Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  The tree gave enough shade to make sitting there pleasant.You could no more look at the lake than you could at a mirror with the full sun shining on it. A few cars passed along the road, village people off to shop in the town supermarkets, and the drivers waved. At Ben, of course; they wouldn’t wave at me. He told me how his early lovemaking with Susannah had become a full-blown love affair.

  No inhibition held him back from telling me about it. He had to tell someone. I’d never known him so open, so revelatory.

  “I’m glad it’s making you happy,” I said.

  What lies we tell for the sake of social accord!

  “It won’t last, of course, I know that. It’s entirely physical.” (I’m always skeptical when people say that. What do they mean? Do they know what they mean?) “She’s years younger than I am.”

  “Yes.” Oh, yes, she was. “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen, I suppose.”

  “And you wouldn’t”—I tried to put it tactfully—“exactly call her an educated person, would you?”

  “What does that matter? I’m not going to marry her, I’m not going to settle down with her for life. It’s not as if I were in love with her. I’m having—oh, something I’ve never had with anyone in my life before, something I’ve only read about: pure, uncomplicated, beautiful sex. Sex without questions, without pain, without consequences. It’s as if we’re mythical beings at the beginning of the world, we’re Paris and Helen, mutually exulting in the sweetest and most innocent pleasure known to mankind.”

  “My goodness,” I said.

  “I suppose you think that very high-flown, Louise, but it’s an accurate expression of my feelings.”

  Why didn’t I warn him then? Why didn’t I tell him about Susannah’s father and Sandy and Roddy Fowler and meetings in the village hall? Or my suspicions about the farmer’s wife from Lynn? Quite simply because I thought the difference of gender made the difference. He was a man. I thought men would be exempt. But later that day, after I’d made a rough inventory of the furniture I’d keep and noted the few small repairs the house needed before it could be put up for sale, I found myself looking at him, assessing things about him.

  I was very fond of him, had started to grow fond after he’d separated from his wife, but it was very much for his mind and his manner. His gentleness pleased me, as did his thoughtfulness, his sensitivity and modesty. Pointless to pretend that he was much to look at, though I liked his looks, the intelligence in his face and the perceptiveness, his expressions of understanding and of pondering. But he was somewhat below medium height and very thin, with an unfit, slack-muscled thinness. He looked older than his age—thirty-seven? thirty-eight?—and his face was lined as thin, fair faces soon become with time, his hair fast receding.

  I knew what I saw in him but not what Susannah did. The older man, perhaps, a father figure, though she had a perfectly adequate father of her own, very little older than Ben. They marry early in the village. But who can account for love? Even for attraction?

  We went out for our dinner that evening to a restaurant ten miles away. During the meal he asked me if he should be paying Sandy. Wasn’t there something wrong about Sandy working for him without payment?

  “If you don’t pay him,” I said, “maybe he’ll get the message and go away. He’s a pest and a nuisance.” I said nothing about Sandy’s attempts to make love to me after the John Peddar incident and my outrage. I would have if I’d thought it would make a difference.

  “But for him,” he said, “I suppose I’d never have met Susannah.”

  He would have, but I didn’t know it then.

  “When are you seeing her again?” I meant this joke question seriously, and that was how he took it.

  “On Monday morning. It’s a bit awkward her going on cleaning the house, and paying her is very awkward. I shall have to try to get someone else. Of course we meet in the evenings—well, she comes to the house. I can’t exactly go to her father’s house.”

  I had nothing to say to that. From what I knew of her father’s house, an orgy in the front room in broad daylight wouldn’t have been unacceptable. I had revised my sympathy for Iris when at a village dance she had tried to introduce me, with unmistakable motive, to her younger unattached brother, Roddy. For some reason the Peddar family had done their best to find me a sexual partner, and apparently anyone would do, if not either of them or a relation of theirs, some other villager. Sandy, I supposed, had been put up to it by them. After all, I knew him already, and in their eyes perhaps that was the only necessary prerequisite.

  While showing me something he’d done in the garden he’d put his arm around me. I’d told him not to do that. He’d looked sideways at me and asked why not.

  “Because,” I’d said. “Because I don’t want you to. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Come on, Louise, it’s not natural, a nice-looking woman like yourself, never with a man.”

  “None of this is any business of yours.” How ridiculous one sounds when offended!

  “Is it women that you fancy? You can say, you needn’t be shy. I know about those things, I’ve been around.”

  “You needn’t be around here anymore, that’s for sure,” I’d said. “I don’t want you working for me any longer. Please go and don’t come back.”

  Ben wouldn’t have been interested in any of that, so I didn’t tell him. We went home to Gothic House, and next day I said I thought I might put it on the market at the end of August.

  “You’ll have finished your translation by then, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m sure I will.” He looked rather dismayed. “I said three months, didn’t I? It’s so beautiful here, and the situation of the house, this village—won’t you regret getting rid of it?”

  “I come here so seldom,” I said, “it’s really not worth keeping it up.”

  5

  It was strange how seldom those people went out in the evenings. They visited each other, I know that now, but they hardly ever left the village after six. I spent two weeks there once, when I was trying to teach myself to like the place, and not a single car passed along the road by the lake in the evenings. I might not have seen cars if they had passed, but I would have seen the beams from their headlights sweep across my ceilings. They stayed at home. They preferred their isolation.

  I believe I was their principal concern at that time. No doubt they had a meeting in the village hall, called especially for the discussion of me. I’d blundered into one of those meetings one night, having mistaken it for a teenage fund-raiser for cancer research. Utter silence had prevailed as I’d walked in; they had heard or sensed my coming. Mark Gresham had come down the hall to me, explained my mistake, and escorted me out with such care and exquisite politeness that the thinnest skinned couldn’t have taken offense.

  Sometimes, in those days, the last of those days, the watchers in the windows waved to me. There was never any question of concealing from me that they were watching. They waved or they smiled and nodded. And then, suddenly, all smiles and waving ceased, all friendliness came to an end. When Ben came down for that weekend and we saw the bathers, they were still amiably inclined toward me. Next time I came everything had changed, and the antagonism was almost palpable.

  Ben fell in love with her.

  Perhaps he’d really been in love from the first but had refused to allow himself to admit it, and all that insistence on matters between them being “entirely physical” was self-deception. Whatever it was, by the middle of July he was in love—“deeply in, in up to my neck,” as he told me— utterly, obsessively, committed to love.

  Not that he told me then. That came much later. At the time, though I heard from him, he did not mention Susannah. He wrote to ask if I was sincere about selling Gothic House and if I was, would I sell it to him. His former wife had found a buyer for the home they had shared, and under the terms of the divorce settlement half the proceeds were to be his. Gothic House might, even so, be beyond his means, and if th
is was the case he would look for some cottage in the village. In a mysterious, oblique sentence he wrote that he thought “living elsewhere might not be acceptable to everyone concerned.”

  Why live there? He was a Londoner. He had lived abroad but never other than in a big city. The answer was that in the short time he’d been there he’d become very attached to the place. He loved it. How could he return to London and its painful memories? As a translator he could live anywhere. The village was a place in which he thought he could be happy as he had never been before.

  Perhaps I was slow, but I attached no particular significance to any of this. The truth was that I felt it awkward. It was a principle of mine, which had never before needed to be acted on, that one does not sell a house, a car, or any large valuable item or object, maybe anything at all, to a friend. The passing of money will break the friendship, or that was the theory.

  I waited a few days before replying. The seriousness of this, the projected sale or refusal to sell, caused me to write rather than phone. If I had phoned I might have learned more. But at last I wrote to say that, as I’d told him, I wasn’t intending to sell yet. Let us wait till the end of August. Didn’t he really need more time before committing himself? If by then he still wanted to live in the village and still wanted Gothic House, then we could talk about it.

  No answer came to my letter. I found out later that Ben, exasperated by my delaying tactics, had gone the next day to an estate agent to inquire about cottages. He didn’t much care what he lived in, what roof was over his head, so long as he could live there with Susannah.

  When it was all over and we were talking, when he poured out his heart to me, he told me that love had come to him in a moment, with an absolute suddenness. From being a contented man with a beautiful young lover whose body he enjoyed more than perhaps he’d ever enjoyed any woman’s, he became lost, at once terrified and exalted, obsessed, alone, and desperate.Yet it came to him when she was out of his sight, when she was at home in her father’s house.

  They had made love in his bed at Gothic House, had eaten a meal and drunk wine and gone back to bed to make love again. And then quite late, but not as late as midnight, he had done what he was now in the habit of doing: he had driven her home, discreetly dropping her at the end of the street. Useless, all this secrecy, as I could have told him. Everyone would have known. They would have known from the first kiss that passed between those two. But to him the love affair was a secret that—since almost as soon as he recognized his feelings for what they truly were, he wanted everything out in the open—he wanted the world to know.

  He walked about the house, putting dishes in the sink, drinking the last of the wine, and suddenly he found himself longing for her. A pain caught him in the chest and shoulders. Like a heart attack, he said, or what he imagined a heart attack would be. He hugged himself in his arms. He sat down and said aloud, “I’m in love and I know I’ve never been in love before.”

  The pain flowed out of him and left him tired and spent. He was filled with what he called “a glory.” He saw her in his mind’s eye, naked and smiling, coming to him so sweetly, so tenderly, to put her arms around him and touch him with her lips. The wrench of it was so bad that he said he didn’t know how he continued to sit there, how he resisted jumping in the car and rushing back to her, beating on her father’s door to demand her release into his arms. And he did get up but only to pace the room, the house, speaking her name, Susannah, and uttering into that silent place, “I love you, oh, I love you.”

  The next day he told her. She seemed surprised. “I know,” she said.

  “You know?” He gazed at her, holding her hands. “How clever you are, my love, my sweetheart, to know what I didn’t know. Do you love me? Can you love me?”

  She said with the utmost tranquillity, “I’ve always loved you. From the first. Of course I love you.”

  “Do you, darling Susannah?”

  “Did you think I’d have done those things we’ve done if I didn’t love you?”

  He was chastened. He should have known. She was no Lavinia. Yet I suppose some caution, some vestige of prudence or perhaps just his age and the remembrance of his marriage, prevented his asking her there and then to marry him. For that was what he had wanted from the first moment of his realization, to marry her. It was what you did, he said to me, when you were in love like that, irrevocably, profoundly; you didn’t want any trial time, you wanted commitment for life. Besides, she was half his age, she was very young; it wasn’t as if he were a fellow teenager and the two of them experimenting with passion. Honorably, he must marry her.

  “But you didn’t ask her?” I said.

  “Not then. I intended to wait a week. She was so sweet that week, Louise, so loving, I can’t tell you how giving she was, how passionate. Of course I wouldn’t tell you, it’s not something I’d speak of. I wrote some of it down in my diary.You can see the diary. Why should I care now?”

  She had shown him, when they made love, things he wouldn’t have suspected she knew. Things he had hardly known himself. She was adventurous and entirely uninhibited. He was even, once, quite shocked.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do it,” she said serenely, “if I didn’t love you so much.”

  She still came to clean the house. His suggestion that it was no longer suitable, that he must find someone else, was met with incredulity, with laughter. Of course she would come to clean the house, and she did so, regularly, without fail. Only sometimes she came to him away from her work to kiss him or hold her arms around his neck and lay her cheek sweetly against his.

  It was a Saturday when she made that remark about loving him so much, and he expected her on the Monday morning. No, that is to put it too tamely. He hadn’t seen her for thirty hours, and he yearned for her. Waiting for the appointed hour, eight-thirty, he paced the house, watching for her from window after window.

  She didn’t come.

  After a half-hour of hell—in which he speculated every possible disaster, a road accident, her father’s wrath—when he at last decided he must phone the Peddars’ house, Lavinia came.

  She had no explanation to offer him beyond saying Susannah couldn’t be there and had sent her as a substitute. Susannah had come around to her mother’s very early and asked if Lavinia would do the Gothic House duty that day. Only today? he had asked, and she said as far as she knew. She, at any rate, doubted if she would be coming again herself. But when she said this she gave him one of her coy looks over her thin, white shoulder, somehow making him understand that future visits could happen, might be contingent on his response. He was disgusted and angry. He did his best to ignore her, put her money downstairs on the kitchen table, and fled to his room upstairs. Susannah would come that evening; they had an arrangement for her to come at seven, and then all would be well, all would be explained.

  Soon after Lavinia left, the estate agent phoned. A cottage had just been put on the market. It was in the heart of the village. Would he be interested? If so, the estate agent would meet him outside the cottage at three and show him around. The owner was a Mrs. Fowler, an old lady growing infirm, who intended to move in with her son and his wife.

  Ben walked to the village. It was a lovely day. The sun was brighter for him than for others, the lake bluer and its waters more sparkling, the flowers in the gardens more scented and more brilliant and the air sweeter—because he was in love. Sometimes “the glory” came back to him, and when that happened he wanted to leap and sing, he wanted to prostrate himself on the ground and cry aloud to whoever or whatever had given him the joy of love, had given him Susannah. All this was in his diary. A phrase from the Bible kept coming back to him: “And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” He said it to himself as he walked along—there shall be no more pain, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. He didn’t think the word in the text was “pain,” but he couldn’t really remember.

  Mrs. Fowler’s was a tiny cottage, two up and two down, with a thatched roof. The frowst
y little bedroom—low-ceilinged, the floor piled with layers of rugs, the bed with layers of dingy whitish covers, fringed or lacy, and now inhabited by sleeping cats—he saw as it would be when transformed, when occupied by himself and Susannah. A four-poster they would have, he thought, and he imagined her kneeling naked on the quilt, drawing back the curtains to disclose herself to him, the two of them sinking embraced into that silky, shadowy, scented warmth . . .

  He looked out of the window and faces looked back at him, one in each of the windows opposite. A curtain dropped; another pair of eyes appeared. Mrs. Fowler said comfortably, “Everyone likes to know your business down here.”

  She was a tiny, upright woman, still handsome in extreme age, hawk-faced and no doubt hawk-eyed, those eyes a sparkling pale turquoise.

  “My granddaughter does for you,” she said.

  He thought for some reason she meant Lavinia, but she didn’t.

  “Susannah Peddar.”

  There was the suspicion of a smile at the corners of her mouth when she said the name. She looked conspiratorial. In that moment he longed to tell her. An overpowering desire to tell her seized him, to come out with it. He wanted to say that this was why he needed a house in the village, a home to which he could bring his bride, a bower for Susannah, among her own people, a stone’s throw from her mother. How splendid it was, how serendipitous, that the very house in the whole village that might seem almost home to Susannah was the one he could buy.

  He managed to suppress that desire, but all ideas of purchasing Gothic House vanished.This was the house for him, the only one. He would have offered her double what she was asking, anything to possess it and present it to Susannah. Probably it was as well he had been cautioned only to make his offer through the estate agent.