The truth about Onions turned out to be more absurd than the scurrilous rumours. She had been summoned for jury-service at the assizes where the main case as far as local interest was concerned was Regina v Thomas Chubb, Retail Chemist and, till recently, Alderman.
Chubb was accused of a complex of offences arising from his alleged enthusiasm for taking obscene photographs and ciné-films which he sold and rented in (it was rumoured) some very influential local circles. The offence had been brought to light by the use he was alleged to have made of certain expensive pieces of photographic equipment purchased by the council for the municipal museum and art gallery.
‘It’ll be the death of her!’ said Vernon. ‘She won’t know which way up to hold the pictures!’
‘Watch your trousers when she comes back, lads!’ cackled Colley, the ancient head of chemistry. ‘She’ll have seen what she’s been missing.’
‘Poor old Chubb,’ mused Joe. Maggie Cohen smiled at this display of human sympathy.
‘Perhaps his counsel will have the sense to object,’ she said.
The reappearance of Onions herself after morning break seemed to put an end to the business until she let it out that she was merely temporarily released and had to reappear later in the week. She implied that the judiciary were getting the dross out of the way first and saving both Chubb and herself for a grand finale, an opinion which, as far as Chubb was concerned, the papers substantiated.
‘Poor old Chubb,’ said Joe once more, hoping for more approval from Maggie. It was like a light turning on behind her eyes when she directed her full, gift-wrapped smile specially at you. She did it now and he asked her on the spot to go out with him that evening, thanking his lucky stars Alice Fletcher had been out the previous night. Her acceptance more than compensated for Onions’s return and he went about his business with a light heart.
Even the children seemed particularly well-behaved. The Carter gang gave him no trouble at all and when Mickey approached him at lunch-time, Joe greeted him with unusual amiability.
‘Please, sir,’ said the boy. ‘My dad says you said you’d lend me some books.’
‘Did I?’ said Joe.
‘Yes. About that house.’
‘Averingerett? Oh yes, of course. You enjoyed your visit then?’
‘Yes. It were grand,’ said Mickey without a great deal of enthusiasm.
‘I’m pleased. Look, I’m sorry but I forgot about the books and they’re mostly at home. I’ll try to remember tomorrow. OK?’
Surprisingly the boy held his ground.
‘My dad said I were to read them tonight.’
‘Did he now? Can’t you read them tomorrow night then?’
‘I’m busy tomorrow night,’ said Mickey, then as an afterthought, ‘I’m busy every night but tonight.’
‘Lucky you,’ said Joe. He found Mickey’s sudden desire to read difficult to believe and normally his reaction would have been to send the lad packing. But his own rare state of contentment, plus a memory of a pair of thinly-slitted eyes boring into him from under the line of ginger eyebrows, made him say, ‘Well, if you care to call in at my flat after school, I’ll dig ’em out for you. You know where I live?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The yobbos always knew where you lived, as a constant stream of football pools and other unwanted literature attested, plus, if you were very unlucky or unpopular, bangers through the letter-box on Guy Fawkes night and cracked window-panes any night of the year.
The rest of the day passed pleasantly. Despite the fact that Joe had a car and didn’t linger around the staff-room much after four o’clock, Mickey was already waiting for him outside his flat.
‘Wait there,’ said Joe firmly as he opened the door. He could think of half a hundred reasons right off why he didn’t want the likes of Mickey Carter crossing his threshold. Indeed he had some misgivings as he selected three fairly expensive tomes from his shelves. Only one of them was specifically about Averingerett, but the others contained substantial sections on the house.
He explained this carefully to the boy on the doorstep and also stressed the good condition of the books and their value.
‘Yeah,’ said Mickey nodding. ‘Yeah.’
‘I must be mad,’ said Joe as he listened to the boy’s feet clattering away down the stairs.
Anyway that’s my good scholastic deed for today. Oh ye patron saint of frustrated pedagogues, take note and smile on me tonight. For tonight with your kind help, I intend to score.
He selected one of his old Judy Garland records and put it on the turn-table, starting it revolving as he went into the shower. The young girl’s voice, incredibly vulnerable, incredibly mature, talked and sang her undying affection for Clark Gable.
‘You made me love you,’ sang Joe.
An even more discordant noise penetrated the stream and he trotted naked across his bedroom to open the window. A small black and white cat with a reproachful look on its face stepped off the sill into the room.
‘Where the hell have you been, Vardon?’ asked Joe, but received no answer. The cat was rolling on its back by the record-player. Vardon was an even more enthusiastic Garland fan than Joe.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ called Alice from the little patch of communal garden below in which she was hanging out some bits of washing.
What’s she doing back from work so early? wondered Joe starting back from the window, conscious suddenly of his uncovered manhood.
‘I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it,’ sang Garland.
‘Miaow,’ said Vardon.
Joe returned to the shower, only to be brought out of it again two minutes later by a ring at his doorbell.
‘You couldn’t let me have a jug of milk,’ smiled Alice. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were having a bath. I’ll come back, shall I?’
‘No. Wait,’ said Joe. He returned from the kitchenette with a pint bottle.
‘That’s far too …’
‘Take it,’ said Joe. ‘I’m out tonight so I won’t be needing it.’
Jesus, he thought as he towelled himself. If the sight of my naked shoulders brings them running, what’s the rest of my torso going to do?
Seriously, Alice could be a problem, he told himself smugly. She’s just too accessible. And I’m too vulnerable! He turned the shower to cold. ‘Put your arms around me, honey,’ sang Garland and his mind turned to Maggie.
Now there was a girl worth serious consideration. Perhaps if he said it quickly enough, his mother would think she was called Coon. Which was probably worse. Surely, though, one minute of Maggie’s charm would dissociate her in his mother’s mind from archfiends like Allie Cohen who ran the betting shops in Ilford?
In any case, he said to himself, it matters not if mother does not like it. For, as the good book states, mother is not going to get it.
Even Vardon’s derisive grunts could not undermine his sudden optimism.
Tonight was the night!
Maggie’s strength, he decided later as he let himself back into the flat, lay in the amiable way she refused. There was nothing absurdly moral or frigid about it; her refusals didn’t bring the evening to a cold, uncomfortable end. She accepted as perfectly natural and even enjoyable his efforts to get among her underclothes, and turned the whole thing into a highly entertaining wrestling match where there was always the hint that some day Joe might win. He hadn’t yet, but the memory of the evening just past was very pleasant for all that.
They had gone to an Indian restaurant. Joe had lost his faith in the Chinese and Vernon had long been assuring him of the aphrodisiac qualities of Bombay Duck. Indeed as far as Joe was concerned it worked perfectly, though perhaps sitting knee to knee with Maggie in the darkly-lit, exotically perfumed booth helped.
Halfway through the meal a group of people had come into the restaurant talking with that loud certainty of their own standing shared only by the public schools and Yorkshire businessmen. Loudest of all was a little round man with a shiny
black moustache that looked as if it had just been painted on.
Maggie’s foot dug into Joe’s calf, too violently for even the greatest optimist to assess the intention as erotic.
‘Ugg,’ she said through a mouthful of Vindaloo prawn.
‘It’s probably the lime-pickle,’ said Joe sympathetically.
‘No! Chubb!’ whispered Maggie swallowing and reaching for her glass of iced lager. ‘That’s Chubb. You know. Onions’s Chubb.’
‘Good Lord! But I thought he was locked up?’
‘He’ll be on bail, fool.’
Joe tried to glance discreetly round at the group of men but they had seated themselves in a booth out of his line of vision.
‘Are you sure? How do you know?’
She giggled, a lovely bubbly sound.
‘Νo, I’m not one of his models, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve seen his picture in the paper, that’s all.’
‘What was he doing? Hanging naked from a chandelier?’ She kicked him again.
‘I’ve never seen the point of that.’
‘What?’
‘Everyone says it. About hanging naked from a chandelier, I mean. But why? I mean did anyone ever do it?’
‘Oh yes,’ assured Joe in his serious lit-crit. voice. ‘That’s why all these stately homes are full of chandeliers. You should see Averingerett. Can’t move for them.’
‘I’d like to some time. I’ve never been.’
‘Good God,’ said Joe. ‘Not really?’
‘Can I have this last prawn? No, really. They say you’ve been a hundred times. Is that right?’
‘Not quite. But once or twice, yes.’
‘Why? Are you eating this onion pickle as well? Good; it doesn’t matter if we both eat it.’
‘What doesn’t matter?’ he asked lasciviously.
‘Why do you keep on going back to Averingerett?’ she insisted.
‘Well, it’s easy,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to think about it. No, I suppose it’s a kind of love-hate relationship really. I love the place as an artefact, as something created by a certain kind of comprehensive artistic vision. At the same time I resent it and what it has stood for in history. I suppose I feel that I’m helping to defeat that every time I lead my little crocodile of kids through the main doorway. It’s a kind of snook-cocking. But I still feel we’re the defeated ones as we gawk helplessly at that great dining-table loaded with porcelain and silver that the likes of us can never use. Or look at those rows upon rows of books in the library. I’m damn sure not a Trevigore touches them from one year’s end to another.’
He fell silent and Maggie took his hand in one of hers, spooning the rest of her curry into her mouth with the other.
‘You sound as though you’d like to see the stuff shared out amongst everybody. It wouldn’t go far!’
‘I suppose I would in a way,’ he said. ‘At least it’d go a bit farther than it has done.’
She pushed her plate away.
‘There now. You can tell me what all these odd-sounding sweets mean.’
On their way out, he glanced back once more in an effort to see Chubb and this time was successful. He looked quite a nice little man, the kind of chap you wouldn’t mind approaching for something very personal as he stood in his white coat behind the counter of his chemist’s shop. Poor bastard.
He turned and walked into Lord Jim. It was like walking into a wall.
‘Sorry,’ gasped Joe.
Lord Jim showed no sign of recognition or acknowledgment and went on into the restaurant.
‘That was lovely,’ said Maggie leaning into him outside the door, and he forgot instantly all about Chubb and Lord Jim. Maggie was right. If you’d both been eating onion pickle, it didn’t matter.
Vardon thought differently, however, sniffing his breath with disgust and refusing to sleep on the bed beside him. Joe didn’t care. It had been a good night and the wrestling match had gone to the last three falls before he lost. He smiled. There had been a moment in the final round when he thought he was going to get a submission. Vardon changed his mind and jumped back up on the pillow. Nothing was impossible.
Smiling, he fell asleep.
The rest of the week continued under the same fair skies that had ushered it in. At school the children seemed bent on demonstrating their usually deep-hidden capacity for good behaviour, Onions was too concerned with the possibility of talking a jury into flogging Chubb to bother with Joe’s minor misdemeanours, and Maggie seemed to have let their relationship move on to another stage. His imagination worked overtime on this.
At home, things were well too. Alice had suddenly been summoned away to nurse her sick father, thus putting a constant temptation out of the way and also leaving the place to Joe alone, as the couple who occupied the topmost of the three flats into which the old terraced house had been converted were away on holiday. It was a comfort to think he could bring Maggie back here on Friday without the worry that Alice was going to come trotting up the stairs in search of a cup of sugar or half a loaf of bread.
Not that there was any certainty that Maggie would come up, but he had high hopes. Vardon was the bait, Maggie having displayed great interest when Joe told her about the cat.
‘You’re my etchings, Vardon,’ said Joe, tickling the little animal’s upturned chin. ‘Be charming or you’ll miss your bacon rind.’
Friday arrived with still no flies in the ointment. Maggie greeted him warmly in the staff-room before assembly.
‘All right for tonight?’
‘You took the words out of my mouth,’ he said.
‘You never know where they’ve been,’ she smiled. ‘Hey, seen the paper? Someone’s got the same idea as you, try to spread the Trevigore wealth around a bit.’
‘What?’
‘Here. Look.’ She showed him a small paragraph in the Telegraph. It stated that an attempt had been made to enter Averingerett, Lord Trevigore’s northern home, the previous night. An alarm had gone off and the would-be burglars had retired empty-handed. That was all.
The mention of Averingerett reminded him of the books he had loaned to Mickey Carter and he tackled him at break. He reckoned Mickey was more than capable of selling the whole lot for five bob in some second-hand shop.
‘You go home at dinner-time, don’t you, Carter? Good. Then I’ll expect you to bring them with you this afternoon. Now see you don’t forget.’
‘No, sir.’
When Joe intercepted the boy coming into school at the end of the lunch-hour, it seemed his worst fears had been partially realized. Mickey had the two general books with him, but the other, Averingerett, Four Centuries of Growth, a lavishly illustrated and expensively produced volume, was missing.
‘But where is it?’ he demanded, putting on (without much difficulty) his we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk voice.
‘Don’t know,’ said Mickey miserably. ‘I must ’ave lost it.’
‘But where boy, where?’ asked Joe. ‘Where did you take the books?’
‘Home.’
‘Then it must be at home. Or did you lose it on the way home?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
‘But when did you notice it was missing?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
Joe groaned in exasperation.
‘Please, sir,’ said the boy. ‘My dad says if you’ll tell him what it cost, he’ll pay you for it.’
‘Too bloody true,’ said Joe viciously. ‘I’ll write him a letter.’
He went away, raging inwardly. But it was Friday afternoon and the nearness of the weekend worked its balm.
‘It was my own fault,’ he was able to say to Maggie philosophically halfway through the afternoon. ‘I should have known better.’
‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘You did the right thing.’
It was nice to be approved of, thought Joe, but these occasional evidences of something like a sense of vocation in Maggie sometimes bothered him. He felt their relationship was within
hailing distance of becoming serious (perhaps he could persuade his mother that ‘Cohen’ was really ‘Cowan’ or better still, ‘Colquhoun’?) but he wasn’t certain that Maggie really understood his character.
‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘You must realize now, I am what I seem to be. When I propose intercourse in the English storecupboard between periods, I mean it. And as for my work here, you’ve got to understand that beneath my surface frivolity lie unplumbed depths of unbelievable irresponsibility.’
Even then she’d probably think he was joking. How much of a shock would the revelation of the real Joe Askern be to her?
But such sombre thoughts had vanished from his mind as he clattered up the stairs to his flat, pausing only to help himself to Alice’s evening paper which she must have forgotten to cancel and which it seemed a shame to waste.
He quickly read through the few letters that had arrived for him. His mother described another victorious encounter she had had with the local housing office, before going on to wonder once more whether he had yet found a ‘nice’ girl.
All the time, bemoaned Joe. They’re all nice, too bloody nice.
He put the letter aside, poured himself a large glass of milk and settled down to read Alice’s local paper.
Averingerett it seemed was local enough to rate front-page attention here. The reporter had tried to make something of it, but there wasn’t a great deal. The headline was GUIDEBOOK BURGLARS FOILED and beneath there was a picture of Jock Laidlaw, the head steward, looking seriously into the camera. Joe was glad to see it as it meant his friend must have recovered. He was quoted as saying the would-be burglars had not had a chance. They hadn’t even penetrated the first line of defences, having set off an alarm while trying to force a ground-floor window in the north wing, which in any case would only have let them into the former chief groom’s room which was quite cut off from every part of the building but the old stables.
A Fairly Dangerous Thing Page 4