A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

thing, an intrigue. Being discreet seems pointless to you, doesn’t it, a squalid bore, and as for me, I always hated lying to Roger. When you said—or was it I who said it?—that it must be all or nothing, I, you, we, were right
.
    But I can’t be very good at lying because I know Roger has sensed my defection. He has always been causelessly jealous but he never actually did things about it. Now he’s started phoning me at work two or three times a day and last week he opened
two letters that came for me. One of them was from mother and the other was an invitation to a dress show, but I couldn’t get all upstage and affronted virtue with him. How could I? After all, I do have a lover, I have deceived him…
.
       A child, playing some distance off, gave his ball a massive kick so that it landed at Anthony’s feet. He bowled it back. Funny, how people thought it was only women who wanted to marry and have children of their own.
       
I remember all the things you taught me, principles on which to conduct one’s life. Applied Existentialism. I tell myself I am not responsible for any other adult person and that I am not in this world to live up to Roger’s expectations. But I married him, Tony. Didn’t I, in marrying him, go a long way towards promising to be responsible for his happiness? Didn’t I more or less say that he had a right to expect much from me? And he has had so little, poor Roger. I never even pretended to love him. I haven’t slept with him for six months. I only married him because he pressed me and pressed me and wouldn’t take my no…
.
       Anthony frowned when he came to that bit. He hated her weakness, her vacillations. There were whole areas of her soft, sensitive personality he didn’t begin to understand. But here was the Bunyan passage—that made sense.
    So why don’t I just tell him and walk out?—Leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell … Fear, I suppose, and compassion
. But sense that was too short-lived.
It’s because at the moment compassion is stronger than passion that I’m here and you’re alone in London
.… He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. He wasn’t downcast, only rather lonely, more than rather bored. In the end she would come to him, her own feelings for him were too strong to be denied. There had been things between them she would remember in his absence, and that memory, that hope of renewal, would be stronger than any pity. In the meantime? He threw back the child’s ball once more, rolled over on his side on the warm dry grass and slept.
    The tube took Anthony one stop back to Kenbourne Lane. At the station entrance a boy of about ten came up to him and asked him for a penny for the guy.
    “In
September?
A bit premature, aren’t you?”
    “Got to make an early start, mister,” said the boy, “or someone else’ll get my patch.”
    Anthony laughed and gave him tenpence. “I don’t see any guy.”
    “That’s what me and my friend are collecting for. To get one.”
    The children, those in the park, and the two at the station, gave him an idea. A job for the evenings and the occasional weekend afternoon, a job for which he was admirably and thoroughly trained … It was six o’clock. He let himself into Room 2, wrote his letter, addressed an envelope and affixed a stamp to it. The whole operation took no more than ten minutes, but by the time it was done the room was so dark that he had to put the jellyfish light on. Emerging, he encountered Arthur Johnson in the hall, and Arthur Johnson was also holding a letter in his hand. Anthony would have passed him with no more than a smile and a “good evening,” but the “other” Johnson—or was that he?—turned, almost barring his passage, and fixed him with an intense, anxious, and almost hungry look.
    “May I enquire if you are going out for the evening, Mr. Johnson, or merely to the post?”
    “Just to the post,” Anthony