by Ruth Rendell
He was a little disappointed because she hadn’t dressed up for him. “I’m not expecting anyone. What made you think so?”
She raised eyebrows that were perfect arcs, black crescents above white moons. “You wouldn’t come to me. Oh, I see. You’re so fond of this exquisite little room with all its antiques and its lovely view of an old-world cellar that you can’t bear to leave it. Do you know, that lampshade looks exactly like a Portuguese Man o’ War?”
He laughed. “I knew it was a jellyfish but I didn’t know what kind. The fact is, I may be going to get a phone call.”
“Ah.”
“Not ‘ah’ at all.” Anthony put the kettle on, set out cups. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. But now you tell me about you.”
“Nothing much to tell. I’m twenty-nine, born in Kingston. Jamaica, not the By-pass. I came here with my parents when I was eighteen. Trained as a social worker here in Kenbourne. Married a doctor.” She looked down at her lap, retrieved a fallen gold pin. “He died of cancer three years ago.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Yes.” She took the cup of coffee Anthony gave her. “Now you,” she said.
“Me? I’m the eternal student.” As he said it, he remembered it was Helen who had dubbed him so, quoting apparently from some Chekhov play. She wasn’t going to phone back. Not now. He began telling Linthea about his thesis, but took his notes gently from her when she started to read them. That sort of thing—For his actions, cruelty to children and animals, even murder, he feels little, if any, guilt. His guilt is more likely to be felt over his failure to perform routine or compulsive actions which are, taken in the context of benefit to society, virtually meaningless—no, that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about tonight Pity there wasn’t a sofa in the room but just the tweed-patched fireside chair and the upright chairs and the thing he thought was called a pouffe. He sat on that because he could surreptitiously, and apparently artlessly, edge it closer and closer to her. He had got quite close, and quite close too, to unburdening himself about his whole disillusionment over the Helen affair, when there came a sharp rap on the door.
Phone for him. Come to think of it, he wouldn’t be able to hear the phone bell in here.… He flung the door open. On the threshold stood the new occupant of Room 3, a tall, handsome man who looked rather like Muhammad Ali.
“I’m extremely sorry to disturb you,” said Winston Mervyn in impeccable academic English quite different from Linthea’s warm sun-filled West Indian. He held out a small cruet. “I wonder if you would be so kind as to lend me a little salt?”
“Sure,” said Anthony. “Come in.” No phone call. Of course he hadn’t given her the number. He remembered quite clearly now.
Winston Mervyn came in. He walked straight up to Linthea who—if this is possible in a Negress—had turned pale. She half rose. She held out her hand and said:
“This is unbelievable. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“It is not,” said the visitor, “entirely a coincidence. The salt was a ploy. I saw you come to the door.”
“Yes, but to be living here and in this house …” Linthea broke off. “We knew each other in Jamaica, Anthony. We haven’t met for twelve years.”
10
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On the doormat lay three letters for Winston Mervyn, a bill for Brian Kotowsky, and the mauve-grey envelope from Bristol addressed to Anthony Johnson. Arthur, holding it in his hand, speculated briefly as to its contents. Had the woman decided to leave her husband or to stay with him? But he couldn’t summon up much interest in it, for he was obsessed to the exclusion of all else by his need to secure absolute private possession of the cellar.
It had been frosty, the night preceding November 5, and a thick white rime stuck like snow to walls and railings and doorsteps. The yellow leaves which clogged the gutters were each edged with a tinsel rim. He put his hand to Grainger’s gate and found that it was already unlocked. For once, Barry was in before him. Arthur saw him over by a load of timber, about to set a match to a jumping cracker.
“Stop that,” Arthur said in a chilly, carrying voice. “D’you want to set the place on fire?”
He let himself into the office. Barry came and stood sulkily in the doorway.
“When I was your age I’d have been severely punished if I’d so much as touched a firework.”
Barry blew an orange bubble gum bubble. “What’s pissing you off this morning?”
“How dare you use such language!” Arthur thundered. “Get out of here. Go and make a cup of tea.”
“What, at half nine?”
“Do as you’re told. When I was your age I’d have thought myself lucky to have got a cup of tea in the morning.”
When I was your age … Looking out of the window at the white desolation, Arthur thought of that lost childhood of his. Would he have been punished for touching a firework? Perhaps, by the time he was Barry’s age, he had already been deterred from doing anything so obviously venal. Yes, he had been strictly brought up, but he had no quarrel with the strict upbringing of children.
“Until you are grown up, Arthur,” Auntie Gracie used to say, “I am the master of this house.”
Laxity on her part might have led to his growing up weak, slovenly, heedless about work and punctuality. And a greater freedom would have been bad for him. Look what he did with freedom when he had it—things which would, if unchecked, deprive him of freedom altogether. Like the incident with Mrs. Goodwin’s baby … But before he could dwell on that one, Barry had come in with the tea.
“You seen that bonfire they’re going to have on the bit of ground?”
“I like my tea in my cup, not in my saucer,” said Arthur. “No, I cannot say I have seen it. Who might ‘they’ be?”
“People, kids, I don’t know. It’s a bleeding great pile of wood they got there. I reckon it’ll be the best fire in Kenbourne. It’s no good you looking out of the window, it’s right up against them fences in Brasenose.”
Arthur sipped his tea. “Let us hope there won’t be any catastrophes. I imagine the fire brigade will have a busy night of it. Now when you’ve finished helping yourself to Mr. Grainger’s sugar, perhaps you’ll condescend to empty my wastepaper basket.”
A formidable pile of correspondence awaited him. He began opening envelopes carefully. Once, hurrying, he had torn a cheque for a large sum in half. But this morning a proper concentration was almost impossible to achieve. He knew, from the images which kept moving in procession across his mental eye, from memories arising out of a past he had been used to think eradicated, from the pressure and buzzing in his head, that he was reaching the end of his tether.
Those images included, of course, dead faces; that of Auntie Gracie, those of the two girls. He saw the mouse, stiff, stretched, bloody. And now he saw the baby and heard again its screams.
Auntie Gracie had been minding that baby for its mother. There had been some sick relative, Arthur remembered, whom Mrs. Goodwin was obliged to visit.
“If I have to pop out to the shops,” Auntie Gracie had said, “Arthur will be here”—and with a loaded look—“it will be good for Arthur to be placed in a position of trust.”
Once she was out of the house, he had gone and stood over the baby, scrutinising it with curious desire. It was about six months old, fat, fast asleep. He withdrew the covers, lifted the woolly jacket it wore, and still it didn’t wake. A napkin, white and fleecy, secured with a large safety pin, was now visible above its leggings. Safety was a strange word to apply to so obviously dangerous a weapon. Arthur removed the pin and, taut now with joy and power, thrust it up to its curled hilt into the baby’s stomach. The baby woke with a shattering scream and a great bubble of scarlet blood welled out as he removed the pin. For a while he listened to its screams, watching it and exulting, watching its wide agonised mouth and the tears which washed down its red face. He watched and listened. Auntie Gracie was away at the shops quite a long time. Fortunately. He had to make
things right to avoid her anger. Fortunately, too, the pin seemed to have struck no vital part. He changed the napkin which was now wet with urine as well as blood, washed it—how Auntie Gracie had congratulated him and approved of that!—and by the time she returned the baby was only crying piteously as babies do cry, apparently for no reason.
No harm ever came to the baby. It was, he supposed, a man in his mid-thirties by now. Nor had he or Auntie Gracie ever been blamed for the wound, if indeed that wound had ever been discovered. But he was glad for himself that he had known Auntie Gracie wouldn’t be long away, for where else, into how many more vulnerable soft parts would he have stuck that pin had the baby been his for hours? No, she had been his guardian angel and his protectress, succeeded at her death by that other protectress, his patient white lady, garbed in her clothes.…
By one o’clock he hadn’t replied to a single letter. Perhaps, when he had a good lunch inside him … He put on his overcoat of silver-grey tweed, a shade lighter than his steel-grey silk tie, which he tightened before leaving the office until it stood out like an arch of metal. On his way to the Vale Café, he paused for a moment to view the stacked wood. The pile stood some fifteen feet high and someone had flanked it with a pair of trestle tables. Arthur shook his head in vague, undefined disapproval. Then he walked briskly to the café, having an idea that the crisp air, inhaled rhythmically, would clear his pulsing head.
Returning, he was accosted by a young woman in a duffel coat who was collecting information for a poll. Arthur gave her his name and address, told her that he supported the Conservative Party, was unmarried; he refused to give his age but gave his occupation as a quantity surveyor. She took it all down and he felt a little better.
Grainger’s correspondence still awaited him and, thanks to his idleness of the morning, it looked as if he might have to stay late to get it all done. During the winter, when dusk had come by five, he liked to leave the office promptly at that hour. The streets were crowded then and he could get home, safe and observed, before dark. But he comforted himself with the thought that the streets would be crowded till all hours tonight. Already he could see flashes of gold and scarlet and white fire shooting into the pale and still sunlit sky.
But from a perverse wish to see the evening’s festivities spoiled, he hoped for rain and went outside several times to study the thermometer. There had been a few clouds overhead at lunchtime. Since then the clouds had shrunk and shivered away as if chilled out of existence by the increasing cold, for the red column of liquid in the thermometer had fallen steadily from 37 to 36 to 35 until now, at five-thirty, it stood at 29 degrees.
The sun had scarcely gone when stars appeared in the blue sky, as hard and clear as a sheet of lapis. And the stars remained, bright and eternal, while those false meteors shot and burst into ephemeral galaxies. Arthur pulled down the blind so that he could no longer see them, though he could hear the voices and the laughter of those who were arriving for the bonfire and the feast.
At ten past six he completed his last letter and typed the address. Then, leaving his replies in the Out tray for Barry to post in the morning, he put on his overcoat, gave yet another tug to his tie, and left the office. He locked the gates. The Guy Fawkes celebrants were making what Arthur thought of as a most unseemly din. He came out into Magdalen Hill and approached the wire netting fence.
A small crowd of home-going commuters were already gathered there. Arthur meant to walk past, but curiosity mixed with distaste and some undefined hope of disaster, impelled him to join them.
The tables had been laid with paper cloths on which were arranged mountains of sandwiches, bread rolls, hot dogs, and bowls of soup. The steam from this soup hung on the air. There were, Arthur estimated, about a hundred people present, mostly children, but many women and perhaps half a dozen men. All were wrapped in windcheaters or thick coats with scarves. Already the grass was frosted and their boots made dark green prints on the frost. The lights in the houses behind shed a steady orange refulgence over the moving figures, the silvered grass, the ponderous mountain of wood, the whole Breughel-like scene.
One of the women brought to the stacked woodpile a box barrow filled with potatoes which she tipped out These, Arthur supposed, were to be roasted in the embers of the fire. And very nasty they would taste, he thought, as he saw a man—a black man, they all looked the same to him—tip paraffin over wood and cardboard and paper and then splash it over the guy itself. The guy, he had to admit, was a masterpiece, if you cared for that sort of thing, a huge, lifelike figure dressed in a man’s suit with a papier-mâché mask for a face and a big straw hat on its head. He was about to turn away, sated and half disgusted with the whole thing, when he saw something—or someone—that held him frozen and excited where he stood. For a man had come out of the crowd with a box of matches in his hand, a tall man with a blaze of blond hair hanging to the collar of his leather jacket, and the man was Anthony Johnson.
Arthur didn’t question what he was doing there or how he had come to be involved in this childish display. He realised only that no man can be in two places at once. If Anthony Johnson was here—from the way the children cheered, an evident master of ceremonies—he couldn’t also be at 142 Trinity Road. It looked as if he would be here for hours, and during those hours the cellar would be private and unobserved. It would be dark and very cold, solitudinous but, on this night of sporadic violent sound, sufficiently within the world to touch his fantasy with a greater than usual measure of reality.
A kind of joy that was both intense and languid filled his whole being. Until that moment he had hardly realised to the full how insistently urgent his need for the woman in the cellar was. None of his dreams, none of his frustration, had brought it home to him as the sight of Anthony Johnson, striking his first match, applying it to the timber, now did. But as he savoured his anticipation and felt it mount, he knew he must let it mount to its zenith. He had time, a lot of time. The culmination and the release would be all the greater for being sensuously deferred.
He stood there, trembling again but now with ecstasy. And he had no fear of the dark or its temptations. Happiness, contentment, was in watching Anthony Johnson apply match after match to that stack of wood until the flames began to leap, to crackle and to roar through the pyramid. As the fire became established, a sheet of it licking the feet of the guy, the first fireworks went off. A rocket rose in a scream of sparks, and along the fence, under the supervision of the black man, a child ignited the first in a long row of Catherine wheels. One after another they rotated in red and yellow flames. And those paler, stronger flames climbed across the guy’s legs, shooting long tongues across the black suit in which it was clothed, until they leapt to its face and head, spitting through its eye sockets, catching the straw hat and roaring through its crown.
The hat toppled off. The suit burned and fell away. There was a grotesque indecency in the way white limbs, long and smooth and glossy, lashed from under the burning material until the fire caught them and began to consume them also. Arthur came closer to the wire. His hands gripped the rusty cold wire. The mask was now a glowing mass that flew suddenly from the face and rose like a firework itself before eddying in sparks to the ground. A child screamed and its mother pulled it clear.
The flames teased the naked face. It wasn’t a man’s face but a woman’s, pale, blank, even beautiful in its utter dead calm expressionlessness. It seemed to move and come closer to Arthur until he could see nothing, no people, no cascading colour, no smoke, nothing but that familiar and beloved face. Then it was still and calm no longer. It arched back as if in parody of those burned at the stake. The great rent under its chin opened, gaped wide like a razor-made slash, and the fire took it, bursting with a hiss through the tear and roasting with a kind of lust the twisted face.
His white lady, his Auntie Gracie, his guardian angel …
11
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The house at 142 Trinity Road was unlit, every street-overlookin
g window a glaze of blackness between dim drifts of curtain. The curtains on the top floor shimmered whitely like the lacy ball gowns of women who wait in vain to be asked to dance. Inside the house there was total, breathless silence. Arthur, leaning against the banisters, his hot forehead against cold smooth wood, thought he had never known it so silent—no tap of heels, no soft giggles, mutter of words, whistle of kettles, trickle of water, throb of heaters, thud of door, heartbeat of life. It was as if it had retreated into sleep, but the sleep of an animal which is awakened at once by the smallest sound or movement. He could awaken the house by going upstairs and setting in motion all the processes of a routine evening. He could switch lights on, fill his kettle, turn on the television, turn down his bed, close the bedroom window—and look down into that court, at last unlighted, but dispossessed for ever of its lure.
Rage seized him. He put on the hall light and took a few steps towards the door of Room 2. To destroy property was foreign to his nature, property was what he respected, but now if he could get into that room, he would, he thought, destroy Anthony Johnson’s books. One after another he pulled open the drawers in Stanley Caspian’s desk. Stanley had been known to leave duplicate keys lying about there, but they were empty now of everything except screwed-up pieces of paper and bits of string. Yet he must have revenge, for he had no doubt that Anthony Johnson had performed an act of revenge against him. All these weeks Anthony Johnson had been harbouring against him a grudge—hadn’t everything in his behaviour shown it?—because he had opened that letter from the council. Now it was his turn, he who had done his best to make amends. Now some act must be performed of like magnitude. But what?
Turning away from the desk and the door of Room 2, his eye fell on the hall table. Something seemed to clutch at his chest, squeezing his ribs. All the letters were still there, undisturbed; the bill for Brian Kotowsky, the official-looking correspondence for Winston Mervyn, the mauve-grey envelope from Bristol for Anthony Johnson. No one had returned to the house since that morning, no one had removed a letter. Arthur put his hand over the Bristol envelope, covering it. A light, constant tremor animated his hand, a tremor that had been there, electrifying his hands and his body with a delicate, frenetic throb from the moment he had witnessed that fire and its consequences. Blood beat in his head as if it were feeding an engine.
