The Man Whose Dream Came True

by Julian Symons

‘In London. Can you come up? This weekend.’

  ‘My father–’

  With what he hoped was powerful urgency he said, ‘I have to see you.’

  There was a pause, so long that he thought the connection had been broken. Then her voice again. ‘All right. I’ll manage somehow. But I can’t come till Saturday.’

  Before she could ask the address of his flat he said quickly, ‘Let’s meet in the Ritz Bar. Can you come up for lunch?’

  ‘Not till the evening. About six.’

  ‘Six o’clock, the Ritz Bar, I’ll be waiting.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Darling, I long for it.’

  ‘I do too. I have to go now.’

  ‘Goodbye, darling.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She was well and truly hooked. Play your cards right, he told himself, and you’ve landed the fish.

  He had no friend from whom he could borrow a flat, so he had to rent one. It cost him forty pounds to take a furnished flat for a week. It was high up in a modern block near Marble Arch, a marvellous position, and he regarded the money as an investment. He told the agents that he was staying over in London for only a few days and wanted to do some entertaining that couldn’t be done in a hotel. Whether or not they believed him, they took the eight fivers he gave them and let him move in immediately. He got in a stock of drink – there was a cocktail cabinet, something that he’d always wanted – hung up his clothes and settled down with the feeling that he was there for ever.

  When we’re married, he told himself, we’ll always live in places like this, places where every room is warm and you can pad about naked, and people live their own lives next door to each other without knowing the names of their neighbours, and you can get almost anything you want by lifting a telephone. He looked at London sparkling beneath him and thought, this is my world, it belongs to me and I’m going to have it. The temptation was strong to go out, find in a bar the kind of middle-aged woman who responded to his smile as if she was a fire waiting for a match, and bring her back here. But he resisted it. Anyway, the setting was wrong. Women of that sort liked to give you things, to feel that they owned you, and they would be disconcerted to find him installed in such style and at such an address. He stayed in the flat from Thursday evening until Saturday morning, having meals sent up to him.

  Just after six o’clock she came into the Ritz Bar, looking slightly nervous, carrying a small suitcase, and wearing a rather unsuitable hat. He was pleased to see that she had abandoned the dark glasses. He commented on that. ‘I feel I’m seeing you properly.’

  She ordered gin and tonic and drank it in sips. ‘Was it a job to get away?’

  ‘Not too bad. Daddy hadn’t got anyone coming down this weekend. He wanted to know where I was going. I told him I was staying with a girl-friend. I fixed it with her too.’

  ‘Clever girl.’ He patted her hand. ‘For a minute on the phone I thought you didn’t want to see me.’

  ‘Tracey was there – the butler. I had to be careful.’

  After a second drink her manner was perceptibly easier. ‘It’s wonderful to get up to London. I feel so cooped up down there.’

  ‘I’m your good angel. I just wave my magic wand and say “Come up to London”, and it’s done.’

  She looked round. ‘It’s rather quiet here.’

  ‘Kind of traditional.’ He was worried that she might have preferred to meet somewhere else, Claridge’s or Hatchetts which he knew only as names. ‘I often use this as a meeting place because it’s so convenient.’

  ‘Of course.’ She fiddled with her handbag.

  ‘But let’s get out. Harry, my bill.’ He had taken the precaution of learning the waiter’s name. It was time to be masterful. He steered her up the stairs, got a taxi and kissed her ardently as soon as they were inside.

  ‘Are we going to your flat?’

  ‘Where else? I’m repaying hospitality.’ He laughed.

  She disengaged herself. ‘Tony, I don’t want you to think I do this with everybody.’

  ‘Darling Fiona.’

  ‘It’s because I like you. Very much. I don’t just want an affair for a weekend.’

  What do you know, he thought, I believe she’s going to propose to me. But the time wasn’t right for anything of that sort. He took her hand and kissed it, which seemed to cover the case.

  He watched when they crossed the entrance hall and went up in the lift to see if she was impressed, and there could be no doubt that she was although she tried not to show it. He was apologetic when he unlocked the door. ‘It’s not much like home, I’m afraid, but then I’m not here all the time.’

  Inside she exclaimed with pleasure, particularly at the view. They were on the fourteenth floor and quite a lot of London was spread out beneath them.

  ‘Yes, I do think it’s something rather special myself,’ he said with perfect truthfulness. ‘But of course you’ve got your own flat in Chelsea.’

  ‘My father has. I’m hardly ever there. Anyway, it hasn’t got a view like this.’

  He came up behind her, put his hands on her breasts. She turned round and her blue eyes questioned him. ‘I meant what I said, Tony. I’m playing for keeps.’

  Wonderful words. ‘So do I, darling. I’m playing for keeps too.’ In the bedroom later he asked with attempted casualness whether she had really meant it.

  ‘You know I did.’

  ‘Then what about meeting your father?’

  Silence. Her fingers traced a pattern on his thigh. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. Not yet anyway. He doesn’t want me to get married. I told you.’

  ‘That’s just damned selfish.’

  ‘It would be no good talking to him. You don’t know what he’s like. I’ve got my own money, but he won’t let me use it to take a flat in town or anything like that. Most of it just stays in the bank.’

  He wanted to say that she was over twenty-one and a free agent, but refrained.

  ‘And when I do marry he wants it to be some ghastly local. There’s a boy he keeps talking about, the son of one of his friends. Marriage to him would be good for business, might even mean a merger.’ She said it without irony and repeated, ‘I’ve got my own money.’

  Again he refrained from speaking, this time from asking how much. She went on, looking up at the ceiling, speaking in a singsong voice.

  ‘You don’t understand about Daddy. I can’t explain it myself, but if he told me I was to have nothing to do with you I should have to do what he said. Do you know what I dream sometimes? I dream I’m a princess and shut up in a castle where I’ve got everything anybody could want except freedom. People come and try to free me, to let me out because they’re in love with me, but there’s an invisible barrier round the castle and as soon as they pass over it their view of me changes and they see me as an old hag, toothless and dirty, so they go away. And in the dream nobody ever gets past the barrier and at the end of the dream I look in the glass and I’ve become what they believed me to be, filthy and dressed in rags and old.’

  ‘That’s just a dream. There aren’t any barriers. You can do what you like.’

  ‘Oh, but I can’t. Someone else has to do it, someone has to help me.’ She turned and clung to him, pressed her naked body to his. ‘Help me, Tony.’

  With everything arranging itself better than he could have hoped, he knew the importance of not saying a wrong word. It seemed best to say the serious thing he had to say lightly. ‘Here’s some news, Princess. Prince Charming’s arrived, and guess how he got past that invisible barrier? With a special licence.’

  ‘A special licence,’ she echoed wonderingly.

  ‘I’ll get one on Monday. You come up to London and, hey presto, the deed’s done, the princess is free.’ He bounced off the bed, went into the bathroom. Her voice followed him. He put his head round the door. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It won’t make any difference to you? I mean, to your job and all that.’

  ‘Everyone wil
l be delighted.’

  ‘Shall we live here?’

  ‘Or take a bigger flat,’ he said recklessly. ‘Come on, let’s celebrate, go out on the town.’ He felt an overwhelming euphoria at having pulled it off, a debt of gratitude towards the girl who was going to provide him with a permanent income.

  They went on the town. He told her that he hardly ever used the Jag in London, driving was such hell, so they took taxis. Over dinner he learned that fifteen hundred a year was settled on her through a trust, although she couldn’t touch the capital. There was quite a bit of money in her bank account, she didn’t know exactly how much. He confided a few vague details of his stockbroking job, saying that it paid well but he was bored with it and thought of striking out on his own, starting a gambling club perhaps, which was a surefire way of making money. It seemed premature to mention that she would be providing the capital. He suggested that it would be fun to take a look at a club and they ended up in the Here’s Sport Club in Soho. Her eyes were wide as he bought a hundred pounds’ worth of chips and gave half of them to her. She asked if he could afford it.

  ‘This is celebration night, Princess.’ He had called her Princess the whole evening. ‘There’s plenty more. Anyway, we’re going to win. We’re playing my system, and it works best with a partner.’

  ‘Was that why you lost down in Landford?’

  ‘It could be,’ he said shortly. He did not care for jokes about roulette. He explained to her the Prudential system which they would be playing. You made two bets at each spin of the wheel, a ten pound bet on passe covering the high numbers, and a five pound bet on the numbers from one to six. If a high number came up you won ten pounds and lost five, if a number from one to six turned up you were paid at odds of five to one so that you won twenty-five pounds and lost ten.

  ‘And if it’s one of the other numbers?’

  ‘If it’s seven to eighteen or zero we lose, but the odds are two to one in our favour. We’ll stop when we’ve won a hundred.’

  They very nearly did it, too. She sat on the opposite side of the table from him playing the six number transversal, and the first time she won she gave a small scream of pleasure. At one time they were seventy pounds up. Then the bank had a run in which the numbers between seven and eighteen came up half a dozen times running followed by zero. They were losing a little, Fiona was looking slightly bored, and to amuse her he committed a roulette player’s cardinal sin. He changed systems, and began to play a modified version of the Capitalist’s system, which involves covering every number on the board except zero and three. When zero turned up he bought another hundred pounds’ worth of chips. They lost these when three came up twice in eight spins.

  ‘Two hundred pounds,’ she said, and repeated it. ‘Just think, if we’d stopped when we were winning–’

  ‘You make rules and you have to keep them,’ he said sharply, although he had failed to do so. The exhilaration of gambling was so great for him that it remained for an hour or two afterwards, like the effect of drink, and he had the true gambler’s dislike of complaints about losing. ‘Better luck next time.’

  ‘Next time?’

  ‘When we’re on the other side of the fence, running the club.’

  ‘It was a lovely evening,’ she said when they were back at the flat. ‘But I wish we hadn’t lost that money.’

  Euphoria had worn off and he now wished it too, but he controlled his irritation. ‘Part of the ceremony of freeing the princess. Let’s have a nightcap. We’re still celebrating.’

  The celebration ended abruptly on Sunday morning.

  He woke at half past nine. The princess was still asleep. He went into the living-room, picked up the papers from the hall – he had ordered them with the feeling that the daily delivery of newspapers gave an air of permanency – and carried them into the kitchen to look at while he made breakfast. Turning the pages idly he saw a picture and a story in the gossip column of one paper, passed it by and returned to it, looking incredulously at picture and story.

  The picture showed a girl wearing a mini-skirt and a sleeveless brocaded blouse with a hooded headdress through which part of her face was visible. The story was headed: ‘Millionaire’s Daughter Starts Yashmak Fashion’ and it began:

  Fiona, up-and-corning daughter of industrial merger-maker Jacob Mallory, is touring Europe in search of something new in the fashion line to rock the younger set. Fiona’s landed up in Ismir, Turkey, where she’s certainly shaken the natives. It’s not the mini-skirt that shocks them, they’ve seen those before, or even the local dress turned into something so, so sophisticated in the form of the brocaded blouse. No, its the way Fiona uses that traditionally concealing yashmak combined with the rest of the outfit that produces an effect on males. Just imagine what a glance from under that hood will do to them over here. Fiona, a working fashion-spotter for Philippa Phillips Associates, is going on looking for that elusive new something in Greece and Yugoslavia before she comes home.

  He went into the living-room and sat down. He felt as dazed as somebody involved in an accident. As he read the story again his lips moved like those of a man spelling out the words. Then he got up, went into the bedroom and opened her case. She had taken clothes out of it last night, and now it was empty. Her handbag was on a chair. He opened it and spilled out the contents. Lipstick, keys – and a letter. The envelope said: ‘Miss Mary Tracey, The Cottages, Frankfort Manor.’ Tracey – the butler’s daughter. It was like some wretched stage farce. No doubt The Cottages were the servants’ quarters.

  ‘What are you doing?’ The words were whispered. She was watching him from the bed.

  He handed her the paper. There was a smell of burning. It was the toast in the kitchen. The smell pervaded the flat. Tears welled into her eyes. She did not speak.

  ‘Well?’ he said questioningly, although he knew the answer. ‘You’re Mary Tracey. The butler’s daughter.’

  ‘He’s a handyman.’

  ‘I suppose you’re a housemaid.’

  ‘I help in the house.’

  Another Doris. ‘That’s why you took me back. Because you knew nobody would be there.’ She didn’t contradict him. ‘And I believed you. What a fool.’

  She blew her nose. ‘Sometimes she gives me clothes and I wear them when I go into town.’

  ‘Your father’s in it too? I spoke to him.’

  ‘I told him I would speak if a friend of Fiona’s rang up. I thought–’ She didn’t say what she thought.

  ‘What the hell were you doing in the Golden Sovereign?’

  ‘I know Claude.’ Claude? ‘Armitage. He’s – he used to be a boy-friend of mine. I worked there for a bit, in the cloakroom.’

  A hat check girl. How could he have failed to recognise her for what she was? She went on.

  ‘But I do want to get away. And I do have that dream, I think of myself as a princess waiting for somebody. You’ve burned the toast. Shall I make some more?’

  Did she think he was going to sit down to breakfast with her? The thought of all the money he had spent, the flat, the food and drink, the roulette last night, rose in his mouth like bile. ‘You can leave. Any time. Now.’

  ‘You don’t want to go on with it? I suppose you wouldn’t. Still, let’s have breakfast.’

  She got out of bed and moved towards the kitchen. He took her by the shoulders. ‘I said you could leave now.’

  ‘I don’t see why you’re so het up. After all, you’ve had some fun out of it, and you’ve got plenty of money.’

  ‘Plenty of money,’ he said bitterly. A moment afterwards he regretted the tone in which he had spoken, but it was too late. She began to laugh.

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t got any money. Oh, that’s good, that’s really good.’

  ‘I spent it on you.’

  ‘“There’s plenty more”,’ she mimicked him. ‘So you were after my allowance? And I only said it because I didn’t want you to think I’d be too much of a burden. It really is funny.’ Her tone an
d accent changed so that he could not think how he had ever been deceived. ‘I suppose you fiddled this place too.’

  ‘It’s rented.’

  She stopped laughing. ‘But you’re clever. Why don’t we do something together?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not staying at home, you know, I’m getting out. This is what I want, what we both want.’ She put a finger in her mouth, bit a nail. ‘Let’s team up.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go?’

  ‘After breakfast.’ While she was eating her toast she continued to talk. ‘I’ve got a thing for you. And I’m not a fool, you know. We’d make a good team.’

  ‘I want you to leave.’

  She packed her things into the little suitcase. ‘Better luck next time. You might wish me that too.’ He did not reply. ‘Trouble is you’ve got no sense of humour.’

  When she had gone he lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. He had several days to run before his week’s tenancy was out, but what use was the flat to him now? With less than fifty pounds of his money left he did what he had done before. He took refuge with Widgey.

  PART TWO

  A Dream Of Loving Women

  Chapter One

  Widgey had not changed in the two years since he had last seen her. The ash was long on the cigarette that stuck out of the corner of her mouth, and she sat at one side of a table in her private parlour with cards in front of her and a woman on the other side of the table. The woman was perhaps fifty, certainly younger than Widgey, and her fingers were crusted with jewels. She nervously twisted a gold bracelet on her left arm.

  ‘A black ace, a red ten, a black queen. Not the queen of spades, that’s something,’ Widgey was saying as he opened the door. She said hallo to Tony without surprise, holding up her face so that he could kiss her cheek. Ash dropped on the table and she brushed it away. ‘That explains part of it.’

  ‘What does it explain?’ The woman opposite panted like a Pekinese.

  ‘Ace of clubs, ten of diamonds, queen of clubs. Means an unexpected visitor. I thought it would be for you, but it’s for me. My nephew Tony. This is Mrs Harrington.’