Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

It was so dark that he had to keep the lamp on all day. He sat under it, leafing through the draft of his thesis, wondering if it was any good, but into his concentration, or what passed for concentration, fragmented images of Helen kept breaking. He found himself recalling conversations they had had in the past, reading duplicity into phrases of hers that had once seemed beautifully sincere. And this obsession displaced everything else. He sat staring dully at the pink and green translucent shade that swayed with a slow, gentle rhythm in the draught from the window-frame crack, hypnotised by it, subdued into apathy. Soon after five, when he had heard Li-li leave, he put on his coat and set off for Winter’s.

The relief barman from the Waterlily was in the shop, and he and Winter were talking about the police activity of the night before. Anthony had forgotten all about it. Now, waiting to be served, he learned its nature.

“Young fellow of nineteen, student at Radclyffe College. What I say is, if they will get themselves up like girls, they’re asking for it. Not that he didn’t stand up for himself. Bashed the fellow’s face up something shocking. You see the news?”

The barman nodded. “Funny thing, I got a black eye myself last week. All above board, got it at my judo. But if it wasn’t better I wouldn’t fancy showing myself on the street.”

“You didn’t get a cut lip as well, though, did you? Mind you, that’d be a turn-up for the books, all the locals finding out the Kenbourne Killer’d been serving them their booze.” Winter laughed. He turned to Anthony. “And what can I do for you, sir?”

“Just a pint of milk, please.”

“Homogenised, Jersey, or silver top?”

Anthony took the silver top. As he was closing the door behind him he heard them say something about his hair and prowling stranglers who couldn’t tell the boys from the girls, and who could blame them? He went past the lighted windows of the Waterlily, for only drunks and potential pick-ups go into pubs on their own in the evenings. The snow had settled in little drifts between the cobbles of Oriel Mews, where there was no light or heat to melt it. It floated thinly over Trinity Road, making a thinner, webbier curtain over the draped nets at Arthur Johnson’s window behind which Anthony thought he could vaguely make out a watcher.

Room 2 had grown cold again in his absence. He kicked on the electric fire, drank some milk straight out of the bottle. It was so cold it made his teeth chatter. He crouched over the fire, and into his mind came a clear and sweet vision of Helen as she had been in the summer, running along the platform at Temple Meads to meet his train when he came to her from York. He felt, closing his eyes, her hands reach up to hold his shoulders, her warm breath from her parted lips on his lips. And he felt real pain, a shaft of pain in his left side, as if he had been kicked where his heart was.

Then he lay face downwards on the bed, hating himself for his weakness, wondering how he would get through the time ahead, the long and cold winter of isolation with only Arthur Johnson for company.

Upstairs, on the landing, the telephone began to ring.

Arthur heard the phone but didn’t answer it. The only people who were likely to receive phone calls had gone away. He went

into the bedroom and looked again at his face. Impossible to consider going to work tomorrow. The phone had stopped ringing. He looked out of the window down to the court below. Anthony Johnson’s light was on, and Arthur wondered why he hadn’t answered the phone.

There was plenty of food in his fridge, including the Sunday joint he hadn’t been able to face and couldn’t face now. The food he had would last him for days. He managed to swallow a small piece of bread and butter. Then he looked at his face again, this time in the bathroom mirror. While he was wondering if ice would ease the swelling, if anyone would believe him if he said he had cut himself shaving—and, presumably, also knocked his eye with the razor—the phone started ringing again. He opened his front door and emerged on to the dark landing. Obscurely he felt that, whoever this might be phoning, it would be safer were he to answer it himself.

He lifted the receiver and Stanley Caspian’s voice said, “That you, Arthur? About time too. I buzzed you five minutes ago.”

Light flooded him suddenly from the hall below. He turned, covering his mouth with his left hand, and called in a muffled voice, “It’s all right, it’s Mr. Caspian for me.”

Anthony Johnson said, “O.K.” and went back into Room 2. Arthur wished the light would go out. He hunched over the phone.

“Listen, Arthur, I’ve got a chap coming to have a dekko at Flat 1 tomorrow around five. Can you let him in?”

“I’m not well,” Arthur said, sick with panic. “I’ve got a—a virus infection. I shan’t be going to work and I can’t let anyone in. I’m going to have the day in bed.”

“My God, I suppose you can get out of your poxy bed just to open the front door?”

“No, I can’t,” Arthur said shrilly. “I’m ill. I should be in bed now.”

“Charming. After all I’ve done for you, Arthur, that’s a bit thick. I suppose I’ll have to fix it a bit earlier with this chap and come myself.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not well. I have to go and lie down.”

Stanley didn’t answer but crashed down the receiver. Arthur stumbled up to his own door. It was almost closed. A slight draught, a tiny push, and he would have been locked out. He who never never neglected such precautions had forgotten to drop the latch. Shivering at the thought of what might have happened, he went into the bathroom to contemplate his lip and his eye. Tears began to course down his face, stinging the bruised flesh.

The second time the phone rang Anthony got off his bed to answer it. But the hopes he had had, hopes that were against all reason, were dissipated by the voice calling from the landing, “It’s Mr. Caspian for me.”

Because the voice sounded thick and strange, Anthony, who in his disappointment would otherwise simply have drifted back into Room 2, glanced up at the figure on the landing. Arthur Johnson was covering his mouth with his left hand, and he turned away quickly, huddling over the phone, but not before Anthony had noticed one of his eyes was swollen and half-closed. The phone conversation went on for a few moments, Arthur Johnson protesting that he was ill, but from a virus infection, not some sort of facial injury. Anthony closed the door. He sat on the bed. An hour before he would have given a lot for some subject to come overpoweringly into his mind and crowd Helen out of it. But this? Did he want this and could he cope with it?

A series of images now. A man, evidently nervous, paranoid, repressed, saying, “You are the other Johnson, I have been here for twenty years.” In the cellar a shop window model with a rent in her neck. Fire burning that figure, and that very night, the night of November 5 … Anthony looked out of the window and up to that other window two floors above. No light showed, though that was Arthur Johnson’s bedroom and he had said he was ill and ought to be in bed. Perhaps he was, in the dark. Anthony went out into the street and looked up. There was light up there, orange light turning the draped muslin stuff to gold, and behind that shimmering stuff a light flickering movement.

He went quickly indoors and up the two flights of stairs. He had thought of no excuse for knocking on Arthur Johnson’s door, but excuses seemed base and dishonest. Besides, once he had seen, he would need no excuse. But there was no answer to his knock, no answer when he knocked again, and that told him as much as if the damaged face had presented itself to him, six inches from his own. To knock again, to insist, would be a cruelty that revolted him, for in the silence he fancied he could sense a concentrated breath-held terror behind that door.