by D. J. Taylor
In Westminster Square he lost his bearings, plumped for the wrong entrance, was set right by a policeman, found himself in the end in a kind of vast holding pen talking to a man with a cockade in his hat who seemed not to think very much of him or the vestibule in which they stood. The things he had meant to say and the nonchalance he had brought with him had gone, and he waited by the gate, the man with the cockade in his hat silent and disapproving at his elbow, until a second man, tall and neatly dressed, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm, broke through the crowd around him and said, ‘Are you the messenger from Mr Kent?’
‘Yes, sir.’ He didn’t know where the ‘sir’ came from.
‘You’d better have this, then. You know where it has to go?’
‘Mr Kent gave me full instructions, sir.’ That was better. What a subaltern would say to a senior officer. But it cut no ice.
‘Well, make sure it gets to him as soon as possible.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said again. Rodney didn’t quite know what he wanted. Complicity? The hint of some other life beyond them both? He watched the man disappear into the crowd, with the light burning off the chandeliers onto the tiled floor, and then went out into the street again with the parcel under his elbow and disappointment welling up in him.
He knew that, if he wanted to, he could go and throw the parcel in the river. There was nothing anyone could do about it if he did. But there might be other parcels. He remembered the five-pound note in the cash-box, Mrs McKechnie teetering on her stool by the gunmetal till. Back in Maida Vale, Mr McKechnie would have come down from the flat by now and be mixing himself a glass of Bromo with a teaspoon the same colour as the pewter pots. Among other idiosyncrasies, Mr McKechnie wore a patent-leather truss that was attached to his spine by a complex arrangement of draw-strings. It would be quite possible that Mrs McKechnie would be tightening or loosening these attachments, like an engineer trying to calibrate the workings of a piece of machinery.
Even now, he realised, they were altogether beyond his comprehension. No doubt there were people back home who kept antique shops, who smelled alternately of sarsaparilla and gin, who had too much to drink at lunch-time and mixed themselves glasses of Bromo, who wore patent-leather trusses with black draw-strings, but they were not like the McKechnies. Perhaps this was London’s signature mark, that it took mundane patterns of behaviour and made them outlandish, perverted the ordinary into unexpected shapes.
In Trafalgar Square the sky seemed emptier and less ominous, the gulls gone, and the clouds bruising into dusk. Coming up level with the first row of sandbags, he unpinned the poppy from the button-hole of his coat and ostentatiously ground it under his foot.
In the pub in Dean Street, the same pug-faced barmaid in the same floral print dress with the same strand of hair escaping the pins at the side of her head was pouring out three quart pots of stout. The bar was as garishly lit as the Bourne & Hollingsworth shop-front, so that the people sitting at it seemed pale, puny creatures dragged up from the ocean’s depths, waterlogged beyond redemption. There was a plaster statuette of an imploring blind boy on the counter next to a collection box, and he put a halfpenny in it, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the silver Guinness ad that ran behind.
Five-thirty and no one much about. Two or three postmen from the sorting depot in Rathbone Street and a couple of tarts dredged out of the Meard Street culverts. He had been here three or four times and thought he was getting to know the clientele. The barmaid, giving the impression that she was engaged on something quite exceptional, that no part of her official duties called for exertions of this kind, finished with the pots of stout and gave a little pout, like an artist’s model several hours before the easel, who thinks that her efforts may not have been appreciated. He ordered a half-pint of bitter and went over to the end of the bar, found a saucer full of potato chips which someone had left there and, sitting on a high stool with the parcel on his lap, began to feed them into his mouth one by one.
He had barely eaten half the chips, still with the parcel balanced proudly on his lap, when a woman came striding into the pub through the farther door, moved into the little knot of people gathered about and cut him out of them, like a sheepdog detaching an ewe from the flock. She did this quite matter-of-factly and yet also self-consciously, as if she were taking part in a scene in a film, so that the people next to them fell obediently away, in deference to this new, colonising power, while the props she needed for her performance—the spare stool, the empty space at the bar—sprang dutifully into place.
‘You again,’ she said. ‘Rodney, isn’t it? I always seem to see you in here.’
It was the third time he had talked to the woman, or the third time she had talked to him, and he wasn’t in the least sure of her, what she was, what she wanted. She was tall and very fair, negligently dressed—tonight she was wearing an old mackintosh and a pair of canvas shoes—but he knew that had she knocked on the front door back home his mother would have straightaway called her ‘Madam’ on account of her accent.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t come this way so very often.’ Half of him wanted the American to arrive and the other half wanted the conversation to go on for as long as the woman wanted it to.
‘I expect you have all kinds of things to occupy yourself with, haven’t you?’ She had a way of picking up whatever he said and making something uneasy out of it. ‘In all sorts of places. How are things at the shop?’
He couldn’t remember telling her about the shop, but he supposed he must have done. ‘Trade’s not so good,’ he said loftily. ‘It’s because of the war.’
‘Well, that’s good for you, isn’t it?’ she said. She looked extraordinarily like the girls you saw in the toothpaste advertisements or on the covers of magazines: clear-skinned, enticing, stratospherically removed from the world of buses, cindery pavements, and smoky skies that seethed around them. ‘Gives you more time to go out delivering things.’
‘Who said anything about delivering things?’ he wondered. He was fascinated by her and scared at the same time. He had no idea why she spoke in the way she did or what form her interest in him took.
‘That’s what you do, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Deliver things. I expect you’re on your way to deliver something just this moment.’
‘That would be telling,’ he said, thinking he could play this game too. He was proud of this conversation, proud of the woman, proud that she had singled him out, eager to be bantered with and—he half suspected—to be made fun of.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I don’t imagine you come in here just to amuse yourself. I expect you’ve got far more important things to do. I expect you’re off somewhere. Buckingham Palace, is it? The Houses of Parliament? Somewhere else?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, rather sharply. She was about twenty-four or maybe a year or so older, he thought. If you’d put her in a ball gown she would have done for Film Pictorial, no question. ‘Never been to any of them places. Don’t have the inclination.’
‘You’re very mysterious,’ she said. He wondered whether if, as a result of some miracle they were washed up on a desert island wearing loin-cloths and scrabbling for coconuts on the beach, she would still be like this. ‘Not so mysterious as all that,’ she said. She was sitting on her stool with her feet pointed down, like a dancer about to whirl off round the room. ‘Well, it was nice talking to you again, Rodney. I hope you manage to make your delivery.’
‘It’s my laundry, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Just fetched it this afternoon.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you did.’ A moment later she was gone. He could see her in the shadowy doorway, talking to someone who might have been waiting for her.
She was probably a marchioness out slumming. He had read about this in the newspapers. The thought that he might be being trifled with made him feel suddenly exposed, less confident than he had b
een when he hiked up from Westminster, and he settled the parcel more comfortably on his lap. There were still some potato chips left in the saucer and he began to feed them into his mouth again.
A tall man, fattish and run to seed, came out of the Gents, pudgy fingers buttoning his fly, and rattled over to where he sat. ‘Them’s my chips,’ he said.
Rodney looked up at him, only half interested. The last chip was a quarter-way to his mouth. ‘Shouldn’t have left ’em there,’ he said.
‘Them’s my chips,’ the man said again, exasperated rather than cross. ‘You young—’
‘Finders keepers,’ Rodney said. In an ideal world, he knew, he would have found the man twopence for an extra packet, maybe even conducted the transaction himself. But he was still annoyed about the parcel. He picked up his glass and held it carefully between his fingers.
The fat man was clenching and unclenching his fists. It was nervousness, Rodney thought, not belligerence. ‘There’s a packet of chips owed,’ he said. Some of the bluster had gone out of him now. ‘It’s only fair.’
‘Listen, chum,’ Rodney said. He knew that if the fat man came at him he’d shove the glass in the way. ‘Catch me being frightened of you. If you want another packet of chips, you can bloody well pay for them.’
The fat man had picked up the empty saucer that had held the chips and was looking at it with a rather sorrowful expression, as if he half thought that by staring at it long enough he might conjure some of them back into existence.
A burly man, alerted by the barmaid, came through a side-door and said, in a placatory way, ‘Now then, gents, now then.’
All this the American saw, and seemed to appreciate, as he came into the bar. Seeing instantly that it was the fat man who had to be appeased, he said in a friendly way, ‘You’ll have to excuse my friend here. It’s his impetuous nature. It gets the better of him. What has he done now?’
‘Ate my chips while I was in the lavvy,’ the fat man said. His wariness suggested that he could not quite believe in the American. ‘Every last one of them.’
‘Is that so?’ the American said. He gave a little sigh that took in the empty saucer, the abraded red skin of the fat man’s face, Rodney’s half-full glass, gathered them up and re-imagined them so that the bar they stood in was a different place from the one he had sauntered into five minutes before, full of glamour and intrigue. ‘Well, I suppose the budget will run to a packet of potato chips.’
But whatever hopes might have been bred up in the fat man’s breast were instantly extinguished, for there was no further mention of the potato chips. Instead the American sat down on the stool immediately next to Rodney, propped one of his black Oxfords experimentally against the bar, and said conversationally, ‘You’ll have to stop behaving like this, you know.’
‘How do I have to stop behaving?’ The Lancashire stuck in his voice again, like a burr.
‘Let’s just say you could draw a little less attention to yourself. You kick over the traces on one of my little errands and there’ll be the devil to pay.’
The fat man had gone off to talk to the barmaid. Her floral print dress was grubby at the edges, Rodney noticed. He was horribly bored. Outside an air-raid siren started to go off, and then stopped even before the first person said ‘False alarm.’
‘I got the parcel, didn’t I?’
‘You surely did. Let me congratulate you on your ability to convey a small book a mile and a half through central London and not get lost in the blackout.’
He could put up with banter. Some of the other boys resented it, which led to difficulties. He said: ‘What sort of a book is it?’
The American had made a little tent of his fingers, balanced on his upturned knees, and was moving his thumbs back and forth beneath it. ‘Did I say it was a book?’
There were times when the American couldn’t resist letting you know how clever he was. It was all the same to Rodney. Cleverness; books in parcels; pilfered potato chips: it was all the same. The bar was beginning to fill up now. A couple of businessmen in brown overcoats. A nancy-boy with a face like a cod-fish. He said: ‘A book. That’s what you said. Why’s he giving you a book?’
‘He knows I like reading.’
‘Is that what it is, then?’
‘Could be. And then, you see, if something ends up inside a foreign embassy it isn’t easily taken out again.’
‘Is that so?’ Rodney was losing interest in the contents of the parcel. There were things summoning him back to Maida Vale. The nancy-boy was feeding pennies into a slot-machine with the same casual intensity Rodney had fed the potato chips into his mouth, but none of the numbers had yet come up. He said, ‘Do you want me later on? For the other business?’
The American thought about this. He said, ‘I don’t know. It all depends. Maybe about ten. Where will you be?’
‘At home, I shouldn’t wonder. All tucked up.’
‘Is there a telephone?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’ll come and find you.’ He had something in the palm of his hand: parti-coloured, not much bigger than a postage stamp. ‘See this?’
It was a photograph of a middle-aged man with brilliantined hair and a nose slightly out of proportion to the rest of his face. A joker’s face that would have looked better staring out of motley.
‘That’s the chap, is it?’
‘That’s him. No, you can’t have it. Think you could recognise him?’
‘Don’t see why not. Friend of yours, is he?’
‘Let’s just say we have interests in common.’
Rodney liked this sort of talk: ironic, archly insinuating, powdered with meaning that might not be there if you paused to gather it up.
It reminded him of cross-talk comedians on the radio. In Maida Vale the McKechnies would be trading an infinitely debased version of it as they dined off macaroni and cheese and browsed through the sales catalogues. He had once been into the room where they ate their meals: as austere and unornamented as an anchorite’s cell.
When he looked up, the American was gone: his exits were rarely as impressive as his entrances. He finished his beer and went out into the street, where half-extinguished headlights glinted in the murk and there were already Christmas decorations in one or two of the shop windows. At the top of Dean Street the German pastry-cooks had a sign up that read entirely english managed and run, and one or two other shops of doubtful ethnicity seemed to have changed their names.
It was about half-past six, and subdued. One lot of people had gone home and the second lot had yet to come out and replace them. Here in the blackout, London was full of wounds: the black gashes in the spaces between the house-fronts were so dark that they seemed to bleed ink. He got his bearings, lit a cigarette, and then headed north, went along Oxford Street and turned into the Edgware Road. Then, not far from Paddington, he turned left into a network of little terraces that ran parallel with Blomfield Road.
Here there was another pub with a saloon bar opening out into the pavement, empty except for a girl of about nineteen in an imitation fox-fur who sat drinking what from the smell of it was a tumblerful of peppermint cordial. When she saw him she gave him a little reproving look, too timid to register genuine annoyance but not wholly enthusiastic.
‘If you hadn’t come in the next ten minutes, I’d have took myself off.’
‘Maybe if you had, I’d have followed you back,’ he declared.
‘You wouldn’t have known where I’d gone,’ she said, a bit hopelessly, as if she knew the futility of any kind of resistance.
‘I’d have found out. You can always find out. I’d have gone to the shop on the corner and asked them. That’s what I’d have done,’ he said, catching the reek of peppermint again. ‘You can’t be drinking that. Have a gin.’
‘You won’t get any gin here,’ she said. ‘Nor whisky, neither. Be
er house, this is.’
‘Beer house, is it? Well, I don’t mind.’ He took a ten-shilling note out of his pocket and bought two half-pints of stout.
‘I’m glad you came, though,’ she confided. ‘They don’t like girls sitting on their own in there. They think they’re—tarts.’
‘Never you mind about that,’ he said. It was an effort for him, this kind of small-talk, but he persevered. ‘How’d you get on today?’
‘Not as bad as last week, when all that stuff came in.’ She worked in a factory that manufactured the silk canopies of parachutes. ‘We had one of those pilots round to talk to us. Chap that flew a Hurricane, I think it was.’
He wasn’t interested in fighter-pilots. The stout, like the small-talk, was an effort. He wondered how long he would have to stay there, and what might be said. Her hairstyle, à la Veronica Lake, had begun to turn in on itself, which made her look faintly crestfallen. She said, a bit suddenly, ‘What do you know?’
‘What do you mean, what do I know?’ He was bored by all this. In the flat over the shop, the McKechnies would be listening to It’s That Man Again or complaining that the blackout curtains were inadequate.
‘Just that. What do you know? I was thinking about it this morning. You have to think of something when you’re cutting out the silk, or you’d go mad. All the things I know.’
‘And what did you think you knew?’
‘Well, I know the English county towns. Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and so on. Monarchs since 1066. And some French. Où est la plume de ma tante? Directez-moi à la bibliothèque, s’il-vous plaît?’
‘School stuff,’ he said disgustedly. He was thinking about the man whose picture the American had shown him, the white five-pound note in the cash-box under the bed. Two five-pound notes there would be next week, if this went through.