Talking to Strange Men

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘It was you all the time and no one knew it.’ John felt as if his eyes were starting from his head. He stared at Mark with strained bared eyeballs. It was as if he were seeing him for the first time. He said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Do you understand what you did? It wasn’t just Cherry you killed, it was my parents too. And you made us all desperately unhappy. You said how wonderful our family life was and what it meant to you, yet you destroyed all that . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly happy about it myself, you know.’

  All Mark’s shaking had stopped and his face, or what John could see of it, seemed to have relaxed. He got to his feet, stood at the window, stretched. John felt the shock of what he had been told fully reaching him, effecting a buzzing in his head, a palpitating of the heart. He said it again, his voice breaking:

  ‘Was it a temporary madness, a fit of madness?’

  Mark sat in the chair, on the edge of it, leaning forward. ‘It must have been, when I actually physically did it. There wasn’t anything mad about my reasons for doing it.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Jealousy. Rage. Hurt.’

  ‘But you hadn’t any reason to be jealous of Cherry. She loved you. She never looked at any man but you and I’m sure no man ever looked at her.’

  Mark gave that brittle laugh of his. ‘Are you kidding?’ He said in a very artificial way, like an actor in a bad film, ‘She was the biggest whore in town.’

  For the first time that he could remember John knew what it was to be totally out of control. His body acted without his apparent volition. A redness of the kind you usually only see when looking at the light through closed lids appeared before his eyes. He jumped up and lashed out with both fists at Mark. But Mark dodged and was struck only a light blow on the neck. He sidestepped and when John lunged again he found himself pummelling the upholstery of the chair. Mark reached for the table lamp and a switch by the door and the whole room was flooded with brilliant blinding light. John fell head foremost into the chair and crouched there in silent misery.

  ‘You and your parents,’ Mark said. ‘You must have been living with your heads buried in sand. From the time she was fifteen, long before she left school, she was going with anyone. And it wasn’t some sort of insecurity, mark you, it wasn’t because she needed her ego bolstering or anything like that. It was because she loved it. She was mad for sex, it was the mainspring of her life. I suppose that was what made her so attractive.’

  ‘Attractive?’ John said. ‘Cherry attractive?’ He felt dreadful saying it, wicked and abominably disloyal, but at the same time that it didn’t matter what he said, nothing like that mattered or ever would again. ‘She was one of the plainest girls I ever saw.’

  That hateful laugh of Mark’s made him wince. ‘Those eyes,’ he said. ‘That hair. She had the most beautiful body. She had a breathtaking body.’

  John faltered, ‘You mean you’d seen . . .?’

  ‘Of course I’d seen. Do you think she’d go to bed with all those others and not with me? She was going to marry me. At least she did want me – only she wanted all the others as well. Anybody, old, young. I suppose she couldn’t help it. I really do suppose that. It was a pity I couldn’t take it, wasn’t it? It was a pity I couldn’t say to myself, this is the most wonderful woman I will ever know and the best sex I will ever get, surely I can put up with her promiscuity if she’s discreet about it, if she doesn’t broadcast it. I was right thinking it was the best. My marriage was a travesty compared to that. But I couldn’t put up with it, John. I couldn’t take it. Not when she’d promised me to change and then I found she was sleeping with old Maitland.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘I know. That’s what I said. A sixty-year-old bricklayer with a bricklayer’s hands. He stank of Guinness. He had white stubble on his face.’

  ‘But when was all this? When could she have . . .?’

  ‘Half those visits to Mrs Chambers were never made, for instance. Nearly all the times she was supposed to be staying with your aunt she wasn’t there. It was very convenient for Cherry your parents not having the phone. And as for old Maitland, at work of course. I walked in there unexpectedly one evening – I was half an hour early fetching her – and I found her sitting on his knee.’

  ‘Perhaps she was sick,’ John said. ‘She was ill.’

  ‘Nymphomania? Don’t give me that. We don’t say a man’s ill if he’s crazy about sex, if he can’t get enough sex. Why should a woman be different? You’re the one that says women are the same as us. There was nothing wrong with Cherry. It was me that was wrong, that was inadequate if you like. I killed her because she admitted going with other men and said she couldn’t stop, it was no good her pretending she could stop.’

  ‘You could have left her. You could have broken the engagement and left her.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t. I’m going to tell you what happened. I called for her that night. Well, about five. It was already dark. We walked along the embankment quarrelling. She told me quite frankly that old Maitland had been screwing her every day, or as often as he could make it. She said she didn’t see any point in lying to me, nor would she have lied to her parents if they’d asked her, or you, only none of you ever asked. We came up Beckgate Steps. I got hold of her. I put my hands round her throat and once they were round her, John, I couldn’t let go. It was as if my hands were fused there. I squeezed and squeezed and I heard something snap and as soon as that happened the life went. She went limp and slipped down, she fell through my hands and lay on the stones . . .’

  He stopped and was silent. He closed his mouth and bowed his head. John felt hollow and worn out as if he had not eaten or slept for a long time. It was then too that he was aware of the world having changed.

  ‘Why have you told me?’ he said in a strange voice that sounded unlike his own.

  ‘I had to tell someone. Do you know what it’s like going about with something like that on your conscience? It’s like a weight that pulls you down . . .’

  John got up. The city lay below him, embroidered with light and lit by the moon. He thought, irrelevantly, how many times, a couple of hundred times by now, that moon had waxed and waned since Cherry died, and all that time Mark had held on to his stupid cruel secret. He gasped out, still in shock:

  ‘I’m going. I don’t want to see you again.’

  ‘I’d better drive you home.’

  ‘No, thanks. You’re drunk.’

  ‘I drive better when I’m drunk,’ said Mark, and John thought he looked better than he had done for weeks, he looked happier.

  He left the flat quickly without saying any more. It must have been very late. For some reason his watch had stopped. Sometimes it was possible to pick up a taxi here that was returning to the city after dropping a fare at Fonthill. But there were no taxis that night. He began the long walk down, confused, shocked, his head still swimming from it, but resolving as he walked to go to the police. A kind of angry horror took hold of him when he remembered that relieved happy look on Mark’s face as he was leaving.

  The road brought him down among the big houses of Hartlands. A few last lights gleamed between the trees in garden that were like woodland clearings. He saw no one, passed no one. The lights of an occasional car swept the road ahead, the grass plots in the pavement. There was a police station at Feverton, down near Randolph Bridge. They would think he was mad, going in there with a thing like this at that time of night. For suddenly, now, the CitWest tower clock reared up ahead of him, still a mile away but plainly visible. The time was twelve-forty-two and the temperature eleven degrees. It would be better to go to the police in the morning . . .

  That Friday was the first day John had ever stayed away from work for a less than sound reason, for real illness or, for instance, a funeral. He had taken a morning off for his mother’s funeral and an afternoon for his father’s. But before he went to bed he knew he would take the day off. And the Saturday morning when he was supposed to
be working he would take off too. After lying awake for an hour in the dark, he understood that he had only gone to bed because that was what one did in the night time. It was a rule, a convention, and he lived by those. But the world had changed.

  So he got up and dressed again and sat downstairs and after a while he went out into his garden. He buried his face in the cold blossoms of a pink rose. He sat on the little stone seat and closed his eyes and he was surprised at the blankness of his mind, his inability to think. But he didn’t sleep there either and at four the birds started. I will never rest again, what will happen to me? an inner voice asked, and as the dawn came he wandered indoors and out again, waiting for the time when he could reasonably phone Gavin . . .

  That had been three weeks ago. He hadn’t gone to the police and on the Monday he had returned to work. Being born again, he thought, generally seemed to imply being reborn for the better, but why shouldn’t it also mean being born anew into a grimmer world and with the knowledge that life was hard and terrible? He also had some curious feelings about what pain can do to you. Perhaps it could cut into and damage that part of the brain we call the mind. Perhaps in this way it could alter you and make you a different, less scrupulous, less timid, person. The old John, he felt, would not have said harshly to Gavin:

  ‘Leave off talking to that damned bird, will you? There’s a queue of customers at the goldfish pond.’

  The old John wouldn’t have let Jennifer’s letter lie about for a week before answering it, nor when he did answer agree in clipped cold terms to the proposed meeting, stipulating only that it should be in his house. Certainly, the old John, when Mark phoned to suggest talking it over more fully, would not have replied:

  ‘I’ve nothing to talk about with you,’ and replaced the receiver.

  7

  A RECURRING DREAM for Angus Cameron led him through a series of large shabby high rooms where the wallpaper, of faded roses, hung in strips from beneath a crumbling cornice, broken chandeliers were suspended precariously from the ceilings by a single chain of prisms, and split or missing floorboards revealed through fissures sooty depths where beetles crept. Sometimes, along his fearful route through this dream house, Angus would see ahead of him, through a floorboard hole, a bony hand rise up. And then he yelled out. When he was a little boy Lucy would come, calm and comforting. Now it was different and he groaned softly in an empty room. It was just as well perhaps that he had only once entered the safe house at 53 Ruxeter Road and never been higher than the ground floor. To walk up that staircase as Mungo did and wander from decaying room to decaying room would have brought up goose pimples on his flesh and one of those dreams that night . . .

  They never opened the windows. They hardly knew whether it was possible to open them. Eventually it would have been noticed and their presence detected. On a warm June night, still daylight at nine and after, the drawing room on the first floor was airless and smelling of dust and moth, a dry powdery smell that made you sneeze. Moths had scored the dirty pink silk curtains with furry runnels. A great cobweb, a multi-layered structure of rigging and galleries, hammocks and swinging ropes, stretched from vine-leaf cornice to dust-clotted pelmet and held a hecatomb of dead flies. Graham O’Neill, wearing his octopus tee-shirt, sat on the ragged chaise longue, Mungo on the garden seat of metal loops and curlicues. The slanting rays of the setting sun came in here through dirty panes and made squares on the floor the colour of fire.

  ‘He’s late,’ Graham said.

  ‘Your watch is fast. I’ll be surprised if he’s late. Whatever he may have been up to, he won’t be late. He’s not a late person.’

  Mungo went to the window, not to look down into the street, but up at the sky and the tower.

  ‘Eight-fifty-six,’ he said, ‘and nineteen degrees.’ He stood with his back to the window, his eyes on the door which was shut. It was a panelled door with fingerplate and knob of heavy blackened brass. ‘I’ve got something to tell you before he comes. Stern has got our June code.’

  ‘What do you mean, got it?’

  ‘There are two possibilities, aren’t there? One is that he or one of his field agents happened on it by chance. It could be done with a lot of guesswork and a lot of work. He would have to have found out it’s espionage fiction we use. OK, that was always possible. But Spytrap? It’s quite an obscure book. It’s a spy-novel buff’s book. I mean it’s not in the Smiley’s People class, is it? The other possibility is that someone gave it to him.’

  Graham said nothing but he made his mouth into a whistling shape. Reflected in his cat’s eyes, the window panes could be seen and the red sun. Mungo waited for him to ask how he knew and when he didn’t ask, said:

  ‘Basilisk got a command in Spytrap to abandon Autoprox.’

  Mungo stopped talking abruptly. He listened. One of the stairs creaked, the fifth from the top. No matter how you trod on it and at which point, it would creak. Not when it was he mounting the staircase, of course, for he would jump it. He thought he had heard something, not a creak, more a tremor in the depths of the house. Silently he moved back to the metal seat and sat in the middle of it. The door opened and Charles Mabledene came in, but the stair hadn’t creaked. He, too, had learned to miss it.

  He looked very small, a little boy with a child’s face. With his soft fair wavy hair and his swimmy blue eyes, his expressionless rather flat face, he looked stupid. He was the only brilliant person Mungo had ever known who looked stupid.

  ‘I suppose you know why we’ve asked you to come here.’ I sound like Mr Lindsay, Mungo thought, I sound like the headmaster. But what other way was there? ‘You can sit down if you want.’ A shifting of the blue eyes reminded him. ‘Don’t do any conjuring tricks, please.’ Mungo asked the question sharply: ‘How does Stern know about Autoprox?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  Mungo nodded. It was Graham who said:

  ‘Basilisk was given a fake command. In the June code. The real command was removed and a fake one substituted in Spytrap.’

  Charles Mabledene’s small feet in immaculate white trainers only just reached the floor. One of the squares of red light bathed them, they were set in the centre of it as if in deliberate quest of symmetry. But the sun was setting, had almost set, and quite quickly the colour receded, faded, was gone. Dragon, who could scarcely have been less aptly named, looked down at his feet, at the vanishing light, the dying fire, then lifted his eyes and looked at Mungo.

  ‘Are you saying I’m a traitor?’

  Instead of replying directly, Mungo said, ‘You defected. I know it’s hard. It’s a hard doctrine that the defector is always set apart from one’s own, but there it is. In a way it’s a paradox, because the defector in order to want to come over has to have powerful feelings of allegiance to the firm he’s going to, and yet . . .’

  ‘What he means is,’ said Graham harshly, his gooseberry cat’s eyes gleaming, ‘once a traitor always a traitor. If you could betray Stern you can betray us.’

  ‘But surely the argument is that I never betrayed Stern, that I’m still Stern’s man?’

  Charles Mabledene was cleverer than Graham, Mungo thought, and he didn’t want to think that way. The voice that hadn’t yet broken, the choirboy’s treble, said:

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Mungo hadn’t thought that far. He was aware of dusk coming, of more than dusk. Dark clouds had come up to cover the sunset’s afterglow. The room was filling with shadows and the smell of dust and rotten wood was a sour cold smell. He didn’t want to lose Charles Mabledene but his skin grew cold and crept when he thought of every secret, every new exercise, passing stealthily to Stern.

  ‘You must prove you’re ours,’ he said.

  8

  JOHN KNEW SHE didn’t much care about houses and furniture, that sort of thing, but she must surely notice the improved look of the place, the clean covers, the new lamp. And the garden, even she who had been indifferent couldn’t fail to admire the garden. The wisteria
that covered the front bay was out, long mauve tassels draping the window panes, the patch of lawn was cut to the precise length of one inch and the edges trimmed, and among the last of the Siberian wallflowers the first pansies were coming out. On an impulse he brought a big plaster tub back from Trowbridge’s and, though this was the kind of cheating he had formerly despised, filled it with geraniums and begonias that were already in bloom. It seemed to him that he kept on doing things he would not have done in the past, that his whole nature was changing.

  The old John would have waited at the window for them, staring at the street, at his opposite neighbour’s monkey puzzle tree, or paced the front bedroom, on every count of a hundred peering to right and left round the edges of curtains. Instead he went into the greenhouse to nip the side shoots off his tomato plants and pot up capsicum seedlings. He didn’t even worry about getting dirty, for he hadn’t dressed up, he hadn’t done what he once would have and changed out of the clothes he had worked in all day. She is my wife, he had said to himself, and you don’t dress up for your wife, that is the point of marriage, that you can be your natural self, you can behave as if you were alone. And he regretted a little the lawn and the tub but it was too late to do anything about them now.

  Every year for years and years he had grown green peppers, yet he had never liked the taste of them, growing them rather for their appearance and the fun of it. When they were ripe he picked them and gave them away, to Colin or Sharon or his aunt, though she didn’t much like them either. The only one in their family who had was Cherry. He shied away from naming her, he didn’t want to think about her ever again, yet she kept returning to his mind. A thousand small associations called her up. He wanted to forget her because she was not what he had thought her, he couldn’t forgive her for having been what she was. And the strange thing was that he recoiled almost more from her, the memory of her, Mark’s victim, than he did from Mark who had killed her.

  Yet two days before, he had gone back to the place where she died, had made a kind of pilgrimage to those scenes of her dying and her death and the time preceding her death, to the building where Maitland’s office had been. The builder’s premises had been no more than a room at the back of a great white decaying Victorian house with a trailer clamped on the side of it to give more space. It had stood in a wilderness of nettles and brambles, bisected by a railway line that was disused even then. He had gone there a few times to meet Cherry after work. Flinching from the thought of it, he imagined her on her best behaviour for this prudish brother, putting a reluctant stop to Maitland’s gropings and kisses, or those of any other man presumably, who might drop in about a roof repair or bricklaying job. It made him shiver. That broad face, bunched cheeks, snub nose, dwarf woman’s distorted face, that fibrous glittering hair, came before his eyes now as a portrait of malevolence as well as lechery.