The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  But that night he dreamed of Tim for the first time for many weeks. They were in the house in Stroud Green which Martin, in waking reality, had never visited. Tim had spoken of it as unsavoury, and in the dream it was more than that, Dickensian in its grotesque squalor, a series of junk-crowded rat-holes that smelt of rot. He and Tim were arguing about something, he hardly knew what, and each was provoking the other to anger, he by a kind of contrived pomposity, Tim by being outrageously camp. At last Martin could stand it no longer and he lunged out at Tim, but Tim parried the blow and together, clutching each other, they fell on to a deep, red, dusty, velvet settee that filled half the room. There, though still locked together, elbows hooked round each other’s necks, it was impossible to continue struggling, for the red velvet which had become damp and somehow soggy, exerted an effect of sucking and seemed to draw them into its depths. Or to draw Martin into its depths. Tim was no longer there, the red velvet was Tim’s mouth, and Martin was being drawn down his throat in a long devouring kiss.

  It was the kind of dream from which one awakens abruptly and to a kind of rueful embarrassment. Fortunately, it was half-past eight when Martin awoke as he could hardly have remained comfortably in bed after visions of that sort. Once recovered, he saw the day floating invitingly before him, a rather-better-than-usual Saturday. It was warmish, a damp, misty November day with the sun like a little puddle of molten silver up there over the dome and cupolas of St. Joseph’s, jade green and gleaming in that sun’s pale glow.

  By lunchtime the mist had melted and the sun brightened and Martin wondered whether to walk to the Flask for his drink with Norman Tremlett. It took him about a quarter of an hour to walk there, two or three minutes to drive—but walking there meant walking back too. He often thought of that in the weeks to come, that if he had decided to walk he wouldn’t have been there when the doorbell rang and he would never have met Francesca. Why hadn’t he? There had been no reason but laziness. A spurt of energy had prompted the walk that led to his meeting Tim; laziness had cancelled the walk that would have prevented the meeting with Francesca. He felt there must be some significance in this, though he was never able to say what it was.

  He thought his caller must be Miss Watson. She had never called on him before, but he had never offered to buy her a home before, and he was convinced it must be she. He opened the door, a kindly and welcoming smile already on his lips.

  Outside stood a boy holding a bunch of enormous bright yellow incurved chrysanthemums. The boy had thick smooth black eyebrows and big dark brown eyes and very pink cheeks. He was wearing jeans and a kind of tunic of dark blue cotton or canvas and a close-fitting woolly cap that covered all his hair.

  He said, “Mr. Urban?” in a voice that sounded to Martin very like a woman’.s

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Martin, “but those can’t be for me.”

  “You are Mr. Martin W. Urban and this is 12 Cromwell Court, Cholmeley Lane, Highgate?”

  “Yes, of course, but I still can’t …”

  “They certainly are for you, Mr. Urban.” The woolly cap was suddenly snatched off to release a mass of long glossy wavy hair. The hair was dark brown and nearly two feet long and its owner was definitely a woman, a girl of perhaps twenty. She had a rather earnest voice and she spoke slowly. “It’s really warm today, isn’t it? I don’t know why I put this on. Look, you can see on the label they’re for you.”

  He forced himself to stop staring at her hair. “Please come in, I didn’t mean to keep you standing there.” She came in rather shyly, it seemed to him, hesitated between the open doorways, not knowing which to enter. “In here,” he said. “People don’t send flowers to men unless they’re ill, do they?”

  She laughed. In here, where the big window made it very light, he was a little taken aback to see how pretty she was. She was tallish and very slim and delicately made and with a beautiful high colour in her face, a rose-crimson that deepened with her laughter. How awful if he had betrayed to her that at first he had taken her for a boy! It was her slimness, those strongly marked eyebrows, her earnest look, the boyishness in fact about her, which only made her more attractive as a woman. He was suddenly aware of the strong, aggressive, bitter scent of the chrysanthemums.

  “Is there a card with them?” He took the flowers from her and found the card, wired on to the bunch of coarse damp stems. The message on it was printed, the signature an indecipherable scrawl. “‘Thanks for everything,’” he read aloud, “‘I will never forget what you have done.’”

  “The name is just a squiggle. I expect whoever it is came into the shop and wrote that themselves.” She looked distressed. “Could it be Ramsey or Bawsey? No? I could try and check if you like.”

  He was standing by the window and he could see the van she had come in parked on the drive-in to the flats. It was a dark blue van lettered on its side in pink: Bloomers, 416 Archway Road, N. 6.

  “Is that your shop on the corner of the Muswell Hill Road? I pass it every day on my way to and from work.”

  “On weekdays we don’t close till six. You could call in on Monday.”

  “Or I could phone,” said Martin. It would be difficult to park the car, one of the worst places he could think of. Was it his imagination that the girl looked slightly hurt? You’re twenty-eight, he told himself, and you’re fussing like some old pensioner about where you’re going to park a car two days hence. He could put it in Hillside Gardens, couldn’t he? He could walk a hundred yards. “I’ll come in about half-past five on Monday,” he said.

  From the window he watched her drive away. The mist had gone and the puddle of sun and the sky had become leaden. It was twenty-five to one. Martin put on his jacket and went off to the Flask to meet Norman Tremlett. When he got back the first thing he had to do was put those flowers in water. He didn’t know anyone called Ramsey or Bawsey or anything like that; he didn’t think he knew anyone who would send him flowers.

  There were far too many chrysanthemums for one vase there were too many for two. He had to use a water jug as well as the Swedish crystal vase and the Copenhagen china jar with the spray of brown catkins on a blue ground. Fleetingly, he thought of not putting them into water at all but of taking them with him as a gift for Alice Tytherton. And have Alice think he had chosen them? It seemed awful to say so, but they were very ugly flowers. Martin had always believed that flowers were beautiful, all flowers as by definition, and his feeling about these slightly shocked him. But it was no use pretending. They were very ugly, hideous, more like vegetables than flowers really, like a variety of artichoke. You could imagine them cooked and served up with butter sauce.

  He began putting them into water and in doing so looked again at the card. Not Ramsey-but, yes, surely, Bhavnani! What more likely than that Mrs. Bhavnani should send him flowers as a token of her gratitude. As an Indian she wouldn’t know it wasn’t the custom in England to send flowers to men, and she might see flowers with different eyes too. The eye of an Oriental might not see these great spherical blooms as monstrous and coarse. But if she were the sender, it was an oddly colloquial message she had sent: “Thanks for everything. I will never forget what you have done.” And why would she come all the way to the Archway Road when there was a flower shop in her own block in Hornsey? It was just as likely that Miss Watson who lived in Highgate, in Hurst Avenue, was the mysterious donor.

  His living room was transformed, and somehow made absurd, by an embarrassment of chrysanthemums, chrome yellow, incurved, smelling like bitter aloes. All the time he was arranging them Martin had been searching his memory for what incident in the past that scent brought back to him. Suddenly he knew. A dozen years ago and chrysanthemums arriving for his mother from some friend or recent guest. Those chrysanthemums had been fragile-looking, pale pink with frondy petals, but the smell of them had been the same as these. And what Martin remembered was going into the drawing room where a pale frail woman called Mrs. Finn was crying bitterly because she had dropped and smashed a cu
t-glass vase. The pink flowers lay about in little pools of water and Mrs. Finn wept as if it were her heart and not a vase that had broken.

  The extraordinary things one remembers, thought Martin, and evoked by so little. He could still see Mrs. Finn as she had been that afternoon, weeping over the broken glass or perhaps over her own cut finger from which the blood fell in large dark red drops.

  V

  His window gave on to the back of a house in Somerset Grove. There were strips of untended garden between and tumbledown sheds and even a green-house in which all the glass was broken. But unless he looked down all he could see was the yellow brick back of the other house, its rusty iron fire escape, and its bay windows. In one of these bays a woman stood ironing.

  Finn stared at her, exercising his powers on her, trying to bend her to his will. He bore her no malice, he didn’t know her, but he willed her to burn her finger just slightly on the iron. Pressing his body against the glass, he concentrated on her, piercing her with his eyes and his thought. He wanted her to feel it in her head, to stagger, bemused, and graze her trembling hand with the burning triangle.

  The iron continued to move in steady, sweeping strokes. Once she glanced up but she didn’t see him. All magicians long to discover the secret of making themselves invisible, and Finn wondered if he had found it. He stared on, forcing his eyes not to blink, breathing very deeply and very slowly. The woman had set the iron up on end now and was folding a rectangle of something white. He could have sworn she brushed the tip of the iron with her hand, but she didn’t wince. And now, suddenly, she was staring back at him with indignation, looking at him full in the face. If he had been invisible, he was no longer. He saw her move the ironing board away from the window to another part of the room, and he turned back to what he had been doing before, screwing the cover back on the hot plate.

  His room was on the second floor. It contained a single mattress, a three-legged stool, and a bookcase. There had once been more furniture but gradually, as he mastered himself and his energies increased, he had disposed of it piece by piece. He hung his clothes from hooks on the wall. No curtains hung at the window and there was no carpet on the floor. Finn had painted the ceiling and the walls a pure, radiant white.

  He had no means of cooking anything, but he seldom ate anything cooked. On the floor stood a stack of cans of pineapple and pineapple juice and in the bookcase were the works of Aleister Crowley, Meetings with Remarkable Men and Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky’s A New Model of the Universe, and The Secret Doctrine of Helena Blavatsky. Finn had picked them up in second-hand bookshops in the Archway Road.

  As he was coiling the flex round the hot plate and putting it into a carrier bag, Finn heard Lena pass his door and go on up the stairs. She had been out all the morning at a shop in Junction Road called Second Chance, spending two ten-pound notes Finn had given her from the initial Anne Blake payment. Her movements were uneasy. He could tell by ear alone, by the sound of her feet on the stairs, her footsteps pattering across the landing, whether she was happy or afraid or whether there was a bad time coming. There hadn’t been a bad time for nearly two years now. Finn looked on her strangeness quite differently from the way most people did, but the bad times were another matter. The bad times had been brought into being by himself.

  He took off the white cotton robe he wore for studying or meditating or just being in his room and hung it on one of the hooks. Finn had no mirror in which to see his long body, hard and white and thin as a root. The clothes he put on, jeans, a collarless grandad shirt, the velvet waistcoat, and the scarf with the coins on, had all been acquired by Lena, as had the pearl-handled cut-throat razor with which he now began to shave. He could see his face reflected in the window pane which, if he stood back a little, the opposing brick wall made into a passable looking glass. Nevertheless, he cut himself. Finn, with no pigment anywhere except in those water-grey pupils, sometimes thought it strange his blood should be as red as other people’.s

  Lena’s tiny living room was draped all over with her purchases, a mauve silk dress with a fringe round the hem, a man’s grey morning coat, a bunch of scarves, a pair of lace-up girl’s can-can boots, and several little skirts and jumpers. The budgerigar, temporarily manumitted, surveyed all this array from its perch on an art nouveau lamp standard. In a day or two Lena would sell all these clothes to another shop, retaining perhaps one garment. She nearly always lost by these transactions, but sometimes she made a tiny profit. When she saw Finn she recoiled from him, alarmed, inordinately distressed as always by even a pin-head drop of blood.

  “You’ve been cut!” as if it had been done to him by someone else.

  “Well, well,” said Finn, “so I have. Let’s cover it up, shall we?”

  She gave him a lump of cotton wool that might have come out of a pill bottle or been the bedding of a ring. Finn stuck it on his chin. It smelt, like Lena’s clothes, of camphor. She had brought in with her, he saw to his annoyance, a local paper, the Post, and he knew at once the cause of her uneasiness. Her eyes followed his.

  “There’s been a girl murdered in Kilburn.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, guessing what was to come. She came up even closer to him, laid her finger on his lips, and said in a hesitant, fearful voice,

  “Did you do it?”

  “Come on,” said Finn. “Of course I didn’t.” The bird flew down and clung to the hem of the mauve dress, pecking at its fringe.

  “I woke up in the night and I was so afraid. Your aura had been all dark yesterday, a dark reddish-brown. I asked the pendulum, and it said to go down and see if you were there, so I went down and listened outside your door. I listened for hours but you weren’t there.”

  “Give it here,” said Finn. He took the paper gently from her. “She wasn’t killed in the night, see? She wasn’t killed yesterday. Look, you read it. She was killed last Wednesday week, the fifteenth.”

  Lena nodded, clutching on to his arm with both hands like a person in danger of drowning clutches a spar. The bird pecked little mauve beads off the dress and scattered them on the floor.

  “You know where we were that Wednesday, don’t you? The day before my birthday it was. All afternoon and all evening we were in here with Mrs. Gogarty, doing Plan-chette. You and me and Mrs. Gogarty. Okay? Panic over?”

  Ever since the Queenie business, which had also marked the onset of her trouble, Lena had supposed every murder committed north of Regent’s Park and south of Barnet to have been perpetrated by her son. Had supposed it, at any rate, until Finn proved it otherwise or someone else was convicted of the crime. From time to time there came upon her flashes of terror in which she feared his arrest for murders committed years ago in Harringay or Harlesden. It was for this reason, among others, that Finn intended to make his present enterprise appear as an accident. Had he known what he was doing in those far-off days, had he not been so young, he would have done the same by Queenie and thus saved poor Lena from an extra anguish.

  “Panic over?” he said again.

  She nodded, smiling happily. One day she might forget, he thought, when he took her with him to India and they lived in the light of the ancient wisdom. She had begun rummaging through the day’s horde of treasures, the budgerigar perched on her shoulder. A cushion, falling out, was caught between an octagonal table and a wicker box. Few objects could fall uninterruptedly to the floor in Lena’s flat. She surfaced, grasping something yellow and woollen.

  “For you,” she said. “It’s your size and it’s your favourite colour.” And she added, like any mother who fears her gift won’t be appreciated as it should be, “It wasn’t cheap!”

  Finn took off his waistcoat and pulled on the yellow sweater. It had a polo neck. He got up and looked at himself in Lena’s oval mirror with the blue-velvet frame. The sleeves were a bit short and under the left arm was a pale green darn, but that only showed when he lifted his arm up.

  “Well, well,” said Finn.

&n
bsp; “It does suit you.”

  “I’ll wear it to go out in.”

  He left her noting down her new stock in the book she kept for this purpose. Finn had once seen this book. When Lena couldn’t describe a garment she drew it. He went down into his own room and collected his tool box and the hot plate in its carrier and his PVC jacket. It was just gone two. He went in the van but not all the way, leaving it parked in a turning off Gordonhouse Road at the Highgate end.

  Finn had waited to do the deed until after the departure of the Frazers. They had moved out the previous Friday. Sofia lonides always spent Monday evening baby-sitting for her brother and his wife in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Finn didn’t mind being seen entering the house in Modena Road, but he would have preferred not to be seen leaving it. By then, however, it would be dark. What most pleased him was the turn for the worse that the weather had taken. From Saturday afternoon it had grown steadily colder, there had been frost this morning, and as he drove up Dartmouth Park Hill a thin snow had dashed against the wind-screen. If the weather had stayed as warm as it had been on Saturday morning he might have had to postpone his arrangements.

  Anne Blake’s flat was clean and tidy and very cold. One day, Finn thought, when he had developed his theta rhythms, he might be able to generate his own bodily heat, but that day was not yet. It would be unwise to use any of Anne Blake’s heating appliances, he must just endure it. He attached a 13-amp plug to the flex which protruded from the gas pipe behind the fridge and plugged it in to the point next to the fridge point. Then he put up the steps and climbed into the loft, carrying the hot plate. Up there it was even colder. Finn joined the flex on the hot plate to the flex, some five or six yards of it, that came out of the gas pipe. Down the steps again to test if it worked. It did.