Ruth Rendell: A Demon in My View

“All right, I get the message,” he heard Brian Kotowsky say. “You’ve told me three times you won’t be in tonight.”

“I just don’t want you ringing up all my friends, asking where I am.”

“You can settle that one, Vesta, by telling me where you’ll be.”

They clumped down the stairs, still arguing, but Arthur couldn’t catch Vesta Kotowsky’s reply. The front door closed fairly quietly which meant Vesta must have shut it. Arthur went to his living room window and watched them get into their car which was left day in and day out, rain, shine or snow, parked in the street. He was sincerely glad he had never taken the step of getting married, had, in fact, taken such a serious step to avoid it.

As he was returning to his kitchen he heard Li-li Chan come upstairs to the half-landing and the phone. Li-li spoke quite good English but rather as a talking bird might have spoken it. Her voice was high and clipped. She was always giggling, mostly about nothing.

She giggled now, into the receiver. “You pick me up soon? Quarter to nine? Oh, you are nice, nice man. Do I love you? I don’t know. Yes, yes, I love you. I love lots, lots of people. Goodbye now.” Li-li giggled prettily all the way back down the stairs.

Arthur snorted, but not loudly enough for her to hear. London Transport wouldn’t get rich out of her. Don’t suppose she ever spends a penny on a train or bus fare, Arthur thought, and darkly, I wonder what she has to do to make it worth their while? But he didn’t care to pursue that one, it was too distasteful.

He heard her go out on the dot of a quarter to. She always closed the doors very softly as if she had something to hide. A well-set-up, clean-looking young Englishman had come for her in a red sports car. A wicked shame, Arthur thought, but boys like that had only themselves to blame, they didn’t know the meaning of self-discipline.

Alone in the house now, he finished his breakfast, washed the dishes, and wiped down all the surfaces. The post was due at nine. While he was brushing the jacket of his second-best suit and selecting a tie, he heard the dull thump of the letter box. Arthur always took the post in and arranged the letters on the hall table.

But first there was his rubbish to deal with. He lifted the liner from the wastebin, secured the top of it with a wire fastener and went downstairs, first making sure, with a quick glance into the mirror, that his tie was neatly knotted and that there was a clean white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Whether there was anyone in the house or not, Arthur would never have gone downstairs improperly dressed. Nor would he set foot outside the house without locking the doors behind him, not even to go to the dustbin. Once more, the bin was choked with yellowish decaying bean sprouts, not even wrapped up. That wasteful Li-li again! He would have to make it clear to Stanley Caspian that one dustbin was inadequate for five people—six, when this new man came today.

Unlocking the door and re-entering the house, he picked up the post. The usual weekly letter, postmarked Taiwan, from Li-li’s father who hadn’t adopted Western ways and wrote the sender’s name as Chan Ah Feng. Poor trusting man, thought Arthur, little did he know. Yet another bill for Jonathan Dean. The next thing they’d have debt collectors round, and a fine thing that would be for the house’s reputation. Two letters for the Kotowskys, one for her and one for both of them. That was the way it always was.

He tidied up the circulars and vouchers—who messed them about like that out of sheer wantonness he didn’t know—and then he arranged the letters, their envelope edges aligned to each other and the edge of the table. Ten past nine. Sighing a little, because it was so pleasant having the house to himself, Arthur went back upstairs and collected his briefcase. He had no real need of a briefcase for he never brought work home, but Auntie Gracie had given him his first one for his twenty-first birthday and since then he had replaced it three times. Besides, it looked well. Auntie Gracie had always said that a man going to business without a briefcase is as ill dressed as a lady without gloves.

He closed his door and tested it with his hand to make sure it was fast shut. Down the stairs once more and out into Trinity Road. A fine, bright day, though somewhat autumnal. What else could you expect in late September?

Grainger’s, Contractors and Builders’ Merchants, weren’t due to open until nine-thirty, and Arthur was early. He lingered to look at the house where he had lived with Auntie Gracie. It was on the corner of Balliol Street and Magdalen Hill, at the point where the hill became Kenbourne Lane, a tall narrow house, condemned to demolition but still waiting along with its neighbours to be demolished. The front door and the downstairs bay were sealed up with gleaming silvery corrugated iron to stop squatters and other vagrants from getting in. Arthur often wondered what Auntie Gracie would say if she could see it now, but he approved of the sealing up. He paused at the gate and looked up to the boarded rectangle on the brick façade which had once been his bedroom window.

Auntie Gracie had been very good to him. He could never make up to her for what she had done for him if he struggled till the day of his death. He knew well what she had done, for, apart from the concrete evidence of it all around him, she had never missed an opportunity of telling him.

“After all I’ve done for you, Arthur!”

She had bought him from his mother, her own sister, when he was two months old.

“Had to give her a hundred pounds, Arthur, and a hundred was a lot of money in those days. We never saw her again. She was off like greased lightning.”

How fond Auntie Gracie had been of grease! Elbow grease, greased lightning—“You need a bit of grease under your heels, Arthur.”

She had told him the facts of his birth as soon as she thought him old enough to understand. Unfortunately, Stanley Caspian and others of his ilk had thought him old enough some months before, but that was no fault of hers. And she had never mentioned his mother or his father, whoever he may have been, at all. But in that bedroom—with the door open, of course. She insisted on his always leaving the door open—he had spent many childhood hours, wondering. How foolish children were and how ungrateful.…

Arthur shook himself and gave a slight cough. People would be looking at him in a moment. He deplored anything that might attract attention to oneself. And why on earth had he been mooning away like this when he passed the house every day, when there had been no unusual circumstance to give rise to such a reverie? But, of course, there was an unusual circumstance. The new man was coming to Room 2. It was only natural that today he should dwell a little on his past life. Natural, but governable too. He turned briskly away from the gate as All Souls’ clock struck the half-hour. Grainger’s yard was next door but one to the sealed-up house, next to that a half-acre or so of waste ground where houses had been demolished but not yet replaced; beyond that Kenbourne Lane tube station.

Arthur unlocked the double gates and let himself into the glass and cedarwood hut which was his office. The boy who made tea and swept up and ran errands and whose duty it was to open the place hadn’t yet arrived. Typical. He wouldn’t be late like this morning after morning if he had had an Auntie Gracie to put a spot of grease under his heels.

Raising the Venetian blinds to let sunshine into the small, neat room, Arthur took the cover off his Adler standard. Plenty of post had come since Friday, mostly returned bills with cheques enclosed. There was one irate letter from a customer who said that a pastel blue sink unit had been installed by Grainger’s in his kitchen instead of the stainless steel variety he had ordered. Arthur read it carefully, planning what diplomatic words he would write in reply.