Authors: Ruth Rendell
The sound of a key in the lock made him think it must be Christine, though it was early for her. He had forgotten Fee was coming round with a loaf and the ham. She had also bought Danish pastries, a basket of strawberries, a carton of double cream.
“Who are you writing to?”
He had quickly covered the letter with the
TV Times
on which he had been resting the paper, but a corner showed. The truth would never be believed, so he told her the truth in an airy tone.
“Senta Pelham, of course.”
“You should co-co. Chance’d be a fine thing. That reminds me, I had that bridesmaid’s dress cleaned, the one she kindly dumped on the floor, and it’s come up looking super. Will you tell Mum I picked up her winter coat at the same time and I’ve put it up in her wardrobe?”
He waited until the front door had closed behind her.
“Darling Senta, I have tried and tried to see you, I don’t know how many times I have been to your house. Of course I can understand now why you wouldn’t let me in and didn’t want to see me. But please don’t ever do that again, it hurts too much.
“I have thought a lot about what you asked me. All this time I have been thinking of you, I don’t think I have had a thought for anything or anyone else, and of course I have naturally thought about what you said I should do to prove I love you. Personally, I think the proof is in what I’ve been through since I left you that day and you took the keys to your house away from me….”
Perhaps he shouldn’t put that bit in. It sounded too much like a reproach, it sounded like whining. The throbbing of a diesel engine outside told him Christine had arrived. He put the
TV Times
over his letter again and went to the door. She was alone, without Cheryl. Her skin was tanned, her face golden with pink cheeks, her hair bleached by the sun. She looked young and pretty, and she was wearing a dress he hadn’t see before, a natural-coloured linen coat-dress that was plainer and more sophisticated than what she usually wore. Hardy rushed past him and hurled himself at Christine, yelping with joy.
She came up the step with the dog in her arms and kissed Philip. “You said to have a taxi, so I did, and it was ever so nice, but he charged me over five pounds. I said to him I didn’t think it was fair that clock or meter or whatever it is still ticking the price up even when you’re stuck in a traffic jam. It ought to stop when the taxi isn’t moving, I said, but he just laughed.”
“What happened to Cheryl?”
“It’s funny you should ask that because she was with me right up until we’d been in the taxi for ten minutes. We were going along this street with lots of quite nice shops and she suddenly said to the driver to stop and let her out and he did and she said, Good-bye, see you later, and got out, and I must say I did think it was funny because all the shops were closed.”
The Edgware Road, he thought. “Did you have a good time in Cornwall?”
“Quiet,” she said. “It was very quiet.” This was what she said when people asked her if she had enjoyed Christmas. “I was on my own a lot.” She wasn’t complaining, just stating a fact. “Cheryl wanted to be off by herself. Well, a young girl, you know, she doesn’t want an old bat flapping after her. Isn’t Hardy pleased to see me? He does look well, dear, you’ve been taking good care of him.” She peered into the dog’s adoring face and then into Philip’s in her gentle rather apprehensive way. “I can’t say the same for you, Phil, you’re looking quite peaky.”
“I’m okay.”
Thanks to Cheryl’s defection, he would have to stay with her now instead of finishing the letter. He couldn’t go upstairs and desert her on her first evening at home. Looking back over those terrible ten days, he thought, what a waste, what a waste! We could have been together every night, all night, if I hadn’t been such a fool….
It was gone ten-thirty when he got back to his letter. Christine wanted an early night. A quick scan of her appointments book had shown her she was doing a shampoo, trim, and blow-dry at nine next morning. Philip sat on his bed, rested the letter paper on the
TV Times
and the
TV Times
on his old school atlas on his knees.
“Darling Senta, I have missed you so terribly….” He read over what he had written, felt fairly satisfied. At any rate he knew he couldn’t do better. “I don’t know why I made such a fuss when you suggested what we should do to prove our love for each other. You know I would do anything for you. Of course I will do it. I would do fifty times that for you, just to see you again I would do it. I love you. You must know that by now, but I will tell you again because this is what I want you to know and what I will prove to you. I love you. With all my love for ever and ever, Philip.”
She didn’t reply.
He knew she must have got his letter. Unwilling to entrust it to the post, he had taken it to Tarsus Street himself on his way to work and put it through the letter box. Then he had looked through and seen it lying there, not on the doormat—for there was no doormat—but on the dirty red and black tiles. The house had been quite silent, the shutters closed at the basement window and the two windows above it. The phone on the table was hidden behind a pile of leaflets, freebie magazines, and junk mail.
Once the idea of writing to her had come to him, or rather, once the idea of what he should write had come, his unhappiness had gone and he had been filled with hope. This euphoria was quite baseless. Simply writing a letter and delivering it wouldn’t bring her back. He knew that this was true on one level of consciousness, but on another that seemed most to affect his emotions, he had solved his problems, put an end to misery, won her. At work he was happy, he was almost as he had been before that Sunday when he had said those things to her and she had turned him out.
What form her return to him would take he hadn’t considered. A phone call, surely. Yet she had never phoned him in the past, not once. He couldn’t imagine her writing a letter in return. Should he go to her house as in the old days? It was less than a fortnight ago, but just the same it was the old days. Thursday passed without his going back to Tarsus Street. On Friday he phoned her number from work and got Jacopo on his answering machine. He left the same message as he had last time, to ask Senta to phone him. But this time he stipulated that it should be that evening and added his phone number. It occurred to him, strange though this seemed, that Senta might not know his phone number. There were unlikely to be phone directories in that house.
Christine took Hardy out for his evening walk. Philip wouldn’t leave the house. He told her he was expecting the art director to call from head office. Christine believed anything he told her, even that a company like Roseberry Lawn had an art director and that this mythical personage might work late on Friday evenings and need to consult very junior executives like Philip. While she was out with the dog, he experienced one of the worst possible emotional torments: to wait by the telephone for long hours for a call from the person you are in love with. It comes at last—from your sister.
Fee wanted to know whether Christine would do her hair if they came round for supper on Sunday. She had a fancy for ash blonde highlights. Usually Philip wouldn’t have known anything about Christine’s appointments and engagements, but he had overheard her telling her friend on the phone that she was going out at six on Sunday to do a perm for an old lady who was housebound with arthritis. Fee said okay, she’d call back a bit later when Christine was in, and Philip had to say that was all right, thought he thought that if Senta hadn’t phoned by then, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from rushing to it and seizing the receiver.
And this in fact happened, for Senta didn’t phone but Fee did and he suffered the same hope and destruction of hope all over again. She hadn’t phoned by midnight, when at last he went to bed.
On Saturday afternoon he drove to Tarsus Street. The old man in the woman’s raincoat had obtained from somewhere a wooden trolley or barrow on which were piled his possessions, stowed into plastic carriers. These were arranged like cushions and were in gaudy cushion colours: Tesco red, Marks and Spencers’ green, Selfridge’s yellow and the blue and white of Boots the Chemist. The old man reclined on top of them, like an emperor in a chariot, eating a sandwich of something greasy in white bread, on which his fingers made black prints.
He waved the sandwich at Philip. He had never looked so cheerful. His open-mouthed grin showed greenish carious teeth. “See what I got meself with your more than generous gift, governor.” He kicked the wooden side of the barrow. “I’ve got me own transport now, and what’s more, it runs on shanks’s pony.”
After that, Philip could hardly avoid giving him a pound coin. He was entitled perhaps to something in return. “What’s your name?”
The reply came a little cagily and it was indirect. “They call me Joley.”
“Are you always about here?”
“Here and Caesarea”—he pronounced it “Si-saria”—“and over to Ilbert.”
“Do you ever see a girl come out of that house?”
“Kid with grey hair?”
Philip thought it a bizarre way to describe Senta but he nodded.
The old man stopped eating. “Not the fuzz, are you?”
“Me? Of course I’m not.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, governor, she’s in there now. She come home and went in there ten minutes back.”
Without shame, he held out his hand. Philip didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he gave him another pound coin. A flicker of hope that the front door might have been left open once more was soon dispelled, but when he looked down into the area he saw that the shutters had been folded back a little way. By climbing over the low plaster wall of the steps and squatting down on the concrete, it was possible to see into her room. Looking into it after two weeks deprivation—except for dreams, except for those—hastened his heartbeat, he could feel the blood drumming. The room was empty. Over the wicker chair hung her silver dress and a pair of lilac-coloured tights, worn and discarded, for they still held, faintly, the contour of her legs and feet. The bed was still made up with purple cover and pillowcases.
This time he didn’t knock on the door. The old man was watching him, grinning, though not unsympathetically. Philip said good-bye to him and “See you,” though he now doubted whether he would ever see him again. He drove home, telling himself not to return, to bear it, to contemplate life without her, to soldier on without her. But, although he didn’t mean to do this, he made his way up to his bedroom on dragging feet and there, having pushed the chair against the door, lifted Flora out from the cupboard. Her face, her neat crimped hair, her remote smile and mesmerised eyes no longer recalled Senta to him. For all that, he had a feeling new and alien to him. He wanted to smash her, break her to pieces with a hammer, and stamp on those pieces, grinding them to dust. For someone who hated violence in all its forms, these were unwelcome, shameful desires. He simply put Flora back in her hiding place. Then he lay face-downwards on the bed and, to his own surprise and shame, found himself beginning a dry-eyed painful sobbing. He wept without tears into the pillow, wadding the linen against his mouth in case Christine should come upstairs and hear him.
It was halfway through Sunday when he gave up hope. Fee was there, having arranged for Christine to do her highlights in the afternoon. And Cheryl was at home, affording Philip his first sight of her since her return from Cornwall. But she wasn’t there for long. Having eaten or picked at the rather better than usual lunch Christine had provided, roast chicken with Paxo stuffing, reconstituted potato, and real fresh runner beans, she got up from the table and five minutes later left the house. Philip she had asked, when she was briefly alone with him, to lend her five pounds. He had to say no, he hadn’t got five pounds, adding, perhaps pointlessly, that she couldn’t want money on a Sunday. He sat at the table, with two halves of tinned peaches in a glass dish in front of him, and thought, I will never see Senta again, this is it, all over, the end, it is over. The frightening thing was that he couldn’t imagine how he was ever going to get through another week of it. Would next Sunday come and would he be here alive and surviving? Would he actually survive the torture of another week of this?
When the dishes were done, Christine and Fee took over the kitchen. Christine never charged her daughters for doing their hair but she did allow them to pay for the cost of the preparations she used. Now she and Fee engaged in argument as to how great a proportion of this cost Fee should be allowed to pay.
“Yes, but, dear, you got us all that nice ham and the strawberries and cream and I’ve only paid you for the loaf,” Christine was saying.
“The strawberries were a present, Mum, my pleasure, you know that.”
“And doing your highlights is my pleasure, dear.”
“I’ll tell you what then, you tell me the price of the ash blond tint, and I’ll want conditioner, so you can count that in, and the bit of mousse you use, and take away whatever the ham was—one twenty-two it was—and I’ll give you the difference.”
Philip was sitting in the living room, looking at the Sunday
Express,
not reading it but pretending to, with Hardy on his lap. Christine came in with the PG Tips tin she kept small change in.
“Do you know, I could have sworn there was a good seven pounds fifty in here before I went away and now it’s down to thirty pee!”
“I haven’t been making raids on it,” he said.
“I wish I’d looked in it on Wednesday. I keep wondering if it happened yesterday afternoon while you were out and I popped round the block with Hardy and didn’t lock up. I know I should have locked up, but I still think of this as a nice neighbourhood. I was only gone ten minutes, but you know that’s quite long enough for someone to come in and take a quick look round and help themselves to what’s going. Some poor person down on their uppers and desperate, I expect, I can sympathise, there but for the grace of God, I always say.”
Philip thought he knew very well who the poor person, down on her uppers and desperate, would be. The theft had happened just before lunch, not yesterday. Once he would have cared, would have known he must do something, at least would have communicated what he knew to Christine. Now he was concerned for no one but himself. But he emptied his pockets, giving what change he had to his mother. Briefly he wondered where Cheryl was now, what dealing she was involved in with the seven pounds fifty. What could you buy with such a miserable sum? Not smack, not grass, not crack. A bottle of whisky? That, certainly. Some sort of solvent? He couldn’t see his sister as hooked on glue sniffing.