Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

He was glad now he hadn’t made that request to Linthea. Hedging his bets? Maybe. But the West Indian girl had seemed more attractive to him than ever when he had had lunch with her and Leroy after they had collected the wood and when they had met again at the Tenants’ Association last Saturday afternoon. And if, as it would seem, he was going to lose Helen, be dismissed in favour of that sharpshooting oaf …? Was it so base not to want to jeopardise his chances with Linthea—her husband, at any rate, was nowhere in evidence—by making her think herself a second choice, a substitute?

Rather bitterly he thought that he didn’t now much care who overheard his phone call, for there would be no reminiscing over past love passages. One who wouldn’t overhear it, anyway, was Vesta Kotowsky who rushed past him in a floor-length black hooded cloak as he was coming up the station steps. He went to the kiosk and bought a box of matches with a pound note, thus ensuring a supply of tenpence pieces for his phone call. He was going to need them, all of them.

Her voice sounded nervous when she answered, but it was her voice, not heard for a month, and its effect on him was temporarily to take away his anger. That voice was so soft, so sweet, so civilised and gentle. He thought of the mouth from which it proceeded, heart-shaped with its full lower lip, and he let her talk, thinking of her mouth.

Then he remembered how crucial this talk was and what he must say. “I got your letter.”

“Are you very angry?”

“Of course I’m angry, Helen. I’m fed up. I think I could take it even if you decided against me. It’s probably true what you said in your other letter, that we’d forget each other in time. What I can’t take is being strung along and …” He broke off. The Kotowskys’ door opened and Brian came out. Brian started making signals to him, ridiculous mimes of raising an invisible glass to his lips. “Can’t,” Anthony snapped. “Some other night.”

Helen whispered, “What did you say, Tony?”

“I was talking to someone else. This phone’s in a very public place.” He shouted, “Oh, God damn it!” as the pips sounded. He shovelled in more money. “Helen, couldn’t you call me on this number? I’ll give it to you, it’s …”

She interrupted him with real fear in her voice. “No, please! I’ll have to explain it when the bill comes.”

He was silent. Then he said, “So you’re still going to be there when the bill comes?”

“Tony, I don’t know . I thought if you could come here at Christmas, stay in an hotel here, and we could see each other again and talk properly and I could make you understand how difficult …”

“Oh no!” he exploded. “Come for a week, I suppose, and see you for half an hour a day and maybe one evening if you can get out of jail? And at Easter perhaps? And in the summer? While you keep on vacillating and I keep on trying to understand. I won’t be any married woman’s lap dog, Helen.”

The pips went. He put in more money. “That was the last of my change,” he said.

“I do love you. You must know that”

“No, I don’t know it. And stop crying, please, because this is important. Your next letter is going to be very important, maybe the most important letter you’ll ever write. If you’ll come to me we’ll find a place to live and I’ll look after you and you needn’t be afraid of Roger because I’ll be with you. Roger will divorce you when he sees it’s no use and then we’ll get married. But your next letter’s your last chance. I’m fed up, I’m sick to death of being kicked around, and it’ll soon be too late.” Anger made him rash, that and the threat of the pips going again. “There are other women in the world, remember. And when I hear you tell me your husband’s so important to you that you’re afraid of him seeing phone bills three months hence, like someone in a bloody French farce, I wonder if it isn’t too late already!”

A sob answered him but it was cut off by the shrilling peep-peep-peep. He dropped the receiver with a crash, not bothering to say good-bye. But in the silence he leant against the wall, breathing like someone who has run a race. In his hand was one last twopence piece. His breathing steadied, and on an impulse he dialled Linthea’s number.

As soon as she heard who it was she asked him round for coffee. Anthony hesitated. His conversation with Helen had become a jumble in his mind and he couldn’t remember whether he had given her this number or not. If he had and she phoned back …? No, he wouldn’t go to Linthea’s, but would Linthea come to him? She would, once she had got the upstairs tenant to listen for Leroy.

Arthur had overheard it all, or as much of phone conversations as a listener can hear. Because he hadn’t heard the women’s replies he wasn’t sure whether or not Anthony Johnson was going out. Please let him go out, he found himself praying. Perhaps to that God whose portrait with a crown of thorns hung in All Souls’ church hall where his Sunday school had been, though neither he nor Auntie Gracie had ever really believed in Him. Please let him go out.

But the light from Room 2 continued to illuminate the lichen-coated court. He heard the front door opened and closed and then he saw what he had never seen before, the shadows of two heads, one Anthony Johnson’s, the other sleekly crowned with a pin-pierced chignon, cast on the lighted stone. Arthur turned away, his whole body shaking. He threw back the pink floral eiderdown and seized the pillows one after the other in his hands, strangling them, digging his fingers into their softness, tossing them and grasping them again so savagely that his nails ripped a seam. But this brought him no relief and, after an excess of useless violence, he lay face downwards on the bed, weeping hot tears.

———

Linthea wore a long black wool skirt embroidered with orange flowers. The upper part of her body was covered with a yellow poncho and she had small gold pins in her hair.

“I dressed up,” she said, “because you’re expecting other guests. A party?”

He was a little disappointed because she hadn’t dressed up for him. “I’m not expecting anyone. What made you think so?”

She raised eyebrows that were perfect arcs, black crescents above white moons. “You wouldn’t come to me. Oh, I see . You’re so fond of this exquisite little room with all its antiques and its lovely view of an old-world cellar that you can’t bear to leave it. Do you know, that lampshade looks exactly like a Portuguese Man o’ War?”

He laughed. “I knew it was a jellyfish but I didn’t know what kind. The fact is, I may be going to get a phone call.”

“Ah.”

“Not ‘ah’ at all.” Anthony put the kettle on, set out cups. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. But now you tell me about you.”

“Nothing much to tell. I’m twenty-nine, born in Kingston. Jamaica, not the By-pass. I came here with my parents when I was eighteen. Trained as a social worker here in Kenbourne. Married a doctor.” She looked down at her lap, retrieved a fallen gold pin. “He died of cancer three years ago.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Yes.” She took the cup of coffee Anthony gave her. “Now you,” she said.

“Me? I’m the eternal student.” As he said it, he remembered it was Helen who had dubbed him so, quoting apparently from some Chekhov play. She wasn’t going to phone back. Not now. He began telling Linthea about his thesis, but took his notes gently from her when she started to read them. That sort of thing— For his actions, cruelty to children and animals, even murder, he feels little, if any, guilt. His guilt is more likely to be felt over his failure to perform routine or compulsive actions which are, taken in the context of benefit to society, virtually meaningless —no, that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about tonight Pity there wasn’t a sofa in the room but just the tweed-patched fireside chair and the upright chairs and the thing he thought was called a pouffe. He sat on that because he could surreptitiously, and apparently artlessly, edge it closer and closer to her. He had got quite close, and quite close too, to unburdening himself about his whole disillusionment over the Helen affair, when there came a sharp rap on the door.