Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer

Author:Penelope Mortimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

She looked curiously out of the window as they crawled along Praed Street and the Edgware Road. Safe in the taxi, she fastened on the crowds, the bicycles hung up in shops like meat, the nudes outside the Metropole, the barrows and mop-haired boys in black ties and perilous bus conductors and old women nipping on and off like crows: anything to postpone Doctor Fickstein, the thought of Rex, the realisation of what she was actually doing. Maida Vale loomed empty, no one in the streets but solitary policemen and errand boys weaving lazily on their bicycles round the genteel, dejected crescents. She pulled off her gloves and put them on again, moistened her lips, held her purse ready. Up the hill, stopping at the lights for one small child on a tricycle to pedal carefully by, through a maze of roads where detached houses cold-shouldered each other behind high walls and side gates were marked Trademan’s Entrance. She peered at the meter and counted out two shillings more. Her watch said five to eleven, but she couldn’t remember when she had last put it right. Did it gain or lose? She shook her wrist, listened in case the watch had stopped. They were in a town of new buildings, unrecognisable, high, narrow blocks of flats arranged haphazardly together like building blocks tumbled out of a sack. Their height excluded the sun, but the patches of grass in front of them were bright green, like dyed raffia.

‘Rowntree House?’ the driver asked, leaning back as though reining in his taxi.

‘Yes.’ She glanced at the crumpled paper.

He peered about a little, crawling along in the street that seemed to have been stricken by plague; not a cat or a dog, nothing but the thousands of muslin-curtained eyes staring down on the creeping, ant-sized taxi. He turned in through a gateway, drew up outside an enormous portico with double doors twenty feet high.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here it is.’

Ruth paid him, hesitating until he had driven off, rollicking away into the common sun of London. She wondered how she would ever get away again, imagined herself wandering the canyon streets till nightfall. She pushed nervously at the door, which gave way without a sound. A small, pale commissionaire got up from his chair and enquired softly, ‘Yes, madam?’

She saw, in the dimness, a vast, marble-floored hall. The two chairs put, for some reason, in the middle of it were like thrones for midgets. There was a strange sound of dripping water. Great urns, weeping maidenhair fern and carnations, stood about as though in preparation for some ghoulish wedding. She jumped, clutching her handbag in both hands.

‘Number 38?’ she whispered, then repeated loudly, ‘Number 38, please.’

‘Doctor Fickstein?’

She nodded.

‘Across the hall there, the lift is through the door on the left, it’s on the first floor.’

‘Thank you.’

She stepped off the carpet on to the marble. A shallow, oblong pool accounted for the dripping water; the water was clear but the fish, rolling from side to side, looked dead.

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