by Ruth Rendell
“What are you looking at?” said Stanley, none too pleasantly, for Arthur’s remark about the washbasin had perhaps rankled.
“Nothing,” said Arthur. “I was just thinking he won’t have much of an outlook.”
“What d’you expect for seven quid a week? You want to remember you pay seven for a whole flat because the poxy government won’t let me charge more for unfurnished accommodation. You’re lucky, getting your hooks on that when I didn’t know any better. Oh yes. But times have changed, thank God, and for seven quid a week now you look out on a cellar door and lump it. Right?”
“It’s no concern of mine,” said Arthur. “I imagine my name-sake will be out a lot, won’t he?”
“If he’s got any sense,” said Stanley, for at that moment there crashed through the ceiling the triumphant chords of the third movement from Beethoven’s Eighth. “Tschaikowsky,” he said learnedly. “Dean’s at it again. I like something a bit more modern myself.”
“I was never musical.” Arthur gravitated into the hall. “I must get on with things. Shopping day, you know. If I might just have my little envelope?”
———
His shopping basket in one hand and an orange plastic carrier containing his laundry in the other, Arthur made his way along Trinity Road towards the launderette in Brasenose Avenue. He could have used the Coinerama in Magdalen Hill, but he went to Magdalen Hill every weekday to work and at the weekends he liked to vary his itinerary. After all, for good reason, he didn’t go out much and never after dark.
So instead of cutting through Oriel Mews, past the Waterlily pub and making for the crossroads, he went down past All Souls’ Church, where as a child he had passed two hours each Sabbath Day, his text carefully committed to memory. And at four o’clock Auntie Gracie had always been waiting for him, always, it seemed to him, under an umbrella. Had it invariably rained on Sundays, the granite terrace opposite veiled in misty grey? That terrace was now gone, replaced by barracklike blocks of council flats.
He followed the route he and Auntie Gracie had taken towards home, but only for a little way. Taking some pleasure in making the K.12 bus stop for him alone, Arthur went over the pedestrian crossing in Balliol Street, holding up his hand in an admonitory way. Down St. John’s Road, where the old houses still remained, turn-of-the-century houses some enterprising but misguided builder had designed with Dutch façades, and where plane trees alternated with concrete lamp standards.
The launderette attendant said, “Good morning,” and Arthur rejoined with a cool nod. He used his own soap in the machine. He didn’t trust the blue stuff in the little packet you got for five-pence. Nor did he trust the attendant to put his linen in the drier nor the other customers not to steal it. So he sat patiently on one of the benches, talking to no one, until the thirty-five-minute cycle was completed.
It afforded him considerable satisfaction to note how superior were his pale blue sheets, snowy towels, underwear and shirts, to the gaudy jumble sale laundry in the adjacent machines. While they were safely rotating in the drier, he went next door to the butcher’s and then to the greengrocer’s. Arthur never shopped in the supermarkets run by Indians, in which this area of Kenbourne Vale abounded. He selected his lamb chops, his small Sunday joint of Scotch topside, with care. Three slices off the roast for Sunday, the rest to be minced and made into Monday’s cottage pie. A pound of runner beans, and pick out the small ones, if you please, he didn’t want a mouthful of strings.
A different way back. The linen so precisely folded that it wouldn’t really need ironing—though Arthur always ironed it—he trotted up Merton Street. More council flats, tower blocks here like pillars supporting the heavy, overcast sky. The lawns which separated them, Arthur had often noticed with satisfaction, were prohibited to children. The children played in the street or sat disconsolately on top of bits of sculpture. Arthur disapproved of the sculptures, which in his view resembled chunks cut out of prehistoric monsters for all they were entitled “Spring” or “Social Conscience” or “Man and Woman,” but he didn’t think the children ought to sit on them or play in the street for that matter. Auntie Gracie had never allowed him to play in the street.
Stanley Caspian’s Jaguar had gone, and so had the Kotowskys’ fourth-hand Ford. A fistful of vouchers, entitling their possessor to threepence off toothpaste or free soap when you bought a giant size shampoo, had been pushed through the letter box. Arthur helped himself to those which might come in handy, and mounted the stairs. There was a half-landing after the ten steps of the first flight where a pay phone box was attached to the wall. Four steps went on to the first floor. The door of the Kotowskys’ flat was on his left, that to Jonathan Dean’s room facing him, and the door to the bathroom they shared between the other two. Dean’s door was open, Shostakovitch’s Fifth Symphony on loud enough to be heard in Kenbourne Town Hall. The intention apparently was that it should be loud enough merely to be audible in the bathroom from which Dean, a tall, red-haired, red-faced man now emerged. He wore nothing but a small mauve towel fastened round him loincloth-fashion.
“The body is more than raiment,” he remarked when he saw Arthur.
Arthur flushed slightly. It was his belief that Dean was mad, a conviction which rested partly on the fact that everything the man said sounded as if it had come out of a book. He turned his head in the direction of the open door.
“Would you be good enough to reduce the volume a little, Mr. Dean?”
Dean said something about music having charms to soothe the savage breast, and beat his own, which was hairy and covered with freckles. But, having slammed his door with violence but no animosity, he subdued Shostakovich and only vague Slavic murmurs reached Arthur as he ascended the second flight.
And now he was in his own exclusive domain. He occupied the whole second floor. With a sigh of contentment, resting his laundry bag and his shopping basket on the mat, he unlocked the door and let himself in.
2
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Arthur prepared his lunch, two lamb cutlets, creamed potatoes, runner beans. None of your frozen or canned rubbish for him. Auntie Gracie had brought him up to appreciate fresh food, well-cooked. He ended the meal with a slice from the plum pie he had baked on Thursday night, and then, without delay, he washed the dishes. One of Auntie Gracie’s maxims had been that only slatternly housekeepers leave dirty dishes in the sink. Arthur always washed his the moment he finished eating.
He went into the bedroom. The bed was stripped. He put on clean sheets, rose pink, and rose pink pillowcases. Arthur couldn’t sleep in a soiled bed. Once, when collecting their rent, he had caught a glimpse of the Kotowskys’ bed and it had put him off his supper.
Meticulously he dusted the bedroom furniture and polished the silver stoppers on Auntie Gracie’s cut-glass scent bottles. All his furniture was late Victorian, pretty though a little heavy. It came up well under an application of polish. Arthur still felt guilty about using spray-on polish instead of the old-fashioned wax kind. Auntie Gracie had never approved of short cuts. He gave the frilly nets with which every window in the flat was curtained a critical stare. They were too fragile to be risked at the launderette, so he washed them himself once a month, and they weren’t due for a wash for another week. But this was such a grimy district, and there was nothing like white net for collecting every bit of flying dust. He began to take them down. For the second time that day he found himself facing the cellar door.
The Kotowskys had no window which overlooked it. It could be seen only from this one of his and from the one in Room 2. This had long been known to Arthur, he had known it for nearly as long as the duration of his tenancy. Very little in his own life had changed in those twenty years. The cellar door had never been painted, though the bricks had darkened perhaps and the concrete grown more green and damp. No one had ever seen him cross that yard, he thought as he laid the net curtains carefully over a chair, no one had ever seen him enter the cellar. He continued to stare down, conside
ring, remembering.
He had been at school with Stanley Caspian—Merton Street Junior—and Stanley had been fat and gross and coarse even then. A bully always.
“Auntie’s baby! Auntie’s baby! Where’s your dad, Arthur Johnson?” And with an inventiveness no one would have suspected from the standard of Stanley’s school work: “Cowardy, cowardy custard, Johnson is a bastard!”
The years civilise or, at least, inhibit. When they met by chance in Trinity Road, each aged thirty-two, Stanley was affable, even considerate.
“Sorry to hear you lost your aunt, Arthur. More like a mother to you, she was.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be wanting a place of your own now. Bachelor flat, eh? How about taking the top of a hundred and forty-two?”
“I’ve no objection to giving it the once-over,” said Arthur primly. He knew old Mrs. Caspian had left her son a lot of property in West Kenbourne.
The house was in a mess in those days and the top flat was horrible. But Arthur saw its potential—and for two pounds ten a week?
So he took Stanley’s offer, and a couple of days later when he had started the redecorating he went down into the cellar to see if, by chance, it housed a stepladder.
She was lying on the floor of the furthest room on a heap of sacks and black-out curtains left over from the war. She was naked and her white plastic flesh was cold and shiny. He never found out who had brought her there and left her entombed. At first he had been embarrassed, taken aback as he was when he glimpsed likenesses of her standing in shop windows and waiting to be dressed. But then, because he was alone with her and there was no one to see them, he approached more closely. So that was how they looked? With awe, with fear, at last with distaste, he looked at the two hemispheres on her chest, the soft, swollen triangle between her closed thighs. An impulse came to him to dress her. He had done so many secret things in his life—almost everything he had done that he had wanted to do had been covert, clandestine—that no inhibition intervened to stop him fetching from the flat a black dress, a handbag, shoes. These had belonged to Auntie Gracie and he had brought them with him from the house in Magdalen Hill. People had suggested he give them to the WVS for distribution, but how could he? How could he have borne to see some West Kenbourne slattern queening it in her clothes?
His white lady had attenuated limbs and was as tall as he. Auntie Gracie’s dress came above her knees. She had yellow nylon hair that curled over her cheekbones. He put the shoes on her feet and hooked the handbag over her arm. In order to see what he was doing, he had put a hundred-watt bulb in the light socket. But another of those impulses led him to take it out. By the light of the torch she looked real, the cellar room with its raw brick walls an alley in the hinterland of city streets. It was sacrilege to dress her in Auntie Gracie’s clothes, and yet that very sacrilege had an indefinable lightness about it, was a spur.…
He had strangled her before he knew what he was doing. With his bare hands on her cold smooth throat. The release had been almost as good as the real thing. He set her up against the wall once more, dusted her beautiful white face. You do not have to hide or fear or sweat for such a killing; the law permits you to kill anything not made of flesh and blood.… He left her and came out into the yard. The room that was now Room 2 had been untenanted then as had the whole house but for his flat. And when a tenant had come he had been, as had his successor, on night work that took him out five evenings a week at six. But before that Arthur had decided. She should save him, she should be—as those who would like to get hold of him would call it—his therapy. The women who waited in the dark streets, asking for trouble, he cared nothing for them, their pain, their terror. He cared, though, for his own fate. To defy it, he would kill a thousand women in her person, she should be his salvation. And then no threat could disturb him, provided he was careful never to go out after dark, never to have a drink.
After a time he had come to be rather proud of his solution. It seemed to set down as nonsense the theories of those experts—he had, in the days of his distress, studied their works—that men with his problem had no self-control, no discipline over their own compulsions. He had always known they talked rubbish. Why shouldn’t he have the recourse of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, of the rehabilitated drug addict?
But now? Anthony Johnson. Arthur, who made it his business to know the routines and lifestyles of his fellow tenants, hoped he would soon acquire a thoroughgoing knowledge of the new man’s movements. Anthony Johnson would surely go out two or three evenings a week? He must. The alternative was something Arthur didn’t at all want to face.
There was nothing for it but to wait and see. The possibility of bringing the white lady up into the flat, installing her here, killing her here, occurred to him only for him to dismiss the idea. He disliked the notion of his encounters with her taking on the air of a game. It was the squalor of the cellar, the dimness, his stealthy approach that gave to it its reality. No, she must remain there, he thought, and he must wait and see. He turned from the window and at the same time turned his mind, for he didn’t much care to dwell upon her and what she truly was, preferring her to stand down there forgotten and unacknowledged until he needed her again. This, in fact, he thought as he took away the curtains to put them in soak, was the first time he had thought of her in those terms for many years.
Dismissing her as a man dismisses a compliant and always available mistress, Arthur went into the living room. The sofa and the two armchairs had been reupholstered since Auntie Gracie’s death, only six months after, but Arthur had taken such good care of them that the covers still looked new. Carefully he worked on the blue moquette with a stiff brush. The cream drawn-thread antimacassars might as well go into the water with the nets. He polished the oval mahogany table, the mahogany tallboy, the legs and arms of the dining chairs; plumped up the blue and brown satin cushions, flicked his feather duster over the two hand-painted parchment lampshades, the knobs on the television set, the Chelsea china in the cabinet. Now for the vacuum cleaner. Having the flat entirely covered with wall-to-wall carpet in a deep fawn shade had made a hole in his savings, but it had been worth it. He ran the cleaner slowly and thoroughly over every inch of the carpet, taking his time so that its droning zoom-zoom wouldn’t be lost on Jonathan Dean, though he had little hope of its setting him an example. Finally, he rinsed the nets and the chair backs and hung them over the drying rack in the bathroom. There was no need to clean the bathroom or the kitchen. They were cleaned every morning as a matter of course, the former when he had dried himself after his bath, the latter as soon as breakfast was over.
At this point he sat down in the chair by the front window and, having left all his doors open, surveyed the flat along its spotless length. It smelt of polish, silver cleaner, soap, and elbow grease. Arthur recalled how, when he was about eleven and had neglected to wash his bedroom window as thoroughly as Auntie Gracie demanded, she had sent him round to Winter’s with threepence.
“You ask the man for a pound of elbow grease, Arthur. Go on. It won’t take you five minutes.”
The man in the shop had laughed himself almost into a fit But he hadn’t explained why he had no elbow grease, and Arthur had to take the threepenny bit—a threepenny joey, they called them then—back home again.
“I expect he did laugh,” said Auntie Gracie. “And I hope you’ve been taught a lesson.” She rubbed Arthur’s arm through the grey flannel shirt. “This is where your elbow grease comes from. You can’t buy it, you have to make it yourself.”
Arthur hadn’t borne her any malice. He knew she had acted for the best. He would do exactly the same by any child in his charge. Children had to be taught the hard way, and it had set him on the right path. Would she be pleased with him if she could see him now? If she could see how well he kept his own place, his bank balance, how he ordered his life, how he hadn’t missed a day at Grainger’s in twenty years? Perhaps. But she had never been very pleased with him, had she? He
had never reached those heights of perfection she had laid before him as fitting for one who needed to cleanse himself of the taint of his birth and background.
Arthur sighed. He should have washed the Chelsea china. It was no good telling himself a flick with that duster would serve as well as a wash. Tired now but determined to soldier on, he put the shepherdesses and frock-coated gentlemen and dogs and little flower baskets onto a tray and carried them into the kitchen.
3
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Arthur was a sound sleeper. He fell asleep within five minutes of laying his head on the pillow and hardly ever awoke before the alarm went off at seven-thirty. This ability to sleep was something to confound those silent critics, that invisible army of psychiatrists whose words he had read but never yet heard, and who would, he suspected, categorise him disagreeably. Which was absurd. Neurotic people don’t sleep well, nor do hysterics. Arthur knew he was a perfectly normal man who happened (like all normal men) to have a small peculiarity he was well able to keep under control.
He was always the last to leave for work and the first to get home. This was because the others all worked further afield than he. Jonathan Dean went first. He left at five past eight while Arthur was still in his bath. This Monday morning his room door was slammed so loudly that the bath water actually rocked about like tea in a joggled cup. The front door also crashed shut. Arthur dried himself and, for decency’s sake, put on his towelling robe before washing down bath, basin, and floor. As soon as he was dressed, he opened his own front door and left it on the latch.
The Kotowskys burst out of their flat while he was pouring out his cornflakes. As usual, they were quarrelling.
