Read Online The Saint Zita Society by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online

third child. That was how Montserrat came to be an au pair and called Lucy by her first name. What she was supposed to do she had never been told. Zinnia did the housework, Rabia looked after the new baby and the girls when they needed looking after, Beacon drove the Audi. Lucy had no car but took taxis everywhere. Montserrat had the one-bedroom basement flat which would have been Beacon’s if he had chosen to live in it instead of with Dorothee, William and Solomon.
    If her duties had never been specified, she soon knew that she would be expected to perform those vaguely secretarial tasks that weren’t to Lucy’s taste. Sending for a plumber when one was required, informing credit card companies that a card was lost, asking for help from the provider when Lucy’s computer failed to work. Much the same as the ‘little jobs’ that Thea carried out for Damian and Roland for free. Montserrat found this tedious but she mostly did it. Her conscience had never troubled her when she found she was expected to admit, escort upstairs and eventually dismiss Lucy’s lover. While living with her mother in Barcelona when she wasn’t living with her father in Bath, she saw her mother’s lovers come and go and in some cases a secret was made of their visits. This was normal, she thought. She never thought it beneath her dignity or degrading to take the twenty-pound note Lucy tucked into her jeans pocket when she brought Rad along to the bedroom or the fifty-pound note he thrust into her hand when she saw him out of the basement door.
    Now, on a morning in October, she found herself asked, not by Lucy who cared nothing for such things, but by MrStill on his way to get into the Audi, if she would find someone to mend the loose banister at the top of the basement stairs.
    ‘Some sort of builder, d’you mean?’
    ‘Try the Yellow Pages,’ said Preston Still, sounding impatient. ‘I don’t know. Just do it.’
    Montserrat couldn’t find the Yellow Pages. For one thing, she didn’t know where to look, so she opened every drawer and cupboard she came to and was emerging from one of the spare rooms when she met Lucy coming out of her bedroom. Lucy was wearing a pale yellow suit the same colour as her hair with a skirt some eight inches above her knees, lacy tights and shoes with five-inch heels. Montserrat asked her if she knew where the Yellow Pages were.
    ‘No one uses phone directories any more,’ said Lucy. ‘This is the age of the cellphone or hadn’t you noticed?’
    ‘Mr Still wants someone to mend the banister.’
    ‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother. He’s probably forgotten all about it by now. He’s a chronic amnesiac.’
    Lucy tottered downstairs, waved once and slammed the front door behind her. Her bedroom was in its usual chaotic state before Zinnia got to work on it, the bed a sprawl of discarded clothes, the sheets scattered with ash and crumbs, the breakfast tray she had taken up two hours before cluttered with smeary plates and coffee dregs in which fag ends floated. Montserrat, no believer herself in the virtues of cleanliness, almost admired Lucy’s ability to turn a neatly laid tray of prettily packaged foodstuffs into a filthy tip like the contents of a waste bin ravaged by urban foxes. She looked in vain inside the clothes cupboards and the drawers for the Yellow Pages, abandoned the room to Zinnia and went on up to the nursery floor.
    Rabia was teaching Thomas to feed himself. He sat in his high chair with a spoon in each hand, digging away at a bowlof goo. The spoon in his right hand was used to transfer the goo to his mouth, more or less haphazardly, the other to fling its contents on to the floor or as far across the room as he could reach. Montserrat, who disliked children, had seldom seen a more disgusting sight.
    ‘He is so clever and good, aren’t you, my sweetheart?’ Rabia was kept busy, crawling about, wiping up messes on floor, wall and skirting board.
    Thomas laughed, goo leaking out of his