Piranha to Scurfy (23 page)

It was as if I were the Pied Piper. But the children I led were not in happy thrall to me, not following me to some paradise, but dogging my steps with silent menace, driving me ahead of them. To what end? To what confrontation in the forest depths?

I was terribly afraid. It’s not an exaggeration to say I feared for my life. The whole tribe of them, as one, had gone mad, had succumbed to spontaneous psychopathy, had conceived some fearful paranoiac hatred of me. They would surround me in some dark green grove and murder me. In their high mysterious union. In silence.

But I never quite came to believe that. If I wanted to crouch on the ground and cover my head and whimper to them to let me go, to leave me alone, I didn’t do that either. By some sort of effort of will that I achieved, God knows how, I turned, clenched my fists, set one foot before the other, and began walking back the way I’d come.

This brought me face to face with the vanguard of them, with John Peddar and one of his daughters, Susannah herself for all I know.They fell back out of my path. It was gracefully done; one by one they all yielded, half bowing, as if this were some complicated ritual dance and they giving place to the principal dancer, who must now pass with prescribed steps down the space between them. Only I had no partner in this minuet; I was alone.

No one spoke. I didn’t speak. I wanted to, I wanted to challenge them, to ask why, but I couldn’t. I suppose I knew I wouldn’t get an answer or perhaps that no voice would come when I tried to speak. The speechless-ness was one of the worst things, that and the closed faces and the silent movements. Another was the sound of the rising wind.

They followed me all the way back. While I was in the forest the wind could be heard but not much felt. It met me as I emerged onto the lakeshore and even held me back for a moment, as if pushing me with its hands. The surface of the lake was ruffled into waves, and the tree branches were pulled and stretched and beaten. By the shore the people who followed me let me go and turned aside, two hundred of them I suppose, at least two hundred.

From having been perfectly silent, they broke into talk and laughter as soon as they were separated from me and, buffeted by the wind, made their way homeward. I ran into my house. I shut myself inside, but I could still hear their voices, raised in conversation, in laughter, and at last in song. It would be something to chronicle, wouldn’t it, if they’d sung an ancient ballad, a treasure for an anthropologist, something whose words had come down unbroken from the time of Langland or Chaucer? But they didn’t. The tune I heard carried by the wind, receding, at last dying into silence, was “Over the Rainbow.”

That evening the gale became a storm. Trees went down on the edge of the woodland and four tiles blew off the roof of Gothic House. The people of the village weren’t to blame, but that was not how it seemed to me at the time, as I cowered in my house, as I lay in bed listening to the storm, the crying of the wind and the crash of falling tree branches. It was just a lucky happening for them that this gale blew up immediately after their slow, dramatic pursuit of me in the forest. But that night I could have believed them all witches and magicians,
wicca
people who could control the elements and raise a wind.

9

They had something else in store for Ben.

“I was determined not to go,” he said. “I would have gone immediately if Susannah had come too, but without her I was going to stay put. On the Sunday I went back to the village to try to find her, but no one would answer their doors to me, not just the Peddars, no one.”

“It was brave of you to try,” I said, and that was when I told him what had happened to me, the silent starers, the blazing lights, the pursuit through the forest.

“I’d stopped being a coward,” Ben said. “Well, I thought I had.”

The next morning someone was due to come and clean the house. Which girl would they send? Or was it possible Susannah might come? Of course he hadn’t slept much. He hadn’t really slept for four nights, and exhaustion was beginning to tell on him. If he managed to doze off it would be to plunge into dreams of Susannah, always erotic dreams but deeply unsatisfying. In them she was always naked. She began making love with him, kissing him, placing his hands on her body as was her habit, kissing his fingers and taking them to the places she loved to be touched. Then, suddenly, she would spring out of his arms and run to whoever had come into the room, Kim Gresham or George Whiteson or Tom Kirkman, it could be any of them, and in a frenzy begin stripping off their clothes, nuzzling them, gasping with excitement. He’d reached a point where he didn’t want to sleep for fear of those dreams.

By eight-thirty the next morning he’d been up for more than two hours. He’d made himself a pot of coffee and drunk it. His head was banging, and he felt sick. The time went by, nine o’clock went by, and no one came. No one would come now, he knew that.

The weather had changed and become dull and cool. He went outside for a while and walked about, he couldn’t say why. There wasn’t anyone to be seen—there seldom was—but he had a feeling that he was being watched. He took his work into the ground-floor front room because he knew it would be impossible for him to stay upstairs in the back. If he did that, sat up there where he could only see the rear garden and the forest, something terrible might happen in the front, by the lake, some awful event take place that he ought to witness. It was an unreasonable feeling, but he gave in to it and moved into the living room.

The author of
The Golden Apple
was analyzing Helen, her narcissism, her choice of Menelaus declared by hanging a wreath round his neck, her elopement with Paris. Ben tried to concentrate on translating this, first to understand which events stemmed in the writer’s estimation from destiny and which from character, but he couldn’t stop himself from constantly glancing up at the window. Half an hour had passed, and he had translated only two lines, when a car came along the road from the village. It parked by the lake in front of Gothic House.

I suppose there was about a hundred yards between the house and the little beach, and the car was on the grass just above the beach. He watched and waited for the driver or the driver and passenger to get out of it and come up to the house. No one did. Nothing moved. Then about ten minutes later the car windows were wound down. He saw that the driver was Kim Gresham and his passenger an unknown woman.

He tried to work. He translated the lines about Helen taking one of her children on the elopement with her, then read what he had written and saw that the prose was barely comprehensible and the sense lost. There was no point in working in these conditions. He wondered what would happen if he tried to go out and felt sure that if he attempted a walk to the village those two would stop him. They would seize hold of him and frog-march him back to the house.

“I thought of calling the police,” he said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“The man they’d have sent lived in the police house in the village. He’s one of them, he’s called Michael Wantage. If anyone else had come, what could I have said? That two people were sitting in a parked car admiring the view? I didn’t call the police. I got my car out of the garage.”

He put his work aside and decided to drive to the town four miles away and do his weekly shopping. He watched them watching him as he backed the car out.

“I think they were hoping I’d fetch out suitcases and the word processor and my books. Then they’d know I was being obedient and leaving. They’d just have let me go, I’m sure of that. A sigh of relief would have been heaved and they’d have gone back to the village.”

As it was, they followed him. He saw the car behind him all the way. They made no attempt at secrecy. In the town he left his car and went to the supermarket but, as far as he knew, they remained in theirs. When he got back they were still sitting in their car, and when he drove home they were behind him.

In the early afternoon a second car arrived and the first one left. They were operating a shift system. From Ben’s description it seemed that Marion Kirkman was driving the second car. He had no doubt as to the identity of her passenger. It was Iris Peddar. Later on another car replaced it and was still there when darkness came.

Perhaps a car was there all night. He didn’t know. By then he didn’t want to know; he just desperately hoped this surveillance would have ceased by morning. Just after sunrise he pulled back the curtains and looked out. A car was there. He couldn’t see who was inside it. It was then that he told himself he could be as strong and as resolute as they. He could stick it out. He simply wouldn’t look. He’d do what seemed impossible the day before, work in the back, not look, ignore them.They meant him no harm; they only mounted this guard to stop him from going to the village to find Susannah. But there must be other ways of reaching Susannah. He could do a huge circular detour via the town and come into the village from the other direction. He could park
his
car outside her father’s house. But if he did that, all that, any of that, they would follow him...

All that day he stayed indoors. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t read, he didn’t want to eat. At one point he lay down and slept, only to dream of Susannah. This time he was in a tower, tall and narrow with a winding stair inside like a windmill, and he was watching her from above, through a hole in the floor. He heard her footsteps climbing the stairs, hers and another’s, and when she came into the room below she was with Sandy Clements. Sandy began to undress her, taking the bracelet from her arm and the necklace from her neck and held one finger of her right hand as she stepped naked out of the blue dress. She looked up to the ceiling and smiled, stretching out her hands, one to him, one to Sandy, turning her body languorously for them to gaze at and worship. He awoke with a cry and, forgetting his resolve, stumbled into the front room to look for the car. A red one this time, Teresa Gresham’s. She was alone in it.

At about seven in the evening, long before dark, she got out of the car and came up to the house. He’d forgotten he’d left the back door unlocked. She walked in. He asked her what the hell she thought she was doing.

“You asked me to come up and do your ironing,” she said.

“That’s rubbish,” he said. “I asked you nothing. Now get out.”

She had apparently been gone five minutes when he saw, in the far distance, a bicycle approaching. The very first time she came Susannah had been on a bicycle, and that was who he thought it was. The surveillance was over: she had persuaded them to end it, and she was coming to him. She had told them they couldn’t prevent her from being with him, she was over age, she loved him. He opened the front door and stood on the doorstep waiting for her.

It wasn’t Susannah. It was the younger of her two sisters, the fourteen-year-old Julie. Disappointment turned inside his body as love does, with a wrench, an apparent lurching of the heart. But he called out a greeting to her. She rested her bicycle against the garden wall and fastened a chain and padlock to its front wheel—the good girl, the responsible teenager. Who did she think would steal it out here? He let her into the house, certain she must have a message for him, perhaps a message from Susannah, who was allowed to reach him in no other way.

She was a pretty little girl—his words—who was much shorter than her sisters, who clearly would never reach Susannah’s height, with a very slight, childish figure. She wore a short skirt and a white sweatshirt, ankle socks, and white trainers. Her straw-colored hair was shoulder-length, and she had a fringe.

“She looked exactly like the girl in the Millais painting, the one who’s sitting up in bed and looking surprised but not unhappy.”

“I know the one,” I said. “It’s called
Just Awake.
”

“Is it?” he said. “I wonder what Millais meant by ‘awake.’ D’you think a double meaning was intended?”

Julie sat down sedately in my living room. He asked her if she had a message for him from Susannah, and she shook her head.

“You asked me to come,” she said. “You phoned up an hour ago and said if I’d come over you’d let me have those books you told Susannah I could have.”

“What books?” He had no idea what she meant.

“For my schoolwork. For my English homework.”

It was at this point that he had the dreadful feeling they had sent her as the next in the progression. They’d decided it was still worth trying to keep him and make him one of them. He didn’t want Lavinia or Carol; stubbornly, he still wanted monogamy with Susannah. But since he’d rejected the more mature Teresa, wasn’t it possible he’d be attracted by her antithesis, by this child?

Of course he was wrong there. They weren’t perverse. In their peculiar way, they were innocent. But by this time he’d have believed anything of them, and he did, for a few minutes, believe they’d sent her to tempt him. He’d been sitting down but he jumped up, and she too got up.

“Why are you really here?”

She forgot about the books. “I’m to tell you to go away,” she said. “I’m to say it’s your last chance.”

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I’m not listening to this.”

“You can stay here tonight.” She said it airily, as if it were absolutely her province to give him permission. “You can stay here tonight, but you must go tomorrow. Or we’ll make you go.”

He didn’t once touch her. She didn’t touch him. She left the house, unlocked the padlock on her bicycle chain, and got on the bicycle. It’s almost impossible for a practiced cyclist to fall off a bicycle, but she did. She fell off in the road, and the machine fell on her. He lifted the bicycle off her, put out his hand to help her up, pulled her to her feet. She jumped on the bicycle and rode off, turning around to call something after him, but he didn’t hear what it was. He returned to the house and thought that in the morning he’d go to the village and get into her parents’ house, even if that meant breaking a window or kicking the door in.

In the morning the car was back. It was parked at the lakeshore. The driver was David Stamford and the passenger Gillian Atkins.

If he went to the town and from there by the back way into the village, they would follow him. He had no doubt that they would physically prevent him from driving or walking along the lakeshore road. It was harassment, their simply being there was harassment, but imagine telling this tale to the police, imagine proving anything.

Working on his translation was impossible. Attempting to find Susannah would be difficult, but he tried. He phoned the Peddars, Sandy Clements, the shop, the pub, Angela Burns. One after the other, when they heard his voice, they put the phone down. It was deeply unnerving, and after Angela’s silence and the click of the receiver going into its rest, he stopped trying.

But there was some comfort to be drawn from these abortive phone calls. He’d been able to make them. They hadn’t cut his phone line. It’s some measure of the state he was getting into that he even considered they might. This negativity, this absence of some hypothetical action, told him there would be no violence used against him. He hadn’t exactly been afraid of violence, but he’d been apprehensive about it.

He sat down, in the back of the house where he couldn’t see that car, and thought about what they’d done. Not so very much, really. They’d stopped him from going to a wedding and followed his car and sent him to the town. Surely he could stick it out if that was all that was going to happen? If he had Susannah he could. He had to stay at Gothic House for her sake, he had to stay until he got her away.

“I thought of going out to them,” he said to me, “to those two, Stamford and the Atkins woman, and later on to the people who replaced them, the Wantages, Rosalind’s parents, of going out to them and asking what they wanted of me. Of course I knew really, I knew they wanted me to leave, but I wanted to hear someone say it, and not a child of fourteen. And then I thought I’d say, Okay, I’ll leave but I’m taking Susannah with me.”

By now he couldn’t bear to leave his observers unobserved, and he sat in the front window watching them while they watched him. He still hadn’t been able to bring himself to carry out his intention. He just sat there watching and thinking of how to put his question and what words to choose to frame his resolution. In the middle of the afternoon a terrible thing happened. He had calculated that the Wantages’ shift would end at four—that was the state he had got into, that he was measuring his watchers’ shifts—and, sure enough, at five to four another car arrived. The driver was an unknown man, his passenger Susannah.

The car was parked so that its near side, and therefore the passenger’s seat, was toward Gothic House. He looked out into Susannah’s eyes and she looked back, her face quite expressionless. There are times when thinking is dismissed as useless, when one stops thinking and just acts. He had thought enough. He walked, marched, out there, calling her name.

She wound down the window. The face she presented to him, he said, was that of a woman in a car of whom a stranger has asked the way. It was as if she had never seen him before. The man in the driver’s seat didn’t even turn around. He was staring at the lake with rapt attention. He looked, Ben said, as if he’d seen the Loch Ness Monster.

“Please get out of the car and come inside, Susannah,” he said to her.