Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

He grasped the cross. There was nothing there. Of course not, there never had been. All the sounds, the single sighting, the opening door, everything was an illusion brought about by the horror-film setting, the nasty creepiness of this house. Just getting back into his flat relieved him enormously. The silence now was welcome, the proper condition of this place at this hour. And the bodily sensations he had were a sour taste in his mouth, nausea rising and the start of a drumming in his head. He knew how unwise it would be to drink anything more but he did, filling the same glass that had held gin with the sweet cheap Riesling she had brought. As it hit him, he stumbled into the bedroom where her clothes lay as she had placed them, irritating him by arranging them neatly over a chair.

Reggie had wrapped Ruth Fuerst's body in her own coat and buried the rest of her clothes with her. He should have done the same. Collapsing onto the bed, noticing through glaze deyes that it was twenty to two, he knew he couldn't go back in there tonight, he couldn't take those boards up again, replace them again. In the morning he would take the clothes out of the house in a carrier bag and put them in a litter bin, or several litterbins. No, a better idea. He'd put them in one of the bins where the proceeds from their sale went to sufferers from cerebral palsy or some such thing.

And now he would sleep…

Today was the anniversary of the first time he had come into the drawing room to have tea with her. Half a century ago. She saw that she had made a ring in red round that date on the Beautiful Britain calendar that hung on the kitchen wall on top of last year's kitten calendar and the tropical flowers one fromthe year before. Gwendolen had kept all the calendars forevery year back to 1945. They piled up on the kitchen hookand when there was room for no more, the bottom ones were all stuffed away in drawers somewhere. Somewhere. Among books or old clothes or on top of things or under things. The only ones whose whereabouts she was positive about were those from 1949 and 1953.

The 1953 calendar she had found and now kept in the drawingroom for obvious reasons. It recorded all the dates onwhich she had had tea with Stephen Reeves. She had comeupon it by chance last year while looking for the notice which had come from some government department telling her abouta £200 fuel payment due to be made to pensioners. And there, alongside it, was the Canaletto Venice calendar. Just seeing it again made her heart flutter. Of course she had never forgotten a single one of their times alone together but seeing it recorded-"Dr. Reeves to tea"-somehow confirmed it, made it real, as if she might otherwise have dreamt it. Under the heading of a Wednesday in February she had written, in a rarecomment, "Sadly, no Bertha or any successor to bring our tea."

Sheltered and quiet as Gwendolen's life had been, perhaps as unruffled as a life can be, it had included a very few peaks of excitement. All of these she thought about from time to time but none with such wonder as her visit to Christie's house. It too was more than fifty years ago now and she had been notmuch over thirty. The maid who carried up the hot water and perhaps even emptied the chamber pots had been with themfor two years. She was seventeen and her name was Bertha. What else she was called Gwendolen couldn't remember, if shehad ever known. The professor never noticed anything about people and Mrs. Chawcer was too wrapped up in working for the Holy Catholic Apostolics to have time for a servant's troubles,but Gwendolen observed the change in the girl's figure. She was with her more than the other occupants of the house.

"You're beginning to get stout, Bertha," she said, using a favorite word applied to others in the vocabulary of the skeletal Chawcers. Gwendolen was too innocent and ignorant to suspect the truth, and when Bertha confessed it she was deeply shocked.

"But you can't be expecting, Bertha. You're only seventeen and you can't have… " Gwendolen couldn't bring herself to go on.

"As far as that goes, miss, I could have ever since I was eleven, but I never did and now I am. You won't tell the missus or your dad, will you?"

It was an easy promise for Gwendolen to make. She would have died before she mentioned such things to the professor. As for her mother, she couldn't forget how once, when she whispered to Mrs. Chawcer, with much shame and diffidence, of an old man who had exposed himself to her, she had been told never to utter such words again and to wash her mouth out with soap.

"What will you do with the baby?"

"There won't be a baby, miss. I've got the name and address of someone who'll get rid of it for me."

Gwendolen was not so much in deep waters as in an unknown country peopled with men and women who did forbidden things and spoke a language of words that should never be uttered, a land of mystery and discomfort and ugliness and danger. She wished very much that she hadn't asked Bertha why she was gaining weight. It never occurred to her to be sorry for this young girl who worked ten hours a day for them and was paid very little for performing tasks their own class would shudder to think of. It never entered her mind to put herself in Bertha's shoes and imagine the disgrace which would come to an unmarried mother or the horror of watching herself grow so large that further deception was impossible. She was curious rather against her will, but afraid and anxious to be,uninvolved.

"You'll be all right then," she said brightly.

"Miss, can I ask you something?"

"I expect so," said Gwendolen with a smile.

"When I go to him, would you come with me?"

Gwendolen thought this an impertinence. She had been brought up to expect deference from servants and indeed everyone from a "lower class." But her shyness and her fear of the different and of things she hadn't experienced wasn't absolute. Curiosity was a novelty for her but she felt it worm its way into her mind and wait there, trembling. She might see a little more of this new country which had unprecedently opened its borders to her. Instead of replying to Bertha with a sharp, "Do you know whom you're speaking to?" she said, quite meekly but with an increased beating of the heart, "Yes, if you like."

The street was squalid, with the old chimney of an iron foundry at the far end of it, the Metropolitan Railway from Ladbroke Grove to Latimer Road running nearby and above ground. The man they had come to see lived at number 10. It smelled and it was dirty. The kitchen was furnished with two deckchairs. Christie might have been in his forties or past fifty,it was hard to tell. He was a tallish but slight man with a beakyface and thick glasses and he seemed dismayed to see Gwendolen. Later on she understood why. Of course she did. He wanted no one else to know Bertha had been there. She refused to sit down. Bertha took one of the chairs and Christie the other. Perhaps she had antagonized him or perhaps he onlyever dealt with his clients tete-a-tete, but he immediately said he would want to see Bertha alone. For chaperonage, his wife would be present. Gwendolen never saw the wife nor heard anything of her. All they would do now, Christie said, was make an appointment for the examination and the "treatment,"but Miss Chawcer must go. Everything that passed between himself and his patient must be confidential.

"I won't be long, miss," Bertha said. "If you'd wait for me at the end of the street, I won't be a minute."

Another impertinence, but Gwendolen did wait. Various passersby stared at her with her carefully made-up face, hair permed into sausage curls and her full-skirted, tight-fitting blue dress. One man whistled at her and Gwendolen's discomfort showed in her darkly flushed cheeks. Eventually Bertha came. "I won't be a minute" was true. She had been at least ten. The appointment was for Bertha's next day off, a week ahead.