Ruth Rendell - Portobello

'It was my mother's name. He made me take it. He told Ma he didn't want me called Stemmer any more. You know who he is, don't you? They call him the king of the tycoons.'

Some head of an insurance company or the chief executive of a huge syndicate? She never knew about things like that but she would ask Eugene. He would know.

'He was punishing me because he said I'd killed Amy. He never seemed to see that it was as bad for me as for him, I loved Amy too and I had guilt as well. I told Ma that over and over and she told him but it never made any difference. I left school but my A levels weren't very good. I got into one of those universities with a name no one had ever heard of and I stuck it for nearly two years. Then I dropped out. I don't know what he thought, Ma never said and I didn't ask.'

'Were you living at home?'

'I wasn't allowed to. He took a flat for me near my college and he gave me an allowance, a big allowance, bigger than I wanted. I told Ma but he just went on paying it into my bank account. I had some jobs, unskilled stuff, the sort of thing illegal immigrants take these days, cleaners and working in cafés, that sort of thing. I worked in a sandwich factory for a while. All the other people were Italians and we never spoke. I couldn't stand it so I left.'

'If your father was giving you money why did you need to take that sort of work? Couldn't you have trained for something? Done a course?'

He said simply, 'I hadn't the heart.' And then, 'I never felt very well, I was always tired. Ma said it was my imagination but it wasn't, it was my heart. I literally hadn't the heart, you see, Ella.'

'Pa had bought this flat for me. Like I said, he bought it with all this furniture and curtains and everything. I didn't have any choice about it. By then I couldn't have worked if I'd wanted to. I got so tired, especially in the evenings. I'd do nothing all day except sometimes go to the shops but still I'd be wiped out by seven. I'd fall asleep on that sofa. Ma wanted me to go to the doctor but I didn't. Then I had that heart attack, which was how I came to meet you.'

And have a near-death experience, she thought, or what he thought was a near-death experience. The question she wanted to ask was a therapist's question, not a doctor of medicine's but she asked it. 'That place you went to that was beautiful but you thought was hell, was that somewhere you knew? Was it familiar to you?'

He said nothing for a moment or two, then, 'I don't know. It was a bit like Mossbourne, it had the white columns and a turret, but it wasn't really very like. I tried to make it like that in my mind, but I couldn't, it wouldn't work. The place I went to was a river with grassy banks and at the end of it a city. The view was of a city with domes and palaces and towers. It wasn't the house at Mossbourne. That would be too convenient, wouldn't it? Hell as the lake at Mossbourne where you could say everything began – or maybe where everything ended.'

She gave him the name of another therapist, and said she would phone this woman and tell her about Joel. The dimness was beginning to oppress her, the unnatural dark, which almost anyone else would have altered by pulling up the blind or switching on a light. It was almost as if this contrived dusk was making it hard for her to breathe. She found herself drawing in deep gulps of night-indaytime air. Writing a letter for him to give Miss Crane, she had to peer closely at the paper. The therapist's phone number, which she could usually remember, she had to look up in her address book.

Joel seemed to be listening. 'Can you hear the people next door?' he asked her. 'I can hear they're talking but not what they say.'

She could hear nothing but she thought it might be best to say she could. 'Maybe just a murmur.'

'I bought earplugs so that I couldn't hear it,' he said, 'but they didn't make any difference.' He stared at her through the gloom, leaning forward across the space between them. 'You see, Ella, I'm not mad, I know it's not the neighbours I hear. It's Mithras. He makes a noise like two people talking when he's trying to get through. But he always does get through. He will in a minute.'

For the first time since she was a child and her father had accidentally driven into the back of the car in front (with no injury to anyone) she wanted to scream aloud. She'd screamed then and sobbed while her mother tried to comfort her. Now, thirty-five years later and a responsible person, a doctor, she controlled herself and no sound came till she said in a hoarse voice, 'You must see Miss Crane and as soon as possible. You will, won't you, Joel?'

He nodded. 'I want to get better,' he said like the child he still seemed to be.

While Mithras was talking to him, Joel found it impossible to sleep. The voice, other-worldly, very low, to some extent like an automaton's, droned quite softly, and sometimes another voice, which he fancied was his own when he was a boy, answered him or asked him questions. Because there were occasionally two speakers he had been able to tell himself it was the neighbours he heard. An argument or discussion went on in his head but afterwards he couldn't say what it was they had been talking about. He had absorbed enough pop psychology to expect Mithras and his companion, his own other self, to tell him that certain people he knew were his enemies and perhaps that they would kill him if he didn't kill them first. This didn't happen or hadn't happened yet.

The strangest aspect of all this was that he could hear Mithras and the other Joel talking and know they were speaking English. He knew too that they hadn't, either of them, that kind of foreign accent that would make sorting out what they said difficult. This unknowing was the worst of it. Having hated Mithras's voice, tried to explain it away and taken steps to block up his ears, he now wanted very much to understand what was said. He felt excluded, isolated and lonely. How could he teach himself to decipher their conversation or simply interpret Mithras when he spoke on his own? And how did he know his visitant was called Mithras?

The discussion came to an end and there was absolute silence. Those who live in the country, come to London only seldom and view all its doings with suspicion, believe everywhere is noisy, night and day. There is no peace, no quiet and stress reigns. They have no idea of the utter silence that prevails inside some of London's mansion flats in the afternoon. Joel knew very well that his neighbours made no noise. If they had, it would scarcely have penetrated those walls. But for Mithras and the other one (himself?) not a sound would reach the interior of this flat, and when a neighbour came home from work he would hear no more, and then only if his front door was open, than the whisper of the lift rising and the turning of a key in a lock. The earplugs were useless and he threw them away.

He lay down on the brown sofa to sleep again. The slats on the dark-green blind were not entirely closed and thin strips of sunlight gleamed in the gaps. He got up and remedied this by pulling the cords as tightly as they would go. His action deepened the darkness and he lay down again, savouring the silence and the gloom. It occurred to him that this was very likely what death would be with the added bonus of unconsciousness.

The paella stall was almost too much for Lance. He couldn't afford to buy anything from it, any more than he could afford to buy one of the sugar-dusted pancakes he had seen on offer outside Magic City, the amusement arcade. But the circular pans of steaming and bubbling prawns in golden sauce, green peas and onions and chicken pieces, and another of gleaming saffroncoloured rice as beautiful as one of Gemma's quilted and beaded cushions, made him sick with longing. He forced himself to turn away and concentrate on the true purpose of his visit.