The Fever Tree and Other Stories by Ruth Rendell Page B

places. I’m sure I never have and therefore, until I got all this from Carol, I never considered how important this business of being scared when out alone might be to them. When I came to understand it gave me a funny feeling of excitement.
    And then I actually frightened a woman myself – by chance. My usual way of going to work is to cut through Queens Wood to Highgate tube station and take the Northern Line down into London. When the weather is very bad I go to the station by bus but most of the time I walk there and back and the way through the wood is a considerable short cut. I was coming back through the wood at about six one evening in March. It was dusk, growing dark. The lamps, each a good distance apart from each other, which light the paths, were, lit, but I often think these give the place a rather more bleak and sinister appearance than if it were quite dark. You leave a light behind you and walk along a dim shadowy avenue towards the next lamp which gleams faintly some hundred yards ahead. And no sooner is it reached, an acid yellow glow among the bare branches, than you leave it behind again to negotiate the next dark stretch. I thought about how it must be to be a woman walking through the wood and, yes, I gloried in my maleness and my freedom from fear.
    Then I saw the girl coming. She was walking along the path from Priory Gardens. It came into my head that she would be less wary of me if I continued as I had been, marching briskly and purposefully towards Wood Vale, swinging along and looking like a man homeward bound to his family and his dinner. There was no definite intent present in my mind when I slackened my pace, then stopped and stood still. But as soon as I’d done that I knew I was going to carry it through. The girl came up to where the paths converged and where the next lamp was. She gave me a quick darting look. I stood there in a very relaxed way and I returned her look with a blank stare. I suppose I consciously, out of some sort of devilment, made my eyes fixed and glazed and let my mouth go loose. Anyway, she turned very quickly away and began to walk much faster.
    She had high heels so she couldn’t go very fast, not as fast as I could, just strolling along behind her. I gained on her until I was a yard behind.
    I could smell her fear. She was wearing a lot of perfume and her sweat seemed to potentiate it so that there came to me a whiff and then a wave of heady, mixed-up animal and floral scent. I breathed it in, I breathed heavily. She began to run and I strode after her. What she did then was unexpected. She stopped, turned round and cried out in a tremulous terrified voice: ‘What do you want?’
    I stopped too and gave her the same look. She held her handbag out to me. ‘Take it!’
    The joke had gone far enough. I lived round there anyway, I had my wife and son to think of. I put on a cockney voice. ‘Keep your bag, love. You’ve got me wrong.’
    And then, to reassure her, I turned back along the path and let her escape to Wood Vale and the lights and the start of the houses. But I can’t describe what a feeling of power and – well, triumphant manhood and what’s called machismo the encounter gave me. I felt grand. I swaggered into my house and Carol said had I had a Premium Bond come up?
    Since I’m being strictly truthful in this account, I’d better add the other consequence of what happened in the wood, even though it does rather go against the grain with me to mention things like that. I made love to Carol that night and it was a lot better than it had been for a long time, in fact it was sensational for both of us. And I couldn’t kid myself that it was due to anything but my adventure with the girl.
    Next day I looked at myself in the mirror with all the lights off but the little tubular one over our bed, and I put on the same look I’d given the girl when she turned in my direction under the lamp. I can