Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  When they parted at the end of an evening he kissed her gently on the lips. He smelled of Alliage or Je Reviens or Opium. During the afternoon they usually went into one of the big stores and sprayed themselves out of the tester bottles.

  Angie’s mother lived in the north of England. When she had to convalesce after an operation Angie went up there to look after her. She expected to be away two weeks and the second weekend of her absence Graham had to go to Brussels with the sales manager.

  ‘We could go away somewhere for the weekend,’ David said.

  ‘Graham’s sure to phone,’ Christine said.

  ‘One night then. Just for the Saturday night. You can tell him you’re going out with your new girl friend and you’re going to be late.’

  ‘All right.’

  It worried her that she had no nice clothes to wear. David had a small but exquisite wardrobe of suits and dresses, shoes and scarves and beautiful underclothes. He kept them in a cupboard in his office to which only he had a key and he secreted items home and back again in his briefcase. Christine hated the idea of going away for the night in her grey flannel skirt and white silk blouse and that velvet jacket while David wore his Zandra Rhodes dress. In a burst of recklessness she spent all of two weeks’ wages on a linen suit.

  They went in David’s car. He had made the arrangements and Christine had expected they would be going to a motel twenty miles outside London. She hadn’t thought it would matter much to David where they went. But he surprised her by his choice of an hotel that was a three-hundred-year-old house on the Suffolk coast.

  ‘If we’re going to do it,’ he said, ‘we may as well do it in style.’

  She felt very comfortable with him, very happy. She tried to imagine what it would have felt like going to spend a night in an hotel with a man, a lover. If the person sitting next to her were dressed, not in a black and white printed silk dress and scarlet jacket but in a man’s suit with shirt and tie. If the face it gave her so much pleasure to look at were not powdered and rouged and mascara’d but rough and already showing beard growth. She couldn’t imagine it. Or, rather, she could only think how in that case she would have jumped out of the car at the first red traffic lights.

  They had single rooms next door to each other. The rooms were very small but Christine could see that a double might have been awkward for David who must at some point – though she didn’t care to think of this – have to shave and strip down to being what he really was.

  He came in and sat on her bed while she unpacked her nightdress and spare pair of shoes.

  ‘This is fun, isn’t it?’

  She nodded, squinting into the mirror, working on her eyelids with a little brush. David always did his eyes beautifully. She turned round and smiled at him.

  ‘Let’s go down and have a drink.’

  The dining room, the bar, the lounge were all low-ceilinged timbered rooms with carved wood on the walls David said was called linenfold panelling. There were old maps and pictures of men hunting in gilt frames and copper bowls full of roses. Long windows were thrown open on to a terrace. The sun was still high in the sky and it was very warm. While Christine sat on the terrace in the sunshine David went off to get their drinks. When he came back to their table he had a man with him, a thickset paunchy man of about forty who was carrying a tray with four glasses on it.

  ‘This is Ted,’ David said.

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ Ted said. ‘I’ve asked my friend to join us. I hope you don’t mind.’

  She had to say she didn’t. David looked at her and from his look she could tell he had deliberately picked Ted up.

  ‘But why did you?’ she said to him afterwards. ‘Why did you want to? You told me you didn’t really like it when that man put his hand on you in the cinema.’

  ‘That was so physical. This is just a laugh. You don’t suppose I’d let them touch me, do you?’

  Ted and Peter had the next table to theirs at dinner. Christine was silent and standoffish but David flirted with them. Ted kept leaning across and whispering to him and David giggled and smiled. You could see he was enjoying himself tremendously. Christine knew they would ask her and David to go out with them after dinner and she began to be afraid. Suppose David got carried away by the excitement of it, the ‘fun’, and went off somewhere with Ted, leaving her and Peter alone together? Peter had a red face and a black moustache and beard and a wart with black hairs growing out of it on his left cheek. She and David were eating steak and the waiter had brought them sharp pointed steak knives. She hadn’t used hers. The steak was very tender. When no one was looking she slipped the steak knife into her bag.

  Ted and Peter were still drinking coffee and brandies when David got up quite abruptly and said, ‘Coming?’ to Christine.

  ‘I suppose you’ve arranged to meet them later?’ Christine said as soon as they were out of the dining room.

  David looked at her. His scarlet-painted lips parted into a wide smile. He laughed.

  ‘I turned them down.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘I could tell you hated the idea. Besides, we want to be alone, don’t we? I know I want to be alone with you.’

  She nearly shouted his name so that everyone could hear, the relief was so great. She controlled herself but she was trembling. ‘Of course I want to be alone with you,’ she said.

  She put her arm in his. It wasn’t uncommon, after all, for girls to walk along with linked arms. Men turned to look at David and one of them whistled. She knew it must be David the whistle was directed at because he looked so beautiful with his long golden hair and high-heeled red sandals. They walked along the sea front, along the little low promenade. It was too warm even at eight-thirty to wear a coat. There were a lot of people about but not crowds for the place was too select to attract crowds. They walked to the end of the pier. They had a drink in the Ship Inn and another in the Fishermen’s Arms. A man tried to pick David up in the Fishermen’s Arms but this time he was cold and distant.

  ‘I’d like to put my arm round you,’ he said as they were walking back, ‘but I suppose that wouldn’t do, though it is dark.’

  ‘Better not,’ said Christine. She said suddenly, ‘This has been the best evening of my life.’

  He looked at her. ‘You really mean that?’

  She nodded. ‘Absolutely the best.’

  They came into the hotel. ‘I’m going to get them to send us up a couple of drinks. To my room. Is that OK?’

  She sat on the bed. David went into the bathroom. To do his face, she thought, maybe to shave before he let the man with the drinks see him. There was a knock at the door and a waiter came in with a tray on which were two long glasses of something or other with fruit and leaves floating in it, two pink table napkins, two olives on sticks and two peppermint creams wrapped up in green paper.

  Christine tasted one of the drinks. She ate an olive. She opened her handbag and took out a mirror and a lipstick and painted her lips. David came out of the bathroom. He had taken off the golden wig and washed his face. He hadn’t shaved, there was a pale stubble showing on his chin and cheeks. His legs and feet were bare and he was wearing a very masculine robe made of navy blue towelling. She tried to hide her disappointment.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ she said brightly.

  He shrugged. ‘There are limits.’

  He raised his glass and she raised her glass and he said: ‘To us!’

  The beginnings of a feeling of panic came over her. Suddenly he was so evidently a man. She edged a little way along the mattress.

  ‘I wish we had the whole weekend.’

  She nodded nervously. She was aware her body had started a faint trembling. He had noticed it too. Sometimes before he had noticed how emotion made her tremble.

  ‘Chris,’ he said.

  She sat passive and afraid.

  ‘I’m not really like a woman, Chris. I just play at that sometimes for fun. You know that, don’t you?’ The hand that touched her
smelt of nail varnish remover. There were hairs on the wrist she had never noticed before. ‘I’m falling in love with you,’ he said. ‘And you feel the same, don’t you?’

  She couldn’t speak. He took her by the shoulders. He brought his mouth up to hers and put his arms round her and began kissing her. His skin felt abrasive and a smell as male as Graham’s came off his body. She shook and shuddered. He pushed her down on the bed and his hands began undressing her, his mouth still on hers and his body heavy on top of her.

  She felt behind her, put her hand into the open handbag and pulled out the knife. Because she could feel his heart beating steadily against her right breast she knew where to stab and she stabbed again and again. The bright red heart’s blood spurted over her clothes and the bed and the two peppermint creams on the tray.

  A Dark Blue Perfume

  It would be true to say that not a day had passed without his thinking of her. Except for the middle years. There had been other women then to distract him, though no one he cared for enough to make his second wife. But once he was into his fifties the memory of her returned with all its old vividness. He would see other men settling down into middle age, looking towards old age, with loving wives beside them, and he would say to himself, Catherine, Catherine . . .

  He had never, since she left him, worked and lived in his native land. He was employed by a company which sent him all over the world. For years he had lived in South America, Africa, the West Indies, coming home only on leave and not always then. He meant to come home when he retired, though, and to this end, on one of those leaves, he had bought himself a house. It was in the city where he and she had been born, but he had chosen a district as far as possible from the one in which she had gone to live with her new husband and a long way from where they had once lived together, for the time when he had bought it was the time when he had begun daily to think of her again.

  He retired when he was sixty-five and came home. He flew home and sent the possessions he had accumulated by sea. They included the gun he had acquired forty years before and with which he had intended to shoot himself when things became unendurable. But they had never been quite unendurable even then. Anger against her and hatred for her had sustained him and he had never got so far as even loading the small, unused automatic.

  It was winter when he got home, bleak and wet and far colder than he remembered. When the snow came he stayed indoors, keeping warm, seeing no one. There was no one to see, anyway, they had gone away or died.

  When his possessions arrived in three trunks – that was all he had amassed in forty years, three trunkfuls of bric-à-brac – he unpacked wonderingly. Only the gun had been put in by him, his servant had packed the rest. Things came to light he had long forgotten he owned, books, curios, and in an envelope he thought he had destroyed in those early days, all his photographs of her.

  He sat looking at them one evening in early spring. The woman who came to clean for him had brought him a bowl of blue hyacinths and the air was heavy and languorous with the sweet scent of them. Catherine, Catherine, he said as he looked at the picture of her in their garden, the picture of her at the seaside, her hair blowing. How different his life would have been if she had stayed with him! If he had been a complaisant husband and borne it all and taken it all and forgiven her. But how could he have borne that? How could he have kept her when she was pregnant with another man’s child?

  The hyacinths made him feel almost faint. He pushed the photographs back into the envelope but he seemed to see her face still through the thick, opaque, brown paper. She had been a bit older than he, she would be nearly seventy now. She would be old, ugly, fat perhaps, arthritic perhaps, those firm cheeks fallen into jowls, those eyes sunk in folds of skin, that white column of a neck become a bundle of strings, that glossy chestnut hair a bush of grey. No man would want her now.

  He got up and looked in the mirror over the mantelpiece. He hadn’t aged much, hadn’t changed much. Everyone said so. Of course it was true that he hadn’t lived much, and it was living that aged you. He wasn’t bald, he was thinner than he had been at twenty-five, his eyes were still bright and wistful and full of hope. Those four years’ seniority she had over him, they would show now if they stood side by side.

  She might be dead. He had heard nothing, there had been no news since the granting of the divorce and her marriage to that man. Aldred Sydney. Aldred Sydney might be dead, she might be a widow. He thought of what that name, in any context, had meant to him, how emotive it had been.

  ‘I want you to meet the new general manager, Sydney Robinson.’

  ‘Yes, we’re being sent to Australia, Sydney actually.’

  ‘Cameron and Sydney, Surveyors and Valuers. Can I help you?’

  For a long time he had trembled when he heard her surname pronounced. He had wondered how it could come so unconcernedly off another’s tongue. Aldred Sydney would be no more than seventy, there was no reason to suppose him dead.

  ‘Do you know Aldred and Catherine Sydney? They live at number 22. An elderly couple, yes, that’s right. They’re so devoted to each other, it’s rather sweet . . .’

  She wouldn’t still live there, not after forty years. He went into the hall and fetched the telephone directory. For a moment or two he sat still, the book lying in his lap, breathing deeply because his heart was beating so fast. Then he opened the directory and turned to the S’s. Aldred was such an uncommon name, there was probably only one Aldred Sydney in the country. He couldn’t find him there, though there were many A. Sydneys living at addresses which had no meaning for him, no significance. He wondered afterwards why he had bothered to look lower, to let his eyes travel down through the B’s and find her name, unmistakably, incontrovertibly, hers. Sydney, Catherine, 22 Aurora Road . . .

  She was still there, she still lived there, and the phone was in her name. Aldred Sydney must be dead. He wished he hadn’t looked in the phone book. Why had he? He could hardly sleep at all that night and when he awoke from a doze early in the morning, it was with her name on his lips: Catherine, Catherine.

  He imagined phoning her.

  ‘Catherine?’

  ‘Yes, speaking. Who’s that?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Guess. It’s a long long time ago, Catherine.’

  It was possible in fantasy, not in fact. He wouldn’t know her voice now, if he met her in the street he wouldn’t know her. At ten o’clock he got his car out and drove northwards, across the river and up through the northern suburbs. Forty years ago the place where she lived had been well outside the great metropolis, separated from it by fields and woods.

  He drove through new streets, whole new districts. Without his new map he would have had no idea where he was. The countryside had been pushed away in those four decades. It hovered shyly on the outskirts of the little town that had become a suburb. And here was Aurora Road. He had never been to it before, never seen her house, though on any map he was aware of precisely where the street was, as if its name were printed in red to burn his eyes.

  The sight of it at last, actually being there and seeing the house, made his head swim. He closed his eyes and sat there with his head bent over the wheel. Then he turned and looked at the neat, small house. Its paint was new and smart and the fifty-year-old front door had been replaced by a panelled oak one and the square bay by a bow window. But it was a poor, poky house for all that. He sneered a little at dead Aldred Sydney who had done no better than this for his wife.

  Suppose he were to go up to the door and ring the bell? But he wouldn’t do that, the shock would be too much for her. He, after all, had prepared himself. She had no preparation for confronting that husband, so little changed, of long ago. Once, how he would have savoured the cruelty of it, the revenge! The handsome man, still looking middle aged, a tropical tan on his cheeks, his body flat and straight, and the broken old woman, squat now, grey, withered. He sighed. All desire for a cruel vengeance had left him. He wanted instead to be merciful, to be kind. Wouldn�
��t the kindest thing be to leave her in peace? Leave her to her little house and the simple pursuits of old age.

  He started the car again and drove a little way. It surprised him to find that Aurora Road was right on the edge of that retreating countryside, that its tarmac and grey paving stones led into fields. When she was younger she had possibly walked there sometimes, under the trees, along that footpath. He got out of the car and walked along it himself. After a time he saw a train in the distance, appearing and disappearing between green meadows, clumps of trees, clusters of red roofs, and then he came upon a signpost pointing to the railway station. Perhaps she had walked here to meet Aldred Sydney after his day’s work.

  He sat down on a rustic seat that had been placed at the edge of the path. It was a very pretty place, not spoilt at all, you could hardly see a single house. The grass was a pure, clean green, the hedgerows shimmering white with the tiny flowers of wild plum blossom which had a drier, sharper scent than the hyacinths. For the time of year it was warm and the sun was shining. A bumble bee, relict of the past summer, drifted by. He put his head back on the wooden bar of the seat and fell asleep.

  It was an unpleasant dream he had, of those young days of his when he had been little more than a boy but she very much a grown woman. She came to him, as she had come then, and told him baldly, without shame or diffidence, that the child she carried wasn’t his. In the dream she laughed at him, though he couldn’t remember that she had done that in life, surely not. He jerked awake and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. People talking, walking along the path, had roused him. He left the seat and the path and drove home.

  All that week he meant to phone her. He longed fiercely to meet her. It was as if he were in love again, so full was he of obsessional yearnings and unsuspected fears and strange whims. One afternoon he told himself he would phone her at exactly four, when it got to four he would count ten and dial her number. But when four came and he had counted ten his arm refused to function and lift the receiver, it was as if his arm were paralysed. What was the matter with him that he couldn’t make a phone call to an old woman he had once known?