Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘You’d got ice cream on your chin.’ The lifted finger showed a brown and green trace.

  Charles nodded, dumb.

  ‘What would you like to eat, Ian? I mean I suppose that ice cream isn’t going to last you long. There’s a menu up on that blackboard.’

  The simple coffee idea had been forgotten then.

  ‘Only don’t have the specialities de la maison, so called, do you mind? I’m a poor man, your majesty. Frankly, I’m usually on the breadline. You don’t mind my being honest, do you?’

  Charles shook his head. He knew he had better say something and now.

  ‘What do I call you?’

  ‘Peter. We will be Peter and Ian. Do you know, it never crossed my mind to call you Mr Cameron?’

  Nothing can happen out here with all these people about, thought Charles. The funny thing was that while he was waiting in the embrasure of the wall he had actually wondered if he could have been wrong about Peter Moran and he wasn’t a paederast, he was just a lonely person or someone who missed not having children of his own. The finger touch on his chin had put paid to any wishful thinking of that kind. He did another Guy Parker Mona Lisa, forced himself to read the blackboard and told Peter Moran he would have spaghetti bolognaise and chips.

  This didn’t seem to be too expensive and Peter Moran had it too. He also had wine, cheap wine perhaps because it arrived in a glass jug, but a good deal of it, maybe a whole litre. For Charles there was a can of Coke. Peter Moran began talking about food, Italian food mostly, telling Charles about pasta in Italy, coffee-flavoured tortellini filled with cream and blocks of chocolate, coloured orange or bright green, and cakes of marzipan made in the shape of heads of maize or pods of peas. He evidently thought Charles had a sweet tooth, evinced by the ice cream perhaps. It all brought back from infancy days tales of men who lured children with bags of sweets.

  ‘Enough of this nonsense,’ Peter Moran said suddenly. ‘Now tell me about yourself. Tell me about Ian Cameron.’

  Make up as little as possible, thought Charles, who understood the science of lying. He lived in Church Bar, he said, with his parents and his brothers. Although it went against the grain, it was almost painful to have to do it, he lowered his age by two years. Peter Moran seemed to have no difficulty in believing he was only twelve.

  ‘Where do you go to school?’

  ‘Rossingham,’ said Charles. ‘I’ll be starting at Rossingham next term.’

  The spaghetti came. Charles didn’t feel hungry but he knew he would have to force himself to eat it. Peter Moran poured himself a third glass of wine. He said:

  ‘I was at Rossingham.’

  Charles looked at him. A year at the school had impressed on him its code of neatness and cleanliness. It wasn’t unusual to take two showers in one day, commonplace to wear two clean shirts. This had already been Charles’s way but some newcomers found it almost bizarre. Yet they conformed, they learned the habit. Peter Moran looked, if not dirty, scruffy. On each occasion Charles had seen him his hair needed a wash. So you could lapse post-Rossingham apparently, you could backslide. The accent was right, Charles suddenly realized, the accent which curiously had puzzled him by its familiarity. It was the Rossingham voice that Peter Moran had, that he too would have some day if he didn’t already . . .

  The subject had been changed while he was considering and now Peter Moran was talking about interests, hobbies. What did Charles like to do? Was he good at games? Did he collect things? How about the theatre? The cinema? Charles reluctantly admitted to a liking for films. His plate clean, he took the pack of cards out of his jeans pocket and did a waterfall, only a passable one though, not the tour de force with which he had entertained his parents and sister. Peter Moran was impressed. He asked for a repeat performance. As the cards fell for the second time, interweaving, feathering from the left and from the right and from the left, Charles thought how he must get the conversation back to Rossingham. He was aware of an uneasy chilly feeling, in spite of the warmth of the day.

  ‘We might go to a movie together,’ Peter Moran was saying.

  Charles nodded, his smile small and tight. He put the pack away.

  ‘Are you busy on Friday?’

  ‘Friday evening?’ said Charles.

  ‘Well, maybe the five-thirty show if you don’t have to be late home.’ The thick glasses had a way of deadening his eyes according to how his face turned against the light. Sometimes they were just thick glasses, magnifying the pale eyes behind them to preternatural size, sometimes mirrors reflecting Charles’s own desperate angel face, and sometimes opaque planes like roundels of dull metal, pewter perhaps or lead. There was quite a lot of sweat on his skin and it reminded Charles of the drops of moisture that are exuded from stale cheese. He hazarded a suggestion. A try-on it was. If Peter Moran agreed he didn’t quite know what he would do. But he was sure he wouldn’t agree.

  ‘Do you want to call for me at my house?’

  The glasses turned to lead as Peter Moran’s head gave one of its sharp turns. ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, do you?’

  That was coming out into the open, Charles thought. That was what he had once heard his father say wasn’t calling a spade a spade but a bloody shovel. Peter Moran named a film. It was something Japanese and obscure and showing at the Fontaine in Ruxeter Road. They could meet outside, he said. He gave a broad smile that somehow this time didn’t make him look attractive or nice but – Charles sought for a word and came up with an unwelcome one – wolfish.

  He didn’t have to go to the cinema, he didn’t have to go near the place. Hadn’t he done enough, far over and above the call of duty?

  ‘When were you at Rossingham?’ he asked quite abruptly.

  ‘Oh, dear. That would be telling. You’ll be asking me my age next. I always give the same answer. Somewhere between thirty and death.’ He poured the last of his wine, turned and flicked his fingers at the waitress. ‘Now it has to be paid for, Ian. Like everything you get in this life, whether it’s love or farinaceous strings in tomato sauce. I went to Rossingham in the year of grace nineteen sixty-five. You’ll see my name on the list of past pupils in the chapel, hardly a roll of honour. I was in Pitt House and in my last year the incoming housemaster was a dusty eunuch of a latinist called Lindsay.’

  Charles stared at him, feeling the beginnings of an understanding of Mungo’s purposes.

  ‘Don’t you believe me? The chapel will prove it to you. And if you need more, if you actually have to put your hand in my side and feel the mouth of the wound . . .’ The grin was wide and humourless again, not flecked with foam of course, but somehow looking as if it should be. ‘When you get to Rossingham have a look in study seven in Pitt House, in the old part, not the extension, and under the lower bunk you’ll see something – not so much to your advantage as proof positive.’

  It was the sign, thought Charles. It was what he had been waiting for. Did he need further evidence that Peter Moran had something or knew something Mungo wanted? Wasn’t study seven the very study Mungo shared with Graham O’Neill and two others? He watched the man, the ex-Rossingham man, wine-drinker and paederast, paying the bill with a dribble of coins, feeling into the depths of pockets for the last necessary ten pee, and it took all the strength he had not to run away.

  4

  LADY ARABELLA’S GARDEN was still white, still fresh and blooming in August. The cupolas and trellises were hung now with the creamy fronds of the russian vine, and still flowering between the flagstones and in the borders amongst ox-eye daisies and bleached tobaccos were the white violas lasting summer through. John sat on a stone seat looking at the flowers, a seat that was carved with maidens and lions and swags of leaves and which grew damp with green mould in spring and autumn but was dry as dust now. His shoulder pained him with a dull rheumatic ache. He had come here to try to heal himself of various bruisings, physical and mental. From encounters with the police at Feverton it was the obvious place to visit for such a pur
pose. One set of the gates to Hartlands Gardens faced the opaque deceitful one-way windows of the police station.

  The two people who talked to him, a man and a woman, were not that man and woman he had seen before. They didn’t want much from him, only that he should look through the statement he had made sixteen years before, reconfirm it, add to it if he had anything to add. Reading Cherry’s name hurt and now caused a curious embarrassment as well. But it was all over and done with in fifteen minutes and the whole empty Thursday afternoon, and a hot sunny one, stretched before him. He sat and looked at the flowers in the sunshine and marvelled again how only white butterflies seemed to come in here, as if they knew.

  That morning, from the central depot in Bristol, they had sent him a replacement for the mynah bird just as last Monday a replacement had arrived for Gavin, a lively red-cheeked young woman who had been one of a team of gardeners at some open-to-the-public showplace. Trees were really her field, she told John, which struck him as amusing. The mynah bird’s successor was a snow-white and silent cockatoo. John rested his head back against the stone loins of a lion and thought how he had lost his sister for ever. He would never now be able to speak of her to others as he once had with reverence and sorrow. There would always be her excesses to remember and get in the way of grief, and Mark Simms’s absurd false confession that he had swallowed so gullibly. These things would now be inseparable from memories of Cherry in life and death.

  He understood now that those memories, unspoilt as they then were, had been something for him to hold on to after Jennifer had gone. They were lost as his code-makers, that other consolation, were lost. What was left to him now? Library books, thrillers and Victorian novels. Colin and his mother. Trowbridge’s. Tired of this list of questionable assets, he got up and moved away, his arm heavy in its sling, his shoulder stiff. The prospect of the evening ahead began to frighten him, for he could think of absolutely nothing to do with it, nowhere to go, no one to visit or phone, nothing he wished to read. And he realized that in all his unhappiness he had never quite felt this. He had never felt panic at the idea of a future, only sadness and – hope.

  From the white garden he had achieved what he expected, a soothing of wounds. But nothingness, negation, vacancy, can be worse than wounds and all that shimmering scented pallor, those fluttering white wings, had in some strange way shown him a vision of emptiness. Thinking like this, struggling against a rising fear, he walked along the terrace where in the spring, before there was a leaf on these trees that were now foliaged past their prime, he had looked down and seen Jennifer sitting at one of the tables below. Then he had fancied himself unhappy but he had been full of hope, hope which had taken a lot of quenching, and his state in retrospect seemed to him enviable. He was looking down there now – inevitably – but he wrenched his eyes away, looked ahead of him and saw Susan Aubrey approaching along the terrace path.

  Since his last sight of her, in Geneva Road when she had come on what was almost an errand of mercy, he had been glancing through the photographs in a library book, an art book about the pictures in the Frick Collection in New York, and had seen the face hers had reminded him of. It was that of a pale blonde young girl with translucent skin and red-gold hair in a painting by Greuze called The Wool Winder. Remembering this somehow intimate thing made the blood come up into his cheeks now they were face to face again.

  She didn’t greet him. She said instead in a voice of consternation, ‘What happened to your arm?’

  Incongruous that he should suddenly think of Peter Moran. He suspected, without real knowledge, that Peter Moran was a person who could make that kind of thing funny, tell it wittily. A madman who was in love with a talking bird duffed me up with a pitchfork, he would say. Something like that. John wasn’t able to do it himself and never would be able to. Perhaps that was what Jennifer liked about the one of them she did like. Never mind all that stuff about people depending on her and needing her. He told Susan Aubrey the history of his injured shoulder in quite a straightforward way and then they were walking down the steps towards the tables and the cafeteria. It was she, not he, who happened to choose the very table he and Jennifer had sat at and she had told him she wanted a divorce.

  When he had fetched their tea on a tray and two match-box-sized pieces of fruit cake wrapped in cellophane, he told her about it. He thought, what the hell, why not, and he told her. It had something to do with the empty feeling and nothing much mattering any more. He would have told her about Peter Moran being convicted for sexual abuse of a child only his inhibition on naming things like that in front of a woman, even a policewoman, held him back.

  ‘You’ve had a bad time,’ she said. ‘A sea of troubles. I’d say the tide’s bound to turn now.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. My father used to say, “Cheer up, things might be worse, so I cheered up and they got worse.”’

  She laughed and he felt that perhaps being a wit was possible even now. He was glad he hadn’t added that his father never said that or anything like that after Cherry died. And then, as she finished her cake and brushed crumbs off her dark blue skirt, flicked with a fingernail a sugar granule from the Greuze chin, he thought, why don’t I ask her to have dinner with me? Tonight – well, this evening, supper really, or a meal at that Indian place I went to with Mark, the Hill Station?

  For two reasons, he thought. They had got up and were moving out of the circle of tables, about to separate, she to continue northwards across the gardens, he to seek the Feverton entrance. Two reasons – I would keep thinking of Jennifer, I would wish she was Jennifer, I might even make a fool of myself and call her Jennifer. And then I am afraid. I am afraid she would say no.

  Perhaps that’s really why I haven’t asked, I can’t ask, he thought as they parted and she turned back once and waved, I haven’t the nerve or the resources to face rejection . . .

  5

  ON THE CROWN of the hill, at a viewing place, a telescope was sited for a better appreciation of the panorama of rocks, cypresses, olive groves, broken columns and gushing water below. A certain amount of drachmae had to be put into its slot in order to see more than a blur but the telescope no longer functioned and even its coin slot was blocked with dust. Mungo leant over the low wall, inhaling – so deep was his pleasure – rather than merely smelling the scent of the hillside herbs, the thyme and oregano and bay. It wasn’t hard to imagine gods come to earth here, larger-than-life animated statues he saw them as, in robes like fluted cloud.

  Down the slope Ian and Gail were chasing butterflies, not to catch them but to get a closer look at wing spans and colours unknown at home. The heat was intense but somehow light and dry.

  ‘Seems funny to think this place once belonged to us,’ said Graham.

  ‘What do you mean, to us?’

  ‘Well, it was a British Protectorate after the Napoleonic Wars. We had a governor here for about fifty years.’

  Graham was marvellous on history, he was going to do history at university. While Angus asked him about it, about how the British ever managed to get a foot in the Ionian Sea, Mungo turned to examine the telescope. It was stupid having it here if it didn’t work, its ineffectual presence an affront to nature. Then, as he touched the blackened brass band on the cylinder, a fuse of memory was lit and the solution he had been seeking for months exploded.

  ‘Ang,’ he said, ‘Graham.’

  ‘What?’ Angus had already started down the slope. He turned round under the bay trees.

  ‘I’ve broken Moscow Centre’s code,’ Mungo said. ‘It just came to me in a flash of enlightenment. God, it was like one of those experiences mystics have. Everything was explained and made clear.’

  ‘Saint Bean,’ said Angus.

  ‘You can mock but it was like that.’ Mungo had his codebook out and was turning to his lists of Stern’s messages, all with their ultimate numbers. ‘Listen. We knew the numbers at the end were the time. I realized that last week – I told Graham, didn’t I? – I realized those
numbers were times, not nine hundred and forty-two but nine forty-two, not one thousand and three but three minutes past ten. And I knew they were on a digital clock because Graham’s got his with him in our room, but what I see now is that it’s a particular digital clock. It’s the one on the CitWest tower.’

  ‘How did you see that on a hill in Corfu?’ Graham said, grinning.

  ‘Not because I’m a visionary. It was the telescope.’

  Graham’s eyebrows went up. He was wearing the tee shirt he had bought in Corcyra with a genuine jellyfish printed on it.

  ‘Charles Mabledene took that photograph of Perch’s room when he got into Utting. You remember that, don’t you? It’s in the departmental archives. The photograph didn’t show much but it did show he keeps a telescope on the windowsill. That was the clue to the code only we never saw it. You couldn’t see the clock on the CitWest tower from as far away as Utting but you could through a telescope. You couldn’t see the tower from Rosie Whittaker’s – not at ground level you couldn’t. But you would be able to from the top floor of their house. The rest of Moscow Centre’s agents would all be able to see the tower with the naked eye, or if not, with telescopes or binoculars.’

  Angus gave an angry twitch of his head. ‘So what? When are you going to get over all this, Bean? I mean, isn’t the joke wearing a bit thin?’ He who never lost his temper roared suddenly, ‘You have to live, do you know that? You have to be a normal human being. When are you going to have a life instead of a game?’ And he plunged down the slope towards his father and mother unpacking picnic things.

  ‘Take no notice,’ Graham said kindly. ‘It’s just that he’s pissed off over Diana not coming.’

  Mungo wasn’t concerned. ‘What they do is, start with the date the person getting the message is to act on. That’s what the first number is. Then they write the message in the code they directed yesterday or whenever and at the end they put the time in digits. It’s the time on the prearranged date at which whoever gets the message is to look at the digital clock on the CitWest tower and note the temperature. Say, for example, the message begins with nine and ends with nine two three. That means the recipient has to look at the CitWest clock at twenty-three minutes past nine on the ninth and if the temperature is twelve degrees, start making a code alphabet from the twelfth letter of the alphabet.’ Mungo was writing now, dashing off numbers and letters in his book rested on the old stone wall. Graham came and looked over his shoulder. ‘It does work. It’s working out beautifully. You see, here’s the last message we picked out of Lysander Douglas’s hand. If you work from the message previous to that it directs with the numbers two seven then one 0 one five. That means Perch, say, had to look at the CitWest clock on the twenty-seventh at ten fifteen, record the temperature and work the code from whatever number in the alphabet the temperature was.’