The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  “Whatever is that beagle doing to the borzoi?”

  “Best ignore it, madam,” said Bean. If she didn’t know by this time, he wasn’t in the business of telling her. He took the shih tzu from her and as he was attaching a free branch of the leash to its collar, fending off Ruby’s overtures, a taxi came round the corner and drew up outside Charlotte Cottage.

  The young woman who got out of it, and lugged out two suitcases from the seat next to the driver, must be the Blackburn-Norris’s house-sitter. She looked very young to Bean, though he admitted that the greater part of the population looked young to him, and he could no longer tell whether someone was eighteen or thirty. This woman—girl, he thought—had an appearance of fragility, as if the wind could blow her away. She was slim and for some reason made him think of a lily, long-necked, white-skinned, and very fair. Not the sort to take Gushi out for long walks herself by the looks of her, and that was all to the good.

  He nodded and said good afternoon. He could see that many would have called her attractive, even beautiful, but she held no attraction for him. What he had known of sex, particularly in later years, had seemed to him at best grotesque and at worst frightening. When Maurice Clitheroe died he put all thoughts of it away forever with a sigh of something stronger than relief. It crossed his mind to help the young lady up the path with her cases, crossed it and fled. His hands were full with the dogs. Besides, she shouldn’t bring heavy suitcases with her if she couldn’t handle them herself and if she tipped him it would be the average woman’s ludicrous offering, twenty pee or at most fifty.

  By this time the dogs were straining and pulling, impatient to be off, anxious for the real outing to begin. He crossed the street and the Outer Circle, taking them into the park by the Gloucester Gate, and on the broad expanse of green south of the zoo he unfastened the leashes and let them run free.

  In the distance the woman who exercised a dozen dogs, but behaved more like a nanny with her charges, was playing ball with three labradors and a boxer. Bean gave her one of his looks but she was much too far away to see.

  • • •

  “We are starting out in Brazil,” said Lady Blackburn-Norris, “then on to Costa Rica and Mexico. California after that, Utah for the great national parks or whatever they call them, and then on to New England. We shall be back by September, shan’t we, darling?”

  Her husband had a face and figure very much like the borzoi Mary had seen at the gate, even to the spindly legs, bent shoulders, and anteater’s proboscis of a nose.

  “If it hasn’t killed us,” he said. “I expect we seem far too ancient to you, Miss Jago, to be doing this at all. And you would be right. I am eighty-two and the madam is seventy-nine.”

  “My grandmother is older and she still travels a lot,” Mary said.

  “Oh, dear Frederica! If only she were coming with us! But she’s still in Sweden and apparently she has a long-standing engagement to go with the Trattons to Crete next month. I can’t tell you how grateful we are to her, Miss Jago, for bringing us you. Without someone really reliable in the house we couldn’t be going away at all, could we, darling?”

  Sir Stewart Blackburn-Norris said in his dry restrained way that indeed they could not. Frequently, in the past weeks, he had entertained murderous thoughts toward his wife’s best friend Frederica Jago for making this protracted trip of theirs possible. Notifying the police was all very well and they had a dog—if Gushi could be called a dog—but nothing equaled someone in the house. Without someone in the house even his wife would have thought twice about going. Of course he didn’t want to go. With his intimates he made no secret of it. He wanted to stay here, to stroll down to his club in Brook Street every morning and lunch there; every afternoon to take a cab back to Park Square for a chat with his friend, the director of the Crown Estates, in his sanctum, a templelike building next to the Nursemaids’ Tunnel entrance; to go on eating his dinner at Odette’s three times a week, at Odin’s three times a week, and at the Mumtaz on Sundays.

  “It was not to be,” he said aloud but didn’t explain when Frederica’s granddaughter looked enquiringly at him.

  He showed her how to work the heating and his wife showed her how to work the VCR, they gave her the list of useful phone numbers and indispensable services. She was instructed on no account to take Gushi out between eight and nine in the morning or four-fifteen and five-fifteen in the afternoon, Bean would do that, but she could take him out at other times if she—and he—felt like it and had the strength.

  “I doubt if I will,” said Mary. “I’ll be at work during the day.”

  “Oh, yes, you work, don’t you?” said Sir Stewart as if he had just about heard of women pursuing this freakish course, as if maybe one in a thousand did so due to esoteric pressures or rare idiosyncrasy. “At that Sherlock Holmes place in Baker Street, wasn’t it?”

  Mary laughed. “No, no. Not Sherlock Holmes. Irene Adler. I work at the Irene Adler Museum in Charles Lane.” She thought the name might mean something to them but it evidently didn’t. “That’s St. John’s Wood. I can walk to work from here.”

  Sir Stewart insisted on looking it up in his Geographer’s London Atlas. He was calculating the distance, deciding perhaps whether it might be too far for her to walk, too far for anyone to walk, let alone someone as fragile-looking as she, when Bean came back with the dog. Introductions were made and Bean said,

  “I’ll see you at eight-fifteen A.M. then, miss.”

  No one had ever called her “miss” before. It made her feel like the daughter of the house in a Victorian novel. Fondled and spoken to nicely, Gushi launched himself at her, licking and snuggling, settling into her arms like a bunch of chrysanthemums.

  “Get down, bloody dog,” said Sir Stewart.

  Mary said, “Why Gushi? I mean, where does the name come from?”

  “Gushi Khan ruled Tibet in the seventeeth century, didn’t he, darling?”

  “God only knows,” said Sir Stewart. “His first owner named him. I’d have called him Sam.”

  Mary wandered through the rooms while the Blackburn-Norrises put the final touches to their packing. It was a pretty house, comfortable and elegant, furnished charmingly yet indistinguishably from the interiors of a thousand houses and flats that bordered on the park. Chintz, velvet, Wilton, Chinese porcelain, Georgian silver, poppy heads and peacock feathers, button-back chairs, chaise longues, rent tables, Hope chairs, and one that might have been a Duncan Phyfe. She knew about these things, sometimes hoped wistfully for something different, to come upon an interior that might surprise or delight. One day, no doubt, she would have a house of her own to furnish.

  There were shutters at the windows and these would help with security. No lace curtains hid the lattices or obscured the view. She stood looking out on the garden with its pergolas, and its ornamental pond, and beyond it to the green space that divides the two segments of the village. At this time of the year trees and shrubs were luxuriant, flowering creepers sprawling across every wall and height, brickwork hidden under a complicated leafy tapestry, so that nothing could be seen that might not have been in the depths of country-side. If skyscraping towers were somewhere out there, the trees clothed in fresh green and jade and golden-green hid them. Aircraft trails that scored broken white lines across the blue sky might have been streaks of cirrus.

  In the garden a white lilac thrust its spires of blossom between those of a late forsythia and the snowy net of a spirea. For some reason, the beauty of it added to her sudden, unexpected loneliness. It was a long time since she had lived alone and in half an hour she would be quite solitary. Except, of course, for Gushi, but Mary was not one of those who find the companionship of an animal equal to that of human beings. She stroked the dog’s head, for the thought seemed a shade treacherous.

  The taxi came early. Mary opened the door to the driver. The Blackburn-Norrises were still upstairs. Sir Stewart, as soon as he heard voices, began shouting for the driver to come up and lend a hand
with the cases. Five minutes of chaos ensued, the driver arguing and grumbling about his back, Lady Blackburn-Norris fluttering in circles and suddenly, surprisingly, kissing Mary good-bye, Sir Stewart inexplicably choosing this final moment to tell her how the window locks worked.

  They went. The dog had gone to sleep. Mary continued to look out of the window until long after the taxi had disappeared. It was very quiet, silent as the country, and though she strained to listen she could hear nothing of the throb and hum of London. Alistair came into her mind and she thought of what it meant to be afraid of someone you had once loved and admired. He would very likely phone this evening. She wondered what would happen if she failed to answer it, if she let it ring, and the caller was a friend of the Blackburn-Norrises.

  The idea of speaking to Alistair was suddenly very terrible. Perhaps she could go out for a walk or go to the cinema. There was a cinema by Baker Street Station and another one in Baker Street itself. Wouldn’t it be irresponsible to leave the house and the dog immediately she had got here? She went upstairs and began to unpack.

  Her bedroom looked out over the garden and the gardens of Park Village East and across the railway line to Mornington Crescent. A gas balloon, segmented red and yellow, floated up in the sky over Euston Station. She emptied the first case and hung things up in a mahogany wardrobe with claw feet. The clothes on the top of the second case went into drawers. She lifted out the trouser suit. Underneath were the postcard from Jokkmokk and the letter from the Harvest Trust.

  Mary sat on the bed and looked at the envelope in her hands for a few moments before opening it. This was normal for her with letters from the trust. She wanted to know and she dreaded to know, so she always hesitated like this, bracing herself, being prepared. Could you prepare? Wouldn’t the worst thing, the thing she dreaded, be a shock, however much she anticipated it?

  Alistair had said he hoped the man she knew only as “Oliver” was dead. No doubt he had not absolutely meant that, he was illogical, unreasonable, about everything to do with the donation, but “Oliver” might be dead, this letter might be telling her so.

  When had she last heard? She thought back. Before Christmas, October or November, more than six months. But that, of course, was normal, the way things should be. She had asked the trust to supply information after three months, after six, nine, twelve, and eighteen months. It must now be more than eighteen months, nearer twenty, since the harvest was taken.

  He might be dead. The success rate was only twenty to fifty percent. In fact, he was rather more likely to be dead than alive. Prepared, or as near prepared as she was likely to be, she opened the envelope quickly, tearing at the flap with her thumbnail.

  The letter was from the Harvest Trust’s donor welfare officer. It reminded her that she had “requested anonymity be relaxed after one year and a half if all continued to go well.” Therefore, subject to her consent, her name and address would be supplied to “Oliver” and his, with his consent, to her. Or, having obtained “Oliver’s” address, she might go ahead and make contact with him herself. It was advisable for the parties to correspond with each other before arranging a meeting. The donor welfare officer would be happy to assist in every possible way. She hoped “Helen” would consult her if she had any problems, and she signed herself, Deborah Cox.

  Mary read it again. She had been given something to occupy her first evening.

  3

  Irene Adler, adventuress, beauty, one-time mistress of the king of Bohemia, resided, according to Conan Doyle, at Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St. John’s Wood. But this is fiction and the only street in London to be designated Serpentine is in West Two not West Eight, so the founders of the museum that bears her name had to be content with a house in a turning off St. John’s Wood High Street.

  It holds no memorabilia of her. How could it? The only woman that Sherlock Holmes ever loved—or at least, admired—appears in one single story. No sooner had he set eyes on her than she had married Mr. Norton, leaving nothing behind but a photograph of herself for Holmes to treasure. But the objects in the museum are the kind of things she might have possessed: a collection of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dresses, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, numberless exercises in the art nouveau, furniture of the kind with which the Blackburn-Norrises furnished their house, jewelry in silver and jet, pinchbeck, cairngorms, and moonstones, a few treasured copies of the “Yellow Book,” Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, a great many Beardsley drawings, and a first edition of Zuleika Dobson.

  Mary Jago’s introduction to it was soon after she left art school and set up her own business, restoring costumes. It had not been lucrative, but it brought her into contact with Dorothea Borwick, who ran the Irene Adler and who later offered her a partnership. For the museum, largely ignored by Londoners, was a success with tourists, particularly Americans. Sometimes Mary and Dorothea even had to restrict admittance, roping off the entrance for half an hour, their hearts gladdened by the sight of a queue forming and extending round the corner into St. John’s Wood Terrace.

  Dorothea never came in on Mondays, just as Mary never did on Saturdays, and when she got there it was still only twenty past nine and Stacey, who sat at the ticket office and served in the shop, had not yet arrived. Mary had left Charlotte Cottage as soon as the dog-walker had brought Gushi back. She was uncertain as to the whereabouts of a pillar box in which to post her letter to the Harvest Trust, but she had found one at once, at the point where Park Village West debouched from Albany Street.

  A good deal of thought and careful deliberation had preceded the writing of that letter. It had taken up most of the evening, causing her to give up ideas about a visit to the cinema. Did she, for instance, want the Harvest Trust to have her new address? Was there any point when it was only temporary? The Blackburn-Norrises would be back by early September and then, unless she felt very differently, unless she was utterly changed and had decided to go back to Alistair, she must find a place of her own. But the reply to this letter would be very important, the revealing at last of “Oliver’s” identity. She almost decided to phone instead, but would they tell her on the phone? Of course not, she might be anyone, an investigative journalist, a spy, no one at the trust would recognize her voice. Back to the letter, then, the blank sheet of paper on which she had not even yet written an address. If she put Chatsworth Road, Willesden, now that she no longer lived there, would Alistair send the trust’s reply on to her? Or would he take pleasure in destroying it?

  The simplest plan would be to head the paper with her grandmother’s address. She had a key to the house and, besides, Frederica would be home in a day or two. After this letter from the trust, there would very likely be no more, for information about his condition would come to her straight from “Oliver.” She wrote c/o Mrs. F. M. Jago in the top right-hand corner, Lamballe House, Belsize Park Gardens, London NW3. The substance of the letter was to ask for “Oliver’s” real name and his home address.

  This way it would be out of Alistair’s reach. In the past year and a half he had become angrier and more resentful of what she had done, not less so. In some curious way he had seemed to want revenge on this man he had never seen and she had never seen, whose only offense had been to suffer from acute myeloid leukemia. As she walked across the park, crossing the Broad Walk, and took the path that runs along the southern boundary of the zoo, she thought once more of Alistair’s inexplicable behavior. She thought of how her action had seemed to change him and turn him into an unreasonable and at times cruel man.

  The Harvest Trust had recommended a discussion with one’s family before the decision to be a donor was finally taken. Alistair and her grandmother were her family, she had no other, but while her grandmother had been supportive once she’d conquered her original anxiety, from Alistair she had had nothing but anger, incredulity, rejection.

  The trust’s very name had provoked shudders. He seemed to have a gift for picking out from its literature every point that might be construed as omi
nous.

  “A harvest, they call it a harvest what they do. Doesn’t that tell you something? They’re harvesting the marrow out of your bones.”

  And then, “They insure you for a quarter of a million pounds. Look, it says so here. Do you think they’d do that if it weren’t dangerous?”

  “I’m young and healthy,” she had said. “They wouldn’t take me if I weren’t suitable. I just look fragile but I’m not.”

  And that was before she had been asked to give the donation, when she had only put her name on the register. To give in to him, to what was after all a quite unreasonable demand, she had felt would be weak and positively wrong. She knew that she belonged in the victim type, the quiet gentle person, usually female, who yields for the sake of peace, who placates and smiles and who, of course, brings out the worst in the bully. It was a casting, a role, she had lately been setting out to resist. But when the trust came back to her with a potential recipient and asked her to attend the center for a medical examination, she had not been able to stand up for herself.

  She said nothing to Alistair. She went for the medical in her lunch hour. Of course, she still intended to tell him. Ironically, if things had been going badly for them she might have told him, she might have been made stronger by adversity, but their relationship was in a successful and happy period—why spoil it? Just the same, she meant to tell him well in advance of the harvest date. She would have to tell him, she knew that.

  The bank sent him to Hong Kong. He was to be away a week and it was during that week that the donation was to be made. Donors should be met, it was advised, on leaving the hospital and accompanied home. She would have to do without that, or she would have to do without Alistair. Dorothea would meet her, Dorothea was discreet and would say nothing. Perhaps Alistair need never know. Whatever advances she had made, she had by then reverted to type, and telling herself she was a coward and a fool made no difference.