had committed perjury either at this trial or at the preparatory examination. There was the suggestion in the mind of the court that she might be an accomplice in the crime; but, again, insufficient proof.
The judge commended the honorable behavior of the husband (sitting in court in a brown-and-yellow-quartered golf cap bought for Sundays) who had not rejected his wife and had “even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means.”
The verdict on the accused was “not guilty.”
The young white man refused to accept the congratulations of press and public and left the court with his mother’s raincoat shielding his face from photographers. His father said to the press, “I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.”
Interviewed by the Sunday papers, who spelled her name in a variety of ways, the black girl, speaking in her own language, was quoted beneath her photograph: “It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more.”
The Irony of Hate
RUTH RENDELL
When lists are made fifty or a hundred years hence of the best writers of our time, regardless of genre, Ruth Rendell (b. 1930), despite her career-long identification with crime and detective fiction, may well rank high. She was born Ruth Barbara Grasemann in London, the daughter of two teachers who both found a creative outlet in painting. After leaving school at eighteen, she eschewed university for a brief career as a newspaper reporter in Essex. After marrying fellow reporter Donald Rendell and producing a son, she quit journalism for full-time motherhood and self-education through voracious reading.
Rendell’s first novel From Doon with Death (1964), introducing her odd-couple police team of Reg Wexford and Mike Burden, is solidly traditional, the trickiness of its plot inviting the inevitable Agatha Christie comparison. Rendell would never abandon this devotion to fair-play plotting as her novels increased in psychological and thematic depth. Her second novel, To Fear a Painted Devil (1965), is non-series, and throughout her career she has mixed the Wexford and Burden books, immensely popular with readers, with often dark-hued crime novels that have achieved even greater critical acclaim. Writing in the Scribner Writers Series volume Mystery and Suspense Writers (1998), B. J. Rahn describes these non-series books as “centered in the consciousness of the main character—whether villain or victim—whose feelings of alienation, anxiety, fear, hatred, and anguish are experienced firsthand by the reader.” Rendell, who was called Ruth by her father and Barbara by her mother, answers to both and now writes as both, having adopted the pseudonym Barbara Vine with A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986). According to
Rahn, the Vine novels “plumb the depths of the human psyche more in the manner of Henry James than Patricia Highsmith or Alfred Hitchcock…The novels are distinguished by subtle manipulation of the narrative viewpoint and complex patterning, which often produce startling ironic surprises.”
Along with her prolific book-or-two-per-year output, Rendell has also kept busy as a short-story writer. Her first collection, The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976) has been followed by at least six more, including Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories (2000). “The Irony of Hate,” revealing who did what in the very first sentence, demonstrates Rendell’s psychological insight as well as her ability to surprise the reader.
Imurdered Brenda Goring for what I suppose is the most unusual of motives. She came between me and my wife. By that I don’t mean to say that there was anything abnormal in their relationship. They were merely close friends, though “merely” is hardly the word to use in connection with a relationship which alienates and excludes a once-loved husband. I murdered her to get my wife to myself once more, but instead I have parted us perhaps for ever, and I await with dread, with impotent panic, with the most awful helplessness I have ever known, the coming trial. By setting down the facts—and the irony, the awful irony that runs through them like a sharp glittering thread—I may come to see things more clearly. I may find some way to convince those inexorable powers that be of how it really was; to make Defending Counsel believe me and not raise his eyebrows and shake his head; to ensure, at any rate, that if Laura and I must be separated she will know as she sees me taken from the court to my long imprisonment, that the truth is known and justice done. Alone here with nothing else to do, with nothing to wait for but that trial, I could write reams about the character, the appearance, the neuroses, of Brenda Goring. I could write the great hate novel of all time. In this context, though, much of it would be irrelevant, and I shall be as brief as I can. Some character in Shakespeare says of a woman, “Would I had never seen her!” And the reply is: “Then you would have left unseen a very wonderful piece of work.” Well, would indeed I had never seen Brenda. As for her being a wonderful piece of work, I suppose I would agree with that too. Once she had had a husband. To be rid of her for ever, no doubt, he paid her enormous alimony and had settled on her a lump sum with which she bought the cottage up the lane from our house. On our village she made the impact one would expect of such a newcomer. Wonderful she was, an amazing refreshment to all those retired couples and cautious weekenders, with her clothes, her long blond hair, her sports car, her talents, and her jet-set past. For a while, that is. Until she got too much for them to take.
From the first she fastened on to Laura. Understandable in a way, since my wife was the only woman in the locality who was of comparable age, who lived there all the time and who had no job. But surely—or so I thought at first—she would never have singled out Laura if she had had a wider choice. To me my wife is lovely, all I could ever want, the only woman I have ever really cared for, but I know that to others she appears shy, colorless, a simple and quiet little housewife. What, then, had she to offer to that extrovert, that bright bejeweled butterfly? She gave me the beginning of the answer herself.
“Haven’t you noticed the way people are starting to shun her darling? The Goldsmiths didn’t ask her to their party last week and Mary Williamson refuses to have her on the fête committee.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” I said. “The way she talks and the things she talks about.”
“You mean her love affairs and all that sort of thing? But, darling, she’s lived in the sort of society where that’s quite normal. It’s natural for her to talk like that, it’s just that she’s open and honest.”
“She’s not living in that sort of society now,” I said, “and she’ll have to adapt if she wants to be accepted. Did you notice Isabel Goldsmith’s face when Brenda told that story about going off for a weekend with some chap she’d picked up in a bar? I tried to stop her going on about all the men her husband named in his divorce action, but I couldn’t. And then she’s always saying, ‘When I was living with so-and-so’ and ‘That was the time of
my affair with what’s-his-name.’ Elderly people find that a bit upsetting, you know.”
“Well, we’re not elderly,” said Laura, “and I hope we can be a bit more broad-minded. You do like her, don’t you?”
I was always very gentle with my wife. The daughter of clever domineering parents who belittled her, she grew up with an ineradicable sense of her own inferiority. She is a born victim, an inviter of bullying, and therefore I have tried never to bully her, never even to cross her. So all I said was that Brenda was all right and that I was glad, since I was out all day, that she had found a friend and companion of her own age.
And if Brenda had befriended and companioned her only during the day, I daresay I shouldn’t have objected. I should have got used to the knowledge that Laura was listening, day in and day out, to stories of a world she had never known, to hearing illicit sex and duplicity glorified, and I should have been safe in the conviction that she was incorruptible. But I had to put up with Brenda myself in the evenings when I got home from my long commuting. There she would be, lounging on our sofa, in her silk trousers or long skirt and high boots, chain-smoking. Or she would arrive with a bottle of wine just as we had sat down to dinner and
involve us in one of those favorite debates of hers on the lines of “Is marriage a dying institution?” or “Are parents necessary?” And to illustrate some specious point of hers she would come out with some personal experience of the kind that had so upset our elderly friends.
Of course I was not obliged to stay with them. Ours is quite a big house, and I could go off into the dining room or the room Laura called my study. But all I wanted was what I had once had, to be alone in the evenings with my wife. And it was even worse when we were summoned to coffee or drinks with Brenda, there in her lavishly furnished, over-ornate cottage to be shown the latest thing she had made—she was always embroidering and weaving and potting and messing about with watercolors—and shown too the gifts she had received at some time or another
from Mark and Larry and Paul and all the dozens of other men there had been in her life. When I refused to go Laura would become nervous and depressed, then pathetically elated if, after a couple of blissful Brenda-less evenings, I suggested for the sake of pleasing her that I supposed we might as well drop in on old Brenda.
What sustained me was the certainty that sooner or later any woman so apparently popular with the opposite sex would find herself a boyfriend and have less or no time for my wife. I couldn’t understand why this hadn’t happened already and I said so to Laura.
“She does see her men friends when she goes up to London,” said my wife.
“She never has any of them down here,” I said, and that evening when Brenda was treating us to a highly colored account of some painter she knew called Laszlo who was terribly attractive and who adored her, I said I’d like to meet him and why didn’t she invite him down for the weekend?
Brenda flashed her long green-painted fingernails about and gave Laura a conspiratorial woman-to-woman look. “And what would all the old fuddy-duddies have to say about that, I wonder?”
“Surely you can rise above all that sort of thing, Brenda,” I said. “Of course I can. Give them something to talk about. I’m quite well aware it’s only sour grapes. I’d have Laszlo here like a shot, only he wouldn’t come. He hates the country, he’d be bored stiff.”
Apparently Richard and Jonathan and Stephen also hated the country or would be bored or couldn’t spare the time. It was much better for Brenda to go up and see them in town, and I noticed that after my probing about Laszlo, Brenda seemed to go to London more often and that the tales of her escapades after these visits became more and more sensational. I think I am quite a perceptive man and soon there began to form in my mind an idea so fantastic that for a while I refused to admit it even to myself. But I put it to the test. Instead of just listening
to Brenda and throwing in the occasional rather sour rejoinder, I started asking her questions. I took her up on names and dates. “I thought you said you met Mark in America?” I would say, or “But surely you didn’t have that holiday with Richard until after your divorce?” I tied her up in knots without her realizing it, and the idea began to seem not so fantastic after all. The final test came at Christmas.
I had noticed that Brenda was a very different woman when she was alone with me than when Laura was with us. If, for example, Laura was out in the kitchen making coffee or, as sometimes happened at the weekends, Brenda dropped in when Laura was out, she was rather cool and shy with me. Gone then were the flamboyant gestures and the provocative remarks, and Brenda would chat about village matters as mundanely as Isabel Goldsmith. Not quite the behavior one would expect from a self-styled Messalina alone with a young and reasonably personable man. It struck me then that in the days when Brenda had been invited to village parties, and now when she still met neighbors at our parties, she never once attempted a flirtation. Were all the men too old for her to bother with? Was a slim, handsome man of going on fifty too ancient to be considered fair game for a woman who would never see thirty again? Of course they were all married, but so were her Paul and her Stephen, and, if she were to be believed, she had had no compunction about taking them away from their wives.
If she were to be believed. That was the crux of it. Not one of them wanted to spend Christmas with her. No London lover invited her to a party or offered to take her away. She would be with us, of course, for Christmas lunch, for the whole of the day, and at our Boxing Day gathering of friends and relatives. I had hung a bunch of mistletoe in our hall, and on Christmas morning I admitted her to the house myself, Laura being busy in the kitchen.
“Merry Christmas,” I said. “Give us a kiss, Brenda,” and I took her in my arms under that mistletoe and kissed her on the mouth.
She stiffened. I swear a shudder ran through her. She was as awkward, as apprehensive, as repelled as a sheltered twelve-year-old. And then I knew. Married she may have been—and it was not hard now to guess the cause of her divorce—but she had never had a lover or enjoyed an embrace or even been alone with a man longer than she could help. She was frigid. A good-looking, vivacious, healthy girl, she nevertheless had that particular disability. She was as cold as a nun. But because she couldn’t bear the humiliation of admitting it, she had created for herself a fantasy life, a fantasy past, in which she queened it as a fantasy nymphomaniac.
At first I thought it a huge joke and I couldn’t wait to tell Laura. But I wasn’t alone with her till two in the morning and then she was asleep when I came to bed. I didn’t sleep much. My elation dwindled as I realized I hadn’t any real proof and that if I told Laura what I’d been up to, probing and questioning and testing, she would only be bitterly hurt and resentful. How could I tell her I’d kissed her best friend and got an icy response? That, in her absence, I’d tried flirting with her best friend and been repulsed? And then, as I thought about it, I understood what I really had discovered, that Brenda hated men, that no man would ever come and take her away or marry her and live here with her and absorb all her time. For ever she would stay here alone, living a stone’s throw from us, in and out of our house daily, she and Laura growing old together.
I could have moved house, of course. I could have taken Laura away. From her friends? From the house and the countryside she loved? And what guarantee would I have had that Brenda wouldn’t have moved too to be near us still? For I knew now what Brenda saw in my wife, a gullible innocent, a trusting everlastingly credulous audience whose own inexperience kept her from seeing the holes and discrepancies in those farragos of nonsense and whose pathetic determination to be worldly prevented her from showing distaste. As the dawn came and I looked with love and sorrow at Laura sleeping beside me, I knew
what I must do, the only thing I could do. At the season of peace and goodwill, I decided to kill Brenda Goring for my own and Laura’s good and peace.
Easier decided than done. I was buoyed up and strengthened by knowing that in everyone’s eyes I would have no motive. Our neighbors thought us wonderfully charitable and tolerant to put up with Brenda at all. I resolved to be positively nice to her instead of just negatively easygoing, and as the New Year came in I took to dropping in on Brenda on my way back from the post or the village shop, and if I got home from work to find Laura alone I asked where Brenda was and suggested we should phone her at once and ask her to dinner or for a drink. This pleased Laura enormously.
“I always felt you didn’t really like Brenda, darling,” she said, “and it made me feel rather guilty. It’s marvelous that you’re beginning to see how nice she really is.”
What I was actually beginning to see was how I could kill her and get away with it, for something happened which seemed to deliver her into my hands. On the outskirts of the village, in an isolated cottage, lived an elderly unmarried woman called Peggy Daley, and during the last week of January the cottage was broken into and Peggy stabbed to death with her own kitchen knife. The work of some psychopath, the police seemed to believe, for nothing had been stolen or damaged. When it appeared likely that they weren’t going to find the killer. I began thinking of how I could kill Brenda in the same way so that the killing could look like
the work of the same perpetrator. Just as I was working this out Laura went down with a flu bug she caught from Mary Williamson.
Brenda, of course, came in to nurse her, cooked my dinner for me and cleaned the house. Because everyone believed that Peggy Daley’s murderer was still stalking the village, I walked Brenda home at night, even though her cottage was only a few yards up the lane or narrow path that skirted the end of our
garden. It was pitch dark there as we had all strenuously opposed the installation of street lighting, and it brought me an ironical amusement to notice how Brenda flinched and recoiled when on these occasions I made her take my arm. I always made a point of going into the house with her and putting all the lights on. When Laura began to get better and all she wanted in the evenings was to sleep I sometimes went earlier to Brenda’s, had a nightcap with her, and once, on leaving, I gave her a comradely kiss on the doorstep to show any observing neighbor what friends we were and how much I appreciated all Brenda’s kindness to my sick wife.
Then I got the flu myself. At first this seemed to upset my plans, for I couldn’t afford to delay too long. Already people were beginning to be less apprehensive about our marauding murderer and were getting back to their old habits of leaving their back doors unlocked. But then I saw how I could turn my illness to my advantage. On the Monday, when I had been confined to bed for three days and that ministering angel Brenda was fussing about me nearly as much as my own wife was, Laura remarked that she wouldn’t go across to the Goldsmiths that evening as she had promised because it seemed wrong to leave me. Instead, if I was better by then, she would go on the Wednesday, her purpose being to help Isabel cut out a dress. Brenda, of course, might have offered to stay with me instead, and I think Laura was a little surprised that she didn’t. I knew the reason and had a little quiet laugh to myself about it. It was one thing for Brenda to flaunt about, regaling us with stories of all the men she had nursed in the past, quite another to find herself alone with a not very sick man in that man’s bedroom.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 20