Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

She had been humiliated enough by her visit to the Internet cafe, where for a time she received no help from anyone. And she was utterly in the dark. Whether other people, all of them very young, expertly using the machines, found her bafflement absurd, she couldn't tell, but she felt they did, interpreting the half-smile on a face and the turning away of a head as signs of amused contempt. Although she had paid and she hated wasting money, she would have got up and left, abandoning foreverthese means of finding Stephen Reeves. But just as she pushed back her chair in despair a young man who had just come in asked her if she had a problem.

"I am afraid I can't seem to make it… "

"What is it you want to know?" he asked.

Would there be any harm in telling this stranger? She would never see him again. And surely he couldn't guess her reasonfor searching for Stephen Reeves? Deciding to confide in him was one of the biggest decisions of Gwendolen's long life.

"I wish to discover the-er, whereabouts of a Dr. Stephen Makepeace Reeves." She sensed that giving Stephen's age would rouse incredulity in this twenty-year-old, but she couldn't help that. "He would be eighty years old. He's a doctor of medicine and he once practiced here in Ladbroke Grove-oh, a long long time ago, fifty years ago."

If her helper found the request an odd one he gave no signof it. In spite of her shyness and her very real fear of the computer and what it might do, she was fascinated by the quick sure way he conjured up one picture after another on the screen; columns of text, squares of printing, and boxes of information followed one another, unfolding and rolling, and in somany different colors. Then, there he was: Stephen MakepeaceReeves, 25 Columbia Road, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, with a phone number and something the young man said was an e-mail address, and then a kind of biography of him, telling her when and where he was born, where he took his medical training, that he had been married to Eileen Summers and they had ason and a daughter. He had left Notting Hill and become apartner in a practice in Oxford, where he had remained until his retirement in 1985. In the years that followed he had written several books on the life of a doctor in a famous university town, one of which had been the forerunner of a television series.

His wife, Eileen, had sadly died recently, aged seventy-eight.Gwendolen sighed happily and hoped the young man didn't notice. All she wanted now was to be alone, but curiosity remained and she had to know.

"Does everyone have something like that in there?" She pointed with one finger close to the screen, half afraid, half hopeful, that her own history might be concealed in its depths.

"Not like that. He's got a website, you see. On account of writing those books, I guess, and getting that stuff on TV"

Gwendolen hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about, but she thanked him and left. She had shopping to do but not just at present, she couldn't do anything now but think. Mr. Cellini's car, which had been parked outside when she left, was gone. She was relieved. Although she and he had little contact,the fact that he was in the house, though all the way upthere in what her mother had called the attics, slightly interfered with the absolute peace she needed to think in and remember and plan.

For a while she sat in the drawing room where the dusty atmosphereand the smells of fabrics uncleaned for half a century, damp, mildew, flaking plaster, and dead insects combined to remind her comfortingly of distant happy times. But something that hadn't been there half a century before, the grind and screech and throb of traffic passing outside the window,sent her upstairs to her bedroom, where things were marginally better.

Otto was eating a mouse in front of the fireplace, where ashes from a fire lit in 1975 still lingered in the grate. He never brought mice to her as a gift, as most cats would to their owners, but took them to his favorite places, bit their heads off, and ate as much of the rest of them as he fancied. Gwendolen took no more notice of him than she had ever done, apart from putting his food down, since he had walked into St. Blaise House from nowhere a year before. She kicked off her shoes, lay on the bed, and pulled the pink silk eiderdown over her feet and legs.

Perhaps she would go to Oxford. Perhaps even, daringly, spend a weekend there. At the Randolph. That was where Papa always stopped if he wasn't invited by the master of some college to stay in a set designated for distinished guests. While there she would take a taxi out to Woodstock, though perhaps there was a bus. Taxis were very expensive. Or write a letter. It was usually best, in these circumstances, to write first. On the other hand, she had no previous experience of these circumstances…

The music she had been vaguely aware of since she came into the bedroom seemed gradually to increase in volume. It wasn't coming through the wall but through the ceiling. So Mr. Cellini must be at home in spite of the absence of his car. Perhaps it had gone to be mended or whatever one did with cars. She went to the door and opened it, annoyed but at thesame time rather gratified that her tenant liked real music, afterall. Whatever he said, that must have been he playing Lucia theother day. This time it was a Bach toccata.

Gwendolen would have been incredulous if, before the arrival of Mr. Cellini, anyone had told her she would tolerate with patience, and even pleasure, sounds coming from the rented flat. But, really, classical music was another thing, and she didn't have to pay for the electricity used up in playing it. So long as he didn't fancy Prokofiev-she couldn't stand those Russians-she wasn't at all perturbed. Back on the bed, she imagined coming face to face with Stephen Reeves outside the gates of Blenheim Palace. He would know her at once, and taking both her hands in his, tell her she hadn't changed a bit. Then she would show him her mother's engagement ring she wore in place of the one he hadn't given her. Perhaps he would slip it off her finger and transfer it to her left hand. With this ring I thee wed…

At Shoshana's Spa, Mix attended to the next batch of machines. It was his fourth visit, he had finished what he was coming to call the "day job" and got here just before five. On the other occasions he had chosen morning on his day off, early morning before work, and the middle of the day in his lunch break, buton none of these visits had he seen Nerissa. Now there wasnothing left to do to these machines for at least six months andhis only excuse for coming back was to see Danila.

If Mix had his way he would never have set eyes on Danila again. Unfortunately, she very evidently felt the reverse about him. Not an analyst of character, he nevertheless understood she was a loser, a woman with little if any self-esteem, one who was looking for a man to cling to, love, and obey as a pet dog might. In him she believed she had found that man. Recognizing her, if dimly, as a victim and one who, seeing herself as of no account, merited being treated that way, he was unwilling to spend money on her or take her anywhere she might be seen as with him. He wasn't proud of her flat chest and skinny legs, he rweasel face and hungry eyes. Their evening at the Kensington Park Hotel was an isolated visit. Since then he had simply called around at her place in Oxford Gardens with a couple of bottles and spent the evening there.

She regarded him as her boyfriend. He wanted to know if she had told any of her friends about him and she said she hadn't really got any friends. There was Kayleigh, of course, but she hadn't mentioned him to Kayleigh. It might upset her. She hadn't a boyfriend of her own. Danila had only been in London six months. Before that she'd worked at Shoshana's Beauty Zenana in Lincoln.