A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell

morning. One for Li-li from Taiwan, sender Chan Ah Feng; two for Anthony Johnson, one postmarked York, the other, in a mauve-grey envelope, Bristol.
Her
letters, Arthur had noted, always came on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and were still addressed to A. Johnson Esq., 2/142 Trinity Road. Mrs. R. L. Johnson, however, had learned sense and put Room 2. All the other correspondence, five official-looking envelopes, was for Winston Mervyn Esq., 3/142 Trinity Road. Winston! The cheek of it, some West Indian grandchildren of slaves christening their son after the greatest Englishman of the century! It seemed to Arthur an added effrontery that this presumptuous black should receive letters so soon after his arrival—five letters to fill up the table and make him look important.
    But he didn’t see the new tenant or hear a sound from him, though nightly he listened for voodoo drums.
       As Anthony had expected, the departure of Jonathan Dean was the signal for Brian to put on the pressure. He was marked to succeed Jonathan, and evening after evening there came a knock on the door of Room 2 and a plaintive invitation to go drinking in the Lily.
    “I do have to work,” Anthony said after the fourth time of asking. “Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
    Brian gave him his beaten spaniel look. “I suppose the fact is you don’t like me. I bore you. Go on, you may as well admit it. I
am
a bore. I ought to know it by now, Vesta’s told me often enough.”
    “Since you ask,” said Anthony, “yes, it’d bore me going out and getting pissed every night. And I can’t afford it.” He relented a little. “Come in here for a while tomorrow night, if you like. I’ll get some beer in.”
    Brightening, Brian said he was a pal, and turned up at seven sharp on the Friday with a bottle of vodka and one of French vermouth which made Anthony’s six cans of beer look pathetic. He talked dolefully about his job—he sold antiques in a shop owned by Vesta’s brother—about the horrors of living always in furnished rooms, Vesta’s refusal to have children even if they got a house, her perpetual absences in the evenings—worse than ever this week—his drink problem, and did Anthony think he was an alcoholic?
    Anthony let him talk, replying occasionally in monosyllables. He was thinking about Helen’s latest letter. It was all very well to talk of absence making the heart grow fonder, but “out of sight, out of mind” might be just as true a truism. He hadn’t expected her letters to concentrate quite so much on Roger’s woes. Roger had scarcely been mentioned during that summer of snatched meetings, that clandestine fortnight of love when a shadowy husband had been away somewhere on a business trip. Now it was Roger, Roger, Roger.
I ask myself if it wouldn’t be better for both of us to try and forget each other. We could, Tony. Even I, whom you have called hyper-romantic, know that people don’t go on loving hopelessly for years. The Troilus and Cressida story may be beautiful but you and I know it isn’t real. We should get over it. You’d marry someone who is free and trouble-free and I’d settle down with Roger. I just don’t think I can face Roger’s misery and violence, and not just for a while but for months, years. I’d know for years that I’d ruined his life
.… Stupid, Anthony thought. Illogical. He and she wouldn’t go on loving hopelessly for years, but Roger would. Of all the irrational nonsense …
    He said “Yes” and “I see” and “That’s bad” for about the fiftieth time to Brian and then, because he couldn’t take any more, he bundled him out with his two half-empty bottles under his arm. Having drunk no more than a pint of beer himself, heset to work and was still writing at two in the morning. The coarse, talking-with-his-mouth-full voice of Stanley Caspian woke him at ten, and he waited until he and Arthur Johnson had gone before going to the bathroom. It was lucky he happened to be in