A Demon in My View (2 page)

The space beneath the lowest bell was vacant as was Room 2 with which it communicated.

   Between the door of the vacant room and the long diagonal sweep which was the underside of the staircase, a shabby windowless space, Stanley Caspian, the landlord, had his office. It was furnished with a desk and two bentwood chairs. On top of the shelves, bristling with papers, which lined the rear wall, stood an electric kettle and a couple of cups and saucers. There was no other furniture in the hall but a rectangular mahogany table set against the banisters and facing the ground floor bathroom.

Stanley Caspian sat at the desk, as he always did when he came to 142 for his Saturday morning conference with Arthur
Johnson. Arthur sat in the other chair. On the desk were spread the rent books and cheques of the tenants. Each rent book had its own brown envelope with the tenant’s name printed on it. This had been an innovation of Arthur’s and he had done the printing. Stanley wrote laboriously in the rent books, pressing his pen in hard and making unnecessary full-stops after every word and figure.

“I’ll be glad to see the back of that Dean,” he said when he had inked in the last fifty pence and made the last full-stop. “Middle of next month and he’ll be gone.”

“And his gramophone,” said Arthur, “and his wine bottles filling up our little dustbin. I’m sure we’ll all be devoutly thankful.”

“Not Kotowsky. He won’t have anyone to go boozing with. Still, thank God he’s going off his own bat, is what I say. I’d never have been able to get rid of him, not with this poxy new Rent Act. Put the kettle on, me old Arthur. I fancy a spot of elevenses.”

And tenses and twelveses, Arthur thought. He plugged in the electric kettle and set out the cups. He wouldn’t have dreamed of eating anything at this hour, but Stanley, who was enormously fat, whose belly almost burst open the front of his size-seventeen-collar shirt, opened one of the packages he had brought with him and began devouring sandwiches of bread rolls and processed cheese. Stanley spluttered crumbs all over his shirt, eating uninhibitedly like some gross, superannuated baby. Arthur watched him inscrutably. He neither liked nor disliked Stanley. For him, as for everyone, he had no particular feeling most of the time. He wished only to be esteemed, to keep in with the right people, to know where he stood. Inclining his head towards the door behind him, he said:

“A little bird told me you’d let that room.”

“Right,” said Stanley, his mouth full. “A little Chinese bird, was it?”

“I must confess I was a bit put out you told Miss Chan before telling me. You know me, I always believe in speaking out. And I was a little hurt. After all, I am your oldest tenant. I
have
been here twenty years, and I think I can say I’ve never caused you a moment’s unease.”

“Right. I only wish they were all like you.”

Arthur filled the cups with instant coffee, boiling water and a dribble of cold milk. “No doubt, you had your reasons.” He lifted cold eyes, of so pale a blue as to be almost white. “I mustn’t be so sensitive.”

“The fact is,” said Stanley, shovelling spoonfuls of sugar into his cup, “that I wondered how you’d take it. You see, this new chap, the one that’s taking Room 2, he’s got the same name as you.” He gave Arthur a sidelong look and then he chortled. “You have to laugh. Coincidence, eh? I wondered how you’d take it.”

“You mean he’s also called
Arthur Johnson?”

“Not so bad as that. Dear oh dear, you have to laugh. He’s called Anthony Johnson. You’ll have to take care your post doesn’t get mixed up. Don’t want him reading your love letters, eh?”

Arthur’s eyes seemed to grow even paler, and the muscles of his face tightened, tensed, drawing it into a mask. When he spoke his accent smoothed into an exquisite, slightly affected English. “I’ve nothing to hide. My life is an open book.”

“Maybe his isn’t. If I wasn’t in a responsible position I’d say you could have a bit of fun there, me old Arthur.” Stanley finished his sandwiches and fetched a doughnut from the second bag.
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, that’s the sort of open book his life’ll be. Good-looking young devil, he is. Real flypaper for the girls, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Arthur couldn’t bear that sort of talk. It made him feel sick. “I only hope he’s got a good bank reference and a decent job.”

“Right. He’s paid two months’ rent in advance and that’s better than all your poxy bank references to me. He’s moving in Monday.” Stanley got heavily to his feet. Crumbs cascaded onto desk, envelopes, and rent books. “We’ll just have a look in, Arthur. Mrs. Caspian says there’s a fruit bowl in there she wants and young Anthony’ll only smash it.”

Arthur nodded sagely. If he and his landlord were in agreement about anything, it was the generally destructive behaviour of the other tenants. Besides, he enjoyed penetrating the rooms, usually closed to him. And in this one he had a special interest.

It was small and furnished with junk. Arthur accepted this as proper in a furnished room, noting only that it was far from
clean. He picked his way over to the window. Stanley, having secured his fruit bowl, of red and white Venetian glass, from heterogeneous stacks of crockery and cutlery on the draining board, was admiring the only object in the place less than twenty years old.

“That’s a bloody good washbasin, that is,” he remarked, tapping this article of primrose-coloured porcelain. “Cost me all of fifteen quid to have that put in. Your people did it, as I remember.”

“It was a reject,” said Arthur absently. “There’s a flaw in the soap dish.” He was staring out of the window which overlooked a narrow brick-walled court. Above an angle of wall you could see the topmost branches of a tree. The court was concreted and the concrete was green with lichen, for into the two drains on either side of it flowed—and sometimes overflowed—the waste water from the two upstairs flats and Jonathan Dean’s room. In the wall which faced the window was a door.

“What are you looking at?” said Stanley, none too pleasantly, for Arthur’s remark about the washbasin had perhaps rankled.

“Nothing,” said Arthur. “I was just thinking he won’t have much of an outlook.”

“What d’you expect for seven quid a week? You want to remember
you
pay seven for a whole flat because the poxy government won’t let me charge more for unfurnished accommodation. You’re lucky, getting your hooks on that when I didn’t know any better. Oh yes. But times have changed, thank God, and for seven quid a week now you look out on a cellar door and lump it. Right?”

“It’s no concern of mine,” said Arthur. “I imagine my name-sake will be out a lot, won’t he?”

“If he’s got any sense,” said Stanley, for at that moment there crashed through the ceiling the triumphant chords of the third movement from Beethoven’s Eighth. “Tschaikowsky,” he said learnedly. “Dean’s at it again. I like something a bit more modern myself.”

“I was never musical.” Arthur gravitated into the hall. “I must get on with things. Shopping day, you know. If I might just have my little envelope?”

———

His shopping basket in one hand and an orange plastic carrier containing his laundry in the other, Arthur made his way along Trinity Road towards the launderette in Brasenose Avenue. He could have used the Coinerama in Magdalen Hill, but he went to Magdalen Hill every weekday to work and at the weekends he liked to vary his itinerary. After all, for good reason, he didn’t go out much and never after dark.

So instead of cutting through Oriel Mews, past the Waterlily pub and making for the crossroads, he went down past All Souls’ Church, where as a child he had passed two hours each Sabbath Day, his text carefully committed to memory. And at four o’clock Auntie Gracie had always been waiting for him, always, it seemed to him, under an umbrella. Had it invariably rained on Sundays, the granite terrace opposite veiled in misty grey? That terrace was now gone, replaced by barracklike blocks of council flats.

He followed the route he and Auntie Gracie had taken towards home, but only for a little way. Taking some pleasure in making the K.12 bus stop for him alone, Arthur went over the pedestrian crossing in Balliol Street, holding up his hand in an admonitory way. Down St. John’s Road, where the old houses still remained, turn-of-the-century houses some enterprising but misguided builder had designed with Dutch façades, and where plane trees alternated with concrete lamp standards.

The launderette attendant said, “Good morning,” and Arthur rejoined with a cool nod. He used his own soap in the machine. He didn’t trust the blue stuff in the little packet you got for five-pence. Nor did he trust the attendant to put his linen in the drier nor the other customers not to steal it. So he sat patiently on one of the benches, talking to no one, until the thirty-five-minute cycle was completed.

It afforded him considerable satisfaction to note how superior were his pale blue sheets, snowy towels, underwear and shirts, to the gaudy jumble sale laundry in the adjacent machines. While they were safely rotating in the drier, he went next door to the butcher’s and then to the greengrocer’s. Arthur never shopped in the supermarkets run by Indians, in which this area of Kenbourne
Vale abounded. He selected his lamb chops, his small Sunday joint of Scotch topside, with care. Three slices off the roast for Sunday, the rest to be minced and made into Monday’s cottage pie. A pound of runner beans, and pick out the small ones, if you please, he didn’t want a mouthful of strings.

A different way back. The linen so precisely folded that it wouldn’t really need ironing—though Arthur always ironed it—he trotted up Merton Street. More council flats, tower blocks here like pillars supporting the heavy, overcast sky. The lawns which separated them, Arthur had often noticed with satisfaction, were prohibited to children. The children played in the street or sat disconsolately on top of bits of sculpture. Arthur disapproved of the sculptures, which in his view resembled chunks cut out of prehistoric monsters for all they were entitled “Spring” or “Social Conscience” or “Man and Woman,” but he didn’t think the children ought to sit on them or play in the street for that matter. Auntie Gracie had never allowed him to play in the street.

Stanley Caspian’s Jaguar had gone, and so had the Kotowskys’ fourth-hand Ford. A fistful of vouchers, entitling their possessor to threepence off toothpaste or free soap when you bought a giant size shampoo, had been pushed through the letter box. Arthur helped himself to those which might come in handy, and mounted the stairs. There was a half-landing after the ten steps of the first flight where a pay phone box was attached to the wall. Four steps went on to the first floor. The door of the Kotowskys’ flat was on his left, that to Jonathan Dean’s room facing him, and the door to the bathroom they shared between the other two. Dean’s door was open, Shostakovitch’s Fifth Symphony on loud enough to be heard in Kenbourne Town Hall. The intention apparently was that it should be loud enough merely to be audible in the bathroom from which Dean, a tall, red-haired, red-faced man now emerged. He wore nothing but a small mauve towel fastened round him loincloth-fashion.

“The body is more than raiment,” he remarked when he saw Arthur.

Arthur flushed slightly. It was his belief that Dean was mad, a conviction which rested partly on the fact that everything the
man said sounded as if it had come out of a book. He turned his head in the direction of the open door.

“Would you be good enough to reduce the volume a little, Mr. Dean?”

Dean said something about music having charms to soothe the savage breast, and beat his own, which was hairy and covered with freckles. But, having slammed his door with violence but no animosity, he subdued Shostakovich and only vague Slavic murmurs reached Arthur as he ascended the second flight.

And now he was in his own exclusive domain. He occupied the whole second floor. With a sigh of contentment, resting his laundry bag and his shopping basket on the mat, he unlocked the door and let himself in.

Arthur prepared his lunch, two lamb cutlets, creamed potatoes, runner beans. None of your frozen or canned rubbish for him. Auntie Gracie had brought him up to appreciate fresh food, well-cooked. He ended the meal with a slice from the plum pie he had baked on Thursday night, and then, without delay, he washed the dishes. One of Auntie Gracie’s maxims had been that only slatternly housekeepers leave dirty dishes in the sink. Arthur always washed his the moment he finished eating.

He went into the bedroom. The bed was stripped. He put on clean sheets, rose pink, and rose pink pillowcases. Arthur couldn’t sleep in a soiled bed. Once, when collecting their rent, he had caught a glimpse of the Kotowskys’ bed and it had put him off his supper.

Meticulously he dusted the bedroom furniture and polished the silver stoppers on Auntie Gracie’s cut-glass scent bottles. All his furniture was late Victorian, pretty though a little heavy. It came up well under an application of polish. Arthur still felt guilty about using spray-on polish instead of the old-fashioned wax kind. Auntie Gracie had never approved of short cuts. He gave the frilly nets with which every window in the flat was curtained a critical stare. They were too fragile to be risked at the launderette, so he washed them himself once a month, and they weren’t due for a wash for another week. But this was such a grimy district, and there was nothing like white net for collecting every bit of flying dust. He began to take them down. For the second time that day he found himself facing the cellar door.

The Kotowskys had no window which overlooked it. It could
be seen only from this one of his and from the one in Room 2. This had long been known to Arthur, he had known it for nearly as long as the duration of his tenancy. Very little in his own life had changed in those twenty years. The cellar door had never been painted, though the bricks had darkened perhaps and the concrete grown more green and damp. No one had ever seen him cross that yard, he thought as he laid the net curtains carefully over a chair, no one had ever seen him enter the cellar. He continued to stare down, considering, remembering.