The Lake of Darkness

by Ruth Rendell

  The sun was shining on the white frosted roofs that hung like a range of glittering alps beneath his window. It was going to be a fine day, it was Friday, tonight he was going to see Francesca. He stood at the bedroom window, looking down at the white roofs, the long shadows, the occasional spire of whiter smoke rising through the bright mist. Coming across the car park was the paper boy with his canvas satchel. Martin turned away from the window and went into the living room where Mr. Cochrane was polishing plate glass and the chrysanthemums were as vigorous as ever. He took the vases out into the kitchen. The big yellow blossoms seemed to look reproachfully at him as he thrust them into the waste bin.

  “Wicked waste,” said Mr. Cochrane, padding up behind him to empty his bowl of water. “Not a withered petal on the lot of them!”

  The two newspapers had just come through the letter box. Martin picked them up and looked at the Post. The front page lead, for the second week running, was the Parliament Hill Fields murder. This time it was a report of the inquest on Anne Blake, the heading was woman brutally murdered and the by-line Tim Sage’s. Martin went through the paper to try and find what had so upset Francesca in anticipation. The Post was a forty-page tabloid so this took some time, but he could find nothing, no photograph, no story. It was still only ten to nine. Watched curiously by Mr. Cochrane, Martin began again, working this time more slowly and meticulously.

  Because he could no longer bear the scrutiny of pebble eyes through distorting bi-focals he took the paper into the bedroom. There, using a red ballpoint, he went through each page like a proof reader, ticking its lower edge when he had cleared it.

  He found what he was looking for on page seven, a mere paragraph in a gossip column called “Finchley Footnotes.”

  The coming year will be an exciting one for Mr. Russell Brown, 35, whose first book is to be published in the summer. This is an historical novel about the Black Death entitled The Iron Cocoon. Mr. Brown, who is an authority on the fourteenth century, teaches history at a north London polytechnic. He lives with his wife, Francesca, and two-year-old daughter, Lindsay, in Fortis Green Lane.

  VIII

  “Since this is going to be our last meeting,” said Martin, “I should have liked to take you somewhere nice.” He glanced round the Greek taverna in the Archway Road where she had insisted on coming. It smelt of cooking oil, and over the glass-fronted case of raw kebabs trailed the fronds of a plastic tradescantia. “Still, I don’t suppose it matters.” An unpleasant thought, among so many, struck him. “Where does he think you are? Come to that, where did he think you were all last week?”

  “He had flu,” she said, “and the doctor said to take a week off to convalesce, so he went to his parents in Oxford and took Lindsay with him.”

  “I can’t believe you have a child,” he said miserably. “A child of two.” The waiter came to their table. Martin ordered lamb kebab, a salad, for both of them. She passed across the table to him something she had taken from her handbag. He looked without enthusiasm, with dismay, at the photograph of a dark-haired, wide-eyed baby girl. “But where is she? What happens to her when you’re at work?” It was as if he doubted the very truth of it, as if by questioning her closely, he might break her down and make her confess that she had lied and the newspaper been wrong.

  “In a day nursery. I take her there in the mornings and Russell fetches her. He gets home before me.”

  “I looked him up in the phone book,” said Martin. “I take it he’s the H. R. Brown at 54 Fortis Green Lane?”

  She hesitated momentarily, then nodded. “His first name,” she said, “is Harold, only he prefers his second name and Russell Brown sounds better for an author.”

  “And I used to wonder all the time why you wouldn’t let me take you home. I thought you might be ashamed of your home or even have an angry father. I thought you couldn’t be more than twenty.”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “Oh, don’t cry,” said Martin. “Have some wine. Crying isn’t going to help.”

  Neither of them could eat much. Francesca picked at her kebab and pushed it away. Her deep brown glowing eyes held a kind of feverish despair and she gave a little sob. Up till then he had felt only anger and bitterness. A pang of pity made him lay his own hand gently on hers. She bit her lip.

  “I’m sorry, Martin. I shouldn’t have gone out with you last week, but I did want to, I wanted some fun. I’m not going to indulge in a lot of self-pity, but I don’t have much fun. And then-then it wasn’t just fun any more.” He felt a tremor of delight and terror. Hadn’t she just admitted she loved him? “Russell came home on Friday, and on Monday he said he’d, had this phone call from the Post about his book. I knew they’d, put something in the paper, and I knew you’d, see it.”

  “I suppose you love him, don’t you? You’re happy, you and Russell and Lindsay and the Black Death?” Wretchedness had brought out a grim wit in him and he smiled a faint ironical smile.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go back to your place, Martin.”

  In the car he didn’t speak to her. So this is what it’s like, he thought, this is what it had been like for all those men he had heard of and read about and even known who had fallen in love with married women. Clandestine meetings, deception, a somehow dirty feeling of being traitorous and corrupt. And at the end of it a bitter parting with ugly recriminations or else divorce and re-marriage in some High Street register office to an experience-ravaged girl with a ready-made family. He knew he was old-fashioned. He had been a schoolboy when the word “square” was current slang, but even then he had known he was and always would be, square. A thickset square-shouldered man with a square forehead and a square jaw and a square outlook on life. Rectangular, tetragonal, square, conventional, conservative, and reactionary. The revolution in morals which had taken place during his adolescence had passed over him and left him as subject to the old order as if he had actually spent a lifetime under its regime. He would have liked to be married to a virgin in church. What he certainly wasn’t going to do, he thought as he drove up to Cromwell Court, was have an affair with Francesca, with Mrs. Russell Brown, embroil himself in that kind of sordidness and vain excitement and -disgrace. They must part, and at once. He helped her from the car and stood for a moment holding her arm in the raw frosty cold.

  The place looked strangely bare without the chrysanthemums, as a room does when it has been stripped of its Christmas decorations. He drew the curtains to shut out the purplish starry sky and the city that lay like a spangled cloth below. Francesca sat on the edge of her chair, watching him move about the room. He remembered that last week he had thought there was something child-like about her. That had been in the days of her supposed innocence, and it was all gone now. She was as old as he. Under her eyes were the shadows of tiredness and suffering and her cheeks were pale. He glanced down at her hands which she was twisting in her lap.

  “You can put your wedding ring on again tomorrow,” he said bitterly.

  She said in a very low voice, not much above a whisper, “I never wear it.”

  “You still haven’t told me where he thinks you are.”

  “At Annabel’s, the girl who lives in Frognal, the one I see on Mondays. Martin, I thought we could-I thought we could sometimes meet on Mondays.”

  He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself some brandy. He held up the bottle. “For you?”

  “No, I don’t want anything. I thought Mondays and-and Saturday afternoons, if you like. Russell always goes to White Hart Lane when Spurs play at home.”

  He almost laughed. “You know all about it, don’t you? How many have there been before me?”

  She shrank as if he had made to strike her. “There haven’t been any at all.” She had a way of speaking very simply and directly, without artifice. It was partly because of this, that like him she had no sharp wit, no gift of repartee, that he had begun to love her. Begun, only begun, he must remember that. Caution, be my friend!

&n
bsp; “We aren’t going to see each other any more, Francesca. We’ve only known each other two weeks and that means we can part now without really getting hurt. I think I must have been a bit crazy, the way I went on last week, but there’s no harm done, is there? I’m not going to come between husband and wife. We’ll forget each other in a little while, and I know that’s the best thing. I wish you hadn’t-well, led me on, but I expect you couldn’t help yourself.” Martin came breathlessly to the end of this speech, drank down the rest of his brandy, and recalled from an ancient film a phrase he had thought funny at the time. He brought it out facetiously with a bold smile. “I was just a mad impetuous fool!”

  She looked at him sombrely. “I shan’t forget you,” she said. “Don’t you know I’m in love with you?”

  No one had ever made that confession to him before. He felt himself turn pale, the blood recede from his face.

  “I think I loved you the day I brought those horrible flowers and you said”-her voice trembled-“that no one sends flowers to men unless they’re ill.”

  “We’re going to say good-bye now, Francesca, and I’m going to put you in a taxi and you’re going home to Russell and Lindsay. And in a year’s time I’ll come and buy some flowers from you and you’ll have forgotten who I am.”

  He pulled her gently to her feet. She was limp and passive, yet clinging. She subsided clingingly against him so that the whole length of her body was pressed softly to his and her hands tremulously on either side of his face.

  “Don’t send me away, Martin. I can’t bear it.”

  He was aware of thinking that this was his last chance to keep clear of the involvement he dreaded. Summon up the strength now and he would be a free man. But he longed also to be loved, not so much for sex as for love. He was aware of that and then of very little more that might be said to belong to the intellect. His open lips were on her open lips and his hands were discovering her. He and she had descended somehow to the cushions of the sofa and her white arm, now bare, was reaching up to turn off the lamp.

  Martin hadn’t much experience of love-making. There had been a girl at the L.S.E. and a girl he had met at a party at the Vowchurches and a girl who had picked him up on the beach at Sitges. There had been other girls too, but only with these three had he actually had sexual relations. He had found it, he brought himself to confess to himself only, disappointing. Something was missing, something that books and plays and other people’s experiences had led him to expect. Surely there should be more to it than just a blind unthinking need beforehand and afterwards nothing more than the same sense of relief as a sneeze gives or a drink of cold water down a thirsty throat?

  With Francesca it wasn’t like that. Perhaps it was because he loved her and he hadn’t loved those others. It must be that. He had done nothing different, and it couldn’t have been any great skill or expertise on her part. She had whispered to him that he was the only man apart from Russell. Before Russell there had been no one and for a long time now Russell had scarcely touched her. She was married and she had a child, but still she was nearly as innocent as Martin would have had her be.

  She slept beside him that night. At eleven she phoned Russell and told him she would be staying the night with Annabel because of the fog. Martin heard the murmur of a man’s voice answering her truculently. It was only the second time in his life he had been in bed all night with a woman. On an impulse he told her so and she put her arms round him, holding him close to hejr.

  In the morning he looked once more at that copy of the Post with its cover photograph of the path from the railway bridge to Nassington Road and, on the inside, the paragraph about Russell Brown. It seemed a hundred years since he had first read it, had underlined that emotive name and inserted, after a feverish scanning of the phone book, the number of her house in Fortis Green Lane. He put the paper on top of the neat pile of tabloids on the floor of the kitchen cupboard and the Daily Telegraph on the pile of broadsheets. Later, walking up the hill with Francesca-she refused to let him drive her-he called into the newsagents and cancelled the Post. Why had he ever bothered to take a local paper? Only, surely, because of knowing Tim Sage.

  Martin didn’t expect to see Francesca again that weekend, he didn’t even really mind that, but he had somehow taken it for granted that now they would meet every evening. He was very taken aback when she phoned him on Monday morning to say she wouldn’t be able to see him that night, Lindsay had a bad cold, and perhaps they could see each other in a week’s time. He was obliged to wait, phoning her every day, very aware of that other life she led with a husband and a little child, yet scarcely able to believe in its reality.

  Nothing could have brought that reality more forcefully home to him than Lindsay herself. On the first Saturday afternoon Russell went off to football and she was able to get away she brought Lindsay with her.

  “Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry. I had to bring her. If I hadn’t I couldn’t have come myself.”

  She was a beautiful little girl, anyone would have thought that. She was dark like her mother but otherwise not much like her, their beauty being of two very distinct kinds. Francesca had a high colour and fine pointed features, hair that waved along its length and curled at it tips, and her eyes were brown. Lindsay’s eyes were bright blue, her skin almost olive, her mouth like the bud of a red flower, a camellia or azalea perhaps from her mother’s shop. Because her straight, almost black hair was precociously long, she looked older than she was. To Martin it seemed for a moment as if the face beside Francesca’s smiling apologetic face was that of an aggressive adolescent. And then Francesca was stripping off coat and woolly scarf and it was a baby that emerged, a walking doll not three feet high.

  Lindsay ran about examining and handling the Swedish crystal. Martin’s heart was in his mouth, but he scolded himself inwardly for turning so young into an old bachelor. If he was like this now how would he be when he had children of his own, when he and Francesca had children of their own? Lindsay began turning all his books out of the bookcase and throwing them on the floor. It surprised Martin that Francesca kissed him in front of Lindsay and let him hold her hand and sat with her head on his shoulder. It surprised and slightly embarrassed him too, for Lindsay had so far only uttered one sentence, though that frequently and in a calm conversational tone.

  “I want to see my daddy.”

  Martin looked at Francesca to see how she took this, but even when Lindsay had repeated it at least ten times Francesca only smiled vaguely and she continued to give Martin butterfly kisses. It’s because she doesn’t mind Russell knowing, Martin thought and he felt elated. It’s because she knows now that her marriage is over.

  Then a rather curious thing happened.

  Martin had been saying rather gloomily that he supposed they wouldn’t be able to meet much over Christmas.

  “No, but I’ve got something nice to tell you, darling.” Francesca’s eyes sparkled. “I’ll be able to come and stay the whole New Year week-end with you-if you’d, like that.”

  “If I’d, like it! It’s the most wonderful Christmas present you could give me.”

  “Russell’s taking her to his parents in Cambridge for the week-end.”

  Lindsay came over and climbed on her mother’s knee and put her hand over her mother’s mouth and said,

  “We’ll go home now.”

  Martin said, “I thought you said his parents lived in Oxford. That week we met I thought you said he had taken Lindsay to his parents in Oxford.”

  Francesca opened her mouth to speak and Lindsay pinched her lips together. “We’ll go home now, we’ll go home now,” Lindsay chanted. “I want to see my daddy.”

  Lifting Lindsay, Francesca stood up. “I’ll have to take her home, Martin, or we could all go for a walk. Oh, don’t do that, Lindsay, don’t be so awful.” She turned on Martin her direct and transparently honest gaze. “Russell’s parents live in Cambridge, Martin. I’m afraid it’s you who got it wrong. One always does associate those two
places, don’t you think? That’s why you got confused.”

  She wouldn’t let him drive them home but insisted on a taxi.

  On Saturday, December 16, Mrs. Bhavnani and Suma flew to Sydney, and Martin, after drinks in the Flask with Norman Tremlett, did his Christmas shopping. He bought six rose bushes for his father, My Choice, Duke of Windsor, Peace, Golden Showers, and Super Star twice, Rive Gauche eau de toilette, for his mother, a box of handkerchiefs embroidered with blue and yellow flowers for Caroline, and for the Vowchurches, who had invited him on Boxing Day, a macrame hanging plant container. Mr. Cochrane would get a ten-pound note. There was no one else to buy for except Francesca.

  This was difficult. He had never seen her wear jewellery, so presumably she didn’t like it. He couldn’t buy her clothes when he didn’t know her size or perfume since he didn’t know her taste. At last he found two cut-glass scent bottles with silver stoppers in an antique shop and paid thirty pounds for them.

  On Sunday he had lunch with his parents. Secretly, so that his father shouldn’t observe them, his mother showed him the current North London Post. The front page lead was headed “Miracle Op for Hornsey Boy,” and there was a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Bhavnani with Suma, the three of them posed, evidently several years before, in a very Victorian way in a photographer’s studio. Mrs. Bhavnani, wearing a sari, was sitting in a carved chair with the boy standing at her knees and her husband behind her.