Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  It made him shudder to hear the village talked of as if it were heaven or some utopian planet. “In the world,” out there, two miles away . . .

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he said to me. “Human beings wouldn’t stand for it, not as a theory of life. It may be all right in a commune, a temporary thing, but for everyone of all ages, a whole village community in England? I asked her about jealousy. Teresa, I mean. I asked her. She said they used to say jealousy wasn’t in their blood, but now they thought it was rather that a gene of jealousy had been left out of them. After all, they were all more or less the same stock, they came out of the same gene pool.” He asked me, “Did you know about all this?”

  “I? No, I didn’t know.”

  “Not the green-eyed monster,” he said, “but the blue-eyed fairy. You didn’t know when you came down for that weekend?”

  “I knew there was something. I thought it was because I was a woman, and it wouldn’t happen to a man.”

  “We sat in that bedroom, Susannah and Teresa and I, and Teresa told me all about it. She’d known it all her life, it was part of everyone’s life, and as far as they knew it had always been so, perhaps for hundreds of years. When new people tried to live in the village they judged whether they’d be acceptable or not, did they have the right physical appearance, would they join in.”

  “You mean take part in this sexual free-for-all?”

  “They tested them. John Peddar passed the test. If they didn’t pass they—got rid of them. Like they were getting rid of the man from Lynn. He wouldn’t, Teresa said, but his wife would, and naturally the poor man didn’t want her to.”

  “And I wouldn’t,” I said, “and you wouldn’t.”

  “They knew enough to be aware that new genes ought to be introduced sometimes, though no defects ever appeared in the children. As to who their fathers were, it just as often wasn’t the mother’s husband, but he’d have children elsewhere, so no one minded. If a man’s children weren’t his they were very likely a brother’s or a cousin’s.”

  “How about accidental brother-and-sister incest?”

  “Perhaps they didn’t care,” he said, and then he said, “I’ve told you all this as if I believed it when I was first told. But I didn’t believe it. I thought Susannah had been brainwashed by her parents and Teresa roped in because she was articulate, a suitable spokeswoman.You see, it wasn’t possible for me to take this in after—well, after the way Susannah had been with me and the things she’d said. Teresa hadn’t been there, thank God—what did she know? I thought the Peddar family had instructed Susannah in what to say and they and Teresa had concocted this tale to make me back off.”

  “It was true, though, wasn’t it?”

  He said, “Even the Olympian gods were jealous. Hera persecuted the lovers of Zeus. Persephone was jealous of the King of the Underworld.” Then he answered me. “Oh, yes, it was true.”

  After Susannah had gone and Teresa had followed her, for he had told Teresa to get out of the house and never to come back, he shifted the blame from the Peddar family onto Teresa and onto Kim Gresham.Wasn’t she, after all, Kim Gresham’s aunt? (Or cousin or second cousin or even sister.) Kim Gresham was holding Susannah to her engagement even though she loved him, Ben. In the light of what he’d just heard this wasn’t a logical assumption, but he was beyond logic.

  He would go to the Greshams’ house and see Kim, have it out with him, drive down to the village and find out where he worked. But something strange happened while he was locking up, getting the car out. It was another beautiful day, sunny and warm, the blue sky flecked with tiny clouds like down. A pair of swans had appeared on the lake to swim on the calm, glassy water among the lily pads. The forest was a rich, velvety green, and for a moment he stood staring at the green reflected in the blue.

  He found himself thinking that if, as he put it, “all things had been equal,” if he hadn’t been in love with Susannah, how idyllic would be the life Teresa had presented to him: unlimited love and pleasure without jealousy or recrimination, without fear or risk, free love in all senses, something to look forward to all day and look back on every morning. Love of which one never wearied because if one did it could without pain or damage be changed. An endless series of love affairs in this beautiful place where everyone was kind and warm and liked you, where people clapped at the sight of kisses. He thought of his wife, whom he hated because she had been unfaithful to him. Here he would have given her his blessing, and they would still be together.

  If he believed what Teresa said. But he didn’t. The sun didn’t always shine. Jealousy hadn’t been left out of his genetic makeup nor, he was sure, out of Susannah’s. It hadn’t occurred to him before this that she might have slept with Kim Gresham, but now it did, and the green of the forest turned red, the sky blazed with a hard yellow light, passion roared inside his head, and he forgot about idylls and blessings and unlimited love.

  He drove to the village, parked the car, and went into the shop, the source of all his supplies of food and information. Anne Whiteson was less friendly than usual, and it occurred to him that Teresa might already have begun spreading the tale of her expulsion from Gothic House. She was less friendly, but it was no worse than that, and she was quite willing to tell him where Kim Gresham was to be found: at home with his parents in their house on the village outskirts. He had lost his job as a mechanic in a garage four miles away and was, until he found another, on the dole.

  Scorn was now added to Ben’s rage against Kim. Those Peddars were willing for their daughter to marry an unemployed man who couldn’t support her. They preferred that man to him. He made his way to the Greshams’ house, that pretty house a little way outside the village with the roses round the door. Kathy opened it and let him in, and he found Kim sprawled in the front room in front of the television. In his eyes, that compounded the offense.

  Kim got up when Ben came in and, all unsuspecting, smiling—how they all smiled and smiled!—held out his hand. He was a tall, well-built young man, very young, perhaps twenty, several inches taller than Ben and probably two stone heavier. Ben ignored the hand. It suddenly came to him that it wouldn’t do to have a row in Kim’s parents’ house, as he had no particular quarrel with the parents, and he told Kim to come outside.

  Though obviously in the dark about all this, Kim followed Ben out into the front garden. I suppose he thought Ben wanted to show him something—possibly there was something wrong with his car. After all, he was a motor mechanic. Outside, among the flowers, standing on a lawn with a birdbath in the middle of it, Ben told him he was in love with Susannah and she with him, there was no room for Kim in that relationship, he’d been replaced, his time with Susannah was past. Did he understand?

  Kim said he didn’t know what Ben was talking about. “I’m going to marry Susannah,” he said, and he said it with no show of emotion, in the tone he might have used to say he was going bowling or down to the pub. “The wedding’s been fixed for September. Second Saturday in September. You can come if you want. I know you like her, she’s said, and that’s okay with me. She’s told me all about it—we don’t have secrets.”

  Ben hit him. He said it was the first time in his life he’d ever hit anyone, and it wasn’t a very successful blow. He had lashed out and struck Kim on the neck below the jawbone, and he hit him again with the other fist, this time striking his head, but neither punch seemed to have much effect. Unlike adversaries in films, Kim didn’t reel back or fall over. He got hold of Ben around his neck, in that armlock the police are advised not to use on people they arrest, and propelled him down the path and out of the gate, where Ben collapsed and sat down heavily on the ground. Ben told me all this quite openly. He said he was utterly humiliated.

  Kim Gresham, who probably watched a lot of television, said to Ben not to try anything further or he might “be obliged to hurt him.” Then he asked him if he was all right and, when Ben didn’t answer, went back into the house and closed the front door quietly behind
him.

  Because the Gresham house stood alone with fields on either side of it—Greshams, someone had told me, always liked to live a little way away from the village—there were no witnesses. Ben got up and rubbed his neck and thought that, with luck, no one else would know of his defeat and humiliation. His ignorance of the village and its ways was still sublime. He still thought there were things he could do outside his own four walls and no one would know.

  He walked back to the village to where he had parked. In his absence his car had received attention. Someone had printed on the windscreen in a shiny red substance, probably nail varnish: GO AWAY. Even then he knew they didn’t just mean go away for now, don’t park here. The village street was empty. It often was, but if people were about this was the time they would be, eleven in the morning. There was no one to be seen. Even the front gardens were empty, and on this fine August day all the front doors and windows were closed. Eyes watched him. No one made any pretense that those eyes weren’t watching.

  Back at Gothic House he cleaned the printed letters off with nail-varnish remover he found in the bathroom cabinet. Deterred by what had happened but willing himself to be strong, he phoned the Peddars. A woman answered, Iris, he supposed, for the voice didn’t belong to Susannah or her sisters.

  He said, “This is Ben Powell.”

  Without another word, she put the receiver down. In the afternoon he phoned the hairdresser. Before the horrible things began to happen, on the previous evening when he and Susannah had been so happy, she’d told him she worked for the hairdresser on Friday afternoons as well. He phoned at two. Angela Burns answered, and when he said who it was, she put the receiver down.

  That shook him, because it seemed to him to prove that Kim Gresham or his mother had talked of what had happened. Teresa had talked. It was one thing telling the Peddars, but the news had spread to the hairdresser. His defeat of the morning made him feel he had to be brave. If he was to achieve anything, overcome these people and secure Susannah for himself exclusively, he had to have courage now. He drove back to the village, but this time he parked the car directly outside the shop.

  When Anne Whiteson saw him she said straight out she wasn’t going to serve him. Then she walked into the room at the back and shut the door behind her. Ben went to the staircase, but before he’d gone up half a dozen stairs Susannah appeared at the top. She came down and met him halfway. Or, rather, she stood two stairs above him. He put out his hand to her.

  She shook her head and said very softly, so that no one else should hear, “It’s over, Ben.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “What do you mean, over? Because of what these people say and do? The rest of the world isn’t like this, Susannah.You don’t know that but I do, I’ve seen, believe me.”

  “It’s over,” she said, and now she was whispering. “I thought it needn’t be, I thought it could go on, because I do love you, but it has to be over because of what you’ve done and, Ben, because of what you are.”

  “What I am?”

  “You’re not like my dad, not many are. You’re like the man who lives in the rectory, you’re like the lady Gothic House belongs to. I didn’t think you were, but you are.”

  “This is all nonsense.” He wasn’t going to whisper, no matter what she might do. “It’s rubbish, it’s irrelevant. Listen, Susannah, I want us to go away. Come away with me.” He forgot about her grandmother’s cottage. “I’ve got a place in London. We can go there tonight—we can go there now.”

  “You must go, Ben. I’m not going anywhere. This is where I live and I always will, you know. The people who live here never want to go away.” She reached down from her higher stair and touched him on the arm. It was electric, that touch; he felt the shock of it run up his arm and rattle his body. “But you must go,” she said.

  “Of course I’m not going,” he shouted. “I’m staying here, and I’m going to get you away from these people.”

  He meant it. He thought he could. He ran back to his car and drove home to Gothic House, where he began composing a letter to Susannah’s parents and another, for good measure I suppose, to Susannah’s grandmother. Perhaps he was thinking of her in the capacity of a village elder. Then by one of those coincidences, just as he was writing “Dear Mrs. Fowler,” the phone rang. It was the estate agent to tell him Susannah’s grandmother had received a better offer than his for her house.

  “What is it?” he said. “I’ll match it.” Recklessness, which can be as much the effect of terror as of happiness, made him say, “I’ll top it.”

  “Mrs. Fowler has already accepted the offer.”

  He tore up the letter he’d started writing. The one he’d written to the Peddars remained on his desk. But he intended to send it. He intended to fight. This time he refused to allow himself to become despondent. He pushed away the longings for her that came, the desire that was an inevitable concomitant of thinking of her. He would fight for her, he would think of that. What did the loss of the cottage matter? They couldn’t live in this village, anyway.

  He refused to let her become part of what he saw as an exceptionally large commune, where wife-swapping was the norm and husbands couldn’t tell which were their own offspring. For a moment he had seen it, very briefly he’d seen it, as the ideal that all men, and women too perhaps, would want. But that had been a moment of madness. These people had made a reality out of a common fantasy, but he was not going to be drawn into it and nor was Susannah. Nor was he going to leave the village until it was to take her with him.

  8

  They got rid of me. I had no idea of the reason for my expulsion—no, that’s not true. I did have ideas, they just weren’t the right ones. I did have explanations of a kind. I was a “foreigner,” so to speak, born and bred a long way off with most of my life lived elsewhere. I’d sacked Sandy.When I asked myself if it also had something to do with my repudiation of John Peddar I was getting near the truth, but I thought it too far-fetched. Aware that I had somehow offended, I could never believe that I had done anything reprehensible enough to deserve the treatment I got.

  The day after the bathers had extended their invitation to me—the final overture, as it happened, from any of them—I went to church. I tried to go to church. It was Saint John’s day and the church’s dedication was to Saint John, and I had noticed that a special service was always held on that day, whether it fell during the week or on a Sunday. They had a wonderful organist at Saint John’s, a Burns who came from a village some miles away but was, I suppose, a cousin of that Angela, the hairdresser. The visiting clergyman preached a good sermon, and everyone sang the hymns lustily.

  One of the sidesmen or wardens—I don’t know what he was but he was a Stamford, I knew that—met me in the church porch. He was waiting for me. They knew I’d come, and they’d despatched him to wait for me.

  “The service is private this morning,” he said.

  “What do you mean, private?”

  “I’m not obliged to explain to you,” he said, and he stood with his back against the heavy old door, barring my way.

  There wasn’t much I could do. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get involved in a struggle with him. I went back to my car and drove home, indignant and humiliated. I wasn’t frightened then, not yet, not by then.

  A week later I came down again. I came on the Friday evening, as I often did when I could make it. Of course I’d thought a lot about what had happened when I’d tried to get into the church, but the incident became less a cause for rage and indignation the more I considered it. Perhaps I’d asked my question aggressively and Stamford, also being inclined to belligerence, had answered in kind. Perhaps he was having a bad day, was already angry. It was nonsense, I decided, to suppose “they” had sent him; it was paranoia. He happened to be there, was probably just arriving himself, when I arrived.

  All this, somewhat recycled and much reviewed, was passing through my mind as I reached the village at dusk that Friday evening. They kn
ew I would come, knew too approximately what time I’d come, and besides that, I had to pass the Greshams’ house two minutes before I entered the village proper. They used the phone and their own grapevine.

  It was like pictures that one sees of streets that royalty or some other celebrity is about to pass through.They were all outside, standing in front of their houses. They stood in front gardens if they had them, on the road itself if they didn’t. But those waiting to welcome someone famous are preparing to smile and wave, even to cheer. These people, these Kirkmans and Burnses, Stamfords and Wantages, Clementses and Atkinses and Fowlers, all of them, some with children in their arms, tall, fair, handsome people, stood and stared.

  As I approached I saw their eyes all turned in my direction, and as I passed I’ve no doubt their eyes followed, for in my driving mirror I could see them staring after me. All down that village street they were outside their houses, waiting for me. Not one of them smiled. Not one of them even moved beyond turning their eyes to follow me. Outside the last house three old people stood, a woman between two men, all holding hands. I don’t know why this hand-holding particularly unnerved me. Perhaps it was the implication of total solidarity it conveyed. Now I think it symbolized what I had rejected: diffused love.

  A little way down the road I slowed and saw in the mirror the three of them turn and go back into the house. I drove to Gothic House, and when I got out of the car I found that I was trembling. They had done very little, but they had frightened me. I hadn’t much food in the house and I’d meant to go to the village shop in the morning, but now I wouldn’t go. I’d take the road that didn’t pass through the village to the town four miles away.

  I’ve since wondered if they approached every newcomer to the village or if they applied some system of selection. Would they, for instance, tolerate someone for the sake of a spouse, as in the case of the farmer from Lynn? Would elderly retired people be welcome? I thought not, since their principal motivation was to draw in new genes to their pool and the old were past breeding.