Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  In the early afternoon a second car arrived and the first one left. They were operating a shift system. From Ben’s description it seemed that Marion Kirkman was driving the second car. He had no doubt as to the identity of her passenger. It was Iris Peddar. Later on another car replaced it and was still there when darkness came.

  Perhaps a car was there all night. He didn’t know. By then he didn’t want to know; he just desperately hoped this surveillance would have ceased by morning. Just after sunrise he pulled back the curtains and looked out. A car was there. He couldn’t see who was inside it. It was then that he told himself he could be as strong and as resolute as they. He could stick it out. He simply wouldn’t look. He’d do what seemed impossible the day before, work in the back, not look, ignore them.They meant him no harm; they only mounted this guard to stop him from going to the village to find Susannah. But there must be other ways of reaching Susannah. He could do a huge circular detour via the town and come into the village from the other direction. He could park his car outside her father’s house. But if he did that, all that, any of that, they would follow him...

  All that day he stayed indoors. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t read, he didn’t want to eat. At one point he lay down and slept, only to dream of Susannah. This time he was in a tower, tall and narrow with a winding stair inside like a windmill, and he was watching her from above, through a hole in the floor. He heard her footsteps climbing the stairs, hers and another’s, and when she came into the room below she was with Sandy Clements. Sandy began to undress her, taking the bracelet from her arm and the necklace from her neck and held one finger of her right hand as she stepped naked out of the blue dress. She looked up to the ceiling and smiled, stretching out her hands, one to him, one to Sandy, turning her body languorously for them to gaze at and worship. He awoke with a cry and, forgetting his resolve, stumbled into the front room to look for the car. A red one this time, Teresa Gresham’s. She was alone in it.

  At about seven in the evening, long before dark, she got out of the car and came up to the house. He’d forgotten he’d left the back door unlocked. She walked in. He asked her what the hell she thought she was doing.

  “You asked me to come up and do your ironing,” she said.

  “That’s rubbish,” he said. “I asked you nothing. Now get out.”

  She had apparently been gone five minutes when he saw, in the far distance, a bicycle approaching. The very first time she came Susannah had been on a bicycle, and that was who he thought it was. The surveillance was over: she had persuaded them to end it, and she was coming to him. She had told them they couldn’t prevent her from being with him, she was over age, she loved him. He opened the front door and stood on the doorstep waiting for her.

  It wasn’t Susannah. It was the younger of her two sisters, the fourteen-year-old Julie. Disappointment turned inside his body as love does, with a wrench, an apparent lurching of the heart. But he called out a greeting to her. She rested her bicycle against the garden wall and fastened a chain and padlock to its front wheel—the good girl, the responsible teenager. Who did she think would steal it out here? He let her into the house, certain she must have a message for him, perhaps a message from Susannah, who was allowed to reach him in no other way.

  She was a pretty little girl—his words—who was much shorter than her sisters, who clearly would never reach Susannah’s height, with a very slight, childish figure. She wore a short skirt and a white sweatshirt, ankle socks, and white trainers. Her straw-colored hair was shoulder-length, and she had a fringe.

  “She looked exactly like the girl in the Millais painting, the one who’s sitting up in bed and looking surprised but not unhappy.”

  “I know the one,” I said. “It’s called Just Awake.”

  “Is it?” he said. “I wonder what Millais meant by ‘awake.’ D’you think a double meaning was intended?”

  Julie sat down sedately in my living room. He asked her if she had a message for him from Susannah, and she shook her head.

  “You asked me to come,” she said. “You phoned up an hour ago and said if I’d come over you’d let me have those books you told Susannah I could have.”

  “What books?” He had no idea what she meant.

  “For my schoolwork. For my English homework.”

  It was at this point that he had the dreadful feeling they had sent her as the next in the progression. They’d decided it was still worth trying to keep him and make him one of them. He didn’t want Lavinia or Carol; stubbornly, he still wanted monogamy with Susannah. But since he’d rejected the more mature Teresa, wasn’t it possible he’d be attracted by her antithesis, by this child?

  Of course he was wrong there. They weren’t perverse. In their peculiar way, they were innocent. But by this time he’d have believed anything of them, and he did, for a few minutes, believe they’d sent her to tempt him. He’d been sitting down but he jumped up, and she too got up.

  “Why are you really here?”

  She forgot about the books. “I’m to tell you to go away,” she said. “I’m to say it’s your last chance.”

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I’m not listening to this.”

  “You can stay here tonight.” She said it airily, as if it were absolutely her province to give him permission. “You can stay here tonight, but you must go tomorrow. Or we’ll make you go.”

  He didn’t once touch her. She didn’t touch him. She left the house, unlocked the padlock on her bicycle chain, and got on the bicycle. It’s almost impossible for a practiced cyclist to fall off a bicycle, but she did. She fell off in the road, and the machine fell on her. He lifted the bicycle off her, put out his hand to help her up, pulled her to her feet. She jumped on the bicycle and rode off, turning around to call something after him, but he didn’t hear what it was. He returned to the house and thought that in the morning he’d go to the village and get into her parents’ house, even if that meant breaking a window or kicking the door in.

  In the morning the car was back. It was parked at the lakeshore. The driver was David Stamford and the passenger Gillian Atkins.

  If he went to the town and from there by the back way into the village, they would follow him. He had no doubt that they would physically prevent him from driving or walking along the lakeshore road. It was harassment, their simply being there was harassment, but imagine telling this tale to the police, imagine proving anything.

  Working on his translation was impossible. Attempting to find Susannah would be difficult, but he tried. He phoned the Peddars, Sandy Clements, the shop, the pub, Angela Burns. One after the other, when they heard his voice, they put the phone down. It was deeply unnerving, and after Angela’s silence and the click of the receiver going into its rest, he stopped trying.

  But there was some comfort to be drawn from these abortive phone calls. He’d been able to make them. They hadn’t cut his phone line. It’s some measure of the state he was getting into that he even considered they might. This negativity, this absence of some hypothetical action, told him there would be no violence used against him. He hadn’t exactly been afraid of violence, but he’d been apprehensive about it.

  He sat down, in the back of the house where he couldn’t see that car, and thought about what they’d done. Not so very much, really. They’d stopped him from going to a wedding and followed his car and sent him to the town. Surely he could stick it out if that was all that was going to happen? If he had Susannah he could. He had to stay at Gothic House for her sake, he had to stay until he got her away.

  “I thought of going out to them,” he said to me, “to those two, Stamford and the Atkins woman, and later on to the people who replaced them, the Wantages, Rosalind’s parents, of going out to them and asking what they wanted of me. Of course I knew really, I knew they wanted me to leave, but I wanted to hear someone say it, and not a child of fourteen. And then I thought I’d say, Okay, I’ll leave but I’m taking Susannah with me.”

  By now he coul
dn’t bear to leave his observers unobserved, and he sat in the front window watching them while they watched him. He still hadn’t been able to bring himself to carry out his intention. He just sat there watching and thinking of how to put his question and what words to choose to frame his resolution. In the middle of the afternoon a terrible thing happened. He had calculated that the Wantages’ shift would end at four—that was the state he had got into, that he was measuring his watchers’ shifts—and, sure enough, at five to four another car arrived. The driver was an unknown man, his passenger Susannah.

  The car was parked so that its near side, and therefore the passenger’s seat, was toward Gothic House. He looked out into Susannah’s eyes and she looked back, her face quite expressionless. There are times when thinking is dismissed as useless, when one stops thinking and just acts. He had thought enough. He walked, marched, out there, calling her name.

  She wound down the window. The face she presented to him, he said, was that of a woman in a car of whom a stranger has asked the way. It was as if she had never seen him before. The man in the driver’s seat didn’t even turn around. He was staring at the lake with rapt attention. He looked, Ben said, as if he’d seen the Loch Ness Monster.

  “Please get out of the car and come inside, Susannah,” he said to her.

  She was silent. She went on staring as if he really was that stranger and she was considering what directions to give him.

  “We can talk about all this, Susannah. Come inside and talk, will you please? I know you don’t want to leave this place, but that’s because you don’t know anywhere else. Won’t you come with me and try?”

  Slowly she shook her head. “You have to go,” she said.

  “Not without you.”

  “I’m not coming.You have to go alone.”

  She touched her companion’s arm, and he turned his head. From that touch, intimate but relaxed, Ben somehow knew this young fair-haired man was her lover as he had been her lover, and for a moment the sky went black and a sharp pain pierced his chest. She watched him as if calculating all this. Then she said, “Why don’t you go now? You’ll go if you’ve any sense.”

  The young man beside her said, “I’d advise you to leave before dark.”

  “We’ll follow you through the village,” said Susannah. “Then you’ll be safe. Pack your bags and put them in the car.”

  “Shall we say an hour?” That was the young man, in his coarse, rustic voice.

  Ben went back into the house. He had no intention of packing, but at the same time he didn’t know what to do next.The idea came to him that if he could only get Susannah alone all would be well. He could talk to her, remind her, persuade her. The question was, how to do that? Not at the hairdresser’s, he’d tried that. She baby-sat for Jennifer Fowler one evening a week, an evening she’d never been able to come to him, a Wednesday—those few Wednesdays, how bereft and lonely he’d felt. Tomorrow, then, he’d somehow get to the village and Jennifer Fowler’s house. They’d only kept up their surveillance till dark the night before, and it would be dark by nine...

  He sat inside the window watching Susannah for a long time. It was marginally better to see her, he’d decided, than to be in some other part of the house, not seeing her but knowing she was there. To gaze and gaze was both pleasure and pain. The strange thing was, he told me, that watching her was never boring, and he couldn’t imagine that applying to any other person or object on earth.

  He also watched, in sick dread, to see if she and the man with her touched each other or moved toward each other or gave any sign of the relationship he had at first been sure was theirs. But they didn’t. As far as he could tell, they didn’t. They talked and, of course, he wondered what they said. He saw Susannah’s head go back against the headrest on the seat and her eyes close.

  The afternoon was calm and dull, white-skied. Because there was no wind, the surface of the water was quite smooth and the forest trees were still. He went into the back of the house to watch the sunset, a bronze-and-red spectacular sunset striped with black-rimmed thin clouds. These signs of time going by seemed to bring the following night closer, Wednesday night, when he could be alone with her. He began planning how to do it.

  When he went back to the front window the car was moving, turning around prior to leaving. And no other had come to replace it. He began to feel a lightness, something that was almost excitement. They couldn’t keep her from him if they both wanted to be together, and if they could influence her, how much more could he? Any relationship between her and her companion in the car had been in his imagination. Probably, at some time or other, she had slept with Kim Gresham, but that was only to be expected. He had never had any ideas of being the first with her or even desired to be.

  After a little while he poured himself a drink. Never much of a drinker, he had nevertheless had to stop himself from having recourse to whiskey these past few days. But at eight o’clock at night he could indulge himself. He began thinking of getting something to eat, but he hadn’t been outside all day except to speak those few brief words to Susannah, and at about nine, when the twilight was deepening, he walked down to the lake.

  Flies swarmed a few inches above its surface and fish were jumping for them. The water bubbled and broke as a slippery body leapt, twisted, gleaming silver in the last of the light. He watched, growing calm and almost fatalistic, resigning himself to the hard struggle ahead, but knowing that anyone as determined as he would be bound to win.

  Because their lights were off and dusk had by now fallen, because they drove quietly and in convoy, he didn’t see the cars until the first of them was almost upon him.

  10

  He went back into the house. He didn’t quite know what else to do. They parked the cars on the little beach and on the grass. There were about twenty of them, and he said it was like people going to some function in a village hall and parking on the green outside. Only they didn’t get out of their cars until he was indoors, and then not immediately.

  You have to understand that it was all in darkness, or absence of light, for it wasn’t quite dark. The cars were unlit, and so was the house. Once he was inside he tried putting lights on, but then he couldn’t see what they meant to do. He put on the light in the hall and watched them through the front-room window.

  They sat inside their cars. He recognized the Wantages’ car and Sandy Clements’s and, of course, John Peddar’s white van. There was just enough light left to see that. He thought then of phoning the police—he often had that thought—and he always came to the same conclusion, that there was nothing he could say. They had a right to be there. For all he knew, they’d explain their presence by saying they’d come fishing or owl-watching. But by now he was frightened. He was also determined not to show his fear, whatever they did.

  The doors of the white van opened and the four people inside it got out, Susannah and her parents and one of the sisters. He stepped back from the window and moved into the hall. One after the other he heard car doors slamming. It seemed as if an hour passed before the front doorbell rang, though it was probably less than a minute. He breathed in slowly and out slowly and opened the door.

  John Peddar pushed his way into the house or, rather, he pushed his daughter Julie into the house and followed behind her. Next came his wife and Susannah. Ben saw about forty people in the front garden and on the path and the doorstep, and once he had let Susannah in he tried to shut the door, but his effort was useless against the steady but entirely nonviolent onslaught. They simply pushed their way in, close together, a body of men and women, a relentless shoving crowd. He retreated before them into the living room, where the Peddars already were. He backed against the fireplace and stood there with his elbows on the mantelpiece, because there was nowhere farther that he could go, and faced them, feeling that now he knew how it was to be an animal at bay.

  My small front room was full of people. He thought at this moment literally that they meant to kill him, that as one they had go
ne mad. He thought as I had thought in the wood, that the collective unconscious they seemed to share had taken a turn into madness and they had come there to do him to death. And the worst thing was, one of the worst things, that he now grouped Susannah with them. Suddenly he lost his feeling for her. She became one of them, and his passion evaporated with his fear. He could look at her, and did, without desire or tenderness or even nostalgia, but with distaste and the same fear as he had for her family and her neighbors.

  At first he couldn’t speak. He swallowed; he cleared his throat. “What do you want?”

  John Peddar answered him. He said something Ben couldn’t believe he’d heard aright.

  “What?”

  “You heard, but I’ll say it again. I told you you could have my Carol, but not my little girl, not my Julie.”

  Ben said, his voice strengthening, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do. D’you know how old Julie is? She’s not fourteen.” He was still holding the girl in front of him, and now he pushed her forward, displaying her. “See the bruises on her? See her leg? Look at that blue all up her arms.”

  There was a murmur that seemed to swell all around him, like the buzzing of angry bees. His eyes went to Susannah, and he thought he saw on that face that was no longer lovely to him the hint of a tiny malicious smile.

  “Your daughter fell off her bicycle,” he said. “She hurt her leg falling off her bicycle. The bruises on her arm I may have made, I don’t know. I may have made them when I helped her to her feet, that’s all.”

  The child said, in a harsh unchildish voice, “You were going to rape me.”

  “Is that why you’ve come here?” he said. “To accuse me of that?”

  “You tried to rape me.” The accusation, slightly differently phrased, was repeated. “I fell over when I ran out of the house. Because you were trying to do it.”

  “This is rubbish,” he said. “Will you please go.” He looked at Susannah. “All of you, please leave.”