Ruth Rendell - A Sleeping Life

'Thanks, Michael, but I’m going to take myself off for a walk.’ He said to Loring, ‘You can get over to All Soul Grove and find out when the Flinders girl is expected home. If Miss Patel is taking another of her days off, I daresay you won’t find the work too arduous.’

He went out into the hazy sunshine. Sluggishly people walked, idled on street corners. It seemed strange to him, as it always does to us when we are in a state of turbulence, that the rest of humanity was unaffected. He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. Giddiness exactly described his present condition, but it was a giddiness of the mind, and he walked steadily and slowly along Kenbourne High Road. At the cemetery gate he turned into the great necropolis. Along the aisles, between the serried tombs, he walked, and sat down at last on a toppled gravestone. On a warm summer’s day there is no solitude to be found on a green or in a park, but one may always be sure of being alone in the corner of a cemetery. The dead themselves seem to decree silence, while the atmosphere of the place and its very nature are repellent to most people.

Very carefully and methodically he assembled the facts, letting the whispers wait. West had been cagey about his past, had made few friends, and those he had were somehow unsuitable and of an intellect unequal to his own. He gave his publishers and his readers his birthplace as London, though his passport and the registration of his birth showed he had been born in Sussex. His knowledge of the Sussex countryside and its great houses also showed a familiarity with that county. No one seemed to know anything of his life up to fourteen years before, and when he had first come to Elm Green and two years before his book was published.

Not to his neighbour and intimate friend did he ever speak of his origins, and to one other bearer of the name Grenville West he had denied any connection with the family. Why? Because he had something to keep hidden, while Rhoda Comfrey was similarly secretive because she had her blackmailing activities to keep hidden. Put the two together and what do you get? A threat on the part of the blackmailer to disclose something. Not perhaps that West was homosexual – Wexford could not really be persuaded that these days this was of much significance – but that he had never been to a university (as his biography claimed he had), never been a teacher or a courier or a freelance journalist, been indeed nothing till the age of twenty-four when he had somehow emerged from a home for the mentally handicapped.

As his first cousin, Rhoda Comfrey would have known it; from her it could never have been kept as it had been kept from others. Had she used it as a final weapon – Burden’s theory here being quite tenable – when she saw herself losing her cousin to Polly Flinders? West had overheard that phone call made by her to his own mother, even though she had called Lilian Crown ‘darling’ to put him off the scent. Had he assumed that she meant to see his mother and wrest from her the details of his early childhood, the opinions of doctors, all Mrs Crown’s knowledge of the child’s incarceration in that place and his subsequent release?

Here, then, was a motive for the murder. West had booked into the Trieste Hotel because it was simpler to allow Polly Flinders and Victor Vivian to believe him already in France. But that he had booked in his own name and for three nights showed surely that he had never intended to kill his cousin. Rather he had meant to use those three days for argument with Rhoda and to attempt to dissuade her from her intention.

But how had he done it? Not the murder, that might be clear enough, that unpremeditated killing in a fit of angry despair. How had he contrived in the first place such an escape and then undergone such a metamorphosis? Allowing for the fact that he might originally have been unjustly placed in the Abbotts Palmer or its predecessor, how had he surmounted his terrible difficulties? Throughout his childhood and early youth he must have been there, and if not in fact retarded, retardation would surely have been assumed for some years so that education would have been withheld and his intellect dulled and impeded by the society of his fellow inmates. Yet at the age of twenty-five or six he had written and published a novel which revealed a learned knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, of history and of the English usage of the period.

If, that is, he were he.

It couldn’t be, as Wexford had said to Loring, and yet it must be. For though John Grenville West might not be the author’s real name, though he might be a suitable pseudonym by chance have alighted on it – inventing it, so to speak, himself – other aspects were beyond the possibility of coincidence. True, the chance use of this name (instead, for example, of his real one which might be absurd or dysphonious) could have brought him and Rhoda together, the cousinship at first having been assumed on her part as Charles West had also assumed it. But he could not by chance have also chosen her cousin’s birthday and parentage. It must be that John Grenville West, the novelist, the francophile, the traveller, was also John Grenville West, the retarded child his mother had put away when he was six years old. From this dismal state, from this position in the world…

He stopped. The words he had used touched a bell and rang it. Again he was up in the spare bedroom with his daughter, and Sylvia was talking about men and women and time, saying something about men’s position in the world. And after that she had said this position could only be attained by practising something or other. Deism? No, of course not. Aeolism? Didn’t that mean being longwinded? Anyway, it wasn’t that, she hadn’t said that. What had she said?

He tried placing one letter of the alphabet after another to follow the diphthong after the O and settled at last with absolute conviction for ‘aeonism’. Which must have something to do with aeons. So she had only meant that, in order for sexual equality to be perfected, those who desired it would have to transcend the natural course of time. He felt disappointed and let down, because, with a curious shiver in that heat, he had felt he had found the key. The word had not been entirely new to him. He fancied he had heard it before, long before Sylvia spoke it, and it had not meant transcending time at all.

Well, he wasn’t getting very far cogitating like this. He might as well go back. It was after five, and by now Burden might have got results. He left the cemetery as they were about to close the gates and got a suspicious look from the keeper who had been unaware of his presence inside. But outside the library he thought of that elusive word again. He had a large vocabulary because in his youth he had always made a point of looking up words whose meaning he didn’t know. It was a good rule and not one reserved to the young. This was the place for which Grenville West had a ticket and where Wexford himself had first found his books. Now he spared them a glance on his way to the reference room. Four were in, including Apes in Hell, beneath whose covers Rhoda Comfrey’s name lurked with such seeming innocence.

The library had only one English dictionary, the Shorter Oxford in two bulky volumes. Wexford took the first one of these down, sat at the table and opened it. ‘Aeolism’ was not given, and he found that ‘aeolistic’ meant what he thought it did and that it was an invention of Swift’s. ‘Aeon’ was there – an age, or the whole duration of the world, or of the universe; an immeasurable period of time; eternity’. ‘Aeonian’ too and ‘aeonial’, but no ‘aeonism’ Could Sylvia have made it up, or was it perhaps the etymologically doubtful brain-child of one of her favourite Women’s Lib writers? That wouldn’t account for his certainty that he had himself previously come across it. He replaced the heavy tome and crossed the street to the Police Station.