Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  “At least I was saved from making a total fool of myself,” he wrote in his diary.

  The agent, he discovered, had his own home in the village. He was a villager born and bred. Mrs. Fowler would very likely take an offer, he said. Anyway, there would be no harm in trying.

  “I wouldn’t want to lose it,” Ben said.

  The estate agent smiled. “No fear of that. Think about it and come back to me.”

  Rather late in the day Ben reflected that he should have asked Susannah first. She should have been asked if she wanted to live in a house that had belonged to her grandmother. He would ask her that night. He would propose marriage to her and he had no doubt she would accept, since she had told him she loved him.Then he’d tell her about the cottage. She was, he told himself, a simple country girl. Of course she was a goddess, his Helen and Oenone and Aphrodite, an ideal woman, a queen, the perfect paramour, but she was a country girl also, only eighteen, and one who would have no latter-day urban preferences for cohabitation over marriage or any nonsense of that sort.

  At seven-thirty she still hadn’t come. He was mad with worry and terror. He didn’t want to phone her father’s house; he’d never done so, and he’d got it into his head—without any evidence for so doing—that the Peddars disapproved of him. Perhaps she was ill. He had a moment’s comfort from thinking that. (Thus do lovers console themselves, deriving peace of mind from the beloved’s incapacity.) He had forgotten for the moment that she had gone out “very early” to Lavinia’s house, hardly the behavior of someone too ill to go to work. He would phone, he had to.

  Her voice was always magical to him, soft, sweet, with the lilting accent he had come to hear as pretty and, of course, seductive. He had never heard it on the phone, but somehow he knew that when he did hear it he would be silenced, for seconds he would be unable to reply, he would have to listen, be captured by her voice and feel it run into his blood and take away his breath. He dialed the number and waited, waited for her. It was the first time in his life he had ever suffered the awfulness of hearing the ringing tone repeated and repeated while longing, praying, for an answer.

  Someone answered at last. It was a young girl’s voice, soft, sweet, with that same accent, but without the power to stir him, a voice immediately recognizable as not hers. One of the sisters, he supposed. She didn’t say.

  “Sue’s gone ’round to Kim’s.”

  It sounded like a code to him, a spatter of phonemes. He had to ask her to repeat it.

  “Sue,” she said more slowly, “has gone ’round to Kim’s house, okay?”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He realized he knew nothing of her friends, nothing of her life away from him. He had supposed her so young and artless as to be satisfied with the company of her parents and her sisters, remaining at home in the evenings until he rescued her from this rustic domesticity. But of course she had friends, girls she had been to school with, the daughters of neighbors. None of that accounted for her failure to come to him, and he racked his mind for reasons. Had he inadvertently said something to hurt her feelings?

  Could it be that, after taking thought, she found herself offended by his inquiry as to her sexual adventurousness? But she had replied that she would only do these things with someone she loved and she loved him so much. That had been almost the last thing she had said to him when they’d parted on the previous Friday a hundred yards from her father’s house, that she loved him so much. He was driven to think—he wanted to think—that it was that father and that mother who, having discovered the truth from Susannah, her heart too full to keep love to herself, had taken a heavy line and sent her to spend the evening not at Gothic House but with a girlfriend.

  Night is the enemy of the unhappy lover, for it’s then that fearful thoughts come and horrible forebodings. It would have been better if the night had been dull and wet, but it was warm with a yellow moon rising, a moon fattening to the full. He walked out and down to the lake, expecting to hear the nightingales, not knowing that they cease to sing once early June is past. The moonlight was almost golden, laying a pale sheen on the water and on the lilies, closed into buds for the hours of darkness. He wrote about that in his diary, the things he observed and the sounds he heard, a single cry from the woods as of an animal attacked by a fox, a disturbance of lily pads as a roosting moorhen shifted and folded its wings. Above him the sky was a clear bright opal, the stars too weak to show in the light of that moon.

  He thought about Susannah, perhaps lying in her bed wakeful and longing for him as he longed for her. He lay down on the dry turf of the shoreline, facedown, his arms outstretched, and whispered her name into the sand, Susannah, Susannah.

  The following morning he tried to work. Over and over he read the last passage he had translated, of Hecuba’s dream that she had given birth to a burning brand that split into coils of fiery serpents. The French text swam before his eyes like tadpoles, meaningless black squiggles. He spent the rest of the day trying to reach Susannah.

  He phoned and no one answered. He tried again, and still there was no reply. Her job at Gothic House wasn’t the only one she had, he knew that. She cleaned for someone else somewhere, she minded the children of one of the schoolteachers, she washed hair and swept up for the hairdresser who operated from two rooms over the shop. The irony escaped him that in London, in his old life, he would never have considered taking out for a drink a woman who earned her living by performing such menial tasks, still less been intent on marrying her.

  He had very little idea when and where she went to these jobs. The hairdresser’s perhaps, he could find that number and try that. Anne Whiteson at the shop gave him the number. It was his imagination, it must be, but he had an uncomfortable sense that she knew something he didn’t know or was humoring him, was playing along with him in some indefinable way. A great deal to read into a woman’s voice asking after his health and giving him a phone number, but, as he said, his imagination was very active, was pulsating with theories and suspicions and terrors.

  Susannah wasn’t at the hairdresser’s. She wasn’t expected there till Wednesday afternoon. He phoned her father’s house again, and again there was no reply. He imagined phones unplugged by determined parents. Nothing more was done on the translation that day, and in the late afternoon he drove down to her home, anxious, very apprehensive, not in the least wanting to confront John Peddar or Iris but seeing no other way.

  A little girl came to the door. That was how he described her, Julie, the youngest one, who must have been fourteen or fifteen but whom he saw as a child.

  “They’ve all gone to the seaside. They won’t be back till late.”

  It wasn’t the voice on the phone. He thought she was lying but could hardly tell her so.

  “Why didn’t you go, then?” This was the nearest to an accusation he could get.

  “I was at school, wasn’t I?”

  By then he had noticed how seldom people left the village but to work or shop. The seaside story strained his credulity. He thought they must all be hidden in the house, Susannah perhaps a prisoner in the house, and that evening, in his misery, he sat in the window watching for the Peddar van to pass along the lake road, that being the way the family would be obliged to return from the coast. But only two cars passed, and they were both sedans.

  He dreamed of Susannah, naked and chained like Andromeda, who appeared briefly in the preface to The Golden Apple, on her dragon-menaced rock. He struck off the chains and they fell from her at a single blow, but when he took her into his arms and felt the smooth resilience of her breasts and thighs press against him, the flesh began to melt and pour through his hands in a scented, sticky flood, like cream or some cosmetic fluid. He woke up crying out, put his head in his hands, then saw the time and knew that Lavinia would soon come. Or would she? Hadn’t she said she had no plans to come on Wednesday? Was it possible that after everything Susannah would come?

  The girl who let herself into the house and came into t
he kitchen, where he stood staring, his fists clenched, his teeth set, was the one whose voice he had heard the only time one of his calls was answered.

  “Sue won’t be coming today.”

  He said rudely, “Who are you?”

  “Carol,” she said. “I’m the middle one.”

  She opened the cupboard where the cleaning things were kept, pulled out the vacuum cleaner, inspected a not very clean duster, and sniffed it. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. It was as if the whole family had united and conspired together to control him, keep an eye on him, handle him, and keep him from Susannah. He was a man of thirty-seven, an intellectual, a highly respected linguist taken over by a bunch of peasants of whom this pert sixteen-year-old blonde was the representative. No doubt we say such things to ourselves when we are desperately unhappy and frightened. Ben wouldn’t normally have talked about peasants, nor about himself as belonging to an elite. Besides, his Susannah was one of them . . .

  “I want an explanation,” he said.

  She smiled, about to leave the room. “Do you?”

  He took her by the wrist. “You have to tell me. I want you to tell me— now. What’s going on? Why can’t I see Susannah?”

  She looked at his hand gripping her wrist. “Let me go.”

  “All right,” he said. “But you can sit down, sit down here at the table, and tell me.”

  “I came to tell you, as a matter of fact,” she said calmly. “I thought I’d get your bits and pieces done and then I’d tell you over a coffee.”

  “Tell me now.”

  She smiled comfortably. It was the smile of a woman much older than she was, a middle-aged smile, as of a mother speaking of some gratifying event, a daughter’s wedding, for instance. Yet she was a smooth-faced, pink-cheeked adolescent, full-mouthed, her lips as red as lipstick but unpainted, not a line or mark on her velvety skin.

  “You can see Sue again, of course you can. There’s no question of anything else. But not all the time.You can’t”—she brought the word out as if someone had taught it to her that morning—“monopolize her. You can’t do that. Don’t you see?”

  “I don’t see anything,” he said. “I love Susannah, and she loves me.” He might as well tell her. It must all come into the open now. “I want to marry Susannah.”

  She shrugged. She said the unbelievable thing. “Sue’s engaged to Kim Gresham.”

  His voice almost went. He said hoarsely, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Sue’s been engaged to Kim for a year now. They’ll be getting married in the spring.” She got up. “There are plenty of other girls, you know.”

  6

  On a warm September evening I saw the bathers in the lake outside my house. Not the young woman and the two children who’d appeared to us when Ben was staying with me for that weekend, but a whole group who arrived to swim from “my” beach.This was after I’d repulsed John Peddar and after I’d dismissed Sandy but before the really alarming things happened.

  They were all women and all good to look at. I suppose it was then that I realized there were no grossly fat women in the village, none who was misshapen, and that even as they grew older their bodies seemed not pulled down by gravity or ridged with wrinkles or marked with distorted veins. These things are very much a matter of genes. I had plenty of chance to observe the results of a good gene pool when I watched the women from my front garden in that soft twilight.

  It wasn’t quite warm enough to bathe. Not strictly. If I’d gone closer, I expect I should have seen gooseflesh on limbs. But I didn’t go closer, though they evidently wanted me to. They waved. Jennifer Fowler called out, “It’s lovely in the water!”

  They swam among the lilies. Those lilies were like a Monet painting, red and pink and white cups floating among their flat, duck-green leaves on the pale water. One of the women picked a red lily and tucked its brown snaky stem into the knot of yellow hair she had tied up on top of her head. The wife of the farmer from Lynn was there, floating on her back beside Jennifer on the calm, gleaming surface, her outstretched hand clasping Jennifer’s hand.

  Have I said they were naked, every one of them? They swam, but mostly they played in the shallow water by the shore, splashing one another, then lying down and submerging themselves, except for their uplifted, laughing faces and long hair spread on the rippling water. The farmer’s wife whose name I never knew stood up and, in a gesture at once erotic and innocent—didn’t that sum them all up?—lifted her full breasts, one cupped in each hand, while Kathy Gresham splashed her with handfuls of water.

  All the time they were glancing at me, smiling at me, giving me smiles of encouragement. It was plain they wanted me to come in too. I didn’t disapprove; I didn’t mind what they did—the lake was free and as much theirs as anyone’s. But I did object to an attitude they all had, unmistakable though hard to define. It was as if they were laughing at me. It was as if they were saying, and probably were saying to one another, that I was a fool, inhibited, shy, perhaps ashamed of my own body. Go in there with them and all that would change. But I didn’t want to go in there. It’s not an excuse to say that it was really by this time quite cold. I got up and went into the house.

  Later I saw them all emerge from the woods where their clothes were, fully dressed, still laughing, slowly dancing homeward along the lakeshore, some of them holding hands. It was dusk by then, and all I could see as they receded into the distance were shadowy forms, still dancing and no doubt still laughing, coming together and parting as if taking part in some elegant pavane.

  If any bathers came to display themselves to Ben, he didn’t mention them in his diary. But there was a lot he left out. I suppose he couldn’t bear to put it down or perhaps look at it on the page after he’d written it. Some of it he told me, but there must have been a lot he didn’t, a great deal I shall never know.

  The actions of others he faithfully recorded. It was his own that he became, for a few days, reticent about. For example, he didn’t seem to mind putting on paper that Carol Peddar had offered herself to him. After she said that about there being plenty of other girls, she looked into his eyes and, smiling, said there was herself. Didn’t he like her? A lot of men thought she was prettier than her sister.

  “Try me,” she said, and then, “touch me,” and she reached for his hand.

  He told her to go, to get out, and never to come back. He still believed, you see, that it was a family conspiracy that was trying to separate him from Susannah, a plot in which every Peddar was involved, and Carol with them.

  “I even believed the engagement was an arranged thing,” he told me. “I thought they’d fixed it up. Perhaps that was the way marriages happened in that village. I knew something strange was going on, and I thought there must be a tradition of arranged marriages. Susannah and this Kim Gresham had been destined for each other from babyhood, like something in India or among the Habsburgs. You see, I knew it was me she wanted, I knew it as I know you and I are sitting here together now.”

  “You thought you did,” I said.

  “Later on, when I really knew, I tried telling myself I’d only known her for a couple of months, so it couldn’t be real, it must be sex and infatuation, whatever that is. I told myself what you told me that weekend, that she wasn’t an educated person and that she was too young for me.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You meant it whether you said it or not,” he said. “I told myself all that and I asked myself what we had in common. Would she even understand what I did for a living, for instance? That sort of thing ought to matter, but it didn’t. I was in love with her. I’d never felt for anyone what I felt for her, not even for Margaret when we were first married. I’d have given the whole world, I’d have given ten years of my life, for her to have walked in at that moment and said the engagement story was nonsense, made up by her family, and it was I she was going to marry.”

  Ten years of his life, in those circumstances, was the last thing he should h
ave thought of giving. Still, he wasn’t called on to give anything. He went to the Peddars’ house that evening, demanded admittance, and got it. John and Iris were at home with Carol and Julie, but there was no sign of Susannah. She was out, Iris said. No, she didn’t know where, she didn’t think a person of eighteen ought to have to account to her parents for everywhere she went.

  “Especially in this village,” John said. “This is a safe place. Horrible things don’t happen here, never have and never will.”

  He sounded absolutely sure of himself, Ben said. He was smiling. Had I ever noticed how much they smiled in that village? The men always had a grin on their faces and the women sunny smiles.

  “Now that you mention it,” I said, “I suppose I have.” Until they changed toward me and all smiles stopped.

  Ben was tremendously angry. He thought of himself—and others thought of him—as a quiet, reserved sort of man, but by then he was angry. How did he know she wasn’t in the house, that they hadn’t got her hidden somewhere?

  “You’re welcome to look,” Iris said, and then, incredibly, the self-conscious housewife, “It’s not very tidy upstairs, I’m afraid.”

  Of course he didn’t look. They wouldn’t have given him the chance to look if she’d been there. John was eyeing him up and down as if summing him up for some purpose. Then he asked him why he wanted Susannah. What did he want her for?

  Carol, no doubt, had reported back their conversation of the morning, so they must have known about himself and Susannah, that he wanted to marry her. He told them so then and there, he repeated what he’d said.

  “It takes two to agree to that,” Iris said comfortably.

  “We are two,” he said. “She loves me, she’s told me often enough. I don’t know what you’re doing, how you’re controlling her or coercing her, but it won’t work. She’s eighteen. She doesn’t need your consent, she can please herself.”

  “She has pleased herself, Ben.” It was the first time anyone from the village but Susannah had called him by his given name. “She’s pleased herself and chosen Kim.”