The web she weaves, p.38
The Web She Weaves, page 38
Margaret felt her limbs grow rigid. Both women had been the mothers of small boys … both had lived in tall derelict houses converted into flats … both had had black hair done in tight curls … Margaret fingered her hairstyle with damp, trembling fingers, and tried not to read any more, but her eyes seemed glued to the page. Why had the man not been hanged that first time?
There followed the story of his childhood—a story of real Dickensian horror. Brought up in a tall ruined old house by a stepmother who had starved him, thrashed him, shut him in dark rooms where she told him clawed fiends were waiting … her black, shining curls had quivered over his childhood like the insignia of torture and death. The prison doctors had learned all this from him after the first murder —and had learned, too, how the sight of a black-haired woman going up the steps of just such a derelict house as he remembered had brought back his terror and misery with such vividness that “I didn’t just feel like a little boy again —I was a little boy … that was my house … that was her” — that was the only way he could describe it. And he had crept into the house, locked himself in one of the empty rooms until the dead silence of the night, and then crept out, with a child’s enormity of terror and hatred in his heart, and with a man’s strength in his fingers… .
Margaret closed her eyes for a second, and then opened them again to read the description of the murderer: “About fifty years of age, medium height, ginger hair growing grey, eyebrows and eyelashes almost invisible …” With every word the face leaped before her more vividly—not the face of the ageing, unknown man, but the little malevolent face she had seen that afternoon—the ill-cut ginger hair, the little red-rimmed eyes filled with the twisted malice of an old and bitter man …
“I didn’t just feel like a little boy again, I was a little boy…” The words beat through Margaret’s brain, over and over again.
She thrust the paper away from her. Don’t be so fanciful and absurd, she told herself. After all, if I really think anything’s wrong all I’ve got to do is call the police. There’s the telephone just there in the hall.
She walked slowly to the door and out onto the landing, and stood there in her little island of light with darkness above and below. She tried to go on telling herself what nonsense it all was, how ridiculous she was being. But now she dared not let any more words come into her mind, not any words at all. For she was listening—listening as civilized human beings rarely have need to listen—listening as an animal listens in the murderous blackness of the forest. Not just with the ears—rather with the whole body. Every organ, every nerve is alert, pricked up, so that, in the end, it is impossible to say through which sense the message comes, and comes with absolute certainty: Danger is near. Danger is on the move.
For there was no sound. Margaret was certain of that. No sound to tell her that something was stirring in the locked room upstairs—that dark, empty room so like the locked room where once a little boy had gone half mad with terror at the thought of the clawed fiends. The clawed fiends who had lost their terrors through the years and become his friends and allies, for now at last he was a clawed fiend himself.
Still Margaret heard no sound. No sound to tell that the door of the empty room was being unlocked, silently, and with consummate skill, from the inside. No shuffle of footsteps across the dusty upstairs landing. No creak from the ancient, rickety steps of that top flight of stairs.
And in the end it was not Margaret’s straining ears at all which caught the first hint of the oncoming creature—it was her eyes. They seemed to have been riveted on that shadowy bend in the banisters for so long that when she saw the hand at last, long and tapering, like five snakes coiled round the rail, she could have imagined it had been there all the time, flickering in and out and dancing before her eyes.
But not the face. No, that couldn’t have been there before. Not anywhere, in all the world, could there have been a face like that—a face so distorted, so alight with hate that it seemed almost luminous as it leered out of the blackness, as it seemed to glide down towards her a foot or two above the banister …
There was a sound now—a quick pattering of feet, horribly light and soft, like a child’s, as they bore the heavy adult shape down the stairs, the white, curled fingers reaching out towards her …
A little frightened cry at Margaret’s elbow freed her from her paralysis. A little white face, a tangle of ginger hair … and an instinct stronger that that of self-preservation gripped her. In a second she was on her knees, her arms round the small trembling body; she felt the little creature’s shaking terror subsiding into a great peace as she held him against her breast.
That dropping on her knees was her salvation. In that very second her assailant lunged, tripped over her suddenly lowered body, and pitched headlong down the stairs behind her. Crash upon crash as he fell from step to step, and then silence. Absolute silence.
Then a new clamour arose:
“Mummy! Mummy! Who … ? What.. . ?”—a tangle of small legs and arms, and in a moment her arms seemed to be full of little boys. She collected her wits and looked down at them. Only two of them, of course, her own two, their familiar dark heads pressed against her, their frightened questions clamouring in her ears …
And when the police came, and Henry came, and the dead man was taken away, there was so much to tell. So much to explain. It could all be explained quite easily, of course (as Henry pointed out), with only a little stretching of coincidence.
The little ginger-headed boy must come from somewhere in the neighbourhood—no doubt he could be traced, and if necessary helped in some way. Margaret’s obsession about him would explain Robin’s dream; it would also explain why, in that moment of terror, she imagined the strange child had rushed into her arms. Really, of course, it must have been one of her own boys.
And yet, Margaret could never forget the smile on the face of the dead man as he lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs. They say that the faces of the dead can set in all sorts of incongruous expressions, but it seemed to Margaret that the smile had not been the smile of a grown man at all; it had been the smile of a little boy who has felt the comfort of a mother’s arms at last.
THE FALL OF A COIN
Ruth Rendell
A Londoner and former journalist, Ruth Rendell is perhaps best known for her series of novels featuring Chief Inspector Wexford of the village of Kingsmarkham. In addition, she has written many short stories and other novels, the most recent of which is Master of the Moor. Ms. Ren-dell’s honors include the British Crime Writers Association Current Crime Silver Cup for best crime novel of 1976, the Gold Dagger for best crime novel of 1975, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar for Best Short Story of 1974. In “The Fall of a Coin” Ms. Rendell gives us a sensitive portrait of a couple trapped in a nightmarish marriage as it draws near its inevitable, horrible conclusion.
The manageress of the hotel took them up two flights of stairs to their room. There was no lift. There was no central heating either and, though April, it was very cold.
“A bit small, isn’t it?” said Nina Armadale.
“It’s a double room and I’m afraid it’s all we had left.”
“I suppose I’ll have to be thankful it hasn’t got a double bed,” said Nina.
Her husband winced at that, which pleased her. She went over to the window and looked down into a narrow alley bounded by brick walls. The cathedral clock struck five. Nina imagined what that would be like chiming every hour throughout the night, and maybe every quarter as well, and was glad she had brought her sleeping pills.
The manageress was still making excuses for the lack of accommodation. “You see, there’s this big wedding in the cathedral tomorrow. Sir William Tarrant’s daughter. There’ll be five hundred guests and most of them are putting up in the town.”
“We’re going to it,” said James Armadale. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Then you’ll appreciate the problem. Now the bathroom’s just down the passage, turn right and it’s the third door on the left. Dinner at seven-thirty and breakfast from eight till nine. Oh, and I’d better show Mrs. Armadale how to work the gas fire.”
“Don’t bother,” said Nina, enraged. “I can work a gas fire.” She was struggling with the wardrobe door, which at first wouldn’t open, and when opened refused to close.
The manageress watched her, apparently decided it was hopeless to assist, and said to James, “I really meant about working the gas meter. There’s a coin-in-the-slot meter—it takes fivepence pieces—and we really find it the best way for guests to manage.”
James squatted on the floor beside her and studied the grey metal box. It was an old-fashioned gas meter with brass fittings of the kind he hadn’t seen since he had been a student living in a furnished room. A guage with a red arrow marker indicated the amount of gas paid for, and at present it showed empty. So if you turned the dial on the gas fire to “on” no gas would come from the meter unless you had previously fed it with one or more fivepence pieces. But what was the purpose of that brass handle? There were differences between this contraption and the one he’d had in his college days. Maybe, while his had been for the old toxic coal gas, this had been converted for the supply of natural gas. He looked enquiringly at the manageress, and asked her.
“No, we’re still waiting for natural in this part of the country and when it comes the old meters will have to go.”
“What’s the handle for?”
“You turn it to the left like this, insert your coin in the slot, and then turn it to the right. Have you got fivepence on you?”
James hadn’t. Nina had stopped listening, he was glad to see. Perhaps when the inevitable quarrel started, as it would as soon as the woman had gone, it would turn upon the awfulness of going to this wedding, for which he could hardly be blamed, instead of the squalid arrangements in the hotel, for which he could.
“Never mind,” the manageress was saying. “You can’t go wrong, it’s very simple. When you’ve put your fivepence in, you just turn the handle to the right as far as it will go and you hear the coin fall. Then you can switch on the fire and light the gas. Is that clear?”
James said it was quite clear, thanks very much, and immediately the manageress had left the room. Nina, who wasted no time, said, “Can you tell me one good reason why we couldn’t have come here tomorrow?”
“I could tell you several,” said James, getting up from the floor, turning his back on that antediluvian thing and the gas fire which looked as if it hadn’t given out a therm of heat for about thirty years. “The principal one is that I didn’t fancy driving a hundred and fifty miles in a morning coat and top hat.”
“Didn’t fancy driving with your usual Saturday morning hangover, you mean.”
“Let’s not start a row, Nina. Let’s have a bit of peace for just one evening. Sir William is my company chairman. I have to take it as an honour that we were asked to this wedding, and if we have an uncomfortable evening and night because of it, that can’t be helped. It’s part of the job.”
“Just how pompous can you get?” said Nina with what in a less attractive woman would have been called a snarl. “I wonder what Sir William-Bloody-Tarrant would say if he could see his sales director after he’s got a bottle of whisky inside him.”
“He doesn’t see me,” said James, lighting a cigarette, and adding because she hadn’t yet broken his spirit, “That’s your privilege.”
“Privilege!” Nina, who had been furiously unpacking her case and throwing clothes onto one of the beds, now stopped doing this because it sapped some of the energy she needed for quarrelling. She sat down on the bed and snapped, “Give me a cigarette. You’ve no manners, have you? Do you know how uncouth you are? This place’ll suit you fine, it’s just up to your mark, gas meters and a loo about five hundred yards away. That won’t bother you as long as there’s a bar. I’ll be able to have the privilege of sharing my bedroom with a disgusting soak.” She drew breath like a swimmer and plunged on. “Do you realise we haven’t slept in the same room for two years? Didn’t think of that, did you, when you left booking up till the last minute? Or maybe— yes, that was it, my God!—maybe you did think of it. Oh, I know you so well, James Armadale. You thought being in here with me, undressing with me, would work the miracle. I’d come round. I’d—what’s the expression?—resume marital relations. You got them to give us this—this cell on purpose. You bloody fixed it!”
“No,” said James. He said it quietly and rather feebly because he had experienced such a strong inner recoil that he could hardly speak at all.
“You liar! D’you think I’ve forgotten the fuss you made when I got you to sleep in the spare room? D’you think I’ve forgotten about that woman, that Frances? I’ll never forget and I’ll never forgive you. So don’t think I’m going to let bygones by bygones when you try pawing me about when the bar closes.”
“I shan’t do that,” said James, reflecting that in a quarter of an hour the bar would be opening. “I shall never again try what you so charmingly describe as pawing you about.”
“No, because you know you wouldn’t get anywhere. You know you’d get a slap round the face you wouldn’t forget in a hurry.”
“Nina,” he said, “let’s stop this. It’s hypothetical, it won’t happen. If we are going to go on living together—and I suppose we are, though God knows why—can’t we try to live in peace?”
She flushed and said in a thick sullen voice, “You should have thought of that before you were unfaithful to me with that woman.”
“That,” he said, “was three years ago, three years. I don’t want to provoke you and we’ve been into this enough times, but you know very well why I was unfaithful to you. I’m only thirty-five, I’m still young. I couldn’t stand being permitted marital relations—pawing you about, if you like that better—about six times a year. Do I have to go over it all again?”
“Not on my account. It won’t make any difference to me what excuses you make.” The smoke in the tiny room made her cough and, opening the window, she inhaled the damp, cold air. “You asked me,” she said, turning round, “why we have to go on living together. I’ll tell you why. Because you married me. I’ve got a right to you and I’ll never divorce you. You’ve got me till death parts us. Till death, James. Right?”
He didn’t answer. An icy blast had come into the room when she had opened the window, and he felt in his pocket. “If you’re going to stay in here till dinner,” he said, “you’ll want the gas fire on. Have you got any fivepence pieces? I haven’t, unless I can get some change.”
“Oh, you’ll get some all right. In the bar. And just for your information, I haven’t brought any money with me. That’s your privilege.”
When he had left her alone, she sat in the cold room for some minutes, staring at the brick wall. Till death parts us, she had told him, and she meant it. She would never leave him and he must never be allowed to leave her, but she hoped he would die. It wasn’t her fault she was frigid. She had always supposed he understood. She had supposed her good looks and her capacity as housewife and hostess compensated for a revulsion she couldn’t help. And it wasn’t just against him, but against all men, any man. He had seemed to accept it and to be happy with her. In her sexless way, she had loved him. And then, when he had seemed happier and more at ease than at any time in their marriage, when he had ceased to make those painful demands and had become so sweet to her, so generous with presents, he had suddenly and without shame confessed it. She wouldn’t mind, he had told her, he knew that. She wouldn’t resent his finding elsewhere what she so evidently disliked giving him. While he provided for her and spent nearly all his leisure with her and respected her as his wife, she should be relieved, disliking sex as she did, that he had found someone else.
He had said it was the pent-up energy caused by her repressions that made her fly at him, beat at him with her hands, scream at him words he didn’t know she knew. To her dying day she would remember his astonishment. He had genuinely thought she wouldn’t mind. And it had taken weeks of nagging and screaming and threats to make him agree to give Frances up. She had driven him out of her bedroom and settled into the bitter, unremitting vendetta she would keep up till death parted them. Even now, he didn’t understand how agonisingly he had hurt her. But there were no more women and he had begun to drink. He was drinking now, she thought, and by nine o’clock he would be stretched out, dead drunk on that bed separated by only eighteen inches from her own.
The room was too cold to sit in any longer. She tried the gas fire, turning on the switch to “full,” but the match she held to it refused to ignite it, and presently she made her way downstairs and into a little lounge where there was a coal fire and people were watching television.
They met again at the dinner table.
James Armadale had drunk getting on for half a pint of whisky, and now, to go with the brown Windsor soup and hotted-up roast lamb, he ordered a bottle of burgundy.
“Just as a matter of idle curiosity,” said Nina, “why do you drink so much?”
“To drown my sorrows,” said James. “The classic reason. Happens to be true in my case. Would you like some wine?”
“I’d better have a glass, hadn’t I, otherwise you’ll drink the whole bottle.”
The dining room was full and most of the other diners were middle-aged or elderly. Many of them, he supposed, would be wedding guests like themselves. He could see that their arrival had been noted and that at the surrounding tables their appearance was being favourably commented upon. It afforded him a thin, wry amusement to think that they would be judged a handsome, well-suited and perhaps happy couple.
“Nina,” he said, “we can’t go on like this. It’s not fair on either of us. We’re destroying ourselves and each other. We have to talk about what we’re going to do.”
