A Demon in My View (3 page)

He had been at school with Stanley Caspian—Merton Street Junior—and Stanley had been fat and gross and coarse even then. A bully always.

“Auntie’s baby! Auntie’s baby! Where’s your dad, Arthur Johnson?” And with an inventiveness no one would have suspected from the standard of Stanley’s school work: “Cowardy, cowardy custard, Johnson is a bastard!”

The years civilise or, at least, inhibit. When they met by chance in Trinity Road, each aged thirty-two, Stanley was affable, even considerate.

“Sorry to hear you lost your aunt, Arthur. More like a mother to you, she was.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be wanting a place of your own now. Bachelor flat, eh? How about taking the top of a hundred and forty-two?”

“I’ve no objection to giving it the once-over,” said Arthur primly. He knew old Mrs. Caspian had left her son a lot of property in West Kenbourne.

The house was in a mess in those days and the top flat was horrible. But Arthur saw its potential—and for two pounds ten a week?

So he took Stanley’s offer, and a couple of days later when he had started the redecorating he went down into the cellar to see if, by chance, it housed a stepladder.

She was lying on the floor of the furthest room on a heap of sacks and black-out curtains left over from the war. She was naked and her white plastic flesh was cold and shiny. He never found out who had brought her there and left her entombed. At first he had been embarrassed, taken aback as he was when he glimpsed likenesses of her standing in shop windows and waiting to be dressed. But then, because he was alone with her and there
was no one to see them, he approached more closely. So that was how they looked? With awe, with fear, at last with distaste, he looked at the two hemispheres on her chest, the soft, swollen triangle between her closed thighs. An impulse came to him to dress her. He had done so many secret things in his life—almost everything he had done that he had wanted to do had been covert, clandestine—that no inhibition intervened to stop him fetching from the flat a black dress, a handbag, shoes. These had belonged to Auntie Gracie and he had brought them with him from the house in Magdalen Hill. People had suggested he give them to the WVS for distribution, but how could he? How could he have borne to see some West Kenbourne slattern queening it in her clothes?

His white lady had attenuated limbs and was as tall as he. Auntie Gracie’s dress came above her knees. She had yellow nylon hair that curled over her cheekbones. He put the shoes on her feet and hooked the handbag over her arm. In order to see what he was doing, he had put a hundred-watt bulb in the light socket. But another of those impulses led him to take it out. By the light of the torch she looked real, the cellar room with its raw brick walls an alley in the hinterland of city streets. It was sacrilege to dress her in Auntie Gracie’s clothes, and yet that very sacrilege had an indefinable lightness about it, was a spur.…

He had strangled her before he knew what he was doing. With his bare hands on her cold smooth throat. The release had been almost as good as the real thing. He set her up against the wall once more, dusted her beautiful white face. You do not have to hide or fear or sweat for such a killing; the law permits you to kill anything not made of flesh and blood.… He left her and came out into the yard. The room that was now Room 2 had been untenanted then as had the whole house but for his flat. And when a tenant had come he had been, as had his successor, on night work that took him out five evenings a week at six. But before that Arthur had decided. She should save him, she should be—as those who would like to get hold of him would call it—his therapy. The women who waited in the dark streets, asking for trouble, he cared nothing for them, their pain, their terror. He cared, though, for his own fate. To defy it, he would
kill a thousand women in her person, she should be his salvation. And then no threat could disturb him, provided he was careful never to go out after dark, never to have a drink.

After a time he had come to be rather proud of his solution. It seemed to set down as nonsense the theories of those experts—he had, in the days of his distress, studied their works—that men with his problem had no self-control, no discipline over their own compulsions. He had always known they talked rubbish. Why shouldn’t he have the recourse of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, of the rehabilitated drug addict?

But now? Anthony Johnson. Arthur, who made it his business to know the routines and lifestyles of his fellow tenants, hoped he would soon acquire a thoroughgoing knowledge of the new man’s movements. Anthony Johnson would surely go out two or three evenings a week? He must. The alternative was something Arthur didn’t at all want to face.

There was nothing for it but to wait and see. The possibility of bringing the white lady up into the flat, installing her here, killing her here, occurred to him only for him to dismiss the idea. He disliked the notion of his encounters with her taking on the air of a game. It was the squalor of the cellar, the dimness, his stealthy approach that gave to it its reality. No, she must remain there, he thought, and he must wait and see. He turned from the window and at the same time turned his mind, for he didn’t much care to dwell upon her and what she truly was, preferring her to stand down there forgotten and unacknowledged until he needed her again. This, in fact, he thought as he took away the curtains to put them in soak, was the first time he had thought of her in those terms for many years.

Dismissing her as a man dismisses a compliant and always available mistress, Arthur went into the living room. The sofa and the two armchairs had been reupholstered since Auntie Gracie’s death, only six months after, but Arthur had taken such good care of them that the covers still looked new. Carefully he worked on the blue moquette with a stiff brush. The cream drawn-thread antimacassars might as well go into the water with the nets. He polished the oval mahogany table, the mahogany tallboy, the legs and arms of the dining chairs; plumped up the blue and brown satin cushions, flicked his feather duster over the
two hand-painted parchment lampshades, the knobs on the television set, the Chelsea china in the cabinet. Now for the vacuum cleaner. Having the flat entirely covered with wall-to-wall carpet in a deep fawn shade had made a hole in his savings, but it had been worth it. He ran the cleaner slowly and thoroughly over every inch of the carpet, taking his time so that its droning zoom-zoom wouldn’t be lost on Jonathan Dean, though he had little hope of its setting him an example. Finally, he rinsed the nets and the chair backs and hung them over the drying rack in the bathroom. There was no need to clean the bathroom or the kitchen. They were cleaned every morning as a matter of course, the former when he had dried himself after his bath, the latter as soon as breakfast was over.

At this point he sat down in the chair by the front window and, having left all his doors open, surveyed the flat along its spotless length. It smelt of polish, silver cleaner, soap, and elbow grease. Arthur recalled how, when he was about eleven and had neglected to wash his bedroom window as thoroughly as Auntie Gracie demanded, she had sent him round to Winter’s with threepence.

“You ask the man for a pound of elbow grease, Arthur. Go on. It won’t take you five minutes.”

The man in the shop had laughed himself almost into a fit But he hadn’t explained why he had no elbow grease, and Arthur had to take the threepenny bit—a threepenny joey, they called them then—back home again.

“I expect he did laugh,” said Auntie Gracie. “And I hope you’ve been taught a lesson.” She rubbed Arthur’s arm through the grey flannel shirt. “This is where your elbow grease comes from. You can’t buy it, you have to make it yourself.”

Arthur hadn’t borne her any malice. He knew she had acted for the best. He would do exactly the same by any child in his charge. Children had to be taught the hard way, and it had set him on the right path. Would she be pleased with him if she could see him now? If she could see how well he kept his own place, his bank balance, how he ordered his life, how he hadn’t missed a day at Grainger’s in twenty years? Perhaps. But she had never been very pleased with him, had she? He had never reached those heights of perfection she had laid before him as
fitting for one who needed to cleanse himself of the taint of his birth and background.

Arthur sighed. He should have washed the Chelsea china. It was no good telling himself a flick with that duster would serve as well as a wash. Tired now but determined to soldier on, he put the shepherdesses and frock-coated gentlemen and dogs and little flower baskets onto a tray and carried them into the kitchen.

Arthur was a sound sleeper. He fell asleep within five minutes of laying his head on the pillow and hardly ever awoke before the alarm went off at seven-thirty. This ability to sleep was something to confound those silent critics, that invisible army of psychiatrists whose words he had read but never yet heard, and who would, he suspected, categorise him disagreeably. Which was absurd. Neurotic people don’t sleep well, nor do hysterics. Arthur knew he was a perfectly normal man who happened (like all normal men) to have a small peculiarity he was well able to keep under control.

He was always the last to leave for work and the first to get home. This was because the others all worked further afield than he. Jonathan Dean went first. He left at five past eight while Arthur was still in his bath. This Monday morning his room door was slammed so loudly that the bath water actually rocked about like tea in a joggled cup. The front door also crashed shut. Arthur dried himself and, for decency’s sake, put on his towelling robe before washing down bath, basin, and floor. As soon as he was dressed, he opened his own front door and left it on the latch.

The Kotowskys burst out of their flat while he was pouring out his cornflakes. As usual, they were quarrelling.

“All right, I get the message,” he heard Brian Kotowsky say. “You’ve told me three times you won’t be in tonight.”

“I just don’t want you ringing up all my friends, asking where I am.”

“You can settle that one, Vesta, by telling me where you’ll be.”

They clumped down the stairs, still arguing, but Arthur couldn’t catch Vesta Kotowsky’s reply. The front door closed fairly quietly which meant Vesta must have shut it. Arthur went to his living room window and watched them get into their car which was left day in and day out, rain, shine or snow, parked in the street. He was sincerely glad he had never taken the step of getting married, had, in fact, taken such a serious step to avoid it.

As he was returning to his kitchen he heard Li-li Chan come upstairs to the half-landing and the phone. Li-li spoke quite good English but rather as a talking bird might have spoken it. Her voice was high and clipped. She was always giggling, mostly about nothing.

She giggled now, into the receiver. “You pick me up soon? Quarter to nine? Oh, you are nice, nice man. Do I love you? I don’t know. Yes, yes, I love you. I love lots, lots of people. Goodbye now.” Li-li giggled prettily all the way back down the stairs.

Arthur snorted, but not loudly enough for her to hear. London Transport wouldn’t get rich out of her. Don’t suppose she ever spends a penny on a train or bus fare, Arthur thought, and darkly, I wonder what she has to do to make it worth their while? But he didn’t care to pursue that one, it was too distasteful.

He heard her go out on the dot of a quarter to. She always closed the doors very softly as if she had something to hide. A well-set-up, clean-looking young Englishman had come for her in a red sports car. A wicked shame, Arthur thought, but boys like that had only themselves to blame, they didn’t know the meaning of self-discipline.

Alone in the house now, he finished his breakfast, washed the dishes, and wiped down all the surfaces. The post was due at nine. While he was brushing the jacket of his second-best suit and selecting a tie, he heard the dull thump of the letter box. Arthur always took the post in and arranged the letters on the hall table.

But first there was his rubbish to deal with. He lifted the liner from the wastebin, secured the top of it with a wire fastener and went downstairs, first making sure, with a quick glance into the mirror, that his tie was neatly knotted and that there was a clean
white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Whether there was anyone in the house or not, Arthur would never have gone downstairs improperly dressed. Nor would he set foot outside the house without locking the doors behind him, not even to go to the dustbin. Once more, the bin was choked with yellowish decaying bean sprouts, not even wrapped up. That wasteful Li-li again! He would have to make it clear to Stanley Caspian that one dustbin was inadequate for five people—six, when this new man came today.

Unlocking the door and re-entering the house, he picked up the post. The usual weekly letter, postmarked Taiwan, from Li-li’s father who hadn’t adopted Western ways and wrote the sender’s name as Chan Ah Feng. Poor trusting man, thought Arthur, little did he know. Yet another bill for Jonathan Dean. The next thing they’d have debt collectors round, and a fine thing that would be for the house’s reputation. Two letters for the Kotowskys, one for her and one for both of them. That was the way it always was.

He tidied up the circulars and vouchers—who messed them about like that out of sheer wantonness he didn’t know—and then he arranged the letters, their envelope edges aligned to each other and the edge of the table. Ten past nine. Sighing a little, because it was so pleasant having the house to himself, Arthur went back upstairs and collected his briefcase. He had no real need of a briefcase for he never brought work home, but Auntie Gracie had given him his first one for his twenty-first birthday and since then he had replaced it three times. Besides, it looked well. Auntie Gracie had always said that a man going to business without a briefcase is as ill dressed as a lady without gloves.

He closed his door and tested it with his hand to make sure it was fast shut. Down the stairs once more and out into Trinity Road. A fine, bright day, though somewhat autumnal. What else could you expect in late September?