The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  She had expected to feel violent shock and revulsion and had tried to prepare herself all the way here, but when she looked on the face it was calmly and with no particular feeling. The dead man was Bean, there could be no doubt, but it looked more like a waxwork of Bean from Madame Tussaud’s. This sculpted head and rigid face seemed as if they had never been alive but had been cast in this shape and turned out of a mold.

  “Yes,” she said. “That is—is Mr. Bean.”

  “Quite sure, Miss Jago?”

  Had she sounded dubious? Impossible to explain to this policeman the awe death induced in this pitiful place, the wonder she felt at what man came to at the last, an effigy in a metal drawer.

  “I am quite sure,” she said.

  It had shaken them both. She and Leo were subdued, refusing the policeman’s offer of a lift home, needing to be away from the police and talk of dead Bean. They would make their own way back. All ideas of revisiting that little Italian restaurant were abandoned, for Mary didn’t feel like eating. They walked, hand in hand, sometimes giving each other rueful glances until Leo said, “Smile. Please. For me. You were wonderful in there. Cool as a cucumber. Why are cucumbers cool, anyway? They are. We all know that. But why are they, when marrows aren’t and melons aren’t?”

  “You’ll have to ask a botanist or a vegetable gardener.”

  “The tiresome thing about all this for me is that I have to go to a funeral tomorrow.”

  She turned to him, distracted by this flat statement where none of his attempts at distraction could succeed. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “No. It’s an old friend of my family’s. A bore—I mean the funeral is, not the friend was.”

  He said no more until they were in the house. She noticed that his eyes were puffy as if he had been suppressing tears. His voice had a ragged sound.

  “The funeral is in the afternoon. My mother will be there and I’ll have to go back with her afterward. I probably won’t see you all day.”

  “Leo, if your mother is in London, can’t I meet her? And wouldn’t she come to our wedding?”

  He beckoned her to him, took her face gently in his hands.

  “You’re so beautiful. I shall never tire of looking at your face. Never a day goes by when I don’t want to gaze and gaze at you.”

  She smiled. “I asked you about your mother.”

  “I’m leaving my family behind after tomorrow. I’ll say good-bye to them tomorrow. They won’t know it’s for the last time, but it will be.” She knelt down in front of his chair and he bent forward to put his arms round her. “So I’m not going home tonight. Wild horses couldn’t drag me home.”

  “We won’t let the wild horses try,” she said.

  26

  That night he again cried in his sleep. He made no sound, but when he turned his face to meet hers the wetness touched her cheek. It was dawn and she could just see. The tears glistened.

  In the morning he was up before her, bringing her tea in bed and the post, the newspaper, more fliers, a tax demand for Sir Stewart Blackburn-Norris, hire car cards. He was so cheerful, pulling rueful faces but making light of the ordeal ahead, that she decided to say nothing. His intention to wear a dark suit for the funeral pleased her, for it was in accordance with her own ideas of what was decorous and civilized.

  Still he was unwilling to talk about the funeral, who this family friend was, why his mother would be there. It made her wonder if it was for this dead friend that Leo’s nightly tears were shed. She felt she couldn’t ask. Perhaps one day he would tell her. He held her hand at the breakfast table. Together they took Gushi into the park and there, by the Parsi’s fountain, Leo left her and went off toward St. Mark’s Bridge and Primrose Hill.

  His parting from her brought back that afternoon in Covent Garden. She watched his receding figure as she had on that previous occasion. He had never satisfactorily explained why he had gone after apparently intending to spend the day with her. Did it any longer matter? This time he had kissed her tenderly, held her in his arms, and whispered that he loved her.

  • • •

  A party of eleven children came into the museum at four. They were Scots from Lanark on a school trip to London who, having done the Sherlock Holmes house, had come up here in their minibus. Mary showed them round and gave them the guided tour because their harassed teacher preferred that to a Walkman and a tape for each child.

  It was the kind of day when she longed for air-conditioning, wholly impractical for this little house of small rooms in a climate where the heat would endure for only a short time. The street door and the window in the shop stood open, but it was still almost insufferably hot. The sun blazed and the air was motionless. In the shop, where the children, like so many visitors, showed more interest in the artifacts for sale than in the museum exhibits, papers and prints on the counters had begun to curl in the heat.

  By five it was no cooler and Alistair still hadn’t come. Mary supposed she would just have to wait. Running away from him was something she was now ashamed of. There was a childishness about it she wanted to eradicate from her character but knew that Alistair, though censorious, rather liked. Weakness and folly in women made him feel more powerful and in control, more able to justify a superior stance.

  Once Stacey had gone home, Mary went outside and sat in the shade on the low wall that bounded the courtyard. On such warm summer evenings London acquired a pavement life. Restaurateurs were putting out tables and chairs and striped umbrellas in preparation for those who preferred to dine outdoors. Shopkeepers, in the half hour before their shops closed, sat on their doorsteps. Every sun-blind was down and at the café opposite in St. John’s Wood Terrace someone was casting bucketfuls of water over the flagstones.

  She watched steam rise from the wet pavement. Her thoughts were full of Leo as they had been for most of the day. She sensed that being in the company of his mother and brother might be as troublesome and painful as the funeral itself. The relationship he had with his brother became each day more mysterious. If he loved him so much why break with him? She was resolving never again to ask Leo if she might meet his mother or brother when she looked up and saw Alistair coming down Ordnance Hill from the direction of the tube station. The present must be very small. He wore no jacket and carried only the thin flat briefcase she had once given him but had thought even at the time too small to accommodate more than a few sheets of paper and a diary.

  He waved when he saw her but did not quicken his pace. It was too hot to rush. She couldn’t fail to remember how once, seeing him approach from a distance, her heart had leapt and a thrill run through her body. She felt nothing for him now, no faint lingering regret. He looked uncomfortably hot, his face red and beaded with sweat, his hair wet with it and sticking to his scalp. His hot hand felt wet through the thin stuff of her blouse as he laid it on her shoulder. She freed herself and began walking back toward the museum. Then she thought, as she had not thought before, this may be the last time we shall ever meet, we shall very likely never see each other again. We were lovers, we once thought we loved each other, perhaps truly did, though impermanently—how sad and awful to terminate it like this.…

  “Alistair, let’s go over to the café and have a drink.”

  His eyebrows went up. She hadn’t noticed till then, but now she saw how unpleasant his expression was, how grim. “Sure,” he said, “and while I’m inside ordering two Perriers you’ll do another of your famous flits.”

  “No. I promise I won’t.”

  They had turned back and were crossing the road, he somewhat reluctantly. “I don’t think we ought to part,” she said, “without some …”

  “Ceremony?”

  “I was going to say, without saying good-bye properly, and without saying perhaps that we have no hard feelings for each other.”

  He laughed. A waitress came up and he ordered without asking Mary what she wanted. “You seem to think,” he said carefully, “that I still feel for you what I used to.
I suppose it pleases your vanity. Well, I don’t. I’m over you. As for hard feelings, I’ve plenty of those. You could say, those are all I have. And now I want, frankly, to get shut of you.”

  She could find nothing to say. Perrier came, a large bottle of it, with ice and lemon in two glasses. He poured their drinks. She had a sudden dreadful feeling he would fill another glass with water and throw it in her face. She even edged her chair back a little. Her life, she realized, had been shot through for a long time with imaginings of what Alistair might do, fantasies far exceeding what he actually ever did. He drank the last drops in his glass, reached down, opened the briefcase, and took out a small flat parcel. It was about the size of a videocassette, rectangular, less than an inch thick. The gift-wrapping, pink and silver paper, narrow silver ribbon falling from its knot in curlicues, looked nevertheless as if he had done it himself. The corners were clumsily folded, the ribbon twisted. On a card he had printed her name in rather large but uneven capital letters.

  “Thank you,” she said faintly.

  “I want to say something, one last thing. It’s this. Don’t think you can come back to me. When things go wrong, I mean.”

  She said, with a spark of spirit she didn’t feel but forced to flash out, “Don’t you mean, if things go wrong?”

  “No, Mary, that’s what you mean. As long as you know. I won’t be available. I won’t be carrying any torches. I shall have found someone else.”

  Thinking of this meeting, she had planned all kinds of things to say, charitable wishes for his future, even the expression of some impossible hope that they might go on knowing each other. But now she had no words, she simply felt a kind of despair in his presence that she knew would disappear entirely once he had gone. He was the kind of man, she thought, that she would always run away from and she wondered that she had not done so before, long ago.

  He paid the bill. He jumped up and struck an attitude. She watched him, appalled, already nervous.

  “And whether we shall meet again I know not,” he declaimed. “Therefore let us our everlasting farewells take. Forever and forever farewell, Mary!”

  A group of tourists approaching the next table turned and stared. He said it again.

  “Forever and forever farewell, Mary!”

  He pushed back his chair and sent it skidding across the pavement where it toppled and fell over. Then he walked rapidly away. Someone laughed. Mary was embarrassed and rather shaken. She picked up the parcel but it was too big to go into the small bag she was carrying. She would have to carry it in her hand. It was too hot to walk far but she would walk, she would keep to the shady side of the street, and hope it was true what they said about endorphins being released by exercise to calm you down, to create a sense of well-being.

  More than endorphins, she wanted someone to comfort her. Leo, of course. But she knew she really wanted her grandmother. Her grandmother would hold her as she had done when she was a little girl, hug her in warm silence, but her grandmother was dead, was ash, was dust. Leo would be there, eventually he would, though he was spending the evening with his family. When Leo came in at the front door she would go quietly up to him and he would take her in his arms.

  The man she called Nikolai came into her mind and she thought, strangely, that he was one of the few people she could think of who she would like to talk to, to have listen to her, to receive from her confidences whose nature she hardly understood. But when she came to the Gloucester Gate and, crossing the road by the bronze maiden, looked down into the Grotto, there was no one there and no evidence of his occupancy. A cigarette packet, discarded over the wall, floated on the surface of the pool. Otherwise the place was as neat as a suburban garden.

  She put the parcel down on the hall table. Gushi was too hot to run out to meet her. He lay panting on the cold kitchen floor, his tongue hanging out. There was no point in taking him out for hours yet, perhaps she would wait until Leo came home and they would walk him together. She stroked Gushi’s head, gave him fresh water, then went upstairs to shower and put on trousers and a T-shirt.

  It was at this point that the telephone rang. It was Leo. Once, several years before, she had spoken on the phone to Dorothea’s husband Gordon just after he had come round from an anesthetic. Leo’s voice sounded like Gordon’s had then, thick, throaty, half-choked, aged by many years.

  “I can’t get away this evening,” he said. “I don’t know when I will. Things haven’t been too—too good. I’ll see you tomorrow.” There was a pause in which she fancied she heard sounds like sobs suppressed. “Is that all right?”

  “Leo, of course it is. But can’t I …?”

  “No, I don’t know what you were going to say but you can’t do anything. No one can. I shall be fine. Did you see Alistair?”

  “For the last time, I’m sure. He’s given us a wedding present.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “Perhaps you’d better not open it. Perhaps there’s a bomb inside.” There was a hysterical edge to his voice. Had she imagined a sob? “Mary, I’m sorry I can’t come back tonight.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I understand.”

  But she was not at all sure that she did. She was aware of bitter disappointment. Why is it worse to be alone on fine summer evenings than when it is cold or wet? The food in the fridge looked uninviting. She drank some sparkling water, ate a peach, and settled down to put the final touches to the Irene Adler brochure. It was due to go to the printer by the end of the week. By the time it came out she would no longer be Mary Jago but Mary Nash.

  Did she want that or would she keep her maiden name? She hadn’t thought of that before. Somewhere on the brochure there should be a line saying, “Designed by Mary Jago” or “Designed by Mary Nash.” She wrote the new name to see how it looked, how it felt. Many people would say it was unlucky for a woman to write her new name before it was hers, before she was married. She tried her new signature, disliked it, and almost decided to keep the name Jago.

  From the hall Gushi gave a sharp yap. She went out to see what had alarmed him and found another flier from Express Tikka and Pizza on the doormat. Alistair’s present was on the hall table where she had left it, pink and silver paper, curlicues of ribbon, clumsily bunched corners. She took it back into the living room. Gushi jumped onto her lap and curled up like a cat.

  Sticky tape held the parcel together under the ribbon. It was surprisingly hard to get off. She had to disturb the dog to fetch scissors. Leo’s words came back to her then, about the present being a bomb. That was absurd, of course, he hadn’t been serious, but she held the package up to her ear as if to hear something ticking. She shook it. There was nothing loose inside, nothing to rattle.

  She cut the sticky tape, then the corners. Inside the paper was a flat silver box, the kind you can buy from the gift wrapping section in stationery shops. The lid was taped to the base. More cutting and the lid came off. Bubble-wrap, cotton wool, a handful of tissues for padding, and a card in an envelope.

  It was a strange choice for Alistair to have made. That was her first thought as she looked at the picture of a bride and groom, doll-like figures, the man in a top hat and morning coat, the woman in white crinoline and bridal veil, the pair of them standing on the carved and scrolled icing of a beribboned cake. Underneath the legend read: Wishing You Joy on Your Wedding Day.

  Was this his present? Was this all? Inside the card was an enclosure; evidently a letter, the paper folded twice. He had written nothing on the card, not even his name. For a moment she thought of not reading the letter, of throwing it away unread, apprehensive of his insults and reproaches. But it was cowardly not to read it. It could do her no harm, it was only words and from someone who now meant nothing to her. She was holding it between thumb and forefinger, still unfolded, when the phone rang again, and as she picked up the receiver it was still with her, just a standard sheet of paper, folded twice.

  Le
o’s voice said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for that—that display just now. I’m at my brother’s, but he’s gone out for a moment and I’m ringing back as soon as I could. Forgive?”

  “Nothing to forgive. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She said wistfully, “I wish you could come home now.”

  “Mary, my mother wants me to stay the night. She’s here. I may not see her again for years, if ever. You know what I said about that. That this was the final meeting.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Of course you must stay. Don’t worry about it. I shall be fine.” Afterward she didn’t know why she had told him. “I’ve opened the present. It wasn’t a bomb. Just a card and a letter and a lot of padding.”

  “I love you,” he said. “I just wanted to ring you and say that. On Thursday you’ll be my wife. It’s too good to be true.”

  “It’s true,” she said.

  His brother must have come back into the room. He said goodbye, he would see her on the following evening, and put the receiver down. That reminder that he was with his family for the last time was disquieting. It suddenly seemed unnatural, unnecessary. She wished she had asked his reasons, simply asked to know more about it. Anyway, it wasn’t too late. Tomorrow she would ask him.

  She unfolded the sheet of paper she was still holding in her hand.

  • • •

  The logo of the Harvest Trust, the scarlet mushroom shape, the Battersea address, and opposite this the direction to her, Ms. Mary Jago in Chatsworth Road, NW10. Below it was a line that this was from Deborah Cox, Donor Welfare Officer. The date was six days earlier.

  Her first thought was that the letter shouldn’t have gone to her old address. Then she remembered she had never given the trust a firm change of address, only asked for one letter, the last she thought she would receive from them, to be sent to her care of her grandmother. She read: