Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

gathering,” he said. “Seven is a gathering.”
    For years she had been trying to identify the character in fiction of whom Ambrose Ribbon reminded her. A children’s book, she thought it was.
Alice in Wonderland
?
The Wind in the Willows
? Suddenly she knew. It was Eeyore, the lugubrious donkey in
Winnie-the-Pooh.
He even looked rather like Eeyore, with his melancholy gray face and stooping shoulders. For the first time, perhaps the first time ever, she felt sorry for him. Poor Ambrose, prisoner of a selfish mother. Presumably, when she died, she had left those royalties to him, after all. Susan distinctly remembered one unpleasant occasion when the two of them had been staying and Auntie Bee had suddenly announced her intention of leaving everything she had to the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. She must have changed her mind.
    Susan voiced these feelings to her husband in bed that night, their pillow talk consisting of a review of the “gathering,” the low-key, rather depressing supper they had eaten afterward, and the video they had watched, which failed to come up to expectations. Unfortunately, in spite of the novel’s absence from the living room, Bill and Irene had begun to talk about
Demogorgon
almost as soon as they arrived. Apparently, this was the first day of its serialization in a national newspaper. They had read the installment with avidity, as had James and Rosie. Knowing Susan’s positive addiction to Kingston Marle, Rosie wondered if she happened to have a copy to lend, when Susan had finished reading it, of course.
    Susan was afraid to look at Ambrose. Hastily she promised a loan of the novel and changed the subject to the less dangerous one of the archaeologists’ excavations in Haybury Meadow and the protests it occasioned from local environmentalists. But the damage was done. Ambrose spoke scarcely a word all evening. It was as if he felt Kingston Marle and his book underlying everything that was said and threatening always to break through the surface of the conversation, as in a later chapter in
Demogorgon,
when the monstrous Dragosoma, with the head and breasts of a woman and the body of a manatee, rises slowly out of the Sea of Azov. At one point a silvery sheen of sweat covered the pallid skin of Ambrose’s face.
    “Poor devil,” said Frank. “I suppose he was cut up about his old mum.”
    “There’s no accounting for people, is there?”
    They were especially gentle to him the next day, without knowing exactly why gentleness was needed. Ambrose refused to go to church, treating them to a lecture on the death of God and atheism as the only course for enlightened mankind. They listened indulgently. Susan cooked a particularly nice lunch, consisting of Ambrose’s favorite foods— chicken, sausages, roast potatoes, and peas. It had been practically the only dish on Auntie Bee’s culinary repertoire, Ambrose having been brought up on sardines on toast and tinned spaghetti, the chicken being served on Sundays. He drank more wine than was usual with him and had a brandy afterward.
    They put him on an early-afternoon train for London. Though she had never done so before, Susan kissed him. His reaction was very marked. Seeing what was about to happen, he turned his head abruptly as her mouth approached, and the kiss landed on the bristles above his right ear. They stood on the platform and waved to him.
    “That was a disaster,” said Frank in the car. “Do we have to do it again?”
    Susan surprised herself. “We have to do it again.” She sighed. “Now I can go back and have a nice afternoon reading my book.”
    A letter from Kingston Marle, acknowledging the errors in Demogorgon and perhaps offering some explanation of how they came to be there, with a promise of amendment in the paperback edition, would have set everything to rights. The disastrous weekend would fade into oblivion and those stupid guests of Frank’s with it. Frank’s idiot wife, good-looking, they said,