The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell

this?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “I’ve got an older brother. He’s important to me—he’s like a best friend. I told him and he rushed me to Emergency. The hospital found my spleen was three times its normal size. It had a lot to cope with. It had taken over the function of my white blood cells. They told my brother and then they told me.”
    “It must have been a great shock.”
    “Like being stunned by a totally unexpected blow. One minute I was a normal healthy man, or so I thought, a man with a pain in his stomach, and then—this. They operated and took out my spleen. They told me I had AML—acute myeloid leukemia. I thought it was a death sentence.”
    “But you went to the Harvest Trust?”
    “Not at first. I’d been told I should have a bone marrow transplant. With siblings the chance of matching tissue is one in four, so I was hoping against hope my brother would match. He was willing.” She saw him clench his hands. He spoke with intensity. “He was more than willing. He was longing for the chance to help me. We’re very close.”
    “But his tissue didn’t match?”
    “As I said, I’d felt under sentence of death. When they told me about this one in four chance all that changed, I was so sure it would be all right. You know, if you were told you had to have surgery andthere was a one in four chance of not coming out of the anesthetic you’d be sure you’d die, wouldn’t you? I would. I was sure one in four meant my brother’s tissue would match. I was so confident I didn’t even think much about it. He was my brother, we had the same genes, the same coloring, the same sort of looks. I knew it would be all right.
    “They tested him and he wasn’t compatible. I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought they must have made a mistake. But they hadn’t.” He sighed, then brightened. “Still, if my brother had been able to make the donation I wouldn’t have met you.”
    “I doubt if that would have bothered you much,” Mary said. “You wouldn’t have known I existed.”
    He put his head a little on one side, as if considering what she had said.
    “My brother tried to find a donor. He had leaflets printed and put them through a thousand doors. Can you imagine? Most people just ignored them but a lot came forward for tests. One of them was compatible, but he turned out not to be suitable. I knew I’d die unless a donor was found. That’s a very unpleasant feeling, it throws you into a panic, knowing you’ve got something that can be cured, or at any rate arrested, and the drug, serum, whatever, is everywhere, maybe even quite common, but you can’t find it, it’s hidden away, it may be inside lots of people you see in the street but you can’t get at it. Then the hospital told us about the trust.”
    “Go on.”
    He recalled the day the Harvest Trust told him there was someone prepared to make the donation and his happiness at this good news, his excitement, later on his realization of reprieve.
    “I’d lived with the dread that I’d never see my next birthday. Now here was a bunch of people telling me the chances were I would. I’d tried to get used to despair, to my fate, and now I had to get used to hope.”
    There was a setback when they were afraid his condition haddeteriorated too far for him to be eligible for the transplant. But he seemed stable and they had gone ahead. While this was going on, he said, he thought of her all the time.
    “I thought of ‘Helen.’ Maybe I’m a bit of a hero-worshiper. I worshiped my brother, still do, and now here was this woman for me to worship, this unknown woman. You were a savior to me, a sort of saint.”
    She disliked the ease with which she blushed. Never in her life before had she had such cause for blushing. Her face flooded with color.
    “But it was
nothing
,” she said, surprising herself by her own vehemence. “It was
nothing
.”
    “I’m not at all sure
I
would have done it,” he said. “Getting over the transplant,