A Demon in My View (7 page)

“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.

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 …

He could remember quite precisely when this need had first come upon him. The need to use darkness. He was twelve. Auntie Gracie had had two friends to tea and they were sitting in the back round the fire, drinking from and eating off that very china he had set out in vain for Anthony Johnson. Talking about him. He would have liked, as he would often have liked, to retreat to his own bedroom. But this was never allowed except at bedtime when, as soon as he was in bed, Auntie Gracie would turn off the light at the switch just inside the door and forbid him on pain of punishment to turn it on again. The landing light was always left on, so Arthur wasn’t afraid. He would have preferred, in fact longed for, enough light to read by or else total darkness.

Mrs. Goodwin and Mrs. Courthope, those were the friends’ names. Arthur had to sit being good, being a credit to Auntie Gracie. They talked a lot about some unnamed boy he supposed
must be himself from the mysterious veiled way they spoke and the heavy meaningful glances exchanged.

“Of course it puts a stigma on a child he can never shake off,” Mrs. Goodwin said.

Instead of answering, Auntie Gracie said, “Go into the other room, Arthur, and get me another teaspoon out of the sideboard. One of the best ones, mind, with the initial on.”

Arthur went. He didn’t close the door after him but one of them closed it. The hall light was on so he didn’t put on the front room light, and as a result he opened the wrong drawer by mistake. As he did so a mouse scuttered like a flash across the sideboard top and slithered into the open drawer. Arthur slammed it shut. He took an initialled spoon out of the other drawer and stood there, holding the spoon, his heart pounding. The mouse rushed around inside the drawer, running in desperate circles, striking its head and body against the wooden walls of its prison. It began to squeak. The cheep-cheep sounds were like those made by a baby bird, but they were sounds of pain and distress. Arthur felt a tremendous deep satisfaction that was almost happiness. It was dark and he was alone and he had enough power over something to make it die.

Strangely enough, the women didn’t seem to have missed him, although he had been gone for quite five minutes. They stopped talking abruptly when he came in. After Mrs. Goodwin and Mrs. Courthope had gone, Auntie Gracie washed up and Arthur dried. She sent him to put the silver away which was just as well, because if she had gone she would have heard the mouse. It had stopped squeaking and was making vague brushing, scratching sounds, feeble and faint. Arthur didn’t open the drawer. He listened to the sounds with pleasure. When he did at last open it on the following evening, the mouse was dead, and the drawer, which contained a few napkin rings and a spare cruet, spattered all over with its blood. Arthur had no interest in the corpse. He let Auntie Gracie find it a week or so later, which she did with many shrieks and shudders.

Darkness. He thought often in those days of the mouse afraid and trapped in the dark and of himself powerful in it. How he longed to be allowed out in the streets after dark! But even when he was at work and earning Auntie Gracie wanted him to come
straight home. And he had to please her, he had to be worthy of her. Besides, defiance of her was too enormous an enterprise even to consider. So he went out in the evenings only when she went with him, and once a week they went together to the Odeon that was now Indian and called the Taj Mahal. Until one night when old Mr. Grainger, catching him in the yard as he was sweeping up at five-thirty, sent him over to the other side of Kenbourne to pick up an electric drill some workman had been careless enough to leave behind in a house where he was doing a rewiring job. He’d tell Miss Johnson on his way home, he told Arthur, and he was to cut along as fast as he could.

Arthur collected the drill. The darkness—it was midwinter-was even lovelier than he thought it would be. And how very dark it was then, how much darker than nowadays! The black-out. The pitch darkness of wartime. In the dark he brushed against people, some of whom carried muffled torches. And in a winding little lane, now destroyed and lost, replaced by a mammoth housing complex, he came up against a girl hurrying. What had made him touch her? Ah, if he knew that he would know the answer to many things. But he had touched her, putting out his hand, for he was already as tall as a man, to run one finger down the side of her warm neck. Her scream as she fled was more beautiful in his ears than the squeaking of the mouse. He stared after her, into the darkness after her, emotion surging within him like thick scented liquid boiling. He knew what he wanted to do, but thought intervened to stay him. He had read the newspapers, listened to the wireless, and he knew what happened to people who wanted what he wanted. No doubt, it was better not to go out after dark. Auntie Gracie knew best. It was almost as if she had known why, though that was nonsense, for she had never dreamed …

His own dreams had been troubling him this past fortnight, the consequence of frustration. Each evening at eleven, before going to bed, he had taken a last look out of his bedroom window to see the courtyard below aglow with light from Room 2. It seemed a personal affront and, in a way, a desecration of the place. Moreover, Anthony Johnson hadn’t been near him, had avoided all contact with him. Arthur wouldn’t have known he was in the house but for the arrival, and the subsequent removal
from the hall table, of another of those Bristol letters, and of course that ever-burning light.

Then, on a Friday evening just before eight, it went out. Carrying his torch, Arthur let himself out of his flat and came softly down the top flight. He had heard the front door close, but that might have been Li-li Chan going out. Both she and Anthony Johnson closed it with the same degree of moderate care. And it must have been she, for as Arthur hesitated on the landing he saw Anthony Johnson appear in the hall below him. Arthur stepped back and immediately the front door closed. Through its red and green glass panels the shape of Anthony Johnson could be seen as a blur vanishing down the marble steps. No one, Arthur reasoned, went out at this hour if he didn’t intend to stay out for some time. He descended the stairs and, delaying for a moment or two to let the occupant of Room 2 get clear, left the house, crossed the lawn, and entered the side passage.

There was no moon. The darkness wasn’t total but faintly lit by the far-reaching radiance of street lamps and house lights, and the sky above, a narrow corridor of it, was a gloomy greyish-red; the darkness, in fact, of any slum backwater. And this passage resembled, with the colouring of Arthur’s imagination, some alleyway, leading perhaps from a high road to a network of shabby streets. The muted roar of traffic was audible, but this only heightened his illusion. He crossed the little court, all the muscles of his body tense and tingling, and opened the cellar door.