by Ruth Rendell
Mary relived all this as she walked through the park to the Monkey Gate, over the canal bridge and into Charlbert Street. It had been a day like this, sunny and breezy, but autumn not spring, when she went to the hospital for the harvest collection. The only risk, contrary to what Alistair suggested, was that associated with general anesthetic, the same as if undergoing any operation. She was “out” for about two hours, during which time they took a liter of marrow and blood, or five percent of the total in her body.
Coming round, she had felt at first excitement. It was done, she had done it. She had been able to do it, use her own good health to repair someone else’s ill health, to mend nature’s mistake. If she had done nothing much up till now, no good deeds, if she did none in the years to come, she had performed this one act to justify her existence. To no one on earth would she actually have said those words; to Dorothea when she came in to visit she made light of it, saying it was nothing, a breeze. But in her heart she experienced a deep satisfaction. Even if it failed, if the transplant was useless, she would have tried, she would have done what all philosophies and all religions told us we were here to do: love our neighbor and with positive intent.
This emotional high was not long enduring. The words she had used, though silent and unspoken, now embarrassed her. She came back swiftly to practical things. Dorothea accompanied her home in a taxi, made a meal, and shared it with her, telling her to take it easy, not to come back to the museum till the following week. Mary had been tired and a little stiff but otherwise well. She ate three meals a day, went for gentle walks, took the iron pills prescribed for her, and waited for Alistair to come home.
It was something she had never been able to account for, to explain to herself, why she had not once looked at the place on her body from which the harvest had been taken. She knew precisely where it was, the cavity of the hip, the iliac crest. It would have been normal surely, natural, to have studied these punctures on the smooth pale skin, even though she had been assured they would not leave a scar. Some revulsion, if not regret—never that—must have kept her eyes from the spot while she undressed, while she took a shower. Some unwillingness to see what altruism had done to a body that was perfect, without a blemish?
Alistair saw the marks. He saw them when they made love and the bedroom was flooded with autumn sunshine, soft golden light falling on her nakedness, her whiteness and its single flaw …
• • •
The first-comers made straight for the shop where Stacey sold them calendars and postcards of Lily Langtry and Eleanora Duse, leather-bound reissues of the novels of Ada Leverson, painted fans, beaded bags, batik, appliqué work, and very expensive mock-Fortuny Knossos scarves. Mary set to work in the hat room, mending a silk brim, reattaching black ostrich feathers. “A crab shelled in whalebone” was Aldous Huxley’s description of the Edwardian lady, and he called her plumed hat “a French funeral of the first class.” There were more than twenty such hats in this room, all huge gâteau-like confections, pearly white, rose pink, blue, yellow, black, festooned with roses, ribbons, feathers. On one wall was a Vogue cartoon from 1909 of a tiny woman wearing a hat as big as an umbrella on whose brim sat a rabbit gobbling up a cabbage.
When she was in here or in the corset room, Mary often thought Irene Adler’s incursions into male attire—as when she whispers “good evening” to Holmes in Baker Street—entirely understandable. The crab in whalebone could have known comfort only in bed at night, never by day in the S-shaped whalebone stays, the buckled and webbed bodices, the crustaceous layers, and those furbelowed cartwheel hats. Other pictures on the walls showed Edwardian women attempting to mount stairs, board trams, and manage their hats on windy days.
The first visitors began wandering through and Mary put her work aside. The Americans asked the most questions and there was a preponderance of Americans. She had expected a quiet slack day, as Monday usually was, failing to take into account that the tourist season was approaching its height.
“How did they handle those trailing skirts in the rain?” someone asked. It was a stock question and one she could scarcely answer.
“What about ordinary women?” was another. It was asked more and more often. “What did the poor do? The ones who couldn’t afford maids to dress them and cabs to ride in? How did they manage?”
And always, “Who was Irene Adler?”
They sold more copies of the Sherlock Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia (Irene as crab in whalebone on the front cover and in jacket and breeches on the back) than all the catalogs and brochures put together. A favorite place was the facsimile of Irene’s drawing room, as it must have been at Briony Lodge, with the secret panel by the fireplace where the compromising photograph was kept hidden, open for all to see the secret spring. Gustav Klimt had not painted her, for he was real and she was fiction, but the mock-Klimt portrait of Irene in sequins and pearls posed against a gold-leaf screen, framed in narrow gilded wood, went back to hang on the walls of many a Midwest condo. Business was too brisk at lunchtime for Mary to leave the museum. It even looked at one point during the afternoon as if admission would have to be restricted for half an hour. But the crowd dwindled as five approached, by which time the shop had run out of calendars and Knossos scarves and Stacey was on the phone to the sales rep. Mary worried a little about Charlotte Cottage. Would Bean have let himself in satisfactorily at four-fifteen, found Gushi, and by now have brought him back? Would he have secured the front door behind him?
She considered taking a taxi back, for she had had one good walk that day. But the sun was still shining and the wind had dropped, and once she had entered the park she forgot about a reluctance to walk, she forgot about Charlotte Cottage and Gushi, and turned southward across the broad open space. Strange, how seldom she had come in here at all while she lived in Willesden, and, though working at the museum, had scarcely ever crossed the canal or even set foot south of Prince Albert Road.
Taking the path that leads down to the boating lake, she noticed for the first time how open the park was, how relatively treeless in its center, a great plain of green fringed with the towers and landmarks of London, the gold dome of the mosque, the slender column of the minaret beside it, the art deco edifice of the Abbey National in Baker Street, the Post Office Tower, and, behind her, the Mappin Terraces of the zoo. There were trees on the north bank of the lake and at its shallow rim a cluster of waterfowl, pochards and mandarins and a black swan, squabbling over the spilled slices from a cut loaf.
She crossed the Long Bridge and paused for a while to look at the heron perched on one of the island trees. It should have been possible to turn left and head for the Cumberland Gate, but there was no way through.
She was learning that this was characteristic of the park, perhaps inevitable in a design based on a circle within a circle that were not concentric. Paths seldom led where you thought they would, and it was very easy, especially in this vicinity, to take what you thought were all the right directions yet find yourself heading back for the zoo and St. John’s Wood. Through the Looking Glass was what it was like, the bit where Alice notices that the path that seems to lead straight to the garden does not and is afraid of going back through the glass into the old room. I, at any rate, shall not go back to the old room, the old life, Mary thought, and with that she came out into the Inner Circle by the Open Air Theatre.
It was a short distance from there, through the golden gates and along Chester Road, to the Broad Walk. The new fountains were playing. Flowers spilled over the rims of the lion tazzas and the Roman vases. The flowerbeds, formal rectangles that flanked the wide path, were filled with polyanthus in bloom, with pansies and yellow jonquils. All the way along, from Park Square to Chester Road, and up beyond where there were no flowers but only trees and a certain wildness, seats faced each other, most of them occupied by two or three people. But on the seat nearest to the point where the road crossed the Broad Walk a man was sitting alone.
People of his sort always did
sit alone, unless another of their kind joined them. No one would choose to sit on the same seat as he. Mary, approaching along the path from the west, sought about in her mind as she had often done before, for the right word for him. Dosser? Street person? Street sleeper? Not beggar, he wasn’t begging. Not tramp, that was from her grandmother’s time. Perhaps there was no word and perhaps there should be none.
He was reading. That made him different, set him apart. He seemed oblivious to everything and everyone, concentrating on his book. The barrow that contained his possessions rested against the metal arm of the seat. From the rag tied round his neck to the boots on his feet, his clothes were well-worn denim, rumpled wool, and threadbare polyester. He wore a dark-colored quilted jerkin. His hair was dark, the thick bushy beard that covered the greater part of his face iron-gray. She thought she had seen him somewhere before without being able to remember where. It was his hands that recalled this previous sighting or meeting. They were long, narrow, beautiful hands, sun-browned but smooth, and on the left one was a gold wedding ring.
He looked up as she passed and for a moment, infinitesimal, fleeting, their eyes met. His were blue, a strong sea-blue. He lowered his eyes almost immediately to his book and turned the page in a precise controlled movement. Trying to remember where she had seen him that first time—in Baker Street? Outside Madame Tussaud’s? But she hardly ever went that way—Mary walked along the path where the gingko trees grow, the Chinese Maidenhair trees, toward the Cumberland Gate. Had he asked her for money? Had he perhaps been selling the Big Issue?
At the sound of her key in the lock, Gushi made three sharp barks. She called his name and he came running. If he was tired from his walk he gave no sign of it. She squatted down and he jumped into her arms, nestling there and burying his chrysanthemum face in her neck and shoulder.
• • •
Mary Jago may have failed to remember where she had previously seen Roman Ashton, but he had no trouble in placing her. She was the young woman who, arriving two hours earlier than usual at the museum in Charles Lane, had come upon him waking up on the doorstep. Irene Adler, the place was called. It had a glass-covered porch outside its front door that extended to the pavement across a small forecourt. For several nights he had slept there, dry and secluded, but he never went back after she had discovered him.
“I’m so sorry,” she had said, not wanting to step over him, also perhaps afraid. A great many people were afraid of them, himself and his kind. “I woke you up. I didn’t know anyone was sleeping here.”
It was a principle of his not to speak to the “public,” to speak only to his fellows, though that had its own problems, its own guilt. There was no reason for him to speak to people, he had no need to beg and never did, so if they addressed him he merely nodded or shrugged or gave no sign of having heard them. This delicate-looking slender girl, fair and somewhat fey-like, merited more than that. She had spoken to him as politely as if he had been a respectable householder. So he nodded, got to his feet, and rolled up his bedding in a quick, deft movement, stepping aside to let her pass.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “I’m going.”
She must have heard it as a mutter, a low growl. She was not to know those were the first words he had uttered to anyone apart from the street sleepers for a year. The first sentence to escape him since he had closed up his house and taken to the outdoors. And now he had seen her again. For a moment he thought she was going to speak to him and he wondered what reply to make, if any, whether to be as he once had been, a pleasant, courteous, easy-going sort of man, or as he now was, forbidding, grave, dour. But she had not spoken, she had not recognized him. It was just as well. Conversation with ordinary people was not for him; they spoke different languages.
For a little while he continued to read Dead Souls, or tried to read it, but the doings of Chichikov no longer held his attention. He had been distracted, not so much by the sight of the pale fair-haired girl with the swinging stride as by the emotion and the reflections thinking back to that earlier time had evoked.
He put the book into his buggy, a wooden barrow with four wheels and a handle like the shaft of a spade, and, pushing it ahead of him, began ambling along one of the paths in a westerly direction. He had no clear idea where he was going, a common state for him to be in, for one of the benefits of his condition was perfect freedom.
It was a warm, still afternoon and this he enjoyed after the winds of the past weeks, the cold spring, the long damp winter. If happiness was denied him forever, was something exclusively for others, he could feel pleasure and that sometimes more intensely and sensuously than those who lived under roofs and slept in beds. His appreciation of the sun on his face and the soft balmy air was luxurious and profound. It almost made him smile.
Another of his principles was never to make plans during the afternoon or evening as to where he would sleep that night, for to do so was to abrogate that freedom, and freedom was all he had. Everything else had been taken away or he had taken it away himself. He would give some thought to his night’s “lodging” when it was dark and the streets were empty, the cars had gone, the pubs had closed, and those like himself came into their own.
He crossed over York Bridge and entered the sequestered part of the park on the southern shore of the lake. On the seats along here his fellows were often to be found, Effie with her bundles wrapped in green plastic, or Dill, who would be accompanied by his dog but encumbered by so little, a nylon backpack, a couple of coats tied round his middle by their sleeves; but there was no one today. He knew Dill could live that way because he mostly had a bed in the Marylebone Road shelter or the one in the Edgware Road, something Roman’s guilt and sense of being always a phony and a fake would never allow him to have. After all, how many of those others had possessed a house of their own, possessed it, sold it, and banked the money?
For much of each day Roman lived in the past. And this was deliberate, a purposeful exploration of the time of his happiness, a reliving. Sometimes this dreaming occupied him for several hours on end as he walked across the park and the streets that made a network like the weaving of a nest around its center. He would select a particular happening from that past and enter it again, as it might be the birth of one of his children and the things he said to Sally and she to him, or even earlier to his first meeting with Sally at university.
Once he had been quite unable to do this, had been afraid to do it, more than afraid, terrified. The sight of that delicate fair girl reminded him that when they first encountered each other had been the time of his beginning this process of recall. Walking away from her, his bedding in the buggy, he had thought that speaking to an ordinary person, a dweller in the world he had left, should serve as a sign for him, and there and then he decided to put an end to the time of denial. Total change, absolute alteration of circumstances, utter abandonment of the past—all these had served their purpose. Now it was time to move on and take the plunge into pain. He would rip the scar tissue off the wound and lay a cold probe against the rawness. He had nothing to lose. It had to be done and now was the time to begin.
He had begun by a kind of meditation, his eyes on his wedding ring, the symbol of what had been and what was lost. Since then, in this world he had chosen for himself, both unreal and more real than any reality he had ever known, he had re-experienced every day his lovely history, a chapter of it or part of a chapter, and it did not heal the pain or come near healing it. But something else was happening. He was more aware than he had ever been of what it was to be a human being and it was as if, in all his joyous and contented days, he had never really known this before. And self-pity, so rebellious and consuming, was utterly gone. He had become unaccommodated man, perhaps even what those existentialists said man should be, free, suffering, alone, and in control of his own destiny.
Now he chose for his excursion into the past a holiday he and Sally and Elizabeth had had in Crete. It was ten years before, almost exactly ten years. Elizabeth had be
en four or five. They had chosen May for the wildflowers that cover the island with blossom at that time and because the sun was warm but not yet hot. He chiefly remembered from that holiday the color of the sea, the blue of Elizabeth’s eyes, the languor and the sweet idleness and his and Sally’s lovemaking, the best since their honeymoon. They had been the young ardent lovers of seven years before and in those two weeks Daniel had been conceived. With a pain that made him gasp, Roman remembered their bed and waking in the morning naked, uncovered by bedclothes, and Sally naked beside him. Like gods they were, discovered by the morning light.
As he left the park by me Clarence Gate, he found himself able to summon up from that past time the things they had said to each other and even the expression in Sally’s eyes, the tranquillity and sometimes the passion. He remembered walking on the beach with his daughter and carrying her because the sand was too hot on the soles of her small tender feet. “Daddy, Daddy,” she had said, lifting up one foot, “my soul is burning!” Or that was what it sounded like and they laughed, he and Sally, for what did he know then of burning souls and hellish torment?
Across Gloucester Place he walked and into the hinterland of Marylebone Station, where the shabby streets make so extreme a contrast with Nash’s palatial terraces. He took the steps down into Boston Place and through Blandford Square into Harewood Avenue. The sight of a corner shop reminded him that he must buy food for his supper. Sometime or other it must be done, but shops were always open till all hours in these streets. He came into Lisson Grove and turned south, conjuring Elizabeth’s face in his mind, its innocence and its rapture, and as sometimes happened, the tears came into his eyes and fell down his cheeks.
