Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

At eleven, when he was doing Grainger’s accounts in the room at the side of the works—no little cedarwood and glass office in those days—Mr. Grainger had walked in with Mrs. Goodwin. He could see them now, Mr. Grainger clearing his throat, Mrs. Goodwin with tears on her face. And then the words: “Passed away … her heart … fell down before my eyes … gone, Arthur. There was nothing anyone could do.”

Someone had been in and laid her out. Arthur wouldn’t let the undertakers take the body till the following day. He knew what was right. The first night after death you watched by the dead. He watched. He thought of all she had done for him and what she had been—mother, father, wife, counsellor, housekeeper, sole friend. The large-featured face, waxen and calm, lay against a clean white pillowcase. He yearned towards her, wanting her back—for what? To be better than he had been? To please her as he had never pleased her? To explain or ask her for explanation? He didn’t think it was for any of those things, and he was afraid to touch her, afraid even to let one of his cold fingers rest against her colder cheek. The hammering in his head was strong and urgent.

Not for nearly six years had he been out alone at night But at half-past nine he went out, leaving Auntie Gracie on her own.

He slipped through the passage into Merton Street and then he walked and walked, far away to a pub where they wouldn’t know him—the Hospital Arms.

There he drank two brandies. A stretch of weed-grown bomb site separated the hospital from the embankment, the railway line, and the footbridge that crossed it. Arthur didn’t need to cross the line. His way home was by way of the long lane that straggled through tenements and cottages to the High Street. But he went on to the bomb site and lingered among the rubble stacks until the girl came hurrying over the bridge.

Bridget O’Neill, twenty, student nurse. She screamed when she saw him, before he had even touched her, but there was no one in that empty wasteland to hear her. A train roared past, letting out its double-noted bray. She ran from him, tripped over a brick, and fell. With his bare hands he strangled her on the ground, and then he left her, returning through the dark ways to Magdalen Hill. Soon he slept, falling into a sleep almost as deep, though impermanent, as that which enclosed Auntie Gracie in her last bed.

He had never tended her grave. Thick grass grew above the sides of the slab, and her Christian name was obliterated by tendrils of ivy. Death surrounded him, cold, musty, mildewed death, not the warm kind he wanted. He knew he had begun to want it again, and frightened, wearied by this urge which only death itself could end, he went back to the bus, the launderette and the eternal cleaning of the flat.

Love is the cure for love. Anthony knew that, whatever might happen between him and Linthea it could at best be a distraction. But what was wrong with distractions? His love for Helen had been deep, precious, special. It was absurd to suppose that that could be replaced at will. But many activities and many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.

So he set off for Brasenose Avenue, if not a jolly, thriving wooer, at least a purposeful one. In his time he had received very few refusals. His thoughts, embittered, took a base turn. Was it likely that a widow, lonely, older than himself, would turn him down? And when he rang the doorbell it was answered almost at once by Linthea herself who drew him without a word into the flat and threw her arms round his neck. Afterwards he was thankful he hadn’t responded as he had wanted to. Perhaps, even at that moment, he sensed that this was a kiss of a happiness so great as to include any third party.

Winston was in the sitting room. They had been drinking champagne. Anthony stuck his bottle of Spanish Graves on top of the cupboard where it wouldn’t be noticed.

“You can be the first to congratulate us,” Winston said. “Well, not the first if you count Leroy.”

“You’re getting married.” Anthony uttered it as a statement rather than a question.

“Saturday week,” Linthea said, embracing him again. “Do come!”

“Of course he’ll come,” said Winston. “We’d have told you before, we decided a week ago, but we wanted to make sure it was all right with Leroy first.”

“And was it?”

Winston laughed. “Fine, only when Linthea said she was marrying me he said he’d rather have had you.”

So Anthony also had to laugh at that one and drink some champagne and listen to Winston’s romantic, but not sentimental, account of how he had always wanted Linthea, had lost her when she married and had later pursued her half across the world in great hope. Helen had once quoted to Anthony that it is a bitter thing to look at happiness through another man’s eyes. He told himself that her quotations and her whole Eng. Lit. bit bored him, she was as bad as Jonathan Dean, and then he went home to do more work on his thesis.

Though the psychopath may suffer from compulsive urges or an obsessional neurosis, his condition is related to a lowered state of cortical arousal and a chronic need for stimulation. He may therefore face the warring elements of a routine-driven life and an inability to tolerate routine in the absence of exciting stimuli… .

He broke off, unable to concentrate. This wasn’t what he wanted to write. He wanted—needed—to do something he had never done before, write a letter to Helen.

18

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He wouldn’t send it to her home, that would be worse than useless. To the museum then? Although she hadn’t a secretary, he remembered her telling him there was a girl who opened the incoming post for herself and Le Queuex. Her mother would do if only he knew her mother’s address. He tried to remember the names of friends she had spoken of when they were together. There must be someone to whom he could entrust a letter that was for her eyes only.

Rereading her old letters in search of a name, a clue, was a painful exercise. Darling Tony, I knew I’d miss you but I didn’t know how bad it would be… . That was the one with the bit in it about an invitation to a dress show. If he’d known the name of the dress shop … The people she’d been to school with, to college with? He recalled only Christian names, Wendy, Margaret, Hilary. Suppose he wrote to her old college? The authorities would simply forward the letter to her home. Anyone would do that unless he put in a covering letter expressly directing them not to. And could he bring himself to do that? Perhaps he could, especially as the letter he intended to write wasn’t going to be a humble plea.

He wrote it. Not simply, just like that, but draft after draft until he wondered if he was as mentally unstable as the sick people he studied. The final result dissatisfied him but he couldn’t improve on it.

Dear Helen, I love you. I think I loved you from the first moment we met, and though I would give a lot to blot this feeling out and be free of you, I can’t. You were my whole hope for the future and it was you who gave me a purpose for my life. But that’s enough of me, I don’t mean to go in for maudlin self-pity .

This letter is about you. You led me to believe you loved me in the same way. You told me you had never loved anyone the way you loved me and that Roger was nothing to you except an object of pity. You made love with me many times, many beautiful unforgettable times, and you are not—I can tell this, you know—the kind of woman who sleeps with a man for fun or diversion. You almost promised to come away and live with me. No, it was more than that. It was a firm promise, postponed only because you wanted more time .