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

never allow him to have. After all, how many of those others had possessed a house of their own, possessed it, sold it, and banked the money?
    For much of each day Roman lived in the past. And this was deliberate, a purposeful exploration of the time of his happiness, a reliving. Sometimes this dreaming occupied him for several hours onend as he walked across the park and the streets that made a network like the weaving of a nest around its center. He would select a particular happening from that past and enter it again, as it might be the birth of one of his children and the things he said to Sally and she to him, or even earlier to his first meeting with Sally at university.
    Once he had been quite unable to do this, had been afraid to do it, more than afraid, terrified. The sight of that delicate fair girl reminded him that when they first encountered each other had been the time of his beginning this process of recall. Walking away from her, his bedding in the buggy, he had thought that speaking to an ordinary person, a dweller in the world he had left, should serve as a sign for him, and there and then he decided to put an end to the time of denial. Total change, absolute alteration of circumstances, utter abandonment of the past—all these had served their purpose. Now it was time to move on and take the plunge into pain. He would rip the scar tissue off the wound and lay a cold probe against the rawness. He had nothing to lose. It had to be done and now was the time to begin.
    He had begun by a kind of meditation, his eyes on his wedding ring, the symbol of what had been and what was lost. Since then, in this world he had chosen for himself, both unreal and more real than any reality he had ever known, he had re-experienced every day his lovely history, a chapter of it or part of a chapter, and it did not heal the pain or come near healing it. But something else was happening. He was more aware than he had ever been of what it was to be a human being and it was as if, in all his joyous and contented days, he had never really known this before. And self-pity, so rebellious and consuming, was utterly gone. He had become unaccommodated man, perhaps even what those existentialists said man should be, free, suffering, alone, and in control of his own destiny.
    Now he chose for his excursion into the past a holiday he and Sally and Elizabeth had had in Crete. It was ten years before, almost exactly ten years. Elizabeth had been four or five. They had chosenMay for the wildflowers that cover the island with blossom at that time and because the sun was warm but not yet hot. He chiefly remembered from that holiday the color of the sea, the blue of Elizabeth’s eyes, the languor and the sweet idleness and his and Sally’s lovemaking, the best since their honeymoon. They had been the young ardent lovers of seven years before and in those two weeks Daniel had been conceived. With a pain that made him gasp, Roman remembered their bed and waking in the morning naked, uncovered by bedclothes, and Sally naked beside him. Like gods they were, discovered by the morning light.
    As he left the park by me Clarence Gate, he found himself able to summon up from that past time the things they had said to each other and even the expression in Sally’s eyes, the tranquillity and sometimes the passion. He remembered walking on the beach with his daughter and carrying her because the sand was too hot on the soles of her small tender feet. “Daddy, Daddy,” she had said, lifting up one foot, “my soul is burning!” Or that was what it sounded like and they laughed, he and Sally, for what did he know then of burning souls and hellish torment?
    Across Gloucester Place he walked and into the hinterland of Marylebone Station, where the shabby streets make so extreme a contrast with Nash’s palatial terraces. He took the steps down into Boston Place and through Blandford Square into Harewood Avenue. The sight of a corner shop reminded him that