Kissing the Gunner's Daughter by Ruth Rendell Page B
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Police, England, Police Procedural, Large Type Books, Inspector (Fictitious character), Sussex (England), Sussex, Wexford
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first volume of whose autobiography The Youngest Wren of Nine is published by St Giles Press at 16 pounds 00 pence He turned the page and there she was when young: a little girl in a velvet dress with lace collar, ten years later a grown-up girl with a swan neck, mysterious smile, shingled hair and one of those dresses with no waist and a belt round the hips.
The print swam before his eyes. Wexford gave a huge yawn. He was too tired to read the piece tonight and leaving the paper open on the table, he went back upstairs. The evening past seemed immensely long, a corridor of events with at the opening of the tunnel, distant but very much there, Sheila and that wretched man.
* * *
While the reader had recourse to a magazine, the non-reader went to a book for help.
Burden let himself into his house to the sound of his son yelling. By the time he was upstairs title noise had stopped and Mark was being comforted in his mother's arms. Burden could hear her telling him, in that rather didactic confident way of hers which was immediately reassuring, that diplodocus the two-ridged reptile toad not walked the earth for two million years
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and in any case had never been known to inhabit toy cupboards.
By the time she came into their bedroom Burden was in bed, sitting up with her birthday copy of The Youngest Wren of Nine resting against his knees.
She kissed him, went into a detailed description of Mark's dream, which for a little while distracted him from the biographical note he had been reading on the back flap of the book jacket. In that moment he decided to say nothing to her of what had happened. Not till the morning. She had deeply admired the dead woman, followed her travels and collected her works. Their pillow talk of the previous night had been about this book, Davina Flory's childhood and the early influences which helped to form the character of this distinguished anthropologist and 'geo-sociologist'.
"You can't have my book till I've finished it," she said sleepily, turning over and burying her head in the pillows. "Anyway, can't we have the light out?"
"Two minutes. Just to let me unwind. Good night, love."
Unlike many writers past a certain age, Davina Flory had had no reservations about her birth date appearing in print. She had been seventy-eight, born in Oxford, the youngest of the nine children of a professor of Greek. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, with later a Ph.D. from London, she had married in 1935 a fellow undergraduate at Oxford, Desmond Cathcart Flory. Together they had set about
62
the redemption of the gardens of his home, Tancred House, Kingsmarkham, and had begun the planting of the famous woods.
Burden read the rest, put the light out, lay looking into the dark, thinking of what he had read. Desmond Flory had been killed in France in 1944, eight months before his daughter Naomi was born. Two years later Davina Flory began her travels in Europe and the Middle East, re-marrying in 1951. He had forgotten the rest of it, the new husband's name, the titles of all the works.
None of this would matter. That Davina Flory had been who she was would turn out to be no more important than if she had been what Burden called 'an ordinary person'. It was possible that the men who had killed her had no idea of her identity. A good many of the kind of people Burden came across in his work were, in any case, unable to read. To the gunman or gunmen at Tancred House she had been only a woman who possessed jewellery and lived in an isolated place. She and her husband and daughter and granddaughter were vulnerable and unprotected and that was enough for them.
* * *
The first thing Wexford saw when he woke up was the phone. Usually the first thing he saw was the little black Marks and Spencer alarm clock, the arch-shaped clock that was either braying away or about to go off. He couldn't remember
63
the phone number of Stowerton Royal Infirmary. WPG Mountjoy would have phoned if anything had happened.
In
The print swam before his eyes. Wexford gave a huge yawn. He was too tired to read the piece tonight and leaving the paper open on the table, he went back upstairs. The evening past seemed immensely long, a corridor of events with at the opening of the tunnel, distant but very much there, Sheila and that wretched man.
* * *
While the reader had recourse to a magazine, the non-reader went to a book for help.
Burden let himself into his house to the sound of his son yelling. By the time he was upstairs title noise had stopped and Mark was being comforted in his mother's arms. Burden could hear her telling him, in that rather didactic confident way of hers which was immediately reassuring, that diplodocus the two-ridged reptile toad not walked the earth for two million years
61
and in any case had never been known to inhabit toy cupboards.
By the time she came into their bedroom Burden was in bed, sitting up with her birthday copy of The Youngest Wren of Nine resting against his knees.
She kissed him, went into a detailed description of Mark's dream, which for a little while distracted him from the biographical note he had been reading on the back flap of the book jacket. In that moment he decided to say nothing to her of what had happened. Not till the morning. She had deeply admired the dead woman, followed her travels and collected her works. Their pillow talk of the previous night had been about this book, Davina Flory's childhood and the early influences which helped to form the character of this distinguished anthropologist and 'geo-sociologist'.
"You can't have my book till I've finished it," she said sleepily, turning over and burying her head in the pillows. "Anyway, can't we have the light out?"
"Two minutes. Just to let me unwind. Good night, love."
Unlike many writers past a certain age, Davina Flory had had no reservations about her birth date appearing in print. She had been seventy-eight, born in Oxford, the youngest of the nine children of a professor of Greek. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, with later a Ph.D. from London, she had married in 1935 a fellow undergraduate at Oxford, Desmond Cathcart Flory. Together they had set about
62
the redemption of the gardens of his home, Tancred House, Kingsmarkham, and had begun the planting of the famous woods.
Burden read the rest, put the light out, lay looking into the dark, thinking of what he had read. Desmond Flory had been killed in France in 1944, eight months before his daughter Naomi was born. Two years later Davina Flory began her travels in Europe and the Middle East, re-marrying in 1951. He had forgotten the rest of it, the new husband's name, the titles of all the works.
None of this would matter. That Davina Flory had been who she was would turn out to be no more important than if she had been what Burden called 'an ordinary person'. It was possible that the men who had killed her had no idea of her identity. A good many of the kind of people Burden came across in his work were, in any case, unable to read. To the gunman or gunmen at Tancred House she had been only a woman who possessed jewellery and lived in an isolated place. She and her husband and daughter and granddaughter were vulnerable and unprotected and that was enough for them.
* * *
The first thing Wexford saw when he woke up was the phone. Usually the first thing he saw was the little black Marks and Spencer alarm clock, the arch-shaped clock that was either braying away or about to go off. He couldn't remember
63
the phone number of Stowerton Royal Infirmary. WPG Mountjoy would have phoned if anything had happened.
In
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