by Ruth Rendell
“Don’t you like women, then?” said Sybil.
“Of course I do. In their place.”
He could educate her, he thought. He told her where he worked, making his position at the pet clinic rather more elevated than it was. She seemed to think he must be a vet and he said nothing to correct her. Would she meet him next day for coffee in the Café Rouge in Clifton Road? he wondered. A lot of girls would have asked why not a drink or dinner, but he knew she wouldn’t. She was innocent enough to ask him if he was sure he wanted her to meet him.
“I asked you, didn’t I?”
“I just wanted to check.”
“One p.m. OK?”
No, she couldn’t do that. She’d be at work. She looked almost triumphant, as if she’d known he hadn’t meant it.
“OK, make it the evening.”
He didn’t care what her work was; she would tell him this when they met. And she was bound to be early, probably ten to seven rather than seven.
He was right. When he arrived at Café Rouge the next evening at five past seven, she was sitting at one of their outside tables. He talked to her about the animal patients at the clinic, describing dog diseases and dog surgery. Her parents, with whom she lived, had two dogs and she didn’t much like them. Animals smelt, she said, and made a mess. She preferred a clean house and would like one of her own but she’d never afford it. She said this with some passion. He realised he had no need to make another date, but only said he would see her in church on Sunday. Things could go on from there.
“Why don’t you grow your hair?” he said. “It would look a lot better.”
He knew she would. He’d get to work on her clothes next. Maybe persuade her to lose a bit of weight. After all, people were going to see her with him.
LIZZIE WAS GOING to visit Dermot at the Sutherland Pet Clinic. She remembered Stacey once telling her that her aunt Yvonne took her cat there for its injections. She’d also worked out that Gervaise, who’d taken her number but not yet called her, might still be living at home, if he hadn’t already gone travelling.
When she had handed over to its parent the last of what the head teacher called “the kiddiwinks,” Lizzie got on her bus in the middle bit, which you were not supposed to do because if you were lucky, the driver wouldn’t see you and you could get away without having a ticket or a pass. This worked well if you were going no more than two stops. But Lizzie was going a lot farther, and the driver was leaning out of his window shaking his fist at her as she tripped lightly down Sutherland Avenue.
Dermot was happy to talk to her when he learned that she knew Carl and had been one of Stacey’s closest friends. He told her about Stacey’s aunt, Mrs. Weatherspoon, whose son and daughter both lived with her in her mansion at Swiss Cottage.
“Poor Stacey left her apartment in Primrose Hill to her aunt, as I expect you know. I shouldn’t say it, but it doesn’t seem quite fair, does it? ‘To him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not everything shall be taken away, even that which he hath.’ ”
“Is that right?” Lizzie had no idea what he meant and didn’t care. “You know, Stacey once gave me her aunt’s phone number, but I’ve mislaid it. Would you let me have it?”
“I couldn’t do that,” said Dermot in unctuous tones. “But I could give her yours and ask her to call you.”
She’s already got it, or her son has, thought Lizzie. But in a piece of luck at that moment the vet called out to Dermot to come and give her a hand with Dusky. “Excuse me,” said Dermot.
By another piece of luck, he had also left Yvonne Weatherspoon’s details on the computer. Lizzie, popping behind the counter, committed landline and mobile numbers to her excellent memory, then, on the principle of better safe than sorry, exited the file and quickly afterwards the clinic.
Back in Kilburn by six, a good time to phone anyone, Lizzie was soon speaking to Gervaise Weatherspoon, who answered his mother’s phone.
“I’m so glad to have caught you,” Lizzie said. “I was hoping we might have a talk before you go on your trip. About the apartment in Pinetree Court, I mean.”
“Oh, yes?”
“It’s just an idea I had. I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
He sounded strangely hostile. “Where did you want to talk about it then?”
“I thought perhaps in the apartment?”
“OK. Tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.? I’ll be there.”
THE FIRST TIME Lizzie had seen Gervaise, she had been dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. The idea would be to create a glamorous image today, so she put on the green suit she had worn for that evening visit to her parents. Getting on the bus in Kilburn High Road, she presented her pass this time and settled into her seat, conscious that she was the best-dressed woman there. Not that there was much competition from this bunch, who looked as if they were all off to clean out someone’s drains.
She was five minutes late, but Gervaise wasn’t there. Irritated, she waited outside Stacey’s front door and wondered what she would do if he didn’t come. But he did, arriving just as she was making her contingency plans, and let them both in.
Inside, he looked her up and down. “That thing you’re wearing looks exactly like one Stacey had in her slimmer days.”
“Does it? Well, it isn’t hers. Stacey was never as thin as me.”
He laughed. “Don’t you girls ever watch films from the fifties? All the women in them are what you call fat. Marilyn Monroe was a size sixteen.”
Lizzie didn’t say anything. She wondered what he was trying to prove. “When are you going to wherever it is? Thailand, was it?”
He seemed to find that funny too. “Cambodia and Laos. Next week. Why?”
“Well, I thought you might want someone to look after the place while you’re away. I mean, live here, keep it clean. I wouldn’t want paying.”
His apparently irrepressible laughter was bubbling up again. “I don’t suppose you would. I don’t suppose you’d want to pay me either.” He made no answer to her offer, but strolled into the bedroom. Lizzie followed him. He opened the wardrobe doors and peered inside. She was conscious once again of how good-looking he was. “I wonder what happened to Stacey’s clothes. There’s not much here.”
Apart from the green suit and a few other items, they were all in Lizzie’s cupboards in Kilburn. She had an answer for him. “Someone must have taken them to that designer-seconds shop in Lauderdale Road.”
“Ah, of course.” He looked at his watch. No one else of his age that Lizzie knew had a watch. They all told the time on their mobiles or iPads. “I have an appointment in St. James’s in half an hour, so I’m afraid we must terminate this interview. It’s been delightful.”
Lizzie had lost all her confidence and now felt small and inferior, but she had not entirely lost her nerve. “Well, can I stay here while you’re away?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? Of course you can. We’ll keep in touch while I’m in Cambodia.” There was no invitation to have a drink or even dinner before he left; no laughter this time, only a broad smile. “I won’t need to give you a key, I’m sure you’ve got one already.”
She nodded in stupefied silence.
“I’ll leave you a phone number.”
Would you be able to call a mobile number in Cambodia? Lizzie wondered. Gervaise produced a receipt from his pocket and wrote in pencil on the back of it what was obviously a landline number. She put it in her handbag.
Once he had gone, and she had helped herself to a long draught of tequila for what her grandmother would have called medicinal purposes, she made a survey of the flat. Since Gervaise hadn’t checked what was in the place apart from the absence of clothes, she would be able to help herself to whatever she wanted. The days of getting into people’s flats or houses and taking some small item away with her seemed long past.
The bathroom was still crowded with makeup and perfume, most of it barely used. She would have all that. The Roberts radio wouldn’t be missed, she thought,
nor would the nearly new camera. Was there anything in the flat she could sell? Maybe what her mother quaintly called cutlery? But no. She had never stooped to stealing and she mustn’t start now.
After another swig of tequila, she went downstairs to tell the concierge that she was looking after the flat for the next—how long? She didn’t know; say, eight weeks? But Gervaise had already given the concierge the news, and it seemed not to have gone down well. The man scowled behind the black-framed sunglasses he wore, which seemed a strange choice as it had come on to rain and the sky was dark.
13
IT WAS A little late in the day to take a bus to Hampstead Heath, Tom Milsom thought, but now that it was light for sixteen hours of the day, he hadn’t noticed it was nearly five when he left home. Still, his favourite bus, the number 6, had taken him to the stop outside the Tesco in Clifton Road and the flower shop, and there he got on the single-decker 46, which took him to Fitzjohn’s Avenue.
The houses up here were huge four-storey places, most of them sheltered and veiled by tall creeper-hung trees. Tom wondered if just one family or even a couple lived in them, or were they divided into flats? Flats wasn’t a suitable word. You would have to call them apartments and the houses mansions. Although quite-heavy traffic filled the road, the whole area was oddly silent. Few people were about, and no young ones. Tom saw a youngish woman in high heels taking a dog out for its walk, a dog you couldn’t mistake for a mongrel or a crossbreed, it was so unmistakably pedigree, with its slender, elegant shape, sleek cream-coloured fur, and legs rather like its owner’s. The collar it wore was black leather studded with green and blue jewels.
This was a safe, quiet bus, his fellow passengers mostly middle-aged and elderly women, all middle-class and with shopping bags. Working women would have shrieked, or at any rate gasped, when the bus driver had to stamp on his brakes and judder to a stop as a teenager in a long, scarlet sports car charged across Nutley Terrace right in front of him, yet these women barely reacted. Tom got out by Hampstead station, which he remembered was the deepest belowground in the London underground system—or was that Highgate? Hampstead was pretty. That was a word a man should never use, he thought as he walked down Rosslyn Hill, except perhaps about a girl. A thin drizzle was falling.
Should he try to find the house where Keats had lived? There seemed little point when all he knew about Keats was a poem about a knight-at-arms and a woman who had no mercy that Tom had had to learn at school. Anyway, he didn’t know whether the house was in Downshire Hill or in Keats Grove, where it ought to be, and he didn’t want to show his ignorance by asking. He could have some tea instead. Perhaps he ought to buy something, a little present for Dorothy, and what better place than Hampstead? It was a bit ridiculous, for he was hardly on holiday, but he bought it just the same, a book of notelets, one for every day of the year, with Hampstead Queen of the Hills printed on it in Gothic lettering. He had a cup of tea and a millionaire’s macaroon before going off to find the bus home.
The kind of people who made trouble on buses were not to be found in Hampstead. The Hampstead sort all had valid passes, plenty of silver coins should the pass have mysteriously become obsolete, and a driving licence for ID. Tom had all this, and the bus he was getting on was the prestigious 24, which plied between Hampstead Heath and Victoria, taking in Camden Town and Westminster on its way.
He got on and sat in a small, single seat tucked away behind the driver’s cab. The girl who followed him, instead of touching her pass to the reader as he had done, turned away and got on halfway down, after Tom’s daughter’s fashion. He waited for her to go up to the driver and either present her pass or put down the requisite two pounds forty. Neither happened. Should he approach the driver himself and tell him? Or hand the girl the coins, which he had? But she was on her phone, talking to someone with whom she appeared on intimate terms.
Tom felt indignant. How dare she impose on what the government called “the hardworking taxpayer” and have a free ride? Walking up the bus, he said, “Excuse me,” into the driver’s window. The entire lower floor of the bus had stopped talking and was paying him close attention. He dropped his voice to a whisper. The driver said the girl probably hadn’t got a pass or any spare money. He seemed displeased, not grateful and friendly as Tom felt the driver should have been. Wondering if this would produce a warmer response, Tom laid down the two-pound coin and the two twenties.
“What’s that for?” said the driver. “Her? Cash payments stopped last month. By law.”
The girl was still on her mobile, talking in a rather indignant way, and when the driver pulled the bus to the kerb and stopped, Tom began to feel nervous. Whatever happened next, he would be drawn into it. Standing up, he watched the doors at the front of the bus come open, muttered, “Got to get off,” and jumped out onto the pavement. He looked back over his shoulder. The driver and the girl appeared to be in a fierce argument as Tom walked away down the hill.
He wasn’t sure what to do. It was a long walk from here to Willesden, and bad enough to the number 6 route. He didn’t even know which way the number 6 went between Clifton Road and Willesden Green. Perhaps he should make for the Beatles’ place in—what was it?—Abbey Road. The bus he had got off passed him, sending spray up from the water in the gutter. It wasn’t exactly dark yet, but getting that way.
He was almost at the next bus stop by now. The best thing would be to wait there, as by now he had no idea where he was. People were waiting for the next 24: two young men, no more than boys. One of them said to him, “Got a ciggie, Granddad?”
Tom wanted to ask him how he dared call him that, but he was frightened. “I don’t smoke,” he muttered.
The other one said, “Don’t you lie to me,” and grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him.
Tom made a whimpering sound. He was released so violently that he staggered. The one who had asked him for a cigarette pushed himself in front of him and punched him hard in the stomach, a blow powerful enough to knock him over. He fell to the ground, doubled up. The two men kicked him onto a patch of grass under a tree and, as the 24 bus came, ran away.
IN FALCON MEWS, something crashed onto the floor from the flat above. It must have been heavy, a saucepan or a bucket. The sound it made reverberated through the house, followed by footsteps running down the stairs and the front door slamming.
The noise went on like this every day, only stopping when Dermot went to work. Carl knew it must be deliberate, intended to annoy him. It had started about the time the August rent was due but never came. The noise varied: a crash made by something dropped, doors slamming, the piercing growl of an electric drill, the hammering of a nail into the wall, the TV on full, the radio playing hymns—and all the doors up there wide-open.
The houses in Falcon Mews were Victorian jerry-built with thin walls and not very substantial floors, so that every sound echoed and trembled. When the noise first began, Carl had been irritated by it. Now it had started to frighten him. Could the neighbours hear it, the Pembrokes on the left side, Elinor Jackson on the right? They hadn’t complained to him, but then he hadn’t complained to Dermot either. He and Dermot barely spoke to each other anymore. Dermot no longer knocked on one of the doors in Carl’s part of the house to make some fatuous remark. Instead he ran faster than ever down the stairs and burst out into the street, banging the front door behind him.
While Nicola was at home, the noise stopped altogether. This behaviour on Dermot’s part was so transparent, so obvious, that Carl found it almost incredible. Now, if he told her his tenant made a deliberate racket simply to annoy him, she wouldn’t believe it. He had told her, though, and she had begun to treat him as if he were imagining the bangs and crashes and might be hearing things as a result of the nervous state he had worked himself into.
“I’ve got a couple of weeks’ holiday owing to me,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we go away somewhere? It would be good for you.”
“I can’t afford it. Well, I can now, but I
soon won’t be able to if I don’t get any rent.”
That only led to her giving him the advice she always gave him. “Tell him you must have the rent and let him . . . well, do his worst. No one can charge you with anything. You won’t go to prison. Tell him to go ahead and talk to these people and the newspapers, and once you’ve done it, you’ll feel a great relief and we’ll go to Cornwall or Guernsey or somewhere.”
Dermot was out. The house was silent. It was Sunday, so he was probably in church, but he would soon be back and the noise would start again.
“I can’t,” Carl said. “I mean that literally. I can’t do it. I can’t allow him to shame me. And yet it’s such a little thing, isn’t it? Sometimes I dream he’s dead, and when I wake up and he’s not . . . I lie there and hear him drop something, or his telly comes on, and I know he’s alive and there’s nothing I can do.”
Nicola was looking at him in horror. “Oh, Carl, sweetheart.”
The front door opened and closed softly and Dermot’s footsteps tiptoed up the stairs. Carl put his head in his hands.
“LET’S HOPE THIS has taught you that riding around to dodgy places on buses isn’t a good idea,” said Dot Milsom.
“Oh, Mum, Hampstead’s not a dodgy place.” Lizzie was more shocked by this description of London’s loveliest suburb than by her father’s experience.
“On your own too,” said Dot. “I did offer to come with you, you’ll remember.”
“You’re not old enough.” Tom laughed at his own wit. “It’s not the kind of thing that happens more than once, anyway. It looks to me like the girl I reported to the bus driver phoned her boyfriend, and it was him waiting to clobber me.”
A passerby had found him struggling to get up and called an ambulance, which took him to St. Mary’s Hospital, where he was treated for various cuts and bruises. It was discovered that no ribs were broken, but he was kept in overnight and allowed home next morning. For now he could just about walk with someone holding his arm.
