Piranha to Scurfy (24 page)

She was silent. She went on staring as if he really was that stranger and she was considering what directions to give him.

“We can talk about all this, Susannah. Come inside and talk, will you please? I know you don’t want to leave this place, but that’s because you don’t know anywhere else. Won’t you come with me and try?”

Slowly she shook her head. “You have to go,” she said.

“Not without you.”

“I’m not coming.You have to go alone.”

She touched her companion’s arm, and he turned his head. From that touch, intimate but relaxed, Ben somehow knew this young fair-haired man was her lover as he had been her lover, and for a moment the sky went black and a sharp pain pierced his chest. She watched him as if calculating all this. Then she said, “Why don’t you go now? You’ll go if you’ve any sense.”

The young man beside her said, “I’d advise you to leave before dark.”

“We’ll follow you through the village,” said Susannah. “Then you’ll be safe. Pack your bags and put them in the car.”

“Shall we say an hour?” That was the young man, in his coarse, rustic voice.

Ben went back into the house. He had no intention of packing, but at the same time he didn’t know what to do next.The idea came to him that if he could only get Susannah alone all would be well. He could talk to her, remind her, persuade her. The question was, how to do that? Not at the hairdresser’s, he’d tried that. She baby-sat for Jennifer Fowler one evening a week, an evening she’d never been able to come to him, a Wednesday—those few Wednesdays, how bereft and lonely he’d felt. Tomorrow, then, he’d somehow get to the village and Jennifer Fowler’s house. They’d only kept up their surveillance till dark the night before, and it would be dark by nine...

He sat inside the window watching Susannah for a long time. It was marginally better to see her, he’d decided, than to be in some other part of the house, not seeing her but knowing she was there. To gaze and gaze was both pleasure and pain. The strange thing was, he told me, that watching her was never boring, and he couldn’t imagine that applying to any other person or object on earth.

He also watched, in sick dread, to see if she and the man with her touched each other or moved toward each other or gave any sign of the relationship he had at first been sure was theirs. But they didn’t. As far as he could tell, they didn’t. They talked and, of course, he wondered what they said. He saw Susannah’s head go back against the headrest on the seat and her eyes close.

The afternoon was calm and dull, white-skied. Because there was no wind, the surface of the water was quite smooth and the forest trees were still. He went into the back of the house to watch the sunset, a bronze-and-red spectacular sunset striped with black-rimmed thin clouds. These signs of time going by seemed to bring the following night closer, Wednesday night, when he could be alone with her. He began planning how to do it.

When he went back to the front window the car was moving, turning around prior to leaving. And no other had come to replace it. He began to feel a lightness, something that was almost excitement. They couldn’t keep her from him if they both wanted to be together, and if they could influence her, how much more could he? Any relationship between her and her companion in the car had been in his imagination. Probably, at some time or other, she had slept with Kim Gresham, but that was only to be expected. He had never had any ideas of being the first with her or even desired to be.

After a little while he poured himself a drink. Never much of a drinker, he had nevertheless had to stop himself from having recourse to whiskey these past few days. But at eight o’clock at night he could indulge himself. He began thinking of getting something to eat, but he hadn’t been outside all day except to speak those few brief words to Susannah, and at about nine, when the twilight was deepening, he walked down to the lake.

Flies swarmed a few inches above its surface and fish were jumping for them. The water bubbled and broke as a slippery body leapt, twisted, gleaming silver in the last of the light. He watched, growing calm and almost fatalistic, resigning himself to the hard struggle ahead, but knowing that anyone as determined as he would be bound to win.

Because their lights were off and dusk had by now fallen, because they drove quietly and in convoy, he didn’t see the cars until the first of them was almost upon him.

10

He went back into the house. He didn’t quite know what else to do. They parked the cars on the little beach and on the grass. There were about twenty of them, and he said it was like people going to some function in a village hall and parking on the green outside. Only they didn’t get out of their cars until he was indoors, and then not immediately.

You have to understand that it was all in darkness, or absence of light, for it wasn’t quite dark. The cars were unlit, and so was the house. Once he was inside he tried putting lights on, but then he couldn’t see what they meant to do. He put on the light in the hall and watched them through the front-room window.

They sat inside their cars. He recognized the Wantages’ car and Sandy Clements’s and, of course, John Peddar’s white van. There was just enough light left to see that. He thought then of phoning the police—he often had that thought—and he always came to the same conclusion, that there was nothing he could say. They had a right to be there. For all he knew, they’d explain their presence by saying they’d come fishing or owl-watching. But by now he was frightened. He was also determined not to show his fear, whatever they did.

The doors of the white van opened and the four people inside it got out, Susannah and her parents and one of the sisters. He stepped back from the window and moved into the hall. One after the other he heard car doors slamming. It seemed as if an hour passed before the front doorbell rang, though it was probably less than a minute. He breathed in slowly and out slowly and opened the door.

John Peddar pushed his way into the house or, rather, he pushed his daughter Julie into the house and followed behind her. Next came his wife and Susannah. Ben saw about forty people in the front garden and on the path and the doorstep, and once he had let Susannah in he tried to shut the door, but his effort was useless against the steady but entirely nonviolent onslaught. They simply pushed their way in, close together, a body of men and women, a relentless shoving crowd. He retreated before them into the living room, where the Peddars already were. He backed against the fireplace and stood there with his elbows on the mantelpiece, because there was nowhere farther that he could go, and faced them, feeling that now he knew how it was to be an animal at bay.

My small front room was full of people. He thought at this moment literally that they meant to kill him, that as one they had gone mad. He thought as I had thought in the wood, that the collective unconscious they seemed to share had taken a turn into madness and they had come there to do him to death. And the worst thing was, one of the worst things, that he now grouped Susannah with them. Suddenly he lost his feeling for her. She became one of them, and his passion evaporated with his fear. He could look at her, and did, without desire or tenderness or even nostalgia, but with distaste and the same fear as he had for her family and her neighbors.

At first he couldn’t speak. He swallowed; he cleared his throat. “What do you want?”

John Peddar answered him. He said something Ben couldn’t believe he’d heard aright.

“What?”

“You heard, but I’ll say it again. I told you you could have my Carol, but not my little girl, not my Julie.”

Ben said, his voice strengthening, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. D’you know how old Julie is? She’s not fourteen.” He was still holding the girl in front of him, and now he pushed her forward, displaying her. “See the bruises on her? See her leg? Look at that blue all up her arms.”

There was a murmur that seemed to swell all around him, like the buzzing of angry bees. His eyes went to Susannah, and he thought he saw on that face that was no longer lovely to him the hint of a tiny malicious smile.

“Your daughter fell off her bicycle,” he said. “She hurt her leg falling off her bicycle. The bruises on her arm I may have made, I don’t know. I may have made them when I helped her to her feet, that’s all.”

The child said, in a harsh unchildish voice, “You were going to rape me.”

“Is that why you’ve come here?” he said. “To accuse me of that?”

“You tried to rape me.” The accusation, slightly differently phrased, was repeated. “I fell over when I ran out of the house. Because you were trying to do it.”

“This is rubbish,” he said. “Will you please go.” He looked at Susannah. “All of you, please leave.”

“We’ve a witness,” said Iris. “Teresa saw it all.”

“Teresa wasn’t in the house,” he said.

“That’s not true,”Teresa Gresham said. “I’d been there an hour when Julie came. I expect you’d forgotten—there was a lot you forgot once you got to touch her.” She said to the Peddars, “I came out of the kitchen and I saw it all.”

“What do you want of me?” he said again.

“We don’t want to go to the police,” John Peddar said.

His wife said, “It’s humiliating for our little girl.”

“Not that it’s in any way her fault. But we’ll go to them if you don’t go.You go tonight and this’ll be the last you hear of it. Go now or we get the police. Me and Julie and her mother and Teresa.You can phone them on his phone, Iris.”

He imagined the police coming and his having absolutely no defense except the truth, which would collapse in the face of Julie’s evidence and the Peddars’ and Teresa’s. If that wasn’t enough, they’d no doubt produce Sandy Clements, who would have also have been there watching, cleaning the windows perhaps or weeding the garden. Sandy he could pick out of the crowd packed into the room, just squeezed in, leaning against the closed door beside his new wife.

“None of this is true,” he said. “It’s lies, and you know it.”

They didn’t try to deny it. They weren’t interested in whether something was true or not, only in their power to control him. None of them smiled now or looked anything but grim. One of the strangest things, he said, was that they were all perfectly calm. There was no anxiety. They knew he’d do as they asked.

“This is a false accusation, entirely fabricated,” he said.

“Iris,” said John Peddar, “phone the police.”

“Where’s the phone?”

Teresa Gresham said, “It’s in the back room. I’ll come with you.”

Sandy moved away from the door and opened it for them. The crowd made a passage, squeezing back against one another in a curiously intimate way, not seeming to resist the pressure of other bodies. Breasts pushed against arms, hips rested against bellies, without inhibition, without awkwardness. But perhaps that wasn’t curious, perhaps it wasn’t curious at all. They stood close together, crushed together, as if in some collective embrace, cheek to cheek, hand to shoulder, thigh to thigh.

Then Teresa went out of the room. Iris, following her, had reached the door when Ben said, “All right. I’ll go.”

He was deeply humiliated. He kept his head lowered so that he couldn’t meet Susannah’s eyes. His shame was so great that he felt a burning flush spread across his neck and face. But what else could he have done? One man is helpless against so many. In those moments he knew that every one of those people and those left behind in the village would stand by the Peddars. No doubt, if need was, they would produce other evidence of his proclivities, and he remembered how, once, he had taken hold of Carol Peddar by the wrist.

“I’ll go now,” he said.

They didn’t leave. They helped his departure. He went upstairs and they followed him, pushed their way into his bedroom. One of them found his suitcases; another set them on the bed and opened their lids. Teresa Gresham opened the wardrobe and took out his clothes. Kathy Gresham and Angela Burns folded them and packed them in the cases. No one touched him, but once he was in that bedroom, he was their prisoner. They packed his hairbrush and his shoes. John Peddar came out of the bathroom with his sponge bag and his razor and toothbrush. All the time, Julie, the injured one, sat on the bed and stared at him.

Sandy Clements and George Whiteson carried the cases out of the room. One of the women produced a carrier bag and asked him if they’d got everything of his.When he said they had but for his dressing gown and the book he’d been reading in bed, she put those items in the bag, and then they let him leave the room.

If they were enjoying themselves, there was no sign of it. They were calm, unsmiling, mostly silent. Teresa led a group of them into the back room, where he had worked on his translation, admitted him, and closed the door behind him. Gillian Atkins—she was bound to be there, his nemesis—brought two plastic bags with her, and into these they cleared his table of books and papers. They did it carefully, lining up the pages, clipping them together, careful not to crease or crumple. A man Ben didn’t recognize, though his coloring, height, and manner were consistent with the village people, unplugged his word processor and put it into its case. Then his dictionary went into the second bag.

Again he was asked if there was anything they’d forgotten. He shook his head, and they let him go downstairs. Gillian Atkins went into the kitchen and came back with a bag containing the contents of the fridge.

“Now give me the door key,” Kevin Gresham said.

Ben asked why. Why should he?

“You won’t need it. I’ll send it back to the present owner.”

Ben gave him the key. He really had no choice. He left the house in the midst of them. Their bodies pressed against him, warm, shapely, herbal-smelling. They eased him out, nudging and elbowing him, and, when the last of them had left and turned out the hall light, closed the door behind them. His cases and bags were already in the boot of his car, his word processor in its case carefully placed on the floor in front of the back seat. He looked for Susannah to say good-bye, but she had already left; he could see the red taillights of the car she was in receding into the distance along the shore road.

They accompanied him in convoy through the village, two cars ahead of him and all the rest behind. Every light was on, and some of the older people, the ones who hadn’t come to Gothic House, were in their front gardens to see him go. Not all the cars continued on. Some fell away when their owners’ homes were reached, but the Peddars and the Clementses continued to precede him, and Gillian Atkins with Angela Burns continued to follow him, as did, he thought, the Greshams, but he wasn’t sure of that because he couldn’t see the car color in the dark.

After ten miles, almost at the approach to an A road, Gillian Atkins cut off his further progress the way a police car does, by overtaking him and pulling sharply ahead of him. He was forced to stop. The car behind stopped. Those in front already had. Gillian Atkins came around to his window, which he refused to open. But he’d forgotten to lock the door, and she opened it.

“Don’t come back,” was all she said.

They let him go on alone.

He had to stop for a while on the A road in a lay-by because his hands were shaking and his breathing erratic. He thought he might choke. But after a while things improved and he was able to drive on to London.