Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

When nothing had arrived from Helen by the weekend, Anthony’s attitude towards her wavered between resentful anger and the more reasonable feeling that her letter had got lost in the post. She would, in any case, write again next week. It brought him a small, bitter pleasure to think she might have written to say she had made up her mind in his favour. How ironical if it were that letter which had got lost and she now be wondering if he were paying her back in her own coin. But he didn’t really think she would have decided for him. The likeliest answer was that she had written with her usual ambivalence, given the letter to some colleague or friend to post, and it lay even now in that friend’s pocket or handbag.

On Saturday night he phoned Linthea, but she was out and Leroy’s sitter answered. However, on Sunday evening she was free and Anthony was invited to the flat in Brasenose Avenue.

The Sunday newspapers all had photographs of Brian Kotowsky, dog-faced Brian with his wild hair and his unhappy eyes. POLICE MOUNT MASSIVE SEARCH FOR VESTA’S HUSBAND. She was Vesta now to everyone, a household word, her Christian name on the lips of strangers enough to summon up immediate images of violence, terror, passion, death. But, keeping their options open, the less genteel of the Sundays also carried whole page spread stories entitled in one case, WAS VESTA KENBOURNE KILLER’S VICTIM? and in another, echoing poor Brian’s own words, KENBOURNE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN?

Linthea, in the kitchen making Chicken Maryland, talked about the murder practically, logically, like a character in a detective story. “If Brian Kotowsky did kill her, he can’t have gone straight to find this Dean, because he left your house at a quarter to eleven and she didn’t leave the Grand Duke till ten minutes later. So they’re saying he hung about in the street on a freezing cold night on the chance she’d come that way and at that time. When she did come they didn’t go home to quarrel but quarrelled in a pitch-black mews where he killed her. And that’s ridiculous.”

“We don’t know what they’re saying.”

“The police always think murdered wives have been murdered by their husbands, and considering what I see in my work every day almost, I know why.”

He thought how Helen would have spoken of it, with intuition, using her rich imagination to clothe that night and the players in its drama. But Linthea looked coolly and prosaically at things as he did. Linthea had more in common with him than Helen had. Strange that the girl gifted with the delicate perception, the passionate imagination, should look so cool and fair, the calm and practical one so exotic. Tonight Linthea’s long black hair hung loose down her back. She wore a heavy gold chain about her neck which threw a yellow gleam up against her throat and chin. He wondered about that dead husband of hers and whether she now lived a celibate life.

Later, when they had eaten and she had exhausted the subject of the Kotowskys, completed her analysis of times and circumstances and likelihood, he felt an overpowering urge to confide in her about Helen. But that brought him back to where he had been once before. Can you, if you want to make love to a woman, confess to her your present, strong, and angry love for another woman? Not certainly, with her son in the room, pressing you to a game of Scrabble.

“You’re keeping him up late,” he said at last.

“He’s on half-term. No school tomorrow, no work for me.” She had a merry laugh, evoked by very little, as some West Indians have. “Scrabble’s good for him, he can’t spell at all. How will you grow up,” she said, hugging the boy, “to be a big important doctor like Anthony if you can’t spell?”

So they played Scrabble till midnight when Leroy went to bed and Linthea said very directly, “I shall send you home now, Anthony. You must be fresh for your psychopaths in the morning.”

He didn’t feel very fresh on Tuesday morning because he had awakened at four and been unable to sleep again. All day he wondered if a letter would be waiting for him when he got home, though he refused to give way to the impulse that urged him to go home early and find out. But when he returned at five there was no letter. No post had come that day for the occupants of 142 Trinity Road and the table was bare. So, on the following morning, beginning now to feel real anxiety, he waited at home until the post came, and at nine he took it in himself. Two letters, one for Li-li, one for Winston. It was now two whole weeks since he had heard from Helen.

Two of her letters couldn’t have gone astray. He considered breaking her rule and phoning her at work. She was assistant to the curator of a marine art museum. But why give her what she wanted, a lover content to hang on, playing the amour courtois game, while she gave him nothing? No, he wouldn’t phone. And maybe he wouldn’t phone on the last Wednesday of the month either. By that time, anyway, he might have managed to console himself. Linthea, he thought, Linthea who had no ties, who lived in and worked for a society he understood, who wasn’t effete with poetry and dream and metaphor and a jellylike sensitivity that melts at a hard touch. Above all, this mustn’t affect his thesis. He had begun to write it in earnest and it was going well. Now, having dealt in depth with the findings of various psychometric tests, he wrote:

In the survey it was suggested that the majority of psychopaths feared their own aggression and were as guilt- and anxiety-ridden about their acts as were the normal subjects. In their manner of relating to female and authority figures, a greater disturbance was found in psychopaths than in non-psychopaths, but whereas more guilt feelings were present in the former, further analysis shows that the guilt feelings of psychopaths were indicative rather of their difficult and disagreeable situation than of true remorse. The psychopath, when offered a choice between selfish forms of conduct and those which seem self-denying and are therefore socially acceptable, may be shrewd enough to choose the latter. When obliged to be guided solely by his own judgment, his choice is directed primarily by personal need… .

A tap on the door, discreet and somehow insinuating, interrupted Anthony. Arthur Johnson stood outside, dressed as usual in one of his silver-sheened suits and a shirt as white as that in a detergent commercial. He gave a small, deprecating cough.

“I do most sincerely apologise for this intrusion, but I have to trouble you about the little matter of the rent. Your—er, first weekly payment in advance falls due tomorrow.”

“Oh, sure,” said Anthony. “Will a cheque do?”

“Admirably, admirably.”

While Anthony hunted out his chequebook which was sandwiched between Sokolov’s The Conditioned Reflex and Stein’s Role of Pleasure in Behaviour , Arthur Johnson, in a finicky manner, waved at him a small red rent book and a brown envelope on which was printed with a touching attention to detail: Mr. Anthony Johnson, Room 2, 142 Trinity Road, London W15 6HD.

“If you would be good enough to place your cheque inside your rent book each Friday and the book inside this little envelope?

Then I will either collect it or you may leave it on the hall table.”

Anthony nodded, wrote his cheque.

“Thank goodness, the police have ceased to trouble us.”

“They haven’t troubled me at all yet,” said Anthony.

“Of course, there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mr. Kotowsky is guilty. He’s known to be in South America but he will be extradited.”

“Oh, rubbish,” said Anthony rather more roughly than he intended. “And there’s plenty of doubt in my mind. I don’t believe for a moment he did it.”