by R. N. Morris
‘You need to get a grip,’ said the other. ‘Otherwise they’ll be carting you off to that place again.’ His mate guffawed appreciatively.
Perhaps he should give them something that would confirm their worst suspicions about him. Bang their heads together, or tip over a table. In the end, he was happy simply to nod towards the serving counter. ‘You’d better move along now. You’re holding up the queue.’
They turned their backs on him with a pair of vulgar sneers.
SEVEN
‘Mr Simpkins!’
The pen shook so much in Felix’s hand he had to put it down for fear of spattering the ledger with ink. The glances he received from the other clerks were those given to a condemned man by his fellow convicts on the day of his execution. There was some sympathy, but mostly relief that they were not the one summoned. They were not bad fellows. They at least made an effort to disguise their schadenfreude. Yes, he knew the word. Mother wasn’t just German. She was the embodiment of that particular emotion, though sometimes he suspected it wasn’t just other people’s misfortune she took pleasure in but her own too.
Felix slipped off his stool and took a moment to straighten his clothes and brush himself down. He pummelled his hair flat with the palm of one hand. ‘Coming, Mr Birtwistle.’ He made the announcement under his breath.
Mr Birtwistle, the head clerk, was looking down at his desk as Felix let himself into his office. Felix had a clear view of the top of his boss’s head with its few strands of black hair plastered across a gaping expanse of glistening skin. There was something both comical and obscene about this pathetic attempt to mask the scalp. It was such an odd combination of vanity and miscalculation. Felix found it humiliating on Mr Birtwistle’s behalf, as if his boss had appeared before him naked from the waist down.
Felix coughed to announce his presence, in the hope that Mr Birtwistle would look up and he would not have to confront the disconcerting sight any longer. But Mr Birtwistle was intent on studying the workbook that lay open on his desk.
At last he repeated ‘Mr Simpkins’, but not in the same angry bellow as before. Now Felix heard his name expelled in a kind of weary sigh. But any thought that Mr Birtwistle had relented was dispelled by the grim expression on his lantern-jawed face and the hatred in his eyes when he looked up.
‘Is this your handiwork?’
Mr Birtwistle pushed a ledger book across his desk. Felix saw the smudged workings from yesterday.
‘Yes, Mr Birtwistle.’
‘Would you care to explain yourself?’
‘Explain?’
‘What is the meaning of this?’
‘I …’
‘What caused this catastrophe?’
‘I … Mother …’
‘Mother?’
For a split second, Felix was tempted to say that she was dead. Much as he would have welcomed that event, he restrained himself. ‘Mother has not been well.’
‘I don’t see what …’
‘I’m very worried about her.’
‘What?’
‘I was … yesterday afternoon … I’m afraid I became upset. The thought of losing her, you see.’ Felix dabbed one eye with the knuckle of his hand.
A look of disgust came over Mr Birtwistle as it dawned on him what had caused the smudging. ‘You …? Oh.’
‘I am very sorry, Mr Birtwistle. It’s her heart, you see.’ Felix was beginning to feel quite light-headed. He had to stop himself from adding, ‘She doesn’t have one.’ He had to get a grip. There was a danger he might burst into hysterical laughter, as easily as tears. Such a display was the very last thing he wanted to let slip in front of Mr Birtwistle.
‘See to it that it doesn’t happen again.’ Mr Birtwistle laid a wooden ruler diagonally across the offending page and drew a line through it in red ink. ‘You will have to do the whole page again. Naturally, you will be docked a day’s pay for yesterday. Consider yourself lucky that I don’t give you notice. If we were not so short-staffed, there would be no question.’
Felix thought it rather unfair of Mr Birtwistle that he did not mention the many hundreds of immaculate pages that Felix had produced in the fifteen months he had worked at Griffin.
He took his ledger without complaint and returned to his perch amid the shy, sideways glances of his colleagues.
On Saturday afternoon, Felix joined the crowds at Shepherd’s Bush Market.
No one expected anything of him here. He could be who he liked, anyone but Felix Simpkins, the pathetic coward who couldn’t go through with a single resolution. As far as anyone in the crowd knew, he was on his way to a recruitment station right now.
To his ear the cries of the costermongers seemed to have a harsher, more desperate edge than before the war, as if there was more at stake than the price of veg. The men were not competing for sales, but fighting for survival. Even so, he welcomed the clashing shouts. It was a sign of business as usual, defiantly so. What did it matter if the Germans occupied Brussels if beets were still being cried on a London street market in August?
At the outbreak of war, there had been shortages in the shops, to which Mother had contributed with her frantic stockpiling. She had bought up all manner of supplies – butter, sugar, bacon, flour, cocoa and her beloved coffee – which he had been obliged to carry home for her, loaded like a pack animal. Shops were left as devastated as a field stripped by locusts, except the locusts in this case had the appearance of respectable housewives. Felix had felt ashamed of his part in it. But what could he do? What Mother wanted, Mother got.
All that had settled down now. The emptied shops had gradually been restocked, if not to their former levels then at least to a degree which the middle classes could contemplate without undue alarm. Yes, some imported goods, like tinned pineapples and raisins, would be harder to come by from now on. But there was a war on. One had to expect some hardship.
In the aftermath of the most severe shortages, prices rose. It was a simple question of supply and demand. Certain customers everywhere had shown their willingness to pay over the odds for essentials. That was the way the world worked. It was unfortunate but inevitable that some would be priced out of the market. For them it was as if the shortages had never ended. Even Mother felt the pinch, and contemplated the dwindling of her treasured provisions with a grim, hard-eyed apprehension, as if she were afraid not of her supplies running out, but of what she might do when they did.
Felix liked to look at the barrows bursting with vegetables of all sizes and colours. They rewarded his gaze with a comforting sense of plenty. He moved through the wafts of fresh-baked bread, the mouth-watering savour of meat pies, past the silver gleam of fish stalls and the smell of blood and slaughter from the butchers. His senses were overwhelmed. It took him back to a simpler time, a time of infantile appetites and pleasures, when his relationship with the world was uncomplicated by experience. It reminded him that he was alive.
He wanted to immerse himself in the market even more, to be consumed by it. To become part of the bustling mass which pulsed through the market like its lifeblood.
Put simply, he was driven by the impulse to buy something. It almost didn’t matter what. To buy something for himself, which would compensate him for all the setbacks and failures he had endured.
It was most irksome of Mr Birtwistle to dock his pay, but Felix had few expenditures, apart from the contribution he made to the household expenses. He was able to put aside a little each month, which he was saving for a rainy day. Perhaps he would take a holiday. To Switzerland, perhaps. The idea of an Alpine hike appealed to him immensely. And Switzerland’s neutrality made the prospect even more attractive. Of course, one couldn’t get there without going through France, which was possibly dangerous. He hadn’t considered the details. It didn’t have to be Switzerland. There were some marvellous walks to be had in the Lake District, he didn’t doubt.
A chap could feel the war was a long way away standing on the banks of Lake Grasmere, surrounded by th
e fells and forests of Cumbria.
Or perhaps he would follow through on his adventure of the other night. This time he would go to a music hall, to the promenade. He had heard that that was where a man went to pick up a girl of a certain kind. He tasted the gaseous tang of anticipation.
He kept his savings in a tin box under his bed. That morning he had taken the money out and counted it, all £1 17s 11d. It was never quite as much as he hoped it would be, but still a tidy enough sum.
He didn’t know how much it would cost to purchase the services of a lady of the night. He would be surprised if it ate too much into his nest egg. Or perhaps something else might catch his eye. And so that morning he had transferred the money to an envelope, which he now felt bulging against his chest in his inside jacket pocket.
He found himself standing outside the shabby exterior of a junk shop. The window was crowded with mismatched items of furniture and cracked bric-a-brac, chipped candelabras, a stuffed heron in a glass cabinet and a black-spotted mirror in a lacklustre gilt frame. If these were the best the shop had to offer, then it did not say much for what was inside. But Felix noticed some small nude figurines amongst the tat. He knew nothing about antiques, but they seemed to him to have been executed with some skill. The curves and lines of the figures possessed an alluring delicacy. The sculptor had imbued the cold, grey marble with something of the quality of living flesh. The figures represented some species of mythological females, unnamed goddesses or nymphs, or possibly sirens, enticing him into the shop. There might be more of the same inside, perhaps even more indecent. If he could not bring himself to pick up a real girl, he might at least take home a statue of one. Of course, he would have to keep it hidden from Mother. She had a principled horror of him ‘spilling his seed’ which he had no wish to provoke.
It took a moment for Felix’s eyes to adjust to the interior. Muddy oil paintings by obscure artists began to emerge from the darkness. Loitering ghosts lurked in the corners, plaster mannequins dressed in dusty clothes from the last century, a suit of armour and a medical student’s skeleton. Oppressive wardrobes loomed over him on every side, while a gang of unruly dining chairs blocked his way. Cabinets and tables jutted out to snag him. Overhead, tarnished chandeliers hung like ornate crystal stalactites, laden with danger for the unwary. There were clocks everywhere, all stopped at different times, and more examples of the taxidermist’s art, a strange, inert menagerie set free amongst the assembly of secondhand objects. This was the plunder of interrupted lives, pilfered from the houses of the dead, the remnants of countless midnight flits, and possibly even the booty of actual larceny.
He had stumbled into a bargain basement Aladdin’s cave.
The air smelled musty and stale. Felix had the sense of small creatures scuttling away from his feet.
At first he didn’t see the man seated behind the large, leather-topped desk, or perhaps he saw him, but took him for another of the curiosities on sale. The man was dressed in a black morning coat, dusted with a faint patina of something white and possibly luminous. His face was dominated by momentous side-whiskers, giving him something of the appearance of a character from Dickens. He was a stout man – the side-whiskers seemed designed to detract from the corpulence of his face – who seemed well suited to the sedentary life. He was, in fact, sitting very still, reading an old olive-coloured volume, which had evidently been taken from one of the bookcases that added to the clutter. It was only when he turned the page that he revealed his presence among the living.
Grateful for the man’s indifference, Felix made his way towards the back of the shop.
Here he found rails of secondhand clothes. Boxes of shoes littered the floor. A shelf of hats drew his attention. A silk topper teased a smile to his lips.
Felix looked back towards the man at the desk, who was still engrossed in his book. Gingerly, as if he were transgressing some unwritten rule, he picked up the top hat and put it on.
He found a tarnished mirror in which to admire the effect. It fitted him admirably, though there was the problem of what to do with his ears. Maybe he should dress like a toff when he went to the promenade to pick up a girl. He should go the whole hog and get a cane and a cape while he was at it.
He returned the top hat to its place and scanned along the other headwear. He was intrigued to see a collection of military caps and helmets, including some spiked Prussian ones. And on one of the rails nearby he found a collection of khaki field tunics and greatcoats. He took off the jacket he was wearing and tried on one of the tunics at random. It engulfed him. The cuffs extended a good inch beyond his fingers. The shoulders flapped loosely around his own. Felix found it hard to imagine the individual who could fill this uniform.
The second tunic he tried on was more like it. He turned back to the mirror as he finished buttoning up the last of the five brass buttons. It was still not a perfect fit, but better than the last one. It just needed taking in an inch or so. Failing that, he could bulk himself up by wearing a pullover underneath it.
Yes, the effect was not too bad at all. Passable. It was a private’s uniform. It did not seem to have been worn. Felix could not help wondering how it came to be in the shop. Perhaps the owner had died before he had a chance to serve and his impoverished family had been forced to get what they could for it. Times were hard for many, after all. Somehow that didn’t quite add up, but he was reluctant to probe the tunic’s history too deeply.
He rooted through a pile of combat trousers until he found a smallish-looking pair. He held them up against his body. Perhaps a little on the large side but no matter. That was what braces were for.
Felix was excited now as he picked out a cap from the shelf. The oilskin lining gripped his scalp tightly, but a second cap came down comically over his eyes. He opted for the first. He would have preferred it if the regimental insignia on the front had matched the metal badge on his tunic collar, but he didn’t suppose anyone would notice that – unlike an ill-fitting cap, which would stick out like a sore finger.
He took off the tunic and gathered his selections together.
The man behind the desk did not look up from his book.
‘I say,’ began Felix nervously. ‘How much for all this?’
It was a moment before the shopkeeper treated Felix to the most cursory of glances. ‘Ten shillings.’
‘Ten shillings? That’s rather steep, isn’t it?’
‘It’s all authentic War Office issue. Brand new. Never been worn.’
‘It’s for a play, you see. I’m in an amateur dramatic group. We’re putting on a production. I’m in charge of the wardrobe. We don’t have much money.’
At last the man put down his book. He regarded Felix with undisguised contempt. He even contrived to have his right eyebrow ascend with slow, deliberate scepticism. ‘Take it or leave it.’
‘I’ll take it.’
‘Do you have puttees?’
Felix frowned.
‘You bind them round your calves.’
‘Oh yes, I see.’
‘You can’t do the play without puttees. The audience won’t buy it.’
‘How much more would that be?’
‘I’ll throw them in for an extra sixpence.’
‘Very well.’
The man rose from his seat at last. ‘And what about a gun?’
‘A gun?’
‘It’s a question of verisimilitude.’
‘You have guns?’
‘Antiques. But adequate for theatrical purposes.’
‘So they don’t actually fire?’
‘I dare say I can find you one that does, if it’s important. For the play.’
Now that he had been roused, the man moved with surprising sprightliness, given his size. He unlocked a cabinet and took out a small leather case which he placed on the desk in front of Felix. He unfastened the buckle of the case, revealing the object of interest. It was forged from a dull grey metal. Just by looking at it, Felix had a sense of its dense mass, which
seemed far in excess of its size.
The man took out the gun and aimed it nonchalantly at Felix. ‘It’s an old one, but the basic Webley service revolver hasn’t changed much over the years.’
Felix felt his heartbeat quicken. There was something darkly pleasurable about being in the presence of this deadly weapon, even if it was pointed at him. He had no doubt the gun wasn’t loaded, but it was laden with the potential to wield death. ‘How much?’
‘I can let you have the whole lot, uniform and gun, for a guinea.’
The man carefully turned the gun around, offering Felix the handle. It was even heavier in his hand than he had imagined it would be. But as soon as he touched it, he knew that he must have it.
PART II
Dreams of Flight
31 August–2 September, 1914.
THE INFLUENCE OF A GIRL.
The Interesting Romance of a Love that Conquered.
‘“There is nothing in human life more unfortunate than that a man should be without a woman’s influence.’”
Begin this fine story today: previous chapters contained in synopsis.
Daily Mirror serial, Monday, 31 August, 1914
EIGHT
Adam Cardew had seen the bird return to the same bush several times now. It was a small brown bird with stripes on the side of its breast. When he got home he would look in his copy of J. L. Bonhote’s Birds of Britain and Their Eggs to see if he could identify it. Was it possible that it had a nest in there? It was rather late in the year, he thought, for that, but not impossible. Some birds continued nesting into September. He should like to have a look inside the bush, next time the bird went away.
Adam liked to come to the Scrubs after school, not just to look at birds. Even more thrilling was the prospect of catching sight of some activity from the great hangar. He remembered coming here with some of the chaps from school to see the arrival of M. Clément-Bayard’s dirigible No. 2 from France. The notable event had occurred on a Sunday. He had got out of church by feigning a stomach ache. His father was suspicious but Adam had managed to induce vomiting by drinking a tumbler of salt water and poking his finger down his throat. The results had been spectacular, beyond anything Adam could have hoped for.