A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell Page A

the hall when Linthea Carville, her son, and Steve and David arrived, for it was Arthur Johnson’s bell they rang. Anthony saw them silhouetted behind the red and green glass and, making a mental note that sometime he must put his own name under his own bell, he went outside and took them round the back to the cellar. Linthea had brought a torch and two candles, and the boys had the box barrow. They didn’t take the barrow down but carried the wood up in armfuls.
    He was impressed by Linthea’s strength. She had a perfect body, muscular, but curvy and lithe as well, and the jeans and sweater she wore did nothing to impede those graceful movements which he found himself watching with a slightly guilty pleasure.
    “There’s more wood here than I thought,” he said hastily when he realised she was aware of his gaze. “We’ll have to make a second journey,” and he pushed the door as if to shut it.
    “Don’t forget my boy’s still down there,” said Linthea. “They all are. And they’ve got your torch.”
    The training they had in common had prevented them from falling into the adult trap of doing all the work themselves on the grounds that they could do it faster and more efficiently than the children. But once the barrow was filled, they had left the boys to explore the rest of the cellar. Linthea called out, “Leroy, where are you?” and there came back a muffled excited call of “Mum!” which held in it a note of thrill and mischief.
    David and Steve were sitting on an upturned box, the torch between them, in the first room of the cellar. They giggled when they saw Linthea. Carrying a candle, she went on through the second room, walking rather fastidiously between the banks of rubbish. Anthony was just behind her and when, at the entrance to the last and final room, her candle making the one tiny puddle of light in all that gloom, she stopped and let out a shriek of pure terror, he caught her shoulders in his hands.
    Her fear was momentary. The shriek died away into a cascade of West Indian merriment, and she ran forward, shaking off Anthony’shands, to catch hold of the boy who was hiding in a corner. Then and only then did he see what she had seen and which had sent that frightened thrill through her. As the candlelight danced, as the woman caught the laughing boy, the torch beam levelled from behind him by Steve, showed him the pale figure leaning against the wall, a black handbag hooked over one stiff arm.
    “You wanted to give your poor mother a heart attack, I know you,” Linthea was saying, and the boy: “You were scared, you were really scared.”
    “They were all in it,” said Anthony. “I wonder how on earth that thing came to be down here.”
    He went up to the model, staring curiously at the battered face and the great rent in its neck. Then, hardly knowing why, he touched its cold smooth shoulders. Immediately his fingertips seemed again to remember the feel of Linthea’s fine warm flesh, and he realised how hungry he had been to touch a woman. There was something obscene about the figure in front of him, that dead mockery of femaleness with its pallid hard carapace as cold as the shell of a reptile and its attenuated unreal limbs. He wanted to knock it down and leave it to lie on the sooty floor, but he restrained himself and turned quickly away. The others were waiting for him, candles and torch accounted for, at the head of the steps.

9
————
    November was the deadline Anthony had given Helen for making up her mind. It was nearly November now and he was due to make his phone call to her on Wednesday, October 30. The letter he had received from her on the previous Tuesday had dwelt less on Roger’s feelings and more on her own and his. In it she had written of her love for him and of their love-making so that, reading it, he had experienced that curious pit-of-the-stomach
frisson
that comes exclusively when nostalgia is evoked for a particular and well-remembered act of sex.