The Saint Zita Society by Ruth Rendell Page A

only ‘staff’ in Hexam Place to smoke were Henry (in his room with the window wide open and him hanging half out of it), Zinnia (in her own home and in the street) and Miss Grieves (as much and as often as she liked in her own flat with all the windows shut). Damian and Roland were anti-smoking fanatics. That was the way Thea put it, or sometimes ‘anti-smoking fascists’. If they had ever had anything to do with Miss Grieves they would have known about her smoking and done their best to stop it with threats and maybe promises but they didn’t know because they had never been inside herflat or smelt her. Miss Grieves reeked of stale cigarette smoke, providing a lesson to Thea. Before going into Damian and Roland’s part of the house she took the dress or suit she had been wearing to the dry-cleaner’s, had a hot bath and washed her hair.
    They had gone to work an hour before or Thea wouldn’t have dared sit here to smoke her cigarette. She watched Beacon sitting in the Audi, waiting for Preston Still. He was late this morning. Perhaps he wasn’t going to his office in Old Broad Street but off to another of those eternal conferences in Birmingham or Cardiff. Henry had departed with Lord Studley before she had started on her first cigarette. The only interesting thing to happen this morning was the departure of the Princess and June for Heathrow and somewhere in Italy. Their taxi was due at ten thirty, June had told her, and it duly arrived, five minutes early which was par for the course with that company. From where she sat Thea couldn’t see the front door of number 6 but she could just see the bottom steps, the driver go up them and June appear with him after a couple of minutes. The amount of baggage those two old women took with them! June was hauling some of it along behind her, bump, bump, bump down the steps with her, the driver balancing a huge suitcase on his right shoulder like a furniture remover. The Princess never carried anything except her handbag. She minced down the steps in the high heels and on two sticks. Thea thought they must be the only pair of heels she owned, red snakeskin with toes pointed enough to stab someone. June went back for the rest of the bags and they got into the taxi.
    Thea was watching it disappear northwards, sucking on the stub of her cigarette, when Damian appeared from nowhere, opened the gate and advanced to the foot of the steps.
    ‘When the cat is away,’ he said in his snooty accent,‘the mice will play. I thought I caught a whiff on you the other day.’
    ‘I can’t give up. I
have
tried.’
    ‘It’s not so much the smoking, though if you’ll forgive the cliché, it
is
a filthy habit. No, it’s sitting on the steps I mind. Like some slag on a council estate. Still, since you’re here perhaps you’ll go inside and find my briefcase for me. Unaccountably I forgot it.’
    Thea could have said it wasn’t unaccountable, he was always forgetting things, but she didn’t. She found the briefcase on the table just inside the front door and brought it to him.
    ‘Thank you. You do have your uses.’
    He walked off to pick up a taxi in Ebury Bridge Street. Thea lit a third cigarette, walked round the house into the back garden where the paths and the lawn were invisible under a thick wet layer of fallen leaves. Unidentifiable toadstools that looked like hunks of purple liver poked their heads through the brown mush. It had begun to rain again. Thea sheltered under the gingko tree, scraped the mud off her shoes on its trunk and thought she might get smoking or ‘the smoking question’ put down as an item on the agenda of the next Saint Zita meeting. Where were smokers to smoke, for instance? In the street? Surely not. Perhaps someone’s flat or studio room might be turned into a smoking room like you got at certain airports. That reminded her that she couldn’t put anything on the agenda as June had departed on her holidays.
    ‘N ever pass a weed,’ said Abram