by Gerald Kersh
“I don’t understand,” said Louisa, faintly.
“Here you are then, here you are – tell your mother and dear old pa – Joe Gutkes pays on the nail! The old firm, straight-as-a-die Joe Gutkes, the old firm!” said Gutkes, in his race-course bark. “Here you are then, £480 payable to Mr. Edward Middleton. And my cheque is as good as gold. Grab hold of it, lady, it won’t bite and it won’t bounce. . . . What’s the matter?”
“I felt a little faint.”
“It’s the heat,” said Joe Gutkes. “Have a glass of brandy. . . . Go on, drink it up, it won’t hurt you – Gutkes buys the best and nothing but the best . . .”
When she was gone he said to Shiv: “There you are, luck of the game. I don’t mind telling you when that geezer put a tenner on Little Sneeze I thought the money was as good as in my pocket.”
“You’ve got nothing to cry about, Joe, with all the money in the world on the favourite and the second favourite disqualified. You must have cleared two thousand on that race, so what’s an odd monkey? Now! What about my commission?”
“How’ll you have it, Shiv, cash or credit?”
“Credit,” said Shiv, taking a folded pink newspaper out of his pocket. For Shiv, the collector, invariably gambled away his earnings, and was always in debt to his employers; and the more he was in debt, the more eloquent his indignation with unsportsmanlike debtors who gambled on credit.
So runs the world away.
Louisa met Middleton outside Sweetings.
“What happened?” he asked, frightened by the pallor of her face and the strange shining of her eyes.
“Oh Ted – that horse, that horse – the horse you went and put ten pounds on, on Saturday!”
“Oh my God! As if I didn’t have enough without that! I’d forgotten all about it. It seems like a hundred years ago. Ten pounds on a horse!” cried Middleton, “ten pounds – on a horse!”
“I met Mr. Joe Gutkes——”
“Don’t tell me. I know. He won’t sue me, but he’ll send somebody up to the office to talk to me. I know.”
“No you don’t, because look!” said Louisa, and showed him Joe Gutkes’s cheque. “It won at fifty to one, and we’ve got five hundred pounds!”
* * * * *
They walked to St. Paul’s and back, before Middleton was calm enough to talk coherently. Then he said: “We’d better bank this money at once, to meet that cheque.”
“I forgot,” said Louisa, opening her purse, “look, Ted – here it is.”
“Come on in here and let’s have something decent to eat, Louie dear,” said Middleton, leading her into Sweetings, “because all of a sudden I feel hollow.”
“Me too, Teddykins. I feel I could eat a horse.”
After Louisa had eaten one of her lamb cutlets, and Middleton had taken the fine edge off his hunger with the better half of a fillet steak, he put down his knife and fork suddenly and said: “I don’t understand this. You say that Gutkes said this cheque changed hands five times. Now look. I gave Jack Duck this cheque and got twenty pounds in cash. Then Duck pays this cheque to number two. Number two pays it to number three, who pays it again to number four – who pays it back to me, number five. And here I am, Louie, with this bit of paper in my hand. I’ve had twenty pounds in cash, and five people have been paid twenty pounds apiece out of this bit of paper. Now look, Louie: I’m going to tear this cheque up.”
Middleton tore the cheque into tiny pieces and mixed them in the ash-tray. Then he continued: “Now look, there’s nothing. Well look here, Louie dear. How do you make this out? I’ve had twenty pounds in money. Parties number one, two, three, four and five, have been paid twenty pounds each. Five twenties are a hundred, and twenty makes one hundred-and-twenty. So it means to say that my cheque, which was nothing but a valueless bit of paper, has paid six people £120. It has paid me twenty pounds twice over! How would you work that out?”
“Oh, but it can’t be, surely!”
“That’s what I’d have thought. But it must be. It is so, Louie dear! My cheque was worth nothing, you’ll admit that.”
“I should say so!”
“For a cheque worth nothing I got twenty pounds. Paid into my hand. This cheque goes from hand to hand, five people get twenty pounds or twenty pounds worth each, the cheque comes back to me, and I tear it up, having had forty pounds out of it! Now where did all that money come from?”
“And there’s £480 on top of it,” said Louisa.
“Yes,” said Middleton, nibbling a pencil and describing figures in the air with a forefinger, “yes, but what gets me is: how did a hundred-and-twenty pounds in money or money’s worth come out of nothing?”
“There must be a catch in it somewhere,” said Louisa. “Don’t let’s worry about it now. We’ve got enough to tide us over.”
“ – And that reminds me! You’ll never guess what happened this morning. You can imagine what a state I was in when I got to the office. I don’t mind telling you I’d half a mind not to go back at all. And then, when Mawson tells me to come along, well, my heart was . . .”
A quarter of an hour later Louisa said, with a great sigh: “Oh, Teddykins, Teddykins, you clever darling! Australia!”
“Have a glass of port,” said Middleton.
“Well, Ted, just this once. But promise me – no more bottles of wine and no more gambling. Promise?”
“Promise, Louie dear. Look, it’s just on two o’clock. Walk back with me to the office. I don’t want it to look as though I was imposing on them.”
On the way they met Trew, who, having eaten a cheese-and-tomato sandwich and a plate of tomato soup in a milk bar, was wretchedly hungry. Trew had been very humorous. With tremendous gusto, he told three junior clerks how he had telephoned an old lady in the middle of the night and asked: “Are you the woman who washes?” Shivering with cold and indignation the lady replied: “Certainly not!” Then Trew said: “Oh, you dirty old woman!” But when he tried to borrow five shillings until Friday the junior clerks looked at their watches and said that they had to be getting along; so that Trew had three-and-sixpence to see him through the week.
Louisa felt her husband’s arm growing tense. She pinched it and whispered: “Don’t do anything silly, Teddykins. Leave it to me, please!” She saw that Trew was trying to pretend that he had not seen them. “Hullo!” she cried.
“Oh – hullo. Didn’t see you,” said Trew. “Seen the lawyer?”
“We spent half the morning with him,” said Louisa.
“Everything all right, Middy, old man?”
Louisa pinched Middleton’s arm again and he, understanding, said: “Yes, Trewie, old boy, couldn’t be better. Everything’s in order. We talked to Mr. Charles Pismire.”
“You did?”
“Yes. And another thing, over and above that,” said Louisa. “Do you remember Ted picking a horse and putting ten pounds on it? Little Sneeze – remember? Well, it came home at fifty to one. . . . Show him the cheque, Teddykins.”
Taking Joe Gutkes’s cheque out of his wallet, Middleton said: “Good luck never comes singly, Trewie, old boy, does it? What do you think of this – I’ve just been made manager of the new Australian office at £650 a year plus bonuses and expenses for a start.”
“Eh?”
“ – So it looks as though we won’t have the pleasure of your company much longer,” said Louisa. Then she jogged Middleton’s arm, urging him forward, and they walked on, leaving Trew standing, stunned.
Louisa whispered: “He wrote that letter all right, Teddykins, but how are you going to prove it? And how is he going to find out that what we just said isn’t the truth? He’ll eat his heart up, don’t you see? It’ll just about kill him.”
* * * * *
Trew did not die, as men who are mourned die. He faded, curdled, and grew silent. He will never make more than five pounds a week. But Middleton went with Louisa to Australia, where their son was born. One of the news magazines has printed a story about Edward Middleton
of Coulton Utilities – the diligent, early-rising man; non-smoker, teetotaller, implacable enemy of gamblers, and inveterate Puritan. He is supposed to have a large private fortune, which he never touches. But whatever may be written, this is the true story behind the story.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington-on-Thames, near London, in 1911. He left school and took on a series of jobs – salesman, baker, fish-and-chips cook, nightclub bouncer, freelance newspaper reporter – and at the same time was writing his first two novels. His career began inauspiciously with the release of his first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, published when Kersh was 23: the book was withdrawn after only 80 copies were sold when Kersh’s relatives brought a libel suit against him and his publisher. He gained notice with his third novel, Night and the City (1938) and for the next thirty years published numerous novels and short story collections, including the comic masterpiece Fowlers End (1957), which some critics, including Harlan Ellison, believe to be his best.
Kersh fought in the Second World War as a member of the Coldstream Guards before being discharged in 1943 after having both his legs broken in a bombing raid. He traveled widely before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen, because “the Welfare State and confiscatory taxation make it impossible to work [in Great Britain], if you’re a writer.”
Kersh was a larger than life figure, a big, heavy-set man with piercing black eyes and a fierce black beard, which led him to describe himself proudly as “villainous-looking.” His obituary recounts some of his eccentricities, such as tearing telephone books in two, uncapping beer bottles with his fingernails, bending dimes with his teeth, and ordering strange meals, like “anchovies and figs doused in brandy” for breakfast. Kersh lived the last several years of his life in the mountain community of Cragsmoor, in New York, and died at age 57 in 1968 of cancer of the throat.