Ruth Rendell: Portobello

Instead of the elaborate affair Eugene once wanted, he and Ella were married very quietly with her sister and his brother as witnesses, the bride wearing what the local paper called 'a simple afternoon dress'. Ella's baby is expected in August, her due date is the fifteenth, her forty-first birthday, that historic date that gave Lance his freedom.

Joel Roseman has become Mithras and seems to be happier in his new identity than he ever was as himself. He lives with his parents in Hampstead Garden Suburb where Morris Stemmer treats him with kindness and consideration, and Wendy's attitude to him is one of timorous love. Joel's father could perhaps never have been reconciled to the son who let his daughter drown but Mithras is a different person, sunny-tempered, even playful. He loves the light and keeps his own bed lamp on all night. His parents have got over the embarrassment they used to feel when he talks about the city from which he is a wistful exile, its towers glittering in the sun, its wide boulevards and its white walls on which angels sit and gaze at the broad shining river.

Undine in a Fishpond has lost its attractions for Morris Stemmer since his son came back in his new avatar. He tried to sell it back to Eugene but Ella's husband was unable to afford the exorbitant price he was asking and eventually got elsewhere. Anxious about the coming birth of his child, Eugene succumbed and bought a single packet of Oranchoco in the Golborne Road pharmacy. It lasted him a fortnight, he threw the last two sweets away and has had no compulsion to buy another.

The Portobello Road changes very little. There is talk of Woolworths disappearing and a tower block of flats with car park going up in its place, rumours too of arcades scheduled to be converted into mewses to satisfy the demand for more houses. Some say the pubs are to be renamed because no one knows who the Earl of Lonsdale was, still less the Prince Bonaparte, and those wanting change favour that cliché name the Slug and Lettuce. But there are always rumours and mostly they come to nothing.

On Saturday mornings the young pour out of Notting Hill Gate tube station and off the number seven bus and the number twentythree, on their way to spend their week's wages at the stalls and in the shops, on soap and beads and pashminas and herbs and all the perfumes of Arabia. To sit at the pavement tables drinking cappuccinos and lattes and Chardonnay. The old people come with their shopping trolleys because they have always come, because, if you live around there, the Portobello Road is where you do your shopping. The graffitists come and the pickpockets and the serious thieves. Prudent shopkeepers pull down metal grilles over their windows before they go home for the night.

And in the deep of the night all is silent while the centipede street draws breath and prepares for another day.