by Ruth Rendell
“What’s the Latin for a priest?” said Anthony abruptly.
Winston stared at him. “Sorry if I’m boring you.”
“You’re not boring me. I hope you’ll have a fabulous honeymoon. I should be so lucky. Take the whole Merton Street Primary School with you if you like, but just tell me the Latin for a priest.”
“Pontifex, pontificis, masculine.”
He knew it was the right name as soon as he heard it. Pontifex. He’d go to the public library, the main branch in the High Street, where they kept telephone directories for the whole country. “Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” said Winston. “Just a dictionary, I am. Mr. Liddell or Mr. Scott.”
There were three Pontifexes (or pontifices, as Winston would have put it) in the city of Gloucester. But A.W. at 26 Dittisham Road was obviously the one, Miss Margaret and Sir F. being unlikely candidates. Anthony prepared an envelope: Mrs. Pontifex, 26 Dittisham Road, Gloucester, and on the flap: Sender, A. Johnson, 2/142 Trinity Road, London W15 6HD. The letter to Helen went into a blank, smaller envelope to be inserted inside it. But there would have to be a covering letter.
Anthony knew he couldn’t write to a woman he had never met, instructing her to pass an enclosure to another woman without the knowledge of that woman’s husband. But that wouldn’t be necessary. Helen and Roger would arrive at the Pontifex home on, say, Christmas Eve. Mrs. Pontifex would hand his letter over to Helen either when they were alone together—perhaps in Mrs. Pontifex’s bedroom immediately after their arrival—or else, and more likely, in public and full view of a company of festive relatives. Did that matter? Anthony thought not. This way, even if Roger were to demand to see it, Helen would see it first.
Dear Mrs. Pontifex, I know that Mrs. Garvist will be spending Christmas with you and I wonder if you would be kind enough to give her the enclosed when you see her. I have mislaid her present address, otherwise I would not trouble you. Yours sincerely, Anthony Johnson.
It looked, he thought, peculiar, to say the least. He had mislaid the address of someone with the rare name of Garvist whom he obviously knew well, but was in possession of the address of someone with the equally rare name of Pontifex whom he didn’t know at all. If one name could be found in the phone book so could the other. He stuck a stamp on the envelope. He looked at this result of so much complicated effort. Was it worth it? Would any possible outcome mitigate the depression which enclosed him? The letter need not, in any case, be sent till a few days before Christmas. Pushing it to one side with a heap of books and papers and notes, he wondered if, in the end, he would send it at all.
When Arthur spoke of “my solicitor” he meant a firm in Kenbourne Lane which had acted for him twenty years before in the matter of proving Auntie Gracie’s meagre will. Since then he had never communicated with this firm or been inside its offices, but he went there now and it cost him fifteen pounds to be told that unless there were any repairs outstanding to the fabric of his flat, he hadn’t a leg to stand on against Stanley Caspian in the matter of the rent increase. Although, as he put it to himself exaggeratedly, the rest of the place was falling down, Flat 2 was in fact in good order. Almost wishing that the roof would spring a leak, Arthur managed some petty revenge by telling a young couple whom he found waiting in the hall before Stanley Caspian’s Saturday arrival that Flat 1 had macabre associations and that its rent could be knocked down to eight pounds a week by anyone who cared to try it on. The young couple argued with Stanley but they didn’t take the Kotowskys’ flat.
The police had not reappeared. Everyone took it for granted Brian Kotowsky had murdered his wife. But Arthur remembered the case of John Reginald Halliday Christie. Christie had murdered, among others, another man’s wife and that man had been hanged for it. But in the end that murder had been brought home to the true perpetrator. Arthur never relaxed his surveillance of the post or failed to put his door on the latch when he heard anyone use the telephone. Wednesday, November 27, had been a bad evening but it had passed without Anthony Johnson making a call. No letters from Bristol had come for more than a fortnight. Surely there would be none? Arthur observed Anthony Johnson coming and going at his irregular hours, a little dejected, perhaps, as if some of that youthful glow and vigour which he had noticed on their first meeting, had gone out of him. But we all have to grow up and face, Arthur thought, the reality and earnestness of life. Once, passing beneath his window, Anthony Johnson raised a hand and waved to him. It wasn’t a particularly enthusiastic wave, but Arthur would have distrusted it if it had been. It signified to him only that Anthony Johnson bore him no malice.
On the morning of Saturday, December 7, he wrote a stiff letter to his solicitor, deprecating the high cost of such negative advice but nevertheless enclosing a cheque for fifteen pounds. He always paid his bills promptly, having an undefined fear of nemesis descending should he be in debt to anyone for more than a day or two. At nine he saw the postman cross the street and he went down to take in the mail. Nothing but a rates demand for Stanley Caspian which shouldn’t, by rights, have come to Trinity Road at all.
Li-li Chan’s rent envelope was on the hall table and so was Winston Mervyn’s. Anthony Johnson’s, however, was missing. Arthur listened warily outside the door of Room 2. Silence, then the clink of a tea cup against a saucer. He knocked softly on the door and gave his apologetic cough.
“Yes?”
“It’s Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson,” said Arthur, feeling this was ridiculous, but not knowing how else to put it.
“One minute.”
About a quarter of a minute passed and then the door was opened by Anthony Johnson in jeans and a sweater which had obviously been pulled on in haste. The room was freezing, the electric fire having perhaps only just been switched on. From the state of the bed and the presence on the bedside table of a half-consumed cup of tea, it was evident that Anthony Johnson had been having a lie-in. And to his caller’s extreme disapproval, he intended to resume it, for, having offered Arthur a cup of tea which was refused, he got back into bed fully clothed.
“I hope you’ll excuse the intrusion, but it’s about the little matter of the rent.”
“You needn’t have bothered. I’d have put it out before Caspian came.” Anthony Johnson finished his tea. “It’s on the table,” he said casually, “among all that other stuff.”
“All that other stuff” was a formidable array (or muddle, as Arthur put it to himself) of books, some closed, some open and face downwards, scattered sheets of foolscap, dog-eared notebooks and a partially completed manuscript.
“With your permission,” Arthur said, and delicately picked about in the mess as if it were a pile of noxious garbage. He came upon the brown rent envelope under a weighty tome entitled Human Behaviour and Social Processes.
“The rent book and my cheque are in there.”
Arthur said nothing. Under the rent envelope was another, stamped and addressed, but without his glasses he was unable, from this distance, to read the address. At once it occurred to him that this letter might be to H in Bristol. He thought quickly, said almost as quickly:
“I have to go to the post with a letter of my own. Would you care for me to take this one of yours?”
Anthony Johnson’s hesitation was unmistakeable. Was he remembering that other occasion on which Arthur had posted a letter for him and the unfortunate antagonism that action had led to? Or did he perhaps suspect a tampering with his post? Anthony Johnson threw back the bed covers, got up and came over to the table. He picked up the envelope and looked at it in silence, indecisively, deep in thought. Arthur managed a considerate patient smile, but inwardly he was trembling. It must be to her, it must be. Why else would the man linger over it like this, wondering, no doubt, whether posting it would risk a violent confrontation with the woman’s husband.
At last Anthony Johnson looked up. He handed the letter to Arthur with a funny swift gesture as if he must either be rid of it quickly or not at all.
&nbs
p; “O.K.,” he said. “Thanks.”
Once more in the hall and alone, Arthur held the envelope up to within two inches of his eyes. Then he put on his glasses to make absolutely sure. But it was all right. The letter was addressed to a Mrs. Pontifex in Gloucester. He was savouring his relief when Stanley Caspian banged in, sucking a toffee. Arthur put the kettle on without waiting to be asked and handed Stanley his rents. Stanley opened Winston Mervyn’s envelope first.
“Well, my God, if Mervyn’s not going now! Given in his poxy notice for the first week of Jan.”
“A little bird told me he’s getting married.”
Stanley munched ill-temperedly, jabbing so hard into Arthur’s rent book that his pen made a hole in the page. “That’ll be the whole of the first floor vacant. Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to.”
“The rats,” said Arthur, “might be said to be leaving the sinking ship.”
“Not you, though, eh? Oh no. Those as have unfurnished tenancies don’t go till they’re carried out feet first. You’ll die here, me old Arthur.”
“I’m sure I hope so,” said Arthur. “Now, if I could have my little envelope?”
He took it and set off with his laundry, pausing outside Kemal’s Kebab House to drop both letters in the pillar box.
19
————
During the week which followed Arthur was oppressively aware of the emptiness of 142 Trinity Road. Li-li had never been at home much, was flying to Taiwan for Christmas, and now Winston Mervyn was out every night. Soon he too would be gone. Then, if the pressure of the London housing shortage wasn’t strong enough to overcome people’s semi-superstitious distaste for 142, he and Anthony Johnson would in effect be the sole tenants. He would once have welcomed the idea. Once he had savoured those moments when he had had the house to himself, when the last of them to leave in the mornings had given the front door a final bang. And he had dreamed of being its only occupant, living high on the crest of silent emptiness, while she who inhabited the depths below awaited the attentions and whims of her master.
But now that empty silence disturbed him. For three nights out of the seven no light fell on to the court from the window of Room 2, and the dark well he could see below him when he drew his curtains brought him temptations he had no way of yielding to. It frightened him even to think of them, but these suppressed thoughts blossomed in dreams like tubers which, put away in the dark, throw out sickly, sluglike shoots. Not since he was a young man had he dreamed of that act he had three times performed. But he dreamed of it now and awoke one morning hanging half out of bed, his hands clenched as if in spasm round the leg of his bedside table which, unknowingly, he had dragged towards him.
The postman had ceased to call. In all the years Arthur had been there no such week as this, without a single letter, had passed. It was as if the Post Office were on strike. Of course it was easily explicable. Winston Mervyn had seldom received any post except that from estate agents; Li-li’s father wouldn’t write when he expected to see his daughter next week; little had ever come for Anthony Johnson but those mauve-grey Bristol envelopes. And yet this also seemed to contribute to Arthur’s feeling that all the forces of life were withdrawing from the house and leaving it as a kind of mausoleum for himself.
But on the morning of Saturday, December 14, something resembling a convulsion took place in it, like a death throe. The phone ringing wakened him. It rang for Winston Mervyn three times before nine o’clock. Then he heard Winston Mervyn running up and down the stairs, Anthony Johnson in Mervyn’s room, Anthony Johnson and Mervyn talking, laughing. He went down to see if there was, by chance, any post. There wasn’t. The door of Room 1 was open, music playing above the whine of the vacuum cleaner. Li-li had decided, unseasonably and uniquely, to spring-clean her room. And Stanley Caspian, usually so mindful of the fabric of his property, added to the noise by slamming the front door so hard that plaster specks lay scattered on his car coat like dandruff.
Stanley detained him so long with moans about the rates, the cruelty of the government towards honest landlords, and the fastidiousness of prospective tenants that he was late in getting to the shops. Every machine at the launderette was taken. He had to leave his washing in the care of Mr. Grainger’s nephew’s wife who was distant with him and demanded an extra twenty pence for service.
“I never heard of such a thing,” said Arthur.
“Take it or leave it. There’s inflation for me same as for others.”
Arthur would have liked to say more but he was afraid it might get back to Mr. Grainger, so he contented himself with a severe, “I’ll call back for it at two sharp.”
“Four’d be more like,” said the woman, “what with this rush,” and she paid Arthur no compliments as to the superiority of his linen.
It was a June-skied day but hazeless and clearer than any June day could be, and the sunlight was made icy by a razor wind. Angrily, Arthur shouted at the children who were climbing on the statues. They took no notice beyond shouting back at him a word which, though familiar to any resident of West Kenbourne, still brought a blush to his face.
A taxi stood outside 142, and as he approached, Winston Mervyn and Anthony Johnson came out of the house and went up to it. Arthur thought how awkward and embarrassed he would feel if called upon to say to a taxi driver what Winston Mervyn now said:
“Kenbourne Register Office, please.”
He said it in a bold, loud voice, as if he were proud of himself, and favoured everyone with a broad smile. Arthur would have liked to pass on up the steps without a word, but he knew better than to neglect his social obligations, particularly as Stanley Caspian had told him this coloured fellow, obviously well off, was buying a house in North Kenbourne.
“Let me offer you my best wishes for your future happiness, Mr. Mervyn,” he said.
“Thanks very much.”
“A fine day for your wedding,” said Arthur, “though somewhat chilly.”
He went indoors and passed Li-li going out, her rare effort at cleaning finished or abandoned. Again he was alone. He cooked his lunch, scoured the flat, watched Michael Redgrave in The Captive Heart on television. It wasn’t till darkness began to close in and lights came on in the tall houses opposite that he remembered he still had to collect his washing.
Winston had engaged one of the dining rooms at the Grand Duke for his wedding reception, and there at one-thirty the bride and groom, Leroy, Anthony, Winston’s brother and sister-in-law, and Linthea’s sister and brother-in-law sat down to lunch. Linthea gave Anthony a rose from the bouquet she was carrying.
“There, that means you’ll be the next to marry.”
He felt a painful squeeze of the heart. But he smiled down at the beautiful girl in her apple-green silk dress and said, “That’s only for bridesmaids.”
“For best men too. It’s an old West Indian custom.”
Cries of denial, gales of laughter greeted this. Anthony made a speech which he felt was feeble, though it was received with applause. He could hardly bear to look at Winston and Linthea, whose exchanged glances and secret decorous smiles spoke of happiness enjoyed and anticipated.
At four they all went back to Brasenose Avenue to collect Linthea’s luggage and then to Trinity Road for Winston’s. From the call box on the landing Winston phoned London Airport to check his honeymoon flight to Jamaica and was told it had been delayed three hours. By this time Leroy had already been carried off by his aunt, with whom he was to stay, and Linthea felt a dislike of going back to the empty flat. At a loose end, they were debating how they should kill the intervening time, when the front door, which had been left on the latch, crashed heavily, and a voice called up the stairs:
“The wedding guest, he beat his breast!”
Jonathan Dean.
“Thought I’d try and catch you before you left, old man. Wish you Godspeed and all that.” He showed, Anthony thought, no scars from grief over his dead friend, but seemed stouter and ruddier. Half-way
up the stairs he met them coming down. “Did I hear someone mention killing time? How about a quick one or a few slow ones up the Lily?”
“It’s not five,” said Winston.
Jonathan agreed but said it wanted only ten minutes and that tempus was fugiting as usual. At this point Li-li emerged from Room 1 to be met by a look of frank lechery from Jonathan, who made a joke with heavy play on her name and that of the pub which evoked screams of merriment from Winston’s sister-in-law. And so, without much show of enthusiasm on the part of either bride or groom, the whole party, now swelled to seven, made their way towards the Waterlily.
When they reached the corner of Magdalen Hill and Balliol Street—by common unspoken consent, they avoided Oriel Mews—Anthony saw, standing on the other side of the street, waiting for the lights to change, a familiar lean figure in silver-grey overcoat and carrying an orange plastic laundry bag. The man’s face had the sore, reddish look he had noticed before, and there was something prickly and resentful in his whole bearing as if he took the persistent greenness of the traffic light and the stream of vehicles as an affront aimed personally at him. In that crowd, London working class, hippy-costumed drop-outs, brown immigrants, his clothes and his air set him apart and enclosed him in loneliness. Time and change had passed him by. He was a sad and bitter anachronism.
Anthony touched Winston’s arm. “Should we ask old Johnson to join us for a drink? It’s up to you, it’s your party, but it seems a bit cold not to …”
Before he could finish, Winston had hailed Arthur Johnson who had begun to cross the road. “I’m glad you saw him,” he said to Anthony. “He was rather nice to me this morning with his good wishes, and seeing everyone else in the house is here, it’s the least we can do. Mr. Johnson!” he called. “Can you spare a few minutes to come and celebrate with us in the Waterlily?”
Anthony wasn’t surprised to see that Arthur Johnson was flummoxed, even shocked, by the suggestion. First came the mottled flush, then a stream of excuses. “I couldn’t possibly—most kind but out of the question—a busy evening ahead of me—you must count me out, you really must, Mr. Mervyn.”
