Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  I must not give the impression that all of this went on for long. No more than three weeks, perhaps, before the change came and his world was overturned. He thought afterward that the change was helped along by his taking his work upstairs. She might not have done what she did if he had been in the room on the ground floor with its view of the lake— affording a view to other people driving by the lake and to window-cleaning, lawn-mowing, flower-bed-weeding Sandy.

  She always came into his room to tell him when she was leaving. He had reached the point where the sound of her footsteps ascending the stairs heated his body and set his blood pounding. The screen of the word processor clouded over, and his hands shook above the keyboard. That’s how bad it was.

  One of the things that terrified him was that she might touch him. Playfully, or in simple friendliness, she might lay her hand on his arm or even, briefly, take his hand. She never had; she wasn’t a “toucher.” But if she did, he didn’t know what he would do. He felt he couldn’t be responsible for his own actions; he might do something outrageous or his body, without his volition, something shameful. The strange thing was that in all this it never seemed to have occurred to him that she might want him, or at least be acquiescent. She came into the room. His desire blazed out of him, but he was long beyond controlling it.

  “I’ll be off then, sir.”

  How he hated that “sir”! It must be stopped and stopped now, whatever I might require from my “help.”

  “Please don’t call me that. Call me Ben.”

  It came from him like a piteous cry. He might have been crying to her that he had a mortal illness or that someone close to him was dead.

  “Ben,” she said. “Ben.” She said it as if it were new to her or distantly exotic instead of, as he put it, the name of half the pet dogs in the district. “I like it.” And then she said, “Are you all right?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Ignore me.”

  “Why would I want to do that, Ben?”

  The burr in her voice was suddenly more pronounced. She spoke in a radio rustic’s accent. Perhaps she had experience of men in Ben’s condition; probably it was a common effect of her presence, for she knew exactly what was wrong with him. What was right with him?

  She said, “Come here.”

  He got up, mesmerized, not yet believing, a long way still from believing. But she took his hands and laid them on her breasts. It was her way to do that, to take his hands to those soft hidden parts of her body where she most liked to feel his touch. She put her mouth up to his mouth, the tip of her tongue on his tongue; she stood on tiptoe, lifting her pelvis against him. Then, with a nod, with a smile, she took him by the hand and led him into his bedroom.

  4

  Before Ben went to Gothic House it had been arranged that I should go down myself for a weekend in June. I’d decided to put the house on the market as soon as Ben left, and there were matters to see to, such as what I was going to do about the furniture, which of it I wanted to keep and which to sell. As the time grew near I felt less and less like going. To have his company would be good—perhaps rather more than that—but I could have his company in London. It was the place I didn’t care to be in. In the time I’d been away from it my aversion had grown. If that was possible, I felt even worse about it than when I’d last been there.

  At this time, of course, I knew almost nothing of what Ben was doing. We’d spoken on the phone just once after the nightingale conversation, and he had said only that the change of air was doing him good and the translation was going well. The girls weren’t mentioned and neither was Sandy, so I knew nothing of Susannah beyond what I’d seen of her some two or three years before.

  That was when I’d had my encounters with her parents. Peddar, they were called, and they had three young daughters, Susannah, Carol, and another one whose name I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even remember which was the eldest and which the youngest. Of course I have plenty of cause to do so now. I’d been to the village quite a lot by that time and even taken a small part in village life, attended a social in the village hall and gone to Marion Kirkman’s daughter’s wedding.

  The villagers were guarded at first, then gradually friendlier. Just what one would expect. I went to the wedding and to the party afterward. In spite of all that has happened since, I still think it was the nicest wedding I’ve ever been to, the best party, the handsomest guests, the best food, the greatest joy. Everyone was tremendously nice to me. If I had the feeling that I was closely watched, rather as if the other people there were studying me for a social survey, I put that down to imagination. They were curious, that was all. They were probably shy of my middleclassness, for I had noticed by that time that there were no professional people in the village: agricultural laborers, mechanics, shopworkers, and cleaners (who went to their jobs elsewhere), plumbers, electricians, builders, thatchers and pargeters, a hairdresser, and, because even there modern life intruded, a computer technician, but no one who worked otherwise than with his or her hands.

  I think now I was a fool. I should have kept myself to myself. I should have resisted the seductions of friendliness and warmth. Instead, because I’d accepted hospitality, I decided to give a party. It would be a Sunday-morning drinks party, after church. I invited everyone who had invited me and a good many who hadn’t but whom I had met at other people’s gatherings. Sandy offered to serve the drinks and in the event did so admirably.

  They came and the party happened. Everyone was charming; everyone seemed to know that if you go to a party you should endeavor to be entertaining, to talk, to listen, to appear carefree. What was lacking was middle-class sophistication, and it was a welcome omission. The party resulted in an invitation, just one, from the Peddars, who delivered it as they were leaving, a written invitation in an envelope, evidently prepared beforehand with great care. Would I come to supper the following Friday? And I need not bother to drive: John Peddar would collect me and take me home.

  It must have been about that time that I noticed another oddity—if good manners and friendliness can be called that—about the village and its people. I’d already, of course, observed my own resemblance to the general appearance of them, a sort of look we had in common. I was tall and fair with blue eyes, and so were they. Not that they were all the same, not clonelike, I don’t mean that. Some were shorter, some less slender; eyes varied from midnight blue through turquoise to palest sky and hair from flaxen to light brown; but they had a certain look of all belonging to the same tribe. Danes used to look like that, I was once told, before the influx of immigrants and visitors; if you sat outside a café on Strøhet you saw all these blue-eyed blondes pass by, all looking like members of a family. Thus it was in the village, as if their gene pool was small, and I might have been one of them.

  So might Ben, though I didn’t think of it then. Why should I?

  I wrote a note to the Peddars, saying I’d be pleased to come on Friday.

  It sounds very cowardly, what I’m about to say. Well, it will have to sound that way. Although I’d much have preferred to postpone going to Gothic House till the Saturday, I’d told Ben I’d come on the Friday, and I kept to that. But I drove down in the evening so as to pass through the village in the dark, and since, in June, it didn’t start getting dark till after nine-thirty, I was late arriving.

  I braced myself, even took a deep breath, as I reached the corner where the first house was, some half mile from the rest, Mark and Kathy Gresham’s house. There were lights on but no windows open, though it was a warm night. I drove on quickly. A dozen or so teenagers had assembled with their bikes by the bus shelter; they were the only people about. The light from the single lamp in the village street shone on their fair hair. They turned as one as I passed, recognizing the car, but not one of them waved.

  An estate agent’s For Sale board was up outside the Old Rectory. So the farmer from Lynn hadn’t been able to stand it either. Or they hadn’t been able to stand him. I slowed and, cert
ain no one was about, stopped. No lights were on in the big handsome Georgian house. It was in darkness and it was deserted. You can always tell from the outside if a house is empty—no wonder burglars are so successful.

  No doubt he spent as little time there as possible. He hadn’t been there long, perhaps two years, and I’d known him only by sight, a big dark man with a pretty blond wife, much younger than he. As I started the car again I wondered what they had done to him and why.

  The sky was clear but moonless. In the dark, glassy lake whole constellations were reflected and a single bright planet shining like a torch held under the water. A little wind had got up, and the woodland trees rustled their heavy weight of leaves. In my headlights Gothic House had its fairy-tale-castle look, gray but bright, its lighted windows orange oblongs with arched tops, the crenellated crown of the turret the only part of it reflected in the water. Ben and I had never kissed. But now he took me in his arms and kissed me with great affection.

  “Louise, how wonderful that you’re here. Welcome to your own house!”

  I thought him a changed man.

  It was only half an hour since Susannah had left him and gone home to her father’s house. He told me that while we sat drinking whiskey at the window with its view of the lake.The moon had risen, a bright full moon whose radiance was nearly equal to winter sunshine. Its silver-green light painted the tree trunks like lichen.

  “Susannah Peddar?” I was finding an awkwardness in saying it, already remembering.

  “Why the surprise?” he said. “You employ her. And, come to that, Sandy.”

  I told him I used to employ Sandy but no longer. As for Susannah.... She wasn’t quite the last person from that village I’d have wanted in my house, but nearly. I didn’t say that. I said I was glad he’d found someone to look after him. He went on talking about her, already caught up in the lover’s need to utter repeatedly the beloved’s name, but I didn’t know that then. I only wondered why he dwelt so obsessively on the niceness, the cleverness, and the beauty of someone I still thought of as a village teenager.

  That night he said nothing of what had happened between them but went off to bed in a pensive mood, still astonished that Susannah wasn’t employed by me. I, who had been relaxed, moving into a quiet sleepy frame of mind, was now unpleasantly wide awake, and I lay sleepless for a long time, thinking of the Peddars and of other things.

  The evening with John and Iris Peddar was very much what I’d expected it would be, or the early part was. They lived in one of the newer houses, originally a council house, but they had done a great deal of work on it, building an annex and turning the two downstairs rooms into one.

  I’d calculated, in my middle-class way, my deeply English class-conscious way, that they would dress up for me. He would wear a suit, she a dress with fussy jewelry, and the three little girls frilly frocks. So I decided to dress up for them and did that rare thing, wore a dress and stockings and shoes with heels. When John Peddar arrived to collect me I was surprised to see him in jeans and an open-necked check shirt but supposed that he intended to change when we got to his house.

  Everyone looks better in informal clothes, in my opinion. Something of the absurd is inseparable from gowns and jewels and men’s dark suits. But I didn’t expect them to feel this. I was astonished when Iris came out to greet me in jeans and a striped T-shirt. The children too wore what they’d worn at school that day, or what they’d changed into after the greater formality of school.

  Even now, knowing what I know, I marvel at the psychology of it, at their knowledge of people and taste. They knew I wouldn’t necessarily be easier with them dressed like that, but that I would unquestionably find one or all of them more attractive.They were a good-looking family, John especially—tall, thin, fair, with a fine-featured face and inquiring eyes, eyebrows that went up often, as if commenting with secret laughter on the outrageous. Iris was pretty, with commonplace Barbie-doll looks, but the three little girls were all beauties, two of them golden blondes who favored their father, the third unlike either parent, the image of a Millais child with nut-brown hair and soulful eyes.

  We drank sherry before the meal. John drank as much as Iris and I did and as much wine. I think I must have known by that time that in the village you drank as much as you liked before driving.The police who drove their little car around the streets every so often would never stop a villager, still less breath-test him. Two P.C.’s lived here, after all, and one was Jennifer Fowler’s brother.

  We had avocado with prawns, chicken casserole, and chocolate mousse. That, at any rate, was what I’d expected. The children went to bed, the eldest one last, as was fair. Iris called me upstairs to see her bedroom, which she and John had newly decorated, and I went—it was still light, though dusk, the soft violet dusk that comes to woodland places— and there, while I admired the wallpaper, she tucked her arm into mine and stood close up against me.

  It was friendliness, the warm outgoing attitude of one woman to another that she finds congenial. So I thought as she squeezed my arm and pressed her body against mine. She had had a great deal to drink. Her inhibitions had gone down. I still thought that when she moved her arm to my shoulders and, slowly turning me to her, brought her lips to within an inch of mine. I stepped aside, I managed a small laugh. I was anxious, terribly anxious in that moment, to avoid her doing anything she might bitterly regret the next morning. We all know the feeling of waking to horrified memory, to the what-have-I-done self-inquiry that sets the blood pounding.

  About an hour later he drove me home. She was all pleasantness and charm, begging me to come again, it was delightful that we’d got to know each other at last. This time I had no choice but to allow the kiss; it was no more than a cool pecking of the air around my cheek. John showed no signs of the amount he’d drunk. But neither, then, had she, apart from that bedroom overture I was sure now came from nothing more than a sudden impulse of finding she liked me.

  In the car, sitting beside me, he told me I was a beautiful woman. It made me feel uncomfortable. All possible rejoinders were either coy or vulgar, so I said nothing. He drove me home and said he’d come in with me—he wouldn’t allow me to go alone into a dark, empty house. It was late, I said, I was tired. All the more reason for him to come in with me. Once inside I put on a lot of lights, and I offered him a drink. He had seated himself comfortably, as if at home.

  “Won’t Iris wonder where you are?”

  He looked at me and those eyebrows rose. “I don’t think she will.”

  It was clear what he meant. I was revolted. His intrigues must be so habitual that his wife accepted with resignation that if he was late home he was with a woman. It explained her overture to me, a gesture born of loneliness and rejection.

  He began talking about her, how he would never do anything to hurt her or imperil their marriage. Nothing could imperil it, he insisted. Most women have heard that sort of thing from men at some time or other; it is standard philanderer-speak.Yet if he hadn’t said it, if he’d been a little different, less knowing, less confident, and, yes, less rustic, I might have felt his attraction, at least the attraction of his looks. I’d have done nothing because of her, but I might have felt like doing something. As it was, I was simply contemptuous. But I didn’t want trouble, I didn’t want a scene.Was I afraid of him? Perhaps a little. He was a tall, strong man who had had a lot to drink, and I was alone with him.

  In the end, when he’d had a second whiskey, I stood up and said I was desperately tired, I was going to have to turn him out. I know now that physical violence was quite foreign to his nature, but I didn’t then, and I hated it when he put his hand under my chin, lifted my face, and kissed me.You could just—only just—have called it a friendly, social kiss.

  Just as Ben was later to have those dreams, so did I. Something in the air? Or, more subtly, the atmosphere of the place? The first of my dreams was that night. John Peddar was different in the dream, looking the same but more my kind of man. Civ
ilized is the word that comes to mind, yet it’s not quite the right one. Gentler, more sensitive, less crude in his approach. I suppose that the I who was dreaming arranged all that, but whatever it was I didn’t repulse him; I began to make love with him, I began to enjoy him in a luxuriating way, until the dawn chorus of birds awoke me with their singing.

  He came back in the morning—the real man, not the dream image.

  It was a dull morning of heavy cloud. I’ve said the sky was always clear and the sun always shining, but of course it wasn’t. All that is fantasy, myth, and magic. The house was quite dark inside. Before the dream came I had slept badly.That was the beginning of sleeping badly at Gothic House, of bad nights and, later, total insomnia. I came downstairs in my dressing gown, thinking it must be Sandy at the door. He came in and— I don’t know how to put this—took the door out of my hands, took my hands from it, closed it himself, and shot the bolt across it.

  I was taken aback by this appropriation of actions that should be exclusively mine. I stared. He took me into his arms in a curious caressing gesture, a sweeping of light gentle hands down my arms, my body, my thighs. He drew me close to him, murmuring “darling” and “darling” again and “sweetheart,” his voice thick and breathless. Before his mouth could touch mine I pushed him away with a great shove, and he staggered back against the wall.

  “Please go,” I said. “I can’t stand this. Please go.”

  I expected trouble, excuses that I’d invited him, defenses that he could sense my desire, accusations finally of frigidity. But there was nothing. For a moment he looked at me inquiringly. Then he nodded as if something suspected had been confirmed. He even smiled. My front door, which he had previously taken possession of, he opened; he let himself out and closed it quietly and very carefully behind him.

  Ben told me about Susannah. He told me all those things I have already told you and more than that. We sat out in the garden. There was a stone table, a bench, and chairs on the lawn in front of the house under a mulberry tree, and we sat there in the heat of the day. The fallen fruit lay about on the grass like spoonfuls of crimson jam.