The Broken Penny

by Julian Symons

  ‘Yes.’

  Garden handed back the photograph of Peterson. The Colonel pushed it under his blotting pad without a glance, and said almost absently: ‘Now, money. Said you were on the pay roll. Want some?’

  ‘I can’t go far unless you give me some, and that’s a fact,’ Garden said with composure.

  The Colonel hitched up the waistcoat of his suit, and selected a small key from a chain that ran to a pocket inside his trousers. He opened a wall safe across the room and took out an envelope full of pound notes. He laboriously counted out forty of these, and pushed them over to Garden. ‘Two weeks in advance. Let me know expenses. If you run short tell Floy, he’ll fix you up.’

  During the counting of the notes Bretherton had glided palely back into the room. He sat down again now in his corner, staring at nothing. Garden carefully tucked away the notes in a shabby wallet. They made a slight bulge inside the right-hand side of his jacket.

  ‘That’s the lot, then.’ Colonel Hunt abandoned head scratching. ‘We’ll keep in touch, Garden, don’t worry about that. Telephone if it’s very urgent, not unless. Better not make a note of the number, remember it.’ And he gave a Mayfair number. ‘Good-bye. And good luck.’

  ‘Good-bye and good luck,’ Bretherton echoed. He stepped forward, a pallid ghost. His hand, as Garden held it, was cold and apparently boneless.

  In the outer office there was no sign of Mr Hards. Perhaps he had got tired of waiting. Fanny Bone sat primly at her desk. rattling on the typewriter. She flashed a smile at him and then lowered her eyes demurely to the sheet of paper in front of her. The lift took Garden down.

  Chapter Five

  Walking down Station Road, Garden sniffed nostalgically the salt sea air. He passed the Railway Hotel and stopped a moment at the stationer’s that sold comic postcards, many of them remembered from his childhood. The striped-trousered manager, the girl assistant on top of the ladder, the customer gleefully gazing at a fine expanse of leg. ‘Show this gentleman something a little higher up, Miss Jones.’ Or the man in a shop full of parlour tricks balancing three balls on three fingers and saying to prospective purchasers, ‘You should see the trick I played on the wife last night.’

  With a feeling of melancholy Garden walked down the street that ran straight for a hundred yards and then plunged steeply rightward to the sea. Here was so much that had been commonplace in childhood, so much to which time had lent glamour. The tall narrow houses still had short lace curtains across their triple bow windows. In the middle bow a card said, as it had done long ago, ‘Bed and Breakfast’, and another time-dishonoured card in the left- or right-hand window announced ‘Vacancies’. Toy shops displayed hopelessly buckets and spades on this cool day of early autumn. Sweet shops offered confectionery in the shape of sea shells. Beach shoes and swim suits were in the shop windows, as they would be even in February fill-dyke weather.

  At the corner where Station Road turned sharp right to the sea and the pier, Garden looked at his watch. He had twenty minutes to spare. He turned left into the more prosperous part of Brightsand, where lived the stockbrokers and chartered accountants who commuted daily from London, the rich bookmakers and doctors who liked to live by the sea, the retired army officers and maiden ladies who watched their lives drain away year by year in the stuffy lounges of small genteel hotels. Down wide roads full of detached villa residences he walked, most of them with a side entrance for the garage, a strip of green in front and a large square of lawn at the back. Here were Byron Avenue and Scott Road and Wordsworth Crescent, and leading off them other glimpses of a literary Elysium, in streets named for Arnold and Moore and Patmore, Rossetti, Meredith and Morris. In Rossetti Gardens, which was a little shabby but still genteel, he stood for a moment looking at a typical small seaside villa of the year 1910. In this house he had passed his childhood and schooldays.

  How the past overwhelms us as soon as it comes washing through any gap in the high wall we have made to keep out the seas of memory, what a mistake it had been to turn left instead of right. With painful clarity Garden saw himself as a mophaired schoolboy pushing open the slightly squeaking gate, heard his feet on the asphalt drive, halted at the sound of his father’s and mother’s voices raised in angry dispute. What were they quarrelling about? She had spread butter with a ruinously lavish hand upon toast, she had bought a new dress without telling him, she had overspent her household allowance and was asking him for money. Garden’s father was a schoolmaster who combined a Wellsian belief in the betterment of mankind through education and scientific enlightenment with a cramping personal meanness. His mother was a feckless, gentle woman who was quite incapable of adding up a column of figures correctly, or of resisting bargains at sales. One day she had bought three umbrella stands and a dinner service for twenty-four persons, a pair of very old armchairs, sets of the works of Bulwer Lytton and Charles Lever, a shooting stick and a large bird bath. Garden, a boy of twelve, was appalled to find her carefully dusting the books and arranging them so that they should be the first things his father saw. Inevitably the storm broke over her. ‘But they were so cheap,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Junk,’ said Mr Garden. He had come back from a meeting of the Rational Religious Society where, through some trickery, he had been voted off the committee. ‘Filth. Rubbish. Take it away, get it out.’ He gave the set of Lytton a kick and sent half a dozen books flying. One of them smashed a plate from the dinner set.

  ‘Oh,’ wailed Mrs Garden. ‘Look what you’ve done. The set’s ruined.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool. What does it matter whether we have twenty-four or twenty-three dinner plates, there are never six people here to eat. It won’t hurt to break a few more of ’em.’ Mr Garden picked up a volume of Lytton and threw it at a gravy boat. His aim was bad. The book struck his wife over the right eye. She staggered backward against an umbrella stand which tottered, and then fell on to the dinner service, reducing its numbers considerably. Young Garden rushed at his father, hitting out wildly. Mr Garden, who was in principle a man of peace, caught him by the arms. ‘Now young feller me lad, no fisticuffs. Remember, it’s the reasoning faculty that distinguishes man from the brute creation.’

  Mrs Garden’s eye was undamaged, but her sensibilities were deeply wounded. She sank back into one of the newly purchased armchairs, the spring of which squeaked beneath her, and held out both arms to her son. ‘Charlie, Charlie, you’re the only one who understands me.’

  Looking back through the years, as he stared at the very front window behind which many such scenes had been enacted, Garden saw his mother and father as wholly ludicrous figures, and their lives as fragments of Dickensian fantasy. To live through such a fantasy, however, is to experience reality in its most painful shape. Garden was wholeheartedly on the side of his mother against his father, and he fought for her in the most effective way possible, by expressing contempt for his father’s ideas. When Charles Garden was in his teens his father was a man in his middle fifties who believed himself to be in the forefront of advanced thought. Had his son been a Conservative or a mild Liberal he would have felt able to condescend amiably enough to the ignorance of youth. But to be told, as he was, that Wells was an outmoded writer whose mental outlook was as antiquated as his novels about female emancipation, to have his elaborate commentaries on the factual inaccuracies of the Bible dismissed casually with the remark that since every thinking person was an atheist nowadays all that was so much wasted ink, was a harder fate than any he had expected to bear. Nor, indeed, did he feel inclined to bear it, for this apostle of pure reason was a choleric man, strikingly intemperate in his expression of a sweetly reasonable point of view. ‘There’s no use arguing with you,’ he would say to his son. ‘It’s like arguing with a lunatic, a crazy man. Pure materialism indeed, I call it bilge water. Do you mean to tell me,’ Mr Garden shouted at his son, ‘that you don’t believe in a Life Force controlling everything?’

  Garden laughed provokingly with one leg over the old horsehair sofa. ‘C
ertainly. Individual life has no purpose. The only meaning in life is that given to it by social change.’

  ‘Blasphemous rubbish.’ Mr Garden tugged at his frayed collar. The whole of his life outside school had been occupied in a delicate flirtation with different religions, comparisons oftheideals of pure Christianity, Zen Buddhism and Mohammedanism, a quest for the ideal in thought which had been utterly denied to him in the life that had made him a tired and impatient teacher of small boys. ‘Do you mean to tell me you believe in nothing?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Garden. ‘I believe in man.’

  Many years ago those words had been spoken. In 1941 a stray bomber off its course had dropped its load on Brightsand, and one of the bombs had fallen with pleasing accuracy two yards from the air raid shelter in which Mr and Mrs Garden spent their nights, as became logical people who knew that an air raid shelter was safer than their beds. The two old people were killed outright, while the house remained almost undamaged. Garden, who was serving in Africa at the time, felt the deaths to be merely ridiculous until, some weeks afterwards, he received a few pages of manuscript that had been found in the shelter. He recognised them as fragments of the textual commentaries on the Gospels that had occupied so many years of his father’s life. Looking at the pieces of paper, slightly burned and then well soaked, in which a few words and phrases were still discernible in his father’s neat, clear hand, Garden had a sense of the pathos and futility of human effort. Yet in the presence of those pieces of paper he could still say, ‘I believe in man.’ And now, when the years had turned a fresh-faced arrogant boy into the battered man who passed this villa with a wry smile on his way to the pier, many more years of deceit and treachery had left those words unblurred in his mind.

  At the end of Rossetti Gardens you are confronted at once by the sucking, lapping greenish-blue sea. A hundred and fifty yards of small restaurants and teashops, with two amusement arcades and half a dozen sellers of Brightsand souvenirs brings you to the long finger of the pier that points more than half a mile into the water. Along here Garden walked, looking at two boys skimming the water with stones, sniffing up memories with the ozone. The deck chairs had been put away, the front was almost deserted. Beside a beach photographer’s hut a man lounged with a camera strapped round his neck. Garden paid his twopence toll and stepped on to the wooden boards of the pier. The time was just before two o’clock.

  As he walked up the pier it seemed to him that he caught a glimpse of somebody hurrying the other way, a figure for some reason vaguely familiar, but when he turned to look the figure, if it existed, had passed through the turnstile and out of sight. Passing the idle Brooklands Skooter Race track, looking casually at the people who sat reading newspapers on the sheltered side of the pier, Garden shook off the distant past that seemed here to surround him, and thought again of his coming meeting with Peterson. What would they have to say to each other, he and this ghost who called himself by the ridiculous name of Floy? How had Peterson got out of prison, what had he done during the war, what above all was he doing now in some kind of secret government service? There was a kind of assurance of integrity and truth for Garden in the knowledge that Peterson was his companion in this affair. Vivid in his memory was that day in the prison and the words: Believe me, I do not hate anybody. And then Peterson abruptly turning away. This time there would be no need to turn away.

  Garden had reached the end of the pier. Nobody was standing by the third seat from the end on the jetty side, but near to it there were two men fishing. As he watched, one drew back his line and cast out to sea. Garden walked round the dance pavilion, an empty wooden blob topped by an onion dome. He did not see Peterson. Iron steps led down to the platforms underneath the pier, almost washed by water, which were used in summer as landing stages. Garden made a circuit of the pavilion, walked back to the third seat on the jetty side and stared out to sea. He looked at his watch. The time was ten minutes past two.

  Twenty minutes later he had made another circuit of the onion-domed pavilion, and had returned to his position by the sea. Nobody had spoken to him. The two men were still fishing, and now one of them, a thickset figure with a handlebar moustache, showed for the first time some sign of animation as he began to reel in. He beckoned to the other man, a green-jerkined figure, who carefully propped his rod and went over. Green Jerkin tentatively testing Handlebar’s line, nodding sagely. Both looked a little askance when Garden joined them.

  ‘Rod’s caught up,’ said Handlebar tersely, in reply to Garden’s question. ‘Something carried it under the pier. Don’t want to break it. I’m going down.’ Green Jerkin took the rod and Handlebar went to the end of the pier and began to descend the iron steps.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Garden said. He clattered down the stairs after Handlebar, looking down upon good broad shoulders and a head of hair with a tonsured patch. They walked along the stone fretwork together, the sea just beneath them.

  ‘Don’t get many people stopping up this end of the pier when there’s a bit of a blow,’ Handlebar said. ‘Waiting for somebody?’

  ‘Just taking the air.’

  Handlebar grunted. They were now directly under the pier, invisible from above. ‘Here we are.’ He bent down within a foot of the sea. ‘Got tangled round the pillar. But why – my God, what’s this?’

  A dark, shapeless mass had come into view as Handlebar pulled. Garden felt a premonition, that turned in a moment to certainty, about the nature of the mass. He heard Handlebar’s cry, ‘It’s a man,’ he knelt down and disengaged the hook that had caught in the man’s coat, he helped to pull the sodden thing on to the iron stage. The thing was on its back, but sight of the face was merely confirmation of his knowledge. The body, cold and lifeless, with a little seaweed ornamenting the left ear, was that of Hans Peterson.

  In one steady look Garden took it all in: the face, more terribly gaunt even than in the photograph, the long matchstick of a body, the open mouth that deprived death of dignity. Then he turned away.

  Handlebar uttered an exclamation. ‘I know him. What do you think of that? Seen him half a dozen times in the last week. Often on the pier. And there he is now, dead as a doornail. Makes you think. Here, what’s up, you look a bit greenish. Did you know him too?’

  ‘No,’ Garden added with an effort. ‘We ought to tell somebody. You go and do it. I’ll wait here.’

  ‘You look as if you’ve had a shock.’ There was no chance, Garden thought, that he would go unremembered. Handlebar’s rather prominent eyes were popping forward at him.

  ‘Sure you don’t know the chap?’

  Garden forced himself to look down again at the body. Water from it trickled slowly on to the stone fretwork. ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘All right.’ With one last stare at Garden, Handlebar walked away. His feet clattered decisively on the stairs.

  He must go at least to the end of the pier, Garden thought, and first he will tell Green Jerkin. If he comes down here I shan’t have more than a couple of minutes to spare. He dropped on one knee and turned Peterson over again. He had glimpsed the tear in the cloth when he and Handlebar lifted the body out of the water. Now the two holes were clearly visible. A dark stain showed round them in spite of the body’s immersion. Peterson had been stabbed twice in the back. Thinking quickly while he turned over the body again and went through its pockets, Garden thought that Peterson must have come early to keep the appointment, or perhaps made an earlier appointment with somebody else. He had been lured down to the landing stage, stabbed twice in the back and pushed into the water. Whether he had died from the wounds or been drowned did not seem of much importance. Then, by a queer stroke of luck, he had been caught in Handlebar’s fishing line.

  There was a wallet in Peterson’s breast pocket. In his jacket pockets there were some papers, in his trousers only coins. Garden put back the coins, and stuffed the damp wallet and papers into his own pocket while he pondered his next move. There was no sign of Green Jerkin, who was presumab
ly waiting at the top of the iron stairs. It seemed to Garden essential that he should get away and report to Colonel Hunt without being seen or questioned. He walked to the end of the landing stage and looked contemplatively at one of the pillars that propped the pier. The pillar was covered with green weed, and looked uninviting. On the other hand it was not very far away, and if he could climb up it he would come up well out of Green Jerkin’s view. There was in fact, no other way. Garden looked back once at the body of his friend, then gathered himself at the edge of the platform, and jumped.

  He clasped the pillar tightly and tried to inch up it, but it was like climbing a greasy pole. Twice he almost slipped back into the water, then he was able to tear and push away some of the weed and got foot and handholds. After an unpleasant couple of minutes he was on one of the ornamental iron struts below the pier, desperately cleaning rust and weed off his old raincoat. He climbed the strut, waited to make sure that there were no onlookers and swung himself over on to the pier. He took off the raincoat, folded it over his arm and walked off the pier. He did not see Handlebar.

  The first thing to do was to look at Peterson’s papers. Garden paused uncertainly for a moment, took the first turning right off the promenade and then the first left, and went into a teashop called The Chinese Lantern. This was a teashop of his youth, and he half expected to see old Mrs Brewis or her pretty daughter come to take his order. But the waitress who came was a placid, solid, square young woman who merely shook her head when he asked about Mrs Brewis. Garden ordered a pot of tea and some bread and butter. His hand was in his pocket to take out Peterson’s papers when something hard jabbed him in the side. A voice said, ‘Well, what a coincidence.’ Garden looked up to see the neatly rolled umbrella – which had just poked his ribs – the apple-red face and black bird’s eyes of Mr Hards.