Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  “The goddess loves us this morning.”

  Roderick Thomas looked at her with his mouth open. “You what?”

  “I said, the goddess loves us today. She’s shedding her glorious sunshine onto the face of the earth.”

  Thalia smiled at him and walked on. She was on her way to the shops in King Street. Roderick Thomas started shambling after her. For some years he had been on the lookout for the Antichrist, who he knew would come in female form. He followed Thalia into Marks & Spencer’s and the cassette shop, where she was in the habit of buying music as background for her fortune-telling sessions. She was well aware of his presence and, growing increasingly angry, then nervous, went home in a taxi.

  Next day he hammered on her door. She told him to go away.

  “Say that about the sunshine again,” he said.

  “It’s not sunny today.”

  “You could pretend. Say about the goddess.”

  “You’re mad,” said Thalia.

  A client who had been having his palm read and had heard it all gave her a funny look. She told him his life line was the longest she had ever seen and he would probably make it to a hundred.When she went downstairs Roderick Thomas was waiting for her in the hall. He looked at the scarf.

  “Clothed in the sun,” he said, “and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

  Thalia said something so alien to her philosophy of life, so contrary to all her principles, that she could hardly believe she’d uttered it. “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll call the police.”

  He followed her just the same. She walked up to Shepherds Bush Green. Her threats gave her a dark aura, and he saw the stars encircling her. She fascinated him, though he was beginning to see her as a source of danger. In Newcastle, where he had been living until two years before, he had killed a woman he had mistakenly thought was the Antichrist because she’d told him to go to hell when he spoke to her. For a long time he expected to be sent to hell, and although the fear had somewhat abated, it came back when he was confronted by manifestly evil women.

  A man was standing on one of the benches on the green, preaching to the multitude. Well, to four or five people. Roderick Thomas had followed Thalia to the tube station, but there he had to abandon pursuit for lack of money to buy a ticket. He wandered onto the green. The man on the bench stared straight at him and said, “Thou shalt have no other gods but me!”

  Roderick took that for a sign—you’d have to be daft not to get the message—but he asked his question just the same.

  “What about the goddess?”

  “For Solomon went after Ashtoreth,” said the man on the bench, “and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. Wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and will give it to thy servant.”

  That was fair enough. Roderick went home and bided his time, listening to the voice of the preacher, which had taken over from the usual voice he heard during his waking hours. It told him of a woman in purple sitting on a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. He watched from his window until he saw Thalia Essene come in, carrying a large recycled paper bag in a dull purple with CELESTIAL SECONDS printed on its side.

  Thalia was feeling happy because she hadn’t seen Roderick for several hours and believed she had shaken him off. She was going out that evening to see a play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in the company of a friend who was a famous water diviner. To this end she had bought herself a new dress or, rather, a “nearly new” dress, purple Indian cotton with mirrorwork and black embroidery. The blue starry scarf, which she had taken to calling the astrological scarf, went well with it. She draped it around her neck, lamenting the coldness of the night. A shawl would be inadequate, and all this would have to be covered by her old black coat.

  A quick glance at her engagement book showed her that Maureen’s boyfriend was due for a consultation the next morning.The scarf must be returned to him. She would wear it for the last time. As it happened, Thalia was wearing all these clothes for the last time, doing everything she did for the last time, but clairvoyant though she was, of her imminent fate she had no prevision.

  She walked along, looking for a taxi. None came. She had plenty of time and decided to walk to Hammersmith. Roderick Thomas was behind her, but she had forgotten about him and she didn’t look around. She was thinking about the water diviner, whom she hadn’t seen for eighteen months but who was reputed to have split up from his girlfriend.

  Roderick Thomas caught up with her in one of the darker spots of Hammersmith Grove. It wasn’t dark to him but illuminated by the seven times seventy stars on the clothing of her neck and the sea of glass like unto crystal on the hem of her garment. He spoke not a word but took the two ends of the starry cloth in his hands and strangled her.

  After they had found the body, her killer was not hard to find. There was little point in charging Roderick Thomas with anything or bringing him up in court, but they did.The astronomical scarf was Exhibit A at the trial. Roderick Thomas was found guilty of the murder of Noreen Blake, for such was Thalia’s real name, and committed to a prison for the criminally insane.

  The exhibits would normally have ended up in the Black Museum, but a young police officer called Karen Duncan, whose job it was to collect together such memorabilia, thought it all so sad and distasteful, that poor devil should never have been allowed out into the community in the first place, that she put Thalia’s carrier bag and theater ticket in the shredder and took the scarf home with her. Although it had been dry-cleaned, the scarf had never been washed. Karen washed it in cold-water gel for delicates and ironed it with a cool iron. Nobody would have guessed it had been used for such a macabre purpose; there wasn’t a mark on it.

  But an unforeseen problem arose. Karen couldn’t bring herself to wear it. It wasn’t the scarf’s history that stopped her so much as her fear that other people might recognize it. There had been some publicity for the Crown Court proceedings, and much had been made of the midnight-blue scarf patterned with stars. Cressida Chilton had read about it and wondered why it reminded her of James Mullen’s second wife, the one before the one before his present one. She didn’t think she could face a fourth divorce and fifth marriage; she’d have to change her job. Sadie Williamson read about the scarf, and for some reason there came into her head a picture of butterflies and a dark house in Bloomsbury.

  After some inner argument, reassurance countered by denial and self-rebuke, Karen Duncan took the scarf round to the charity shop, where they let her exchange it for a black velvet hat. Three weeks later it was bought by a woman who didn’t recognize it, though the man who ran the charity shop did and had been in a dilemma about it ever since Karen had brought it in. Its new owner wore it for a couple of years. At the end of that time she got married to an astronomer. The scarf shocked and enraged him. He explained to her what an inaccurate representation of the heavens it was, how it was quite impossible for these constellations to be adjacent to each other or even visible at the same time, and if he didn’t forbid her to wear it that was because he wasn’t that kind of man.

  The astronomer’s wife gave the scarf to the woman who did the cleaning three times a week. Mrs. Vernon never wore the scarf—she didn’t like scarves, could never keep them from slipping off—but it wouldn’t have occurred to her to say no to something that was offered to her. When she died, three years later, her daughter came upon it among her effects.

  Bridget Vernon was a silversmith and a member of a celebrated craft society. One of her fellow members made quilts and was always on the lookout for likely fabrics to use in patchwork. The quiltmaker, Fenella Carbury, needed pieces of blue, cream, and ivory silks for a quilt that had been commissioned by a millionaire businessman well known for his patronage of arts and crafts and for his charitable donations. No charity was involved here. Fenella worked hard, and she worked long hours. The quilt would be worth every penny of the two thousand pounds she was asking
for it.

  For the second time in its life the scarf was washed. The silk was as good as new, its dark blue unfaded, its stars as bright as they had been twenty years before. From it Fenella was able to cut forty hexagons, which, interspersed with forty ivory damask diamond shapes and forty sky-blue silk lozenge shapes from a fabric shop cutoff, formed the central motif of the quilt. When it was finished it was large enough to cover a king-size bed.

  James Mullen allowed it to hang on exhibition in Chelsea at the Chenil Gallery for precisely two weeks. Then he collected it and gave it to his new bride for a wedding present, along with a diamond bracelet, a cottage in Derbyshire, and a Queen Anne four-poster to put the quilt on.

  Cressida Chilton had waited through four marriages and twenty-one years. Men, as Oscar Wilde said, marry because they are tired. Men, as Cressida Mullen said, always marry their secretaries in the end. It’s dogged as does it, and she had been dogged, she had persevered, and she had her reward.

  Before getting into bed on her wedding night, she contemplated the £2,000 quilt and told James it was the loveliest thing she had ever seen.

  “The middle bit reminds me of you when you first came to work for me,” said James. “I should have had the sense to marry you then. I can’t think why it reminds me, can you?”

  Cressida smiled. “I suppose I had stars in my eyes.”

  HIGH MYSTERIOUS UNION

  1

  BEFORE BEN, I’d never lent the house to anyone. No one had ever asked. By the time Ben asked I had doubts about its being the kind of place to inflict on a friend, but I said yes because if I’d said no I couldn’t have explained why. I said nothing about the odd and disquieting things, only that I hadn’t been there myself for months.

  I’m not talking about the house. The house was all right. Or it would have been if it hadn’t been where it was. A small gray Gothic house with a turret would have been fine by a Scottish loch or in some provincial town, only this one, mine, was in a forest. To put it precisely, on the edge of the great forest that lies on the western borders of—well, I won’t say where. Somewhere in England, a long drive from London. It was for its position that I’d bought it.This beautiful place, the village, the woods, the wetlands, changed very little while everything else all around was changing. My house was about a mile outside the village, at the head of a large man-made lake. And the western tip of the forest enclosed house and lake in a curved sweep with two embracing arms, the shape of a horseshoe.

  It was the village that was wrong: right for the people and wrong for the others, a place to be born in, to live and die in, not for strangers.

  Ben had been there once to stay with me. Just for the weekend. His wife was to have come too but cried off at the last moment. Ben said later she took her chance to spend a night with the man she’s with now. It was July and very hot. We went for a walk, but the heat was too much for us and we were glad to reach the shade of the trees on the lake’s eastern side. Then we saw the bathers. They must have gone into the water after we’d started our walk, for they were up near the house, had gone in from the little strip of gravel I called “my beach.”

  The sky was cloudless and the sun hot in the way it is only in the east of England, brilliant white, dazzling, the clean hard light falling on a greenness that is so bright because it’s well watered. The lake water, absolutely calm, looked phosphorescent, as if a white fire burned on the flat surface. And out of that blinding fiery water we saw the bathers rise and extend their arms, stand up, and, with uplifted faces, slowly rotate their bodies to and away from the sun.

  It hurt the eyes but we could see. They wanted us to see, or one of them did.

  “They’re children,” I said.

  “She’s not a child, Louise.”

  She wasn’t, but I knew that.We’re all inhibited about nudity, especially when we come upon it by chance and in company, when we’re unprepared. It’s all right if we can see it when alone and ourselves unseen. Ben wasn’t especially prudish, but he was rather shy and he looked away.

  The girl in the burning water, entirely naked, became more and more clearly visible to us, for we continued to walk toward her, though rather slowly now. We could have stopped and at once become voyeurs. Or turned back and provoked—I knew—laughter from her and her companions. And from God knows who else, hidden for all I could tell among the trees.

  They were undoubtedly children, her companions, a boy and a girl. The three of them stretched upward and gazed at the dazzling blueness while the sun struck their wet bodies. That was another thing that troubled me, that sun, inflicting surely a fierce burning on white skin. For they were all white, white as milk, as white lilies, and the girl’s uplifted breasts, raised by her extended arms, were like plump white buds, tipped with rosy pink.

  What Ben thought of it I didn’t quite know. He said nothing about it till much later. But his face flushed darkly, reddening as if with the sun, as those bodies should have reddened but somehow, I knew, would not— would stay, by the not always happy magic of this place, inviolable and unstained. He had taken his hands from his eyes and was feeling with his fingertips the hot red of his cheeks.

  He didn’t look at the bathers again. He kept his head averted, staring into the wood as if spotting there an array of interesting wildlife. They waded out of the water as we approached, the children running off to the shelter of the trees. But the girl stood for a moment on the little beach, no longer exposing herself to us but rather as if—there is only one word I can use, only one that gives the real sense of how she was—as if ashamed. Her stance was that of Aphrodite on her shell in the painting, one hand covering the pale fleece of hair between her thighs, the other, the white arm glittering with water drops, across her breasts. But Aphrodite gazes innocently at the onlooker. This girl stood with hanging head, her long white-blond hair dripping, and, though there was nothing to detain her there, remained in her attitude of shame as might a slave exhibited in a marketplace.

  Yet she was enjoying herself. She was acting a part and enjoying what she acted. You could tell. I thought even then, before I knew much, that she might equally have chosen to be the bold visitor to the nude beach or the flaunting stripper or the shopper surprised in the changing room, but she had chosen the slave. It was a game, yet it was part of her nature.

  When we were some twenty yards from her, she lifted her head and behaved as if she had only just seen us. We were to think, for it can’t have been sincere, that until that moment she had been unconscious of our approach, of our being there at all. She gave a little artificial shriek, then a laugh of shocked merriment, waving her arms in a mime of someone grasping at clothes, seizing invisible garments out of the air and wrapping them around her, as she ran into the long grass, the low bushes, and at last into the tall, concealing trees.

  “I don’t know who that was,” I said to him as we went into the house. “One of the village people, perhaps.”

  “Why not a visitor?” he said.

  “No, I’m sure. One of the village people.”

  I was sure. There were ways of telling, though I hardly ever went near the village. Not by that time. Not to the church or the pub or the shop. And I didn’t take Ben there. The place was gradually becoming less and less attractive to me, Gothic House somewhere I thought I ought occasionally to go to but put off visiting.You could only reach it with ease by driving through the village, and I avoided that village as much as I could. By the time he asked me if he could borrow it, I had already decided to sell the house.

  His wife had left him. Or made it plain to him that she expected him to leave her—leave her, that is, the house they lived in. He’d bought a flat in London, but before he’d ever lived in it he’d had a kind of breakdown from an accumulation of causes but mainly Margaret’s departure. He wanted to get away somewhere, to get away from everyone and everything he knew, the people and places and things that reminded him. And he wanted to be somewhere he could work in peace.

  Ben is a translator
. He translates from French and Italian, fiction and nonfiction, and was about to embark on the biggest and most complex work he’d ever undertaken, a book called The Golden Apple by a French psychoanalyst that examined from a Jungian viewpoint the myths attendant on the Trojan War, Helen of Troy and Paris, Priam and Hecuba and the human mind. He took his word processor with him, his Collins-Robert French dictionary, his Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary, and Graves’s The Greek Myths.

  I gave him a key to Gothic House. “There are only two in existence. Sandy has the other.”

  “Who’s Sandy?”

  “A sort of odd-job man. Someone has to be able to get in in case of fire or, more likely, flood.”

  Perhaps I said it unhappily, for he gave me an inquiring look, but I didn’t enlighten him. What was there to say without saying it all?

  There was nothing sinister about the village and its surroundings. It is important that you understand that. It was the most beautiful place, and in spite of all the trees, the crowding forest that stretched to the horizon, it wasn’t dark. The light even seemed to have a special quality there, the sky to be larger and the sun out for longer than elsewhere. I am sure there were more unclouded skies than to the north and south of us. Mostly, if you saw clouds, you saw them rolling away toward that bluish wooded horizon. Sunsets were pink, the color of a bullfinch’s breast.

  I don’t know how it happened that the place was so unspoiled. Trunk roads passed within ten miles on either side, but the two roads into the village and the three out were narrow and winding. New building had taken place but not much, and what there was by some lucky chance was tasteful and plain. The old school still stood, no industry had come there, and no row of pylons marched across the fields of wheat and the fields of grazing beasts. Nothing interrupted the view everyone in the village had of the green forest of oak and ash and the black forest of fir and pine. The church had a round tower like a castle, but its surface was of cut flints.