by Paul Sussman
‘I’m sure everything will turn out just fine,’ I assured her. ‘They really seem very pleasant girls. I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything rash.’
‘Oh Mr Phoenix, you do put my mind at rest! You’re right, I’m sure. They are wild, but at least’ – and here she leaned close to my ear and dropped her voice to a whisper – ‘at least they are unblemished. Oh dear, Mr Phoenix, has something gone down the wrong way? Here, let me pat your back. Did you know Liverpool’s had a royal charter since the reign of King John?’
Aside from making love to the Miss Gristles and listening to the wireless, the only other social life I enjoyed was an occasional visit to the cinema – as a simple, thr’penny punter, of course; my matinee-idol days were long gone – and a Friday-night trip to the pub with Bentham of Bonds.
As his name implied, Bentham worked in the Simsby’s Bonds Department. An averagely built man with extremely bad skin, his first name was Isembard, but he never used it, preferring to be addressed simply as Bentham.
Bentham was what you might call my best friend of the period. He was, indeed, what you might call my only friend of the period, since, the Gristle girls apart, he was the only person with whom I enjoyed anything that might fairly be termed regular social intercourse. Not that our friendship was a particularly close one. We neither confided in each other nor bought each other drinks, nor even particularly liked each other. Looking back on it, indeed, I am at a loss to explain why I bothered to spend any time with him at all, since he was without doubt one of the most inane people I have ever met.
Spend time with him, however, I did – four hours of it, every Friday evening, when at 6 p.m., having completed our day’s business, we would meet beside the revolving front door of the bank and walk together to the Empire in Hanover Street.
‘Go Dutch, shall we?’ Bentham would inquire as we pushed our way to the bar.
‘Fine by me,’ I would reply.
We would purchase our drinks separately – a half of stout for Bentham, a large Scotch for me – and ensconce ourselves in a corner seat.
‘A good week?’ my companion would inquire.
‘Passable,’ I would reply. ‘And yourself?’
‘Passable,’ he would respond. ‘Very passable. And how goes it in Bullion?’
‘Fine, fine. Nothing untoward. The bank’s silver is as safe as ever.’
‘Good, good!’
‘Although I did find a dead fly in the safe on Tuesday.’
‘Gosh.’
‘And Bonds?’
‘Same as ever. Nothing out of the ordinary. They’re thinking of printing them on a new type of paper.’
‘Good heavens!’
‘Although nothing’s been decided as yet.’
‘I see.’
‘Bus fares are going up again, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. It’s going to cost me tuppence extra to get to work.’
‘Dear oh dear!’
And so it went on, a slow back and forth of inanities until the clock struck 10 p.m., by which point I would be on my fifth double and Bentham on his sixth half of stout.
‘Good heavens above,’ my companion would exclaim. ‘Is that the time! I really must be going or I’ll miss my bus.’
‘Well, if you do, at least you’ll save yourself the fare!’
‘Ha ha ha! I like that. Miss the bus but save the fare. I’ll have to tell my mum that. She likes a laugh. Good night.’
As he stood in front of me buttoning his raincoat – which he invariably wore, whatever the weather – I always had the urge to lean forward and squeeze his penis very hard through the material of his trousers, just to see how he reacted. I resisted the temptation, however, instead accompanying him on to the street, where we each went our separate ways, he back to the house he shared with his mother in Knowsley, me back to Mrs Gristle for a cup of tea and a chat about her daughters.
‘Driving me mad, they are, Mr Phoenix! Mad as a hatter. I feel you’re the only one who understands.’
‘There there, Mrs Gristle. It’ll all turn out right in the end. They’re good girls, of that I’m sure.’
Which is, in a nutshell, how I spent my nine years in Liverpool. They were admittedly unspectacular years, and in many senses rather dull ones, but after the whirlwind of my life in America it was actually quite pleasant to slip back into quiet and anonymous mediocrity. I certainly never found myself wishing things were any different.
The Photo I kept snug in the inside pocket of my jacket, removing it every now and then for a wistful look at its cracked and fading image. The Pill, meanwhile, I extracted from the gold ring in which I had kept it during my Hollywood days – pawning the latter to raise money for my first month’s rent – and consigned to an inner pocket of an old calfskin wallet which I purchased at a Sunday flea-market. From Emily I heard not a word.
And so things might have continued – steadily, dully, anonymously – had the Germans not taken it upon themselves to invade Poland in 1939, thus precipitating the outbreak of the Second World War. Amongst the many crimes that can be laid at the doorstep of the Third Reich, not the least was the scuppering of my brilliant banking career.
Like most people in Britain, I’d listened to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s radio broadcast announcing that we were now at war with Germany and, like most people in Britain, I had, over the subsequent weeks, gradually adjusted myself to the exigencies of the situation. I had, for instance, helped Mrs Gristle take all her pots and pans to a local collection point so that they could be melted down and made into armaments, and joined in enthusiastically with the construction of large, baize-covered frames to black out the windows of the bank. One thing that never occurred to me, however, was that I might actually be expected to do something ridiculous, such as fight.
The awful truth only hit me one morning in early December of that year when I received a letter from the conscriptions department of the War Office requesting my attendance at a medical fitness test. I immediately wrote back informing them that, since only those aged between 18 and 28 were at that time being called up, and since I was currently just shy of my 40th birthday, there must have been some mistake. I heard nothing for a fortnight, and then received another letter exactly the same as the one before, and from exactly the same department. You have to give it to the Civil Service: they’re certainly persistent.
Suspecting I might have more success face to face, I decided to attend the fitness test and argue my case in person. I duly presented myself at a nondescript building on the outskirts of Liverpool one bitterly cold late-December morning, queuing for half an hour with several hundred others before eventually finding myself in front of a puce-faced man in a white coat sitting at a trestle table.
‘Name?’ he snapped.
‘Phoenix,’ I replied. ‘But there seems to have been some mistake—’
‘How do you spell that?’
‘P.H.O.E.N.I.X., but you see, I’m 39. I’m too old to be here. There’s obviously some confusion—’
‘Initials.’
‘R.I. I was in America for some time, you see, which might be why your records are—’
‘Address?’
‘117 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool. Look, I shouldn’t be here. I’m 40 in a couple of days.’
‘Take this form and go behind that screen. Next!’
Behind the screen was another man in a white coat, who shoved a wooden spatula in my mouth and made me say ‘Ahhh!’ I tried to tell him there had been a mistake, but had barely begun when I was dispatched to another part of the room to have my reflexes tested, and then another to have my chest examined, and another to have my testicles squeezed, and so on, and so on. In the end I had to do the whole bloody medical from start to finish, and suffer the indignity of being told I was one of the healthiest people they had ever seen, before I finally managed to collar a senior official and make my grievance known.
‘Thirty-nine, you say, sir?’
‘That’s r
ight. Almost 40.’
‘Well, I must say, you’re in extraordinarily good shape for your age.’
‘That’s not the point. I shouldn’t be here. I’m outside the age group.’
‘That would certainly seem to be the case. I can’t think what’s happened. Most unusual. We’re not examining anyone over 28 at the moment.’
‘Well, there you go. I’m entirely the wrong age.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘And you’ll do something about it?’
‘Oh yes. Up to 28 and no older. That’s the order. There’s been a slip-up somewhere. We’ll put it right, don’t you worry.’
‘Thank you!’ I said, relieved. ‘I don’t mind saying I’ve been rather worried about it. Not that I don’t want to fight, of course. I’d just rather do it alongside people of my own age.’
‘I quite understand. We’ll get it sorted out. Trust me.’
Which, foolishly, I did. Foolishly because, four weeks later, in the freezing late January of 1940, by which point I had convinced myself that December’s error had now been fully rectified, I received my enlistment notice. It took the form of a rectangle of grey-green card bearing my name, address, registration number (LHZ 35720) and an instruction to present myself to No. 6 Training Regiment, Catterick Camp, Yorkshire (nearest railway station Richmond.) And as if that wasn’t enough, I was expected to do it that very day. Whoever was screwing up at the War Office wasn’t doing it by half-measures.
I stared at the damned thing in horror, and then – having no intention whatsoever of acting upon it – stuffed it into my jacket pocket alongside The Pill and The Photo and stomped off to work. Which is where, just an hour or so later, I killed my Mr Popplethwaite. Bad day all round.
There were two separate, and quite distinct, factors involved in Mr Popplethwaite’s murder. One was the Simsby’s bullion safe, of which more in a moment. The second was a large wheel which dropped, quite unexpectedly, through the roof of the bank as we all went about our morning business.
The wheel, all 500lbs of it, rubber and metal, belonged to a Blenheim bomber, one of a number of such planes engaged in low-level training exercises up and down the Mersey River. Each day a number of these would take off from an airfield just to the north of Liverpool, drone south across the city, fly up and down the river for a while, and then drone away back north again, their business complete.
On the morning of Mr Popplethwaite’s murder, the very same morning I received my enlistment notice, at about 9 a.m., as I was getting down to dusting the bullion safe, one of these planes was experiencing difficulties with its undercarriage, which refused to close as it was supposed to after take-off. The pilot wrestled manfully with his undercarriage controls, but was unable to rectify the problem and, directly above the centre of Liverpool, at a height of about 9,000 feet, radioed Control to say he was returning to base. Even as he spoke, however, there was a loud wrenching sound and one of his wheels dropped off the underside of the plane.
Precisely why the wheel fell off was never properly established – theories aired at the subsequent inquiry included metal fatigue, sabotage and a fundamental flaw in the design of the Blenheim. Fall off it did, however, dropping from the plane’s belly like a large rubber birdshit and plummeting earthwards straight towards the roof of Simsby’s of Castle Street.
I had, I recall, just finished oiling one of the bullion safe’s combination dials, and was tiptoeing across the room to water my house plant, when I heard a loud crash somewhere in the building above me. Several loud crashes, in fact, each getting closer until, with an ear-splitting roar, an enormous round object burst through the ceiling and smashed through the floor directly in front of me, its passage throwing up a lung-choking billow of dust and plaster and knocking me backwards off my feet.
For several moments I was too stunned to do anything and merely lay, flat on my back, covered in biscuits of rubble, coughing violently and mumbling, ‘What the hell!’ over and over again. Eventually, however, I pulled myself together and, rubbing dust from my eyes, knocking lumps of plaster from my shoulders and checking to make sure I didn’t have any broken bones, struggled to my knees and took stock of the situation.
The wheel appeared to have hit the building at a slight diagonal, punching its way like a large fist through whatever floors and ceilings happened to be in its path, so that from where I was kneeling it was possible to gaze upwards through a succession of gaping, jagged-edged holes to a large patch of blue morning sky high above.
‘Bloody hell!’ I muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’
Having noted the state of affairs overhead, I duly turned my attention to that around and below me. The middle of my room, where only a few minutes ago my desk had been standing – where only a few minutes ago I had been standing – now consisted of a wide, gaping crevasse, the sides of which were formed of teeth-like shards of splintered wood. Looking into this chasm, I could, despite the dust, clearly make out Mr Popplethwaite’s room beneath, in the corner of which the wheel had eventually come to rest, lying on its side like some enormous snail.
‘The bloody Germans are dropping wheels on us!’ I cried. ‘Bastards!’
So fascinated was I by the sight of the wheel, and so outraged by the thought that the Germans had dropped it, that it was some while before I noticed, almost directly beneath me, covered in dust like a heavily floured suet dumpling, the recumbent figure of Mr Popplethwaite. He was slumped on his castor-footed chair with his head thrown backwards, one of his spectacle lenses shattered. A small chunk of plaster sat plum in the middle of his forehead like a third eye, whilst in his left hand he was holding his pill bottle, the contents of which had spilled out all over the floor. His bow tie was all skew-whiff.
‘Are you all right, Mr Popplethwaite?’ I called, uncertain whether he was alive or dead. ‘Are you injured?’
He made no reply.
‘Mr Popplethwaite! Can you move?’
Still no reply. I fumbled in my pocket and found an old pencil rubber, which I dropped through the hole. It landed on his nose, and caused him to judder somewhat.
‘Burghhhhh,’ he mumbled. ‘Burghhhh.’
‘What is it, Mr Popplethwaite? Are you trying to say something?’
‘Burghhhh!’ he repeated, lips trembling, chest heaving up and down. ‘Booooooo!’
‘Blood?’ I offered. ‘Are you bleeding, Mr Popplethwaite? Should I get bandages?’
He shook his head wearily from side to side.
“Boo . . . Boo!’
‘I can’t understand what you’re saying, Mr Popplethwaite. I think you might be delirious.’
Again he shook his head, this time more violently than before, and, clutching the arm of his chair and taking a long, deep breath, he raised his head a little and sputtered a single word:
‘Bullion!’
So shocked had I been by the wheel’s sudden appearance that I had, up to that point, given no thought to the Simsby’s bullion reserve, nor the solid steel monstrosity in which that reserve was secured. Now, however, I turned my head, very slowly, very carefully, and noticed with some alarm that the giant safe, which had previously stood flush against the wall, was now listing forward at an angle of some 20 degrees from the vertical. The floor beneath it appeared to have sagged rather and, even as I watched, there was a creaking, splitting sound and the safe dipped forward another couple of degrees. It was evidently only a matter of time before gravity got the better of it and it crashed downwards on to the head of Mr Popplethwaite beneath.
‘Are you all right, Mr Phoenix?’ came a voice from outside my office. ‘We heard a crash.’
‘Yes!’ I replied, as quietly as possible. ‘I’m perfectly OK. But don’t come in. There’s a big hole in the floor.’
‘A hole in the floor!’
‘Yes, yes. Just don’t come in. And don’t move. Stay where you are and don’t clomp about.’
Very slowly, very delicately, hardly daring to breathe, I inched my way across the room un
til I was crouched beside the safe. There was another groan and a creak and, with a horrible wrenching sound, one of the floorboards beneath the vault snapped in half and clattered down into the room below, narrowly missing Mr Popplethwaite’s head. The safe trembled.
‘Mr Popplethwaite,’ I whispered, trying to keep my voice as low as possible, ‘the bullion safe is in a rather precarious position. If you can, you must try to move.’
He stared up at me, uncomprehendingly, eyes blinking.
‘Bullion!’ he sputtered. ‘Bullion. The very crux of banking!’
‘Mr Popplethwaite, please! Your life is in danger. You must try to move.’
There was a deep groan, and beside me the safe listed forward at an even more precarious angle. The floor seemed to buckle before my very eyes, and splinters of wood rained down into the room beneath, piling up on Mr Popplethwaite’s head and shoulders like pine needles. The least nudge would now have been enough to upset the safe and send it crashing downwards.
‘For God’s sake, move!’ I snapped. ‘Get out of the way, man. It’s going to come straight down on top of you.’
For a moment it seemed as if my words had had some effect, for Mr Popplethwaite’s feet, acting, it appeared, independently of the rest of his body, which remained slumped and motionless, began paddling up and down on the debris-strewn floor, each paddle moving his chair backward an inch or so away from the hole in his ceiling. After he had gone perhaps a foot, however, he came to a halt and moved no further.
‘No!’ he mumbled. ‘No! Must stay with the bullion. We have our reputation to think of! Excellence and Security since 1781! Three lords, two admirals and 18 knights of the realm!’
Most people, I suspect, especially those actively involved in the world of finance, would have been deeply impressed by this show of selfless dedication to duty. This was a man who placed the wellbeing of a single, rather paltry, silver ingot above that of his own self. It is upon such heroes that the foundations of banking are built.