“He does most of it on the A2. He says he can average eighty on one stretch.”
Sandra said, “Well, they don’t sound a bad bunch, really.”
Anthony considered this as carefully as he considered all his wife’s opinions. “Individually,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong with them. A bit of brains and a bit of brawn. It was the gang spirit, combined with the maps on the wall, that I didn’t like. They were a damned sight too military. When I asked Drummer Senior about them he told me that their policy was – ‘Put Britain First’.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. As long as the corollary isn’t – ‘Keep the Others in their Place’. And there’s another thing. A sort of personal rivalry between Ted and Salim.”
“In the old days,” said Sandra, “when two tribes had a difference of opinion, they let their headmen fight it out in single combat and agreed to abide by the result. It’s a pity we can’t do the same thing now.”
“Prime Minister against Prime Minister?”
“Why not?”
“Some of them are women nowadays.”
“So what? Women fight just as hard as men. And twice as dirty.”
Anthony tried to visualise the heads of England and France in bare-fisted combat. He said, “Well, it’s a lovely idea.”
He had arranged to visit the opposition that evening. This had to take place after hours as three of the boys, he knew, had jobs. When he got to the yard behind the Kahn garage and workshop he found that their meeting place was an altogether more ramshackle affair than the headquarters of the Young Britons. It had been knocked together out of planks and sheets of plywood. The sloping roof had once been part of an outsize packing-case. He could still see the words ‘East London Motors’ stencilled across it. It reminded him of constructions he had seen in the slums of Abbottabad. There, whole families had lived in them.
This interior was arranged more like a living-room than an army headquarters; a decrepit sofa, a newish armchair, a card-table and three collapsible canvas chairs of the type used by army officers as camp equipment. There were five boys present, two of whom, Salim and Rahim Kahn, he had met already. Salim introduced the other three to him with adult formality. Javed Rahman, Rameez Rahman the brother of Javed, and Saghir Abbas a friend of both families. Later, as the discussion became more relaxed, he identified them as Jay, Ram and Sher.
Anthony opened on the same line he had pursued on the previous evening. He said that they were all of them old enough to behave sensibly. Salim had not been in any trouble before. Nor, as far as he knew, had the other boys – had they?
Four heads were shaken.
Very well then. He couldn’t promise anything, but he thought it most likely that the magistrate would bind Salim over or give him a conditional discharge. But if there was any further trouble, then the police would be bound to take a very serious view of it after this warning. Did they understand that?
Four pairs of eyes were fixed on Salim.
At this point in his previous interview, Ted Drummer had said, predictably, that they were none of them looking for trouble, and if other people left them alone, they would leave other people alone. He expected Salim to use much the same formula. Instead, after a pause, he said, very respectfully, “We have been told that you lived at Rawalpindi, sir. Is that true?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Then you will have acquired some knowledge of our people.”
“Of the Afridis? Yes, a little.”
“With us a feud is a serious matter. An affair of honour.”
“And who, precisely, do you imagine you have a feud with?”
“Perhaps a feud is too serious a word. But I have a quarrel with Edward Drummer which will have to be settled. He has been spreading untruths about me.”
“Oh. What has he been saying?”
Salim looked at Saghir, who nodded.
“He said, when other boys were present, Jay and Sher were there too, that if the police had not intervened he would have given me such a beating as would have taught me manners. I did not object—” Salim showed his teeth for a moment in a tight smile—“to him saying that he was trying to teach me manners. What was incorrect was saying that he was succeeding.”
“Oh come. That’s not a serious matter. Anyone who takes part in a fight which gets stopped may think he is winning.”
Five heads were shaken in violent dissent.
Salim said, “We know, and he knows, that I was winning. He has not been taught to fight in the same way that I have. Unfortunately my foot slipped and we fell to the ground together. That was when my face was bruised. Not by him, you understand, but by the fall. It made no difference. If the policeman had not been there, the fight would have ended in his destruction.”
“I think,” said Rameez, “that if the policeman had not been there his friends would have joined in to save his skin.”
“Ram’s right,” said Rahim. “They all knew that he was being defeated.”
“And if that had happened,” said Anthony, “I suppose you would all have joined in.”
“Of course,” said Saghir. “And many of our friends who had heard the words used.”
Now we’re coming to it, thought Anthony. He said, “Tell me. What was it all about?”
Salim said, “The clock in the square was striking five as we came past. Ted Drummer shouted across the street—”
“Loudly, so that all could hear,” said Rameez.
“The hour of prayer. Get out your mats, monkeys.”
Oh dear, said Anthony to himself.
“That was not only insulting, it was stupid. Our family and the Rahman family have, in fact, given up the five-fold ritual of public worship. We confine ourselves to the first prayer and the last, which we observe in the privacy of our homes. It was not an easy decision, you understand. But our fathers considered the matter together and decided that since we were settled now permanently in England it would be sensible to modify the strict demand and that was how we should be brought up.”
“I agree,” said Anthony, “that what Ted Drummer said was stupid and tactless. Would it not have been better to ignore it altogether?”
“If I had been permitted to continue the fight to its appointed end, I should have been satisfied.”
Anthony found it difficult to know what to say. His years in India had taught him that his religion meant a great deal more to a Muslim than Christianity did to the average Englishman. He had witnessed some of the unspeakably terrible results of this. He said, choosing his words and speaking slowly, “You are of the frontier Muslims. In the troubles which followed partition you took no part in the massacres. You were not fanatical, as were the Sikhs. In fact, your father told me that it was because his father disapproved of the violence that he brought his family to England. That is your tradition. A tradition of tolerance.”
Salim said, with a tiny smile at the corner of his mouth which gave him a curiously adult look, “We do not plan to massacre Ted Drummer and his friends. But an insult has been given, heard by all here. It must be answered appropriately.”
As Anthony said later that evening to his wife, “I was just about gravelled. There was such a serious logic in what Salim said.”
“So what did you do?”
“I pushed off feeling ineffective. As I was leaving something rather odd happened. I ran into their father, Azam Kahn, being talked to by a man, who slid off as soon as he saw me coming, but not before I’d got a good look at his face.”
“The press, I suppose.”
“That’s what he told Azam.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“Do you remember, when Elfe was staying with us in Rawalpindi, in connection with the trouble which was being stirred up among the Sikhs, he pointed a man out to me one day? I don’t think he was one of the rabble-rousers, but Elfe seemed to think he was important.”
“I remember him saying something about it. Why?”
“Well, tha
t was the man I saw talking to Azam.”
Sandra refrained from saying, are you sure? She knew that one of the faculties her husband was proud of – and a very useful one in his present job – was a memory for faces. About other things he made mistakes. About faces rarely.
She said, “Elfe told us his name. An uncommon one.”
“He did. And I’ve forgotten it. I hoped you’d remember it.” Sandra shook her head slowly.
Next morning at breakfast she put down the coffee pot she was holding and said, “Firn. Spelt with an ‘i’.”
“That’s right,” said Anthony. “Olaf Firn. Good. With a name like that he shouldn’t be too difficult to locate.”
“He might have had some perfectly legitimate reason for talking to Azam. Maybe he has got a job on one of the national papers. Since the Brixton business they get excited about any racial trouble. Last month there were paragraphs and paragraphs about that white boy who spat in a black teacher’s eye.”
“You could be right. But if there’s something else behind it, I’ve a feeling I ought to find out what it is.”
This was a sound resolution, but like many sound resolutions, not easy to put into practice. Anthony’s first call was at the public library, where he spent an hour with books of reference. Telephone directories, street directories, lists of lawyers, doctors, accountants, estate agents, dentists and veterinary surgeons. Drawing a blank with these he contacted a friend in the Post Office, knowing that they had more extensive nominal lists than any other government department. The friend was helpful, but warned Anthony that the references he had access to were confined to the south-east postal district, from Southwark in the north-west to Eltham in the south-east. This district they covered in detail, street by street, but they produced no Firn.
Anthony knew that, if he was to go any further, he would need official help. He spoke to the magistrate’s clerk who arranged for him to have a word with Mr. Norrie as soon as court rose for that day. This would serve a double purpose, since it was time he made an interim report. The summons came at one o’clock and he found the magistrate in a good temper. He had contrived to dispose of the court’s business by lunchtime. It was an unusual thing to happen and it left him free to devote the afternoon to his hobby: the perusal, arrangement and classification of a vast stamp collection. King George the Fifth had had a larger one, but apart from his royal rival he believed that there were few collections in private hands to match his own.
He listened with half his attention to what Anthony had to tell him and said, “If you think it’s important you could ask Elfe about it, I suppose.”
“I thought about that, sir. But he’s rather a senior man. Head of the Special Branch. And besides, he may not like the idea of me following up something he said to me in confidence. I’d prefer to handle it a bit more discreetly.”
Norrie said, “What I could do is have a word with Chief Superintendent Tancred at District. He’s a good chap and I know him well enough to talk to him unofficially. He’d have access to the computerised records at Central and could put in an enquiry without having to explain what it was all about.”
Anthony thanked him. Both he and Sandra had liked Elfe, but he was a formidable person.
He decided to spend the afternoon watching South London, whose second team had a midweek game. After all, he told his conscience, this would be partly business. He would be able to watch Norman Younger in action and form some impression of the character of that hopeful English international.
5
Arthur Drayling ranked in the general view, including his own, as one of the leading citizens of Plumstead. His shop or, as he sometimes called it, his studio, was also his private house. It stood in an acre and a half of garden and was fronted by a colonnade in the Italian style. Photographs of the beautiful things it contained, statues, baths and fountains, porticoes, wrought-iron gates and railings, appeared regularly in Country Life and The Connoisseur. It was a business which he had built up, with hard work and real artistic taste, over the forty years since he had left Oxford with an unimpressive degree, a small patrimony and a liking for instructive travel.
He was a heavily-built man. The bald dome of his head, sunburned by the regular trips which he still took to Mediterranean countries, was surrounded by a fringe of curly auburn hair.
The reputation he had earned and the money he had made should have been the recipe for a relaxed and happy existence. If it was, it was curious that on that particular evening he seemed unable to sit still. He was in the main living-room of his house. It faced the back part of the garden, which sloped slightly downhill, with a view across Woolwich Common.
For no apparent reason he jumped up and paced across the room. This had as many gods and goddesses in it as any heathen pantheon. His objective seemed to be to admire for the hundredth time the young athlete in the corner. He stroked a hand over the smooth contours. It was a fine reproduction of an original by Donatello and he had refused many offers for it.
To his surprise he found that his hand was sweating. The weather was warm, but surely not as warm as all that? Probably he had allowed the room to get stuffy. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock. The club would be open. He would walk round for a drink.
He felt better as soon as he was out of the house. It was one of the incomparable evenings that early October sometimes brings, when the sun goes down in red splendour and there is a tiny, but invigorating, foretaste of winter in the air. When he reached the point where Perry Road turned right, along the north-west wall of the Infantry Barracks, he stood for a moment listening to a train which was clattering along the line between the Arsenal and the Dockyard stations.
He was beginning to throw off the feelings which threatened him whenever he thought of the evening, when that vile boy had turned up, unannounced and horribly self-possessed, out of the autumn dusk. It was not so much the threat to his material welfare; it was the destruction of his peace of mind. Intolerable persecution. Unthinkable submission. He started to walk briskly as though by moving fast he could put the thought of it behind him. The exercise was doing him good. He was beginning to recover some of his poise. He strode along the pavement, crossed Berridge Street at the end and headed for the club.
He was too preoccupied to notice the man who turned the corner into Perry Road some seconds after he did and kept a careful distance behind him.
He found reassurance in his welcome at the club. The ex-corporal of marines, who acted as caretaker, said, “Good evening, sir. You’ll find quite a crowd here already. They were all talking about that piece in the paper about you.” This was the first article in a daily series being run by the Woolwich Herald on notable local businessmen. No question that he was one of the most important businessmen in Woolwich and certainly the most important man in the club that evening. Not, he reflected, that the group present that evening amounted to much in the way of competition.
Little Mr. Nabbs, the solicitor; Crispin Locke, headmaster of the local secondary school, tall, thin and pedantic; Abel Drummer; Bernard Seligman, the grocer and a number of minor characters, hardly worth a glance. He accepted a drink from Seligman, who was holding forth on the unfair competition of supermarkets with decent old-fashioned provision merchants; ‘provision merchant’ being a description he preferred to ‘grocer’.
“They buy in bulk and they undercut our prices,” he said. “But I can tell you one thing. They have ten times more loss from shop-lifting than we do. Youngsters – boys and girls – go in there regularly, get behind one of the racks where they can’t be seen and stuff things into their pockets or somewhere down their clothes. Then they come out with one or two small items, pay for them and walk off scot-free with the rest.”
“Why don’t they do it in your shop?” said Nabbs.
“Because it’s arranged so that I and my assistants can watch every inch of it.”
“I thought you were going to say that the sort of families who come to your shop are naturally more honest tha
n the sort of ones who use supermarkets.”
“Give ’em the chance; they’re all dishonest,” said Seligman gloomily. “And we know why. Schools don’t teach them honesty nowadays.”
“I thought it would come round to the schools soon,” said Locke. “And I resent it. Tell me, how can schools teach children honesty when their parents live dishonestly?”
“Oh, come off it,” said Drummer. “We’re not a nation of crooks. Not yet.”
“Maybe not crooks. Short changers, tax dodgers, people who travel first class with second-class tickets.”
“I don’t know if the present generation are more dishonest,” said Nabbs. “But they’re certainly cleverer. An articled clerk who joined me a year ago is already teaching me the law.”
This produced a laugh. Nabbs was not a profound lawyer.
“Naturally every generation in a civilised community is cleverer than the last,” said Locke. “It’s the law of cumulative progress. You can’t stop it. Twenty-five years ago no child would have understood computers. Now they take to them like ducks to water.”
“There’s one consolation,” said Seligman. “In another twenty-five years their children will be sneering at them for not understanding the latest microchips. What do you say, Arthur?”
Called on to sum up arguments which he had heard many times before, Drayling put down his drink and pronounced, in his most judicial tones, “The thing which schools nowadays fail to teach is discipline. Financial discipline. Children who get everything free can’t be expected to grasp the first rule of life. Which is, as I’ve often said before, that if you want something you’ve got to be prepared to pay for it.”
“Talking of which,” said Nabbs, “I’m bringing up at our committee meeting next week the question of whether those boys who use the shed behind the club house oughtn’t to be asked to pay some rent.”
“I’d support that,” said Seligman.
“What if they can’t afford to pay?” said Locke.
“I expect their fathers can help them out.”
This was said with a side glance at Drummer, who ignored it and moved away.
Trouble Page 7