Ruth Rendell: A Demon in My View

The launderette attendant said, “Good morning,” and Arthur rejoined with a cool nod. He used his own soap in the machine. He didn’t trust the blue stuff in the little packet you got for five-pence. Nor did he trust the attendant to put his linen in the drier nor the other customers not to steal it. So he sat patiently on one of the benches, talking to no one, until the thirty-five-minute cycle was completed.

It afforded him considerable satisfaction to note how superior were his pale blue sheets, snowy towels, underwear and shirts, to the gaudy jumble sale laundry in the adjacent machines. While they were safely rotating in the drier, he went next door to the butcher’s and then to the greengrocer’s. Arthur never shopped in the supermarkets run by Indians, in which this area of Kenbourne Vale abounded. He selected his lamb chops, his small Sunday joint of Scotch topside, with care. Three slices off the roast for Sunday, the rest to be minced and made into Monday’s cottage pie. A pound of runner beans, and pick out the small ones, if you please, he didn’t want a mouthful of strings.

A different way back. The linen so precisely folded that it wouldn’t really need ironing—though Arthur always ironed it—he trotted up Merton Street. More council flats, tower blocks here like pillars supporting the heavy, overcast sky. The lawns which separated them, Arthur had often noticed with satisfaction, were prohibited to children. The children played in the street or sat disconsolately on top of bits of sculpture. Arthur disapproved of the sculptures, which in his view resembled chunks cut out of prehistoric monsters for all they were entitled “Spring” or “Social Conscience” or “Man and Woman,” but he didn’t think the children ought to sit on them or play in the street for that matter. Auntie Gracie had never allowed him to play in the street.

Stanley Caspian’s Jaguar had gone, and so had the Kotowskys’ fourth-hand Ford. A fistful of vouchers, entitling their possessor to threepence off toothpaste or free soap when you bought a giant size shampoo, had been pushed through the letter box. Arthur helped himself to those which might come in handy, and mounted the stairs. There was a half-landing after the ten steps of the first flight where a pay phone box was attached to the wall. Four steps went on to the first floor. The door of the Kotowskys’ flat was on his left, that to Jonathan Dean’s room facing him, and the door to the bathroom they shared between the other two. Dean’s door was open, Shostakovitch’s Fifth Symphony on loud enough to be heard in Kenbourne Town Hall. The intention apparently was that it should be loud enough merely to be audible in the bathroom from which Dean, a tall, red-haired, red-faced man now emerged. He wore nothing but a small mauve towel fastened round him loincloth-fashion.

“The body is more than raiment,” he remarked when he saw Arthur.

Arthur flushed slightly. It was his belief that Dean was mad, a conviction which rested partly on the fact that everything the man said sounded as if it had come out of a book. He turned his head in the direction of the open door.

“Would you be good enough to reduce the volume a little, Mr. Dean?”

Dean said something about music having charms to soothe the savage breast, and beat his own, which was hairy and covered with freckles. But, having slammed his door with violence but no animosity, he subdued Shostakovich and only vague Slavic murmurs reached Arthur as he ascended the second flight.

And now he was in his own exclusive domain. He occupied the whole second floor. With a sigh of contentment, resting his laundry bag and his shopping basket on the mat, he unlocked the door and let himself in.

2

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Arthur prepared his lunch, two lamb cutlets, creamed potatoes, runner beans. None of your frozen or canned rubbish for him. Auntie Gracie had brought him up to appreciate fresh food, well-cooked. He ended the meal with a slice from the plum pie he had baked on Thursday night, and then, without delay, he washed the dishes. One of Auntie Gracie’s maxims had been that only slatternly housekeepers leave dirty dishes in the sink. Arthur always washed his the moment he finished eating.

He went into the bedroom. The bed was stripped. He put on clean sheets, rose pink, and rose pink pillowcases. Arthur couldn’t sleep in a soiled bed. Once, when collecting their rent, he had caught a glimpse of the Kotowskys’ bed and it had put him off his supper.

Meticulously he dusted the bedroom furniture and polished the silver stoppers on Auntie Gracie’s cut-glass scent bottles. All his furniture was late Victorian, pretty though a little heavy. It came up well under an application of polish. Arthur still felt guilty about using spray-on polish instead of the old-fashioned wax kind. Auntie Gracie had never approved of short cuts. He gave the frilly nets with which every window in the flat was curtained a critical stare. They were too fragile to be risked at the launderette, so he washed them himself once a month, and they weren’t due for a wash for another week. But this was such a grimy district, and there was nothing like white net for collecting every bit of flying dust. He began to take them down. For the second time that day he found himself facing the cellar door.

The Kotowskys had no window which overlooked it. It could be seen only from this one of his and from the one in Room 2. This had long been known to Arthur, he had known it for nearly as long as the duration of his tenancy. Very little in his own life had changed in those twenty years. The cellar door had never been painted, though the bricks had darkened perhaps and the concrete grown more green and damp. No one had ever seen him cross that yard, he thought as he laid the net curtains carefully over a chair, no one had ever seen him enter the cellar. He continued to stare down, considering, remembering.

He had been at school with Stanley Caspian—Merton Street Junior—and Stanley had been fat and gross and coarse even then. A bully always.

“Auntie’s baby! Auntie’s baby! Where’s your dad, Arthur Johnson?” And with an inventiveness no one would have suspected from the standard of Stanley’s school work: “Cowardy, cowardy custard, Johnson is a bastard!”

The years civilise or, at least, inhibit. When they met by chance in Trinity Road, each aged thirty-two, Stanley was affable, even considerate.

“Sorry to hear you lost your aunt, Arthur. More like a mother to you, she was.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be wanting a place of your own now. Bachelor flat, eh? How about taking the top of a hundred and forty-two?”

“I’ve no objection to giving it the once-over,” said Arthur primly. He knew old Mrs. Caspian had left her son a lot of property in West Kenbourne.

The house was in a mess in those days and the top flat was horrible. But Arthur saw its potential—and for two pounds ten a week?

So he took Stanley’s offer, and a couple of days later when he had started the redecorating he went down into the cellar to see if, by chance, it housed a stepladder.

She was lying on the floor of the furthest room on a heap of sacks and black-out curtains left over from the war. She was naked and her white plastic flesh was cold and shiny. He never found out who had brought her there and left her entombed. At first he had been embarrassed, taken aback as he was when he glimpsed likenesses of her standing in shop windows and waiting to be dressed. But then, because he was alone with her and there was no one to see them, he approached more closely. So that was how they looked? With awe, with fear, at last with distaste, he looked at the two hemispheres on her chest, the soft, swollen triangle between her closed thighs. An impulse came to him to dress her. He had done so many secret things in his life—almost everything he had done that he had wanted to do had been covert, clandestine—that no inhibition intervened to stop him fetching from the flat a black dress, a handbag, shoes. These had belonged to Auntie Gracie and he had brought them with him from the house in Magdalen Hill. People had suggested he give them to the WVS for distribution, but how could he? How could he have borne to see some West Kenbourne slattern queening it in her clothes?