The Man Whose Dream Came True

by Julian Symons

  ‘But it’s my future you were reading.’

  ‘You just can’t tell, dear. Come for a visit? You can have your old room, thirteen.’

  ‘You mean to say you don’t mind?’ Bulbous Pekinese eyes rolled at Tony.

  ‘Course he doesn’t, he’s not superstitious any more than I am. He doesn’t believe the cards and I don’t really.’ Widgey re-shuffled expertly, stubbed out her cigarette, rolled another with paper and tobacco from an old metal case. ‘Just they seem to come true, that’s all.’

  ‘Why are you starting again?’

  ‘He disturbed the flow, and anyway when one thing’s happened you always want to shuffle again, gets confused otherwise. Let’s see now, two of diamonds, eight of spades, jack of hearts, not very exciting. See you later,’ she called to Tony.

  Room thirteen was an attic, from which across the roofs of houses you could glimpse the sea. As he looked round at the cracked wash basin, the rose-patterned paper which didn’t quite cover the whole wall because Widgey had bought a discontinued line and there had not been enough of it, at the painted chest of drawers scarred by cigarette burns and the disproportionately large mahogany tallboy which she had bought with him at a sale for thirty shillings, he felt a sensation of relief. He threw himself on the bed, which was placed so that you were likely to strike your head on the coved ceiling if you got up from it hurriedly, then after a few minutes began to unpack his things. The painted chest was still uncertainly balanced because one leg was shorter than the other three and the little piece of cork under it became displaced as soon as anything was put inside. And, yes, the top drawer still contained ‘The Bible For Commercial Travellers’, bound in red leather with the editorial injunction on the opening page: ‘Read this book and it will bring you comfort.’ He turned to the back flyleaf and saw that the old message was still there, written in a flowing commercial traveller’s hand:

  ‘If no comfort obtained try ringing Anna,’ followed by what was presumably Anna’s telephone number. He had come home.

  He had first visited the Seven Seas Hotel when he was five years old, brought down by his father and mother to see ‘the place where Belle’s set up to poison people’, as his father put it. That was during the war. There was barbed wire along the sea front, they had to bring ration cards, and his father complained that they did not get enough food to fill a gnat’s belly. Mrs Widgeon – her name was Arabella and she was his mother’s sister – was the wife of a heroic fighter pilot who had been wounded, discharged from the service, and was in the process of dying quietly. His father was of the opinion that Alec had opted for a quiet life and that there was not much wrong with him, and he did not really change this view even after Alec had proved his case by dying just after the war ended. For years they had taken their family holiday at the Seven Seas, but his father had never really liked it. It was, he contemptuously said, not a proper hotel but a boarding house, which served only breakfast and an evening meal. After his mother died and his father married again, Tony had come down alone. If room thirteen was free he always stayed in it.

  He could never remember Widgey looking any different from the way she looked now, a small woman with grey untidy hair who rolled her own cigarettes and always had one in a corner of her mouth. She ran the Seven Seas with the accompaniment of a continually changing staff, and she must have been less haphazard than she seemed because people came back year after year. Or perhaps it was the haphazardness they liked. Certainly it had always delighted Tony. There was no regular time for the evening meal at the Seven Seas, or rather there was a time but it was most erratically observed. There were no rules about not taking girls, or bottles, or both up to your room. Widgey had never applied for a drinks licence but drink often appeared mysteriously on the tables. Evenings of sparse meals would alternate with occasions when the astonished guests would see a turkey or a goose brought into the dining-room, to be carved by Widgey and served with the appropriate trimmings, cranberry jelly, apple sauce, stuffing. There was no question of the door being locked at eleven. The sign in the hall ‘Last In Please Lock Up’ sometimes led to a reveller returning at three in the morning and finding the door locked against him, but Widgey would wave aside apologies and complaints when she staggered down in her dressing gown to open it. Never apologise, never explain: she might have adopted the motto had she known it. Her charm for Tony was that she was never surprised, reproachful, or disappointed by the conduct of others. In adolescence the Seven Seas became increasingly for him a home from home.

  Home was a semi-detached house in Eltham, one of London’s more undistinguished outer suburbs. The house was one in a long group put up during the nineteen twenties in the worst period of between-the-wars jerry building, and it fronted on to a main road where the traffic roared past both night and day. His remembrances of childhood were patchy. Going to the local school, writing his name Anthony Jones, and being upset because a teacher said ‘Jones, that’s the most common name there is,’ wishing he had a brother or a sister, a terrible time in the school lavatories one afternoon with some older boys, good reports changing to critical ones. (‘His ability is clear, but doesn’t try hard… Can do well enough but doesn’t seem interested.’) His father was away a lot during the week, because he was a traveller. Tony told this to other boys, and could never understand why they were not more impressed. In his mind he saw his father travelling from one place to another, going to strange cities where wonderful things happened to him. On Friday, or sometimes Thursday, evenings when Mr Jones came home in the little car and brought a big battered brown case into the house and said that it had been a good week or a bad week and that now he must do his reports, Tony associated these reports with travel, something similar to the essays he was asked to write in school about the most exciting thing that had happened on your holidays. Not until he was eleven years old did he realise that his father’s travelling was not done for pleasure but to sell things, at one time electrical equipment, at another a new kind of electric lamp, at another still a range of toys.

  Mr Jones was a short stout man with a thick moustache and an ebullient way of talking. When, on returning after the week’s travelling, he exclaimed ‘Hallo hallo, what have we here?’ and lifted Tony on to his shoulders, the boy was conscious of a pungent smell which he eventually recognised as a blend of cigarette smoke, beer and male sweat. Mr Jones was a great sportsman or at least a great watcher of sport, and in the winter they always went together on Saturday afternoons to watch a professional football match. At the match he would shout criticism freely. ‘Pass, you fool,’ he would cry. ‘Don’t fiddle faddle with the ball, man, get rid of it…what’s happened to your eyesight, ref, go and get some glasses…dirty, send him off.’ Occasionally they would find themselves in a nest of opposition supporters and then a verbal altercation might go on throughout the match. When the exchange of insults seemed likely to reach the point of blows Mr Jones would calm down suddenly. ‘What’s up then, what’s the matter, it’s a game, isn’t it?’ he would say, adding afterwards to his son, ‘Just as well you were there, I almost lost my temper with that fellow, I might have done something I’d have been sorry for.’ On the way home they often fell in with a bunch of home supporters and the discussion, no longer an argument, would be continued.

  On Sunday mornings they would kick a ball about in the small back garden or on the nearby common. Tony would stand between a cap and a scarf placed to represent goal posts and would dive to try to save his father’s rather feeble shots. ‘That was great,’ Mr Jones would say after these occasions, which ended with him panting hard from the reputedly weak heart which had kept him out of the armed forces. ‘You’re going to be a smashing little goalkeeper, you’ll be playing for the school in no time.’ The truth was, however, that Tony was no good at games, and didn’t like them. Awareness of this was kept from his father until the day when Tony said he had been picked as goalkeeper and Mr Jones turned up to the match on Saturday morning to find that his son was not even
a spectator. There was no row afterwards, but the occasion marked the end of something in their relationship. Afterwards Tony went to no more professional matches, and before long Mr Jones also stopped going.

  At about the same time, when he was thirteen, Tony became aware of other things about his father. The smell that had seemed in childhood to be warm, comforting and safe, became extremely disagreeable. He learned to identify the evenings when his father came home more than usually cheerful as those on which beer could be smelt strongly on his breath, and indeed it seemed to him at times that his father’s whole body reeked of beer and that the smell permeated his clothes. He associated this smell in some way with the incident in the school lavatories, which had never been repeated. And he wondered for the first time about his father’s relationship with his mother. When Mr Jones came home he would embrace his wife in a bear hug and say something like ‘Give us a buss, Sheila, me bonny lass. You’re a sight for sore eyes and no mistake.’ His mother would accept this embrace rather as if she were a statue with movable arms, which she laced in a loose and formal manner behind her husband’s back. After a moment she would move away and say that she must get supper. Her husband, duty done, then dropped into an armchair, put on his slippers, and asked how every little thing was going on at school. Was this the way all mothers and fathers went on, could it be said that they loved each other. This was a question to which he never found an answer. Certainly they never had rows, there was hardly ever an argument, although Mr Jones was argumentative enough with the neighbours who came in sometimes for a drink or coffee. At any sign of family argument, however, his wife would say that she must get the lunch or the supper or clean the bedrooms, or wash some clothes.

  He saw much more of his mother than of his father, yet she was never so real a presence to him. Like her sister she was untidy and vague, but unlike Widgey she was shapelessly fat, with an indeterminate figure shrouded in sacking-like dresses of anonymous colour. Like her sister again she was interested in the unseen world, but where Widgey read the future in cards, and had once possessed a tarot pack before evolving her own system of interpreting ordinary playing cards, Mrs Jones was interested in spiritualism. She took the Psychic News and similar periodicals and was a member of a Spirit Circle which held regular séances. Occasionally she went to meetings in central London, and at one of these she herself had fainted after receiving a spirit message from her brother Jack who had been killed in an air raid. Sometimes Tony would come home from school and find his mother, with three or four other ladies, sitting round an ouija board or conducting spirit rapping sessions at a table. He would go into the kitchen and eat his bread and butter and jam listening to the murmur of voices, raised occasionally to small screeches of pleasure or dismay, that came from next door. When the session was over Mrs Jones would float in at the kitchen door, rather like a spirit herself, and ask whether he wanted anything more to eat. Then he did his homework, and after that in the summer went out to play with other boys on the common, in the winter stayed in and read books. Television was not yet endemic, and they had no set in their home.

  When he grew up he wondered often whether she had wanted a child, and concluded that upon the whole she hadn’t. She never spoke harshly to him, saw that he was clean and that his clothes were neat, but as he looked back it seemed that she had shown him no sign of love. Sometimes the ladies who came to the table rapping sessions would say what a delightful boy he was, so good looking, so quiet, so well behaved. His mother would smile vaguely and agree with them, but did she really think so? ‘He’s no trouble,’ they would cry as if this were some kind of miracle, and this was true until the time of the Creighton affair, when he was fourteen years old.

  Creighton was a big, rather stupid boy who had a gang of which Tony became a member. His qualification was the possession of a roulette wheel. The wheel had been bought by his mother at a sale, in a lot together with a pair of Victorian vases, which were what she really wanted, and a number of books. Among the books was one called The Winning Rules, Or Roulette Practically Considered by Sperienza, a gentleman who had played the game for many years at Monte Carlo. From this book Tony learned that you may bet en plein or à cheval, on a transversal or a carré or on one of the even chances. He learned also of systems that practically guaranteed you against losing, the Infallible System, the Wrangler’s System, the D’Alembert System, and many others. He discovered the meaning of martingales and anti-martingales, intermittences and permanences. Why was it necessary to work, he asked his father, when you could play the Infallible System instead? His father merely said that he shouldn’t believe any of that rubbish.

  Was it rubbish? Tony and the gang played roulette, but few of them used any sort of system, and he could not make up his mind. After a time the rest of them got bored, and turned to other things. The gang’s exploits were not remarkable. They took girls up into the nearby woods where Tony was initiated into sex, and they also pilfered goods from shops in Lewisham. The usual technique was for three of them to go in and talk to the assistant while a fourth took something off the counter or stall. The things were not of much value. Sometimes Creighton sold them, at other times they threw them away. Then four of them, including Tony, were caught in Woolworth’s and brought into Juvenile Court, where they were all put on probation. The effects of the affair reverberated through the Jones household. Mr Jones came back specially from Gloucester to speak for his son in Court. Later, at home, he was almost incoherent with rage.

  ‘That a son of mine should–’ he began, and tried again. ‘I can’t understand it when you come from a good home. You all come from good homes.’ Later he said, ‘I should have known. Look at this last report, doesn’t try. Doesn’t try. Why don’t you try, eh? You’ll come to a bad end. He’ll come to a bad end, Sheila, I’ll tell you that.’ A quick switch of attack. ‘And you know whose fault it’ll be. Yours.’

  His wife put a hand to her wide bosom. ‘Mine?’

  ‘Too much freedom. If you hadn’t given him so much freedom–’

  ‘I must see to the potatoes.’ She elevated slowly from the chair in which she had been sitting and floated out of the room.

  The Creighton affair marked another turning point. In a way Tony had been terrified by the serious way in which everybody treated something so simple, something as you might say that everybody did, but what was chiefly borne in on him was the difference between practice and precept. He had often jumped off a bus with his father before the conductor had got round to collecting the fares. His father had winked and said, ‘Freeman’s ride, Tony, that’s the best.’ At Christmas time they had more than once gone to a brewery where one of the men would come out in a van and stop round a corner. Bottles of whisky would be exchanged for money, and after the van had driven away Mr Jones would chortle. ‘Half price, less than half price. Makes it taste better.’ How was the man able to sell them whisky at less than half price? Another wink. ‘Don’t ask, son. It fell off the back of the van.’ When he understood what this meant he wondered: what was the difference between whisky falling off the back of the van and things disappearing from a store counter?

  At fifteen he got his first job, as an insurance company clerk. He had been working for three months when he came home one evening to find supper in the oven. There was no sign of his mother. He ate supper and waited for her to come home. At eleven o’clock he went upstairs and found her lying fully dressed on the bed, with an empty bottle that had contained sleeping tablets by her side. She must have taken them immediately after putting his supper into the oven. She left no message, but there were a number of letters on the dressing-table, written to her husband by a woman who signed herself Nora. These letters, left carelessly in an old overcoat, were thought to provide the reason for her death. Tony wondered – but this was much later – whether the loss of love or of respectability had been the decisive stroke. Or had she simply wanted to move over into the spirit world about which she was so curious?

  Three months after
his wife’s death Mr Jones married Nora, a brawny peroxide blonde with a flat Midlands voice, and soon after that Tony left the insurance company and went down to Widgey. He never returned to Eltham and never wrote to his father. He had had many jobs since then, but had held none for more than a few months before going to Leathersley House. He had sold insurance, had acted as debt collector for some bookmakers, and had worked as a salesman on commission for several firms. In all of these occupations he had practised a little fiddle, something had dropped off the back of the van as it were. He had kept back some of the insurance premiums, put a percentage of the collected debts into his own pocket, and with the co-operation of somebody in the office of a firm of vacuum cleaner manufacturers had sold a number of cleaners which never passed through the company books.

  Such activities meant that you could never stay in one place for long, and Tony would have accepted if he had known it the philosophical idea that life itself implies movement, a permanent flow. Every so often, when he was in the money, he would play roulette, but he had never possessed enough capital to give any system the financial backing it needed, and the result almost always showed itself on the losing side. After leaving Eltham he abandoned the undesirable Jones, and since then had called himself Scott-Williams, Lees-Partridge and Bain-Truscott. He usually placed his origin in the colonies, and said something deprecating about his name. For a short time he had cherished ideas of becoming a journalist, and had taken a course in shorthand and typing at evening classes. He had found it impossible to get a job on a paper, but these accomplishments had been useful when at times he had been compelled to do secretarial work for private employers. Most of these jobs bored him quickly. Others involved too much work, and in two cases he had been dismissed because the lady of the house made advances which were noticed by her husband. There was something hungry but yearning about Tony’s looks that was especially attractive to women over forty. Such women, he slowly realised, wished to be a mother to him and at the same time wanted him to be a lover to them. There was something vaguely disagreeable about this, but the thought had crossed his mind that he might marry one of these ladies. The proposition, however, had never been a practical one because they always had husbands.