The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  He had a Birdseye Lean Cuisine for his lunch and watched Emmerdale on television. After that, feeling cheerful, he told himself that nothing ventured, nothing gained. All his clients’ phone numbers were written down in the accounts book he kept. As he dialed Barker-Pryce’s number he thought, if she answers or some secretary or whatever I’ll just put the phone down. When he heard Barker-Pryce speak, his throat dried.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  He managed to speak. “It’s Bean, sir. The one who walks the dogs.”

  “What d’you want? Speak up.”

  “I was wondering,” said Bean, his rising anger strengthening his voice, “if you’d like to see some really beautiful photographs I’ve taken of Charlie. They’re smashing, sir, I think you’d like them.”

  He was well named Barker. The noise he made, a laugh presumably, was much the same sound as that coming from McBride when he put up a mandarin duck.

  “That’s rich. Coming from you. You walked the animal, right? When did I give you permission to use it as a model?”

  Bean drew a deep breath, expelled it, said, “Talking of models, sir, I nearly mentioned these pix the other evening when I saw you in Paddington with the young lady.”

  Silence. Bean seemed to smell cigar smoke.

  “I’d been buying a paper, Mr. Barker-Pryce. A newspaper. It was to read that article about the gentleman from the government and the lady in the hotel. I expect you know him, don’t you, sir?”

  The voice was quieter this time, the tone more polite. “What exactly do you want?”

  “Among other things, a reference, if you please, sir. For a lady with a dalmatian. I wondered if I might drop in after I’ve taken my other dogs for their walk. Say about five-thirty?”

  19

  It took Roman a while to find out where she lived. He felt a natural aversion to spying on her. But one Saturday, he saw her in Primrose Hill and with the utmost discretion followed her home.

  He had been in a secondhand bookshop in Regent’s Park Road and there found an old work, published in 1840, called Colburn’s Calendar of Amusements. The bookseller only wanted two pounds for it, for it was in a ragged battered state. Roman stood in the shop doorway, reading a passage from it that touched him, that seemed to parallel in a zany, awkward way his own state.

  The lion in the collection of the Zoological gardens was brought, with his lioness, from Tunis, and as the keeper informed us, they lived most lovingly together. Their dens were separated only by an iron railing, sufficiently low to allow of their jumping over. One day, as the lioness was amusing herself leaping from one den to the other, while her lord looked on, apparently highly delighted with her gaiety, she unfortunately struck her foot against the top of the railing, and was precipitated backwards; the fall proved fatal, for, upon examination, it was found she had broken her spine. The grief of her partner was excessive, and, although it did not show itself with the same violence as in a previous instance, it proved equally fatal: a deep melancholy took possession of him, and he pined to death in a few weeks.

  Deep melancholy may kill lions, but not human beings. Not even the deepest grief kills them, for men have died from time to time but not of love.… He was remembering, incongruously, how when he was a boy the zoo’s telephone exchange was called Primrose and remembering too a joke about dialing Primrose 1000 and asking for Mr. Lion, when he looked up and saw her pass by on the opposite pavement.

  She might not have been walking home but somehow he fancied she was. He put the book in his pocket and began to walk in the direction she was going. If she looked back, he thought, he would abandon his pursuit of her. He would give it up at once, for she must on no account be made afraid of him. How much, how infinitely much, he would have liked to read that account of the poor lion’s fate to Sally, for there seemed no one else in the world to whom he could read it or tell it and who would react with the same tender sympathy. But she was not in the world, she was nowhere, ageless, lost, with her dead children.

  The fair-haired girl, the Irene Adler girl, crossed the road ahead of him and then Albert Road and made her way into the park by way of St. Mark’s Bridge, over the Outer Circle and into the Broad Walk. She hadn’t once looked back. But why would she? She wasn’t Lot’s wife, leaving the Cities of the Plain, or Orpheus hoping Eurydice followed on behind. The walk was shady here, much overhung by trees, chestnuts and planes in heavy leaf. The two wolves, penned behind double wire fences, explored and sniffed their territory like dogs. He saw her turn to look at them but not pause. She took the first of the two left-hand paths that led to the Gloucester Gate.

  He had been making his nightly home in the Grotto for nearly three weeks now, the longest time he had spent in any one place. And all the while, it seemed, she had been quite near him, for she had crossed the Outer Circle and was leading him along Albany Street. Park Village West. If she went in there she must live there, for it was a crescent, leading nowhere but back to that northbound artery. It was quiet, a bower of trees and flowers, green, scented, but the leaves a little dusty, for this after all was near the heart of London.

  She hadn’t once looked back, but she did so at the gate of a pretty Italianate house, and seeing him, not knowing that he had been behind her all the way from Primrose Hill, lifted up her hand and waved.

  Only a woman in a million, he thought, would say hello to me, smile at me, and when there had been some hellos and smiles, wave to me. And he wondered if he should stay a while to see if her brother came home, but it might be hours, the brother might be in there now, and he turned away, opening his book and reading it as he walked along.

  • • •

  Someone had come and boarded up his windows. Hob didn’t know who because he had been out most of the day, trying to get what he wanted out of the bunch of stony-hearted people he knew or was related to. He got home late, spaced out and low on the pediatric Valium syrup, which was all he’d been able to get out of his half-sister. It didn’t do much for him beyond making him sleepy so that at least he was too tired to feel all the intensity of a state.

  He’d first gone for help to his half-sister’s boyfriend. This man, the father of her youngest child, made crack himself by mixing cocaine and bicarbonate of soda and baking the resultant paste in a microwave. He offered it to Hob at ten percent less than its street value, or he said it was ten percent, Hob couldn’t work it out. But Hob had already handed over all his giro money to Lew under the Chinese trees and he was skint. The boyfriend shrugged and said too bad. His half-sister took pity on him, or more likely wanted him out of the house, and said she’d got a bottle of the kids’ Valium he could have. They were supposed to have it in their bottles but she and the boyfriend found whiskey more effective.

  After that he proceeded to his cousin’s place in one of the blocks off Lisson Grove. The cousin and two of his mates were sitting in front of a hard-core video smoking weed. They passed the joint to Hob more or less as a matter of course, but none of them would give him any money or even lend him any. The cousin said he knew a man he’d met in a pub that might want a job done and he told Hob where he might find this man, giving him a funny look when he saw him swigging out of a kid’s medicine bottle.

  The pediatric Valium tasted very sweet and of something that brought back Hob’s childhood. He couldn’t think what it was and he was too sleepy to think much anyway. He hung about the newsagent’s the man used for a long while, bought a couple of scratch cards, getting nothing up of course but a couple of Walker’s Crisps and two diet Cokes. Then he sat on a seat outside on the pavement, but no one came along who remotely fitted his cousin’s description. Fruit drops, that was what it was. It came back to him suddenly as he was trudging home, fruit drops that syrup tasted of, what his mother’s nan called boiled sugars. His first stepfather used to buy them for him after he’d given him a harder clout than usual.

  He was looking up high, to the top of the next block, Blackwater House, to see where the kid had stood when he’d droppe
d the rock on the old man, which was why he didn’t notice the windows till he was almost at the door. Raw planks of wood were nailed up over all his front windows, the two in the living room and the one in the bedroom. It was a warm night and inside the flat it was hot like an oven. He sat on the settee and laid his head on one of the Mickey Mouse scatter cushions.

  When the lights in the flats opposite and the lights in the car park went out it would be black as pitch in here. As it was, only thin lines of light, orange-colored, slipped through the cracks between the boards. It would be as bad in the bedroom. Hob drank more Valium syrup to put himself out and he must have spilled some on the floor, for he was aware in his sleep and his half-sleep of the mice at his feet, licking it up.

  • • •

  “We could live here,” Mary said, “when the time comes for me to leave Charlotte Cottage.”

  She and Leo were in Frederica Jago’s house, big, turreted, late-Victorian red brick, in an overgrown rather dark garden. Mary had not visited it since her grandmother’s funeral and the meeting there with Alistair and Mr. Edwards. It was stuffy and airless; she felt she should go about opening windows, but as soon as she came through the front door she had been lethargic and reluctant to take any positive steps. The place was filled with her grandmother. It was not a new feeling, it was how everyone felt in her circumstances, but all the time she expected the dead woman to walk in, to smile, to speak, to hold out her arms.

  “I grew up here. It seems forbidding now but it didn’t then. I remember being proud of living in such a distinguished house and I think I used to boast about it at school. I must have been a horrid child.”

  Leo had been silent ever since they came through the front door. Normally, he would have reacted to that last statement of hers, refuted it at once, and she even wondered if she had said it for that reason: to hear him tell her she could never have been horrid. She was growing hungry for praise from him. But he said nothing, only shrugged lightly. She took him upstairs, going from room to room. In one she opened a dressing table drawer, but the scent that came from it, vanilla and roses, was so much the essence of her grandmother that she drew back with a little cry.

  In the big bay window of the master bedroom she turned to him and laid her head against his shoulder. “Leo, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “I’m sure there is. Do you hate the place? We don’t have to live here. I don’t even know that I want to. There’s something retrograde about choosing to live in the house where one was brought up.”

  He screwed up his eyes. He said, as if with an effort, “Your wealth. I suppose it’s only now that I’m realizing how rich you are. This place has brought it home to me.”

  “I told you.”

  “I know. Now I’m seeing for myself.”

  She had no heart for the rest of the house and led him downstairs and back into Frederica’s drawing room. He was looking all the while warily about him. She saw his eyes take in the pictures, the glass, the porcelain, and linger on a tall French clock in a case of brass and glass that began at that moment to strike four.

  “If you’d known,” she said fearfully, “when first we’d met, would you have still wanted to know me? I mean, would you have pursued it? Or would you just have said thanks and maybe we’ll run into each other again one day?”

  He paused. It was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t answer that.”

  Her heart seemed to fall through her body, sliding down in a sluice of coldness. “But you thought at first Charlotte Cottage was mine. When you first heard from me you had my address as Charlotte Cottage.”

  “Yes, and I was mightily relieved, I can tell you, when I found out it wasn’t yours.”

  “But what can I do? I can’t give it all away. And, Leo, I don’t want to. I want somewhere nice for us to live. I want us to live as we please and you not necessarily have to go on working for your brother—unless you want to, I mean. I want to buy a car, I haven’t even got a car and nor have you.” She found she was talking wildly. “I can buy us a smaller place, a flat, a little house.”

  She put out her hand to touch his but it remained unresponsive. The memory that came back to her was always there but usually suppressed, buried under layers of pleasanter things.

  “Why did you leave me that day in Covent Garden?”

  He turned uncomprehending eyes. “What?”

  “We were out together. It was the second, the third, time we went out together, and you suddenly said you had to go, you had to meet your brother, and you said good-bye and walked away.”

  “I suppose I had to meet my brother.”

  Some inner cautious voice told her not to pursue it. She stood up. “Let’s go.”

  Outside it was very dark. Clouds had been gathering all afternoon and now thunder rumbled from beyond Hampstead and Highgate like distant explosions. Coming here, he had held her hand, but now he walked apart from her, his head down, sullen as she had never seen him. After a moment or two he said lifelessly, almost regretfully, “I love you.”

  Until then he had never quite said it.

  The words themselves were gratifying. Perhaps they always were, no matter who said them. Suddenly she was uncertain, she thought she loved him, she loved being with him, she loved their lovemaking, but could she answer him in the way he would want her to? What made her suddenly doubt? A certain sulky childishness because he had difficulty in coping with the difference in their incomes?

  They were in a taxi, silent again, and home in Charlotte Cottage before he said another word. By then the storm was full-blown, the lightning splitting a sky of huge black thunderclouds, the rain beating down all the flowers in Park Village gardens. She had put the lights on, it was like a winter evening. Gushi, terrified, hid under the sofa, his cold nose pressed against her ankles. It was the kind of weather when you could take it for granted Bean wasn’t coming. Leo said suddenly, in an uncharacteristic outburst, “I can’t bear that man, whatshisname, Alistair, writing to you that you’re going to live together, you’re going to buy a place together.”

  “But we’re not. I’ve told you, all that’s over.”

  “He wants to marry you, doesn’t he?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t want to marry him.”

  A thunder crash seemed to rock the house. Gushi whimpered. She got down on her knees and did her best to stroke his chrysanthemum head, reaching under the sofa.

  “Will you marry me?”

  She turned her head. It was ridiculous to be on all fours.

  “Did you really say that?”

  “I really did.” He looked almost shamefaced. His face was her face when she was awkward or embarrassed.

  “Leo, I’m older than you. We’ve known each other for less than two months. And—” she couldn’t resist “—I’m rich.” She saw him wince. “We can live together, we’re going to do that. We can get to know each other.”

  “We do know each other.” He got down onto the floor beside her and held her shoulders. His eyes were very near hers. “We are part of each other’s bodies, and not just in the way all lovers are, but in a special way. You are my bones, Mary. You are my blood. Who else could we marry? Don’t you see that after what we’ve been to each other, it would be wrong for us ever to marry anyone else?”

  She felt a little faint. She shook her head, on and on.

  “Marry me, Mary, before he can marry you. Marry me now.”

  “Leo, you know we see eye to eye in most things, but this is—isn’t it a bit ridiculous? I do want to be with you, I do want to live with you as soon as I can leave here, but why does it have to be marriage? One day, yes. Maybe in two or three years’ time. When we know what we both really want.”

  He said very quietly, “There may not be two or three years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to live very long.”

  It was as if she had put out her
hand, expecting to encounter warmth, and had felt, instead, ice. She had been practical, prudent, and she could see he was deadly serious.

  “What do you mean?”

  There was fear in his voice now. “Just what I say.”

  The ice was touching her spine, sliding down. “Have they told you that? Have they told you at the hospital?”

  “Let’s say,” he said, “they won’t answer when I ask. I had a checkup on Wednesday.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I would have if there’d been a—a favorable outcome. I shall be all right for a while. They talked about a while.”

  She said breathlessly, “Another transplant?”

  “You would do that for me a second time?”

  “If necessary. Of course I would.”

  There was a wild look in his eyes she had never seen before.

  “I never thought you’d do that. I never considered it.” He seemed disproportionately distressed. It was as if she had said something that might change his life and his plans, as indeed this might, but not pleasurably, not in a way to be entirely desired. “I wish I’d known,” he said, half to himself, and then, “You’d do that?”

  “I’ve just said so. Leo, it’s nothing to the donor, nothing but an anesthetic and that’s quite safe if you’re strong and healthy.”

  She put her arms round him. She felt a pulse drumming in his neck, his heart beating steadily but fast. Her mind wasn’t made up but she knew she was about to act as if it were.

  “If you need another transplant, who better to have it from than your wife?”

  20

  Before going to St. Andrew’s Place, Bean called in at the chemist and picked up the ten enlargements he had had made. Expensive but worth it. The dog photographs, Charlie sniffing noses with McBride, Charlie in pursuit of a goose, Charlie reclining elegantly on sunlit grass, he had in a cardboard folder and he slipped one of the enlargements in with them. The others he locked up in Maurice Clitheroe’s safe.