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    Portobello: A Novel
    Portobello: A Novel
    Portobello: A Novel
    Ebook351 pages6 hours

    Portobello: A Novel

    By Ruth Rendell

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL’S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERS

    Ruth Rendell is widely considered to be crime fiction’s reigning queen, with a remarkable career spanning more than forty years. Now, in Portobello, she delivers a captivating and intricate tale that weaves together the troubled lives of several people in the gentrified neighborhood of London’s Notting Hill.

    Walking to the shops one day, fifty-year-old Eugene Wren discovers an envelope on the street bulging with cash. A man plagued by a shameful addiction—and his own good intentions—Wren hatches a plan to find the money’s rightful owner. Instead of going to the police, or taking the cash for himself, he prints a notice and posts it around Portobello Road. This ill-conceived act creates a chain of events that links Wren to other Londoners—people afflicted with their own obsessions and despairs. As these volatile characters come into Wren’s life—and the life of his trusting fiancée—the consequences will change them all.

    Portobello is a wonderfully complex tour de force featuring a dazzling depiction of one of London’s most intriguing neighborhoods—and the dangers beneath its newly posh veneer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9781439154366
    Portobello: A Novel
    Author

    Ruth Rendell

    Ruth Rendell (1930–2015) won three Edgar Awards, the highest accolade from Mystery Writers of America, as well as four Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre from England’s prestigious Crime Writ­ers’ Association. Her remarkable career spanned a half century, with more than sixty books published. A member of the House of Lords, she was one of the great literary figures of our time.

    Read more from Ruth Rendell

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    Reviews for Portobello

    3.5/5

    206 ratings30 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I feel like this was an idea book. That after decades of writing novels in which people with psychological issues commit crimes, Rendell thought one day about how many people with bizarre psychological issues never go on to commit crimes, and how most crimes are probably committed by really comparatively ordinary people. And she thought about how people are so interconnected sometimes, in unexpected ways. And so she set this situation up, some people with issues who nevertheless, are leading fairly normal lives, and some people who seem saner, yet who end up in inexplicable situations - and she tied them all together, in ways that we can see as the outside observers, but which they themselves cannot. I don't know that this book is the edge-of-your-seat thriller you may be expecting from Rendell. But it's a brilliant experiment. There's a fictitious painting described in the book, Undine in a Goldfish Bowl - a painting so well described that I thought it was real until a Google Image search told me the sad truth. The painting seems to sum up the book very neatly - a mermaid, trapped in a goldfish bowl, struggling to breathe air and get out - as if she, like some of the people in the book, is more afraid of her own potential weakness than she is cognizant of her ability to breathe underwater. As if she is trapped in the bowl for our viewing pleasure. Like a cast of characters, perhaps.
    • 4/5
      The English market on Portobello Road is the focal point for the interwoven lives that make up this novel. Eugene Wren is very secretive. So secretive he (secretly) wonders whether he should propose to his doctor girlfriend, Ella. Eugene is afraid she will discover his growing addiction to a certain flavor of sugar-free sweet.The plot escalates when Eugene finds an envelope containing quite a bit of money and puts an advert in the paper to try to find the owner. Lance, a pathetic young man with delusions of criminality, seizes the opportunity to case Eugene's home for later robbery. Meanwhile Ella delivers the money to its proper owner, Joel, who has recently had a near death experience and has begun to see things and hear voices.I found this novel charming. The writing and story-telling is truly on point at all times. I immediately loved the characters (or loved to hate them) and was fascinated by their bizarre inner lives. Funny, odd, sometimes creepy, but ultimately satisfying.
    • 3/5
      This book differs from the other Rendell books I read. The novel studies several characters whose lives become intertwined because they live on or near or visit Portobello Road. One character is a middle-aged man addicted to a candy; his fiancée is a doctor who becomes a personal physician to a man we meet because he becomes injured on the Portobello Road. A young thief who loves a girl he assaulted and whose relative belongs to a cult-like church also appears. The action is slow. The flawed characters often express themselves in peculiar manners. While it is not my favorite Rendell book, I didn't hate it. I listened to the audiobook read by Tim Curry.
    • 3/5
      This audiobook was difficult to get through, because it was so bland and boring. The only thing that kept me coming back at all was because Tim Curry (THE Tim Curry) is the narrator of this novel in audiobook form. It wasn’t really a mystery, just a view into some English people’s lives that lived off the Portobello road, in Notting Hill.
      I didn’t think this novel was “wonderfully complex tour de force”, nor did I think it “featuring a dazzling depiction of one of London's most intriguing neighborhoods—and the dangers beneath its newly posh veneer”, like my library’s description sells it as.
      Curry’s plummy tones kept me coming back to this novel, and a vague hope for an HEA, even though I couldn’t be bothered to care about a single character. (Seriously, a couple of his impressions were hilarious!). But that’s about it.
      3 stars, and not really recommended to anyone, unless you need help sleeping at night.
    • 1/5
      I thought that I would be reading a crime fiction. At 32 pages, I have only seen intricate character descriptions. This marks the first time that I have considered the negative side of the word intricate. I chose that adjective because it was on the dust cover, and I cannot be bothered to think any more about this work.
    • 4/5
      There's no mystery about the murder, but Portobello is a novel full of interesting characters whose lives intersect. Not everyone will get a happy ending, but enough of them do.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this examination of obsession in many forms and how the fixation of each character dovetailed with the others. The setting is district of Portobello and its varied residents. I loved the tongue-in-cheek humour. In the new-found dignity of Portobello elite, the pub is to be renamed because no one knows who The Earl of Lonsdale was. The favoured new name is The Slug and Lettuce. This story with its widely diverse characters in an iconic neighbourhood is possibly my favourite Rendell.
    • 3/5
      I'm a huge fan of Ms. Rendell and hate writing anything critical of her work, but I was disappointed in Portobello.

      As always, I was drawn into her cast of characters, from the quirky to the disturbed. She's a master at weaving the threads of disparate lives to an inevitable conclusion. Because of her brilliant characters that popped off the page and planted themselves in my mind, I gave this book three stars. I enjoyed the ride.

      However, the ending was weak and left me unsatisfied. One story line that had lured me in with hints of a dark outcome fell flat without anything happening. The other threads were too tidy in their conclusions and all conflicts were resolved too quickly. The sense of "happily ever after" made this novel veer toward a fairy tale.

      If you've never read one of her novels, don't start here, but definitely give the rest of her work a try. You won't be disappointed.
    • 4/5
      I was fine with apparent strangers being connected to each other until the doctor's patient turns out to be the lover of the man who tried to convince the doctor's fiance that he (the patient's lover) was the owner of the money found by the fiance, even though the rightful owner was the son of a man to whom the fiance had sold a painting. There are other connections as well. The description of a secret chocorange addiction with the resulting guilt and shame was well done. Only one character seems to actually change and grow (Lance, who comes to realize that he can't trust everyone), the lives of the others follow their natural course. SPOILER: The book has no loose ends and justice seems to be done.
    • 3/5
      I feel like this was an idea book. That after decades of writing novels in which people with psychological issues commit crimes, Rendell thought one day about how many people with bizarre psychological issues never go on to commit crimes, and how most crimes are probably committed by really comparatively ordinary people. And she thought about how people are so interconnected sometimes, in unexpected ways. And so she set this situation up, some people with issues who nevertheless, are leading fairly normal lives, and some people who seem saner, yet who end up in inexplicable situations - and she tied them all together, in ways that we can see as the outside observers, but which they themselves cannot. I don't know that this book is the edge-of-your-seat thriller you may be expecting from Rendell. But it's a brilliant experiment. There's a fictitious painting described in the book, Undine in a Goldfish Bowl - a painting so well described that I thought it was real until a Google Image search told me the sad truth. The painting seems to sum up the book very neatly - a mermaid, trapped in a goldfish bowl, struggling to breathe air and get out - as if she, like some of the people in the book, is more afraid of her own potential weakness than she is cognizant of her ability to breathe underwater. As if she is trapped in the bowl for our viewing pleasure. Like a cast of characters, perhaps.
    • 1/5
      This book was a disappointment. The plot was weak and left me wondering what the point of the story was. The book did not capture my attention, and I felt no connection to any of the characters. This was the first book of Rendell's that I've read, and it did not inspire me to read any other works by the author.
    • 4/5
      Ruth Rendell is not just a great British mystery writer, she is also a plain great writer, whose characters and plots are always a bit off the map. In this one, the Portobello Road in London figures prominantly in the story. There is the art gallery owner who finds money in the street and advertises to find the owner, which starts a rather nasty chain of events. Each of the characters Rendell weaves into the story has a story of his/her own, such as the gallery owner who is secretly addicted to sugarless candies, and is terrified his fiance will find out. The lazy layabout who tries unsuccessfully to claim the money is desperate to get back in the good graces of his girlfriend. The young man who lost the money is the guilt-ridden and mentally ill son of a wealthy business man who casts him out because he has inadvertently caused the death of his sister. He's being treated by the young female doctor who is engaged to the sweet addict. It's un-put-downable. Rendell is best known for her Inspector Wexford novels, and they are great in themselves. But Portobello, one of her many psychological suspense stories, is also great. I want to read more!”
    • 5/5
      I know that a lot of people were just not sure about this Rendell book. But for me, the audio reader Tim Curry was so good that there was just no way you could do anything but thoroughly enjoy this Rendell work. The varying English accents of all of the characters made this a wonderful listening experience. I'm always amazed to listen to a book and realize that reading it would be such a different and probably less enjoyable experience.
    • 2/5
      I love Ruth Rendell. I hated this book. It felt too much like Rendell phoned it in, and lacked the sharp, psychological suspense I've come to expect from her.I've had the feeling from the last couple of Rendell's novels that she's either off her game, or has lost her touch.
    • 5/5
      Another fine Rendell book.
    • 4/5
      The ending was so unlike her. It's terrible to be poor in Britain.
    • 4/5
      Portobello is a sort of detective novel about several widely disparate characters who live in the Portobello section of London. It centers a middle aged antiques dealer who discovers some money on the street near his home. He wants to return it to the rightful owner so he posts an ad inviting the owner of the money to come claim it. As you can imagine this invites all sorts of losers into his life that he wouldn't have otherwise come into contact with.I don't think that I've read any of Rendell's books before but I'm intrigued by what she did in this book as she deals with all the different paths the characters take. The book is somewhat of a mystery but is more of a character study that is very interesting.I give the book three and a half stars out of five, which is good, but not great. It is worth reading.
    • 4/5
      You can help but get all tangled up in the character drama Ruth Rendell creates in her novel, Portobella. Each one walks off the page. Carefully construction and true to their nature, Rendell writes an entertaining novel about their lives. Nobody is extraordinary, but each is realistically portrayed. This is a story about people dealing with their lives. Each character rises above his or her's unique circumstances, though by the end, it has been a long, windy, never-boring adventure to get there. A simple thief, an unwed young mother, a spinster (and reformed) uncle, a young man who loses his mind to save it, a 50 year old upper middle class man and a woman entering middle age --all are just getting started in this new and better phase of their lives. Its not a sappy finish, but one that left me feeling bright and positive about the future of each character and in a way, about myself.I really liked the storyline, which intertwines all these different people by the circumstance of the Portobello Road and open air market thereon. It is a consistent theme throughout and it works beautifully.Ruth Rendell always entertains me. She is an author I will continue to read and enjoy.
    • 3/5
      The idea for the story itself is good, as are the characters, in principle. It's just that, to me, this is children's writing for adults. I couldn't get over the simplistic style. There is no depth. I guess that's why I don't usually read books in this genre.
    • 3/5
      The scene is the Portobello Road in London, home to a sprawling market and to people from all walks of life, the wealthy middle class and those with no hope of a job. A middle-aged antiques dealer finds some cash dropped in the street, and rather than hand it to the police, advertises locally for the owner. Half a dozen lives cross and are entangled as a result, some knowing and some unknowing; setting them all on a path that will change some forever, and leave others dead.Rendall starts with stock stereotypes, and then draws their lives in intimate detail, showing them as rounded characters with a mix of good and bad in their personalities. This is a psychological thriller, but it's about ordinary people living ordinary lives; and how everyday pressures and events can lead into, and out of, tragedy. It has a mostly happy ending, and even the dead get some justice in the end, but these things depend on the small coincidences of ordinary life.There's a very strong sense of place in the book, excellent characterisation, and an engaging story. My own reaction to it was that I thoroughly enjoyed it and am glad I read it -- but I have no desire to read it again, and no urge to go out and buy more by the same author. I'm not quite sure why this is so, as the book certainly doesn't rely on the shock value of seeing the events unfold for the first time.
    • 5/5
      Rendell is well known in certain of her novels for painting many of her characters as odd and somewhat frightening.'Portobello' is no exception to this. As is self-evident in the title,the action takes place in the area of the Portobello Road in London.It relates the lives of various diverse characters who become entangled with each other. Eugene Wren is the well-off owner of a local art gallery,who finds a quantity of money on one of his walks. Instead of taking it to the police,he leaves a notice on a lamp-post asking anyone who has lost it to contact him.In doing this,he brings about a series of regrettable events which affect not only himself,but several other too.It is in the final stages of the story where the reader should be really surprised (I know that I was) with what happens to all of the characters in this skillfully told tale.
    • 3/5
      I don't read a lot of mystery/crime fiction, but given Rendell's huge popularity and prodigious output, I was interested to read this (especially as I've just visited London and am familiar with the Portobello area). However, it was not at all what I was expecting (a whodunit). I enjoyed the way she wove together the stories of all the different characters, and her characterisation of a wide swathe of social classes was well-done. The tale of Joel/Mithras, in particular, was genuinely creepy. Overall, however, the book was a little aimless - and I don't think I'll be rushing to read more of Rendell's work.
    • 4/5
      Rendell has a real talent for creating common place characters that live bizarre turns. In this novel she focuses on obsessions: Joel obsessing on the past, Gib on religion, Eugene on mints (by far the most bizarre and most intriguing) and Lance on Gemma. Rendell creates a web spun around Portobello Road which gives a very solid structure to the novel with the various characters weaving in and out. This is a psychological thriller rather than a murder mystery - it's the evolution of the characters' mindset that keep the reader wanting more. Well done and original, it's a great weekend read.
    • 5/5
      One of her good ones
    • 4/5
      Anybody who has visited London is familiar with the Portobello Road and its markets. Some of the families, rich and poor, who live in the streets off Portobello Road have lived in the district for generations. Eugene Wren's very successful art gallery of fine arts in upmarket Kensington Church Street for example, is the successor to the one his father had in a glossy arcade quite a long way up the road. Gene, seemingly a confirmed bachelor now in his 50s lives in the more fashionable Chepstow Villas.In contrast is the Gibson family, once market stall holders, now most of the family either lives on the dole or on the products of breaking and entering. Lance, unemployed, lives with his step-uncle Gib,an elder of the Church of the Children of Zebulun. His girlfriend has thrown him out, and his parents won't let him in. Lance needs instant money to repair his girlfriend's teeth after he knocks her front tooth out, and burglary provides afeasible option.When Joel Roseman has a heart attack in the street he becomes a patient of Eugene's lady friend Ella, who is a GP in a nearby practice. Ella soon realises that Joel's problems are as much psychological as they are physical, and outside her capabilities. And in an illustration that the problems right on our own doorstep often go unrecognised by our nearest and dearest, Eugene has an addiction he doesn't dare tell Ella about.Ruth Rendell has taken the lives of three principal characters and the circles within which they move, and played with the concept of degrees of separation, forging connections between them that we would never have expected.In a sense, although several crimes take place in the novel, this isn't really a crime fiction novel. For me, it is more like those novels that Rendell has written under her Barbara Vine pseudonym. I've felt that with the last couple of Rendell stand alones, most recently in in THE WATER'S LOVELY. It is almost as if she has changed her mind about what goes under what name. As others have commented, this isn't Rendell at her best. She struggles with a couple of plots to make them interesting, and I found the one involving Eugene Wren particularly tedious. However she still writes well, but the crime fiction strands are really not tensioned enough.
    • 4/5
      I am a devoted fan of Ruth Rendell having read her novels steadily for 20 years and more. She is in my category of "can't wait for the paperback" authors and I enjoyed Portobello thoroughly. It is not as heartstopping as some of her other books which can actually badly frighten the reader and for some strange reason we do like to be frightened. As the Sunday Times (UK) commented, "The suspense is genteel , but palpable.....". There is murder and mayhem in this book but it is also a fine love story and a harrowing tale of the devastation of mental illness. The character developement is suberb and that is what makes this book a fine novel, not just another thriller. There is humour throughout. The newly religious former thief, Uncle Gib and the neurotic art gallery owner, Eugene Wren are just two of the finely drawn characters who will make you laugh. Human foibles and obsessions are exposed with understatement and very mild sarcasm but still cut to the bone. And then there is the story which is the usual tangled web created by Ms Rendell and enjoyable in itself.I highly recommend this book
    • 4/5
      I deeply enjoyed reading Portobello. Ruth Rendell has taken a small and ordinary corner of the world with people who you'd pass on the street and not give a second glance to and draws us into their lives. Calling this a page-turner is so cliche, Rendell takes the time to make the characters so very real that even though there are no dark intrigues or heart-stopping action you can't help but feel like a part of the neighbourhood, and like a nosy neighbour you just HAVE to know what's going on.
    • 4/5
      At her best - in fits and starts - Ruth Rendell is like Graham Greene without the Catholic guilt. But it's a bit frustrating how cack-handed this book is in ways, considering how subtle it can be in others. Dame Rendell has a brilliant touch with human darkness when she wants to - her treatment of Eugene Wren in Portobello and his addiction and the way it's not really an addiction but springs out of his existential dread of being boxed in by human relationships is masterful, and she plays it satisfyingly light, not spelling out what's happening behind his face. And it helps keep him a sympathetic character. And she pulls off the same trick with Ella and Joel/Mithras and the old neighbour who gets burgled, high-strung thoroughbreds all.But - I hesitate to set myself up as a rival authority on the behaviour of the English lower classes, but I can't believe they are all this dull and insensate. Like, you feel like the poor characters in this are all semi-developed lumps of flesh - sensory organs not fully emerged yet - eyes just knots of nerve endings hissing and retreating from the light. Social justice is a work in progress and Gini coefficients are increasing everywhere, but are we really to believe that the London working classes cheat, steal and kill this readily? And have zero or next-to-no self-consciousness or reflection about it, so that the novel's central plot twist depends on a poor person having an ounce of remorse? If that was Rendell's view of he world, dog eat dog like, fine, but her upper- and middle-class characters are mostly all decent people well aware of their overdeveloped neuroses, and that is not a cool contrast to draw.Still, it has a lot of spills and thrills, and Eugene Wren is well compelling, and Rendell's touch with everyday deets can be inspired, as long as she eschews hubris and sticks with the world she knows. One thing I should mention: this is hardly crime fiction, and less creepy than, um, psychological, I guess. Her oeuvre and the way this is being promoted might give you other ideas.
    • 4/5
      This book wasn’t as dark and scary and mysterious as I had hoped. I heard many things about Ruth Rendell (but this was my first to try and read her), and this didn’t seem to fit the description of her type of writing. I was wondering if I had got my authors mixed up, but then I read other reviews that said this wasn’t typical of her style. I found this book a tough start. The first night I tried to read Portobello it was late, and I had to put it down and sleep, I couldn’t follow it at all. The second time, I was still confused at the end of the first chapter, but chose to disregard it and press on. There was a lot of history, and new characters in those first few pages, many or which were not consequential, except for being ancestors of the characters in the story and isn’t it funny, in a small world kind of way.It was not a mystery as I was expecting (or at least a suspense) but more of a funny how small details and decisions affect ours and so many other lives in big ways. And how everybody’s life is intertwined with everybody else’s in some way.If one thing drove me crazy, it was one of the main characters obsessions with a candy called chocorange. I get it. He is addicted. But do I have to hear HOW addicted, and how this is affecting the way he goes to work or eats his sandwich or drinks his sherry every 5 pages in great detail? I really felt like it was getting ridiculous toward the end the amount of words wasted on this candy, and if there was anything that would have made me put down the book, that would have been it.On the most part I liked the ending, but I’m a sucker for an ending where everybody gets what I think they deserve. This was the case for all but one person, so I guess I’ll have to take what I can get. I think I’ll have to try one more Rendell book to see if I like this author or not.
    • 4/5
      In 'Portobello', Rendell creates an elegant tale of interwoven lives. Readers are shown the profound impact that strangers can, without realization, have on one another's lives.The setting of Portobello Road and Notting Hill is vividly rendered, almost to the point that it is another character.The suspense is extremely subdued. I repeatedly found myself expecting it to peak higher than it did. Having not read Rendell's work before, perhaps this is a feature of her writing for which I was not entirely prepared.

    Book preview

    Portobello - Ruth Rendell

    Praise for

    PORTOBELLO

    "No one surpasses Ruth Rendell when it comes to stories of obsession, instability, and malignant coincidence, but in Portobello she has surpassed herself. Invisible wires draw seemingly disparate characters closer and closer until this reader actually felt them under his skin. The clarity and reason of Rendell’s prose stand in perfect contrast to the escalating madness in the tale. Portobello is a brilliant novel."

    —Stephen King

    In her trademark matter-of-fact prose, this clear-eyed, quietly brilliant writer examines the ties that ensnare her small cast of characters—people linked in ways that are sometimes random, sometimes not.

    —Adam Woog, The Seattle Times

    Rendell can skewer a character with a single line. . . . [A] complex tapestry of intersecting lives.

    —Hallie Ephron, The Boston Globe

    "Ruth Rendell, the reigning queen of suspense fiction, turns in another stellar performance with Portobello."

    —The San Diego Union-Tribune

    Applying her formidable skills as a puppeteer, Rendell encourages the members of this cast to indulge their various obsessions in a plot that unfolds with the bleak gravity of Greek drama while following the insane logic of French farce. . . . Although Rendell seems to be taking a dispassionate view of her characters’ perverse behavior, she’s a sly one, showing more sympathy for their pathetic fixations than for the prevailing social attitudes that condemn them.

    —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

    A suspenseful, complex mystery about mixed-up lives in a London neighborhood.

    —The Daily Beast

    Ruth Rendell is a genius at setting up an unlikely premise that is just this side of believable. . . . The characters jump off the page. The page-to-page surprises are so clever that the reader is left agape at each twist and turn. The pieces fit together brilliantly.

    —Robert Croan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

    One of the best and most prolific mystery writers (although that category is too confining for one as good as Rendell) conveys the menace of the commonplace in this gripping novel.

    —Jay Stafford, Richmond Times-Dispatch

    Superlative.

    —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    For Doreen and Les Massey with love

    PORTOBELLO

    1

    IT IS CALLED the Portobello Road because a long time ago a sea captain called Robert Jenkins stood in front of a committee of the House of Commons and held up his amputated ear. Spanish coast guards, he said, had boarded his ship in the Caribbean, cut off his ear, pillaged the vessel, then set it adrift. Public opinion had already been aroused by other Spanish outrages, and the Jenkins episode was the last straw to those elements in Parliament which opposed Walpole’s government. They demanded British vengeance and so began the War of Jenkins’s Ear.

    In the following year, 1739, Admiral Vernon captured the city of Puerto Bello in the Caribbean. It was one of those successes that are popular with patriotic Englishmen, though many hardly knew what the point of it was. In the words of a poet writing about another battle and another war: That I cannot tell, said he, but ’twas a famous victory. Vernon’s triumph put Puerto Bello on the map and gave rise to a number of commemorative names. Notting Hill and Kensal were open country then where sheep and cattle grazed, and one landowner called his fields Portobello Farm. In time the lane that led to it became the Portobello Road. But for Jenkins’s ear it would have been called something else.

    Street markets abounded in the area, in Kenley Street, Sirdar Road, Norland Road, Crescent Street, and Golborne Road. The one to survive was the Portobello, and from 1927 onwards a daily market was held there from eight in the morning to eight in the evening and 8 a.m. till 9 p.m. on Saturdays. It still is, and in a much reduced state on Sundays too. The street is long, like a centipede snaking up from Pembridge Road in the south to Kensal Town in the north, its legs splaying out all the way and almost reaching the Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal. Shops line it and spill into the legs, which are its side streets. Stalls fill most of the centre, for though traffic crosses it and some cars crawl patiently along it among the people, few use it as a thoroughfare. The Portobello has a rich personality, vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy, with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. An indefinable edge to it adds a spice of danger. There is nothing safe about the Portobello, nothing suburban. It is as far from an average shopping street as can be imagined. Those who love and those who barely know it have called it the world’s finest street market.

    You can buy anything there. Everything on earth is on sale: furniture, antiques, clothes, bedding, hardware, music, food and food and more food. Vegetables and fruit, meat and fish, and cheese and chocolate. The stalls sell jewellery, hats, masks, prints, postcards old and new, shawls and scarves, shoes and boots, pots and pans, flowers real and artificial, furs and fake furs, lamps and musical instruments. You can buy a harp there or a birdcage, a stuffed bear or a wedding dress, or the latest bestseller. If you want to eat your lunch in the street, you can buy paella or pancakes, piping hot from a stall. But no live animals or birds are for sale.

    Cheap books in excellent condition are on sale in the Oxfam shop. A little way up the road is the Spanish deli which sells, mysteriously, along with all its groceries, fine earthenware pots and bowls and dishes. There is a minimarket in most of the centipede’s legs and at Portobello Green a covered market under a peaked tent like a poor man’s Sydney Opera House. In Tavistock Road the house fronts are painted red and green and yellow and gray.

    The moment you turn out of Pembridge Road or Westbourne Grove or Chepstow Villas and set foot in the market, you feel a touch of excitement, an indrawing of breath, a pinch in the heart. And once you have been, you have to go again. Thousands of visitors wander up and down it on Saturdays. It has caught them in the way a beauty spot can catch you and it pulls you back. Its thread attaches itself to you and a twitch on it summons you to return.

    QUITE A LONG way up the Portobello Road, a glossy arcade now leads visitors into the hinterland. There is a children’s clothes shop, for the children of the wealthy who go to select private schools, a shop that sells handmade soaps, pink and green and brown and highly scented, another where you can buy jerseys and T-shirts but exclusively cashmere, and a place that calls itself a studio, which offers for sale small watercolours and even smaller marble obelisks. It was here, long before the arcade came into being, that Arnold Wren had his gallery. He never called it that but preferred the humbler designation shop.

    Stalls filled the pavement outside. Mostly fruit and vegetables up here. When Arnold’s son, Eugene, was a little boy, the vegetables and fruit were of a kind that had been sold in English markets for generations. Eugene’s grandmother could remember when the first tomato appeared, and he, now a man of fifty, saw the first avocado appear on old Mr. Gibson’s stall. The boy’s mother didn’t like the taste, she said she might as well be eating green soap.

    Arnold sold paintings and prints, and small pieces of sculpture. In rooms at the back of the shop stacks of paintings occupied most of the available space. He made enough money to keep himself, his wife, and his only son in comfort in their unprepossessing but quite comfortable house in Chesterton Road. Then, one day when the boy was in his teens, his father took his family on holiday to Vienna. There, in an exhibition, Arnold saw paintings by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin on loan from various European galleries. The Christian name struck him because it was the same as his own. Arnold Wren never forgot the paintings; they haunted his dreams and later on he could have described some of Böcklin’s works in the greatest detail entirely from memory, The Isle of the Dead, the frightening self-portrait with the skeleton’s hand on Böcklin’s shoulder, the Centaurs Fighting.

    He had forgotten where most of the paintings in the rooms behind the shop came from. Some had been inherited from his father. Others were sold to him for shillings rather than pounds by people clearing out their attics. There were thousands of attics in old Notting Hill. But looking through the paintings one day, wondering if this one or that one was worth keeping at all, he came upon a picture that reminded him of Vienna. It wasn’t at all like The Isle of the Dead or The Centaur at the Forge, but it had the scent of Böcklin about it, which made him catch his breath.

    It was a painting of a mermaid swimming inside a glass vase with a narrow neck, trying perhaps—from the expression on her face of fear and desperation—to climb out of the water and the vase. All was glaucous green but for her rosy flesh and her long golden hair. Arnold Wren called the picture Undine in a Goldfish Bowl and showed it to an expert without telling him what he suspected. The expert said, Well, Mr. Wren, I am ninety-nine percent certain this is by Arnold Böcklin.

    Arnold was an honest man and he said to the potential purchaser of the painting, I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is a Böcklin, but Morris Stemmer, rich and arrogant, fancied himself an expert and was a hundred percent sure. He paid Arnold the sort of sum usually said to be beyond one’s wildest dreams. This enabled Arnold to buy a house in Chepstow Villas, a Jaguar, and to go farther afield than Vienna on his holidays. His was a Portobello Road success story while old Mr. Gibson was a failure. Or so it appeared on the surface.

    When his father died, Eugene Wren moved the business to premises in upmarket Kensington Church Street and referred to it as the gallery. The name in gilded letters on a dark green background was EUGENE WREN, FINE ART and, partly through luck and partly due to Eugene’s flair for spotting new young artists and what from times past was about to become fashionable, made him a great deal of money.

    Without being a thief himself, Albert Gibson the stallholder married into a family of thieves. His only son, Gilbert, had been in and out of prison more times than his wife, Ivy, cared to count. That, she told her relatives, was why they had no children. Gib was never home for long enough. She was living in Blagrove Road when they built the Westway, which cut the street in two and turned 2 Blagrove Villas into a detached house. The Aclam Road minimarket separated it from the overhead road and the train line, and the Portobello Road was a stone’s throw away if you were a marksman with a strong arm and a steady eye.

    2

    JOEL ROSEMAN NEVER walked with a purpose, a destination. He wasn’t going anywhere but mostly round in a sort of circle from his flat in a mansion block at the eastern end of Notting Hill Gate and back again. Once, when he first tried it, he had attempted going out in the late afternoon, but it was March and still broad daylight. Next time he went out after dark and that was better. Sometimes he walked clockwise into Bayswater, down to the Bayswater Road and home again, sometimes widdershins, in a loop up to Campden Hill and back to the high street. Mostly he wandered aimlessly.

    For a long time now he had found life better in darkness. That was why he dreaded the summer, when it wouldn’t start getting dark till ten. But now it was April and exceptionally warm, light too in the evenings but dusk coming at seven. He wore sunglasses, a special pair in which the lenses were darker than usual. At home he had several pairs of sunglasses but none with lenses as black and smoky as these.

    The allowance Pa had paid into his account regularly on the tenth of the month had just come in on the previous day. Joel brooded on Pa as he walked along, wondering in despair what made him tick, why he was so cruel, and how it was possible that a man whose child had drowned could have that picture hanging up in his house. He stopped thinking about it when he found a cash dispenser in a bank wall at the bottom of Pembridge Road. The sunglasses had to come off briefly while he drew out 140 pounds. It came in twenty- and ten- and five-pound notes. Carefully looking over his shoulder (as the bank said you should) he put twenty-five pounds into the pocket of his jeans and the rest into an envelope. This went into an inside breast pocket of his rainproof jacket. There was no sign of rain, but Joel possessed few clothes and this jacket had happened to be hanging up, in the dark, just inside his front door.

    He was taking these precautions with his money because he intended walking up the Portobello Road. It would be his first visit. He put his sunglasses on again and the world went dark and rather foggy. When she was young, his mother had lived in Notting Hill, and she had told him—she went on speaking to him when Pa did not—that if your house was burgled and your silver stolen, the police would advise you to go look for it on the stalls in the Portobello Road, where you were likely to find it up for sale. This had made Joel think that the market was a dangerous place, somewhere to be careful, but he had decided that the stallholders would be packing up by seven thirty. He was surprised to see that this was not so. The place was blazing with light and colour, packed with jostling people, voices and music, a flourishing trade still going on. When the natural light was dying, they had to make up for it artificially. They never thought what it was like for people of his sort. He blinked behind his glasses. According to his mother, Pa called him a mole and sometimes an earthworm.

    No one took any notice of him. He walked up the western side, past knitwear shops and blanket shops and print and china shops. It surprised him to see any shops at all because he had expected only stalls. These were there in abundance, shops on the left, stalls on the right, and people, hundreds of people, walking, dawdling, strolling between them and up the roadway itself. All the people looked busy and happy. Joel could always spot happiness, he was an expert at noticing it, perhaps because in everyone he personally knew it was absent. On the other side of the road crowds were going home, heading southwards for the tube and the buses. They looked happy too and, the ones carrying bags and packages, satisfied or excited. He went on, not stopping, not considering buying anything. He never needed anything except food and not much of that. He shopped for nothing else. The special sunglasses were his last buy and he had had them for two years.

    By the time he had been walking fairly steadily for twenty minutes, he came to the pub Ma had mentioned called the Earl of Lonsdale. He crossed the road and turned down Westbourne Grove. No one had looked menacingly at him while he was in the market, and he was beginning to think reports of the place had been exaggerated. But it was still a relief to find himself among the genteel boutiques and soon the gracious houses of this corner of Notting Hill. He had begun to feel a little tired. Well, they told him he had a heart problem. Young as he was, he had a bad heart.

    It was quiet. The poor live among strident voices, clatter, crashes, deafening music, barking dogs, shrieking children, but places inhabited by the rich are always silent. Tall trees, burgeoning into spring leaf, line their streets and their gardens bloom with appropriate flowers all the year round. Joel was reminded by the silence, if by nothing else, of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where Pa and Ma had a big, low-roofed house squatting in landscaped grounds. Around here wasn’t much like that, but the peace and quiet were the same, yet somehow uneasy, almost uncanny.

    No one was about but for two men, not much more than boys, loitering on an opposite corner. They wore jackets or coats with hoods pulled down over their eyes, and Joel had learnt from newspapers he occasionally saw that hoods meant their wearers were up to no good. They looked at him and he looked at them, and he told himself that they would do nothing to him because they could see he was young and tall and they didn’t know that his pockets were full of money. He looked poor in his old clothes, his ragged jeans and that jacket with one sleeve torn and the other stained.

    He had once read somewhere about the assassination of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, how she had been walking onto a boat, which was to take her across Lake Geneva, when she had felt someone jostle her and she received a mild enough blow in the chest. Only when she was in her stateroom, some minutes later, was it realised she had been stabbed and was about to die. This was how Joel thought afterwards of what happened to him on the corner of Pembridge Crescent and Chepstow Road. He had been struck not in the chest, but on the left shoulder and from the back. He felt the pain grip him with iron claws down his upper left arm.

    Perhaps he cried out. He never knew. He fell or sank or plunged to the ground. But he must have leant backwards at some point for his head struck against the bell push in a plastered brick pillar, which was one of the gateposts of the house on the corner. Had someone assaulted him, as someone had assaulted the Empress Elisabeth? He forgot that he had a bad heart, he forgot everything as he lost consciousness.

    THE TWO BOYS in the hoods crossed the street and stared fearfully at this shabby, long-haired man who lay spread-eagled on the pavement. They thought he was dead. The front door of the house behind those pillars opened. They ran.

    If Joel had fallen forwards, his mother told him, no one and nothing would have pressed that bell. He would have died. What she didn’t tell him, until a lot later and she was in a temper, was that his father had said it was a pity he hadn’t. As it was, the occupants of the house had come out to see why their chimes were ringing and ringing. They found him slumped against the pillar and called an ambulance.

    3

    JUST FIFTY YEARS old, single still but not unattached, Eugene Wren was a tall, handsome man who would have looked young for his age but for his white hair. It was thick hair, a glossy thatch, but there was no doubt that it aged him. He minded this but he was careful not to let it show that he minded, just as, though he chose his clothes with care and wore them with appropriateness, he gave the impression of being indifferent to his appearance. Only his girlfriend knew that his sight wasn’t perfect but that he wore contact lenses.

    He was secretive. Why? Who can tell why we are the way we are? Psychiatrists can. Innumerable books have been written tracing our faults and foibles, fantasies, criminal tendencies, sexual tastes, inhibitions, and other peculiarities back to events in our childhoods. Eugene had read a good many of them without being any the wiser. He could have understood his secretiveness if when owning up to something as a child he had been punished, but his parents had unvaryingly been loving, easygoing, and kind. In fact, he was encouraged to be open. It made no difference. He kept hold of his secrets. Like his mind, his house in Chepstow Villas held many secret drawers and locked boxes.

    One of his secrets was his addictive personality. He had been a heavy drinker and had never given up drink but, by an almost superhuman effort, cut down to a reasonable couple of glasses of wine a day. That was before he met Ella, so he was able to keep his onetime alcoholism a secret from her. The breakup with his previous girlfriend, a long-term partner of several years, had happened because she found the bottle of vodka he kept in the bottom of a wardrobe he thought he had locked. His smoking was impossible to hide. But as he had with his drinking habit, he eventually conquered it. Several attempts were made at giving up, the last and successful one helped by nicotine patches and hypnotism. It had been horrible for Eugene to reveal his weakness to Ella, not least of it the disclosing that he had a weakness. But when it was over, he was quite proud of himself and Ella was proud.

    You can’t really continue to smoke when you are going about with a doctor of medicine, he said to her with a light laugh.

    For a while he was without an addiction, but not for long.

    He hoped he wouldn’t put on weight, though he didn’t say this to Ella, and when he did put it on, he did his best to keep it secret. The difficulty was that he tended to eat between meals. Once he would have had a cigarette.

    Eugene called his habit snacking and Ella called it grazing. To combat it he tried eating Polo mints, but he didn’t really like the taste of mint, and besides, Polos had sugar in them. Considering how he fulminated against gum-chewing, especially against those who spat out their gum on the pavement, he couldn’t take it up himself. Well, he could, but it would have to be done in secret and that would be just one more secret. He was anxious not to succumb to deception with Ella. No doubt he would soon propose to Ella and they would live happily ever after, something he sincerely wished and thought likely. Then he had what he called the fat-bridegroom dream. He was standing at the altar in a morning suit, marrying Ella, and when he looked down to take the ring out of his pocket, all he saw was his huge paunch. He said nothing of this to Ella but pretended to be indifferent to weight or girth.

    IT WAS A Saturday morning and he was on his way to the shops. It would be a long walk, some of it perhaps not a walk but a taxi ride. What he sought wasn’t readily obtainable even in the sort of shops whose business (he thought) was to sell it. On occasion it was a weary quest he undertook. Although it had been going on for no more than six weeks, sometimes he found it hard to remember what he had done with his time before that day he went into the pharmacy at the top of the Portobello Road.

    But spring had come, the day was fine, and his scales had just informed him he had lost two pounds. Think of the positive things, he told himself, think what a harmless indulgence this is, then, glancing down at the pavement, he saw the sprawl of litter. A tumble of fish and chips remains, part but not all of a bright blue polystyrene container, a can that had once held Red Bull, and some fragments of a meat pie. Eugene recoiled from this rubbish but braced himself to remove it. The plastic carrier he always took with him on a shopping expedition (in the interest of saving the planet) he took out of his pocket, and covering his fingers with a tissue, he picked up and deposited inside it the remains of some lowlife’s supper. Underneath it—or, rather, behind it, up against a garden wall, pillar, and hedge—was an unsealed and bulging envelope. When he picked it up, he could see that inside were five or six twenty-pound notes, a ten, and a five.

    Without counting the notes, he put the envelope into his pocket before dropping the plastic bag into the next waste bin he passed. Ahead of him he could see in the distance the swarms of people, mostly young, heading for the Portobello Road market. It was always the same on Saturdays. They poured off the buses and out of Notting Hill tube station and charged along, talking and laughing at the top of their voices, in their weekly quest for bargains and the companionship of their fellow shoppers.

    As soon as he had the chance, Eugene turned left to avoid them. Not that he disliked the Portobello Road, but he preferred it on Sundays when it was half-empty and you could see its buildings and feel its charm. On weekdays he only went there now for one purpose, and he had been up to the pharmacy in Golborne Road on the previous Tuesday. Today one of the other selected shops he patronised must be visited. So now to the serious business of the morning.

    What would they think he was in need of and was off to buy, those shoppers heading for the market whose indifferent gaze rested briefly on him before passing on? If they thought about it at all, they would assume that a man seeking an addictive substance would look for alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, ecstasy, crack, or, at the very least, marijuana. Eugene allowed himself to feel vaguely glad that it was none of these he sought.

    It had begun when he decided he must find some way to curb his appetite. Some kind of slimming pills, he had vaguely thought. But when first he turned out of the Portobello Road in the direction of the illuminated green cross outside the Golborne Pharmacy, it wasn’t with slimming or appetite suppression in mind but in search of a plug-in mosquito repellent for the summer ahead. Though it was early March, on the previous night his sleep had been disturbed by the whine of a mosquito in his bedroom, and he had spent a frustrating quarter of an hour flapping about with a towel before squashing the thing. Paying for the device, he noticed a row of packets of sugar-free sweets absurdly named Lemfresh, Strawpink, and Chocorange on the counter by the till. Probably they tasted disgusting. But he picked up a Chocorange and read the label on it: sugar-free, healthy, tooth-friendly, it said, only four calories per pastille. Suppose they didn’t taste too bad. He could eat one halfway between breakfast and lunch, and one between lunch and dinner or maybe two. He could give it a try. They had no sugar in them and few calories.

    He took two packets, one Chocorange and one Strawpink. It was four o’clock and hunger was beginning to bite. Like every container these days, the Chocorange pack was hard to open, but he got there. It held perhaps a dozen dark brown lozenges. Tentatively, Eugene put one in his mouth and was pleasantly surprised by the taste. A rich chocolate flavour with a hint of sharp citrus. Delicious, really. And no bitter aftertaste, which used to be the case with sugar substitutes. He took another to confirm his judgment, trying a Strawpink this time. Nice enough, with an authentic flavour of strawberries but a bit insipid, not a patch on Chocorange.

    Why not keep some of these by him so that he could help himself to one or two instead of snacking? Money didn’t worry him, but if it had, these were cheap enough for anyone to afford: seventy-five pence a packet. And he knew where to find them. Golborne Road was ten minutes’ walk away from his house. It looked as if he had found the solution. No voice inside his head said, Don’t go there. No small cautionary thought came to him, telling him to remember the cigarettes, climbing from five to forty a day, or the drinking, which started with two glasses of wine and mounted to a bottle of vodka plus wine, and now was only shakily reduced to two glasses once more. Don’t go there was unspoken or went unheard.

    Should he tell Ella? Sucking a Chocorange, he had asked himself that on the

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