Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about one isolated case if I were you,’ said Teddy, feeling very uncomfortable. ‘You want to forget that sort of thing while you’re here. Unwind a bit.’

  ‘An isolated case is just what it isn’t. There’s someone at work, John Frost, you don’t know him. He and his wife split up – at her wish, naturally – and she took their baby with her as a matter of course. And George told me the same thing happened in his brother’s marriage a couple of years back. Three children he had, he lived for his children, and now he gets to take them to the zoo every other Saturday.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Teddy who had his moments of shrewdness, ‘if he’d lived for his wife a bit more it wouldn’t have happened.’

  He was glad to be back in the house. In bed that night he told Anne about it. Anne said Michael was an obsessional person. When he’d first met Linda he’d been obsessed by her and now it was Andrew and Alison. He wasn’t very nice to Linda these days, she’d noticed, he was always watching her in an unpleasant way. And when Linda had suggested she take the children up to the fortress in the morning if he wanted to go down to the harbour and see the fishing boats come in, he had said:

  ‘No way am I going to allow you up there on your own with my children.’

  Later in the week they all went. You had to keep your eye on the children every minute of the time, there were so many places to fall over, fissures in the walls, crumbling corners, holes that opened on to the empty blue air. But the view from the eastern walls, breached in a dozen places, where the crag fell away in an almost vertical sweep to a beach of creamy-silver sand and brown rocks, was the best on Stamnos. You could see the full extent of the bay that was the lip of the wine jar and the sea with its scattering of islands and the low mountains of Turkey behind which, Teddy thought romantically, perhaps lay the Plain of Troy. The turf up here was slippery, dry as clean combed hair. No rain had fallen on Stamnos for five months. The sky was a smooth mauvish-blue, cloudless and clear. Emma and Andrew, the bigger ones, ran about on the slippery turf, enjoying it because it was slippery, falling over and slithering down the slopes.

  Teddy had successfully avoided being alone with Michael since their conversation in the bar but later that day Michael caught him. He put it that way to himself but in fact it was more as if, unwittingly, he had caught Michael. He had gone down to the grocery store, had bought the red apples, the feta cheese and the olive oil Anne wanted, and had passed into the inner room which was a secondhand book-store and stuffed full with paperbacks in a variety of European languages discarded by the thousand tourists who had come to Votani that summer. The room was empty but for Michael who was standing in a far corner, having taken down from a shelf a novel whose title was its heroine’s name.

  ‘That’s a Swedish translation,’ said Teddy gently.

  ‘Oh, is it? Yes, I see.’

  ‘The English books are all over here.’

  Michael’s face looked haggard in the gloom of the shop. He didn’t tan easily in spite of being so dark. They came out into the sunlight, Teddy carrying his purchases in the string bag, pausing now and then to look down over a wall or through a gateway. Down there the meadows spread out to the sea, olives with the black nets laid under them to catch the harvest, cypresses thin as thorns, The shepherd’s dog was bringing the flock in and the sheep bells made a distant tinkling music. Michael’s shadow fell across the sunlit wall.

  ‘I was off in a dream,’ said Teddy. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? I love it. It makes me quite sad to think we shan’t come here in October again for maybe – what? Twelve or fourteen years?’

  ‘I can’t say it bothers me to have to make sacrifices for the sake of my children.’

  Teddy thought this reproof uncalled for and he would have liked to rejoin with something sharp. But he wasn’t very good at innuendo. And in any case before he could come up with anything Michael had begun on quite a different subject.

  ‘The law in Greece has relaxed a lot in the past few years in favour of women – property rights and divorce and so on.’

  Teddy said, not without a spark of malice, ‘Jolly good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Those things are the first cracks in the fabric of a society that lead to its ultimate breakdown.’

  ‘Our society hasn’t broken down.’

  Michael gave a scathing laugh as if at the naivety of this comment. ‘Throughout the nineteenth century,’ he said in severe lecturing tones, ‘and a good deal of this one, if a woman left her husband the children stayed with him as a matter of course. The children were never permitted to be with the guilty party. And there was a time, not so long ago, when a man could use the law to compel his wife to return to him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want that back, would you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Teddy. There’s a time coming when children won’t have fathers – that is, it won’t matter who your father is any more. You’ll know your mother and that’ll be enough. That’s the way things are moving, no doubt about it. Now in the Middle Ages men believed that in matters of reproduction the woman was merely the vessel, the man’s seed was what made the child. From that we’ve come full circle, we’ve come to the nearly total supremacy of women and men like you and me are reduced to – mere temporary agents.’

  Teddy said to Anne that night, ‘You don’t think he’s maybe a bit mad, do you? I mean broken down under the strain?’

  ‘He hasn’t got any strain here.’

  ‘I’ll tell you the other thing I was wondering. Linda’s not up to anything, is she? I mean giving some other chap a whirl? Only she’s all dressed up these days and she’s lost weight. She looks years younger. If she’s got someone that would account for poor old Michael, wouldn’t it?’

  It was their turn to go out in the evening and they were on their way back from the Krini Restaurant, the last one on the island to remain open after the middle of October. The night was starry, the moon three-quarters of a glowing white orb.

  ‘There has to be a reason for him being like that. It’s not normal. I don’t spend my time worrying you’re going to leave me and take the kids.’

  ‘Is that what it is? He’s afraid Linda’s going to leave him?’

  ‘It must be. He can’t be getting in a tizzy over George Wilton’s and Somebody Frost’s problems.’ Sage Teddy nodded his head. ‘Human nature isn’t like that,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up to the fort, darling. We’ve never been up there by moonlight.’

  They climbed to the top of the hill, Teddy puffing a bit on account of having had rather too much ouzo at the Krini. In summer the summit was floodlit but when the hotels closed the lights also went out. The moonlight was nearly as bright and the turf shone silver between the black shadows made by the broken walls. The Stamniots were desperate for rain now the tourist season was over, for the final boost to swell the olive crop. Teddy went up the one surviving flight of steps into the remains of the one surviving tower. He paused, waiting for Anne. He looked down but he couldn’t see her.

  ‘The Aegean’s not always calm,’ came her voice. ‘Down here there’s a current tears in and out like a mill race.’

  He still couldn’t see her, peering out from his look-out post. Then he did – just. She was silhouetted against the purplish starriness.

  ‘Come back!’ he shouted. ‘You’re too near the edge!’

  He had made her jump. She turned quickly and at once slipped on the turf, going into a long slide on her back, legs in the air. Teddy ran down the steps. He ran across the turf, nearly falling himself, picked her up and hugged her.

  ‘Suppose you’d fallen the other way?’

  The palms of her hands were pitted with grit, in places the skin broken, where she had ineffectually made a grab at the sides of the fissure in the wall. ‘I wouldn’t have fallen at all if you hadn’t shouted at me.’

  At home the children were all asleep, Linda in bed but Michael still up. There were two empty wine bottles on the table and three glasses. A man they had met the n
ight before in Agamemnon’s had come in to have a drink with them, Michael said. He was German, from Heidelberg, here on his own for a late holiday.

  ‘He was telling us about his divorce. His wife found a younger man with better job prospects who was able to offer Werner’s children a swimming pool and riding lessons. Werner tried to kill himself but someone found him in time.’

  What a gloomy way to spend an evening, thought Teddy, and was trying to find something cheerful to say when a shrill yell came from the children’s room. Teddy couldn’t for the life of him have said which one it was but Michael could. He knew his Alison’s voice and in he went to comfort her. Teddy made a face at Anne and Anne cast up her eyes. Linda came out of her bedroom in her dressing gown.

  ‘That awful man!’ she said. ‘Has he gone? He looks like a toad. Why don’t we seem to know anyone any more who hasn’t got a broken marriage?’

  ‘You know us,’ said Teddy.

  ‘Yes, thank God.’

  Michael took his children down to the beach most mornings. Teddy took his children to the beach too and would have gone to the bay on the other side of the headland except that Emma and Tim wanted to be with their cousins and Tim started bawling when Teddy demurred. So Teddy had to put up a show of being very pleased and delighted at the sight of Michael. The children were in and out of the pale clear green water. It was still very hot at noon.

  ‘Like August,’ said Teddy. ‘By golly, it’s a scorcher here in August.’

  ‘Heat and cold don’t mean all that much to me,’ said Michael.

  Resisting the temptation to say Bully for you or I should be so lucky or something on those lines, Teddy began to talk of plans for the following day, the hire car to Likythos, the visit to the monastery with the Byzantine relics and to the temple of Apollo. Michael turned on him a face so wretched, so hag-ridden, the eyes positively screwed up with pain, that Teddy who had been disliking and resenting him with schoolboy indignation was moved by pity to the depths of himself. The poor old boy, he thought, the poor devil. What’s wrong with him?

  ‘When Andrew and Alison are with me like they are now,’ Michael began in a low rapid voice, ‘it’s not so bad. I always have that feeling, you see, that I could pick them up and run away with them and hide them.’ He looked earnestly at Teddy. ‘I’m strong, I’m young still. I could easily carry them both long distances. I could hide them. But there isn’t anywhere in the civilized world you can hide for long, is there? Still, as I say, it’s not so bad when they’re with me, when there are just the three of us on our own. It’s when I have to go out and leave them with her. I can’t tell you how I feel going home. All the way in the train and walking up from the station I’m imagining going into that house and not hearing them, just silence and a note on the mantelpiece. I dread going home, I don’t mind telling you, Teddy, and yet I long for it. Of course I do. I long to see them and know they’re there and still mine. I say to myself, that’s another day’s reprieve. Sometimes I phone home half a dozen times in the day just to know she hasn’t taken them away.’

  Teddy was aghast. He didn’t know what to say. It was as if the sun had gone in and all was cold and comfortless and hateful. The sea glittered, it looked hard and huge, an enemy.

  ‘It hasn’t been so bad while we’ve been here,’ said Michael. ‘Oh, I expect I’ve been a bore for you. I’m sorry about that, Teddy, I know what a misery I am. I keep thinking that when we get home it will all start again.’

  ‘Has Linda then . . . ?’ Teddy stammered. ‘I mean, Linda isn’t . . . ?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘Not yet, not yet. But she’s young too, isn’t she? She’s attractive. She’s got years yet ahead of her – years of torture for me, Teddy, before my kids grow up.’

  Anne told Teddy she had spoken to Linda about it. ‘She never looks at another man, she wouldn’t. She’s breaking her heart over Michael. She lost weight and bought those clothes because she felt she’d let herself go after Alison was born and she ought to try and be more attractive for him. This obsession of his is wearing her out. She wants him to see a psychiatrist but he won’t.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Teddy, ‘there’s a certain amount of truth behind it. There’s method in his madness. If Linda met a man she liked and went off with him – I mean, Michael could drive her to it if he went on like this – she would take the children and Michael would lose them.’

  ‘Not you too!’

  ‘Well, no, because I’m not potty like poor old Michael. I hope I’m a reasonable man. But it does make you think. A woman decides her marriage doesn’t work any more and the husband can lose his kids, his home and maybe half his income. I mean if I were twenty-five again and hadn’t ever met you I might think twice about getting married, by golly, I might.’

  Their last evening it was Anne and Teddy’s turn to baby-sit for Michael and Linda. They were dining with Werner at the Hotel Daphne. Linda wore a green silk dress, the colour of shallow sea water.

  ‘More cosy chat about adultery and suicide, I expect,’ said Teddy. Liking to have things pleasant about him, he settled himself with a large ouzo on the terrace under the vine. ‘I shan’t be altogether sorry to get home. And I’ll tell you what. We could come at Easter next year, in Emma’s school hols.’

  ‘On our own,’ said Anne.

  Michael came in about ten. He was alone. Teddy saw that the palms of his hands were pitted as if he had held on to the rough surface of something stony. Anne got up.

  ‘Where’s Linda?’

  He hesitated before replying. A look of cunning of the kind sane people’s expressions never show spread over his face. His eyes shifted along the terrace, to the right, to the left. Then he looked at the palm of his right hand and began rubbing it with his thumb.

  ‘At the hotel,’ he said. ‘With Werner.’

  Anne cottoned on before he did, Teddy could see. She took a step towards Michael.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, with Werner?’

  ‘She’s left me. She’s going home to Germany with him tomorrow.’

  ‘Michael, that just isn’t true. She can’t stand him, she told me so. She said he was like a toad.’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ said Teddy. ‘I heard her say that.’

  ‘All right, so she isn’t with Werner. Have it your own way. Did the children wake up?’

  ‘Never mind the children, Michael, they’re OK. Tell us where Linda is, please. Don’t play games.’

  He didn’t answer. He went back into the house, the bead curtain making a rattling swish as he passed through it. Anne and Teddy looked at each other.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ Anne said.

  ‘Yes, so am I, frankly,’ said Teddy.

  The curtain rattled as Michael came through, carrying his children, Andrew over his shoulder, Alison in the crook of his arm, both of them more or less asleep.

  ‘I scraped my hands on the stones up there,’ he said. ‘The turf’s as slippery as glass.’ He gave Anne and Teddy a great wide empty smile. ‘Just wanted to make sure the children were all right, I’ll put them back to bed again.’ He began to giggle with a kind of triumphant relief. ‘I shan’t lose them now. She won’t take them from me now.’

  The Green Road to Quephanda

  There used to be, not long ago, a London suburban line railway running up from Finsbury Park to Highgate, and further than that for all I know. They closed it down before I went to live at Highgate and at some point they took up the sleepers and the rails. But the track remains and a very strange and interesting track it is. There are people living in the vicinity of the old line who say they can still hear, at night and when the wind is right, the sound of a train pulling up the slope to Highgate and, before it comes into the old disused station, giving its long, melancholy, hooting call. A ghost train, presumably, on rails that have long been lifted and removed.

  But this is not a ghost story. Who could conceive of the ghost, not of a person but of a place, and that place having no existence in the natur
al world? Who could suppose anything of a supernatural or paranormal kind happening to a man like myself, who am quite unimaginative and not observant at all?

  An observant person, for instance, could hardly have lived for three years only two minutes from the old station without knowing of the existence of the line. Day after day, on my way to the Underground, I passed it, glanced down unseeing at the weed-grown platforms, the broken canopies. Where did I suppose those trees were growing, rowans and Spanish chestnuts and limes that drop their sticky black juice, like tar, that waved their branches in a long avenue high up in the air? What did I imagine that occasionally glimpsed valley was, lying between suburban back gardens? You may enter or leave the line at the bridges where there are always places for scrambling up or down, and at some actual steps, much overgrown, and gates or at least gateposts. I had been walking under or over these bridges (according as the streets where I walked passed under or over them) without ever asking myself what those bridges carried or crossed. It never even, I am sorry to say, occurred to me that there were rather a lot of bridges for a part of London where the only railway line, the Underground, ran deep in the bowels of the earth. I didn’t think about them. As I walked under one of the brown brick tunnels I didn’t look up to question its presence or ever once glance over a parapet. It was Arthur Kestrell who told me about the line, one evening while I was in his house.

  Arthur was a novelist. I write ‘was’, not because he has abandoned his profession for some other, but because he is dead. I am not even sure whether one would call his books novels. They truly belong in that curious category, a fairly popular genre, that is an amalgam of science fiction, fairy tale and horror fantasy.

  But Arthur, who used the pseudonym Blaise Fastnet, was no Mervyn Peake and no Lovecraft either. Not that I had read any of his books at the time of which I am writing. But Elizabeth, my wife, had. Arthur used sometimes to give us one of them on publication, duly inscribed and handed to us, presented indeed, with the air of something very precious and uniquely desirable being bestowed.