by Ruth Rendell
He thought now of the telephone call he had overheard. “Your next letter’s our last chance.…” Her next letter. It lay under his trembling hand. Arthur lifted it up, holding it by its edge as if its centre were red-hot. Words of Auntie Gracie’s trickled across his brain.
“Other people’s correspondence is sacrosanct, Arthur. To open someone else’s letter is the action of a thief.”
But she was gone from him, never more to guard him, never more to watch and save.… He ripped open the envelope, splitting it so savagely that it tore into two pieces. He pulled the letter out. It was typewritten, not on mauve-grey paper but on flimsy such as is used for duplicates, and the machine was an Adler Standard like the one in his office at Grainger’s.
Darling Tony, I think I’ve changed a lot since I spoke to you. Perhaps I’ve grown up. Suddenly I realised when you put the phone down that you were right, I can’t hover and play this insane double game any more. It came quite clearly to me that I have to choose directly between you and Roger. I would have called you back then and there, but I don’t know your number—isn’t that absurd? I only know your landlord’s got a name like a river or a sea.
I have chosen, Tony. I’ve chosen you, absolutely and finally. For ever? I hope so. But I promised for ever once before, so I’m chary of making that vast dreadful promise again. But I will leave Roger and I will marry you if you still want me.
Don’t be angry, I haven’t told Roger yet. I’m afraid, of course I am, but it isn’t only that. I can’t tell him I’m leaving him without having anywhere to go or anyone to go to. All you have to do for me to tell him is to write—write to me at work—and let me know where and when to meet you. If my letter gets to you by Tuesday, you should be able to get yours to me by Friday at the latest. Of course, what I really mean is I want word from you that you aren’t too disgusted with me to need me any more. I will do whatever you say. Command me.
Tony, forgive me. I have played fast and loose with you like “a right gypsy.” But no longer. We could be together by Saturday. Say we will be and I will come even if I have to run from Roger in my nightdress. I will be another Mary Stuart and follow you to the ends of the earth in my shift. I love you. H.
Arthur felt a surge of power. Just as the control of his destiny, his peace, had lain in Anthony Johnson’s hands, so the other man’s now lay in his. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Anthony Johnson had taken away his white lady; now he would take from Anthony Johnson his woman, rob him as he had been robbed of his last chance.
He screwed up the letter and envelope and thrust them into his pocket. He walked down the hall and came to the foot of the stairs. How terrible and beautiful the silence was! With something like anguish, he thought of the cellar, unguarded, unwatched. Wasn’t it possible he could still get some relief from it, from its atmosphere that had fed his fantasy, from an imagination that could still perhaps provide, furnishing her absence with vision and empty air with flesh? He turned off the light, left the house and made his way down the side passage. But he had no torch, only a box of matches in his pocket. One of these he lit as he passed through the first and second rooms. He lit another and in its flare saw the heap of clothes on the floor, Auntie Gracie’s dress, the bag, the shoes, and scattered all of them like so much trash as if they had never clothed a passion.
It was the death of a fantasy. His imagination shrivelled, and he was just an embittered man in a dirty cellar looking at a pile of old clothes. The match burned down in his fingers; its flame caught the box which suddenly flared into a small brilliant fire. Arthur dropped it, stamped on it. He caught his breath on a sob in the darkness, stumbled back through the thick darkness, feeling his way to the steps.
Through the passage to the front he walked. He turned to the right, crossed the grass, set his foot on the bottom step. Like others before him, he would have been safe if he had not paused and looked back. The mouth of the dark opened and called him. The jaws of darkness received him, the streets received him, taking him into their arteries like a grain of poison.
The tables were bare, the fire had burned out, and the only fireworks which remained were those sparklers which are safe for children to hold in their hands. Only they and the stars now glittered over the frosty, debris-scattered ground. Linthea had stacked her crockery into the barrow and now, having collected her son and Steve, left them with a wave and one of her radiant smiles.
Anthony and Winston Mervyn began dismantling the trestle tables which they would return to All Souls’ hall. The last of the fire, a fading glow, dying into handfuls of dust, held enough heat to warm them as they worked. Winston, who seemed preoccupied, said something in a language Anthony recognised for what it was, though the words were unintelligible.
“What did you say?”
Winston laughed and translated. “Look at the stars, my star. Would I were the heavens that I might look at you with many eyes.”
“Amazing bloke, you are. I suppose you’ll turn out to be a professor of Greek.”
“I thought of doing that,” Winston said seriously, “but there’s more money in figures than in Aristotle. I’m an accountant.” Anthony raised his eyebrows but he didn’t say what he wanted to, why was an accountant living at that grotty hole in Trinity Road? “Easy does it,” said Winston. “You take that end and I’ll go ahead.”
They carried the tables up Magdalen Hill and along Balliol Street. A Roman candle, ignited outside the Waterlily, illuminated in a green flash the cavelike interior of Oriel Mews. Anthony, walking behind Winston, realised that although he had been told what Winston had quoted, he hadn’t been told why he chose to quote it. All Souls’ caretaker took the tables from them, and Winston suggested a drink in the Waterlily. Anthony said all right but he’d like to go home first as he was expecting an important letter.
A hundred and forty-two was a blank, dark smudge in a street of lighted houses. Winston went in first. He picked up his letters from the table. There was nothing for Anthony. Well, Helen’s letter didn’t always come on a Tuesday. It would come tomorrow.
“That’s more like it,” said Winston. “I might get along and look at that tomorrow.” He passed a printed sheet to Anthony, who saw it was an estate agent’s specification of a house in North Kenbourne, the best part. The price was twenty thousand pounds.
“You’re a mystery,” he said.
“No, I’m not. Because I’m coloured you expect me to be uneducated, and because I live here you expect me to be poor.”
Anthony opened his mouth to say this was neither true nor fair, but he knew it was, so he said, “I reckon I do. Sorry.”
“I came to live here because my firm moved to London and now I’m looking for a house to buy.”
“You’re not married, are you?”
“Oh no, I’m not married,” said Winston. “Let’s go, shall we?”
Going out, they met Brian Kotowsky coming in.
“You look thirsty,” said Brian. “Me, I’m always thirsty. How about going across the road and seeing if we can find an oasis?”
There was no way of getting rid of him. He trotted along beside them, talking peevishly of Jonathan Dean, whom, he said, he hadn’t seen since the other man moved away. This was because Jonathan and Vesta disliked each other. Brian was positive Jonathan had phoned, but Vesta had always taken the calls and refused to tell him out of spite. They walked through the mews which smelt of gunpowder and entered the Waterlily just before nine o’clock.
In another public house, the Grand Duke, in a distant part of Kenbourne, Arthur sat alone at a table, drinking brandy. A small brandy with a splash of soda. When first he had set out on this nocturnal walk he had been terrified—of himself. But gradually that fear had been conquered by the interest of the streets, by the changes which had come to them, by the squalid glitter of them, by the lonely places at which alley mouths and mews arches and paths leading to little yards hinted like whispers in the dark. He hadn’t forgotten, in twenty years, the geography of th
is place where he had been born. And how many of the warrens, the labyrinths of lanes twisting across lanes, still remained behind new, soaring façades! The air was smoky, acrid with the stench of fireworks, but now, at half-past nine, there were few people about. It excited Arthur to find himself, during that long walk, often the only pedestrian in some wide, empty space, lividly lighted, swept by car lights, yet sprawled over with shadows and bordered with caverns and passages penetrating the high frowning walls.
The pattern, twice before experienced, was repeating itself without his volition. On both those previous occasions he had walked aimlessly or with an unadmitted aim; on both he had entered a pub; on both ordered brandy because brandy was the one alcoholic drink he knew. Auntie Gracie had always kept some in the house for medicinal purposes. Sipping his brandy, feeling the unaccustomed warmth of it move in his body, he began to think of the next repetition in the pattern.…
12
————
There were strangers in the Waterlily, men with North Country accents wearing green and yellow striped football scarves. Brian Kotowsky struck up acquaintance with one of them, a fat, meaty-faced man called Potter, and that would have suited Anthony very well, enabling him to discuss houses and house-buying with Winston, but Brian kept calling him “Tony, old man” and trying hard to include him in the conversation with Potter. Before Helen’s tuition, Anthony wouldn’t have noticed the way greenish-ginger hairs grew out of Potter’s ears and nostrils, nor perhaps been able to define Potter’s smell, a mixture of onions, sweat, whisky, and menthol. But he would have known Potter was very drunk. Potter had one arm round Brian’s shoulders and, having listened to the saga of Jonathan Dean’s defection and Vesta’s knack of losing her husband all his friends, he said:
“Rude to him, was she?” He had a flat West Riding accent. “And he were rude to her? Pickin’ on her like? Ay, I get the picture.”
“You’ve got one of her kind yourself, have you?”
“Not me, lad. I never made mistake of putting my head in the noose. But I’ve kept my eyes open. When a woman’s rude to a man and he’s rude to her, it means but one thing. He fancies her and she fancies him.”
“You have to be joking,” said Brian.
“Not me, lad. You mark my words, you haven’t set eyes on him because him and your missus is out somewhere now being rude.” And Potter gave a great drunken guffaw.
“I’m going,” said Anthony. “I’m fed up with this place.” He got to his feet and glanced at Winston who replaced the specifications in their envelopes.
They turned into the mews and were very soon aware that Brian and Potter were following close behind them. It was a little after ten.
“This is going to be splendid,” said Winston in his cool, precise way. “They’ll be drinking and rioting next door to me half the night.”
But as it happened, Potter was unable to make the stairs. He sat down on the bottom step and began to sing a bawdy agricultural ballad about giving some farmer’s daughter the works of his threshing machine. Anthony had noticed that Li-li wasn’t in and that all the upstairs lights were off. That meant Arthur Johnson must already be in bed. Sound asleep too, he hoped.
“You’d better get him out of here,” he said to Brian. “He’s your friend.”
“Friend? I never saw him before in my life, Tony old man.” Brian had brought a half-bottle of vodka back with him from the off-licence and this he raised to his lips, drinking it neat. “Where am I supposed to put him? Out in the street? He comes from Leeds.”
“Then he can go back there. On the next train out of King’s Cross.”
Brian looked helplessly at Potter, who was humming now and conducting an imaginary orchestra. “He doesn’t want to go back there. He’s come down for tomorrow’s match.”
“What Goddamned match?” said Anthony, who rarely swore. “What the hell are you on about?” He knew nothing of football and cared less.
“Leeds versus Kenbourne Kingmakers.” Brian waved his bottle at Anthony. “Want some Russian rotgut? O.K., be like that. I’d never have brought him here if I’d known he was that pissed. I suppose we couldn’t put him in your …?”
“No,” said Anthony, but as he was about to add something rude and to the point, Potter staggered to his feet and waved his arms, swivelling his head about.
“He wants the lavatory,” said Winston. He took Potter’s arm and propelled him down the passage. Anthony unlocked the door of Room 2 and, without waiting to be asked, Brian followed him in and sat down on the bed. He was flushed and truculent.
“I didn’t like what he was insinuating about Vesta.”
“He doesn’t know her,” Anthony said. “What’s the use of listening to stupid generalisations about behaviour? They’re always wrong.”
“You’re a real pal, Tony, the best pal a man ever had.”
The lavatory flush went, and Winston came in with Potter who looked pale and smelt even worse than in the pub. Potter sat down in the fireside chair and lay back with his mouth open. Outside a rocket going off made them all jump except Potter, who began to snore.
“Give him half an hour,” said Winston, “then we’ll get some black coffee into him. In my ambulance-driving days I saw a lot of them like that.”
“You’ve crowded a lot into your life,” said Anthony. “Greek, accountancy, a bit of medical training. You’ll be telling me you’re a lawyer next.”
“Well, I did read for the bar but I was never called,” said Winston, and, taking Ruch’s Psychology and Life from the bedside table, he was soon immersed in it.
“I didn’t like what he said about my wife,” said Brian. The vodka bottle was half empty. He glared at Potter and gave one of his shoulders a savage shake. Potter sat up, groaned, and staggered off once more to the lavatory. “He shouldn’t have said that about Jonathan. Jonathan’s the best friend I ever had.”
Winston looked at him severely over the top of his book. “Make some coffee,” he snapped. “Get on with it. You need it as much as he does.”
Brian obeyed, whimpering like a little dog. He put the kettle on while Anthony got out coffee and sugar. Feeling suddenly tired, Anthony sat on the floor because there wasn’t anywhere else to sit, and closed his eyes. The last thing he noticed before he fell into a doze was that Brian was crying, the tears trickling down his sagging red cheeks.
Arthur went into the gents, where he tore the Bristol letter into small pieces and flushed them down the pan. There was a finality in this act which both pleased and frightened him. No going back now, no possibility of restoring the letter with another explanatory note. The deed was done and his revenge accomplished. Would the knowledge of that be sufficient to sustain him till he was home again? Could he get home in safety? As he emerged once more into the cocktail bar, the fear of himself began to return. But all the same, he bought another small brandy. He was deferring his departure from the Grand Duke until the last possible moment. It was twenty minutes to eleven. In his absence, someone had taken his seat and he was obliged to stand in a corner by the glass partition which divided this section from the saloon. The glass was frosted but with a flower pattern on it of clear glass. Glancing through a clear space, the shape of a petal, Arthur saw a familiar profile some three or four yards away.
Fortunately, it was the profile and not the full face of Jonathan Dean that he saw, for he was sure Dean hadn’t seen him. He moved away quickly, elbowing through the crowd. Dean’s mouth had been flapping like the clapper of a briskly rung handbell, so he was obviously talking to an unseen person. Very likely, unseen people. Brian Kotowsky and maybe Anthony Johnson and that black man as well. Birds of a feather flock together. He must get out.
It was only when he was out in the street that he questioned that compulsion of his. If he meant to go straight home, what did it matter who saw him or what witnesses there were to his absence from 142 Trinity Road? Or didn’t he mean to go straight home, but to wander the streets circuitously, the pressure in his hea
d mounting, until the last permutation of the pattern was achieved? Arthur shivered. There was a bus stop a few yards down the High Street from the Grand Duke, but he didn’t want a bus which would take him no nearer Trinity Road than the Waterlily. A taxi, on the other hand, would deposit him at his door.
Taxis came down this way, he knew, returning to the West End after dropping a fare in North Kenbourne. But the minutes passed and none came. Ten to eleven. Soon the Grand Duke would close and disgorge its patrons onto the pavement. On the opposite side of the street Arthur could see the edge of the thickly treed mass of Radclyffe Park. Its main gate was closed, but the little iron kissing gate, the entry to a footpath which skirted the park, couldn’t be closed. He saw a woman pass through this gate, her shadow, before she entered the dark path, streaming across the lighted pavement. His heart squeezed and he clenched his hands. Maureen Cowan, Bridget O’Neill …
At last a taxi appeared. He hailed it feverishly and asked the driver for Trinity Road.
“Where might Trinity Road be?”
Arthur told him.
“Sorry, mate. I’m going back to town and then I’m going to my bed. I’ve been at the wheel of this vehicle since nine this morning, and enough is enough.”
“I shall note down your number,” Arthur said shrilly. “You’re obliged to take me. I shall report you to the proper authority.”
“Screw you and the proper authority,” said the driver, and moved off.
The last K.12 bus would pass at two minutes to eleven. Arthur decided he had no choice but to get on it, but at the Waterlily stop avoid Oriel Mews and walk home by the bright lighted way of Magdalen Hill. Yet it took all his self-control to remain at that bus stop and not set off on foot, to take the way the woman had taken or to follow the serpentine course of Radclyffe Lane which, passing at one point between acres of slum-cleared land, at another between terraces of squat houses and mean little shops, at last came to the hospital, the bridge, and the grey-grassed embankment of Isembard Kingdom Brunel’s railway. But as the temptation to do this became intolerable, the K.12 appeared over the brow of the rise from the direction of Radclyffe College.
