Ruth Rendell - A Demon in My View

The pavements everywhere were cluttered with garbage in black plastic sacks. A dustmen’s strike, perhaps. The kids were out of school. He wondered where they played. Always on these dusty pavements of Portland stone? Or on that bit of waste ground, fenced in with broken and rusty tennis court wire, between Grainger’s, the builders, and the tube station?

Houses marked here for demolition. The sooner they came down the better and made way for flats with big windows and green spaces to surround them. Not many truly English people about. Brown women pushing prams with black babies in them, gypsy-looking women with hard, worn faces, Indian women with Marks and Spencers woolly cardigans over lilac and gold and turquoise saris. Cars parked everywhere, and vans double-parked on a street that was littered with torn paper and bruised vegetables and silvery fish scales where a market had just packed up and gone. Half-past five. But very likely that corner shop, Winter’s, stayed open till all hours. He went in, bought a packet of ham, a can of beans, some bread, eggs, tea, margarine, and frozen peas. Carried along by a tide of home-going commuters, he returned to 142 Trinity Road. The house was no longer empty.

A man of about fifty was standing by the hall table, holding in his hand a bundle of cheap offer vouchers. He was tallish, thin, with a thin, reddish and coarse-skinned face. His thin, greyish-fair hair had been carefully combed to conceal a bald patch and was flattened with Brylcreem. He wore an immaculate dark grey suit, a white shirt, and a maroon tie dotted with tiny silver spots. On his rather long, straight, and quite fleshless nose, were a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. When he saw Anthony he jumped.

“These were on the mat,” he said. “They come every day. You wouldn’t think there was a world paper shortage, would you? I tidy them up. No one else seems to be interested. But I hardly feel it’s my place to throw them away.”

Anthony wondered why he bothered to explain.

“I’m Anthony Johnson,” he said. “I moved in today.”

The man said, “Ah,” and held out his hand. He had a rather donnish look as if he perhaps had been responsible for the naming of those streets. But his voice was uneducated, underlying the pedantic preciseness Kenbourne Vale’s particular brand of cockney. “Moved into the little room at the back, have you? We keep ourselves very much to ourselves here. You won’t use the phone after eleven, will you?”

Anthony asked where the phone was.

“On the first landing. My flat is on the second landing. I have a flat , you see, not a room.”

Light dawned. “Are you by any chance the other Johnson?”

The man gave a severe, almost reproving, laugh. “I think you must mean you are the other Johnson. I have been here for twenty years.”

Anthony could think of no answer to make to that one. He went into Room 2 and closed the door behind him. On this mild, still summery day the room with its pipe-hung brick ramparts was already growing dark at six. He switched on the jellyfish lamp and saw how the light radiated the whole of that small courtyard. Leaning out of the window, he looked upwards. In the towering expanse of brick above him there was only one other window, and that on the top floor. The frilly net curtains behind its panes twitched. Someone had looked down at him and at the light, but Anthony’s knowledge of the geography of the house was as yet insufficient to tell him who that someone might be.

Every morning for the rest of that week, Arthur listened carefully for Anthony Johnson to go off to work. But Jonathan Dean and the Kotowskys always made so much noise over their own departures that it was difficult to tell. Certain it was, though, that Anthony Johnson remained at home in the evenings. Peering downwards out of his bedroom window, Arthur saw the light in Room 2 come on each evening at about six, and could tell by the pattern of two yellow rectangles divided by a dark bar, which the light made on the concrete, that Anthony Johnson didn’t draw his curtains. It was a little early for him to feel an urge to visit the cellar again, and yet he was already growing restless. He thought this restlessness had something to do with frustration, with knowing that he couldn’t go down there however much he might want to.

On the Friday morning, while fetching in the post, he saw Anthony Johnson come out of Room 2 and go into the bathroom, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans. Didn’t the man go to work? Was he going to stop in there all day and all night?

Among that particular batch of letters was the first one to come for Anthony Johnson. Arthur knew it was for him as it was postmarked York and written on the flap was the sender’s name and address: Mrs. R. L. Johnson, 22 West Highamgate, York. But the front of the envelope was addressed, quite ambiguously, to A. Johnson Esq., 2/142 Trinity Road, London W15 6HD. Arthur sucked in his lips with an expression of exasperation. And when, a minute or so later, Anthony Johnson re-emerged, smelling of toothpaste, Arthur pointed out to him the possible consequences of such impreciseness.

The young man took it very casually. “It’s from my mother. I’ll tell her to put Room 2, if I think of it.”

“I hope you will think of it, Mr. Johnson. This sort of thing could lead to a great deal of awkwardness and embarrassment.”

Anthony Johnson smiled, showing beautiful teeth. He radiated health and vigour and a kind of modest virility to an extent that made Arthur uncomfortable. Besides, he didn’t want to look at bare brown chests at ten past nine in the morning, thank you very much.

“A great deal of awkwardness,” he repeated.

“Oh, I don’t think so. Let’s not meet trouble half-way. I don’t suppose I’ll get many letters, and the ones I do get will either be postmarked York or Bristol.”

“Very well. I thought I should mention it and I have. Now you can’t blame me if there is a Mix Up.”

“I shan’t blame you.”

Arthur said no more. The man’s manner floored him. It was so casual, so calm, so poised. He could have coped with defensiveness or a proper apology. This cool acceptance—no, it wasn’t really cool, but warm and pleasant—of his reproach was like nothing he had ever come across. It was almost as if Anthony Johnson were the older, wiser man, who could afford to treat such small local difficulties with indulgence.

Arthur was more than a little irritated by it. It would have served Anthony Johnson right if, when Arthur took the post in on the following Tuesday, he had torn open the letter from Bristol without a second thought. Of course he didn’t do so, although the postmark was so faint as to be almost illegible and there was no sender’s name on the flap. But this one, too, was addressed to A. Johnson Esq., 2/142 Trinity Road, London W15 6HD. The envelope was made of thick mauve-grey paper with a rough, expensive-looking surface.

Arthur set it on the table on the extreme right-hand side, the position he had allotted to Anthony Johnson’s correspondence, and then he went into the front garden to tidy up the mess inside, on top of, and around the dustbin. The dustmen had now been on strike for two weeks. In the close, sunless air the rubbish smelt sour and fetid. When he went back into the house the mauve-grey envelope had gone.

He didn’t speculate about its contents or the identity of its sender. His concern with Anthony Johnson was simply to get some idea of the man’s movements. But on the following evening, the last Wednesday of the month, he was to learn simultaneously partial answers to all these questions.

It was eight o’clock and dusk. Arthur had long finished his evening meal, washed the dishes, and was about to settle in front of his television. But he remembered leaving his bedroom window open. Auntie Gracie had always been most eloquent on the subject of night air and its evil effects. As he was pulling down the sash, taking care not to catch up the fragile border of the net curtain, he saw the light, shed on the court below, go out. Quickly he went to his front door, opened it and listened. But instead of leaving the house, Anthony Johnson was coming upstairs.