Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Oh, yes. Right. There’s a book called The Other Side of Silence. I mean I suppose it’s referring to Philby’s own book. Would that be it? It’s by Ted Albeury.’

  The name rang an immediate bell. The librarian made title and author come up on the computer screen. ‘I’ll see if it’s in.’

  Both books were in, King Solomon’s Mines and The Other Side of Silence. John felt disproportionately pleased. He would have two good books, two absorbing books, to get him through to Saturday.

  His front garden was buried under a quilt of pink petals. The high winds had blown the last of them down. It would be light for another two hours and he would have plenty of time to sweep them up, snip the dead heads off the daffodils, and perhaps plant out Siberian wallflowers among the bulbs. This year he was going to have a hanging basket under the porch, a begonia and pelargoniums in it. Jennifer would like that, she liked flowers if not gardens . . . Don’t count your chickens, he said to himself, there’s a long way to go yet, she’s not just going to move back in with you on Saturday night. The thought made his heart move painfully. For suppose it were in fact to be so? Suppose she wanted to do just that? Peter Moran had treated her vilely once and had very likely done so again. A man of that kind doesn’t change.

  ‘We were living together,’ she had said. ‘I was the only girl he’d ever been serious about. He wanted to get married and at first I was the one that hung back. We just had this bedsit we shared and then my mother got ill and I had to move back in with her. But Peter and I were engaged by then, we were planning on getting married in August. Mother had cancer but they have remissions, you know, cancer patients, even people as far gone as she was. I don’t want to speak ill of her, that’s the last thing, but she liked show did my mother. A big white wedding was what she wanted for me and I gave in and Peter didn’t seem to mind. I thought, well, it’ll be the last celebration of her life, the last really big event. We sent out invitations to nearly two hundred people.

  ‘A white dress was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Especially the crinoline Mother wanted me to have and the great billowing veil. You’d have liked the flowers I was going to have, though, John. I wouldn’t have white, I wanted colour. Peach-pink cactus dahlias and deep pink pompoms and pink zinnias . . .’

  He hadn’t had the heart – or the nerve – to tell her dahlias and zinnias were the flowers he most disliked, their stiffness, their vulgar show. The flowers he grew were graceful, delicate, rare even. He let himself into the house, dropped the books on to the oak and leather table, kicked on the top bar of the electric fire. In the morning she would get his letter. Would she phone him? It was a possibility. When she read that ‘dearest’ she might well decide to phone . . . He made himself a pot of tea with loose tea, not teabags, filled a mug. Maybe he should try to change his ways, have a drink, for instance, when he got home, a small tulip-shaped glass of dry sherry.

  Later he would think about eating. Scrambled eggs or pizza or pasta out of a tin. It was always something like that. Before that, though, to try the first of the coded messages against the first lines of King Solomon’s Mines. Wrong again. No again. He looked at the jackets of both books, undecided which one to start on first. Of course he wouldn’t start on either until it got dark. He had the petals to sweep up and the wallflowers to plant out.

  They were in a seed tray in the lean-to greenhouse attached to the back of the kitchen, where for want of a garage he also had to keep the Honda. John imagined the orange flowers they would bear in May and June and their rich yet delicate scent. He brought the watering can through the house with him. The water in it had been allowed to stand for two days, for he never used it fresh from the tap. All the time he was working out there, the street remained empty, empty of people on foot, that is. Plenty of cars went past. When he was young, when Cherry was still alive, there would have been people walking up and down Geneva Road right up till dark and beyond. The sky was overcast and it was warm for late March, in spite of the wind, a west wind that swayed the branches of the monkey puzzle tree. His mother had always liked Geneva Road because through the gaps between the rows of houses you could see the countryside beyond the city, glimpses of green hills. John planted his wallflowers, watered them in, and went back into the house. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Scrambled eggs would be the easiest dish to make, scrambled eggs on toast with half a tin of fruit to follow and Longlife cream.

  His supper on a tray, he went back into the living room. It felt hot and stuffy and he saw that he had left the fire on all the time he was out in the garden. Wasteful but there was no point in turning it off now. Out of politeness he had never read at table while Jennifer was with him, though at home they had all read books or magazines at mealtimes if they had wanted to and it hadn’t seemed anti-social or rude. At home – John realized the phrase he had used. Wasn’t this home then? Wasn’t this the very same house? Home is where the people you love are, he thought, the people who love you.

  He opened The Other Side of Silence and read the opening lines. ‘The snow lay thick on the steps and the snowflakes driven by the wind looked black in the headlights of the cars.’ Almost mechanically, because he did it with every book he started, he began placing the alphabet against the letters. Not in the book itself, of course, but in his notebook, using a pencil. He took a mouthful of egg on toast. A would be T, B would be H, C would be E, DS, EN, FO, GW, HL. . . . It was going to work out – or was it?

  The first word in the coded message he had copied from the pillar at cats’ green when he saw the very tall young man was HCRKTABIE. If you used the first lines of The Other Side of Silence, that came out as LEVIATHAN. Well, ‘Leviathan’ was a word or at any rate a name. ‘To Basilisk’, it continued. There followed ‘Take Sterns Childers.’ John had a vague idea ‘childers’ might be old-fashioned or dialect English for children. ‘Take Sterns Childers’ didn’t seem to mean anything.

  Never mind. He had more coded messages in the notebook, including the one he had found last night. Feeling disproportionately excited, he began matching letters in this message against letters in those first lines. The results were more comprehensible. The second message when deciphered read: ‘Leviathan to Basilisk and Unicorn. Fifty-three Ruxeter Road stays as safe house.’ He tried other messages, those picked up in January and February but here he could not break the code. Nevertheless, John had that feeling common to all humanity in his sort of situation. He had triumphed and now he wanted to tell someone about it. The person he would best liked to tell was Jennifer. He got as far as the phone and dialling the first three digits of Colin’s number instead, and then he put the receiver back, asking himself if he wanted to share this with anyone. A more satisfactory thing might be to go to fifty-three Ruxeter Road and see what those people meant by a ‘safe house’.

  By now it was dark outside but how much did that matter? It might be better in the dark. He could go up there on the Honda. Across Alexandra Bridge, he thought, and up Nevin Street which after a time became Ruxeter Road. He got into his motorcycle leathers, black and heavier than Jennifer’s soft blue jacket.

  As he turned into Berne Road he felt the sting of a raindrop on his face. He would regret this adventure if the rain came on like it had last night, he thought. Adventure it was, though. He wondered what he was getting himself into. Nothing presumably that he couldn’t pull out of again. There had been a lot in the papers and on television lately about drugs and it sometimes seemed to John as if everybody except himself had taken drugs at some time or other. To hear them and read about them you’d think the whole nation was permanently stupefied by dope and crack. What if these people he had got on to were involved with drugs? What if that was what they were up to and why they needed this code and these messages? They might be drug dealers and drug pushers, what was called a narcotics ring.

  The wind had dropped and the river lay calm and flat with a dark oily surface. At the other end of the bridge the street narrowed, passing under the cathedral walls, then betwe
en tall office blocks, widening into Nevin Square where behind green lawns and a fountain that never played after six p.m. stood the city hall. The clock on St Stephen’s Cathedral struck an uncounted number of strokes. There were few people about, few cars. On the pedestal of the statue of Lysander Douglas, philanthropist, explorer and former mayor of this city, sat two punk people with bright-coloured hair, dressed in leather far more bizarre than his own and eating fish and chips from paper bags.

  John went round the square, leaving by the third exit of the roundabout which was Nevin Street. Neon digits on top of the CitWest insurance tower told him it was nine-0-two and the temperature nine degrees. The whole left-hand side of this street was dominated by the buildings of the polytechnic. The swing doors on the main entrance opened and John saw Peter Moran come out and start to walk down the steps. He had only seen him twice before but he would have known him anywhere. We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.

  This was the man his wife was living with. John told himself this in so many words as he slowed and turned his head and looked at Peter Moran. Fair-haired, nothing special to look at, a lantern jaw and glasses so thick that he must be very short-sighted. Of course John couldn’t see the thickness of his glasses at this moment but he had noticed them before on the single occasion they had met, an occasion he remembered with pain but could no more forget than he could forget Peter’s face. Peter, of course, didn’t see him. A man on a motorbike is the most anonymous, the most invisible, of people. He is scarcely a man, more an adjunct of the bike, furnished in black and chrome and upholstered in leather like itself.

  John revved the bike and swung off up into Ruxeter Road.

  Two days before her intended wedding day, she had told him on that evening of confidences, that man had said to her he couldn’t marry her after all, he couldn’t go through with it.

  ‘He didn’t really give a reason, just said he couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t believe what I was hearing. I thought it was some sort of joke. We were at my place – well, my mother’s. My aunt was staying with us, she’d come from Ireland for the wedding.’

  ‘You knew it wasn’t a joke though,’ John had said.

  ‘After a while I did. I said was it all the fuss, I mean a white wedding and all those people coming, I said was it that which was upsetting him. I said it didn’t matter, we could get married in a registry office, we didn’t have to do what Mother wanted. He said no, it wasn’t that. It was just the idea of being married, of marriage itself he couldn’t face, he wasn’t the kind of person who could ever be married. And suddenly there wasn’t any more to say. Can you understand that, John? There was nothing to say. We just stared at each other and then he said, well, goodbye then, and he walked out of the house and closed the front door behind him. My mother came in and said Peter hadn’t gone, had he, without being introduced to Auntie Katie. I said he’d gone and there wouldn’t be any wedding and she started laughing and crying and screaming. Those repressed people, they’re the worst when they break out. I didn’t cry, not then. I was stunned, I wasn’t even angry.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you angry,’ he had said to her.

  John parked the bike down a side street called Collingbourne Road. A pub called the Gander was advertising something called a ‘Neez-up Nite’ for the coming Saturday but for all that it had a gloomy look, its lights dim. Between it and the road where he had parked stood a terrace of Victorian houses, tall, bleak, the rough grey plaster with which they were faced cracked or broken away, their lower windows, rectangular and of uniform size, sealed with boards. Sheets of corrugated metal covered where the front doors should have been. Number 53 was the middle house of this row of five. It was the only one with a gable and in the centre of this gable, on a circular plaque of smoother stone, were engraved the name Pentecost Villas and the date, 1885.

  For a moment or two John doubted if he had come to the right place. But this was Ruxeter Road and Pentecost Villas were not separately numbered from the rest of the houses in this long street. Carrying his crash helmet and visor, he walked back along Collingbourne Road to see if there might be a way in at the side but the long gardens of those grey houses were separated from the pavement by a high wall of yellow bricks unbroken by any gateway. When the wall came to an end he turned left along Fontaine Avenue. The gardens ended in a fence here and in the fence were five solid-looking gates. He could see this by the light from a series of street lamps on the opposite pavement, behind which instead of more houses was the green space called Fontaine Park. John couldn’t recall having been down here since he was about ten. He was alone in the street. As usual there was no one about, the only sign that people were in the vicinity, those inevitable parked cars.

  He tried the first gate in the fence but it was bolted as he had feared, and probably locked too. So was the next one. They all would be and that would be that. But because he had come all this way and must when he started out surely have intended to find out what this ‘safe house’ business was all about, he tried the third door. The latch yielded and it opened.

  John looked round. He looked to the right and the left and behind him but there was no one. He went into the garden and closed the gate. A wilderness met his eyes, a waste land of rough grass and sprawling shrubs, tree stumps and trees overgrown with rampant ivy. The back of the house seemed boarded up too where it wasn’t festooned with a cobweb-like creeper. As he approached it the shadow of the fence loomed up behind him, rising up the house, quelling the light, until by the time he reached it he and it were in darkness. He shouldn’t have come at night, or he should have brought a torch. But he had hardly expected something like this. What had he expected? He didn’t know.

  Down a shallow flight of steps he could just make out a door, the only door in the whole block surely that wasn’t boarded up. John had a feeling this door was painted green though he couldn’t in fact see what colour it was.

  As he went down the steps he thought, suppose the door is unlocked and I open it and go in and the whole place is a blaze of light and there are twelve men sitting at a round table and one of them gets up with a gun in his hand . . .? By the time he had thought that, he had tried the door and it yielded and he was inside. There was no light though and when he fumbled on the wall for a switch and found it and pressed it, nothing happened. It was deathly dark in there, as dark as a mine or a tomb. He didn’t even know if he was in some sort of a living room or in a kitchen. The strong smell was of mould. The dampness touched the skin of his face like cold rubber. He moved warily across a floor which had a slippery feel, realizing before he reached the far side of the room that it was hopeless. In the absence of light or access to any source of light, he could go no further.

  Anyway, there was no one here. More accustomed now to the darkness, he peered about him searching for what he thought those sort of people would leave behind them, empty bottles, cigarette stubs, half-smoked joints perhaps, though he doubted if he would recognize these. Pinned to one wall, to peeling wallpaper and squashy rotted plaster, was a sheet of paper that seemed to have writing on it. Impossible to read the writing here. He pulled it down, folded it and put it into his pocket, opened the door and went out the way he had come. Something about the garden, its desolation, its rough grass, its air of absolute neglect, reminded him of cats’ green. Only there were no cats, there was nothing alive.

  He felt curiously relieved to be out in Fontaine Avenue once more, the neat little park opposite, its hedges and trim trees lit by splashes of yellow light. What a fool I am, he thought, coming all the way out here. Like a schoolboy. Like a kid. And for what? What did I hope to find? He retrieved the Honda, put on his visor and crash helmet, and started back.

  10

  WHEN HE WAS going to get married John had bought only one new piece of furniture and that was a bed. All his life, up till then, he had slept in the three-foot-wide single bed in the smallest of the three bedrooms. His parents had slept in the large bedroom at the fron
t and Cherry in the large bedroom at the back. When she died, or at any rate after she had been dead a few months, he might have taken over her room but he never had. No one ever again slept in that room, and it began to be kept as a sort of shrine. John suspected his mother sometimes went up and sat there. Colin had once suggested he ought to find a tenant for it, people were always on the look-out for rooms, but to John the idea was sacrilegious.

  Jennifer and he would of course use his parent’ room but to sleep in his parents’ bed seemed grotesque. He and Cherry had been born in that bed and no doubt conceived there too. His bride and he couldn’t sleep there. Without consulting Jennifer he went out and bought a big double bed, a bed the shop assistant called queen-sized. Now when he lay alone in this bed it seemed enormous.

  John told himself he respected Jennifer too much to attempt to make love to her before they were married. But wherever else he failed he tried to be honest and he knew in his heart it was not respect, whatever that might really mean, which stood in his way, but fear. He was thirty-seven years old and he had never made love to any woman, he was a virgin.

  It was not all that unusual, he suspected. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Colin was too, and still was. Somehow, if you didn’t get to go with a girl when you were sixteen or seventeen, you sort of missed the boat and unless you got engaged and married that was it. There were no opportunities, especially in a place like this and if you lived with your parents. Suppose, he asked himself, he had met a girl and they had wanted to sleep together and she was living at home too, what would they have done? He had no car, he couldn’t have afforded an hotel room and would have baulked at the open air. Anyway he never seemed to meet any girls. After Cherry died happy things, normal things, ceased to happen in their family. They were crushed and frozen, cowed and driven indoors to be together, but not to share their exclusive sorrow, to deal separately with grief.