Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  Before what? That day in February when she had come up here to— well, oversee him, supervise him. She frequently did so, and in later years he hadn’t been as grateful to her as he should have been. By the desk here she had stood and told him it was time he earned some money by his work, by a man’s fifty-second year it was time. She had made up her mind to leave Daddy’s royalties to the lifeboat people. But it wasn’t this that finished things for him, or triggered things off, however you liked to put it. It was the sneering tone in which she told him, her right index finger pointing at his chest, that he was no good, he had failed. She had kept him in comfort and luxury for decade after decade, she had instructed him, taught him everything he knew, yet in spite of this, his literary criticism had not had the slightest effect on authors’ standards or effected the least improvement in fiction. He had wasted his time and his life through cowardice and pusillanimity, through mousiness instead of manliness.

  It was the word “mousiness” that did it. His hands moved across the table to rest on Piranha to Scurfy; he lifted it in both hands and brought it down as hard as he could on her head. Once, twice, again and again. The first time she screamed, but not again after that. She staggered and sank to her knees and he beat her to the ground with volume 8 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She was an old woman: she put up no struggle; she died quickly. He very much wanted not to get blood on the book— she had taught him books were sacred—but there was no blood. What was shed was shed inside her.

  Regret came immediately. Remorse followed. But she was dead. He buried her in the wide flower bed at the end of the garden that night, in the dark without a flashlight. The widows on either side slept soundly— no one saw a thing. The ivies grew back and the flowerless plants that liked shade. All summer he had watched them slowly growing. He told only two people she was dead, Glenys Next-door and his cousin Frank. Neither showed any inclination to come to the “funeral,” so when the day he had appointed came he left the house at ten in the morning, wearing the new dark suit he had bought, a black tie that had been Daddy’s, and carrying a bunch of spring flowers. Sandra On-the-other-side spotted him from her front-room window and, approving, nodded somberly while giving him a sad smile. Ribbon smiled sadly back. He put the flowers on someone else’s grave and strolled round the cemetery for half an hour.

  From a material point of view, living was easy. He had more money now than Mummy had ever let him have. Daddy’s royalties were paid into her bank account twice a year and would continue to be paid in. Ribbon drew out what he wanted on her direct-debit card, his handwriting being so like hers that no one could tell the difference. He had been collecting her retirement pension for years, and he went on doing so. It occurred to him that the Department of Social Security might expect her to die sometime and the bank might expect it too, but she had been very young when he was born and might in any case have been expected to outlive him. He could go on doing this until what would have been her hundredth birthday and even beyond. But could he live without her? He had “made it up to her” by keeping her bedroom as a shrine, keeping her clothes as if one day she would come back and wear them again. Still, he was a lost soul, only half a man, a prey to doubts and fears and self-questioning and a nervous restlessness.

  Looking down at the floor, he half-expected to see some mark where her small slight body had lain. There was nothing, any more than there was a mark on volume 8 of Britannica. He went downstairs and stared out into the garden. The cypress he had associated with her, had been near to seeing as containing her spirit, was down, was lying on the grass, its frondy branches already wilting in the heat. One of the two fat shrubs was down too. Damian and the young one were sitting on Mummy’s grave, drinking something out of a vacuum flask and smoking cigarettes. Mummy would have had something to say about that, but he lacked the heart. He thought again how strange it was, how horrible and somehow wrong, that the small child’s name for its mother was the same as that for an embalmed Egyptian corpse.

  In the afternoon, after the washing-machine man had come and been let into Glenys Next-door’s, Ribbon plucked up the courage to phone Kingston Marle’s publisher. After various people’s voice mail, instructions to press this button and that, and requests to leave messages, he was put through to the department that sent on authors’ letters. A rather indignant young woman assured him that all mail was sent on within a week of the publisher’s receiving it. Recovering a little of Mummy’s spirit, he said in the strongest tone he could muster that a week was far too long.What about readers who were waiting anxiously for a reply? The young woman told him she had said “within a week” and it might be much sooner. With that he had to be content. It was eleven days now since he had apologized to Marle, ten since his publisher had received the letter. He asked tentatively if they ever handed a letter to an author in person. For a while she hardly seemed to understand what he was talking about. Then she gave him a defiant “no”; such a thing could never happen.

  So Marle had not called off his dogs because he had received the apology. Perhaps it was only that the spell, or whatever it was, lasted no more than, say, twenty-four hours. It seemed, sadly, a more likely explanation. The tree fellers finished at five, leaving the wilted shrubs stacked on the flower bed, not on Mummy’s grave but on the place where The Book was buried. Ribbon took two of Mummy’s sleeping pills and passed a good night. No letter came in the morning; there was no post at all. Without any evidence as to the truth of this, he became suddenly sure that no letter would come from Marle now—it would never come.

  He had nothing to do, he had written to everyone who needed reproving, he had supplied himself with no more new books and had no inclination to go out and buy more. Perhaps he would never write to anyone again. He unplugged the link between computer and printer and closed the computer’s lid. The new shelving he had bought from Ikea to put up in the dining room would never be used now. In the middle of the morning he went into Mummy’s bedroom, tucked the nightdress under the pillow and quilt, removed the bedspread from the wardrobe door, and closed the door. He couldn’t have explained why he did these things; it simply seemed time to do them. From the window he saw a taxi draw up and Glenys Next-door get out of it. There was someone else inside the taxi she was helping out, but Ribbon didn’t stay to see who it was.

  He contemplated the back garden from the dining room. Somehow he would have to dispose of all those logs, the remains of the cypresses, the flowering currant, the holly, and the lilac bush. For a ten-pound note the men would doubtless have taken them away, but Ribbon hadn’t thought of this at the time. The place looked bleak and characterless now, an empty expanse of grass with a stark ivy-clad flower bed at the end of it. He noticed, for the first time, over the wire dividing fence, the profusion of flowers in Glenys Next-door’s, the bird table, the little fishpond (both hunting grounds for Tinks), the red-leaved Japanese maple. He would burn that wood; he would have a fire.

  Of course he wasn’t supposed to do this. In a small way it was against the law, for this was a smokeless zone and had been for nearly as long as he could remember. By the time anyone complained—and Glenys Next-door and Sandra On-the-other-side would both complain—the deed would have been done and the logs consumed. But he postponed it for a while and went back into the house. He felt reasonably well, if a little weak and dizzy. Going upstairs made him breathless in a way he never had been before, so he postponed that for a while too and had a cup of tea, sitting in the front room with his feet up. What would Marle do next? There was no knowing. Ribbon thought that when he was better he would find out where Marle lived, go to him and apologize in person. He would ask what he could do to make it up to Marle, and whatever the answer was he would do it. If Marle wanted him to be his servant he would do that, or kneel at his feet and kiss the ground, or allow Marle to flog him with a whip. Anything Marle wanted he would do, whatever it was.

  Of course, he shouldn’t have buried the book. That did no good. It would be ruined now and the best
thing, the cleanest thing, would be to cremate it. After he was rested he made his way upstairs, crawled really, his hands on the stairs ahead of him, took Piranha to Scurfy off the shelf, and brought it down. He’d burn that too. Back in the garden he arranged the logs on a bed of screwed-up newspaper, rested volume 8 of Britannica on top of them, and, fetching the spade, unearthed Demogorgon. Its plastic covering had been inadequate to protect it, and it was sodden as well as very dirty. Ribbon felt guilty for treating it as he had. The fire would purify it. There was kerosene in a can somewhere; Mummy had used it for the little stove that heated her bedroom. He went back into the house, found the can, and sprinkled kerosene on newspaper, logs, and books, and applied a lighted match.

  The flames roared up immediately, slowed once the oil had done its work. He poked at his fire with a long stick. A voice started shouting at him but he took no notice; it was only Glenys Next-door complaining. The smoke from the fire thickened, grew dense and gray. Its flames had reached The Book’s wet pages, the great thick wad of 427 of them, and as the smoke billowed in a tall, whirling cloud an acrid smell poured from it. Ribbon stared at the smoke, for in it now, or behind it, something was taking shape, a small, thin, and very old woman swathed in a mummy’s bandages, her head and arm bound in white bands, the skin between fishbelly white. He gave a small choking cry and fell, clutching the place where his heart was, holding on to the overpowering pain.

  The pathologist seems to think he died of fright,” the policeman said to Frank. “A bit fanciful that, if you ask me. Anyone can have a heart attack. You have to ask yourself what he could have been frightened of. Nothing, unless it was of catching fire. Of course, strictly speaking, the poor chap had no business to be having a fire. Mrs. Judd and her mother saw it all. It was a bit of a shock for the old lady—she’s over ninety and not well herself. She’s staying with her daughter while recovering from a bad fall.”

  Frank was uninterested in Glenys Judd’s mother and her problems. He had a severe summer cold, could have done without any of this, and doubted if he would be well enough to attend Ambrose Ribbon’s funeral. In the event, Susan went to it alone. Someone had to. It would be too terrible if no one was there.

  She expected to find herself the only mourner, and she was very surprised to find she was not alone. On the other side of the aisle from her in the crematorium chapel sat Kingston Marle. At first she could hardly believe her eyes.Then he turned his head, smiled, and came to sit next to her. Afterward, as they stood admiring the two wreaths, his and hers and Frank’s, he said that he supposed some sort of explanation was in order.

  “Not really,” Susan said. “I just think it’s wonderful of you to come.”

  “I saw the announcement of his death in the paper with the date and place of the funeral,” Marle said, turning his wonderful deep eyes from the flowers to her. “A rather odd thing had happened. I had a letter from your cousin—well, your husband’s cousin. It was a few days after we met in Oxford. His letter was an apology, quite an abject apology, saying he was sorry for having written to me before, asking me to forgive him for criticizing me for something or other.”

  “What sort of something or other?”

  “That I don’t know. I never received his previous letter. But what he said reminded me that I had received a letter intended for Dillon’s bookshop in Piccadilly and signed by him. Of course I sent it on to them and thought no more about it. But now I’m wondering if he put the Dillon’s letter into the envelope intended for me and mine into the one for Dillon’s. It’s easily done. That’s why I prefer E-mail myself.”

  Susan laughed. “It can’t have had anything to do with his death, anyway.”

  “No, certainly not. I was going to mention it to him in Blackwell’s but—well, I saw you instead and everything else went out of my head. I didn’t really come here because of the letter—that’s not important. I came because I hoped I might see you again.”

  “Oh.”

  “Will you have lunch with me?”

  Susan looked around her, as if spies might be about. But they were alone. “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  FAIR EXCHANGE

  YOU’RE LOOKING FOR TOM DORCHESTER, aren’t you?” Penelope said.

  I nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve been expecting you to ask. I mean, he’s always been at this conference in the past. Quite a fixture. This must be the first he hasn’t come to it in—what? Fifteen years? Twenty?”

  “He’s not here, then?”

  “He’s dead.”

  I wanted to say, “He can’t be!” But that’s absurd. Anyone can be dead. Here today and gone tomorrow, as the saying goes. Still, the more full of vitality a person is the more you feel he has a firmer grasp on life than the rest of us. Only violence, some appalling accident, could prize him loose. And Tom was—had been, I should say—more vital, more enthusiastic, and more interested in everything than most people. He seemed to love and hate more intensely, especially to love. I remember him once saying he needed no more than five hours’ sleep a night, there was too much to do, to learn, to appreciate, to waste time sleeping. And then his wife had become ill, very ill. Much of his abundant energy he’d devoted to finding a cure for her particular kind of cancer. Or trying to find it.

  I said, stupidly, I suppose, “But it was Frances who was going to die.”

  Penelope gave me a strange, indecipherable look. “I’ll tell you about it, if you like. It’s an odd story. Of course I don’t know how much you know.”

  “About what? I wouldn’t have called Tom a close friend, but I’d known him for years. I know he adored Frances. I mean, I adore Marian but— well, you know what I mean. He was like a young lover. To say he worshiped the ground she trod on wouldn’t be an exaggeration.”

  Penelope took her cigarettes out of her handbag and offered me one.

  “I’ve given it up.”

  “I wish I could, but I know my limitations. Now, d’you want the story?”

  I nodded.

  “You may not like it. It’s pretty awful one way or the other. He killed himself, you know.”

  “He what? Tom Dorchester?”

  “Did away with himself, committed suicide, whatever.”

  There was only one possible event that could make this believable. “Ah, you mean Frances did die?”

  Penelope shook her head. She took a sip of her drink. “It was June or July of last year, about a month after the conference. You’ll remember Tom only came for two days because he felt he couldn’t leave Frances any longer than that, though their younger daughter was with her. They had two daughters, both married, and the older one has three children. The eldest child was twelve at the time.”

  “I had dinner with Tom,” I said. “There were a couple of other people there, but he mostly talked to me. He was telling me about some miracle cure they’d tried on Frances but it hadn’t worked.”

  “It was at a clinic in Switzerland. They dehydrate you and give you nothing but walnuts to eat, something like that.When she came back and she was worse than ever,Tom found a healer. I actually met her. Chris and I went around to Tom’s one evening and this woman was there. Very weird she was, very weird indeed.”

  “What do you mean, weird?”

  “Well, you think of a healer as laying on hands, don’t you? Or reciting mantras while using herbal remedies, something like that. This woman wasn’t like that. She did it all by talk and the power of thought. That’s what she said, the power of thought. Her name was Davina Tarsis and she was quite young. Late thirties, early forties, very strangely dressed. Not that sort of floaty, hippy look, Oriental garments and beads and whatever, not like that at all. She was very thin—only a very thin woman could have got away with wearing skin-tight white leggings and a white tunic with a great orange sun printed on the front of it. Her hair was long and dyed a deep purplish red. I don’t know why I say ‘was.’ I expect she’s still got purple hair. No makeup, of course: a scrubbed face and a rin
g in one nostril—not a stud, a ring.

  “Tom thought she was wonderful. He claimed she’d cured a woman who had been having radiotherapy at the same time as Frances. Now, the odd thing was that she didn’t talk much to Frances at all—I had a feeling Frances didn’t altogether care for her. She talked to Tom. Not while we were there, I don’t mean that. I mean in private. Apparently they had long sessions, like a kind of mad form of psychotherapy. Chris said maybe she was making a play for Tom, but I don’t think it was that. I think she really believed in what she was doing and so did he. So, my God, did he.

  “She taught him to believe that anything you wished for hard enough you could have. He told me that—not at the time, but when it was all over.”

  “What do you mean,” I said, “ ‘when it was all over’?”

  “When Tom had got what he wanted.”

  “Presumably, that was for Frances to be cured.”

  “That’s right. He got very emotional with me one night—Chris was out somewhere—and he started crying and sobbing. I know men do cry these days, but I’ve never known a man to cry like Tom did that night.The tears poured out of his eyes. There was quite a long time when he couldn’t speak, he choked on the words. It was dreadful. I didn’t know what to do. I gave him some brandy, but he’d only take a sip of it because he was driving and he had to go back to Frances before his daughter and her daughter had to go home.That’s the nine-year-old, Emma she’s called. Anyway, he calmed down after a bit and then he said he couldn’t live without Frances, he couldn’t imagine life without her, he’d kill himself ...”