by Ruth Rendell
Leo went into the living room and sat on the sofa, perfectly still, as if in a trance. Unusually for him, he put out no hand to fondle the little dog as it pressed itself against his legs. He said in a curiously intense tone, “Tell me about your grandmother. Tell me all about her and your childhood and everything.”
It was what she had wanted. She began talking to him of things never previously aired. The idea of telling Alistair of the day when, newly orphaned but not yet knowing it, she had been brought to her grandparents, how she had felt, was unthinkable. But she could tell Leo, who sat listening intently, his eyes sometimes meeting hers, his lips sometimes parting in a smile. She spoke of those early days. Frederica had seemed old, but when you are eight all grownups seem old. Children are quickly won over and a devotion in them is easily awakened. The oddest thing was that from the first Frederica was nicer than her own mother had been.
“It seems disloyal. It’s something people don’t say, that their adoptive parents were better than their natural parents. But mine were. My parents were very young, my mother was only twenty-one when I was born. They only married because I was going to be born. And afterward they wanted to go on living the same sort of life they always had. I think my mother must have resented me. I remember her as indifferent and rather rejecting. Why am I telling you all this?”
“Because I asked you.”
“And that’s enough? Maybe it is. My parents died when someone’s private plane they were flying in from an airfield in Essex to France came down in the Channel. I was unhappy at first, of course I was. I think my grandparents were very unhappy, they’d lost their only child, but they never showed it to me. She was called Helen, my mother. That’s why I took the name when I had to write that note for you. Guilt, I expect it was, though, not love.
“I loved my grandparents. I adored my grandmother. And, you know, the air crash, which was so terrible for them and supposed to be for me—I once overheard a woman say to my grandmother that it was the great tragedy that had blighted my childhood—it was romantic, it was something to have and almost to boast about, it set me apart in a rather dashing way from the other girls at school. If some power, some genie, had asked me if I would like my parents back, I’d have said no. But I’d never have told anyone; I’d have been ashamed.”
“But you’re not ashamed to tell me?”
“No. Strange, isn’t it?”
He said, “I want you to think you can tell me anything. I want to be the person you can talk to.” He stood up, a little unsteadily, she thought, and for a moment he put his hand on his forehead. “I must go now. May I come back tomorrow?”
“I’ve tired you,” she said.
“No. You’re the last person to tire me. You refresh me.” He spoke like a child, a very young boy. “Can I have a proper kiss?”
She nodded. He put his arms round her and kissed her, but very softly, very gently. His mouth tasted of some scented spice, cinnamon perhaps or cardamom. Afterward she thought it had been like no other kiss she had ever known, and if she had had to explain what she meant she would have said it was nonphysical, like a kiss in the mind, or like kissing someone not of this world, a wraith, a spirit, a ghostly visitant.
“You will come back?” she said eagerly.
“I promise.”
He looked less ill the next day, though his thinness was extreme. She had the illusion that she could see through him as he passed through the hall and came into the living room, could see the shapes of furniture and the colors of cloth through his transparent form. They drank wine and she made lunch for them. He told her about his feelings for his brother.
“I love him and he loves me,” he said. “Does that sound terrible to you, coming from a man?”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“He’s done everything for me. Given up everything too. He was at drama school, he’s a wonderful actor, but he gave that up to be with me every day when I was so ill, so that I’d never be alone. He’s been more than a father to me.”
“I’d like to meet him.”
He didn’t answer that but said rather abruptly, “I’m moving out, I’m getting a place of my own.”
“But why, if you get on so well?”
“Because it’s not fair on him, Mary. I drag him down. I spoil his privacy. Besides, it’s his place but he gives up the bedroom to me and sleeps on the sofa.”
He had found a flat in Primrose Hill, in Edis Street, no more than a room with kitchen area and shower really, but it would do. She searched her mind for ways of putting it, finally came out with, “Leo, I’m going to be quite rich. My grandmother left me a lot of money. If there is anything I could—”
He cut her short. It was like that first time when he had reacted so peremptorily to her offer of paying her share of the bill. “Absolutely not. Please don’t even think of it.”
They had left the table and were once more side by side on the sofa, Gushi at their feet.
“I very much dislike the idea of your being rich,” Leo said. There was an unprecedented distaste in his voice, though rather than rising in volume it had sunk almost to a whisper. “You may say that it’s none of my business but—but I want things about you to be my business, Mary.”
He looked deep into her eyes. She felt her face flood with color. Seeing the flush, he put up one finger to touch her cheek. The other hand followed. He took her face in his hands and kissed her with the gentleness of a woman kissing a child. Then, when she was unresistant, he began a soft delicate kissing, his lips on hers, then brushing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her mouth once more. The gentleness of it, the slowness, aroused her. She expected every moment a crushing embrace, hard lips, a tongue that prized her mouth open and reached chokingly, like some surgical probe, for the back of her throat. Leo kissed her lips and stroked her cheek. Her body, which she now felt to have been stiff and tense for weeks, the muscles held rigidly, began to slacken and melt.
“There is something I would very much like to do,” he whispered. “May I ask you? If you say no, we’ll just go on sitting here, but if you say yes …”
“What is it, Leo?”
“I would like to lie down and hold you. That’s all, just hold you.”
She nodded.
“I mean just hold you,” he said. “Not anything more.” He gave a dry unhappy laugh. “That has to be all, I think.”
They went upstairs. He seemed quite unselfconscious when he took off his outer clothes. She looked at a skeletal but still beautiful body, straight, smooth, as white as her own. It would have seemed ridiculous, in anticipation or retrospect, to go to bed with a man in her underclothes, he in underpants, she in bra and tights, but in the present, as a happening, it was natural. She wondered where he had received the transplant but could see no mark on him.
In bed he held her in his arms. She had always found this position a difficult one with Alistair, for if maintained for more than a few minutes, the arm under his body would “go to sleep,” as would his under her, while the other possibility, that of embracing him with one arm and folding the other behind her, brought an intolerable ache to her shoulder. But Leo held her without demanding that she hold him. She laid one arm across his chest, the other on her own breasts. He held her firmly but not tightly, and if the arm under her body grew numb he gave no sign of it. He did not speak. She had to remind herself that he was six years younger than she, for he held her as an innocent father might hold his child.
Not since she was a child herself, not since those days when she was laid down for a rest in the afternoon—by that mother who was only too glad, if the truth were known, for an hour of peace—had Mary slept in the daytime. But she slept now and Leo slept. His, she thought, waking after the unbelievable period of two whole hours, was the heavy slumber of a man who has missed out on sleep for too long and has a hundred hours to make up. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at his face, the narrow lips relaxed in sleep, the pale skin in places prematurely lined, the veined lid
s over his closed eyes, membranes like purplish leaves. When he was a child his hair must have been white, for even now it was only faintly colored, the shade of sun-bleached straw.
Something told him she had moved away, for blindly in sleep he reached for her. But not in the way other men had done, not as Alistair had done, seizing her roughly and pulling her down into a hard embrace and bruising kisses that made her lips sore and her gums bleed. Without opening his eyes, Leo felt for her hand and, taking it in his, brought it to his mouth. He kissed her hand gently, the wrist, the back of it, the knuckles. She thought, what is happening to me? Am I falling in love with him? Is it the strangeness of him that fascinates me, or is it that I feel an ever and ever stronger need to look after him?
I do need that. I need to bring him here and care for him. It is as if I have begun the process of healing him and I must carry it through. Soon I must let him go, I must let him go home, but I am afraid that when he goes, when he is out of my sight and my care, he will fail and fall and become ill again. Oh, if only I could keep him here I know I could restore him and then, one day …
Bean was back. The bell rang once, then again insistently. She put on a dressing gown, picked Gushi up into her arms and went down to answer the door. Bean smiled his obsequious smile, his eyes cold and empty. He thrust a package into her hand.
“Photos of the little chap, Miss,” he said. “Just to take a look. No obligation to purchase.”
14
While in Maurice Clitheroe’s employ Bean had drunk heavily. Sometimes he had drunk to excess. There was always a lot of liquor in the house and he had helped himself. If Clitheroe knew, and he must have known, he never said anything. Perhaps he understood that Bean couldn’t do the job he did without a stimulant and a sedative. It was no joke, as Bean often said to himself, being the companion, servant, pimp, and nurse of a serious masochist.
Most of the young people who came to the house in York Terrace were in it only for the money. They took no more pleasure in beating a fat old man than Bean did in doing his shopping and cooking his tournedos. But one or two were different. Bean, admitting them to the house, could see it in their faces and in the fixed stare of their half-mesmerized eyes. They were sadists, and when the whip or the cane was in their hands there was no stopping their frenzy.
It was then, hearing Clitheroe’s screams and unable to sort pain from pleasure—or were they the same?—that Bean took the brown ale chasers with glass after glass of cheap Spanish brandy. Sometimes he was almost too far gone to see the visitor off the premises, but he had to persevere, he had to keep as steady as he could, for afterward Clitheroe needed his ministrations.
Once he found him unconscious. On another occasion he wanted to take his employer to Emergency, but Clitheroe, gasping on the floor, open weals on his naked back that bled into the Turkey carpet—fortunately predominantly crimson already—forbade his phoning for an ambulance on pain of dismissal. Bean passed out himself later, on brandy and brown ale.
There was one young man, nameless but called by him The Beater, that he particularly remembered. If the eyes were the windows of the soul, as Anthony Maddox said they were, he had no soul, for looking into his eyes was like looking into empty holes. There was nothing beyond. The tip of his nose and his upper lip were pinkish as if he had rubbed them with sandpaper. He walked gracefully, his body straight and relaxed, his shoulders permanently lifted and his knees ever so slightly bent. After his visits Maurice Clitheroe was in a worse state than after any other beatings or being ridden up the stairs or having sharp objects threaded into soft parts of his body.
He was sixty-seven, Bean’s own age. His body was covered with scars, as a constantly abused slave’s must be. Bean had never seen anything like it. He advised Clitheroe not to let The Beater come again, but his employer took no notice. Bean was not fanciful, he admitted with some satisfaction that he had no imagination, yet he thought to himself that, peculiar though it was, Clitheroe was in love with The Beater. He was obsessed by him. He desperately needed him. And The Beater killed him.
Or that was Bean’s view of it. The beating Clitheroe got that evening was the worst Bean had ever known. Of course he was not a witness to it, he never was, and when the screams began, he swigged brandy directly out of the bottle and hid himself in his bed with the quilt stuffed into his ears. The Beater let himself out and Bean never saw him again. Clitheroe had a hemorrhagic stroke.
His doctor, from Harley Street, just across the road, knew all about Clitheroe’s proclivities. He didn’t look at the old man’s body below the neck. By the time Clitheroe died ten days later the worst of the evidence had faded, though Bean had sometimes wondered what the undertakers thought.
So long as no one blames me, was his philosophy, and no one did. He gradually stopped drinking once the funeral was over. He was interested in getting fit before it was too late, and now it had come down to one whiskey and two bottles of brown ale in the Globe on a Friday night. Freddie Lawson called the Globe “a real pub, all spit and sawdust and sausage sandwiches,” and Bean’s dinner on a Friday was not exactly a sausage but a veggie-burger sandwich with Branston pickle and sometimes a plate of chips.
He wanted to find out the identity of the round-headed man who had asked for a light on the bridge last Sunday. Freddie knew nothing about it and Peter Carrow refused to say anything until Bean told him why he needed to know. The air in the Globe was blue with smoke. It made Bean hoarse and he had to raise his voice. Several people stared at him.
“Who d’you think you’re looking at?” Bean said belligerently.
An American tourist turned his face away. Bean glared at those who kept on staring. One of them was maybe the mate of the round-headed man.
“You been drinking before you come in here?” said Carrow.
“I’m not pissed, so don’t make insinuations.” Bean dipped a chip in Branston pickle and popped it into his mouth. “There’s a feller I’m on the lookout for. Got a pal with a head like Mussolini.”
“Who?” said Carrow, who was a mere forty-five, and without waiting to hear, “What d’you want him for?”
Bean told him, not lowering his voice much. “It must be him overheard me talking in here.”
Freddie Lawson started laughing.
“A Hawaii! Where did he get that from? A Hawaii!”
“I can’t afford it,” said Bean. “Shame, because I reckon Mussolini’d do a good job.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” said Carrow, “when a working man has to do the Filth’s dirty work for them.”
The American tourist, on his way out, whispered to Bean, “Hawaii Five-O, right?”
“And you can keep your nose out of my business,” said Bean.
The round-headed man’s friend failed to declare himself and Bean had to go home unsatisfied. While he was out at the shops the next morning he considered walking over to the cash dispenser outside Barclay’s in Baker Street. Perhaps Mussolini wouldn’t want it all at once but would accept twenty-five before the assault on Clancy and twenty-five after the deed was done. He started to cross the Marylebone Road before the lights changed, but he was too late and retreated angrily when a van nearly mowed him down. The driver stuck up two fingers in response to Bean’s raised fist.
A few years back, someone had been hit by a van just about here. Well, in Luxborough Street, same difference. A laundry and dry cleaner’s van it was. The one who was in the way had only been one of those beggars, so it didn’t matter much. After that the van had skidded and hit a wall and the driver, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, had been thrown out and found by the ambulance men draped over the spiked railings of the mansion flats. Bean remembered the case well and remembered Mr. Clitheroe reading it out of the paper to him as he often did; he liked reading aloud.
The beggar had been killed instantly, hadn’t felt a thing, no doubt, but the driver, for all he’d three broken ribs, had been found guilty of manslaughter, not just careless driving, and he’d gone to prison.
Not for all that long, though going to prison at all Bean thought a monstrous injustice. But it went to show how dangerous the streets were round here.
With Clancy incapacitated he would be able to use the tunnel again.
Mr. Cornell came to the door. In the time it had taken Bean to exercise Boris, Valerie Conway had gone away on her summer holidays. Cornell, at any rate, was a gentleman, coming to the front door, not expecting Bean to go down into the area. Bean told him about the photos he’d taken of Boris and Mr. Cornell seemed interested, said that if Bean would drop a selection in sometime he’d like to have a look.
With no Valerie to needle or be needled by and no stairs to climb, he got to Devonshire Street five minutes early and saw through a downstairs window Erna Morosini kissing a man. They were both in dressing gowns. The man wasn’t her husband, Bean was sure of that, and maybe he could make something of it, maybe it would lead to an augmentation of his funds. The trouble was that Mrs. Morosini looked not at all disconcerted when she answered his ring, but was all smiles, happier than he’d ever seen her.
“I’d love to see photos of Ruby. Will you drop them in? Not naughty ones, mind!”
That made up his mind for him. He could afford it. He was going to increase his income, would buy a new camera and draw out fifty pounds for Mussolini. The beggar with the beagle was sitting outside the Screen on Baker Street when he got over there, and talking to him, or standing beside him and wearing a typically evil expression, was Clancy, the key man. His hair had the blue sheen of a peacock’s feather; the sun shining on his keys made a breastplate of them and made Clancy look, in Bean’s eyes, like some demon god in a Hammer film. Bean went into one of the Sherlock Holmes souvenir shops and bought the red baseball cap with a picture of Holmes in a white circle he’d seen in the window. It was summer weight, with a perforated crown.
