Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  In 1954 she returned home with me and soon married a consultant geologist, a jolly fellow who fully appreciated my difficulties and brought me up to get the best out of my adopted country: in fact, to accept what must be accepted and enjoy whatever could be enjoyed. Having preserved with the utmost tact his reputation as a sound party member and being on excellent terms with Russian colleagues he got himself posted to Egypt to work on the Assuan Dam. Since my mother had recently died—her heart not equal to her gay vitality—he managed to take me with him. He had a theory that the dam was going to play merry hell with the Nile Delta and suggested that some young agronomists should take a look at the problem in the ground. As I was then at an admirable Agricultural College—a keen student but in no way an expert—I was chosen to be one of the team. Family connections are as useful behind the Iron Curtain as anywhere else.

  To me Egypt was the fabulous scene of British victories, wicked imperialists or not. But I found that I was not allowed to see much of the country or to mix freely with its people; the Russian colony was more closed and self-sufficient than the British had ever been. Boredom with the whole deadening system became intolerable. On an official visit to Cairo I slipped away to the British Consulate where I presented my birth certificate.

  Of course, it was still far from plain sailing. Since I was close on nineteen I was entitled to my passport after details of my story had been confirmed, but I refused to have it sent to me for fear of compromising my sympathetic stepfather. So three months later I escaped—at least that was what I called my unauthorised dash to Cairo—and fortunately found my passport ready and waiting.

  So there I was, unquestionably British but with no means of earning a living. The foreign merchants who would gladly have employed me had all been expelled; the native Egyptians had little use for a waif of dubious antecedents who could not speak Arabic. For two years I was a hanger-on of hotels and travel agencies, making just enough from small tips and split commissions to eat once a day and pay the rent of a bug-ridden room. There is no need to go into the shame and misery of it all. From this existence without a future or any chance of affording my passage to England I was rescued by the police who ran me in together with a few other forgotten, destitute British subjects. We were shipped home at our government’s expense.

  Due to my languages and do-anything appearance I landed a job as the lower sort of courier to a travel agency, which led me out of England almost as soon as I returned to it. For six months I stayed in Paris, attending incredulously to the stereotyped requirements of motor-coach tourists from the Midlands. In one such party was Herbert Sokes, demonstrating that he was just one of the boys though well able to afford greater comfort. I was useful to him—seeing to his personal tastes and, more important, ensuring his privacy—so he offered me a trial as personal assistant. The orphan from Egypt, who had the sense to say nothing of his embarrassing Romanian background, accepted gratefully. This was the stake in my own country which I wanted. Councillor Herbert Sokes, O.B.E., a small manufacturer of automobile accessories, seemed to me solid ground from which to climb the ladder of conventional living.

  I spent two years in—or rather just outside—the factory of Sokes Ltd. Besides his managerial office Sokes had another, which he called the Parlour, where he received his private and political visitors. It was in a small cottage adjoining the factory with its own front door opening on to a quiet alley. I at first assumed that the most important piece of furniture in the Parlour was likely to be the comfortable couch. I was quite wrong. In his own community Herbert Sokes’s private intrigues were all directed towards increasing his private capital.

  This small town boss is of no real importance to my story, but without him I cannot explain myself. He was a director of the local mortgage company and had a sleeping interest in an estate agency. As leader of the Conservative opposition on the Borough Council and a close friend—outside the council chamber—of the Labour chairman of the Housing Committee, he knew of all likely developments within the town. But his integrity was unquestionable. He always declared his interest, refusing to vote on any issue where private advantage might conflict with public service. Sokes was never corrupt and avoided any shadow of suspicion when he corrupted.

  I thought I understood my employer and enjoyed our enigmatic relationship. He made a cheerful pretence of treating me as an unprincipled black sheep to whom anything might be confessed, and occasionally added to my small salary a cash bonus when I was bound to know a little—it was never everything—of the means by which a handsome profit had been secured. Sometimes I acted as runner between Councillor Sokes and his supposedly bitter opponent Alderman Gunsbotham. I was not shocked. My country-bred integrity had been overlaid by all I had observed since the age of twelve. What else could politicians be but crooks? Only newspapers pretended to be horrified. For me the essential was that I had come home at last and that my affection for my employer was returned.

  On that evening when he and I finally parted he did not follow his usual practice of approving or altering the private correspondence in my claustrophobic office but asked me to come into the Parlour. It was impossible to tell whether he was worried or not, for he kept up his Rotary and Committee manners with everyone except his wife—always jolly and never warm. His neat, oval face was a very clean-shaven mask, pale except where red and blue veins bore witness to the quantity of whisky and water which had to be consumed for the sake of good fellowship and never noticeably affected him.

  He waved me towards table and chair and poured me a drink. Himself sitting on the couch, he looked through the typed correspondence. His position somehow disassociated him from personal interest, as if he were running through family documents which only vaguely concerned him. He made no remark on three letters which I had been instructed to sign myself, one of which was the effusion to his washily depraved seventeen-year-old in Wandsworth.

  ‘Good! Now there’s one more little thing I want you to do for me, Mr. Gurney,’ he said.

  He never addressed me as Adrian. I approved, though observing that in other offices the use of Christian names was becoming common.

  ‘All right, guv’nor! Let’s have it!’

  The office called him ‘Mr. Sokes’ or ‘sir’. Guv’nor was only used by the factory floor. I had picked it up before I was quite at home with all the subtleties of address and had then stuck to it. There seemed a slightly disreputable air about guv’nor which suited our intimate relationship.

  ‘I need your receipt for that twelve hundred pounds. Just a formality. You’ll never hear any more of it.’

  I was accustomed to handling cash for purchases or commitments in which the principal did not wish to appear. Another useful intermediary who could perform the most delicate disappearing tricks with bundles of notes was the local bookmaker, Len Shuffleton, Turf Accountant, who fascinated me. In his own dealings with the public the man was scrupulously honest; otherwise he was a crook well up to Egyptian standards.

  It was to him that I had paid, a month earlier, the sum of £1,200 in cash—an amount which suggested one thousand plus twenty per cent commission. What Len had done with the thousand I strongly suspected. It had been paid to Alderman Gunsbotham for carrying his committee and party with him in an eloquent plea for the hard-won savings of the poor.

  On the outskirts of Caulby were seventy acres of muddy land occupied by three struggling small-holders and their tumble-down cottages. Herbert Sokes and his dubious estate agency were after so promising a building site, but any move on their part to buy would have been instantly answered by a compulsory purchase order for Council housing at the low price of agricultural land, easily carried by the Labour majority.

  To their astonishment Sokes himself proposed this compulsory purchase from the Conservative benches. The Labour councillors were disconcerted. They agreed with the motion; on the other hand it was their duty to vote against anything whatever proposed by Conservatives. Which way they would jump depended on their leader, Al
derman Gunsbotham.

  He spoke passionately against the hard-hearted motion of the Conservatives, Labour alone watched over the interests of the helpless. It was iniquitous to drive them out of their properties, bought with the miserable savings of working men, and force them to accept a price far too low to buy any other accommodation. So long as he and his great party were in control the land would never be bought compulsorily.

  The result was that both parties emerged from the dispute with honour and the plaudits of the local press. Gunsbotham had stood up nobly in the interests of the poor and secretly earned a thousand pounds for carrying his party with him. Sokes had reinforced his reputation for bluff honesty and—now that the Council had denied any intention of compulsory purchase—was free to buy the very contented smallholders out of their mud at the full market price and was holding the land for resale to the highest bidder.

  Devoted servant though I was, I hesitated to give a receipt for money I had never had and I asked the guv’nor what he would do with it. Councillor Sokes laughed with his invariable geniality.

  ‘Quite right to ask, Mr. Gurney! You’re quite right! Well, it will go into the office safe and you can forget it.’

  ‘Not your personal safe?’

  ‘The cheque you cashed for that twelve hundred was on the firm’s account, not mine. So the firm must hold your receipt.’

  Something certainly had to be in the firm’s safe for the auditors. I suggested charging it to advertising and said I thought I could fix the agent. He did not respond. He seemed to resent the hint of partnership.

  ‘I understand that you wanted to buy a house. The firm is very generous to its employees.’

  ‘It would be like you, guv’nor,’ I said after thinking this over. ‘If I really needed the money, I believe you’d let me have it. But where’s the house?’

  ‘You are negotiating the down payment. I’ll deal with that through our mortgage friends.’

  So he could probably; but it was the devil of a lot to ask. Affection insisted that Sokes would never let me down, while instinct was strongly against signing anything more beyond amorous correspondence.

  ‘Well, if you are sure there’s no other way out …’ I began.

  ‘It’s the easiest—a straightforward receipt back-dated. Sign it and you won’t be the loser. The last thing we want is any unpleasantness.’

  Unpleasantness. One could take that in several ways. I assumed my employer was referring to the fact that the political manoeuvres had left a slight but increasing stink. Sokes urgently wanted that receipt so that he could challenge rumours by throwing open bank accounts to anyone who wished to inspect them.

  ‘I’ve never been the loser yet, guv’nor,’ I answered gratefully, ‘and I know you well enough to be sure I won’t lose any of your respect if I just want to give it some thought.’

  ‘My respect?’ Sokes asked incredulously.

  ‘Well, I mean—as a businessman, would you do it yourself?’

  His face slightly reddened. When he was annoyed, it was a reaction he could not control. Again, I saw that he did not relish any parallel between himself and his personal assistant.

  ‘Under the circumstances I should.’

  ‘Perhaps that is what I haven’t understood, guv’nor—the circumstances.’

  ‘They could be, Mr. Gurney, that you forged my signature on a cheque for twelve hundred pounds. But we’ll forget that. I want our relations to continue just as they are.’

  I replied that he couldn’t be serious, that Len Shuffleton could witness I paid the money to him.

  ‘You went straight from the bank to a bookmaker with twelve hundred pounds of the firm’s money?’

  I fully appreciated the threat. In Shuffleton’s books were lost credit bets in the name of Adrian Gurney though they didn’t amount to much more than thirty quid and Len had never yet pressed for settlement. That account could be altered to show that I had made a losing bet of twelve hundred on some favourite which was dead certain to win and had not. I doubted if Sokes when he instructed me to cash the cheque and take the money round to Shuffleton had ever intended an accusation of forgery; on the other hand he always left himself a way of retreat. I remembered noticing that Sokes’s signature on the cheque had been in some way too careful, too deliberate. Suppose he had written it slowly over a tracing?

  The right game was to calm him down. Anyone, after all, would try to avoid losing the good will of a useful, very confidential employee.

  ‘In a hole, guv’nor?’ I asked sympathetically. ‘But surely to God there’s a way out without wanting to fix me?’

  ‘Want it? Of course I don’t! What I want is for you to do what you’re told and forget about it.’

  ‘I’ll forget about it all right. That’s part of the job. No reason for any embarrassment between us.’

  ‘That is why I chose you, Mr. Gurney. I should have some trouble in finding anyone in this part of the world quite as obliging as you.’

  The implication was a savage shock. To Sokes, then, I was an unscrupulous, anglicised wog. And wasn’t it a fact? Like all cruel accusations which are ten per cent true, it immediately became ninety per cent true to the guilty conscience at the receiving end. My own picture of myself, when caught up in Sokes’s deals and diversions, had been one of a loyal, cynically tolerant retainer. To a young man intimately acquainted with corruption—in Romania subtle and involving status rather than cash, in Egypt considered more entertaining than regrettable—there was nothing exceptional about Sokes either as a businessman or a local politician.

  The bitterest disappointment of all was to find that Sokes had no affection for me. His lack of shame in my presence was because I didn’t count. I was just a private pimp to be sacrificed when necessary in the certainty that I was too defenceless to do any damage and would not be believed if I tried.

  I told him that he would not get his receipt.

  ‘I shall, Mr. Gurney,’ he said, ‘when you think over the alternative.’

  I walked back to my depressing lodgings in a fury of agitation. I could not bring myself even to stop at my usual pub for a drink and a game of darts, feeling that the geniality of my acquaintances might be, like my employer’s, a mere opening and shutting of the mouth. The sudden discovery that Sokes despised me shattered all self-confidence.

  Unable to bear the prospect of landlady’s chops and tea, I bought a bottle of cheap red wine and plunged into a grubby little Italian restaurant off the High Street. The front of it was normally occupied by young criminals and their admiring friends; at the back was a room where the few foreign workers at Caulby were made welcome if they chose to drop in for a meal. I went there seldom, for my enjoyment of the place worried me, as if a disloyalty to my English birth.

  I had dreaded the loneliness of my room, but loneliness at my table was that of the observer, alive and calculating. Veal and spaghetti, wine and harsh coffee helped to smooth out the two years of Caulby into some sort of perspective.

  Would Sokes really go so far as to accuse me of forging that cheque and betting on a certainty with the money? Assuming that he had some very good reason to be alarmed, it looked as if he might. And then any magistrate would decide there was a case to be answered. What have you to say for yourself? Your Worship, he told me to pay that twelve hundred to the bookie and he made his signature on the cheque look as if it had been forged. But Mr. Sokes and Mr. Shuffleton deny anything so ridiculous. Mr. Sokes does not bet and you do. Moreover both these gentlemen, one a very prominent citizen of our town, have given evidence that their only contacts are on the management of the Old Peoples’ Home to which both have been good enough to give much of their valuable time.

  Bail or remanded in custody for further enquiries? The enquiries when answered would not be helpful. No character from any employer. Earned a dubious living on the streets of Cairo and Paris. And then out would come my very private secret: that I had been brought up in communist Romania. If I refused to give that receipt an
d Sokes carried out his threat I was going to be for all my life a suspect foreigner who had been in trouble with the law without a trade or any qualifications.

  Right then! Could I counterattack and put the screws on the guv’nor? Of all I suspected how much could be proved? Most of my knowledge of his dealings was composed of direction pointers, unmistakable to the personal assistant but pretty worthless to an outside investigator. The bribe to Alderman Gunsbotham was typical. I had no conclusive evidence. I could be indicted for criminal slander. No, I had nothing of genuine interest to the police, nothing even that the Caulby Herald, with the law of libel brooding over the editorial office, would dare to print.

  Another thought leapt out of my bottle of wine. Sokes could have covered up that bribe to Gunsbotham in half a dozen different ways. The receipt he required me to sign was not essential. So his threat of prosecution was for general use against a potential blackmailer, intended to hang over my head if I opened my mouth about any dirty deals, past or future. It bound me into perpetual slavery—possibly quite profitable but leaving me always at the mercy of my employer. It was no wonder that he had resented any suggestion of partnership when he had all along considered his personal assistant on a par with a seller of filthy postcards.

  So Caulby and Sokes were exploded, leaving me among the fall-out a free man without any ties of interest or affection. Suppose I just bolted and restarted a career somewhere else? But that would be most convenient for Sokes. A sudden disappearance was strong evidence, if it were needed, that the twelve hundred pounds had gone with me.