‘You’re telling me,’ the wife said.
‘Well, he has to watch everything now. Marrying a young girl like that, it stands to reason,’ said the wife in a melancholy voice.
‘Wears him out, at his age,’ suggested the tobacconist.
‘Stop the dirty talk, Alfred,’ said the wife.
‘You mean he married the girl?’ I said. ‘Who’s the big woman without a hat – in the store?’
‘What big woman is that?’ asked the tobacconist’s wife. ‘He’s married to the girl. Who else do you think – there’s no one else.’
The wife’s face went as blank as a tombstone in the sly London way.
‘She’s done well for herself,’ said the tobacconist. ‘Keeps her locked up like his mother, wasn’t I right?’
‘He worships her,’ said the woman.
I went home to my flat. I was nauseated. The thought of Isabel in bed with that dressed up servant, with his wet eyes, his big raw ears and his breath smelling of onions! Innocent? No, as the woman said, ‘She has done well for herself.’ Happy with him too. I remembered her pretty face laughing in the shop. What else could you expect, after August and Mrs Price.
The anger I felt with Pliny grew to a rage but by the time I was in my own flat Pliny vanished from the picture in my mind. I was filled with passion for the girl. The fever of the trade had come alive in me; Pliny had got something I wanted. I could think of nothing but her, just as I remember the look August gave Pliny when the girl asked if the jug was Meissen. I could see her holding the jug at arm’s length, laughing at the old man’s face under the lip. And I could see that Pliny was not mad; what was making him frantic was possessing the girl.
I kept away from Pliny’s. I tried to drive the vision out of my mind, but I could not forget it. I became cunning. Whenever my job allowed it – and even when it didn’t – I started passing the time of day with any dealer I had known, picked up news of the sales, studied catalogues, tried to find out which ones Pliny would go to. She might be with him. I actually went to Newbury but he was not there. Bath he couldn’t miss and, sure enough, he was there and she wasn’t. It was ten in the morning and the sale had just started. I ran off and got into my car. I drove as fast as I could the hundred miles back to London and cursed the lunchtime traffic. I got to Pliny’s shop and rang the bell. Once, then several long rings. At once the drum started beating and went on as if troops were marching. People passing in the street paused to listen too. I stood back from the window and I saw a movement at a curtain upstairs. The drumming was still going on and when I bent to listen at the letter box I could hear the sound become deafening and often very near and then there was a blast from the bugle. It was a misty day south of the river and for some reason or other I was fingering the grey window and started writing her name, I S A B … hopelessly, but hoping that perhaps she might come near enough to see. The drumming stopped. I waited and waited and then I saw an extraordinary sight; Isabel herself in the dull red dress, but with a lancer’s helmet on her head and a side drum on its straps hanging from her shoulders and the drum sticks in her hand. She was standing upright like a boy playing soldiers, her chin up and puzzling at the sight of the letters BASI on the window. When she saw me she was confused. She immediately gave two or three taps to the drum and then bent almost double with laughter. Then she put on a straight face and played the game of pointing to one thing after another in the shop. Every time I shook my head, until at last I pointed to her. This pleased her. Then I shouted through the letter box: ‘I want to come in.’
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘It’s open.’
The door had been open all the time; I had not thought of trying it. I went inside.
‘I thought you were locked in.’
She did not answer but wagged her head from side to side.
‘Sometimes I lock myself in,’ she said. ‘There are bad people about, August’s men.’
She said this with great importance, but her face became ugly as she said it. She took off the helmet and put down the drum.
‘So I beat the drum when Mr Pliny is away,’ she said. She called him Mr Pliny.
‘What good does that do?’
‘It is so quiet when Mr Pliny is away. I don’t do it when he’s here. It frightens August’s men away.’
‘It’s as good as telling them you are alone here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I came. I heard the drum and the bugle.’
‘Did you?’ she said eagerly. ‘Was it loud?’
‘Very loud.’
She gave a deep sigh of delight.
‘You see!’ she said, nodding her head complacently.
‘Who taught you to blow the bugle?’ I said.
‘My mother did,’ she said. ‘She did it on the stage. Mr Pliny – you know when Mr Pliny fetched me in his motor-car – I forgot it. He had to go back and get it. I was too frightened.’
‘Isab …’ I said.
She blushed. She remembered.
‘I might be one of August’s men,’ I said.
‘No you’re not. I know who you are,’ she said. ‘Mr Pliny’s away for the day but that doesn’t matter. I am in charge. Is there something you were looking for?’
The child was gone when she put the drum aside. She became serious and practical: Mrs Pliny! I was confused by my mistake in not knowing the door was open and she busied herself about the shop. She knew what she was doing and I felt very foolish.
‘Is there something special?’ she said. ‘Look around.’ She had become a confident woman. I no longer felt there was anything strange about her. I drifted to look at the chessmen and I could not pretend to myself that they interested me, but I did ask her the price. She said she would look it up and went to a desk where Pliny kept his papers and after going through some lists of figures which were all in code she named the sum. It was enormous – something like £275 and I said, ‘What!’ in astonishment. She put the list back on the desk and said, firmly:
‘My husband paid £260 for it last Sunday. It was carved by Dubois. There are only two more like it. It was the last thing he did in 1785.’
(I found out afterwards this was nonsense.)
She said this in Pliny’s voice; it was exactly the sort of casual sentence he would have used. She looked expressionlessly and not at all surprised when I said, ‘Valuable,’ and moved away.
I meant, of course, that she was valuable and in fact her mystery having gone, she seemed conscious of being valuable and important herself, the queen and owner of everything in the shop, efficiently in charge of her husband’s things. The cabinet in the corner, she said, in an offhand way, as I went to look at it, had been sold to an Australian. ‘We are waiting for the packers.’ We! Not to feel less knowing than she was, I looked around for some small thing to buy from her. There were several small things, like a cup and saucer, a little china tray, a christening mug. I picked things up and put them down listlessly and, from being indifferent, she became eager and watched me. The important, serious expression she had had vanished, she became childish suddenly and anxious: she was eager to sell something. I found a little china figure on a shelf.
‘How much is this?’ I said. It was Dresden; the real thing. She took it and looked at the label. I knew it was far beyond my purse and I asked her the price in the bored hopeless voice one puts on.
‘I’ll have to look it up,’ she said.
She went to the desk again and looked very calculating and thoughtful and then said, as if naming an enormous sum:
‘Two pounds.’
‘It can’t be,’ I said.
She looked sad as I put it back on the shelf and she went back to the desk. Then she said:
‘I tell you what I’ll do. It’s got a defect. You can have it for thirty-five shillings.’
I picked it up again. There was no defect in it. I could feel the huge wave of temptation that comes to one in the trade, the sense of the incredible chance, the lust that makes one shudder first and then breaks over one so that
one is possessed, though even at that last moment, one plays at delay in a breathless pause, now one is certain of one’s desire.
I said: ‘I’ll give you thirty bob for it.’
Young Mrs Pliny raised her head and her brown eyes became brilliant with naïve joy.
‘All right,’ she said.
The sight of her wrapping the figure, packing it in a box and taking the money so entranced me, that I didn’t realise what she was doing or what I had done. I wasn’t thinking of the figure at all. I was thinking of her. We shook hands. Hers were cold and she waved from the shop door when I left. And when I got to the end of the street and found myself holding the box I wondered why I had bought it. I didn’t want it. I had felt the thrill of the thief and I was so ashamed that I once or twice thought of dropping it into a litter box. I even thought of going back and returning it to her and saying to her: ‘I didn’t want it. It was a joke. I wanted you. Why did you marry an awful old man like Pliny?’ And those stories of Pliny going off once a month in the old days, in his mother’s time, to Lal Drake that old whore in Brixton, came back to me. I didn’t even unpack the figure but put it on the mantelpiece in my room, then on the top shelf of a cupboard which I rarely used. I didn’t want to see it. And when in the next months – or even years – I happened to see it, I remembered her talking about the bad people, August’s men.
But, though I kept away from Pliny’s on Sundays, I could not resist going back to the street and eventually to the shop – just for the sight of her.
And after several misses I did see her in the shop. It was locked. When I saw her she stared at me with fear and made no signals and quickly disappeared – I suppose into the room at the back. I crossed the main road and looked at the upper part of the house. She was upstairs, standing at a window. So I went back across the street and tried to signal, but of course she could only see my mouth moving. I was obsessed by the way I had cheated her. My visits were a siege for the door was never opened now. I did see her once through the window and this time I had taken the box and offered it to her in dumb show. That did have an effect. I saw she was looking very pale, her eyes ringed and tired and whether she saw I was remorseful or not I couldn’t tell, but she made a rebuking yet defiant face. Another day I went and she looked terrified. She pointed and pointed to the door but as I eagerly stepped towards it she shook her head and raised a hand to forbid me. I did not understand until, soon, I saw Pliny walking about the shop. I moved off. People in the neighbourhood must often have seen me standing there and the tobacconist I went to gave me a look that suggested he knew what was going on.
Then, on one of my vigils, I saw a doctor go to the side door down the Goods Entrance and feared she was ill – but the butcher told me it was Pliny. His wife, they said, had been nursing him. He ought to convalesce somewhere. A nice place by the sea. But he won’t. It would do his wife good. The young girl has worn herself out looking after him. Shut up all day with him. And the tobacconist said what his wife had said a long time back. ‘Like his poor mother. He kept her locked in too. Sunday evening’s the only time she’s out. It’s all wrong.’
I got sick of myself. I didn’t notice the time I was wasting for one day passed like a smear of grey into another and I wished I could drag myself away from the district, especially now Pliny was always there. At last one Saturday I fought hard against a habit so useless and I had the courage to drive past the place for once and did not park my car up the street. I drove on, taking side streets (which I knew, nevertheless, would lead me back), but I made a mistake with the one-ways and got on the main Brixton road and was heading north to freedom from myself.
It was astonishing to be free. It was seven o’clock in the evening and to celebrate I went into a big pub where they had singers on Saturday nights; it was already filling up with people. How normal, how cheerful they were, a crowd of them, drinking, shouting and talking; the human race! I got a drink and chose a quiet place in a corner and I was taking my first mouthful of the beer, saying to myself: ‘Here’s to yourself, my boy,’ as though I had just met myself as I used to be. And then, with the glass still at my lips, I saw in a crowd at the other end of the bar Pliny, with his back half-turned. I recognised him by his jug-handle ears, his white hair and the stoop of a tall man. He was not in his dressy clothes but in a shabby suit that made him seem disguised. He was listening to a woman who had a large handbag and had bright blonde hair and a big red mouth who was telling him a joke and she banged him in the stomach with her bag and laughed. Someone near me said: ‘Lal’s on the job early this evening.’ Lal Drake. All the old stories about Pliny and his woman came back to me and how old Castle of Westbury said that Pliny’s mother had told him, when she was saying what a good son he was to her, that the one and only time he had been with a woman he had come home and told her and put his head in her laps and cried ‘like a child’ and promised on the Bible he’d never do such a thing again. Castle swore this was true.
I put down my glass and got out of the pub fast without finishing it. Not because I was afraid of Pliny. Oh no! I drove straight back to Pliny’s shop. I rang the bell. The drum started beating a few taps and then a window upstairs opened.
‘What do you want?’ said Isabel in a whisper.
‘I want to see you. Open the door.’
‘It’s locked.’
‘Get the key.’
She considered me for a long time.
‘I haven’t got one,’ she said, still in a low voice, so hard to hear that she had to say it twice.
‘Where have you been?’ she said.
We stared at each other’s white faces in the dark. She had missed me!
‘You’ve got a key. You must have,’ I said. ‘Somewhere. What about the back door?’
She leaned on the window, her arms on the sill. She was studying my clothes.
‘I have something for you,’ I said. This changed her. She leaned forward trying to see more of me in the dark. She was curious. Today I understand what I did not understand then; she was looking me over minutely, inch by inch – what she could see of me in the sodium light of the street lamp – not because I was strange or unusual – but because I was not. She had been shut up either alone or with Pliny without seeing another soul for so long. He was treating her like one of his collector’s pieces, like the Meissen August had said he kept hidden upstairs. She closed the window. I stood there wretched and impatient. I went down the Goods Entrance ready to kick the side door down, break a window, climb in somehow. The side door had no letter box or glass panes, no handle even. I stood in front of it and suddenly it was opened. She was standing there.
‘You’re not locked in,’ I said.
She was holding a key.
‘I found it,’ she said.
I saw she was telling a lie.
‘Just now?’
‘No. I know where he hides it,’ she said lowering her frank eyes.
It was a heavy key with an old piece of frayed used-up string on it.
‘Mr Pliny does not like me to show people things,’ she said. ‘He has gone to see his sister in Brixton. She is very ill. I can’t show you anything.’
She recited these words as if she had learned them by heart. It was wonderful to stand so near to her in the dark.
‘Can I come in?’ I said.
‘What do you want?’ she said cautiously.
‘You,’ I said.
She raised her chin.
‘Are you one of August’s men?’ she said.
‘You know I’m not. I haven’t seen August for years.’
‘Mr Pliny says you are. He said I was never to speak to you again. August was horrible.’
‘The last I heard he was in prison.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He steals.’
This seemed to please her; she forgave him that easily. Then she put her head out of the doorway as if to see if August were waiting behind me.
‘He does something else, too,’ she said.
I re
membered the violent quarrel between August and poor Mrs Price when she was drunk in Salisbury – the quarrel about Isabel.
‘You ran away,’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘I didn’t run away. Mr Pliny fetched me,’ she said and nodded primly, ‘in his car. I told you.’
Then she said: ‘Where is the present you were bringing me?’
‘It isn’t a present,’ I said. ‘It’s the little figure I bought from you. You didn’t charge me enough. Let me in. I want to explain.’
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I had taken advantage of her ignorance, so I said:
‘I found out afterwards that it was worth much more than I paid you. I want to give it back to you.’
She gave a small jump towards me. ‘Oh please, please,’ she said and took me by the hand. ‘Where is it?’
‘Let me come in,’ I said, ‘and I will tell you. I haven’t got it with me. I’ll bring it tomorrow, no not tomorrow, Monday.’
‘Oh. Please,’ she pleaded. ‘Mr Pliny was so angry with me for selling it. He’d never been angry with me before. It was terrible. It was awful.’
It had never occurred to me that Pliny would even know she had sold the piece; but now, I remembered the passions of the trade and the stored up lust that seems to pass between things and men like Pliny. He wouldn’t forgive. He would be savage.
‘Did he do something to you? He didn’t hit you, did he?’
Isabel did not answer.
‘What did he do?’
I remembered how frantic Pliny had been and how violent he had sounded, when he told me to get out of his shop.
‘He cried,’ she said. ‘He cried and he cried. He went down on his knees and he would not stop crying. I was wicked to sell it. I am the most precious thing he has. Please bring it. It will make him better.’
‘Is he still angry?’
‘It has made him ill,’ she said.
‘Let me come in,’ I said.
‘Will you promise?’
‘I swear I’ll bring it,’ I said.
‘For a minute,’ she said, ‘but not in the shop.’
I followed her down a dark passage into the store and was so close that I could smell her hair.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 51