Free A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell Page A

no thanks, it wasn’t suitable, which didn’t seem the reply to gratify Caspian, and left him to his rents. He walked over to the station where the little boys were once more at their post, and with them this time a black child. The white children knew him by now. Instead of asking for money, they said hallo.
    “Why don’t we have a bonfire on that bit of waste ground?” But even as he spoke he checked himself. Wasn’t that the insinuating approach a child molester would use? “If you like the idea,” he said quickly, “we’ll go and talk to your parents about it.”
    Leroy, the coloured boy, lived with his mother in a ground-floor flat in Brasenose Avenue. Linthea Carville turned out to bea part-time social worker, which gave her an immediate affinity with Anthony, though he would in any case have been drawn to her. He couldn’t help staring at her, this tall daughter of African gods, with her pearly-bloomed dark face, and her black hair, oiled and satiny, worn in a heavy knot on the crown of her head. But he remembered his plan, explained it, and within ten minutes they had been joined by white neighbours, the chairman of the Brasenose Tenants’ Association, and by the mother of Leroy’s taller friend, Steve.
    The chairman was enthusiastic about Anthony’s idea. For months his association had been campaigning for the council to convert the waste ground into a children’s playground. This would be a feather in its cap. They could have a big party on November 5 and maybe invite a council representative to be present. Linthea said she would make hot dogs and enlist the help of another friend, the mother of David, the third boy. And when Anthony told them about the wood, Steve said his elder brother had a box barrow which he could bring over to 142 on the following Saturday.
    Then they discussed the guy Steve’s mother said she would dress in a discarded suit of her husband’s. Linthea made lots of strong, delicious coffee, and it was nearly lunchtime before Anthony went back to Trinity Road. He had forgotten that this was the day of Jonathan Dean’s departure. The move, he now saw, was well under way. Jonathan and Brian were carrying crates down the stairs and packing them into Brian’s rather inadequate car. Vesta was nowhere to be seen.
    “I’ll give you a hand,” Anthony said, and regretted the offer when Brian slapped him on the back and remarked that after Jonathan had deserted him he would know where to turn for a pal.
    Jonathan, like Anthony, possessed no furniture of his own but he had hundreds of records and quite a few books, the heaviest and most thumbed of which was the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. While they worked and ate the fish and chips Brian had been sent out to buy, the record player remained on, and the laughter sequence from Strauss’s
Elektra
roared out so maniacally that Anthony expected Arthur Johnson to appear at any moment and complain. But he didn’t appear even when Jonathandropped a crate of groceries on the stairs and collapsed in fits of mirth at the sight of egg yolk and H.P. Sauce and extended-life milk dripping from the treads.
    They had to make several journeys. Jonathan’s new home was a much smaller room than the one he had occupied at 142, in a squalid, run-down house in the worst part of South Kenbourne. And this alternative to Trinity Road seemed to perplex Brian as much as it did Anthony. What had possessed Jonathan? he kept asking. Why not change his mind even at this late stage? Caspian would surely let him keep his old room if he asked.
    “No, he wouldn’t,” said Jonathan. “He’s let it to some Spade.” And he added, like Cicero but less appositely, “O
temporal O mores!”
    The record player was the last thing to be shifted. A container was needed in which to transport it, so Brian and Anthony went down to Anthony’s room where Anthony said he had found a cardboard box in the wardrobe. The books impressed Brian and soon he had found out all