A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

way for which he, as the farmer’s son, the white one among them, must in-tercede with the farmer. She disturbed the sleeping face by scratching or tickling gently at a cheek with one finger, and slowly the eyes opened, saw nothing, were still asleep, and then, awake, no longer narrowed, looked out at them, grey with yellowish flecks, his own hazel eyes.

He struggled for a moment with a grimace of tears, anger and self-pity. She could not put out her hand to him. He said, “You haven’t been near the house with it?”

She shook her head.

“Never?”

Again she shook her head.

“Don’t take it out. Stay inside. Can’t you take it away somewhere?

You must give it to someone—”

She moved to the door with him.

He said, “I’ll see what I will do. I don’t know.” And then he said:

“I feel like killing myself.”

Her eyes began to glow, to thicken with tears. For a moment there was the feeling between them that used to come when they were alone down at the river-bed.

He walked out.

Two days later, when his mother and father had left the farm for the day, he appeared again. The women were away on the lands, weeding, as they were employed to do as casual labor in summer; only the very old remained, propped up on the ground outside the huts in the flies and the sun. Thebedi did not ask him in. The child had not been well; it had diarrhea. He asked where its food was.

She said, “The milk comes from me.” He went into Njabulo’s house, where the child lay; she did not follow but stayed outside the door and watched without seeing an old crone who had lost her mind, talking to herself, talking to the fowls who ignored her.

She thought she heard small grunts from the hut, the kind of infant grunt that indicates a full stomach, a deep sleep. After a time, long or short she did not know, he came out and walked away with plodding stride (his father’s gait) out of sight, toward his father’s house.

The baby was not fed during the night and although she kept telling Njabulo it was sleeping, he saw for himself in the morning that it was dead. He comforted her with words and caresses. She did not cry but simply sat, staring at the door. Her hands were cold as dead chickens’ feet to his touch.

Njabulo buried the little baby where farm workers were buried, in the place in the veld the farmer had given them. Some of the mounds had been left to weather away unmarked, others were covered with stones and a few had fallen wooden crosses. He was going to make a cross but before it was finished the police came and dug up the grave and took away the dead baby: someone — one of the other laborers? their women? — had reported that the baby was almost white, that, strong and healthy, it had died suddenly after a visit by the farmer’s son. Pathological tests on the infant corpse showed intestinal damage not always consistent with death by natural causes.

Thebadi went for the first time to the country town where Paulus had been to school, to give evidence at the preparatory examination into the charge of murder brought against him. She cried hysterically in the witness box, saying yes, yes (the gilt hoop earrings swung in her ears), she saw the accused pouring liquid into the baby’s mouth.

She said he had threatened to shoot her if she told anyone.

More than a year went by before, in that same town, the case was brought to trial. She came to court with a newborn baby on her back.

She wore gilt hoop earrings; she was calm, she said she had not seen what the white man did in the house.

Paulus Eysendyck said he had visited the hut but had not poisoned the child.

The defense did not contest that there had been a love relationship between the accused and the girl, or that intercourse had taken place, but submitted there was no proof that the child was the accused’s.

The judge told the accused there was strong suspicion against him but not enough proof that he had committed the crime. The court could not accept the girl’s evidence because it was clear she had committed perjury either at this trial or at the preparatory examination. There was the suggestion in the mind of the court that she might be an accomplice in the crime; but, again, insufficient proof.

The judge commended the honorable behavior of the husband (sitting in court in a brown-and-yellow- quartered golf cap bought for Sundays) who had not rejected his wife and had “even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means.”

The verdict on the accused was “not guilty.”

The young white man refused to accept the congratulations of press and public and left the court with his mother’s raincoat shielding his face from photographers. His father said to the press,

“I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.”

Interviewed by the Sunday papers, who spelled her name in a variety of ways, the black girl, speaking in her own language, was quoted beneath her photograph: “It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more.”

The Irony of Hate RUTH RENDELL

When lists are made fifty or a hundred years hence of the best writers of our time, regardless of genre, Ruth Rendell (b. 1930), despite her career-long identification with crime and detective fiction, may well rank high. She was born Ruth Barbara Grasemann in London, the daughter of two teachers who both found a creative outlet in painting. After leaving school at eighteen, she eschewed university for a brief career as a newspaper reporter in Essex. After marrying fellow reporter Donald Rendell and producing a son, she quit journalism for full-time motherhood and self-education through voracious reading.

Rendell’s first novel From Doon with Death (1964), introducing her odd-couple police team of Reg Wexford and Mike Burden, is solidly traditional, the trickiness of its plot inviting the inevitable Agatha Christie comparison. Rendell would never abandon this devotion to fair-play plotting as her novels increased in psychological and thematic depth. Her second novel, To Fear a Painted Devil (1965), is non-series, and throughout her career she has mixed the Wexford and Burden books, immensely popular with readers, with often dark-hued crime novels that have achieved even greater critical acclaim. Writing in the Scribner Writers Series volume Mystery and Suspense Writers (1998), B. J. Rahn describes these non-series books as “centered in the consciousness of the main character — whether villain or victim — whose feelings of alienation, anxiety, fear, hatred, and anguish are experienced firsthand by the reader.” Rendell, who was called Ruth by her father and Barbara by her mother, answers to both and now writes as both, having adopted the pseudonym Barbara Vine with A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986). According to Rahn, the Vine novels “plumb the depths of the human psyche more in the manner of Henry James than Patricia Highsmith or Alfred Hitchcock…The novels are distinguished by subtle manipulation of the narrative viewpoint and complex patterning, which often produce startling ironic surprises.”

Along with her prolific book-or-two-per-year output, Rendell has also kept busy as a short-story writer. Her first collection, The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976) has been followed by at least six more, including Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories (2000). “The Irony of Hate,” revealing who did what in the very first sentence, demonstrates Rendell’s psychological insight as well as her ability to surprise the reader.

Imurdered Brenda Goring for what I suppose is the most unusual of motives. She came between me and my wife. By that I don’t mean to say that there was anything abnormal in their relationship.

They were merely close friends, though “merely” is hardly the word to use in connection with a relationship which alienates and excludes a once-loved husband. I murdered her to get my wife to myself once more, but