Kif: An Unvarnished History

by Josephine Tey

  In the early spring of 1918 they spent a leave together in Paris and made the gilt tawdriness of it sheer gold with their youth. The dreary sand-bagged Paris of war-time did nothing to shake the throne that London held in Kif's heart, but there were moments when, the pale spring sunlight falling suddenly from the wide Parisian sky across the squares and the bridges, he paused approvingly in the ploy of the moment, awakened to a half-realisation of the beauty of this war-haggard queen. 'A bonza place,' he said, still using Travenna's phrase as the superlative of praise.

  They went back from waywardness and exuberance to bitter fighting and retreat. By the time that the British army had found a wall to set its back against and had drawn breath for recoil the incident of his Paris leave had faded from the surface of Kif's mind.

  One day at the beginning of April, Carroll, who had been reading a letter from home—that home which he never talked about—handed an enclosure over to Kif and said: 'Want to back something?' Kif took the type-written slip and found that it was a bookmaker's list of prices for the Guineas.

  'I wish I were going to see them,' he said wistfully, and read down the lists with attention. There had been no racing either during his leave with the Barclays or during his leave after discharge from hospital, which he had spent alone in London; and he longed unutterably to taste again the glow and satisfaction of it.

  'What are you backing?' he asked.

  'I'm having Gainsborough for the Two Thousand and My Dear for the Thousand. If you want to have something on I'll send it with mine, if you like.'

  'Yes, I'm having one bet. I'm going to back a filly called Ferry for the Thousand.'

  'Think again!' said Carroll.

  'No. Ferry is the place I know best on earth—Wypers always barred—in fact, it's the place where I was born, and I'm putting a pound on it. How many francs make a pound to-day?'

  Carroll again pointed out that it was a pitiful mistake to back outsiders at a hundred-to-one, especially in a classic race, where form was well known. 'You're worse than a girl,' he said disgustedly. 'They back a thing because it has the same colours as the dress they're wearing. Take a free tip and back My Dear!'

  Kif smiled lazily at him and remained unmoved. And that is how he came to be possessed of a hundred pounds sterling and a bank book. Ferry won the Thousand Guineas at the starting price of fifty-to-one.

  When Carroll, amused and congratulatory, asked him what should be done with his fortune, he decided that he would have it banked and the bank-book sent to Mrs Clamp, who had put him up on his last leave and to whom he wrote more or less regularly. He thought for a moment of asking the Barclays to take charge of the money for him—Carroll did not offer that service—but though he still heard regularly and often from Tim, letters from Golder's Green had grown so infrequent as almost to have ceased. Ann still wrote to him at longish intervals, and her letters were still events which made a whole day vivid for him when they occurred, but he was shy of introducing the subject of money affairs into the correspondence. So he gave Carroll Mrs Clamp's address, saying happily: 'That will cure the old lady! She says no good ever came out of racing. Now she'll have documents to prove the contrary!'

  A fortnight before the armistice Kif developed pleurisy. He was sent down to the base cursing feverishly, since the rumour of peace had been insistent for the last two weeks, and the bitterness of being out of the show now that the great moment had come was insupportable. Ten days later he was in hospital at Eastbourne and the Half-and-Halfers went into Germany without him.

  He would have been mildly bored by his second dose of hospital life, since he knew all that was to be known about it, if the prospect of his imminent discharge had not given him a never-failing source of speculation. In his walks along the deserted front with the grey winter sea thick and still as if on the point of freezing, and Beachy Head very clear and near; to the sound of the falling cards as he played with his fellow patients; in bed at night when the night sister's lamp made a warm pool among the shadows and the breathings and stirrings of his neighbours filled the darkness: always the thought was with him. Free! His own master, with money in his pocket and the world to choose from. There was nothing he might not do. He played with possibilities as a child with coloured balls, tossing them up one by one and watching them spin and glitter and change colour as they turned, throwing up another before the last had come to rest in his hand. There was all abroad to be considered— America, Arizona, Oklahoma. The reality mightn't be as fine as the shining names but there was nothing to hinder his going to see. He might go and punch cows till he had enough money to have a ranch of his own. The life had too decided a resemblance to the one at Tarn, and he would toss up another ball. New York, the home of the self-made. He didn't know anything about office work, but then neither did half the men who had made millions. And anyhow he didn't want to make millions. To go and do and see things while he was young—that was better than making a mint of money. And someday to have enough to take a taxi without counting his loose change; and to own a thoroughbred, bay with black points. But even while the balls rose and twisted and gleamed, deep down in his consciousness, unacknowledged but strong, was the realisation that he was only playing; that the American plains and the South Seas and New York and New Zealand were but foils to one thing, and his consideration of them but sops to his pride. I could do this and this, he boasted to himself, knowing full well that he never would. That he was caught. That once he stepped out of Charing Cross into the Strand again coral islands and cattle plains would be meaningless for him.

  They gave him his discharge in January. 'You are sound now,' the doctor said as he passed him, 'but you will have to be careful for a year or two. No colds and no over-exertion. Good luck!'

  'Ay, ay,' said the master tailor at the depôt, 'so ye're through with it! I mind the day ye went out o' barracks with all yer bonnie white kit-bags and the pride o' the devil…Ay!…Well, good luck!'

  The old lady in the tuck-shop at the gate remembered him. 'You were the boy who used to come for three tuppenny pies every evening. I'm very glad to see you safe. And your two friends?…Ah!…Well, good luck!'

  So Kif came to London possessed of a hundred pounds, his gratuity—the tip a soldier received for dodging death for four years—and a light heart, and clothed by a grateful government in a suit which, thanks to a timely lubrication of an appropriate palm, was one which very nearly fitted him. He decided that he would find a pied-à-terre with Mrs Clamp while he looked for a temporary job which would keep him until he decided upon an investment for his fortune. But Mrs Clamp, loquacious and cheerfully reminiscent, had, for the first time in ten years as she explained, her husband and two of her sons home together, and consequently had no room to spare. She dragged the reluctant Kif into her kitchen and presented him to two of the world-wanderers, clear-eyed taciturn men with wind-bitten faces. They clutched pipes in a nervous silence while their wife and mother trotted back and fore in the preparation of the fatted calf for Kif, and translated for the visitor's benefit their lightest word, their most embryonic gesture, their very silences, into an exhaustive commentary on the world's affairs. She played showman to them very much as she had played the part to their empty garments on Kif's first leave. As they drew in their chairs for the consumption of the calf—fried eggs and sausage—Mr Clamp said to Kif:

  'Looking for a job?'

  'Yes.'

  'Know what you want?'

  'Well, I'll recognise it when I see it. But I'm taking anything to begin with.'

  'Know anything about the sea?'

  'Only enough to keep off it.' Kif grinned.

  'Well, well, perhaps it's just as well. Lots of chaps coming out of navy service. Overcrowding. No prospects. Eh, Bert?'

  Bert, secure in the possession of a first engineer's 'ticket', believed that that was so. And Mrs Clamp took hold of the conversation again. She was not, it appeared, going to turn him into the street unaided. Her sister's daughter's husband had a sister who let roo
ms. She lived in a mews near the far end of Tottenham Court Road and if she had a room vacant would do for Kif right willingly, Mrs Clamp was sure. So Kif, primed with the fat of what was then a lean land, armed with the address of his haven written in pencil on the back of a bullhead, and with a warm feeling under his government suit too high in situation and too potent in effect to be due wholly to eggs and sausage, went out into the street, his hand still glowing from articulation with the hands of the inarticulate mariners.

  When next he went to pay his respects to his benefactor, some weeks later, he found her gone. Mr Clamp had been given a shore job, a neighbour informed him, and they had gone to live at Southampton.

  At 5A Fitzmaurice Lane Kif set up his household gods. His landlady, a pathetic little wisp of a woman with mouse-coloured hair and a subdued manner, had been made a widow by the battle of Arras and supported herself and her child—a girl of five—by letting her rooms and by taking in fine washing. There was sometimes on her kitchen sink, in queer contrast to the rough crockery and the poor room, a foam of lace as delicate and lovely as happy dreams, frail beautiful mockery. Kif, coming into the kitchen one morning to clean his boots, paused at the white heap on the scrubbed spotless wood and touched it with a tentative finger. The stuff fell across his finger-tip with no more friction than would a cobweb.

  'Do people really wear that?' he asked.

  'That they do,' Mrs Connor said. 'Pretty, isn't it? Made by hand every bit of it.' There was vicarious pride in her voice.

  'How do they keep warm?'

  'Oh, that kind live in heated houses, and when they go out they have furs to put on.' Again there was no malice in her tone.

  'Don't you envy them?' asked Kif, who envied no one on earth, but could understand a woman resenting other women's fripperies.

  'If they didn't have them there would be no work for me,' she said.

  It seemed to Kif that there was something wrong with the reasoning, but it was not the kind of thing he bothered his head about. As long as his little landlady was content it was all right. There were times when her eyes were so unhappy, hopelessly unhappy like a dog that has been beaten and, knowing no future, touches the nadir of despair, that he was uncomfortable. He had seen war in being, but he had not till now been brought into contact with the backwash. He had gone through the mill and come out and was free of it. This woman was caught; hopelessly and irretrievably caught. The insane thing was going on grinding her to pieces long after the need for it was over. Kif tried in various ways to show his sympathy and she made it obvious that she appreciated his unspoken goodwill by the thought she gave to his comfort, mental and physical; the garnishing of a dish at supper or a vase of flowers in his room. Hetty, the small girl, fell in love with him and, being at that refreshing age of maidenhood when reticence is not, made no attempt to hide her passion. She would waylay him on the stairs with a brazenness which was disarming, and if an invitation was not forthcoming would invite herself to his room with a mixture of determination and charm which Kif found difficult to resist.

  'Are you going to your room?'

  'Yes.'

  'Are you going to do anything speshul?'

  'No, I don't think so.'

  'Because if you were doing anything speshul Mother said I wasn't to bother you.'

  'Oh, did she?'

  'Shall I come and talk to you for a little?'

  'What will you talk about?'

  Pause. 'Me.'

  She would sit on the edge of his bed, her small thin legs swaying gently back and fore, the movement varied every now and then by a click of the shabby heels. Before he had been many days with them she had catechised him on his birth, parents, beliefs, war experiences, and had passed an opinion on most of his belongings.

  'Why haven't you a tex'?' she asked one day, her round blue eyes on his bare walls. Kif didn't know.

  'How many tex' do you know?' she pursued suspiciously.

  'Oh, thousands,' said her victim, trying a big bluff.

  'Well, say one.'

  Bluff called. ''Fraid I can't remember any at the moment. Haven't used many lately. Only King's Regulations.'

  'That's not a very good one.'

  'Well, you say one.'

  'God is a ghost,' she said promptly.

  'That doesn't sound quite right.'

  'It's quite right. And if you don't know any how can you tell? Shall I give you a butterfly kiss?'

  'Will it hurt?'

  'No-o! It's just a little tickle-ickle. Has no one ever given you one before?'

  'Don't think so.'

  'Poor Mr Vicar!' She pulled the boy down beside her and wound her skinny arms round his neck. She laid her creamy cheek alongside his and, her breath tightly held, brushed his cheek with her long lashes. 'There!' she said, thankfully expelling the pent air from her lungs, 'that's a butterfly kiss. Did you like it?'

  'Rather!'

  'You can have one every day if you like.'

  'Thank you.' Kif gave the slight little body in the curve of his arm a gentle hug and lifted her to the floor. 'You'd better go to Mummy now. I'm going to wash.'

  'Must you wash?'

  'Don't you?'

  'Oh yes. But I shan't when I'm your age. Are you fond of washing?'

  'Love it.'

  'Would you like to bath me? To-morrow's my night.'

  'Don't think I'd be any good at that.'

  'I'll teach you. Please bath me! Please!'

  But this time Kif was firm—until next evening, when, on his way upstairs, he heard soft heart-broken crying from the kitchen and Mrs Connor's patient protesting voice. He leaned over the balusters and said 'Hetty in trouble?' and learned that it was his delinquency in the matter of superintending her ablutions that was the cause of her sorrow. He came slowly and shyly back down the stairs and into the warm kitchen full of steam and the faintly carbolic smell of soap. In an oval zinc bath before the fire sat the infant, her soapy shoulders jerking convulsively to her sobs, her fair hair screwed into a quaint knot at the top of her head.

  'You said you wouldn't come,' she said accusingly, at once defending her lapse by making him responsible and preventing any criticism of her conduct by carrying the war into the enemy's country.

  'Well, I've changed my mind,' said Kif humbly. 'Have you been soaped enough?'

  On every bath night after that he not only assisted at the ceremony but carried her up to bed on his shoulder, a small bundle of satisfaction, half crowing baby, half Cleopatra on her royal barge. Upstairs she reverted wholly to baby and Kif tossed her three times and then tucked her up. He was slightly ashamed of his own enjoyment of these moments, and was glad that no one but Hetty's mother could see him. But he never willingly missed one.

  At 8.30 every morning Kif went round the corner to the little newsagent's and came back with two daily papers. These he studied and clipped in the quiet of his attic bedroom until, about ten o'clock, he sallied forth in all the glory of a made-to-measure suit of the brown he had once coveted on Travenna. Between five and six he came back, tired, and each day a little more disillusioned. He had climbed stairs, penetrated into yards and warehouses, waited in queues, and had been interviewed by all sorts of men who had yet this in common, that they looked at him with one of two expressions: hostility or a pitying contempt. It is an old tale now, that reluctance on the part of the home front's defenders to employ men out of the army, but Kif had to find it all out for himself. Incredulous at first, later in a dull rage that ate up his vitality like a furnace, he pursued the search for a job, any job that would keep him from spending his precious fortune before he had a chance to invest it.

  'What did you do before?' asked the foreman in a contractor's yard where they wanted labourers.

  'A farm servant.'

  'You look it, I must say!' said the man, with a glance at Kif's clothes.

  After that Kif went job-hunting in his government 'tweed'. But the results were no better.

  It was significant that no one asked his a
ge. Kif at nineteen gave no impression of immaturity. Though not so tall for a man as he had been for his age at fifteen he was yet fairly tall, and, as always, well put together. The army had abstracted the drawl from his step and there was nothing left of the countryman either in his appearance or his manner. He carried himself well and spoke easily. Even his accent, thanks to his imitative faculty and Barclay's long proximity, was less rugged. He had presentability, he had a man's strength, and he had the goodwill to work; but no one wanted him.

  So used had he become to rejection that he was almost shocked when he found himself employed as assistant to a greengrocer in Camden Town. Until he had been two days there he could not rid himself of the apprehension that he had been engaged by mistake. Since this relief promised to be merely temporary—his predecessor was 'off with appendicitis'—he continued to live at Fitzmaurice Lane, and studied advertisements in the intervals of enticing carrots and turnips into the packed baskets of Mr Grabham's customers. On his first day he had wrapped up a cauliflower—yea, in fair white paper—and it took him a week to live down his mistake, and to reinstate himself in the good graces of his employer.

  'Paper!' Mr Grabham had shrieked. 'No paper, you great fool!'

  'Don't you wrap up anything, then?' asked Kif humbly.

  'Certainly not. Nothing's been wrapped up for the last two years.'

  'And what's that for?' asked Kif, pointing to the pile of virgin sheets.

  'That? That's just to show that we're a firm that knows what's what, even if we don't do it. And don't ask so many questions. I bet you didn't ask your sergeant questions.'

  Kif's dark eyes rested sardonically on the fussy meagre man with his cockatoo crest of thin grey hair. He had a picture of the mighty chest and withering glance of Mullins, company-sergeant-major. What did this little…

  'I didn't,' he said good-humouredly. 'He usually got in first.'

  I do not think Mr Grabham found Kif a bad assistant. He was at least strictly honest, which, as Mr Grabham remarked in camera to his wife, was a pleasant change from the last five bar one. But when the appendicitic one came back two months later he returned to unemployment with a feeling of emancipation which was as welcome as he recognised it to be illogical. Sometimes among the barrels of apples and the vegetable baskets even in these eight weeks he had had waves of that bitter impatience which he had not known since he left Tarn. Now he was free to pursue the search. The search for what? He was not quite sure. The search, anyhow.