Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

Very uneasy now, Arthur stood at the window. And again Brian Kotowsky appeared. Arthur caught his breath in sharply as he saw Anthony Johnson also emerge from the house. He looked reluctant, even irritable.

“All right,” Arthur heard him say, “but it’ll have to be a quick one. I’ve got work to do.”

They crossed the road, bound for the Waterlily. Arthur crept down the first flight. A low murmur of voices could be heard from Jonathan Dean’s room and then a soft, throaty laugh. He went on down. From over the banisters he saw that the hall table was bare but for the inevitable cheap offer vouchers. Li-li Chan’s shoe shop circular and the two envelopes for Anthony Johnson had gone. Arthur stood by the table, nonplussed. Then some screws of paper lying in Stanley Caspian’s wastepaper basket caught his eye. He picked them out. They were the note he had written with such care and anxiety to Anthony Johnson and the envelope in which the council’s letter had been contained.

The Inner London Education Authority told Anthony that they couldn’t possibly say over the phone whether they had a vacancy for him or not. Would he write in? He wrote and got a very belated reply full of delaying tactics which amounted to telling him that he had better apply again at Christmas. At least the Kenbourne authority had replied promptly. Anthony smiled ruefully to himself when he recalled the evening on which he had received their reply. It had been fraught with annoyance.

Firstly had come that letter from Helen, a letter which was more like an essay on Roger’s miseries. I sit reading escapist literature and every time I look up I find his eyes on me, staring accusingly, and every little innocent remark I make he takes me up on “What’s that supposed to mean?” “What are you getting at?” so that I feel like some wretched shoplifter being interrogated by the great detective. I started to cry last night and—Oh, it was awful—he began to cry too. He knelt at my feet and begged me to love him .… Anthony had been so exasperated by this letter which, in his delight at receiving it, he had stood reading out in the hall by the table, that it was some minutes before he had even noticed that there was another one for him. And when he did, when he opened and read that ridiculous note from Arthur Johnson, his impatience had reached such a pitch that he had screwed it up and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. It was at this point that Brian Kotowsky had arrived and, deserted by the best pal a man ever had, had pressed him to accompany him to the Waterlily. There Anthony had been obliged to listen to a dissertation on the horrors of matrimony, the undesirable independence having a job of her own gave to a wife, and what Brian would do after Jonathan’s departure he honestly didn’t know. Obliged to listen, but not for more than half an hour.

Returning alone to 142, Anthony considered going upstairs to reassure Arthur Johnson. The man obviously had an acute anxiety neurosis. A better-adjusted person would simply have scribbled Sorry I opened your letter and left it at that. The circumlocutions, the polysyllabic words were pathetic. They breathed a tense need for the preservation of an immaculate ego, they smelt of paranoia, fear of retribution, a desire to be thought well of by all men, even strangers. But men like that, he thought, cannot be reassured, their deep-seated belief in their own worthlessness is too great and too long-established at fifty for self-confidence ever to be implanted in them. Besides, Arthur Johnson liked to keep himself to himself, and would probably only be further perturbed by an invasion of his privacy. Much better wait until they happened to meet in the hall.

In the week which followed he didn’t encounter Arthur Johnson but he was again accosted by the children at Kenbourne Lane station.

“Penny for the guy, mister?”

“Where are you going to have your bonfire?” asked Anthony. “In Radclyffe Park?” He handed over another tenpence.

“We asked. The park keeper won’t let us, rotten old bastard. We could have it in our back yard if my dad lets us.”

“Old Mother Winter,” said the other boy, “got the cops last time your dad had a bonfire.”

Anthony went off down Magdalen Hill. The kids and their parents called it Mag-da-lene, just as they called Balliol Street Bawlial. How stupid these pseudo-intellectuals were—Jonathan Dean was one of them—to sneer at mispronunciations. If the people who lived here hadn’t the right to call their streets what they wanted, who had? His eye was caught by the piece of waste ground, enclosed by its rusty tennis court netting. The authorities wouldn’t let him do official social work, but why shouldn’t he do some privately and off his own bat? Why not, in fact, think about organising November 5 celebrations on that bit of ground? The idea was suddenly appealing. He gazed through the wire at the hillocky weed-grown wilderness. On one side of it was the cutting through which the tube ran down to London, on the other the mountains of brown brick, broken woodwork and yellow crumbled plaster which was all that remained now of the demolished houses. Backing on to the ground rose the grey-brown rears of Brasenose Avenue terraces, tall tenements hung with Piranesi-like iron stairways. A man seen building a bonfire there would soon attract all the juvenile society in the neighbourhood. And he could rope in the parents, mothers especially, to organise a supper. The great Kenbourne Vale Guy Fawkes Rave-up, he thought. Why, he might set a precedent and they’d start having one there every year.

It was six o’clock on a Friday evening, Friday, October 10. If he was going to do it he’d better start on the organisation tomorrow. Work tonight, though. Seated at the table in Room 2, its gateleg propped up with Arieti’s The Intrapsychic Self , Anthony assembled and read his notes.

Not to be classified as schizophrenic, manic-depressive or paranoid. Condition cannot strictly be allied to any of these. Psychopath characteristically unable to form emotional relationships. If these are formed—fleetingly and sporadically—purpose is direct satisfaction of own desires. Guiltless and loveless. Psychopath has learned few socialised ways of coping with frustrations. Those he has learned (e.g. a preoccupation with “hard” pornography) may be themselves at best grotesque. For his actions …

With a sudden fizzle, the light bulb in the jellyfish shade went out.

Anthony cursed. For a few moments he sat there in the dark, wondering whether to appeal for help from Jonathan or the Kotowskys. But that would only involve him in another drinking session. The gentle closing of the front door a minute or two before had told him of Li-li’s departure. He’d have to go out and buy another light bulb. Just as well Winter’s didn’t close till eight.

Making for the front door, he was aware of footsteps on the landing above him. Arthur Johnson. But as he hesitated, glancing up the stairs—now might be an opportunity for that belated reassurance—he saw the figure of which he had only caught a glimpse retreat. Anthony shrugged and went off in search of his light bulb.

7

————

Arthur was certain he had given mortal offence to Anthony Johnson and thus had wrecked his own hopes. Now there was nothing for it but to watch and wait. Sooner or later the “other” Johnson must go out in the evening. He went out by day on Saturdays and Sundays all right, but what was the use of that? It was darkness that Arthur needed, darkness to give the illusion that the side passage, the courtyard, the cellar, were the alley, the mews, the deserted shadowed space that met his desires. Darkness and the absence of noisy people, car doors slamming, interference …