by Ruth Rendell
‘But we can’t. We don’t know what the temperature was.’
‘No, but we can make guesses. Somewhere between twelve and twenty degrees, wouldn’t you think? On the twenty-seventh of July at ten fifteen in the morning? Or, that is to say, starting the code alphabet somewhere between L and T.’
‘You couldn’t do it with Fahrenheit,’ Graham said. ‘You could only do it with Celsius and in a climate where the temperature hardly ever goes above twenty-six.’
‘If it does I expect they start again from the beginning, twenty-seven being one and twenty-eight two and so on. We’ll try it later, we’ll start by assuming it was fifteen degrees. That’s Dad yelling for us. He worries some of us will get lost and carried off by brigands.’
Graham nodded, grinning. He held out his hand in a funny grown-up old-fashioned gesture. ‘Congratulations.’
They shook hands. Mungo got embarrassed suddenly and vaulted over the wall and went running down to the picnic.
6
‘SOMEONE WAS ASKING for a monkey puzzle,’ said the girl called Flora, the new assistant manager. Flora in a garden centre among the flowers, it was absurd. ‘Araucaria araucana, the Chile pine.’ She was as bad as Gavin with her Latin names, John thought.
‘I suppose we might get her one.’
‘I told her they’d gone out of fashion. You never see them.’
‘There’s one of them trees in John’s road,’ said Sharon, protruding sea-anemone lips into her handbag mirror, starting to outline them with red pencil. ‘Geneva, is it, John, or Lucerne?’
‘Geneva,’ he said, having no idea how she knew about the monkey puzzle, not much caring. She could walk along there much as anyone else was free to do. He made an effort. Everything had become an effort, every utterance, even the ‘Can I help you?’ to customers. ‘It’s a fine specimen, I daresay a hundred years old from when they were fashionable.’
‘I’ll come down and look at it one of these fine days. I’m partial to the old Araucaria.’ The top flowerpot from the stack Flora was holding toppled and fell to the ground with a crash. That was the fourth thing she had smashed since she came less than a week before. John thought her the most accident-prone giddy creature he had come across. ‘Oh, sorry. Still, it’s only a pot.’
John didn’t say anything but went into the chrysanthemum house, into the warm damp and the bitter scent. It was Friday, a Friday coming to its end, and another weekend waited over the brink of it. You could easily reach a point in this world when you didn’t know anyone, when you had no acquaintances, still less had friends. You could reach a point when all days were exactly the same, limbo-days, neither happy nor sad. And there could come a time – for him he thought it might already have come – when all your memories were too painful to revive and although they were all you had, there was nothing for it but strive to crush them into oblivion.
People would call it self-pity but that implied being sorry for oneself and he didn’t feel pity for anyone much, least of all himself. It was rather as if he had withdrawn from all involvement. With Jennifer only was there something left, a fear for her really, as to what would become of her in her chosen role of guardian and protector to Peter Moran. He walked along the aisle, testing the dampness of the soil in the pots with his forefinger. Someone had slightly over-watered them. Flora, probably. John didn’t want to go home, he would have liked the afternoon to go on and on, five-thirty never coming, the shoppers continuing to trickle in, take their trolleys or baskets, choose their little pots of alpines or cacti or herbs, lingering outside in the hot perpetually five o’clock sunshine, for ever.
Les had gone out as he always did about this time for the evening paper and four Marathon bars. Trowbridge’s sold only healthy snacks, tropical mix fruit and nuts, sunflower seeds, harvest crunch. It hadn’t been a busy afternoon and the place was empty now. Sharon, reading the paper, said to Flora:
‘They found that missing boy, the Nottingham one.’
‘Alive, d’you mean?’
‘Are you kidding? They never are alive.’
Half a dozen people came in through the swing doors. John went to help a man who said rather hectoringly that it was roses he was interested in, only roses. As he passed Flora on his way to the rose-garden exit he saw that, facing the shelves, her back turned, she was quietly weeping and he knew, with a kind of hopeless wonder, that it was for a child she didn’t know in a place she had very likely never been to.
7
A CUSTOMER WAS coming in to view and test-drive one of the big Volvos. This was the reason Charles’s father had made an exception to his rule of not coming in on Fridays. He brought Charles in with him at three and to his son’s consternation, started showing some interest in why he wanted to come in at all. Charles said truthfully that he was going to the cinema but untruthfully that it was to see Aliens at the Odeon.
‘How are you going to get home?’
‘The last bus, I expect.’ Getting home seemed an unreal concept. Or as if he were getting to the end of a journey and the limousine that awaited him was standing in sight, but between him and it was a deep gulf probably too wide to jump. ‘The last Fenbridge bus goes from the station at nine.’
‘You weren’t thinking of hitching, I hope.’
Truthful again, Charles said he hadn’t been. His father started on another of his lectures about not speaking to strangers. Then he said Charles must get a taxi, not a bus, at the station and he gave him the money for the fare. Charles thought it was like deliberately spending a night in a leper hospital after you’d been told to mind and not catch a cold. He hung about the garage for a while. In the shop where you paid for petrol they sold chocolate bars and knick-knacks and weird things like cut flowers and plastic toys. Charles helped himself to a couple of Yorkies and, almost as an afterthought, to one of the penknives stuck on a coloured card that hung up among the ballpoints and key rings. He took it off its card and opened the blades. If they were each five centimetres long that was all they were and just remotely capable of injuring someone if handled, say, by a really experienced surgeon who knew exactly the site of the hyoid or the medulla or one of those things. Charles grinned ruefully to himself but he put the penknife into his pocket.
Just before four-thirty he went to get the bus. He intended to be early. This would be the first time he had ever been to this cinema, the Fontaine, which for as long as he could remember had shown foreign or controversial or less than generally popular films. There was no sign of Peter Moran. Charles started walking round a bit, though the area was familiar to him, harbouring as it did the safe house.
It hadn’t occurred to him that Peter Moran might come by car, though he knew he had a car, having of course cleaned it at their first meeting. He recognized it at once, parked on a meter in Collingbourne Road. It was clear to him that while he had been walking round the other way, via Lomas Road and Fontaine Road, Peter Moran had parked here and gone to wait outside the cinema. Charles decided to try to avoid getting in that car if he could help it. He was wearing his watch today and saw that it was five to five. The heat had been intense all day, thirty degrees he had noticed when he saw the CitWest clock from the top of his bus. It made him wonder how high that digital recorder could go. Forty degrees? Forty-five? Perhaps they made different ones for different climates. The heat had somehow thickened during the afternoon and the sky grown overcast without much diminishing the sun’s glare. He was aware of a powerful smell compounded of petrol and diesel fumes, gas and drains, something which he had noticed in the past was strongest just before a storm. He noticed something else different too. The corrugated metal was gone from the fronts of the houses in Pentecost Villas and their shabby front doors were exposed. Builders or architects or someone had been in.
Peter Moran was standing outside the Fontaine, apparently studying the poster of Samurai swordsmen. He had his white tee-shirt on. From the back he looked very thin and fleshless, his elbows knobby, his legs like sticks. As Charles approached
he turned round.
‘Hi, Ian.’
‘Hallo,’ said Charles.
‘I have to warn you I never make comments on the weather, however extreme.’
Charles smiled, saying nothing. He hoped the cinema would be crowded. They were directed into what was no more than a large room, carpet-lined, air-conditioned, claustrophobic – and empty. It was Charles’s first moment of real fear. He had the sensation that he wouldn’t have been able to get out if he had wanted to, of the doors having been locked behind them, though this of course must be nonsense. Their tickets were not numbered and Peter Moran chose to sit four rows from the front and in the centre. That at any rate was better than being at the side up against the wall. A curtain of black velvet with a gold pattern on it hung in front of the screen. It was silent when they entered but as soon as they sat down music of the popular classical kind began playing and Charles couldn’t escape the rather uneasy conclusion that it had only started on account of their presence.
It wasn’t the sort of cinema where they sold ice cream and soft drinks. Peter Moran had brought a bag of wrapped chocolates with him and these he passed to Charles while he talked about Rossingham. He talked about starting at Rossingham and the people he knew there and Pitt House and the man who was housemaster there before Mr Lindsay. Charles knew that this was what it was all about, it must be. This had to be the object of the exercise. Sooner or later Peter Moran was going to tell him some vital fact and he sensed too that he would know it immediately he heard it. But he couldn’t help noticing Peter Moran’s smell. He smelt very clean, of soap and possibly even some sort of cologne. And he had washed his hair which stood out soft and yellow with ragged split ends – with a mother like Charles’s you observed that kind of thing – and which also smelt scented.
Just before the lights dimmed three more people came in. Being English, they sat as far away from each other and from Charles and Peter Moran as was possible. The curtain was swept aside and the ads and previews, followed by a cartoon, began. Charles felt better having the other people there. The lights came up again and Peter Moran excused himself to go to the men’s. Charles hoped the other people would note his appearance and Peter Moran’s just in case anything happened and he went missing and they needed witnesses. He stared into the faces of the two behind him, trying to give them a good view. Peter Moran came back and at last the Japanese picture started, almost an hour after they had come in.
It seemed darker in the cinema than during the cartoon. The film was not dubbed but sub-titled and there was not even much of that, for on the whole the characters, of whom there were dozens, didn’t talk. It was beautiful to look at, Charles could see that, and there was some elaborate stylized dancing but just the same it was incomprehensible. Peter Moran seemed fascinated by it. Not so absorbed though as to keep from putting his arm lightly round Charles’s shoulders. The arm was only on the back of his seat at first. When he felt the hand touch him, though he was expecting it, he couldn’t help a sort of leaping flinch. But he controlled himself, he made himself relax. And then he could almost feel the gratitude in the hand, the fingers pressing with relief at not being flung furiously away.
In this small auditorium it was quite cold. The air conditioning created the temperature of an autumn day. Charles was rather glad of the cold, of feeling he wasn’t wearing quite enough clothes, for it distracted him from his revulsion and his gradually increasing fear. Soon, he thought, he would start shivering. The film was fairly noisy, with drum beats and strange music and the clash of weapons if not with talk, but Charles could hear an occasional heavy rumbling as well. If this had been about the Second World War or Vietnam or something like that he would have thought it gunfire. Then there came a crash like a bomb and Charles knew it was thunder, outside and not in the film, that he was hearing.
The film seemed interminable. In a lighter sequence, the screen lit with Japanese sunshine, Charles looked at his watch and saw that it was already past eight. By the time they got out of here it would be getting dark. The thought horrified him. But then, before another five minutes had gone by, without any apparent warning in the story, it was all over and the lights were coming on. Peter Moran’s arm had been quickly withdrawn.
‘Strange stuff,’ he said, ‘or was it all crystal clear to you?’
‘I couldn’t follow it at all.’
‘I’m sorry about that. My mistake. Mea culpa, as housemaster Lindsay might say. Should I have taken you to A Hundred and One Dalmatians?’
They were leaving the Fontaine and a brilliant lightning flash, followed by a clap of thunder sounding like wooden planks tossed on to a concrete floor, cut off Charles’s answer. True to his claim never to speak of the weather, Peter Moran said:
‘I expect you’re hungry. I’ve got something to eat in the car. I mean I brought it with me. As I may have told you, I’m an impecunious beggar, erratically supported by my woman who sometimes lets a few crumbs fall in my direction.’
Charles had eaten nothing since his lunch but the two Yorkies washed down with a cup of tea someone had given him at the garage and two of Peter Moran’s chocolates. He wasn’t in the least hungry though, he felt very slightly sick, his throat gagging. As they crossed the road, passing the front of Pentecost Villas, the first drops of rain began to fall, making big black circular splashes on the pavement. Once he got into that car, he thought, he would have no control at all over his movements. Peter Moran could drive them anywhere, out into the country perhaps, to some remote place of heath or woodland. And by then it would be dark.
The car was now in sight and Charles had a premonition Peter Moran would suggest they run for it before the rain came on harder. He thought of the safe house, empty, supplied with candles, well known to him and not known at all to Peter Moran. A truly ‘safe’ house in that it contained rooms into which one could if necessary lock oneself.
‘I used to live there,’ he said. ‘My family used to live there. We moved out because they’re going to turn it into flats. The middle one was our house.’
Peter Moran had a parking ticket stuck under one of the windscreen wipers. He tore it off, cursing. He hadn’t put enough money in to last from five till six-thirty when metering ended. Opening the car door and feeling inside, he said:
‘Who lives there now?’
‘Nobody lives there now. I’ve got a key.’
‘Have you now?’ Peter Moran looked at him. It was a strange look, Charles couldn’t have said what it expressed, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like the tightening of the facial muscles and the moistening of those pale lips with a curiously pale tongue. ‘Are you saying we could go in there and eat our grub? Shelter from the rain?’ He began to smile. ‘Better than a car, maybe?’
‘We have to go in the back way,’ said Charles.
Peter Moran removed from the back of the car a half-full carrier bag from which the neck of a wine bottle protruded.
‘Tuck,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to see if they still call it tuck at Rossingham. I get the impression you rather like hearing me talk about Rossingham, don’t you?’
‘Very much.’
The rain began in earnest as they turned the corner into Fontaine Road. As the thunder receded to grumble softly in the distance, the heavens seemed to open.
‘Can we run for it?’
‘Sure,’ said Charles.
He opened the gate into that wilderness of a garden. The back of the house reared up like a cliff. Lightning flared and showed them a rampart with blank or broken windows, a peeling facade hung with dying creeper. Charles went ahead knowing he must get there first so that Peter Moran wouldn’t see he didn’t actually have a key. Some deft deceiving finger movements were made and the door pushed open.
Down here it was pitch dark but there were candles in the table drawer and matches beside them. Charles lit the candles and pocketed the matches. He felt the knife there, the small useless penknife.
‘You come here often, I can see that,’ said
Peter Moran.
‘We’ll go upstairs. It’s nicer upstairs.’
Charles led the way. It grew lighter as they climbed. He held two candles and Peter Moran one. The rain roared on the windows, throbbing through the house. Charles was quite wet, his shirt sticking to him and water dripping from his hair. The first thing he looked for on the threshold of the big room where the furniture was, was the key. He looked on the inside of the door and the outside but the key wasn’t there.
‘Nice place you have here,’ Peter Moran said, holding his candle aloft and looking round. ‘I particularly like the day bed.’
The long windows shimmered and looking out of them was like looking into an aquarium, flowing water only, streams of water, and distantly beyond it, dark blueness and a goldfish speck of light. A stuffy dusty warmth made Charles feel he was steaming. The food and drink was tumbled out on to the metal garden seat, a couple of wrapped pies, biscuits, a can of Coke. Peter Moran felt the wine bottle and pronounced it warm.
