Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  I should therefore, I suppose, have been flattered, for I was getting on to forty. Did they hope I would settle there, would live there, marry some selected man? I shall never know. I shall never know why they wanted Ben, although it has occurred to me that it might have been for his intellect. He had a good mind, and perhaps they thought that brains too might be passed on. Perhaps whoever decided these things—all of them in concert? like a parliament?—discerned a falling intelligence quotient in the village.

  He too tried to go to church. It was Sandy’s wedding, and Susannah had said they would go to it together. His mind had magnified her invitation to a firm promise, and he still believed she’d honor it. He stuck for a long while to his belief that, having said and said many times that she loved him, she would come to him and stay with him.

  He wasn’t, then, frightened of the village the way I was. He walked there boldly and knocked on the Peddars’ door. Carol opened it. When she saw who it was she tried to shut the door, but he put his foot in the way. He pushed past her into the house, and she came after him as he kicked the door open and burst into their living room.There was nobody there: all the Peddars but Carol had already gone to the wedding. He didn’t believe her, and he ran upstairs, going into all the rooms.

  “Where’s Susannah?”

  “Gone,” she said. “Gone to the church. You’ll never get her—you might as well give up. Why don’t you go away?”

  Leave the house was what he thought she meant. He didn’t, then, take in the wider implication. Sandy was just arriving at the church when he got there, Sandy in a morning coat and carrying a topper, looking completely different from the handyman and window cleaner Ben knew. His best man was one of the Kirkmans, similarly dressed, red-faced, very blond, self-conscious. Ben stood by the gate and let them go in. Then he tried to get in himself, and his way was barred by two tall men who came out of the porch and simply marched at him. Ben didn’t recognize them, though they sounded from his description like George Whiteson and Roger Atkins. They marched at him, and he stood his ground.

  For a moment. It’s hard to do that when you’re being borne down upon, but Ben did his best. He walked at them, and there was an impasse as he struggled to break through the high wall their bodies made and they pushed at him with the flat of their hands. They were determined not to assault him directly, Ben was sure of that. He, however, was indifferent as to whether he assaulted them or not. He said he beat at them with his fists, and that was when other men joined in: John Peddar, who came out of the church, and Philip Wantage, who had just arrived with his daughter, the bride. They pinned Ben’s arms behind him, lifted him up, and dropped him onto the grass on the other side of the wall.

  With these indignities heaped on him, he sat up in time to see Rosalind Wantage in white lace and streaming veil proceed up the path with a bevy of pink-clad Kirkman and Atkins and Clements girls behind her. He tried to go after them but was once more stopped at the porch. Another tall, straight-backed guardian gave him a heavy push that sent him sprawling and retreated into the church. Ben sprang at the door in time to hear a heavy bolt slide across it on the inside.

  The more of this they did, the more he believed that they might be acting on Susannah’s behalf but not with her consent. It was a conspiracy to keep her from him. He sat on the grass outside the church gate and waited for the wedding to be over. It was a fine, sunny day and such windows in the church as could be opened were open. Hymns, swelling from the throats of almost the entire village, floated out to him, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” and “The Voice That Breathed o’er Eden.”

  “For dower of blessed children,

  For love and faith’s sweet sake,

  For high mysterious union

  Which nought on earth may break.”

  No one should break the union he had with Susannah and, sitting out there in the sunshine, perhaps he thought of the night they had spent, of transcendence and sex made spirit, which he had written of in his diary. It didn’t occur to him then, though it did later, that a high mysterious union was what that village had, what those village people had.

  They began coming out of the church, bride and bridegroom first, then bridesmaids and parents. Susannah came out with her parents and Carol. He said that when he saw her he saw no one else. Everyone else became shadows, gradually became invisible, when she was there. She came down the path, let herself out of the gate. What the others did he said he didn’t know, if they stared after her or made to follow her, he had no eyes for them.

  Susannah was in a pale blue dress. If she had stood against the sky, he said, it would have disappeared into the blueness, it was like a thin scanty slip of sky. She pushed back her hair with long pale fingers. He wanted to fall at her feet, her beautiful white feet, and worship her.

  “You must go away, Ben,” she said to him. “I’ve told you that before, but you didn’t hear me.”

  “They’ve put you up to this,” he said. “You’re wrong to listen. Why do you listen? You’re old enough to make up your own mind. Don’t you understand that away from here you can have a great life? You can do anything.”

  “I don’t want us to have to hurt you, Ben.” She didn’t say “them,” she said “us.”“We needn’t do that if you go.You can have a day.You don’t have to go till Monday, but you must go on Monday.”

  “You and I will go on Monday.” But her use of that “us” and that “we” had shaken him. “You’re coming with me, Susannah,” he said, but his doubts had at last begun.

  “No, Ben, you’ll go.You’ll have to.” She added, as if inconsequentially, but it was a consequence, it was an absolute corollary, “Sandy’s buying the cottage, Grandma’s cottage, for him and Roz to live in.”

  I haven’t said much about the forest.

  The forest surrounded the lake in a horseshoe shape with a gap on the side where the road left its shores and turned toward the village. Behind the arms of the horseshoe it extended for many miles, dense and intersected only by trails or as a scattered sprinkling of trees with healthy clearings between them. It was protected, and parts of it were a nature reserve, the habitat of the little owl and the greater spotted woodpecker. If I haven’t mentioned it much, if I’ve avoided referring to it, it’s because of the experience I had within its depths, the event that drove me from the village and made me decide to sell Gothic House.

  Already, by then, the place was losing its charms for me. I avoided it for a whole month after that Friday night drive through the village, confronted as I’d been by the silent, staring inhabitants. But I still liked the house and its situation, I loved the lake and walking in the forest, the nightingales in spring and the owl calling in winter, the great skies and the swans and water lilies. Unwilling to face that silent hostility again, I drove down very late. I passed through half an hour before midnight.

  No one was about, but every light was on.They had turned on the lights in every room in the front of their houses, upstairs and down. The village was ablaze. And yet not a face showed at any of those bright windows. It was if they had turned on their lights and left, departed somewhere, perhaps to be swallowed up by the forest. I think those lights were more frightening than the hostile stares had been, and then and there I resolved not to pass through the village again, for, as I slowed and turned to look, the lights were one after another turned off; all died into darkness. No one had departed: they were there, and they had done their work.

  I wouldn’t pass through the village again, not at least until they had got over whatever it was, had come to accept me again. I really believed then that this would happen. But not passing through hardly meant I had to stay indoors. There is, after all, little point in a weekend retreat in the country if you never go out of it.

  On Saturday afternoons I was in the habit of going for a walk in the forest. If I had a guest I asked that guest to go with me; if I was alone I went alone. They knew I was alone that weekend. If I hadn’t seen them behind their lights they had seen me
, alone at the wheel in an otherwise empty car.

  At three in the afternoon I set out into the forest. It was May, just one year before Ben went there, not a glorious day but fine enough, the sun coming out for half an hour, then retreating behind fluffy white clouds. A little wind was blowing, not then much more than a breeze. Ten minutes into the forest and I saw the first of them. I was walking on the wide path that ran for several miles into the forest’s heart. He stood close to the silver-gray trunk of a beech tree. I recognized him as George Whiteson, but if he recognized me—and of course he did, I was why he was there—he gave no sign of it. He wasn’t staring this time, but looking at the ground around his feet.

  A hundred yards on, three of them were sitting on a log, Kirkmans or Kirkmans and an Atkins, I forget and it doesn’t matter, but I saw them and they affected not to see me, and almost immediately there were more, a man and a woman on the ground embracing—a demonstration for my benefit, I suppose—then two children in the branches of a tree, a knot of women—those bathers, standing in a ring, holding hands.

  The sun was shining onto a clearing, and it was beautiful in there, all the tiny wildflowers in blossom in the close heathy turf, crab-apple trees flowering, and the sunlight flitting, as the wind drove clouds across it and bared it again. But it was terrible too, with those people, the whole village it seemed, there waiting for me but making no sign they’d seen me. They were everywhere, near at hand or in the depths of the forest, close to the path or just discernible at the distant end of a green trail, Burnses and Whitesons, Atkinses and Fowlers and Stamfords, men and women, young and old. And as I walked on, as I tried to stick it out and keep on, I became aware that they were following me. As I passed they fell into silent step behind, so that when I turned around—it was quite a long time before I turned around—I saw behind me this stream of people padding along quietly on the sandy path, on last year’s dry, fallen leaves.

  It was as if I were the Pied Piper. But the children I led were not in happy thrall to me, not following me to some paradise, but dogging my steps with silent menace, driving me ahead of them. To what end? To what confrontation in the forest depths?

  I was terribly afraid. It’s not an exaggeration to say I feared for my life. The whole tribe of them, as one, had gone mad, had succumbed to spontaneous psychopathy, had conceived some fearful paranoiac hatred of me. They would surround me in some dark green grove and murder me. In their high mysterious union. In silence.

  But I never quite came to believe that. If I wanted to crouch on the ground and cover my head and whimper to them to let me go, to leave me alone, I didn’t do that either. By some sort of effort of will that I achieved, God knows how, I turned, clenched my fists, set one foot before the other, and began walking back the way I’d come.

  This brought me face to face with the vanguard of them, with John Peddar and one of his daughters, Susannah herself for all I know.They fell back out of my path. It was gracefully done; one by one they all yielded, half bowing, as if this were some complicated ritual dance and they giving place to the principal dancer, who must now pass with prescribed steps down the space between them. Only I had no partner in this minuet; I was alone.

  No one spoke. I didn’t speak. I wanted to, I wanted to challenge them, to ask why, but I couldn’t. I suppose I knew I wouldn’t get an answer or perhaps that no voice would come when I tried to speak. The speechless-ness was one of the worst things, that and the closed faces and the silent movements. Another was the sound of the rising wind.

  They followed me all the way back. While I was in the forest the wind could be heard but not much felt. It met me as I emerged onto the lakeshore and even held me back for a moment, as if pushing me with its hands. The surface of the lake was ruffled into waves, and the tree branches were pulled and stretched and beaten. By the shore the people who followed me let me go and turned aside, two hundred of them I suppose, at least two hundred.

  From having been perfectly silent, they broke into talk and laughter as soon as they were separated from me and, buffeted by the wind, made their way homeward. I ran into my house. I shut myself inside, but I could still hear their voices, raised in conversation, in laughter, and at last in song. It would be something to chronicle, wouldn’t it, if they’d sung an ancient ballad, a treasure for an anthropologist, something whose words had come down unbroken from the time of Langland or Chaucer? But they didn’t. The tune I heard carried by the wind, receding, at last dying into silence, was “Over the Rainbow.”

  That evening the gale became a storm. Trees went down on the edge of the woodland and four tiles blew off the roof of Gothic House. The people of the village weren’t to blame, but that was not how it seemed to me at the time, as I cowered in my house, as I lay in bed listening to the storm, the crying of the wind and the crash of falling tree branches. It was just a lucky happening for them that this gale blew up immediately after their slow, dramatic pursuit of me in the forest. But that night I could have believed them all witches and magicians, wicca people who could control the elements and raise a wind.

  9

  They had something else in store for Ben.

  “I was determined not to go,” he said. “I would have gone immediately if Susannah had come too, but without her I was going to stay put. On the Sunday I went back to the village to try to find her, but no one would answer their doors to me, not just the Peddars, no one.”

  “It was brave of you to try,” I said, and that was when I told him what had happened to me, the silent starers, the blazing lights, the pursuit through the forest.

  “I’d stopped being a coward,” Ben said. “Well, I thought I had.”

  The next morning someone was due to come and clean the house. Which girl would they send? Or was it possible Susannah might come? Of course he hadn’t slept much. He hadn’t really slept for four nights, and exhaustion was beginning to tell on him. If he managed to doze off it would be to plunge into dreams of Susannah, always erotic dreams but deeply unsatisfying. In them she was always naked. She began making love with him, kissing him, placing his hands on her body as was her habit, kissing his fingers and taking them to the places she loved to be touched. Then, suddenly, she would spring out of his arms and run to whoever had come into the room, Kim Gresham or George Whiteson or Tom Kirkman, it could be any of them, and in a frenzy begin stripping off their clothes, nuzzling them, gasping with excitement. He’d reached a point where he didn’t want to sleep for fear of those dreams.

  By eight-thirty the next morning he’d been up for more than two hours. He’d made himself a pot of coffee and drunk it. His head was banging, and he felt sick. The time went by, nine o’clock went by, and no one came. No one would come now, he knew that.

  The weather had changed and become dull and cool. He went outside for a while and walked about, he couldn’t say why. There wasn’t anyone to be seen—there seldom was—but he had a feeling that he was being watched. He took his work into the ground-floor front room because he knew it would be impossible for him to stay upstairs in the back. If he did that, sat up there where he could only see the rear garden and the forest, something terrible might happen in the front, by the lake, some awful event take place that he ought to witness. It was an unreasonable feeling, but he gave in to it and moved into the living room.

  The author of The Golden Apple was analyzing Helen, her narcissism, her choice of Menelaus declared by hanging a wreath round his neck, her elopement with Paris. Ben tried to concentrate on translating this, first to understand which events stemmed in the writer’s estimation from destiny and which from character, but he couldn’t stop himself from constantly glancing up at the window. Half an hour had passed, and he had translated only two lines, when a car came along the road from the village. It parked by the lake in front of Gothic House.

  I suppose there was about a hundred yards between the house and the little beach, and the car was on the grass just above the beach. He watched and waited for the driver or the driver and passenge
r to get out of it and come up to the house. No one did. Nothing moved. Then about ten minutes later the car windows were wound down. He saw that the driver was Kim Gresham and his passenger an unknown woman.

  He tried to work. He translated the lines about Helen taking one of her children on the elopement with her, then read what he had written and saw that the prose was barely comprehensible and the sense lost. There was no point in working in these conditions. He wondered what would happen if he tried to go out and felt sure that if he attempted a walk to the village those two would stop him. They would seize hold of him and frog-march him back to the house.

  “I thought of calling the police,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “The man they’d have sent lived in the police house in the village. He’s one of them, he’s called Michael Wantage. If anyone else had come, what could I have said? That two people were sitting in a parked car admiring the view? I didn’t call the police. I got my car out of the garage.”

  He put his work aside and decided to drive to the town four miles away and do his weekly shopping. He watched them watching him as he backed the car out.

  “I think they were hoping I’d fetch out suitcases and the word processor and my books. Then they’d know I was being obedient and leaving. They’d just have let me go, I’m sure of that. A sigh of relief would have been heaved and they’d have gone back to the village.”

  As it was, they followed him. He saw the car behind him all the way. They made no attempt at secrecy. In the town he left his car and went to the supermarket but, as far as he knew, they remained in theirs. When he got back they were still sitting in their car, and when he drove home they were behind him.