Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Ah, nothing. That had nothing to do with it. Frances went back into the hospital soon after that. They were trying some new kind of chemotherapy on her.Tom hadn’t any faith in it. By then he only had faith in Tarsis. He was having daily talk sessions with her. He’d taken leave from his job, and he’d spend an entire morning talking to Tarsis, mostly about his feelings for Frances, I gather, and how he felt about the rest of his family, and how he and Frances had met, and so on. She’d make him go over and over it, and the more he repeated himself the more approving she was.

  “Frances came home and she was very ill, thin, with no appetite. Her hair began to fall out. She could barely walk. The side effects from the chemo were the usual ghastly thing, nausea and faintness and ringing in the ears and all that. Tarsis came round and took a look at her, said the chemo was a mistake but, in spite of it, she thought she could heal Frances completely.Then came the crunch. I didn’t know this at the time, Tom didn’t tell me until—oh, I don’t know, two or three months afterward. But this is what Tarsis said to him.

  “They talked while Frances was asleep. Tarsis said, ‘What would you give to make Frances live?’ Well, of course, Tom asked what she meant, and she said, ‘Whose life would you give in exchange for Frances’s life?’ Tom said that was nonsense, you couldn’t trade one person’s life for another, and Tarsis said, oh yes, you could. The power of thought could do that for you. She’d trained Tom in practicing the power of thought, and now all he had to do was wish for Frances to live. Only he had to offer someone else up in her place.

  “That was when he started to see her for what she was. A charlatan. But he played along, he said. He wanted to see what she’d do. Called her bluff, was what he said, but he was deceiving himself in that. He still half believed. Who would he offer up, she asked him. ‘Oh, anyone you like,’ he said, and he laughed. She was deadly serious. That day she’d met Tom’s elder daughter and the granddaughter Emma.Tom said—he hated telling me this, but on the other hand he was really past caring what he told anyone—he said Emma hadn’t been very polite to Davina Tarsis. She’d sort of stared at her, at the tight leggings and the sun on her tunic and sneered a bit, I suppose, and then she’d said it wasn’t Tarsis but the chemo that was doing her grandmother good, it stood to reason that was what it was.”

  I interrupted her. “What do you mean, he hated telling you?”

  “Wait and see. He had good reason. It was after Emma and her mother had gone and Frances was resting that they had this talk. When Tom said it could be anyone she liked, Tarsis said it wasn’t what she liked but what Tom wanted, and then she said, ‘How about that girl Emma?’ Tom told her not to be ridiculous, but she persisted and at last he said that, well, yes, he supposed so, he would give Emma, only the whole thing was absurd. The fact was that he’d give anyone to save Frances’s life if it were possible to do that, so of course, yes, he’d give Emma.”

  “It must have put him off this Davina Tarsis, surely?”

  “You’d think so. I’m not sure. All this was about nine or ten months ago. Frances started to get better. Oh, yes, she did.You needn’t look like that. It was just an amazing thing.The doctors were amazed. But it wasn’t unheard-of, it wasn’t a miracle, though people said it was. Presumably, the chemo worked. All the things that should get right got right. I mean, her blood count got to be normal, she put on weight, the pain went, the tumors shriveled up. She simply got a bit better every day. It wasn’t a remission, it was a recovery.”

  “Tom must have been over the moon,” I said.

  Penelope made a face. “He was. For a while. And then Emma died.”

  “What?”

  “In a road crash. She died.”

  “You’re not saying this witch woman, this Davina Tarsis... ?”

  “No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. At the time of the crash Tarsis and Tom were together in Tom’s house with Frances. Besides, there was no mystery about the accident. It was indisputably an accident. Emma was on a school bus with the rest of her class, coming back from a visit to some stately home.There was ice on the road, the bus skidded and overturned, and three of the pupils were killed, Emma among them. You must have read about it, it was all over the media.”

  “I think I did,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

  “It affected Tom—well, profoundly. I don’t mean in the way the death of a grandchild would affect any grandparent. I mean he was racked with guilt. He had such faith in Tarsis that he really believed he’d done it. He believed he’d given Emma’s life in exchange for Frances’s. And another awful thing was that his love for Frances simply vanished, all that great love, that amazing devotion that was an example to us all really, it disappeared. He came to dislike her. He told me it wasn’t that he had no feeling for her anymore—he actively disliked her.

  “So there was nothing for him to live for. He believed he’d ruined his own life and ruined his daughter’s and destroyed his love for Frances. One night after Frances was asleep he drank a whole bottle of liquid morphine she’d had prescribed but hadn’t used with twenty paracetomol and a few brandies. He died quite quickly, I believe.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “The most awful tragedy. I’d no idea. And poor Frances. One’s heart goes out to Frances.”

  Penelope looked at me and took another cigarette. “Don’t feel too sorry for her,” she said. “She’s as fit as a fiddle now and about to start a new life. Her G.P. lost his wife about the time he diagnosed her cancer, and he and Frances are getting married next month. So you could say that all’s well that ends well.”

  “I wouldn’t go as far as that,” I said.

  THE WINK

  THE WOMAN IN RECEPTION gave her directions: Go through the dayroom, then the double doors at the back, turn left, and Elsie’s in the third room on the right. Unless she’s in the yroom.

  Elsie wasn’t but the Beast was. Jean always called him that, she had never known his name. He was sitting with the others watching television. A semicircle of chairs was arranged in front of the television, mostly armchairs but some wheelchairs, and some of the old people had fallen asleep. He was in a wheelchair and he was awake, staring at the screen where celebrities were taking part in a game show.

  Ten years had passed since she had last seen him but she knew him, changed and aged though he was. He must be well over eighty. Seeing him was always a shock, but seeing him in here was a surprise. A not unpleasant surprise. He must be in that chair because he couldn’t walk. He had been brought low; his life was coming to an end.

  She knew what he would do when he saw her. He always did. But possibly he wouldn’t see her, he wouldn’t turn around. The game show would continue to hold his attention. She walked as softly as she could, short of tiptoeing, around the edge of the semicircle. Her mistake was to look back just before she reached the double doors. His eyes were on her and he did what he always did. He winked.

  Jean turned sharply away. She went down the corridor and found Elsie’s room, the third on the right. Elsie was asleep, sitting in an armchair by the window. Jean put the flowers she had brought on the bed and sat down on the only other chair, an upright one without arms. Then she got up again and drew the curtain a little to keep the sunshine off Elsie’s face.

  Elsie had been at Sweetling Manor for two weeks, and Jean knew she would never come out again. She would die here—and why not? It was clean and comfortable and everything was done for you and probably it was ridiculous to feel as Jean did, that she would prefer anything to being here, including being helpless and old and starving and finally dying alone.

  They were the same age, she and Elsie, but she felt younger and thought she looked it. They had always known each other, had been at school together, had been each other’s bridesmaids. Well, Elsie had been her matron of honor, having been married a year by then. It was Elsie she had gone to the pictures with that evening, Elsie and another girl whose name she couldn’t remember. She remembered the fil
m, though. It had been Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls. Sixty years ago.

  When Elsie woke up Jean would ask her what the other girl was called. Christine? Kathleen? Never mind. Did Elsie know the Beast was in here? Jean remembered then that Elsie didn’t know the Beast, had never heard what happened that night—no one had, she had told no one. It was different in those days, you couldn’t tell because you would get the blame. Somehow, ignorant though she was, she had known that even then.

  Ignorant. They all were, she and Elsie and the girl called Christine or Kathleen. Or perhaps they were just afraid. Afraid of what people would say, would think of them. Those were the days of blame, of good behavior expected from everyone, of taking responsibility, and often punishment, for one’s own actions.You put up with things and you got on with things. Complaining got you nowhere.

  Over the years there had been extraordinary changes. You were no longer blamed or punished, you got something called empathy. In the old days what the Beast did would have been her fault. She must have led him on, encouraged him. Now it was a crime, his crime. She read about it in the papers, saw about things called helplines on television, and counseling and specially trained women police officers. This was to avoid your being marked for life, traumatized, though you could never forget.

  That was true, that last part, though she had forgotten for weeks on end, months. And then, always, she had seen him again. It came of living in the country, in a small town, it came of her living there and his going on living there. Once she saw him in a shop, once out in the street; another time he got on a bus as she was getting off it. He always winked. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her and winked.

  Elsie had looked like Deanna Durbin. The resemblance was quite marked. They were about the same age, born in the same year. Jean remembered how they had talked about it, she and Elsie and Christine-Kathleen, as they left the cinema and the others walked with her to the bus stop. Elsie wanted to know what you had to do to get a screen test and the other girl said it would help to be in Hollywood, not Yorkshire. Both of them lived in town, a five minutes’ walk away, and Elsie said she could stay the night if she wanted. But there was no way of letting her parents know. Elsie’s had a phone but hers didn’t.

  Deanna Durbin was still alive, Jean had read somewhere. She wondered if she still looked like Elsie or if she had had her face lifted and her hair dyed and gone on diets. Elsie’s face was plump and soft, very wrinkled about the eyes, and her hair was white and thin. She smiled faintly in her sleep and gave a little snore. Jean moved her chair closer and took hold of Elsie’s hand. That made the smile come back, but Elsie didn’t wake.

  The Beast had come along in his car about ten minutes after the girls had gone and Jean was certain the bus wasn’t coming. It was the last bus, and she hadn’t known what to do. This had happened before—the driver just hadn’t turned up and had got the sack for it, but that hadn’t made the bus come. On that occasion she had gone to Elsie’s and Elsie’s mother had phoned her parents’ next-door neighbors. She thought that if she did that a second time and put Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings to all that trouble, her dad would probably stop her from going to the pictures ever again.

  It wasn’t dark. At midsummer it wouldn’t get dark till after ten. If it had been she mightn’t have gone with the Beast. Of course he didn’t seem like a Beast then but young, a boy really, and handsome and quite nice. And it was only five miles. Mr. Rawlings was always saying five miles was nothing, he used to walk five miles to school every day and five miles back. But she couldn’t face the walk and, besides, she wanted a ride in a car. It would only be the third time she had ever been in one. Still, she would have refused his offer if he hadn’t said what he had when she’d told him where she lived.

  “You’ll know the Rawlings then. Mrs. Rawlings is my sister.”

  It wasn’t true, but it sounded true. She got in beside him. The car wasn’t really his—it belonged to the man he worked for; he was a chauffeur—but she found that out a lot later.

  “Lovely evening,” he said. “You been gallivanting?”

  “I’ve been to the pictures,” she said.

  After a couple of miles he turned a little way down a lane and stopped the car outside a derelict cottage. It looked as if no one could possibly live there but he said he had to see someone, it would only take a minute, and she could come too. By now it was dusk but there were no lights on in the cottage. She remembered that he was Mrs. Rawlings’s brother. There must have been a good ten years between them, but that hadn’t bothered her. Her own sister was ten years older than she was.

  She followed him up the path, which was overgrown with weeds and brambles. Instead of going to the front door, he led her around the back, where old apple trees grew in waist-high grass.The back of the house was a ruin, half its rear wall tumbled down.

  “There’s no one here,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything. He took hold of her and pulled her down in the long grass, one hand pressed hard over her mouth. She hadn’t known anyone could be so strong. He took his hand away to pull her clothes off and she screamed, but the screaming was just a reflex, a release of fear, and otherwise useless. There was no one to hear. What he did was rape. She knew that now—well, had known it soon after it happened, only no one called it that then. Nobody spoke of it. Nowadays the word was on everyone’s lips. Nine out of ten television series were about it. Rape, the crime against women. Rape, which these days you went into court and talked about.You went to self-defense classes to stop it happening to you. You attended groups and shared your experience with other victims.

  At first she had been most concerned to find out if he had injured her. Torn her, broken bones. But there was nothing like that. Because she was all right and he was gone, she stopped crying. She heard the car start up and then move away. Walking home wasn’t exactly painful, more a stiff achy business, rather the way she had felt the day after she and Elsie had been learning to do the splits. She had to walk anyway—she had no choice. As it was, her father was in a rage, wanting to know what time she thought this was.

  “Anything could have happened to you,” her mother said.

  Something had. She had been raped. She went up to bed so they wouldn’t see she couldn’t stop shivering. She didn’t sleep at all that night. In the morning she told herself it could have been worse, at least she wasn’t dead. It never crossed her mind to say anything to anyone about what had happened. She was too ashamed, too afraid of what they would think. It was past, she kept telling herself, it was all over.

  One thing worried her most. A baby. Suppose she had a baby. Never in all her life was she so relieved about anything, so happy, as when she saw that first drop of blood run down the inside of her leg a day early. She shouted for joy. She was all right! The blood cleansed her and now no one need ever know.

  Trauma? That was the word they used nowadays. It meant a scar.There was no scar that you could see and no scar she could feel in her body, but it was years before she would let a man come near her. Afterward she was glad about that, glad she had waited, that she hadn’t met someone else before Kenneth. But at the time she thought about what had happened every day, she relived what had happened, the shock and the pain and the dreadful fear, and in her mind she called the man who had done that to her the Beast.

  Eight years went by and she saw him again. She was out with Kenneth. He had just been demobbed from the air force and they were walking down the High Street arm in arm. Kenneth had asked her to marry him, and they were going to buy the engagement ring. It was a big jewelers they went to, with several aisles. The Beast was in a different aisle, quite a long way away, on some errand for his employer, she supposed, but she saw him and he saw her. He winked.

  He winked, just as he had ten minutes ago in the dayroom. Jean shut her eyes. When she opened them again Elsie was awake.

  “How long have you been there, dear?”

  “Not long,” Jean said.

  “Are those flowe
rs for me? You know how I love freesias. We’ll get someone to put them in water. I don’t have to do a thing in here, don’t lift a finger. I’m a lady of leisure.”

  “Elsie,” said Jean, “what was the name of that girl we went to the pictures with when we saw Three Smart Girls?”

  “What?”

  “It was nineteen thirty-eight. In the summer.”

  “I don’t know, I shall have to think. My memory’s not what it was. Bob used to say I looked like Deanna Durbin.”

  “We all said you did.”

  “Constance, her name was. We called her Connie.”

  “So we did,” said Jean.

  Elsie began talking of the girls they had been at school with. She could remember all their Christian names and most of their surnames. Jean found a vase, filled it with water, and put the freesias into it because they showed signs of wilting. Her engagement ring still fitted on her finger, though it was a shade tighter. How worried she had been that Kenneth would be able to tell she wasn’t a virgin! They said men could always tell. But of course, when the time came, he couldn’t. It was just another old wives’ tale.

  Elsie, who already had her first baby, had worn rose-colored taffeta at their wedding. And her husband had been Kenneth’s best man. John was born nine months later and the twins eighteen months after that. There was a longer gap before Anne arrived, but still she had had her hands full. That was the time, when the children were little, that she thought less about the Beast and what had happened than at any other time in her life. She forgot him for months on end. Anne was just four when she saw him again.

  She was meeting the other children from school.They hadn’t had a car then; it was years before they got a car. On the way to the school they were going to the shop to buy Anne a new pair of shoes. The Red Lion was just closing for the afternoon. The Beast came out of the public bar, not too steady on his feet, and he almost bumped into her. She said, “Do you mind?” before she saw who it was. He stepped back, looked into her face, and winked. She was outraged. For two pins she’d have told Kenneth the whole tale that evening. But of course she couldn’t. Not now.