A Demon in My View Read Online Free PDF

poor,the sick and the deprived, he had never woken up to awareness and insight until he met Helen. She it was who had turned his soul’s eye towards the light.
    But as he thought this, he turned his physical eye towards Stanley Caspian’s green-spotted fingermarked mirror and surveyed his own reflection. He wasn’t a vain man. He hardly ever thought about the way he looked. That he was tall and slim and strongly made with straight features and thick fair hair had never meant much to him except in that they denoted health. But lately he had come to wonder. He wondered what he lacked that Roger had; he who was good-looking and vigorous and—well, good company, wasn’t he?—hypereducated with a good salary potential, and Roger, who was stupid and dull and possessive and couldn’t do anything but win pistol-shooting contests. Only he knew it wasn’t that at all. It was just that Helen, for all her awareness, didn’t know her own mind.
    To give her a chance to know it, to choose between them, he had come here. The library, of course, was an advantage. But he could easily have written his thesis in Bristol. The theory was that absence made the heart grow fonder. If he had gone to his parents in York she could have phoned him every night. He wasn’t going to let her know the phone number here—he didn’t know it himself yet—or communicate with her at all except on the last Wednesday in the month when Roger would be out at his gun club. And he couldn’t write to her at all in case Roger intercepted the letter. She’d write to him once a week. He wondered, as he unpacked his books, how that would work out, if he had been wise to let her call the tune, make all the arrangements. Well, he’d given her a deadline. By November she must know. Stay in prison or come out with him into the free air.
    He opened the window because the room smelt stale. Outside was a narrow yard. What light it received came from a bit of sky just flicked at its edges by leaves from a distant tree. The sky was a triangular patch because most of it was cut off by brick wall meeting brick wall diagonally about four yards up. In one of these walls—they were festooned with pipes betwigged with smaller pipes like lianas—was a door. Since there was no window beside it or above it or anywhere near it, Anthony decided it must lead down to a cellar.
    Five o’clock. He had better go out and get himself something to cook on that very old and inefficient-looking Baby Belling stove. The hall smelt vaguely of cloves, less vaguely of old, unwashed fabrics. That would be the bathroom, that door between his and Room 1, and that other one to the right of old Caspian’s table, the loo. Wondering what sort of a woman or girl Miss Chan was and whether she would get possession of the bathroom just when he wanted to use it, he went out into the street.
    Trinity Road. It led him via Oriel Mews into Balliol Street. The street names of London, he thought, require an historical treatise of their own. Someone must know why this group in Hampstead are called after Devon towns and that cluster in Cricklewood after Hebridean islands. Were the Barbara, the Dorinda and the Lesly, after whom roads are named just north of the City, once the belles of Barnsbury? Did a sorcerer live in Warlock Road, Kilburn Park, and who was the Sylvia of Sylvia Gardens, Wembley, what is she, that all our maps commend her? In that corner of Kenbourne Vale, to which his destiny had drawn Anthony Johnson, someone had christened the squalid groves and terraces after Oxford colleges.
    A cruel joke cannot have been intended. The councillor or town planner or builder must have thought himself inspired when he named Trinity Road, All Souls Grove, Magdalen Hill, Brasenose Avenue, and Wadham Street. What was certain, Anthony thought, was that he hadn’t been an Oxford man, had never walked in the enclosed quadrangles of that city or even seen its dreaming spires.
    Such a fanciful reverie would once