Read Online Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online Page B

hundred times without the lipstick coming off. They held hands walking down Winterside Down, past Maureen’s house with its curtains like fancy white lace aprons and the polished car outside. Iris and Jerry were already in the Old Bulldog, they had probably been there since it opened. Jerry was a smallish, fattish, pink-faced man, a heavy drinker but showing few signs of this. He was never drunk. His eyes looked as if they had been stewed in brine, they had a soggy yet shrivelled look, and his clothes smelled as if they had been rinsed out in gin. His favourite pastime next to going to the Old Bulldog was watching television with a tumbler of gin and water beside him.
    People said Iris had once been even prettier than Carol. Barry found that hard to believe. She was fifty, thin as a skeleton and with long bony legs. She wore her dyed yellow hair shoulder-length to make herself look younger, and she always had very high-heeled sandals on, summer and winter, to show off her high insteps and her thin ankles. Barry guessed she had had a hell of a life with the brutish Knapwell. Yet she was always cheerful, carefree, making the best of a bad job. She smoked forty or fifty cigarettes a day and had a cough which turned her face purple with the strain. Iris couldn’t get down to anything without a cigarette.
    â€˜Let me just get a fag on,’ she would say, or ‘I’ll have to have a cig first.’
    Since Knapwell went, there had been (according to Carol) a man called Bill and one called Nobby, but they hadn’t lasted long and Jerry had been Iris’s companion for years now. He was a mysterious man who seldom spoke, showed no emotion, seemed to have no family of his own,and who preserved towards everything but gin and the television a sublime indifference. Even his real name was a mystery, for he had begun to call himself Knapwell within a year of moving in with Iris. He worked for Thames Water which made Barry laugh, considering Jerry’s tastes. Iris had a job in a small garment factory housed in what used to be the old Prado cinema.
    Barry had a Foster’s and Carol a gin and tonic. She and Iris talked about childminding arrangements for the coming week. Maybe Maureen could be roped in for one day.
    â€˜You have to be joking,’ said Iris. ‘Maureen’s doing up her lounge. She’s been all day stripping.’
    â€˜I’ll have to take on another evening at Kostas’s, that’s all,’ said Carol. ‘It’s costing me a fortune.’
    Jerry got up. ‘You going to have the other half?’ he said to Barry as if his lager hadn’t been the entire contents of a can but out of a bottle or jug. Knowing what they would want, he didn’t waste words on the women.
    â€˜Let me get a fag on,’ said Iris. She smoked in thoughtful silence. Carol talked about taking on extra work. That troubled Barry who had been feeling happy and contented. He longed to earn more, make a lot of money, so that instead of working longer hours Carol could give up altogether and stay at home with the kids. ‘There’s always the council,’ Iris said suddenly. ‘You could try them, see what they come up with.’
    Barry didn’t know what she meant for a minute but he could see Carol did. She took one of her mother’s cigarettes, lit it from Iris’s.
    â€˜It may come to that. It just may.’
    â€˜I’d like to do more myself,’ said Iris. ‘You know I’d bend over backwards to give you a helping hand. But if it means giving in my notice, I have to draw the line. I couldn’t let Mr Karim down. I’ve been there seven years or it will be come New Year and he, like, relies on me, doesn’t he, Jerry?’ She didn’t even wait for the confirmation. She knew it wouldn’t come. ‘You’ll have to play it by ear, I reckon,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Just go on from day to day.’
    â€˜I