Read Online The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online

for the rest of her life.
    â€˜My son wants to buy a flat,’ said Irene. ‘I don’t know why. I tell him he already has a house. I regard this place as as much his as mine.’
    This was said in the presence of both Edmund and Marion, Edmund and his mother having already thrashed the matter out to exhaustion point earlier in the day. Excited as another woman might be by sexual desire or some great treat in prospect, Marion was stimulated by family rows, any sort of row and anyone’s family. Her face had taken on youthful colour, her cheeks red and her eyes gleaming. Irene, by contrast, looked pale, even wan. Stately in a long black tunic over a long black skirt, her hair piled up on top of her head and kept in place precariously by silver pins, she sat like patience on a monument, wondering at the vagaries of men. In her lap lay the coral beads she had been stringing on to a length of thread.
    â€˜You’d think he had everything he wanted here,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t have to lift a finger. Even though I say it who shouldn’t, the food here is as good as anything cooked by that Jamie Oliver.’ She turned to Marion. ‘You know who I mean.’
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ said Marion. ‘Frankly, I think your cooking is better.’
    â€˜Cleaning the house from top to bottom, too. Bed making, the windows shining like – like diamonds, washing, ironing, all done for him.’
    For a moment Edmund thought his mother was going to compare herself with some television star who demonstrated the arts of the laundry on screen, but instead she said, ‘What do you think, Marion, about this idea of leaving, of setting up home elsewhere? Have you ever heard anything so absurd?’
    â€˜I’d rather not discuss this in front of Marion,’ said Edmund.
    â€˜Why on earth not?’
    â€˜Believe me, Edmund,’ said Marion, ‘I have nothing but your interests at heart. Who knows? After all, I am practically an estate agent and I may be able to help.’
    â€˜Marion, you force me to say I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I shall move out of here the moment the purchase of my flat is completed and that’s all there is to it.’
    Having already said more in front of Marion than he intended, Edmund went upstairs where he phoned Heather, told her there had been a row but he intended to move just the same. He sat in his bedroom, thinking about how Heather had said of course she’d move in with him once he had possession of the flat in Crouch End, how easy it had been to find the flat and how smoothly things appeared to be going, and that he must assess the size of Heather’s ring finger – and propose.
    Downstairs, tactful Marion thought a change of subject would be the most acceptable course to take and had begun chatting about Avice Conroy. Three times since Christmas she had called on her in her house in Pinner and once she had done a stint of rabbit-sitting while Avice had gone away for the night to a friend’s funeral in Harrogate. Avice herself was very frail, Marion thought, though of course marvellous for an eighty-year-old. As for those rabbits – well, it took all sorts to make a world, didn’t it?
    â€˜She’s eighty-four,’ said Irene in a doleful voice, and then, ‘I suspect he’s going to get engaged to that girl. I don’t see why they can’t live here. Not that I would allow it until they were married.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t think much of a girl who lived with a man without being married under his mother’s roof.’ Realising that she had got into a mess with that sentence, Marion amended it to, ‘I mean, I wouldn’t think much of an unmarried girl living with an unmarried man in his mother’s house.’
    â€˜Wouldn’t you, Marion?’ said Irene wistfully. She sighed. ‘I wish things could have been otherwise.’
    This was