The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Ruth Rendell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

10

The soft insinuating voice at the other end of the line was peculiarly persistent. ‘Bernard thought such a lot of you, David. He often talked about you. It seems a pity to lose touch and I know Carl wants to meet you again. We were both disappointed when you couldn’t stay and have a meal on Friday, so I wondered if you’d make it another time. Say tomorrow?’

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t make it tomorrow.’

‘Tuesday, then?’

‘I can’t make it this week at all. I’ll ring you, shall I?’ David said good-bye firmly and hung up. Then he went back into the untidy, cluttered but interesting room he called a studio and thought about it.

She had a face like Goya’s Naked Maja, full-lipped, sensuous. It didn’t attract him. He was always finding resemblances between living people and people painted long ago. Portraits were pinned all over his walls, Ganymede reproductions, picture gallery postcards, pages cut out of Sunday paper colour supplements. Vigee Le Brun’s Marie Antoinette was there, stuck up with Sellotape next to an El Greco Pope; Titian’s L’homme aux Gants had a frame which was more than he had accorded to his Van Gogh peasants or the Naked Maja herself.

A peculiar inconsistent woman, he thought, and he wasn’t thinking about the Goya. She had been surly to him on the night before her husband’s death and actually dismayed to see him in The Man in the Iron Mask. And then, after five minutes stilted courtesy on his part and absent-minded rejoinders on hers, she had changed her entire personality, becoming sweet, seductive and effusive. Why?

They said that no man can resist a pretty woman who throws herself at him. His nature is such that he succumbs, unable to believe such good fortune. And if he has not himself made the slightest overture, he congratulates himself, while despising the woman, on his irresistible attractions. But it hardly ever happens that way, David thought. It had never happened to him before. There had been no difficulty at all in resisting. From the first he had been bewildered.

And yet he would have done nothing about it. The incident would have been dismissed to the back of his mind, along with various others of life’s apparently insoluble mysteries. People were peculiar, human nature a perennial puzzle. You had to accept it.

But she had telephoned him, talking like an old friend who had every hope and every justification for that hope of becoming much more. From a vague uneasiness, his bewilderment grew until it crowded everything else from his mind. No matter how carefully he thought about it, going over and over the events of Friday night, he could only justify Magdalene Heller’s conduct by assuming her to be not quite sane. But he knew that this conclusion is always the lazy and cowardly resort of a poor imagination. Mad she might be, but there would be method in her madness. Young widows do not go into West End pubs on the day of their

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