'If you'd give me something to eat. I haven't had a thing for twenty-four hours. I could think then.'
Mather said, 'There's only one chance you won't be charged with complicity. If you make a statement.'
'Is this the third degree?' Anne said.
'Why do you want to shelter him? Why keep your word to him when you don't—?'
'Go on,' Anne said. 'Be personal. No one can blame you. I don't. But I don't want you to think I'd keep my word to him. He killed the old man. He told me so.'
'What old man?'
'The War Minister.'
'You've got to think up something better than that,' Mather said.
'But it's true. He never stole those notes. They double-crossed him. It was what they'd paid him to do the job.'
'He spun you a fancy yarn,' Mather said. 'But I know where those notes came from.'
'So do I. I can guess. From somewhere in this town.'
'He told you wrong. They came from United Rail Makers in Victoria Street.'
Anne shook her head. 'They didn't start from there. They came from Midland Steel.'
'So that's where he's going, to Midland Steel—in the Tanneries?'
'Yes,' Anne said. There was a sound of finality about the word which daunted her. She hated Raven now, the policeman she had seen bleeding on the ground called at her heart for Raven's death, but she couldn't help remembering the hut, the cold, the pile of sacks, his complete and hopeless trust. She sat with bowed head while Mather lifted the receiver and gave his orders. 'We'll wait for him there,' he said. 'Who is it he wants to see?'
'He doesn't know.'
'There might be something in it,' Mather said. 'Some connection between the two. He's probably been double-crossed by some clerk.'
'It wasn't a clerk who paid him all that money, who tried to kill me just because I knew—'
Mather said, 'Your fairy tale can wait.' He rang a bell and told the constable who came, 'Hold this girl for further inquiries. You can give her a sandwich and a cup of coffee now.'
'Where are you going?'
'To bring in your boy friend,' Mather said.
'He'll shoot. He's quicker than you are. Why can't you let the others—?' She implored him, 'I'll make a full statement. How he killed a man called Kite too.'
'Take it,' Mather said to the constable. He put on his coat. 'The fog's clearing.'
She said, 'Don't you see that if it's true—only give him time to find his man and there won't be—war.'
'He was telling you a fairy story.'
'He was telling me the truth—but, of course, you weren't there—you didn't hear him. It sounds differently to you. I thought I was saving—everyone.'
'All you did,' Mather said brutally, 'was get a man killed.'
'The whole thing sounds so differently in here. Kind of fantastic. But he believed. Maybe,' she said hopelessly, 'he was mad.'
Mather opened the door. She suddenly cried to him, 'Jimmy, he wasn't mad. They tried to kill me.'
He said, I'll read your statement when I get back,' and closed the door.
Chapter 7
1
THEY were all having the hell of a time at the hospital. It was the biggest rag they'd had since the day of the street collection when they kidnapped old Piker and ran him to the edge of the Weevil and threatened to duck him if he didn't pay a ransom. Good old Fergusson, good old Buddy, was organizing it all. They had three ambulances out in the courtyard and one had a death's-head banner on it for the dead ones. Somebody shrieked that Mike was taking out the petrol with a nasal syringe, so they began to pelt him with flour and soot; they had it ready in great buckets. It was the unofficial part of the programme: all the casualties were going to be rubbed with it, except the dead ones the death's-head ambulance picked up. They were going to be put in the cellar where the refrigerating plant kept the corpses for dissection fresh.
One of the senior surgeons passed rapidly and nervously across a corner of the courtyard. He was on the way to a Caesarian operation, but he had no confidence whatever that the students wouldn't pelt him or duck him; only five years ago there had been a scandal and an inquiry because a woman had died on the day of a rag. The surgeon attending her had been kidnapped and carried all over town dressed as Guy Fawkes. Luckily she wasn't a paying patient, and, though her husband had been hysterical at the inquest, the coroner had decided that one must make allowance for youth. The coroner had been a student himself once and remembered with pleasure the day when they had pelted the Vice-Chancellor of the University with soot.
The senior surgeon had been present that day too. Once safely inside the glass corridor he could smile at the memory. The Vice-Chancellor had been unpopular; he had been a classic which wasn't very suitable for a provincial university. He had translated Lucan's Pharsalia into some complicated metre of his own invention. The senior surgeon remembered something vaguely about stresses. He could still see the little wizened frightened Liberal face trying to smile when his pince-nez broke, trying to be a good sportsman. But anyone could tell that he wasn't really a good sportsman. That was why they pelted him so hard.
The senior surgeon, quite safe now, smiled tenderly down at the rabble in the courtyard. Their white coats were already black with soot. Somebody had got hold of a stomach pump. Very soon they'd be raiding the shop in the High Street and seizing their mascot, the stuffed and rather moth-eaten tiger. Youth, youth, he thought, laughing gently when he saw Colson, the treasurer, scuttle from door to door with a scared expression: perhaps they'll catch him: no, they've let him by: what a joke it all was, 'trailing clouds of glory', 'turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping'.
Buddy was having the hell of a time. Everyone was scampering to obey his orders. He was the leader. They'd duck or pelt anyone he told them to. He had an enormous sense of power; it more than atoned for unsatisfactory examination results, for surgeons' sarcasms. Even a surgeon wasn't safe today if he gave an order. The soot and water and flour were his idea; the whole gas practice would have been a dull sober official piece of routine if he hadn't thought of making it a 'rag'. The very word 'rag' was powerful; it conferred complete freedom from control. He'd called a meeting of the brighter students and explained. 'If anyone's on the streets without a gas-mask he's aconchie. There are people who want to crab the practice. So when we get 'em back to the hospital we'll give 'em hell.'
They boiled round him. 'Good old Buddy.'
'Look out with that pump.'
'Who's the bastard who's pinches my stethoscope?'
'What about Tiger Tim?' They surged round Buddy Fergusson, waiting for orders, and he stood superbly above them on the step of an ambulance, his white coat apart, his ringers in the pockets of his double-breasted waistcoat, his square squat figure swelling with pride, while they shouted, 'Tiger Tim! Tiger Tim! Tiger Tim!'
'Friends, Romans and Countrymen,' he said and they roared with laughter: Good old Buddy. Buddy always had the right word. He could make any party go. You never knew what Buddy would say next. 'Lend me your—' They shrieked with laughter. He was a dirty dog, old Buddy. Good old Buddy.
Like a great beast which is in need of exercise, which has fed on too much hay, Buddy Fergusson was aware of his body. He felt his biceps; he strained for action. Too many exams, too many lectures, Buddy Fergusson wanted action. While they surged round him he imagined himself a leader of men. No Red Cross work for him when war broke: Buddy Fergusson, company commander, Buddy Fergusson, the daredevil of the trenches. The only exam he had ever successfully passed was Certificate A in the school O. T. C.
'Some of our friends seem to be missing,' Buddy Fergusson said. 'Simmons, Aitkin, Mallowes, Watt. They are bloody conchies, every one, grubbing up anatomy while we are serving our country. We'll pick 'em up in town. The flying squad will go to their lodgings.'
'What about the women, Buddy?' someone screamed, and everyone laughed and began to hit at each other, wrestle and mill. For Buddy had a reputation with the women. He spoke airily to his
friends of even the super-barmaid at the Metropole, calling her Juicy Juliet and suggesting to the minds of his hearers amazing scenes of abandonment over high tea at his digs.
Buddy Fergusson straddled across the ambulance step. 'Deliver 'em to me. In war-time we need more mothers.' He felt strong, coarse, vital, a town bull; he hardly remembered himself that he was a virgin, guilty only of a shame-faced unsuccessful attempt on the old Nottwich tart; he was sustained by his reputation, it bore him magically in imagination into every bed. He knew women, he was a realist.
'Treat 'em rough,' they shrieked at him, and 'You're telling me,' he said magnificently, keeping well at bay any thought of the future: the small provincial G. P.'s job, the panel patients in dingy consulting rooms, innumerable midwife cases, a lifetime of hard underpaid fidelity to one dull wife. 'Got your gas-masks ready?' he called to them, the undisputed leader, daredevil Buddy. What the hell did examinations matter when you were a leader of men? He could see several of the younger nurses watching him through the panes. He could see the little brunette called Milly. She was coming to tea with him on Saturday. He felt his muscles taut with pride. What scenes, he told himself, this time there would be of disreputable revelry, forgetting the inevitable truth known only to himself and each girl in turn: the long silence over the muffins, the tentative references to League results, the peck at empty air on the doorstep.
The siren at the glue factory started its long mounting whistle rather like a lap dog with hysteria and everyone stood still for a moment with a vague reminiscence of Armistice Day silences. Then they broke into three milling mobs, climbing on to the ambulance roofs, fixing their gas-masks, and drove out into the cold empty Nottwich streets. The ambulances shed a lot of them at each corner, and small groups formed and wandered down the streets with a predatory disappointed air. The streets were almost empty. Only a few errand boys passed on bicycles, looking in their gas-masks like bears doing a trick cycle act in a circus. They all shrieked at each other because they didn't know how their voices sounded outside. It was as if each of them were enclosed in a separate sound-proof telephone cabinet. They stared hungrily through their big mica eye-pieces into the doorways of shops, wanting a victim. A little group collected round Buddy Fergusson and proposed that they should seize a policeman who, being on point duty, was without a mask. But Buddy vetoed the proposal. He said this wasn't an ordinary rag. What they wanted were people who thought so little about their country that they wouldn't even take the trouble to put on a gas-mask. 'They are the people,' he said, 'who avoid boat-drill. We had great fun with a fellow once in the Mediterranean who didn't turn up to boat-drill.'
That reminded them of all the fellows who weren't helping, who were probably getting ahead with their anatomy at that moment. 'Watt lives near here,' Buddy Fergusson said, 'let's get Watt and debag him.' A feeling of physical well-being came over him just as if he had drunk a couple of pints of bitter. 'Down the Tanneries,' Buddy said. 'First left. First right. Second left, Number twelve. First floor.' He knew the way, he said, because he'd been to tea several times with Watt their first term before he'd learned what a hound Watt was. The knowledge of his early mistake made him unusually anxious to do something to Watt physically, to mark the severance of their relationship more completely than with sneers.
They ran down the empty Tanneries, half a dozen masked monstrosities in white coats smutted with soot; it was impossible to tell one from another. Through the great glass door of Midland Steel they saw three men standing by the lift talking to the porter. There were a lot of uniformed police about, and in the square ahead they saw a rival group of fellow-students, who had been luckier than they, carrying a little man (he kicked and squealed) towards an ambulance. The police watched and laughed, and a troop of planes zoomed overhead, diving low over the centre of the town to lend the practice verisimilitude. First left. First right. The centre of Nottwich to a stranger was full of sudden contrasts. Only on the edge of the town to the north, out by the park, were you certain of encountering street after street of well-to-do middle-class houses. Near the market you changed at a corner from modern chromium offices to little cats'-meat shops, from the luxury of the Metropole to seedy lodgings and the smell of cooking greens. There was no excuse in Nottwich for one half of the world being ignorant of how the other half lived.
Second left. The houses on one side gave way to bare rock and the street dived steeply down below the Castle. It wasn't really a castle any longer; it was a yellow brick municipal museum full of flint arrowheads and pieces of broken brown pottery and a few stags' heads in the zoological section suffering from moths and one mummy brought back from Egypt by the Earl of Nottwich in 1843. The moths left that alone, but the custodian thought he had heard mice inside. Mike, with a nasal douche in his breast pocket, wanted to climb up the rock. He shouted to Buddy Fergusson that the custodian was outside, without a mask, signalling to enemy aircraft. But Buddy and the others ran down the hill to number twelve.
The landlady opened the door to them. She smiled winningly and said Mr Watt was in; she thought he was working; she buttonholed Buddy Fergusson and said she was sure it would be good for Mr Watt to be taken away from his books for half an hour. Buddy said, 'We'll take him away.'
'Why, that's Mr Fergusson,' the landlady said. 'I'd know your voice anywhere, but I'd never 'ave known you without you spoke to me, not in them respiratorories. I was just going out when Mr Watt minded me as 'ow it was the gas practice.'
'Oh, he remembers, does he?' Buddy said. He was blushing inside the mask at having been recognized by the landlady. It made him want to assert himself more than ever.
'He said I'd be taken to the 'ospital.'
'Come on, men,' Buddy said and led them up the stairs. But their number was an embarrassment. They couldn't all charge through Watt's door and seize him in a moment from the chair in which he was sitting. They had to go through one at a time after Buddy and then bunch themselves in a shy silence beside the table. This was the moment when an experienced man could have dealt with them, but Watt was aware of his unpopularity. He was afraid of losing dignity. He was a man who worked hard because he liked the work; he hadn't the excuse of poverty. He played no games because he didn't like games, without the excuse of physical weakness. He had a mental arrogance which would ensure his success. If he suffered agony from his unpopularity now as a student it was the price he paid for the baronetcy, the Harley Stiset consulting room, the fashionable practice of the future. There was no reason to pity him; it was the others who were pitiable, living in their vivid vulgar way for five years before the long provincial interment of a lifetime.
Watt said, 'Close the door, please. There's a draught,' and his scared sarcasm gave them the chance they needed, to resent him.
Buddy said, 'We've come to ask why you weren't at the hospital this morning?'
'That's Fergusson, isn't it?' Watt said. 'I don't know why you want to know.'
'Are you a conchie?'
'How old-world your slang is,' Watt said. 'No. I'm not a conchie. Now I'm just looking through some old medical books, and as I don't suppose they'd interest you, I'll ask you to show yourselves out.'
'Working? That's how fellows like you get ahead, working while others are doing a proper job.'
'It's just a different idea of fun, that's all,' Watt said. 'It's my pleasure to look at these folios, it's yours to go screaming about the streets in that odd costume.'
That let them loose on him. He was as good as insulting the King's uniform. 'We're going to debag you,' Buddy said.
'That's fine. It'll save time,' Watt said, 'if I take them off myself,' and he began to undress. He said, 'This action has an interesting psychological significance. A form of castration. My own theory is that sexual jealousy in some form is at the bottom of it.'
'You dirty tyke,' Buddy said. He took the inkpot and splashed it on the wallpaper. He didn't like the word 'sex'. He believed in barmaids and nurses and tarts, and he believed in love, something rather
maternal with deep breasts. The word sex suggested that there was something in common between the two: it outraged him. 'Wreck the room!' he bawled and they were all immediately happy and at ease, exerting themselves physically like young bulls. Because they were happy again they didn't do any real damage, just pulled the books out of the shelves and threw them on the floor; they broke the glass of a picture frame in puritanical zeal because it contained the reproduction of a nude girl. Watt watched them; he was scared, and the more scared he was the more sarcastic he became. Buddy suddenly saw him as he was, standing there in his pants marked from birth for distinction, for success, and hated him. He felt impotent; he hadn't 'class' like Watt, he hadn't the brains, in a very few years nothing he could do or say would affect the fortunes or the happiness of the Harley Street specialist, the woman's physician, the baronet. What was the good of talking about free will? Only war and death could save Buddy from the confinements, the provincial practice, the one dull wife and the bridge parties. It seemed to him that he could be happy if he had the strength to impress himself on Watt's memory. He took the inkpot and poured it over the open title-page of the old folio on the table.
'Come on, men,' he said. 'This room stinks,' and led his party out and down the stairs. He felt an immense exhilaration; it was as if he had proved his manhood.
Almost immediately they picked up an old woman. She didn't in the least know what it was all about. She thought it was a street collection and offered them a penny. They told her she had to come along to the hospital; they were very courteous and one offered to carry her basket; they reacted from violence to a more than usual gentility. She laughed at them. She said, 'Well I never, what you boys will think up next!' and when one took her arm and began to lead her gently up the street, she said, 'Which of you's Father Christmas?' Buddy didn't like that: it hurt his dignity: he had suddenly been feeling rather noble: 'women and children first': 'although bombs were falling all round he brought the woman safely...' He stood still and let the others go on up the street with the old woman; she was having the time of her life; she cackled and dug them in the ribs: her voice carried a long distance in the cold air. She kept on telling them to ' take off them things and play fair', and just before they turned a corner out of sight she was calling them Mormons. She meant Mohammedans, because she had an idea that Mohammedans went about with their faces covered up and had a lot of wives. An aeroplane zoomed overhead and Buddy was alone in the street with the dead and dying until Mike appeared. Mike said he had a good idea. Why not pinch the mummy in the Castle and take it to the hospital for not wearing a gas-mask? The fellows with the death's-head ambulance had already got Tiger Tim and were driving round the town crying out for old Piker.
A Gun for Sale Page 15