The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

museum in Charles Lane, had come upon him waking up on the doorstep. Irene Adler, the place was called. It had a glass-coveredporch outside its front door that extended to the pavement across a small forecourt. For several nights he had slept there, dry and secluded, but he never went back after she had discovered him.
    “I’m so sorry,” she had said, not wanting to step over him, also perhaps afraid. A great many people were afraid of them, himself and his kind. “I woke you up. I didn’t know anyone was sleeping here.”
    It was a principle of his not to speak to the “public,” to speak only to his fellows, though that had its own problems, its own guilt. There was no reason for him to speak to people, he had no need to beg and never did, so if they addressed him he merely nodded or shrugged or gave no sign of having heard them. This delicate-looking slender girl, fair and somewhat fey-like, merited more than that. She had spoken to him as politely as if he had been a respectable householder. So he nodded, got to his feet, and rolled up his bedding in a quick, deft movement, stepping aside to let her pass.
    “Sorry about that,” he said. “I’m going.”
    She must have heard it as a mutter, a low growl. She was not to know those were the first words he had uttered to anyone apart from the street sleepers for a year. The first sentence to escape him since he had closed up his house and taken to the outdoors. And now he had seen her again. For a moment he thought she was going to speak to him and he wondered what reply to make, if any, whether to be as he once had been, a pleasant, courteous, easy-going sort of man, or as he now was, forbidding, grave, dour. But she had not spoken, she had not recognized him. It was just as well. Conversation with ordinary people was not for him; they spoke different languages.
    For a little while he continued to read
Dead Souls
, or tried to read it, but the doings of Chichikov no longer held his attention. He had been distracted, not so much by the sight of the pale fair-haired girl with the swinging stride as by the emotion and the reflections thinking back to that earlier time had evoked.
    He put the book into his buggy, a wooden barrow with fourwheels and a handle like the shaft of a spade, and, pushing it ahead of him, began ambling along one of the paths in a westerly direction. He had no clear idea where he was going, a common state for him to be in, for one of the benefits of his condition was perfect freedom.
    It was a warm, still afternoon and this he enjoyed after the winds of the past weeks, the cold spring, the long damp winter. If happiness was denied him forever, was something exclusively for others, he could feel pleasure and that sometimes more intensely and sensuously than those who lived under roofs and slept in beds. His appreciation of the sun on his face and the soft balmy air was luxurious and profound. It almost made him smile.
    Another of his principles was never to make plans during the afternoon or evening as to where he would sleep that night, for to do so was to abrogate that freedom, and freedom was all he had. Everything else had been taken away or he had taken it away himself. He would give some thought to his night’s “lodging” when it was dark and the streets were empty, the cars had gone, the pubs had closed, and those like himself came into their own.
    He crossed over York Bridge and entered the sequestered part of the park on the southern shore of the lake. On the seats along here his fellows were often to be found, Effie with her bundles wrapped in green plastic, or Dill, who would be accompanied by his dog but encumbered by so little, a nylon backpack, a couple of coats tied round his middle by their sleeves; but there was no one today. He knew Dill could live that way because he mostly had a bed in the Marylebone Road shelter or the one in the Edgware Road, something Roman’s guilt and sense of being always a phony and a fake would