Piranha to Scurfy

Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

Book: Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Tags: Fiction
It
is
a warm day and there was a quite a crowd in there. I don’t care for crowds myself, so I know how you feel.”
    “You don’t know how I feel at all. You’ve just made that very plain. I don’t want to go to the Randolph, I want to go home.”
    There was little they could do about it. Susan, who seldom lunched out and sometimes grew very tired of cooking, was disappointed. But you can’t force an obstinate man to go into a hotel and drink sherry if he is unwilling to do this. They went back to the car park, and Frank drove home.When she and Frank had a single guest, it was usually Susan’s courteous habit to sit in the back of the car and offer the visitor the passenger seat. She had done this on the way to Oxford, but this time she sat next to Frank and left the back to Ambrose. He sat in the middle of the seat, obstructing Frank’s view in the rear mirror. Once, when Frank stopped at a red light, she thought she felt Ambrose trembling, but it might only have been the engine, which was inclined to judder.
    On their return he went straight up to his room without explanation and remained there, drinkless, lunchless, and, later on, tealess. Susan read her new book and was soon totally absorbed in it. She could well understand what the reviewer had meant when he wrote about readers fainting with fear, though in fact she herself had not fainted but only felt pleasurably terrified. Just the same, she was glad Frank was there, a large comforting presence, intermittently reading the
Times
and watching golf on television. Susan wondered why archaeologists went on excavating tombs in Egypt when they knew the risk of being laid under a curse or bringing home a demon. Much wiser to dig up a bit of Oxfordshire, as a party of archaeology students were doing down the road. But Charles Ambrose—how funny he should share a name with such a very different man!—was nothing if not brave, and Susan felt total empathy with Kayra de Floris when she told him one midnight, smoking
kif
on Mount Ararat,
“I could never put my body and soul into the keeping of a coward.”
    The bit about the cupboard was almost too much for her. She decided to shine a torch into her wardrobe that night before she hung up her dress. And make sure Frank was in the room. Frank’s roaring with laughter at her she wouldn’t mind at all. It was terrible, that chapter where Charles first sees the small, dark,
curled-up
shape in the corner of the room. Susan had no difficulty imagining her hero’s feelings. The trouble (or the wonderful thing) was that Kingston Marle wrote so well. Whatever people might say about only the plot and the action and suspense being of importance in this sort of book, there was no doubt that good literary writing made threats, danger, terror, fear, and a dark nameless dread immeasurably more real. Susan had to lay the book down at six; their friends were coming in for a drink at half past.
    She put on a long skirt and silk sweater, having first made Frank come upstairs with her, open the wardrobe door, and demonstrate, while shaking with mirth, that there was no scaly paw inside. Then she knocked on Ambrose’s door. He came at once, his sports jacket changed for a dark gray, almost black suit, which he had perhaps bought new for Auntie Bee’s funeral. That was an occasion she and Frank had not been asked to. Probably Ambrose had attended it alone.
    “I hadn’t forgotten about your party,” he said in a mournful tone.
    “Are you feeling better?”
    “A little.” Downstairs, his eye fell at once on
Demogorgon.
“Susan, I wonder if you would oblige me and put that book away. I hope I’m not asking too much. It is simply that I would find it extremely distasteful if there were to be any discussion of that book in my presence among your friends this evening.”
    Susan took the book upstairs and put it on her bedside cabinet. “We are only expecting four people, Ambrose,” she said. “It’s hardly a party.”
    “A

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