Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

He began to shiver and goose pimples came up on his arms.To warm himself up, he marched to the bottom of the hill,along Holland Park Avenue and up the other side of thesquare. He was breathless when he got back to the top but no warmer. To his horror, he saw the Jaguar reversing out of the drive. He had missed her.

She drove past him down the hill and though he waved, she couldn't have seen him. She kept looking straight ahead and gave him no answering smile. There was nothing for it but to make his way back home and nothing to do when he got there but rub the stuff he had bought on his back and write applications to the two jobs he had seen in the Evening Standard, both of which looked likelier than the others.

The lodger had lived in her house for nearly four months now and sometimes weeks had passed without her seeing him or wanting to see him. They had spoken only when they encounteredeach other by chance and then not for long. He was another kind of person, she had told herself, and no doubt she was not his. Therefore she found it strange how much she now needed to see him. It seemed to her essential that at some point during this Sunday she should confront him and have out with him this business of the thing and the missing letter. There was also the matter of his failure, according to Queenie and Olive,to feed Otto in her absence. Her own indifference to Otto was not the question. It had been Cellini's duty to feed the cat, he had promised. Besides, she was sure Otto would never have killed and eaten those guinea fowl and that pigeon if he had been properly fed.

Thinking of the guinea fowl reminded her that Mr. Singh was due to call on her at 11 A. M. She was so sure he would be late, everyone always was these days, that she was astonishedand nearly disbelieving when the doorbell rang promptly on the hour. When she got to her feet she felt so dizzy she had tograb hold of the back of the sofa so it took her a few minutes toget to the door; he rang again, which gave her an excuse to be irritable.

"All right, all right, I'm coming," she said to the empty hallway.

He was a handsome man, taller and paler than she had expected, with a small iron-gray mustache and instead of the anticipated nightshirt-like garment, he wore gray flannel trousers, a sports jacket, and a pink shirt with a gray and pink tie. The only incongruous note (to Gwendolen's eyes) was his snowwhite intricately wound turban.

He followed her into the drawing room, patiently walking at her own slow pace. "It is a fine place you have here," he said.

Gwendolen nodded. She knew it. That was why she stayed. She sat down and motioned to him to do the same. Siddhartha Singh did so, but slowly. He was looking around, carefully taking in the spaces and corners, the peeling walls and cracked ceiling, the shaky and splintered window frames, the prototype radiators dating from the twenties, and the carpets, one piled on another, all eaten by moths and apparently chewed by smallmammals. Only in the slums of Calcutta, years ago, had h eseen such a degree of disintegration.

"If it is about your birds," Gwendolen began, "I really don't know what I'm supposed… "

"Excuse me, madam." Mr. Singh spoke very politely. "Excuse me, but the bird episode is a thing of the past. History, if I may so put it. I cut my losses and turn over a new leaf. And on this subject, perhaps you, obviously an English lady; can tell me why 'leaf.' Is it perhaps that we go out into the woods and turn over a leaf to discover a secret beneath?"

Gwendolen would, in normal circumstances, have made a withering rejoinder but this man was so good-looking (and not just for an Oriental) and so charming that she felt quite weak in his presence. Like the Queen of Sheba when confronted by Solomon, there was no more spirit in her:"

" 'Leaf' means a page," she said unsteadily. "A page in the well, the book of life, I suppose."

Mr. Singh smiled. It was just such a smile as the sun god might bestow, broad, benign, lighting his whole handsome face and displaying the kind of teeth possessed by American adolescents, shiny, white, and even. "Thank you. Sometimes, although I have been in this country for thirty years, I feel I dwell in a new age of enlightenment."

Gwendolen smiled back helplessly. She made an offer the like of which she hadn't extended to a casual visitor since Stephen Reeves disappeared from her life. "Would you likesome tea?"

"Oh, no, thank you. I am here only for a jiffy. Let me come to the point. While you were unwell and not in residence, I see your gardener working away, a most industrious young man, and I say to Mrs. Singh, look, this young man is just what we need to set things to rights here. And that is why I come to you. For the name and, please, the telephone number of your gardener, in the hope that he requires more work."

Various emotions fought each other. in Gwendolen's head. She hardly knew why she had felt a sinking of the heart when a Mrs. Singh was mentioned, though she could understand the astonishment and incipient anger that rose in her at the same time. She sat up straighter, wondering fleetingly if he might take her for ten years younger than she actually was and said, "I haven't got a gardener."

"Oh, yes, indeed, madam. You have. Perhaps it has slipped your mind. I understand you have been indisposed and in a hospital. That was when he was here. No doubt you engaged him and he came to begin the work in your absence."

"I did not engage him. I know nothing about it." Impossible to delude herself. He was looking at her pityingly as if he saw her not as ten years her own junior but as an old woman suffering from senile dementia. "What did he look like?" she asked him.

"Let me see. About thirty years old, fairish hair, a Britishf ace, blue eyes, I think, and handsome. Not as tall as I or"-he sized her up critically-"as you, I would respectfully say,madam."

"What exactly was he doing?"

"Digging the garden," said Mr. Singh simply. "He dug in two places. The ground, you know, is very heavy, like rock, like"-he ventured a flight of fancy-"adamantine stone."

He even spoke, she thought, the same language as she did. If she had known him sooner, would he have replaced Stephen Reeves in her affections? "The man you're talking about," she said, her anger surfacing again, "is my lodger. He lives upstairs,on the top floor."

"Then I apologize for troubling you."

Mr. Singh got to his feet, affording Gwendolen another sight of his tall soldierly figure, his height, and the boardlike flatness of his stomach. She wanted to cry, "Don't go!" Instead she said, "His name is Cellini and he is not permitted access to my garden."

Another smile, but sad this time. "I won't say I'm not disappointed.No, please don't get up. You are a convalescent lady and not, if I may say so, quite in the first youth." He caught sight of himself in one of Gwendolen's many fly-spotted, desilvered mirrors. "Who is?" he said more tactfully. "Now I say good morning, thank you for your trouble and I let myself out."

With his departure the sun went in. Anger remained, hotter than before. She would lie in wait for Cellini now, drink black coffee, do anything to stay awake until she heard him come in. The thing, the letter, and now this, she thought. She'd get rid of him and find a nice quiet lady, not in the first youth. Oh, the hurt the phrase had done her! Even though he bracketed himself with her in that category. But Cellini. She would evict Cellini just as soon as she could.

He had begun to walk home, but when he was passing a bus stop and a bus came, he got on it. It was too wild a day for a walk to be enjoyable. A few yellow leaves were already fallingfrom the plane trees, whirling past the windows of the bus.Something seemed to be pinching his spine with iron fingers and whatever it was stabbed his lumbar region as he was getting off on the corner of St. Mark's Road. The rest of the way he had to go on foot, the pain subsiding a little with enforced movement.