by Ruth Rendell
*
The wallpaper came off very easily. In places it was only necessary for Duncan to take hold of an edge and peel it off. When he placed his hand on the exposed plaster it felt pleasantly warm. Looking back on the various homes he had had, his parents’ house, the first flat he shared with Eva, then the cottage out in Essex, he couldn’t recall anywhere that the central heating was as efficient as here. Now March had come in and the sun shone every day, he had turned off all but three of the radiators and still he had to open the casements wide and the French windows.
At the DIY store beyond the Tesco and IT Heaven, he bought almond-white eggshell-finish paint, a sheepskin roller and two small brushes for doing the fiddly bits. The man who was the caretaker for the flats opposite came out of the Tesco carrying bottles of spirits. By the shape of the bags Duncan could see they were spirits, one bottle of gin and one of whisky. The man must be an alcoholic, not at all suitable for a responsible job like his. Duncan thought of doing something about it but postponed any action until he had finished painting the hall and stairwell. He often thought of doing something about things but when the time came he seldom did.
‘Leila has opened a boutique in the Bel Esprit Centre,’ said Molly, pouring hot milk onto the cocoa powder, sugar and milk mix in the new mug she had bought Stuart. ‘Me and Noor and Sophie are going in there to have a look.’
‘Who’s Leila?’ said Stuart for something to say.
‘I don’t know. Some woman. She put a flyer in our pigeonhole. That’s how I know she’s opening this morning. We can’t afford to buy anything but we thought we’d take a look.’ Stuart’s beauty made Molly shy of asking anything of him but she took courage. ‘You want to come?’
‘I don’t like going into crowds, not with my arm.’
‘I don’t suppose there’ll be a crowd. It’s not Oxford Street, is it?’
A place like that, Stuart thought, was a kind of Mecca for young women. Would it attract the beautiful girl? ‘I may see you there,’ he said not very graciously.
He spent a long time at his front window, watching for the beautiful girl. Once he had seen her father, walking along the street alone. Once he had seen that same man driving the black car with a woman beside him but whether it was her he couldn’t tell for the woman had a thick black scarf wound round her head and neck. After Molly had gone he stationed himself at the window, holding the hot-chocolate mug which had a scarlet heart pierced by an arrow on it, unaware that it was a Valentine’s gift from her. The street was empty, no crowds of eager women queuing up at the Bel Esprit Centre. But looking across to the opposite side of Kenilworth Avenue, he saw the face of Duncan Yeardon at one of his windows. It wore, he thought, a wistful lonely expression, and having no desire to be seen in the same light, he moved away and eased himself into the heavy pale blue sweater, the only garment for the upper body he could presently wear with ease.
It was a very warm day for mid-March so that Stuart almost decided to go for a longer walk later. But Leila’s boutique first. He mounted the front steps and the glass doors parted for him. Apart from a coffered ceiling and a dark brown wooden arch or two, nothing much remained of Smirke’s ecclesiatical interior. A door on the left led into the Holistic Forum where Rose Preston-Jones did a stint twice a week, another to an acupuncturist, while on the right an arch led to the Recreation Arena and the Yoga Room. Ahead of him, above an open door, was the word Leilaland. Inside, he could see something very near the crowd he had anticipated, milling about among racks of clothes. There was not a man in sight. Not subdued by this but wary of a knock to his arm, Stuart approached the open door, suddenly confident that the beautiful girl would be here. It was her sort of place, the diaphanous wispy bits of chiffon and lace masquerading as dresses made for her.
Holding up his right hand to protect his left arm, he moved cautiously in among the racks, looking this way and that for his quarry, his head well above most of those of the women in the room. Molly and Noor and Sophie were soon spotted, each of them concentrating on tops and trousers and shifts with the kind of attention their parents and teachers would have liked to see them give to their studies. There was no sign of the beautiful girl.
When he first came in he had attracted stares as the only man there, or more probably because of his looks, but the clothes and the price tickets were more of a lure and soon they left him alone between a table laden with folded sweaters and a tall cabinet like a bookcase full of costume jewellery and artificial flowers. He moved about carefully. Afraid for his arm. Staying seemed pointless and he was turning to leave when a door at the back of the shop opened and Claudia came out with a middle-aged Asian woman. He felt disorientated, for a moment doubting his own eyes, then he remembered something he usually managed to forget, that she was a fashion journalist. She must be visiting this place and interviewing this woman for her newspaper’s women’s pages. At the same time a visual memory came to him of that enormous thug Freddy Livorno. But before he could escape Claudia had found him.
‘How sweet of you to follow me here, darling!’
Useless to deny it. He stared helplessly at her and then his eyes fell. She was a good-looking woman, no doubt about it, but not in the same league as the beautiful girl.
‘Did you see me from your window? How is your poor arm?’ Without waiting for replies, she seized him by his good arm and said, ‘There’s a lovely little cafe at the back of the arena. Come and buy me a cappuccino.’
Buy her one, Stuart thought. Typical. But he went with her through what had once been the nave of this 1890s church and into the chancel which, long stripped of its altar and communion rail, now held a dozen scarlet tables, four dozen scarlet chairs and a long glass counter laden with food and drink.
‘Imagine,’ said Claudia when her cappuccino and his hot chocolate had come, ‘what I found when I knocked over the bowl of dried flowers behind my desktop. You’ll never guess. All those dusty old flowers fell out and so did a little device. A gizmo for spying on people’s conversations. I don’t know how it works but I can guess. It picks up anything that’s said within earshot.’
‘What about it?’
‘What about it? It’s been planted there by Freddy. It means he’s heard everything I’ve said to you all these months. And I found a nasty little thing he’s fixed on to my computer so he can read all my emails.’
‘That’s why he broke my arm,’ Stuart said indignantly, his irritation with her just as much as Freddy.
‘Exactly. But I know how to outwit him. I put the thing back among the flowers and I’ll never send another email that isn’t absolutely innocuous. But when I speak to you I’ll do it from my bedroom or my office or in the garden.’
Where he might have more of these hidden devices … ‘Better not speak to me at all,’ said Stuart, and his upper arm which hadn’t pained him at all for a month, claimed his attention with a sharp shaft of agony. ‘Better we don’t speak.’
‘Then how are we to carry on our relationship?’
‘We’re not.’
‘Now, sweetheart, you don’t mean that. You’re not well yet. I’ve not been well – he hit me too, you know. Well, you don’t know. But he did. I thought he’d broken my jaw and he meant to but he hadn’t. He did frighten me a lot and that’s why I didn’t call you. Then I found that horrid little thing among the flowers and I was scared, darling, but I’ve got over that. Let’s go to your place and just lie down quietly on your bed for an hour. I haven’t got to be back till one.’
So they lay down quietly on Stuart’s bed and nothing much happened. Stuart found that it wasn’t only walking which was inhibited by a heavy plaster weighing down one’s arm. If it had been the beautiful girl lying beside him he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have allowed a broken leg and a fractured skull as well as a broken arm to impede him, but it wasn’t, it was Claudia. He went out into the street with her when she left and up to the Watford Way to find her a taxi. Cabs were more frequent and the drivers more obliging since
the recession had begun, but still it was several minutes before one came. At least he wasn’t going to have to pay for it, Stuart thought, walking back into Kenilworth Avenue.
He had turned through the gateway to Lichfield House, was walking up the path, when something made him turn his head. What? Some instinct, some stroke of fate, some spiritual summons of the object of passion to the lover? Whatever it was, he turned round and there, on the other side of the street, mounting the shallow steps to the front door of Springmead, was the beautiful girl followed by her father. In their hands they carried shopping bags which they had evidently brought from the black Audi that was parked at the kerb. By inserting a key in the lock and opening the door the beautiful girl told Stuart she lived there. She and her father lived there. Stuart, riveted to the spot – a phrase he had read but never previously experienced – watched her walk into the house, watched the man walk in, but instead of closing the door behind him, drop his bags and return to the car. The beautiful girl, now turned round to face him and her father, showed Stuart the full extent of her beauty, her lithe and slender shape, her swan’s neck, her incomparable face and jet-black hair, piled like a geisha’s in smooth coils on top of her head. She faced him and her father but for no more than a moment, then she closed the door.
Stuart had been holding his breath. He expelled it in a long exhalation. She lived opposite, she must do. Why otherwise would she have let herself in with her own key? Her father drove off. No doubt he was putting the car away in a garage they must have somewhere round the back. Silently, Stuart said to himself, ‘Thank you, Claudia.’ If it hadn’t been for escorting Claudia round the corner to find a cab he might never have found out where the beautiful girl lived. Well, if not never, not for a long time. Thank you, Claudia. He stood in the sunshine, the pain in his arm quite gone, until the three girls appeared from the church, all carrying bags labelled Leilaland.
‘We’ve spent zillions,’ said Noor. ‘Well, our Visa cards have. I’m crossing my fingers Daddy will pay. Are you all right?’
‘I’m absolutely fine,’ said Stuart.
It was April before the plaster came off his arm. In the weeks before that happened he found himself making plans for his future all dependent on that day coming. Everything was on hold until then but when it came and the removal of this great chunk of rock, grubby now and fraying at the edges, had taken place, he would do several decisive things. Make it plain to Claudia that their affair was over and refuse to listen to her cajolements; think seriously about getting a job and start looking for one in earnest; go across the road, ring the bell of Springmead and meet the beautiful girl.
Claudia had had flu. That kept her away from him for about ten days, and after that, when she was better, she and Freddy went to Greece on holiday. The moment she came back – well, it felt like the moment – she phoned. ‘Nessun dorma’ rang once more through Flat 1 Lichfield House, but she assured him that she was phoning out in the street, actually standing in the entrance to Angel Tube station. She arrived and it was quite a lot like old times, but even then he was telling himself that it couldn’t go on. The truth was that even at the height of his lovemaking he heard Freddy’s voice saying, ‘I’ll do worse …’ and he thought about that heavy stick smashing his face, breaking his nose, mashing up his mouth. Oh, no, no, no. Freddy was a demon. Stuart wouldn’t put it past him to have had spies with recording devices lurking in Angel station.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stuart’s teens had been free of acne and any facial eruption had been rare, but there had been the occasional spot. One of these, on his nose, he still remembered with horror. He had been seventeen and already conscious of his looks, a vanity fostered by his mother who often spoke of him as ‘my handsome son’ or ‘my good-looking boy’. The spot was so distressing that he had wanted to take time off school but his father had put his foot down.
‘I could understand it if you were a girl, Stuart.’
Since then there had been various small disfigurements – ‘pink eye’ dyeing one retina red, a chipped tooth and the wait until the crown could be in place. Now he was appalled by the sight of his left arm when the plaster came off, the skin white, scaly and wrinkled like he could imagine (but had never seen) the arm of an old person, someone like Marius Potter, for instance. The weather was warm but the state of his arm made wearing a tight royal-blue T-shirt impossible. ‘Nessun dorma’ was repeating itself hysterically from his bedroom where he had flung the mobile on his bed. Whatever Claudia might say, he had a horrible feeling that Freddy was sitting in his solicitor’s office also listening to that ringtone and waiting for him to answer it. Waiting for the incriminating evidence which would be enough to fetch him down here with a lethal weapon.
He moved his arm up and down from the elbow like someone doing ‘curls’. It felt a bit stiff but it didn’t hurt. He was young, the skin would rejuvenate itself – wouldn’t it? Once it was back to normal he would go to one of those fake-tanning places, there was one up at the roundabout, and get himself done a lovely golden brown all over. Or maybe find himself a sunbed. But no, those things gave you cancer.
He had rather gone off hot chocolate. Perhaps it was something to do with the way Molly made it – not like his mother did – or else it was the stain on the carpet that Richenda had said was impossible to eradicate. Now he preferred cappuccino. Able to use his arm and hand as if he had never been injured, he made himself a mugful, grated some white chocolate and sprinkled it on the top, and took it to his front-facing window. Stuart was as frequently stationed at the window as the Lady of Shalott and as assiduous a looker in the mirror. But as he drank his coffee he told himself the time had come to stop gazing and act.
Today the weather was warm enough to dispense with the pale blue sweater, but wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt wasn’t much to his taste. He possessed one in navy-blue and white horizontal stripes but he seldom wore it. Going into his bedroom to find it and see what it looked like on, he was met by ‘Nessun dorma’. He switched off the phone, a daring step to take and one he could barely remember ever taking before. Although the place had been quiet before, once that key had been pressed it seemed to him to be followed by utter silence. It made him feel a little uneasy. He pulled the striped T-shirt over his head, contemplated his reflection in the mirror in the black-matt frame and decided he was satisfied.
Now the time had come he felt inclined to put it off. Not for long, maybe just for half an hour. So a walk first. Again he went unaccompanied by his mobile. It felt strange, the way, according to his mother, a woman feels when out without her handbag. The sky was a clear cloudless blue, the sun very warm, and the trees were coming into leaf, a fresh bright green. Other trees he didn’t know the name of were a mass of pink and white blossom. He walked up as far as St Ebba’s, round Kenilworth Green and back at the roundabout and made an appointment at Embrown to come in for an all-over tanning session the following afternoon. Varying the walk by returning via Chester Grove, he walked past the parade and noticed that Design for Living had closed. Another casualty of the recession. No more putting it off, Stuart, he told himself. The time has come. But what was he going to say to whoever came to the door? That was something he had given no thought to. Maybe simply say that they were neighbours, he had seen them about and would they like to come over for a drink? It was the kind of thing people did. His mother had often done it when new people moved in. Of course it would involve him in more expense and more preparation but all that was worth it to meet the beautiful girl. And they might say no, thank you for asking, but you must come to us.
All Duncan Yeardon’s casement windows were open. As if it was high summer instead of only April. He could smell the paint from halfway up the path. Stuart thought of DIY as essentially something you did when you were too old to do anything else and Duncan’s activities didn’t interest him. Few people’s did unless they were young and attractive.
In spite of the sunshine, blinds were down at all the Springmead windows, sl
atted blinds made of some kind of thin wood, and not a single window was open. The front door was painted black with ‘SPRINGMEAD’ on it in silver capitals. Stuart wasn’t usually very observant but he noticed the lack of a letter box. That was strange. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that not having a letter box was against the law. There was, however, a bell. He pressed it and heard chimes from inside. No one came. Perhaps they were out. The absence of their car meant nothing, as when they weren’t out in it, it was kept in a garage.
He rang the bell again. This time someone appeared from the side of the house. The gate was opened between Springmead and number 7 and the beautiful girl’s father came out. With him was a girl, but not the beautiful one.
He had a clipped jerky accent and his voice was rather high-pitched. ‘Yes? What is it?’
Stuart felt awkward. He hadn’t expected to be treated like someone distributing flyers. ‘I – I mean, I’m a neighbour of yours. I live over there. In those flats. I wondered – I wonder if you’d – well, if you’d like to come over for a drink sometime. You and your –’ he found himself using a phrase he thought he would never utter ‘– the two young ladies.’
This one was very different from the beautiful girl, being short, rather squat and with big coarse features. Her hair was jet black and long but not glossy and her eyes looked malevolent, perhaps because they were sunk in fleshy folds. The man said something to her in what was presumably their language, said it in a sibilant whisper. She turned away and went back the way she had come.
The man looked down before he spoke. ‘You are kind,’ he said, ‘but no, thank you. We don’t go out. We stay in our own place. Thank you.’
He didn’t wait for Stuart to go but followed the girl, closing the side gate behind him. Stuart looked round to see Duncan Yeardon standing on the other side of the dividing fence, holding a mug in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.
