A Demon in My View (10 page)

As soon as she heard who it was she asked him round for coffee. Anthony hesitated. His conversation with Helen had become a jumble in his mind and he couldn’t remember whether he had given her this number or not. If he had and she phoned back …? No, he wouldn’t go to Linthea’s, but would Linthea come to him? She would, once she had got the upstairs tenant to listen for Leroy.

   Arthur had overheard it all, or as much of phone conversations as a listener can hear. Because he hadn’t heard the women’s replies he wasn’t sure whether or not Anthony Johnson was going out. Please let him go out, he found himself praying. Perhaps to that God whose portrait with a crown of thorns hung in All Souls’ church hall where his Sunday school had been, though neither he nor Auntie Gracie had ever really believed in Him. Please let him go out.

But the light from Room 2 continued to illuminate the lichen-coated court. He heard the front door opened and closed and then he saw what he had never seen before, the shadows of two heads, one Anthony Johnson’s, the other sleekly crowned with a pin-pierced chignon, cast on the lighted stone. Arthur turned away, his whole body shaking. He threw back the pink floral eiderdown and seized the pillows one after the other in his hands, strangling them, digging his fingers into their softness, tossing them and grasping them again so savagely that his nails ripped a seam. But this brought him no relief and, after an excess of useless violence, he lay face downwards on the bed, weeping hot tears.

———

Linthea wore a long black wool skirt embroidered with orange flowers. The upper part of her body was covered with a yellow poncho and she had small gold pins in her hair.

“I dressed up,” she said, “because you’re expecting other guests. A party?”

He was a little disappointed because she hadn’t dressed up for him. “I’m not expecting anyone. What made you think so?”

She raised eyebrows that were perfect arcs, black crescents above white moons. “You wouldn’t come to me. Oh, I
see
. You’re so fond of this exquisite little room with all its antiques and its lovely view of an old-world cellar that you can’t bear to leave it. Do you know, that lampshade looks exactly like a Portuguese Man o’ War?”

He laughed. “I knew it was a jellyfish but I didn’t know what kind. The fact is, I may be going to get a phone call.”

“Ah.”

“Not ‘ah’ at all.” Anthony put the kettle on, set out cups. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. But now you tell me about you.”

“Nothing much to tell. I’m twenty-nine, born in Kingston. Jamaica, not the By-pass. I came here with my parents when I was eighteen. Trained as a social worker here in Kenbourne. Married a doctor.” She looked down at her lap, retrieved a fallen gold pin. “He died of cancer three years ago.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Yes.” She took the cup of coffee Anthony gave her. “Now you,” she said.

“Me? I’m the eternal student.” As he said it, he remembered it was Helen who had dubbed him so, quoting apparently from some Chekhov play. She wasn’t going to phone back. Not now. He began telling Linthea about his thesis, but took his notes gently from her when she started to read them. That sort of thing—
For his actions, cruelty to children and animals, even murder, he feels little, if any, guilt. His guilt is more likely to be felt over his failure to perform routine or compulsive actions which are, taken in the context of benefit to society, virtually meaningless
—no, that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about tonight Pity there wasn’t a sofa in the room but just the tweed-patched
fireside chair and the upright chairs and the thing he thought was called a pouffe. He sat on that because he could surreptitiously, and apparently artlessly, edge it closer and closer to her. He had got quite close, and quite close too, to unburdening himself about his whole disillusionment over the Helen affair, when there came a sharp rap on the door.

Phone for him. Come to think of it, he wouldn’t be able to hear the phone bell in here.… He flung the door open. On the threshold stood the new occupant of Room 3, a tall, handsome man who looked rather like Muhammad Ali.

“I’m extremely sorry to disturb you,” said Winston Mervyn in impeccable academic English quite different from Linthea’s warm sun-filled West Indian. He held out a small cruet. “I wonder if you would be so kind as to lend me a little salt?”

“Sure,” said Anthony. “Come in.” No phone call. Of course he hadn’t given her the number. He remembered quite clearly now.

Winston Mervyn came in. He walked straight up to Linthea who—if this is possible in a Negress—had turned pale. She half rose. She held out her hand and said:

“This is unbelievable. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“It is not,” said the visitor, “entirely a coincidence. The salt was a ploy. I saw you come to the door.”

“Yes, but to be living here and in this house …” Linthea broke off. “We knew each other in Jamaica, Anthony. We haven’t met for twelve years.”

On the doormat lay three letters for Winston Mervyn, a bill for Brian Kotowsky, and the mauve-grey envelope from Bristol addressed to Anthony Johnson. Arthur, holding it in his hand, speculated briefly as to its contents. Had the woman decided to leave her husband or to stay with him? But he couldn’t summon up much interest in it, for he was obsessed to the exclusion of all else by his need to secure absolute private possession of the cellar.

It had been frosty, the night preceding November 5, and a thick white rime stuck like snow to walls and railings and doorsteps. The yellow leaves which clogged the gutters were each edged with a tinsel rim. He put his hand to Grainger’s gate and found that it was already unlocked. For once, Barry was in before him. Arthur saw him over by a load of timber, about to set a match to a jumping cracker.

“Stop that,” Arthur said in a chilly, carrying voice. “D’you want to set the place on fire?”

He let himself into the office. Barry came and stood sulkily in the doorway.

“When I was your age I’d have been severely punished if I’d so much as touched a firework.”

Barry blew an orange bubble gum bubble. “What’s pissing you off this morning?”

“How dare you use such language!” Arthur thundered. “Get out of here. Go and make a cup of tea.”

“What, at half nine?”

“Do as you’re told. When I was your age I’d have thought myself lucky to have
got
a cup of tea in the morning.”

When I was your age … Looking out of the window at the white desolation, Arthur thought of that lost childhood of his. Would he have been punished for touching a firework? Perhaps, by the time he was Barry’s age, he had already been deterred from doing anything so obviously venal. Yes, he had been strictly brought up, but he had no quarrel with the strict upbringing of children.

“Until you are grown up, Arthur,” Auntie Gracie used to say, “I am the master of this house.”

Laxity on her part might have led to his growing up weak, slovenly, heedless about work and punctuality. And a greater freedom would have been bad for him. Look what he did with freedom when he had it—things which would, if unchecked, deprive him of freedom altogether. Like the incident with Mrs. Goodwin’s baby … But before he could dwell on that one, Barry had come in with the tea.

“You seen that bonfire they’re going to have on the bit of ground?”

“I like my tea in my cup, not in my saucer,” said Arthur. “No, I cannot say I have seen it. Who might ‘they’ be?”

“People, kids, I don’t know. It’s a bleeding great pile of wood they got there. I reckon it’ll be the best fire in Kenbourne. It’s no good you looking out of the window, it’s right up against them fences in Brasenose.”

Arthur sipped his tea. “Let us hope there won’t be any catastrophes. I imagine the fire brigade will have a busy night of it. Now when you’ve finished helping yourself to Mr. Grainger’s sugar, perhaps you’ll condescend to empty my wastepaper basket.”

A formidable pile of correspondence awaited him. He began opening envelopes carefully. Once, hurrying, he had torn a cheque for a large sum in half. But this morning a proper concentration was almost impossible to achieve. He knew, from the images which kept moving in procession across his mental eye, from memories arising out of a past he had been used to think eradicated, from the pressure and buzzing in his head, that he was reaching the end of his tether.

Those images included, of course, dead faces; that of Auntie Gracie, those of the two girls. He saw the mouse, stiff, stretched, bloody. And now he saw the baby and heard again its screams.

Auntie Gracie had been minding that baby for its mother. There had been some sick relative, Arthur remembered, whom Mrs. Goodwin was obliged to visit.

“If I have to pop out to the shops,” Auntie Gracie had said, “Arthur will be here”—and with a loaded look—“it will be good for Arthur to be placed in a position of trust.”

Once she was out of the house, he had gone and stood over the baby, scrutinising it with curious desire. It was about six months old, fat, fast asleep. He withdrew the covers, lifted the woolly jacket it wore, and still it didn’t wake. A napkin, white and fleecy, secured with a large safety pin, was now visible above its leggings. Safety was a strange word to apply to so obviously dangerous a weapon. Arthur removed the pin and, taut now with joy and power, thrust it up to its curled hilt into the baby’s stomach. The baby woke with a shattering scream and a great bubble of scarlet blood welled out as he removed the pin. For a while he listened to its screams, watching it and exulting, watching its wide agonised mouth and the tears which washed down its red face. He watched and listened. Auntie Gracie was away at the shops quite a long time. Fortunately. He had to make things right to avoid her anger. Fortunately, too, the pin seemed to have struck no vital part. He changed the napkin which was now wet with urine as well as blood, washed it—how Auntie Gracie had congratulated him and approved of that!—and by the time she returned the baby was only crying piteously as babies do cry, apparently for no reason.

No harm ever came to the baby. It was, he supposed, a man in his mid-thirties by now. Nor had he or Auntie Gracie ever been blamed for the wound, if indeed that wound had ever been discovered. But he was glad for himself that he had known Auntie Gracie wouldn’t be long away, for where else, into how many more vulnerable soft parts would he have stuck that pin had the baby been his for hours? No, she had been his guardian angel and his protectress, succeeded at her death by that other protectress, his patient white lady, garbed in her clothes.…

By one o’clock he hadn’t replied to a single letter. Perhaps,
when he had a good lunch inside him … He put on his overcoat of silver-grey tweed, a shade lighter than his steel-grey silk tie, which he tightened before leaving the office until it stood out like an arch of metal. On his way to the Vale Café, he paused for a moment to view the stacked wood. The pile stood some fifteen feet high and someone had flanked it with a pair of trestle tables. Arthur shook his head in vague, undefined disapproval. Then he walked briskly to the café, having an idea that the crisp air, inhaled rhythmically, would clear his pulsing head.

Returning, he was accosted by a young woman in a duffel coat who was collecting information for a poll. Arthur gave her his name and address, told her that he supported the Conservative Party, was unmarried; he refused to give his age but gave his occupation as a quantity surveyor. She took it all down and he felt a little better.

Grainger’s correspondence still awaited him and, thanks to his idleness of the morning, it looked as if he might have to stay late to get it all done. During the winter, when dusk had come by five, he liked to leave the office promptly at that hour. The streets were crowded then and he could get home, safe and observed, before dark. But he comforted himself with the thought that the streets would be crowded till all hours tonight. Already he could see flashes of gold and scarlet and white fire shooting into the pale and still sunlit sky.

But from a perverse wish to see the evening’s festivities spoiled, he hoped for rain and went outside several times to study the thermometer. There had been a few clouds overhead at lunchtime. Since then the clouds had shrunk and shivered away as if chilled out of existence by the increasing cold, for the red column of liquid in the thermometer had fallen steadily from 37 to 36 to 35 until now, at five-thirty, it stood at 29 degrees.

The sun had scarcely gone when stars appeared in the blue sky, as hard and clear as a sheet of lapis. And the stars remained, bright and eternal, while those false meteors shot and burst into ephemeral galaxies. Arthur pulled down the blind so that he could no longer see them, though he could hear the voices and the laughter of those who were arriving for the bonfire and the feast.

At ten past six he completed his last letter and typed the address.
Then, leaving his replies in the Out tray for Barry to post in the morning, he put on his overcoat, gave yet another tug to his tie, and left the office. He locked the gates. The Guy Fawkes celebrants were making what Arthur thought of as a most unseemly din. He came out into Magdalen Hill and approached the wire netting fence.

A small crowd of home-going commuters were already gathered there. Arthur meant to walk past, but curiosity mixed with distaste and some undefined hope of disaster, impelled him to join them.

The tables had been laid with paper cloths on which were arranged mountains of sandwiches, bread rolls, hot dogs, and bowls of soup. The steam from this soup hung on the air. There were, Arthur estimated, about a hundred people present, mostly children, but many women and perhaps half a dozen men. All were wrapped in windcheaters or thick coats with scarves. Already the grass was frosted and their boots made dark green prints on the frost. The lights in the houses behind shed a steady orange refulgence over the moving figures, the silvered grass, the ponderous mountain of wood, the whole Breughel-like scene.

One of the women brought to the stacked woodpile a box barrow filled with potatoes which she tipped out These, Arthur supposed, were to be roasted in the embers of the fire. And very nasty they would taste, he thought, as he saw a man—a black man, they all looked the same to him—tip paraffin over wood and cardboard and paper and then splash it over the guy itself. The guy, he had to admit, was a masterpiece, if you cared for that sort of thing, a huge, lifelike figure dressed in a man’s suit with a papier-mâché mask for a face and a big straw hat on its head. He was about to turn away, sated and half disgusted with the whole thing, when he saw something—or someone—that held him frozen and excited where he stood. For a man had come out of the crowd with a box of matches in his hand, a tall man with a blaze of blond hair hanging to the collar of his leather jacket, and the man was Anthony Johnson.