The Dust and the Heat

by Michael Gilbert

  “It’s no use getting ideas about Maureen,” said Oliver. “She’s married to an all-in wrestler. If you haven’t got anything better to do, why not come down and spend the afternoon with Chrissie and me?”

  “Chrissie?”

  “I forgot. You didn’t know I was married. Christina Engelbach. Now Chrissie Nugent. We’ve rented a revolting little house at Radlett. But it’s got a spare bedroom. If you picked up your pyjamas and toothbrush, you could stay the night. What about it?”

  What about it? If I didn’t, I should spend the afternoon at a soccer match, and the evening either drinking beer or sitting at home with my mother, listening to her Blitz stories. I sometimes thought she’d had a more exciting war than I had.

  “Besides,” said Oliver, “I’ve got a proposition I’d like to put to you. Whilst we drive down, I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to during the last two years. It’s had its moments.”

  He had already assumed I would come.

  (The little man, pushing his bicycle, had reached the first elbow bend in the road. I watched him out of sight.)

  Part One

  Skirmishing in Elsfield Wood

  In the early part of that year the Minister of Food aroused great indignation amongst housewives by proposing to discontinue the bulk purchase of dried egg from America; the expenditure of nine million pounds on films was also criticized, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that American films were better for morale than dried egg. The British Union of Fascists held a meeting in the Albert Hall which was attended by two hundred members; since three hundred Communists also attended, few speeches were made. Sir Hartley Shawcross, introducing the Trades Disputes Bill, said that the trade unions had been victimized and intimidated long enough. The two-pound loaf was reduced to one and three quarter pounds, but, in order to overcome the objection of bakers, was sold at the same price. Mr Bevan, introducing the National Health Service Bill, said that it would mean happy doctors and efficient hospitals. A puma escaped from a private zoo in Kent. Mr Laski said that the age of socialist planning had arrived, and twenty thousand people squatted in abandoned army camps. Later that summer, Oliver Nugent accompanied Dumbo Nicholson on a visit to Elsfield Wood.

  2

  Dumbo spent most of the journey apologizing for Quinn & Nicholsons. In the end Oliver said, “I expect it’s a bloody shambles, Dumbo. But if you go on about it, I shall begin to feel sorry I put my gratuity into it.”

  Dumbo, big, pink and serious, like a grown-up Wolf Cub, said, “You won’t lose your money, old boy. I guarantee that. If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll buy you out myself.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Oliver. “I’m not buying preference shares in your outfit. I’ve got a slice of the equity. It’s sink or swim, on this trip, and as a matter of fact, I feel remarkably buoyant. It must be the weather.”

  The September sun was beaming down out of a sky of implausible blue. Its smile warmed even the battered north London suburb, and the rows of prefabs which were beginning to show among the rubble of the Blitz like mushrooms in a devastated field.

  Dumbo said, “I joined the firm as soon as I left Bedford. I don’t suppose I was much help to the old man. You know what it was like in 1937. I was already in the TA and doing two parades a week, and I played a lot of rugger.”

  “A typical product of the decadent thirties,” said Oliver. “You realize that if you’d taken life more seriously – gone to the London School of Economics and read Time and Tide – Hitler would never have dared to attack us. You were responsible for the war, Dumbo. I wonder if that girl knows we can see straight into her bedroom? Yes, I think she does.”

  The train started again with a jerk.

  “I ought to have helped the old man more,” agreed Dumbo. “I realize that. We had quite a nice little business. In theory, we were prepared to make anything for anyone, from talcum powder to tummy pills. Actually we made the mistake of getting too involved with one outfit. The people who made San-Fine.”

  “Is that what every nice girl rolls on under the armpits, or the stuff you scour out neglected lavatories with?”

  “It’s a skin cream. Or it was. When United Druggists bought up the San-Fine boys they suppressed it. It conflicted with one of their own products.”

  “That seems to be one of the troubles of this business,” said Oliver. “Too many products chasing the same market. Why did you say it was a mistake getting involved with the San-Finers. Couldn’t they pay their bills?”

  “It wasn’t that. But by the time I came along, about sixty per cent of our business was making their products. So you see, if they’d walked out on us, we should have had to sack half our staff. They used their position to squeeze us on costs.”

  “They had you by the short and curlies,” said Oliver. He was leaning forward, really interested now. (It was like an orders party. Information about own troops. Information about enemy. Intention. Method. Plan of attack.) “So what happened next?”

  “We clung on to them like grim death. We cut prices to the lowest possible, and then cut them again. In the end I’m pretty sure we were producing for them at a loss, but the old man couldn’t face the idea of closing down half the works, even temporarily. Then, one morning, we read in the papers that they’d been taken over by UD. Of course, they do all their own production.”

  “So you had to sack half the staff?”

  “Actually, no. That was August 1939. As soon as war broke out the Government took us over.”

  “What for? Cough mixture for the troops?”

  “They converted us into manufacturing filter ingredients for gas masks.”

  “Flexible,” said Oliver. He smoked in silence for a few minutes, staring at the rows of miniature gardens each with its own air-raid shelter. It was a new idea to him that a factory could be converted, almost overnight, from face cream to gas masks, and he was examining its implications.

  “When your old man died, who kept the place going?”

  “Len Williams. A good type. He was works foreman when I was there before the war. Father put him on the board in 1941. He kept it going.”

  “I suppose turning out standard fitments for gas masks wasn’t a very exacting job.”

  “Gas masks finished in 1943,” said Dumbo. “Either they’d made enough, or the powers that be realized we were never going to use them anyway, so we switched again, to first-aid kits for bomber crews. Antiseptic dressings. Anti-burn ointments and morphia syrettes.”

  “Anti-burn? Made of what?”

  “I don’t really know. Yellow jelly. Acro-flavin, wasn’t it?”

  “Not protomycil?”

  “Never heard of it. What is it?”

  “Something I picked up in Switzerland,” said Oliver. He seemed to have lost interest in the subject. “What a ghastly train this is. Think of it in the rush hour. When the carriage is full of steaming commuters.”

  “What are you doing about it?”

  “We’ve rented a house near Radlett. It’s a beastly little place, but it’ll do for the time being. I shall come to work by car. As soon as I can find one.”

  The train had been rattling along for some minutes between green fields and now plunged into another zone of bricks and mortar; yards, back gardens, and the gable ends of barn-like structures which might have been factories or film studios; then it slowed and halted.

  “When you think,” said Oliver, “of all the attractive, historical and desirable places that the Luftwaffe did drop bombs on, one wonders why they had to overlook this.”

  “We had three misses,” said the ticket collector. “One of them just missed the public convenience.”

  “A horrifying thought,” said Oliver. “Is there anywhere here I could buy a motor car?”

  “Snyder’s, over the bridge on the right.”

  “And have lunch?”

  “Duke of Cumberland. Over the bridge on the left.”

  “It looks as if we’d better go over the bridge, then.�
��

  Elsfield Wood was undergoing a change of life. For eight hundred years it had nestled round its flint-towered church, a community of farmers, market gardeners and pig-breeders, selling produce to the ready markets of London. And then, almost overnight – no one could quite say when or how it had happened – London had opened its mouth and swallowed them. They had become part of the great sprawling beast they had been helping to feed.

  The war had accelerated the processes of digestion.

  Abandoned film studios were converted into factories. A steady flow of troops had stimulated all forms of local production. The illegitimacy rate had trebled. Now, by the summer of 1946, the last of the troops had departed, the wartime factories were closing down, and the speculative builders were closing in.

  (“If you listened hard,” Oliver maintained, “you could hear the springs creaking as it got ready to stretch. It was tattered and battered and it wanted a coat of paint, but its streets were paved with gold. If I’d had any capital I’d have gone into property dealing on the spot, and I’d have been a millionaire ten years later. Unfortunately, all I had was my gratuity, which I’d already invested in Dumbo’s joint, and a sympathetic bank manager.”)

  Whilst Dumbo went into the Duke to order lunch, Oliver had a look at Snyder’s. It was a big, rambling outfit, with garage and workshops at the back and a forecourt full of pre-war cars in the front, labelled, like slave girls in the market at Fez, with a list of their alleged attractions, but with the price carefully concealed.

  He hesitated in front of “Two-cylinder Jowett, 1926 model. Still in Remarkable Condition”, and “Standard Coventry. Reliable Little Runabout. Recently Entirely Overhauled”, and came to rest between a neat Wolseley (“12 HP. 1938 model, one owner, in Holy Orders”) and a vast, sleek Lagonda “Drop-head coupé, 1933/4 model: 26 HP. Seat eight in comfort”).

  Oliver poked his head inside the Wolseley. The speedometer showed a reading of just under nine thousand miles. Its owner must have had a very small parish, or done most of his visiting on foot. He saw that the accelerator and brake pedals had brand new rubber caps on them, too.

  He laid his folded newspaper on the ground, knelt on it, and looked under the edges of the mudguards. The rust had been sandpapered off, and they had been carefully repainted.

  “Smart operator, this parson,” said Oliver.

  “Lost something?”

  He got up and saw a mountain of a man, a human elephant in corduroy trousers, and khaki pullover, leaning against the Lagonda, watching. He was wearing plimsolls, and must have come up very quietly.

  Oliver said, “Would you, by any chance, be Mr Snyder?”

  “I would.”

  “How much are you asking for this heap?”

  “Two-fifty.”

  “The list price, new, was £180.”

  “Ah! That was 1938. You could buy a new car by writing out a cheque, then. Two-year waiting list now. A bargain at the price.”

  “If what the speedo says is true,” said Oliver, “it might be.”

  “And just what might you mean by that?”

  “I’ve got a horrible feeling,” said Oliver, “that the reverend gentleman who owns this car has been fiddling the speedometer. It’s not difficult, given patience and a strong pair of pliers, but it’s not the sort of thing one expects from the Established Church, is it? Has it got a starting handle?”

  “There’s a self-starter.”

  “I’d prefer to start it on the handle. Easier to judge the compression that way.”

  Mr Snyder gave Oliver a long, hard look. Then, finding this wasn’t making a greal deal of impression, he opened the boot and produced a starting handle.

  Oliver switched on and swung the handle slowly. It went round easily, twice, before the engine kicked into life. He listened to it for a few moments.

  “Perhaps you thought there wasn’t an engine in it at all,” said Mr Snyder.

  Oliver went round to the back, put the sole of his shoe against the exhaust pipe to check the running, took it away again, and repeated the operation. Finally he kept it there long enough to stop the engine altogether, came back to the front of the car and switched on again.

  “I should say that engine’s done about 25,000 miles, give or take a mile, wouldn’t you?” he said.

  “I believe what I’m told,” said Mr Snyder, wooden-faced.

  “We could easily get an expert opinion,” said Oliver. “The makers would know at once if the speedo had been tampered with.” He let the thought hang for a moment, and then said, “Of course, I wouldn’t want to get a clergyman into trouble. I’ll give you £170 for her as she stands.”

  “Two hundred,” said Mr Snyder, in a choked voice.

  “A hundred and eighty,” said Oliver, and got out his cheque book. “I see the licence has got three months to run. And I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy all my petrol from you. In fact, you can fill her up now.”

  When the deal had been completed, Mr Snyder said, “Are you living down here, do I gather? Or is it business?”

  “It’s business,” said Oliver.

  “You ought to do well in business,” said Mr Snyder.

  The Duke of Cumberland was the illegitimate offspring of a respectable coaching inn and the modern licensed catering establishment which is playfully known as a Road House. It had enjoyed the war, and was now reluctantly getting used to the idea that customers might object to watery beer, uneatable food and grudging service.

  “The alternative luncheons,” said Dumbo, “would appear to be boiled sole of boot, with spring carrots, or cold spam and plastic lettuce. And this is Len Williams.”

  “Good morning, Mr Williams,” said Oliver. “Mr Nicholson was telling me all about you.”

  “Nothing to my discredit, I hope,” said Mr Williams.

  “On the contrary,” said Oliver, “he tells me you have been the mainstay of the firm since his father died. What’s that you’re drinking? Scotch?”

  “If you want whisky, I’d better do the ordering. They still like to keep it under the counter.”

  “Then you’d better get three doubles whilst you’re at it,” said Oliver. “I don’t want much to eat. Perhaps a couple of pork pies.”

  He watched Len Williams fighting his way through the lunchtime crowd at the snack bar, and said, “He doesn’t look too fit, Dumbo.”

  “He’s had a hard war.”

  “Not like you and me,” agreed Oliver.

  Three quarters of an hour later the middle-aged lady behind the bar started to intone, “Last orders, please,” and the two barmen started collecting empty mugs.

  “Your credit seems to be good, Len,” said Oliver. “See if you can get us one more.”

  “Not for me,” said Dumbo.

  “You’ll have one, Len?”

  “If you insist,” said Mr Williams. A pink flush, starting round his jowls and moving upwards like a sunset in reverse, was now enveloping the bald expanses of his head.

  “Make it two big ones if you can,” said Oliver.

  As Mr Williams pushed his way through the crowd round the bar Dumbo said, “If he’s going to show us round the works this afternoon, we don’t want him stinko.”

  “Len’s all right.”

  “Not everyone’s got your remarkable capacity for whisky.”

  “I’m conducting a scientific experiment. Watch his hands, and his chin. Particularly his chin.”

  When Mr Williams came back he was carrying a glass in each hand. He placed them carefully on the table, one at a time. Oliver topped them both well up with water, raised his, and said, “Prosperity to Quinn & Nicholson.”

  As Mr Williams picked up his glass, some of the drink slopped out of it on to the table top.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he said thickly.

  Dumbo could see that his left hand was gripping the side of his chair so tightly that his knuckles showed white.

  “Time, gentlemen, if you please. Act of Parliament.”

  Dumbo w
as watching Mr Williams. His head kept jerking round, as if he was trying to scratch the top of his left shoulder with his chin but just missing it each time.

  Oliver said, “Well, now, hadn’t we better be starting our tour of the works? There’s a lot to look at.”

  Mr Williams put down his glass. The drink in it was almost untouched.

  “If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” he said, speaking each word as if it hurt. “I’ve got to go home and pick up some papers. I’ll see you at the works in half an hour.”

  “Fine,” said Oliver. He sat back in his chair, his eyes dreamy, swirling the whisky lovingly round the glass. As an afterthought he added the remains of Mr Williams’ abandoned drink to his own.

  “What’s it all about?” said Dumbo.

  “I’m afraid we shall have to be looking for another Managing Director,” said Oliver.

  “Because he can’t drink level with you?”

  “Not only that. Let’s go and look at the works.”

  The crowd round the bar was still thick. As they pushed through it a character in a light-grey flannel suit with a Clark Gable moustache was saying, “Now that all those pansy soldier boys have stopped playing games and gone home, perhaps we can get on with some real work.”

  Oliver stopped, and swung round.

  “I expect you had a good war, didn’t you?”

  “Eh?”

  “Made a lot of money, too?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Whilst the soldier boys were keeping you nice and safe.”

  “Look here–” said the man, and stopped. There was something about the way Oliver was holding himself that he didn’t like. He said, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Quite so,” said Oliver. “But I’m talking to you. I’m one of those pansy soldier boys.”

  There was a fringe of babble going on all round, but the circle in which they stood was quiet.

  The man said, “You’re tight. I don’t want any trouble with you.”