Ruth Rendell - Portobello

Eugene said he was going to buy her a new car for a wedding present. Like many women she couldn't get excited at the prospect. She was rather fond of her five-year-old car but giving her things and choosing presents for her brought Eugene so much pleasure she disliked stopping him. He was at the gallery but would be home by six. Ella carried her boxes and bags indoors.

She was very aware that Eugene had a greater appreciation of beauty and elegance than she had. She might like organising her life and tidying up details but neatness in the home wasn't as important to her as it was to him. She had determined some time before that she would conform to him in these things. He did so much for her and she, she sometimes thought, so little for him. This stuff she had brought back from her flat she would put away neatly before he came home, starting perhaps with the clothes and all these bottles and jars.

There was plenty of wardrobe space in the house, including a walk-in cupboard opening off their bedroom. Ella hung up the dresses and the suits she had brought with her, folded sweaters and laid them on the shelves. Then she went into the second bathroom, well aware that all the half-used cosmetics and half-empty bottles of shampoo and bath essence would never be finished up. No doubt there were some people who would have thrown these things out without wasting time, just as there were some who took a garment to the charity shop when it hadn't been worn for six months. She wasn't among them. Foolishly, she admitted, she revolted against the waste of it even when she knew keeping stuff you would never use was mere hoarding for hoarding's sake.

This cabinet, seldom used except by the occasional guest, was probably empty. She wasn't much surprised to find a safety razor, a tube of arnica and some wads of cottonwool in the top drawer. These were the things visitors left behind. All the other drawers were empty but for the bottom one, in which was a pack of some sort of sweets. Sugar-free sweets, apparently. The packaging was brown and orange with a badly executed design on it of liquid chocolate being poured into a half-orange. Ella put it into the top drawer with the razor and the arnica, and tipped her bottles and jars into the bottom one. Carli again? She had just remembered finding a similar pack of sweets in the secret drawer in the kitchen. Carli was very absent-minded for someone so young, leaving these sweets of hers all over the house. She would ask her about it next time they encountered each other.

The books next. Ella loved Eugene's bookshelves. They had all been made for him from golden-grey walnut and fitted to the walls in the study and drawing room. There had apparently been a dilemma as to whether these should be plain shelves or cabinets with glass doors. Ella was glad he had decided against the glazing because she much preferred open bookcases where everything could be clearly seen to cupboards with keys in their locks through whose windows spines were obscured or lost behind wood uprights.Tidy, precise Eugene had arranged all his books in alphabetical order if they were novels and according to subject and then alphabetically in the case of non-fiction. Ella enjoyed just standing in front of them and giving herself up to exulting in their beauty and the pristine state in which Eugene kept them.

She had intended to fit the books she had brought with her in among those already there. There were no more than twenty of them, some kept from her schooldays or received as presents, for Ella usually bought paperbacks and passed them on to her sister or a friend. But, like most people who love reading, she found it wasn't possible for her simply to shuffle the novels around on the shelf and push the newcomers in among them. Each one she took out she had to study, recall how she had enjoyed it or otherwise, read its first line and before she set it down, congratulate herself on keeping it so well. These classics from the nineteenth and early twentieth century in their dark-blue or mulberry-red binding wouldn't disgrace Eugene's shelves.

E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey had better go next to the existing copy. They seemed to be identical editions. She was about to move Eugene's own copies, one of them necessarily on to the shelf below, when she heard his key in the lock. The time had flown past.

He walked into the room. His expression was quite unlike his usual pleasant composure, the look of a considerate and civilised man, but frowning and aghast. He shouted at her. 'What are you doing?'

She flinched. Before she could reply – she was on her feet now – a transformation seemed to come over him, as if a hand had passed over his features, wiping away the cruel mask and leaving a gentle sweetness behind.

'I'm sorry, darling. I don't know what came over me. I've had a hard day.'

'Who did you think I was?'

It was an opening and he took it. 'It's rather dark in here. A strange person kneeling by the bookcase gave me a shock. Very silly, I know. Still, we have once been burgled. Look, let me do those books, will you?'

'If you like,' she said, still a little stunned.

'We'll go and have a drink first.' They went into the study. 'Why don't we have a bottle of champagne?'

She smiled, took his arm. 'You can't be going to propose to me again?'

'I will if you like,' he said.

'What are we celebrating, then?'

A lucky escape, he thought. An amazing stroke of good fortune. If I had been five minutes – no, half a minute – later… 'The new exhibition, Priscilla Hart's show,' he said. 'It's going well. I sold three of her miniatures this afternoon.'

'Good,' she said. 'Let's celebrate for ourselves too. Not long to our wedding now.'

He kissed her. Because he had been saved from humiliation at her hands, had vindicated himself perfectly by pretending he had seen a burglar, he felt a surge of love for her. It was going to be all right. They were going to be very happy.

The shortening days of September seemed each one more beautiful than the last, the sky a clear blue, the air as warm as on a July day. Only it hadn't been like this in July but grey and cold and constantly raining. Now, although the sun was strong, in the shade you felt the chill of autumn. It was too late for true heat. The time for hot days and mild evenings had gone by, and the nights were cold. Ella noticed how tired the trees were beginning to look, their leaves worn out by onslaughts of wind and rain and now by belated sunshine.

The gardens in front of Joel's block were scattered with fallen leaves, not those of the final shedding, which would come in November, but the September drop, which relieves trees of their weight. They crunched under her feet as she walked up the steps. The lift seemed to rise especially slowly and, when she rang Joel's bell, a woman she had never seen before opened the door to her. She introduced herself as the day carer and, although she didn't say so, Ella thought she might be responsible for letting more light into the flat.

In the grim and gloomy living room the blind had been raised and the curtains half drawn apart. In the increased light it was possible to see how shabby the furnishings were, the only bright and fresh object an amber glass vase on the table full of orange coloured chrysanthemums. Had the day carer brought them or even Wendy Stemmer?

Joel lay on the sofa. He wore dark glasses but had also spread a black scarf over his face. He gave no sign of having seen or heard her. She sat down in one of the chairs drawn up to the table and asked him how he was feeling. To her surprise, after a long while, he took the scarf off his face and sat up. Because he hadn't replied she said it again, 'How are you?'

'Well enough.' His voice was low and lifeless.

'When you were in the hospital did they give you any tests? Did they check your heart?'