Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s up to you,” said John. “You can believe what you like.”

  He said it serenely; he was smiling. Ben said then what I’d often thought, that they were so happy in that village, as if they’d found the secret of life, always smiling, never ruffled, calm, forbearing. They were mostly quite poor: a lot of them were unemployed, and a few were on the edge of being comfortably off, that was all. But they didn’t need material things; they were happy without them.

  “As if they were all in love,” Ben said bitterly. “All in love all the time.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “in a way they were.”

  After he’d told Ben he could believe what he liked and added that that was his privilege, John said why be so set on marrying Susannah. Why not, for instance, Carol?

  “This I don’t believe,” Ben said.

  “Ah, but you’ll have to change your way of thinking. That’s the point, don’t you see? If you’re going to live here, if you’re going to take on my mother-in-law’s place.”

  “There are no secrets in this village,” said Iris. “But you know that.”

  John nodded. “Carol’s as lovely in her way as Susannah, and she likes you. I wouldn’t be saying any of this if she didn’t like you. That’s not our way. Stand up, Carol.”

  The girl stood. She held her head high and slowly turned to show herself in profile, then fully frontal. Like a slave for sale, Ben thought, and he remembered the bather emerging from the lake. She put up her arms and untied the ribbon that confined her hair in a ponytail. It was thick, shiny hair, the color of the corn they’d begun cutting that day.

  “You could be engaged to Carol if you like,” said Iris.

  He got up and walked out of the house, slamming the front door behind him.

  At the house next door he rang the bell hard. He didn’t know who lived there—that hardly mattered. The young woman who answered the door he recognized at once. Later on he found out she was Gillian Atkins, but all he knew then was that she was the bather he had seen when with me and had been thinking of only a moment before. It gave him, he said, a horrible feeling of having stumbled into another world, a place of dreams and magic and perhaps science fiction. Or into the French analyst’s myths where goddesses appeared out of clouds and where gods, in order to seduce, disguised themselves as swans and bulls and showers of gold.

  She was smiling, of course. He stared, then he asked her if she knew where Kim Gresham lived. That made her smile again. As if she wouldn’t know that, as if anyone in this place wouldn’t know a thing like that. She told him to go to the house on the outskirts of the village.

  When he got there the house was shut up. He knew, as one does, that there was no one at home. It was a lovely place, like a cottage on an old-fashioned calendar or a chocolate-box lid, thatch coming down over eyelid dormers, a pheasant made of straw perched on the roof. Roses climbed over the half-timbering and a white-flowering climber with them that gave off a rich, heavy scent. It made him feel sick.

  The evening was warm, the sky lilac and pink. Birds flew homeward in flocks as dense as swarms of bees. He walked back to where he’d left his car, passing the cottage he meant to buy, he still at that time meant to buy. Old Mrs. Fowler was taking the air, sitting on the wooden bench in the front garden beside an old man. They were holding hands, and they waved to him and smiled. He said that though he was in a turmoil, he was profoundly aware of them and that he had never seen such a picture of tranquillity.

  He knew where Susannah would be the next day. On Wednesday afternoons she went to work for the hairdresser. He expected Lavinia to come in the morning—it surely wouldn’t be Carol after what had happened— but instead a stranger arrived, brought to his door by Sandy.

  “We didn’t want to let you down,” Sandy said, “did we, Teresa? This is Teresa, she’s taking Susannah’s place.”

  “Teresa what?” he said.

  “Gresham,” the woman said. “Teresa Gresham. It’s my husband’s nephew that Susannah’s engaged to.”

  She was probably thirty-five, shorter and plumper than the girls, browner-skinned and with light brown hair, an exquisitely pretty face, her eyes the bright dark blue of delphiniums.The summer dress she wore he had learned to think of as an old-fashioned garment.This one was pink with white flowers on it. Her legs were bare, and she had white sandals on her strong brown feet.

  “They tried everything,” I said when he told me.

  “I suppose they did. But she wasn’t flirtatious like Lavinia or blatant like Carol. I suppose you could say she was—maternal. She talked to me in a soothing way, she was cheerful and comforting—or she thought she was being comforting. Of course the whole village knew about Susannah and me by then, and they knew what had happened. Teresa made me coffee and brought it up. I was still working upstairs, still hiding from Sandy’s grins and gestures, and she brought the coffee in and said not to be unhappy, life was too short for that. Smiling all the time, of course, need I say? She didn’t tell me there were plenty more girls in the village—she said there were more fish in the sea than ever came out of it.”

  Sandy knocked on the back door at one to take her home in his van. Ben had suspected there was something between those two, he had sensed a close, affectionate intimacy, but then Sandy announced he was getting married in ten days’ time and would Ben like to come? The village church at twelve noon. He didn’t say whom he was marrying, but it couldn’t be Teresa because she had talked of a husband, and Marion Kirkman also was married. Almost anything could have been believed of the villagers by that time, he thought, but no doubt they drew the line at bigamy.

  He said he didn’t know if he could accept—he didn’t know where he’d be on the Saturday that week, he’d have to see.

  “Oh, you’ll come,” Sandy said airily. “Things’ll work out, you’ll see. Everything’ll be coming up roses by then.”

  You had to pass through the shop to get to the hairdresser’s, through the shop and up the stairs. Anne Whiteson, behind the counter, detained him too long, smiling, friendly, asking after his health, his work, his opinion of the enduring hot weather. He heard Susannah’s voice while he was climbing the steep staircase, and as much as he longed to see her, he stood for a moment experiencing the pleasure and the pain, not knowing which predominated, of those soft sweet tones, that rustic burr, the sunny warmth that informed everything she said. Not that she was saying anything particularly worth hearing, even he knew that, though it was poetry to him. It was something about a kind of shampoo she was discussing and whether it really made a perm last longer, but it thrilled him so that he was both shivering and awestruck.

  The door was open, but as he came to it two hair dryers started up simultaneously. He walked in. All the women had their backs to him: Angela Burns, the hairdresser, and her assistant, Debbie Kirkman—he learned their names later—plus two older women, with their gray hair wound up onto pink plastic curlers, and Gillian Atkins, whose long blond curls were at that moment being liberated from a battery of rollers by Susannah herself. He was beginning to see Gillian Atkins as some kind of evil genius who dogged his steps and appeared at crucial moments of his life. Aphrodite or Hecate.

  Although the windows were open the place was very hot, and when Susannah turned around her cheeks were flushed and her hair curled into tendrils around her face like one of Botticelli’s girls. He thought she had never looked more beautiful. In front of them all she came up to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. Over her shoulder he could see five pairs of eyes watching them, heads all turned around to see. In front of them he couldn’t speak, but she could.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.Trust me. I’ll come to you tomorrow evening.”

  Someone laughed.The five women started clapping.They clapped as at a play or a show put on for their benefit. Horribly embarrassed, he muttered something and ran down the stairs and ou
t through the shop. But she’d restored him, he was better now, she had told him to trust her. He could see it all: the arranged marriage, the established engagement, two sets of parents and a bunch of siblings all wanting the marriage, everyone set on it but the promised bride, who was set on him.

  That evening he managed to do some good work. The French was about sacrifice as propitiation of the gods, Agamemnon’s killing of Iphigenia and the sacrifice of Polyxena on Achilles’ tomb, and the subject demanded a similarly elegant grave prose. He worked upstairs in that room that had a view of the forest, not the lake, and when he reached Polyxena’s burial, a wind sprang up like that which had risen while the Greeks waited to embark from Rhoetea. The forest trees bent and fluttered in this freakish wind, which blew and howled and died after half an hour.

  Once he had the Greeks embarked for Thrace, he abandoned the translation and turned to write in his diary instead, the diary that had been untouched for almost a week. He wrote about Susannah and how she had reassured him and about the dark forest too and the strange sounds he could hear as he sat there with the dark closing in. “A yelping like a puppy,” he wrote, unaware that what he heard must have been the cry of the little owl out hunting.

  He slept soundly that night, and the next day, at lunchtime, on a whim, he walked down to the pub. Have I mentioned there was a pub? I don’t think I have, but there was one and it was kept by Jean and David Stamford. It should have been called by some suitable name in that village, the Cupid’s Bow, perhaps, or the Maiden’s Prayer, Ben said, but it wasn’t, it was called the Red Lion. Like almost every house along the village street and around the green, it was a pretty building, half-timbered, with flowers climbing over it and flowers in tubs outside. Ben went in there to lunch off a beer and a sandwich for no better reason than that he was happy.

  You could always tell strangers from the village people. They looked different. Ben said brutally that strangers were fat or dark or ugly or all those things together. There were several couples like that in the bar. He had noticed their cars parked outside. They were passing through—all they would be permitted to do, he said, though in fact the Red Lion did have rooms available, and visitors had been known to stay a few nights or even a week.

  The farmer from Lynn was sitting by himself up at the bar. It’s a measure of the way the village people regarded him and had for quite a long time regarded him that no one ever uttered his name or called him by it, which is why even now I don’t know what it was. He sat in miserable solitude while the rest of the clientele enjoyed themselves, greeting Ben enthusiastically, the old man he had seen holding hands with Mrs. Fowler actually slapping him on the back. No doubt, the farmer had come in there out of defiance, refusing to be browbeaten. He drank his beer and, after sitting there a further five minutes, staring at the bottles behind the bar, got down from his stool and left.

  To Ben’s astonishment everyone laughed and clapped. It was like the scene in the hairdresser’s all over again. When the applause died down Jean Stamford announced to the assembled company that a little bird had told her the Old Rectory was sold. Everyone seemed to know that the little bird was the village’s resident agent and her brother-in-law. Mrs. Fowler’s friend asked how much the farmer had got for it, and Jean Stamford named a sum so large that the customers could only shake their heads in silence.

  “Who’s bought it?” Ben asked.

  They seemed to like his intervention. There was a kind of hum of approval. It was apparently the right inquiry put at the right time. But no one knew who had bought the Old Rectory, only that it was nobody from the village.

  “More’s the pity,” said the old man.

  “And a pity for them,” David Stamford said strangely, “if they don’t suit.”

  Ben walked home. All this talk of houses as well as the prospect of his reunion with Susannah prompted him to ring up the estate agent and make an offer for Mrs. Fowler’s house.The agent assured him it would be accepted, no doubt about it.

  The combination of the beer, the walk, and the sunshine sent him to sleep. It was gone five before he woke, and he immediately set about putting wine in the fridge and preparing a meal for Susannah and himself, avocados and chicken salad and ice cream. He wrote all this down in his diary the next morning while she still slept. It was the first time she had ever stayed a whole night with him.

  From his bedroom window he’d watched for her to come. She hadn’t said a time and he watched for her for an hour, quietly going mad, unable to remain still. When at last she arrived it was in her father’s van, which she was driving herself. The sight of it filled him with joy, with enormous exhilaration. All the suspense and terrors of the past hour were forgotten. If she could come in her father’s own car this must mean that, miraculously, her parents had given their approval, minds had changed, and he was to be received, the accredited lover.

  She was wearing nothing underneath her thin, almost transparent silk trousers and a loose top of lilac-colored silk. He had never been so aware of the beauty of her young body, her long legs and very slightly rounded belly, in which the navel was a shallow well. Her loose hair covered her breasts as if spread there from modesty. She lifted to him her warm red lips and her tongue darted against the roof of his mouth.

  “Susannah, I love you so. Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you, dear Ben.”

  He was utterly consoled. Those were the words he wrote down the next morning. She shared the wine with him, she ate. She talked excitedly of Sandy Clements’s wedding to Rosalind Wantage, the present her parents had bought, the dress she would wear to the ceremony. And Ben must come with her—they would go together. He would, wouldn’t he? Ben laughed. He’d have gone to the ends of the earth with her, let alone to the village church.

  His laughter died, and he asked her about Kim Gresham. She was to tell him there was nothing in it or at least that it was over. He could bear an old love, a love from the past.

  She said seriously, “Let’s not talk about other people,” and, as if repeating a rule, “We don’t. Not here.You’ll soon learn, darling Ben.”

  They made love many times that night. Ben wrote that there had never been such a night in all his life. He didn’t know it could be like that; he had read of such things and thought they existed only in the writer’s imagination. And one of the strange things was that those actions of hers he had previously thought of as adventurous, even as shocking, weren’t indulged in, or if they were they became unmemorable, for something else had happened. It was as if in the midst of this bodily rapture they had somehow become detached from their physical selves; it was sex made spirit and all the stuff of sex transcended. They were taken from themselves to be made angels or gods, and everything they did took on the aspect of acts of grace or sacred rituals, yet at the same time made a continuum of pleasure.

  He wrote that in his diary in the morning. He couldn’t have brought himself to tell it to me in words.

  She slept with her head on his pillow and her hair spread out—“rayed out,” was how he put it, “like the sun in splendor.” He watched her sleeping and he remembered her telling him to trust her. He couldn’t therefore account for his terror, his awful fear. What was he afraid of?

  Teresa Gresham came at eight-thirty to clean the house, and at nine Susannah woke up.

  7

  Dodging Teresa, avoiding knowing glances, he made coffee for Susannah and set a tray with orange juice, toast, and fruit. But when he took it up to her she was already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed combing her hair. She smiled at him and held out her arms. They held each other and kissed and he asked her when they could be married.

  She gave him a sidelong look. “You’ve never asked me to marry you.”

  “Haven’t I?” he said. “I’ve told almost everyone else it’s what I want.”

  “Anyway, darling Ben...” She always called him that, “dear Ben” or “darling Ben,” and it sat oddly—charmingly to him—with her rustic accent. But wh
at she had to say wasn’t charming. “Anyway, darling Ben, I can’t because I’m going to marry Kim.”

  He didn’t believe he’d heard that, he literally didn’t believe his ears. She must have asked if he’d thought she was marrying Kim. He asked her what she’d said, and she repeated it. She said, “You know I’m engaged to Kim. Carol said she’d told you.”

  “This is a joke, isn’t it?” he said.

  She took his hand, kissed it, and held it between her breasts. “It’s nice that you want to marry me. Marriage is very important, you only do it once, so I think it’s lovely that you want to be with me like that forever and ever. But that’s the way I’m going to be with Kim. Live in the same house and share the same bed and bring up children together. It can’t be changed, darling Ben. But I can still see you, we can be like we were last night. No one will mind. Did you think they would mind?”

  She was his dear love, his adored Susannah, but she was a madwoman too. Or a child who understood nothing of life. But he knew that wasn’t so. She was eighteen, but the depths of her eyes weren’t; they were as old as her grandmother’s, as knowledgeable, in her own way as sophisticated.

  He took his hand away. It didn’t belong there. She picked up her coffee cup and repeated what she’d said. She was patient with him, but she didn’t know what it was he failed to understand. It seemed as clear as glass to her.

  “Look, I’m not good at this,” she said. “Ask Teresa.”

  The last person he wanted at that moment was Teresa Gresham, but Susannah went to the door and called her, and Teresa came upstairs. She looked quite unembarrassed; she wasn’t even surprised.

  “We all do as we please here,” she said. “Marriage is for life, of course, just the once. But lovemaking, that’s another matter. Men go with who they like, and so do women. There’s only been one divorce in this village in thirty years,” she said. “And before that no one got divorced, anyway. No one outside here—in the world, that is.”