Portobello

by Ruth Rendell

  While he was thinking of ways to get rid of, or make Uncle Gib get rid of, the upstairs tenant, but keeping his eyes on the house opposite, the old woman came out of her front door, carrying an umbrella and pushing a shopping trolley. Heading for the Portobello probably, Lance thought. You wouldn't go up to Westbourne Grove unless you wanted to buy clothes or CDs or make-up and this woman was too old for any of that. He watched her go off in the direction he had predicted. For someone of her age she walked very fast.

  That meant she wouldn't be long. Still, he wasn't planning on anything major today. All he wanted was to get a good look at the place; from the back, in daylight. No one would do anything about the window he'd broken for days, maybe weeks. Lance locked the back door on the inside and let himself out of the front door, pulling it closed behind him. The old woman's side gate wasn't locked, couldn't be locked, he saw when he was on the other side of it. No keyhole, no bolts. The back door, however, was locked but a window was open. She must be losing her marbles if she thought there was any point in locking that door when she was leaving other easy means of access. He soon saw that she wasn't all that foolish, had calculated that no human being was thin enough to squeeze between the casement and its frame.

  Lance was very thin, he had a narrow concave chest and no hips worth speaking of. He took off his jacket and then his T-shirt. Still, his shoulders got stuck and he had a moment of panic when he thought she might come back and find him trapped there, she might have to send for paramedics or, worse, the police. But by wriggling and contracting his upper arms, folding them across his still tender ribs, he got himself through, his shoulders scraped and burning. His poor hand wasn't right yet and now it had begun to ache – but no pain, no gain, he said to himself, quoting Gemma in another context. He found himself in a sort of laundry room from which a doorway led into the kitchen, a large place equipped with all sorts of ultra-modern stuff, quite surprising in a woman of that age.

  What wasn't surprising was the glass jar full of money he found in a cabinet. That was the kind of thing these geriatrics did, kept the housekeeping in a jar or tin. Knowing that she was behaving, in one aspect at least, the way old people should behave brought him a sort of comfort. The money wasn't all small change. There were fivers and tenners mixed up with the coins. Lance stuffed most of it into his jeans pockets, leaving only two- and five-pence pieces. With that and what he'd been saving out of his takings from the fat woman's handbag he might have nearly enough to buy Gemma a tumble dryer himself. That would be one in the eye for Fize… Nearly a quarter of an hour had passed since he had seen the old woman go out and ten minutes since he got through the window. He ought to be out of there within half an hour of her departure. Old people didn't eat much and she might only be buying a chop for her supper and a packet of biscuits. Thinking of food made him realise he was ravenous. Saving up for Gemma's present had made him cut his rations and he'd been relying on the meagre pickings provided by Uncle Gib. He opened the fridge. A large frosted chocolate cake had pride of place in the front of the middle shelf. Saliva flowing, Lance cut himself a slice with one of her kitchen knives, stuffed it into his mouth with both hands and cut another. Uncle Gib had once told him that it was usual for burglars on breaking and entering to eat the food they found. He found himself wanting to be like other burglars, to be a professional and do it right.

  He cut a third piece, carrying it with him into a huge lavishly furnished living room and leaving a trail of sticky brown crumbs. He made for a desk, lifted up the rolltop and contemplated the contents. No money was to be seen but there were two credit cards right in the front and a chequebook. Better not touch them now. Twenty minutes had gone by and Lance thought that if he turned the cake round so that the side he'd cut slices off faced the other way, she might not know he'd been there. After all, he had entered but not broken in. Half-starved for the past week, he felt a little sick. Put the small change back into the jar and just keep the notes. A change of plan with regard to the cake would be to take what remained of it with him. He found a carrier bag and dropped it in. She wouldn't notice now. Old people had terrible memories, lots of them halfway to Alzheimer's, and she'd think she'd eaten the cake or, more likely, never made it.

  From the living-room window, peering out between the festoons of lace and velvet curtains, he looked up and down the empty street. No reason why he shouldn't let himself out of the front door. When he came to think of it, nothing else was possible; if he went by way of the back door there was no way he could lock it and leave the key in place on the inside. Cautiously, he emerged into the front garden, toting his carrier bag full of cake. His nausea was passing. At first he had thought of dumping the cake in the nearest bin but a little foresight told him that next day he would be hungry again and a slice of it would be very welcome as dessert after one of Uncle Gib's first courses of black pudding and fried egg.

  He sat on a wall and counted the money, just as he had done when he plundered the American woman's handbag. Not so much from today, only forty-five pounds. He'd take the credit cards next time.

  The Sharpes from next door and Elizabeth Cherry were being entertained to drinks at Eugene's house. They had all talked about the weather, how it was unbelievable, rain pouring down day after day, and so cold that Marilyn Sharpe had had her central heating on for two days. In July!

  Ella thought talking about rain as boring as anything one could think of and she was relieved when Elizabeth began telling everyone about her extraordinary experience of the previous day. Eugene went round filling glasses from the second Veuve Clicquot bottle. Everyone in this smart area of Notting Hill served champagne on such occasions, wine being considered rather mean and spirits unhealthy.

  'I waited till the rain stopped,' Elizabeth was saying, 'and then I went out shopping. I'd absolutely nothing in the house except this enormous cake I'd made for my granddaughter's birthday. Or let me say I think I'd made. Really, I'm telling this story against myself because it'll make you all think I'm senile. And, oh dear, perhaps I am.'

  She paused until the cries of 'But you're wonderful' and 'Absurd, you're like someone twenty years younger' had died down. 'Well, anyway, I came back after about three-quarters of an hour – it was raining again, needless to say – and everything was just as I left it except that the house had an odd feel about it. That's the only way I can describe it. I think a child had been in there.'

  Ella asked why a child.

  'I'd left the laundry-room window open to let out the steam. But only a little way. I mean, no adult could have squeezed through. A child could have. The next thing was I found crumbs going into my living room, quite a trail of them, brown crumbs like my chocolate cake. Of course I went straight to the fridge and the cake was gone. Honestly, you'll think I'm senile, but if it hadn't been for those crumbs I'd have wondered if I'd actually made the cake or if I'd dreamed of making it.'

  'Was there anything missing?' Eugene asked.

  'Only the cake, as far as I know. I haven't searched the house. It's just what a child would do, isn't it? Eat cake and then steal the rest of it.'

  Eugene was trying to think up something witty to say about having one's cake and eating it when the phone rang. 'Leave it,' he said to Ella. 'Let them leave a message.'

  'It may be for me. I'd better take it.'

  It was Joel Roseman. 'I'm not well,' he said. 'Can you come?'

  Inexperienced in the handling of private patients, Ella nevertheless thought she must have some rights. She could take a stand. It was seven o'clock, a cool wet evening. 'What's wrong, Joel?' She kept her voice gentle and quiet, very conscious too of listeners, fascinated as people always are, by 'doctor' conversations. She heard Eugene murmur to the others 'A private patient'. 'Are you in pain? Breathless?' After all, the man had a heart condition.

  'Not in pain, not breathless,' he said. 'I'm just under the weather.'

  It seemed appropriate, she thought, watching the rain lash the french windows. 'Would you like to come to me in
the morning? I could fit you in after surgery. Shall we say twelve noon? Come in a taxi.'

  'I thought you'd come here.'

  'I'll tell you what.' She glanced at her watch. 'I'll give you a call at nine to see how you are or you can call me.' She gave him Eugene's number.

  He said nothing and the receiver was replaced.

  Ella worried for the next two hours. The Sharpes departed. Elizabeth Cherry went home and spent the rest of the evening puzzling over the mystery of the chocolate cake. The rain stopped while Ella and Eugene were eating the black olive pasta Eugene had prepared earlier in the day.

  'I won't be able to sleep if I just leave it,' Ella said.

  Eugene knew she meant visiting Joel Roseman. 'It's a pity you took him on but it's too late to say that now.'

  She tried to phone Joel but there was no reply and the phone wasn't on message. 'I'll have to go over there.'

  'You must do as you think best, darling,' said Eugene.

  The first thing he did after she had gone, even before he had cleared the table, was go to his Chocorange cache and break open a new pack. Oh, the relief after three hours of denial! The most wonderful taste in the world…

  The flat was in total darkness. Not even a feeble gleam showed through the small stained-glass panes in the top of the door. At first Ella thought he must be out. No, worse, he might be unable to reach the door when she had rung the bell. He was really ill after all. Her own heart began beating rather fast. She rang the bell again, lifted up the metal flap and called to him through the letter box, 'Joel, Joel, are you there? It's Ella.'

  A moment or two passed. She heard footsteps, like an old man shuffling in slippers. He opened the door and stood there, blinking at the light, his dressing gown loosely tied and a blanket over his head like a cowl.

  'I didn't expect you,' he said, his tone accusing.

  She walked into the hallway. 'I was worried. I didn't want to leave you alone overnight.'

  He closed the front door. The light from the corridor outside made two faintly glowing patches, greenish, reddish, brown, on the panelled wood. Apart from that the place was absolutely dark. She was aware of something she had felt once or twice before in his presence, a frisson of fear. 'Please let us have some light, Joel.'

  She wouldn't have believed bulbs of such low wattage were available. But, yes, perhaps the one he reluctantly switched on was the kind for putting in the bedrooms of children afraid of the dark. They left the partial light behind to stumble once more into blackness as he led her into the living room. Rain roared against the window behind the muffling blinds. Without waiting for his permission she pressed the switch on one table lamp, then another.

  He glowered at her as if she had committed some serious social solecism and took a pair of sunglasses out of the table drawer. She put down her bag on the brown sofa and seated herself beside it. The long procession of identical emperors seemed to come alive with the light. She made herself not look at them. 'Now, what do you think is wrong with you? How do you feel?'

  His head bowed, he stood in front of her. 'I don't know.'

  'All right. Why did you want me to come?'

  He lifted his shoulders and the enwrapping blanket with them.

  She persevered. 'Have you been breathless? Have you any pain?'

  'No. Not either.'

  Asked to take off the blanket and remove his pyjama jacket, he obeyed with maddening slowness. Her stethoscope held against his chest and then his back, she listened to his heart, his lungs. 'I don't think there's much wrong with you, Joel.'

  'It's not my body, it's my mind.'

  'That's for Miss Crane, not me,' she said. 'You are seeing Miss Crane?'

  'I've been once. I told her about Mithras. I told her I wanted him to go away. It's strange, really, I liked him at first but I hate him now.' He seemed to read the doubt in her eyes, the fear. 'I tell myself he's not real, he's in my mind. I told him that. But when I'm alone with him I don't know. How can he only be in my mind when he talks to me in a language I can't understand? I can't have made that up.' She said faintly, 'Is he here now?'

  'He's here but he's not speaking. He won't speak till you've gone.'

  'And when he does will he speak – well, English or his own language?'

  'It's hard to say.'

  She must stop asking him about this imaginary creature. It wasn't her province, that was for the therapist. 'When is your next checkup at the hospital?'

  'Friday,' he said.

  It was a relief. She wanted him to be in other hands than her own. 'I don't think you should be alone here, Joel. Would your mother come and stay with you?'

  'Pa wouldn't let her.'

  'Is there no one else? No friend or relative you could ask to stay for a few days?' A few days wasn't enough but it was better than nothing. 'There must be someone.'

  'No one who'd come unless I paid them. I mean, Pa paid them.'

  She came to a quick decision. 'I will find someone for you.'

  'I don't want a nurse!'

  'Not a nurse, a carer. Someone just to be in the flat overnight.'

  He put his head in his hands but he made no objection. 'You can go now,' he said, looking up. 'It gets better when I talk to you. I feel a bit better.'

  When she was out in the street heavy rain was falling from a leaden sky and it was as dark as winter midnight, the street lamps dimmed by the yellowish fog the rain made. She drove back to Eugene's, thinking of the man she had left behind in that sepulchral place and wondering if, with her departure, the mind-created thing he called Mithras was muttering to him once more. She had meant to ask him how he passed his long lonely days in that dark place. She would do so next time they met, perhaps after his checkup on Friday. The reason she hadn't asked might have been because she knew the answer. Nothing. Nothing at all. No exercise, no reading, no watching television, listening to music, no talking to friends, nothing but sitting dozing in the dark.

  Half the country was under flood water. Uncle Gib saw the pictures of Tewkesbury and Gloucester on his computer and in a newspaper he found on a wall in Raddington Road. 'We shall be all right up here,' he said. 'It's not called Notting Hill for nothing, is it? Haitch, I, double L, geddit?'

  Dorian Lupescu didn't get it. He hadn't understood a word but he nodded in agreement. Uncle Gib had exited from the Internet and was replying to a few selected letters. One of them had come from a man in Marlow, a member of the Children of Zebulun's Cookham church, who was watching the Thames rise and who hadn't insured his house. The Agony Uncle had no intention of answering it, privately or in print. Questions of morality, usually sexual, were all he bothered with. He turned his attention to the letter from a woman in Kenton whose partner couldn't maintain an erection. Disgusting, thought Uncle Gib. He wouldn't sully the pages of The Zebulun with that word. A reply only would suffice.

  Distraught, Kenton, he wrote. Your letter is unsuitable for family reading. The man you call your partner must ask God's forgiveness for sinful living. Marriage to you will cure his problem. It is a wellknown fact that guilt, justified guilt in his case, makes a man uncapable. Uncle Gib wasn't sure about that final word. It didn't look right. He checked in the dictionary and corrected it. Then, although he wasn't going to reply to it, he looked again at the letter from the Marlow reader. In spite of what he had said to Dorian Lupescu, it had made him rather uneasy.

  He had remembered the Brent Reservoir that they called the Welsh Harp. It was quite a long way away but water travelled fast. Look how it had travelled all over Gloucestershire from rivers on the border of Wales. He switched on the television for the one o'clock news just to check where that water had got to now. Fifteen flood alerts issued, the newscaster told him. Tewkesbury cut off, Oxford in danger, Bedford threatened. That Welsh Harp was a great lake and it was high up, a lot higher than here, he thought vaguely, geography not being his strong suit. He imagined it bursting its banks the way they said the Severn had and the Great Ouse. Water would pour down through Will
esden and Kensal into North Kensington…

  Uncle Gib looked up insurance companies in the Yellow Pages but the abundance of them confused him. Turning down the volume on the television, he picked up the phone and dialled Reuben Perkins's number. Maybelle answered, which was just as well as it was she who saw to what she called 'business matters' in their household. Within minutes she had given him the phone number of their insurance company.

  The way they made him hold on before anyone was available to answer his call started to put Uncle Gib in a bad temper. Music played – if you could call that droning and throbbing music – interrupted every few seconds by a woman thanking him for his patience and inexplicably telling him his call was important to her. Uncle Gib had shouted loudly and threatened the speaker with dire punishments before he realised he was berating a recorded voice. After ten minutes of this, Lance came into the room, hovering on the threshold, looking apprehensive. 'Get out!' Uncle Gib yelled and threw the Yellow Pages at him.

  But he got his answer at last and by the time the weather man had appeared on the screen and was forecasting more torrential rain, he had arranged for the insuring of his house. Against water damage, fire, tornados and other Acts of God, which Uncle Gib naturally thought less likely to be directed at his property than at that of the rest of the population. Forms would arrive, a cheque must be sent, but substantially the deed was done.

  He could have the whole day in the old woman's house, the whole night if he wanted it. He could stay in the place. The thought of it made Lance feel quite dizzy. Before Uncle Gib got religion he'd told Lance how he and a pal had cleared someone's flat while they were away on holiday. Just turned up in the pal's van and walked in with a key Uncle Gib had got from somewhere and taken everything, two TVs, a new computer, a CD player, a microwave and most of the furniture. The pal was a good dad, devoted to his daughter, and he'd wanted the tables and chairs and whatever for her flat. She'd just got married. Lance decided that it wasn't likely the old woman had a computer but she'd got a state-of-the-art TV with flat screen and built-in DVD player. He'd need a van but now he and Gemma were having their affair he and her brother were best mates again.