by John Moore
“Is that all right?” said Stephen. “What about Mr. Hawker?”
“To tell the truth, he’s not very well. He isn’t up yet,” Florrie said. “And it’s all the fault of that American friend of yours. By the way, he left a message for you; he’s gone to the factory to see about buying some balloons. A nice mess he got me into last night,” she added.
“Goodness, what’s he been up to now?”
“You may well ask. He came back at half-past eleven, just as I was finishing washing up, and before I knew where I was he’d started mixing drinks behind the counter. I should never have allowed it, Mr. Tasker; but you must admit he has a way with him.”
“He has indeed.”
“He concocted something he called a snakebite cocktail. There was rum and gin and goodness knows what else in it; but it was mostly whisky. I had a little one myself, just to be friendly, and it fairly made my head go round! Then we got talking about circuses and animals, my first husband having been in the lion-taming profession, as you know. So I had another of those snakebites; but your Mr. Polly-something, he had about half a dozen; and then, Mr. Tasker, he started singing.”
“He would,” said Stephen, remembering VE-day in Greece.
“I should never have allowed it; I don’t know what come over us, except that he has such a way with him. And although they were in a foreign language, I could tell they were improper songs, from the expression on his face. Well, before long, of course, down comes Mr. Hawker in his dressing-gown. He pokes his little whiskers round the door, just like a weasel, you know, and there was Mr. Polly swinging his long legs as he sat on the counter, and there was I—well, I must tell you the truth—I’d got the giggles, Mr. Tasker; just like a schoolgirl, I was, laughing till the tears ran down my face.”
“So Mr. Hawker wasn’t very pleased?”
“He carried on about the police, and the place being respectable—you couldn’t blame him, Mr. Tasker, I’m not blaming him at all—and then, all of a sudden I come over swimmy, owing to that snakebite, and I had to leave the room. Just then Mr. Hawker was saying it was a shame the way we’d woken him up, he being under the weather and all, and your friend was telling him that if he was under the weather he ought to have a drop of snakebite to put him on top of the world again. ‘Even if you was bitten by a rattlesnake,’ he was saying, ‘this stuff would fix you in no time.’ But I never thought he’d allow himself to be persuaded, him being a teetotaller as you might say from the cradle.”
“And did he?”
Florrie nodded her head gravely.
“Nobody could have done it but your friend. Nobody. But when I came back, Mr. Tasker—as soon as the swim-miness had gone—believe it or not, they was both singing. They was sitting on the bar like two birds on a perch and they was singing:
“‘Here’s to the good old snakebite, Put it down, put it down!’
They was, Mr. Tasker. Yes, they was.” She nodded her head again and went on:
“But of course, it couldn’t last. As soon as Mr. Hawker began to twiddle his thumbs I guessed what was coming. None of my husbands was what you’d call moderate men, Mr. Tasker; so whenever I sees a gentleman with his eyes half-shut, and his chin on his chest, and his hands clasped across his stomach, and his thumbs twiddling, I know that I shan’t get any more sense out of him till morning. Your friend was singing away, and I don’t suppose he even noticed; but Mr. Hawker slid off the counter like a sack of potatoes into my arms, and I—” finished Florrie with pardonable pride— “I carried him up to bed.”
It was a splendid picture which rose up in Stephen’s mind, of Florrie’s broad back rippling like the withers of a great Percheron mare of Normandy as she lifted up the little man and enveloped him within her strong arms and generous bosom. She would know the way to do it; for had she not carried to bed the lion-tamer and the astrologer and the punisher of whisky, those fabulous immoderate husbands of hers?
But just then, as Florrie took a deep breath and prepared to continue her story, the porter came in to tell Stephen that he was wanted on the telephone. He went into the stuffy little box in the hall on the walls of which somebody —perhaps Mr. Oxford—had scribbled the names of innumerable race-horses, and heard Faith’s voice saying:
“The Mayor wants you in the office, please. There’s an awful crisis on.”
“What is it?”
“Mr. Gurney—” She broke off suddenly, there was a scrabbling sound, and instead of her clear young voice a throaty whisper filled the telephone-box. It could belong to none but Councillor Noakes.
“Walls have ears.”
Part Six
I
Dame Joanna’s statue was still draped in readiness for its unveiling at the end of the week, for it had been deemed indecorous to associate this solemn ceremony with the choosing of the Beauty Queens. Amorphous in its draperies, it appeared to be almost headless, like a piece of sculpture by Mr. Henry Moore. Portentous, brooding, it looked across the river from the Pleasure Gardens towards the grandstands on the Bloody Meadow with an air that was curiously and indefinably sinister; and well it might.
“If that ain’t jest too bad,” said Polly. “And you’re telling me that there never was no such dame as this Joanna?”
“There never was,” said Stephen, still awe-stricken by the revelation.
“Well, if that ain’t jest too bad.”
It was Monday morning, and the sun beamed its blessing upon the festive town, the flags and the roses, the purple loosestrife on the river-bank, the Bloody Meadow bedecked already with the favours of Lancaster and York. Forecasts more reliable than the Vicar’s promised a week of fine weather. But all was overshadowed, darkened, blighted, by yesterday’s shocking discovery. As the Mayor had pathetically said: “It somehow spoils everything.” He seemed to have shrunk and withered, so that he looked even more unimportant than usual, and his kindly face wore an expression of hopeless bewilderment. “If we unveil her,” he had sighed, “we lay ourselves open to ridicule; but if we do not unveil her, people will want to know why. We are in a cleft stick, Stephen.” As for Councillor Noakes, he seemed capable of no positive action at all, but strode up and down in Stephen’s office like a caged animal, exclaiming in hollow tones: “Figures of fun. That’s what we shall be. Figures of fun, laughing stocks, butts, to the end of our days.” It was mainly to escape from him that Stephen had sought out Polly in the Pleasure Gardens, where with the aid of some of the grandstand carpenters he was building an improvised bridge over the narrow neck of the river just below the mill-pool. Stephen called him up the bank and confided in him the appalling problem of Dame Joanna.
A professor on holiday had started the trouble. The voice-pipe in Mr. Runcorn’s office, wailing like a bird of doom, had announced him late on Saturday afternoon. He was something of a specialist, he said, in Middle English literature. He was therefore interested in Dame Joanna, and he proceeded to ask some awkward questions about the local poetess. When he had departed Mr. Runcorn sighed deeply and put through a telephone call to the Bodleian. Its Librarian promised to make inquiries and on Sunday morning he rang up the Mayor. He disclaimed the possession of any manuscripts by Dame Joanna. He had never heard of such a poet. Mr. Gurney, in fact, had invented her.
But Mr. Gurney, when the Mayor rang him up to ask for an explanation, had uttered a bird-like squawk and put down the receiver. Later, when Stephen accompanied the Mayor to his shop, they had received no answer to their urgent knocking on the door. The familiar notice Back in half an hour had been removed from the window and replaced by another which bore the single word Wait.
So Joanna turned out to be as mythical as the unicorn and the roc and the great sea serpent; an airy nothing, a creature of Mr. Gurney’s mischievous imagination, an ingenious fraud like the Chippendale and Hepplewhite chairs in his shop window, and, like them, faked up with infinite pains, to feed fat his ancient grudge against Councillor Noakes. But her statue remained, as pointless as the pyramids, six feet six in
ches from the base of the pedestal to the top of her head, seven hundredweight (as Councillor Noakes put it) of hoax. She whom it commemorated no longer had any substance; but its formidable solidity would mock the town for ever. And it had cost the ratepayers four hundred pounds.
“I’m real sorry for your little Mayor,” said Polly. He lifted the draperies about Joanna’s skirt and stared at her reflectively. “And I’m sorry for you too, Stevie. Let’s go to the Red Lion and have a drink.”
He waved to the carpenters, who were laying wooden crosspieces upon the framework of the little bridge, and took Stephen’s arm as they walked down the back lane which led past the balloon factory towards the main street.
“Those planks,” he said, “will blow clean out, see, so we can collect ’em up and use ’em again for each performance. I’ve gotten some dynamite, Stevie. We can have a real big bang.”
How on earth, Stephen wondered, does a stranger in a strange land get hold of some dynamite? But that was all of a piece with the numinosity of Polly, it was another demonstration of his Dionysiac quality: he could do things which were impossible to ordinary men.
“And I dated up that redhead,” he observed casually, as they came opposite the balloon factory from all the windows of which, like smoke from a crowded room, there streamed a thin haze of french chalk. “And I bought a hundred thousand balloons to advertise my circus.”
Dionysiac indeed! Within less than forty-eight hours he had caused Old Screwnose to sing Hexes to the good old snakebite, he had persuaded the carpenters to work all Sunday afternoon, he had mysteriously obtained some dynamite, he had dated up Miss Foulkes, he had bought a hundred thousand balloons. And now, at the corner where the lane entered the street, he suddenly paused and exclaimed excitedly:
“Stevie, I got an idea!”
“Yes? What is it this time?”
“I been thinking. If you could have those Pleasure Gardens closed to the public for an hour or two this afternoon, and the gates locked during the performance—”
“Yes—why?”
“I could fix that Dame Joanna of yours.”
“You’re rather good at fixing dames, aren’t you?” laughed Stephen. “But what exactly do you mean?”
“Well, are you sure your little old Mayor would be glad to be rid of her, Stevie? Are you quite sure of that?”
“I should think he’d give his right arm if she could just magically disappear.”
“That’s fine. Then I’ll fix her. I reckon,” said Polly thoughtfully, wrinkling his forehead, “that the narrowest part of a dame is somewhere round about her waist.”
II
Because Edna had gone up to London for her film-test, Mrs. Greening had taken her place at the end of the long bench, and was testing the new batch of beach-balls which were being turned out in a hurry to fulfil an unexpected repeat order from Australia. When they were done the factory was going to start on Polly’s platypuses. There was enough work on hand for nearly a month, and all the arrears of wages had been paid that morning.
“What would they be like, these platy pusses?” said Mrs. Greening to Jim, as he brought her another dozen beach-balls which he had just peeled off the formas.
“Dunno. They make some pretty funny things in this line of business, but I can’t say I’ve ever ’eard of a platy puss. But good luck to ’em. Means we keeps our jobs, anyway.” Then, as he went back to his oven, he resumed his description of the things which would happen to Edna if her film-test were successful.
“Fust thing,” he said, “they takes out all your teef.”
“They never!”
“They does. I read it in the Worker. Nobody’s natural teef ain’t good enough for them B. plutocrats what owns the fillums. Then they pulls out your eyebrows ’air by ’air, ’cause you ’as to ’ave new ones painted on special. Just the same wiv your mouf. Maybe it’s the wrong shape; not what the plutocrats calls kissable. Maybe it ain’t big enough. So they paints you on another.”
“They never!” said Mrs. Greening again.
“Read it in the paper. ’Sides, you can see it’s right every time you goes to the fillums. Those lushus great mouvs wiv the paint dripping off of ’em like strawberry jam ain’t real, don’t you kid yourself. Nor’s the eyelashes. They’ll pull out Edna’s eyelashes wiv the tweezers, and stick on artificial ones about an inch long. But mark my words, Mrs. Grinnin,” croaked Jim solemnly, “it’s ten to one that when they’re done wiv ’er they won’t like the result. They’ll fiddle about wiv ’er face till they’ve made a muck of it, and then they’ll say they don’t like ’er figure or something. Maybe she ain’t got enough uplift or maybe she’s got too much—uplift’s bosoms, it said so in the Worker —and then they’ll just send ’er back to store. Girls is just cannon-fodder to them.”
“Who’d have thought it?” exclaimed Mrs. Greening in amazement. “I’d rather ’ave me pendix out meself. Now what’d them long eyelashes be made of, d’you suppose?”
“Pigs’ bristles, I dessay,” improvised Jim on the spur of the moment.
“But what for do they do it, like?”
“So’s they lie flat on ’er cheek and she looks like she’s swoonin’ when she’s being made love to by James Mason or some such chap. When she looks like a dyin’ duck in a thunderstorm it means she’s enjoyin’ of it special. I often seen it ’appen on the fillums.”
“Does your old ’oman swoon when you makes love to ’er?” inquired Mrs. Greening tartly.
“She’d be that took back, she would if I tried,” said Jim; and all the women at the long bench set up such a cackle of laughter that it sounded as if a fox had got in among a lot of old hens. Even John Handiman in his office could hear it, and he looked across the room at Miss Foulkes and smiled.
“What kind of a tail did you say it had?” said John, who was making the rough drawing for the matrix of the formas from an engraving of a duck-billed platypus in an old Encyclopaedia. “This picture doesn’t show it.”
“Short and fat,” said Miss Foulkes promptly.
“All the book says about it is that it’s oviparous,” said John. “What’s oviparous, Enid?”
“Lays eggs, instead of bringing forth its young alive.”
“You seem to know a lot about the beast,” said John. He glanced up from his drawing and was astonished to see Miss Foulkes smiling at him quite composedly. This was a rare phenomenon anyhow, but what particularly struck him was that it was a peculiarly contented smile. He found himself staring at her, wondering why she looked so different this morning. There were lights in her hair which he had never noticed before; in the sunlight which came through the small window over her head it burned with a slow-smouldering flame. And somehow—-John couldn’t explain it—her manner was changed too. Some of the sharp edges seemed to have been rubbed away. Aware that he was looking at her, she returned his glance quite calmly, without any of the awkward defensiveness which so often embarrassed him. Then there was a knock at the door, and in came the messenger-boy from the florist’s.
Miss Foulkes did not immediately look round; and John had said, “Put them on the filing-cabinet,” before she noticed the messenger. The flowers this time were gladioli, an enormous bunch of salmon-pink ones which must have cost, John thought, at least a pound. He was horrified at the thought of her spending so much of her wages on such nonsense. Then he became aware that Miss Foulkes had got up from her desk and was staring in amazement at the gladioli. He expected that her blush would match the flowers themselves, and prepared as usual to avert his glance. But this time Enid Foulkes did not even blush. Instead the blood drained away from her pale skin so that it looked quite transparent.
“But—but I didn’t order them!” she gasped, and slumped back in her chair.
III
Stephen And Polly had just ordered their drinks, and inquired after the health of Mr. Hawker— “He’s getting up now; but shaky as an aspen-leaf,” said Florrie—when the clock in the hall began to strike twelve, and as i
f at a signal Mr. Oxford entered the bar. He was followed by Timms, bearing like an acolyte a large silver trophy which he set down upon the counter. Mr. Oxford, who had a strong sense of the dramatic, stood before it in silence while he deliberately counted out five pound notes.
“Fill that,” he commanded, handing them to Florrie, “with a mixture of equal parts of brandy and champagne! ”
“Why, Mr. Oxford, whatever has come over you?” Florrie fluttered. “Have you won the Irish Sweep or something?”
Mr. Oxford took a step back from the counter and looked about him. He nodded to Stephen, who introduced Polly. “Welcome to our ancient borough!” said Mr. Oxford, taking off his hat. Then he waved his hand towards the trophy, and Florrie dutifully reached up for a bottle of Martell Three-Star on the shelf over her head.
“That cup,” said Mr. Oxford, “is presented every year to the champion angler of all the Midlands, and it was won on Saturday by Mr. Handiman senior of this town with a chub weighing eight pounds two and a half ounces. Am I right, Timms?”
“Two and three-quarter,” squeaked Timms.
“Two and three-quarter to be precise. Now, Mr. Handiman, flying as you might say in the face of all his prejudices and principles, backed himself with me to win two hundred pounds, and fortunately I had the good sense to lay off that bet among my confreres. It cost me, personally, a mere matter of twenty smackers, which I was very pleased to part with in a good cause.”
“Well, fancy that! And Mr. Handiman so strict!” said Florrie.
“You know my motto,” Mr. Oxford went on. “‘Pay up with a smile and pay on the nile,’ as they say in Brummagem. So first thing on Sunday morning I says to Timms, ‘Timms,’ I says, ‘the better the day the better the deed.’ So off we go to Mr. Handiman to pay him his two hundred pounds. It was a moving moment, gentlemen! I have paid out a great deal of money in my time—it is always a pleasure—but I can honestly say I have never been so touched in all my professional career. ‘Praise the Lord!’ he said; and there were tears in his eyes as he said it. ‘But if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not actually handle the money on the Sabbath. May I have it to-morrow instead? ’ Then ‘ Praise the Lord!’ he cries again; and he puts on his bowler hat and hurries off to chapel like a man in a dream.”