Authors: Ruth Rendell
More shutters were closed at the upper windows than he had ever seen before. The only light came from the basement, and the sight of that light alone was enough to make his heart beat faster. The breathless feeling was back. He ran up the stairs and let himself in. Music drifted to him but not the kind of music Rita and Jacopo danced to. It was coming up the basement stairs. This was so unusual that he had a momentary fear she might have someone with her and he hesitated outside her door for a moment, listening to the bazouki music, wondering. She must have heard his feet on the stairs, for she opened the door to him herself and came immediately into his arms.
Of course there was no one else there. He was moved with love for her by what she had done, what she seemed so proud of: food and wine set out on the bamboo table, the tape playing, the room somehow cleaner and fresher, the purple sheets on the bed changed for brown ones. She was wearing a dress he had never seen before, black, short, thin, and clinging, with a low oval neck that showed her white breasts. He held her in his arms, kissing her softly, slowly. Her little hands, warm with cold rings on them, stroked his hair, his neck.
He whispered, “Are we alone in the house?”
“They’ve gone away up north somewhere.”
“I like it better when we’re alone,” he said.
She poured glasses of wine for them and he told her about Cheryl. It was a strange treachery in him, he sometimes thought, a mistrust without foundation, that he expected her not to be interested in the things he told her, in his family, his doings. He expected her to be preoccupied, anxious to return to her own concerns. In fact, she
was
interested, did like to hear, gave him all her attention, sitting there with hands clasped, looking into his eyes. When he got to the bit about Cheryl poking the umbrella through the letter box, a smile dawned on her face, which, if you didn’t know it couldn’t be, you might have taken for admiration.
“What do you think I ought to do, Senta? I mean, should I tell anyone? Should I even tell
her?”
“Do you really want to know what I think, Philip?”
“Of course I do. That’s why I’m telling you. I want your opinion.”
“My opinion is that you worry too much about the law and society and things like that. People like you and me, exceptional people, are above the law, don’t you think? Or let’s say beyond it.”
All his life he had been taught to be law-abiding, to respect authority, man-made government. His father, gambler though he had been, was adamant about honesty and strict integrity in his dealings. Making one’s own rules savoured to Philip of anarchy.
“Cheryl won’t be beyond the law if she gets caught,” he said.
“We don’t see the world in quite the same way, you and I, Philip. I know you’re going to learn to see it as I do, but that hasn’t happened yet. I mean seeing it as a place of mysticism and magic, as if on a different plane from the dull practical things most people waste their lives on. When you come onto that plane with me, you’ll find a world of wonderful occult things where everything is possible, nothing is barred. There aren’t any policemen there and there aren’t any laws. You’ll start seeing things you never saw before, shapes and wonders and visions and ghosts. You took one step towards that plane when you killed the old man for my sake. Did you know that?”
Philip returned her gaze, but puzzled, not as happy as he had been moments before. He was well aware that she hadn’t given him any sort of opinion he might want to hear, hadn’t really answered him. Her terms were vague, open to any sort of definition; they bore no relation to concrete things, to rules and restrictions, decency, socially acceptable behaviour, respect for the law. She talked well, he thought, she was beautifully articulate, and the things she said, they couldn’t be nonsense. That feeling came from his own inability, as yet, to understand. He learned something as she spoke, though not what she had meant him to learn. It was interesting but disquieting at the same time. What he learned was that if you have told a lie about something you have done, as in his case about the murder of the vagrant, you very quickly forget all about it, something inside your memory blots it out. He knew that if, instead of speaking as though she took this act of his for granted, she had asked him artlessly what he had been doing the previous Sunday night, he would have replied that after he left her, he had driven home and gone to bed. He would have done the natural thing and told the truth.
The sun crept through the splits in the old shutters, making gold bars on the ceiling and laying rods of gold on the brown quilt. That was the first thing Philip saw when he woke up very late on Sunday morning, a string of sunlight drawn across his hand, which lay limply outside the covers. He withdrew the hand and, turning over, reached for Senta. She wasn’t with him. She was gone.
Again she surprised him. He was sitting up, already full of fears that she had left him, he would never see her again, when he saw the note on her pillow: “Back soon. I had to go out, it was important. Wait for me, Senta.” Why hadn’t she written “love”? It didn’t matter. She had left him the note. Wait for her? He would have waited for ever.
His watch told him it was past eleven. Most nights he simply didn’t get enough sleep, he never seemed to get more than five or six hours. No wonder he had been tired, had slept on and on. Fully awake now but still relaxed, he lay thinking about Senta, relieved and happy because in the region of his mind which was the place for Senta and himself he had at this moment no worries and no fears. But as if his consciousness didn’t want him to be without anxieties, it allowed Cheryl to creep into it. For the first time since he had witnessed that act of hers, the enormity of it struck him. He had been in a state of shock but now the shock had worn off. He knew at once that he couldn’t just let it alone, pretend he hadn’t seen what he had seen; he was going to have to confront Cheryl. The alternative would inevitably be the phone call from the police to say they had arrested Cheryl on a theft charge. Would it be worse or better to tell Christine first?
After that, Philip couldn’t just lie there, he had to get up. In the nasty corner where the lavatory was and the dripping, bandaged brass tap, he managed a wash of sorts. Back in her room he folded back the shutters and opened the window. Senta said opening the window let flies in, and as the sash went up a great blowfly sang past his cheek, but the room seemed sometimes to gasp for air. It was a bright shimmering summer’s day, the last sort of weather you would have expected to follow the bleak grey week that had preceded it. The short shadows up there on the concrete were black and the sunlight a burning dazzling white.
Something happened then which had never happened before and which brought him an enormous exciting pleasure. He saw her come to the house. He saw her legs in jeans and her feet in running shoes—unprecedented, he had never before seen her in trousers. Would he even have known it was she if she hadn’t bent down at the railings and looked at him through the bars? She put her hand through the bars, then her arm, stretching it towards him in a yearning kind of way. Her hand was open, palm upwards, as if she wanted to take his hand in hers. The hand was withdrawn and she came up the steps. Listening intently, he heard every step she took, along the hallway, down the passage, down the stairs.
It was a slow entry she made. She closed the door behind her with extravagant care, as if the house were full of sleeping people. He wondered how he could say of someone who was white-skinned, who never had colour in her cheeks, that she was very pale. Her skin had that greenish-silvery look. With the jeans and the shoes, she was wearing a kind of loose tunic of dark red cotton, with a black leather belt round her waist. Her hair was twisted up or tied up on the top of her head under a flat cap of cotton cord like a boy’s. She took this cap off, threw it on the bed and shook out her hair. Philip saw her looking at him, the beginnings of a smile on her lips, and saw the back of her in the misty spotted mirror, her hair spread over her shoulders in a great silver fan.
She extended her hand and he took it in his. He drew her towards him, to where he sat on the end of the bed. He smoothed her hair back from her face in both his hands, turned her face and brought it to his, kissed the lips, which felt cool for so warm a day.
“Where have you been, Senta?”
“You weren’t worried, Philip? You had my note?”
“Of course I did, thank you for it. But you didn’t say where you were, only that it was important.”
“Oh, it was. It was very important. Can’t you guess?”
Why did he naturally think of Cheryl? Why did he assume she had been to Cheryl, had said something he would want unsaid? But he didn’t answer her, he didn’t put this into words. She spoke softly, her lips almost against his skin.
“I went to do for you what you did for me. I went to prove my love for you, Philip.”
It was strange how any mention of those reciprocal acts immediately made him uneasy. More than uneasy, causing a recoil, a reflex of shying away. In those few seconds he thought, she may be going to try and teach me her philosophy, but I’ll also teach her mine: that fantasising has to stop. But all he could say was, “Did you? You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
She never heard what he said when she didn’t want to. “I did what you did. I killed someone. That’s why I went out so early. I’ve trained myself to wake up when I want to, you know. I woke up at six and went out. I had to go so early because it was a long way. Philip will worry, I thought, so I’ll leave him a note.”
In the midst of his growing exasperation, warmth touched him at her sweetness, her concern for him. He was aware of something wonderful, yet frightening. She loved him more now than before their separation, her love for him was always growing. He took her face gently in his hands to kiss her again, but she broke away.
“No, Philip, you have to listen to me. It’s very important what I’m telling you. I was going to Chigwell, you see, on the tube and it’s a very long way.”
“Chigwell?”
“Well, a place called Grange Hill, it’s the next station. It was the nearest one to where Gerard Arnham lived. You haven’t guessed, have you? It’s Gerard Arnham I killed for you. I killed him at eight o’clock this morning.”
For perhaps half a minute he actually believed her. It seemed infinitely longer, it seemed hours. The shock of it made something strange happen in his head, a kind of singing throbbing and a dark redness before his eyes, a sensation as of wheels turning and rolling behind his eyes. Then reason dispelled all that. You fool, he told himself, you fool. Don’t you know by now she lives in a world of daydreams?
He dampened dry lips with a dry tongue, shook himself a little. His heart was thudding and shaking his ribs. Strangely, she seemed not to notice these earthquakes in him, these overturnings and attempts to grasp at reality, these splits in reassurance through which nightmares came grinning.
“I’d been observing him,” she said. “I’ve been over to that house you showed me twice in the past week. I found out he takes his dog out for a walk in these woods every morning before he goes to work. I calculated he’d still do it on a Sunday but he’d be a bit later—and he was. I waited there, hiding in the trees, and saw him come with his dog.”
If any doubts about the falseness of what she said still lingered, this would have dispelled them. Gerard Arnham with a dog! Philip remembered how Christine had told him Arnham didn’t care for dogs, had cited this as a reason for not taking him with them on that fateful day. It provided him with a question for Senta, a policeman’s sort of question aimed at ferreting out the kind of information which the liar may have left unconsidered.
“What kind of a dog?”
“Quite a little one, black.” She answered at once. She was prepared with her circumstantial details. “A Scottie, are they called? If it had been a big fierce doberman, Philip, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do what I did. I chose Arnham, you know, because he was your enemy. You’d told me he was your enemy, so that’s why I picked him.”
Philip wanted to ask her what Arnham looked like, but he remembered what had happened last time he seemed to doubt her stories. He tried to think of ways of rephrasing that question.
“It’s an interesting thing that a girl will be quite frightened if she meets a man she doesn’t know in a wood,” she said, “but a man’s not frightened if a girl comes up to him. I came up to him holding my eye. I said I’d got something in my eye and it was hurting and I couldn’t see out of it and I was frightened. That was clever, don’t you think?”
“He’s a very tall man, isn’t he?” Philip was proud of himself. This was the kind of thing he had come across in police procedural serials on television. “He must have had to bend right over to look at your eye.”
“Oh, he did, he did. He bent right down and I held my face up for him to see my eye.” She nodded with a kind of pleased satisfaction. And Philip found himself smiling at this second and surely final confirmation, all that was needed. Arnham was no more than five feet eight, if that. “He was as near to me as you are now. I knew where to strike. I stabbed him in the heart with a glass dagger.”
“You what?” said Philip, half-amused now by her inventiveness.
“Didn’t I ever show you my Venetian dagger? They’re made of Murano glass, those daggers, and they’re as sharp as razors. When you plunge them in, they break off at the handle and they only leave a scratch to show. The victim doesn’t even bleed. I used to have two but I used the other one for something else and they’re both gone now. I bought them in Venice when I was on my travels. I did feel sorry for the poor little dog, though, Philip. It came running up to its dead master and it started this awful whimpering.”
He didn’t know much about Venice, he had never been there, and less about Venetian glass. But he wanted to ask her—he had to stop himself from asking her—if she had worn one of those bird-face masks and a black cloak.
“It will be in all the papers tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t usually see a paper but I shall buy one tomorrow to read about it. No, I know! I’ll go upstairs later and see it on their TV.”