Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  He walked daily: around the lake, along a footpath high above damp meadows crossed by ditches full of watercress; down the lane to a hamlet where there was a green and a crossroads and a pub, though he never at that time ventured into the forest. Once he went to the village and back, but saw no one. Though it was warm and dry, nobody was about. He knew he was watched—he saw eyes looking at him from windows— but that was natural and to be expected. Villagers were always inquisitive about and even antagonistic to newcomers; that was a cliché that even he, as a townee, had grown up with. Not that he met with antagonism. The postman, collecting from the pillar-box, hailed him and wished him good morning. Anne Whiteson, the shopwoman, was friendly and pleasant when he went into the shop for tea bags and a loaf. He supposed he couldn’t have a newspaper delivered? He could. Indeed he could. He had only to say what he wanted and “someone” would bring it up every morning.

  The “someone” turned out to be Sandy, arriving at eight-thirty with his Independent. Lavinia Fowler had already been twice, but this was the first time he had seen Sandy since that first evening. Though unasked, Lavinia brought tea for both of them, so Ben was obliged to put up with Sandy’s company in the kitchen while he drank it. How was he getting on with Lavinia? Was she giving satisfaction?

  Ben thought this a strange, almost archaic term. Or should another construction be put on it? Apparently it should, for Sandy followed up his inquiry by asking if Ben didn’t think Lavinia a most attractive girl.The last thing Ben intended to do, he told me, was enter into this sort of conversation with the handyman. He was rather short with Sandy after that, saying he had work to do and to excuse him.

  But he found it hard to settle down to The Golden Apple. He had come to a description of the contest between the three goddesses, when Paris asks Aphrodite to remove her clothes and let fall her magic girdle, but he could hear sounds from the kitchen, once or twice a giggle, the soft murmur of voices. Too soft, he said, too languorous and cajoling, so in spite of himself, he got up and went to listen at the door.

  He heard no more and shortly afterward saw Sandy’s van departing along the lakeshore. But as a result of what Sandy had said, he found himself looking at Lavinia with new eyes. Principally, she had ceased to be a joke to him, and when she came in with his midmorning coffee he was powerfully aware of her femininity, that fragile quality of hers, her vulnerability. She was so slender, so pale, and her thin white skin looked— these were his words, the words he put in his diary—as if waiting to be bruised.

  Her fair hair was as fine and soft as a baby’s but longer than any baby had ever had, a gauzy veil, almost waist length, very clean and smelling faintly of some herb. Thyme, perhaps, or oregano. As she bent over his desk to put the cup down, her hair just brushed his cheek, and he felt that touch with a kind of inner shiver just as he felt the touch of her finger. For he put out his hand to take the coffee mug while she still held it. Instead of immediately relinquishing her hold she left her forefinger where it was for a moment, perhaps thirty seconds, so that it lay alongside his own forefinger and skin delicately touched skin.

  Again he thought, before he abruptly pulled his hand away, of skin waiting to be bruised, of how it would be if he took that white wrist, thin as a child’s, blue veined, in a harsh grip and squeezed, his fingers more than meeting, overlapping and crushing until she cried out. He had never had such thoughts before, never before about anyone, and they made him uncomfortable. Departing from the room, she again gave him one of those over-the-shoulder glances, but this time wistful—disappointed?

  Yet she didn’t attract him, he insisted on that. He was very honest with me about all of it. She didn’t attract him except in a way he didn’t wish to be attracted. Oenone, the shepherdess and daughter of the river, was how he saw her. Her fragility, her look of utter weakness, as of a girl to be blown over by the wind or felled by a single touch, inspired in him only what he insisted it would inspire in all men, a desire to ravish, to crush, to injure, and to conquer.

  “Ravish” was his word, not “rape.”

  “You really felt all that?” I asked.

  “I thought about it afterward. I don’t say I felt that at the time. I thought about it and that’s how I felt about her. It didn’t make me happy, you know—I wasn’t proud of myself. I’m trying to tell you the honest truth.”

  “She was”—I hesitated—“offering herself to you?”

  “She had been from the first. Every time we encountered each other she was telling me by her looks and her gestures that she was available, that I could have her. And, you know, I’d never come across anything quite like that before.”

  Since the separation from his wife he had been celibate. And he could see no end to his celibacy; he thought it would go on for the rest of his life, for the step that must be taken to end it seemed too great for him to consider, let alone take. Now someone else was taking that step for him. He had only to respond, only to return that glance, let his finger lie a little longer against that finger, close his fingers around that wrist.

  Any of these responses were also too great to make. Besides, he was afraid. He was afraid of himself, of those horrors that presented themselves to him as his need. His active imagination showed him how it would be with him when he saw her damaged and at his hands, the bruised whiteness, the abraded skin. But her image came into his consciousness many times throughout that day and visited him in the night like a succubus. He stood at the open window listening to the nightingales, and felt her come into the room behind him, could have sworn one of those transparent fingers of hers softly brushed his neck.When he spun round no one was there, nothing was there but the faint herby smell of her, left behind from that morning.

  That night was the first time he dreamed of the lake and the tower.

  The lake was as it was in his conscious hours, a sheet of water that took twenty minutes to walk around, but the tower on Gothic House was immensely large, as high as a church spire. It had absorbed the house— there was no house, only this tall and broad tower with crenellated top and oeil-de-boeuf windows, as might be part of a battlemented castle. He had seen the tower and then he was on the tower, as is the way in dreams, and Lavinia, the river god’s daughter, was walking out of the lake, water streaming from her body and her uplifted arms. She came to the tower and embraced it, pressing her wet body against the stone. But the curious thing, he said, was that by then he had become the tower, the tower was himself, stone still but about to be metamorphosed, he felt, into flesh that could respond and act. He woke up before that happened and he was soaking wet, as if a real woman had come out from the lake and embraced him.

  “Sweat,” he said, “and—well, you can have wet dreams even at my age.”

  “Why not?” I said, though at that time, in those early days, I was still surprised by his openness.

  “Henry James uses that imagery, the tower for the man and the lake for the woman. The Turn of the Screw, isn’t it? I haven’t read it for a hundred years, but I suppose my unconscious remembered.”

  Lavinia didn’t come the next day. It wasn’t one of her days.That Friday he prepared himself for her coming—nervous, excited, afraid of himself and her, recalling always the dream and the feel against his body of her wet, slippery skin, her small, soft breasts. He put in the diary that he remembered water trickling down her breasts and spilling from the nipples.

  She was due at eight-thirty. By twenty to nine, when she still hadn’t come—she was never late—he knew he must have offended her. His lack of response she saw as rejection. He reminded himself that the woman in the dream was not Lavinia but an imagined figment. The real woman knew nothing of his dreams, his fears, his terrible self-reproach.

  She didn’t come. No one did. He was relieved but at the same time sorry for the hurt he must have done her. Apart from that, he was well content; he preferred his solitude, the silence of the house. Having to make his own midmorning coffee wasn’t a chore but a welcome interruption of the work, to
which he went back refreshed. He was translating a passage from Eustathius on Homer that the author cited as early evidence of sexual deviation. Laodamia missed her husband so much when he set sail for the Trojan War that she made a wax statue of him and laid it in the bed beside her.

  It was an irony, Ben thought, that the first time he’d been involved since the end of his marriage in any amorous temptation happened to coincide with his translating this disturbingly sexy book. Or did the book disturb him only because of the Lavinia episode? He knew he hadn’t been tempted by Lavinia because of the book. And when he went out for his walk that afternoon he understood that he was no longer tempted; the memory of her, even the dream, had no power to stir him. All that was past.

  But it—and perhaps the book—had awakened his long-dormant sexuality. He had lingered longer than he needed over the passage where Laodamia’s husband, killed in the war, comes back as a ghost and inhabits as her lover the wax image. It had left him prey to an undefined, aimless, undirected desire.

  That evening his diary entry was full of sexual imagery. And when he slept he dreamed flamboyantly, the dreams full of color, teeming with luscious images, none approximating anything he’d known in life. Throughout the day he was restless, working automatically, distracted by sounds from outside: birdsong, a car passing along the road, the arrival of Sandy, and then by the noise of the lawn mower. He couldn’t bring himself to ask what had happened to Lavinia. He didn’t speak to Sandy at all, disregarding the man’s waves and smiles and other meaningless signals.

  It occurred to him when he was getting up the next Monday that Lavinia might come. She might have been ill on Friday or otherwise prevented from coming. Perhaps those signs that Sandy had made to him had indicated a wish to impart some sort of information about Lavinia. It was an unpleasant thought. He dreaded the sight of her.

  He had already begun work on the author’s analysis of a suggestion that the real Helen had fled to Egypt while it was only a simulacrum that Paris took to Troy, when distantly he heard the back door open and close and footsteps cross the tiles. It was not Lavinia’s tread; these were not Lavinia’s movements. For a moment he feared Sandy’s entry into his room, Sandy with an explanation or, worse, Sandy asking for an explanation. Somehow he felt that was possible.

  Instead a girl came in, a different girl. She didn’t knock. She walked into his room without the least diffidence, confidently, as if it were her right.

  “I’m Susannah, I’ve taken over from Lavinia.You won’t mind, will you? We didn’t think you’d mind. It’s not as if it will make a scrap of difference.”

  I know the girl he meant, this Susannah. Or I think I do, though perhaps it’s one of her sisters that I know, that I have seen in the village outside her parents’ house. Her father was one of those rarities not native to the place, but a newcomer when he married her mother, a man for some reason acceptable and even welcomed. There were a few of such people, perhaps four. As for the girl . . .

  “She was so beautiful,” he said.

  “There are a lot of good-looking people in the village,” I said. “In fact, there’s no one you could even call ordinarily plain. They’re a handsome lot.”

  He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. Her beauty struck him forcibly from that first moment. She had golden looks, film-star looks. If that had a vulgar sound, I was to remember that this particular appearance was only associated with Hollywood because it was the archetype, because no greater beauty could be found than the tall blonde with the full lips, straight nose, and large blue eyes, the plump breasts and narrow hips and long legs. Susannah had all that and a smile of infinite sweetness.

  “And she didn’t throw herself at me,” he said. “She cleaned the house and made me coffee and she wasn’t—well, servile, the way Lavinia was. She smiled. She talked to me when she brought the coffee and before she left, and she talked sensibly and simply, just about how she’d cycled to the house and the fine weather and her dad giving her a Walkman for her birthday. It was nice. It was sweet. Perhaps one of the best things was that she didn’t mention Sandy. And there was something curative about her coming. I didn’t dream the dreams again, and as for Lavinia—Lavinia vanished. From my thoughts, I mean.That weekend I felt something quite new to me: contentment. I worked. I was satisfied with my rendering of The Golden Apple. I was going to be all right. I didn’t even mind Sandy turning up on Sunday and cleaning all the windows inside and out.”

  “Young Susannah must be a marvel if she could do all that,” I said.

  He didn’t exactly shiver, but he hunched his shoulders as if he was cold. In a low voice he began to read from his diary entries.

  3

  She seemed very young to him. The next time she came and the next he wanted to ask her how old she was, but he had a natural aversion to asking that question of anyone. He looked at her breasts—he couldn’t help himself; they were so beautiful, so perfect.The shape of a young woman’s breasts was like nothing else on earth, he said, there was nothing they could be compared to and all comparison was vulgar pornography.

  At first he told himself he looked at them so because he was curious about her age—was she sixteen or seventeen or more?—but that wasn’t the reason, that was self-deception. She dressed in modest clothes, or at least in clothes that covered most of her—a high-necked T-shirt, a long skirt—but he could tell she wore nothing underneath, nothing at all. Her navel showed as a shallow declivity in the clinging cotton of the skirt, and the material was lifted by her mount of Venus (his words, not mine). When he thought of these things as well as when he looked, the blood pumped loudly in his head and his throat constricted. She wore sandals that were no more than thongs, which left her small, high-instepped feet virtually bare.

  It never occurred to him at that time that he was the object of some definite strategy. His mind was never crossed even by the suspicion that Susannah might have taken Lavinia’s place because he’d made it plain he didn’t find Lavinia desirable; that it would be most exceptional for two young girls, coming to work for him in succession, to both—immediately—make attempts to fascinate him, indeed to seduce him.

  There should have been no doubt in his mind, after all, for all he had said about Susannah not throwing herself at him, that in the ordinary usages of society a girl doesn’t come to work for and be alone with a man stark naked under her skirt and top unless she is extending an invitation. But he didn’t see it. He saw the movement of her breasts under that thin stuff, but he saw only innocence. He saw the cotton stretched across her belly, close as a second skin, and put down her choice of dressing like this to juvenile naïveté. The blame for it was his—and Lavinia’s. Lavinia, he told himself, had awakened an amorousness in him that he would have been happy never to feel again. Instead, he had lost all peace and contentment; with her stupid coyness, her posturing and her clothes, she had robbed him of that. And now he was in thrall to this beautiful, simple, and innocent girl.

  She was subtle. Not for her the blatant raising of her arms above her head to reach a high shelf, still less the climbing onto a chair or up a pair of steps, stuff of soft pornography. He asked her to sit and have her coffee with him and she demurred but finally agreed, and she sat so modestly, taking extravagant care to cover not only her knees but her legs, almost to those exquisite ankles. She even tucked her skirt round her legs and tucked it tightly, thus revealing—he was sure in utter innocence— as much as she concealed. While she talked about her family—her mother, who had been a Kirkman, her father, who came from a hundred miles away, from Yorkshire, her big sister and her little sister—she must have seen the direction his eyes took, for she folded her arms across her breasts.

  It dismayed him. He wasn’t that sort of man. Before his wife he had had girlfriends, but there had been nothing casual, no pickups, no one-night stands. He might almost have said he had never made love to a woman without being, or in a fair way to being, in love with her. But this feeling he had was lust. He was sure that it had no
thing to do with “being in love,” though it was as strong and as powerful as love. And it was her beauty alone that was to blame—he said “to blame”—for he couldn’t have said if he liked her; liking didn’t come into it. Her appearance, her presence, the aura of her stunned him but at the same time had him desperately staring. It was an amazement to him that others didn’t see that desperation.

  Not that there were others, with the exception, of course, of Sandy.

  While Ben was working, Sandy, if he was outside, would sometimes appear at the window to smile and point up his thumbs. Ben would be working on some abstruse lining up of Jungian archetypes with Helen and Achilles and be confronted by Sandy’s grinning face. If the weather was fine enough for the window to be open, Sandy would put his head inside and inquire if everything was all right.

  “Things going okay, are they?”

  Ben moved upstairs. He took his word processor and his dictionary into a back bedroom with an inaccessible window. And all this time he thought these people were my servants, “help” paid by me to wait on him. He couldn’t dismiss them, he felt, or even protest. I was charging him no rent; he paid only for his electricity and the telephone. It would have seemed to him the deepest ingratitude and impertinence to criticize my choice. Yet if he had been free to do so he would have got rid of not only Sandy but Susannah also. He could scarcely bear her in his presence. Yet he wondered what grayness and emptiness would replace her.