Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

Arthur put the rent envelopes on the desk in front of him. “Locally?” he said.

“Up the cemetery. Don’t suppose there’ll be what you’d call a big turn-out. Mrs. Caspian says I ought to put in an appearance, but there are limits. Where did I put me bag of crisps, Arthur?”

“Here,” said Arthur, producing it with distaste from where it had fallen into the wastepaper basket.

“Poxy sort of day for a funeral. Eleven-thirty, they’re having it, I’m told. Still, I should worry. I’m laughing, Arthur, things are looking up. Two bits of good news I’ve got. One, the cops say I can relet Flat 1 at my convenience, which’ll be next week.”

“It could do with a paint. A face-lift, as you might say.”

“So could you and me, me old Arthur, but it’s not getting it any more than we are. I’ve no objection to the new tenant getting busy with a brush.”

“May I know your other piece of good news?”

“Reckon you’ll have to, but I don’t know how you’ll take it. Your rent’s going up, Arthur. All perfectly legal and above board, so you needn’t look like that. Up to four-fifty a year which’ll be another two quid a week in that little envelope, if you please.”

Arthur had feared this. He could afford it. He knew the Rent Act made provision for just such an increase in these hard times. But he wasn’t going to let Stanley get away with it totally unscathed. “No doubt you’re right,” he said distantly, “but I shall naturally have to go into the matter in my own interest. When you let me have the new agreement it would be wise for my solicitors to look at it.” As a parting shot he added, “I fear you won’t find it easy letting those rooms. Two violent deaths, you know. People don’t care for that sort of thing, it puts them off.”

He took his envelope and went upstairs, his equilibrium which had prevailed, though declining, for a week, now shaken. He hoped that any prospective tenants of the Kotowskys’ flat would come round while he was at home, in which case he would take care to let them know all. A gloomy day of thin fog and fine rain. Not enough rain, though, for his umbrella. The orange plastic bag of laundry in one hand, the shopping basket in the other, he set off for the launderette.

Mr. Grainger’s nephew’s wife promised to keep an eye on his washing and pleased Arthur by commenting favourably on the quality of his bed linen. He bought a Dover sole for lunch, a pound of sprouts, a piece of best end of neck for Sunday. The K.12 bus drew up outside the Waterlily and, on an impulse, Arthur got on it. It dropped him at the cemetery gates.

This was the old part, this end, a necropolis of little houses, the grey lichen-grown houses of the dead. Some years back a girl had been found dead in one of these tombs, a family vault. Arthur paused in front of the iron door which closed off the entrance to this cavern. He had been there before, had been inside, for the girl had been strangled and he had wondered if the police would regard her as the third of his victims, though he had been safe in those days with his white lady. Her murderer had been caught. He walked under the great statue of the winged victory, past the tomb of the Grand Duke who had given his name to the pub, on to the crematorium. The chapel door was closed. Arthur opened it diffidently.

A conversation seemed to be taking place inside, for what else can you call it when one man is speaking to one other? The man who was speaking was a clergyman and the man who was listening, sole member of that congregation, was Jonathan Dean. Brian Kotowsky had only one friend to mourn him. Music began to play, but it was Muzak really, as if the tape playing in a supermarket had suddenly taken a religious turn. The coffin, blanketed in purple baize, began to move, and silently the beige velvet curtains drew together. Brian Kotowsky, like Arthur’s white lady, had gone to the fire.

Arthur slipped out. He didn’t want to be seen. He walked back towards the gates along another path, much overgrown, this one, by brambles and the creeping ivy and long-leaved weeds the frost hadn’t yet killed. Droplets of water clung to stone and trembled on leaf and twig. Presently he came to the red granite slab on which was engraved: ARTHUR LEOPOLD JOHNSON, 1855–1921, MARIA LILIAN JOHNSON, 1857–1918, BELOVED WIFE OF THE ABOVE, GRACE MARIA JOHNSON, 1888–1955, THEIR DAUGHTER. BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHICH DIE IN THE LORD. No room for him there, no room for his mother, though perhaps she too was dead. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t come to Auntie Gracie’s funeral.…

In his best dark suit and new black tie, he had sat in the front room of the house in Magdalen Hill, reading the paper. The paper was full of some journalist’s theorising about the Kenbourne Killer and his latest victim. He had read it while he waited for the mourners, Uncle Alfred who had sent him the birthday postal orders, the Winters, Beryl’s mother, Mrs. Goodwin from next door. It was she who had told him of Auntie Grade’s death.

A cold Monday in March it had been. His bedroom was icy, but no one in his milieu and at that time thought of heating bedrooms. Auntie Gracie awakened him at seven-thirty—he never questioned why he should get up at seven-thirty when he only worked next door and didn’t have to be there till half-past nine-awakened him and left for him in the cold bathroom a jug of hot water for shaving. Then into clean underwear because it was Monday.

“If you keep yourself clean, Arthur, you don’t need clean underclothes more than once a week.”

But a fresh white shirt each day because a shirt goes on top and shows. Downstairs to the kitchen where the boiler was alight and the table laid for one. Since he became a man Auntie Gracie had put away childish things for him. She ate her breakfast before he came down and waited on him because he was now master of the house. A bowl of cornflakes, one egg, two rashers of collar bacon, it was always the same. And she had been just the same that morning, her grey hair in tight curls from the new perm she hadn’t yet combed out, dark skirt, lilac jumper, black and lilac crossover overall, slippers that were so hard and plain and unyielding that you would have thought them walking shoes.

“It looks like rain.” As he emptied a plate she took it and washed it. Between washing, she stood at the window, studying the sky above the rooftops in Merton Street. “You’d better take your umbrella.”

Once he had protested that he didn’t need an umbrella to walk twenty yards through light rain or a hat to withstand ten minutes’ chill or a scarf against the faintly falling snow. But now he knew better. By keeping silent he could avoid hearing the words that aroused in him impotent anger and shame: “And when you get ill like you were last time, I suppose you’ll expect me to work myself into the ground nursing you and waiting on you.”

So he kept silent and didn’t even attempt to argue that he might have spent a further hour in bed rather than on a stool in front of the boiler reading the paper. She bustled about the house, calling to him at intervals, “Ten to nine, Arthur,” “Nine o’clock, Arthur.” When he left, allowing himself ten minutes to walk next door, she came to the front door with him and put up her cheek for a kiss. Arthur always remembered those kisses when, in his introspective moments, he reminded himself how happy their relationship had been. And he felt a savage anger against Beryl’s mother for a comment she had once made.

“You give that boy your cheek like you were showing the doctor a boil on your neck, Gracie.”

That morning he had kissed her in the usual way. Many times since he had wished he had allowed his lips to linger or had put an arm round her heavy shoulders. But thinking this way was a kind of fantasising, identifying with characters from films, for he had no idea how to kiss or embrace. And he blocked off the picture at this point because, after the image of that unimaginable closeness, came a frightening conclusion of the embrace, the only possible ending to it.…