A Demon in My View Read Online Free PDF Page A

instead of the stainless steel variety he had ordered. Arthur read it carefully, planning what diplomatic words he would write in reply.
    He called himself, when required to state his occupation, a surveyor. In fact, he had never surveyed anything and wouldn’t have known how to go about it. His work consisted simply in sitting at this desk from nine-thirty till five, answering the phone, sending out bills and keeping the books. He knew his work back to front, inside out, but it still caused him anxiety, for Auntie Gracie’s standards were always before him.
    “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today, Arthur. Remember if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Your employer has reposed his trust in you. He has put you in a responsible position and it’s up to you not to let him down.”
    Those, or words like them, had been the words with which she had sent him off to be Grainger’s boy a week after his fourteenth birthday. So he had swept up better than anyone else and made tea better than anyone else. When he was twenty-one he had attained his present responsibility, that of seeing to it that every customer of Grainger’s got his roof mended better than anyone else’s roof and his kitchen floor laid better than anyone else’s kitchen floor. And he had seen to it. He was invaluable.
    Dear Sir
, Arthur typed,
I note with regret that the Rosebud de Luxe sink unit (type E/4283, pastel blue) was not, in fact
    Barry Hopkins slouched into the office, chewing bubble gum.
    “Hi.”
    “Good morning, Barry. A little late, aren’t you? Do you know what time it is?”
    “Round half nine,” said Barry.
    “I see. Round half nine. Of all the lackadaisical, feckless …” Arthur would have liked to advise him to go over to the works and ask for a pound of elbow grease, but the young were so sophisticated these days. Instead he snapped, “Take that filthy stuff out of your mouth.”
    Barry took no notice. He blew an enormous bubble, like a balloon and of a pale shade of aquamarine. Leaning idly on the window sill, he said:
    “Old Grainger’s comin’ across the yard.”
    Arthur was galvanised. He composed his face into an expression suggestive of a mixture of devotion to duty, self-esteem and simpering sycophancy, and applied his hands to the typewriter.

4
————
    Anthony Johnson had no furniture. He possessed nothing but a few clothes and a lot of books. These he had brought with him to 142 Trinity Road in a large old suitcase and a canvas bag. There were works on sociology, psychology, his dictionary of psychology, and that essential textbook for any student of the subject,
The Psychopath
, by William and Joan McCord. Whatever else he needed for reference he would obtain from the British Museum, and from that excellent library of criminology—the best, it was said, in London—housed in Radclyffe College, Kenbourne Vale. In that library too he would write the thesis whose subject was “Some Aspects of the Psychopathic Personality,” and which he hoped would secure him from the University of London his doctorate of philosophy.
    Part of it, he thought, surveying Room 2, would have to be written here. In that fireside chair, presumably, which seemed to be patched with bits from a woman’s tweed skirt. On that crippled gate-leg table. Under that hanging lamp that looked like a monstrous joke-shop plastic jellyfish. Well, he wanted his Ph.D and this was the price he must pay for it. Dr. Johnson. Not, of course, that he would call himself doctor. It was Helen who had pointed out that in this country, the land of such anomalies, the bachelor of medicine is called doctor and the doctor of philosophy mister. She too had seen the funny side of being Dr. Johnson and had quoted epigrams and talked about Boswell until he, at last, had seen the point. But it was always so. Sometimes he thought that for all his Cambridge First, his Home Office Social Science diploma, his wide experience of working with the