Read Online Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online Page B

slept in Jordan’s room or downstairs on the couch. The truth was, however, and there was never any question about it, that he shared Zillah’s bed. Sex with Jerry was really the only thing about him she still liked as much as she ever had and there had been plenty of it that last weekend he’d spent at Willow Cottage. For a moment, running the children’s bath, she wondered about that remark of Jims’s. Something about he didn’t mind what she did about sex but he drew the line at “that ex-husband of yours.” She’d been too struck with surprise at his proposal to think much about it at the time, but did that mean he wasn’t among those who believed Jerry had been visiting just as the children’s father? Probably. It didn’t matter. Jims, as she very well knew, was no fool.
    It showed her something else as well. That Jims took it for granted she and Jerry were divorced. Did her parents? They no longer lived on Jims’s father’s estate but had retired to a bungalow in Bournemouth. Relations between her and them were strained and had been since she moved in with Jerry, got pregnant, and dropped out of the art foundation course she was doing at a north London polytechnic. Strained but, since the original rift was mended, not broken off. It was her parents who’d persuaded Sir Ronald to let her have this house. Still, when she spoke to her mother on the phone, she had the impression they considered her a divorced woman who had only got what she asked for.
    The children had to share a bath. It cost too much to keep the immersion heater on for long. Eugenie stared searchingly at her brother until he said, “Stop looking at me. Your eyes are making holes in my tummy.”
    “Mummy,” said Eugenie, “did you know his willy is called a penis? Some people call it that. Did you know?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “Titus told me when Jordan got his out to do a wee. Are they all called a penis or is it just his?”
    “All,” said Zillah.
    “You should have told me. Annie said it’s wrong to keep children in the dark. I thought she meant keep them in a dark bedroom but she said, No, she didn’t mean that, she meant it’s wrong to keep them in the Darkness of Ignorance.”
    “It’s a willy,” said Jordan.
    “No, it isn’t.”
    “It is.”
    “It isn’t.”
    “It is, it is, it’s mine and it’s called a willy.” He began to cry and beat the water with his hands so that splashes went all over the room and Zillah. She dabbed about her with a towel. Every towel had to be washed by hand and dried on the line, as she didn’t need to remind herself.
    “Do you have to provoke him, Eugenie? If he wants to call it a willy, why not let him?”
    “Annie says it’s wrong to teach children baby words for Parts of the Anatomy.”
    Zillah got them to bed. When she had finished reading Harry Potter to them—though Eugenie could read perfectly well herself and had been able to for two years—she thought as she kissed them goodnight that they might not see their father again. It seemed, suddenly, intolerably sad. If he intended never to see her again, he wouldn’t see them either. In Jordan’s rosy face on the pillow she could see Jerry’s nose, the curve of his upper lip, in Eugenie’s his dark blue eyes and strongly marked eyebrows. Neither of them was much like her. Last time Jerry had been at Willow Cottage, when he was sitting at breakfast that final morning, Jordan had taken their two hands, hers and Jerry’s, and laying his over hers on the table, said, “Don’t go, Daddy. Stay here with us.”
    Eugenie hadn’t said a word, just looked at her father with cool, penetrating reproach. Zillah had hated Jerry then, even though she hadn’t wanted him to stay, hated him for not being a proper dad to his children. They could have a new one in Jims and everything a good father should provide.
    Still, there was no getting away from the fact that she was married already. But Zillah knew it was hopeless to start