The Man Whose Dream Came True

by Julian Symons

  Like some motor cars the General was a slow starter in the morning, when his rheumatism was at its worst. He would soak some of the pain from his joints with a hot bath, be moving with comparative ease by midday, and in the afternoon was ready for work on his memoirs. These existed in various forms, housed in two large grey filing cabinets which stood in the gloomy library, a room untouched by Miriam’s restorative hand. There was a typescript of the book’s first half which was several years old, there were revisions of it made over the year, there were bits of many chapters in the second half of the book, there were several thousand notes which had been filed in boxes by other secretaries. Most of the book was concerned with the General’s (he had been a Brigadier then) command of an armoured column in the Western Desert, and his replacement and relegation to a home command after the disastrous failure of Operation Battleaxe in June 1941. What precisely had happened, why were both official and independent histories so inaccurate, where did responsibility really lie for errors wrongly attributed to the General? It was such questions that the memoirs set out to answer, and the secretary’s task was that of blending all the notes into a harmonious whole. Or at least that was his nominal task for in fact, as Tony soon realised, the memoirs would never be completed. The General revised notes, elaborated incidents, re-read histories of the desert war and dictated furious refutations of passages that concerned him. These sessions gave him great emotional satisfaction. His blue eyes would blaze, his white hair become pleasingly disordered, he strode up and down the library thundering denunciations of GHQ and individual commanders. The resultant typescript took its place among all the other notes and fragments of chapters.

  In the evenings after dinner they played billiards. The flexibility of the General’s fingers had by now greatly increased, so that he could make a bridge with comfort, and his movements which in the morning were jerky as a puppet’s had become smooth and easy. He was a poor player, and Tony had to play with some care to make sure that he sometimes lost a game without seeming to throw it away. The General liked a close finish and when he won by only a few points would say: ‘Nerve, that’s what you need. You’re a good player, Tony, but in the last stretch you lose your nerve.’ They generally played three games, then spread the cloth carefully over the green baize, had a nightcap and went to bed. There was a companionship about it that delighted the old man. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he would say after a close finish. ‘A damned near run thing, as the Duke of Wellington would have said.’ It was during a game of billiards that he became Tony instead of Scott-Williams.

  The life was boring, but the situation might have been designed for him. Mrs Adams made it clear at once that she would tolerate no interference with her handling of the household accounts, and within a month he had persuaded the General to get rid of her. She had been followed by other cook-housekeepers, of whom Mrs Causley was the most amenable. She took no interest in the household accounts, and indeed could hardly add up. After Mrs Adams’ departure Tony kept the ledger in which bills were entered with scrupulous accuracy and insisted on showing them to the General until one day the old man waved them irritably away and said he never wanted to see them again. After this Tony arranged what he thought of as his commission. He changed the butcher and came to an understanding with another local man, who put in bills for steaks and chickens that never appeared at Leathersley House, in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds. He was able to make a similar arrangement with the local garage who serviced the General’s Jaguar, which turned out to need a good deal more attention than it had received in the past. The invoices were rendered, Tony drew the cheques and the General signed them. It proved impossible to do the same thing with the grocer, and Tony shopped personally for groceries, adding his commission to the cost. He was at times inclined to resent the pettiness of all this, but the builders’ work had provided an opportunity of which he had taken full advantage. The cheque signed by the General for Clinker included a hundred pounds for Tony. He would take the cheque to Clinker tonight and collect the money.

  Yet there were periods of discontent, and this fine April morning was one of them. Retyping ‘Off to the Western Desert,’ which contained an account of the General’s feelings on learning that his only son, a fighter pilot, had been shot down and killed, the vision of Siena – at other times it was Florence, Monte Carlo, the French Riviera – became increasingly strong. When would he get away? A few pounds here, a few pounds there, even the money from Clinker, what did it amount to? He had occasional fantasies of forging the General’s name to a really sizeable cheque. He had practised copying the signature, simply for the fun of it as he told himself, but of course had never done anything about it. On this morning he contemplated, as he had done before, the rich opportunity that lay under his hand if he dared to use it. One of the first jobs he had done after coming to Leathersley was clearing out the contents of a lumber room. The tin trunks and suitcases were mostly filled with ancient movement orders, menus of regimental dinners and copies of unintelligible or uninteresting army memoranda. He turned it all over quickly, and then his attention was caught by some letters from Miriam which he put aside for possible use in the memoirs. Beneath them was a thick sealed envelope which he opened. It contained more letters addressed to ‘My dearest G’ or ‘My own darling G’ (the General’s name was Geoffrey). They were love letters, signed ‘Bobo’, and he had read two of them through before he realised that they were addressed by one man to another. Some of them made the nature of G’s relationship with Bobo absolutely plain.

  He had shown the General the letters from Miriam, thrown out the rest of the stuff, and kept the Bobo letters in their envelope, locked up in the chest of drawers in his room. He had a vision of himself confronting the General with them and asking for some really substantial sum, say a thousand pounds, which would be more money than he had possessed at any one time. With all that money in his wallet he would go to the south of France, stay in a good hotel, meet a rich woman older than himself who fell in love with his looks, marry her and live in luxury ever after.

  But he knew all this to be a dream. It would be blackmail, and he had never blackmailed anybody. And the dream conflicted with another, entirely different, in which the General’s obvious liking for him was translated into practical benefits. In this vision he took the place of the long dead son and a will was made in his favour. But this meant staying for some years, since the General was only in his early seventies and seemed healthy, apart from the arthritis. ‘You’ve got to do something about it,’ he would tell himself, and the fact that he did nothing increased his irritation. He found it hard to work on the dreary old memoirs that day, and when the General mentioned billiards gave a reminder that this was one of his free evenings.

  ‘Shan’t be having our game tonight, then.’ He would have been annoyed had the old man asked him to stay, but somehow it was almost equally annoying that he simply said, ‘Have a good time.’

  ‘Is it all right if I take the Jag?’ There was another car, a rather ancient Morris, which he used for shopping. The General looked at him from under thick white brows, then nodded.

  Chapter Three

  Gravel crunching under tyres on the drive, speed on the road moving up effortlessly to seventy at the touch of his foot – he felt exhilarated always behind the wheel of a car. ‘There goes a lucky one,’ people would say to each other as he passed. ‘Young, handsome, well-dressed, big car, yes, he’s got it made.’ The sense of exhilaration grew, he wondered why he had been low-spirited. After all, he was about to profit from the Clinker coup, and surely it was not beyond his ingenuity to find some new ways of obtaining commissions? He felt extremely cheerful when he drew up at Clinker’s yard which was on the edge of Landford, ten miles away.

  The builder was in his office. He was a dark squat morose man with a powerful sweaty smell about him. He took the cheque, looked at it, then put it in a drawer.

  ‘You’ll send a receipt. Got to keep the books in order.’ He was awar
e that his jocosity sounded uneasy. He was slightly afraid of Clinker.

  ‘I’ll send it.’

  ‘Then there’s just the question of settling up.’

  A pause. Was there going to be trouble? Clinker slowly lifted his black head, looked ruminatively at Tony, then went to a safe and unlocked it. A cash box inside was filled with notes. He counted, keeping his back to Tony, put the cash box back in the safe, relocked it, thrust the bundle of notes forward.

  Tony counted. They were one pound notes and there were fifty of them. ‘This isn’t right.’

  Clinker was at his desk, short powerful legs thrust out in front of him. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s not what we agreed. A hundred.’

  ‘That’s right. Fifty each.’

  ‘No no.’ The injustice of it overcame him, his voice rose. ‘A hundred for me. You – I arranged it so that you didn’t even have to give an estimate. You could put in any price you liked.’

  ‘It was steep enough. Couldn’t make it any more.’

  ‘I want a hundred.’

  ‘That’s all you get.’ The builder rose and came near him, measuring his own squatness against Tony’s height. ‘Not bad for doing nothing.’

  ‘I’ll see you’re not employed again.’

  Clinker laughed in his face. He stuffed the notes awkwardly into his pocket and retreated. As he drove away he saw the man standing in his office doorway, grinning.

  Landford was a town without many attractions. There were two cinemas, eight churches and twenty-seven pubs. It had once been a market town and there was still a Thursday market, but the town lived now on industries brought down from London, canning factories, bicycle manufacturers, a steel pressing firm. Londoners had come to live there and complained that there was nothing to do, the place was dead. It was designated as an overspill town, and the council after long discussion had permitted the opening of a ten pin bowling alley with a casino attached to it. He paused before the entrance to the Golden Sovereign, then walked quickly past. Farther down the High Street a fascia said Allways Travel. When he pushed open the door, still smarting from the Clinker humiliation, it was like putting salve on a burn.

  A poster inside showed a gondola, a bridge, water, beneath them the word Venezia. The maps, France, Spain, Greece, Italy, made him glow inside as if he had been drinking. Two girls sat behind a horseshoe desk, deep in train times and air connections. He waited his turn impatiently. One of the girls looked at him with a mechanical smile. He had been in here before.

  ‘I’m interested in Italy.’

  ‘Any particular area? What time of year?’

  ‘I’d thought of Venice.’ She reached for a folder. ‘But Venice in September, that’s when I’d be going, I mean, will the season be over?’

  ‘Our last Venice holiday, 837 B, starts on the sixteenth.’

  ‘A package tour.’ He laughed easily. ‘I don’t want that. An individual holiday is so much more – well, agreeable, isn’t it? The thing is, is late September quite the time for Venice?’

  ‘If you’re going on an individual flight you can go any time.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but that’s not quite what I meant. The canals are liquid history, but they do smell, don’t they?’ He gave her a confidential smile showing – he glimpsed the glass on the wall behind her – his beautiful teeth. The smile was boyish, it would always be boyish. ‘So I did wonder about Athens.’

  ‘Individual flight again?’

  She was the dullest of girls. ‘I’d never think of anything else.’

  ‘Here’s the folder.’

  ‘Thank you. What hotel would you recommend? I stayed at the George the Fifth last time, but perhaps I might make a change.’

  She goggled at him. ‘Hotel list inside. Did you want to make a booking?’

  It was almost as if she did not take him seriously. He spun the conversation out for another couple of minutes and left when the man behind him began to mutter about people who couldn’t make up their minds. It had not, after all, been very satisfactory.

  Later, sitting in the American Bar of Landford’s best hotel, he became convinced that Fiona Mallory would not turn up. She was something different from the usual run of his girls, the daughter of a business tycoon with a house outside the town and a flat in London (Tony had looked him up in Who’s Who), and at their only other meeting she had seemed obviously keen on him. He had met her in the Golden Sovereign, where she had watched him playing on his final disastrous visit, and as she told him afterwards had admired the calmness with which he faced a losing streak. Later they had had a drink together and he had taken her back to Frankfort Manor in the Jag, dropping her in the drive. She represented an agreeable variation on the vision in which he married a rich woman, in the sense that she was younger than he and had the wealth of Mallory Textiles behind her. But obviously she was not going to turn up.

  He was sipping his second Manhattan when she said, ‘Sorry I’m late. Daddy dropped me off on his way to London and he kept dithering about. I thought we’d never get away.’

  She was a tall slender girl with a good figure and a long, slightly horsy face. Dark glasses with jewelled frames concealed her eyes. Her blue dress had obviously cost a lot of money.

  ‘I’ve kept you waiting hours. I hope you’re not getting sloshed.’

  ‘Only been here a few minutes. Hell of a lot of traffic coming down.’

  ‘You’ve not driven down specially?’

  ‘When I make a date with a beautiful girl I keep it.’ He smiled. ‘What are you hiding?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The glasses.’

  ‘They’re a thing I’ve got at the moment. You don’t mind?’

  ‘They add a touch of mystery,’ he said, although in fact it made him feel uncomfortable to talk to somebody whose eyes were invisible. ‘Anyway I had to come down to see my aged uncle.’

  ‘Oh yes, the General. You told me about him. How is he?’

  ‘Just about the same, one foot in the grave and the other in the Western Desert. I shall stay there tonight, combining pleasure with duty. Shall we eat? The roast duck with orange is rather good, or they grill a steak quite decently.’ He had looked up the place in the Good Food Guide. ‘Of course it’s not London.’

  ‘If you ask me this place is just about the end, I can’t think why daddy likes being here. He’s divorced, you know that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The bore is he wants me down here too. I’m useful as a sort of hostess cum housekeeper.’

  ‘And you always do what he tells you?’

  The dark glasses were enigmatic. ‘Almost always. I’m a dutiful daughter. But I hope he’ll get married again soon, then I’ll be free.’

  Throughout dinner he was bothered by the glasses, which made him feel as if he was naked while she remained fully clothed. But still he seemed to be keeping his end up. It was lucky that she went to London very little, and to theatres and cinemas hardly at all, so that he did not have to admit his own ignorance of current plays. He talked vaguely about the firm of stockbrokers in which he worked and in more detail about his clubs and the famous people to be met in them. These were stories he had told before, with a few variations, and they came easily enough. Her own life was humdrum, friends of her father’s to dinner always at weekends and sometimes in the week, a few stuffy dances with dreary local escorts. She wanted to get a job in London but her father wouldn’t hear of it, or not at the moment anyway. It would be different if he got married again.

  She pushed aside the food, at which she had only picked although she said it was delicious, and said suddenly, ‘Would you like to come back for coffee?’

  ‘Back?’ For a moment he did not understand.

  ‘Home. Where I live.’

  ‘It’s those glasses. They confuse me, I wish you’d take them off.’

  ‘All right.’ Her eyes were a shallow blue. She put the glasses carefully into a case.

  ‘That’s better. I felt as
though everything I said was bouncing back at me. Yes, I’d love that.’

  Driving back through the lonely country lanes, the situation became real to him. They were married and Mallory had given them the house as a wedding present. They had been driving round Europe on their honeymoon and now they were returning. Fiona was fully provided for, and there was no question of working or of having to worry about money ever again. He placed a hand on her knee.

  She took it off. ‘I don’t like one handed drivers.’

  Why did she have to spoil it? But five minutes later this annoyance was forgotten as they went past the entrance gates, up the long drive, skirted the servants’ quarters and entered the house. How could he ever have thought Leathersley House impressive? This was the real thing, an entrance hall with big brown pictures on the walls and lots of furniture that was obviously old and valuable. A great staircase led out of the hall, of the kind he had only seen in films when the ambassador received at the top of it, and she led him into a drawing-room so big that if you put it jokingly you might say it was hard to see from one end to the other. This too was full of pictures and, yes, he could hardly believe it, but there was actually a marble statue at the other end of the room.

  He nodded approvingly. ‘Is that your father?’ He pointed to a big head and shoulders. The man who looked out of the frame was tight-lipped, unsmiling.

  ‘Yes. You are clever.’

  ‘I thought I recognised him.’

  ‘Everyone’s gone to bed.’ For a moment she looked directly at him with her blue shallow eyes. ‘I’ll make coffee.’

  ‘I don’t want coffee.’ He took one step forward, held her in a powerful grip. She nibbled his ear and murmured something. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My room’s upstairs.’

  He would have liked to see the upper part of the house, but the thought of the magnificent staircase intimidated him. He led her towards a sofa that was bigger than most beds. ‘We’ll stay here.’