A Demon in My View (15 page)

Darling Tony, Why haven’t I heard from you? I couldn’t believe it when the post brought me nothing from you. Letters don’t go astray, do they? But the alternative is that you didn’t
want to write, that you’re angry with me, making me wait now as I made you wait in the past. Or is it that you need time to think in, to make plans for where we shall live and so on? I see you may need time to adjust to a new life and disrupt the new one you have already made. But if you need weeks, if you want to wait till your term ends, can’t you understand that I’ll understand? I’m so entirely yours now, Tony, that I’ll do anything you ask. Only don’t let me endure suspense, don’t leave me in fear
.

But there isn’t any real need to be frightened, is there? I know you’ll write. Is it possible that someone living in your house would take your letters by mistake. Surely, no one who did that would keep a letter like mine, a true love letter. And yet I hope and hope this is what happened. Or that this murder in your street I’ve read about in the newspapers has somehow made the police take people’s post
.

Because I have to believe you didn’t get my letter, I’ll repeat what I said in it, that I’ll leave Roger and come to you whenever you like. Your most devoted and loving, H
.

   Arthur read it several times. He wondered at the emotion conveyed in it. Strange that anyone could put such exaggerations, such drama, on paper. But her guesswork was correct. Her previous letter had been purloined by someone living in the house, and therefore Anthony Johnson must no more receive this one than he had received the last. He must never be allowed to receive any letter in a mauve-grey envelope, postmarked Bristol.…

   When nothing had arrived from Helen by the weekend, Anthony’s attitude towards her wavered between resentful anger and the more reasonable feeling that her letter had got lost in the post. She would, in any case, write again next week. It brought him a small, bitter pleasure to think she might have written to say she had made up her mind in his favour. How ironical if it were that letter which had got lost and she now be wondering if he were paying her back in her own coin. But he didn’t really think she would have decided for him. The likeliest
answer was that she had written with her usual ambivalence, given the letter to some colleague or friend to post, and it lay even now in that friend’s pocket or handbag.

On Saturday night he phoned Linthea, but she was out and Leroy’s sitter answered. However, on Sunday evening she was free and Anthony was invited to the flat in Brasenose Avenue.

The Sunday newspapers all had photographs of Brian Kotowsky, dog-faced Brian with his wild hair and his unhappy eyes.
POLICE MOUNT MASSIVE SEARCH FOR VESTA’S HUSBAND
. She was Vesta now to everyone, a household word, her Christian name on the lips of strangers enough to summon up immediate images of violence, terror, passion, death. But, keeping their options open, the less genteel of the Sundays also carried whole page spread stories entitled in one case,
WAS VESTA KENBOURNE KILLER’S VICTIM
? and in another, echoing poor Brian’s own words,
KENBOURNE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN?

Linthea, in the kitchen making Chicken Maryland, talked about the murder practically, logically, like a character in a detective story. “If Brian Kotowsky did kill her, he can’t have gone straight to find this Dean, because he left your house at a quarter to eleven and she didn’t leave the Grand Duke till ten minutes later. So they’re saying he hung about in the street on a freezing cold night on the chance she’d come that way and at that time. When she did come they didn’t go home to quarrel but quarrelled in a pitch-black mews where he killed her. And that’s ridiculous.”

“We don’t know what they’re saying.”

“The police always think murdered wives have been murdered by their husbands, and considering what I see in my work every day almost, I know why.”

He thought how Helen would have spoken of it, with intuition, using her rich imagination to clothe that night and the players in its drama. But Linthea looked coolly and prosaically at things as he did. Linthea had more in common with him than Helen had. Strange that the girl gifted with the delicate perception, the passionate imagination, should look so cool and fair, the calm and practical one so exotic. Tonight Linthea’s long black hair hung loose down her back. She wore a heavy gold chain about her neck which threw a yellow gleam up against her
throat and chin. He wondered about that dead husband of hers and whether she now lived a celibate life.

Later, when they had eaten and she had exhausted the subject of the Kotowskys, completed her analysis of times and circumstances and likelihood, he felt an overpowering urge to confide in her about Helen. But that brought him back to where he had been once before. Can you, if you want to make love to a woman, confess to her your present, strong, and angry love for another woman? Not certainly, with her son in the room, pressing you to a game of Scrabble.

“You’re keeping him up late,” he said at last.

“He’s on half-term. No school tomorrow, no work for me.” She had a merry laugh, evoked by very little, as some West Indians have. “Scrabble’s good for him, he can’t spell at all. How will you grow up,” she said, hugging the boy, “to be a big important doctor like Anthony if you can’t spell?”

So they played Scrabble till midnight when Leroy went to bed and Linthea said very directly, “I shall send you home now, Anthony. You must be fresh for your psychopaths in the morning.”

   He didn’t feel very fresh on Tuesday morning because he had awakened at four and been unable to sleep again. All day he wondered if a letter would be waiting for him when he got home, though he refused to give way to the impulse that urged him to go home early and find out. But when he returned at five there was no letter. No post had come that day for the occupants of 142 Trinity Road and the table was bare. So, on the following morning, beginning now to feel real anxiety, he waited at home until the post came, and at nine he took it in himself. Two letters, one for Li-li, one for Winston. It was now two whole weeks since he had heard from Helen.

Two of her letters couldn’t have gone astray. He considered breaking her rule and phoning her at work. She was assistant to the curator of a marine art museum. But why give her what she wanted, a lover content to hang on, playing the
amour courtois
game, while she gave him nothing? No, he wouldn’t phone. And maybe he wouldn’t phone on the last Wednesday of the month
either. By that time, anyway, he might have managed to console himself. Linthea, he thought, Linthea who had no ties, who lived in and worked for a society he understood, who wasn’t effete with poetry and dream and metaphor and a jellylike sensitivity that melts at a hard touch. Above all, this mustn’t affect his thesis. He had begun to write it in earnest and it was going well. Now, having dealt in depth with the findings of various psychometric tests, he wrote:

In the survey it was suggested that the majority of psychopaths feared their own aggression and were as guilt- and anxiety-ridden about their acts as were the normal subjects. In their manner of relating to female and authority figures, a greater disturbance was found in psychopaths than in non-psychopaths, but whereas more guilt feelings were present in the former, further analysis shows that the guilt feelings of psychopaths were indicative rather of their difficult and disagreeable situation than of true remorse. The psychopath, when offered a choice between selfish forms of conduct and those which seem self-denying and are therefore socially acceptable, may be shrewd enough to choose the latter. When obliged to be guided solely by his own judgment, his choice is directed primarily by personal need…
.

A tap on the door, discreet and somehow insinuating, interrupted Anthony. Arthur Johnson stood outside, dressed as usual in one of his silver-sheened suits and a shirt as white as that in a detergent commercial. He gave a small, deprecating cough.

“I do most sincerely apologise for this intrusion, but I have to trouble you about the little matter of the rent. Your—er, first weekly payment in advance falls due tomorrow.”

“Oh, sure,” said Anthony. “Will a cheque do?”

“Admirably, admirably.”

While Anthony hunted out his chequebook which was sandwiched between Sokolov’s
The Conditioned Reflex
and Stein’s
Role of Pleasure in Behaviour
, Arthur Johnson, in a finicky manner, waved at him a small red rent book and a brown envelope on which was printed with a touching attention to detail: Mr. Anthony Johnson, Room 2, 142 Trinity Road, London W15 6HD.

“If you would be good enough to place your cheque inside your rent book each Friday and the book inside this little envelope?

Then I will either collect it or you may leave it on the hall table.”

Anthony nodded, wrote his cheque.

“Thank goodness, the police have ceased to trouble us.”

“They haven’t troubled me at all yet,” said Anthony.

“Of course, there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mr. Kotowsky is guilty. He’s known to be in South America but he will be extradited.”

“Oh, rubbish,” said Anthony rather more roughly than he intended. “And there’s plenty of doubt in my mind. I don’t believe for a moment he did it.”

Arthur had been rather perturbed during the previous week to observe that on two mornings the post had been taken in by someone else. But that hadn’t happened since Saturday—thanks to his watching from his living-room window for the postman to appear round the corner of Camera Street, and taking care to be down in the hall in good time. In any case, no further mauve-grey envelopes had arrived. The woman wouldn’t write again. She had now been twice rebuffed and she wouldn’t risk a further snub. Tuesday, November 19, and Wednesday, November 20, went by. Those were crucial days, but they brought Anthony Johnson only a letter from York from his mother. Arthur felt more relaxed and peaceful than he had done since the night of November 5, although it gave him a certain bitterness to notice, now when it was too late and unimportant, that twice this week already no light had fallen from the window of Room 2 on to the courtyard in the evenings.

Friday, November 22, dawned cold and wet. Arthur saw Anthony Johnson leave the house at eight-thirty and Winston Mervyn follow him five minutes later. Then Li-li Chan emerged. She stood at the front gate under a red pagoda umbrella, scanning the cars that turned into Trinity Road from Magdalen Hill. Then the front door slammed with a Dean-like crash and Arthur heard her platform soles clumping up the stairs. He opened his door and put it on the latch.

Li-li was on the phone.

“You say you come at eight-thirty. You are oversleeping? Why don’t you buy alarm clock? I am late for my work. You would not oversleep if I sleep with you?” Arthur clicked his tongue at
that one. “Perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t. Of course I love you. Now come quick before I get sack from my job.”

It was five to nine before the car came for her, an ancient blue van this time. Arthur went down to take in the post. There was nothing on the mat, so presumably the postman hadn’t yet come. But as he turned back into the hall, he saw that the table which on the previous night had been bare even of vouchers, now held a pile of envelopes. The post must have come early and while he was listening to Li-li’s phone conversation. She had taken it in herself.

His own new Barclaycard, two circulars for Winston Mervyn and—unbelievable but real—a mauve-grey envelope postmarked Bristol. She had written again. Was there no stopping her? Arthur held the envelope in his fingertips, held it at arm’s length, as if it might explode. Well, he had decided no Bristol letter must ever be allowed to reach Anthony Johnson and that decision should stand. Better burn the thing immediately as he had burned the last. And yet … A thrill of fear touched him. Li-li had taken that letter in, might or might not have noticed it. But how could he be sure she hadn’t? If Anthony Johnson began to wonder why no letter had come for him for three weeks and started asking around—following up, in fact, H’s suggestion, though it had never been communicated to him—then Li-li would remember.

Again he steamed open the envelope.

   
Darling Tony, What have I done? Why have you rejected me without a word? You begged me to make up my mind and let you know as soon as I could. I did let you know by the Tuesday. I told you I was willing to leave Roger as soon as I heard from you and that I’d come to you. That was November 5 and now it’s November 21. Please tell me what I did and where I went wrong. Is it because I said I couldn’t promise to love you for ever? God knows, I’ve wished a thousand times I’d never written those words. Or is it because I said I hadn’t told Roger? I would have told him, you must believe me, as soon as I’d heard from you
.

I think I’ve lost you. In so far as I can think rationally at all, I think I shall never see you again. Tony, you would have pity on
me if you knew what black despair I feel, as if I can’t go on another day. I would even come to you, only I’m terrified of your anger. You said there are other women in the world. I am afraid to come and find you with another girl. It would kill me. You said I was the only woman you had ever felt real passion for, apart from wanting them as friends or to sleep with. You said you thought “in love” was an old-fashioned meaningless expression, but you understood it at last because you were in love with me. These feelings can’t have been destroyed because I wrote tactless silly things in my first letter. Or weren’t they ever sincere?

Roger has gone to Scotland on business. He’s to be there at least a fortnight and wanted me to go with him, only I can’t get time off from work till next Wednesday. Tony, while I’m alone here, please will you phone me at home? At any time during the weekend—I won’t leave the house—or next week in the evenings. I beg you to. If I ever meant anything to you in the past, if only for what we once were to each other, I beg you to phone me. If it’s only to say you don’t want me, you’ve changed your mind, I want to hear you saying it. Don’t be so cruel as to let me wait by the phone all the weekend. I can take it—I think—if you say you’ve changed. What I can’t take is this awful silence
.