by Ruth Rendell
Dot had wanted to come with him, but he had put her off, he hoped not unkindly. He said she would be bored, but in truth he enjoyed his bus trips so much, he wanted to keep them to himself. He didn’t want to talk but to look and, he supposed, to learn, to discover how little he really knew of London. Now he was learning, and that was something she wouldn’t understand. She and Lizzie tended to laugh at this new interest of his, but to him it wasn’t funny. It was marvellous, and serious.
Next week he would be more ambitious. He could take the number 6 to halfway down the Edgware Road, then get on the 7. Lizzie had once told him that she went on that bus to the Portobello Road. It was such a trendy place to go to that he hadn’t liked to tell her he had never been there, that he barely knew where it was. The number 7 bus driver would, though.
“You’re very quiet,” Dot said when he got in. “Thinking about your exciting trip, are you? I’ll come with you one of these days.”
“No, you won’t,” Tom said hastily. “You don’t get your pass till you’re sixty.”
The following day he took the number 16 to Victoria. The building works going on around the bus station, the chaos and the crowds, even though it was only half past three in the afternoon, made him resolve not to come here again until the underground improvement works were finished.
Coming home, he got on the 16, which went to Cricklewood Broadway, from where he could transfer to one of the three routes that would take him to Willesden. But at the Edgware Road stop, a big, burly man got on, slapped his pass onto the card reader, and shouted out when it didn’t beep. The driver took the card from him and read it; it was out-of-date and the driver told the fat man he would need to renew it. The queue getting on the bus began muttering angrily. The man with the out-of-date pass shouted insults at the driver, calling him a black bastard. That was enough. The driver said to get off, everyone must get off because he was calling the police. The man with the out-of-date pass yelled that he wasn’t getting off, and the driver said good, that suited him. Tom escaped through the exit in the middle of the bus and walked the short distance to the next stop, where he got on the number 6.
He smiled. When he got home, he would tell Dorothy about the row on the bus. She always enjoyed a bit of a fight so long as no one came to blows.
FOR ONCE, AS Lizzie put it to herself, she hadn’t drunk very much, just a gin and tonic and two small glasses of wine the whole evening. She wanted to make a good impression on Swithin, and she noticed how little he drank.
He had at their first meeting seemed an intelligent man, but he hadn’t much conversation, and long silences fell. She tried to fill the gaps by telling him about her father’s bus rides, making his small adventures as amusing as she could, but Swithin appeared to have no sense of humour. Like most of her friends, Lizzie believed that if a man took you out for an expensive dinner in a place such as this, he would expect you to have sex with him afterwards. You didn’t necessarily have to. She looked across the table at him and smiled mysteriously. He began talking about the Scottish referendum.
Taking her home in a taxi, he accepted her invitation to come in for coffee. She had only once tried Stacey’s espresso machine and looked forward to using it again. She wanted to see the impression it made on him. She wasn’t disappointed.
“You own this place, do you?” Those were almost his first words as he walked into the living room.
She said she did.
“At current prices it must be worth close on a million.”
“Not quite that.” She went to make the coffee. When she came back, he was looking at Stacey’s paintings of tropical birds and examining a table of pale yellow wood with a grey inlay. Lizzie didn’t much like it; it was the kind of thing her mother would have called too modern.
“Is it a——?” Swithin uttered a name that sounded like a town in Slovakia.
“Oh, yes. It was very pricey.” She knew she shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t the sort of word to use in connection with valuable furniture. “I didn’t buy it, my mother did.”
He gave her a strange look. They drank their coffee and he talked about house prices. When he had emptied his cup, she expected him to move towards her along the sofa, but he got up instead. “Very good coffee.”
There was nothing to say to that. He gave her a kiss, a light peck on the cheek, and quickly departed.
IN THE WEEKS she had been in Pinetree Court, few callers had come to the door. The post, what there was of it, was deposited in the boxes in the entrance hall. Meters were read in cupboards outside and by the front doors. So when the doorbell rang the following morning, Lizzie jumped. She wasn’t going to answer it or even guess who it might be. It rang again. It will ring twice, she thought, and then they’ll give up and go away.
The sound of a key turning in the lock brought a cold shiver. She waited in the little hallway as a man she recognised as the concierge stepped into the flat. With him was a tall, handsome man of about her own age whom she vaguely recognised.
“Who might you be?” said the concierge.
Lizzie did her best to make her voice bold. “I’m a friend of Miss Warren’s. I’m looking after the place.”
“Miss Warren passed away some time ago. The apartment is now about to be occupied by this gentleman, Mr. Weatherspoon.”
Of course. That was who it was. Aunt Yvonne’s son. “Hi, Gervaise.”
“Well, if it isn’t little Lizzie,” said Gervaise Weatherspoon. “How did you get in?”
“I’ve had a key for years.”
The concierge plainly didn’t believe her, something Lizzie resented, as for once what she said was more or less true. “I’ll have that key, thank you, miss, and then we’ll say no more about it.”
She gave him the key meekly because she had just remembered she didn’t need it. The other one, the one in the floor of the recycling cupboard, was known to her and her alone. She favoured Gervaise with a radiant smile. “Will you be living here?”
“One day.” His smile matched hers. “First I’ll be going on an archaeological visit to Cambodia and Laos.”
Gervaise asked for Lizzie’s phone number so she could give him details of the flat’s phone and energy suppliers. The concierge looked disgruntled: he could help Mr. Weatherspoon with that, he said. But Lizzie took no notice and wrote down her mobile number and the landline at the Kilburn flat. Gervaise’s request had given her an idea and done her a power of good. Never mind that she was going to be an hour late for school.
“I’ll be in touch,” she promised.
LIZZIE PACKED EVERY bag she could find in the flat. Seeing no reason to leave any of Stacey’s clothes behind, she stuffed them into suitcases from Louis Vuitton, Marks & Spencer, and Selfridges. Then she phoned for a taxi.
While she was waiting for it, a knock came at the door. She thought it was the taxi, but, no, it was the concierge, with an enormous bunch of white lilies, feathery gypsophila, and pink rosebuds. The card accompanying it was addressed to “Darling Liz” with love from Swithin. Liz indeed. No one had ever called her that.
Taking the flowers with her, she removed the extra key from underneath the brick in the floor of the recycling cupboard and put it in her handbag. Then she stacked the luggage on the pavement to wait for the taxi to take her to Kilburn.
11
RENT DAY, THE last day of the month, had gone past. By August 2, Carl knew he wouldn’t be paid.
He wasn’t yet destitute. The second instalment of the advance he had received on publication of Death’s Door had taught him to be careful, if not frugal, and though nearly all of that had gone, he had saved a little more from the July rent that had come in. He probably had as much as four hundred pounds in his current account. But if Dermot’s August rent failed to appear—and plainly it was not going to—the demand for council tax did. City of Westminster it said across the top of the letter, and underneath that, the sum. He could pay it in instalments, of course, but was that much help?
That afternoon, he sat down
at the computer, went to the document called SacredSpirits.doc, and read with mounting disgust what he had written. It was hopeless, useless. Tinkering with it was a waste of time. After staring at the text in despair, he deleted all ten pages. He must forget this philosophy theme, this learned stuff he was obviously useless at, and think seriously of something he could do, such as a sequel to Death’s Door. If that wasn’t feasible, he could create a new detective, a woman, perhaps. He would begin by making a list of characters, looking up names online and finding new ones in the surname dictionary.
But his heart wasn’t in it. All his heart could do was sink. He missed Nicola so much. Her old flatmates had found room for her. She was gone. And there was Dermot. Suppose he really did stay in the flat and never paid the rent again? Perhaps Carl could tell him to leave because he wanted to sell the house. But he knew this wouldn’t work. Dermot would refuse to go.
Another course would be to force him to pay the rent and leave him to do his worst. Dermot would no doubt tell this woman Yvonne Weatherspoon the tale of Carl’s “medicaments” and the sale of the DNP to Stacey. And why should it stop there? Dermot might not lead an involved and widespread social life, but he met a lot of people. He talked (chatted, he would call it) to a host of pet owners, for example. He would carry out his threat to go to that newspaper that sold widely in Hampstead and Highgate. He would say he had a story for them and go to their office to give an interview. He might even approach one of the tabloids, the Sun, say, or the Mail. Stacey was known to the public. It would be a juicy story: “Author Kills Actress.” Carl would never have a serious literary career again.
He was making himself feel sick. He leaned over his desk, putting his head in his hands, but this did nothing to help. He ran, choking, into the kitchen and threw up into the sink.
The footsteps behind him could only be Dermot’s. Carl kept his head bent, ran the cold tap, switched on the waste disposal unit, hoping the noise would drive his tenant away. It didn’t.
“You’re not very well, are you?” Dermot used his deeply concerned voice. To Carl it sounded as if he was enjoying himself. “Don’t you think you should see your doctor? I’ll come with you if you like.”
“Go away. You’re ruining my life.”
“No, no. It’s you who’s doing that.”
Carl drank some water from the tap. He wiped his mouth on the tea cloth.
“I came down to ask you if you would like to go out for a drink. Maybe something to eat as well?”
In this instance, to respond with “Are you joking?” was a genuine question.
“No,” Dermot said. “I thought it would be a good idea to get to know each other better.”
“I don’t want to know you better. I don’t want to know you at all. I want you out of my life. Now go away, please. Please go away.”
When Dermot had gone, Carl sat down at the kitchen table, found Nicola’s mother’s number on his phone’s list of contacts, and rang it. There was no answer. He remembered his own mother telling him that not so long ago your name didn’t come up when you made a call. The person you called didn’t know who it was, so they had to answer. As things were now, Nicola might be sitting in her mother’s house, also in a kitchen for all he knew, and deliberately not answering because she could see Carl on the screen. He thought, I don’t even know where her house is. Aylesbury, I think, but I don’t know the address.
As he was leaving, the postman brought ten copies of Carl’s book. When he’d originally been shown the jacket design, he hadn’t liked it, but had accepted the corpse and the blood and the weeping woman. It looked no better now under the bright-coloured glaze, and he dumped the box on the hall table and left it there. A moment that should have been glorious—the delivery of copies of his first published book—was just a disappointment, like everything else in his life.
He decided to walk to Nicola’s flat in Ashmill Street, telling himself he’d nothing to lose if no one let him in. Things couldn’t be any worse than they already were. It occurred to him that he had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. There was only Nicola, and perhaps even she wouldn’t speak to him.
He walked through Church Street market, where the traders were dismantling the stalls. Farther up on Lisson Grove, the man with the antiques shop was removing his chairs and tables from the pavement and closing up for the night.
By now it was early evening, and once off the main streets, few people were about. Carl turned down the street by the fish-and-chips shop. Nicola knew, he said to himself. She was the only one other than Dermot who knew; she had heard his account of what had happened, she knew. Surely now she would be over her initial shock and horror and would be able to give him some sympathy, tell him what to do.
The Victorian terraced house where she lived was one of a long row and must have been ugly and shabby even when it was first built. It looked empty, as if all the girls were out somewhere; with friends, maybe, or boyfriends, having coffee or a drink or at the cinema. Nicola wouldn’t be there, he accepted this, but one of the others might know where she was. He rang the bell, the top bell for the top floor, then rang it again.
The window above him opened and Nicola put her head out.
“Let me in, Nic. Please.”
She smiled her beautiful Nicola smile. “I’m coming down.”
It wasn’t all right, it couldn’t be that, but it was better. He knew it was better when, as soon as she had let him in and closed the front door, she took him in her arms and hugged him tightly. He felt like a small child whose mother had been cross with him for some misdemeanour, but had now forgiven him and loved him again as she used to.
THEY WENT TO bed. It was Judy’s bedroom, which Nicola was sharing as a temporary measure. It had one tiny window offering what Nicola described rather sardonically as “a magnificent view of the Marylebone Road.” The bed was a single, with a camp bed beside it. They slept, and when they woke up, Nicola produced a bottle of port she had bought at a fete in the village where she had spent the previous weekend.
“It’s not me giving Stacey the stuff, is it? It’s selling it. That’s the problem you’ve got with it.”
Nicola agreed. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you hadn’t sold it. What’s Dermot going to do? Or what do you think he’s going to do?”
He told her about the rent. The newspapers, maybe the police, Stacey’s relatives. “He calls them ‘her loved ones.’ ”
They heard the front door close and a set of footsteps on the stairs.
“We’d better get up and go,” Nicola said.
So she was coming home with him. For a moment Carl was almost happy.
Out in the street, she asked him again what he thought Dermot was going to do. “Would it be so bad if he did go to Stacey’s relatives, or even the newspapers? You keep saying that giving her the pills wasn’t against the law.”
“Having sex with your friend’s wife isn’t against the law, but you still don’t want it known.”
“But let’s say you tell Dermot you want the rent and he says OK, you can have it, and the consequence is that he starts telling people—newspapers, police, whatever. Can’t you face up to it? The police caution you—isn’t that the worst that can happen? You just tell everyone it’s not against the law, and in time it’ll blow over.”
Carl was silent. Then he said slowly, “I know it’s not against the law, but the national press—the print media, don’t they call it that?—will get hold of it from the Ham and High and the Paddington Express, and they will say exactly what they like about me. I guess the broadsheets like the Guardian and the Independent may not be that interested—or they may be, but not in a loud, screaming-headline way. That’ll be for the Sun and the Mail. And they’ll run great big headlines in—oh, I don’t know, seventy- or eighty-point typeface, and they can do it because all their readers will want to know about an author selling what the paper will call poison to a poor, desperate actress who’s so overweight people laugh at her.”
“You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you? You’ve sort of constructed it. Look, let’s go and eat somewhere and forget about this for an evening and a night.”
Very out of character, he threw his arms round her and said loudly so that people stared, “Oh, Nic, it’s so good, it’s so lovely to have you back.”
12
WALKING SYBIL SOAMES home from church on Sunday morning was possibly (or arguably, as journalists wrote every day in newspapers) the most fateful thing Dermot had ever done in his life. He didn’t know this, of course. He didn’t arrange it. It happened, that was all.
Sybil shook hands with the vicar and he was the next to do so. They walked down the path from St. Mary’s, Paddington Green, one after the other and came out together in Venice Walk.
“Are you going my way?” he said.
Because she didn’t know what to say, a situation Sybil often found herself in, she blushed. “I don’t know.”
“Where do you live?”
“Jerome Crescent. It’s sort of Rossmore Road.”
He said no more. He didn’t find her attractive. To be attractive, a woman had to look like Angelina Jolie or Caroline the vet: tall, thin as a reed, long-necked, with full lips, dark red hair piled on top of her head. If Dermot had met Sybil Soames anywhere but in church, she might never have become his girlfriend. Sitting next to her by chance in the third pew from the front at St. Mary’s made speaking to her, and at their fourth meeting asking her out, respectable.
Dermot had little experience of going out with women, and most of that was with his mother in Skegness, or one of his aunts, who lived next door to his mother. But somehow he could tell that Sybil would not be particular or exacting. She was not good-looking, nor, from the conversation they had had (mostly about the hymns they had sung that morning), particularly intelligent. Perhaps the most attractive thing about her was the admiration she clearly had for him. They talked about the vicar, whose gender Sybil approved of, and Dermot told her he thought women in the clergy was a mistake, while making them bishops was the beginning of the end of Anglicanism in this country.
