by Joan Fleming
Her face was blotchy with dried tears. “Then I had a brainwave, I thought of that shop; it wasn’t far away, straight on down that long, long street up a side turning, past the pub called World’s End, and it feels like it, too. When I got there … guess what? It was long past closing time but I saw a dim light down in the basement and there some of them were, smoking pot. I went in and told them the red-haired bloke who’d introduced me had gone off with all the possessions I had in the world and they laughed their heads off. However, one of them who wasn’t so, what, high? … he said he was called Sledge and he lived in a tower block not far from Battersea Bridge, couldn’t miss it, he said, and then offered me a marihuana cigarette. I’ve had them and I knew it wasn’t the time for it, I have to keep my head now, so I left.”
“You told me you didn’t know his name,” Joe accused.
“I know I did, I thought the chap was making up the name or something because when I called on the Mrs. Sledge she slammed the door in my face!”
Her tears had dried rapidly, she simply sat back, replete and sniffing, regarding him expectantly as though awaiting his suggestions for the next move.
“They didn’t know the number of his flat, otherwise I wouldn’t have been up on the roof. All those flats! On my market research rounds I asked lots of people which flat a tall young chap with lots of red hair lived in, nobody could tell me. So I’m absolutely sunk, destitute and on your hands, and that’s that!”
“But why on my hands?”
“Because you’re nice,” she said decisively. “It was silly of him (a) not to tell me his name, and (b) to take me to that ghastly shop ‘I Was Napoleon’s Mistress’, where there were friends of his there who knew him. Or perhaps, thinking it over, greed outweighed his common sense: perhaps he can’t help stealing or bag snatching and did it without thinking. But then we both lost our common sense, I ought never to have told him I’d run away from home; he’d guess my handbag was packed with boodle …”
“With what?” he asked absently. But he was sick at heart, Sledge’s action was out of character, as was his further action a few hours later of strangling the old lady. It wasn’t like him; he was seriously slipping, like going suddenly off his nut.
“Cash; dibs; lolly; nearly two hundred pounds, in fact, two hundred minus my train fare, everything I had in the bank; gifts and saved-up allowance. So, you see, I’ve got to get it back, got to. I can’t go to the blooming police because, because I’m a minor minor, what my father calls a mere school-kid. He’ll have alerted the whole police force in England, my father will, he’ll be having all the ports watched, the airports … the lot; he’s Lord Lieutenant of our county, by the way, and the most charming man anyone has ever met too, so people say, but he’s not my choice. He has strong stiff upstanding white hair and a round rosy face and big, wide almost continuous smile with all his own teeth and that’s the lot. He’s the sort of thing a computer would knock up in its spare time if you instructed it to produce: one perfect English gentleman, please. He’s a … a façade, a cardboard … no, worse, he’s a plastic person; I can see right through him and out on the other side. I can absolutely understand why my mother left him and why she’d much rather live on a barge with any old soak than to have to put up with him and his eternal, jolly-good-fellow laughter. He won’t divorce her, of course; he could, if he only would, for desertion, but he never will. So everybody says my mother must be mad, how could she leave such a marvellous chap! Huh, huh!”
“So did you tell Sledge all this?”
“Of course I didn’t. I did tell him I’d left home, though, and for ever, but I didn’t tell him about my father and mother being separated nor did I tell him why I left home. But if you’re really going to help me and go on being kind, I may tell you. It’ll wring your heart.”
His heart was too sick to be wrung as well, he hardly cared any more.
It was now about two minutes to midnight and Silas was keeping very quiet, probably listening to everything, but it was too late to bother about that now. He was holding The Times up in front of him and the smoke from yet another cigarette was rising above it.
“Well, tell me now, quick, I’ve got to pack up, it’s closing time.”
“Don’t believe slave-selling is over! There was a take-over bid for me, for me! One of these business tycoons came to live near, he uses his Jacobean house as a factory, making cheap flashy shirts and selling them by post; he actually had a deal to buy me off my father’s hands.”
Joe said: “I was thinking something like that myself, only yesterday, about slavery.”
But she wanted to tell her story: “He actually did! Well, I’d liked him to start with; it was fun to be seen about in such marvellous cars with such an evil-looking type … but marry him! The very thought makes me heave but heave … he wears a wig!” she screamed.
Silas cleared his throat; it was a sign for Joe to spring up and make all the late-night movements, which he did whilst the girl sat with her hands deep in her coat pockets, her legs stretched out in front of her, brooding darkly.
Silas walked round her, or mooched thoughtfully about her; she looked up and said she hoped she was not in the way. Joe came out from behind the bar now without his uniform and wearing his waterproof zipped jacket. He took out the relevant amount of money he owed for his girl-friend’s supper and handed it to Silas, who already had his hand stretched out for it.
“Thanks,” Joe said, looking at his boss.
“What are you going to do with her?” Silas asked.
“I’ll take care of her,” Joe said, still looking soberly at Silas. He was affronted by the huge wink that Silas gave him, and hustled his girl-friend out in front of him.
CHAPTER IV
THEY SAT STIFFLY, not touching one another in the taxi, but presently out came her warm gloveless hand and sought his own hand. He folded his fingers round it but said disapprovingly: “Now look! You’re a sly one, I know, you’ve got a hell of a lot to say but it’s difficult to know what’s true and what isn’t. I think, when you’re talking, I think: she’s inventing all this, I’m sure!”
“Well, I don’t blame you,” she sighed, “but truth is stranger than fiction (as they say); I’ve had to keep things bottled up for a long time; the groom at home knows the lot, not because I’ve told him, but because he’s seen it all happen …”
“Oh, is he a boy-friend?”
“Certainly not; he’s got a perfectly good wife, thanks. Only he’s sorry for me, I know. I’ve heard him say it, things like ‘Poor kid, what’s going to happen to her?’ And once I heard him say someone ought to knock his bloody block off, meaning my father. There’s just one or two, people who work for him mostly, know what he’s really like. Things like my father’ll tell his friends: ‘I’ve given my groom his cottage for my lifetime!’ he’ll say boasting, it sounds fine if you don’t start thinking; but what does it mean? Absolutely damn’ all, as I heard the groom telling someone. And I overheard Dad talking to a friend one evening: ‘I hope I’m not going to lose my darling baby’ (that’s me!) ‘to a man old enough to be her father … but there it is, she’s devoted to him!’ ”
He couldn’t see her face properly but he noted the way her head hung on her long thin neck which appeared, perhaps, abnormally long owing to the shortness of her hair. The taxi lurched round Trafalgar Square with the lights green and she rolled against him; he put an arm round her.
“But …” he thought carefully, “you don’t tell the truth always, do you?”
No answer.
“You tell just what’s useful and what isn’t?”
“Can’t you distinguish between truth and a white lie for convenience?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Well, give me an example of me lying.”
“When I first met you I asked you the name of the chap, the bloke you called him, you were looking for and you said you didn’t know, that was a lie for one.”
“I had to, of course, silly, he might hav
e been a friend of yours.”
“As it happens he is … was, I mean.”
“Oh, so that’s his real name? When he asked me my name and I said Frances Smith, he didn’t believe it any more than you did. He made me swear it and I said only if he told me his name, which he did. I knew it wasn’t right,” she said bitterly.
“But it is, he’s called Winston Sledge, but he’ll never let on to the Winston because his Mum and Dad called him after some funny old politician, died a bit ago, Prime Minister or some lark.”
“Well, it can’t be his real name because … because one of the caretakers showed me the names of everybody in the flats and there’s one couple called Sledge and I called on them; as I told you; there was a very bad-tempered old woman opened the door, masses of red hair and a cross face, she had, said she didn’t know any young chap called Sledge; said they hadn’t any children and never wanted any either … and slammed the door shut, as I told you …”
Battersea Bridge rose in front of them, majestic, belonging to a different world and retaining its eccentricities with pride. Joe tapped on the driver’s window, they descended and as the taxi moved off they moved automatically and together on to the bridge, staring along the river at the reflected light in the translucent, sliding water below.
“It’s a mistake not to have told me before, since you’re telling me now,” Joe remarked, “you’ve got yourself into a heck of a mess.”
“Yes, I agree. But I must say, there’s nothing like a spot of ‘market research’ if you really want to get inside people’s dwellings. You stand on the doorstep, pen poised, and ‘oozing charm from every pore,’ you indicate that your firm have only one wish in mind and that is to know what your Mrs. So-and-So does about whatever you decide on; I decided on breakfast food, I made up the brand name, ARBISCO, it’s a town in North Sweden, I went with friends not long ago, to see the Midnight Sun. Half way through I thought cosmetics might have got me going quicker, on the personal side, but then, I wasn’t really going round to get their private life history. ARBISCO did very nicely; they opened up with their household problems. It was fun but the worry of finding Sledge spoiled it for me, actually,” she complained wistfully. “It took ages, one or two of them couldn’t stop talking; it’s taken me all day to do about twenty flats. But it’s strange what an isolated world you all live in, in Fiery Beacon—nobody I asked had ever heard of Winston Sledge!”
“They’re going to!” Joe shuddered. For a time his mind had been taken off his own troubles.
“What?”
“They’re going to hear the name Sledge before long.”
“Come on, tell me …”
That he would certainly not do. Instead he said: “No! But you’ve got to tell me your proper name.”
“How am I to know you’re not going straight to the police?”
She had a point there, he would not have done what he asked if he had been she. He was not insulted or annoyed, as he might have been, he simply accepted it sadly.
After a time she felt for his hand again, pressing it and saying: “Well, it honestly is Frances Smith, you can call me Fanny if you like; my father’s is a hyphened name.”
“What’s that?”
“You know … something-or-other-Smith, with a hyphen, distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill, as he’d call it, Smiths.”
“I get you.”
“But I’ve decided to drop the something-or-other, there’s no law against dropping it, is there?”
He wouldn’t know. “Well, tell me just one more thing and I’ll never ask another question.”
“What is it?”
“Promise you’ll tell the truth?”
She thought for a long time, minutes, so that he thought she was going to ignore it. Finally she promised elaborately, as he had done himself earlier, crossing her heart in the old school-girlish way, with licked fingers and a request to God to strike her dead should she tell a lie.
He was so annoyed that he let go of her hand. “It’s not that I care all that much about the truth, it’s that I don’t know where I am with you if you make up facts about yourself.”
“Oh, go on, I’ve promised I’ll answer truthfully.”
He took a little winning round before he came out with it: “You said, when you and Sledge were on the tow-path at Maidenhead, you said he said it was too cold … if he hadn’t like … said that, I mean … would you of?”
She frowned, trying to understand the question: “You mean … when he said it was too cold to make love?”
“Um. Would you of?”
“No I wouldn’t, I’d have kicked and screamed and fought like mad, I’d have knocked him silly … with my knee, I’d have rolled into the river and drowned, rather than.”
“Oh,” he returned inadequately.
“You don’t believe me, I suppose?”
“Well, it’s very unusual, I mean.”
“I won’t do it till I get married.”
“Why not, everyone does.”
“Not everyone.” She paused and said: “Because I want to have a happy marriage and if I’ve done all that lot before … well, it might, it just might, spoil things later on, see?”
He did believe her; he was struck dumb with amazement; he took her hand again and they walked over the bridge.
CHAPTER V
MOTHERHOOD had only gradually gone bad on Mrs. Sledge. After the post office pilfering episode she had lowered her sights about the hypothetical man she intended to marry. The actual pilfering had been an effort to pull herself up from the poverty into which she was born, to better herself regarding clothes, hair-dos, manicures and the circle of acquaintances amongst whom she moved.
Having failed, at the age of thirty-five, to find a white-collared husband she decided it was time to settle, if she must, for someone in a lower social scale. She met Sledge one Sunday evening in a public house in the farthest reaches of Chelsea. He was attracted, like a moth to the flame, by her gorgeous red hair, and within four weeks had married her.
There being something obscure but immensely interesting about Mrs. Sledge’s ovaries (there were either too few or too many), the birth of her perfect boy-child was considered, at the Chelsea Hospital for Women, little short of a miracle; the birth was written up in a gynaecological journal and a record kept in a Book of the Hours.
He was indeed a perfect baby, turning into a delightful-looking toddler. Adults could not keep their hands off him; strong men, with shouts of pleasure, would snatch him up and throw him in the air, catching him again to swing him from side to side, as though he were some kind of cocktail. When left in his parked pram outside the Co-op, old ladies would be so entranced by his looks that they would buy him iced lollies for which they would be rewarded by an angelic smile. As soon as he had finished one there would be someone eager to buy him another so that they too might be rewarded by that smile.
His mother would hurry out saying: “He’d better not have any more, thanks, he’ll be sick …”
Sick? It didn’t matter how many iced lollies he had, he was not sick; what did make him sick was not having another.
Since time passes very slowly to a child, this happy period seemed to last a very long time indeed. But as he grew up, it all passed; unaccountably to himself, he was no longer the golden boy, there was no longer any delighted response to his appearance. When his milk teeth fell out in front he looked rather repulsive; adults would address him in quite a different manner. When he sprouted two big yellow teeth, the ones he was to have for life, they looked quite out of proportion to the rest of his face. When he fell and broke one of them in half on the bottom step of the concrete stairs at Fiery Beacon, his mother shook him: “I’ll have to put up with you being an ugly little monster and that’s all! No dentist can fix on half a tooth!” And because he was upset he found the cat and tortured it; somehow it made him feel better. He did this in secret for a long time but when his mother found him at it she flew into a very noisy temper and slapped hi
m on the side of the head.
After that the cat disappeared.
He threw it over the balcony rail, outside their front door, whilst his mother was in the lavatory. His mother moaned around for several days, complaining that the cat had left home and she couldn’t blame it. Nothing was ever said about the broken little ginger body found eight stories below in the forecourt and thrown into the incinerator by one of the caretakers.
Some time later, when they were both twelve, he told Joe Bogey, as they were sitting together on the low wall at the edge of the playground beside the tower block. Unaccountably, Joe wouldn’t believe it, thought he was boasting. “You didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t!” he shouted.
“All right, I didn’t!” young Sledge said soothingly, squatting down and writing “F …” in the dust. One day he would show him!
It became important to impress people, since they no longer fell about with cries of delight at the sight of him. He found there were a number of ways in which he could at least impress himself. He would go off alone to the street markets on Saturday and Sunday mornings and practise a technique which, in time, he developed to an art, that of stealing with his head, as it were, turned the other way. He would choose some small article at the very edge of the stall, spending some time over the choice; he would stay in the vicinity so that he became part of the scene and in no way remarkable, then he would “accidentally” knock the article off the table and, at the exact moment when the stall-owner’s head was engaged in serving someone, he would crouch down and without looking at the article, would feel for it with one hand and get it into his pocket, whilst staying in that position for perhaps as long as a minute after the act of pilfering; nobody is surprised at a boy’s unusual movements such as squatting thoughtfully almost under a stall in a market on Saturday mornings. Young Winston did not know the word subtle; in time he prided himself on being “crafty.”