A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  “Yes?”

  Daisy took a plunge at it. “—told me you did illegal operations.”

  “Like a good many other doctors. Are you so shocked?” There was something like a jeer behind the usual crooning tone of his voice. The planes of his lumpy face seemed to have altered their relationship, so that it resembled for a moment, under the glaring light, a dead lunar landscape.

  “I’m beyond being shocked at anything,” the girl drearily replied. “I just need help.”

  “Oh, I see, my dear. You’re pregnant, is that it?”

  Daisy flushed, in her turn disconcerted. “No, John, of course I’m not. It’s the way we live—Hugo and I.” She began to flounder in her mind, unable to find words for the sense of unreality and isolation which so oppressed her. She was aware of Jacko scrutinising her; and something wry, dispassionate yet expectant in his regard made her once more uncharacteristically aggressive. “Don’t you feel any responsibility for Hugo?”

  “Responsibility?” His voice had a humouring upward inflection.

  “Well then, guilt,” she said forthrightly.

  Jacko lit a cigarette, his first of the evening; then, apologising, offered Daisy one. “I don’t quite understand you. Do you mean I should feel guilty because Hugo is my friend and Hugo’s way of life is—er—rather unconventional?”

  “Oh, do let’s stop pretending,” she cried. “You know perfectly well that Hugo is a burglar.”

  Jacko’s nostrils flared, and one side of his mouth twitched.

  “All right then. He’s a burglar. Ought I to feel guilt about that?”

  “About helping him—what’s the word?—tipping him off.”

  “Tipping him off?” The man’s voice became almost falsetto. “My dear child, what are you dreaming about?”

  Daisy had gone too far to draw back. She told him what Hugo had told her—how Jacko let fall bits of information which were useful to Hugo. As she spoke, Jacko looked at first amazed, then tickled.

  “Oh, my goodness me,” he said, with a chuckle. “The old boy was pulling your leg. He’s a desperate romancer, you know.”

  “He doesn’t tell lies to me, really he doesn’t.” Daisy was wounded, and Jacko’s voice at once became solicitous again.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t. Not about important things. But as a joke, a tall story—don’t you see? You mustn’t take everything he says too seriously. It’s a sort of game with him, to invent discreditable fantasies about his friends: haven’t you noticed? Though I must say this is a new one to me. You can see, my dear, that a doctor in my position has to watch his step extra carefully. It would be madness for me to talk about my patients, to anyone.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous for you to—well, associate with Hugo at all?”

  Jacko had an embarrassed look. “One doesn’t drop one’s friends for the sake of one’s reputation.”

  “I’m sorry I—” Daisy squeezed his hand. “You’re a good man.”

  “And you’re a very very good girl. And a beautiful one,” said Jacko, smiling at her. “Now what about some dinner? You’re not expecting Hugo back till late, are you? It’ll cheer you up.” Jacko chuckled again. “I take it he’s on the tiles again to-night, in a manner of speaking?”

  Overwrought, Daisy began helplessly to cry. Jacko watched her in silence for a while, then said, “You must try not to worry. If he thought you were worrying, it would be bad for his nerve.”

  Daisy nodded, miserably. But it was not the thought of Hugo’s danger which had made her cry: it was not knowing what to believe. She could have sworn that Hugo had been serious when he told her about Jacko. But now Jacko had convinced her, or nearly convinced her, that the idea was fantastic, impossible. So Hugo must have been lying to her then, quite wantonly. And she could never talk to him about it: he would be furious if she told him she had discussed it with Jacko—equally furious whether it was a joke or the truth. The thing would weigh upon her mind, unresolved, like a malignant lump.

  Presently Jacko rang for his housekeeper to take Daisy upstairs. The housekeeper was an elderly woman with a non-committal expression, natural or cultivated, who proved, however, unexpectedly talkative. It was nice for the doctor to have company—they didn’t often have visitors, except professionally of course—she hoped Miss Bland could fancy a chicken omelette and a trifle—watch the step down into the bedroom, it could be dangerous. It soon became evident to Daisy that the woman was putting out feelers to discover whether she was a prospective patient of the doctor’s; and Daisy, who had glanced timidly about her in the hall below, wondering which of those doors led to the surgery, felt an acute shame—an apprehension, almost, as though the place were haunted by the furtive desperate shades of women who had been here to have the life within them destroyed. While the housekeeper hovered inquisitively beside her, it came to Daisy, with all the force of a great discovery or a great decision, that if ever she were pregnant by Hugo, however difficult it might make things for them, she would have the baby.

  “Why, that’s better,” Jacko exclaimed, when she came downstairs again. “You look as if someone had given you a million.”

  From time to time during dinner she noticed his eyes upon her, a puzzled look in them she had never seen before. She was used to him reading her like a book: she could not imagine that this new page might be in a language he did not understand. Her heart was so lightened by the simple discovery she had just made, she felt like hugging it to herself for a while, not sharing it—even with Jacko. From a round mirror above the sideboard her own face gazed at her dreamily, complacently, with an expression which almost duplicated that of the Piero della Francesca Madonna reproduced on the wall to her right.

  “Don’t go broody on me,” Jacko said.

  “I’m sorry. I was thinking.”

  “A penny for them.” His eyes followed every movement of hers, like a dog’s waiting for a tit-bit from the table. It seemed a shame to disappoint him, yet she could not come out with it point-blank: instead, she murmured:

  “I can’t understand a woman wanting to get rid of her baby.”

  Jacko dabbed his mouth in a finicky way with his napkin. “It’s need, not want, with most of them. And of course some women’s maternal instinct is completely dormant till after a child is born.”

  “It must be horrible for you,” said Daisy.

  “You mean, you’re horrified by me?”

  “Oh no, no!” Daisy was distressed. “I’m sure you don’t like doing—well, it is taking life, isn’t it?”

  A strange expression, which she was to remember afterwards, passed over his face and was gone. It reminded her of the impish, “dare-you” look which Hugo sometimes had; yet it was different, more secretive.

  “It’s only a small part of my practice, you know,” he answered mildly.

  “You are nice. You never tell me how young and inexperienced I am.”

  “Why should I? You’re wise beyond your years. Like any child of nature. I hope Hugo, realises it.” Jacko’s eyes were upon her steadily again, like fingers feeling a pulse. “I’d never forgive him if he hurt you.”

  “Oh, one can’t be truly in love without getting hurt,” she gaily proclaimed. “That’s how you know it’s the real thing.”

  “Well! You little masochist! You’ll be telling me next you want Hugo to beat you. Or perhaps he does.” Jacko leant forward, his eyes brightly interrogative.

  “I’m black-and-blue all the time. Silly! Of course he doesn’t.” Daisy blushed, thinking of the love-bruises, and went on quickly, at random, to conceal the thought, “I wonder would Hugo be a good father.”

  Jacko leant back again, neatly skinning an orange with his dessert knife: he did not reply at once.

  “My dear,” he said at last, “if that’s the way your mind is working, I must warn you. Hugo travels light. He’d never let himself be saddled with a family.”

  “But—”

  “Remember, I’ve known him some time. He’s a fine chap, but he’s not
cut out for responsibility. Can you see him as a family man—nappies, regular hours, life insurances? Bless your heart, he’d as soon be in prison.…”

  Jacko’s words were still tolling in her head when Daisy got home. The Maida Vale flat seemed a poor place after the spruce, spinsterish little house in Albert Grove. Daisy set herself to tidying up the sitting-room, a leaden depression weighing on her mind. If only Hugo would come back soon! It was so silent here, so desolate.

  She went into the bedroom, and switching on the light, gave a little cry. Hugo was there, lying full length, fully clothed, on the bed, his eyes staring at her, past her, with a lack-lustre expression.

  “Hugo! What’s the matter, darling? Didn’t you hear me come in?”

  “It was a flop,” he said in a bitter, dead voice. “A proper bloody wash-out. All I’ve got out of it is a sprained ankle. Managed to find a cab, and save myself from the wreck. For Christ’s sake, love, don’t look as if I’d raped you or something!”

  9. Journey through the Underworld

  Hugo’s sprained ankle kept him inactive for several days. At first he was docile, submitting to Daisy’s cold compresses and fussing, following her with his eyes like an injured child who is not yet sure whether he will be blamed for the accident which has caused his injury. Hugo was evidently mortified by his failure, and Daisy’s instinct told her that just now he needed very careful handling. He would say nothing more about his failure than that he had fallen fifteen feet from a window-ledge: such a drop was nothing to him; but he had landed with one foot on a paint-pot in the yard below, and this had turned his ankle.

  The girl could not help remembering what Jacko had said last night: “if he thought you were worrying, it would be bad for his nerve.” Hugo had never slipped before, he told her, almost apologetically: he must be out of practice or something. And she avoided his eyes, feeling guilty.

  At least there had been no alarm given. The occupants of the house were on holiday, and the nearest neighbours presumably asleep: so Hugo felt no apprehension about inquiries being made of taxi-drivers: after lying doggo for five minutes, he had managed to hobble a hundred yards, then caught a taxi in the main street, pretending to be drunk and blearily explaining to the driver that he had fallen down some steps after a party.

  Hugo’s piano mood that first day made it all the more of a surprise to Daisy when, as she ate her supper off a tray by his bedside, he suddenly said:

  “What’s up, old girl?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, conscious of his eyes upon her—the eyes that could be so evasive, but sometimes, as now, so disconcertingly shrewd.

  “You’re cherishing a grievance. I know you,” he said, amiably teasing, but searching too. She shook her head.

  “The breadwinner failed to bring home the bacon?”

  “Oh, it’s not that!” she cried, with a self-betraying emphasis. “You know I don’t blame you for—”

  “Then what do you blame me for? You’re bottling something up. You’ve been keeping your distance.”

  Daisy had not been aware of this; but she knew now it was true. There was nothing she could hide from Hugo.

  “Why did you tell me Jacko was sort of an accomplice—I mean, tipped you off—?”

  “So he does. In his back-handed way.” A wariness in Hugo’s voice made her feel a little sick.

  “But he absolutely denies it. He was staggered when I—”

  “You brought that up with him last night?” Hugo’s tone was almost hostile now, but she had to go on.

  “Well, he’s our friend, isn’t he? He wasn’t angry. He just said you were pulling my leg, romancing.”

  “You don’t really suppose he’d admit it to you, do you? My poor, simple-minded girl—why, he hardly admits it to himself.”

  “But I don’t understand—”

  “Keep your nose out of it then,” he flashed up at her.

  “I won’t! Why should I be kept in the dark all the time? Don’t you see I want to share your life—all of it, not just the dainty bits you decide to dish out?”

  “I’m sorry, love.” He took Daisy’s hand, gazing at her thoughtfully. “I shouldn’t have told you that about Jacko.”

  “Was it true?” she asked.

  “Yes. Perfectly true. But why?”

  Daisy sighed. Could she never make Hugo understand that if they did not tell each other the truth, their life together was meaningless?

  “Jacko’s a queer fish,” Hugo was saying. “He doesn’t let his right hand know what his left hand is doing. But you can trust him to the limit: I’ve proved that all right.”

  “You certainly do,” said Daisy, on a perverse impulse.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You don’t seem to mind my going there alone at night.”

  Hugo burst out laughing. “Oh glory! You’re angry because I’m not jealous? I really believe you are. Poor Daisy, wasn’t she assaulted by her young man’s wicked friend then!”

  The girl dragged her hand away furiously. “I hate you when you talk like that!”

  “My word, we are touchy to-day! Look, darling. I’m as jealous as hell normally. But not over Jacko. He’s my friend, and anyway I suspect the poor old bastard’s as good as impotent.”

  As always when Hugo talked about Jacko, Daisy felt herself excluded—a frantic little dot dancing about on the outside of a closed circle. She tried now to convey this to Hugo, and presently found herself telling him how unreal and isolated her life sometimes seemed. He listened patiently enough: he did not, as she had half feared, tell her that she could take it or leave it—this hole-and-corner life; nor did he indulge in self-pity of the I-always-said-I-wasn’t-good-enough-for-you kind. Instead, a subdued gleam came into his eye, and with that boyish audacity, complicity, which always swept her off her feet, he said:

  “Well, love, if you’re on for it, shall we change our way of life?”

  “Change our—?”

  “Go and live where I belong. Amongst the publicans and sinners. We’ve hardly a bean in the kitty, anyway. I can sub-let these rooms furnished till the end of the year.” Hugo talked with the same enthusiasm as when he suggested a move to the Ritz, and Daisy was, as usual, infected by it. She would sell the clothes he had bought her, she would go out to work, she—

  “Oh no, my pet, we don’t work in the circles I’m introducing you to.” Hugo made a shocked face. “‘Work’ is a word you must never use there. A dirty word.”

  What was Hugo’s motive in transplanting her to the underworld, Daisy never knew, nor indeed bothered to think about much. Some inhibition against doing so, some chivalrous desire to protect her innocence, must have been swept away. Or perhaps the self-destructive element in his nature impelled him to show himself to her against his natural background. At any rate, as soon as he could move about again, he went off to re-establish contact with a man he had known when they were both working the Midland city. This man, “Tacker” Fenton, he told Daisy when he returned, had put him on to a lodging-house off the Whitechapel Road where they could get a room cheap and no questions asked. Hugo had booked the room; and in the same whirl of energy he sold most of Daisy’s clothes—at a price which astonished her—and found a tenant for the flat.

  “Are you going to join a gang?” she asked, hesitantly. “I thought you always worked alone.”

  “We’ll see. Maybe I’ll have to double up with someone. The free-lance lark hasn’t got me anywhere lately.”

  A schoolboy going home for the holidays could not have been more gay than Hugo when, the next morning, he humped their two suitcases and hurried Daisy through the early autumn air, en route for the underworld, where they were to sojourn now, off and on, for nearly twelve months.

  Daisy’s first impression of it, once she had acclimatised herself to the lodging-house room, the seedy cafés and the crowded, babbling streets, was of a life curiously similar to their high-flying days at the Ritz. Here was the same drifting, apparently rootless society, easy come easy
go, its members—like Hugo’s elegant acquaintances from the upper world—talking a language of their own, allusive and slangy, living on their wits or their parasitic powers, showily generous if they were in the money, shamelessly battening when funds ran low. Daisy’s introduction to these people, all of whom existed by crime or on its shady fringes, was made easier by Tacker Fenton. Tacker, a squat, broad, merry character, took to her from the first, nicknamed her “the Queen,” acted as bear-leader and bodyguard. It was from Tacker that she learnt the gradations and snobberies of the criminal world, whose aristocracy are the con. men and the burglars, where pickpockets are small fry. Himself one of the aristocracy, Tacker deplored the post-war tendencies—crimes of violence, Teddy boys, and the mob of left-overs from the rackets which had flourished under rationing and shortages. The profession, one gathered from him, was overcrowded, while half the operators were amateurs who ought to be condemned, for their incompetence, to do an honest job of work.

  Hugo, having been out of touch with the fraternity for some time, took a back seat at first. But he was looked upon with respect as a solo operator whose reputation was secure: and Daisy soon observed how quickly he became at home here, like a born countryman returning to his old village after many years. He even seemed to take on the colour of the environment, his appearance growing both jauntier and warier, his gestures adapting themselves to the nervous, slick stereotype of criminal free-masonry. It was partly a game with him, Daisy thought: but in playing this game according to its rules and conventions he took a boyish pride. This—his alert bearing and high spirits seemed, if a little defiantly, to proclaim—this is where I belong; I need not keep up appearances any more.

  Such conscience or hankering after respectability as had remained to Daisy was soon dissipated by Hugo’s new-found contentment. She realised that he too had felt isolated, often ill-at-ease, in their Maida Vale existence. She would always be happy so long as he was happy; and now, imperceptibly to herself and by gradual degrees, she was surrendering to the values of this new world, Hugo’s world, where the honest citizen was honestly considered a mug, respectability a smear, and the Law a thing to be broken, evaded or suffered—one’s natural adversary.