A Demon in My View Read Online Free PDF Page B

have been alien to him. Helen had taught him to think like this, to see through her eyes, to associate, to compare, and to dream. She was all imagination, he all practical. Practical again, he noted mundane things. The Vale Café for quick, cheap snacks; Kemal’s Kebab House, smelling of cumin and sesame and fenugreek, for when he wanted to splash a bit; a pub—the Waterlily, it was called. Just opening now. Anthony saw red plush settees, a brown-painted moulded ceiling, etched glass screens beside and behind the bar.
    The pavements everywhere were cluttered with garbage in black plastic sacks. A dustmen’s strike, perhaps. The kids wereout 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 namingof 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