by Ruth Rendell
He saw the name in gold letters but without reading it, shook his head, muttered ‘No, thanks’, too late, for she had let fly a jet of it over the hands he had raised to ward her off. The effect on him was cataclysmic. He stepped back and as it assailed his nose, felt an earthquake shake him from head to foot. His first reaction he never quite knew, only that he cried out, some strangled string of words coming out, but after that the floor rose like a lift. He sank through it as if it were made of jelly, viscid and glutinous. Its quivering walls closed in and he fainted.
When he came round he was lying on some sort of makeshift stretcher, being carried out of the department. Keeping his eyes shut and his body still, he feigned continued unconciousness. He didn’t want to come to, he didn’t want to talk or be questioned, and if given a choice, he would have preferred the total extinction of life and the long rest which would come afterwards.
But, as in the previous night, he had no choice. The stretcher had been set down. He struggled into a sitting position, saw they had brought him into an office and laid whatever they were carrying him on across two chairs. A man was bending over him, asking if he should call a doctor. Jeremy said he didn’t want a doctor. This was normal, he lied, what had happened to him, a kind of epilepsy, only it had never before happened in a public place. He was fine, he would leave and go home. Was there anything he wanted? At that moment a woman brought him a glass of water and finding himself suddenly parched with thirst, he drank it down.
‘I was looking’, he said, ‘for a perfume called Tourmaline …’
‘Nothing easier,’ said the woman, and she was back in two minutes with a red casket, the name printed in gold on its side.
Jeremy paid for it, allowed them to call him a taxi. Sitting back in his seat, he found himself silently reciting over and over again the words on a small notice in front of him: Thank you for not smoking, thank you for not smoking. He couldn’t stop saying it and he even said it aloud to the driver as he got out. ‘Thank you for not smoking—I’m sorry. I mean, how much is that?’
The man gave him a strange look, occasioned perhaps by his repeating the phrase which had become a mantra or by the reason the cab had been ordered for him. Men don’t faint. Women may do but men don’t.
Why had he? He knew the answer to that but he still had to think about it all, go out on to his roof garden and think.
What had happened to him at the time of his father’s death had not come back to him in complete unexpurgated form in the moments between smelling the scent and passing out, but only the salient incidents. There had been no illusion of seeing a film rapidly run nor that experience, the favourite of old wives’ tales, of his whole past life flashing before his eyes. Now, though, as he sat among his flowers, under a benign blue and white sky, he thought of himself at thirteen, already very tall, already well into puberty, the hated brace on his teeth. He was accompanying his mother to the hospital where his father lay in the extreme last stages of lung cancer. All his life James Gibbons had been a smoker, as had his wife, as his widow still was, in her late sixties and apparently fit. Then she was young, distraught with misery, telling her son over and over that he would soon be all she had left to live for.
Her reaction to these bedside sessions became more and more violent so that by the time of this visit, when her husband lay stunned with morphia, she was on the verge of hysteria. He knew his son and managed for Jeremy a faint ghastly smile but he seemed no longer to recognise his wife. His seeing but uncomprehending eyes turned on her with bewilderment in their dark depths, he seemed not to know who this woman was. It was enough to provoke a storm of tears and with a murmured, ‘I’ll see you at home, darling,’ to Jeremy, she had run out of the room.
Later he was to wonder if the woman who came in would have done so if his mother had still been there, if she had perhaps looked through the little porthole in the door to check first. He recognised her as a one-time friend of his mother’s who had dropped out of their lives when she moved house some two or three years before. She was younger than his parents by a dozen years and very good-looking. In those days he had a fast-developing eye for female beauty—that was long gone—and he appreciated this woman’s shapely figure, short and trim blonde hair and long stockings-advertisement legs. In fact, the sight of her stirred him in a way he had never known before but hoped to know again. In his eyes, though certainly fifteen years older than he, she was a girl just enough his senior to be exciting.
At first she took no notice of him. She stopped a yard into the room, saw his father and drew in her breath. He thought he heard her murmur, ‘Oh, God.’ Then she went slowly up to the bed and fell on her knees, taking his hand and covering it with kisses. Jeremy might not have been there, or been a wheelchair or a folded-up bedspread for all the notice she took of him. His father turned on her a look so full of love that even Jeremy, young as he was, recognised it. To recognise was one thing, to understand another. He was confused, not knowing what he was witnessing, feeling dreamlike sensations, unsure by what mystical or supernatural means he had stumbled into this scene.
‘Tess,’ his father said in his whispery cracked voice, ‘Tess,’ and then, with a huge effort, ‘Lovely of you to come.’ Even those few words exhausted him and he gasped, closing his eyes.
Lost for a while in his memories, Jeremy came back to life in Star Street, got up, stretched his legs and his arms above his head. He went back into the flat and poured himself a stiff gin and tonic. The first sip he took before returning to the roof garden. When you considered how wonderful that first taste was, how it buoyed you up, how it infused you with energy and a kind of inspiration, it was hard to understand alcoholism, for nothing that came after equalled in intensity and sheer excitement that first sip.
He stood on the roof looking across Inez’s garden and the one that joined the end of it. Everything was richly green now and thickly overgrown. A shrub was covered in great snowy bracts of flowers, another he identified as a lilac. The house the garden belonged to must be in St Michael’s Street. From an upper window a bronze-skinned face he vaguely recognised—from where? In what circumstances?—looked back at him before slowly retreating.
He sat down again, unable to close his mind to Tess and his father. There was something miraculous about recovered memory, which, previously, he had never believed in. Another life was lived in that past. He had slept through remembrance of it and now, suddenly, because of a perfume, recalled it all.
She had stayed at his father’s bedside for perhaps half an hour, mostly not speaking, the two of them simply contemplating one another. On her face a look of need and concupiscence, in his father’s a terrible weariness and a kind of hopeless longing.
‘Shall I go now?’ he had asked. He was too young to be anything much but embarrassed.
‘Alex,’ his father said, for that was what he always called him, ‘please stay. Stay and take Tess home. I’ll feel better if she’s got you to look after her.’
He look after her? At thirteen? But he stayed and at last Douglas Gibbons fell asleep. Jeremy was never to see him again. He looked at Tess and she at him, and simultaneously they nodded. He didn’t smile, he kept his lips closed because of the brace. As for him taking her home, it was she who took him back to her house, for she had a car with her. She lived in a house on the outskirts of the city. To himself he called it ‘a nasty little house’ because he was a snob, as most children are in one way or other.
Indoors, she asked him if he’d like tea or coffee but when she fetched the drinks it was sherry she brought, rich, brown and sweet. He had never tasted it before and it went straight to his head. That was when he really noticed her legs and he suddenly saw them as quite different from men’s legs, just as her breasts (which he was almost afraid to notice) were something no man had. She talked to him then in a way he recognised when he was older as something she should not have done. It was as if she had forgotten that Douglas Gibbons, her lover, was his father and that when he left her
it would be to go back to Douglas Gibbons’s wife, his mother. She told him they were passionately in love and that his father would have left his home for her if he hadn’t fallen ill. She spoke, in only a thinly veiled way, of their lovemaking and its wonders. Again he was embarrassed but something else too. He was excited by these references to the act of love.
After a while, when she had drunk a second sherry, she said she must go upstairs and change. Her skirt was too tight and her shoes pinched her feet. She was a long time and he was reaching a stage of not knowing what to do, go home, call out to her—she might have fallen asleep—when she called out to him, ‘Come up here a minute, will you?’
Scent pervaded her bedroom. The scent, it must have been, and as he smelt it in its full strength, he realised it had drifted from her as she came up to his father’s bed and knelt down beside him. She was in bed, a quilt pulled up to her chin. ‘I was so tired,’ she said. ‘I was quite worn out.’
He stood by her. She put out her hand for his hand and as she sat up the quilt fell off her shoulders, exposing her naked breasts. Heat flooded his face and neck, and he knew he must have blushed violently. He dared not look at her breasts, yet it was impossible to tear his gaze away.
‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I’m so lonely. I’ll be lonely for ever now.’ She meant when his father was dead but even those words failed to chill him. ‘You look a lot like Douglas. He must have looked just the same as you when he was young. Except for that awful teeth brace.’
He nodded, blushing, his mouth tightly shut.
‘What I’d really like’, she said, ‘would be for you to come into bed with me and hold me. Just for a little while. Will you do that?’
He was so green, so naïve, that he thought she meant as he was, dressed in grey trousers and green checked shirt and school blazer. Even through all those clothes he imagined what her breasts would feel like pressed against him.
‘Oh, darling,’ she said in the voice she had used to his father, ‘do get undressed.’ She giggled. ‘I won’t look.’
It was ridiculous—or seemed so in retrospect. He went behind the dressing table, behind the mirror, took his clothes off, and covered himself with her bathrobe which lay across a chair, approaching the chair backwards. At that time he still thought all she meant was that he was to hold her and cuddle her for comfort, and he was ashamed of his erect penis which the thin robe barely hid. She put her hands over her eyes and he ran to the bed and got in beside her.
She began, in what he supposed later was a fairly expert way, to stroke his body. She touched his penis and held it and said it was lovely. Jeremy had never even kissed anyone in that way and now he discovered kissing was a revelation, a great deal more than just lips meeting. Her tongue ran across the hated brace and he didn’t mind. She said, unwisely as it turned out, whispering it in a soft conspiratorial way, ‘You won’t tell your mother, will you? I don’t mean about us, that wouldn’t matter all that much, but about me and your father.’
She had moved herself on top of him, perhaps because she feared—and with justification—that he wouldn’t know what to do without aid and encouragement. But as she spoke, using those fatal words, he thought of his mother waiting at home for him, already mourning his father, probably trusting his father and certainly wholeheartedly loving him, and his erection weakened and slackened, so that his penis became a flaccid tiny thing, curled up between his belly and hers.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said, ‘what’s happened to you?’ She began to knead his penis and kiss it, and he, as the quilt fell back and uncovered him, felt such shame and indignity that if he had stayed there he thought he would have died. He pushed her away roughly and jumped out of bed.
‘Trust me,’ she said, reaching out to him. ‘I can deal with it. Just relax and leave it to me.’ She began to laugh, staring at him and pointing. Peals of laughter shook her. ‘You really are rather young for that to happen. I’d have thought at your age, obviously a first time …’
What shouldn’t have taken place at his age and what she would have thought, he didn’t stay to hear. The scent caught him in a wave, released as the bedclothes were loosened, and with his clothes held against his body, for just as he had been ashamed of his erection, so now he felt doubly disgraced by the lack of it. The bathroom door was open and he ran in, just making it to the lavatory pan before being sick.
Saying goodbye to her, saying anything to her ever again, were not options. He dressed, went downstairs, let himself out of the house. No doubt she had intended to drive him home—he was too inexperienced to envisage the assignation she might also have intended making—but he was dependent on the bus, which took a long time coming and involved itself in a traffic queue most of the way back to his village. He thought of what had happened while he was on that bus, and as far as he knew it was the last time he ever thought of it or recollected it until today.
The mind will bury experience if the unconscious will is strong enough. Wounded though it is, it will grow scar tissue over the place and will it never to be peeled away. But the scent that girl had sprayed so liberally on him had stripped it bare, so agonisingly that the bleeding and the pain took away consciousness and for a moment or two laid him low.
He had rediscovered it all and now he knew. He knew that her words and her laughter, his failure and his shame, had so marked him that at the time his life was quite changed and he had entered more than a new phase: a new world. Just as he had that morning come into another world, different again, when he smelt the scent, hidden from him for a third of a century.
Thinking of it—he would always be able to think of it now—he understood why it was always when they were ahead of him and he walked behind them, that the impulse to kill those girls seized him. The scent they wore, all of them using that perfume she used—popular once, long out of production, revived two years before—drifted behind them as they moved, lingering and delicate or strong and pungent, on the air in their wake. And he was there to be caught by it, ensnared, captured, reminded, driven to dreadful things.
Now he knew, would he stop?
CHAPTER 25
Anxious not to fall into the habit of going to her sister and brother-in-law every Bank Holiday, Inez resolved this time to take herself to the cinema and spend the evening at home, watching a Forsyth video as antidote to the film which would probably be a disappointment. What a negative attitude to life, she said to herself, but she kept to her plan. Westminster and the West End would be full of sightseers in pursuit of the Golden Jubilee celebrations, so those areas she avoided and went to the Screen on Baker Street. A gloom she failed to shake off settled on her when she reflected that there were to be two days of holidays in succession this year, an unparalleled phenomenon in British history.
In the Isle of Man it was sunny but cold. Freddy and Ludmila went on a coach tour every day, avoiding any contemplation of beauty spots, visits to museums, churches and big houses, eschewing beaches and leaving their seats only to go shopping or eat huge meals of the pizza–burger-and-chips variety. Freddy told everyone on the trips and anyone else they encountered that he and Ludmila were just married, a piece of news that made them immensely popular. As Freddy said afterwards, he hardly had to pay for a single drink himself, but his bride’s opinion was that it was ridiculous when you’d been married as often as she had, and who knew how many more husbands she would have?
Algy took Zeinab and the children and Mrs Sharif to the Mall to watch the Queen and the Royal Family come out on to the palace balcony. Reem Sharif was enthusiastically patriotic and pro-monarchist, and wept copiously into her binoculars when the national anthem was sung. Algy was amazed. He had never seen her cry before. Also in the crowd quite near them were Anwar Ghosh, Keefer, Julitta and Flint, but although Anwar recognised Zeinab he gave no sign of knowing her. He was concentrating on winding his own black scarf round Julitta’s neck to hide the diamond pendant.
‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doi
ng?’ Julitta bellowed at him. ‘I’m too bloody hot as it is, I can’t fucking breathe.’
‘The girl it belongs to is over there.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Swallowed up by the crowd,’ said Anwar.
‘I told you not to wear it, you stupid bitch,’ said Flint.
‘She won’t after today.’ Anwar was still peering about in search of Zeinab. ‘I’m flogging it tomorrow.’
He sounded confident but in fact he was wondering if the man he knew in Clerkenwell would touch it. They should never have taken something so obviously valuable. Well, wait and see. Enjoy the here and now. He was a great believer in living in the present and if he’d had to have a motto it would have been: Seize the Day. The four of them had all been spending a lot of Jeremy Quick’s money and meant to resume spending it in pubs and, later, in clubs and restaurants, once Julitta’s passion was satisfied and she had seen Prince William.
On Friday James took Becky out to dinner, came back with her and spent the night in Gloucester Avenue. Although she had warned him several days in advance that Will would be coming on Monday, he forgot all about it, stayed in bed on Monday morning and was in the shower when Will arrived. As he muttered to Becky later in the day, he would have gone home at once but he had lent his flat to a couple of friends who had come down from the north to see the Jubilee celebrations.
His behaviour in Will’s presence, largely ignoring him, sulking, absorbing himself in the crossword, complaining to Becky whenever he could snatch moments alone with her, had perturbed her from the start. But up till now Will’s behaviour in his company had been very much what it was when he and Becky were on their own or with Kim. On that Monday she noticed a change.
Of course, it was true that Will had been different since his treasure hunting and consequent night in a police cell, more fearful, less talkative and when he did speak, saying odder things than he used. This was another departure. The television inevitably on, he began doing something Becky had never known him do before, using the remote to flit back and forth between channels. Unusually for him, James was showing some interest in the screen, the World Cup being on during the whole month of June, and although no play was taking place at present, commentary on past matches, the form of various teams, whether this player or that had recovered from injury, was almost continuous. Football, someone announced, was more important than the Golden Jubilee and far more than impending war between India and Pakistan. Not to Will, who preferred children’s programmes and game shows, and who, particularly when James showed heightened interest in film clips of past England victories or concentrated on Beckham’s damaged foot, flicked back to a Tom and Jerry cartoon.