Ruth Rendell - Portobello

It was Joel Roseman. 'I'm not well,' he said. 'Can you come?'

Inexperienced in the handling of private patients, Ella nevertheless thought she must have some rights. She could take a stand. It was seven o'clock, a cool wet evening. 'What's wrong, Joel?' She kept her voice gentle and quiet, very conscious too of listeners, fascinated as people always are, by 'doctor' conversations. She heard Eugene murmur to the others 'A private patient'. 'Are you in pain? Breathless?' After all, the man had a heart condition.

'Not in pain , not breathless,' he said. 'I'm just under the weather.'

It seemed appropriate, she thought, watching the rain lash the french windows. 'Would you like to come to me in the morning? I could fit you in after surgery. Shall we say twelve noon? Come in a taxi.'

'I thought you'd come here.'

'I'll tell you what.' She glanced at her watch. 'I'll give you a call at nine to see how you are or you can call me.' She gave him Eugene's number.

He said nothing and the receiver was replaced.

Ella worried for the next two hours. The Sharpes departed. Elizabeth Cherry went home and spent the rest of the evening puzzling over the mystery of the chocolate cake. The rain stopped while Ella and Eugene were eating the black olive pasta Eugene had prepared earlier in the day.

'I won't be able to sleep if I just leave it,' Ella said.

Eugene knew she meant visiting Joel Roseman. 'It's a pity you took him on but it's too late to say that now.'

She tried to phone Joel but there was no reply and the phone wasn't on message. 'I'll have to go over there.'

'You must do as you think best, darling,' said Eugene.

The first thing he did after she had gone, even before he had cleared the table, was go to his Chocorange cache and break open a new pack. Oh, the relief after three hours of denial! The most wonderful taste in the world…

The flat was in total darkness. Not even a feeble gleam showed through the small stained-glass panes in the top of the door. At first Ella thought he must be out. No, worse, he might be unable to reach the door when she had rung the bell. He was really ill after all. Her own heart began beating rather fast. She rang the bell again, lifted up the metal flap and called to him through the letter box, 'Joel, Joel, are you there? It's Ella.'

A moment or two passed. She heard footsteps, like an old man shuffling in slippers. He opened the door and stood there, blinking at the light, his dressing gown loosely tied and a blanket over his head like a cowl.

'I didn't expect you,' he said, his tone accusing.

She walked into the hallway. 'I was worried. I didn't want to leave you alone overnight.'

He closed the front door. The light from the corridor outside made two faintly glowing patches, greenish, reddish, brown, on the panelled wood. Apart from that the place was absolutely dark. She was aware of something she had felt once or twice before in his presence, a frisson of fear. 'Please let us have some light, Joel.'

She wouldn't have believed bulbs of such low wattage were available. But, yes, perhaps the one he reluctantly switched on was the kind for putting in the bedrooms of children afraid of the dark. They left the partial light behind to stumble once more into blackness as he led her into the living room. Rain roared against the window behind the muffling blinds. Without waiting for his permission she pressed the switch on one table lamp, then another.

He glowered at her as if she had committed some serious social solecism and took a pair of sunglasses out of the table drawer. She put down her bag on the brown sofa and seated herself beside it. The long procession of identical emperors seemed to come alive with the light. She made herself not look at them. 'Now, what do you think is wrong with you? How do you feel?'

His head bowed, he stood in front of her. 'I don't know.'

'All right. Why did you want me to come?'

He lifted his shoulders and the enwrapping blanket with them.

She persevered. 'Have you been breathless? Have you any pain?'

'No. Not either.'

Asked to take off the blanket and remove his pyjama jacket, he obeyed with maddening slowness. Her stethoscope held against his chest and then his back, she listened to his heart, his lungs. 'I don't think there's much wrong with you, Joel.'

'It's not my body, it's my mind.'

'That's for Miss Crane, not me,' she said. 'You are seeing Miss Crane?'

'I've been once. I told her about Mithras. I told her I wanted him to go away. It's strange, really, I liked him at first but I hate him now.' He seemed to read the doubt in her eyes, the fear. 'I tell myself he's not real, he's in my mind. I told him that. But when I'm alone with him I don't know. How can he only be in my mind when he talks to me in a language I can't understand? I can't have made that up.' She said faintly, 'Is he here now?'

'He's here but he's not speaking. He won't speak till you've gone.'

'And when he does will he speak – well, English or his own language?'

'It's hard to say.'

She must stop asking him about this imaginary creature. It wasn't her province, that was for the therapist. 'When is your next checkup at the hospital?'

'Friday,' he said.

It was a relief. She wanted him to be in other hands than her own. 'I don't think you should be alone here, Joel. Would your mother come and stay with you?'

'Pa wouldn't let her.'

'Is there no one else? No friend or relative you could ask to stay for a few days?' A few days wasn't enough but it was better than nothing. 'There must be someone.'

'No one who'd come unless I paid them. I mean, Pa paid them.'

She came to a quick decision. 'I will find someone for you.'

'I don't want a nurse!'

'Not a nurse, a carer. Someone just to be in the flat overnight.'

He put his head in his hands but he made no objection. 'You can go now,' he said, looking up. 'It gets better when I talk to you. I feel a bit better.'

When she was out in the street heavy rain was falling from a leaden sky and it was as dark as winter midnight, the street lamps dimmed by the yellowish fog the rain made. She drove back to Eugene's, thinking of the man she had left behind in that sepulchral place and wondering if, with her departure, the mind-created thing he called Mithras was muttering to him once more. She had meant to ask him how he passed his long lonely days in that dark place. She would do so next time they met, perhaps after his checkup on Friday. The reason she hadn't asked might have been because she knew the answer. Nothing. Nothing at all. No exercise, no reading, no watching television, listening to music, no talking to friends, nothing but sitting dozing in the dark.

Half the country was under flood water. Uncle Gib saw the pictures of Tewkesbury and Gloucester on his computer and in a newspaper he found on a wall in Raddington Road. 'We shall be all right up here,' he said. 'It's not called Notting Hill for nothing, is it? Haitch, I, double L, geddit?'

Dorian Lupescu didn't get it. He hadn't understood a word but he nodded in agreement. Uncle Gib had exited from the Internet and was replying to a few selected letters. One of them had come from a man in Marlow, a member of the Children of Zebulun's Cookham church, who was watching the Thames rise and who hadn't insured his house. The Agony Uncle had no intention of answering it, privately or in print. Questions of morality, usually sexual, were all he bothered with. He turned his attention to the letter from a woman in Kenton whose partner couldn't maintain an erection. Disgusting, thought Uncle Gib. He wouldn't sully the pages of The Zebulun with that word. A reply only would suffice.

Distraught, Kenton , he wrote. Your letter is unsuitable for family reading. The man you call your partner must ask God's forgiveness for sinful living. Marriage to you will cure his problem. It is a wellknown fact that guilt, justified guilt in his case, makes a man uncapable. Uncle Gib wasn't sure about that final word. It didn't look right. He checked in the dictionary and corrected it. Then, although he wasn't going to reply to it, he looked again at the letter from the Marlow reader. In spite of what he had said to Dorian Lupescu, it had made him rather uneasy.