by Ruth Rendell
“It has been very good to meet you at last,” she said, as if such warm words would soften her rejection of him. At once, in her own ears, they sounded like cold words. They sounded rigidly formal. She held out her hand, making things worse. “I hope we’ll see each other again.” She could see she had hurt him. He pursed his lips the way a man may do when he feels he has committed some solecism, when he has put a foot wrong but does not know where or how.
“I hope that too. May I phone you?”
“Of course.”
“Then I will. Soon.”
“Thank you for walking me home,” she said, and she had gone quickly to let herself into the house, picking up Gushi and hugging him the moment she was inside.
After that it was a relief when he phoned. She could repair the damage, make all things well between them. She had waited for him to phone but wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t, and then she would have had to get in touch with him. But he had phoned and surely at the earliest opportunity that he could have done so without seeming too eager. His voice had been warm and friendly and had evoked from her just such a warm response.
The call seemed to have released her to talk about him. When her cousin Judith phoned she spoke to her of the new friend she had made, the man who was the recipient of her transplant. She told Dorothea, who wanted to know if he was “personable,” if he was “fanciable”—when was she seeing him again?
“That would be one in the eye for old Alistair.”
“I’ve only met him once for half an hour, Dorrie.”
She told her grandmother. Frederica Jago was going to Crete on the following day with some people called Tratton, old friends who had a house there.
“I know one shouldn’t ever say I told you so, but I did tell you he’d reply, he just took a long time about it. And he’s nice?”
“I think so. I think he’s very nice.”
“Not a—what do they call them?—not a yob? My darling Mary, you needn’t look like that. We do judge people by the neighborhoods they come from.”
“He’s a clever, well-educated, quiet, and, I think, rather sensitive man.”
“And you found that out in how long? An hour?”
Mary laughed. “A bit less. Perhaps you can meet him when you get back from Crete. I must go. I’ve been here much longer than I meant to.” Frederica insisted on calling a taxi for her. She was not to wait out in the street. The murder had been too near for comfort.
“And take her right to the door, please,” she said to the driver. “Into the crescent and right to the door, not just to the Albany Street corner.”
Mary kissed her. Her grandmother smelled delicately of vanilla. She had looked back at the house and waved as the cab pulled away, at the great late Victorian pile, stucco, red shingles, red tiles, all gleaming in yellow lamplight, and Frederica’s neat tiny figure on the steps under the big bulbous portico.
• • •
Leo was a little early. He had a taxi waiting, and though he came in, it was only to the hall while she shut Gushi into the drawing room. He wore a suit and this reminded her of Alistair, who dressed formally most of the time. She came back to find him studying a framed print of Christ Church in a series of Oxford college etchings on the hall wall.
“I was at the House,” he said. “It looks just the same.”
Did people still call Christ Church that? “Yes, you said you were taken ill just after you’d got your degree.”
He smiled at her. The smile pulled his young face into a network of radiating lines. She thought he looked ill, suddenly aged, pale as a sick old man.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Why? I’m naturally a bit wan. It’s the curse of the very fair-skinned.”
He took her to an Italian restaurant in Paddington Street, off Marylebone High Street. It was a place recommended by a friend of his brother’s. The distance could easily have been walked. But was he fit to walk half a mile? She very much wanted to ask him how he was now. Would he stay well? Was he, in fact, cured? She doubted if such a thing was possible.
As soon as they entered the simple little restaurant, Mary sensed that the food would be good, the service efficient and discreet. It was a pretty place, with wooden tables and comfortable seats instead of the rickety glass and wrought-iron kind, mirrors and paintings on the walls, flowers on every table and candles lit.
While they ate he talked of the first donor who had come along. Their tissue was compatible. In fact, it was a perfect match, as close as a brother or sister. But the man was chronically mildly ill himself and he was found medically unfit to donate marrow.
“It was the most appalling disappointment. I was sure I was going to die. I tried to teach myself to be resigned to it, I even wrote out instructions for the kind of funeral I wanted to have.”
“Your mother wasn’t compatible?”
His face was impassive. He no longer met her eyes. “My mother wasn’t tested. She—well, she was afraid of the anesthetic, of going under. She’s never had anesthesia. I can understand.”
This had been her grandmother’s fear. Perhaps it was common, this dread of loss of consciousness, loss of control, a brief experience of death. “There were no other relatives, then?”
“Cousins. Two were tested, but it was no use. Then you came along.” He smiled. “In the nick of time.”
“I’m sure there would have been others.”
“No, I think not. You were the only one in the world.”
There was an intensity in the way he said it and the look he gave her that made her glance away. He seemed to sense her embarrassment and began to talk of indifferent things, his brother’s business, a vague merchandising that meant nothing to her, the place they lived in that he would like to leave when he could, but that had come to them when their mother moved out. A roof over one’s head was not something to be lightly abandoned.
The bill came and she offered to go halves. His expression became stern, a little impatient. “No. Don’t suggest it again, please.”
She recoiled. His severity was unexpected and, gentle herself, she reacted painfully to brusqueness in others. It was almost like being struck and she put up her hand to her cheek, remembering Alistair, fearing verbal attack almost as much as physical. Leo’s smile, warm and somehow conspiratorial, a small, sharing, intimate smile, restored them to where they had been before.
“The only one in the world,” he said again. “You may not care for the idea, but I can’t help feeling that makes for a special relationship.”
She hesitated, then said quietly as they came out into the street, “Oh, no, I feel that too. I don’t see how anyone in our situation could escape feeling that.”
“Shall we walk back?”
It was not for her, she felt, to suggest he might be incapable of walking. But now the half mile she had first thought of as the distance between here and Park Village, in a more realistic estimate became at least a mile.
“If you like.”
She tried to say it grudgingly. Her unwilling tone was assumed to give him the impression walking found no favor with her. If it did he chose to ignore it and they walked side by side up toward the Marylebone Road and the York Gate.
To her relief he had said nothing about the murder. He was the only person she had spoken to in the past three days who had not talked of the murder. Even her grandmother had touched on it with her injunction to the taxi driver. She asked Leo about his parents and he told her his father was dead and his mother lived in Scotland, had married again after his father’s death. His brother Carl was ten years older than he, a clever gifted man, he said, and he added with a smile that he was nearly as much a lifesaver as she. Though Leo didn’t say so, Mary had the impression Carl was gay. Leo only said that he was rather solitary, mysterious about his private life.
At the utterance of this last word, the word “life,” Leo put out one hand to support himself against a shop front. In the artificial light it was hard to see, but Mar
y thought his pallor had intensified. He stood there, breathing carefully, then lowered himself to sit on a wall that reached to waist height.
“You shouldn’t be walking,” she said. “It’s too far. It’s too much for you.”
He nodded. “I’m afraid it is. I’ll be all right in a moment.” The smile he managed reassured her. “This still happens. They warned me it would go on happening.” He seemed to be considering whether what he wanted to say would be wise. The words came out in a rush. “I’m on low-dose chemotherapy. It’s—” he sought for a word “—a bore.”
“We’ll get a taxi.”
Quite a long time passed before one came. It was nearly eleven and Mary, who had been determined this time to ask Leo in, make coffee for him, explain to him how she came to be there and show him over the house, now saw that all this must be postponed. He opened the taxi door for her and she heard him tell the driver to take them first to Park Village West and then take him on alone to Plangent Road.
“May I see you again tomorrow?” he said. “To make up for making a fool of myself tonight? In a subtle sort of way you warned me not to try walking, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to make you believe I was reluctant. I couldn’t do more.”
He turned away and said in a muffled voice, “You do everything quite perfectly.”
She blushed in the dark. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to tell him how glad she was he hadn’t mentioned the murder, but to say anything about it would defeat the purpose of the remark. As the taxi turned into Park Village West he took both her hands in his. His hands felt warmer tonight. They exerted a strong pressure on her, not the grip of a sick man.
“Tomorrow then.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she said.
“All the better. May I come in the morning? May I come at ten?”
“Of course.” Things seemed to be progressing very fast, but why not? What harm could it do? What had she to lose? “Look after yourself,” she said. “Rest. Have a good night’s sleep.” She was aware of the chill of the night as she stood there for a moment. All the flowers were out, gleaming monotone in the pale cold light from street lamps. From a house nearby music was coming softly, but she heard a window close and then all was silent.
The inside of Charlotte Cottage felt warm and Gushi like a soft comforting muff. She buried her hands in his golden fur. The weekend ahead would be the first one she had spent there that would not be lonely and herself forlorn. She took Gushi up to bed with her and dreamed of Leo Nash, a dream in which she came upon him sitting in the park in front of an easel. He was making an architect’s drawing of Sussex Place with its ten Oriental domes and array of Corinthian columns. As she approached he tore the sheet off a drawing block and handed it to her, saying, “You may like to see a compatible tissue-type.”
The thin paper was icy in her hands and before she could look at the drawing it had melted like snow and dripped from her fingers.
• • •
A clock somewhere that she hadn’t yet located was striking the last note of ten when he arrived. He put out his hand as if for a formal hand-shaking but, when he placed hers in it, covered it with the other in a warm intimate gesture. The little dog came running out and without hesitation he picked it up and held it in his arms.
“He is just the sort of dog I’d expect you to have.”
“Why?”
“Small but strong, gentle and appealing, loving, childlike. Not like you but the sort of things you like. Am I right?”
“About the things I like or his being my dog?”
They had come into the living room and sat down. He had glanced at the work Mary had been doing on the Irene Adler brochure and she expected him to ask her about it, but instead he said, looking a little disconcerted, “Isn’t he yours?”
Raised eyebrows, a half smile, his hands deep in the dog’s fur. She had never seen such clear eyes, like glass, water in a smoked glass. He was in jeans this morning, a check shirt, a denim jacket. These boy’s clothes restored his youth.
“I am beginning to wish he was,” she said. “I’ve got very fond of him.”
“You’re looking after him for someone?”
“The owners of this house. Did you think this house was mine, Leo?”
He looked about the room, his eyes resting on a vase, a cabinet, then meeting hers again. “I suppose so. Isn’t it yours?”
“I’m looking after it for an old couple who are friends of my grandmother.”
He smiled. “The assumptions one makes!”
“They’ve gone on holiday to Central America and the United States. They’ve no children and no one to look after the house and the dog. My grandmother’s away too, but only for a couple of weeks. She lives in Hampstead and she’s not up to coming in here every day. She’s over eighty.”
“I’m glad you don’t own this house.”
“Why?”
He was serious now. A pair of frown lines appeared between his eyebrows. “You haven’t seen where I live. I thought you must be rich. I’ll tell you something. When I saw your address on the letter I almost didn’t reply.”
“Is that why it took you so long?”
It was a question, she now understood, that had bothered her for weeks. Why he had waited, why he had condemned her to waiting for the post, to rushing to the phone when it rang. She just stopped herself saying, “So that’s why!”
“I wanted to reply, I wanted desperately to meet you. You still don’t fully realize the depths of my gratitude. But when I saw that address I was—well, deeply disappointed. Taken aback, that may be a better way to put it. I came down here, you know. I came one evening and sneaked a look at the house.”
“How devious,” she said lightly.
“I concluded you were rich and privileged. It was a natural assumption to make. You were rich and therefore not for me, never for me.”
“For you?” she said, the color flooding into her face.
“A figure of speech,” he said. “I’m sorry. Already I—I think of us as close. I can’t help it. You know what the Victorians used to say, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.”
“That was husbands and wives. That was the one flesh of the old marriage service.”
“They didn’t have transplants then.” His sidelong glance and half smile took away her discomfort. “It’s a lovely day. Where shall we have lunch?”
“You must let me give you lunch.”
“Why not? I will now I know you’re not rich.”
9
Roman’s children had been fond of the British Museum. Elizabeth seemed to have passed her affection for it on to Daniel and several times they had accompanied him, both particularly attracted by Egyptian antiquities. It was the museum then that drew him when he felt the need to absent himself for a few days from his usual haunts, and he set up the nearest thing to a home he had on a doorstep in Russell Street.
The temperature had dropped and it was cold, but not cold like winter. He passed a lot of his time in Coram’s Fields, reading Bunin’s stories, which he bought in a secondhand shop in Theobald’s Road. One day, after a visit to the baths and an attempt at smartening up, he went into the museum, and on another, unprecedentedly, to the cinema. His flight from Regent’s Park had been brought about by the discovery of Decker’s body, though he had not known it was Decker then.
For a few minutes he and Effie had stood there, not looking at it, but aware more than they were aware of anything, that it was there. In spite of himself and in spite of what he thought of as his new toughness, the result of true street wisdom, Roman had felt his throat rise and the awful black weakness that precedes vomiting take hold of him. But he had turned his eyes from that hand with the clawed fingers, from those booted feet and the blackened blood on the railing, and looked up at the cold purity of the morning sky. And slowly, while he held on to Effie and she clutched him, the nausea had passed. Whatever Effie felt, trembling and pale, looking up at him for help, also passed. He heard h
er sigh throatily.
The street was still deserted, the place still silent. Only now was the traffic beginning to swell in Wellington Road and its muted thunder to reach them. A van passed, its driver staring straight ahead.
“You go, Effie,” he said. “Go into the park. Go back through the churchyard into the park. And say nothing. You haven’t seen this. You haven’t been here. Say nothing.”
There was little fear of that. She could speak, but she seldom did more than mutter or curse passersby who cringed from her. He looked into her face. It was blank, snub-nosed, the eyes round and protuberant, the pink-brown skin smooth like a child’s. The woolen scarf that wrapped her head smelled of old damp sheep.
So ingrained was his middle-classness, his education, his gentility, that it was impossible for him ever to feel the same toward a woman as he had before he made love to her. Strange term for what had passed between him and Effie, but what other to use that would not also revolt his middle-classness? He and Effie, though in grotesque circumstances, had performed that act that must make him forever feel some tenderness for her. He could never be otherwise than aware of a bond between them, though she hadn’t spoken his name, was probably unaware of what it was.
He put his arms round her, hugged her tightly, and sent her off with a gentle push along the path. Then he too left the churchyard, uncertain what to do, uncertain whether to do anything. What he and Effie had seen on the railings back there he was very nearly sure no one else had seen before them. Except whoever had done this deed, always excepting him.
He tramped up St. John’s Wood High Street—the meaning of the word “tramp” had been made manifest to him this past year and a half—until he came to a phone box. There he calculated his chances. All calls could be quickly traced, he was sure of that, but he had his voice to rely on. An anonymous call made in the accent of Westminster School and Cambridge would hardly lead police to the vagrant with his barrow.
