Chapter Two
And of course it never did happen in the least like I vaguely imagined then; and it was nine years before it happened at all.
I didn’t get out before the war came. I’d gone up to Liverpool with half an idea of finding a ship, but I left it too late, so, soon after Dunkirk, I was called up.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t meant those things to the girl. Every word of them had been formed and forged since I was old enough to think. But it’s so much easier to talk about getting out than to do it—or even to make the first move to do it. Impulse plays a biggish part in my life, and in this case for some reason the impulse didn’t come. I can’t put it plainer than that because I don’t know myself.
To start with, when I got in the army, everything went wrong. It wasn’t the training but the discipline that got me down, and all the silly routine of it; but after a few months it came easier in spite of my better nature. Then someone gave me a stripe, and so it all began.
I was in the army six years, and moved around a good bit. I didn’t have many friends; but as it happened two of them made suggestions about what I might do when I came out. One of them, Roy Marshall, a New Zealander, gave me such a good account of life out there that it was tempting to emigrate to a new country where I could begin again from scratch. But while I was waiting for my papers a letter came from the other one, Michael Abercrombie, and a month later I went to see him at his offices in King William Street, and took the job he offered me in the insurance world.
I’d come to like him quite a lot, and I suppose that had something to do with it. He was a tall, dour looking man with sharply slanting eyebrows that vee’d above his nose whenever he was in trouble or perplexed. He looked determined and a bit of a driver, but in fact he was mild natured and self-doubting when you came to know him.
I remember, after meeting his father that morning, we went out and discussed it over a cup of coffee. I remember he asked me if I was interested, and I thought of the offices I’d just been to on the fourth floor, marked ‘‘Abercrombie & Co. Adjusters, Established 1841’’, and of the little typist with the three-inch heels in the outer office and the other people there taken up with odd, sly businesses of their own. And I couldn’t see myself among it.
He tried to explain what they did. When a firm or a private person or a ship suffered loss or damage and made a claim against an insurance company or an underwriter, an adjuster was engaged to examine and assess the loss and adjust the claim so that it was acceptable to both parties.
‘‘Except for a few old established firms like ours, it’s not a business that had a lot of standing in the between-war years. But that’s changing. The adjuster has formed an association of his own, and qualifications are being brought in to put it on a professional basis like, say, accountancy.”
‘‘And where d’you suppose I should get the qualifications?’’
‘‘That’s not the most important thing in your case. Though I expect they’d come.” He frowned at his coffee. ‘‘My uncle died about eight years ago, and to be quite frank, Dad’s a bit of a freak in this profession. For a certain type of claim he’s perfect; but for other work, where one needs a tougher, stronger character, he’s no good. And the underwriters recognize it. So a lot of business is beginning to pass us by. As for me, I want to specialize in the marine side of the business. It’s the only one I’m really interested in. In any case, I’m too much like Dad in the wrong way. I’m complementary to him, not opposite. And we need an opposite.”
‘‘Should I be flattered or damned insulted?’’
He didn’t laugh. ‘‘A bit of both perhaps. But I’ve been in too much trouble with you to think you need anything wrapped up. I’ve a terrific respect for you, Oliver.”
‘‘Dear heaven,’’ I said.
‘‘We need a man of absolute integrity, pleasant to meet, but able to put over a strong line where it’s necessary; a chap who’s keen minded and knows his way about and can sum people up.”
‘‘What do you know about my integrity? All you know is that I didn’t pinch the mess funds.”
‘‘I know what you’ve told me about yourself.”
I said: ‘‘When I left school I went to work on an airport. Then I was in a garage for two years. I went to night school for a bit trying to get a slant on journalism—chucked it up when my father died, went on the roads as a tramp, crossed the Atlantic as a stoker, did farm work. How d’you suppose that fits me for your sort of job? And pleasant to meet! You’ve got a pretty good imagination, haven’t you?’’
The waitress came along and Michael paid her.
He said: ‘‘ My dear chap, I’ve known you for four years, so I ought to be entitled to my own opinion. I suppose you’re still living with the image of the man you were before the war. Perhaps he looks the same to you in the mirror. Well, that’s just a delusion. Forget it. Oh, I know you had a raw deal in the old days—but whether you like it or not the war suited you. The old Branwell assault tactics.… Now you’ve got to try and make sure that the peace suits you too.”
I shifted uncomfortably. ‘‘The trouble at the moment is that I feel a phoney—neither fish, flesh nor fowl. At least there was a real person before the war, even though he belonged among the down-and-outs.”
‘‘It’s a question of re-orientating your mind, isn’t it? Well, I thought this might be one way.” When I didn’t speak he said: ‘‘Of course, from another angle, you may not be open even to consider the job. It’s a big change from being second in command of your battalion to rushing off to see if Mrs. Smith’s fur coat really was damaged beyond repair when the water-main burst.”
We got up and went out. It was raining. The buses were hissing over the wet streets and people crowded the pavements. There was a man selling matches in the entrance to an alley. I bought a box. I thought, well, it’s not eight years since you passed the night in Swindon workhouse; it’s not much more since you did seven days for hitting that policeman in the eye; it’s not twelve since your father turned on the gas and you came in and found him nearly dead and covered in vomit. Mr. Branwell, with his wing collar and his black tie, coming up from Surbiton on the nine-fifteen.
Well, what was I waiting for, hesitating for? Because farming in New Zealand made a prettier picture?
‘‘I’d let you down in six months. By the time I knew anything about it I’d be sick of it and want a change.”
‘‘It’s possible. But I shouldn’t think so. Anyway, don’t decide now. Think it over for a few days. There’s no hurry.”
We crossed the road and turned into Cannon Street.
‘‘I’ve got to call on a chap here,’’ Michael said. ‘‘I’ll walk with you. What bus do you want?’’
I said: ‘‘Look, there’s not much need for me to say more now. But I don’t want to think it over for a few days. Just to-night; and then I’ll see you again to-morrow. O.K.?’’
I expect he knew then that I was going to accept. For so easy-going a man he smiled very rarely, but he smiled now and touched my arm.
‘‘All right, Oliver.”
I suppose a war has done that sort of thing for plenty of other people. I’m not unique. But it used to twist in me sometimes like laughter to think that the result of all the blood, tears and sweat had been to turn at least one rather mangy stray tomcat into a house pet living fatly and comfortably off the society he’d been so much up against.
I used to remind myself deliberately sometimes; because human nature has only so much capacity for surprise, and before you know where you are the extraordinary has become the commonplace, and you’re behaving as if you’ve never known what the other side is like. Personality isn’t static, it’s like a skin or the bark of a tree, constantly growing and shedding.
Not, if the truth be known, that it’s easy to live either fatly or comfortably as a claims adjuster, when you’re likely to be rung up any hour and sent to Sherborne or Southampton or Sheerness.
I took two rooms over a woma
n’s dress shop in George Street. I could have got something cheaper further out, but it pleased me to be in the West End. And it pleased something in me to play out the joke. I hadn’t got any roots and never had had, so it was right somehow to live where none would grow. When it came to being thrown out of a job—or I tired of it myself—there’d be nothing to drop but the key in the door.
For six months Michael nursed me and we went most places together. After a time I began to find an interest in the things I had to do. I began to see it wasn’t just another job, filling in a corner and doing the same routine things. You had to be quick on the uptake; you had to know the value of things—and people—and often enough you had to be a bit of a detective as well.
I also began to see what Michael meant when he said the firm needed stiffening. Both he and his father were liked everywhere they went, but there was some short measure in them for this work. Perhaps, though they’d have denied this, it was because they thought everyone was as honest as themselves. I’m not at all sure it was anything so unsubtle, but that it didn’t come from some sort of fundamental pride which wouldn’t let them make concessions to a certain attitude of mind in others. Because, when you come down to it, every suspicion that a man holds is a tiny encroachment on his own integrity.
Presently they began to send me out on simple assignments where it was just a question of making a routine report. Then when these were approved by Lloyds without wrecking the City they began to turn over the other minor stuff, which sometimes was as easy as pie and sometimes wasn’t. Once I had to go out to Salisbury about some cars, and I thought, I wonder what happened to that kid who gave me the lift, and if she’s still living here with her father and if she ever got her bracelet back; but I wasn’t interested enough to inquire.
In the first two and a half years while I worked there I didn’t make many friends. Michael did his best, insisting on me being best man at his wedding, and doing all he could to get me known in the insurance world, but I suppose there was still something in me that didn’t make me a very likeable companion, in spite of what Michael said. It was all very well for him to talk about ‘‘trying to belong” but I still didn’t, or couldn’t—at least, not in the important things.
The one friendship that did grow up between me and another man came unstuck because of a girl. Fred McDonald was the claims manager of a firm of brokers, called Burton & Hicks, and after we’d met once or twice in the course of business he invited me to his house in Harrow. McDonald was a stoutish bald man in the late forties with a good-looking face that had grown an extra layer of fat all round it. When I went down there I found he had an unmarried daughter of twenty-two called Joan, and we soon grew pretty friendly. I took her out a good bit, and I suppose they all began to think the thing was as good as settled. Then one morning I woke up and realized it didn’t mean anything to me at all, and I cut it off short. I believe she was a good deal upset about it—though if she but knew it she hadn’t missed much.
One day a report came through of a fire in a house in Kent. The Old Man was away with a chill and Michael was busy, so I went down. The people were called Moreton and the address was Lowis Manor, Sladen, near Tonbridge. It took a bit of finding and in the end it was seven or eight miles from Tonbridge and almost as near Sevenoaks. I left my ten-year-old two-seater Riley at a timbered gatehouse and walked up the drive to the house.
I don’t know much about architecture, but something must have registered because I remember stopping before I got to the door, and that wasn’t just to look for a burnt out roof or an eyeless window. It was a biggish, mellow, timbered place, that looked as if it had been there so long that the countryside had accepted it as a part of itself. You got the feeling it had grown there and never merely been built. The centre with the front door was set back between two wings, and the drive broke into a gravel courtyard with flower beds against the walls of the house and steps down to a lawn and formal gardens.
A plump man in tweeds answered the door, and when I explained what I came for he said he was Mr. Tracey Moreton and would I come in.
‘‘We’ve nothing dramatic to show you,’’ he said abruptly as if he might be apologizing. ‘‘ The smoke woke us and we were able to keep the fire under until the brigade came. The damage is chiefly in one room.”
He led me into a low room at the back of the hall, and there was the usual sort of mess: blackened furniture, curtains hanging in shreds, a partly collapsed wall that looked as if it had been hacked away.
‘‘Apparently there was a fault in this chimney,’’ he said. ‘‘The firemen say one of the beams has probably been smouldering for weeks, but last night it reached the store cupboard that backs on to this room from the kitchens, and the jambs caught alight.” He coughed. ‘‘That’s why there’s this stink. My mother noticed it first and roused us. If you’ll excuse me I’ll wait outside. The smoke gets on my chest.”
I had a good look round. The curtains and some of the other flimsy things had been burned, and the furniture had been rather badly charred; but there was no real structural damage except what the firemen had done breaking away the wall round the cupboard. I squeezed through the cupboard into the kitchen and surprised an old girl peeling potatoes, who looked at me as if I’d just popped out of her vinegar bottle. When I found Mr. Tracey Moreton again he led me in a bored way across to a big drawing-room at the other side of the house and poured me out a whisky and soda.
I said: ‘‘It’s been a lucky escape. If there’d been more draught you’d have been without a home to-day.”
He nodded and coughed and put a glass down beside me on a little curved-legged 18th century table. Everything in the room was old and valuable. ‘‘I’ll get an architect round to examine the other chimneys. It’s locking the stable door, of course.”
‘‘I wouldn’t say that. Was there anything of special value in the room: furniture or rugs?’’ After drinking I moved the tumbler around in my hand; it was old Bristol glass.
He said: ‘‘Luckily there was nothing particular except the Bonington, but it’s a bitter blow to lose that.”
In the previous two years I’d learned enough to guess what he was talking about.
‘‘I noticed two pictures. One was a sea scene, but they were both too badly burnt——’’
‘‘The sea scene was a cheap print. The Bonington was of the mill and spinney which used to be at the back of this house. It was specially commissioned by my great-grand-father.” He lit a cigarette but didn’t offer me one. After a minute the whiff of some herbal mixture told me why. He peered at me through the smoke with his small incurious rust-coloured eyes.
‘‘Have you any idea of its value?’’
‘‘I think it was put at a thousand when the insurance was taken out, but its sentimental value’s a lot more to me.” He got up. ‘‘I have the policy somewhere here … but, no—of course, it’s at my solicitors.”
‘‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll check when I get back to Town. About the damage to the floor …”
I didn’t finish because a young woman came in carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. She began to say something but stopped when she saw me.
‘‘Oh, sorry, I thought——’’
He said casually: ‘‘This is Mr.—er—oh, yes, Branwell, who’s come about the insurance. My wife.”
We muttered the usual sort of polite words, and she went across to the grand piano and began sticking the flowers into a tall green vase. She didn’t recognize me. She obviously hadn’t an idea. But I knew her at once. It was queer. I thought I’d forgotten her. But it was just as if somewhere in my mind, in my memory, all the details had been stored and shut away and the sight of her opened them up.
Chapter Three
When she went out, as she did two or three minutes later, I took a lot more notice of him while we finished our business together.
He was forty or a bit more, with sparse fair hair climbing at the temples, and a thin moustache that he couldn’t leave alone
so that his signet ring glinted in the latticed light from the windows. All his movements were irritable and impatient like a man who’s just missed a train. The herbal stuff didn’t seem to be doing his breathing any good.
By now I was getting over the surprise of seeing her again. What did surprise me was that it seemed to mean something to me.
After I’d finished my drink I went back to the study and took a detailed inventory of the damage. With Bonington’s ‘‘Mill and Spinney’’ to be reckoned in, my first estimate was going to be a lot wide of the mark. Before I left I saw Tracey Moreton again, and after a minute he said: ‘‘Were you in the Eighth Army?’’
‘‘Yes … Why?’’
He shrugged. ‘‘Some expression you used. It sounded like the lingo.”
‘‘Were you?’’
‘‘More or less. I was shot down over Tobruk in ’42.”
‘‘What month?’’
‘‘June.”
‘‘I didn’t go out until the end of 1941. I was in Haifa in June. Were you there later?’’
‘‘No, I was living at the expense of the Italian Government.”
It’s always the same when that sort of thing crops up. He’d been polite before, but bored. Now he had a more friendly tone. He came with me to the door—I hadn’t seen any servants except the old woman with the screwed up hair in the kitchen—and I left him there.
I crossed the gravel square and looked across the grounds. On either side of the tall holly hedge that flanked the drive were formal gardens, with box hedgings, a sundial, a lily-pond. Tracey Moreton had gone in. I walked round the house, past an older stone wing and an arched doorway that led to a cobbled courtyard where a man in shirt sleeves was brushing out a stable. He didn’t bother to look up as I went past the doorway. At the west side the ground fell away gradually and had been made into a series of terraced lawns divided by yew hedges. At the foot of them was a tennis court which was rapidly going back into meadow, and apparently no attempt was being made to prevent the solitary pony from grazing wherever the fancy took him. Behind the houses were two greenhouses and some potting sheds. I saw someone moving in one of the greenhouses. It was Mrs. Tracey Moreton.
Fortune Is a Woman Page 2