The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell Page A

reminder that they were separated, had no effect. If not tomorrow, then the next day, he said. In the end she agreed to the second suggestion and went through agonies all next day and the next, wondering how to deal with him if he came back with her and wanted to stay the night.
    Seven came and seven-thirty and at seven thirty-five he phoned to say he couldn’t make it. She was relieved and at the same time angry. Angry with herself as much as with him for the two miserable days she had spent. That afternoon she had been so distracted that she had told an American tourist Irene Adler had lived in St. John’s Wood Terrace and her royal lover had been the king of Serbia.
    Alistair phoned for the third time to say he was worried about her health. He had made an appointment for their GP to see her.
    “It’s at eight-thirty on Thursday morning.”
    “Alistair, as you know I haven’t got a car. Do you really think I’m coming to Willesden at that hour?”
    “Of course you’d stay the night here.”
    “I’m perfectly well. I don’t need a doctor.” She tried to speak pleasantly to him, to be polite but firm, but when she said good-bye his furious shouting down the receiver made her tremble.
    All of it made her ask herself if she had been right to take on this dog-sitting and house-minding at Charlotte Cottage. Of course she could not have stayed with Alistair, that was plain, but should she perhaps have gone first to her grandmother, and then found herself a place in a shared flat? To be with other people …
    It was too late now. Outside it was sunny again, a warm still evening. Two people walked by, on their way out into Albany Street,their arms round each other. Loneliness was worse on fine evenings when the red sun went down over the horizon of a great city and the night sky grew purple, though with no chance of seeing the stars. She took Gushi on her lap and watched television.
    The little dog was out with Bean and the others when the post came in the morning. A flier from a company selling exercise trampolines, another from Express Tikka and Pizza, and an envelope postmarked NW1. Her habitual hesitation at opening letters she told herself to abandon now, stop it once and for all. It was all part of the fearful temperament she had to learn to abandon. In a cool, controlled way she went into the living room, picked up the paper knife, and slit open the envelope.
    She looked at the photograph first. A passport-size photograph taken in one of those station or supermarket kiosks of a man’s pale thin face in front of a pleated curtain. To herself she was calling it anemic before she realized what she was saying. Of course he was anemic. Anemia had nearly killed him.… The eyes were light and clear, the hair so fair as to be almost white, the features regular, classical: thin lips, straight nose, very high smooth forehead.
    A handwritten letter from the Plangent Road address.
    Dear Mary Jago
,
    I am the man whose life you saved with your more than generous donation. You not only saved it, you made it good again, worth living. I want you to know that I am well now, thanks to you
.
    Since you wrote to me, I think you must want us to get in touch. I hope I am not being presumptuous in saying that you may want us to meet as much as I want it
.
    I will not put you to the trouble of phoning me or writing back. In fact, I should make a confession and tell you I have no phone. Today, as I write, is Monday and you will get this letter by Wednesday at the latest. If I do not hear from you to tell me you would
rather not meet me, I will be at an outside table at the Rose Garden restaurant in Regent’s Park, the one north of the lake, from 5:30 till 6:00 on Friday
.
    I won’t say, do come. But I hope you will come
.
    Yours sincerely,
Leo Nash

6
    M ost of the street sleepers, the dossers, the dropouts, the jacks men, were on the street because they had nowhere else to be. They were without roofs of their own, or roofs rented,