An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  “Well, partly. This was all last summer and autumn. It more or less stopped when Edwina went up to Oxford in October and the others drifted back. I may as well tell you. It was all a sort of fantasy anyway. Edwina said in order to prove herself a true feminist a woman ought to kill a man.” Eve looked at him warily. “I don’t mean everyone who joined ARRIA was to have to kill a man to get to be a member. The idea was for groups of three or four to get together and …

  “But that’s not an initiation ceremony really, is it? I could tell you about some of those if you want.”

  12

  WITH INSCRUTABLE FACE JENNY BURDEN sat reading ARRIA’S manifesto. She was past the stage now of prettifying disguises of her pregnancy. It was beyond disguise and her condition didn’t flatter her. Younger than her years though she had always looked, she now appeared too old to be having a baby. Her face was not so much lined as lacking in its former firmness, caverns hollowed out under the eyes and chin muscles sagging. She had no lap now so she held the flimsy sheets against a book propped upon the table in front of her.

  But Wexford could tell by Burden’s pleased expression that he was content to see his wife making even this small effort to escape from the apathy that had settled on her as the psychotherapy she was having progressed. No longer in revolt, no longer violent in her hatred of the child, she had become resigned. She waited in hopeless passivity. When Wexford arrived she had taken his hand, put up her face for a kiss, inquired in a limbo voice after Dora and the girls. And he had thought: when the baby is born she could go completely mad, enter a schizophrenic world, and pass the rest of her life in hospital. She wouldn’t be the first to whom such a thing had happened.

  Still, now she was reading ARRIA’S constitution, and apparently reading every word with care. Wexford wouldn’t talk about the Williams case in her presence and Burden knew that. Suddenly she began reading aloud.

  “Rule 6: With certain limited exceptions, no woman shall be financially dependent on a man. Then they list the exceptions. Rule 7. All women shall take a course in some martial art or self-defense technique. Rule 8: All women shall carry a permitted weapon for self-defense, i.e., ammonia spray, pin, penknife, pepper shaker, etc. Rule 9: No member shall marry, participate in the bourgeois concept of becoming “engaged,” or share accommodation with a man in a cohabiting situation. Rule 10 … Do you want Rule 10?”

  “Oh, I have read it,” Wexford said. “It is heresy!”

  She didn’t recognize the quotation. “You’re bound to think that way, aren’t you? Perhaps I should have read all this before I met you, Mike.”

  He took the blow with a physical flinch.

  “ARRIA didn’t exist then. It was around earlier this year before I gave up work, though. I always wanted to get hold of their manifesto but no one would even talk to me about it. I was a married woman, you see.”

  “I suppose I was lucky to get it,” Wexford conceded.

  Burden was making an effort to recover from the pain she had given him. “I want to hear Rule 10.”

  “All right. Rule 10: Women wishing to reproduce should select the potential father for his physique, health, height, etc., and ensure impregnation in a rape or near-rape construct.”

  “In a what? What the hell does it mean?”

  Wexford said, “Margaret Mead says men of the Arapesh fear rape by women just as women in other cultures fear rape by men.”

  “The mind boggles.” By this, Wexford knew, Burden meant he would dearly have loved to inquire further into the mechanics and techniques but was hampered by inhibition. “The trouble is surely that most of this was written by lesbians like Edwina Klein and Caroline Peters. It doesn’t seem to cater for women who actually love men—and those are surely in the vast majority.”

  Jenny looked coldly at her husband. “In the sort of explanation bit that comes after the rules it says the authors realize women may feel affection for men and even—I quote—‘what is termed sexual love’ but it is necessary that something must be given up for the cause. Other women in the past have denied themselves this indulgence and been amply compensated. It goes on: ‘After all, what does this so-called “love” amount to when a woman sets it against its concomitants: gross exploitation, pornography degradation, career prohibition or curtailment, rape, father—daughter incest, and the still-persisting double standard.’”

  “It doesn’t seem to bear much relation to our own home lives, does it?” said Burden.

  Jenny had tears in her eyes, Wexford saw. They shone there, unshed. “Revolutionaries are always extreme,” she said. “Look at the Terror of 1793, look at Stalinism. If they’re not, if they compromise with liberalism, all their principles fizzle out and you’re back with the status quo. Isn’t that what’s happened to the broader women’s liberation movement?”

  The men looked at her with varying expressions of doubt and dismay. Burden had gone rather pale.

  “If these girls,” said Jenny, “can accomplish just a fraction of what they’re setting out to do, if they can begin to make people see what ‘inequitable arbitration’ really amounts to, perhaps—perhaps I shan’t so much mind my daughter being born.”

  This time she didn’t break down into tears. “I know you want to talk. I’ll leave you.” She turned to her husband, kissed his forehead, carried herself clumsily to the door. There was no dignity there and no beauty because the child that made her heavy was unwanted … Burden put out one finger to touch the ARRIA manifesto like someone steeling himself to make contact with something he has a phobia about.

  “I feel it threatens me, all this. I’m frightened of it.”

  “It’s good that you’re honest enough to admit it.”

  “Do you really think there’s anything in this killing a man stuff?”

  He had done so at first. It had seemed the obvious answer and for a moment or two the only possible answer. At that point his whole tone towards Eve had changed. He had been dancing lightly with her and then, suddenly, the music stopped and he seized hold of her. That was what it was like. Of course, he had frightened her with his quick rough questions …

  “But nobody ever did it! It was a fantasy—like group sex or something. Like an orgy. You think about what it would be like, you fantasize, but you don’t do it.”

  “Many do.”

  “Well, OK, that wasn’t a very good comparison. The point is fantasy doesn’t become reality, the two don’t mix.”

  “Don’t they? Isn’t that what a psychopath is? Someone who confuses fantasy with reality?”

  She had insisted, with the panic of someone who realizes she had said too much, that Edwina Klein’s idea had been hers alone, even the splinter group had opposed it. Knives next. He had gone on to ask her what was meant by “permitted weapons.” Did this category include knives? Not real knives, she said, and she had looked at him as a child might, round-eyed, afraid of something it doesn’t understand.

  “It’s tempting,” he said to Burden, “to think of a group of those ARRIA girls grabbing hold of poor old Williams like the Maenads with Orpheus and doing him in on the Lesbian shore.”

  Burden looked at him, mystified. “Shall we have a beer?” he said.

  “Good idea.

  “Malt does more than Milton can

  To justify God’s ways to man.”

  “You’re right there,” Burden said feelingly.

  He came back with two cans and two tankards on a tray. Poor chap, Wexford thought, he’s had enough. And how curious it was that all these dramatic things happened to Burden, who was such an ordinary, unimaginative, salt-of-the-earth person. The prototype surely of Kafka’s man to whom, though he shut himself up in his room, hid himself, lay low, life nevertheless came in and rolled in ecstasy at his feet. Whereas for him, Wexford, nothing much came along to disturb his private peace. Thank God for it!

  “Just the same,” he said, “we’re going to have our work cut out checking out every one of ARRIA’S members. There are said to be five hundred
of them, remember.”

  “The girl who stabbed Budd may not be the same girl who stabbed Wheatley who may not be the same girl as the one that killed Williams, but on the other hand they may be one and the same.”

  “Right,” said Wexford. “But don’t let’s talk of the ‘one’ that killed Williams. No girl on her own could have carried his body into that car and then carried it out again and buried him.

  “The way I see it, we have to think of it along these lines. On the one hand we have the radical feminists, of whom we know (a) that the notion of killing a man was at any rate considered by them and (b) that they are required by their own rules to carry offensive weapons. We also know that Wheatley certainly and Budd probably were stabbed by ARRIA members. We’ve been told too that Williams, pursuing his well-known tastes, had a very young girlfriend. Now is this girlfriend a member of ARRIA?

  “Whatever the ARRIA rules may say,” said Wexford, “we know members do have to do with the opposite sex. Look at Eve climbing in through her boyfriend’s window. She hasn’t made the supreme sacrifice of giving up men. And if you want to kill a man what better way of doing it than in what ARRIA would probably call a libido-emotional construct—in other words a love affair?”

  Burden finished the last of his beer. In the next room Jenny had put a record on, Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Infanta. “Who said that about malt and Milton?”

  “Housman. His life was ruined by an unrequited love.”

  “Blimey. Why ravens?”

  “In ARRIA’S logo, d’you mean? They’re predatory birds, aren’t they? No, I suppose not. Harsh-tongued? I really don’t know, Mike. At any rate, they’re not soft and submissive. The collective noun for them is an ‘unkindness.’ An unkindness of ravens. Appropriate, wouldn’t you say? In their attitude to the opposite sex anyway. They stab at us with knives rather than beaks.” “Not without provocation, of course.” “That’s true. Budd on his own admission tried to get fresh with the girl who attacked him. He may have got fresher than he says. Wheatley says he didn’t get fresh at all but I’m not inclined to believe him. They made passes and got themselves stabbed. Makes you wonder what Williams did, doesn’t it?”

  AS WEXFORD WALKED HOME HE THOUGHT about what he had had to do as a result of his visit to the Freeborns’ house. Sergeant Martin and Detective Bennett had paid a follow-up call and this morning Charles Freeborn, the girls’ father, had appeared at Kingsmarkham Magistrates’ Court charged with possessing cannabis and with permitting cannabis to be smoked upon his premises. Bennett, who detected the stuff in a positively cat-and-mouse way—or cat-and-catmint way—had begun a methodical search of the big overgrown garden, starting at the conservatory, following the crazy-paving path through a copse of unpruned dusty shrubs. This path curved all round the perimeter of the garden, winding its way between ghosts of flowerbeds where a few attenuated cultivated plants thrust their heads through a matting of bindweed, ground elder, and thistles. A gate in the fence at the garden’s foot afforded a shortcut into a path to the High Street. Bennett had been wondering if he was getting obsessional imagining Cannabis sativa, which requires sunlight and space, might ever flourish here when he suddenly came upon the only tended flowerbed in the whole half-acre.

  He was nearly back at the house again, the stifling, shadow-spreading trees behind him. A neat rectangular clearing had been made in the shaggy grass here, the soil well watered, weeded, and the bed bordered with bricks. Martin had declared the vigorous young plants to be seedling tomatoes but Bennett knew better. Infra-red light is essential to the Indian hemp if its effect when ingested is to be the characteristically hallucinogenic one, and these plants were basking in it, for their bed was in the only part of the garden to enjoy day-long uninterrupted sunshine.

  Wexford pondered, not for the first time, on the ethics of going into someone’s house for a check and a chat, while there detecting a forbidden drug, and immediately, scarcely with a qualm, taking steps to prosecute the offender. One’s host in absentia, so to speak. Of course he was right, it was right. He was a policeman and that came first. That must always come first or chaos would come instead …

  BY THE TIME THE SCHOOLS BROKE UP TOWARDS the end of July Wexford’s men had vetted and cleared something like 50 percent of the ARRIA membership. Tracking them down was the difficulty, for Caroline Peters denied the existence of a list of members. Why should a list be needed when there was no subscription, and dates and venues of meetings were passed on by grassroots?

  Paulette Harmer, Williams’s niece, a sixth-form-college student, was cleared. She had been out with her boyfriend, to whom she would become engaged at Christmas—thereby abrogating ARRIA membership?—on the evenings Budd and Wheatley were stabbed, and at home with her parents and her aunt Joy on 15 April. Eve Freeborn, before going to her boyfriend in Arnold Road, had spent the evening at home with her parents and her sister. This alibi also accounted for Amy. Neither could be charged with the Budd and Wheatley stabbings. Nor could Caroline Peters, who, however, had been at a meeting in London on the evening of the 15th. The redheaded Nicky turned out to be Nicola Anerley and not the Nicola Tennyson who was Veronica Williams’s friend. She had been at a party on 15 April, Helen Blake’s eighteenth birthday party, which had also been attended by another twelve members of ARRIA, all of whom Wexford was able to discount as far as the murder of Williams was concerned.

  Jane Gardner he questioned himself. She was the right age, pretty and lively, an active member of ARRIA. He owed it to the cordial relationship he had had with her father to go himself and not send Bennett, say, or Archbold.

  Miles was at home, had made a point evidently of being at home. He was affronted and preparing to be bitterly offended. He and his tall wife were in the drawing room (walls of Sevenstar Chinese yellow, black carpet, famille jaune porcelain) and Wexford was shown in by the cleaning lady masquerading as a maid. They spoke to him, he thought, in the aghast tones of parents asking a headmaster why he intends to expel their daughter from his school. Pamela Gardner called him “Mr. Wexford” though it had been “Reg” in the past. Since she had no means of summoning the cleaning lady except by shouting, she went to fetch Jane herself.

  “This is so entirely unnecessary,” Gardner said in a hard voice.

  Wexford said it was routine and felt like a cop in an ancient Cyril Hare detective story.

  The girl came in smiling and perfectly at ease. Then he had to ask the parents to go. They did but with a very ill grace. At first Pamela Gardner pretended she didn’t understand what he meant. Light dawned, then came incredulity, lastly disgusted acceptance. She took her husband’s arm as if the very cornerstones of their home life had been threatened.

  “Did you get a university place?” Wexford asked Jane as soon as they were alone.

  “Oh yes, thanks. We met before, didn’t we? At Dad’s office? I never thought I would actually. I’d even enrolled at secretarial college in London just in case. My school doesn’t have a commercial department.”

  There came back to him a recollection of this girl changing her clothes in full view of the street. In “Dad’s office.” And when she had turned round to see him looking at her she hadn’t turned a hair.

  “Did you know Rodney Williams, Jane?”

  “I’d met him. At the office. Dad introduced us. He had a lot of charm, you know.” She smiled, reminiscently, a bit sadly. “He could make you feel you were the only person there worth talking to.”

  It struck Wexford that this was the first person he had spoken to with a good word to say for Rodney Williams. She spoiled it a little.

  “I expect he was like that with all girls of my age.”

  Was she an enthusiastic member of ARRIA? Had she been in the splinter group? Did she carry a weapon? Where had she been when Budd was stabbed, when Wheatley was stabbed, when Williams was killed? Yes to the first and second questions, an indignant no, wide-eyed and law-abiding, to the third. A baby-sitting alibi for 15 April, a visit to her newly married s
ister for a Budd alibi, no memory of what she had been doing on the evening of the Wheatley stabbing. Apropos of none of this, surprising her with what seemed inconsequential, he said, “Which schools do have commercial departments?”

  “Haldon Finch, Sewingbury Sixth-Form.” She gave him an earnest look. “Dad’s really upset that you suspect me.”

  “There’s no question of that. This is routine.”

  “Well …” Suddenly she was the good daughter, dutiful, compliant, obedient. “He and

  Mummy are dead against you taking my fingerprints.”

  “You” presumably implied the Mid-Sussex Constabulary, or did she think he had come armed with pads and gadgets? The cleaning lady showed him out, her apron changed for rather smart dungarees. There was no sign of Miles or Pamela. Donaldson drove him back to Kingsmarkham and dropped him outside his own house. Dora, dressed up, was on the phone to Sylvia.

  He passed close by her and touched her cheek with his lips. She responded to the kiss, mouthed something about getting a move on, went on talking to Sylvia. He went upstairs, changed into what he called his best suit, gray like the others but the latest and least shabby. When he retired he would never wear a suit again—not even to the theater.

  In the train he told Dora about the Gardners and said he had a feeling they wouldn’t be asked to any more garden parties. She said that didn’t matter, did it? She didn’t care. And he shouldn’t care either, he should relax, especially tonight.

  “I wish I’d read the play.”

  “You haven’t had time.”

  “You can always make time for things you want to do,” he said.

  As it was he didn’t even know what The Cenci was about, and of its history only that it had for a long time been banned from the English stage. He and Dora, on holiday in Italy, had seen Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci in the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, though he wouldn’t have connected that with the play but for Sheila’s saying it would be reproduced in the program. It would have been a good idea to have read the play—or to have read Moravia’s Beatrice Cenci, a novel that might be more entertaining.