The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  He had a look at the camera and checked that there were three frames left on the film.

  • • •

  In her third week at Charlotte Cottage, Mary was twice invited out to dinner. Her grandmother gave a rather grand dinner party for her. The nine guests and Frederica Jago sat down to deep-fried Crottin de Chavignol with cranberry sauce, roast guinea fowl, and French apple tart with clotted cream. A heavy meal suitable for old-fashioned old people. Everyone but Mary and one of the men she sat next to was very old, so it was plain that the young or youngish man had been invited for her sake.

  Much the same thing happened at the other dinner party. This was given by Dorothea in Charles Lane, where she lived with her husband, Gordon, in the house next door to the Irene Adler Museum. Everyone among the eight guests was young, so they ate arugula and corn salad in an orange and walnut dressing, red mullet with couscous and deep-fried sage leaves, followed by cherimoya sorbet with a Sharon fruit coulis. Couples were either married or living together in long-term relationships, so it was apparent to Mary that the single (divorced) man she sat next to had been invited for her sake.

  Of these two men, Frederica’s protégé and Gordon’s friend, the former rang Mary up the next day and asked if she would go to the cinema with him to see The Madness of King George. She said no. It was not only that she had seen the film, but that of all activities likely to improve two people’s knowledge of each other, cinema-going must be the least effective. You met in the foyer, you sat side by side in the dark in silence, you had a drink afterward and said good night. Not that she wanted to improve her knowledge of him and nor apparently did he of her, for he suggested no alternative outing. The other man, Dorothea’s, didn’t get in touch at all.

  “It’s humiliating,” Mary said to Dorothea the next day in the Irene Adler drawing room. “I wish you hadn’t done it. I wish my grandmother hadn’t done it.”

  “Oh, come on. I didn’t do anything. The poor man’s just getting over the trauma of his wife’s running off with the VAT inspector. Gordon and I try to include him in as much as we can.”

  “And you thought this poor girl was just getting over the trauma of her boyfriend knocking her about, is that it? They’d be just right for each other? Well, he didn’t think so. I haven’t heard a word from him. And that is humiliating, Dorrie.”

  Nearly as humiliating as writing to Leo Nash and getting no reply. She had been so sure of a prompt answer to her letter. What a fool, to imagine the man longing to hear from her, desperate for a word, only waiting with bated breath for the chance to get in touch!

  “You’re overreacting,” said Dorothea, and she stood back, trying to decide if the framed photograph of Irene Adler looked best displayed on the mantelpiece or semiconcealed behind the half-open secret panel. It was a question that had exercised her ever since the drawing room had been created in its present mode. “He’s probably just too unhappy to even think of anyone else at the moment.”

  “Yes, I daresay. But to me it seems he must have gone home saying to himself, ‘They needn’t think they can catch me so easily. I know a trick worth two of that.’ And then he forgot me.”

  As Leo Nash must have looked at the Charlotte Cottage address and the writing paper and wondered what form her patronage of him would take?

  “Look, if you fancy him we can maybe manage …”

  “I don’t fancy him in the least. I’ll just go on going to the cinema by myself.”

  She said nothing to Dorothea about being lonely. Dorothea would have asked her round to Charles Lane every evening, given a dinner party for her every week. School friends, college friends would have rallied round if she had got in touch. Her cousin in Surrey had invited her for the weekend, but she had said no because of Gushi. Being alone and minding it wasn’t the best training for someone who was trying to be strong and independent.

  The weekends were the worst. There had been only three of them but they were very bad. She got up late, she read, she walked Gushi until he was exhausted and had to be carried, she walked about the West End, went to the Wallace Collection and the Planetarium. In the evenings she worked on the new catalog and brochure she was compiling for the museum.

  It was better on weekday evenings. She and Gushi watched television or played the Blackburn-Norrises’ CDs. At bedtime she had stopped shutting Gushi up in the kitchen, where his basket was, and took him upstairs with her and let him sleep on her bed. During the night he edged closer and closer up toward the bedhead, and now when she woke in the mornings it was to find his frondy face on the pillow beside her and as often as not her arms embracing him.

  For the first week, in the mornings, she had awaited the post, but nothing came except junk mail, hire car and taxi cards, fliers from a food delivery service. Her phone number was on the writing paper and when the phone rang she half expected a diffident, anxious male voice. But the only voice, and it wasn’t diffident, was Alistair’s.

  After the early-morning call, he phoned three more times, the first to say he was coming to see her, he would be over the following evening to take her out to dinner. Her protests, her reminder that they were separated, had no effect. If not tomorrow, then the next day, he said. In the end she agreed to the second suggestion and went through agonies all next day and the next, wondering how to deal with him if he came back with her and wanted to stay the night.

  Seven came and seven-thirty and at seven thirty-five he phoned to say he couldn’t make it. She was relieved and at the same time angry. Angry with herself as much as with him for the two miserable days she had spent. That afternoon she had been so distracted that she had told an American tourist Irene Adler had lived in St. John’s Wood Terrace and her royal lover had been the king of Serbia.

  Alistair phoned for the third time to say he was worried about her health. He had made an appointment for their GP to see her.

  “It’s at eight-thirty on Thursday morning.”

  “Alistair, as you know I haven’t got a car. Do you really think I’m coming to Willesden at that hour?”

  “Of course you’d stay the night here.”

  “I’m perfectly well. I don’t need a doctor.” She tried to speak pleasantly to him, to be polite but firm, but when she said good-bye his furious shouting down the receiver made her tremble.

  All of it made her ask herself if she had been right to take on this dog-sitting and house-minding at Charlotte Cottage. Of course she could not have stayed with Alistair, that was plain, but should she perhaps have gone first to her grandmother, and then found herself a place in a shared flat? To be with other people …

  It was too late now. Outside it was sunny again, a warm still evening. Two people walked by, on their way out into Albany Street, their arms round each other. Loneliness was worse on fine evenings when the red sun went down over the horizon of a great city and the night sky grew purple, though with no chance of seeing the stars. She took Gushi on her lap and watched television.

  The little dog was out with Bean and the others when the post came in the morning. A flier from a company selling exercise trampolines, another from Express Tikka and Pizza, and an envelope postmarked NW1. Her habitual hesitation at opening letters she told herself to abandon now, stop it once and for all. It was all part of the fearful temperament she had to learn to abandon. In a cool, controlled way she went into the living room, picked up the paper knife, and slit open the envelope.

  She looked at the photograph first. A passport-size photograph taken in one of those station or supermarket kiosks of a man’s pale thin face in front of a pleated curtain. To herself she was calling it anemic before she realized what she was saying. Of course he was anemic. Anemia had nearly killed him.… The eyes were light and clear, the hair so fair as to be almost white, the features regular, classical: thin lips, straight nose, very high smooth forehead.

  A handwritten letter from the Plangent Road address.

  Dear Mary Jago,

  I am the man whose life you saved with your mo
re than generous donation. You not only saved it, you made it good again, worth living. I want you to know that I am well now, thanks to you.

  Since you wrote to me, I think you must want us to get in touch. I hope I am not being presumptuous in saying that you may want us to meet as much as I want it.

  I will not put you to the trouble of phoning me or writing back. In fact, I should make a confession and tell you I have no phone. Today, as I write, is Monday and you will get this letter by Wednesday at the latest. If I do not hear from you to tell me you would rather not meet me, I will be at an outside table at the Rose Garden restaurant in Regent’s Park, the one north of the lake, from 5:30 till 6:00 on Friday.

  I won’t say, do come. But I hope you will come.

  Yours sincerely,

  Leo Nash

  6

  Most of the street sleepers, the dossers, the dropouts, the jacks men, were on the street because they had nowhere else to be. They were without roofs of their own, or roofs rented, to put over their heads. This was not true of Roman, who had had a roof, who had had his own home, but who was on the street because he had no more choice than those others, because the outside was the only option if he was to continue to live.

  If he was to live. An alternative there had been, the alternative open to all. “Skipping out” on the canal bank, he had thought many times of sliding into the cold water one night, having first ripped his brain and his senses apart with the meths and water mixture, cloudy white fluid the jacks men called milk. The faith he no longer had stopped him. His Polish mother had brought him up a Catholic and if all of it was gone now, all dispelled by reason and science, vestigial fear remained, some absurd awe of the sin against the Holy Ghost.

  So the street it had to be. Because home was unlivable in, a hollow place that howled at him, empty, empty, never to be filled again. A place so haunted that he had to hide his face from the staring walls and stuff bedding into his mouth to keep himself from crying out. And not just that house of his, but any house, flat, hotel, shelter he might move to.

  It was as if claustrophobia of a kind never before experienced had come to him with loss. Just as an inability to work had come, to go about among ordinary people. He was obliged to avoid every aspect of life as he had known it, if he was to survive and not curl up somewhere into a fetus that screwed up its eyes and hid its face in its frog’s paws. Only the outside was feasible to him, where those he encountered took it for granted that he was set apart, that he was to some degree mad. This was the point, that he should be the Wandering Jew, or Oedipus. And if he had not put out his own eyes, nor had he his daughter with him as companion.

  It was possible to have been too happy. He knew that now and because, at first, after it first happened, he lamented that he had been as happy as that, wished his had been a bad or broken marriage, his children ugly and stupid, because of these indefensible thoughts he had cut himself off from everything, expelled his family from his mind, and then expelled everything else from his life. The idea was to have nothing to remind him, to make everything different; no roof over his head, no job, no friends, no social life, no familiar things around him. If he was going to run away, and he was, it had to be a proper running away, complete, absolute, the old life shed in every aspect.

  Until the fair girl spoke to him and he spoke to her.

  • • •

  He had been up to Primrose Hill where nuns give out tea and bread and butter to the homeless at five in the afternoon. It was in some novel of Graham Greene’s that he had come upon that phrase “a phony and a fake,” and he applied it often to himself. For he had a home he had put into the hands of agents and sold. The money derived from that sale stopped him using the hostels and the day centers, to which others had a better right than he, it stopped him taking money passersby offered him, but he drew the line at the nuns’ tea. He drank the tea and ate the bread and butter and left a pound coin on the table.

  A lot of Irishmen were up there from the gloomy Victorian hostel in Camden Town. Their life expectancy, he had read somewhere in Talisman Press days, was forty-seven. The meths would do for them, that and the cold and the poor diet. What you learn when you drop out of life! Roman wandered down Regent’s Park Road and took St. Mark’s Bridge over the canal. He counted seven houseboats moored alongside each other in Cumberland Basin and one in front of the Chinese teahouse. On its flat roof a woman lay sunbathing in a green bikini.

  The finger of the minaret pointed into a pale blue sky on which the tiny clouds made a net. He thought of Omar Khayyám and the sultan’s turret caught in a noose of light. The sun made the mosque’s golden roof too bright to look at. He crossed the Outer Circle and came into the Broad Walk. It was wild and thickly treed up here, no flowerbeds, the neat lawns distant.

  Roman sat down for a while on one of the seats by Sir Cowasjee Jehangir’s drinking fountain. An engraved legend told him it had been put there from gratitude for a benevolent Raj’s mercy to Parsis. A man’s face in stone looked out from the column above the inscription. Since its foundation, how many thousands had drunk its water, how many horses once refreshed themselves at its troughs? The Parsis placed their dead on towers of silence for the vultures to take, to eat and pick their bones. He had been so placed, awaiting his fate.

  From the zoo behind him came an animal sound, a loud grunt or trumpeting. He and Sally had never brought their children to the zoo but had taken them only to parkland where the big cats run free, to Woburn and Longleat. Slipping into his meditative mood, his remembering time, he recalled the Longleat day, the glorious weather, Elizabeth drawing pictures of a lioness and cubs on her sketch pad, the whole of it rather marred for him by his ridiculous anxiety.

  The car’s windows opened automatically at the press of a switch, they weren’t the wind-down kind. He had heard of those windows going wrong, of sticking either in the open or the shut position. What if something should go wrong, one of the children open a window and the window refuse to close again? If lions surrounded the car, if the car broke down … Later, when they were home again, he discovered that Sally had been thinking in just the same way, with exactly the same fears. But it was often so. They had shared thoughts, fears, happiness, read each other’s minds.

  Strange then that he had never prevised what had actually happened to his children, to his wife. His fears had been no more than fantasies or sops to a providence in whom he had no belief. They were never actual anticipations of real disaster with the corollary of: What will I do if they are all taken from me? How will I feel? How will I survive? And when it happened he had been without fear for some time, had rid himself of all but normal anxiety now Elizabeth was nearly fifteen and Daniel eight.

  Roman did not usually think of that day. He did not relive the moments in which the news had been brought to him. For one thing, he could hardly remember what his feelings had been. An amnesia had descended and left him with a memory of beforehand and—horribly, agonizingly—twelve hours afterward. The lost hours between he no longer tried to recapture. But he did think sometimes, and he thought now, as he got up again and walked away from the stone column, the tower of silence, of that later aftermath, of the awful recurring disbelief, of sleep that came so readily and so easily, sleep in which everything could be buried, but which had to be resisted, for when he woke the truth returned as fresh and new as when it was first told him. Sleep, which is supposed to be a blessing, the “balm of hurt minds,” could be a curse too. Who would want a painkilling drug that when its effects wore off, brought worse suffering?

  It was different now. Denial was past and forgetfulness never came. He lay down to sleep on some doorstep in the full acceptance of what had happened and his waking was to the naked knowledge of their doom and his fate. There was no longer room for illusion. But in those early days, before he took to the street, he would wake in the morning, turn to the pillow beside his, and wonder where Sally was, up so early. Then, like some slow rumbling explosion, growing in magnitude before the f
inal roar, it had all returned to him and he groaned aloud his irrepressible pain. He whimpered and groaned and relived his homecoming that evening, the arrival of the police on his doorstep, their kindness and their total inability to soften what they called “the blow.” That was when he had taken his decision to deny, expel, bury, pretend.

  Now he had reached a point in the progression of his survival when he could control his memories. He was no longer at the mercy of these things bursting and breaking into the fabric of his general sadness. They were there, always there, the trigger of his madness, but he need not relive them or see what in reality he had never seen, the crash explode, metallic and black and red, on his inner eye. He could expel them and think instead of another happy time, of Daniel’s last birthday, dinner at McDonald’s for fifteen little kids and Beauty and the Beast at the cinema afterward. Elizabeth had come, a great concession, a considerable kindness, from a teenager to a small boy.…

  Roman turned into Chester Road and entered the Inner Circle by the golden gates. Sally had always liked the rose garden, but later than this, a month later, while the roses were in bud and when their scent was still a delicate breath on the air. The precision of the garden had pleased her, its order, the considerable taste that had gone into its arrangement.

  He left the gardens by the gate at the Open Air Theatre and walked on. As he crossed the long bridge over the northern arm of the lake he heard footsteps behind him and looked back. It was the fair girl. She was late, she was running, and he wondered if she was meeting someone.