Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

The Man Who Was the God of Love by Ruth Rendell

We are especially glad to be able to include in this 52nd anniversary issue a story by one of the most distinguished of contemporary crime writers. With her eerily acute depiction of character, Ruth Rendell often transcends the crime genre, producing mainstream novels and stories, but here she gives us a mystery almost in the classic vein...

“Have you got the Times there?” Henry would say, usually at about eight, when she had cleared the dinner table and put the things in the dishwasher.

The Times was on the coffee table with the two other dailies they took, but it was part of the ritual to ask her. Fiona liked to be asked. She liked to watch Henry do the crossword puzzle, the real one of course, not the quick crossword, and watch him frown a little, his handsome brow clear as the answer to a clue came to him. She could not have done a crossword puzzle to save her life (as she was fond of saying), she could not even have done the simple ones in the tabloids.

While she watched him, before he carried the newspaper off into his study as he often did, Fiona told herself how lucky she was to be married to Henry. Her luck had been almost miraculous. There she was, a temp who had come into his office to work for him while his secretary had a baby, an ordinary, not particularly good-looking girl, who had no credentials but a tidy mind and a proficient way with a word processor. She had nothing but her admiration for him, which she had felt from the first and was quite unable to hide.

He was not appreciated in that company as he should have been. It had often seemed to her that only she saw him for what he was. After she had been there a week she told him he had a first-class mind.

Henry had said modestly, “As a matter of fact, I have got rather a high IQ, but it doesn’t exactly get stretched round here.”

“I suppose they haven’t the brains to recognise it,” she said. “It must be marvellous to be really intelligent. Did you win scholarships and get a double first and all that?”

He only smiled. Instead of answering he asked her to have dinner with him. One afternoon, half an hour before they were due to pack up and go, she came upon him doing the Times crossword.

“In the firm’s time, I’m afraid, Fiona,” he said with one of his wonderful, half-rueful smiles.

He hadn’t finished the puzzle but at least half of it was already filled in and when she asked him he said he had started it ten minutes before. She was lost in admiration. Henry said he would finish the puzzle later and in the meantime would she have a drink with him on the way home?

That was three years ago. The firm, which deserved bankruptcy it was so mismanaged, got into difficulties and Henry was among those made redundant. Of course he soon got another job, though the salary was pitiful for someone of his intellectual grasp. He was earning very little more than she was, as she told him indignantly. Soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Fiona was overcome. She told him humbly that she would have gladly lived with him without marriage, there was no one else she had ever known to compare with him in intellectual terms, it would have been enough to be allowed to share his life. But he said no, marriage or nothing, it would be unfair on her not to marry her.

She kept on with her temping job, making sure she stopped in time to be home before Henry and get his dinner. It was ridiculous to waste money on a cleaner, so she cleaned the house on Sundays. Henry played golf on Saturday mornings and he liked her to go with him, though she was hopeless when she tried to learn. He said it was an inspiration to have her there and praise his swing. On Saturday afternoons they went out in the car and Henry had begun teaching her to drive.

They had quite a big garden — they had bought the house on an enormous mortgage — and she did her best to keep it trim because Henry obviously didn’t have the time. He was engaged on a big project for his new company, which he worked on in his study for most of the evenings. Fiona did the shopping in her lunchtime, she did all the cooking and all the washing and ironing. It was her privilege to care for someone as brilliant as Henry. Besides, his job was so much more demanding than hers, it took more out of him, and by bedtime he was sometimes white with exhaustion.

But Henry was first up in the mornings. He was an early riser, getting up at six-thirty, and he always brought her a cup of tea and the morning papers in bed. Fiona had nothing to do before she went off to take first a bus and then the tube but put the breakfast things in the dishwasher and stack yesterday’s newspapers in the cupboard outside the front door for recycling.

The Times would usually be on top, folded with the lower left-hand quarter of the back page uppermost. Fiona soon came to understand it was no accident that the section of the paper where the crossword was, the completed crossword, should be exposed in this way. It was deliberate, it was evidence of Henry’s pride in his achievement, and she was deeply moved that he should want her to see it. She was touched by his need for her admiration. A sign of weakness on his part it might be, but she loved him all the more for that.

A smile, half-admiring, half-tender, came to her lips as she looked at the neatly printed answers to all those incomprehensible clues. She could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had failed to finish the crossword. The evening before his father died, for instance. Then it was anxiety that must have been the cause. They had sent for him at four in the morning and when she looked at the paper before putting it outside with the others, she saw that poor Henry had only been able to fill in the answers to four clues. Another time he had flu and had been unable to get out of bed in the morning. It must have been coming on the night before to judge by his attempt at the crossword, abandoned after two answers feebly pencilled in.

His father left him a house that was worth a lot of money. Henry had always said that when he got a promotion, she would be able to give up work and have a baby. Promotion seemed less and less likely in time of recession and the fact that the new company appreciated Henry no more than had his previous employers. The proceeds of the sale of Henry’s father’s house would compensate for that and Fiona was imagining paying off the mortgage and perhaps handing in her notice when Henry said he was going to spend it on having a swimming pool built. All his life he had wanted a swimming pool of his own, it had been a childhood dream and a teenage ideal and now he was going to realise it.

Fiona came nearer than she ever had to seeing a flaw in her husband’s perfection.

“You only want a baby because you think he might be a genius,” he teased her.

“She might be,” said Fiona, greatly daring.

“He, she, it’s just a manner of speaking. Suppose he had my beauty and your brains. That would be a fine turn-up for the books.”

Fiona was not hurt because she had never had any illusions about being brighter than she was. In any case, he was implying, wasn’t he, that she was good-looking? She managed to laugh. She understood that Henry could not always help being rather difficult. It was the penalty someone like him paid for his gifts of brilliance. In some ways intellectual prowess was a burden to carry through life.

“We’ll have a heated pool, a decent-size one with a deep end,” Henry said, “and I’ll teach you to swim.”

The driving lessons had ended in failure. If it had been anyone else but Henry instructing her, Fiona would have said he was a harsh and intolerant teacher. Of course she knew how inept she was. She could not learn how to manage the gears and she was afraid of the traffic.

“I’m afraid of the water,” she confessed.

“It’s a disgrace,” he said as if she had not spoken, “a woman of thirty being unable to swim.” And then, when she only nodded doubtfully, “Have you got the Times there?”

Building the pool took all the money the sale of Henry’s father’s house realised. It took rather more and Henry had to borrow from the bank. The pool had a roof over it and walls round, which were what cost the money. That and the sophisticated purifying system. It was eight feet deep at the deep end, with a diving board and a chute.

Happily for Fiona, her swimming lessons were indefinitely postponed. Henry enjoyed his new pool so much that he would very much have grudged taking time off from swimming his lengths or practising his dives in order to teach his wife the basics.

Fiona guessed that Henry would be a brilliant swimmer. He was the perfect all-rounder. There was an expression in Latin which he had uttered and then translated for her which might have been, she thought, a description of himself: mens sana in corpore sano. Only for “sana,” or “healthy,” she substituted “wonderful.” She would have liked to sit by the pool and watch him and she was rather sorry that his preferred swimming time was six-thirty in the morning, long before she was up.

One evening, while doing the crossword puzzle, he consulted her about a clue, as he sometimes did. “Consulted” was not perhaps the word. It was more a matter of expressing his thoughts aloud and waiting for her comment. Fiona found these remarks, full of references to unknown classical or literary personages, nearly incomprehensible. She had heard, for instance, of Psyche, but only in connection with “psychological,” “psychiatric,” and so on. Cupid to her was a fat baby with wings, and she did not know this was another name for Eros, which to her was the statue.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand at all,” she said humbly.

Henry loved elucidating. With a rare gesture of affection, he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Psyche was married to Cupid, who was, of course, a god, the god of love. He always came to her by night and she never saw his face. Suppose her husband was a terrible monster of ugliness and deformity? Against his express wishes” — here Henry fixed a look of some severity on his wife — “she rose up one night in the dark and, taking a lighted candle, approached the bed where Cupid lay. Scarcely had she caught a glimpse of his peerless beauty, when a drop of hot wax fell from the candle onto the god’s naked skin. With a cry he sprang up and fled from the house. She never saw him again.”

“How awful for her,” said Fiona, quite taken aback.

“Yes, well, she shouldn’t have disobeyed him. Still, I don’t see how that quite fits in here — wait a minute, yes, I do. Of course, that second syllable is an anagram of Eros...”

Henry inserted the letters in his neat print. A covert glance told her he had completed nearly half the puzzle. She did her best to suppress a yawn. By this time of the evening she was always so tired she could scarcely keep awake, while Henry could stay up for hours yet. People like him needed no more than four or five hours sleep.

“I think I’ll go up,” she said.

“Good night.” He added a kindly, “Darling.”

For some reason, Henry never did the crossword puzzle on a Saturday. Fiona thought this a pity because, as she said, that was the day they gave prizes for the first correct entries received. But Henry only smiled and said he did the puzzle for the pure intellectual pleasure of it, not for gain. Of course you might not know your entry was correct because the solution to Saturday’s puzzle did not appear next day but not until a week later. Her saying this, perhaps naively, made Henry unexpectedly angry. Everyone knew that with this kind of puzzle, he said, there could only be one correct solution, even people who never did crosswords knew that.

It was still dark when Henry got up in the mornings. Sometimes she was aware of his departure and his empty half of the bed. Occasionally, half an hour later, she heard the boy come with the papers, the tap-tap of the letter box, and even the soft thump of the Times falling onto the mat. But most days she was aware of nothing until Henry reappeared with her tea and the papers.

Henry did nothing to make her feel guilty about lying in, yet she was ashamed of her inability to get up. It was somehow unlike him, it was out of character, this waiting on her. He never did anything of the kind at any other time of the day and it sometimes seemed to her that the unselfish effort he made must be almost intolerable to someone with his needle-sharp mind and — yes, it must be admitted — his undoubted lack of patience. That he never complained or even teased her about oversleeping only added to her guilt.

Shopping in her lunch hour, she bought an alarm clock. They had never possessed such a thing, had never needed to, for Henry, as he often said, could direct himself to wake up at any hour he chose. Fiona put the alarm clock inside her bedside cabinet where it was invisible. It occurred to her, although she had as yet done nothing, she had not set the clock, that in failing to tell Henry about her purchase of the alarm she was deceiving him. This was the first time she had ever deceived him in anything and perhaps, as she reflected on this, it was inevitable that her thoughts should revert to Cupid and Psyche and the outcome of Psyche’s equally innocent stratagem.

The alarm remained inside the cabinet. Every evening she thought of setting it, though she never did so. But the effect on her of this daily speculation and doubt was to wake her without benefit of mechanical aid. Thinking about it did the trick and Henry, in swimming trunks and towelling robe, had no sooner left their bedroom than she was wide awake. On the third morning this happened, instead of dozing off again until seven-thirty, she lay there for ten minutes and then got up.

Henry would be swimming his lengths. She heard the paper boy come, the letter box make its double tap-tap, and the newspapers fall onto the mat with a soft thump. Should she put on her own swimming costume or go down fully dressed? Finally, she compromised and got into the tracksuit that had never seen a track and scarcely the light of day before.

This morning it would be she who made Henry tea and took him the papers. However, when she reached the foot of the stairs there was no paper on the mat, only a brown envelope with a bill in it. She must have been mistaken and it was the postman she had heard. The time was just on seven, rather too soon perhaps for the papers to have arrived.

Fiona made her way to the swimming pool. When she saw Henry she would just wave airily to him. She might call out in a cheerful way, “Carry on swimming!” or make some other humorous remark.

The glass door to the pool was slightly ajar. Fiona was barefoot. She pushed the door and entered silently. The cold chemical smell of chlorine irritated her nostrils. It was still dark outside, though dawn was coming, and the dark purplish blue of a pre-sunrise sky shimmered through the glass panel in the ceiling. Henry was not in the pool but sitting in one of the cane chairs at the glass-topped table not two yards from her. Light from a ceiling spotlight fell directly onto the two newspapers in front of him, both folded with their back pages uppermost.

Fiona saw at once what he was doing. That was not the difficulty. From today’s Times he was copying into yesterday’s Times the answers to the crossword puzzle. She could see quite clearly that he was doing this but she could not for a moment believe. It must be a joke or there must be some other purpose behind it.

When he turned round, swiftly covering both newspapers with the Radio Times, she knew from his face that it was neither a joke nor the consequence of some mysterious purpose. He had turned quite white. He seemed unable to speak and she flinched from the panic that leapt in his eyes.

“I’ll make us a cup of tea,” she said. The wisest and kindest thing would be to forget what she had seen. She could not. In that split second she stood in the doorway of the pool watching him he had been changed forever in her eyes. She thought about it on and off all day. It was impossible for her to concentrate on her work.

She never once thought he had deceived her, only that she had caught him out. Like Psyche, she had held the candle over him and seen his true face. His was not the brilliant intellect she had thought. He could not even finish the Times crossword. Now she understood why he never attempted it on a Saturday, knowing there would be no opportunity next morning or on the Monday morning to fill in the answers from that day’s paper. There were a lot of other truths that she saw about Henry. No one recognised his mind as first class because it wasn’t first class. He had lost that excellent well-paid job because he was not intellectually up to it.

She knew all that and she loved him the more for it. Just as she had felt an almost maternal tenderness for him when he left the newspaper with its completed puzzle exposed for her to see, now she was overwhelmed with compassion for his weakness and his childlike vulnerability. She loved him more deeply than ever and if admiration and respect had gone, what did those things matter, after all, in the tender intimacy of a good marriage?

That evening he did not touch the crossword puzzle. She had known he wouldn’t and, of course, she said nothing. Neither of them had said a word about what she had seen that morning and neither of them ever would. Her feelings for him were completely changed, yet she believed her attitude could remain unaltered. But when, a few days later, he said something more about its being disgraceful that a woman of her age was unable to swim, instead of agreeing ruefully, she laughed and said, really, he shouldn’t be so intolerant and censorious, no one was perfect.

He gave her a complicated explanation of some monetary quest ion that was raised on the television news. It sounded wrong, he was confusing dollars with pounds, and she said so.

“Since when have you been an expert on the stock market?” he said.

Once she would have apologised. “I’m no more an expert than you are, Henry,” she said, “but I can use my eyes and that was plain to see. Don’t you think we should both admit we don’t know a thing about it?”

She no longer believed in the accuracy of his translations from the Latin nor the authenticity of his tales from the classics. When some friends who came for dinner were regaled with his favourite story about how she had been unable to learn to drive, she jumped up laughing and put her arm round his shoulder.

“Poor Henry gets into a rage so easily I was afraid he’d give himself a heart attack, so I stopped our lessons,” she said.

He never told that story again.

“Isn’t it funny?” she said one Saturday on the golf course. “I used to think it was wonderful you having a handicap of twenty-five. I didn’t know any better.”

He made no answer.

“It’s not really the best thing in a marriage for one partner to look up to the other too much, is it? Equality is best. I suppose it’s natural to idolise the other one when you’re first married. It just went on rather a long time for me, that’s all.”

She was no longer in the least nervous about learning to swim. If he bullied her she would laugh at him. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t all that good a swimmer himself. He couldn’t do the crawl at all and a good many of his dives turned into belly-flops. She lay on the side of the pool, leaning on her elbows, watching him as he climbed out of the deep end up the steps.

“D’you know, Henry,” she said, “you’ll lose your marvellous figure if you aren’t careful. You’ve got quite a spare tyre round your waist.”

His face was such a mask of tragedy, there was so much naked misery there, the eyes full of pain, that she checked the laughter that was bubbling up in her and said quickly, “Oh, don’t look so sad, poor darling. I’d still love you if you were as fat as a pudding and weighed twenty stone.”

He took two steps backwards down the steps, put up his hands, and pulled her down into the pool. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that she didn’t resist. She gasped when the water hit her. It was eight feet deep here, she couldn’t swim more than two or three strokes, and she made a grab for him, clutching at his upper arms.

He prised her fingers open and pushed her under the water. She tried to scream but the water came in and filled her throat. Desperately she thrashed about in the blue-greenness, the sickeningly chlorinated water, fighting, sinking, feeling for something to catch hold of, the bar round the pool rim, his arms, his feet on the steps. A foot kicked out at her, a foot stamped on her head. She stopped holding her breath, she had to, and the water poured into her lungs until the light behind her eyes turned red and her head was black inside. A great drum beat, boom, boom, boom, in the blackness, and then it stopped.

Henry waited to see if the body would float to the surface. He waited a long time but she remained, starfishlike, face-downwards, on the blue tiles eight feet down, so he left her and, wrapping himself in his towelling robe, went into the house. Whatever happened, whatever steps if any he decided to take next, he would do the Times crossword that evening. Or as much of it as he could ever do.