Ruth Rendell: Portobello

When his father died Eugene Wren moved the business to premises in upmarket Kensington Church Street and referred to it as 'the gallery'. The name in gilded letters on a dark-green background was 'Eugene Wren, Fine Art', and partly through luck and partly due to Eugene's flair for spotting new young artists and what from times past was about to become fashionable, made him a great deal of money.

Without being a thief himself, Albert Gibson the stallholder married into a family of thieves. His only son Gilbert had been in and out of prison more times than his wife Ivy cared to count. That, she told her relatives, was why they had no children. Gib was never home for long enough. She was living in Blagrove Road when they built the Westway, which cut the street in two and turned 2 Blagrove Villas into a detached house. The Aclam Road mini-market separated it from the overhead road and the train line, and the Portobello Road was a stone's throw away if you were a marksman with a strong arm and a steady eye.

Joel Roseman never walked with a purpose, a destination. He wasn't going anywhere but mostly round in a sort of circle from his flat in a mansion block at the eastern end of Notting Hill Gate and back again. Once, when he first tried it, he had attempted going out in the late afternoon but it was March and still broad daylight. Next time he went out after dark and that was better. Sometimes he walked clockwise into Bayswater, down to the Bayswater Road and home again, sometimes widdershins, in a loop up to Campden Hill and back to the High Street. Mostly he wandered aimlessly.

For a long time now he had found life better in darkness. That was why he dreaded the summer when it wouldn't start getting dark till ten. But now it was April and exceptionally warm, light too in the evenings but dusk coming at seven. He wore sunglasses, a special pair in which the lenses were darker than usual. At home he had several pairs of sunglasses but none with lenses as black and smoky as these.

The allowance Pa had paid into his account regularly on the tenth of the month had just come in on the previous day. Joel brooded on Pa as he walked along, wondering in despair what made him tick, why he was so cruel and how it was possible that a man whose child had drowned could have that picture hanging up in his house. He stopped thinking about it when he found a cash dispenser in a bank wall at the bottom of Pembridge Road. The sunglasses had to come off briefly while he drew out a hundred and forty pounds. It came in twenty- and ten- and five-pound notes. Carefully looking over his shoulder (as the bank said you should) he put twenty-five pounds into the pocket of his jeans and the rest into an envelope. This went into an inside breast pocket of his rainproof jacket. There was no sign of rain but Joel possessed few clothes and this jacket had happened to be hanging up, in the dark, just inside his front door.

He was taking these precautions with his money because he intended walking up the Portobello Road. It would be his first visit. He put his sunglasses on again and the world went dark and rather foggy. When she was young his mother had lived in Notting Hill and she had told him – she went on speaking to him when Pa did not – that if your house was burgled and your silver stolen the police would advise you to go and look for it on the stalls in the Portobello Road where you were likely to find it up for sale. This had made Joel think that the market was a dangerous place, somewhere to be careful, but by 7.30, he had decided, the stallholders would be packing up. He was surprised to see that this was not so. The place was blazing with light and colour, packed with jostling people, voices and music, a flourishing trade still going on. When the natural light was dying they had to make up for it artificially. They never thought what it was like for people of his sort. He blinked behind his glasses. According to his mother, Pa called him a mole and sometimes an earthworm.

No one took any notice of him. He walked up the western side, past knitwear shops and blanket shops and print and china shops. It was a surprise to him to see any shops at all because he had expected only stalls. These were there in abundance, shops on the left, stalls on the right, and people, hundreds of people, walking, dawdling, strolling between them and up the roadway itself. All the people looked busy and they looked happy. Joel could always spot happiness, he was an expert at noticing it, perhaps because in everyone he personally knew it was absent. On the other side of the road crowds were going home, heading southwards for the tube and the buses. They looked happy too and, the ones carrying bags and packages, satisfied or excited. He went on, not stopping, not considering buying anything. There was nothing he ever needed except food and not much of that. He shopped for nothing else. The special sunglasses were his last buy and he had had them for two years.

By the time he had been walking fairly steadily for twenty minutes he came to the pub Ma had mentioned called the Earl of Lonsdale. He crossed the road and turned down Westbourne Grove. No one had looked menacingly at him while he was in the market and he was beginning to think reports of the place had been exaggerated. But it was still a relief to find himself among the genteel boutiques and soon the gracious houses of this corner of Notting Hill. He had begun to feel a little tired. Well, they told him he had a heart problem. Young as he was, he had a bad heart.

It was very quiet. The poor live among strident voices, clatter, crashes, deafening music, barking dogs, shrieking children, but places inhabited by the rich are always silent. Tall trees, burgeoning into spring leaf, line their streets and their gardens bloom with appropriate flowers all the year round. Joel was reminded by the silence, if by nothing else, of Hampstead Garden Suburb where Pa and Ma had a big low-roofed house squatting in landscaped grounds. Around here wasn't much like that but the peace and quiet were the same, yet somehow uneasy, almost uncanny.

No one was about but for two men, not much more than boys, loitering on an opposite corner. They wore jackets or coats with hoods pulled down over their eyes and Joel had learnt from newspapers he occasionally saw that hoods meant their wearers were up to no good. They looked at him and he looked at them, and he told himself that they would do nothing to him because they could see he was young and tall and they didn't know that his pockets were full of money. He looked poor in his old clothes, his ragged jeans and that jacket with one sleeve torn and the other stained. Once he had read somewhere about the assassination of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, how she had been walking on to a boat, which was to take her across Lake Geneva, when she had felt someone jostle her and she received a mild enough blow in the chest. It was only when she was in her stateroom, some minutes later, that it was realised she had been stabbed and was about to die. This was how Joel thought afterwards of what happened to him on the corner of Pembridge Crescent and Chepstow Road. He had been struck, not in the chest but on the left shoulder and from the back. He felt the pain grip him with iron claws down his left upper arm.

Perhaps he cried out. He never knew. He fell or sank or plunged to the ground. But he must have leant backwards at some point for his head struck against the bellpush in a plastered brick pillar, which was one of the gateposts of the house on the corner. Had someone assaulted him, as someone had assaulted the Empress Elisabeth? He forgot that he had a bad heart, he forgot everything as he lost consciousness.

The two boys in the hoods crossed the street and stared fearfully at this shabby long-haired man who lay spreadeagled on the pavement. They thought he was dead. The front door of the house behind those pillars opened. They ran.