Portobello

by Ruth Rendell

  Now to attend to the final arrangements for the funeral.

  The first thing Ella had done after he went was take off his ring. She took it off and immediately put it on again. This was ridiculous. He would come back, if not that night, next day, he would come back and say what a fool he had been and could she forgive him. Perhaps she believed this and perhaps not, for she couldn't sleep. In the sad mad hours between two and four, panic struck her and she sat up in bed sobbing, with tears running down her face. The ring had come off again in the morning and she had gone into work, bare-fingered, weak with crying and lack of sleep. If any of the others in the practice noticed they said nothing.

  In between patients she asked herself what she should do. Get in touch with him? Go to the gallery? Leave him to come to his senses? Mrs Khan arrived with a different child to interpret for her. This time it was a girl wearing a hijab, though she was no more than nine, her small pale face looking as if the black veil pinched it. Ella thought it very unsuitable that this little child should have to talk about her mother's heavy periods and agonising cramps but she said nothing. In normal circumstances she might have commented but these circumstances weren't normal. But no, she wouldn't run after Eugene. It would be useless. He would come back, she was sure of it, or told herself robustly that she was sure of it. Mrs Perkins was next, inviting her to come along and view her late husband's body and please not to fail to attend his funeral.

  There were no calls to make in the afternoon. She went home, that is to Eugene's house. She hardly felt she could continue to call it home. This reminded her that on the following day she was due at her solicitor's to sign the contract for the sale of her flat. But was this the time to sell? Suppose Eugene had meant it and wouldn't change his mind? Whatever he may have said, she couldn't live in his house, occupy his home, if they were not to be together, not to be married. For the first time she put it plainly into words: we are not to be married. It seemed utterly unreal, yet the only real thing in her world at the moment. She went upstairs and in their bedroom – she still thought of it as their bedroom – she saw that he had been back in her absence. He had taken some of his clothes. He had also, apparently, taken a good many packets of those ridiculous things, that sugar-free rubbish. With a spurt of energy she went round the house, hunting for them. Some remained in drawers and on shelves and in pockets. Breathing as if she had just run a race, she gathered them all up into a plastic carrier bag, twenty, thirty, forty of them, took them outside into the garden and, almost ritualistically, set fire to them.

  Searching for means of doing this, she remembered her sister's story about being asked for matches by the girl with the cigarette in the hotel foyer. She and Eugene had been so happy then. A sob caught at her throat but anger came back. A book of matches was in that secret drawer in the kitchen and alongside it another packet of those things, those bloody things. She found some paraffin too, an ancient bottle of the stuff, untouched for years. It worked, though, and the matches worked. Regardless of the ban on bonfires, in place for decades, she started the fire and it blazed up, consuming his stupid sweets, the garden stinking of – well, it couldn't be burnt sugar. Burnt chemicals, saccharine, aspartame. She stood, looking at the little blackened patch left behind on the grass until the phone ringing fetched her indoors.

  It must be him, it must be. To say he was sorry, he had lost his mind, he didn't know what had come over him. She stumbled and almost fell in her haste to get to the phone.

  It was her sister.

  'Oh, Hilary,' she cried, 'I don't know what to do. I think Eugene's gone mad. Would you come or can I come to you? I'm going mad too.'

  * * *

  Fize didn't believe in letting women in on men's business. Besides, confiding in Gemma would mean confessing that he and Ian were responsible for setting fire to that house. Or Ian was. But he had been there, he had helped, and Fize knew enough about the law to be pretty sure that in a case of murder and arson, when two people were there, even if only one of them struck the match, both were considered to blame. He wouldn't have cared about any of this if they hadn't arrested Lance, if they hadn't charged him and banged him up. He might not have cared too much if the man on remand had been someone he didn't know. At the time, or just before the time, when he and Ian had been on their way over to Blagrove Road, armed with a bottle of petrol and a bag of fireworks, burning up Lance in his bed had seemed an entirely just and reasonable thing to do. Any man would feel the same towards the bloke who's been messing about with his girlfriend.

  But there were objections to that. For one thing, he didn't really know that Lance and Gemma had been doing any more than she said they had when he asked her, that is, having a cup of tea with Uncle Gib and talking about old times. To back up her story was the fact that he had seen the old man go into the house while they were in there. Surely that meant they couldn't have been doing anything they shouldn't. Of course he hadn't felt like that when he was shoving the bottle of petrol through the letter box. As for Ian Pollitt, he didn't feel anything at all about Lance or Gemma or himself, for that matter, Fize was sure of that. Ian just enjoyed a bit of trouble and was always on the lookout for it.

  But he'd started to feel bad about things when first he heard that they'd killed a man who was living in the house that he'd never even heard of. Killing someone you didn't hate or want to have revenge on, someone you didn't know existed, seemed worse than anything. Fize didn't want to lose his job and Gemma or upset his mother, he didn't want to go to prison, but he had some sort of vague idea, picked up from Hollywood films, that you could make something with the police called a plea bargain. You could in America, so presumably you could here too. If you confessed and told them the name of the bloke who had done it with you, he might go down but you'd get off – or get a suspended sentence or something. Fize thought it was worth trying.

  He tried it on Ian.

  They were in the amusement arcade in the Portobello Road at the time, playing the fruit machines. Ian had just had a big win but whereas anyone else would have ploughed the lot back, he pocketed his winnings. He always did. He didn't seem to hear what Fize was trying to tell him about Lance – not surprising considering the racket in there – but said he needed a drink. They went into the Portobello Arms.

  Fize could never express himself very well. Gemma could. She was what they called articulate. He tried to explain to Ian what he meant but the way it came out, Fize stumbling over words and saying 'you know' every five seconds, it sounded as if all he was doing was trying to drop Ian in the shit. And perhaps he was.

  'Can you tell me why it is', said Ian in a very aggressive way, 'every time we go into a fucking pub you go ballsing on about bleeding Lance Platt. Can you tell me that?'

  'It's on account of I don't reckon it's right him being banged up when he didn't do nothing.'

  'Oh, no,'said Ian with heavy sarcasm, 'he didn't do nothing. He's not a thief, he don't break into places and nick old ladies' jewellery. He never smacked your girlfriend so her tooth come out. He don't mug folks for their mobiles.'

  'Yeah, maybe, but he's not going down for that, is he? He's going down for something he never done.'

  'Oh, give me a break.' Ian finished his drink and asked for another – for himself. No second one for Fize. 'I'm going to say just two words to you,' he said, laughing at his own wit, 'and the second one is "off".'

  Fize saw Ian's big calloused hand go to his jeans pocket, go into it and close over something. He said no more.

  At home he and Gemma never said much to each other. His parents had never said much to each other. This was partly due to his mother speaking only a very few words of English and his father no Farsi at all. Gemma liked talking, she was hours on the phone to girlfriends and round at her mother's the two of them chattered away non-stop, but the things they talked about, kids and clothes and make-up and celebrities and music, interested Fize not at all and he knew nothing about them. He liked Abelard but he had nothing to say to him. They watch
ed telly together, and he and Gemma watched telly. Gemma talked about the actors in soaps and the things they did and said, but all he said was 'yes' and 'right' and 'don't know'. He didn't know what to say, so he left all the talking to her.

  She talked to everyone about everyone they knew, the people in the other flats, the other mums with little kids, his mum even though she could hardly understand a word, and, if he was there, he listened without saying anything much. But she didn't expect replies from him. And the one subject she never talked about was Lance Platt. It seemed like she'd forgotten him. Fize would have liked more than anything to find out what she thought about his dilemma but he was scared to mention it, even to touch on it. She might get up out of her chair, grab Abelard and go straight down the cop shop. She was capable of that.

  It was getting so that he lay awake in the night, thinking about what he and Ian had done, lay awake beside the soundly sleeping Gemma, often with Abelard snuggled up between them because the little boy had got into bad habits Fize's own mother would never have allowed. Gemma wouldn't leave any windows open in case Abelard fell out of them. It was stuffy and hot in that bedroom and Fize sweated as he thought about Lance Platt in a much smaller room somewhere, a cell with bunks in it and another bloke maybe. Not a lovely girl like Gemma. And the chances were Lance would stay in that room or somewhere like it for years. Fize knew he had to have another go at Ian but not in a pub this time.

  Here, maybe. Ask him round when Gemma was out of the way. Perhaps when he was babysitting Abelard, and she'd gone over to Michelle's or her mum's. If this fine weather went on he could leave the door to the balcony open and there'd be people on all the other balconies. And Abelard would be around, running in and out. He'd have to persuade Ian to see things his way. If he couldn't, if there was no moving him – and Fize was afraid there wouldn't be – would he have the bottle to go to the police on his own?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  On his instructions, Jackie printed off a hundred slips of headed paper inscribed: The marriage arranged between Dr Ella Cotswold and Eugene Wren for 20 October 2007 will not now take place. Eugene thought of adding a few words of apology to all those guests who wouldn't now have the pleasure of seeing him and Ella joined in matrimony, eating a splendid lunch and drinking his Dom Perignon, but somehow he hadn't the heart. He hadn't the heart for much any more.

  He had taken a room in an hotel in George Street, very comfortable, very expensive, but he doubted if, since he had arrived there several days before, he had slept for more than two or three hours a night. If he went to sleep at midnight he was awake again at two, sitting up in bed eating an Oranchoco for comfort. Then another and another. They were just as nice as Chocorange. He wondered now why he had found their taste bitter at first.

  Falling into a doze at the gallery wasn't unusual. Dorinda had sometimes found him at his desk, his arms spread out and his head resting on them. 'Dead to the world,' as she put it. She told him he should go home, he couldn't go on like this.

  'I have no home,' Eugene said.

  There was no answer to this. She and Jackie exchanged glances. Neither of them knew the reason for the engagement being broken, only that it was broken. No one knew. It would have been easier to tell people of the infidelity of either party or some recently discovered incompatibility than of his addiction to something so absurd and degrading. He was consuming more of the things now than ever, at the rate of at least two packets a day. Because those two women were there, he was afraid to put one of them in his mouth while in the gallery, so he dragged himself outside to walk the pretty streets of Kensington, sucking as many as five in the half-hour outside he allowed himself. Sometimes he simply stood in a doorway or under a tree like a smoker excluded from the workplace.

  The original reason to buy Chocorange, as it was then called, that of keeping him from snacking between meals or eating too much at meals, at last seemed to fulfil its purpose. He had lost interest in real food. Without the heart to weigh himself – there were scales in his bathroom at the hotel – he could see and feel he was losing weight. His clothes started to hang on him and his waistband was loose. The thought had begun to come to him that if he went on like this he could die. He could kill himself. People did. He remembered reading somewhere of a man who had put an end to his life by eating nothing but carrots until he died of an overdose of vitamin A. Probably there were no vitamins at all in Oranchoco but there were plenty of chemicals and no fat or protein and precious little carbohydrate. Thinking of that, he ate another and another, and skipped going out to the restaurant in Crawford Place for his dinner.

  A letter came for him at the gallery from Ella. Not an email or a text message but a proper letter, which seemed to have been delayed for several days by the postal strike. Eugene, it said, I have moved out of your house and back to my flat. Obviously, I couldn't stay there. You can go back now. I have taken all my things with me and left the key on the hall table. Ella.

  It upset him terribly. He was nearer to tears than he had been when he was eight and old Sid Gibson had shouted at him for knocking a lemon off his stall. But he checked out of the hotel and went home in the vain hope that he would feel better. He had believed that by being surrounded by his treasured things he would be comforted. He wasn't. The one single thing that would have comforted him wasn't a thing at all. Bitterly, he thought that he loved and needed Ella more than ever now she was gone. He opened his suitcase in the bedroom he had shared with her and tipped its contents out on the floor, clothes, shoes, and twenty or more packets of Oranchoco. One of these he ripped open, though he had two already open in the pockets of his jacket, and put two into his mouth at once.

  Lying on the bed, he thought that the best thing that could happen to him would be for Oranchoco to be withdrawn from sale. He remembered reading of certain foodstuffs that contained too much of a substance found to be carcinogenic when eaten by mice at the rate of a kilo a day for fifty years. Immediately they vanished from the shops. It was the result of the current mania for health and safety. If only it would happen to Oranchoco! If only he could walk into the sari lady's shop and when he asked her where the things had gone (only he never would) be told they had been taken off the shelves owing to their new-found toxicity. Come to that, if only the new taste of Oranchoco had put him off the things, as he had hoped it might.

  When he had put all this stuff away, should he go out for dinner? Cook himself something at home? He was aware that he had begun to feel sick. Better not eat, then. He had his consolation here in his bedroom, twenty packets of it.

  On her way back from another patient, Ella found herself driving past the block where Joel Roseman lived. It was weeks since she had heard from him, even longer since she had seen him. Her life had become a mechanical routine: get up, go to work, resist with a forced smile the sympathetic glances of colleagues, see patients, visit patients, go home to the flat, eat something she need not bother to cook, have a whisky and go to bed. Joel had not been one of those patients she visited. She had come near to forgetting him. Now, as she parked the car, she glanced up to the windows of his flat. The blinds were gone, the curtains too, as far as she could see. Had he gone as well? Not much could distract her from her own troubles but this could. She was remembering how Joel had tried to take Mithras back to the river and the meadows and the city with the white towers but had only partially succeeded. Could he have tried again and this time it had worked? It had worked because it killed him?

  Ella went up the steps and into the hallway. A porter sitting behind his desk asked if he could help her. Mr Roseman?

  'Gone, madam. He moved out a week ago.'

  It was a forlorn hope that they might have a forwarding address for him but, remarkably, they did. The porter wrote it down. Ella recognised the street in Hampstead Garden Suburb. This was his parents' house, his father's, of course, as well as his mother's.

  If life had been good to her, Ella would never have gone up there. Life was very bad to her, so she we
nt to take her mind off things, off Eugene and the madness of it all, and off her humiliation.

  The Stemmers' house was a palace, a single-storey bungalow covering about an acre (Ella thought exaggeratedly) and surrounded by several more acres with palm trees and monkey puzzles and laid out geometrically as a tennis court, a bowling green and a mini-golf course with artificial hills and ponds. Eugene would have called it vulgar, a word few people still used. She could see all this from behind closed wrought-iron gates, which apparently only opened electronically. She pressed the bell and a voice asked her who she was.

  'Dr Cotswold,' she said. 'To see Mr Roseman.'

  'One moment.'

  A growling sound was followed by the gates slowly parting. She drove in across a huge bare expanse of paving. Parked on that stony plateau, her car looked very small. It slightly alarmed her that the right-hand half of the double front doors was opened before she had set her foot on the first of four steps. Standing inside was a woman in a dark-blue dress, which would have been a uniform if there had been an apron over it or a label on the breast pocket. She might have been a mute for all she spoke to Ella, leading her across marble and polished wood and perilous scattered rugs.

  There appeared to be no doors in this house and no means of excluding daylight. It was one of those brilliant October days, which would be all over by five in the afternoon, but now sunlight streamed in through walls of glass and a domed skylight. Rooms were separated from other rooms only by a cunning arrangement of walls and half-walls serving as screens. On one of these hung a painting, a large oil of a mermaid inside a goldfish bowl but apparently struggling to get out through its narrow neck. The woman led Ella behind the wall with the painting on it and there, in a silver leather chair behind a desk, sat a fat white-haired man holding a silver phone receiver in his right hand.