The Man Who Won the Pools

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘You a gambler?’ Phil asked.

  Their faces were again close to each other. Her lips parted – and, for the first time, it seemed without any intention of speech. His instinct leapt to the recognition of crisis. He knew that he must have put into that brief question pretty well everything he’d got.

  ‘At least I shall love to hear about you six months on – and then sixty.’ Suddenly she was smiling brilliantly – and there was only the smile there. The thing was like a barrage put up to cover some expertly conducted retreat. ‘Meanwhile, let’s drink to what you’re going to do – whatever it is.’ She raised her glass.

  ‘We’ve decided, haven’t we? I’m going to fall into the gravy.’ Phil was entirely bewildered now. For a wild moment he’d believed he was near the tape. Now he couldn’t tell whether he’d as much as lapped the track once. And he had a feeling that he was about at the end of his stamina. It was as if all the muscles he had been using were unfamiliar ones. ‘So we’ll drink to that,’ he said. ‘That nice smell of sweat and machine oil disappearing beneath a nasty declassy stink.’

  She sat back instantly.

  ‘Have you any cigarettes?’ she asked rather coldly.

  He produced them, blushing.

  ‘Give it a break,’ he said. ‘Mr. Tombs and his money and all that.’ He had drunk some of his brandy and was finding that today he didn’t care for it. He didn’t want his head to be the way brandy slightly made it – not when he was fighting like this to get some sense of where he was with her. ‘Talk about you,’ he said. ‘Let’s fill in the other side of the questionnaire. Anything you could never conceivably bring yourself to do in any circumstances whatever?’

  Jean blew out tobacco smoke delicately and then put back her head in that short low laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Several things. And they’re all sharply physical. I couldn’t use cheap scent. I couldn’t stroke velvet or sit on plush. And, yes—’ she narowed her eyes with a deliberation that obscurely troubled him—‘there are certain kinds of men I couldn’t marry.’

  ‘What kinds of men?’ Phil heard himself ask it very straight, without false casualness.

  ‘Yellow men, black men, enormously fat men, hunchback men, and clergymen.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all. Apart from these, I’d—well, I’d have an open mind.’

  There was a bit of a silence – the first that there had been so that you’d really notice it. Phil knew it was because he hadn’t said something like ‘Am I plush, or will you marry me?’ He’d been invited – as suddenly as if it was in a book or a play – to put up some fast-working, whirlwind lover stuff. But he’d said nothing. And, ever so fleetingly, they’d looked at each other with a sort of guilty recognition before Jean Canaway went talking gaily on.

  He tried blaming himself for just being slow on the draw. Yet he knew that wasn’t right. He hadn’t made a mistake in that surprising moment, even although he knew that she’d challenged him to ask what he hadn’t asked. And now his blood was doing funny things in his head. When you want a girl, and she wants you to say so, and something holds you so that you just don’t say it – well, something’s badly wrong. He tried to persuade himself he’d been thinking of Beryl. But that – no doubt shamefully – simply wasn’t true. The real truth was the painfully obvious one that Jean had just been amusing herself. If he’d said something – well, she’d have gone home and cut another notch on a stick. Something like that.

  Face it, he told himself – and slowly felt the blood behaving better in his temples. If she’d flirted with him right up to that about clergymen and hunchbacks, hadn’t he asked for it – shoving in like he had? And if she hadn’t for an instant taken him seriously, wasn’t it to her credit – considering he’d been pretty well flourishing a quarter of a million pounds at her like she was a dateless shopgirl? And hadn’t there been that about his blurting out to her the truth about him and Beryl? No – she couldn’t be blamed if she’d planned to take him down a peg by getting him to ask her straight out if she’d marry him. And as he’d sheered off in time they’d better call it honours even.

  Over the ruins of their meal, Phil managed all this good sense and cold reason with himself – even though it wasn’t what his heart was feeling.

  ‘It’s been very nice of you,’ he said. ‘To come out like this. But you’ll be wanting to go back. I’ll get a bill.’

  ‘It’s been such fun.’ She said this in a more conventional way than anything she’d said before. But at the same time she was looking at him with a faint dismay that almost made him feel he’d got it utterly wrong. But he hadn’t. His body told him that now – just as if its whole surface was a thermometer registering undeniably the fatal lack of the one vital thing. Perhaps she’d been amused and interested, with no thought of humiliating him until he’d gone too far. But what counted – well that just wasn’t there. He wasn’t perhaps plush or velvet, or a hunchback or a black. But he wasn’t the positive thing either. There was nothing more to be said. He reached across the table and handed her her gloves.

  ‘Well, thanks a lot,’ he said steadily. ‘I’d like to have this every day.’ He got to his feet, smiling. He was beaten and he knew it. But he’d cover up his chin and spar out the round. ‘I’ll take you back to that office.’ He almost added: where you’ll be wanting to fix next week’s winner.’ But that would be silly. ‘I got plenty to learn,’ he said more lightly. ‘Chianti, risotto: I’ll remember them.’

  He thought she was going to say it would be nicer if he said he was going to remember her. But she didn’t. Perhaps she turned it down as a bit cheap. Instead, she looked at him uncertainly. It was the first time she’d done that. And then they went out.

  There was a crush of smart people dithering on the pavement. Phil snapped up a taxi from under their noses – and didn’t hardly raise his voice in doing it. He didn’t want to pretend he knew about the world, but he had no notion of not showing he would be a quick learner if he wanted to. But they hadn’t sat down before she jumped on just this.

  ‘Think of all that money dished out on what’s the next thing to blind chance,’ she said. ‘And yet of its going to somebody with a whole life in front of him – just as you said, Mr. Tombs – and a good brain and fast reaction times and a lot else as well. You don’t mind my telling you you’re intelligent?’

  He was going to say ‘Not if you don’t mind my telling you you’re beautiful.’ But he rebelled. She was looking at him brilliantly again, and he thought brutally that she was just snatching the fun of another round in which she could do all the punching. So he said nothing. And when she spoke again it was almost nervously.

  ‘Intelligent people are usually highly assimilative. I’m not sure – it’s really what I was trying to say – that the assimilative Mr. Tombs won’t come out on top of the Mr. Tombs who’s all rugged independence.’

  ‘All right,’ Phil said. ‘We’ve had it, haven’t we?’

  Amazingly, she put out a hand and laid it for a moment firmly on his arm.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve muddled this. You’re not going to see me again, and you’ll remember me as a common little bitch. Damn!’

  ‘No, I shan’t! Don’t you go saying such a thing!’ In a gesture he didn’t know about, he put his hand on hers and quickly took it away again. ‘It’s just that we haven’t much in common, isn’t it? I don’t get your wave-length right. I keep guessing, and guessing wrong.’ He was incoherent and passionate. ‘But we might go places yet. Jean – mightn’t we?’

  ‘Here we are.’ She said it with a gasp as the taxi drew to the kerb. ‘But no, Mr. Tombs—Phil—just no. There would be something impossible about it. Something missing.’

  ‘Class – education: all that?’

  ‘Yes—no—something simpler—I don’t know. But I just know. Don’t you see?’

  It was she who was incoherent now. He tumbled out of the taxi after her, just remembering to thrust a couple of half-cr
owns at the driver. She went straight into the building, and was standing by the lift before he reached her.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we can’t …’

  She was holding out her hand – and he saw, to his final confusion that, although pale, she was calm and smiling again.

  ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ she said. ‘Good-bye.’

  He found that he had shaken hands – and that she was gone. Where Jean Canaway had been a moment before there was now only Phil Tombs, mirrored in a softly closing panel of black glass. He was still staring at this when a voice – the voice of the little porter – spoke respectfully behind him.

  ‘Mr. Tombs, sir? Associate of the Managing Director’s just stepped in to contact you.’

  Chapter Twelve

  It wasn’t a moment, naturally, at which Phil Tombs wanted to be contacted by anybody. He could still feel Jean’s hand on his arm – and that was a contact which was never going to happen again. But his defeat had roused something he owned rather a lot of, which was either pride or vanity, and he wouldn’t for anything have shown himself as being as battered as he felt himself to be. So he turned round from that horrible glass panel that had closed on his dream girl with a softness like it was the door of a convent, and he tried to give at least an appearance of attention to what was happening behind him.

  A man in a bowler hat was advancing on him – with the little porter, sharp-eyed, hovering behind. He was carrying – the man in the bowler was – a very tightly rolled umbrella, and a very neatly folded copy of The Times, and a very lemon-coloured pair of gloves. The gloves didn’t look like they were meant to be put on, or the umbrella to be hoisted, or The Times to be read. The bowler, for that matter, didn’t seem to be made to take off. But that was a mistake – for off it came now with quite a flourish. And the chap managed to hold it and The Times and the umbrella and the gloves all elegantly in his left hand while stretching out his right to Phil in a gesture like Comrades in Arms on an old cigarette card. For that matter he was about as military as you could imagine, and when he spoke it was in a voice like an affable Brigadier.

  ‘My dear Mr. Tombs, I am quite delighted to meet you. I don’t know whether my name has actually been mentioned to you? Hannay—Colonel Hannay.’ And Colonel Hannay, introduced himself like this and still pumping Phil’s arm, looked keenly into Phil’s face like a scientist in an advert peering at a test tube. Then his expression changed – just as if you’d turned over the page, Phil thought, and come on a retired ambassador saying he’d never raised a whisky was a sodding patch on this one. ‘Very lucky to get wind of each other – eh?’ Hannay nodded his well-groomed head and manufactured kindly wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. ‘I think we’ll have a lot to discuss.’

  ‘Afternoon,’ Phil said. ‘You one of this Prendick’s lot?’ He was still feeling rather dazed.

  ‘Not precisely, my dear sir.’ Hannay smiled like he wasn’t being offended by the ignorance of the young. ‘It’s rather a matter of my group of—um—enterprises being pretty closely associated with his. Arthur and I hold a good many directorships in common. That sort of thing, you know. I’d say we were pretty closely identified in the eyes of the City.’ As he said this, Colonel Hannay sent his own eyes sweeping rapidly round the large hall, so that Phil was faintly reminded of a bookie’s runner making sure there wasn’t any spot of trouble coming down the street. ‘Yes, we’ve had our fairly spectacular occasions, Arthur Prendick and I. Not of course spectacular in any sensational or undesirable sense, I need hardly say. Keen business methods, naturally. But the fact is that one has heavy public responsibilities, Tombs, when one operates on our scale. We have to put the national interest first, you know. We work in pretty closely with the Government, as a matter of fact. Yes, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Mr. Prendick been telling you about me?’ Phil asked. He couldn’t quite get round to seeing how all this tied up.

  ‘That sort of thing,’ Colonel Hannay said largely. ‘Now, shall we drop into my own office for our talk? It might interest you. We ran up our own fifteen storeys only a few weeks ago. Rather like this, as a matter of fact.’ And Colonel Hannay gestured round his associate Prendick’s glassy hall. ‘But perhaps a little more refined,’ he added. ‘A rather more definite touch of artistic distinction. As masters of industry and heads of finance, we must acknowledge a certain responsibility to the arts, and so forth. I was saying so only the other day to the President of the Royal Academy. He was extremely pleased. They’re always deuced grateful for a word of recognition, you know, fellows of that sort. It’s something to remember, Tombs. So let’s go straight along, shall we?’

  Phil had no great notion of going along. But then he hadn’t, at the moment, any great notion of anything. He glanced from Colonel Hannay to the porter – there was something about the two of them that he didn’t quite get – and decided that he liked the porter even less than the Colonel. So he decided to get out of Prendick’s place, and that he might as well see what this talkative chap was up to. An ache was growing in Phil like the sort that comes some time after a wound, and he felt that if he didn’t have something to use his head on he might get round to banging it against a wall.

  ‘O.K.,’ Phil said. ‘I’m ready to blow.’ He found himself wishing he was in his jeans and that – for there was something about Hannay that put you out of love with disguises. ‘Walk, can we?’

  ‘My dear sir, one of my cars is outside.’ Hannay, who had appeared shocked at Phil’s last words, moved briskly towards the open air – not, it occurred to Phil, without a wary glance in the direction of the lift. ‘I’m particularly anxious that you should meet McLeod. Colin McLeod – an old Scottish family, you know, although impoverished, decidedly impoverished – is my most reliable man. Sound judgement, great thingummy—’ Hannay, with the hand that was carrying The Times, managed to snap a finger in quest of the word that had slipped— ‘probity, that is to say – all that sort of thing. Jump in, my dear fellow.’

  Phil jumped in, although it seemed a disrespectful way of entering a car of such sombre splendour as the Colonel’s. A touch or two here and there, and it would make a high-class affair for group burials some place where they had volcanoes and earthquakes. There was a chauffeur standing by the door holding a folded fur rug – which was what you might call a touch of ostentation on a warmish day. The chauffeur was very large and ugly and had a broken nose.

  ‘Office, Hotchkiss,’ Hannay said, as he got in after Phil. ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘I can guarantee you will like McLeod. A trifle dour, perhaps, as our northern friends tend to be. But a dear fellow when you win his confidence. Personal relations are almost everything in business, you will find. Particularly at the level on which we operate. But I imagine it to be true in the lower and middle reaches as well. From what I hear, that is to say.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir.’ Hotchkiss, who had laid the fur rug neatly on the floor as if it was for the convenience of a top-level dog, paused in the act of closing the door on his passengers. ‘Are you thinking to find Mr. McLeod at the office? Wasn’t he to be lunching in the West End, sir? I have a notion Higgs drove him off there in the second Rolls.’

  Colonel Hannay once more snapped his fingers.

  ‘Stupid of me,’ he said. ‘Of course McLeod has been giving lunch at the Grand Excelsior to—um—the President of the Board of Trade.’ He glanced at Phil. ‘You know the present President?’ he asked, like he was courteously ignoring that his guest was the next thing to a kid straight out of a slum. ‘A good fellow – decidedly a good fellow. But a little awkward. Yes, slightly on the uncouth side. I’d hesitate to take him into White’s. I’d baulk at dining him at—um—Boodle’s. Simply because he might be uncomfortable, you know. One has to consider these things with a guest. Best to take a fellow like that to one of the big hotels. We’ll probably be just in time to catch Colin there. All right, Hotchkiss – and I am obliged to you. The Grand Excelsior, as quickly as you can manage it.’

  This time H
otchkiss, who had got into the driving seat, gave a nod without turning. It was one of a number of small things that Phil found he was noticing. Another was Hotchkiss’s ears, which looked as if they’d been thick like that for a long time, and another was Hotchkiss’s neck, which looked as if it was engaged in getting thicker every day.

  After a quick run the car stopped. Hotchkiss didn’t get out this time, because there were a couple of chaps in scarlet uniforms and white gloves competing for the door. Phil saw at once that the Grand Excelsior – which was a name reminding him with a nasty jab of that rather pathetic scarf of Beryl’s – was just the kind of deluxe place Jean hadn’t taken him to. It had carpets you waded through, and palm leaves ready to tickle your neck, and if you went to the lavatory it would be a shilling down for a piss. Hannay led him straight in – the umbrella and the gloves all working like mad – and there was no difficulty at all in finding this other business gent, Mr. Colin McLeod. Not that Phil didn’t think at first that there might be. For Hannay had started chinning with a soft fat pewter-coloured type that could have been put together out of slightly deflated footballs that had been well booted round a greasy field. The last time Phil had seen that sort was on his National Service in Nicosia, and then he’d been told they were tourists from some place farther east – was it the Lebanon. But anyway this was Mr. McLeod, because that was the way Colonel Hannay introduced him – and perhaps Phil ought to have been able to tell, old impoverished family and all, from the fact that he wore a tartan bow tie. Now McLeod shook hands with Phil, and it was as like handling that football as you wouldn’t believe.