Piranha to Scurfy

by Ruth Rendell

  “We’ve a witness,” said Iris. “Teresa saw it all.”

  “Teresa wasn’t in the house,” he said.

  “That’s not true,”Teresa Gresham said. “I’d been there an hour when Julie came. I expect you’d forgotten—there was a lot you forgot once you got to touch her.” She said to the Peddars, “I came out of the kitchen and I saw it all.”

  “What do you want of me?” he said again.

  “We don’t want to go to the police,” John Peddar said.

  His wife said, “It’s humiliating for our little girl.”

  “Not that it’s in any way her fault. But we’ll go to them if you don’t go.You go tonight and this’ll be the last you hear of it. Go now or we get the police. Me and Julie and her mother and Teresa.You can phone them on his phone, Iris.”

  He imagined the police coming and his having absolutely no defense except the truth, which would collapse in the face of Julie’s evidence and the Peddars’ and Teresa’s. If that wasn’t enough, they’d no doubt produce Sandy Clements, who would have also have been there watching, cleaning the windows perhaps or weeding the garden. Sandy he could pick out of the crowd packed into the room, just squeezed in, leaning against the closed door beside his new wife.

  “None of this is true,” he said. “It’s lies, and you know it.”

  They didn’t try to deny it. They weren’t interested in whether something was true or not, only in their power to control him. None of them smiled now or looked anything but grim. One of the strangest things, he said, was that they were all perfectly calm. There was no anxiety. They knew he’d do as they asked.

  “This is a false accusation, entirely fabricated,” he said.

  “Iris,” said John Peddar, “phone the police.”

  “Where’s the phone?”

  Teresa Gresham said, “It’s in the back room. I’ll come with you.”

  Sandy moved away from the door and opened it for them. The crowd made a passage, squeezing back against one another in a curiously intimate way, not seeming to resist the pressure of other bodies. Breasts pushed against arms, hips rested against bellies, without inhibition, without awkwardness. But perhaps that wasn’t curious, perhaps it wasn’t curious at all. They stood close together, crushed together, as if in some collective embrace, cheek to cheek, hand to shoulder, thigh to thigh.

  Then Teresa went out of the room. Iris, following her, had reached the door when Ben said, “All right. I’ll go.”

  He was deeply humiliated. He kept his head lowered so that he couldn’t meet Susannah’s eyes. His shame was so great that he felt a burning flush spread across his neck and face. But what else could he have done? One man is helpless against so many. In those moments he knew that every one of those people and those left behind in the village would stand by the Peddars. No doubt, if need was, they would produce other evidence of his proclivities, and he remembered how, once, he had taken hold of Carol Peddar by the wrist.

  “I’ll go now,” he said.

  They didn’t leave. They helped his departure. He went upstairs and they followed him, pushed their way into his bedroom. One of them found his suitcases; another set them on the bed and opened their lids. Teresa Gresham opened the wardrobe and took out his clothes. Kathy Gresham and Angela Burns folded them and packed them in the cases. No one touched him, but once he was in that bedroom, he was their prisoner. They packed his hairbrush and his shoes. John Peddar came out of the bathroom with his sponge bag and his razor and toothbrush. All the time, Julie, the injured one, sat on the bed and stared at him.

  Sandy Clements and George Whiteson carried the cases out of the room. One of the women produced a carrier bag and asked him if they’d got everything of his.When he said they had but for his dressing gown and the book he’d been reading in bed, she put those items in the bag, and then they let him leave the room.

  If they were enjoying themselves, there was no sign of it. They were calm, unsmiling, mostly silent. Teresa led a group of them into the back room, where he had worked on his translation, admitted him, and closed the door behind him. Gillian Atkins—she was bound to be there, his nemesis—brought two plastic bags with her, and into these they cleared his table of books and papers. They did it carefully, lining up the pages, clipping them together, careful not to crease or crumple. A man Ben didn’t recognize, though his coloring, height, and manner were consistent with the village people, unplugged his word processor and put it into its case. Then his dictionary went into the second bag.

  Again he was asked if there was anything they’d forgotten. He shook his head, and they let him go downstairs. Gillian Atkins went into the kitchen and came back with a bag containing the contents of the fridge.

  “Now give me the door key,” Kevin Gresham said.

  Ben asked why. Why should he?

  “You won’t need it. I’ll send it back to the present owner.”

  Ben gave him the key. He really had no choice. He left the house in the midst of them. Their bodies pressed against him, warm, shapely, herbal-smelling. They eased him out, nudging and elbowing him, and, when the last of them had left and turned out the hall light, closed the door behind them. His cases and bags were already in the boot of his car, his word processor in its case carefully placed on the floor in front of the back seat. He looked for Susannah to say good-bye, but she had already left; he could see the red taillights of the car she was in receding into the distance along the shore road.

  They accompanied him in convoy through the village, two cars ahead of him and all the rest behind. Every light was on, and some of the older people, the ones who hadn’t come to Gothic House, were in their front gardens to see him go. Not all the cars continued on. Some fell away when their owners’ homes were reached, but the Peddars and the Clementses continued to precede him, and Gillian Atkins with Angela Burns continued to follow him, as did, he thought, the Greshams, but he wasn’t sure of that because he couldn’t see the car color in the dark.

  After ten miles, almost at the approach to an A road, Gillian Atkins cut off his further progress the way a police car does, by overtaking him and pulling sharply ahead of him. He was forced to stop. The car behind stopped. Those in front already had. Gillian Atkins came around to his window, which he refused to open. But he’d forgotten to lock the door, and she opened it.

  “Don’t come back,” was all she said.

  They let him go on alone.

  He had to stop for a while on the A road in a lay-by because his hands were shaking and his breathing erratic. He thought he might choke. But after a while things improved and he was able to drive on to London.

  11

  My key came home before he did.

  There was no note to accompany it. I knew where it had come from only by the postmark. No one answered the phone, either at Gothic House or at Ben’s London flat. I drove to Gothic House, making the detour through the town to reach it, and found it empty, all Ben’s possessions gone.

  I phoned the estate agent and put the house up for sale.

  A month passed before Ben surfaced. He asked if he could come over, and once with me, he stayed. The translation was done. He had worked on it unremittingly, thinking of nothing else, closing off his mind, until it was finished.

  “Helen went back to her husband,” he said. “He took her home to Sparta, and she brought the heroes nepenthe in a golden dish, which made them forget their sorrows. My author got a lot of analytical insights out of that.”

  “What was nepenthe?” I said.

  “No one knows. Opium? Cannabis maybe?” He was silent for a while, then suddenly vociferous. “Do you know what I’d like? I’ve thought a lot about this. I’d like them to build a road right through that village, one of those bypasses there are all these protests about. They never work, the protests, do they? The road gets built. And that’s what I’d like to hear, that some town nearby has to be bypassed and the village is in the way, the village has to be cut in half, split up, destroyed.”

  “It do
esn’t seem very likely,” I said, thinking of the forest, the empty, arable landscape.

  After that he never mentioned the place, so when I heard, as I did from time to time, how my efforts to sell Gothic House were proceeding, I said nothing to him. I didn’t tell him when I heard, from the same source, that old Mrs. Fowler had died and had left, in excess of all expectations, rather a large sum.

  By then he’d shown me the diary and told me his story. In the details he told me far more than I often cared to hear. He was still sharing my house, though he often talked of buying somewhere for himself, and one evening, when we were alone and warm and I felt very close to him, when the story was long told, I asked him—more or less—if we should make it permanent, if we should change the sharing to a living together, with its subtle difference of meaning.

  I took his hand and he leaned toward me to kiss me absently. It was the sort of kiss that told me everything: that I shouldn’t have asked or even suggested, that he regretted I had, that we must forget it had ever happened.

  “You see,” he said, after a few moments, in which I tried to conquer my humiliation, “it sounds foolish, it sounds absurd, but it’s not only that I’ve never got over what happened, though that’s part of it. The sad, dreadful thing is that I want to be back there, I want to be with them. Not just Susannah—of course I want her, I’ve never stopped wanting her for more than a few minutes—but it’s to be with all of them that I want, and in that place. Sometimes I have a dream that I am—back there, I mean. I said yes to the offers, I was accepted, and I stayed.”

  “You mean you regret saying no?”

  “Oh, no. Of course not. It wouldn’t have worked. I suppose I mean I wish I were that different person it might have worked for. And then sometimes I think it never happened, that I only dreamed that it happened.”

  “In that case, I dreamed it too.”

  He said some more, about knowing that the sun didn’t always shine there, it wasn’t always summer, it couldn’t be eternally happy, not with human nature the way it was, and then he said he’d be moving out soon to live by himself.

  “Did you manage to sell Gothic House?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him the truth, that I’d heard the day before that I had a buyer, or rather a couple of buyers with an inheritance to spend, Kim Gresham and his wife. Greshams have always liked to live a little way outside the village.

  RUTH RENDELL

  Piranha to Scurfy

  Ruth Rendell has been awarded three Edgars for best novel by the Mystery Writers of America, as well as the Grand Master Award. In England, the Crime Writers Association has honored her with two Gold Dagger Awards for best novel, a Silver Dagger, and a Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. She lives in London.

  ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL

  AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD

  A Demon in My View

  The Fallen Curtain

  Harm Done

  A Judgement in Stone

  The Lake of Darkness

  Murder Being Once Done

  No More Dying Then

  One Across, Two Down

  Shake Hands Forever

  A Sleeping Life

  Some Lie and Some Die

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, DECEMBER 2002

  Copyright © 2000 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises

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