by Ruth Rendell
Then he lay face downwards on the bed, hating himself for his weakness, wondering how he would get through the time ahead, the long and cold winter of isolation with only Arthur Johnson for company.
Upstairs, on the landing, the telephone began to ring.
Arthur heard the phone but didn’t answer it. The only people who were likely to receive phone calls had gone away. He went
into the bedroom and looked again at his face. Impossible to consider going to work tomorrow. The phone had stopped ringing. He looked out of the window down to the court below. Anthony Johnson’s light was on, and Arthur wondered why he hadn’t answered the phone.
There was plenty of food in his fridge, including the Sunday joint he hadn’t been able to face and couldn’t face now. The food he had would last him for days. He managed to swallow a small piece of bread and butter. Then he looked at his face again, this time in the bathroom mirror. While he was wondering if ice would ease the swelling, if anyone would believe him if he said he had cut himself shaving—and, presumably, also knocked his eye with the razor—the phone started ringing again. He opened his front door and emerged on to the dark landing. Obscurely he felt that, whoever this might be phoning, it would be safer were he to answer it himself.
He lifted the receiver and Stanley Caspian’s voice said, “That you, Arthur? About time too. I buzzed you five minutes ago.”
Light flooded him suddenly from the hall below. He turned, covering his mouth with his left hand, and called in a muffled voice, “It’s all right, it’s Mr. Caspian for me.”
Anthony Johnson said, “O.K.” and went back into Room 2. Arthur wished the light would go out. He hunched over the phone.
“Listen, Arthur, I’ve got a chap coming to have a dekko at Flat 1 tomorrow around five. Can you let him in?”
“I’m not well,” Arthur said, sick with panic. “I’ve got a—a virus infection. I shan’t be going to work and I can’t let anyone in. I’m going to have the day in bed.”
“My God, I suppose you can get out of your poxy bed just to open the front door?”
“No, I can’t,” Arthur said shrilly. “I’m ill. I should be in bed now.”
“Charming. After all I’ve done for you, Arthur, that’s a bit thick. I suppose I’ll have to fix it a bit earlier with this chap and come myself.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not well. I have to go and lie down.”
Stanley didn’t answer but crashed down the receiver. Arthur stumbled up to his own door. It was almost closed. A slight draught, a tiny push, and he would have been locked out. He who never never neglected such precautions had forgotten to drop the latch. Shivering at the thought of what might have happened, he went into the bathroom to contemplate his lip and his eye. Tears began to course down his face, stinging the bruised flesh.
The second time the phone rang Anthony got off his bed to answer it. But the hopes he had had, hopes that were against all reason, were dissipated by the voice calling from the landing, “It’s Mr. Caspian for me.”
Because the voice sounded thick and strange, Anthony, who in his disappointment would otherwise simply have drifted back into Room 2, glanced up at the figure on the landing. Arthur Johnson was covering his mouth with his left hand, and he turned away quickly, huddling over the phone, but not before Anthony had noticed one of his eyes was swollen and half-closed. The phone conversation went on for a few moments, Arthur Johnson protesting that he was ill, but from a virus infection, not some sort of facial injury. Anthony closed the door. He sat on the bed. An hour before he would have given a lot for some subject to come overpoweringly into his mind and crowd Helen out of it. But this? Did he want this and could he cope with it?
A series of images now. A man, evidently nervous, paranoid, repressed, saying, “You are the other Johnson, I have been here for twenty years.” In the cellar a shop window model with a rent in her neck. Fire burning that figure, and that very night, the night of November 5 … Anthony looked out of the window and up to that other window two floors above. No light showed, though that was Arthur Johnson’s bedroom and he had said he was ill and ought to be in bed. Perhaps he was, in the dark. Anthony went out into the street and looked up. There was light up there, orange light turning the draped muslin stuff to gold, and behind that shimmering stuff a light flickering movement.
He went quickly indoors and up the two flights of stairs. He had thought of no excuse for knocking on Arthur Johnson’s door, but excuses seemed base and dishonest. Besides, once he had seen, he would need no excuse. But there was no answer to his knock, no answer when he knocked again, and that told him as much as if the damaged face had presented itself to him, six inches from his own. To knock again, to insist, would be a cruelty that revolted him, for in the silence he fancied he could sense a concentrated breath-held terror behind that door.
He knew now. He would have laughed at himself if this had been a laughing matter, for the irony was that he who was writing a thesis on psychopathy, who knew all about psychopaths, had lived three months in the same house as a psychopath and not known it. So, of course, he must go to the police. Knew? Did he? Well, he was sure, certain. When we say that, Helen had once said, we always mean we are not quite sure, not quite certain. He shivered in the hot, fuggy yet draughty room. It had been a shock. Presently he began looking through his books, finding Arthur Johnson or aspects of him in every case history, finding what he well knew already, that if hardly anything is known of the causes of psychopathy, even less has been discovered of ways to cure it. Forever a prison for the criminally insane then, forever incarceration, helplessly inflicted and helplessly borne. But he would go to the police in the morning …
At last he undressed and got into bed. The triangle of sky was a smoky red scudded with black flakes of snow. He found it impossible to sleep and wondered if the man upstairs, lying in bed some twenty feet above him, also lay sleepless under his far greater weight of care.
At eight-thirty in the morning Arthur phoned Mr. Grainger at home. He wouldn’t be coming in, would have to take at least three days off. While he was on the phone he heard Anthony Johnson go into the bathroom, but the man didn’t come to the foot of the stairs. Why had he knocked on his door last night? To borrow something, to get change for the phone? Still fresh with him, still aching in his bruised ribs, was the terror those repeated knocks had brought. But nothing would have made him let Anthony Johnson in to see his face. For hours he had hunched over the window ledge, intermittently leaving his post to look at his face, to listen by the door for Anthony Johnson to phone the police, watching for Anthony Johnson to go out and fetch the police. By midnight, when nothing had happened and the little court had gone dark, he had lain down, spent but sleepless.
The last of four lectures by a distinguished visiting criminologist was to be given at the college that morning. Anthony had attended them all, been rather disappointed that they were more elementary than he had hoped, and now took notes abstractedly. He was tired and uneasy.
Still he hesitated to go to the police, although he had noted where the nearest station was, having passed its tall portals, its blue lamp, on his way to college on the K.12. One o’clock came and he was in the canteen, vacillating still, nauseated at the idea of betraying a man who had done him no injury. He seldom had much to say to the students. They were all younger than he and they seemed to him not much more than children. But now a girl who had sat next to him in the lecture room brought her tray to his table and pointed out to him a long-haired boy who was holding court at the far end of the room, surrounded by avid listeners.
“That’s Philip Harrison.”
“Philip Harrison?”
“The guy who was attacked in the car park on Saturday.”
Anthony didn’t look at him. He looked at the young girls who were his audience, one of whom was distressingly like Helen. If that girl had been in the car park she wouldn’t be here now, listening with innocent relish. She would be dead. He had only to go to the police station an
d tell them what he knew, so little that he knew, so tenuous as it was, yet so true a pointer. Dully, he pushed away his plate. He had eaten nothing. A great weariness overcame him and he wanted nothing so much as to lie down and sleep. He remembered how, once in the summer, he and Helen had lain in each other’s arms in a field in the West Country and for an hour he had slept with her hair against his cheek and the scent coming to him of seeded grass and wild parsley. Since then, it seemed, he had never slept so sweetly as during that hour. But the summer was past, in every sense, and the sweet hours of sleep. He got his coat, walked down the long hall, through the swing doors, out into the snow.
The police station was perhaps ten minutes’ walk away. The college grounds were empty and barren as if the cold had shaved all vegetation away but for the clipped turf and swept up all people like so much litter. There was no one in the grounds but himself and a girl whom he could see in the extreme distance coming in by the main gates. He walked towards her and she towards him down the long gravel drive.
And now he began collecting together his knowledge and suspicions of Arthur Johnson for a coherent statement to the police. But he was distracted by the sight of the approaching girl. By now he ought to be used to the deceptions practised on him by his eyes and his mind. He wasn’t going to catch his breath this time because a strange girl walked like Helen, moved her head like Helen, and now that she came nearer could be seen to have Helen’s crisp, golden hair. He trudged on, looking down at the gravel, refusing any longer to contemplate the girl who was now only some twenty or thirty yards from him.
But, in spite of himself, he was aware that she had stopped. She had stopped and was staring straight at him. He swallowed hard and his heart thudded. They stared at each other across the cold bare expanse. As he saw her lift her arms and open them, and as she began to run towards him, calling his name, “Tony, Tony!” he too ran towards her with open arms.
Her mouth was cold on his mouth but her body was warm. As he held her he knew he hadn’t been warm like this for weeks. The warmth was wonderful and the feel of her, but he was afraid to look at her face.
“Helen,” he said, “is it really you?”
23
————
They sat on a bench on College Green, not feeling the cold. Anthony held her face in his hands. He smoothed back a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead, relearning the look and the feel of her. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I really can’t yet believe it.”
“I know. I felt like that.”
“You won’t go away? I mean, you won’t say in a minute that you’ve got a train to catch or anything like that?”
“I’ve nowhere to go. I’ve burned my boats. Tony, let’s eat. I’m hungry, I’m starving. You know I always want to eat when I’m happy.”
The Grand Duke was crowded. They went into a café that was humble and clean and almost empty.
“I, don’t know whether to sit opposite you or next to you. One way I can look, the other way I can touch you.”
“Look at me,” she said. “I want to look at you.”
She sat down and fixed her eyes on his face. She reached across the table and took his hand. They held hands on the cloth, hers covering his. “Tony, it’s all right now, it will always be all right now, but why didn’t you answer my letters?”
“Because you told me not to. You told me never to write to you.”
“Not my last three. I begged you to write to me at the museum. Didn’t you get them?”
He shook his head. “Since the end of October I’ve only had one letter from you and that was the one where you told me you never wanted to see me again.”
She drew back, then leaned forward, clutching his hand. “I never wrote such a thing!”
“Someone did. Roger?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—well, it’s possible, but … I wrote and told you I was leaving him and coming to you. But how could I come when you didn’t answer? I was crazy with misery. Roger went to Scotland and I waited at home alone night after night for you to phone.”
“I phoned,” he said, “on the last Wednesday of November.”
“By then I’d gone to my mother’s. I’d got a fortnight’s holiday owing to me and I went to my mother because I couldn’t bear being alone any more and being with Roger in Scotland would have been worse. I thought I’d never see you again.”
Just as he had thought he would never again see her. But now he had no wish to solve the mystery. It paled into insignificance beside the joy of being with her.
“Helen,” he said, “why are you here now?”
“But you know that,” she said, surprised. “I’m here because you wrote to me.”
“That letter? That stupid letter?”
“Was it? I never saw it. I only know you said you loved me in the first line of it, so I—I ran away!”
She leaned across the table and kissed him. The waitress gave a slight cough and, as they drew apart, placed their plates in front of them.
“I went to work this morning, my first day back. As soon as I got in the phone rang and it was Roger. A letter had come for me with your name and address on the flap and he—he opened it.”
“My name and address on the flap? But I …” He explained how he had enclosed his letter to her in one to Mrs. Pontifex.
“Oh, I see. We never meant to go there for Christmas this year. She must have copied your name and address from the letter to her and forwarded it. I don’t know. I told you, I didn’t see it. I went out before the post came. Roger was—he was frightening with rage. I’ve heard him in some rages, I’ve seen him, when he’s threatened to kill me and himself, but I’ve never heard him like that. He just read that first line and then he sort of spat out, ‘From your lover.’ He said, ‘You’re to go downstairs and wait outside the building for me, Helen. If you’re not there I’ll come up, but you’d better be there unless you want a public scene. I shan’t flinch from telling anyone in that building what you are.’
“He said he’d be there in the car in five minutes, Tony. I knew it couldn’t take him more than five minutes and I was terrified of what he’d do. I grabbed my coat and my handbag and I rushed out and down the stairs. I remember calling out I’d had bad news and had to go.
“When I got into the street I was afraid to wait there even for a second. I crossed the road and ran down a side street, and then a taxi came and I said, ‘Temple Meads!’ because I knew I must go to London and you. You loved me, you’d said you did, so everything was all right at last.
“I didn’t bother to queue up for a ticket. I could hear an announcer saying, ‘The train standing at platform two is the nine fifty-one for London, calling at Bath, Swindon and Reading.’ It was nine-fifty then and I jumped on that train. I had to buy a ticket when the man came round and it took all the money I’d got but for five pence. I hadn’t got a chequebook or a bank card or anything. Oh, Tony, I’m entirely skint, I’ve got just what I stand up in.
“When I got to Paddington I found a bus going to Kenbourne Vale Garage but I hadn’t got enough money to get further than to Kensal Rise. So I walked the rest.”
“You walked? Here from Kensal Rise?”
She smiled at his dismay. “Out in the cold, cold snow and without any money. All I needed was a baby in my arms. I went into a news agent’s and looked up the route in a guide. I was going to go to Trinity Road but then I thought you might be here. So I came here and here I am.” Her eyes were bright, the pupils mirrors in which, at last, he could see his own face reflected. “Are you pleased?” she said.
“Helen, I was half dead with misery and loneliness and you ask me if I’m pleased?”
“I only wish,” she said, “that I’d seen your letter. I don’t suppose I ever shall now and I’d waited so long for it. Can you remember what you wrote?”
“No,” he lied. “No, only that it was nonsense. You had the only good bit in the first line.”
She sighed, but it was a sigh of happi
ness. “Tony, what are we going to do? Where shall we go?”
“Who cares? Somewhere, anywhere. We shall survive. Right now we’ll go to Trinity Road.”
As he spoke the name he remembered. It was nearly three o’clock and he had delayed long enough. He put an arm round her shoulders, helped her to her feet. “Come along, my love, we’re going to Trinity Road, but we’ll take in an errand I have to do on the way.”
Behind the curtains Arthur had sat all day, breaking his vigil every half-hour or so to examine his face in the bathroom mirror. Now, at three o’clock, he saw Stanley Caspian’s car draw up and park in front of one of the houses on the odd-numbered side. A man was coming to view Flat 1, and in a moment this man and Stanley would come into the house. Arthur watched the car but he could only see Stanley in it, sitting in the driving seat, his bulk and the bikini doll impeding further view. Perhaps he had brought the man with him or perhaps he was simply waiting for the new tenant to arrive for his appointment. Arthur went back to the bathroom. Already, so early, the winter light was beginning to fade. If Stanley did happen to call on him, if he had to show his face, perhaps those dreadful marks would pass unnoticed.…
As he came out of the bathroom his doorbell rang. The sound reverberated through Arthur’s body and he gave a tremendous start. He stood stock still in the hall. It was evident what had happened. Stanley had forgotten his key. Let him go home and fetch it then. The bell rang again, insistently, and Arthur could picture Stanley’s fat finger pressed hard and impatiently on the push. He forced himself to go back into the living room and look out of the window. Stanley’s car was empty. At any rate, it must be he. No police cars anywhere, no parked vehicles but Stanley’s and a couple of vans and a grey convertible. Another long ring fetched him back into the hall. He must answer it, for it would look odder if he didn’t. But he was supposed to be ill and must give the appearance of having been got out of bed. Quickly, though he was shaking, he slipped off his jacket and took his dressing gown from the hook behind the bedroom door. A handkerchief to his face, he let himself out of the flat and went downstairs.
