The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  He made his call. He reported a dead body impaled on the railings in Wellington Place. The second time they asked his name, he put the receiver back. Once, in the past, he had spent several nights asleep on the doorstep, under the Corinthian portico of the Connaught Chapel, once a church, now film studios—O times! O customs!—but it was too obvious, too open. Instead, in Ordnance Hill, in the garden of an empty house with uncurtained windows and a “sold” sign outside, he made his bed on concrete steps and rolled himself into his sleeping bag. Chilled and suddenly hungry, he was unable to sleep, and after a few minutes, perhaps ten, he heard the wail of sirens on police cars.

  Later in the day, he crossed into the park by the Macclesfield Bridge. The canal walkways here were narrow lanes, for the embankments were so thickly overgrown as to be like woodland descending to the water. Planes and limes and hornbeams grew there, their trunks buried among the greenery and white fronds of cow parsley. Something less than two years ago he had brought the children here and told them how an earlier bridge had been destroyed when a gunpowder boat blew up underneath it in 1874. Now he stood on the center of the three segmental arches, looking down onto the narrow paving below him where police were questioning the jacks men. They were not in uniform, but he could tell they were police. Their denim jeans were pressed and their leather jackets glossy; they were well fed and they would not die at forty-seven.

  Roman thought it foolish to mock or vilify the police, but he didn’t love them either. His taking to the streets had removed him from that law-abiding company whose side they are on to another society that lies beyond the pale and where the police are enemies. He watched one of the jacks men, a thin gray-faced Ulsterman he had once or twice talked to, go sluggishly off with the two policemen to the car parked up in Albert Road. To help in their inquiries, no doubt, to be questioned until his meths-addled brain reached a point of incorrigible confusion.

  The moment they spoke to him, Roman, they would know he was different. A crank, a dropout, therefore suspicious. His voice would alert them to his eccentricity while his clothes and barrow proclaimed his vagrant status. He walked on, going southward, through the park, out the other side into the Marylebone Road, across it and through what Dickens, he remembered, had called “the awful perspectives of Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and similar frowning districts.” Four or five days should do and then he would go back. The sky was gray and the ramparts of these tall Georgian houses gray too, not a tree in sight, the traffic a river of shiny metal running down to Cavendish Square.

  When Saturday came he returned. In the sunshine of early June he came back into the park by the York Gate, turning immediately to the left, to the water’s edge and bobbing ducks, the tree-shaded lawns and the seats where Effie sometimes sat. But she was not there this morning. There was no one but the dog man with a borzoi, a beagle, and a golden retriever tugging on his leash.

  • • •

  They had gone out and had their lunch. He had let her pay for it, repeating his remark about its being all right because she wasn’t rich. Afterward they walked down to Covent Garden in the sunshine and listened to a students’ orchestra playing Mozart. The Flute and Harp Concerto, Leo said, the only one for these instruments Mozart wrote, composed for a rich patron and his daughter to play together. When the music stopped and the players began packing up their instruments, he had taken her hand. Not in a handshake but gently lifted as if he meant to bring it to his lips.

  She looked at him, into his eyes, wondering with a small flutter of excitement, what next? What will he say next? What shall we do now?

  He squeezed the hand he was holding, let it fall. “I’m going to leave you here.”

  She almost thought she had misheard.

  “I must go,” he said. “I have to meet my brother.”

  Did he mean her to come too? “We can get the tube if you like.”

  She fancied a note of impatience. “No, I thought I said. I have to meet my brother. Alone.” Then, belatedly, “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course.”

  Disappointment came later. At first she was only astonished at this sudden departure. A kiss on the cheek was to be expected, but he didn’t kiss her. She watched him go off in the direction of Floral Street and the tube, that casual loose-limbed walk of his, his thinness so that his bones showed through whatever he wore, his bright fair hair. He didn’t turn back to wave.

  She was left to go home on her own at that worst time of the week to be alone, five on a Saturday afternoon. Walking back, at last getting into the tube herself, she reflected that he had said nothing about seeing her again, seeing her soon, phoning her. In an age when the merest business acquaintances kissed at a second meeting, he hadn’t kissed her.

  She tried to think what she had said, done, implied, how she might have offended. Nothing came to mind.

  I didn’t know it till now, she thought, but I want to see him again. I want to see him very much.

  10

  No man had ever brought her flowers before. She had believed it an outdated custom. Why did Alistair have to be the first? The flowers were carnations and that white stuff with myriad tiny blossoms whose name she could never remember.

  Alistair had turned up without warning. There had been no more phone calls. She had even allowed herself to think there would be no more. He had given up, she had thought; perhaps he had met someone else.

  “How absolutely over a man, sick and tired and done with him you must be,” Dorothea said, “when you find yourself hoping he’s met someone else.”

  “It would be simple relief. I don’t think I’d have a moment’s regret.”

  A fantasy she had while walking across the park involved a nice strong-minded woman for Alistair, handsome in a no-nonsense kind of way, someone who would laugh at him and stand up to him. The difficulty lay in imagining Alistair’s response. Was the sad fact that he was a bully who needed not a worthy adversary but a victim?

  She was thinking about him as she approached the house, so that seeing him on the doorstep, peering through the letter box as if he thought she was hiding from him, was like a thought miraculously and unpleasantly made real. Holding up the bunch of flowers, and looking constricted in his dark suit and with his black hair slick and short, he seemed like an illustration to P. G. Wodehouse. And in a Wooster-ish way he said, “Aren’t you going to let us in?”

  “Oh, Alistair …”

  She was distracted, she hardly knew what to say.

  It was Leo she had hoped would come this evening. She might have been thinking about Alistair, but it was Leo she wanted to see, Leo who had made no sign since the previous Saturday of wanting to see her. But in spite of his absolute silence, she half expected him and still half expected him. It was impossible that a man should have said the things he had said, looked as he had looked, and then quitted her life with a quick touch of the hand.

  There was no question, though, but to let Alistair in. That fantasy woman might have shut the door in his face, but she was different. She took the flowers from him, standing aside to let him come in.

  “I wished you’d phoned,” she managed to say.

  “Do people in our situation really need to phone and make appointments?”

  She wanted to say, What situation? We are in no situation. We are separated, this is a separation that we are in, and that word “trial” was just a sop to both of us. But she said nothing. He was looking round him at the hall, up the stairs, into the living room, his eyebrows rising.

  “Go in,” she said. “I’ll put the flowers in water.”

  Which vases were for use and which for decoration only? The Chinese ones looked valuable and frail. She opened cupboards, found a pottery jar and a glass vase, and tried to arrange the flowers. Irene Adler could probably have done it but now it was a lost art. She carried vase and jar into the living room.

  Alistair was sitting on the sofa in the act of repelling Gushi’s advances with the toe of his shoe. It was such a classi
c tableau, the former lover now cast as villain proving his worthlessness by kicking the dog, that she found it impossible not to laugh. Gushi had scarcely made contact with Alistair’s shoe. She knew very well that he disliked dogs. But she laughed, thinking of Leo, who was already Gushi’s best friend, and the scene briefly endeared Alistair to her.

  “What’s funny?” he said.

  “Nothing. Poor Gushi. Shall I put him outside?”

  He shrugged. “This is quite a place you’ve secured for yourself.”

  “Hardly for myself, Alistair. The owners will be back in September.”

  “Didn’t you say they’d no children? No family at all?”

  “So far as I know.” The flicker of tenderness she had felt for him was dwindling. “Would you like a drink?”

  “I thought I could take you out to dinner,” he said rather peevishly.

  She was in a dilemma. Having dinner with Alistair was not the way she would have chosen to spend the evening. On the other hand, she didn’t much want Leo to phone while Alistair was in the house. If he phoned he might suggest coming over. It was not so much a matter of the men as rivals—Leo was a friend only, they had barely touched hands—as the awkwardness of introducing him to Alistair as “Oliver,” the recipient of the transplant. What would Alistair do? Insult Leo? Abuse him? Hit him?

  “I’ll phone a restaurant and book a table,” Alistair said. “Have you any ideas? You live here.”

  A quick decision must be made. She must not involve herself in prevarication, plotting, strategy, but tell herself the truth, that she had nothing to hide. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Leo came, whoever else might be here, whatever the consequences? And it was nonsense to think of Alistair hitting anyone. She had magnified a mild belligerence into a full-blown tendency to unprovoked violence.

  “We’ll stay here,” she said. “I’ll cook something.”

  He put the phone receiver down. “I hoped you’d say that. I mean that we could stay in. I don’t care about food. Bread and cheese will do for me and we can have a bottle of wine. You do have wine?”

  She nodded. Suddenly she had no idea what to say to him. No topic of conversation presented itself. The idea of spending a whole evening with him was dismaying, as if they were strangers, as if they hadn’t lived together for nearly three years. What had they talked about? How had they passed a thousand evenings?

  She found herself looking at him in despair, a misery not apparent, it seemed, from her expression for he said in a jovial way, “You don’t know how I’ve missed you.” He looked at her sideways. “That flat in Willesden,” he said as if it were a place he had remotely heard of, not somewhere he and she had lived in for so long, “it’s grim. It’s a dump. I can’t tell you how depressing I find it. And of course it’s much worse now you’re not there.”

  “If you dislike it so much you’ll have to move.” She heard her grandmother’s briskness in her own tone and was glad of it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you’re right. The fact is, darling, I want to do what I should have insisted on doing in the first place.”

  “I’ll get that wine,” she said. “I’ve got a salad made and there’s some salmon. Will wine do, or do you want gin or something?”

  “I should have insisted,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “on moving in here with you.”

  The confrontation she had hoped to avoid was approaching, was almost there. “I’d rather not talk about that. I’ll get the wine.”

  She opened the bottle in the kitchen, so that he couldn’t wrest it from her and demonstrate male skills. Leo came into her mind, Leo opening just such a bottle of wine for them to share before lunch that Saturday. He had raised his glass and said, “To you!” She tried to understand how so much warmth had changed abruptly to indifference, to an apparent need to get away quickly from her presence. How much of that was her imagination and how much real? Every time the phone rang she thought it must be him, but it rang seldom, and once or twice she had found herself willing it to ring into the oppressive silence.

  She put the bottle and glasses on a tray, took the food out of the fridge, refilled Gushi’s water bowl, washed her hands. Alistair was exploring the room, examining the Blackburn-Norrises’ porcelain.

  “What on earth have you been doing?” he said. “Been down the cellar, selecting a choice vintage?”

  “I buy my own wine. I don’t drink theirs.”

  He made her churlish. He brought out the worst in her. She handed him a glass with a forced smile. He raised it and said, “To us!”

  There is no “us,” she thought, but she said nothing, drinking in silence. Leo had said, “To you!” but, like Alistair’s toast, it had meant nothing.…

  “For one thing,” he said, “I don’t like you being alone here, not with people getting murdered in the vicinity.”

  “One person. A man. Some poor down-and-out. And St. John’s Wood is hardly ‘the vicinity.’ ” She must stop being tactful, discreet, cowardly. It was hard, but a beginning must be made somewhere. “Alistair, that’s just an excuse. Why don’t you say what you mean? You want to live with me again. Well, I’m afraid I don’t want to live with you.”

  He was looking disbelieving. Not hurt or angry but simply incredulous. “Then why did you?”

  “That was three years ago,” she said. “People change. I’ve changed. I don’t know if you have. I think you have, but it may be that I never really knew you. And you may never have known me.”

  His answer was cut off by the phone ringing.

  Mary jumped, a reaction she knew she would have if the phone rang, but she was powerless to prevent the reaction. Her heart began to pound. It must be Leo. Leo, who had made no contact with her since Saturday, was phoning to ask her out or even to tell her he was on his way to Park Village. Alistair, on his feet again, put his hand out to lift the phone.

  “No!” She had never, in all their time together, spoken to him with such force. She had hardly ever spoken to anyone so peremptorily. Astonishment stopped him in his tracks and he turned on her a shocked look.

  She picked up the receiver, said a quiet “Hello,” and gave the number.

  The voice was not Leo’s but a woman’s, elderly, educated, gentle. Mary was aware at first only of a huge disappointment, a letdown that made her want to cry out in frustration. She had no idea who this was. The name Celia Tratton meant nothing.

  “We have met, once, a few years ago. At Frederica’s. At your grandmother’s.”

  “Yes, of course.” Enlightenment came quickly. “I do remember. I’m so sorry. My grandmother’s staying with you, isn’t she?”

  “Mary, I have very bad news. I’m sorry.”

  “Bad news? She’s ill?”

  “Well, yes, she was ill. I suppose she was.”

  Mary said flatly, “She’s dead.”

  “Yes. This afternoon. She can have known nothing about it. We were sitting out on the terrace, in the shade. One moment she was talking to us and the next she was dead. A stroke. It was so absolutely sudden, a terrible shock.…”

  She had been as near as a mother. Mary spoke the necessary formal mechanical words. She replaced the receiver with slow deliberation, then shifted it, making sure it was correctly in its rest. Her mind had emptied and she felt cold. She was aware of Alistair’s arm sliding round her shoulders and Alistair’s hot cheek pressed against hers. Gushi came over and sat close up against her leg. Alistair tried to toe him away.

  “Oh, stop doing that!” Mary cried. “Leave him alone. Why do you have to act so in character?” She began laughing and crying at the same time. She expected him to smack her face, but he didn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want him bothering you.”

  “My grandmother died. Did you realize that?”

  “Of course.”

  She moved her face from his, took his arm away.

  “Darling,” he said, “she was old. She’d had her life. She was bound to die soon anyway.”
/>   Mary thought, I would like to get up and point to the door and tell him to go, to get out, I would like to have the power and the clout to do that. Instead, she leaned back, closing her eyes, and saw her grandmother quite vividly, her bright lined face, the sharp green eyes that were full of youth, and thought, she can’t be dead, it can’t be true, there must be a mistake.

  “She must have been all of eighty-five,” said Alistair, pursuing his technique of comforting. “She felt no pain. She was just snuffed out like a candle. We should all be so lucky when our time comes.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “Imagine how it would have been if she’d lingered for months. Think what you’d have been through, seeing to all that, nursing her, you’d have had to, you were all she’d got.”

  “Yes, all right, Alistair. I know.”

  “She’d had a good life and a lot of people would say she’d made a fortunate end.”

  I am a poor meek thing, Mary thought, and I like quiet meek gentle people like myself. I liked, I loved, my grandmother, who treated men and women’s feelings as if they were made of brittle glass and who handled them with fine dextrous fingers. I like people who go slowly and feel their way and are discreet and careful of their words, people who move delicately and tread on no one’s dreams. “Civilized” is my favorite word. That being so, how could I have lived for years with this man? And why can’t I tell him to go away?

  Alistair brought her some wine and she sipped it. He told her she really should eat something and when she said she couldn’t said that he would.

  “I’m hungry and I don’t mind admitting it. Life has to go on.”

  He brought himself a plate of salmon and salad with a hunk of granary bread. While he ate he talked about his day at work to “distract” her. Not listening to what he said, she put Leo in his place, wondering what Leo would be saying if he were here now, imagining sensitivity but not the form it would take.