by Ruth Rendell
Still, he felt that he had reached an important point in his life, a crossroads perhaps. Things were on the crux of change. Once before, when he had first moved in, he had consulted Marius Potter – on the recommendation of Rose Preston-Jones – and applied to him for a sortes reading. Now seemed the time to request another. Stuart sat down in a strange chair with a rail padded in brown corduroy providing its back while Marius sat in a chair with a diamond-shaped seat and carved circular back and consulted the copy of Paradise Lost which lay on the marble table. Marius opened it at random, leafing through the pages with his eyes closed like a practised card sharper.
He opened his eyes but without looking, ran his fingers down the right-hand page, stopping a little more than halfway down. He read: ‘ “Live while ye may, / Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return, / Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed!” ’
‘That’s not very good, is it?’ Stuart was dismayed.
‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Marius sounded genuinely contrite. ‘That’s the trouble with the sortes. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Come back tomorrow and you might get something more hopeful.’
‘I don’t think I will, thanks.’
The reading plainly referred to his relationship with Claudia and must mean that things were all right for him now but would change when she returned. Any pleasure would be shortlived and afterwards, misery. For the first time in the six months since he gave up, Stuart thought how much he would like a cigarette. Reminding him where addiction might lead, he encountered Olwen crossing the hallway, a clinking plastic bag in each hand. She wore her tattered fur. Her face was grey, her head wrapped up in a scarf of much the same shade. Everyone in Lichfield House had by now of course heard on the grapevine, which had its roots in Flat 5, of her near collapse, her apparent illness and pleas for someone to buy her alcoholic drink. Everyone had his or her own view of how this crisis should have been handled.
Stuart didn’t care but still thought it incumbent on him as a resident to ask her how she was. He recoiled a bit from her unsavoury ambience. ‘Are you feeling better?’
‘Not really,’ said Olwen, though she knew she would be once she had swallowed her first gulp of the vodka which, February having started, would probably be the liquor of the month. She shuffled up to the lift. It was now four days since she had eaten anything and there was no food in the two bags she carried.
Still made uneasy by his sortes reading, Stuart decided a long walk would be a good idea. He would go up to that new gym which had opened on the borders of Mill Hill, see what it was like and maybe sign up. Back in the flat to put on a jacket, he heard ‘Nessun dorma’ repeating and repeating itself over and over in his bedroom. He let it repeat, slipped on his very handsome Burberry jacket and, having contemplated his reflection in the mirror to his great satisfaction, went out into the fresh air, leaving his phone behind.
It was rather a nice, pale grey, mild sort of day. A couple of small white flowers Stuart supposed must be snowdrops poked timidly through the earth just inside Lichfield House’s front gate. The street was deserted but for hundreds of cars parked nose to tail along both sides. For the first time ever he saw someone go into the Bel Esprit Centre. Halfway to the roundabout, he passed Wally Scurlock trotting along briskly, very upright, very purposeful.
‘Good morning, sir, and how are you today?’
Stuart said he was good, though he wasn’t, not at all. The man coming down the opposite side was called Duncan something – Stuart had forgotten what. He looked like a paedophile, or how he thought a paedophile would look, furtive, covert, and wearing a raincoat. He cheered himself up a bit by reflecting on what Scurlock and the paedophile must think of him. How they must envy him, his slim figure, his handsome features and fine, luxuriant head of hair. Both the paedophile and the caretaker were bald.
When he had been to the gym and paid in advance for twelve sessions, the desire for a cigarette returned. Everyone said it would be a mistake to give in to it. You only had to have one and you were hooked all over again. Stuart walked past the hairdresser’s, the building society and the now closed-down bathroom shop and went into the newsagent’s. It was a large newsagent’s, selling greetings cards and wrapping paper, sweets and cigarettes, as well as papers. Nothing alerted him as to what was to come, nothing said to him, go, turn round and leave now. If this was his fate, perhaps the most significant moment of his life, as forecast by the sortes, he didn’t recognise it. If this was to determine his death he knew nothing of it or that, like the sword of Damocles, it hung by a hair above his head. He had never heard of Damocles. All he thought about was cigarettes, which brand should he buy and would he need a disposable lighter or would matches do?
He saw that there were two people in the shop apart from the man behind the counter, a man and a girl. If he had thought about it he might have decided they were not together, for the girl who had her back to him was at the counter, waiting to be served while the man appeared to be choosing a birthday card. Then, taking her change, she turned round.
The song which tells of a ‘lady sweet and kind, ne’er a face so pleased my mind’ Stuart was unfamiliar with, but the sentiment was his own. Never had a face so pleased his mind as this one. He knew with a seriousness and an intensity quite foreign to him that this was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and if it were possible to fall in love at first sight this was what was happening to him. It was not a European face but seemed to belong in South-East Asia, pale-skinned with features of perfect regularity, the upper lip short, the mouth full, the eyes large, grave, thickly lashed, a dark golden brown. Her hair hung in two thick black curtains from a centre parting.
She looked at him and lowered those eyes, opening the pack of cigarettes she had bought. He stammered out a request to the shopman for the same brand and, completely disorientated, fumbled for change, dropping coins on the floor. He stooped down to pick them up and so did she, handing him a two-pound coin with a little nod.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’
The man who hadn’t bought a greetings card was standing quite near them now, watching her, not speaking. Because this man was in his forties, round-faced and because his hair was also black, Stuart decided he must be her father. Possibly a strict father, a Muslim as a lot of people from that part of the world were. He took his cigarettes and when he turned round the girl and her father were gone. To lose her now was the most appalling thing he could think of. He rushed out of the shop, staring wildly about, but he hadn’t far to look. She was standing in the doorway of the bathroom shop, leaning against the boarded-up entrance, smoking.
He stared. Her eyes were turned in the direction of the old church and Kenilworth Primary School, so she wasn’t aware of his gaze. Her father was nowhere to be seen. She was as slender as a reed, as the stem of a flower, cocooned in a black quilted coat. Her ankles, he thought with some exaggeration, were the circumference of another girl’s thumbs. She finished her cigarette, stamped out the stub but, instead of leaving it on the pavement, picked it up in a tissue and put it into her pocket. He couldn’t just let her go, he must follow her. That meant he must follow her dad too, for this man had appeared from out of the alley that ran between the building society and the hairdresser’s and was hustling her along towards the next turning out of the roundabout.
One moment they were there, it appeared to him, and the next they had both got into one of the parked cars, the doors were slammed and dad was driving off. The car was a black Audi, he took that in, but it didn’t occur to him to take its number until it was too late. There was nothing for it but to go home. On the way he smoked one of his cigarettes and it served to make him ask himself why he had ever given up. He could almost feel his swollen nerves shrinking back to normal. His mobile told him he had three messages, one from his mother and two from Claudia. Claudia had also left a message on his landline. This one he listened to. Why did he never answer his phone? Was he ill? Or had he gone away? In spite
of the pact they had made, she would come round and see him if he didn’t speak to her in the next twenty-four hours.
Stuart lit another cigarette and made himself a mug of hot chocolate. Why did women think they could make themselves more attractive by bullying and nagging you? He thought of the beautiful girl in the newsagent’s, her eyes, her long slender hands, her full red mouth. She would never nag a man but be a sweet submissive companion. They had so much in common, both dramatically good-looking, a couple to be stared at, both smokers, not common these days. He knew now he never wanted to see Claudia again. Freddy Livorno could rest easy. No need for him to watch his wife, check up on her meetings, put private detectives on to her – or whatever he had done – for their affair was over. It was a pity he had spent such a lot of money on that necklace, but if that was all he had to pay to free himself, it was cheap at the price.
But how was he to find the beautiful girl?
*
On the first Monday in February it snowed. The snowfall wasn’t like the one just before Christmas but a serious ‘weather warning’ event, as the media called it. Seven or eight inches fell that morning, blanketing the pavements and gardens, masking the cars in fleecy white. Panic ensued as motorways came to a standstill, airports closed, buses disappeared and the Tube was disabled. Cautiously, Stuart answered his mobile to Claudia. As if he had been begging her to come, she told him in a scolding tone that it was impossible for her to move out of the house that day. He realised this must be when their separation was due to end and he said rather too heartily that she mustn’t think twice about it, of course she must stay at home.
The day now fixed for him and her to meet again was by coincidence the day before his house-warming party. Claudia was, of course, now not invited. She had understood this would be too awkward. Most residents of Lichfield House had accepted, as had Martin and his girlfriend and Jack, as well as two couples from Chester House whom Stuart had been introduced to by Rose Preston-Jones. They were clients of hers, one signed up for her detoxing programme, the other having acupuncture. Noor Lateef and Molly Flint had asked to bring their boyfriends. For all that, Stuart would have given a great deal not to have had the party. He could hardly understand now what had made him think a party a good idea. Of course, things would have been very different if he could have invited the beautiful girl, but since their encounter in the newsagent’s he hadn’t seen her again, though he had gone back several times on the chance that she would come in while he was there. One of the results of that had been his return to becoming a thirty-a-day smoker.
This snow put everything on hold. Almost everyone had accepted his invitations. Even the Scurlocks were coming. Over the roar of the vacuum cleaner Richenda had said, out of the blue, how much she and Wally were looking forward ‘to your thrash, Stuart’. He made his way round to Lichfield Parade to buy more champagne as well as wine and beer, slipping and sliding and clutching at snow-laden fences. At first he couldn’t believe it, Wicked Wine was closed. Not simply closed but closed down. Like so many other businesses, Rupert’s shop had suffered disastrously from the recession. Customers’ needs were satisfied by the large supermarkets or remained unsatisfied. Stuart wondered if this provided him with sufficient excuse to cancel the party but decided that it didn’t. No buses were running. The television told him that no Tubes were running but for the Victoria Line and that was no use to him. Like most people who didn’t go out to work or who had decided to stay at home today, Stuart watched television, intent on weather updates. Snow fell all the morning, sometimes light and airy, sometimes thick and fast. In the lulls between snowfalls, children and parents with children came out of the houses with trays and doors and plastic bags and the occasional real sledge and tobogganed down Kenilworth Avenue.
Katie Constantine typed twenty-five pages of a historical novel about Perkin Warbeck. Her husband devoted his column to debunking Bach flower treatments with special vitriol reserved for the Rescue Remedy. He was trying to forget the letters which had arrived that morning, one of them from an eminent trichologist calling his statement that women who shaved their legs risked coarsening the growth totally false. Utter rubbish, wrote the hair expert, balderdash. This word Michael had never heard before but he understood it to be pejorative.
Molly, Sophie and Noor plodded down to the pizza place in moon boots where they had a very long lunch of margaritas, peach, anchovy and bacon pizzas and chocolate and vanilla yogurt which lasted from midday to three thirty. So no one was at home when Olwen rang their doorbell in the hope of finding someone to go shopping for her. Marius Potter whom she called on next let her in but refused her request to buy drink for her at the Kenilworth Avenue Tesco.
‘Too slippery,’ he said, ‘and it’s made worse by all those kids sliding up and down. I don’t want to break my leg. I’m afraid you’ll have to do without.’ He thought of adding, ‘For once’, but he was a kind man and he only smiled.
Olwen knew herself to be even less able to walk on those pavements. The closing-down of Wicked Wine had brought her alternating depression and panic. Once this snow had gone she would place a weekly order with one of the wine shops in Edgware. If the delivery man laughed at her and gossiped about her, what did she care?
Downstairs to seek Rose and tell her about it, Marius encountered Stuart looking extra handsome in a bulky white sweater, jeans and moon boots and holding a Harrods carrier bag.
‘If you’re going to the Tesco,’ said Marius in a satirical tone, ‘I don’t suppose you’d feel like fetching old Olwen a litre of her poison?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Not really, as she might say. I mention it because she asked me.’
‘Look across the road,’ said Stuart, ‘at those two houses, number 3 and number 5. The one on the left’s called Springmead. Why isn’t there any snow on their roofs? All the other roofs are covered but theirs aren’t.’
‘Ah, that’s easily explained,’ said Marius, the Luddite. ‘They’ve got solar heating and the panels are on the roof of Springmead. The snow won’t settle while you’ve got those panels.’ And he went into Rose’s flat to tell her about the explanation he had invented and Stuart had swallowed. But talking to Rose and being with her wasn’t the same as it had been. The memory of their meeting so long ago and of that night they had spent together weighed heavily on him. He felt, obscurely, that he was somehow deceiving her, even cheating on her, a notion that would only go away when he spoke out. But suppose she too remembered that night, but remembered it with horror, and the man with whom she had spent it, with shame and, worse, dislike. Marius told himself sadly that there was no question she might have recognised him. His appearance now, scraggy, hollow-eyed and with thin grey hair, was a far cry from the stripling of the Hackney commune.
Stuart tramped up Kenilworth Avenue, carefully placing his feet in the oval indentations made by those who had gone before him like the page who trod in Good King Wenceslas’s footprints. He was on his way to look for the beautiful girl.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wally Scurlock had walked all the way up Kenilworth Avenue to the churchyard, was actually squatting down by Clara Carbury’s grave, before he realised something was wrong. St Ebba’s clock had struck, with a double stroke, half past ten, but no Kenilworth Primary School children had come out to play. Even inside gloves, his fingers were growing numb and his feet in wellies were icy. Perhaps the children were late because of the weather. The weather affected everything, spoilt everything. He paced a bit, slapping his upper arms with his gloved hands. It was supposed to warm you up but it didn’t. St Ebba’s struck three strokes for the three-quarters and then he knew. They had closed the school! That’s what they did in snowy weather, they closed the schools. The comprehensive, visible from the pensioner’s tower, would also be closed. Wally felt cheated of what he thought of as a legitimate and harmless activity, a pastime which saved him from the indulgence he truly – intensely, exultantly – preferred. He got slowly and stiffly to h
is feet.
The churchyard lay peaceful and silent under its thick and fleecy covering. No such silence had prevailed in this part of London for many years, the cars undriven, the buses stilled, pedestrians housebound. Wally knew what would happen if he went back along the snow-hushed streets to Lichfield House and down into his basement flat. Richenda would be out cleaning. He thought with hatred of Richenda. With her great bosom and wide hips, her big painted face and lacquered hair, she was the antithesis of his desire, but it was because this was what she was that he had married her. A real woman, a big woman, was what a man like him should want. Except that when they had been married for no more than a few weeks he knew she wasn’t. His imagination wasn’t big enough to substitute, when they were in bed at night, one of these schoolchildren or the tiny lovely girl from Springmead for the pulsating bulk in his arms. Even with all the lights out, the blinds down, the curtains drawn, the imagined girl wasn’t real enough to dispel Richenda.
Yet the girl was a grown woman. He could somehow tell that. Her breasts were tiny, her legs a teenager’s, her back and shoulders narrow, but she was maybe twenty-five years old. If, knowing what he now knew, he could have found a woman like her, wouldn’t she have saved him from the churchyard and the pensioner’s tower, and more than that, much more, from what he was about to do?
Through Rose Preston-Jones’s window he saw Richenda plying the vacuum cleaner. If she saw him she gave no sign of it. His feet were frozen, he could scarcely feel them any more. Another resentment welled up inside him as he made his way over to the stairs on his numbed feet. What sort of an architect must it have been to design a block of flats with a lift for the residents on the ground and upper floors but only a staircase for the caretaker’s use? Going down was one thing but coming up, as he was obliged to a dozen, two dozen, times a day, was deliberate cruelty. It was bad enough now and he was only in his forties. And then there were the other blocks, Ross, Hereford and Ludlow – he was the caretaker for the lot of them, forced to go out into the open whatever the weather to attend to some footling matter in another building.