An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  “Jane,” said Anna in a warning tone, “there are some …”

  She spun around. On the front of the tee-shirt were the printed letters ARRIA.

  THE FIRST THING THAT STRUCK WEXFORD about the house in Down Road, Kingsmarkham, was that there was no question of any of its occupants being obliged to share a bedroom. It was a very large, castellated, turreted, balconied Edwardian pile. Most houses like it had been converted into flats, but not this one. A single family inhabited it and its (at least) eight bedrooms. Yet Eve Freeborn had given him the reason for going to her boyfriend in Myringham instead of his coming to her that she shared a bedroom with her sister. Perhaps she hadn’t a sister either. He would soon see.

  At first he thought the girl who opened the front door to him was Eve. After all, the fact that this one had green hair meant nothing. They changed their hair color these days as fast as they used to change their lipstick. A second look told him they weren’t even identical twins. Twins, yes, fraternal twins with the same build of body and the same eyes. That was all. God knew what color their hair really was. They had probably forgotten themselves.

  The house smelt faintly of marijuana. An unmistakable smell that was like woodsmoke blended with sweet cologne.

  “Eve?” Eve’s sister said with incredulity. “You want to see Eve?”

  “Is that so difficult?”

  “I don’t know really …”

  He had shown her his warrant card. After all, she was a young girl and it was evening. She shouldn’t admit unidentified men into the house. But she was looking at it as if it were a warrant for her arrest. He felt impatient.

  “Perhaps I should fill in a form or produce a sponsor.”

  “Oh, no, come in. I’m sorry. It’s just that …”

  She had an irritating way of leaving her sentences unfinished. He followed her into the hall, darkly paneled like the offices of Sevensmith Harding, and up a big, elegant winding staircase with a gallery at the top. The marijuana smell was fainter but it was still there. What astonished him about the house was the aura of the sixties that pervaded it. On the wall here was a poster (albeit a glazed and framed poster) of John Lennon seated at a white grand piano. A vase stood on a side table filled with dried grasses and shabby peacock’s tail feathers. And hanging up as an ornament, not because it had been left there by chance, was an antique red silk dress embroidered with gold, its red and its gold tattered and shredded by time and moths. He said, “Are your parents at home?”

  “They’ve got a flat in London. They’re there half the time.”

  Impossible to tell if she minded or was glad. Those parents need not be more than forty themselves, he thought, and Mother might be less. Eve’s twin said, “Perhaps you’d better wait here. I’ll just see if …”

  All the bedroom doors were open. Only they weren’t bedrooms, not exactly. Each one, as far as he could see, had the look rather of a bedsit, with chairs and tables and floor cushions and a couch or divan with an Indian bedspread flung artlessly over it, posters on the walls, and postcards pinned up higgledy-piggledy. He sat down to wait in a rocking chair that had its rockers painted red, black, and white and a dirty lace veil draped over its back, and wondered how to explain this mysterious house.

  Then he understood. It wasn’t the girls who were living in the past, who were twenty years out of date, or purposely living in an anachronism. Those parents had been young in the sixties, had reveled probably in that new, inspiring freedom, and now the spirit of the sixties, the flavor, the mores would never leave them. Not the girls but the parents were the marijuana users. He would have to do something about that …

  How long was she going to keep him waiting?

  He got up and went out into the passage. There was no one about. But from somewhere he could hear the sound of female voices—a sound that was not in the least like a twittering of birds, strong earnest talk rather than a murmuration. A staircase led to the attic floor but it wasn’t from up there that the voices came.

  There was a burst of laughter, some sporadic clapping. He walked down the passage towards the sound, came out into another smaller, squarer landing, a map of the heavens painted on its ceiling by a trained but unsure hand. An amateur astrologer who had been to art school, he thought, which brought the sixties once more to mind. As he stood there, doubtful of the wisdom of bursting into a room full of women, the door opened and two girls came out. They stopped in the doorway, looking at him in astonishment. One was unknown to him, the other was Caroline Peters, physical training instructor.

  Before anyone spoke Eve Freeborn came out of the room, shouldering her way past the two who blocked the doorway. She was once more in the pelvis-crusher jeans but this time with a purple satin blouse to match her hair. Caroline Peters, on the other hand, was dressed exactly like a boy—or like boys used to dress before punk apparel came to stay: blue jeans, brown leather jacket, half-boots, no make-up, hair cropped in a crewcut.

  “Sorry,” Eve said. “Have you been waiting long?”

  “They kept us waiting,” said Caroline Peters with the maximum venom, “for four thousand years.”

  She had recognized him and wasn’t pleased. Or had he been recognized for what he was in addition to being a policeman—a man? Wexford had never before personally encountered the kind of militant feminist who advocates total separatism. Enlightenment broke upon him.

  “Have I by any chance interrupted a meeting of ARRIA?”

  “It’s over,” said Eve. “It’s just over.”

  “We wouldn’t have permitted interruption.”

  Wexford looked at Caroline Peters. “Don’t go yet, please. I’d like to talk to you too.”

  She lifted her shoulders, went back into the room. Eve waved a hand at the other girl, a pretty, sharp-faced redhead.

  “This is Nicky.”

  Inside the room, another, larger bedsit hung with striped bedspreads on ceilings and walls like a Bedouin tent, half a dozen more girls were standing about or preparing to leave. Sara Williams was there and her cousin Paulette, the two of them talking to Jane Gardner, and all of them wearing ARRIA tee-shirts. A black girl, thin and elegant as a model, sat crosslegged on a floor cushion.

  Eve said to the company, “I don’t remember what he’s called,” as if it hardly mattered, “but he’s a policeman.” She pointed to one girl after another: “Jane, Sara, Paulette, Donella, Helen, Elaine, and Amy, my sister, you’ve met.”

  Caroline Peters pushed her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket.

  “What is it you want?”

  “I’d like to know more about ARRIA for a start.”

  “For a start it was started by me and a like-minded woman, a classical scholar now at Oxford.” She paused. “Arria Paeta,” she said, “was a Roman matron, the wife of Caecina Paetus. Of course she was obliged to take his name.” Wexford could tell she was one of those fanatics who never miss a trick. “Ancient Rome was known for its gross oppression and exploitation of women.” Teacher-like, she waited for his comments.

  They came—perhaps to her surprise. “The Emperor Claudius,” said Wexford, who had done his homework, “ordered Paetus to commit suicide but he proved too cowardly, so his wife took the sword and, plunging it into her own heart, said, ‘See Paetus, it does not hurt …’”

  “You’ve been reading Graves!”

  “No. Smith’s Classical Dictionary.” The girl named Nicky laughed. “But I don’t know what the letters stand for,” he said.

  “Action for the Radical Reform of Intersexual Attitudes.”

  “A case of making the nym fit the acronym? Or is it a deliberate obscuration?”

  “Perhaps it is.”

  “How many schools are involved?”

  It was Eve who answered him. “Kingsmarkham High, Haldon Finch, St. Catherine’s …” but Caroline Peters interrupted her.

  “I teach at Haldon Finch. ARRIA had its inception just over a year ago at St. Catherine’s. We admitted as members only those women over
sixteen, those in fact in the sixth and seventh years. I’m glad to say it had an immediate appeal—how could an organization designed expressly for women, designed to give men no quarter—be otherwise?” She turned on him a glacial look of distaste and it gave him a most unpleasant feeling. He didn’t belong to a minority, there was no way he could be categorized into a minority, yet the sensation she gave him was of doing so, and of an oppressed one at that. “Our very well-organized propaganda machine,” she said, “spread the good news through the other schools in the area and we soon had considerable cells at Pomfret College of Further Education and Kingsmarkham High.” The good news, he thought, the “gospel” no less. She astonished him by saying, “We now have a membership of just over five hundred women.”

  He suppressed the whistle he wanted to give. What must the local population of seventeen-and eighteen-year-old girls be? All of them, including those who had left school, could surely hardly amount to more than a couple of thousand and that meant 25 percent in ARRIA. Why, they could almost start a revolution!

  “All right, you’ve got badges, you’ve had tee-shirts printed, you hold meetings, but what do you do?”

  Caroline Peters answered readily. “Basically, have as little contact with men as possible. Defy men by intellectual and also by physical means.”

  He pricked up his ear at that. She wasn’t carrying a bag but she had pockets. Most of the other girls had bags. He hadn’t got a warrant, and almost more to the point, hadn’t a woman with him to carry out a search.

  “We have a constitution and manifesto,” she said. “I expect there’s a copy about and I see no objection to your having one. Would you women agree to that?” There was murmur of assent, some of it amused. “But I must point out that our aim isn’t to meet men on equal terms. It isn’t to come to a truce or compromise with them nor to reach that uneasy détente which in past revolutions had sometimes come into being between a proletariat and a bourgeoisie. As Marx said in another context: Philosophers have tried to explain the world. The point surely is to change it. Good night, everyone.” She went out of the room, closing the door with a somewhat sinister quietness behind her.

  Silence. The black girl, Donella, cast up her eyes, rolling sloe-brown pupils in moon-white whites. Eve said, “By physical means, she only meant self-defense stuff. It’s compulsory when you join to take a self-defense course, karate or judo or tai chi or whatever.”

  “Personally,” said Donella, “I think that’s one of the things that attracts people—the sport, you know.”

  “You may have noticed, there’ve been three times as many evening courses in martial arts started since ARRIA began. That’s in response to increased demand, that’s ARRIA.”

  Nicky had spoken with pride, not aggressively. She made a swift chopping movement with one arm. Wexford, a large man over six feet tall, felt relieved he wasn’t on the receiving end of that blow. It was true about the judo and karate courses, he had remarked on it himself to Burden, pleased that women were at last taking steps to defend themselves against the muggings and rapes which in the past few years had so disproportionately increased.

  “All right,” he said, “that’s for self-defense. How about aggression? I don’t suppose anyone’s going to admit to carrying an offensive weapon?”

  Nobody was. They didn’t look scared or guilty or even alert. He fancied he saw wariness in one or two faces.

  “I’ll give you a copy of the constitution,” Eve said. “There’s nothing private about it. Everyone’s welcome to know what we do, men as well as women. Do you have daughters?”

  “They’re a lot older than you.”

  She looked at him in a not unkindly way, assessing. “Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? You can’t be too old for ARRIA, though.”

  The constitution was typed and photocopied. He noted that there were no flaws in the apex of the capital As or the ascenders of the lower-case ts. It went into his pocket to be read at leisure. Sara Williams, he observed, was watching his every movement. The big fair girl called Helen he now realized had been Eve’s partner in the tennis match. He said to Eve, “If everyone is in fact going I’d like to talk to you alone for five minutes.”

  The brisk policeman’s tone replacing the one of easy jocularity seemed to jolt her. She pushed fingers through the purple crest of hair.

  “OK, if that’s the way you want it. Everybody out, right?” She gave a hiccupping giggle. “Home, women!”

  Amy said, “Well, I think I’ll just …” and drifted vaguely towards the door.

  They all began to take leave in ways peculiar to young girls, whether feminists or reactionaries. Helen and Donella closed in upon each other with a tight bear hug which ended in giggles and heads subsiding on each other’s shoulders. Sara wrapped her arms round herself and moved across the floor with vague dancing steps. Jane humped her bag, filled with ARRIA constitution sheets, as if it weighed a ton, making agony faces. Nicky was lost in a dream that seemed to turn her into a sleepwalker so that she neither paused in her exit nor spoke but merely raised a languid flapping hand in farewell as she passed through the doorway.

  Alone with Eve, Wexford said, “You’ve been telling me lies.”

  “I have not!”

  “Why did you tell me your boyfriend couldn’t come here because you had to share a bedroom with your sister? This is an enormous house and as far as I can see your parents mostly aren’t here anyway. But you told me lack of space—and you implied lack of privacy—stopped him coming here.”

  “Well,” she said, a sly look in her eyes, “I can explain that. You’ll see the answer in our constitution actually. Rule 4.”

  He pulled the constitution out of his pocket. Here it was, Rule 4. “Women”—not ARRIA members, he saw, but always “women,” as if the society contained the world’s entire female population—“Women shall avoid the company of men wherever possible but should their presence be required for sexual, biological, business, or career purposes, it is expedient and desirable for women to go to them rather than permit them to come to us.”

  “But why?”

  “Caroline and Edwina—she’s the classical one who’s at Oxford—they said it smacked of the sultan visiting his harem. You’ve got to think it through, you know. When you do you can see what they mean.”

  “So that’s why you went to your boyfriend in Arnold Road? You required his presence for sexual or even biological purposes?”

  “Isn’t that why women usually require men?”

  “There are more ways of putting it. More aesthetic ways, I’d say. Maybe more civilized.”

  “Oh, civilized. Men made civilization and it’s not up to much, is it? It’s no big deal.”

  He left it. “Did you know Sara Williams was the daughter of the murdered man whose car you saw in Arnold Road?”

  “Not then I didn’t. I do now. Look, I only know her through ARRIA and I didn’t know her father. For all I knew, she mightn’t have had a father.”

  He accepted that. “Miss Peters didn’t tell me much about this society of yours, did she? Only that it’s a wildfire movement, it’s caught on in all the local schools. How about the—what shall I call it?—esoteric stuff? How do you join? Do you pay a subscription? Is there any sort of ritual—like Freemasons, say?”

  “We don’t need money,” she said, “so there’s no sub. Where would they get it from anyway? Most of our members are still at school. They’d have to get it from their fathers and that’s out. See Rule 6 and dependence. The only thing that costs us is the photocopying, only it doesn’t because Nicky does it on her dad’s Xerox in the night, when he’s asleep.”

  There was an irony there but Wexford didn’t point it out. “Anyone can join?”

  “Any woman over sixteen who’s not married. Obviously a married woman has already capitulated. Anyway, it wouldn’t be possible for her to keep to the rules.”

  “That would let my daughters out.”

  She ignored him. “I’m a founder member. Wh
en we started there was a lot of really way-out stuff going on. Edwina wanted initiation ceremonies, sort of baptisms of fire if you can imagine.”

  “What sort?”

  He was deeply curious. At the same time he was afraid she would soon realize she was spending too much time unnecessarily in the society of a man. She considered his question in thoughtful silence. She was not a pretty girl. But perhaps this didn’t matter in these days when beauty was no longer at a premium. She had one of those chinless faces, long-nosed, full-lipped, but with creamy delicate skin. A frown creased, or rather crumpled, her forehead. Creasing was for older people. Eve’s frown was like the bunching of a piece of cream velvet.

  “Some of the others went along with her ideas,” she said. “I mean, she was a radical feminist. For instance, she used to say we couldn’t make revolution on Marxist principles on account of Marx having been a man. She said sexuality was politics and the only way to get freedom was for all women to be lesbians. Any hetero behavior was collaborating with the enemy. Even Caroline Peters never went as far as that.”

  “You were going to tell me about initiation.”

  Eve seemed reluctant to reach the subject. “They actually formed a splinter group over it. Sara, the one whose father was murdered, she was one of them, and Nicky Anerley was another. One of the things they objected to was being educated along with the other sex. They wanted schools and colleges run by women and with women teachers. Of course, it would be best, it’s the ideal if you know what I mean, but it’s a bit fantastic.”

  “Particularly as it’s only in very recent years that women have gained admission to certain men’s colleges, notably at Oxford.”

  “That’s beside the point. This would be a question of getting the men out altogether. Edwina and the rest of them who were at mixed schools wanted to go on strike until they agreed not to admit boys. But Caroline wouldn’t have that. I suppose she was afraid of losing her job.”

  “And that’s what caused the rift in the party?”