfare and the ever-popular strong-arm tactics of Homeland Security. But while the heavily freighted plot continually threatens to go off the rails, the classy writing and the nonstop action keep it on track. Narrating this cautionary tale is its flawed protagonist, Peter Tyler, a Wall Street shark observed at such close range you feel as if you were in the tank with him. Tyler becomes humanized during the Faustian journey he undertakes after losing his wife, his job and his respectability to the sinister forces that have framed him - while inadvertently tipping him off to a huge stock swindle with grave consequences. On the run from American law enforcement and Russian gangsters as he frantically pursues a friend who might have set the entire chain of events in motion, Tyler broods on the questionable values that once defined his life and eventually comes to accept his current punishment as atonement for his past sins. "How did my life ever reach this point?" he asks himself, and by finding the courage to answer that existential question as honestly as he can, this humbled prima donna wins over even those hard-nosed readers who cheered when he lost four straight games of office Nerf ball. Vance plays his own excruciatingly complex game with great finesse, balancing the interior drama of Tyler's self-enlightenment with the spiraling complications of the financial crimes and the ripsnorting action of the chase scenes. And while Tyler's transformation into a human being gets a bit sticky as he becomes sensitized to the world's suffering orphans and AIDS patients, Vance strongly suggests that his chastened hero has a lot to teach his cocky fellow Americans on Wall Street. You call it love. Ruth Rendell calls it sick, and she has written a book that makes her point with exquisite cruelty. In THE WATER'S LOVELY (Crown, $25.95), she examines love from every imaginable angle, rendering much of it in a decidedly unhealthy light. Taking her theme from the opening image of a pedophile drowned in his bathtub, the queen of the psychological suspense novel slyly insinuates that many people who think they're feeling the purest of emotions for their spouses, children, siblings and lovers are more likely sloshing around in jealousy, lust and murderous rage. All the characters come in pairs in this subtly horrifying story, beginning with Ismay and Heather Sealand, sisters who live with their gaga mother (and her care-giving sister) while planning marriages to their respective boyfriends. Ismay and Heather share a festering secret that poisons more than one relationship in this London household before seeping out and infecting all the neighbors - including the homicidally inclined Marion and her abominable brother, Fowler, who have made a career of preying on the love-starved. Rendell develops her many characters with such cunning that an element of comic suspense is created around the question of which of them will crack up first. Don't bet on Marion. In this crowd, she's far too stable. For female mystery readers of a certain age, Sharon McCone was the genre's grown-up Nancy Drew, a smart, if overly stern, private investigator who built her own agency in San Francisco and mainly represented poor people in desperate circumstances. Marcia Muller, who introduced McCone in 1977, has taken her sleuth a good distance from her social-service roots, and the extent of that growth can be measured in THE EVERRUNNING MAN (Warner, $24.99), the 25th book in the series. This may come as a revelation for anyone who hasn't been keeping up, but McCone flies her own plane and chases terrorists these days, and in her latest adventure she has the gratification of saving her husband's security firm from being destroyed by an elusive bomber who seems to object to the shady history and "unorthodox methods" of its military-trained personnel. The story is violent and thick with international intrigue, but McCone fights to keep her cool and save her marriage - a different kind of role model for different times. Of course, for every intelligent and resourceful woman who surfaces in crime fiction, there is sure to be some crazed serial killer out there determined to maim, mutilate and otherwise take her down. David Ellis comes up with a particularly nasty specimen in EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (Putnam, $24.95), challenging his lawyer-sleuth, Paul Riley, to find the connection between two series of murders committed more than 15 years apart. Ellis, a former partner in a Chicago law firm, isn't squeamish about laying out the gory details in the initial massacre of six young women in 1989 or the copycat atrocities to follow. But the carnage is only the grabber for what is actually a very tricky legal mystery, and Riley, who prosecuted "the most famous serial killer our city has ever seen" when he was a raw youth, doesn't really hit his stride until he walks down those mean corridors that lead to the courtroom. Lee Vance In a first novel by a former partner of Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street shark is set up as the chief suspect in his wife's murder.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

The prolific (and never, ever boring) Rendell delivers another gripping tale of psychological suspense, this one centering on murder within a family. It begins with a house, the scene of a bathtub murder, but it ends with the tsunami in Indonesia. In between, Rendell's characters are forced to reflect on the hopelessness of the past ever being washed away. The central event takes place long before the book opens: a 13-year-old girl drowns her stepfather in the bathtub. That girl, Heather, is grown up, as is her sister, Ismay. The scene of the crime has been boarded up as a room, and the family lives without acknowledging that the crime has been boarded up as well. What are the effects of this silent domestic pact? Rendell explores this question to creepy-crawly effect, as Heather prepares to marry. Ismay, conflicted over whether she should tell the fiance about her sister's past, struggles with the question of whether Heather is likely to kill again. Combining potent imagery and exquisite plotting, Rendell twists the knife of suspense in a wonderfully excruciating way. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Three-time Edgar Award-winner Rendell (13 Steps Down) often creates fragile characters, trembling on the edge of losing a lover, child, job, solvency or sanity. Slashing through their world is a "wild card," an obsessive or a sociopath too focused on personal gain to be concerned with damage to others. The vulnerable people at the heart of this taut and enticing stand-alone are the Sealand family, particularly Heather, who's assumed to have drowned her unsavory stepfather, Guy, in the bath while he was weak with illness. A veritable pack of wild cards-including Marion Melville, who cozies up to the lonely and aged in hopes of inheriting their estates after she's poisoned them, and Marion's Dumpster-diving brother, Fowler-keeps everyone off guard. Rendell enlivens the tale with subplots involving various romances-ardent and desperate-and a killer who lurks in London's parks, as well as with pithy comments about class, technology, generational conflict, food and aesthetics. The plot twists in this electrifying read reach all the way to the last page. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

(See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/07) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The legacy of a violent death 12 years ago has even creepier resonances for a misfit London family. Guy Rolland's drowning in his bathtub left his womenfolk shattered. His wife Beatrix descended into madness. Her sister Pamela lost her fianc, Guy's friend Michael Fenster. His stepdaughter Ismay Sealand, a 15-year-old who'd encouraged his sexual advances, sank into guilt. And heaven only knows the effect on Ismay's younger sister Heather, who everyone assumed without asking had killed Guy. Now love has found both Ismay, attached to rising barrister Andrew Campbell-Sedge, and Heather, courted by hospice nurse Edmund Litton. The results of these amours are even more devastating than the original trauma. Ismay's unwisely taped reminiscences of her stepfather's death entangle the sisters with a crew ranging from a retired police inspector to an ingratiatingly murderous companion to the West End Werewolf. The look back at long-buried secrets recalls Rendell's Barbara Vine novels (The Minotaur, 2006, etc.), but here the retrospect is balanced by a deliciously inexorable sense of forward momentum. With so many malign schemers on call and so many frail, foolish victims for them to prey on, the sense of impending calamity is palpable. The only question is how and whom it will strike. Despite some unlikely coincidences and a rushed and muted ending, one of the most deeply pleasurable thrillers from the genre's leading practitioner. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter One Weeks went by when Ismay never thought of it at all. Then something would bring it back or it would return in a dream. The dream began in the same way. She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle of it was a glassy lake. The white thing in the water floated toward her, its face submerged, and her mother said, absurdly, "Don't look!" Because the dead thing was a man and was naked and she was a girl of fifteen. But she had looked and in the dreams she looked again, but at Guy's drowned face. She had looked at the dead face and though she would forget from time to time what she had seen, it always came back, the fear still there in the dead eyes, the nostrils dilated to inhale water, not air. Heather showed no fear, no emotion of any kind. She stood with her arms hanging by her sides. Her dress was wet, clinging to her breasts. No one spoke then, neither in the reality nor in the dreams, neither of them said a word until their mother fell on her knees and began crying and laughing and babbling nonsense. When she came home the house was a different place. She had known, of course, that it would be two self-contained flats, the upper one for her mother and Pamela, the lower one for her and Heather, two pairs of sisters, two generations represented. In her last term at university, four hundred miles away in Scotland, what she hadn't understood was that part of the house would disappear. It was Pamela's idea, though Pamela didn't know why. She knew no more of what had happened than the rest of the world knew. In innocence and well-meaning, she had planned and carried out these drastic changes. She showed Ismay the ground-floor flat and then she took her upstairs. "I'm not sure how much Beatrix understands," she said, opening the door to what had been the principal bedroom, the room they had walked through to find the drowned man. "I can't tell how much she remembers. God knows if she even realizes it's the same room." I can hardly realize, thought Ismay. The shock of it silenced her. She looked around her almost fearfully. It was one room now. The door to the bathroom had been--where? The French windows to the balcony were gone, replaced by a single glass door. The whole place looked larger, nearer to the dream room, yet less spacious. "It's better this way, isn't it, Issy?" "Oh, yes, yes. It's just that it was a shock." Perhaps it would have been better to sell the house and move. But how else would she and Heather afford a flat to share? "Has Heather seen it?" "She loves all the changes. I don't know when I've seen her so enthusiastic about anything." Pamela showed her the two bedrooms that had once been hers and Heather's, the new kitchen, the new bathroom. At the top of the stairs she paused, holding on to the newel post and turning her eyes on Ismay almost pleadingly. "It's ten years ago, Issy, or is it eleven?" "Ten. Coming up to eleven." "I thought changing things like this would help you finally to put it behind you. We couldn't go on keeping that room shut up. How long is it since anyone went in there? All those ten years, I suppose." "I don't think about it much anymore," she lied. "Sometimes I think Heather's forgotten it." "Perhaps I can forget it now," said Ismay and she went downstairs to find her mother, who was in the garden with Heather. Forgetting isn't an act of will. She hadn't forgotten, but that conversation with Pamela, that tour of her old home made new, was a watershed for her. Though she dreamed of drowned Guy that night, gradually her mind-set changed and she felt the load she carried ease. She stopped asking herself what had happened on that hot August afternoon. Where had Heather been? What exactly had Heather done--if anything? Was it possible anyone else had been in the house? Probing, wondering, speculating had been with her for ten years and at last she asked herself why. Suppose she found out, what could she do with the truth she had discovered? She wasn't going to share with Heather, live with Heather, to protect her from anything, still less "save" her. It was just convenient. They were sisters and close. She loved Heather and Heather certainly loved her. She and Heather downstairs, her mother and Pamela on the top floor. The first time Ismay saw her mother in the new living room, in the corner she had made for herself with her radio, her footstool, the handbag she carried everywhere, she watched her to see if her vague dazed glance wandered to the end of the room that was most radically changed. It never did. It really was as if Beatrix failed to understand this was the same room. Heather went up there with her when Pamela invited the two of them for drinks, and it was as Pamela said. She behaved as if she had forgotten, even going up to the new glass door and opening it to check if it was raining. She closed it and came back, pausing to look at a picture Pamela had newly hung on the wall where the towel rail used to be and Beatrix's bowl of colored soaps had stood. Ironically, the only thing to remind you it had once been a bathroom was that picture, a Bonnard print of a nude drying herself after a bath. If they could forget or dismiss it or accept it, whichever it was, she must too. She had. She was almost proud of herself for doing what people said you had to do: move on. The next time she was up there with her mother, sitting with her while Pamela was out, she got up and walked across the polished floor, stepped over the two rugs, stood in front of the table where the shower cabinet used to be, and picked up a glass paperweight patterned with roses. Holding it up to the light, she felt her heart beating faster. The beat steadied, became rhythmic and slow, and, with deliberation, she turned to look at the place where Guy had died. Beatrix had turned on her radio, had contorted her body as she always did, leaning to the left, so that she was almost resting her head on the shelf where the radio was, her ear pressed against it. If she noticed where Ismay was she gave no sign of it, managing a distracted smile when her daughter smiled at her. Not long after that she found her job in public relations and Heather hers in catering. They got on well, they always had. Besides, long ago and almost unconsciously, Ismay had appointed herself, not Heather's guardian, never that, but her companion. Not exactly to watch over her, not in the commonplace phrase to "keep an eye on her," but just to be there and to see. Each time she came home, each time they met during those four years apart, she had watched and inquired and listened to what Heather had to say. She never thought much about the future, the inevitable separation which must come one day--must come or be avoided at a terrible cost to both of them. Living together, they never discussed the changes to the house, still less what had happened on that August day when she was fifteen and Heather was two years younger. If they had, Ismay would have had to ask the question she had never asked. Each of them paid her share of the rent to Beatrix. It was what she lived on. A year went by and half another. Ismay fell in love. To Pam, who listened, and to her mother, who never seemed to care or even hear, she described it as falling fathoms deep in love. There had never been a passion like her passion for Andrew Campbell-Sedge. Heather also listened but had nothing to tell her in return. Heather's love affairs, if she had any, must have been brief, superficial, and lukewarm. In Andrew's presence she hardly spoke and Ismay knew why. She was silent with the people she disliked, but there was more to it than that. Andrew looked like Guy. He belonged to the same type. He might have been Guy's younger brother. Was that why she loved him and Heather didn't love him? The night she understood that, Ismay had the dream again but it was Andrew's face she saw under the clear, pale-green water. Chapter Two Marion was there when Edmund came home from work. That was the second time this week. His mother said, "Marion kindly did my shopping for me, so I asked her to stay and eat with us. I knew you'd be pleased." Did she? Why did she? As far as he could remember he had never expressed an opinion of Marion, apart from saying some months past that it was a mystery to him why women dyed their hair that unnatural shade of dark crimson. She smiled at him and sat at the table, starting to chat in her lively way about all the old people she visited and loved to help--"We'll all be old one day, won't we?"--the National Health Service and her late mother's deferred hip operation, sedatives and analgesics and alternative medicine. She thought it was his "field," she aimed to please him. Later on he would have to walk her to the station. It was only at the bottom of the hill, but he couldn't let her go alone through the dark streets. She would chat all the way about how marvelous his mother was in spite of her health problems. His mother had produced avocado with shrimp, followed by spaghetti carbonara. "Absolutely delicious, Irene," said Marion, no mean cook herself in her own estimation. She had brought a Bakewell tart with her as a gift. "If I shut my eyes I might be in Bologna." I wish you were, thought Edmund. So it was "Irene" now. Last time she was here they had still been on "Mrs. Litton" terms. Marion's hair was redder and darker than it had been at the beginning of the week and her little marmoset face more brightly painted. He had never known a woman to be such a fidget. She couldn't sit still for five minutes but was up and down, bouncing about on her little stick legs and her kitten heels. "You mustn't think you have to come with me," she said to him when she had served and cleared away the coffee. Another first time. "It's no trouble," said his mother as if she were doing it herself. "Suppose something happened. He'd never forgive himself." She smiled. She made a conspiratorial face at Marion, a sort of can't-you-see-he's-longing-to-go-with-you face. And then he knew. Marion was intended for him. His mother's chosen present for him. Not from the first probably, not from when they first knew each other a year or two years back, but for perhaps six months. Like a fool he hadn't seen it coming. He saw it now. She was older than he but maybe by no more than five or six years. She was to be his girlfriend, then his fiancee, in a year or two his wife, a wife who would happily share a house with his mother. Desperate situations call for desperate measures. He walked Marion down the hill, listening with only half an ear to her prattle about his mother's arthritis and her courage (as if Irene were ninety instead of sixty-two), then the latest doings of old Mr. Hussein and old Mrs. Reinhardt. All the while he was thinking what steps to take. Outside the station, as she thanked him for his escort, she lifted her face quite close to his. Did she expect a kiss? He stepped back, said good night, and left her. "Such a sweet woman," said his mother. "Girl, I should say." She paused to let this sink in. "We've got a new neighbor. I saw him move in today. A Mr. Fenix. Marion says he paid over a million for that house and she should know." Next day, at the hospice, he reviewed his fellow nurses. The women were all married or living with a boyfriend. At his mid-morning break he went downstairs to the catering department, for a slice of gingerbread or a piece of strudel to go with his coffee. The Jean Langholm Hospice was known for the high standard of its food. As Michelle, one of the cooks, said, "Let's face it, folks come here to die. The least you can do is make their last meals cordon bleu." She was helping Diane prepare vegetables, cleaning broccoli and scrubbing carrots. Heather, the chef, was making wafer-thin pancakes for lunch. Edmund went up to Heather, as he sometimes did, to ask her how she was and tell her about Mr. Warriner, a cancer patient on his ward in whom she had shown an interest. She simply smiled at the first inquiry and nodded at the news of Mr. Warriner. She was a quiet girl and plain-faced, calm and reposeful, sturdy and full-bodied without being fat. She always looked as if she had just had a bath and washed her hair. Her eyes were the blue of willow-pattern china, and her beautiful thick fair hair was cut in a short bob with bangs. She asked him if he had come for his cake and could she offer him an almond slice or a piece of Battenberg. Edmund chose the Battenberg cake, then he said, "Would you like to come out for a drink one evening?" She was surprised to be asked. He could see that. "All right," she said. "Well, this evening?" She didn't have to think. She stared at him. "If you like." "What time do you finish here?" "Six." "I'll come down for you at six." It would mean hanging about upstairs for an hour, but never mind. He could have a chat with Mr. Warriner about his son and his dog and his once-splendid stamp collection. However awful the evening might be, however many long silences and glum stares, it wouldn't be Marion and her blather. It wouldn't be a step into the trap his mother and Marion were setting for him. "What do you think," said Ismay. "Heather has a boyfriend." Andrew, pouring wine, was so astonished that he let the glass overflow. Ismay ran and fetched a towel from the bathroom. He laughed and kissed her. "Who is this hero?" "Oh, Andrew, that's not kind. She is my sister. I love her if you don't." Excerpted from The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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