Ruth Rendell: A Demon in My View

Entering the Waterlily on his own recalled to him those three previous occasions on which he had gone into a public house alone. He pushed away the memory, reminding himself how near he was to Trinity Road. The pub was crowded now and Arthur had to queue. He asked for a small brandy, though he hadn’t meant to buy a drink at all. But he needed the warmth and the comfort of it to combat the agonies of embarrassment he passed through while the licencee asked the barman and the barman asked the barmaid—in bellowing amused voices—for a Mr. Johnson’s laundry bag.

“You were with those people who’d got married, weren’t you?”

Arthur nodded.

“An orange-coloured bag? That Chinese girl took it. I saw her go out of the door with it.”

He gave-a gasp of relief. Li-li was in Kemal’s, and his laundry, no doubt, was in that very car he had walked past. He almost ran out of the Waterlily. He crossed the mews entrance. There were so many cars lining the street and all their paintbox colours reduced to tones of sepia. But the sports car wasn’t among them. Li-li and her escort had gone.

Arthur stood shaking outside the restaurant, and the hot, spicy smell that wafted to him from its briefly opened door brought a gust of nausea in which he could taste the stinging warmth of brandy. And for support he rested one arm along the convex frosted top of the pillar box. All he wanted, he told himself, was to get his washing, secure it from those who, with reasonless malice, had taken it and were keeping it from him.

Where did people go when they went out in the evening? To pubs, restaurants, cinemas. Li-li had already been to a pub, a restaurant. Arthur considered, his head beginning to drum. Then he crossed the road in the direction of Magdalen Hill and the Taj Mahal.

Now the whole corner was boarded up, the waste ground as well as the area where the demolished houses had been, where Auntie Gracie’s house had been. It was fenced in blankly with a row of those old doors builders save and use for this purpose. As Arthur passed close by he could see through the yellow glare that each was painted in some pale bathroom shade, pink, green, cream. Closed, nailed together, they seemed to shut off great epochs of his life. He went past Grainger’s and the station. A train running under the street made strong vibrations run up through his body.

The film showing at the Taj Mahal wasn’t truly Indian but something from farther east. The slant-eyed faces, the heads crowned with jewelled, pagoda-shaped headdresses on the poster outside told him that. And this gave force to his feeling that it was here Li-li had come. But there was no parking space in Kenbourne Lane with its double yellow band coursing the edge of the pavement. Suppose she was inside? He wouldn’t be able to find her or fetch her out. Still he lingered at the foot of the steps, looking almost wistfully in at the foyer, so much the same as ever yet so dreadfully changed. Hundreds of times he had passed through those swing doors with Auntie Gracie, but it was more than twenty years since he had visited any cinema except that which his own living room afforded.

He wouldn’t go in there now. Behind the cinema was a vast council car park. He would go into that car park and find the red sports car. It was unlikely to be locked, for the young were all feckless and indifferent to the value of property. He made his way down the path between shops and cinema, hearing the oriental music which reached him through the tall, cream-painted ramparts of the Taj Mahal. It made a huge, pale cliff, overshadowing the car park, which was unlit, though semi-circled at its perimeter with many of those yellow lights and with silvery white ones as well. There was no one in the attendant’s hut at the entrance, there was no one anywhere. Arthur passed beside the barrier, the sword-shaped arm that would rise to allow the passage of a vehicle.

Cars stood in long regular rows. Underfoot it wasn’t tarmac or concrete but a gravelly mud, beginning now to freeze into hardness. He could walk on it with soundless footfalls. Slowly he crept along, scanning car after car, pausing sometimes to stare along the lines of car roofs that gleamed dully like aquatic beasts slumbering side by side on some northern moonlit coast. But it was a false moonlight, the heavy purple sky suffused only by street lamps.

When he reached the southernmost point of the great irregular quadrangle, a sense of the absurdity of what he was doing began gradually to penetrate his brandy haze. He wasn’t going to find the sports car, or if he did he wouldn’t dare to touch it. He had no evidence that Li-li had ever passed this way or entered the Taj Mahal. Not for this purpose had he come into the solitary half-dark of this place. He had come for the reason he always ventured into the dark and the loneliness.…

But there were no women here. None of those creatures who threatened his liberty, were always a danger to him, were here. And he could only find one of them if he left the car park by the narrow gate behind him, impassable to vehicles, that led to a path into Brasenose Avenue. With painful lust he envisioned that little defile, but he turned his back on it, turned from its direction, and forced his legs to push him back towards the hut between the ranks of cars.

Then, as he emerged into a wider aisle, he saw that he was no longer alone. A car, one of those tinny, perched-up little Citroëns, had nosed in and was searching for a space. Arthur drew himself up, narrowing and trimming his body so as to present a respectable and decorous air. Almost greater than that growing, not-to-be-permitted desire was the need to appear to any watcher as a law-abiding car owner with legitimate business here. The Citroën dived into a well of darkness between two larger cars. Arthur was only a dozen yards away from it. He saw the driver get out, and the driver was a woman.

A young girl, tallish and very slender, wearing jeans and an Afghan coat with furry edges and embroidery which gleamed a little in the light from pale distant lamps. Her hair was a golden aureole, a mass of metallic-looking filaments that hung below her shoulders. The car door open, she was bending over the interior, adjusting to the steering column some thiefproof locking device. He saw her high-heeled boots, the leather wrinkling over thin ankles, and he felt a constriction in his throat. He could taste brandied bile.

Now, soft-footed, he was a yard behind her. The girl straightened and closed the car door. But it refused to catch. She pulled it wide and shut it with a hard slam. The noise made a vast explosion in Arthur’s ears as he raised his hands and leapt upon her from behind, digging his fingers into her neck.

The earth rocked as he held onto that surprisingly strong and sinewy neck, and the huge purple sky blazed at him, burning his eyes. The girl was resisting, strong as he, stronger.… She gave a powerful twist and her elbow thrust back hard into his diaphragm. He staggered at the sudden pain, slackening his hold, and a fist swung into his face, hard bone against his teeth. With a strangled grunt he fell back against the next car, sliding down its slippery bodywork. Her face loomed over his, contorted, savage, and Arthur let out a cry, for it was the face of a young man with a hooked nose, stubble on his upper lip, and a cape of coarse hair streaming. The fist swung again, this time to his eye. Arthur slid down onto the frozen mud and lay there, half under the oil-blackened chassis of the other car.

He didn’t move, although he was conscious. A hand turned him over, a sharp-toed boot kicked his ribs. He made no sound, but lay there with his eyes closed. The boy was standing over him, breathing heavily, making sucking sounds of satisfaction and triumph Then he heard footsteps pounding away towards the hut and the barrier and there was a terrible deep silence.