Portobello

by Ruth Rendell

  Ian's scream couldn't have been louder if it had been acid Fize had thrown. He swore and scrubbed at his eyes, the knife still clutched in one fist, giving Fize a moment to escape in. Fize sprang, kicked over a chair and tried to open the front door, but his hand was shaking too much to move the latch. He felt the tip of the knife touch his back, right by his spine, and he felt it pulled away as Ian drew his arm back to strike. Twisting round, Fize kicked out, the knife glittering in the air between them. Then, somehow, he stumbled and Ian was upon him. He clutched the upraised arm, forcing it back, and sank his strong young teeth into the hand that held the knife. Ian yelled and dropped his weapon, giving Fize the chance to scramble to his feet. His mouth full of bitter, iron-tasting blood, he threw himself at the front door once more and this time he got it open.

  He was out of the flat, running down the concrete stairs, almost at the foot of the first flight when Ian caught up with him. Ian's breathing was terrible, like an engine or a crazed animal. He grabbed Fize's shoulder, swinging him round, and as he hit out wildly to defend himself, Fize felt that thin blade sink slowly into his chest. Not like a wound but like a blow he felt it, a punch to where he thought his heart was, and then, as his legs buckled and he fell, nothing more.

  * * *

  Abelard had fallen asleep on the couch in Gemma's mother's living room. Gemma picked him up and wrapped him in a blanket. It was only 9.30 but her dad had said he'd take her home in his car if she'd come now. When she was in the back seat and Abelard on her lap – against the law but who would know? – her dad counted out a fifty-pound note, two twenties and a ten and thrust them into her hand. 'For the boy.'

  'Thanks, Dad, you're a star.'

  He dropped her at the kerb alongside the yellow concrete wall and Gemma carried her son up the steps, through the swing doors and on to the stairs. In later life she never ceased to be thankful that the little boy was fast asleep in her arms when she found what lay on the first landing in a pool of blood. For Abelard's sake, by a superhuman effort, she controlled her scream and it came out only as a gasp. Blood was no longer flowing, she noticed that, her legs trembling. She stepped over the body, let herself into her flat with a shaking hand and, once inside, the boy half awake and grizzling, she dialled 999.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  His night passed in a series of strange dreams, one following fast on the other, and each more bizarre than the last. Ghosts came into these dreams and reptiles, figurines from the gallery that came to life and walked about while Ella wandered among them, more beautiful and far less sweet and good than she was in life. Chocorange (or Oranchoco) laid mosaically, paved the floor like a cocoa-brown giant's causeway. The dream to wake him up, shivering under his piled blankets and two duvets, was the mermaid in the fishpond. This was no goldfish bowl but water and weeds behind a glass wall as in an aquarium and the mermaid with her golden scaly tail, beating against the glass, had Ella's breasts and Ella's face.

  He sweated, soaking the bed. When Carli arrived in the morning he asked her to change the sheets while he shivered in the next room, wearing a dressing gown with two blankets draped shawllike over his shoulders. A jug of water and two bottles of the sparkling kind were brought up to him. He wanted a bath but was too weak to attempt it. Dr Irving arrived at lunchtime, though he hadn't given advance warning of his coming, bringing with him the Evening Standard.

  'Where's that lovely fiancée of yours? She not looking after you?'

  Where anyone else would have said they'd split up, Eugene said, 'We are no longer engaged.'

  'Oh, dear, I'm sorry to hear that. Very sorry. I may as well take your temperature now I'm here.'

  Eugene submitted to this. His temperature turned out to be a hundred and one. 'Or something around thirty-eight, I suppose, if you go in for all this Celsius rubbish. I don't suppose you've got much appetite?'

  'None,' said Eugene.

  'Won't do you any harm not to eat. You can do with losing a pound or two. I brought you the evening paper.'

  'Thanks.'

  Eugene buried his face in the pillows and the doctor went away, saying, as a parting shot, though Eugene hadn't asked, 'No good me giving you antibiotics when it's a virus you've got. Keep drinking the old dihydrogen monoxide, ha-ha.'

  Later on Eugene picked up the paper but it was only a glance he gave it, enough to see that yet another young man had died in London after being stabbed. Not far from here, maybe half a mile away. He dropped the Standard on the floor and gulped down another half a bottle of water. Carli would come back again in the morning.

  He felt horribly alone. Tossing and turning, collapsing miserably into a sweaty heap, he dreamed again of Ella but this time she was dancing in a club with a man Eugene had never seen but whom he somehow recognised as that Joel Something who was the real owner of the hundred and fifteen pounds. They were dancing cheek-to-cheek and it was a slow waltz. He woke up groaning, but there was no one to hear him.

  When she contemplated the empty shelves, Ella made up her mind that the books that had filled them were lost to her for ever. And, in a strange way, she wondered if she ever wanted to see those particular books again. They would only remind her of that otherwise happy evening when Eugene had come home and found her about to discover his secret hoard of those wretched sweets. Now she asked herself why she had ever confronted him. She was a doctor – couldn't she recognise the signs of a habit such as his? Had she no understanding how deep such obsessions went with a person as secretive and sensitive as he? Apparently not and now she was paying the price for it.

  Almost for the first time since she became a GP she was wishing she had no need to go to work today. If only she could stay here in bed, turn over and perhaps go back to sleep. It was just first thing in the morning that she really felt able to sleep soundly and she recognised this as a sign of incipient depression. The female characters in those books she had left behind at Eugene's, how different they were from her and from most women today. They could stay in bed all day if they wanted to, daydreaming of their happiness or quietly nursing their sorrows. What else had they to do? Women now had to go back to work and carry on resolutely, soldier on, as if nothing had happened.

  She got up, showered, dressed, picked up the newspaper off the doormat. Not so much in it about the Notting Hill murder as there had been in the Standard last night. The deaths of young men by violence had become almost commonplace. Talbot Road, Notting Hill. She had patients there but not this Feisal Smith. For once there was no eulogy from a relative, no bereaved parent saying he was the best son a mother or father ever had, the kindest, his future the brightest. Briefly, she wondered about Feisal Smith, knifed on a stone staircase, then she forgot him.

  Mrs Khan was her first patient, a highly articulate little girl with her this time. Her rapid translation of her mother's detailed symptoms made Ella think she had a future before her as an interpreter, especially when the child remarked as they were leaving that she spoke Bengali as well and was learning Chinese at school.

  'Then make sure you don't miss too many days,' Ella couldn't resist saying.

  The next to come in was the most glamorous on her list. She always looked as if about to step on to a catwalk. This morning Gemma Wilson wore a black satin trouser suit and she announced that she was in mourning for her partner. 'I expect you've seen about him in the paper,' she said. 'The guy what got stabbed on the stairs. It was me as found him, me and Abelard, only he was asleep and he never saw a thing.'

  'Gemma, I'm so sorry. What a dreadful thing to happen. How is Abelard?'

  'He's fine. He's with Mum. Like I say, he never saw a thing. The thing is, Ella -' it had never occurred to Gemma to call her Dr Cotswold '- the thing is I can't sleep and it's wearing me out. I close my eyes and all I see is pictures of my partner laying there in a pool of blood. Can you give me like sleeping pills?'

  'Yes, of course I will, Gemma. I'll give you enough for two weeks. It's very easy to get into a habit of taking them and we don't wan
t that.'

  She began writing the prescription. Gemma smoothed the sides of her new piled-up coiffure with long white fingers tipped with gleaming black nails, another feature of her mourning. 'The fact is,' she said, 'I've been through a lot lately. I mean, there's Fize getting himself knifed and then there's my lover – I mean, my real lover, Lance Platt – banged up for a crime he never done. It's all taken its toll.'

  'I'm sure it has,' Ella said absently, unsurprised by Gemma's recherché love life. That name Lance Platt rang a bell. Wasn't that the man who had tried to get Eugene's hundred and fifteen poundfind for himself? The man who had been charged with arson and murder?

  'That's him,' said Gemma, 'only he never done it. One in the morning it happened and he wasn't even there.' It occurred to her just in time that she had better not say just why he couldn't have been there. 'He couldn't sleep – like me – so he went for a walk. He was like out for his walk up your way, Ella, when they was burning down that house. It's not fair, is it, if he gets sent down for years and years for something he never done?'

  'Well, no, of course it isn't. It would be very wrong.'

  Ella said goodbye to Gemma and to come back if she was still having trouble sleeping after a fortnight. That had been her birthday, her fortieth, the night the house in Blagrove Road burnt down. She hadn't minded about being forty then because she had Eugene, she was going to marry Eugene, and he had been so lovely to her, coming back to bed and wishing her that delightfully old-fashioned many happy returns of the day. They had made love and she had been so happy and… Her next patient came into the room and Ella, with a silent sigh, asked him what the trouble was.

  The crowd that streamed up the Portobello Road from Notting Hill Gate station and off the number seven bus were mourners, not shoppers. They were on their way to the funeral of their Shepherd. 'Oh, come all ye faithful', the sign on the little purple church welcomed them. It was left to Gilbert Gibson to conduct the service, as the Senior Elder now Reuben Perkins was gone.Tall and emaciated, he presented a finer figure in the pulpit and while speaking the eulogy, than poor Reuben would ever have done, for, as all models know, the thinner you are the better you look when robed in a flowing gown. Uncle Gib spoke about the years when he and Reuben had 'worked together' and laid particular emphasis on the kindness he personally had received when Reuben and his wife had taken him in after his own house had burnt down.

  The service was well attended, for Reuben had been popular and a good turnout was gratifying to Maybelle who invited thirty people back to her house for drinks and canapés. Uncle Gib played host, handing round the food and replenishing wine glasses while telling those guests who didn't already know it the tale of the wedding at Cana. When they had all gone and Maybelle was doing the washing up, he sat down at his computer to reply to the latest spate of letters from readers of The Zebulun. For almost the first time an email had come to which he could give an approving and encouraging reply. I see no objection, he wrote, to you being joined in Holy Matrimony with the lady of your choice. Second marriage is permitted to a widower and widow. Nor need age be a bar. Remember that eighty is the new fifty so eighty-four is only middle age these days. Why not propose to her today?

  The next one he replied to was from the usual immoral applicant. Uncle Gib made short work of her, telling her that deceiving her husband into believing he was the father of her new baby would bring hellfire down on her and the innocent child. But his mind wasn't on it. He wasn't able to summon up his usual invective; his thoughts were still involved with his previous correspondent. Why shouldn't the advice he had given apply equally to himself?

  Carli came in most days and when she couldn't she sent her sister Vicki. There was little for them to do beyond changing his sheets and replenishing his water jug, for Eugene had no appetite. His temperature went up every evening in spite of the aspirins he swallowed to maintain it at 98.4. After about a week, when he staggered into the bathroom to have a bath – he was too weak to stand up in the shower cabinet – he weighed himself and found he had lost five pounds. Once this would have pleased him hugely but now he was unable to summon up enthusiasm for anything.

  But in the morning he managed to eat two small squares of marmite toast, which Vicki brought him, and that evening found it possible to swallow a scrambled egg. Next day he had a needful telephone conversation with Dorinda and later on Dr Irving arrived, saying breezily that he was obviously on the mend and becoming positively jovial when Carli appeared with two glasses of sherry on a tray. The taste of the Amontillado no longer made Eugene feel sick when he sipped it and after the doctor had gone he ate a slice of chicken breast and a small roast potato.

  He came downstairs in his dressing gown. Both girls had gone and wouldn't return till next morning. Sitting in front of the mock but realistic-looking coal fire, he thought how miserable it was to be alone and how desperately he missed Ella who should be sitting opposite him, telling him about her day and talking about their coming wedding and their future together. He could still only walk slowly but he had managed to come downstairs, so he could make it over to the bookshelves. It was one of her books that he picked up and read on the flyleaf, To Ella, on your sixteenth birthday, with love from Daddy. With bowed head he closed it. He had never in his life felt quite so low and sad.

  Two weeks after he had first succumbed to this flu or virus or whatever it was, he went back to work, taking a taxi rather than attempting to walk. The gallery had gone on perfectly well without him and Dorinda had sold two watercolours. He sat at his desk and Jackie brought him cups of tea. The great effort he made not to fall asleep failed but still he made it until five. It was a start and next day was much better. On the Friday evening he took Dorinda out to dinner, ate very little and wished all the time it was Ella sitting opposite him. In the taxi taking him home he thought back to that day when he put off asking her to marry him, when he had actually asked himself if he wanted to get married at all. Had he been out of his mind?

  Another empty lonely weekend, made rather emptier and lonelier because his health had returned and he was beginning to feel well again. He poured himself a glass of wine before sitting down to eat the sandwich he had made for his lunch but, even in his semi-alcoholic days he had always disliked drinking alone. It passed the time, he thought, maybe it would send him to sleep for half the afternoon.

  The dreams we have in the daytime are often more vivid and more lingering than those of the night. He was fitter and stronger in the dream than in life, marching along Westbourne Park Road towards the Portobello in search of a pharmacy. In search of Chocorange or Oranchoco. At some point he remembered that there was a pharmacy in Golborne Road and it was for this that he was heading, although as is the way of dreams, especially daylight ones, the place he was aiming for was no longer to be found where it should be. Golborne Road had vanished and a great lake had taken its place, its shores paved with the dark-brown oval lozenges but magnified to the size of rugby balls. A mermaid surfaced and began to sing and beckon to him like the siren she was. He turned from her and ran, waking himself up.

  Sitting up and rubbing his eyes, he thought of the quest in his dream and its purpose. He had been doing what had been a regular feature of his life before the virus struck him, shopping for sugarfree sweets. Not just a regular feature but the whole aim and purpose of life, his controlling obsession, the demon he was in thrall to. Now, as far as he knew, he had none in the house. It was November. The previous weekend the clocks had gone back and darkness had come by four. It was getting dark now but no matter, he must go out and find a shop that sold his fix. The one in Golborne Road itself, perhaps, or the sari lady's or Elixir in Kensington High Street or…

  He stopped. He thought about what he was doing and realised something. He hadn't tasted or even thought about Chocorange or Oranchoco for more than two weeks. Now when he created one of the sweets in his imagination – once a surefire way of making him long to open a new packet – he felt a small quiver of nausea. He w
ent out into the hall and felt through the pockets of those of his coats and jackets that hung in the cupboard there. He found one, just one, in the right-hand pocket of his leather jacket. The smell of it made his throat rise and he gagged. His reaction to the idea of actually putting it into his mouth, of the touch of it on his tongue, was much the same as it would have been to chewing something scraped off the pavement.

  He opened one of the french windows to the garden. Icy air hit his face. A cold breeze had got up, making every branch and bough and twig dip and sway. But still he stood there, breathing deeply. He was over it. His addiction, habit, whatever you liked to call it, was gone. Seven months, excepting a few days' 'phasing-out', it had been with him but it had gone. A virus had beaten it and without his knowing that the process was happening. Bathsheba, bathed in a greenish radiance from his neighbours' lights, her blue coat turned to emerald, stared at him from the shelf on the wall and it seemed to him that her gaze had become mild and even benevolent.

  'It's gone,' he said aloud to her. 'It's over.'

  He went back inside, closed the door, locked and bolted it. He should be rejoicing, overjoyed, congratulating himself that he was cured. But all he could think of now was that for this stupid fixation, which flu had had the power to destroy, he had lost Ella. For something so absurd, so base, so easily banished – and for good, for ever, as he knew somehow that it would never come back – he had lost her. She was gone as irrevocably as if he had betrayed her with another woman or physically wounded her. For those offences she might have forgiven him but not for this, not because he hadn't been able to give up sucking sweets for her sake. He had lost her for ever.