by Ruth Rendell
It seemed definite enough. But Anthony—and evidently Arthur Johnson—had reckoned without West Indian hospitality and West Indian enthusiastic pressure. In argument, Arthur Johnson would perhaps have won, but he was given no chance to argue, the situation being managed by Winston’s brother, a man of overpowering bonhomie. And Anthony who in the past had been irritated by and sorry for Arthur Johnson, now felt neither anger nor pity. It was all he could do to stop himself laughing aloud at the sight of this finicky and austere-looking man propelled into the saloon bar of the Waterlily between Perry Mervyn and Jonathan Dean. Arthur Johnson looked amazed and frightened. Still clutching his carrier bag, he had the air of some gentleman burglar of fiction apprehended by plainclothes policemen, the bag, of course, containing the spoils of crime. And now it was Li-li who took the bag from him, ignoring his protests and thrusting it under the settle on which she and Jonathan sat down with their victim between them.
———
It was a violation, a kidnapping almost, Arthur thought, too affronted to speak. He had never before entered the Waterlily which, in his youth, had been pointed out to him by Auntie Gracie as a den of iniquity. Bewildered, crushed by shyness, he sat stiff and silent while Jonathan Dean paid Li-li compliments across him and Li-li giggled in return. The stout and very black woman who faced him added to his discomfiture by asking him in rapid succession what he did for a living, if he was married and how long had he lived in Trinity Road. He was saved from answering her fourth question—didn’t he think her new sister-in-law absolutely lovely?—by Anthony Johnson’s asking him what he would drink. Arthur replied, inevitably, that he would have a small brandy.
“Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men, but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.” Having quoted this, Dean roared with laughter and said it was by Dr. Johnson.
Arthur didn’t know what he meant but felt he was getting at him personally and perhaps also at Anthony Johnson. He wondered how soon he could make his escape. The brandy came and with it a variety of longer, less strong, drinks for the others, which made Arthur wonder if he had made a too expensive choice or even committed some gross social error. Two entirely separate conversations began to be conducted round the table, one between Li-li, Dean, and Mervyn’s sister-in-law, the other between the bridal couple and Mervyn’s brother. And Arthur was aware of the isolation of himself and the “other” Johnson, both of whom were left out of these exchanges. Anthony Johnson looked rather ill—had drunk too much, Arthur supposed, at whatever carousing had been going on since lunchtime—and he began turning over in his mind various opening gambits for a conversation between them. As the only English people present, for the loathsome Dean didn’t count and was very likely an Irishman, anyway, it was their duty to present some sort of solid front. And he had opened his mouth to speak of the severe frost which the television had forecast for that night, when Dean, raising his glass in what he called a nuptial toast, launched into a speech.
For some moments this was listened to in silence, though Winston Mervyn seemed fidgety. Didn’t like someone else stealing his thunder, Arthur thought. And Dean was certainly airing his education, spouting streams of stuff which couldn’t have been thought up on the spur of the moment but must have been written down first. It was all about love and marriage, and Arthur actually chuckled when Dean levelled his gaze on Mervyn’s stout brother-in-law and said that in marriage a man becomes slack and selfish and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. At the same time he was aware that under the table a heavily shod foot was groping across his ankles to find a daintily shod foot. He drew in his knees.
“To marry,” said Dean, “is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.”
Only Li-li laughed. The Mervyn relatives looked blank. Winston Mervyn got up abruptly and stalked to the bar, while Anthony Johnson, with a violence which alarmed Arthur because he couldn’t at all understand it, said:
“For God’s sake, shut up! D’you ever stop and think what you’re saying?”
Dean’s face fell. He blushed. But he leaned across Arthur almost as if he wasn’t there and whispered on beery breath into Li-li’s face, “You like me, don’t you, darling? You’re not so bloody fastidious.”
Li-li giggled. There was some awkward dodging about, and then Arthur realised she was kissing Dean behind his back.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you’d care to change places with me?”
Why this should have caused so much mirth—general laughter after awkwardness—he was unable to understand, but he thought he could take it as his chance to leave. And he would have left had not Mervyn returned at that moment with another tray of drinks including a second small brandy. He edged along the settle, leaving Li-li and Dean huddled together.
It was a pity, in a way, about the brandy, because it necessarily brought memories and associations. But without it he couldn’t have borne the party at all, couldn’t even have looked on the conviviality or withstood the incomprehensible warring tensions. Now, however, when he had drunk the last vapourous, fiery drop of it, he jumped to his feet and said rather shrilly that he must go. He must no longer trespass on their hospitality, he must leave.
“Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once,” said Dean.
Such rudeness, even if it came out of a book, wasn’t to be borne. Arthur made a stiff little bow in the direction of Mervyn and the new Mrs. Mervyn, gave a stiff little nod of the head in exchange for their farewells, and escaped.
The joy of getting out was heady. He hurried home through the mews, that dark throat where once, in its jaws, he had made death swallow a woman who flitted like a great black bird. A mouse, a baby, Maureen Cowan, Bridget O’Neill, Vesta Kotowsky … But, no. Home now, encountering no one.
At the top of the empty house he settled down to watch John Wayne discharging yet again the duties of a United States cavalry colonel. He leaned against the brown satin cushion, cool, clean, luxurious. The film ended at half-past eight. Rather late to begin on his ironing, but better late than on Sunday. For twenty years he had done his ironing on a Saturday.
Entering the kitchen to get out the ironing board and the folded linen, he looked in vain for the orange plastic bag. It wasn’t there. He had left it behind in the Waterlily.
20
————
The first to leave the party was Jonathan Dean. Anthony, aware that for the past half-hour Jonathan had been busy entangling his legs with Li-li’s under the table, supposed they would remain after he and the Mervyns had gone and that the evening would end for them by Li-li’s becoming Vesta’s successor. Things happened differently. Li-li departed to the passageway that housed the ladies’ lavatory. It also housed a phone, and when she came back she announced that she must soon go, as she had a date at seven-thirty. Junia Mervyn, a woman who seemed to take delight in the general discomfiture of men, laughed merrily.
“What about me?” said Jonathan truculently.
Li-li giggled. “You like to come too? Wait and I go call my friend again.”
“You know very well I didn’t mean that.”
“Me, I don’t know what men mean. I don’t try to know. I love them all a little bit. You like to go on my list? Then when I come back from Taiwan I make you number three, four?” She and Junia clutched each other, laughing. Jonathan got up and without a backward look or a word to his hosts, banged out of the pub.
The men were heavily, awkwardly, silent. Anthony, suddenly and not very aptly identifying, felt through his depression a surge of angry misogyny. And he said before he could stop himself:
“As a connoisseur of bad behaviour in women, I’d give you my prize.”
Li-li pouted. She sidled up to him, opening her eyes wide, trying her wiles. He wondered afterwards if he would actually have struck her, at least have given her a savage push, had Winston not interrupted by announcing it was time to leave for the airport.
Anthony said he would. In a low voice he apologised to Linthea. She kissed his cheek.
“Have women really behaved so badly to you?”
“One has. It doesn’t matter. Forget it, Linthea, please.”
“I’m not to bother my pretty little head about it?”
Anthony smiled. This description of her head, goddesslike with its crown of coiled braids, was so inept that he was about to correct her with a compliment when Winston’s brother said:
“Your friend left his shopping behind.”
“He’s not our fliend,” said Li-li, “and it’s not shopping, it’s washing.” She pulled it out from under the settle, pointing to and giggling at the topmost item it contained, a pair of underpants. “You,” she said imperiously to Anthony, “take it back for him.”
“Suppose you do that? I’m going to the airport.”
“Me take nasty old man’s washing out on my date?”
“You’ve got time to take it home first,” said Winston. “It’s only a quarter past seven.” Always a controller of situations, he closed her little white hand round the handles of the orange plastic bag and placed her firmly but gently back on the settle. A fresh glass of martini in front of her, she sat silenced, looking very small and young. “That’s a good girl,” said Winston.
The night was cruelly cold, its clarity turning all the lights to sharply cut gems. Linthea took Winston’s arm and shivered against him as if, now she was going home, she could allow herself to feel the cold of an English winter for the first time. As they crossed the street, Anthony saw a familiar red sports car draw up outside the Waterlily.
The contents of the bag were worth, Arthur calculated, about fifty pounds—all his working shirts, his underwear, bed linen … It was unthinkable to leave them in that rough public house which would fill up, on a Saturday night, with God knew what riff-raff. But to go out at this hour into darkness?
One of them might, just might, have brought the bag back for him. He went out on to the landing, and the light from his own hall shed a little radiance as far as the top of the stairs. But below was a pit of blackness. There was nothing outside his door, nothing at the head of the stairs. He put on lights, descended. First he knocked on Li-li’s door, then on that of Room 2. But he knew it was in vain. Slits of light always showed round the doors when the occupants of the rooms were in.
If only he dared forget about it, leave it till the Waterlily opened in the morning. But, no, he couldn’t risk losing so much valuable property. And it was only a step to the pub, less than five minutes’ walk. He went back upstairs and put on his overcoat.
He walked rapidly up Camera Street, keeping his eyes lowered. But Balliol Street was full of people, corpses in brown grave clothes, their faces and their dress turned pallid or khaki by the colour-excluding sodium lamps. Yellow-brown too was the sports car parked outside Kemal’s Kebab House, but Arthur recognized it as belonging to one of Li-li’s young men. Only the traffic lights were bright enough to compete with that yellow glare. Their green and scarlet hurt his eyes and made him blink.
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 B
rasenose 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.