The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  No voice came out of the grille. He must have seen her from a window. The door trembled and growled, came open as she pushed it. She started to walk up the stairs, more quickly when he called to her from above.

  “Come up. How wonderful of you to come!”

  He was standing in the open doorway. She was learning that he didn’t want to kiss or even touch her when first they met. It was just that they stood close together for an instant, looking into each other’s faces. They did this now and she felt her own expression echoing his with a small conspiratorial smile.

  It was an ordinary little room that he had, two open doors off it disclosing the whole of his small domain. A very tidy man might have been living there for six months, the kind of man with a place for everything and everything in that place. Roses from a garden, not a florist’s, filled a blue vase on the windowsill. He had been hanging curtains. One was up and the other, half its rings inserted, lay draped across the back of his single armchair.

  “I was about to phone you and ask you to come,” he said, “but I didn’t need to. You read my mind.”

  She looked about her and a warm joy flooded her, filling her body and her head, until it seemed it must break out of her in happy laughter. “I was afraid—well, a bit apprehensive about coming. I thought you might not be too pleased.”

  He put his arms round her and laid his cheek against hers. She was aware as he held her of that peculiar feeling she had when with him of twinship, of being uncannily like him, older certainly, but physically so similar and with the same tentativeness, caution, shyness, gentleness, and fingertip-feeling sensitivity.

  “I will always be too pleased,” he said. “I will be too pleased for words, for anything. I can’t tell you how pleased.” He saw her arm and frowned at the angry red marks. “Who has hurt you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter now, Leo.”

  17

  From force of habit Bean had continued to take delivery of a newspaper after Maurice Clitheroe died, and one day he had come upon an article about sixteen homosexual men convicted of assault for practicing particularly violent sadomasochism. In spite of the participants’ admitted consent all had been sent to prison.

  Bean heartily agreed with this verdict. In his view, consent or no consent, people needed protection from others’ perversions, and he, he told himself, should know. But he was disgusted to find this sort of thing in a newspaper, reminding him of what he hoped to have put behind him forever. Anyone might read it and get ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have crossed their minds. That was the last time he was going to read that paper, or indeed any paper. What, after all, was the telly for but to provide a pleasanter and easier-on-the-eye alternative to all these Timeses and Daily thises and thats?

  Concentration wasn’t required to nearly the same extent. You could get up and make yourself a cup of tea or fetch in a cress and Marmite sandwich and when you got back it was still merrily spilling out the news, same faces, same music, and if the pictures were different you hardly noticed, you couldn’t remember what the last ones had been. Thus it was that, although Bean saw all about the murder on Primrose Hill, knew the victim was another vagrant, once again impaled on railing spikes, he had been out in the kitchen making a mug of Earl Grey when the man was identified. He hadn’t been much interested. If he thought about it at all it was to reflect that the police hadn’t caught Cahill’s killer and that the chances were they didn’t try all that hard, weren’t bothered when the victim was one of those beggars.

  He had breakfast television on while he ate his breakfast. It was orange juice, muesli, a Danish pastry, and a cup of tea, and in the mornings the news was the BBC’s offering, all those teenagers and cartoon bears and dinosaurs being a bit too much to stomach at seven-fifteen A.M. Nothing on it about the second dead man on the railings, that had been a flash in the pan, and he only kept the set on because he hadn’t quite finished his tea. Bean already had his new baseball cap on and his Marks and Spencer’s bottle-green cardigan, for the early mornings were chilly. He was thinking about switching off and setting forth to Mrs. Morosini’s, his first port of call, when the doorbell rang.

  Nobody ever called at this hour. Mystified, on his way out with his key in his pocket, he went to answer the door. Two men were there, both young. Bean thought one of them looked only about seventeen. The older one had a hatchet face and pitted cheeks, the way it was quite fashionable to have if you were a pop star or in cowboy films. They didn’t look to him like police officers, but they said they were, an inspector and a sergeant, and they flashed warrant cards at him while they told him names he didn’t catch.

  Bean always thought of sadomasochism, even now, after all this time. They had caught up with him, even though he had done nothing more than he was told.

  “What d’you want?” he said, his voice squeaky.

  “May we come in?”

  “I was just going off to my work.”

  They seemed to know all about his work and for some reason it amused them. The older one said he could give his work a miss that morning because, on second thought, instead of coming in they’d like him to accompany them to the police station. Then the younger one said there would be no harm in his phoning a client—one phone call only, mind—to say he was canceling this morning’s walk.

  Bean hardly knew whom to phone, who would be the best bet. He had to make up his mind fast and settled on Valerie Conway, back from holiday the day before, and in his estimation the closest to him of all of them in class and calling. The two policemen stood there watching him in a very laid-back sort of way.

  “I’m not well,” he said when she answered. He didn’t know what he would have done if Mr. or Mrs. Cornell had answered. “I was wondering if you’d give the others a ring and let them know.”

  “What, all five of them?”

  “It wouldn’t take a minute. There’s Mrs. Morosini and her number is …”

  “I’ll phone her,” said Valerie. “She can phone the others. What’s wrong with you, anyway? Laryngitis? It sounds like you’ve lost your voice.”

  The policemen escorted Bean to their car. He told them he had never had anything to do with those perverts, only opened the door to them and looked after Mr. Clitheroe when he was hurt and handed over payment when he was unconscious. They were amused but seemed not to know what he was talking about. He was inside the station and in an interview room before he got an inkling and then it was slow in coming.

  “You drew fifty pounds out of your bank account at the end of last week,” said the inspector, now understood by Bean to be called Marnock.

  How did they know? How could they know? He nodded and his head went on nodding like one of those toy dogs people used to have in the rear windows of cars.

  “What would that have been for, then?”

  A phrase came to Bean from out of somewhere. “Day-to-day general running expenses,” he said and he tried to clear his throat.

  “Got a cough, have you?” said the young one.

  “Must be all that dog-walking in the damp,” said Marnock. “Funny you’ve never drawn anything before for these day-to-day running expenses. Not for, let’s see—” he looked at a notebook on the table “—seven months. That’s right, seven months since you last made a withdrawal from that account.”

  Now he was pretty sure none of it had anything to do with Clitheroe and his practices, Bean was gaining courage. He affected a final throat-clearing. “I don’t know what right you’ve got to go poking about in my private bank account,” he said. “What’s all this about?”

  “Now he asks,” said the young one. “Who’s Mussolini, Leslie? I can call you Leslie, can’t I? Or do you prefer Les?”

  If he hadn’t been so shocked at hearing the name of Mussolini uttered like that, Bean would have reacted violently to being called by his given name. He had hated it ever since his schooldays in that Hampshire village and since then no one had used it. He was always Bean. Bean,
as far as everyone knew, was what he might have been christened. But hearing himself called Leslie was nothing to hearing the name he personally, he a one, had given to the anonymous hit man encountered once on the Hanover Gate bridge.

  He tried playing the innocent. “He was Italian, like the leader of Italy in the war. Like Hitler.”

  The change in Marnock was shocking. He seemed galvanized. He leapt to his feet and stood over Bean, shouting, “Don’t give me that. Don’t you play games with me. Who’s the man you called Mussolini when you were shooting your mouth off in the Globe?”

  “I don’t know his name.” Bean’s voice was still strong, but he had started to shake. He tried to stop his knees knocking together. “I don’t know what he’s called. I called him Mussolini because he looks like him. The spitting image of him, only young like.”

  They had this nasty way of changing the subject, just when you thought you were getting somewhere. “You don’t like homeless people, do you, Les?”

  Bean picked what he thought was the politically correct thing to say. “It’s not right for a great nation like ours to have beggars on its streets.”

  Marnock laughed. It was as if he couldn’t help laughing, though he would have liked to. “So you’d solve the problem in Hitler’s way, would you? Couldn’t quite call it ethnic cleansing—the Final Solution, is that it?”

  Maybe the young one could tell Bean hadn’t the least idea what Marnock meant, for he reverted to an earlier tack.

  “What did you draw the money out for, Les?”

  “It was for Mussolini, wasn’t it?” said Marnock. “What was he going to do for it?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I never saw him.”

  “You what?” Marnock was standing over him again.

  “I mean, I saw him once, he never came back, I never saw him again. I went back but he never turned up. He never did, I swear it.”

  “What was he going to do,” said Marnock, “for this princely sum?”

  “I said, I never saw him again.”

  “Kill Clancy, that was it, wasn’t it?”

  “Not kill him,” Bean protested. “Not that. I never wanted that. Rough him up a bit—and why not? He’d mugged me, he’d taken a good bit more than fifty quid off me, I can tell you. Mussolini, whatever his name is, him, he was going to do the same, that’s all, he—” A gradual, awful realization was dawning. The railings, the second vagrant, the vital part of the news he’d missed to make his tea. “I want a lawyer,” he said. “I can have a lawyer, can’t I?”

  “Of course you can, Leslie,” said Marnock. “I think that’s a very good idea.”

  • • •

  Their natures and ways were uncannily the same. And this was wonderful to discover, each shared emotion, reaction, approach, a relief to find. It was not just that he kept his home precisely as she kept hers, clean, neat, airy, that he dressed simply, got up early, was as good-tempered and warm first thing in the morning as when they at last put out the lights, but that they seemed to like and need and want all the same things. She had only to mention a taste or preference for him to confess a similar leaning. He even had the same sort of food in his fridge as she had in hers. In his bathroom, when she went to take her shower, was the brand of soap she used.

  It was almost as if he had set out to make himself the same kind of person. When his phone rang he answered it by giving the number, as she did; he said “good-bye,” not “bye-bye”; and when someone downstairs slammed the front door he winced and smiled at his wincing, which would have been just her own reaction.

  Their lovemaking, when it finally happened, was what she had wistfully envisaged but never before quite known. With Alistair, and with a boyfriend or two before Alistair, she had tried to achieve the ideal she had made for herself long before. But, reluctantly, she had faced what seemed a universal truth, that her particular wish and need were not acceptable to men. They might not be violent or aggressive, but they were urgent, demanding, determined to make the rules, certain of what was right. If they acceded to her—and from time to time they did—there was always a feeling she had that they were keeping her sweet, being “patient,” giving in so that they might get their own way next time. She had been called frigid by each of them, when they lost their tempers. Until Leo, she had almost reached a point of seeing herself as wrong and the Alistairs of this world as right. She had almost resolved that next time, whenever that was and with whom, she would accept the male attitude and try somehow to teach herself to like it. No doubt, that, like anything else, could be learned. But with Leo there had been nothing to learn or unlearn or make decisions about. She needed to ask him nothing, nor direct his hands, nor resist his urgency, nor pull away from the hardness of lips and teeth. He was as gentle as she, as languid, and—until the end when she, for once, was imperative and demanding—as slow and delicate with his caresses. But at that end she had cried out as those others had always expected her to cry and had held him in an embrace she was fearful of afterward, in case her strength was greater than his.

  That had been three nights earlier, the time of her flight from Alistair. The next evening Leo came to her and, though she worried that Alistair might arrive, might turn up on the doorstep at any moment, she forgot him after a while. Discovering Leo, she forgot everything, lying in his arms, talking to him, caring for him. For it was inescapable, that feeling she must look after him, that he needed her as much to watch over his health, his fragile body, as for a lover.

  Side by side in the warm evening, they were each as white as a marble statue, not a mark, a flaw, a flush of color on their milky paleness. She could scarcely see in the dusk where the skin of his thigh ended and hers began. Only his face, in repose, the bluish eyelids closed, looked more tired than hers, looked, she fancied, older than hers. But that perhaps was the fantasy of a woman of thirty, wishing to be nearer her young lover’s age.

  Their hair was nearly the same color, hers of a slightly finer texture, a clearer gold. The down on her arms was the same thistledown stuff as his. Each had the same kind of freckle sprinkling, pale gold, sparse, on the bridges of their noses. If their features were quite different, it was only as a brother and a sister’s may be, each taking genes from a different parent. Their skin was the same matte-fine white, skin that perhaps lined early, though hers, in spite of her seniority, had fewer lines than his. She looked at those lines tenderly, touching them with a warm fingertip.

  They had talked, earlier, of this similarity and Leo had pointed out what should have occurred to her but for some reason had not, that in people whose blood and tissue types matched so perfectly, resemblance was more likely than not. Wouldn’t it have been far stranger if one of them had been dark and the other fair or one heavy and big-boned and the other slight? She had searched among the trust’s literature and found one of its leaflets, the one with a happy smiling photograph of two young men, donor and recipient, and yes, Leo was right, they were much the same height, with the same coloring, the same smile. “We may even be distantly related,” she said.

  “I’m your lover,” Leo said. “I don’t want to be your cousin.”

  He stayed all night with her. She slept better than she had since coming to Charlotte Cottage. Gushi came upstairs in the small hours and snuggled into the space between their feet. Leo didn’t mind. He got up first and made her tea. It was gone eight and she was still in bed when the phone rang. He took the receiver off and handed it to her. The voice said it was Edwina Goldsworthy and Bean wouldn’t be taking the dogs out. Maybe he wouldn’t be taking them out for a couple of days. He was ill. Some sort of inflammation of the throat, Lisl Pring had said.

  So she and Leo had taken Gushi into the park and in a way she had been glad of Bean’s bad throat because it meant she could spend the next night with Leo, of course taking the dog with her. For the first time she was feeling the constriction imposed by becoming a house-sitter. She was bound to remain at Charlotte Cottage until September, and once Bean was back, remain t
here every night because of Gushi. Alistair, in Leo’s place, would have told her not to be bound to the Blackburn-Norrises, there had been no formal contract, but Leo did not. In his eyes the agreement was just as binding as if it had been drawn up by a solicitor and witnessed. In short, he felt the same as she did. “And I don’t think I could quite move in with you,” he said.

  She hadn’t suggested it, they had known each other only a few weeks, but it was what she wanted.

  “There would be something—not sordid exactly, but not what I want for us, if they were to come back and—well, find us. It will be better for us to be forced to wait until September.” He spoke very seriously. “I would like everything to be aboveboard.”

  She said softly, “What is it that you want for us, Leo?”

  “At the moment,” he said, “I’m still teaching myself to believe what’s happened. That you’re who you are, the woman who saved my life, that I’ve met you, and that you’re—” he hesitated and his face flushed the way hers did “—the other half of me.”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes.”

  “I’m falling in love with you, of course I am, but it’s almost as if I was in love with you before we met, I’d made an ideal image of you and by a kind of miracle you are that image come to life.” He smiled at her, took her in his arms. “It’s not easy getting used to that,” he said. “I don’t want us to have any secrets, Mary. May we tell each other everything about ourselves, tell our whole lives?”

  So they had begun doing that. He told her about his childhood with ambitious failures for parents, a father whose career as an athlete had been ruined by a ruptured Achilles tendon while training to run in the Olympic team and a mother who had twice failed to acquire through correspondence courses and evening classes the degree she longed for.