by Tim Heald
This Wartnaby clearly did find the question peculiar.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he asked. If so he implied he didn’t think it funny.
‘No,’ said Bognor. ‘It’s not a joke at all. I’m trying to trace a friend of mine called Osbert Wartnaby.’
‘I think you have a wrong number.’ Decidedly testy now.
‘No, no.’ Bognor did not want him to ring off. ‘It’s the right number. Just the wrong person.’
He did ring off.
Damn and blast. He sat down hard on the bed and ran a hand through thinning hair which he really must get Monica to cut. If Monica would ever cut his hair again. What to do? Phone again? No point. The geriatric Wartnaby of Magnolia Avenue or his housekeeper would hang up as soon as he breathed, then report him to British Telecom for committing a nuisance over the public wires. Magnolia Avenue. Of course. He had the address. A cab, a cab. He put on his mac and hurried forth on yet another voyage of discovery and missing by no more than five minutes a very important call from his boss, Parkinson, who was in a fine rage before making it and a finer still when there was no answer from Bognor’s room.
The Wartnaby residence was the end of a Victorian terrace half-way out towards the Bog. There were tell-tale signs of modest yuppification in some of the other houses — carriage lamps, brass dolphin knockers, out-of-place bow windows with bottle-bottom panes of glass — but number thirty-five looked as if nothing much had been done to it this century. The window sills were peeling and split, an upstairs window had one broken pane filled with cardboard and Sellotape, the guttering had come adrift just above the front door so that a moss green streak ran down the wall to one side, several tiles were missing from the roof and the net curtains were off-grey. Bognor pressed the bell, heard nothing and knocked loudly instead.
Presently the door opened and a thin woman in carpet slippers and a flowered pinafore over a grey skirt and beige cardy told him the house was not for sale. She had a wispy grey moustache and a dew-drop on the end of her nose.
‘I came to see Mr Wartnaby.’
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘No, but it’s very important. I’m from the Board of Trade.’ He produced his plastic ID and waved it under her weeping nose.
‘Mr Wartnaby won’t see anyone without an appointment.’
From the inside of the house a quavering voice called, ‘If it’s the headmaster, Mrs Simkiss, show him in, show him in.’
‘It’s not,’ Mrs Simkiss called back. ‘It’s a stranger.’
Bognor put one foot in the door and was startled by a nasty growl from behind Mrs Simkiss’s thick-stockinged knees. A dreadful mangy mongrel stood there, snout peeled back over yellow rabid teeth.
‘Bonzo bites,’ said Mrs Simkiss.
‘If it’s about the football pools I’d like to talk to him,’ called Wartnaby.
‘Is it about the football pools?’ Mrs Simkiss asked.
‘Er’ said Bognor. ‘It’s exceedingly important.’ He was getting wet.
‘Oh, very well.’ Mrs Simkiss’s capitulation was sudden and unexpected. ‘You’d better come in. Bonzo, leave the gentleman alone.’
Bonzo did some more heavy-duty growling but did not bite. Bognor stepped off the pavement and into a house where time had stood still for at least twenty years. The smell was a musty mix of boiled vegetable vapours and carpet impregnated with urine, presumably Bonzo’s. The walls of the hall — more of a corridor than a proper hall — were covered in peeling paper of the darkest tobacco brown and there were pictures everywhere. Most of them looked as if they had been cut from old issues of the Illustrated London News. There were a great many of King Edward VII, one of Lord Kitchener, another of Lord Haig, several ocean liners of Lusitania vintage.
Mrs Simkiss shut the door behind him and ushered him into a room off this passage. This too was dark brown with more pictures of a similar kind plus a number of school photographs — some those enormous long thin ones with hundreds of suits, others of rugby and cricket teams. On top of one or two were old caps, some hooped, others little fez-type football ones with gold braid and tassels and small peaks. All over the floor were piles of yellow newspapers tied with string. There was so much furniture that it resembled nothing as much as a junk shop. An extraordinary jostle of occasional tables, a dining-room table, and three battered chaise-longues. On one of these, originally upholstered in bottle green but so stained with wine and food and ink that it resembled a patchwork quilt, there reclined a very old man indeed. His lower half was covered in a tartan rug and his upper was wearing a dark grey suit with waistcoat. He wore a stiff white wing collar and a dark blue tie with a pearl pin. His face had the cadaverous, ultra-wrinkled texture of lizard-skin.
‘Mr Wartnaby?’
‘I don’t recognise you, boy,’ said Mr Wartnaby. ‘Stand by the window so I can see you properly.’
Bognor, startled, stood in the window. ‘It’s not Festing Two, is it?’ asked Wartnaby. ‘I taught your father. Very idle boy. Very idle boy indeed. Caned him for idleness. Gave him lines. Made him learn Lars Porsenna but none of it made the slightest difference. I don’t suppose he came to any good.’
Bognor was appalled to find himself half transformed to the schoolroom of thirty and more years ago.
‘Actually, sir,’ he said, ‘I’m not Festing. My name’s Bognor.’
‘Bognor Bognor … no, I don’t think so. I don’t remember a boy named Bognor. There must be some mistake. My memory’s not what it was. Will you take a glass of Madeira? Mrs Simkiss, two glasses of Madeira, if you please. It isn’t often that we’re honoured with a visitor. To what do we owe the honour, Mr Bognor?’
With exceedingly ill grace Mrs Simkiss poured amber liquid from a decanter, opaque and grey with neglect, into two glasses which also looked as if they had never been washed. They seemed to Bognor to have a definite patina of years of spittle and Madeira.
‘I …’ said Bognor, and dried. He tried again. ‘I’m from the Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade,’ he said, hideously aware that as opening gambits went this was worse than useless. Who was this Wartnaby? What had he got to do with the other Wartnaby? He glanced at one of the photographs. It contained about seventy boys sitting in front of an imitation Colditz Castle only with more drainpipes. Underneath there was a crest and, in Gothick, ‘Wartnaby’s 1956’.
The penny dropped. In the middle of the seated prefects there was a middle-aged gent in tweed jacket and striped tie who was almost certainly Wartnaby, forty years yon. Well, getting on for forty. On his right the starchy woman with the white matron’s cap was Mrs Simkiss also minus forty. Wartnaby was Scarpington’s Mr Chips, fallen on hard times, housekept by Matron. Bognor gazed hard at the boy on Wartnaby’s left, an arrogant little sod with a fancy brocade waistcoat and a supercilious expression.
‘Puce,’ he said out loud. ‘That’s Puce.’
‘Ah,’ croaked the figure on the chaise-longue, cradling his wine glass with hands like chicken’s feet. ‘Puce. Most remarkable boy I ever encountered in my entire school career. A true leader of men.’ He slurped some Madeira, spilling some on his shirt front. ‘A very very remarkable boy. Remarkable.’
‘You must have taught Moulton and Festing and Brackett and Brown?’
Bognor seemed to be through the crisis of establishing his own identity. Wartnaby was up and running through his past. All he needed was a prompt. It didn’t matter where it came from. Or from whom. ‘Moulton was surprisingly good at geography and he won the shot-putt in ’58,’ he quavered, ‘but he would not clean his shoes. Time and again I had to beat him for not cleaning his shoes. Festing was a grubby little boy. Grubby in mind, grubby in body. Went on to the varsity, though. “Festing,” I used to say, “if you go on festing like that you’ll festle away into nothing at all.”’ He cackled. ‘But Puce was a fine boy. Even as a new bug he had so much character. Character with a capital “C”. I told the headmaster that very first term. “Headmaster,
” I said, “we have a very remarkable boy in the school. He is only thirteen years old but already he has more leadership qualities than boys of twice his age. He will do great things for Scarpington.” And so he has. So he has. He’s had a very remarkable career. The child is father to the man, I always say, and that was true of Puce. Not what you’d call an intellect but a leader of men right from the very first.’
Bognor subjected the Wartnaby’s House photograph to a more detailed scrutiny while debating whether or not to drink his Madeira. He guessed the alcohol should kill most of the germs. So it was probably safe. He might as well let the old boy rabbit on, in the vague hope that he might say something of interest. It was Puce, all right. Three stone and forty years — well, nearer thirty — had made a difference, but if you scraped them away it was Puce to a T. And there was Moulton and there Festing and there … Ah! Bognor almost spilled his drink with excitement. There, at the very end of the middle row, that downtrodden boy with the disgruntled expression. He too was familiar. Three breakfasts in a row Bognor had seen the man fathered by this child. This was his Wartnaby.
Very gingerly he removed the photograph from its place on the wall. Dust scattered everywhere and there was a neat rectangle of a different shade of brown where the picture had been. Bognor tiptoed over to the old schoolmaster who was still burbling on. He was not only very old but extremely smelly. Bognor wondered if he had maligned Bonzo.
‘I say, sir,’ he said, hearing himself also sounding like a reincarnation of a much earlier self, ‘who’s that, sir?’ And he pointed at young Wartnaby sitting on the end of the bench far from Puce and the housemaster and matron and the seats of power.
The old eyes wept with the effort of screwing themselves up to focus. Concentration wrinkled the Auden lines and furrows of that vespertilian countenance. The old man willed himself to remember.
‘A very dim boy. A very dim boy indeed. No recollection of him at all. No, wait. His father had an accident. Very tragic. Ran some sort of milk bar and was killed by a car. It’s coming back to me. Sad business. Then the mother killed herself. The boy had to leave early. No money, you see. I’d forgotten all about him until this moment. It must be almost thirty-five years. Very sad story, but not a nice boy. Something very spiteful about him. Other boys didn’t like him. He was never a boy’s boy. Mrs Simkiss, Mrs Simkiss, what was this boy’s name, the one who had to leave after his parents died? The father ran a milk bar.’
Mrs Simkiss came to the chaise-longue, bent over the picture and frowned. ‘Smith,’ she said at last, ‘Peter Smith. Not a nice boy at all. A bed-wetter. Right up until the time he left.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘An answer is always a form of death’ (John Fowles, The Magus)
PUCE WAS ALREADY AT The Laurels when Bognor arrived. He opened the door to him. The MP was drinking whisky from a Brierley crystal glass. A cigar was smouldering in an ash tray on the hall chest. Puce’s smile was fixed but relaxed and he was still in his funereal suiting. He wore it like a hand-fitted carapace. He seemed more than usually impregnable.
‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘to the Artisan Club. You’re very privileged. It’s rare for us to admit non-members. But as a Board of Trade inspector I suppose you could argue that you are one of us. You’ll join me in a Scotch.’ This last was an order, not an invitation. Bognor acquiesced and Puce led the way upstairs to the bar with its half-size billiard table and sporting prints.
‘We operate an honour system,’ said Puce, measuring a double Teachers from the optic. ‘The only time we have a barman or any other staff in is when we have some sort of formal gathering here. Which isn’t usual. It’s a very informal sort of place, as you can see. Take a pew.’
They sat in uncomfortable leather chairs stuffed with horsehair.
‘Cheers,’ said Puce. ‘What can I do for you? I’m a busy man. My chauffeur is calling for me in just over half an hour. I hope that’ll be long enough.’
‘Cheers.’ Bognor took out his notebook. ‘That’ll be fine. I just wanted to see where it all happened and to ask you one or two questions for my report. Partly about you and partly about the Artisans.’
‘Fire away!’ Puce thrust his chin out like Mussolini. It was a gesture of symbolic defiance. It said ‘Sock it to me, Sunshine. Me Tyson, you Bruno.’ Bognor wondered if there was any chance of denting the ego. He was afraid not.
‘I’m interested in the amount of power you exert in this town, Sir Seymour,’ he began. ‘Everywhere I turn you seem either to own the company or be the chairman or a close personal friend of the owner or the chairman. Even here in the Artisans everyone concedes that you’re the one who calls the shots.’
Sir Seymour allowed himself a smirk of self-satisfaction. If all the questions were going to be as doddly as this he was going to have no problem.
‘It’s true that I have a certain position in Scarpington,’ he said, ‘but as the Member of Parliament I believe passionately that I am elected by my constituents to represent them in Parliament and to do my best to look after their interests. I am in a very real sense a servant of the people. As is any MP.’
Bognor scribbled. He wanted to seem deferential, at least for a while.
‘For a servant of the people you’re remarkably rich and powerful.’
‘I’ve worked hard all my life to build up a series of highly successful companies. This is a capitalist country, thank God. We’re more prosperous than we’ve ever been in Britain and in Scarpington. When I was a lad I remember men coming to watch football at the Bog in clogs. There’s none of that any longer and I take pride in it. Pride and some credit.’
Bognor decided to try a gear change.
‘We at the Board,’ he said, ‘are interested in what makes the British businessman tick. It’s why I’m here. Now, obviously, like you he’s interested in profit, a high standard of living, company cars, all that kind of thing. But I wonder where the Honours system fits into all this?’
Was it Bognor’s imagination or did the great man suck a little harder on the fat cigar before answering this. Not that it was a very interesting answer.
‘How do you mean?’ was what he said.
‘You have a knighthood,’ said Bognor. ‘I wondered to what extent your career and behaviour have been dominated by the possibility of becoming Sir Seymour.’
‘My knighthood was for “political services”. Nothing to do with business.’
‘Or money?’
‘Or money.’
Sir Seymour’s eyes were narrowing.
‘Reg Brackett had an MBE.’
‘For services to charity. Reginald was a fine man. He did a great deal of very splendid work for the poor and underprivileged of this city.’
‘For which he got an MBE.’
‘That’s the way we do things in this country. We reward those who perform exceptional services over and above the normal. Reg did. So he got his MBE.’
‘Nothing to do with twenty thousand pounds? Or services rendered?’
‘Just what are you getting at?’
‘I’m suggesting that in Scarpington honours are for sale. To be precise, I’m suggesting that you are selling them. I have one informant who claims that he has paid you a large sum of money in return for a guaranteed gong in next year’s New Year’s Honours.’
‘Poppycock!’
‘He sounded pretty convincing to me. In any case,’ Bognor smiled a sickly smile intended to ingratiate, ‘we’re men of the world, Sir Seymour. And the Board takes a thoroughly pragmatic view of life. If it works, then it works. If an “honour” can be shown to have a material value, then we at the Board like it. The Board of Trade is not about ethics or morality. It’s about the facts of life, money making the world go round. If selling honours makes Scarpington more efficient in the market-place, at the point of sale; if it works, then, frankly, it’s OK by us.’
‘Very neatly put, Simon.’ Sir Seymour exhaled. ‘You had me worried for a moment. I thought I’d misread you. I didn’t
take you for a ginger-beard pinko.’
‘I should jolly well hope not.’ Actually, Bognor did like to think of himself as pinkish, if not ginger-bearded. ‘The point is that if selling honours works in Scarpington then it might work elsewhere. It may be being done elsewhere, but in a discreet way we could push the notion around, suggest ways in which it could be done. And so on. It would have to be discreet. I don’t think the powers-that-be would be prepared to go public on it. For the Honours System to work it has to be perceived to be squeaky clean while actually being corrupt.’
‘Corrupt is not the most fortunate choice of word,’ said Sir Seymour.
‘No,’ said Bognor. ‘What I mean is that the Honours System has to be seen by the great unwashed as a sort of airy-fairy way of rewarding life’s goody-goodies whereas to those in the know it is actually a ruthlessly gritty commercial enterprise.’
Sir Seymour’s smile widened to take in his ears, though not his eyes.
‘You must dine with me at the House one night,’ he said. ‘I think we might be able to develop some interesting commercial projects. I’ve often felt that the Board of Trade and private enterprise should enjoy a more intimate relationship.’
Bognor simpered back. He wondered where Wartnaby was. Or Smith or whoever he really was. He felt he was shouldering too much of this particular burden. He needed rescuing. He was John Wayne again, surrounded by the Apache, waiting for the bugle call which would signal the relief by US Cavalry. Attack, he knew, was the best defence, so he plunged in.
‘Talking of intimate relationships,’ he said, ‘I wanted to discuss the place of cards in commerce; of bridge as a vehicle of communication within the trading community: the way in which the play and work ethic co-mingle. In short,’ he paused and flashed another winsome smile, ‘I wanted to learn a little more about the Artisans’ Bridge Club.’
Silence. Then, unexpectedly, Sir Seymour said, very slowly, ‘A thing well bought is half sold.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Bognor did not understand.