“It was all right in peace time,” she explained. “Whatever you did for him then could be done without much strain, but it’s so different now. Almost everybody’s got as much to put up with as they can stand, without going mad! You’ve always been a very strong person, Bernard, but nobody’s as strong as you’re trying to be, and nobody could do the things you do, and then multiply it by two, every day!”
“I’ve never minded watching out for him,” he said gruffly.
She had then to make a big decision. She had to decide whether she should try and explain that his endless, self-imposed guardianship of Boxer was simply the result of the pond incident and of the guilt he attached to it. That might help him but then again it might not, for it might even set him off into a labyrinth of half-baked speculation that would lead him straight to the medical people whom the soldiers called ‘head-doctors’. Once there they would almost certainly treat him for the equivalent of what people once called ‘shell-shock’ and now called ‘battle fatigue’ and this would mean the end of his active service and an abrupt separation from his twin.
She did not think he could sustain the shock of such a separation, not, at all events, in his present condition, and she was determined not to confuse him with the little she knew of psychological treatment, being wise enough to know that her small stock of knowledge was hopelessly inadequate. What she wanted to do and what she yearned with all her heart to do, was to persuade him that his fancies were the result of months of physical strain, punctuated by short, murderous bursts of action, that he was not really sick but exhausted with the double burden he had been carrying for so long.
“It’s like this, Bernard,” she said, finally, “when you go back you’ve got to begin to relax, at least as far as Boxer’s concerned! You’ve got to get used to letting him take his own chances, not only when you’re fighting but at all other times, in camp and off duty. You’ve got to try and concentrate on looking after yourself for a bit and letting him learn to look after himself. If you don’t you’ll crack up and once that happens you’ll be separated. Then he’ll be on his own anyway. Do you see what I mean?”
“Aw, what does it matter, anyway,” he argued but, without letting go of her hand, “I daresay we’ll never get through, neither of us! We lose half our mob every time we go out!”
It would have astonished Boxer to have heard Bernard talking like this. Until then the war had always been such glorious fun and a show like Vaagso something to which they had looked forward. How was Boxer to understand that Bernard found it impossible to forget the shuddering shoulders of the Little German who had tired to surrender after throwing the grenade.
Pippa said: “I think you’ll come through Bernard because I think you’ve got the other half of your life to live. I think if you want that half enough you’ll have it given to you but if you don’t you won’t. You see, you haven’t really begun your own life yet but when you do you’ll need someone to share it, because you’ve been so used to sharing that you wouldn’t have any use for a life on your own…. When you remember that you’ll come looking for me, and I’ll be here, and we could be very happy together, because I love you and I’ll always try and look after you the way you’ve looked after Boxer!”
She had made up her mind to say more. She was going to be quite ruthless and tell him that he would find no release until Boxer was dead, but suddenly his head was against her breast and he was sobbing, so that there was no point in saying more and she could only hold him there, soothing him, as though he was a child who had been desperately frightened and had run to her for help and comfort.
They remained still a long time but presently, when he was calmer, she inclined her head and softly kissed the short, fair hair on his neck.
He did not move when an elderly woman pedestrian walked past the seat and stared curiously at them. Pippa met her glance defiantly and the woman, suddenly embarrassed, looked away and quickened her step.
With hands coarsened by contact with miles of camouflage netting Pippa began to stroke his cheek. It was then that she saw, with wonder, that he was sound asleep.
Archie had succeeded in talking his way out of the situation arising from his disposal of the gin and whisky, sold to him by the obliging Mr. Swift.
It is difficult to decide who was the more surprised by this, Archie, himself, or his lawyer, Mr. Roland Yelland-Parkes, of Parkes, Follett & Co. This was a firm to whom Archie had given much business in the past and who owed him, he felt, loyalty to the point of willingness to perform legal acrobatics.
Mr. Yelland-Parkes appropriated to himself most of the credit for the acquittal and Archie was too tired, and far too relieved, to begrudge him the credit. Probably honours were even, for while Mr. Yelland-Parkes took every conceivable advantage of the smallest fissures in the prosecution’s case, it was Archie’s brilliant performance in the witness-box that made the decisive impression on the jury, a jury that included two women, both housewives, and both over forty.
At the original hearing Archie took his solicitor’s advice and elected to go to Quarter Sessions and be tried by jury and when it came up the case occupied the court the better part of two days. During the first day’s hearing Archie had plenty of leisure to study the jury and determine the point of attack.
It was soon clear that the jurors had scant sympathy with Mr. Swift and his unlikely story of how he came by the goods featured in the indictment. His explanation was dismissed by them as an insulting fiction and Archie was not surprised, for Mr. Swift, heavy-jowled, lemon-eyed and potbellied, looked exactly like a current cartoonist’s caricature of the black marketeer. He cut a pathetic figure in the witness-box and under cross-examination he lost his temper, said more than he had intended to, and ended in floundering. He was found guilty early in the second day’s proceedings but because the cases were linked his sentence was postponed until Archie’s had been heard.
The first part of Archie’s defence was straightforward. He had been introduced to Mr. Swift by reputable wholesalers, whose names he obligingly supplied. He had purchased the cases of spirit in good faith and could produce a receipt (made out and back-dated an hour or so after the initial visit of the detectives) and the receipt was admitted as evidence, after a great deal of legal blather on the part of Mr. Yelland-Parkes and his learned opponent.
After that, however, the defence looked as if it had spent itself. As the prosecution was quick to stress, a man who has purchased two cases of spirits in good faith does not normally throw them into a pond on a dark night and do so, moreover, immediately after a conversation with detectives.
Archie met this challenge by facing it boldly and freely admitting that he had acted throughout like a hysterical fool. He was a much better actor than he knew and halfway through his testimony he began to gain ground. He dropped all his aitches and acted the part of a slow-witted, bewildered man, contrite and apologetic. He hung his head and several times hovered on the edge of a good, honest snivel.
“The fact is,” he told the court, blinking his eyes to hold back tears of shame, “I was so overworked at the time that I ’ardly knew what I was doing! Fact is, I got into a muddle with my coupons and I’d been up, night after night, trying to make ’em come right! It’s like this see, I try…well I try an’ see everyone get their fair share and that’s difficult when you…well…when you feel so sorry fer customers, especially the ladies, with big families…”
He trailed off and glanced piteously at the nearest female juror, whom he had decided must surely be well acquainted with a grocer’s difficulties in wartime.
Sensing his advantage he warmed to his work and stood up very well to his cross-examination, owning himself to be a fool, a hopelessly incompetent businessman, a soft touch, a stranger to simple addition, anything except a deliberate fraud. At one point his agony of self-abasement embarrassed the prosecution, for when he was asked, in crisp, pitiless tones, how he—as experienced grocer—could have been taken in by Mr. Swift’s story of how he h
ad acquired the spirits, Archie hung his head, and muttered: “I’m just a grocer, sir, not an educated man like you, sir! You see, I didn’t get no schooling, not to speak of, on account of the last war! All me life, sir, I been getting diddled, sir!”
Mr. Yelland-Parkes, who had had the advantage of several long conversations with Archie, dropped his spectacles at this, but he recovered quickly, and nodded sympathetically when Archie returned to his errand-boy days and before being checked by the Judge managed to add a few, deft touches of colour to the outline of the narrative.
By the time the defence had been completed the jurymen, and certainly the jurywomen, were rather confused about Archie. He had been represented to them as being a slick, prosperous profiteer, a man who was gleefully battening on the country’s agony and amassing a personal fortune by under-the-counter merchandising. He had been described, by implication, as a tradesman who, in his reckless pursuit of profit, was eager to consort with men like the wretched Mr. Swift and to buy rationed goods for resale at outrageous prices. The Archie they saw before them, however, bore no resemblance to this monster. He was an earnest, balding, browbeaten tradesman, tired to the point of a breakdown by the manifold difficulties of a wartime provisioning, and anxious only to make a clean breast of what appeared to be a childish act of folly on his part.
The jury was out for more than an hour and when they returned Archie was given the benefit of the doubt and Mr. Swift, who had a record, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.
It might be imagined that Archie would be elated by his triumph, that it would restore to him his pre-war confidence in himself and send him out into the world taut and eager for fresh sallies into the haunts of other and more wary Mr. Swifts. Alternatively, it might be supposed that the margin by which he had missed accompanying his wholesaler to gaol would deter him from engaging in black-market activities, and he would now rest content on his legitimate and by no means inconsiderable profits.
In point of fact he followed neither of these courses, for as things turned out he was never given an opportunity to follow them. Mr. Yelland-Parkes, who was somewhat shaken by his client’s virtuosity in the witness box, congratulated him rather hastily and departed, leaving behind him an impression that Archie would do well to find another firm of solicitors if he had need of one in the future.
So Archie drifted back to his corner shop and tried to pick up the threads of his businesses, lost during the anxious weeks preceding his initial hearing and his trial.
There was plenty to be done—staff to be sacked, new staff to be found, returns to be checked, coupons to be sorted, goods to be ordered, accounts to be examined, and heaven knew what else to claim his attention. For a month or two Archie tried hard to grapple with the complicated situation. He visited all his branches, sold off five of them, sat up over his ledgers until the small hours and generally made a strenuous effort to catch up with the clock. It was all in vain. Something had happened to him when those two lean men had loomed out of the dusk in the muddy lane down by the pond and he was now like a man trying to stem a torrent assailing a crumbling dyke. As soon as he had planted his feet and braced himself to hold out the water at one point it poured through at another, until at last he began to lose heart and seek relief in the bottle.
This (as he would have told you himself in the days before his nerve began to go) only made things progressively worse. He began to send wrong sets of papers to his accountant and make quick but ill-judged decisions on important issues. If Elaine had been at hand, and he could have relaxed now and again, he might have been able to pull himself together, but Elaine was far away in Cornwall, solacing a homesick Dutchman, and he found no relief in occasional expeditions to the West End, or in the arms of a shopgirl whom he succeeded in seducing. This last incident, indeed, ended humiliatingly for him, with the girl’s brother committing assault upon him on the threshold of his Crowley Park branch.
As summer succeeded spring Archie began to grow desperate. In one last bid to sort himself out he suddenly disposed of all his remaining branches, except the Avenue shop, selling at a loss in order to be rid of responsibilities that threatened to drive him into an asylum.
For a month or so after this he wobbled along on a fairly even keel. Then the Inland Revenue representatives began to call on him and he was in no condition at all to take up their challenge but simply passed them on to his tame accountant, who settled for what seemed to Archie a fantastic sum of money rather than face court proceedings that might have been fatal to both of them.
Archie paid up but it cost him every penny he had in the bank. The night he wrote out the cheque he consumed a whole bottle of whisky and reeled off to bed still sober enough to remember, with gratitude, his iron rations in the oil-drums under the store.
He woke next morning with a throbbing head and a sour taste in his mouth, but he was accustomed to dealing with hangovers and set about vanquishing this one by holding his head under a running tap and swallowing pints of Alka-Seltzer and black coffee.
After a light meal he was much better, and felt more clearheaded than he had been for months.
He went up into the biggest bedroom overlooking Shirley Rise, the room in which his partner and father-in-law Toni had died watching the moon ride over the Lane elms, and began to review his position with something like his former detachment.
He was still, he told himself, several jumps ahead of most people, for he still had a sound, old-established business, and was done with the pestilential Inland Revenue for a spell. In addition, nobody of whom he was aware had got anything on him for under-the-counter wholesaling, whereas he still had capital, three large oil-drums full of capital! With this reserve, and the war still in full swing, he could always begin again, possibly in some other sphere, property perhaps, or government contracts of one kind or another. He would take a holiday first. God, how he needed a holiday! He would go down to Cornwall, and coax Elaine away from her Dutchman. That should be easy enough, with three oil-drums stuffed full of cash. They could go to Blackpool, where they had enjoyed themselves so much before this run of bad luck began, and after that he would set about making money again.
He got up, crushed out his cigarette, hitched his belt and almost ran down the wooden steps into his yard. In another moment he had the heavy doors of the store open and locked them behind him, and was moving the crates that concealed the trapdoor to the tiny vault.
The excavation was waist-deep and brick-lined. Archie had made it himself, acting upon the principles of those Elizabethan families who had constructed priests’ holes on their domestic premises. The three oil-drums, two for the silver and one for the notes, stood in a row, buried under a litter of shavings and tissue paper that had once protected Jaffa oranges.
He jumped blithely into the pit but as he did so his foot glanced against the nearest drum. The hollow clang that resulted made him pause; he remembered that the drum containing the notes had stood furthest from the trap-door and there should therefore have been a clonk not a clang, from the dram he had kicked. Puzzled, he kicked it again and it rolled over, booming. He almost fell upon it, up-ending it, and shaking it in a frenzy of bewilderment.
It was empty and he flung it aside, reaching for the next drum but this too was empty! He flung it down, his brain recoiling from the implication, and braced himself against the sides of the opening for a moment, before projecting himself forward and falling on his knees beside the last and furthermost drum.
He tipped it towards him, twisted off the cap and squinted down into the hole, hoping against hope to see paper, wads and wads of paper. He saw only the yellow sheen of long-dried oil, for this drum too was empty!
Someone had been to the vault and eaten his iron rations!
For what seemed a long time he knelt there, telling himself over and over again that what was happening to him was only part of a nightmare, that, in a moment or two, he would wake up and find himself in bed, with the keys of his store on the bamboo table beside the
bed.
Then his eye caught a dull gleam among the shavings near his right knee. His hand shot out and picked up an odd, shapeless lump of metal, about the size of a child’s fist.
He looked at it in dismay and recognised it as a lump of half-crowns and florins, stuck together so firmly that they might have been welded. The exterior coins were a dull green and the gleam came from the milled edges of those in the centre.
He turned it over in his hands and the clammy feel of the metal restored him to reality. He knew now that this was not a dream, that he was actually here, in his own private vault, handling this ridiculous blob of coins that was all that remained of his reserve, the product of years and years of till-gleaning, dating right back to the day when he had opened his first sub-branch.
The enormity of the theft fogged his brain. There was no one, no one in the entire world save only his son, Anthony, who knew of the existence of this vault, and Anthony had landed in Egypt months before his father’s last inspection of the drums. Apart from that, Anthony did not possess a key to the store, nor, indeed, did anyone but himself!
For a moment or two he considered the possibility of someone having spied upon him whilst he was visiting the vault but he soon dismissed this as an impossibility. Invariably, when coming here, he locked the doors behind him and there was no window or chink through which he could have been observed from the yard.
He did not see how the money could have been removed by human agency and although by no means a superstitious man the obvious alternative made him glance over his shoulder.
Finally he stood up and groped his way out of the hole and out of the store. His car was standing in the yard and he crossed to it and got in, leaving the store doors swinging open.
He sat for some minutes at the wheel, forcing himself to consider every possibility. Certainly not Anthony. Certainly not a casual thief. Then obviously someone who not only knew the whereabouts of the money but had access to the store and could enter without forcing an entry, traces of which must have remained.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 22