by Ruth Rendell
“Mrs. Garvist is taking a fortnight of her annual leave, Mr. Johnson.”
How readily the name came to him.… He had been forewarned. “In November? She can’t be.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you. She told you to say that, didn’t she?”
There was an astonished silence. Then the curator said, “I think the sooner we terminate this conversation the better,” and he put the receiver down.
Anthony sat on the stairs. It is very easy to become paranoid in certain situations, to believe that the whole world is against you. But what if the whole world, or those significant members of it, truly are against you? Why should Helen go away now in the cold tail end of the year? She would have mentioned something about it in her last letter if she had planned to go away. No, it wasn’t paranoid, it was only feasible to believe that, wanting no more of him, she had asked Le Queuex and the museum staff to deny her to a caller named Anthony Johnson. Of course they would co-operate if she said this was a man who was pestering her.…
“Kotowsky’s being cremated today,” said Stanley Caspian.
Arthur put the rent envelopes on the desk in front of him. “Locally?” he said.
“Up the cemetery. Don’t suppose there’ll be what you’d call a big turn-out. Mrs. Caspian says I ought to put in an appearance, but there are limits. Where did I put me bag of crisps, Arthur?”
“Here,” said Arthur, producing it with distaste from where it had fallen into the wastepaper basket.
“Poxy sort of day for a funeral. Eleven-thirty, they’re having it, I’m told. Still, I should worry. I’m laughing, Arthur, things are looking up. Two bits of good news I’ve got. One, the cops say I can relet Flat 1 at my convenience, which’ll be next week.”
“It could do with a paint. A face-lift, as you might say.”
“So could you and me, me old Arthur, but it’s not getting it any more than we are. I’ve no objection to the new tenant getting busy with a brush.”
“May I know your other piece of good news?”
“Reckon you’ll have to, but I don’t know how you’ll take it. Your rent’s going up, Arthur. All perfectly legal and above board, so you needn’t look like that. Up to four-fifty a year which’ll be another two quid a week in that little envelope, if you please.”
Arthur had feared this. He could afford it. He knew the Rent Act made provision for just such an increase in these hard times. But he wasn’t going to let Stanley get away with it totally unscathed. “No doubt you’re right,” he said distantly, “but I shall naturally have to go into the matter in my own interest. When you let me have the new agreement it would be wise for my solicitors to look at it.” As a parting shot he added, “I fear you won’t find it easy letting those rooms. Two violent deaths, you know. People don’t care for that sort of thing, it puts them off.”
He took his envelope and went upstairs, his equilibrium which had prevailed, though declining, for a week, now shaken. He hoped that any prospective tenants of the Kotowskys’ flat would come round while he was at home, in which case he would take care to let them know all. A gloomy day of thin fog and fine rain. Not enough rain, though, for his umbrella. The orange plastic bag of laundry in one hand, the shopping basket in the other, he set off for the launderette.
Mr. Grainger’s nephew’s wife promised to keep an eye on his washing and pleased Arthur by commenting favourably on the quality of his bed linen. He bought a Dover sole for lunch, a pound of sprouts, a piece of best end of neck for Sunday. The K.12 bus drew up outside the Waterlily and, on an impulse, Arthur got on it. It dropped him at the cemetery gates.
This was the old part, this end, a necropolis of little houses, the grey lichen-grown houses of the dead. Some years back a girl had been found dead in one of these tombs, a family vault. Arthur paused in front of the iron door which closed off the entrance to this cavern. He had been there before, had been inside, for the girl had been strangled and he had wondered if the police would regard her as the third of his victims, though he had been safe in those days with his white lady. Her murderer had been caught. He walked under the great statue of the winged victory, past the tomb of the Grand Duke who had given his name to the pub, on to the crematorium. The chapel door was closed. Arthur opened it diffidently.
A conversation seemed to be taking place inside, for what else can you call it when one man is speaking to one other? The man who was speaking was a clergyman and the man who was listening, sole member of that congregation, was Jonathan Dean. Brian Kotowsky had only one friend to mourn him. Music began to play, but it was Muzak really, as if the tape playing in a supermarket had suddenly taken a religious turn. The coffin, blanketed in purple baize, began to move, and silently the beige velvet curtains drew together. Brian Kotowsky, like Arthur’s white lady, had gone to the fire.
Arthur slipped out. He didn’t want to be seen. He walked back towards the gates along another path, much overgrown, this one, by brambles and the creeping ivy and long-leaved weeds the frost hadn’t yet killed. Droplets of water clung to stone and trembled on leaf and twig. Presently he came to the red granite slab on which was engraved: ARTHUR LEOPOLD JOHNSON, 1855–1921, MARIA LILIAN JOHNSON, 1857–1918, BELOVED WIFE OF THE ABOVE, GRACE MARIA JOHNSON, 1888–1955, THEIR DAUGHTER. BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHICH DIE IN THE LORD. No room for him there, no room for his mother, though perhaps she too was dead. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t come to Auntie Gracie’s funeral.…
In his best dark suit and new black tie, he had sat in the front room of the house in Magdalen Hill, reading the paper. The paper was full of some journalist’s theorising about the Kenbourne Killer and his latest victim. He had read it while he waited for the mourners, Uncle Alfred who had sent him the birthday postal orders, the Winters, Beryl’s mother, Mrs. Goodwin from next door. It was she who had told him of Auntie Grade’s death.
A cold Monday in March it had been. His bedroom was icy, but no one in his milieu and at that time thought of heating bedrooms. Auntie Gracie awakened him at seven-thirty—he never questioned why he should get up at seven-thirty when he only worked next door and didn’t have to be there till half-past nine-awakened him and left for him in the cold bathroom a jug of hot water for shaving. Then into clean underwear because it was Monday.
“If you keep yourself clean, Arthur, you don’t need clean underclothes more than once a week.”
But a fresh white shirt each day because a shirt goes on top and shows. Downstairs to the kitchen where the boiler was alight and the table laid for one. Since he became a man Auntie Gracie had put away childish things for him. She ate her breakfast before he came down and waited on him because he was now master of the house. A bowl of cornflakes, one egg, two rashers of collar bacon, it was always the same. And she had been just the same that morning, her grey hair in tight curls from the new perm she hadn’t yet combed out, dark skirt, lilac jumper, black and lilac crossover overall, slippers that were so hard and plain and unyielding that you would have thought them walking shoes.
“It looks like rain.” As he emptied a plate she took it and washed it. Between washing, she stood at the window, studying the sky above the rooftops in Merton Street. “You’d better take your umbrella.”
Once he had protested that he didn’t need an umbrella to walk twenty yards through light rain or a hat to withstand ten minutes’ chill or a scarf against the faintly falling snow. But now he knew better. By keeping silent he could avoid hearing the words that aroused in him impotent anger and shame: “And when you get ill like you were last time, I suppose you’ll expect me to work myself into the ground nursing you and waiting on you.”
So he kept silent and didn’t even attempt to argue that he might have spent a further hour in bed rather than on a stool in front of the boiler reading the paper. She bustled about the house, calling to him at intervals, “Ten to nine, Arthur,” “Nine o’clock, Arthur.” When he left, allowing himself ten minutes to walk next door, she came to
the front door with him and put up her cheek for a kiss. Arthur always remembered those kisses when, in his introspective moments, he reminded himself how happy their relationship had been. And he felt a savage anger against Beryl’s mother for a comment she had once made.
“You give that boy your cheek like you were showing the doctor a boil on your neck, Gracie.”
That morning he had kissed her in the usual way. Many times since he had wished he had allowed his lips to linger or had put an arm round her heavy shoulders. But thinking this way was a kind of fantasising, identifying with characters from films, for he had no idea how to kiss or embrace. And he blocked off the picture at this point because, after the image of that unimaginable closeness, came a frightening conclusion of the embrace, the only possible ending to it.…
At eleven, when he was doing Grainger’s accounts in the room at the side of the works—no little cedarwood and glass office in those days—Mr. Grainger had walked in with Mrs. Goodwin. He could see them now, Mr. Grainger clearing his throat, Mrs. Goodwin with tears on her face. And then the words: “Passed away … her heart … fell down before my eyes … gone, Arthur. There was nothing anyone could do.”
Someone had been in and laid her out. Arthur wouldn’t let the undertakers take the body till the following day. He knew what was right. The first night after death you watched by the dead. He watched. He thought of all she had done for him and what she had been—mother, father, wife, counsellor, housekeeper, sole friend. The large-featured face, waxen and calm, lay against a clean white pillowcase. He yearned towards her, wanting her back—for what? To be better than he had been? To please her as he had never pleased her? To explain or ask her for explanation? He didn’t think it was for any of those things, and he was afraid to touch her, afraid even to let one of his cold fingers rest against her colder cheek. The hammering in his head was strong and urgent.
Not for nearly six years had he been out alone at night But at half-past nine he went out, leaving Auntie Gracie on her own.
He slipped through the passage into Merton Street and then he walked and walked, far away to a pub where they wouldn’t know him—the Hospital Arms.
There he drank two brandies. A stretch of weed-grown bomb site separated the hospital from the embankment, the railway line, and the footbridge that crossed it. Arthur didn’t need to cross the line. His way home was by way of the long lane that straggled through tenements and cottages to the High Street. But he went on to the bomb site and lingered among the rubble stacks until the girl came hurrying over the bridge.
Bridget O’Neill, twenty, student nurse. She screamed when she saw him, before he had even touched her, but there was no one in that empty wasteland to hear her. A train roared past, letting out its double-noted bray. She ran from him, tripped over a brick, and fell. With his bare hands he strangled her on the ground, and then he left her, returning through the dark ways to Magdalen Hill. Soon he slept, falling into a sleep almost as deep, though impermanent, as that which enclosed Auntie Gracie in her last bed.
He had never tended her grave. Thick grass grew above the sides of the slab, and her Christian name was obliterated by tendrils of ivy. Death surrounded him, cold, musty, mildewed death, not the warm kind he wanted. He knew he had begun to want it again, and frightened, wearied by this urge which only death itself could end, he went back to the bus, the launderette and the eternal cleaning of the flat.
Love is the cure for love. Anthony knew that, whatever might happen between him and Linthea it could at best be a distraction. But what was wrong with distractions? His love for Helen had been deep, precious, special. It was absurd to suppose that that could be replaced at will. But many activities and many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.
So he set off for Brasenose Avenue, if not a jolly, thriving wooer, at least a purposeful one. In his time he had received very few refusals. His thoughts, embittered, took a base turn. Was it likely that a widow, lonely, older than himself, would turn him down? And when he rang the doorbell it was answered almost at once by Linthea herself who drew him without a word into the flat and threw her arms round his neck. Afterwards he was thankful he hadn’t responded as he had wanted to. Perhaps, even at that moment, he sensed that this was a kiss of a happiness so great as to include any third party.
Winston was in the sitting room. They had been drinking champagne. Anthony stuck his bottle of Spanish Graves on top of the cupboard where it wouldn’t be noticed.
“You can be the first to congratulate us,” Winston said. “Well, not the first if you count Leroy.”
“You’re getting married.” Anthony uttered it as a statement rather than a question.
“Saturday week,” Linthea said, embracing him again. “Do come!”
“Of course he’ll come,” said Winston. “We’d have told you before, we decided a week ago, but we wanted to make sure it was all right with Leroy first.”
“And was it?”
Winston laughed. “Fine, only when Linthea said she was marrying me he said he’d rather have had you.”
So Anthony also had to laugh at that one and drink some champagne and listen to Winston’s romantic, but not sentimental, account of how he had always wanted Linthea, had lost her when she married and had later pursued her half across the world in great hope. Helen had once quoted to Anthony that it is a bitter thing to look at happiness through another man’s eyes. He told himself that her quotations and her whole Eng. Lit. bit bored him, she was as bad as Jonathan Dean, and then he went home to do more work on his thesis.
Though the psychopath may suffer from compulsive urges or an obsessional neurosis, his condition is related to a lowered state of cortical arousal and a chronic need for stimulation. He may therefore face the warring elements of a routine-driven life and an inability to tolerate routine in the absence of exciting stimuli….
He broke off, unable to concentrate. This wasn’t what he wanted to write. He wanted—needed—to do something he had never done before, write a letter to Helen.
18
————
He wouldn’t send it to her home, that would be worse than useless. To the museum then? Although she hadn’t a secretary, he remembered her telling him there was a girl who opened the incoming post for herself and Le Queuex. Her mother would do if only he knew her mother’s address. He tried to remember the names of friends she had spoken of when they were together. There must be someone to whom he could entrust a letter that was for her eyes only.
Rereading her old letters in search of a name, a clue, was a painful exercise. Darling Tony, I knew I’d miss you but I didn’t know how bad it would be…. That was the one with the bit in it about an invitation to a dress show. If he’d known the name of the dress shop … The people she’d been to school with, to college with? He recalled only Christian names, Wendy, Margaret, Hilary. Suppose he wrote to her old college? The authorities would simply forward the letter to her home. Anyone would do that unless he put in a covering letter expressly directing them not to. And could he bring himself to do that? Perhaps he could, especially as the letter he intended to write wasn’t going to be a humble plea.
He wrote it. Not simply, just like that, but draft after draft until he wondered if he was as mentally unstable as the sick people he studied. The final result dissatisfied him but he couldn’t improve on it.
Dear Helen, I love you. I think I loved you from the first moment we met, and though I would give a lot to blot this feeling out and be free of you, I can’t. You were my whole hope for the future and it was you who gave me a purpose for my life. But that’s enough of me, I don’t mean to go in for maudlin self-pity.
This letter is about you. You led me to believe you loved me in the same way. You told me you had never loved anyone the way you loved me and that Roger was nothing to you except an object of pity. You made love with me many times, many beautiful unforgettable times, and you are no
t—I can tell this, you know—the kind of woman who sleeps with a man for fun or diversion. You almost promised to come away and live with me. No, it was more than that. It was a firm promise, postponed only because you wanted more time.
Yet you have ditched me in such a cold peremptory way that even now I can hardly believe it. When I think of that last letter of yours it takes my breath away. I don’t mean to reproach you for the pain you have caused me but to ask you what you think you are doing to yourself? Have you, in these past weeks, ever asked yourself what kind of a woman can live your sort of ambivalent life, pretending and lying to a husband and lover equally? What happens to that woman as she grows older and begins to lose any idea of what truth is? Life isn’t worth living for someone who is a coward, a liar and has lost self-respect, particularly when she is sensitive as, God knows, you are.
Think about it. Don’t think about me if you don’t want to but think about the damage fear and woolly mindedness and that sort of confusion are going to do to whatever there is under that pretty exterior of yours.
If you want to see me I’ll see you. But I won’t commit myself to more than that now. I think I would be wilfully damaging my own self if I were ever to get back into a relationship with the kind of person you are. A.
But who could he send it to? Who could be his go-between?
It was talking about Christmas with Winston that brought him what could be a solution. Helen had told him of friends in Gloucester with whom she and her mother and, since her marriage, Roger as well, spent every Christmas. He had never heard their address and their name eluded him, though Helen had mentioned it. She had told him, he remembered, that it was Latin for a priest …
“Linthea and I,” Winston said, “will still be on our honeymoon. Lovely having Christmas in Jamaica, only I feel a bit bad about Leroy. Maybe we ought to take him. On our honeymoon? Perhaps I’m being too conventional, perhaps …”
