Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell

was a lady sweet and kind, ne’er a face so pleased my mind—Ever yours, Kingston Marle.”
    Perhaps he would write again, even if she didn’t reply. Perhaps he would be
more likely
to write if she didn’t reply.
    On Monday morning the post came early, just after eight, delivering only one item. The computer-generated address on the envelope made Ribbon think for one wild moment that it might be from Kingston Marle. But it was from Clara Jenkins, and it was an angry, indignant letter, though containing no threats. Didn’t he understand her novel was fiction? You couldn’t say things were true or false in fiction, for things were as the author, who was all-powerful, wanted them to be. In a magic-realism novel, such as
Tales My Lover Told Me,
only an ignorant fool would expect facts (and these included spelling, punctuation, and grammar) to be as they were in the dreary reality he inhabited. Ribbon took it into the kitchen, screwed it up, and dropped it in the waste bin.
    He was waiting for the tree fellers, who were due at nine. Half past nine went by; ten went by. At ten past the front doorbell rang. It was Glenys Next-door.
    “Tinks turned up,” she said. “I was so pleased to see him I gave him a whole can of red sockeye salmon.” She appeared to have forgiven Ribbon for his “attitude.” “Now don’t say what a wicked waste, I can see you were going to. I’ve got to go and see my mother—she’s fallen over, broken her arm, and bashed her face—so would you be an angel and let the washing-machine man in?”
    “I suppose so.” The woman had a mother! She must be getting on for seventy herself.
    “You’re a star. Here’s the key, and you can leave it on the hall table when he’s been. Just tell him it’s full of pillowcases and water and the door won’t open.”
    The tree fellers came at eleven-thirty.The older one, a joker, said, “I’m a funny feller and he’s a nice feller, right?”
    “Come this way,” Ribbon said frostily.
    “What d’you want them lovely leylandiis down for, then? Not to mention that lovely flowering currant?”
    “Them currants smell of cat’s pee, Damian,” said the young one. “Whether there’s been cats peeing on them or not.”
    “Is that right? The things he knows, guv. He’s wasted in this job, ought to be fiddling with computers.”
    Ribbon went indoors. The computer and printer were downstairs now, in the dining room. He wrote first to Natalya Dreadnought, author of
Tick,
pointing out in a mild way that “eponymous” applies to a character or object which gives a work its name, not to the name derived from the character. Therefore it was the large, blood-sucking mite of the order Acarina that was eponymous, not her title. The letter he wrote to Raymond Kobbo would correct just two mistakes in
The Nomad’s Smile,
but for both Ribbon needed to consult the
Piranha
to
Scurfy
volume. He was pretty sure the Libyan caravan center should be spelt “Sabha,” not “Sebha,” and he was even more certain that “qalam,” meaning a reed pen used in Arabic calligraphy, should start with a
k.
He went upstairs and lifted the heavy tome off the shelf. Finding that Kobbo had been right in both instances—“Sabha” and “Sebha” were optional spellings and “qalam” perfectly correct—unsettled him. Mummy would have known; Mummy would have set him right in her positive, no-nonsense way, before he had set foot on the bottom stair. He asked himself if he could live without her and could have sworn he heard her sharp voice say, “You should have thought of that before.”
    Before what? That day in February when she had come up here to— well, oversee him, supervise him. She frequently did so, and in later years he hadn’t been as grateful to her as he should have been. By the desk here she had stood and told him it was time he earned some money by his work, by a man’s fifty-second year it was time. She had made up her mind to leave Daddy’s royalties to the