Thursday, October 07, 2010

From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell (Ballantine Books 1964)


"About your boyfriends, Mrs. Missal?" As soon as the words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.
"Oh, no," she said sharply. "You've got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat. We used to talk about . . . well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives." She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books, and hear with his mind's ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: "I wanted to act! They wouldn't let me, my father and mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing." She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the creases that had appeared between her eyebrows. "I met Pete," she said, "and we got married." Her nose wrinkled. "The story of my life."
"You can't have everything," Wexford said.
"No," she said, "I wasn't the only one . . . ."

1 comment:

mikeovswinton said...

Kaffovswinton recently finished Ms R's Tiger Lily's Orchids but didn't rate it. In fact she was a bit miffed, as she'd (and indeed I'd) loved Portobello and was hoping for more in that vein.
Me, I'm into - on your shout - Fleshmarket Close, using a flyer for Rankin's Edinburgh, a tour you can take, as its bookmark.