Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  “Mrs. Mayhew?”

  I put the lid back on the box, slid the box back where I found it and took off my hat. She gave me a smile of exquisite tenderness from a serener world. “Yes indeed. But I am sorry. Nowadays I have no memory at all for faces.”

  A receipt pad lay in among the patterns and magazines on the glass counter. I picked it up and flicked through. At the head of each one of the receipts a couple strode out arm in arm across a bracken moor in matching tweeds, and under their feet the same legend I’d seen from the passing taxicab lettered across the shop window. I opened out the pad and took it over to where we both could read it. Mayhew’s of Hatton Garden, Outfitters to Gentlefolk. “We haven’t met before, and it might be coincidence, but in wartime there was a Mrs. Jeanne Mayhew who ran an officers’ charity. I was wondering …”

  She gave me the surprised, faraway look again and went on stroking the chairback, pleased to be found out. “Why yes of course, that was me. We were a small charity assisting with uniform. With the approval of the services, naturally.” I nodded, naturally. “It was such an expensive item for young officers to buy. Then there were the families whose sons and daughters had been killed. We were a go-between trying to help both. The whole thing has entirely wound down now, thank goodness. But is it really what you wanted? An officer’s uniform?” Her lips pressed together in a small mischief. “One does have to be an officer to qualify, you know.”

  “Reduced to ranks for impersonating one.”

  She crinkled her eyes and made a high, soft mewing in her throat. “Untrue, I’m sure. Now what uniform had you in mind?”

  I said flight lieutenant, on hardly more than a hunch. In a trunk in a spare room in the house on Cloth Court, Nurse Greer had kept a private collection dedicated to Flight Lieutenant Ross: his squadron necktie, braid and field cap, and his service shirts pressed and folded alongside the dresses she wore for him once. Just not his uniform. Even though Central Depository had listed it for return. It was all the hunch amounted to; Charlie Ross’s uniform had been sacrificed to a good cause, otherwise it would still have been there in the trunk, along with the rest of her collection.

  Mrs. Mayhew touched the beads at her throat and maneuvered into the cashier’s chair, lifted out a ledger from a drawer and slammed it square on the desk. Her teeth gritted with the effort. “Every item donated was written in here quite religiously, therefore anything not crossed through must still be in our storeroom, mustn’t it?” She took out a flat wooden rule from the drawer, then opened the ledger at the first double page, dropped her eyeglasses on their silver chain around her neck and bent over the entries one line at a time, recollecting as she went. “One has no idea where these things will lead. Our eldest grandson was so very young when he was killed, and it seemed terribly morbid to let his uniform simply rot away. Better offer it to another young officer, we thought, without the slightest idea so many others would feel the same way. The response was so overwhelming we soon registered as a charity.”

  It took a while. Mrs. Mayhew was past halfway in her ledger when she came across an entry she paused at, then let out a small squeal of triumph. “Well, can you believe it? According to our records we do still have two tunics, a dress cap and a raincoat. Not quite your size either, alas, but all of them kindly donated by…” She put the glasses back on and leaned away from the ledger to get the name in her sights. “a Mr. Greer.”

  The hollow drum of a passing truck rattled the street door in its frame. Her finger tapped an entry at the foot of her page and she read off an initial and address. For no reason except to set her record straight, I said, “Miss Greer. She was a nurse at Bart’s hospital.”

  Mrs. Mayhew checked a note pinned at the side of the ledger. “Well, if you’re sure. But I shouldn’t have thought so. You see, if it were a Miss Greer, our ledger says she purchased an overcoat from us at the same time. We made an alteration to it. There.” She drew out the pin to show me her instructions, and a line of hand-blocked capitals that read, Bryant Overcoat. For Collection E. Greer. “A Bryant is not a lady’s overcoat. Mr. Bryant and his nephew were exclusively gentlemen’s tailors, bombed out of their premises years ago. Such a shame, though some of their items were quite undamaged, and when they were put up for sale, we bought several. Ordinarily of course we would not expect to sell townwear, but in those days I employed a young assistant who thought we should make an exception. It was so beautifully made, and anything other than the dreadful Utility wear was scarcely obtainable.” The pale eyes became distant. She gave her idea some more room. “Miss Greer might have bought it as a gift for a gentleman I suppose, but really, it would have taken so many of her clothing coupons. She must have liked it very much. And here am I, not able to remember a single thing about her. It’s too bad of me.”

  Mrs. Mayhew twisted around a bracelet, slack on her wrist, to squint at a tiny watch face getting tinier with every passing year. When she had it in line with the bridge of her nose, her mouth made a loop. “Gracious, it’s six-fifteen! Please forgive me while I shut up shop. Young assistants, I’m afraid, are quite a thing of the past.” She put away the ledger, got on her feet and dragged the library step to the street door, took a long moment peering at the last passersby and turned the Closed sign on its cord. Then she climbed her step and drew the blind level with her shins.

  I let her climb back down and park the step before I wondered out loud if we were too late to wrap up the plaid scarf. She reached it on tiptoe from around the dummy’s shoulders, with the secret smile that said she knew it was sold the minute I walked in. It was string-tied, paid for and receipted before I asked, “Mrs. Mayhew, the Bryant overcoat Nurse Greer bought. Do you remember its color?”

  She rested her wrists on the edge of the desk like a small bird at a birdbath, looking frailer than when I arrived, her mouth trembling from the adrenalin of making a sale. “Such an elegant dark chocolate, lined in gold silk, how could I forget? It’s so maddening that I can remember the coat and not the lady who bought it. I do wish there were another like it to show you. I’m quite certain it would suit you wonderfully.”

  I pulled a disappointed mouth. “I’ll keep a lookout. Maybe there were other outfitters buying when the Bryant stock got sold off.”

  The notion amazed her. She touched her fingertips over her heart to calm the flutter, then aired her serene smile on me one last time and explained how there wouldn’t be another like it for an outfitter to buy, because Bryant & Nephew were bespoke tailors, and no matter what garment, they never would think of making two the same. Mrs. Mayhew thought she could speak for his nephew just as well as for Mr. Bryant, “I don’t believe…” She tried her hardest to imagine. “No, I really don’t believe Bryant ever felt the need for mass production.”

  The window with the mannequin snapped into darkness. I stepped out onto the street. A cold, steady rain was setting in, drifting needles past the streetlights and making an empty cab as likely as a sleigh ride. I had less than a mile to walk, pushed my package of selected seasonal sportswear inside my coat and moved off along the sidewalk, thinking a riddle:

  A stray from a Heinkel hits a tailor’s shop in Cheapside.

  An outfitter to gentlefolk breaks her rule on outdoor wear.

  A flight lieutenant gets too cozy with a doodle-bug.

  And a wing commander recommends a charity.

  All so a nurse will see a winter coat she can’t really afford.

  So who did she buy it for?

  THIRTY-SIX

  A row of red-brick houses ran the west side of Mecklenburgh Square, saw-toothed where high explosives had taken bites out. At the center of the square, in the sidewalk around a railed garden, a line of tall elms shooed off a drizzle of icing rain. I stood under one of the elms opposite a gray Armstrong parked at the curb mid-row. The house with the Armstrong outside had four double-fronted stories and kept its grandest windows for the second floor. A housekeeper i
n a white apron was drawing curtains there, to shut out the freeze. Three steps up from the sidewalk a lantern lit a shallow porch, and at either side of the steps some fine wrought iron fenced off a basement, the same as at every other house in the row. Live on Mecklenburgh Square and nobody tells you they plan to take away your ironwork to melt it down for a war.

  I stepped from under the elm, detoured around the Armstrong’s hood, climbed to a doorbell, leaned on it and waited. The limousine’s hood had been stone cold. A sleet squall was washing the square when the front door cracked open on a dark gloss chin with a small crescent scar where the beard didn’t grow. The Armstrong’s chauffeur, short and slim and trussed in a light-gray double-breasted, looked me over without interest and glided the flat of his hand along a side part. I said, “Mr. Willard.”

  Scarface gave me his right profile and a look of studied tedium. “Mr. Willard is elsewhere.”

  He was already closing the door when I reached for the handle and snapped it down hard, then snapped it up out of his grasp and stepped inside. The chauffeur backed against a wall, his mouth working and his wrist tucked under his armpit. I heeled shut the door, used my hat to brush the weather off my sleeve and kept the arm inside it stiff in my coat pocket. “His car isn’t elsewhere. I’ll wait.”

  The entrance hallway had a telephone on a marble stand, a lighted chandelier hanging at the foot of a sprung stair, and on the stair a hurry of arriving footfalls. The housekeeper in the starched apron at the second-floor window, large, smiling and a little breathless, was looking from the chauffeur to me and back. “Mr. Willard is expected, Sidney. On such an evening as this we can hardly turn the gentleman away, now can we?” Then to me, “I’ll take your coat and bring you to Mrs. Willard in the meantime.” She was in a style Willard wouldn’t recognize or know how to hire. Probably she came with the house before he noticed. I gave her the smile back and said if it was all the same to her, I’d keep the coat. At that, she turned and got set to take another run at the stair, and while Sidney nursed his wrist and eyed the hall telephone, we climbed the first long oval rise. We got a second wind there, turned toward the back of the house along a corridor of striped walls and wine-colored carpet and halted outside the last door on the passage. The housekeeper put out a hand to the door handle and then checked herself. “Mrs. Willard will be taking cocktails at this hour. Is there something…?”

  “Not a thing. Mrs. Willard will be taking cocktails for both of us.”

  The housekeeper looked away and bit on her tongue. “Of course. Whom may I announce?”

  I took her elbow and pulled her to the middle of the carpet, her bosom still heaving from the exercise. The climb had put a moist pink bloom in her cheeks. Close up she smelled of flat-ironed linen and lavender. “There isn’t any need. Mrs. Willard and I are acquainted. But if Sidney wants a name to give the boss you can tell him it’s Newman. Then again, you might just want to let him sweat.”

  She thought about that, put a hand to her mouth to stifle a short gasp of mischief. “Well then, Mr. Newman, if it’s all the same to you, we’ll let Sidney perspire for the time being, shall we?”

  There was talk the other side of the door, but not conversation. Mrs. Willard was curled in the crook of a sofa and wrapped in a quilted robe, a pair of satin-heeled sandals tossed on the seat cushion beside her. She didn’t notice she had company. Not even the empty glass in her hand. Only the flickering story playing out on a screen drawn down against a wall, and the fast, clipped commentary scratching along with it, hard to hear over the clatter of a cine-projector. I leaned back against the door and watched with her. It was a British Movietone newsreel from a fall day in 1943. An ocean liner with Red Cross markings edged into Leith Dock under a leaden sky, with three thousand returning POWs lining the ship’s rails. Everything considered, the commentary cut in, after four years in a stalag, our boys are in fine spirits and pretty good shape.

  Mrs. Willard rocked in the angle of the sofa. A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the floor. The film cut to pale figures on a mess deck dressed in brand-new khaki. Then to crowds cheering and waving on the quay. Then cut again to a military band playing Roll Out the Barrel before it panned back along the returnees filing down the gangway, dazed and disbelieving. Can it be? Could it be? They gazed around the dockside wanting to be convinced, until one fixed and final certainty began to dawn: no argument, no question, no doubt about it; no place else on God’s green earth could ever look so ordinary. They were home.

  The newsreel cut again, this time to a platform set up on the quayside and a figure standing at a microphone surrounded by Saltires and Union flags. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh, a solid-built Churchill lookalike, pushed his fists deep in the pockets of an army greatcoat, let his audience taste the moment, and by way of introduction began, Those of you who are Scotsmen will appreciate very much how warm the welcome we want to give you. A weighted pause. But those of you who are not Scotsmen… He purses his lips, takes time to scan the mass of upturned faces and measures for effect. You can hear three thousand tears roll down a cheek. Those of you who are less fortunate… The crowd roars as one. Home!

  As if the sound of cheering squaddies was more than she could bear, Mrs. Willard looked away and registered she wasn’t alone. She took a long moment to compose, lifted a lock of hair behind an ear, cleared her throat and said as if we were there for elocution, “Would you be so kind?” The empty glass held aloft like Liberty Leading the People. I straightened up to find the projector switch and turn it off and while the newsreel wound down carried her glass over to a liquor tray that glinted on a table by the fire. I smelled gin on the glass, added some more from a bottle showing wear and floated ice in it from a silver bucket. “Were you expecting one of my husband’s films?” Her voice was thick with liquor. She wiped her tongue around her lips and concentrated on taking the glass. “He has a collection to satisfy most tastes, for the appreciation of distinguished visitors and their escorts. But you’re not distinguished, are you?”

  I let that pass. When the newsreel cut to the men on the mess deck it had lingered on a one-armed man with a strained smile, who smoked a cigarette while another POW tied his bootlaces. I motioned at the darkened screen. “It was how you found out he was alive?”

  She shrank back against the sofa, the flat of her hand across the top of her glass in case the liquor might take off. “One wet afternoon in the Astoria on the Charing Cross Road. It was too ridiculous.” She frowned at telling a story she hadn’t expected to, about an RKO feature that had Ginger Rogers married to a Nazi aristo when one day Cary Grant came along. It being Hollywood, when Ginger discovered the truth about her Nazi, she ditched him. In the movies it can be that simple. But the too-obvious parallel, so far as it went, had made the new Mrs. Willard feel miserable. She noticed the glass in her hand, took a lick out of it and grimaced. “I expect I would have sat through the whole wretched film again, feeling utterly dismal. Then in the interval they showed their newsreel and there he was. Edgar. Maimed, I could see that, but alive and on a troopship home. It was all too much for me. I ran out of there bawling, and kept on practically to the Tottenham Court Road.”

  The Willards hadn’t heard there was a coal shortage. The room was stifling. I hung my hat on the back of a chair and considered what exactly had been too much for her. One part might be realizing she wasn’t going to shake off her husband over breakfast the way Ginger shook off hers. That’s RKO. But the main part would be knowing her marriage had been more than just a terrible mistake. From the way she acted that afternoon in the Astoria, she already knew she’d been tricked and betrayed. Not only that, she knew why. “You ran because you knew sooner or later Edgar Levin would ask why of all men you had to marry Willard. And because when he did ask, you were going to give him the same lie your father gave you.”

  Mrs. Willard shaded her eyes with her hand, took another inch from the gin and grimaced again, as if she couldn’t stop hittin
g her thumb with a small hammer. “You’ve been talking to Edgar.”

  She was sitting up, steeling herself to drain the glass. I stepped over and took it out of her hand. “Will you stop that? You don’t even care for the taste.” I carried the drink to the hearth and emptied it on the coals without any protest. “Mrs. Willard, I’m tired of these games we play. We both know the Drake family didn’t need rescuing. The councilor never was going broke. He had a history. Willard knew it, and when you were traded it was for silence not for money. That was the deal you were a part of, and when you finally learned the truth of it you knew it had to stay strictly in the family.”

  There was a soft knocking at the door, the housekeeper moved into a wedge of light from the passage and Mrs. Willard said in a gravel voice, “What is it, Rose?”

  “Mr. Willard will join Mr. Newman in the drawing room presently, Ma’am, and wishes to remind Mrs. Willard that she has an engagement this evening.” Rose eased shut the door. The room folded back in firelight.

  “For a time, I wondered how you worked out what you really were traded for. Then I realized you wouldn’t need to, because one happy day your husband would be big enough to explain it himself. Good night, Mrs. Willard. Better get dressed.” I let myself out. Rose was in the corridor, ready to go back in. At that time of day, the lady of the house would always need help with a zipper.

  The Willards’ drawing room was on the same floor as their private movie theater. It had an elegant plaster ceiling, pocket doors dividing it in two, heavy drapes at its windows on the square and two large chesterfields facing across a low table in front of a hearth. A dozen wall lights livened the shadows. Up against the pocket doors there was a card table, and in a corner in front of the windows, a lighted Christmas tree that touched the ceiling, sparking with clear glass icicles as if it had just been brought in out of the frost. Willard was at a sideboard opposite the hearth, sluicing soda in a glass. “This is unexpected, Newman. Join me?” When I said not, he slotted the siphon back in among the crystal, carried a brandy across the room and helped himself from a dish on the table. In black-tie he looked slimmer and taller, shirt cuffs opal-studded, chin close-shaved, hair as glossed as his patent shoes. As if it had nothing to do with anything, he asked, “You’re here to talk about our late tenant? What was his name again?” He settled in one of the sofas, shelling nuts and pressing them between his teeth, rinsing with the brandy.