The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  “Well,” said Finn, going up to her and taking her free hand. They never kissed. She smiled at him, a sweet vague smile as if she couldn’t quite see him or was seeing something beyond him. He sat down beside her.

  Finn could do nothing with the pendulum, but Lena had great ability with it just as she had with the divining rod. This was very likely one of the consequences of what those people at the hospital called her schizophrenia. The pendulum was a glass bead suspended on a piece of cotton, and when Lena put it above her right hand it revolved clockwise and when she put it above her left hand it revolved widdershins. She had long since asked it to give her signs for yes and no, and she had noted these particular oscillations. The pendulum had just answered yes to some question which hadn’t been revealed to Finn, and Lena sighed.

  She was old to be his mother, a thin, transparent creature like a dead leaf or a shell that has been worn away by the action of the sea. Finn thought sometimes that he could see the light through her. Her eyes were like his but milder, and her hair which had been as fair as his had reverted to its original whiteness. She dressed herself from the many second-hand clothes shops in which the district abounded and derived as intense a pleasure from buying in them as a Hampstead woman might in South Molton Street. Mostly she was happy, though there were moments of terror. She believed herself to be a reincarnation of Madame Blavatsky, which the hospital had seized upon as a case-book delusion. Finn thought it was probably true.

  “Did you buy anything today?” he said.

  She hesitated. Her dawning smile was mischievous. It was as if she had a secret she could no longer keep to herself and she exclaimed with shining eyes, “It’s your birthday!”

  Finn nodded.

  “Did you think I’d forgotten? I couldn’t.” She was suddenly shy and she clasped her hands over the pendulum, looking down at them. “There’s something for you in that bag.”

  “Well, well,” said Finn.

  In the bag was a leather coat, black, long, double-breasted, shabby, scuffed, and lined with rotting silk. Finn put it on.

  “Well,” he said. “Well!” It was like a storm trooper’s coat. He fastened the belt. “Must be the best thing you ever got,” he said.

  She was ecstatic with pleasure. “I’ll mend the lining for you!”

  “You’ve had a busy day,” he said. The coat was too big for the room. With every movement he made he was in danger of knocking over little glass vases, Toby jugs, china dogs, pebbles, shells, and bunches of dried flowers in chutney jars. He took the coat off carefully, with reverence almost, to please Lena. The green bird began to sing, shrill and sweet, pretending it was a canary. “What did you do this afternoon?”

  “Mrs. Urban came.”

  “Well!”

  “She came in her new car, a green one. The kind of green that has silver all mixed up in it.”

  Finn nodded. He knew what she meant.

  “She brought me those chocolates and she stayed for tea. She made the tea. Last time she came was before you put up the wall and made my bedroom.”

  “Did she like it?”

  “Oh, yes!” Her eyes were full of love, shining with it. “She loved it. She said it was so compact.”

  “Well, well,” said Finn, and then he said, “Ask the pendulum something for me. Ask it if I’m going to have a good year.”

  Lena held up the string. She addressed the pendulum in a whisper, like someone talking to a child in a dark room. The glass bead began to swing, then to revolve clockwise at high speed.

  “Look!“ Lena cried. ”Look at that! Look what a wonderful year you’ll have. Your twenty-seventh, three times three times three. The pendulum never lies.”

  II

  On the broad gravelled frontage of the Urbans’ house were drawn up the Urbans’ three cars, the black Rover, the metallic-green Vauxhall, and the white Triumph. In the drawing room sat the Urbans drinking sherry, oloroso for Margaret, amontillado for Walter, and Tio Pepe for Martin. There was something of the Three Bears about them, though Baby Bear, in the shape of twenty-eight-year-old Martin was no longer a resident of Copley Avenue, Alexandra Park, and Goldilocks had yet to appear.

  Invariably on Thursday evenings Martin was there for dinner. He went home with his father from the office just round the corner. They had the sherry, two glasses each, for they were creatures of habit, and had dinner and watched television while Mrs. Urban did her patchwork. Since she had taken it up the year before as menopausal therapy she seemed to be perpetually accompanied by clusters of small floral hexagons. Patchwork was beginning to take over the house in Copley Avenue, chiefly in the form of cushion covers and bedspreads. She stitched away calmly or with suppressed, energy, and her son found himself watching her while his father discoursed with animation on a favourite subject of his, Capital Transfer Tax.

  Martin had a piece of news to impart. Though in possession of it for some days, he had postponed telling it and his feelings about it were now mixed. Natural elation was mingled with unease and caution. He even felt very slightly sick as one does before an examination or an important interview.

  Margaret Urban held out her glass for a refill. She was a big, statuesque, heavy-browed woman who resembled Leighton’s painting of Clytemnestra. When she had sipped her sherry, she snipped off a piece of thread and held up for the inspection of her husband and son a long strip of joined-together red and purple hexagons. This had the effect of temporarily silencing Walter Urban, and Martin, murmuring that that was a new colour combination, he hadn’t seen anything like that before, prepared his opening words. He rehearsed them under his breath as his mother, with the artist’s sigh of dissatisfaction, rolled up the patchwork, jumped rather heavily to her feet and made for the door, bent on attending to her casserole.

  “Mother,” said Martin, “wait here a minute. I’ve got something to tell you both.”

  Now that the time had come, he brought it out baldly, perhaps clumsily. They looked at him in silence, a calm, slightly stunned silence into which gratification gradually crept. Mrs. Urban took her hand from the door and came slowly back, her eyebrows rising and disappearing into her thick, blue-rinsed fringe.

  Martin laughed awkwardly. “I can’t quite believe it myself yet.”

  “I thought you were going to tell us you were getting married,” said his mother.

  “Married? Me? Whatever made you think that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it’s the sort of thing one does think of. We didn’t even know you did the football pools, did we, Walter? Exactly how much did you say you’d, won?”

  “A hundred and four thousand, seven hundred and fifty-four pounds, forty-six pence.”

  “A hundred and four thousand pounds! I mean, you can’t have been doing the pools very long. You weren’t doing them when you lived here.”

  “I’ve been doing them for five weeks,” said Martin.

  “And you’ve won a hundred and four thousand pounds! Well, a hundred and five really. Don’t you think that’s absolutely amazing, Walter?”

  A slow smile was spreading itself across Walter Urban’s handsome, though somewhat labrador-like, face. He loved it, the consideration of how to make it multiply, how (with subtle and refined legality) to keep it from the coffers of the Inland Revenue, and he loved the pure beauty of it as an abstraction on paper rather than as notes in a wallet. The smile grew to beaming proportions.

  “I think this calls for some sort of congratulation, Martin. Yes, many congratulations. What a dark horse you are! Even these days a hundred thousand is a large sum of money, a very respectable sum of money. We’ve still got that bottle of Piper-Heidsieck from our anniversary, Margaret. Shall we open it? Wins of this kind are free of tax, of course, but we shall have to think carefully about investing it so that you don’t pay all your interest away to the Inland Revenue. Still, if a couple of accountants can’t work it out, who can?”

  “Go and get the champagne, Walter.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t think
of paying off the mortgage on your flat. Remember that tax relief on the interest on your mortgage repayments is a concession of H. M. Government, of which a single man in your position would be mad not to take advantage.”

  “He won’t keep that flat on, he’ll buy himself a house.”

  “He could become an underwriting member of Lloyd’s.”

  “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t buy a country cottage and keep the flat.”

  “He could buy a house and have the maximum twenty-five thousand mortgage …”

  “Do go and get the champagne, Walter. What are you going to do with it, dear? Have you made any plans?”

  Martin had. They weren’t the kind of plans he considered it would be politic to divulge at the moment, so he said nothing about them. The champagne was brought in. Eventually they sat down to the casserole, the inevitably overdone potatoes, and a Black Forest cake. Martin offered his parents ten thousand pounds which they graciously but immediately refused.

  “We wouldn’t dream of taking your money,” said his father. “Believe me, if you’re lucky enough these days to get your hands on a tax-free capital sum, you hang on to it like grim death.”

  “You don’t fancy a world cruise or anything?”

  “Oh, no, thank you, dear, there really isn’t anything we want. I suppose you’d, really rather we didn’t tell anyone about it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of telling anyone but you.” Martin observed his mother’s look of immense gratification, and this as much as anything prevented him from adding that there was one other person he felt obliged to tell. Instead he said, “I’d rather keep it a secret.”

  “Of course you would,” said Walter. “Mum’s the word. You don’t want begging letters. The great thing will be to live as if nothing whatsoever out of the way had happened.”

  Martin made no reply to this. His parents continued to treat him as if he had earned the hundred and four thousand pounds by the expending of tremendous effort or by natural genius instead of the merest chance. He wished they had felt able to accept a present of some of it. It would somewhat have eased his conscience and helped him over the guilt he always felt on Thursday nights when he had to say good-bye to his mother and go home. She was still after nine months inclined to ask, plaintively if by now rhetorically, why he had seen fit to move out of Copley Avenue and go far away to a flat on Highgate Hill.

  Into this flat, 7 Cromwell Court, Cholmeley Lane, he now let himself with the feeling of deep satisfaction and contentment he always had when he entered it. There was a pleasant smell, a mixture, light and clean, of new textiles, furniture polish, and herbal bath essence. He kept all the interior doors open—the rooms were impeccably neat—so that when you walked through the front door the impression was rather as of entering the centrefold of a colour supplement of House and Garden. Or so he secretly hoped, for he kept such thoughts about his flat to himself, and when showing it to a newcomer merely led him through the living room to exhibit from the picture window the view of London lying in a great well below. If the visitor chose to comment on the caramel Wilton, the coffee table of glass set in a brass-and-steel frame, the Swedish crystal, or the framed prints of paintings from the Yugoslav naive school, he would look modestly pleased, but that was all. He felt too deeply about his home to enthuse publicly, and along with his gratitude to goodness knows whom, a certain fear about tempting Providence. There were times when he dreamed of its all being snatched away from him and of his being permanently back in Copley Avenue.

  He switched on the two table lamps which had white shades and bases made from blue-and-white ginger jars. The armchairs were of rattan with padded seats, and the sofa—or French bed as the furniture-shop man had called it—was really only a divan with two bolsters at the back and two at the sides. Now he had won that large sum of money he would be able to replace these with a proper suite, perhaps one in golden-brown hide.

  From the coffee table, between the ashtray with the Greek key design round its rim and the crystal egg with the goat for Capricorn-his birth sign-etched on it he picked up and studied the list he had made on the previous evening. On it were four names: Suma Bhavnani, Miss Watson, Mr. Deepdene, Mr. Cochrane’s sister-in-law. Martin inserted a question mark after this last. He wasn’t sure of her eligibility for his purpose, and besides he must find out what her name was. Some doubt also attached to Mr. Deepdene. But about Suma Bhavnani he was quite sure. He would call on the Bhavnanis tomorrow, he would call on them after he had seen Tim Sage.

  Martin went over to the window. The temples and towers of London hung black and glittering from the sky like the backdrop to some stage extravaganza. He pulled the cord that drew together the long dark green velvet curtains and shut it out. Tim Sage. For days, ever since, in fact, he had heard that he was to benefit from a fifth share in the Little-woods Pool’s first dividend, he had avoided thinking about Tim Sage, but he was going to have to think about him now because tomorrow Tim was coming into the office to talk about his income tax. It would be the first time he had seen Tim for a fortnight, and before three tomorrow he had to decide what to do.

  What to do? He had suppressed that remark to his mother about being obliged to tell one other person, but that was because he had been unwilling to hurt her, not because he was in doubt as to the right way to act. As soon as he allowed himself to think of Tim he knew without a doubt that Tim must be told. Indeed, Tim ought to have been told already. Martin’s gaze travelled speculatively over towards the gleaming dark green telephone. He ought to phone Tim now and tell him.

  Martin’s father always said that one should never make a phone call after ten-thirty at night or before nine in the morning-except, that is, in cases of emergency. This was hardly an emergency and it was ten to eleven. Besides, Martin felt strange about phoning Tim at home. He had never done so. From Tim’s own veiled accounts, his home was a strange one, not to mention his domestic arrangements, and who, anyway, would answer the phone? Tim didn’t live in a place like this where everything was open and above-board as well as immaculate in a more literal sense.

  He turned his back on the phone and switched off the ginger-jar lamps. On second thoughts he helped himself to a small whisky from the glass, brass-and-steel cabinet. It would be silly to phone Tim now when he was going to see him tomorrow. As he drank his whisky he reflected that, of course, it was because he was going to see Tim tomorrow that he hadn’t troubled to phone him before.

  Martin was a well set-up healthy man of medium height with rather too-broad shoulders. In an overcoat he looked burly and older than his age. He had a big square forehead and a strong square chin, but otherwise his features were shapely and refined, his nose being short and straight and his mouth the kind that is sometimes called chiselled. His dark brown curly hair was already beginning to recede in an M-shape from the broad and prominent forehead. He had greeny-blue eyes, a curious shade, very bright and clear, and even white teeth for the attainment of whose regularity Walter Urban had paid large sums to orthodontists in Martin’s early teens.

  Following in his father’s footsteps, he always wore a suit to work. To wash the dishes he put on an apron. Martin wouldn’t have worn an ordinary apron, that would have been ridiculous, but the joke kind made of oilcloth were trendy and amusing and perfectly suitable for men. His mother had given him this one which was orange and brown and represented a gigantic facsimile of a Lea and Perrins Worcester Sauce label. He changed the sheets on his bed, a regular Friday morning task, but he did no other housework because Mr. Cochrane was due at half-past eight.

  That his cleaner was a mister and not a missus was due to the Sex Discrimination Act. When Martin put his advertisement in the North London Post he had been obliged by law not to state that he required female help, and when Mr. Cochrane turned up similarly obliged not to reject him. He was lucky to get anyone at all, as his mother pointed out.

  Mr. Cochrane usually arrived just after the postman and before the newspaper delivery,
but this morning the newsboy must have been early-it was unthinkable for Mr. Cochrane to be late-and Martin had already glanced at the front pages of the Post and the Daily Telegraph before his help rang the doorbell. Always at this moment he wished that he was about to admit a large motherly charwoman, an old-fashioned biddable creature who, if she didn’t exactly call him sir, might nevertheless treat him with respect and show some consideration for his wishes. He had read about such people in books. However, it was pointless to indulge in day-dreaming with Mr. Cochrane outside the door and likely to appear outside the door every Friday for the next ten years. He liked his jobs, of which he had several, in Cromwell Court.

  Martin let him in.

  Mr. Cochrane was about five feet two and spare and wiry with a little scrap of dust-coloured hair fringing a bald pate. His face was exactly like a skull with lampshade material stretched tightly over it and ornamented with a pair of bifocals. He carried the cleaning gear he didn’t trust his employers to provide about with him in a small valise.

  “Morning, Martin.”

  Martin said good morning. He no longer called Mr. Cochrane anything. He had begun by calling him Mr. Cochrane and had been called Martin in return, whereupon he asked his christian name which Mr. Cochrane, flying into one of his sudden rages, had refused to give. It was about this time that a neighbour and fellow-employer told him of his own experience. He had suggested that Mr. Cochrane call him by his surname, to which he had received the reply that it was a disgrace in this day and age to expect an elderly man, a man nearly old enough to be his grandfather, to call him Mr. It was sheer fascism, as if he, Mr. Cochrane, hadn’t done enough kowtowing all his miserable downtrodden life. He had been, apparently, a manservant to some more or less aristocratic person in Belgravia. A butler, said one of Martin’s neighbours who also employed him, but this Martin didn’t believe, for to him butlers were less real a bygone race than dodos.