The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  As a cleaner, he was wonderful. That was why Martin, and presumably the others, kept him on in spite of the familiarity of address and the rages. He cleaned and polished and scrubbed and did ironing all at high speed. Martin watched him open his suitcase and take out of it the khaki canvas coat—like an ironmonger’s—he wore for work, the silver-cleaning cloths, and the aerosol can of spray polish.

  “How’s your sister-in-law?” said Martin.

  Mr. Cochrane, wearing red rubber gloves, had begun taking the top of the stove apart. “She’ll never be better till she gets another place, Martin. The blacks was bad enough, and now they’ve got the pneumatic drills.” He was a ferocious racist. “She’ll never be better stuck up there, Martin, so you may as well save yourself the trouble of enquiring. Three hours’ pneumatic drills in the mornings she gets and three hours’ in the afternoons. The men themselves can’t keep it up more than three hours, and that tells you something. But it’s no use moaning, is it, Martin? I say that to her. I say to her, what’s the good of moaning at me? I can’t do nothing, I’m only a servant.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Whose name?” said Mr. Cochrane, wheeling round from the sink in the sudden galvanic way he had. “You’re always wanting to know folks’ names. My sister-in-law’s name? What d’you want to know that for? It’s Mrs. Cochrane of course. Naturally it is. What else would it be?”

  Martin forebore to ask the address. He thought that, from Mr. Cochrane’s persistent descriptions of the North Kensington block of flats and its geographic location, he could discover it for himself. If he still wanted to. Ten minutes in his cleaner’s company only made him feel there must be many far more deserving candidates for his bounty than the Cochrane family-Suma Bhavnani, Miss Watson, Mr. Deepdene. He pocketed the list lest Mr. Cochrane should find it and pore over it paranoidally.

  As usual he left for work at ten past nine, taking the route by way of the Archway and Hornsey Lane. Sometimes, for the sake of variety, he drove up to Highgate Village and down Southwood Lane across the Archway Road into Wood Lane. And once or twice, on beautiful summer mornings, he had walked to work as he had done on the day he met Tim in the wood.

  The offices of Urban, Wedmore, Mackenzie and Company, Chartered Accountants, were in Park Road, in the block between Etheldene Avenue and Cranley Gardens. Walter Urban was the expert on matters relevant to the Inland Revenue, Clive Wedmore the investment specialist, while Gordon Tytherton had all the complexities of the Value Added Tax at his fingers’ ends. Martin didn’t specialise, he called himself the general dogsbody, and his room was the smallest.

  He knew Ik would keep at this job for the rest of his life, yet his heart wasn’t in it. Although he had tried, he had never been able to sum up that enthusiasm for manipulating cash in the abstract which his father had, or even understand the fascination which the stock market exerted over Clive Wedmore. Perhaps he should have chosen some other profession, though the leanings and longings he had had while still at school had been hopelessly impractical-novelist, explorer, film cameraman. They were not to be seriously considered. Accountancy had chosen him from the first, not he it. Sometimes he thought he had passively let himself be chosen because he couldn’t bear to disappoint his father.

  And the safety of it, the security, the respectability, satisfied him. He wouldn’t have cared for a job or a life style such as Tim’s. He was proud of the years of study that lay behind him, of the knowledge acquired, and was always determined not to let a lack of enthusiasm lead to omissions or oversights. And he liked the room he had here which looked out across the tree tops to Alexandra Park, the park and the trees which he had known as a child.

  Martin had no clients to see that morning and no phone calls to make or receive. He spent nearly three hours unravelling the zany and haphazard accounts of a builder who had been in business for fifteen years without paying a penny of income tax. Walter looked in to beam on him. The news of the pools win was making him behave towards his son much the way he had done when Martin got his A-Levels and then his degree. After he had gone Martin asked Caroline, who was their receptionist and whom Gordon and he shared as secretary, to bring him Mr. Sage’s file.

  He opened it without really looking at the statements and notices of coding and Tim’s own accounts which lay inside. In just over two hours’ time Tim would be sitting there opposite him. And he hadn’t made up his mind what to do. That firm decision of last night had been-well, not reversed but certainly weakened by the sight of the North London Post. He had to decide, and within the next couple of hours.

  Martin usually had lunch in one of the local pubs or, once a week, at a Greek place in Muswell Hill with Gordon Tytherton. Today, however, he drove alone up to the Woodman. It seemed the right and appropriate place in which to be for the solving of this particular problem.

  It was far too cold, of course, and far too late in the year to take his sandwiches and lager out into the Woodman’s garden. There, in summer, one was made very aware, in spite of the thunderous proximity of the trunk road roaring northwards, of the two woods that nestled behind these divergent streets. To the north was Highgate Wood, to the east Queen’s Wood where, walking under the pale green beech leaves, he and Tim had encountered each other on a May morning. Now, in November, those groves appeared merely as throngs of innumerable grey boughs, dense, chill, and uninviting.

  But Tim … Was he going to tell Tim or was he not? Didn’t he have a duty to tell him, a moral obligation? For without Tim he certainly wouldn’t have won the hundred and four thousand pounds, he wouldn’t have done the pools at all.

  III

  Martin had first known Tim Sage at the London School of Economics. They had been friendly acquaintances, no more, and Tim had left after a year. Martin hadn’t seen him again until that morning in Queen’s Wood, eight years later.

  It was the kind of morning, misty and blue and gold and promising heat to come, when the northern reaches of London look as if Turner had painted them. It was the kind of morning when one leaves the car at home. Martin had walked over Jackson’s Lane and into Shepherd’s Hill, entering the wood by the path from Priory Gardens. The wood was full of squirrels scampering, its green silence pierced occasionally by the cry of a jay. Underfoot were generations of brown beech leaves and above him the new ones, freshly unfolded, like pieces of crumpled green silk. It had been a strange experience, even rather dramatic, walking along the path and seeing Tim appear in the distance, over the brow of the hill, the idea that it might be Tim gradually deepening to certainty. When they were fifty yards apart Tim had run up to him, stopping sharply like a reined-in horse.

  “It has to be Dr. Livingstone!”

  Why not? Journalist meets explorer in a wood …

  It was odd the amount of emotion there seemed to be generated in that moment and the intensity of pleasure each felt. They might have been brothers, long-separated. Was it because the meeting took place on a summer’s morning and under the greenwood tree? Was it the unlikelihood of the wood as a meeting place? Martin had never quite been able to understand why this chance encounter had brought him a sensation of instant happiness and hope, and why there had come with it a prevision of lifelong friendship. It was almost as if what he and Tim had experienced for each other, spontaneously and simultaneously, had been love.

  But with the utterance of that word to himself Martin had felt both excited and very frightened. Before parting from him, Tim had briefly put an arm round his shoulder, lightly clapping and then gripping his shoulder, the sort of thing a man may do to another man in comradely fashion but which no man had ever before done to him. It left him feeling confused and shaken, and two days later, when Tim phoned, it took him a few seconds to find his normal voice.

  Tim had only wanted to know if he could consult him as an accountant. He was worried about the tax he had to pay on his free-lance earnings. Martin agreed at once, he couldn’t help himself, though he had mental reservations.

  It was
a maxim of Walter Urban’s that one man cannot tell if another is attractive. He can only judge in respect of the opposite sex. Martin thought about this and it troubled him. In his case now it wasn’t true, and what kind of a man did that make him?

  Tim was very handsome, beautiful even, except that that wasn’t a word one could use about a man. He had an actor’s beauty, dashing, rather flamboyant. One could imagine him as a duellist. His hair was black, short by current standards (though not so short as Martin’s), and his eyes a vivid sea-blue. There was something Slavonic about his high cheekbones and strong jaw and lips that were full like a woman’s. He was tall and very thin, and his long thin hands were stained leather-coloured down the forefingers from nicotine. He had been smoking in the wood, and he lit a Gauloise the moment he entered Martin’s office.

  Tim’s affairs were in considerably less of a muddle than Martin was accustomed to with new clients. It impressed him that, as he studied the columns of figures, Tim was able to repeat them perfectly accurately out of his head. He had a photographic memory. Martin promised to arrange things so as to save him money and Tim had been very gratified.

  Were they going to see each other again, though? Were they going to meet socially? Apparently, they were. Martin could no longer remember whether it was he who had phoned Tim or the other way about. But the upshot had been a pub lunch together, then a drink together one Friday evening, encounters at which Martin had been uneasy and nervous, though extraordinarily happy as well with a curious tremulous euphoria.

  After that Tim had become a fairly frequent visitor at the flat in Cromwell Court, but what Martin had dreaded during their first few meetings had never happened. Tim had never touched him again beyond shaking his hand, never tried to take him in his arms as had sometimes seemed so likely, so imminent, just before their partings. Yet Tim must be homosexual, for what other explanation could there be for his obvious fondness for him, Martin? What else could explain why he continued to find Tim so attractive? For he did find him attractive. He had wrenched this confession out of himself. Normal men probably did find certain homosexuals attractive if they were honest with themselves. Martin was sure he had read that somewhere, in a book about the psychology of sex probably. The fact was that he liked watching Tim, listening to the sound of his deep yet light voice, as one might like watching and listening to a woman.

  It came to him at last that what he really wanted was to fight Tim, to engage with him, that is, in some kind of wrestling match. Of course it was quite absurd. He had never done any wrestling and he was sure Tim hadn’t. But he thought a lot about it, more, he knew, than was good for him, and such a wrestling figured sometimes in his dreams. It was part of these fantasies that in real life he should actually provoke Tim to a fight, and that might not be so difficult for, in spite of his affection for Tim, he knew he wasn’t really a nice person. Long before the wrestling fantasy began, he had seen in Tim signs of ruthlessness, egotism, and cupidity.

  Tim lived in Stroud Green. To this address Martin had sent business letters, but he had never phoned Tim on his private number and he had never been there. This wasn’t for want of being asked. It was the way Tim had looked and the tone he had used when asking that had set Martin so determinedly against ever visiting those rooms or flat or half a house or whatever it was. Tim had said to come and see his “menage,” smiling and raising his somewhat satanic eyebrows, and at once Martin had understood—Tim was living with a man. Martin had never actually been in company with two men living together in a sexual relationship, but he could more or less imagine it and the fearful embarrassment he would feel in such a situation.

  He had returned a polite refusal—he always had an excuse ready—and after a time Tim seemed to understand, for there were no more invitations. But had he really understood? Martin hoped Tim hadn’t thought he wouldn’t come because he disliked the idea of slumming down in Stroud Green.

  Tim seemed impressed by the flat in Cromwell Court. At any rate, he listened and admired when Martin showed him some new item he had bought, and he enjoyed sitting on Martin’s balcony on summer evenings, drinking beer and admiring the view. Martin, like his father, often mixed business with relaxation, and it was on one of these evenings, when Tim had expressed his envy of those who own their homes, that he suggested he too should buy a flat. He should do so as much for the tax relief on a mortgage as for security.

  “With your income and the increasing income you’re getting from these short stories, I’d say you can’t afford not to.”

  “My income, as you call it,” said Tim, lighting his twentieth cigarette of the evening, “is the lowest rate the NUJ allows the Post to pay me. You know what my income is, my dear, and I haven’t got a penny capital.” Martin almost shivered when Tim called him “my dear.” “The only way I’d, ever get the money to put down on a house is if I won the pools.”

  “You’ll have to do them first,” said Martin.

  The blue eyes that could sometimes flame were lazy and casual. “Oh, I do them. I’ve been doing them for ten years.”

  That had surprised Martin. He had supposed doing football pools to be an exclusively working-class habit. He was even more surprised to find himself agreeing to do them too, just to have a go, what had he to lose?

  “I wouldn’t know how to start.”

  “My dearest old Livingstone,” said Tim, who sometimes addressed him in this way, “leave it to me. I’ll work out a forecast for you. I’ll send you a coupon and a copy, and all you’ve got to do is copy the same one every week and send it off.”

  Of course he had had no intention of copying it out and sending it off. But it had come and he had done so. Why? Perhaps because it seemed unkind and ungrateful to Tim not to. Martin supposed he had been to a great deal of trouble to work out that curious pattern on the chequered coupon, a pattern that he found himself religiously copying out each successive week.

  Five times he had filled in and sent off that coupon, and the fifth time he had won a hundred and four thousand pounds. He had won it on the permutation Tim had made for him. Tim, therefore, was something more than indirectly responsible for his having won it. Shouldn’t he then have gone straight to the phone as soon as the news came to him to tell Tim?

  Martin drove back to Park Road by way of Wood Lane. The wood was a crouching grey mass on either side of the road, crusted underfoot with brown leaves. If he had taken the car that morning in May or if he had walked along Wood Vale instead of Shepherd’s Hill, or if he had been five minutes earlier or five minutes later, he would never have met Tim and therefore never have won that huge sum of money. In an hour’s time he would once more be confronting Tim; Tim was coming at three.

  The purpose of his visit was to bring his tax return for the previous financial year and the fees statements from the various magazines that had used his stories. It wouldn’t have crossed Martin’s mind to keep the news of his win from Tim if Tim hadn’t been a journalist. Once tell Tim and the story of his acquisition of wealth would be all over the front page of next week’s North London Post. Suppose he asked Tim not to use it? It was possible Tim might agree not to, but Martin didn’t think it likely. Or, rather, he thought Tim would give a sort of half-hearted undertaking and then drop a hint to another reporter. And this story would be even better when he began on his philanthropy …

  Martin thought deeply about any major action he took, and about a good many minor ones too. He meant to conduct his life on a set of good solid principles. To perform every action as if it might form the basis of a social law, this was his doctrine, though he couldn’t of course always live up to it. Plainly, he ought to tell Tim. He owed Tim thanks, and no consideration that publicity would make life uncomfortable for him for a few weeks should be allowed to stop him. Suppose he received a few begging letters and phone calls? He could weather that. He must tell Tim. And perhaps also-a new idea so alarmed him that he was obliged to stop scrutinising Mrs. Barbara Baer’s investments and lay the file down—offer him
something. It might be incumbent on him to offer Tim some of the money.

  Tim received the lowest possible salary the National Union of Journalists permitted his employers to pay him. He couldn’t buy a house because he had no capital. Ten thousand pounds would furnish a deposit for Tim to put down on a house, and ten thousand, Martin thought, was the sum he ought to give him, a kind of 10 per cent commission. He found the idea not at all pleasing. Tim wasn’t a deserving case like Miss Watson or Mrs. Cochrane. He was young and strong, he didn’t have to stay working on that local rag. At the back of Martin’s mind was the thought that if Tim wanted to get capital, he shouldn’t smoke so much. He had an idea too that Tim was a fritterer. It would be awful to give Tim ten thousand pounds and then find he hadn’t used it to get a home for himself but had simply frittered it away.

  Martin continued to present the two sides of this question to himself until three-fifteen. Tim was late. His inner discussion had led to nothing much, though the notion of telling Tim had come to seem rash almost to the point of immorality. At twenty past three Caroline put her pale red Afro round the door.

  “Mr. Sage is here, Martin.”

  He got up and came round the desk, thinking that if Tim asked, if he so much as mentioned the football pools, he would tell him. But otherwise, perhaps not.

  Tim was never even remotely well-dressed. Today he was wearing a pair of black cord jeans, a dirty roll-neck sweater that had presumably once been white, and a faded denim jacket with one of its buttons missing. Such clothes suited his piratical looks. He lit a Gauloise the moment he came into the room, before he spoke.