by Ruth Rendell
“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.
He called himself, when required to state his occupation, a surveyor. In fact, he had never surveyed anything and wouldn’t have known how to go about it. His work consisted simply in sitting at this desk from nine-thirty till five, answering the phone, sending out bills and keeping the books. He knew his work back to front, inside out, but it still caused him anxiety, for Auntie Gracie’s standards were always before him.
“Never put off till tomorrow what you ca
n do today, Arthur. Remember if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Your employer has reposed his trust in you. He has put you in a responsible position and it’s up to you not to let him down.”
Those, or words like them, had been the words with which she had sent him off to be Grainger’s boy a week after his fourteenth birthday. So he had swept up better than anyone else and made tea better than anyone else. When he was twenty-one he had attained his present responsibility, that of seeing to it that every customer of Grainger’s got his roof mended better than anyone else’s roof and his kitchen floor laid better than anyone else’s kitchen floor. And he had seen to it. He was invaluable.
Dear Sir, Arthur typed, I note with regret that the Rosebud de Luxe sink unit (type E/4283, pastel blue) was not, in fact
Barry Hopkins slouched into the office, chewing bubble gum.
“Hi.”
“Good morning, Barry. A little late, aren’t you? Do you know what time it is?”
“Round half nine,” said Barry.
“I see. Round half nine. Of all the lackadaisical, feckless …” Arthur would have liked to advise him to go over to the works and ask for a pound of elbow grease, but the young were so sophisticated these days. Instead he snapped, “Take that filthy stuff out of your mouth.”
Barry took no notice. He blew an enormous bubble, like a balloon and of a pale shade of aquamarine. Leaning idly on the window sill, he said:
“Old Grainger’s comin’ across the yard.”
Arthur was galvanised. He composed his face into an expression suggestive of a mixture of devotion to duty, self-esteem and simpering sycophancy, and applied his hands to the typewriter.
4
————
Anthony Johnson had no furniture. He possessed nothing but a few clothes and a lot of books. These he had brought with him to 142 Trinity Road in a large old suitcase and a canvas bag. There were works on sociology, psychology, his dictionary of psychology, and that essential textbook for any student of the subject, The Psychopath, by William and Joan McCord. Whatever else he needed for reference he would obtain from the British Museum, and from that excellent library of criminology—the best, it was said, in London—housed in Radclyffe College, Kenbourne Vale. In that library too he would write the thesis whose subject was “Some Aspects of the Psychopathic Personality,” and which he hoped would secure him from the University of London his doctorate of philosophy.
Part of it, he thought, surveying Room 2, would have to be written here. In that fireside chair, presumably, which seemed to be patched with bits from a woman’s tweed skirt. On that crippled gate-leg table. Under that hanging lamp that looked like a monstrous joke-shop plastic jellyfish. Well, he wanted his Ph.D and this was the price he must pay for it. Dr. Johnson. Not, of course, that he would call himself doctor. It was Helen who had pointed out that in this country, the land of such anomalies, the bachelor of medicine is called doctor and the doctor of philosophy mister. She too had seen the funny side of being Dr. Johnson and had quoted epigrams and talked about Boswell until he, at last, had seen the point. But it was always so. Sometimes he thought that for all his Cambridge First, his Home Office Social Science diploma, his wide experience of working with the poor, the sick and the deprived, he had never woken up to awareness and insight until he met Helen. She it was who had turned his soul’s eye towards the light.
But as he thought this, he turned his physical eye towards Stanley Caspian’s green-spotted fingermarked mirror and surveyed his own reflection. He wasn’t a vain man. He hardly ever thought about the way he looked. That he was tall and slim and strongly made with straight features and thick fair hair had never meant much to him except in that they denoted health. But lately he had come to wonder. He wondered what he lacked that Roger had; he who was good-looking and vigorous and—well, good company, wasn’t he?—hypereducated with a good salary potential, and Roger, who was stupid and dull and possessive and couldn’t do anything but win pistol-shooting contests. Only he knew it wasn’t that at all. It was just that Helen, for all her awareness, didn’t know her own mind.
To give her a chance to know it, to choose between them, he had come here. The library, of course, was an advantage. But he could easily have written his thesis in Bristol. The theory was that absence made the heart grow fonder. If he had gone to his parents in York she could have phoned him every night. He wasn’t going to let her know the phone number here—he didn’t know it himself yet—or communicate with her at all except on the last Wednesday in the month when Roger would be out at his gun club. And he couldn’t write to her at all in case Roger intercepted the letter. She’d write to him once a week. He wondered, as he unpacked his books, how that would work out, if he had been wise to let her call the tune, make all the arrangements. Well, he’d given her a deadline. By November she must know. Stay in prison or come out with him into the free air.
He opened the window because the room smelt stale. Outside was a narrow yard. What light it received came from a bit of sky just flicked at its edges by leaves from a distant tree. The sky was a triangular patch because most of it was cut off by brick wall meeting brick wall diagonally about four yards up. In one of these walls—they were festooned with pipes betwigged with smaller pipes like lianas—was a door. Since there was no window beside it or above it or anywhere near it, Anthony decided it must lead down to a cellar.
Five o’clock. He had better go out and get himself something to cook on that very old and inefficient-looking Baby Belling stove. The hall smelt vaguely of cloves, less vaguely of old, unwashed fabrics. That would be the bathroom, that door between his and Room 1, and that other one to the right of old Caspian’s table, the loo. Wondering what sort of a woman or girl Miss Chan was and whether she would get possession of the bathroom just when he wanted to use it, he went out into the street.
Trinity Road. It led him via Oriel Mews into Balliol Street. The street names of London, he thought, require an historical treatise of their own. Someone must know why this group in Hampstead are called after Devon towns and that cluster in Cricklewood after Hebridean islands. Were the Barbara, the Dorinda and the Lesly, after whom roads are named just north of the City, once the belles of Barnsbury? Did a sorcerer live in Warlock Road, Kilburn Park, and who was the Sylvia of Sylvia Gardens, Wembley, what is she, that all our maps commend her? In that corner of Kenbourne Vale, to which his destiny had drawn Anthony Johnson, someone had christened the squalid groves and terraces after Oxford colleges.
A cruel joke cannot have been intended. The councillor or town planner or builder must have thought himself inspired when he named Trinity Road, All Souls Grove, Magdalen Hill, Brasenose Avenue, and Wadham Street. What was certain, Anthony thought, was that he hadn’t been an Oxford man, had never walked in the enclosed quadrangles of that city or even seen its dreaming spires.
Such a fanciful reverie would once have been alien to him. Helen had taught him to think like this, to see through her eyes, to associate, to compare, and to dream. She was all imagination, he all practical. Practical again, he noted mundane things. The Vale Café for quick, cheap snacks; Kemal’s Kebab House, smelling of cumin and sesame and fenugreek, for when he wanted to splash a bit; a pub—the Waterlily, it was called. Just opening now. Anthony saw red plush settees, a brown-painted moulded ceiling, etched glass screens beside and behind the bar.
The pavements everywhere were cluttered with garbage in black plastic sacks. A dustmen’s strike, perhaps. The kids were out of school. He wondered where they played. Always on these dusty pavements of Portland stone? Or on that bit of waste ground, fenced in with broken and rusty tennis court wire, between Grainger’s, the builders, and the tube station?
Houses marked here for demolition. The sooner they came down the better and made way for flats with big windows and green spaces to surround them. Not many truly English people about. Brown women pushing prams with black babies in them, gypsy-looking women with hard, worn faces, Indian women with Marks and Spence
rs woolly cardigans over lilac and gold and turquoise saris. Cars parked everywhere, and vans double-parked on a street that was littered with torn paper and bruised vegetables and silvery fish scales where a market had just packed up and gone. Half-past five. But very likely that corner shop, Winter’s, stayed open till all hours. He went in, bought a packet of ham, a can of beans, some bread, eggs, tea, margarine, and frozen peas. Carried along by a tide of home-going commuters, he returned to 142 Trinity Road. The house was no longer empty.
A man of about fifty was standing by the hall table, holding in his hand a bundle of cheap offer vouchers. He was tallish, thin, with a thin, reddish and coarse-skinned face. His thin, greyish-fair hair had been carefully combed to conceal a bald patch and was flattened with Brylcreem. He wore an immaculate dark grey suit, a white shirt, and a maroon tie dotted with tiny silver spots. On his rather long, straight, and quite fleshless nose, were a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. When he saw Anthony he jumped.
“These were on the mat,” he said. “They come every day. You wouldn’t think there was a world paper shortage, would you? I tidy them up. No one else seems to be interested. But I hardly feel it’s my place to throw them away.”
Anthony wondered why he bothered to explain.
“I’m Anthony Johnson,” he said. “I moved in today.”
The man said, “Ah,” and held out his hand. He had a rather donnish look as if he perhaps had been responsible for the naming of those streets. But his voice was uneducated, underlying the pedantic preciseness Kenbourne Vale’s particular brand of cockney. “Moved into the little room at the back, have you? We keep ourselves very much to ourselves here. You won’t use the phone after eleven, will you?”
Anthony asked where the phone was.
“On the first landing. My flat is on the second landing. I have a flat, you see, not a room.”
Light dawned. “Are you by any chance the other Johnson?”