by Ruth Rendell
Brian looked hurt but he made no response. “They never caught the chap. He struck again”—he employed the journalese quite unconsciously as if it were standard usage—“five years later. That time it was a student nurse called Bridget Something. Irish girl. He strangled her on a bit of open ground between the hospital and the railway bridge. Now would he be a psychopath, Tony?”
“I suppose so. Was it the same man both times?”
“The cops thought so. But there were never any more murders—not unsolved ones, I mean. Now why, Tony, would you say that was?”
“Moved out of the district,” said Anthony, who was getting bored. “Or died,” he added, for he had been less than a year old when that first murder was committed.
“Could have been in prison for something else,” said Brian. “Could have been in a mental home. I’ve often wondered about that and whether he’ll ever come back and strike again.” He parked the car outside Jonathan’s new home. “What a dump! You could still change your mind, Jon old man. Move in with Vesta and me for a bit. Have our couch.”
“Christ,” said Jonathan. “There’s one born every minute.” He delivered this platitude as if it were a quotation, as perhaps, Anthony thought, it was.
They invited him to accompany them to the Grand Duke for an evening’s drinking, but Anthony refused. It was nearly five. He went home and read J. G. Miller’s doctoral dissertation: “Eyeblink Conditioning of Primary and Neurotic Psychopaths,” remembering at ten to put his clock and his watch back. It was the end of British Summertime.
Watching from his eyrie, his living-room window, Arthur saw the new tenant of Room 3 arrive on Sunday afternoon. At first he thought this must be some visitor, a disreputable friend perhaps of Li-li’s or Anthony Johnson’s, for he couldn’t recollect any previous tenant having arrived in such style. The man was as black as the taxi from which he alighted, and not only black of skin and hair. He wore a black leather coat which, even from that distance, Arthur could see had cost a lot of money, and he carried two huge black leather suitcases. To Arthur’s horrified eyes, he resembled some Haitian gangster-cum-political bigwig. He had seen such characters on television and he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that a couple of revolvers and a knife were concealed under that flashy coat.
Staying here obviously, but as whose guest? Arthur put his own front door on the latch and listened. The house door closed quietly, footsteps crossed the hall, mounted the stairs. He peeped out in time to see a sepia-coloured hand adorned with a plain gold signet ring insert a key in the lock of Room 3. He was incensed. Once again Stanley Caspian hadn’t bothered to tell him he’d let a room. Once again he had been slighted. For two pins he’d write a strongly-worded letter to Stanley, complaining of ill-usage. But what would be the use? Stanley would only say Arthur hadn’t given him the chance to tell him, and it was vain to grumble about the new man’s colour with this Race Relations Act restricting landlords the way it did.
On Tuesday Arthur learned his name. He took in the letters, a whole heap of them this morning. One for Li-li from Taiwan, sender Chan Ah Feng; two for Anthony Johnson, one postmarked York, the other, in a mauve-grey envelope, Bristol. Her letters, Arthur had noted, always came on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and were still addressed to A. Johnson Esq., 2/142 Trinity Road. Mrs. R. L. Johnson, however, had learned sense and put Room 2. All the other correspondence, five official-looking envelopes, was for Winston Mervyn Esq., 3/142 Trinity Road. Winston! The cheek of it, some West Indian grandchildren of slaves christening their son after the greatest Englishman of the century! It seemed to Arthur an added effrontery that this presumptuous black should receive letters so soon after his arrival—five letters to fill up the table and make him look important.
But he didn’t see the new tenant or hear a sound from him, though nightly he listened for voodoo drums.
As Anthony had expected, the departure of Jonathan Dean was the signal for Brian to put on the pressure. He was marked to succeed Jonathan, and evening after evening there came a knock on the door of Room 2 and a plaintive invitation to go drinking in the Lily.
“I do have to work,” Anthony said after the fourth time of asking. “Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
Brian gave him his beaten spaniel look. “I suppose the fact is you don’t like me. I bore you. Go on, you may as well admit it. I am a bore. I ought to know it by now, Vesta’s told me often enough.”
“Since you ask,” said Anthony, “yes, it’d bore me going out and getting pissed every night. And I can’t afford it.” He relented a little. “Come in here for a while tomorrow night, if you like. I’ll get some beer in.”
Brightening, Brian said he was a pal, and turned up at seven sharp on the Friday with a bottle of vodka and one of French vermouth which made Anthony’s six cans of beer look pathetic. He talked dolefully about his job—he sold antiques in a shop owned by Vesta’s brother—about the horrors of living always in furnished rooms, Vesta’s refusal to have children even if they got a house, her perpetual absences in the evenings—worse than ever this week—his drink problem, and did Anthony think he was an alcoholic?
Anthony let him talk, replying occasionally in monosyllables. He was thinking about Helen’s latest letter. It was all very well to talk of absence making the heart grow fonder, but “out of sight, out of mind” might be just as true a truism. He hadn’t expected her letters to concentrate quite so much on Roger’s woes. Roger had scarcely been mentioned during that summer of snatched meetings, that clandestine fortnight of love when a shadowy husband had been away somewhere on a business trip. Now it was Roger, Roger, Roger. I ask myself if it wouldn’t be better for both of us to try and forget each other. We could, Tony. Even I, whom you have called hyper-romantic, know that people don’t go on loving hopelessly for years. The Troilus and Cressida story may be beautiful but you and I know it isn’t real. We should get over it. You’d marry someone who is free and trouble-free and I’d settle down with Roger. I just don’t think I can face Roger’s misery and violence, and not just for a while but for months, years. I’d know for years that I’d ruined his life.… Stupid, Anthony thought. Illogical. He and she wouldn’t go on loving hopelessly for years, but Roger would. Of all the irrational nonsense …
He said “Yes” and “I see” and “That’s bad” for about the fiftieth time to Brian and then, because he couldn’t take any more, he bundled him out with his two half-empty bottles under his arm. Having drunk no more than a pint of beer himself, he set to work and was still writing at two in the morning. The coarse, talking-with-his-mouth-full voice of Stanley Caspian woke him at ten, and he waited until he and Arthur Johnson had gone before going to the bathroom. It was lucky he happened to be in the hall when Linthea Carville, her son, and Steve and David arrived, for it was Arthur Johnson’s bell they rang. Anthony saw them silhouetted behind the red and green glass and, making a mental note that sometime he must put his own name under his own bell, he went outside and took them round the back to the cellar. Linthea had brought a torch and two candles, and the boys had the box barrow. They didn’t take the barrow down but carried the wood up in armfuls.
He was impressed by Linthea’s strength. She had a perfect body, muscular, but curvy and lithe as well, and the jeans and sweater she wore did nothing to impede those graceful movements which he found himself watching with a slightly guilty pleasure.
“There’s more wood here than I thought,” he said hastily when he realised she was aware of his gaze. “We’ll have to make a second journey,” and he pushed the door as if to shut it.
“Don’t forget my boy’s still down there,” said Linthea. “They all are. And they’ve got your torch.”
The training they had in common had prevented them from falling into the adult trap of doing all the work themselves on the grounds that they could do it faster and more efficiently than the children. But once the barrow was filled, they had left the boys to explore the rest of the cellar. Linthea called out, “Leroy, where ar
e you?” and there came back a muffled excited call of “Mum!” which held in it a note of thrill and mischief.
David and Steve were sitting on an upturned box, the torch between them, in the first room of the cellar. They giggled when they saw Linthea. Carrying a candle, she went on through the second room, walking rather fastidiously between the banks of rubbish. Anthony was just behind her and when, at the entrance to the last and final room, her candle making the one tiny puddle of light in all that gloom, she stopped and let out a shriek of pure terror, he caught her shoulders in his hands.
Her fear was momentary. The shriek died away into a cascade of West Indian merriment, and she ran forward, shaking off Anthony’s hands, to catch hold of the boy who was hiding in a corner. Then and only then did he see what she had seen and which had sent that frightened thrill through her. As the candlelight danced, as the woman caught the laughing boy, the torch beam levelled from behind him by Steve, showed him the pale figure leaning against the wall, a black handbag hooked over one stiff arm.
“You wanted to give your poor mother a heart attack, I know you,” Linthea was saying, and the boy: “You were scared, you were really scared.”
“They were all in it,” said Anthony. “I wonder how on earth that thing came to be down here.”
He went up to the model, staring curiously at the battered face and the great rent in its neck. Then, hardly knowing why, he touched its cold smooth shoulders. Immediately his fingertips seemed again to remember the feel of Linthea’s fine warm flesh, and he realised how hungry he had been to touch a woman. There was something obscene about the figure in front of him, that dead mockery of femaleness with its pallid hard carapace as cold as the shell of a reptile and its attenuated unreal limbs. He wanted to knock it down and leave it to lie on the sooty floor, but he restrained himself and turned quickly away. The others were waiting for him, candles and torch accounted for, at the head of the steps.
9
————
November was the deadline Anthony had given Helen for making up her mind. It was nearly November now and he was due to make his phone call to her on Wednesday, October 30. The letter he had received from her on the previous Tuesday had dwelt less on Roger’s feelings and more on her own and his. In it she had written of her love for him and of their love-making so that, reading it, he had experienced that curious pit-of-the-stomach frisson that comes exclusively when nostalgia is evoked for a particular and well-remembered act of sex. With this in mind, he knew he would want to refer to it in their telephone conversation, would use it to reinforce his pressures on her, and he didn’t want that conversation overheard by the Kotowskys, Li-li Chan, or the new tenant of whom he had once or twice caught a glimpse.
Why not ask Linthea Carville if he could make the call from her flat? This seemed to have a twofold advantage. He would have complete privacy and, at the same time, the very making of such a request, involving as it would an explanation of his situation with Helen, would reinforce the friendship that was growing between Linthea and himself.
But by Tuesday, October 29, that situation had changed again. He retrieved Helen’s letter from under the huge pile of correspondence for Winston Mervyn which had fallen on top of it, and tore open the envelope only to be bitterly disappointed. On Wednesday when you phone I know you will ask me if I’ve come to a decision. Tony, I haven’t, I can’t. We have had a terrible weekend, Roger and I. First of all he started questioning me about my movements during that fortnight he was away in the States in June. I’d told him before that I’d spent one weekend with my sister and apparently he’s now found out from my brother-in-law that I was never there. He made a lot of threats and raved and sulked but in the evening he became terribly pathetic, came into my room after I’d gone to bed and began pouring out all his miseries, how he’d longed for years to marry me, served seven years like Jacob (of course he didn’t, I’m not old enough) and now he couldn’t bear to be frozen out of my life. This went on for hours, Tony. I know it’s blackmail but most people give in to blackmail, don’t they?
He was glad now he hadn’t made that request to Linthea. Hedging his bets? Maybe. But the West Indian girl had seemed more attractive to him than ever when he had had lunch with her and Leroy after they had collected the wood and when they had met again at the Tenants’ Association last Saturday afternoon. And if, as it would seem, he was going to lose Helen, be dismissed in favour of that sharpshooting oaf …? Was it so base not to want to jeopardise his chances with Linthea—her husband, at any rate, was nowhere in evidence—by making her think herself a second choice, a substitute?
Rather bitterly he thought that he didn’t now much care who overheard his phone call, for there would be no reminiscing over past love passages. One who wouldn’t overhear it, anyway, was Vesta Kotowsky who rushed past him in a floor-length black hooded cloak as he was coming up the station steps. He went to the kiosk and bought a box of matches with a pound note, thus ensuring a supply of tenpence pieces for his phone call. He was going to need them, all of them.
Her voice sounded nervous when she answered, but it was her voice, not heard for a month, and its effect on him was temporarily to take away his anger. That voice was so soft, so sweet, so civilised and gentle. He thought of the mouth from which it proceeded, heart-shaped with its full lower lip, and he let her talk, thinking of her mouth.
Then he remembered how crucial this talk was and what he must say. “I got your letter.”
“Are you very angry?”
“Of course I’m angry, Helen. I’m fed up. I think I could take it even if you decided against me. It’s probably true what you said in your other letter, that we’d forget each other in time. What I can’t take is being strung along and …” He broke off. The Kotowskys’ door opened and Brian came out. Brian started making signals to him, ridiculous mimes of raising an invisible glass to his lips. “Can’t,” Anthony snapped. “Some other night.”
Helen whispered, “What did you say, Tony?”
“I was talking to someone else. This phone’s in a very public place.” He shouted, “Oh, God damn it!” as the pips sounded. He shovelled in more money. “Helen, couldn’t you call me on this number? I’ll give it to you, it’s …”
She interrupted him with real fear in her voice. “No, please! I’ll have to explain it when the bill comes.”
He was silent. Then he said, “So you’re still going to be there when the bill comes?”
“Tony, I don’t know. I thought if you could come here at Christmas, stay in an hotel here, and we could see each other again and talk properly and I could make you understand how difficult …”
“Oh no!” he exploded. “Come for a week, I suppose, and see you for half an hour a day and maybe one evening if you can get out of jail? And at Easter perhaps? And in the summer? While you keep on vacillating and I keep on trying to understand. I won’t be any married woman’s lap dog, Helen.”
The pips went. He put in more money. “That was the last of my change,” he said.
“I do love you. You must know that”
“No, I don’t know it. And stop crying, please, because this is important. Your next letter is going to be very important, maybe the most important letter you’ll ever write. If you’ll come to me we’ll find a place to live and I’ll look after you and you needn’t be afraid of Roger because I’ll be with you. Roger will divorce you when he sees it’s no use and then we’ll get married. But your next letter’s your last chance. I’m fed up, I’m sick to death of being kicked around, and it’ll soon be too late.” Anger made him rash, that and the threat of the pips going again. “There are other women in the world, remember. And when I hear you tell me your husband’s so important to you that you’re afraid of him seeing phone bills three months hence, like someone in a bloody French farce, I wonder if it isn’t too late already!”
A sob answered him but it was cut off by the shrilling peep-peep-peep. He dropped the receiver with a crash, not bothering to say good-bye.
But in the silence he leant against the wall, breathing like someone who has run a race. In his hand was one last twopence piece. His breathing steadied, and on an impulse he dialled Linthea’s number.
As soon as she heard who it was she asked him round for coffee. Anthony hesitated. His conversation with Helen had become a jumble in his mind and he couldn’t remember whether he had given her this number or not. If he had and she phoned back …? No, he wouldn’t go to Linthea’s, but would Linthea come to him? She would, once she had got the upstairs tenant to listen for Leroy.
Arthur had overheard it all, or as much of phone conversations as a listener can hear. Because he hadn’t heard the women’s replies he wasn’t sure whether or not Anthony Johnson was going out. Please let him go out, he found himself praying. Perhaps to that God whose portrait with a crown of thorns hung in All Souls’ church hall where his Sunday school had been, though neither he nor Auntie Gracie had ever really believed in Him. Please let him go out.
But the light from Room 2 continued to illuminate the lichen-coated court. He heard the front door opened and closed and then he saw what he had never seen before, the shadows of two heads, one Anthony Johnson’s, the other sleekly crowned with a pin-pierced chignon, cast on the lighted stone. Arthur turned away, his whole body shaking. He threw back the pink floral eiderdown and seized the pillows one after the other in his hands, strangling them, digging his fingers into their softness, tossing them and grasping them again so savagely that his nails ripped a seam. But this brought him no relief and, after an excess of useless violence, he lay face downwards on the bed, weeping hot tears.
———
Linthea wore a long black wool skirt embroidered with orange flowers. The upper part of her body was covered with a yellow poncho and she had small gold pins in her hair.
“I dressed up,” she said, “because you’re expecting other guests. A party?”
