Dark Corners: A Novel by Ruth Rendell

about an author selling
what the paper will call poison to a poor desperate actress who’s so overweight people laugh at her.’
    ‘You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?’ said Nicola. ‘You’ve sort of constructed it. Look, let’s go and eat somewhere, and forget about this for an evening and a night.’
    Very out of character, he threw his arms round her and said loudly so that people stared, ‘Oh, Nic, it’s so good, it’s so lovely to have you back.’

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    WALKING SYBIL SOAMES home from church on Sunday morning was possibly (or ‘arguably’, as journalists wrote every day in newspapers) the most fateful thing Dermot had ever done in his life. He didn’t know this, of course. He didn’t arrange it. It happened, that was all.
    Sybil shook hands with the vicar and he was the next to do so. They walked down the path from St Mary’s, Paddington Green, one after the other and came out together in Venice Walk.
    ‘Are you going my way?’ he said.
    Because she didn’t know what to say, a situation Sybil often found herself in, she blushed and said, ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Where do you live?’
    ‘Jerome Crescent. It’s sort of Rossmore Road.’
    He said no more. He didn’t find her attractive. To be attractive, a woman had to look like Angelina Jolie or Caroline the vet: tall, thin as a reed, long-necked, with full lips, dark red hair piled on top of her head. If Dermot had met Sybil Soames anywhere but in church, she might never have become his girlfriend. Sitting next to her by chance in the third pew from the front at St Mary’s made speaking to her, and at their fourth meeting asking her out, respectable.
    Dermot had very little experience of going out with women, and most of that was with his mother in Skegness, or one of his aunts, who lived next door to his mother. But somehow he could tell that Sybil would not be particular or exacting. She was not good-looking, nor, from the conversation they had had (mostly about the hymns they had sung that morning), particularly intelligent. Perhaps the most attractive thing about her was the admiration she clearly had for him. They talked about the vicar, whose gender Sybil approved of, and Dermot told her he thought women in the clergy was a mistake, while making them bishops was the beginning of the end of Anglicanism in this country.
    ‘Don’t you like women, then?’ said Sybil.
    ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘In their place.’
    He could educate her, he thought. He told her where he worked, making his position at the pet clinic rather more elevated than it was. She seemed to think he must be a vet and he said nothing to correct her. Would she meet him next day for coffee in the Café Rouge in Clifton Road? he wondered. A lot of girls would have asked why not a drink or dinner, but he knew she wouldn’t. She was innocent enough to ask him if he was sure he wanted her to meet him.
    ‘I asked you, didn’t I?’ he said.
    ‘I just wanted to check.’
    ‘One p.m. OK?’
    No, she couldn’t do that. She’d be at work. She looked almost triumphant, as if she’d known he hadn’t meant it.
    ‘OK, make it the evening.’
    He didn’t care what her work was; she would tell him this when they met. And she was bound to be early, probably ten to seven rather than seven.
    He was right. When he arrived at Café Rouge the next evening at five past seven, she was sitting at one of their outside tables. He talked to her about the animal patients at the clinic, describing dog diseases and dog surgery. It turned out that her parents, with whom she lived, had two dogs and she didn’t much like them. Animals smelt, she said, and made a mess. She preferred a clean house, and would like one of her own but she’d never afford it. She said this with some passion. He realised he had no need to make another date, but only said he would see her in church on Sunday. Things could go on from there.
    ‘Why don’t you grow your hair?’ he said.