by Ruth Rendell
“Sorry I’m late. A court case that rather dragged on.”
“A story in it?” said Martin, using what he hoped was the right terminology.
Tim shrugged. His shoulders were very thin, and his hands and his narrow, flat teen-ager’s loins. He looked hard like an athlete until he coughed his smoker’s cough. The only soft fleshy thing about him was his full red mouth. He sat down on the arm of the chair and said, “Humanity treads ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.”
Martin nodded. He was struck by what Tim had said. That was exactly how he had felt that morning while recalling all the chances there had been against the meeting in the wood happening at all. “Is that a quotation?”
“Arnold Bennett.”
“Humanity treads ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses …” Of course there weren’t inevitably abysses, sometimes only shallow ditches, Martin thought. Novelists were very prone to exaggeration. “Let’s have a look at all this bumf then, shall we?” he said.
“I’ve had a demand for nearly five hundred pounds tax. That can’t be right, can it?”
Martin got out Tim’s file. He had a look at the demand. Tim wanted to know if he could get an allowance for the use of his car and if a library subscription he had taken out was tax-free. Martin said no to the car and yes to the subscription and asked Tim some questions and said he would lodge an appeal with the inspector against the five hundred demand. There wasn’t really anything more to say, as far as business went. Tim was on his second cigarette.
“And how’s life been treating you, love?” said Tim.
“All right,” said Martin carefully. It was coming now. He felt nervous, he couldn’t imagine saying it, couldn’t bear to think of Tim’s initial disbelief, his dawning wonder, his gleeful congratulations. He said in a tone that sounded in his own head artificially bright, “I had that carpet laid in the flat, the one I told you I thought I’d, have.”
“Fantastic.”
Martin felt himself redden. But Tim’s expression was quite serious, even interested and kind. “Oh, well,” he said, “I don’t lead a very exciting life, you know.”
“Who does?” said Tim. He sat silent for a moment. It seemed to Martin that his silence was expectant. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and got up. Martin found that he had been holding his breath, and he let it out in what sounded like a sigh. Tim looked at him. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. I’m having a party tomorrow week, Saturday the twenty-fifth. Any chance you might be free?”
This caught Martin unprepared. “A party?”
“Yes, you know,” said Tim, “a social gathering or entertainment, a group of people gathered together in a private house for merry-making, eating and drinking, et cetera. A feast. A celebration. In this case we shall be celebrating my thirtieth birthday, thirty misspent years, my Livingstone. Do come.”
“All right. I mean, of course I will. I’d, like to.”
“The place is unsavoury but the food won’t be. About seven?”
Martin felt a lightness and a relief after Tim had gone. He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t so much as mentioned football or gambling, let alone the pools, and he had hardly mentioned money. Probably he had forgotten ever having introduced Martin to the pools. How absurd I’ve been, thought Martin, telling myself he would be bound to ask and I would be bound to reward him. As if I could give money to Tim, as if I could even offer it. All the time Tim had been there he had felt as if he were walking on that fragile crust over that chasm, and yet he hadn’t really-the ice had been inches thick and perfectly safe to skate on.
Caroline came in with a request from Clive Wedmore for the Save as You Earn literature he had lent Martin the day before.
“Mr. Sage is very attractive, isn’t he?” said Caroline. “He reminds me of Nureyev, only younger.”
He wouldn’t be much good to you, my dear, were the words that sprang immediately into Martin’s head. The vulgarity of this thought was enough to make him blush for the second time that afternoon. “Be a good girl and take that ashtray away, would you?”
“It smells like being in France.”
She bore the ashtray away, sniffing it as appreciatively as if it had been a rose. Martin wrestled with the builder’s tax for another hour or so and then set off down Priory Road to the tobacconist and newsagent’s kept by the Bhavnanis. He felt rather excited. He tried to put himself in Mrs. Bhavnani’s shoes, imagining how she was going to feel in five minutes’ time when she understood that someone cared, that someone was going to give her son life and health and a future. Possibly she would cry. Martin indulged in a fullblown fantasy of what would happen when he made his offer, only breaking off when he remembered that one should do good by stealth so that the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth.
It was an old-fashioned little shop. When he opened the door a bell rang and from the back regions appeared Mrs. Bhavnani in a green sari with a bright blue knitted cardigan over it. Her face looked dark and wizened and full of shadows in contrast to these gay colours, and when Martin said he wanted to speak to her privately it grew grim. She turned the sign on the shop door to Closed. Martin stammered a little when he explained to her why he had come. She listened in silence.
“You are a doctor to operate on Suma?” she said.
“No, no, certainly not. It’s just that—well, my mother told me about him, and what I’m saying is that if it’s a fact you can get this operation on his heart done in Sydney—well, I could help pay for things.”
“It will cost a lot.”
“Yes, I know that. I mean, I could pay. I will pay. I’d, like you to let me pay for you and him to fly to Sydney and for your accommodation there and for the operation, that’s what I mean.”
She looked at him, then lowered her eyes and stood passively before him. He knew she didn’t understand. Was her husband in? No, not at present. Martin asked the name of their doctor.
“Dr. Ghopal,” she said, “at Crouch End.” The dark mournful eyes were lifted once more and Mrs. Bhavnani said, as if he were some importunate intruder, if that munificence had never been offered, “You must go now, the shop is closed. I am sorry.”
Martin couldn’t help laughing to himself, and at himself, once he was out in the street. So much for the philanthropist’s reward. Of course it would have been far more sensible and business-like to have got Dr. Ghopal’s name in the first place and to have written to him rather than make that romantic direct approach. He would write to him tonight. He would also, he thought as he began the drive home, make the preliminary manoeuvres in his project for using half the money. Suma Bhavnani was merely a sideline. The really serious business was his scheme for giving away fifty thousand pounds.
He could concentrate on that now that Tim Sage was off his conscience.
IV
Dear Miss Watson,
I don’t know if you will remember me. We met last Christmas at the house of my aunt, Mrs. Bennett. I have since then been told that you have a housing problem and that when your employer goes to live abroad next year you expect to be without a home. The purpose of this letter is to ask if I can help you. I would be prepared to advance you any reasonable sum for the purchase of a small house or flat preferably not in London or the Home Counties. You could, if you would rather, regard this sum as a long-term loan, the property eventually to revert to me by will. I should then be able to look on this money in the light of an investment. However, please believe that my interest is solely in helping you solve this problem, and I hope that you will allow me to be of assistance.
Yours sincerely,
Martin W. Urban.
Dear Mr. Deepdene,
You will not have heard of me, but I am a friend of the Tremletts who, I believe, are friends of yours. Norman Tremlett has explained to me that the local authority which is your landlord intends to pull down the block of flats in which you are at present living and to rehouse you in a flat which will be of inadequate size to accommodate your furniture, books, etc. Th
e purpose of this letter is to ask if I can be of any help to you. I would be prepared to advance you any reasonable sum for the purchase of a small house or flat preferably not in London or the Home Counties. If you would care to get in touch with me as soon as possible, we might meet and discuss this, whether you feel you can accept the money as a gift or would prefer to think of it as a lifetime loan, whether you feel able to consider living outside London, and so on.
Yours sincerely,
Martin W. Urban.
Dear Mrs. Cochrane,
You may have heard of me through your brother-in-law. He has told me that you are suffering considerable hardship owing to your housing conditions and are anxious to move. The purpose of this letter …
Martin had found these letters very difficult to write. He abandoned temporarily the one to Mrs. Cochrane because he still hadn’t found out her address. Dr. Ghopal must have had his letter by now, though he hadn’t yet replied to it. It was pleasant to think of the incredulous delight of those two elderly people when the post came on Monday morning. They would understand without resentment, wouldn’t they, what he meant by asking them to choose homes away from London? If he was to benefit four or five people, he couldn’t rise to London property prices. He posted the letters on his way to have his usual Saturday lunchtime drink with Norman Tremlett in the Flask.
Dr. Ghopal phoned him at the office on Monday morning. He would be seeing Mrs. Bhavnani that day and then he hoped to be in touch with the great heart surgeon in Australia. The accented voice that always sounds Welsh to English ears cracked a little as Dr. Ghopal said how moved he had been by Mr. Urban’s more than generous offer. Martin couldn’t help feeling gratified. His mother had said Suma was reputedly good at his schoolwork. Suppose, as a result of his, Martin’s, timely intervention, the boy should grow up himself to be a famous surgeon or a musician of genius or a second Tagore?
Gordon Tytherton came in in the middle of this daydream to say that he and his wife had a spare dress circle seat for Evita on Saturday night and would Martin like it and come with them? Martin accepted with alacrity. He passed the rest of the day on the crest of a wave, and it was some time before it occurred to him that perhaps he ought to have asked for Dr. Ghopal’s discretion in the matter of the source of the money. Still, you could hardly imagine a doctor, a general practitioner, telling the press a thing like that. He thought very little more about it until Thursday when, as he came in from lunch, Caroline told him Mr. Sage had phoned and would call back.
Had Tim found out, maybe from the Bhavnanis? Not that Martin had said anything about the source of his wealth to Dr. Ghopal, but Tim was no fool. Tim would put two and two together. If Tim wanted a story for the Post tomorrow, this would be just about his deadline, Martin calculated. He pictured the headlines in thirty-six point across the front page …
“If he does call back, tell him I’m not available, will you?”
“What, even though you’re really here?”
“I’ll be too busy to talk to him this afternoon.”
Caroline shrugged and pouted her shiny, blackberry-painted mouth. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. He’s got a lovely voice on the phone, just like Alastair Burnet.”
Whether Tim had phoned again Martin didn’t bother to enquire. It would now, in any case, be too late for this week’s Post. He went alone to the house in Copley Avenue, his father having an engagement with a client in Hamp-stead, and on an impulse told his mother about his £50,000 charity and his offer to Suma Bhavnani. She listened, drinking oloroso, and Martin could see that she was torn between admiration for his magnanimity and a natural maternal desire to see him spend the whole hundred and four thousand on a house for himself.
“I suppose I shouldn’t ask why,” she said.
It would have been embarrassing to give his reasons, that life had been extraordinarily kind to him, that he felt he owed the world a living and a debt to the fates. He didn’t answer. He smiled and lifted his shoulders.
“What does Dad say?”
“I haven’t told him—yet.”
They exchanged a glance of veiled complicity, a glance which implied that while they could they would keep this, to him highly disconcerting, information from Walter Urban. Martin refilled their sherry glasses. Later, after they had eaten, Mrs. Urban said:
“You know, when you said what you were going to spend that money on I couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. Finn.”
“Who’s Mrs. Finn?”
“Oh, Martin. You remember Mrs. Finn. She was my cleaner. It must have been—oh, while you were still at school, when you were a teen-ager. A very thin fair woman, looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away. You must remember.”
“Vaguely.”
“I’ve made a point of keeping in touch with her. I go there regularly. She lives in such a dreadful place, it would break your heart. A room smaller than this one divided into three, and where the bathroom is goodness knows. I was dying to spend a penny last time I was there, but I didn’t dare ask. There are such strange people in the house. It’s a real warren. There’s a son who’s a bit backward, I think, and he’s got a room downstairs. He’s a plumber or a builder’s labourer or something. Of course, Mrs. Finn herself has had mental trouble. The misery and squalor they live in, you can hardly imagine it.”
There was a good deal more of this and Martin put on a show of listening attentively, but he felt that since Mrs. Finn had a son whose responsibility she was, she hardly qualified for his bounty. Besides, he had two elderly women on his list already. Wouldn’t it be better to complete it with perhaps a young couple and a baby?
It surprised him that he hadn’t yet heard from either. Miss Watson or Mr. Deepdene. There was nothing from them in the morning. Mr. Cochrane and the newspapers arrived simultaneously, and Martin leafed quickly through the North London Post, looking for a story about Suma Bhavnani or, worse, about Suma Bhavnani in connection with himself.
“I said it was a nice morning, Martin,” said Mr. Cochrane severely, putting on his ironmonger’s coat. “I said it was considerably warmer than it has been of late. I suppose you don’t think it’s worth answering the pleasantries of a mere servant.” His eyes bulged dangerously in their bony sockets.
“I’m sorry,” Martin said. The newspaper made no mention of the Bhavnanis or himself. Its front page was devoted to the murder of a girl in Kilburn, a story which carried Tim’s by-line. “It is a nice day. You’re quite right, it’s a lovely day.” He saw that he had just managed to deflect Mr. Cochrane’s incipient rage. It was like looking at some kind of meter on which, when oil or water is poured into the appropriate orifice, a needle oscillates, wavers and finally sinks away from danger level. “How’s your sister-in-law?”
“Much the same, Martin, much the same.” Mr. Cochrane, applying silver polish to the tea and coffee spoons, seemed to brood with suspicion on this question. When Martin came back with his overcoat on he said sharply, “I don’t know what accounts for your interest, Martin. She’s not a nubile young lady, you know. She’s not one of your pin-up girls. Just a poor old woman who went out into service when she was fourteen. You wouldn’t trouble to pass the time of day with the likes of her, Martin.”
If it hadn’t been for the fact that he knew Mr. Cochrane, by the time he left at noon, would have made the flat more immaculate than even the house in Copley Avenue, would have ironed with exquisite finesse seven shirts, cleaned three picture windows, and polished a whole canteen of cutlery, Martin would have booted him out on the spot. He only sighed and said he was off now.
“Good-bye, Martin,” said Mr. Cochrane in the tones of a headmaster taking end-of-term farewell of a pupil whose conduct has been idle, slovenly, violent, and rude.
It was rare for Mr. Cochrane to leave him messages but if he did, his notes were in the same disapproving and admonitory style as his conversation. Martin found one waiting for him when he came home just before six. Dear Martin, A Mr. Sage phoned 2 mins after you left. I said
I was only the cleaner and could not account for you going off so early like that. W. Cochrane. Martin screwed the note up and threw it into the emptied, and apparently actually polished, wastepaper bin. As it struck with a faint clang the side of this, in fact, metal container, the phone began to ring. Martin answered it cautiously.
“How elusive you are,” said Tim’s voice. “You have quite an army of retainers to protect you from the press.”
“Not really,” said Martin rather nervously. “And what can I—er, do for the press now it’s found me?”
Tim didn’t answer that directly. There was a silence in which Martin guessed he must be lighting a cigarette. He braced himself for the question and was very taken aback when Tim said,
“Just to remind you you’re coming over here tomorrow night, love.”
Martin had forgotten all about the party. It had gone so far out of his head that he had accepted Gordon’s invitation to the theatre. Suddenly he realised how much he hated, and had always hated, Tim calling him “love.” It was much worse than “my dear.” “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve arranged to do something else.”
“You might have let me know,” said Tim.
Martin said it again. “I’m sorry,” and then, rather defensively, “I didn’t think it was necessary for that sort of party.”
If it were possible to hear someone’s eyebrows go up, Martin felt he would have heard Tim’s then. “But what sort of party, Martin?” the drawly, now censorious, voice said. “This is going to be a dinner party. Surely you understood that when I said to come at seven? Just eight of us for dinner.” There was a long, and to Martin awful, pause. “It was to be rather a special celebration.”
“I’m sure my not being there won’t spoil the evening.”
“On the contrary,” said Tim, now very cold. “We shall be desolate.”
The receiver went down. No one had ever hung up on Martin before. He felt unfairly persecuted. Of course he had always refused in the past to go to Tim’s, but this time, if it had been made plain to him from the first that this wasn’t going to be a noisy drunken get-together in uncomfortable darkened rooms, he wouldn’t have forgotten about it and he would have gone. If Tim had something to celebrate, why hadn’t he told him so when he had invited him last Friday? Martin felt a sudden, almost fierce, dislike of Tim. When he heard from the tax inspector he would write him a formal letter, not phone this time. He had had quite enough of Tim for the time being. Let a few weeks go by, then maybe at Christmas he’d, give him a ring.
