The Fallen Curtain

Ruth Rendell
The Fallen Curtain

Ruth Rendell is the recipient of three Edgar Awards, four Gold Daggers, the Commander of the British Empire Award, and the most prestigious Edgar of them all, the Grand Master Award. She lives in London.

The incident happened in the spring after his sixth birthday. His mother always referred to it as “that dreadful evening,” and always is no exaggeration. She talked about it a lot, especially when he did well at anything, which was often, as he was good at school and at passing exams.

Showing her friends his swimming certificate or the prize he won for being top at geography: “When I think we might have lost Richard that dreadful evening! You have to believe there’s Someone watching over us, don’t you?” Clasping him in her arms: “He might have been killed—or worse.” (A remarkable statement, this one.) “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Apparently it bore talking about. “If I’d told him once, I’d told him fifty times never to talk to strangers or get into cars. But boys will be boys, and he forgot all that when the time came. He was given sweets, of course, and
lured
into this car.” Whispers at this point, meaning glances in his direction. “Threats and suggestions—persuaded into goodness knows what—I’ll never know how we got him back alive.”

What Richard couldn’t understand was how his mother knew so much about it. She hadn’t been there. Only he and the Man had been there, and he couldn’t remember a thing about it. A curtain had fallen over that bit of his memory that held the details of that dreadful evening. He remembered only what had come immediately before it and immediately after.

They were living then in the South London suburb of Upfield, in a little terraced house in Petunia Street, he and his mother and his father. His mother had been over forty when he was born and he had no brothers or sisters. (“That’s why we love you so much, Richard.”) He wasn’t allowed to play in the street with the other kids. (“You want to keep yourself to yourself, dear.”) Round the corner in Lupin Street lived his gran, his father’s mother. Gran never came to their house, though he thought his father would have liked it if she had.

“I wish you’d have my mother to tea on Sunday,” he once heard his father say.

“If that woman sets foot in this house, Stan, I go out of it.”

So gran never came to tea.

“I hope I know what’s right, Stan, and I know better than to keep the boy away from his grandmother. You can have him round there once a week with you, so long as I don’t have to come in contact with her.”

That made three houses Richard was allowed into—his own, his gran’s, and the house next door in Petunia Street where the Wilsons lived with their Brenda and their John. Sometimes he played in their garden with John, though it wasn’t much fun, as Brenda, who was much older, nearly sixteen, was always bullying them and stopping them getting dirty. He and John were in the same class at school, but his mother wouldn’t let him go to school alone with John, although it was only three streets away. She was very careful and nervous about him, was his mother, waiting outside the gates before school ended to walk him home with his hand tightly clasped in hers.

But once a week he didn’t go straight home. He looked forward to Wednesdays because Wednesday evening was the one he spent at gran’s, and because the time between his mother’s leaving him and his arrival at gran’s house was the only time he was ever free and by himself.

This was the way it was. His mother would meet him from school and they’d walk down Plumtree Grove to where Petunia Street started. Lupin Street turned off the Grove a bit further down, so his mother would see him across the road, waving and smiling encouragingly, till she’d seen him turn the corner into Lupin Street. Gran’s house was about a hundred yards down. That hundred yards was his free time, his alone time.

“Mind you run all the way,” his mother called after him.

But at the corner he always stopped running and began to dawdle, stopping to play with the cat that roamed about the bit of waste ground, or climbing on the pile of bricks the builders never came to build into anything. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too bad with her arthritis, gran would be waiting for him at
her gate, and he didn’t mind having to forgo the cat and the climbing because it was so nice in gran’s house. Gran had a big T.V. set—unusually big for those days—and he’d watch it, eating chocolate, until his father knocked off at the factory and turned up for tea. Tea was lovely, fish and chips that gran didn’t fetch from the shop but cooked herself, cream meringues and chocolate eclairs, tinned peaches with evaporated milk, the lot washed down with fizzy lemonade. (“It’s a disgrace the way your mother spoils that boy, Stan.”) They were supposed to be home by seven, but every week when it got round to seven, gran would remember there was a cowboy film coming up on T.V. and there’d be cocoa and biscuits and potato crisps to go with it. They’d be lucky to be home in Petunia Street before nine.

“Don’t blame me,” said his mother, “if his school work suffers next day.”

That dreadful evening his mother left him as usual at the corner and saw him across the road. He could remember that, and remember too how he’d looked to see if gran was at her gate. When he’d made sure she wasn’t, he’d wandered on to the building site to cajole the cat out of the nest she’d made for herself among the rubble. It was late March, a fine afternoon and still broad daylight at four. He was stroking the cat, thinking how thin and bony she was and how some of gran’s fish and chips would do her good, when—what? What next? At this point the curtain came down. Three hours later it lifted, and he was in Plumtree Grove, walking along quite calmly (“Running in terror with that Man after him”), when whom should he meet but Mrs Wilson’s Brenda out for the evening with her boy friend. Brenda had pointed at him, stared and shouted. She ran up to him and clutched him and squeezed him till he could hardly breathe. Was that what had frightened him into losing his memory? They said no. They said he’d been frightened before (“Terrified out of his life”) and that Brenda’s grabbing him and the dreadful shriek his mother gave when she saw him had nothing to do with it.

Petunia Street was full of police cars and there was a crowd outside their house. Brenda hustled him him in, shouting, “I’ve found him, I’ve found him!” and there was his father all white in the face, talking to policemen, his mother half dead on the sofa being given brandy, and—wonder of wonders—his gran there too. That had been one of the strangest things of that whole strange evening, that his gran had set foot in their house and his mother hadn’t gone out of it.

They all started asking him questions at once. Had he answered them? All that remained in his memory was his mother’s scream. That endured, that shattering sound, and the great open mouth from which it issued as she leapt upon him. Somehow, although he couldn’t have explained why, he connected that scream and her seizing him as if to swallow him up, with the descent of the curtain.