by Ruth Rendell
‘This flat isn’t big enough for two, Will. You know there’s only one bedroom. How about living on your own if you and I saw each other often? If you came over here a lot and we went out?’
He smiled his sweet smile. ‘I don’t mind.’
The local authority that ran the course got him his job, unskilled labouring for Keith Beatty, and after a while he did pick up basic skills. It was Becky who found the flat above Star Antiques. Convenient for his job in Lisson Grove and not too far from her, it was the right size for him to manage, just a bedsit with kitchen and shower room. And the other people in the house were nice: Inez and a very jolly Caribbean chap called Freddy something, and a pleasant man on the top floor. Ludmila she had never encountered. She worried that Will wouldn’t know how to keep it clean and she prepared herself for the chore of cleaning it for him, but there he surprised her. Not only did he maintain it in spotless condition but he added all kinds of pretty things to the basics Inez provided. Some of them, a green glass vase, a china cat, a lamp whose stand was a Chinese abacus, she suspected Inez had given him, some she had provided herself, but some he had bought, the pink-and-grey cushions, the white cups and plates with rainbow-coloured spots. He had to have a phone, she would never have had a quiet moment if he were without a phone, though she doubted if he knew how to make a call properly.
He loved going to the zoo, so she took him there. They went in the canal boat to Camden Lock and on the river as far as the Thames Barrier. Once or twice they went to the cinema but these visits made her uneasy because what he saw on the screen he believed to be real. Sex he found bewildering, while violence terrified him, he whimpered and clutched at her till she had to take him out. Harry Potter, which had seemed innocent enough to her, so affected him that next time they met he told her he had been to King’s Cross Station looking for platform nine and a half and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t there. Mostly she invited him to Gloucester Avenue, but she told herself it didn’t happen often enough, it ought to be at least once a week and more would be better. What did he do when he was alone in Star Street? In doubt and trepidation because of his reaction to the cinema, she had bought him television and he loved it. How he managed about violence and sex she didn’t know and was afraid to ask. Reading beyond the level of the simplest children’s book was beyond him and he had no interest in listening to music. He cleaned the flat, she supposed, and rearranged his ornaments. And there was always that occasional mainstay, the childcare officer who took him round to the pub for a beer.
The really desirable thing, she thought, as she slipped a new video into her recorder, would be for him to find a girlfriend. A nice sensible girl, a bit old-fashioned if such a person existed, who would mother him and care for him. A dating agency? The worst thing in the world for the likes of Will. Perhaps Inez would know someone. Becky made up her mind to talk to Inez and soon. Before starting the video, she dialled Will’s number and when he answered, as he always did, with a timorous, questioning ‘Hello?’ asked him over for lunch and supper the following day.
He accepted, with the excited enthusiasm another young man might have shown responding to the offer of a round-the-world tour.
CHAPTER 3
Will Cobbett was very likely the only occupant of the house, thought Inez, who knew nothing about the latest murder and didn’t even know it had taken place. The only resident of Star Street, probably. Everybody was talking about it, but Will, whom she had encountered in the back hall when she went down to pick up her Sunday paper, said only that it was a nice sunny day, Mrs Ferry, and that he was on his way to spend it with his auntie. His mild blue eyes seemed to glaze over as he looked at the 48-point headline on the front page and he registered no interest, only lifting his head and saying how much he looked forward to the day ahead.
‘I do like going to her place. She cooks me my dinner at twelve and we always have the things I like.’
He was so handsome and always so clean and neat that he looked as if he must be intelligent too. How could a man be so tall and slim, have that straight nose and firmly cut mouth, that blond hair and those eyes, and be—well, not quite like other people? Most people expected the illiterate and the simple to be ugly and squat but Will was beautiful. There was no other word for him and if she had been thirty years younger she’d have gone overboard for him.
‘You say hello to your auntie from me.’ She liked Becky Cobbett who was marvellous with Will. Few aunts would go to all the trouble she did. Selflessness wasn’t common. ‘Give her my kindest regards. Next time she comes over here you must bring her down for a drink.’
‘And I could have raspberry and cranberry juice.’
‘Of course you could. We must make a date.’
She wasn’t going to mention Caroline Dansk or what had happened to her. Becky had told her that any sort of violence, even the idea of it, upset him a lot. There were plenty of other people in the house or, come to that, the street, more than willing to discuss the murder. Inez took the paper upstairs, made herself coffee in the little one-cup cafetière and ate a Danish pastry. Caroline Dansk’s picture had been in yesterday’s evening paper but this was a different one. She looked older but prettier, her lips parted, her large eyes, thought Inez, full of hope. Much good that had done her, dead at only twenty-one.
It was the age she had been when she married her first husband. If she had been a bit older she would have known better than to tie herself up to a man who couldn’t keep his eyes or, as often as not, his hands, off every girl he encountered, attractive or not. Inez had been very good-looking, fair-haired and brown-eyed with regular features and long thick hair, but that hadn’t been enough for Brian. She ought to have seen the signs and she saw them. It was a matter of interpreting them wrongly, a matter of the old, old story, that she thought she could change him. Really, it wasn’t until Martin came along that she had a man she didn’t want to change. She sighed, went back to the front page.
There it was again, a keyring the murderer had taken this time, the ring itself made of onyx and gold plate, a gold-plated chain and a scottie dog in onyx suspended from it. The police and the newspaper hadn’t seen the keyring, of course, but an artist had drawn his impression of it according to the description given him by Caroline’s stepfather. Inez didn’t see the use of that. The garrotter wasn’t going to leave it lying about for anyone to find. The paper said Noreen Ponti, the poor girl’s mother, had recorded an appeal for her killer to be found. Understandable but pointless. Everybody would like to find him, that wasn’t the problem. She turned the page to a Tory scandal, a top doctor involved in a flagellation ring, and the wedding picture of an elderly politician who had got married to another elderly politician.
Inez had kept for herself the first floor of the house. She had a large living room, fair-sized kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. With the money Martin left her, she had had the three floors over the shop she and Martin shared converted into flats and all the rooms fitted with cupboards, rewired, new fitments put in and the floors carpeted. No philanthropist, she knew she could get far more rent that way and she had long ago resolved, like Scarlett O’Hara, never to be poor again. On the level above her the two studio flats, basically one room with bathroom and kitchen, were occupied by Will at the back and Ludmila Gogol at the front, Ludmila’s more than half the time by Freddy Perfect as well.
Ludmila’s footfalls could be heard overhead now. She never got up till very late on Sundays and stayed in one of her many dressing gowns all day, even if she went up the road to get a paper or a pint of milk. Gogol, Inez thought, had been the name of a famous Russian writer. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be Ludmila’s real name, there were people called Shakespeare and Browning, Martin had had a cousin called Dickens, but it somehow made it less likely. Her accent came and went. Sometimes it was quite strong, central European movie-speak, and at others more the way the clients spoke in the Lisson Grove Job Centre.
Inez was interested in people. It had failed to m
ake her a judge of character, though. She knew that but didn’t know how to change. How, for instance, was she to know if Freddy Perfect was what he seemed, a cheerful though unfunny clown, or a bit of a small-time crook? And Zeinab—why would she never allow anyone to visit her at home, not even let anyone drive her home? Her father, being strict as some Moslems are, might dislike the idea of boyfriends, especially non-Moslem boyfriends, but why, unless he was a raving paranoiac, would he object to her being brought home by a woman? She, Inez, had only last week offered her a lift home in the course of delivering a bronze bust of Field Marshal Montgomery to a house in Highgate, but she had become quite frightened at the prospect. Human beings were impossible to understand.
These two old people in the paper who had got married, for example, what prompted that? Their combined ages added up to a hundred and forty-six. How did they think they could learn each other’s by now rigid habits and idiosyncracies at their age? And did they have the energy to make the attempt? After Martin, Inez was resolved on never marrying again, even supposing someone asked her, but she would have liked a man around. A nice man in his late fifties, who would take her about, take her out for a drink sometimes or to the pictures. And occasionally stay the night, why not? Sometimes, on warm summer nights, she would walk past a café with tables out on the pavement, soft light falling on the couples who sat there, and feel almost sick with longing to have Martin back again. Failing that—and it must always be failing that—a man with certain of Martin’s traits, someone who, for the time being, would rather be with her than with anyone else. She wasn’t asking for passionate love or even the kind of devotion she had had from Martin, only a nice man who attracted her and enjoyed her company.
She had done her best with her looks, kept her figure, been lucky in having that kind of dark-blonde hair that seldom goes grey, but every man who came into the shop saw Zeinab as well as her and that was it. Invariably. She wouldn’t have looked twice at Morton Phibling but, as any reasonable woman would agree, someone of her age was a far more suitable choice for him than a girl of twenty. Men never saw it like that.
Sunday stretched ahead of her. Refusing to admit to loneliness the rest of the week, she was very solitary on Sundays, on her own unless friends invited her to lunch or dinner or she made the effort and invited them. Perhaps she should try to do that more often, even though it meant cooking and dressing up. The day would be spent doing the washing, the ironing, running the vacuum cleaner round the place, and if it didn’t turn cold, an early-evening walk through the park or along the Bayswater Road where the couples sat in the cafés, holding hands across candlelit tables. And when she got home—even perhaps instead of going out—the videos. The twelve hour-long films that had become her most precious possession.
Like most actors, except those at the very top, Martin had had long periods without work. That was when he had taught elocution, stacked shelves in Sainsbury’s and, at a very low point, cleaned flats. Some of the people he had worked for remembered him when he became a big star and went about saying, ‘You won’t believe this but Martin Ferry was once our cleaner.’ He was near to not bothering to audition for the part of Chief Inspector Jonathan Forsyth but a friend urged him on. It was the same friend who had introduced him to Inez a week before. Martin was in the process of being divorced from his first wife and Inez had just divorced Brian. He phoned her and reminded her who he was, asked her out and told her he was auditioning for the lead in a new detective series, but not to keep her fingers crossed because he hadn’t a hope in hell of getting it.
Even when he got it and rehearsals had begun, hopes for the series weren’t high. The books on which it was based were hardly bestsellers and Inez, who had read some of them, thought them badly written and unconvincing. But either they were transformed by a good scriptwriter or Martin’s charismatic performance as Forsyth quickly took them to the top of the polls. Within three months of the first six episodes going out he was a household name. Inez thought he would be bound to drop her, find someone nearer his own new stature, someone younger and also in show business. Instead, he asked her to marry him.
He owned nothing, had been living in a rented flat, but just before the wedding he bought the Star Street house and they moved into the top three floors, shutting up the long defunct shop area. To say it was a happy marriage, as some of those she knew did—‘Oh, Inez is happily married, aren’t you?’—was utterly to underrate and lower it. They were in bliss. The kind of breathless passionate love that never never lasts, that only the very young have and then briefly, endured completely for them from the wedding at Marylebone Register Office to the day Martin had a heart attack and died. Thin, tall, active, abstemious Martin who had never smoked a cigarette, had a heart attack at the age of fifty-six and died within minutes.
The house and his considerable savings became Inez’s. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t have cared if he’d left her nothing and some thief had stolen everything she owned, putting her out on the street to lie with the dossers on the pavements. Nothing could be worse than losing Martin and there was no comfort. Or so she thought then. Finding the twelve videos of Forsyth among his things, made her flinch. Why she didn’t put them out for the rubbish collection she never knew, but perhaps it was only because she couldn’t bring herself to touch them. She always knew where they were, in a drawer she avoided opening. One glimpse, on the cassette box, of his face had been enough to make her collapse in inconsolable tears.
Then, about six months after his death, she went down into the pit, the depths of despair and hopeless longing. Just to see him for a moment, for five minutes, to have him in the room. She gasped for that. She thought that without a brief sight of his face she could no longer bear it. She’d go into the bedroom and take all the sleeping tablets the doctor prescribed for her, washing them down with gin. It was then—she never knew why—that she remembered the videos. She could have that brief sight, she could have more than that, she could see him, hear him, watch him move and walk and speak, for hours on end. And if the seeing and hearing were terrible? She could hardly feel worse than she did.
Her hands shook as she took the cassette out of its cover. It was the first one he had ever made, Forsyth and the Minstrel Boy, and the familiar signature tune was the first shock, a Handel air that she had never heard in any other context. But when the picture began and the camera moved on to Martin going up the stairs to his office, she had let out a cry, she couldn’t help herself. It was going to be as agonising as she had feared.
It wasn’t. Here, after all, was her beloved husband, her lover, her treasure, the only man she had ever really loved, and he was with her, in this room, speaking, she felt, to her. All that was missing was that she couldn’t touch him, and that was a big ‘all’, but this film was giving her so much else. And it wasn’t a one-off. He wouldn’t disappear again for ever, for she could play these videos whenever she liked, as much as she wanted, and have the second-best, a printed, recorded Martin, his smile, his beautiful voice, as often as she wished. There were more videos too, that she didn’t have. But she could get them, she could get everything he had ever made that had been put on tape …
Later on, instead of a walk, seeing in the golden evening light sights that only brought her a bitter nostalgia, she could have a long evening with Martin.
Star Street runs westwards, connecting the Edgware Road with Norfolk Square, Paddington Station and St Mary’s Hospital. It is a street of terraces of once humble houses, each one three storeys high with a basement, but where the cross streets intersect, on each of the four corners is a shop in place of a ground floor, with three storeys above it, raising it to a considerably greater height than the terraces. Since this occurs at three intersections in precisely the same way, it is evidently by design, an architectural innovation thought up by whoever planned these houses in the nineteenth century.
The streets are fairly wide and there are few trees, a deficiency compensated for by the planes and limes of the Norf
olk Square garden. Cars line the roadway, for, as in most parts of inner London, there are no other parking places. No one would call Star Street beautiful but it has its own Victorian attractions. A symmetry about the houses is pleasing and the shops have an old-fashioned charm: a hardware store, the inevitable estate agent, a hairdresser, a newsagent and Star Antiques, this last on the corner of Bridgnorth Street.
Once a second-hand bookshop, it had been kept closed for years. Soon after Martin’s death, Inez’s Aunt Violet died at the age of ninety-two, leaving her a big old house in Clapham and its contents, enough Victorian furniture to stock an antique shop. And that was what Inez did with it. She had the boarding taken off the windows, opened up the shop and began by filling it with Aunt Violet’s things. The tenants for the flats came gradually, Ludmila first, then Will Cobbett, lastly Jeremy Quick. The stairs from the top to the bottom led directly down into a small hall where there was a door into the shop, another to the street and one to the garden. The door into the shop had a sign Inez had attached to it which said Private. No Admittance, but no one ever took any notice, not even Jeremy Quick, whom Inez would have called the ideal tenant, almost faultless as he was. For some reason, mysterious to her, they preferred a prior wandering through the shop to going straight out into Star Street.
She had been in there for no more than ten minutes on Monday morning and Star Antiques was still closed, when there came a ring at the street door and a smart rapping on the glass.
Without looking up from the two toby jugs she was dusting, she called out, ‘We’re not open till nine thirty.’