Talking to Strange Men by Ruth Rendell

didn’t mind Cherry being ugly but he began to wonder what would become of her. Would any man ever want her? Would anyone ever want to marry her? When she was older he noticed that she had developed a good figure, large breasts and shapely legs, and she had beautiful hair, thick and of a rich light chestnut colour, but that did nothing in his eyes to redeem those coarse ill-fashioned features. One day he saw a reproduction of a picture by Velasquez and the court dwarf in it had a face just like his sister Cherry’s.
    He wondered how she came to look like that. He knew he wasn’t bad-looking, ordinary but passable, and his father was much the same while their mother was positively pretty. Then when he was looking through an album of old photographs he saw a family group with his father’s father andhis father’s aunt in it and then he knew. Genes behaved like that. He started watching her as if she were an invalid, someone with a dormant disease whose terrible symptoms would one day show themselves. She wasn’t even clever. She couldn’t be a teacher or a secretary. The job she got when she left school was sending out the invoices for a builder who had an office in a wooden hut down on the west side of Rostock. Sixteen she was then and with a host of friends, all pretty girls, it seemed to John. It made him sad to see her with those girls and her not even aware of the contrast. Maitland the builder had the reputation of being a womanizer, in spite of being married and with children and grandchildren, but that never worried John. A man like that wouldn’t give Cherry a second glance.
    And then one day she met Mark Simms. Mark was handsome and tall, with fine straight features and good teeth and dark eyes, broad shouldered, slim. And he had a nice personality and a good job. John couldn’t believe it when she told him they were engaged. He thought she must have made a mistake, she was so innocent she’d mistaken some remark of his for a proposal. But he met Mark and knew at once it was all genuine, it was all as Cherry said, and the amazing thing was it wasn’t one-sided, it wasn’t a case of Mark being sorry for her or indifferent, he was crazy about her. You only had to see the way he looked at her to know that.
    It was in this very room in the house in Geneva Road that Cherry had introduced him to Mark. Seventeen years ago it must have been, nearer eighteen. And here was Mark back again, still slim and handsome, still with those nice white teeth, his hair going a bit grey but that was all. A failed marriage behind him and seemingly half if not entirely forgotten. John didn’t think he had forgotten Cherry though. He might have found someone else eventually and got married but the place in his heart was for Cherry.
    He and Colin Goodman were watching snooker on John’s television. They had all been to a pub and thence to an Italian restaurant, and now here they were, all three of them, sitting here drinking Carlsberg, Mark smoking his pipe, both bars of the electric fire switched on. He hadn’t seen Markfor years, ten years probably, but when they met in the pub tonight there had been no constraint between them. All had been as in the days when Mark was courting Cherry and expecting to become John’s brother-in-law. I resented him marrying that woman, John thought, that’s what it was, I expected him to keep faith with my dead sister for ever and ever. What a fool I am! The marriage didn’t even work out. I might have saved myself all that misery and resentment, reproaching him, poor Mark.
    John wasn’t interested in snooker. Sport in general bored him. He waited on the other two, bringing in more beer, fetching Mark a clean ashtray, producing a bowl of cheese crackers and another of peanuts. They had talked throughout the Italian meal but it had been small talk, not real. And now John wondered if the truth was that he had only asked Colin to join them