Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  A fine morning, though not hot, and Oxford particularly beautiful in the sunshine. When they had parked the car they strolled up the High Street and had coffee in a small select café, outside which tables and chairs stood on the wide pavement. The Ribbons, however, went inside, where it was rather gloomy and dim. Ambrose deplored the adoption by English restaurants of Continental habits totally unsuited to what he called “our island climate.” He talked about his mother and the gap in the company her absence caused, interrupting his own monologue to ask in a querulous tone why Susan kept looking at her watch.

  “We have no particular engagement, do we? We are, as might be said, free as air?”

  “Oh, quite,” Susan said. “That’s exactly right.”

  But it wasn’t exactly right. She resisted glancing at her watch again. There was, after all, a clock on the café wall. So long as they were out of there by ten to eleven they would be in plenty of time. She didn’t want to spend half the morning standing in a queue. Ambrose went on talking about Auntie Bee, how she’d lived in a slower-paced and more gracious past, how, as much as he missed her, he was glad for her sake she hadn’t survived past the dawn of this new, and doubtless worse, millennium.

  They left at eight minutes to eleven and walked to Blackwell’s. Ambrose was in his element in bookshops, which was partly, though only partly, why they had come.The signing was advertised in the window and inside, though there was no voice on a public-address system urging customers to buy and get the author’s signature. And there he was, sitting at the end of a table loaded with copies of his new book. A queue there was, but only a short one. Susan calculated that by the time she had selected her copy of Demogorgon and paid for it she would be no farther back than eighth in line, a matter of waiting ten minutes.

  She hadn’t counted on Ambrose’s extraordinary reaction. Of course, she was well aware—he had seen to that—of his antipathy to the works of Kingston Marle, but not that it should take such a violent form. At first, the author and perhaps also the author’s name, had been hidden from Ambrose’s view by her own back and Frank’s and the press of people around him. But as that crowd for some reason melted away, Frank turned around to say a word to his cousin and she went to collect the book she had reserved, Kingston Marle lifted his head and seemed to look straight at Frank and Ambrose.

  He was a curious-looking man, tall and with a lantern-shaped but not unattractive face, his chin deep and his forehead high. A mass of long, dark womanish hair sprang from the top of that arched brow, flowed straight back, and descended to his collar in full, rather untidy curves. His mouth was wide and with the sensitive look lips shaped like this usually give to a face. Dark eyes skimmed over Frank, then Ambrose, and came to rest on her. He smiled. Whether it was this smile or the expression in Marle’s eyes that had the effect on Ambrose it apparently did, Susan never knew. Ambrose let out a little sound—not quite a cry, more a grunt of protest. She heard him say to Frank, “Excuse me—must go—stuffy in here—can’t breathe—just pop out for some fresh air,” and he was gone, running faster than she would have believed him capable of.

  When she was younger she would have thought it right to go after him, ask what was wrong, could she help, and so on. She would have left her book, given up the chance of getting it signed, and given all her attention to Ambrose. But she was older now and no longer believed it was necessary inevitably to put others first. As it was, Ambrose’s hasty departure had lost her a place in the queue, and she found herself at number ten. Frank joined her.

  “What was all that about?”

  “Some nonsense about not being able to breathe. The old boy gets funny ideas in his head, just like his old mum.You don’t think she’s been reincarnated in him, do you?”

  Susan laughed. “He’d have to be a baby for that to have happened, wouldn’t he?”

  She asked Kingston Marle to inscribe the book on the title page: For Susan Ribbon. While he was doing so and adding with best wishes from the author, Kingston Marle, he told her hers was a very unusual name. Had she ever met anyone else called Ribbon?

  “No, I haven’t. I believe we’re the only ones in this country.”

  “And there aren’t many of us,” said Frank. “Our son is the last of the Ribbons, but he’s only sixteen.”

  “Interesting,” said Marle politely.

  Susan wondered if she dared. She took a deep breath. “I admire your work very much. If I sent you some of my books—I mean, your books— and put in the postage, would you—would you sign those for me too?”

  “Of course. It would be a pleasure.”

  Marle gave her a radiant smile. He rather wished he could have asked her to have lunch with him at the Lemon Tree instead of having to go to the Randolph with this earnest bookseller. Susan, of course, had no inkling of this and, clutching her signed book in its Blackwell’s bag, she went in search of Ambrose. He was standing outside on the pavement, staring at the roadway, his hands clasped behind his back. She touched his arm and he flinched.

  “Are you all right?”

  He spun around, nearly cannoning into her. “Of course I’m all right. It was very hot and stuffy in there, that’s all. What have you got in there? Not his latest?”

  Susan was getting cross. She asked herself why she was obliged to put up with this year after year, perhaps until they all died. In silence, she took Demogorgon out of the bag and handed it to him. Ambrose took it in his fingers as someone might pick up a package of decaying refuse prior to dropping it in an incinerator, his nostrils wrinkling and his eyebrows raised. He opened it. As he looked at the title page his expression and his whole demeanor underwent a violent change. His face had gone a deep mottled red and a muscle under one eye began to twitch. Susan thought he was going to hurl the book in among the passing traffic. Instead he thrust it back at her and said in a very curt, abrupt voice, “I’d like to go home now. I’m not well.”

  Frank said, “Why don’t we all go into the Randolph—we’re lunching there anyway—and have a quiet drink and a rest. I’m sure you’ll soon feel better, Ambrose. It is a warm day and there was a quite a crowd in there. I don’t care for crowds myself, so I know how you feel.”

  “You don’t know how I feel at all. You’ve just made that very plain. I don’t want to go to the Randolph, I want to go home.”

  There was little they could do about it. Susan, who seldom lunched out and sometimes grew very tired of cooking, was disappointed. But you can’t force an obstinate man to go into a hotel and drink sherry if he is unwilling to do this. They went back to the car park, and Frank drove home.When she and Frank had a single guest, it was usually Susan’s courteous habit to sit in the back of the car and offer the visitor the passenger seat. She had done this on the way to Oxford, but this time she sat next to Frank and left the back to Ambrose. He sat in the middle of the seat, obstructing Frank’s view in the rear mirror. Once, when Frank stopped at a red light, she thought she felt Ambrose trembling, but it might only have been the engine, which was inclined to judder.

  On their return he went straight up to his room without explanation and remained there, drinkless, lunchless, and, later on, tealess. Susan read her new book and was soon totally absorbed in it. She could well understand what the reviewer had meant when he wrote about readers fainting with fear, though in fact she herself had not fainted but only felt pleasurably terrified. Just the same, she was glad Frank was there, a large comforting presence, intermittently reading the Times and watching golf on television. Susan wondered why archaeologists went on excavating tombs in Egypt when they knew the risk of being laid under a curse or bringing home a demon. Much wiser to dig up a bit of Oxfordshire, as a party of archaeology students were doing down the road. But Charles Ambrose—how funny he should share a name with such a very different man!—was nothing if not brave, and Susan felt total empathy with Kayra de Floris when she told him one midnight, smoking kif on Mount Ararat, “I could never put my body and soul into the keeping of a coward.”


  The bit about the cupboard was almost too much for her. She decided to shine a torch into her wardrobe that night before she hung up her dress. And make sure Frank was in the room. Frank’s roaring with laughter at her she wouldn’t mind at all. It was terrible, that chapter where Charles first sees the small, dark, curled-up shape in the corner of the room. Susan had no difficulty imagining her hero’s feelings. The trouble (or the wonderful thing) was that Kingston Marle wrote so well. Whatever people might say about only the plot and the action and suspense being of importance in this sort of book, there was no doubt that good literary writing made threats, danger, terror, fear, and a dark nameless dread immeasurably more real. Susan had to lay the book down at six; their friends were coming in for a drink at half past.

  She put on a long skirt and silk sweater, having first made Frank come upstairs with her, open the wardrobe door, and demonstrate, while shaking with mirth, that there was no scaly paw inside. Then she knocked on Ambrose’s door. He came at once, his sports jacket changed for a dark gray, almost black suit, which he had perhaps bought new for Auntie Bee’s funeral. That was an occasion she and Frank had not been asked to. Probably Ambrose had attended it alone.

  “I hadn’t forgotten about your party,” he said in a mournful tone.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “A little.” Downstairs, his eye fell at once on Demogorgon. “Susan, I wonder if you would oblige me and put that book away. I hope I’m not asking too much. It is simply that I would find it extremely distasteful if there were to be any discussion of that book in my presence among your friends this evening.”

  Susan took the book upstairs and put it on her bedside cabinet. “We are only expecting four people, Ambrose,” she said. “It’s hardly a party.”

  “A gathering,” he said. “Seven is a gathering.”

  For years she had been trying to identify the character in fiction of whom Ambrose Ribbon reminded her. A children’s book, she thought it was. Alice in Wonderland? The Wind in the Willows? Suddenly she knew. It was Eeyore, the lugubrious donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh. He even looked rather like Eeyore, with his melancholy gray face and stooping shoulders. For the first time, perhaps the first time ever, she felt sorry for him. Poor Ambrose, prisoner of a selfish mother. Presumably, when she died, she had left those royalties to him, after all. Susan distinctly remembered one unpleasant occasion when the two of them had been staying and Auntie Bee had suddenly announced her intention of leaving everything she had to the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. She must have changed her mind.

  Susan voiced these feelings to her husband in bed that night, their pillow talk consisting of a review of the “gathering,” the low-key, rather depressing supper they had eaten afterward, and the video they had watched, which failed to come up to expectations. Unfortunately, in spite of the novel’s absence from the living room, Bill and Irene had begun to talk about Demogorgon almost as soon as they arrived. Apparently, this was the first day of its serialization in a national newspaper. They had read the installment with avidity, as had James and Rosie. Knowing Susan’s positive addiction to Kingston Marle, Rosie wondered if she happened to have a copy to lend, when Susan had finished reading it, of course.

  Susan was afraid to look at Ambrose. Hastily she promised a loan of the novel and changed the subject to the less dangerous one of the archaeologists’ excavations in Haybury Meadow and the protests it occasioned from local environmentalists. But the damage was done. Ambrose spoke scarcely a word all evening. It was as if he felt Kingston Marle and his book underlying everything that was said and threatening always to break through the surface of the conversation, as in a later chapter in Demogorgon, when the monstrous Dragosoma, with the head and breasts of a woman and the body of a manatee, rises slowly out of the Sea of Azov. At one point a silvery sheen of sweat covered the pallid skin of Ambrose’s face.

  “Poor devil,” said Frank. “I suppose he was cut up about his old mum.”

  “There’s no accounting for people, is there?”

  They were especially gentle to him the next day, without knowing exactly why gentleness was needed. Ambrose refused to go to church, treating them to a lecture on the death of God and atheism as the only course for enlightened mankind. They listened indulgently. Susan cooked a particularly nice lunch, consisting of Ambrose’s favorite foods— chicken, sausages, roast potatoes, and peas. It had been practically the only dish on Auntie Bee’s culinary repertoire, Ambrose having been brought up on sardines on toast and tinned spaghetti, the chicken being served on Sundays. He drank more wine than was usual with him and had a brandy afterward.

  They put him on an early-afternoon train for London. Though she had never done so before, Susan kissed him. His reaction was very marked. Seeing what was about to happen, he turned his head abruptly as her mouth approached, and the kiss landed on the bristles above his right ear. They stood on the platform and waved to him.

  “That was a disaster,” said Frank in the car. “Do we have to do it again?”

  Susan surprised herself. “We have to do it again.” She sighed. “Now I can go back and have a nice afternoon reading my book.”

  A letter from Kingston Marle, acknowledging the errors in Demogorgon and perhaps offering some explanation of how they came to be there, with a promise of amendment in the paperback edition, would have set everything to rights. The disastrous weekend would fade into oblivion and those stupid guests of Frank’s with it. Frank’s idiot wife, good-looking, they said, though he had never been able to see it, but a woman of neither education nor discernment, would dwindle away into the mists of the past. Above all, that lantern-shaped face, that monstrous jaw and vaulted forehead, looming so shockingly above its owner’s blood-colored works, would lose its menace and assume a merely arrogant cast. But before he reached home, while he was still in the train, Ambrose, thinking about it—he could think of nothing else—knew with a kind of sorrowful resignation that no such letter would be waiting for him. No such letter would come the next day, or the next. By his own foolhardy move, his misplaced courage, by doing his duty, he had seen to that.

  And yet it had scarcely been all his own doing. If that retarded woman, his cousin’s doll-faced wife, had only had the sense to ask Marle to inscribe the book “For Susan,” rather than “For Susan Ribbon,” little harm would have been done. Ribbon could hardly understand why she had done so, unless from malice, for these days it was the custom, and one he constantly deplored, to call everyone from the moment you met them, or even if you only talked to them on the phone, by their first names. Previously, Marle would have known his address but not his appearance, not seen his face, not established him as a real and therefore vulnerable person.

  No letter had come. There were no letters at all on the doormat, only a flyer from a pizza takeaway company and two hire-car cards. It was still quite early, only about six. Ribbon made himself a pot of real tea—that woman used tea bags—and decided to break with tradition and do some work. He never worked on a Sunday evening, but he was in need of something positive to distract his mind from Kingston Marle. Taking his tea into the front room, he saw Marle’s book lying on the coffee table. It was the first thing his eye lighted on. The Book. The awful book that had been the ruin of his weekend. He must have left Demogorgon on the table when he’d abandoned it in a kind of queasy disgust halfway through. Yet he had no memory of leaving it there. He could have sworn he had put it away, tucked it into a drawer to be out of sight and therefore of mind. The dreadful face, fish-belly white between the bandages, leered at him out of the star-shaped hole in the red-and-silver jacket. He opened the drawer in the cabinet where he thought he had put it.There was nothing there but what had been there before, a few sheets of writing paper and an old diary of Mummy’s. Of course there was nothing there, he didn’t possess two copies of the horrible thing, but it was going in there now ...

  The phone rang. This frequent event in other people’s homes happened seldom in Ribbon’s. He ran out
into the hall where the phone was and stood looking at it while it rang. Suppose it should be Kingston Marle? Gingerly he lifted the receiver. If it was Marle he would slam it down fast. That woman’s voice said, “Ambrose? Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. I’ve just got home.”

  “It was just that we’ve been rather worried about you. Now that I know you’re safely home, that’s fine.”

  Ribbon remembered his manners and recited Mummy’s rubric. “Thank you very much for having me, Susan. I had a lovely time.”

  He would write to her, of course. That was the proper thing. Upstairs in the office he composed three letters. The first was to Susan.

  21 Grove Green Avenue

  London E11 4ZH

  Dear Susan,

  I very much enjoyed my weekend with you and Frank. It was very enjoyable to take a stroll with Frank and take in “the pub” on the way. The ample food provided was tip-top. Your friends seemed charming people, though I cannot commend their choice of reading matter!

  All is well here. It looks as if we may be in for another spell of hot weather.

  With kind regards to you both,

  Yours affectionately,

  Ambrose

  Ribbon wasn’t altogether pleased with this. He took out “very much” and put in “enormously,” and for “very enjoyable” substituted “delightful.” That was better. It would have to do. He was rather pleased with that acid comment about those ridiculous people’s reading matter and hoped it would get back to them.

  During the weekend, particularly during those hours in his room on Saturday afternoon, he had gone carefully through the two paperbacks he had bought at Dillon’s. Lucy Grieves, the author of Cottoning On, had meticulously passed on to her publishers all the errors he had pointed out to her when the novel appeared in hardcover, down to “on to” instead of “onto.” Ribbon felt satisfied. He was pleased with Lucy Grieves, though not to the extent of writing to congratulate her. The second letter he wrote was to Channon Scott Smith, the paperback version of whose novel Carol Conway contained precisely the same mistakes and literary howlers as it had in hardcover. That completed, a scathing paean of contempt if ever there was one, Ribbon sat back in his chair and thought long and hard.