The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307801142
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

15

In a cold winter, on a Saturday, when Daniel was five and Elizabeth twelve, he had taken them to the Planetarium, for which his son was a little too young but which his daughter had enjoyed. Afterward, after lunch at a place in Baker Street, the sun had come out and they had walked to St. John’s Wood tube station through the park. Frost still lingered on the grass and there were patches of snow in shady places.

The lake was frozen over. Elizabeth, who was a skater, who had had a new pair of skates for Christmas, wanted to know why no one was on the ice, and Roman had told them, not going into too many details because Daniel was so young, of the disaster on the ice of February 1867, since which time no one had been allowed to skate there. Several hundred people had been on the ice when it began to break, for they had persisted in spite of warnings from the man from the Humane Society who cried to them, “For God’s sake get off, or there will be a great calamity!”

“Were they drowned?” Daniel asked.

“Some were.” Roman didn’t say how many, he didn’t say forty. He didn’t say that a hundred and fifty people went into the water and forty died. “The lake was deeper then, it was twelve feet deep between the islands, and the ice was never thick enough. The Tyburn River flowed through it and a fast current stops thick ice forming.”

The children had looked across the lake to the great house called The Holme and at the islands lying below it. Swans and geese and ducks congregated on their banks. Elizabeth wanted to know how the people were got out of the water.

“They sent down divers. Afterward the lake was drained and remade and now it’s no more than four feet deep anywhere.”

“Are there ghosts?” said Daniel. “In the night do the ghosts of drowned people come out of the water?”

“Ghosts don’t exist, Daniel,” said Roman.

But now he wondered, for in his winter dreams, he had sometimes seen the people from the ice disaster rising from the black water and the ice floes, as in that Pre-Raphaelite painting of the sea giving up its dead, and once among the faces had been his children’s, wan in death, and his wife’s.

Often, while the children were still alive, he had regretted even the expurgated version of events he had given Daniel, for the boy would revert to it in cold weather and Roman thought he too had dreamed about it. The bombing of the bandstand, another horror, had taken place within Elizabeth’s lifetime, though she had been only about three and had known nothing of the IRA bomb that killed and injured so many bandsmen. At least he had never told them that, they had never in their park walks passed the spot where the bandstand stood on the northern bank of the lake, flanked now by memorial willows.

Was this, what was

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