by Ruth Rendell
Eva was a young woman whose Mini broke down on the A12. She filled in the form he had to ask clients to complete but added to all the boxes she had ticked as excellent, that he was ‘a lovely man who was so kind and nice’. It turned out that she lived with her parents quite near where he lived. Standing there on the muddy grass verge five miles from Chelmsford, he asked her out and six months later they were married. It was a successful marriage and they were happy, though without children, perhaps (he sometimes thought) because they were without children. An only child, Eva had inherited her parents’ house and their modest savings which had enabled him to buy number 3 Kenilworth Avenue when he retired two years after her death from cancer.
Duncan thought of some of these events in his past life as he moved from his own bedroom and the spare bedroom next to it to tidy one of the cupboards in the room at the back. He had brought a large carrier bag upstairs with him and into it he began putting the last of Eva’s clothes. Most that she left behind her had long gone to Oxfam. He hardly knew why he had kept these, there was nothing special about them, they had no smell of her scent, none of them was a favourite of hers. Perhaps they had been left because when he got rid of the others he wasn’t able to carry any more. He tied up the handles of the bag, looked out of the window. It was a funny thing, he thought, but when you went into a room you seldom entered you almost always did look out of its window.
During the hours he had worked the fog had lifted. A little snow was still lying. Patches of it lay in the shady places of next door’s untended garden and on the peaked roof of the little summer house which stood up against its rear fence. Duncan called it a summer house because it wasn’t a garage but next door to the garage and it was too big and – well – nice, to be a shed with its pink-painted fretwork eaves, its arched windows and its glass-panelled front door. As he watched, someone came out from the back of the house and was walking down the path towards the back fence. It was a young man this time and Duncan hadn’t seen him before. The young wife’s brother who was staying with them? He too was wearing only jeans and a T-shirt and Duncan wondered what beautiful country of green mountains, dense forests and perpetually blue skies he had left behind to come to this cold cloud-covered suburb. He watched the boy open the door of the summer house and go inside.
Business being practically non-existent, Freddy sat in his office at Crabtree, Livorno, Thwaite and opened the London street guide he had bought while he was waiting for a key to be cut from the one he had taken from Claudia’s handbag. The chances of a block of flats – surely what the name Lichfield House designated – being listed in this guide seemed to him practically nil but he would give it a go. The index was vast and lo and behold (a favourite phrase with Freddy) here was not Lichfield House but Lichfield Road, turning out of Kenilworth Avenue, with a north London postal address. There was not necessarily a connection but after he had seen his one client of the afternoon, he would go and look.
The client’s reason for this interview was rather too close to home for Freddy’s liking. He wanted a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery. Having spent an uncomfortable half-hour in which he had resisted telling the client about useful little eavesdropping gizmos, Freddy drove up to what he thought of as beyond the bleak reaches of northern suburbs and found Lichfield Road. He parked the car in the one remaining empty space outside the Kenilworth Parade shops and went into Wicked Wine. A woman in a long coat with the hem coming down and a hat shaped like a coal scuttle was buying gin. The man behind the counter wrapped the bottles, put them into her carrier and took her cash.
‘And how can I help you, sir?’
‘I don’t suppose,’ said Freddy, ‘there’s a place round here called Lichfield House.’
‘You don’t suppose, do you? Well, you’re in luck,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s just round the corner. Olwen lives there and you can go with her. He can go with you, can’t he, Olwen?’
‘Not really,’ said Olwen.
This greatly amused Rupert who roared with laughter and said, ‘Will you listen to her!’
Freddy followed the woman in the coal-scuttle hat, now struggling along with the bag of bottles. ‘Can I carry that for you?’
‘Not really,’ said Olwen in a considerably colder voice than she had used to the wine-shop man. She hobbled along the path, nearly slipping over on a sheet of ice, and lumbered into the block as the automatic doors opened for her.
Avoiding the ice, Freddy stood on the step, thinking about having an immediate confrontation with Stuart Font. The difficulty was that he hadn’t brought a weapon with him, the walking stick he had in mind. Instead, he too went through the entrance and had a look at the pigeonholes on the right-hand wall. Olwen had disappeared. As Freddy was reading the name S. Font on the lowest pigeonhole a man he supposed to be a porter came up from a staircase beside the lift.
‘Might you be visiting one of our residents, sir?’
‘Mind your own business,’ said Freddy.
‘If this isn’t my bloody business, sir, I don’t know what is.’
‘Piss off,’ said Freddy.
Any steps he took would have to wait till after Christmas, less than a week away. On his way out he met a tall, extremely thin man with longish, sparse grey hair who, making for the pigeonholes, stopped unwillingly to listen to the porter’s torrent of complaints. Freddy went to find his car. It had received a parking ticket in his absence.
*
Carrying his post, Marius Potter went up the flight of stairs to Flat 3, constrained to this means of ascending by a fear of lifts. Long ago he had tried to construct a name for this phobia of his, as it might be treskaidecaphobia, a fear of the number thirteen, or ailurophobia, a fear of cats, but the difficulty was that the Greeks had no lifts. He still had quite a good command of classical Greek, so he tried the verb to lift but there was no noun. The same applied to the verb to elevate. In the end he had decided on the verb to rise. Or the noun as in sunrise which seemed to be ‘epidosis’. Epidosephobia was the best he could do but that didn’t really satisfy him. Before he came to Lichfield House he had lived in a block on the eighth floor, so this was a breeze. Generally speaking, Marius was a bit of an anachronism or Luddite. He disliked innovations, though he possessed a fridge and a TV set which was seldom switched on.
His flat was full of furniture inherited from dead relatives, threadbare armchairs and scuffed tables and curiosities such as stuffed animals and peculiarly shaped china vessels with arms and branches protruding from them reminiscent of hugely magnified photographs of bacteria. There were also a lot of books, new books, hundreds of them, and old books, dusty, all of them non-fiction. One, thick, red with gold lettering on its spine, lay open on an iron table that looked as if it had once belonged in a pub.
Marius sat down at the pub table and looked at his post. Most of it was junk mail but there was also a letter from his sister Meriel in Aylesbury. Meriel was one of the few people he knew who didn’t reproach him for his lack of a computer and therefore of email. Like him, she disliked modernity but, he had to confess, went one better than he in that she and her husband lived in a dilapidated thatched cottage, heated only by coal fires. Both he and she had a phone, however, and he had a mobile. Perhaps he would phone her and ask for her help in solving a problem.
‘Rose Preston-Jones?’ said Meriel, not sounding at all puzzled. ‘You think you recognise her? Well, of course you do. Don’t you remember when we were all living in that commune in Hackney?’
‘You mean she was there?’
‘Only for a few days. She moved on but she was there.’
‘I don’t remember the name.’
‘We all knew her as Rosie.’
And then Marius did remember. No wonder he had felt awkward when he thought of asking Rose herself. Now he began to remember and he was back in that commune, that squat really in a Hackney slum, a big old house that he and his sister and a bunch of like-minded hippies had taken over. He was even thinner then than he was
now and his hair was longer, bright brown and reaching to the middle of his back. They all dressed in tie-dyed clothes except Rosie who wore cheesecloth. Meriel was right when she said Rosie had only been there for a couple of days before moving on. In fact, it was a day and a night, and that night, without the aid of cannabis or wine, he and Rosie had shared a bed.
They had all been sitting in a circle, passing round joints, only Rosie wouldn’t. That made him stop and just sit there with his arm around her. She didn’t know where she was supposed to sleep and when he started taking her to Harriet’s room she clung to him and said not to leave her … He remembered what happened as delightful, entirely satisfactory, and he remembered falling asleep and wanting it to go on in the morning and the next day and the next night. But when he woke at some hour he would now find an incredible time to be still in bed, midday probably, she was gone. Not just from his bed but from the house, gone no one knew where. He didn’t attempt to find her. It had just been a one-night stand, nicer and somehow sweeter than most, but never intended to be the start of a permanency.
And for more than thirty years he had forgotten her.
What to do? Consult the sortes, of course. Where others might have used the Bible or Virgil’s Aeneid, Marius had for many years now, sought advice from Paradise Lost. Not for a moment did he believe in this or any other means of divination and he was always surprised to find how many others did. But it amused him and he continued to do it for those who asked, though resisting the suggestions of those who wanted him to set up as a fortune-teller and charge for his forecasts.
Now he picked up the book and opened it as he always did at random. The rules were where his eye first alighted, and though he didn’t believe, he adhered to the rule that there was no point in doing it at all if you cheated. He read, ‘Her long with ardent look his eye pursued / Delighted, but desiring more her stay …’ It could plainly be taken as a reference to the way he had felt about Rosie that night and the day after but it gave him no counsel. Milton, he had found, sometimes simply commented on the seeker’s situation.
Above his head he heard a familiar sound. Olwen, though having had nothing to eat, had drifted into her after-lunch sleep, the empty bottle sliding off her lap and rolling across the floorboards.
Those of the residents whose parents were still alive went home for Christmas – they still called it home – Rose up to Edinburgh, Stuart to Loughton, the Constantines to Katie’s mother in Wales. Marius’s parents were dead as, necessarily, were all those relatives who had left him their furniture. Noor left for the parental mansion in Surrey, Molly to Torquay and Sophie to join her mother, father, three brothers and a sister in Purley.
Marius was invited to his sister’s vegan Christmas in Aylesbury and had to stay two nights because no trains were running. Duncan Yeardon watched them all go. He made a sort of game for himself, noting who had gone and who stayed. They all went but for Olwen and he saw her hobbling round to Wicked Wine on Christmas Eve in her old black coat and coal-scuttle hat, returning with rather more than usual supplies. Mrs Gamp, he called her. She would be having a party, he decided. A widow, no doubt, with grown-up children and possibly grandchildren. She would have fetched all the requisite food in days before.
As for him, he would be alone. But he had plenty of food and the house was beautifully warm, a real treat. In time he would get to know more people now he had been invited to that gay man’s house-warming party.
CHAPTER FOUR
Coming so soon after his return from Loughton, his mother’s call had thoroughly unsettled him. Stuart now wished he hadn’t answered the phone when it rang. He had told her repeatedly he didn’t want a job. Not yet he didn’t. Wasn’t he taking a gap year?
‘Oh, darling, something exciting,’ she had said. ‘Daddy’s friend Bertram Dixon says he may have something for you if you’d like to phone his secretary and arrange a time for an interview. Daddy says it’s a marvellous opportunity for you.’
‘I don’t want a job with Bertram Dixon or anyone else,’ Stuart had said, but now he was in a dilemma of doubt. Should he have dismissed the offer just like that? Could he afford to? He had only been at Lichfield House since October and all the time his money was gushing away. ‘Haemorrhaging’ was the word he had read somewhere. When he had come into his legacy, putting half of it into this flat and investing the rest so that he had the interest to live on had looked an ideal lifestyle. Since then, the bank rate had fallen and fallen, much of his stock attracted no more than one and a half per cent. He was drawing on his capital at an alarming rate and Claudia didn’t help. Walking down Heath Street after their lunch, she had pulled him after her into a jeweller’s where she had expected him to buy her a necklace, reduced in their pre-Christmas sale, to ‘no more than a thousand pounds, darling’. Of course he had bought it. Was it wise to have said such an adamant no to Bertram Dixon’s offer? Perhaps he should call his mother back. But, no. He remembered how much he disliked Bertram Dixon, an arrogant pompous man he wouldn’t want to work for in any circumstances.
Forget it. Think of something else. He made himself a mug of hot chocolate and sat down to contemplate the three replies he had had to his invitations. All, from the Constantines, the old man opposite and Rose Preston-Jones who also replied for Marius Potter, were acceptances. If they all accepted, how much was it going to cost? What had made him think that the dozen bottles of champagne Rupert had delivered to him the day before would be adequate? He would need wine as well and sparkling water and orange juice and food. He put his head in his hands, took it out again at the sound of a key in his front-door lock. He got to his feet. It could only be Claudia – at ten in the morning?
A man he had never seen before walked into the room, snow on his boots and an encrusting of snow on his hair.
Stuart might have asked him who he was but he didn’t. ‘How did you get in?’ he said. An awful feeling of impending doom was starting to well up inside him.
‘I have a key,’ said the man.
He was in his thirties and tall but not as tall as Stuart, his hair receding a little, his features nondescript, apart from his eyes which were the kind that seem to have more white around the irises than most people’s. His left hand he was holding behind his back. If asked to describe him, Stuart would have said that he looked clever, though he couldn’t have said how he knew this.
‘My name is Frederick Livorno, commonly called Freddy.’
Stuart said before he could help himself, ‘Oh my God.’
‘You may well say so,’ said Freddy Livorno. ‘You may well call upon your god. You’re going to need him. The key with which I opened your front door I found in my wife’s handbag. A highly elaborate handbag, much decorated with metal nonsense. Frivolous, no doubt, but you know what women are. As a practised adulterer, you do know what women are, don’t you?’
‘Look,’ said Stuart, who was starting to feel frightened, ‘we can talk about this. Why don’t we sit down?’
‘The reason I don’t,’ said Freddy Livorno, ‘is that I prefer to stand in your company. This is not a social visit.’ He had the kind of upper-class accent which is more than the result of a public school and a top-of-the-league university, it is learned at one’s mother’s knee, one’s mother possibly being an earl’s daughter. ‘I knew where you lived because I read my wife’s emails and deduced the rest. Now, would you like to know why I’ve come?’
Stuart said nothing. He could think of no answer to that.
‘I’ve come to beat you up. No one has seen me come. Your porter is not at his post. The street was empty of pedestrians due, no doubt, to the snow.’ He took a step towards Stuart and brought his left hand from behind his back. It was grasping a stick. Not a walking stick or a cane or the kind of thing you might use to tie a languid plant to, but a short stout stick about an inch and a half in diameter and made, apparently, from some tropical hardwood. ‘Have you anything to say, as they used to put it in court, before the thrashing I intend to administe
r is carried out?’
Stuart found his voice. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘Claudia told me you were mad. All right, I’m her lover. She needs me, married to a brute like you.’ His mobile was lying on the new coffee table next to his mug of chocolate. He picked it up, said, ‘I’m calling the police.’
For answer Livorno raised his stick and struck Stuart a glancing blow on the side of his head. Stuart dropped the phone and with a yell, for the blow had hurt, punched at Livorno with his fists, ineffectually hitting him in the face and neck. Livorno struck him again, this time on the side of his head and his shoulder, which made Stuart stagger and, like they said in the comics he used to read, see stars. Stuart took a step backwards and another, feeling around him for a weapon. He had no thoughts, his mind suddenly empty but for the need for self-preservation, the need to defend himself. A heavy glass vase, once a gift to his mother from Auntie Helen, its sides nearly an inch thick, stood on a shelf. It was too heavy to be held in one hand, so he took it in both just as Livorno lashed out at him again. It would have been a harder blow than the others, a potentially disabling thrust, but Stuart sidestepped it. He had the vase, his hands hooked over its thick smooth sides, and his mind quite empty, all morality, all fear, all caution – especially all caution – gone, and as a savage poke from the stick plunged into his lower abdomen, he tried a strike at Livorno’s head, but the other man ducked. The vase struck him on the left shoulder.
Livorno fell, knocking over the mug of chocolate. He lay on his back in the middle of Stuart’s oatmeal-coloured carpet, in a spreading pool of brown liquid. Stuart slumped down beside him, aching all over but particularly conscious of a sharp pain in his head and a crippling pain in the region of his lower abdomen. He was still holding the vase. He put it down, remembering incongruously that its purpose had originally been as a container for sticks of celery. Its surface, he noticed, perhaps for the first time, was chased with a pattern of flowers on one of which a butterfly alighted. Livorno had dropped the stick when he fell and the two weapons lay side by side as did the two men, Stuart’s mobile phone about a foot away from them. It began to play ‘Nessun dorma’.