The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell

seen the film, but that of all activities likely to improve two people’s knowledge of each other, cinema-going must be the least effective. You met in the foyer, you sat side by side in the dark in silence, you had a drink afterward and said good night. Not that she wanted to improve her knowledge of him and nor apparently did he of her, for he suggested no alternative outing. The other man, Dorothea’s, didn’t get in touch at all.
    “It’s humiliating,” Mary said to Dorothea the next day in the Irene Adler drawing room. “I wish you hadn’t done it. I wish my grandmother hadn’t done it.”
    “Oh, come on. I didn’t do anything. The poor man’s just getting over the trauma of his wife’s running off with the VAT inspector. Gordon and I try to include him in as much as we can.”
    “And you thought this poor girl was just getting over the trauma of her boyfriend knocking her about, is that it? They’d be just right for each other? Well, he didn’t think so. I haven’t heard a word from him. And that is humiliating, Dorrie.”
    Nearly as humiliating as writing to Leo Nash and getting no reply. She had been so sure of a prompt answer to her letter. What a fool, to imagine the man longing to hear from her, desperate for a word, only waiting with bated breath for the chance to get in touch!
    “You’re overreacting,” said Dorothea, and she stood back, trying to decide if the framed photograph of Irene Adler looked best displayed on the mantelpiece or semiconcealed behind the half-open secret panel. It was a question that had exercised her ever since the drawing room had been created in its present mode. “He’s probably just too unhappy to even think of anyone else at the moment.”
    “Yes, I daresay. But to me it seems he must have gone home saying to himself, ‘They needn’t think they can catch me so easily. I know a trick worth two of that.’ And then he forgot me.”
    As Leo Nash must have looked at the Charlotte Cottage address and the writing paper and wondered what form her patronage of him would take?
    “Look, if you fancy him we can maybe manage …”
    “I don’t fancy him in the least. I’ll just go on going to the cinema by myself.”
    She said nothing to Dorothea about being lonely. Dorothea would have asked her round to Charles Lane every evening, given a dinner party for her every week. School friends, college friends would have rallied round if she had got in touch. Her cousin in Surrey had invited her for the weekend, but she had said no because of Gushi. Being alone and minding it wasn’t the best training for someone who was trying to be strong and independent.
    The weekends were the worst. There had been only three of them but they were very bad. She got up late, she read, she walked Gushi until he was exhausted and had to be carried, she walked about the West End, went to the Wallace Collection and the Planetarium. In the evenings she worked on the new catalog and brochure she was compiling for the museum.
    It was better on weekday evenings. She and Gushi watched television or played the Blackburn-Norrises’ CDs. At bedtime she had stopped shutting Gushi up in the kitchen, where his basket was, and took him upstairs with her and let him sleep on her bed. During the night he edged closer and closer up toward the bedhead, and now when she woke in the mornings it was to find his frondy face on the pillow beside her and as often as not her arms embracing him.
    For the first week, in the mornings, she had awaited the post, but nothing came except junk mail, hire car and taxi cards, fliers from a food delivery service. Her phone number was on the writing paperand when the phone rang she half expected a diffident, anxious male voice. But the only voice, and it wasn’t diffident, was Alistair’s.
    After the early-morning call, he phoned three more times, the first to say he was coming to see her, he would be over the following evening to take her out to dinner. Her protests, her