A Demon in My View (16 page)

But, Tony, if you don’t phone, and I have to face the possibility that you won’t, I shan’t write again. I don’t know what I shall do, but what little pride I have left will keep me from throwing myself at you. So whatever happens now, this is my last letter. H.

   That, Arthur thought, rereading the last sentence, was at any rate something to be thankful for. But if Anthony Johnson saw this letter he’d be on the phone at once, tonight. And in their conversation it would all come out, the dates she’d written and the things she’d written. Yet Anthony Johnson must see this letter because Li-li Chan had already seen it.

By now it was almost twenty past nine. Arthur considered not going to work, phoning Mr. Grainger and saying he’d got this gastric bug that was going about. He seemed to see Auntie Gracie loom before him, shaking her head at his deceit and his cowardice. Besides, he’d have to go back tomorrow or the next
day. Shivering as if he were really ill, he dragged on his raincoat and took his umbrella from the rack in the hall. What to do with H’s letter? Take it to work and try to think of some solution. He could come home at lunchtime, anyway, in good time to restore it if he could find no alternative but to deliver it and himself into Anthony Johnson’s hands.

He was late, of course, late for the first time in years. Drizzle speckled the office window, then rain gushed in sheets against the glass. In a wretched state that was intensely nervous and at the same time apathetic, Arthur opened Grainger’s post, though he felt he never wanted to see another envelope as long as he lived. The handwriting of potential customers who wanted roofs retiled and central heating installed danced before his eyes. He typed two replies, full of errors, but at last there was nothing for it but to take H’s letter out of his briefcase and scrutinise it once more.

Should he take a chance on Li-li’s having failed to notice it? The chances were she hadn’t noticed it among so much other stuff. Since there seemed no alternative, this was a risk he would have to take. Destroy the letter now and hope Anthony Johnson either wouldn’t bother to ask her or that she wouldn’t remember. He had closed his fist over the two sheets of flimsy paper when he realised, with a new terror, that even if Anthony Johnson didn’t get this latest of H’s letters, he would still discover the injury that had been done him. For on Wednesday, November 27, next Wednesday, the last Wednesday in the month, he would phone H as he always did and the whole thing would come out.

   Arthur ground two sheets of paper into his typewriter and struggled with a reply to a Mr. P. Coleman, who wanted Grainger’s advice on the conversion of his nineteenth-century coachhouse into a dwelling for his mother-in-law. H’s letter would have to go back to 142 Trinity Road by one and it was eleven now. He’d brazen it out, that was all. He’d deny in his most severe manner ever having touched Anthony Johnson’s correspondence. Useless to keep turning things over in his mind like this when there was no help for it. He glanced at the sheet on
which he was typing and saw he had put an H instead of a P before Coleman and “convict” instead of “convert.” The paper was torn out and a fresh sheet inserted. Anthony Johnson would go at once to the police. The police would stop hunting for Brian Kotowsky and start thinking seriously about Arthur Johnson, who never went out at night but who had been out that night; who was a resident of Kenbourne Vale at the time of the murder of Maureen Cowan and at the time of the murder of Bridget O’Neill; who had unaccountably lied to them.… He flexed his hands to try and prevent their trembling.

A mammoth effort, a mammoth concentration, and a passable letter advising Mr. Coleman to consult a certain firm of Kenbourne Vale architects had been achieved. But as soon as he had done it and read it through, it struck him that if this reply came to the notice of Mr. Grainger he would be very displeased indeed. Mr. Grainger would expect him, while possibly mentioning the architects, to suggest that Grainger’s themselves would be happy to carry out the work. The displeasure of the whole world, of everyone who mattered, loomed before him. He gave a shuddering sigh. Another, and very different, letter must be composed.

Fresh sheets of paper were in the machine before Arthur realized the significance of the words he had spoken under his breath. Another, and very different, letter must be composed.…

For her letters H always used the same flimsy paper Grainger’s used for their carbon copies. And she used a similar typewriter to Arthur’s. Suppose he himself were to type a letter to Anthony Johnson and insert it in that mauve-grey envelope? The envelope would be the original one, the postmark and its date correct, and it could be placed on the hall table in good time for Anthony Johnson to find it. Only the contents would be different.

Arthur, who had spent half a day composing with fear and extreme care that note of apology, was appalled by the magnitude and the danger of the task. And yet the letter wouldn’t have to be a long one. His purpose, already half formulated, was to make it as short as possible. He could imitate H’s hysterical style—he had seen enough of it—and make the sort of errors she made, not depressing that key properly so that it made an eight instead of an apostrophe, depressing this one too long so that the second as well as the initial letter came out as upper case. And he could make the H with his own blue-black ballpoint pen.

He put two sheets of flimsy into the typewriter. The date first: November 21, and the O of November a capital as well as the N.
Darling
Tony—no, she wouldn’t call him darling for the kind of letter he meant to write. What would she call him? The only personal letters Arthur had written in his whole life were to a certain cousin of Auntie Gracie’s who had sent him five shilling postal orders on his birthdays.
Dear Uncle Alfred, Thank you very much for the postal order. I am going to save the money up in my money box. I had a nice birthday. Auntie Gracie gave me a new school blazer. With love from Arthur
. Dear Tony? In the
end, not having the least idea whether people ever wrote that way, Arthur typed
Tony
. Just
Tony
.

How to begin? She was always asking him to forgive her.
Forgive me
. That was good, convincing.
I’m sorry
, he went on, taking care that an eight instead of an apostrophe appeared,
not to have written to you before as I promised
. Why hadn’t she written?
I knew you would be angry if I said I couldn’t make up my mind
. Good, he was doing well. But he must get on to the nub of it. I
have made it up now and I am going to stay with Roger. I am his wife and it is my duty to stay with him
. Arthur didn’t like that much, it wasn’t H’s style, but he couldn’t better it and still make her say what he meant her to say. There ought to be some love stuff. He racked his brains for something from the television or from one of those old films.
I never really loved you. It was just infatuation
. Now for the most important thing, the point of writing this letter that was primarily designed to put an end to all further communication between H and Anthony Johnson.

Barry loafed in just before one to say he had had his lunch and would be around to answer the phone while Arthur was out. It was still teeming with rain. Arthur put up his umbrella and set off for Trinity Road via the mews. He passed the spot where he had strangled Vesta Kotowsky, feeling a tickle of nostalgia and a fretful resentment against a society which had given him the need to commit such acts yet would condemn him with loathing for yielding to them.

The house was empty. Nothing on the table had been disturbed. Arthur checked that the flap of the mauve-grey envelope was securely gummed down, and then he placed it in the very centre of the glossy mahogany table.

   The house was semidetached, with the uncluttered lines of sixties building, of pale red bricks with big windows to let in ample light. The family who had lived there since it was new had planted each January in its front garden their Christmas trees, and these Norway spruces, ten of them, stood in a row, each one a little taller than its predecessor. Anthony, as he left the house with Winston, thought of Helen and the delight she would have
taken in those Christmas trees, seeing in their arrangement, the almost ritualistic placing of them, evidence of domestic harmony, quietude, and a sense of permanent futurity.

The street was very quiet, a cul-de-sac. Children could play there in safety. But there were no children playing now, for it was dark, dark as midnight at six o’clock.

“What d’you think?” said Winston.

“Very nice, if you’ve got twenty thousand pounds. But you’ll have to get married. It’s no place for a bachelor. You must get married, have children, and with luck you’ll be able to plant at least forty more Christmas trees.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

“Sorry,” said Anthony. Viewing the house had made him bitter. It wasn’t his ideal, too bourgeois, too dull, too sheltered, and yet—could you find a better place in which to build a marriage and raise a family? Relationships are hard to come by, and one woman may make a man very discriminating, very selective. He saw his youth wasted in hanging after Helen, their dream children vanishing in their dream mother’s vacillations.

Winston said, “I think I shall buy it. I shall come and live here among the nobs.” He pointed as they turned the corner to a grander street. “Caspian lives in one of those minimansions, and all made out of grinding our faces.”

They walked towards the K.12 stop. A thin, cold drizzle was falling. It laid a slimy sheen on pavements and on the darker tarmac of the roadway, which threw back glittering yellow and red reflections of lamps. The neighbourhood changed abruptly as London neighbourhoods do. Once again they were among the tenements, the dispirited rows of terraced cottages without gardens or fences, the corner shops, the new housing blocks.

“You can always tell council flats by the smallness of their windows,” said Anthony. “Have you noticed?”

“And their hideous design. It comes of giving second-rate architects a chance to experiment on people who can’t afford to refuse.”

“Unlike lucky you.”

“In a filthy temper tonight, aren’t you? Excuse me, I’m going in here to get a paper.”

Anthony waited at the door. What was happening to him that
he could be rude and resentful to this new friend he liked so much? He stood in the now fast-falling rain, feeling depression settle on him. Friday night, Friday, November 22. He had to get through another five days of this, five days till the last Wednesday of the month. But then he would phone her, certainly he would. He thought of her face that he hadn’t seen for two months. It appeared before his eyes like a ghost face in mist, delicate, sensitive, contrite, wistful. The last time he had made love to her—he remembered it now, her eyes open and watching his eyes, her smile that had nothing to do with amusement. To have that again, even impermanently, even deferred, wasn’t it worth sacrificing his pride for that, his ideal of himself as strong and decisive, for that? Yes, on Wednesday he would beg and persuade all over again, he would begin again.…

Winston came out of the shop, holding the paper up, reading the front page. He came up to Anthony, thrust the paper at him.

“Look.”

The first thing Anthony saw was the photograph of Brian, the uncompromising passport photograph that had appeared so many times already, day after day, in every newspaper. The mop of hair, the wizened yet flaccid face, the eyes that ever seemed to implore, ever to irritate with their silliness. First the picture, then the headline:
VESTA’S HUSBAND FOUND DROWNED
. The account beneath those huge black letters was brief.

The body of a man washed up on the beach at Hastings, Sussex, was today identified as that of Brian Kotowsky, 38, husband of Vesta Kotowsky, strangled on Guy Fawkes Day in Kenbourne Vale, West London. Mr. Kotowsky had been missing since the day following his wife’s death
.

Mr. Kotowsky, an antique dealer, of Trinity Road, Kenbourne Vale, was known to have relatives in Brighton
.

His aunt, Mrs. Janina Shaw, said today that she had not seen her nephew for nine years
.

“We were once very close,” she said. “We lost touch when Brian married. I cannot say if my nephew visited my house prior to his death as I have been ill in hospital.”

An inquest will be held
.

Anthony looked at Winston. Winston shrugged, his face closed
and expressionless. The rain fell onto the newspaper, darkening it with great heavy splashes.

On the way home they hardly spoke. With a kind of delicacy but without communicating that delicacy to each other, they avoided the mews and walked to Trinity Road by the long way round. Then Winston said:

“I shouldn’t have let him go out. I should have dissuaded him and put him to bed and then none of this would have happened.”

“No one is responsible for another adult person.”

“Can you define an adult person?” said Winston. “It isn’t a matter of years.”

Anthony said no more. Entering the hall, he remembered meeting Brian there for the first time. Brian had been sitting on the stairs doing up his shoelaces and he had come up to him and said, “Mr. Johnson, I presume?” Now he was dead, had walked out into the wintry sea until he drowned. He heard Winston say, as from a long way off, that he had a date at seven-thirty, that he must hurry.

“And I must do some work. Have a good time.”

“I’ll try. But I wish I hadn’t seen a paper till tomorrow morning.”

Winston set his foot on the bottom stair, then, having glanced over the banisters, turned and walked up to the table. He picked up three envelopes. “Now I’ve decided on my house, I must remember to tell these agents to stop sending me stuff.” He handed a fourth envelope to Anthony, a mauve-grey one with a Bristol postmark. “Here’s one for you,” he said.

   At last, after so long, she had written. To say she wanted his patience a little longer? That she had been ill? Or, wonder of wonders, that she was coming to him? He unlocked his door and kicked on the switch of the electric fire. A single thumb thrust split open the flap of the envelope. He pulled out the sheet of flimsy. Just one sheet? That must mean she had hardly anything to say, that she had settled in his favour. On the brink of a happy upheaval of his life, of consummation, he read it.