Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

Every afternoon, after lunch, she lay down and rested, reading herself to sleep. She had a radio but no television. The house was full of books, learned works and ancient novels, old bound copies of the National Geographic and Punch , encyclopediaslong obsolete, dictionaries published in 1906, such collections as The Bedside Esquire and The Mammoth Book of Thrillers,Ghosts and Mysteries . She had read most of them and some she had reread. She had acquaintances she had met through the St. Blaise and Latimer Residents' Association, and they called themselves her friends. Such relationships are difficult for an only child who has never been to school. She had been away on holidays with the professor, even to foreign countries, and thanks to him she spoke good French and Italian, though with no chance of using either except for reading Montaigne and D'Annunzio, but she had never had a boyfriend. While she had visited the theater and the cinema, she had never been to a smart restaurant or a club or a dance or a party. She sometimes said to herself that, like Wordsworth's Lucy, "she dwelt among the untrodden ways," but it was said rather with relief than unhappiness.

The professor lived on into extreme old age, finally dying at the age of ninety-four. For the past few years of his life he had been incontinent and unable to walk, but his brain remained powerful and his demands undiminished. With the occasional assistance of a district nurse, even more occasionally that of a paid carer, Gwendolen looked after him. She never complained. She never showed signs of weariness. She changed his incontinence pads and stripped his bed, thinking only while she did so of getting through it as fast as possible so that she could get back to her book. His meals were brought and the tray later removed in the same spirit. He had brought her up apparently with no other purpose than that she should housekeepf or him while he was middle-aged, care for him when he was old, and read to keep herself out of mischief.

There had been moments in his life when he had looked at her with a cool unbiased eye and had acknowledged to himself that she was good-looking. He had never seen any other reason for a man to fall in love and marry, or at least wish to marry, than that the woman he chose was beautiful. Intellect, wit, charm, kindliness, a particular talent or warmth of heart, none of these played any part in his choice nor, as far as he knew, in the choice made by other intelligent men. He had married a woman for her looks alone and when he saw those looks in his daughter he became apprehensive. A man might see them too and take her away from him. None did. How could such a man have met her when he invited no one to the house except the doctor, and she went nowhere without her father's being aware of it and watching her with an eagle eye?

But at last he died. He left her comfortably off and he left her the house, now in the eighties a dilapidated mansion half buried among new mewses and closes, small factories, local authority housing, corner shops, debased terraces, and streetwidening schemes. She was at that time a tall thin woman of sixty-six, whose belle epoque profile was growing nutcracker like, her fine Grecian nose pointing markedly toward a jutting chin. Her skin, which had been very fine and white with a delicate flush on the high cheekbones, was a mass of wrinkles. Such skin is sometimes compared to the peel of an apple that has been left lying too long in a warm room. Her blue eyes hadfaded to pastel gray and her once-fair hair, though still copious, was quite white.

The two elderly women who called themselves her friends, who had red fingernails and tinted hair and dressed in an approximation of current fashion, sometimes said that Miss Chawcer was Victorian in her clothes. This showed only how much they had forgotten of their own youth, for some of Gwendolen's wardrobe could have been placed in 1936 and some in 1953. Many of her coats and dresses were of these vintages and would have fetched a fortune in the shops of Notting Hill Gate where such things were much prized, like the 1953 clothes she had bought for Dr. Reeves. But he went away and married someone else. They had been good in their day and were so carefully looked after that they never wore out. Gwendolen Chawcer was a living anachronism.

She had cared for the house less well. To do her justice, she had determined a year or two after the professor died that it should be thoroughly redecorated and even in places refitted. But she was always rather slow in making decisions and by thet ime she reached the point of looking for a builder, she found she was unable to afford it. Because she had never paid National Insurance and no one had ever made contributions for her, the pension she received was very small. The money her father had left paid annually a diminishing return.

One of her friends, Olive Fordyce, suggested she take a tenant for part of the top floor. At first Gwendolen was appalled but after a time she gradually came around to the idea, but she would never have taken any action herself. It was Mrs. Fordyce who found Michael Cellini's advertisement in the Evening Standard, who arranged an interview and who sent him round to St. Blaise House.

Gwendolen, the Italian speaker, always addressed him as Mr. Chellini but he, the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war, had always pronounced it Sellini. She refused to change: she knew what was correct and what was not if he didn't. He would have preferred that they should be Mix and Gwen, as he lived in a world in which everyone was on first-name terms, and he had suggested it.

"I think not, Mr. Cellini," was all she had said.

It would probably have killed her to be called by her given name, and as for Gwen, only Olive Fordyce, much to Gwendolen's distaste, used that diminutive. She called him, not her tenant, or even "the man who rents the flat," but her lodger." When he mentioned her, which was seldom, he called her "the old bat who owns the place" but on the whole they got on well, largely because the house was so big and they rarely met. Of course, it was early days. He had been there only a fortnight.

At one of their very occasional meetings he had told her he, was an engineer. To Miss Chawcer an engineer was a man who built dams and bridges in distant lands, but Mr. Cellini explained that his job was servicing workout equipment. She had to ask him what that meant and, not being very articulate, he was obliged to tell her she could view similar machines in the sports department of any large London store. The only London store she ever went to was Harrods and when next there she made her way to view the exercise equipment. She entered a world she didn't understand. She could see no motive for setting foot on any of these devices and scarcely believed what Cellini had told her. Could he have been, to use a rare exampleof the professor's inverted-commas-surrounded slang, "pulling her leg"?

Every so often, but not very often, Gwendolen went around the house with a feather duster and a carpet sweeper. She pushed this implement halfheartedly and never emptied its dust container. The vacuum cleaner, bought in 1951, had broken down twenty years before and never been repaired. It sat in the basement among old rolls of carpet, the leaf from a dining table, flattened cardboard boxes, a gramophone from the thirties, a stringless violin of unknown provenance, and a basket off the bicycle the professor had once used to ride to Bloomsbury and back. The carpet sweeper deposited dirt as regularly as it picked it up. By the time she reached her own bedroom, dragging the sweeper up the stairs behind her, Gwendolen had grown bored with the whole thing and wanted to get back to whatever she happened to be reading, Balzac all over again or Trollope. She couldn't be bothered to take the carpet sweeper back downstairs so she left it in a corner of her bedroom with the dirty duster draped over its handle; sometimes it would remain there for weeks.