The Keys to the Street

by Ruth Rendell

  Dear Ms. Jago,

  It is probable I am bringing you news you know already since I believe you have been in correspondence with Mr. Nash and have met him. This is confirmed by our receiving no replies from you to our recent letters informing you of his decline and illness.

  Therefore I hope it will not be a shock to you, though certainly giving distress, to know that Mr. Nash died yesterday. He passed away quite peacefully in the night at the hospice where he had been for the previous two weeks. His mother and brother were with him.

  While this must be a cause of great sadness to you, you will know that by your generous donation you succeeded in giving him a longer life, and of higher quality, than he would otherwise.…

  Mary laid the letter down in her lap. She was simply confused. How could Leo’s death be a shock when she had spoken to him five minutes before? They had made a mistake. They were confusing her with someone else and Leo with someone else, they had their files mixed.

  She picked it up and read it again. This is confirmed by our receiving no replies from you to our recent letters.… What recent letters? Transplant updates that Alistair had received and opened? She was suddenly very cold and she moved into the sunshine of the open windows, feeling the heat touch her. Mr. Nash died yesterday …

  Now, at seven, it was too late to phone them and ask for an explanation. Anger and indignation started to replace the initial shock. Alistair was as much to blame as the trust in perpetuating their mistake, and surely out of malice. He had sent her this letter as a wedding present, the most vindictive act he had ever committed against her.

  The phone rang and rang. At last he picked it up and said, “Alistair Winter.”

  “Alistair, Mary. You must know why I’m phoning—”

  He put the phone down. The dial tone began. She looked at the receiver in disbelief. Blood rose into her cheek where he had struck her and she put up a cold finger to feel the heat. After a moment or two she poured herself a measure of brandy and drank it down neat. The brandy made her choke but filled her with warmth as if some heating agent had got inside her and sent its rays to travel outward to her skin. She told herself to take deep breaths. Alistair’s malice had shaken her profoundly. She fancied that in his silence at the other end of the phone she had heard satisfaction and glee.

  But she reminded herself that it wasn’t he who had written that letter. He had only sent it on. It was a real letter, from a real place, not something Alistair had forged. He had only been the instrument that ensured she received it.

  This was no time for those old hesitations. Avoiding thought, she dialed Leo’s brother’s number at Redferry House. It rang and rang, there was going to be no answer. Leo had said he would be there, but he wasn’t there. That meant very little. He and his brother might have gone out for a drink or he gone back with their mother to wherever she was staying. It just seemed strange, she felt it suddenly as suspicious and odd, that he should have talked to her about breaking with his brother, never seeing his mother again, yet be going out with them, staying the night with them.

  Mary needed someone to be with her, to bring to this letter, to these events, a detached and dispassionate mind. After a while she phoned Dorothea, but instead of coming out with all of it, she found herself asking if it would be all right not to come in tomorrow. She had arranged to take a week off from Wednesday but could she start her holiday tomorrow instead?

  “Sure. Why not?” Dorothea said. “Gordon will cope. Are you okay? You sound a bit shaky. Pre-wedding nerves?”

  “I expect so,” Mary said, and for some reason tried to smile into the receiver as if Dorothea could see her. “Thanks, Dorrie.”

  “It’s your wedding, not your funeral.”

  “Yes.”

  It had been impossible, would have been grotesque, to have read or quoted the letter to Dorothea. To anyone? She picked it up again, read it again, and this time saw something that she had not previously noticed. Under the Harvest Trust address was Deborah Cox’s own home number. Mary had begun to feel sick. The brandy perhaps or not having eaten for so long. She wondered why she had told Dorothea she wouldn’t go to the museum tomorrow. What was she anticipating? What specter awaited her?

  The fear of knowing was starting to overcome the fear of not knowing. Suppose she were to destroy the letter now, tear it into pieces and burn the pieces in an ashtray? Or make a little bonfire outside? Then she could pretend it had never come, that Alistair’s parcel had contained only a card, say nothing of it to Leo.… She dialed Deborah Cox’s number.

  It was answered after the second ring. Scarcely waiting for Mary to say what she wanted, Deborah Cox asked her if she wanted counseling. The trust would be happy to provide counseling. She would advise it, particularly as Mary had written to Leo Nash, had even got to know him.

  “You did actually meet?”

  Mary hesitated. She had begun to tremble, her knees shaking. How she could tell so blatant a lie she didn’t know. “No,” she said. “No, we never met.”

  “But you had contact? By letter?”

  “Yes. We had contact.” Mary had to clear her throat. “What did he look like?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What did he look like? Leo Nash.” Her voice was hoarse, but the lying got easier. “I asked him for a photograph but he didn’t send one.”

  “Fair, short, about five feet six, dark eyes. It’s probably just as well you didn’t meet. A donor can get emotionally involved with a recipient. It’s to do with the nature of the transplant, and that makes it all the worse when the recipient dies.”

  “You said he had a brother …”

  “That’s right. Ten years older. They shared a flat. But I wouldn’t advise contact, if that’s what you’re asking. Now, as to arranging counseling …”

  Mary said no, thank you, and that wouldn’t be necessary. She put the phone down very quietly.

  27

  Hob was well.

  For more than a week now there had been no states. He was fast forgetting what being in a state was like, or even what feeling low was like, for he never let himself decline far enough from being well to find out. He was rich enough to stay well for months, maybe a year, nor did he need to work. The irony was that more work came in than had done for years beforehand, and with it, necessarily, more money to keep him well.

  He wondered why this should be and one day he asked Lew. There was no one else he dared ask since Carl had disappeared. Lew was old and weird and had been into all that stuff when he was young in the seventies and he said it was because of Hob’s positive attitude. He was positive and in touch with his inner self. People sensed this and came looking for him when they wanted a job done. He’d done three jobs just since the big one—the biggest of all big ones—and one of them, funnily enough, had been a second roughing up of that git who hadn’t the sense he was born with, the one who lived in St. Mark’s Crescent.

  Hob hadn’t stayed at home much. Home was a dump, anyway. For all their promises, the council hadn’t come to mend the windows. Maybe he hadn’t read the letter right, so maybe they’d never said they were coming. Whatever the way of it, he couldn’t live in a boarded-up box no different from being inside a microwave, not in this heat he couldn’t. So he’d more or less taken to the outdoors and it had been lovely, like a holiday, better than Corfu really, he’d never been much for going in water.

  He wandered the park and Primrose Hill and St. John’s Church Gardens, sitting on the seats, lying on the grass. By day he’d sit at a table outside one of the refreshment places and he’d drink, but he seldom ate more than a Magnum or a packet of kettle chips. When he was well he never much fancied food. Mostly he drank vodka or sometimes tequila for a change. After the first few days he bought a bottle of each and carried them with him, but in a proper rucksack, not plastic carriers like those beggars. The rucksack also held his gear, the watering can rose, the lighter, a batch of drinking straws—he helped himself from the counter when he paid for his
drink—and reserve supplies. He never let himself get low, let alone run out. The thought of a state even looming on the horizon made him shudder.

  Drinking straws ended up all over the park. Sometimes he wondered, giggling to himself, if anyone noticed, remarked on it, wondered what the hell was going on: straws caught up on rosebushes, littering flowerbeds, floating on the scummy water under the bridges. Because he was a joker he stuck one in the mouth of the bronze maiden and made a woven crown of six others for Sir Cowasjee Jehangir’s drinking fountain. He was happy. One day he bought a postcard of the lake with boats on it and sent it to himself. He had to go home sometimes, for a change of clothes and to catch a bit of the athletics from Trent Bridge on telly, and when he crept into that furnace of a flat he found his postcard on the mat with “Great wether, wish you was heer” on it and “luv from Hob.”

  That made him laugh a lot. It was the funniest thing he could think of, getting a postcard from himself, wishing he was somewhere else. He fell about laughing and got so excited he needed a shot of vodka to calm him down. He had started to lose weight. Not on his head or face, those bits of him were as big and heavy as ever, but his body was thin and the skin sagged round his middle like an old sock when the leg has been pulled out of it. Leo had once told him about a girl he knew who’d been fat, obese he called it, and for some reason she turned anorexic. Her skin hung on her skeleton like draped material and they’d operated on her, cut bits out and stitched her up, and all on the National Health Service. He’d started wondering if he could have the same thing, only he couldn’t because in a hospital he’d never be well but would get into a state the first day.

  Now that he was rich he’d been buying all the rocks he wanted and E too and angel dust when there was any about. Big H was no use to him because he couldn’t face needles, which was why the coming of crack had been such a godsend. The only time he’d tried the needle he’d fainted dead away. God knows what had happened when he was a kid and they’d tried giving him those shots for polio and whatever, he’d never asked his mother, but the answer probably was she was too shellacked to take him or too bone idle.

  He never cared to think about the time, a year or two back, when he’d been reduced to sniffing ozone-unfriendly aerosol stain remover. He thought instead about the other two jobs, breaking a geyser’s leg in Chalk Farm and a straightforward beating up round the back of Lisson Grove. He got a Hawaii for each of those, though he reckoned he was underpaid for his Chalk Farm effort, as fracturing a leg wasn’t the simple task it was cracked up to be. He enjoyed the pun he’d made and had another good laugh.

  Most evenings he went through his ritual by the pond in the Grotto. The beggar with the fancy voice had moved out. The people who owned the house the builders were doing up—and months they’d been at it—had put up more barbed wire and more fencing in their inexplicable efforts to keep intruders out. He couldn’t understand it, it wouldn’t keep him out or any streetwise person. He sat on the coping of the pool in the insect-infested half dark, dropped his rock into the watering can rose, screwed on the top, inserted two fresh straws, applied the lighter to the rock, and set the apparatus in the tin lid.

  The crystalline lump fizzed and crackled. Far from a state though he’d been in, his condition took a dizzying upturn when the smooth sweet smoke drew into his lungs. Later on he’d take a tablet of E or maybe smoke some PCP and if he got too excited bring himself down with a couple of cycles—cyclobarbitone calcium to you ignorant buggers, he thought. It takes an alcoholic to be an expert on alcoholism and a junkie to understand the journey to oblivion.

  He began giggling uncontrollably. The laughter he allowed full rein, he let it rip, and he lay down there rolling on the flagstones and the dusty earth among the dry crackling leaves. A face looked over the parapet of the bridge. He could just make it out in the dusk, a thin face with pitted skin that watched him for a long moment, fascinated by the sight of this man rolling on his back like a dog in a pile of shit.

  When he was ready to stop laughing and rolling he stopped. He was in perfect control. He started putting his gear back into the rucksack, took a swallow of vodka, noticed what he’d been carrying about with him for more than a week now: a red baseball cap and a T-shirt with elephants marching across it. The funniest thing in the world, it seemed to him, would be to take them up to the Oxfam shop in Camden High Street tomorrow, hand them in, and make sure they put them on show in the window.

  As he clambered out of the Grotto and crossed on the lights at the top of Albany Street he began giggling again at the thought of that. Making sure he was unobserved, but still giggling, he climbed over the spiked railings of the Gloucester Gate and disappeared into the soft still darkness of the park.

  • • •

  Her loneliness left her exposed and vulnerable. She was like someone put ashore on a desert island who watches the boat recede across an empty sea; there is no one left in the world who knows or cares where one is or what has happened.

  She held Gushi. Afterward, long afterward, she sometimes said that the little dog, snuggling in her arms, licking her fingers, had saved her sanity. Holding him, his warmth necessary in spite of the heat of the day, she understood that some monstrous fraud had been perpetrated against her but not how or why. Even who it was that had done what had been done she didn’t know, for she had no means of knowing Leo’s identity. Trying to solve this enigma brought on fits of shivering as if it were cold out there, as if snow covered the park.

  She must have sat there for more than an hour, still, scarcely thinking, in a state of shock, for when next she looked at the clock it was nine and dark outside. She switched on a table lamp and a flock of moths came in, brown and yellow and a black and white one, spotted like a dalmatian. They made for the light, circling the lampshade. She thought of his laughter, of “A reference for a dalmatian,” and gave a little cry of pain. The light off, the room in darkness to let the moths escape, she dialed the Redferry House number again, her throat dry and constricted. There was no reply. She wouldn’t phone again. She was resolved on that. For one thing, absurdly, she had no idea what she would say.

  The idea of the night was horrible. It would be so long, so lonely, and the small hours unbearable. She went upstairs and in the medicine cabinet in the Blackburn-Norrises’ bathroom found a phial of capsules with Lady Blackburn-Norris printed on its label, For the sleeplessness, and the name of the drug with instructions to take one or two at bedtime.

  She put Gushi out into the garden. The night was warm and soft and above her in a velvety violet sky a few stars were visible, a rare thing in London. Gushi started yapping at the bats that swooped overhead, so she brought him in again. When she had locked up and settled him on the foot of her bed, she opened the bedroom windows wide, took her clothes off, fetched a glass of water, and swallowed one capsule, then a second. She scarcely had time to lie down. Sleep came at her like a black walking specter, cloaked and hooded, seizing and absorbing her into itself and its wide winglike arms.

  In the early hours, five or six, she awoke, ponderously limp and weak from the drug, but remembering him beside her and making love to him. Over and over, he whoever he was had made love to her, with sweet gentle touches and strong unstoppable passion and murmured loving words. She got up and just made it to the bathroom. She was sick, the retching painful, tearing at her throat. On and on she vomited until she had collapsed onto the floor, drained dry.

  After a while she slept again and slept until Gushi came asking to be let out, his nose like an ice cube against her naked shoulder. She got up off the floor, put a robe round her. Another splendid day was out there, blue sky, sunshine unhindered but the sun itself an invisible fire.

  The phone started ringing just as she had come in from the garden. No one knew this number but for Leo, the man who said he was Leo. Alistair knew it, but she was certain, as if it were a law of nature, that Alistair would never phone her again, that she and Alistair would never speak to each other again. She
let it ring and ring, watching the instrument. She picked up the receiver.

  It was Deborah Cox.

  The question of least importance was the one she asked. “How did you know this number? I didn’t give it to you.”

  “I dialed the number that gets you the voice to tell you who made the last phone call.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. Of course. What was it you wanted?” She had never before spoken so rudely to anyone. “I’m sorry. I mean, what can I do for you?”

  “There’s something I wanted to tell you. You seemed so interested in Leo Nash, the sort of person he was, what he looked like and all that. I’m not sure I ought to tell you, it’s just between you and me, but I know you’re discreet.”

  The woman knew virtually nothing about her.… “What is it then?”

  “Leo,” Deborah Cox said, “when he began to get ill again he refused to ask you to make a second donation. You were the only possible donor but he expressly forbade us to ask you.”

  Mary said stonily, “I don’t understand.”

  “He said he wouldn’t put you through the process again, going into the hospital, having a general anesthetic, which is always a risk, the convalescence afterward, all that. He wouldn’t. We did everything in our power to persuade him but it was no use. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “You mean he was a hero,” said Mary. “A knight in shining armor, a selfless saint—is that what you’re saying? Someone who laid down his life so that I shouldn’t have a week’s discomfort?”

  There was a silence in which, somehow, outrage was apparent.

  “Frankly, Mary,” Deborah Cox said at last, “I didn’t realize you were quite so disturbed. You’re undoubtedly in need of therapy, so about that counseling—”

  Asking herself if all this would turn her from a well-mannered courteous woman into a rude one, Mary quietly replaced the receiver in its rest.