by D. J. Taylor
‘Poor old Edgar,’ he said suddenly. ‘What’s he going to say about this, then?’
‘What a dreadful thing to say,’ Mrs McKechnie protested, trying to be imperious but divining that the moral high ground had crumbled away beneath her. ‘I don’t know who on earth you think you are.’ Once, she had hit him slap-bang in the face, like a welterweight, with such venom that he could hear his teeth rattle.
‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve about,’ he tried. He didn’t care about Edgar. Like the old women who left their baking out to cool on window-sills and came back to find it gone, he had only himself to blame.
On the wall beyond the lampshade there was a photograph of Mr McKechnie, gnome-like and insubstantial, standing in the entrance to a marquee in which towering clumps of antique furniture were ranged against the canvas like ancient burial mounds. He had met other Edgars in his time and marvelled at their lack of gumption, their eagerness to leave their windows open and their sills unguarded.
‘I really think you had better be going,’ she said, unexpectedly regal behind the off-white counterpane, and he realised that you did not say things about eyes seeing and hearts grieving to Mrs McKechnie.
The light was less oppressive now and he made his way out onto the linoleumed landing, past the door to the kitchen, where Mr McKechnie had left a bucket of potato peelings ready for dispatch, and down the squeaking wooden staircase. Something she had said caught in his mind—he could feel it hanging there like a burr—and he wondered what there was for him here. Mrs McKechnie. The American. The fair-haired girl in the Soho pub who had taken such an interest in him. He could take them or leave them.
The shop, whose electric light had yet to be switched on, was more aquarium-like than ever. He lit a cigarette and went over to the window to smoke it, listening to the dispersed yet elephantine sounds from on high of Mrs McKechnie dressing herself. Outside the light was slowly receding and there were patches of shadow silting up the corners of the square. It was about half-past eleven. The summons from Mrs McKechnie had been unexpected.
He had been opening up the shop, realigning the displays of pewter pots, stacking the brass ashtrays, when she had materialised at the foot of the stairs as Lord Leighton’s nymphs stared sympathetically on. One of them looked uncannily like the girl in the Soho pub. The McKechnies’ bed had smelled uncomfortably of Mr McKechnie: a comb choked with thin, cinnamon-coloured hair had fallen out from under the pillow. It could have been worse.
When he opened the door a man who had been standing a few yards along the street outside the shop that sold fishing tackle—youngish but hard-eyed—came looming up into view and he saw that of all people it was Ikey. He was about to tug the door to when the futility of this gesture occurred to him and he wedged himself in the doorway with one hand stuck in his pocket and the other protectively around his chin.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. He had decided several years ago, on no very good evidence, that he wasn’t frightened of Ikey.
‘I could ask the same of you. Christ, you took some finding. Chap at the last address wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone until I told him what it was you were wanted for.’
He still had his hand in front of his chin. ‘So you’ve been up to Islington, have you?’
‘Islington. Hammersmith. Every-bloody-where. Makes no difference to me. Anyway, now I’ve found you, so you’d better collect your traps and we can be off.’
He did not want to turn his head, but he knew that Mrs McKechnie had come down into the shop and was watching him from the till. To play for time he lit a second cigarette off the end of the first and ground the butt under his foot. There was another train going past in the corner of the square and he wished it would pass right by the shop’s front door so that he could be picked up by it and borne away.
‘I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones,’ Ikey said, not quite as decisively as he had intended. He had worked underground once, and there were still little bluish scars running over his forehead like the veins in a Roquefort cheese. The serge suit sat uncomfortably on him. ‘Edna says the same.’
‘Suits me.’ Rodney was still half-in and half-out of the door, his mind miles away, out on the moors above Glossop: Edna’s face a blur in the bright spring sunlight, the crocuses out and sheep huddled by the fence-posts. ‘But there’s a problem about that.’
‘No problem that I can see,’ Ikey said. His real name was Philip: no one could remember how the ‘Ikey’ had supervened. ‘Going back to where you’re wanted. Where you’ve responsibilities. Never mind what’s owed. No, no problem I can see.’
Mrs McKechnie was definitely in the shop. He could hear her taking the cover off the till, the click of an ashtray as she emptied it into the bin. She could not be allowed to speak to Ikey. That much was certain.
Thinking about Edna, half a dozen images sprang fully formed into his head to do battle with the demons of the present: cherry blossom descending onto green grass; smoke rolling out of the bakery chimney; the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes plaque on the public-house door; grey brickwork smouldering under a wide sky. All as extinct as the first volcano.
‘No problem I can see,’ Ikey said again. It was London, Rodney thought, that made Ikey so nervous. A hundred and fifty miles beyond his natural orbit, he had lost his poise. The serge suit and the scars on his face betrayed him. This was not his milieu. He belonged in an older world: the world of clogs and trolley-buses and chapel hymns. Not here in London. The realisation emboldened him. He could deal with Ikey.
‘The problem is I’m not coming with you.’ The last words came out as ‘wi’ you.’ That was how far it had gone. In case there should be any doubt about this, he went on hurriedly: ‘I came on my own account, and I’m [ah’m] not going back again.’
‘Try telling that to Edna,’ Ikey said. But he looked resigned, diminished in his serge suit. Had he any other card up his sleeve? It was difficult to tell. ‘Me father says he’ll have the law on you.’
‘Can’t see how he could do that.’
There were phrases Ikey had armed himself with. You could see him summoning them up. He said: ‘Breach of promise, for one thing.’
‘Don’t remember promising anything to anyone.’ There were other pictures crowding into his head: a Salvation Army band playing; speedway riders waiting for the flag; the smoky twilight beyond the flaring gas lamps. ‘Listen, Ikey,’ he said. ‘I’m not coming back. Can say anything you like. Can hit me if you fancy it. But I’m not coming, and that’s that. I don’t care what anyone says and that’s the end of it.’
‘You’ll regret this,’ Ikey said, with infinite bitterness.
‘Daresay I will. Up to me, though.’
For a moment he thought Ikey was going to rush at him, pull him out of the shop doorway and drag him into the street. But this was Maida Vale, not Lancashire. The shop’s dim interior, the henge of pewter pots and Mrs McKechnie’s Queen-of-Hearts face at the till was too much for Ikey, who shot him a queer and not quite intelligible glance—half-disgusted, half-imploring—and went off down the street.
Inside the shop Mrs McKechnie was totting up the petty cash. She had the curious ability to move columns of coins together without their clinking. She gave him an amused but critical look.
‘Someone you know?’
‘Used to.’
‘Seemed to want quite a conversation.’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. Again he was struck by the idea that they might be on a stage together, like Nervo and Knox or Flanagan and Allen. There was comedy in their dealings if you looked for it, under the freight of menace. One of the cylinders of farthings was about to collapse: the topmost three or four coins had formed a kind of precipice. In the distance another train went by. But he had lost the desire to leave with it. He could have been on a station platform in the north, watching the Wakes week excursion
s set out, making his own plans for the ghost-town left behind.
‘Strapping great boy like you,’ Mrs McKechnie said. ‘You ought to be in the army. Out there with the BEF.’
‘I’ll go when I’m wanted,’ he shot back. He had no intention of going anywhere. Something that had lain dormant in his mind during the past half-hour, with its smells of sweat and face powder, the odd pallor of her face against the pillow, suddenly blossomed to life. ‘Do this often, do you?’
The top two farthings lost their battle with the laws of gravity and went skidding away over the counter.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Lie in bed when Edgar’s off seeing his aunt.’
‘It’s really not something I care to talk about.’
It occurred to him that he had never met anyone like her. If he had he might have been able to deal with her better. There had been women who resembled her—publicans’ wives, mostly, or adventurous widows—but they were more subdued, kept in better order. A man came into the shop with his eye full of bright, acquisitive purpose, bought one of the brass ashtrays, and went out again. Thinking that it would be a kind of test, he took half the money and put it in the till. There was no response.
Perhaps she didn’t really care about the shop, Edgar, the piles of pewter plates, Lord Leighton’s nymphs in their frames. All this begged the question of what she did care about. There he was stumped. The thought occurred to him that he was getting tired of all this, that perhaps he ought to go somewhere where no one—not Ikey, or Mrs McKechnie or anyone else—could find him.
Thinking about this he lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out of his nostrils directly above his head, like a narwhal’s spout. The two farthings that had tumbled down from their precipice still lay on the counter, and he picked them up and put them in the till. With a sudden decisiveness, as if she had been brooding about the matter for days and the sight of the scooped-up farthings had galvanised her into action, Mrs McKechnie said: ‘I can’t stand hanging around here anymore. I’m going out.’
‘Fair enough.’ He was quite happy to be left alone in the shop until Edgar came back.
‘Don’t go shutting the place up and disappearing somewhere.’
‘You can trust me.’
‘That’s one thing I’m determined not to do,’ she said.
There was a copy of the local weekly paper next to the till and he began to flick through it: a dead baby pulled from the Regent’s Park Canal; the Women’s Institute knitting scarves for the troops; a photograph of the ARP wardens’ headquarters. At the back there was a page of job advertisements for gas-fitters and car mechanics and bright lads wanted to apprentice themselves to butchers’ shops or explore openings in the furnishing trade. Was he a bright lad? It depended what you meant by bright.
There was a noise of high heels in precipitous descent, and Mrs McKechnie came back down the staircase. She was wearing a hat he had never seen before and had her handbag clutched against her chest.
‘What shall I tell Edgar?’ he asked.
‘It’s nothing to me,’ she said, ‘what you tell Edgar.’ He really hadn’t met anyone like her before. The shop door jangled and she was gone.
In her absence the Maida Vale and Kilburn Gazette had inexplicably lost its savour. Its flower-beds dug up for cabbages and its teenage tearaways hastened off to the juvenile court meant nothing to him. There were other parts of London waiting for him to explore. Silently he ran the names over his tongue. Deptford. Lewisham. Camberwell. And dominating them all, the grey flood of the river running on to the sea.
He folded the newspaper up into a quarter-size oblong, the way his mother dealt with tablecloths, and jammed it against the side of the till, just as the door-frame rattled again and the American came jauntily into the shop. He had an umbrella under his arm and, seeing Rodney at the till, grasped it in both hands like a gun and made as if to spray him with imaginary bullets.
‘I’m not disturbing you, I hope?’
‘There’s nobody here but me,’ he said. A small part of him would have liked Mrs McKechnie to see the American.
‘That’s fine then. Quite a long time it’s been.’
‘Depends how you look at it.’
‘Everything depends how you look at it,’ the American said. He had something in his hand, white and diminutive, a miniature envelope of the kind you might use for Christmas cards. ‘Look. I brought you a souvenir.’
Inside there was a sheet of newsprint, folded up very small, offering an account of the incident in Jermyn Street. He read it through twice, impressed by its talk of unprovoked assaults and unknown assailants.
‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ he said, evenly. ‘Anyone can write anything if they want to. It stands to reason.’
‘I’m sure it does,’ the American said. He was wearing an overcoat above his dark suit, and a natty silk scarf. It occurred to Rodney that he had never met anyone like the American either. ‘Busy tonight?’
‘Embassy Club,’ he said. ‘Conducting the band.’
The American laughed. ‘I like that,’ he said. ‘Maybe we ought to pay a visit to the Embassy some time. An ambassadorial visit. As for tonight, it would simply be an hour of your time.’
He was still looking at the press clipping. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said. ‘Coming up behind people in the dark.’
‘No, it isn’t fair, is it?’ the American said, as if this was a tremendously funny remark. ‘But no one wants you to come up behind anybody in the dark. Not this evening. It’s just an errand in the usual way.’
He wondered what was so enviable about the American, and decided that it was not his accent, or his clothes, but simply his whole way of behaving and the pictures it conjured up in his mind: soda-jerks in white jackets dispensing twists of popcorn; girls in high heels daintily alighting from sidecars; sleepy midwestern sidewalks patrolled by Buicks and Oldsmobiles; jazz bands starting up. For a moment the antiques shop was a Burbank film lot, garish and ramshackle, a work of limitless possibility where anything might happen and anyone—Chaplin, Hitler, George Formby—walk in.
He said: ‘I don’t like these errands. They get on my nerves.’
‘They’re pretty well-paid, as errands go,’ the American said. ‘What do you want? A coach-and-four to take you?’
He was glancing out of the window, but there was nothing there: just a schoolgirl or two going home to lunch. The bright vision of Hollywood faded away to nothing.
‘Where is it this time?’ he asked.
‘Just the usual places,’ the American said. ‘Westminster and then back to mine. A child could do it.’
‘Why don’t you get a child then?’ He could not resist saying this. ‘Or why don’t you do it yourself?’
The American was still smiling, but not quite so luxuriantly. In the corner of the square another train was going by. The clatter of the wheels and the sharp current of movement made him think of Ikey, who had taken just such a train to be with him that morning. Ikey, Edna, Mrs McKechnie, and now the American. They could never let you alone.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘But it’ll have to wait till seven. I’ve things to do.’
‘Seven o’clock, then,’ the American said. The smile was gone, along with the soda-jerks, the dainty girls, and the fleets of Oldsmobiles. Behind him the pewter pots and the Winterhalter reproductions gleamed dully in the pale light.
Slowly the early afternoon passed. Whether it was Ikey or the memory of Mrs McKechnie staring at him from her nest amid the pillows, something had put him on edge. He looked out of the window several times but there was nobody much in sight. A policeman went by and he shrank instinctively into the shadow thrown up by the till. Once or twice he went and stood outside and smoked a cigarette, but it was too cold for gestures of this sort.
At two o’clock Mrs McKechnie came back, rather pink in t
he face and walking with quick, deliberate steps. He had never been able to work out whether Mrs McKechnie was relatively abstemious or simply drank as much as Mr McKechnie but was better at concealing it. When she saw him she said, ‘Still at your post? When they get you in the army they’ll want you to stay at your post.’
Her eye fell on the press clipping that still lay next to the till and she picked it up and stared at it rather belligerently, as if it was a summons for rent or an unpaid bill.
‘I suppose you did this, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t put it past you.’
‘It’s just a piece of paper,’ he said. He couldn’t care less what Mrs McKechnie thought he’d done.
‘“Premeditated assault,”’ Mrs McKechnie read. She was not holding her drink quite as well as she had done in the past. ‘“Unknown assailant.”’ She mistook the gleam in his eye. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind at all. It’s all the same to me.’
After a bit she went upstairs and he heard the sound of small objects being thrown about and what might have been a chair falling over. This was followed by a profound silence. It was about half-past two. To judge from past experience, Mr McKechnie would not be back from visiting his aunt for another four hours. He had a vision of the two of them sitting before a table crammed with miniature gin bottles.
The sense of unease was dragging him down into some dim, subterranean vault where unimaginable horrors lurked. After another ten minutes, when the noise from upstairs was an ancient memory, he took his coat from the stand to the right of the till, stepped out into the street, locked the door, and pushed the key through the letter-box. The movement made him feel better.
He walked up to Maida Vale Underground Station and took a bus to the West End, only to find that the promise of freedom had deceived him. The bus was full of fat women with canvas bags who stared at him angrily as he stepped on board. Their breath rose in steamy clouds to the off-white ceiling: the roof of the bus was wet with condensation.