Charity Ends At Home f-5

by Colin Watson

  “Unfortunately—and I come now to the point I have had in mind ever since Booker here happened to mention your presence in the town, Mr Hive—unfortunately, I say, all these gentlemen follow their professions locally. Sound men, you understand, very sound. But I fear that some of our pupils are slow to respond to familiar example. It is the exotic that appeals to them. Now if they were to be presented with some stimulus to their imagination in the form of a visitor from the Great Metropolis...”

  “The great M’Trollops...” muttered Mr O’Toole, nastily. He had stood his empty glass back on the table and was now repeatedly ringing it, like a bell, with flicks of his middle fingernail.

  Mr Booker rose to his feet. “Let me do the honours, sir,” he said to Mr Clay. The headmaster shook his head. “Not just at the moment.” The glasses of both Mr Hive and Mr O’Toole were by Booker’s hand; he had seen neither actually in motion. He picked them up and departed for the bar.

  Mr Clay was uncertain of whether his implied invitation had been grasped. He kept his regard steadily on Mr Hive who gazed back with enormous benevolence but continued to say nothing.

  “I should esteem it a great favour, sir,” the headmaster said at last, “if you would come along to our, ah, little symposium and possibly say a few words to the boys on the subject of your career.”

  Mr Hive’s eyes widened and shone; his mouth opened; he spread a hand over his heart. He stood up. The hand left his chest, made a couple of circular motions and remained, fingers spread, in the air. “Lead me, my dear sir,” he cried, “to your siblings!”

  Mr Clay had not been prepared for such enthusiasm. He looked a fraction alarmed. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” he asked, hoping that Mr Hive would soon abandon his pose.

  “Mind? Certainly not! I can think of absolutely nothing that would give me greater pleasure!” Hive plonked back into his chair. His foot knocked against something hard. He looked down. It was his camera case. “Oh, dear!” he said, dolefully.

  “Is something amiss?”

  “Oh, dear!” Mr Hive said again. He tasted his little finger. Mr Clay stared at him anxiously.

  “The fact is,” said Mr Hive, “that I have just remembered a most important engagement.”

  From Mr O’Toole, who had been slumped in an attitude of world-weary detachment since parting with his glass, came a quiet but unmistakeably derisive snigger.

  “Most important,” repeated Mr Hive.

  The headmaster frowned. He looked up at Booker, newly returned from the bar. “Mr Hive says he has an engagement, Booker. You didn’t mention anything about that.”

  “Well, I didn’t know, did I? Anyway, perhaps it’s not all that urgent. Eh, Mr Hive?” He spoke without taking his eyes off the drinks that he was carefully transferring from a tray.

  “The boys will be most disappointed,” said Mr Clay.

  Hive took out his watch.

  “Is your appointment fixed at any particular time?” Booker asked him.

  “Well...”

  “The school is very near,” urged Mr Clay. “There will, of course, be refreshments.”

  A gutteral comment, between swallows, from O’Toole.

  It sounded like “Cocoa”.

  “You tempt me,” said Mr Hive. “Indeed you do. I remember something my old headmaster said to me during my last term at Harrow. ‘Never hesitate to hand on the lamp, Hive,’ he said, ‘for it will burn all the more brightly if you do.’ ”

  “How true,” said Mr Booker.

  “Hodie mihi, cras tibi,” solemnly added Mr Clay.

  “Puss! Puss!”

  They ignored Mr O’Toole.

  “I must not be late, mind. Much depends upon my not being late.”

  “I think I may safely guarantee that, Mr Hive. Half-past nine—a quarter to ten at the outside. Eh, Booker?”

  “We generally manage to clear things up by then, sir.”

  “Excellent. Excellent. So what do you say, then, Mr Hive?” The headmaster reached determinedly for his yet untasted sherry.

  “Of course he will,” said Mr Booker.

  Mr Hive, after some deprecatory chuckles, downed his brandy as a gesture of good fellowship and said that, damn him, the night was young and he really thought he would. “I’m a very easily persuaded fellow,” he added, suddenly and unaccountably sad.

  “Incidentally...” Mr Clay hesitated, drank precisely half his sherry, and went on: “I should be rather interested—purely for introductory purposes—the boys, you know—to hear what your profession, ah, actually is.”

  “Was,” corrected Mr Hive. He was looking dreamily down the room towards the shifting white blur of the barmaid’s décolletage.

  “You are retired?”

  “On the insistence of my doctors. Certain occupational maladies—sciatica, things like that. It was the variation in temperature, you know.”

  “I see,” said Mr Clay, who didn’t. “You mean your work took you abroad a good deal?”

  “I seldom slept in my own bed.”

  Mr Clay, a home-loving man, looked sympathetic. “The foreign service must entail a good deal of hardship, of which ordinary people know little. It is not all balls and levees, I am sure.”

  Mr Hive frowned. “I don’t remember any levees.”

  The headmaster felt a twinge of annoyance. The man was being singularly obtuse. But diplomats doubtless were so by nature. And they were, of course, bound by the Official Secrets Act. It would not do to drive the man, by too direct a catechism, into a blank denial of his profession. That would not be fair to the boys.

  “Did you serve many years in the, ah...?”

  “For nearly quarter of a century,” replied Mr Hive with a promptness and warmth that immediately dispelled the headmaster’s fear of over-fishing. “This would have been my silver jubilee year.”

  “Fancy that!” said Booker.

  O’Toole’s fingernail had begun to ring his glass once more.

  Mr Clay pursued his advantage. “I should be surprised if in so long a period you had not received some tokens of, ah, official recognition of your...” Again he left at the end of the sentence a space that he hoped Mr Hive would fill in.

  “Various little things have come my way, you know.”

  Mr Clay leaned forward and assumed the expression of one who has just recalled what might prove a valuable clue.

  “I seem to remember,” he said slowly, “having seen your name before somewhere. In, I think, The Times newspaper...” He watched Mr Hive’s face. “It could have been the Court Circular column...”

  “Court?” echoed Mr Hive, eagerly.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, very probably.”

  “A citation, I fancy...” Mr Clay felt intoxicated by his own mendacity.

  Mr Hive smiled at his finger-ends, then, much more warmly, at Mr Clay.

  “You can have no idea,” he said, “of how gratifying it is to a mere toiler in the vineyard to hear that his wine has earned good report.”

  “Then I may tell the boys, may I not, that their, ah, guest of honour, has been cited, ah...?”

  “By all means, my dear sir! Forty-seven times.”

  Chapter Six

  In the middle of one of the smaller lawns at the back of the Palgroves’ home was a circular wall of concrete, about three feet in diameter and a little less than three feet high, from which two posts rose to support a steeply pitched roof. The posts also carried a crank, set in a roller from which hung a chain. The wall was brightly painted in imitation of brick. The little roof, held up like an umbrella by the posts, was in fact plastic but it was the same jolly red as the wall and from a distance might have been taken as tile. The whole contrivance, of course, was intended to resemble an old country well-head—a ‘wishing well’, in fact, according to the catalogue of the firm of garden furniture manufacturers from which Mrs Palgrove had bought it a couple of years before.

  Around the well, set in the grass, were several large plastic toadstools, coloured i
n rich browns and reds and yellows. Upon one of them squatted a giant frog, very droll, very lifelike. Lifelike, too, were the dwarfs, modelled in attitudes of fey mischief, that completed the tableau.

  Mrs Palgrove paused on her way from the house and watched the effect of the setting sun upon the little plastic community. Against the long shadow cast by the well across the grass, the dwarfs’ scarlet caps gleamed like peppers.

  Rodney ran past her and toured the toadstools, sniffing them and making equitable bestowal of stale. “Bad boy! Nasty!” called Mrs Palgrove mechanically and quite without rancour. Rodney ignored her.

  She went up to the well. It was filled almost to the brim with water. In the depths glided thin orange shapes. Mrs Palgrove took from the pocket of her coat a small jar with perforated lid and shook white crumbs on the surface. The crumbs spread out and began to sink slowly. A pair, three, four goldfish came mouthing up to the food. Mrs Palgrove unconsciously imitated a fish’s ingesting pout as she watched them suck in the descending, disintegrating fragments.

  “Good boys! Clever boys!”

  The last of the sun had slid from the lawns and was climbing the beech hedge at the far side of the garden. In the chilly, deepening shade, the dwarfs and the toadstools and the frog reverted to lifeless shapes, scarcely identifiable. The vermilion of the dummy well became the colour of dried blood. A cold breeze rustled the leaves of the chestnut trees.

  Mrs Palgrove bade the goldfish good night and went back to the house. Rodney was there already, painstakingly gnawing the tapestry cover off one of the chairs in the dining-room.

  “Bad boy! Naughty!” She left Rodney to its depredations and went into the lounge, switching on the light. This came from a set of candle-like lamps fixed to a varnished oak frame suspended from the ceiling by four chains. The frame only just cleared Mrs Palgrove’s head. She knelt and switched on the electric fire; it simulated glowing coals.

  Looking round for the evening paper, she spotted it on the table by the french window. Her husband had left it, racing page uppermost, propped against a model of a Spanish galleon. The model was complete in every detail; it had been a wedding present and Mrs Palgrove supposed it to be fragile and valuable. Carefully she removed the newspaper and took it over to the settee, glancing on the way at the dock on the mantlepiece. It was twenty minutes past seven.

  At a quarter to eight, Mrs Palgrove folded the paper and added it to others in a rack by the fireplace. The rack was in the form of a pair of shields, embossed with heraldic designs and dipped back to back. She walked soundlessly across the thick, silver-grey carpet, patterned here and there with little yellow maps (of Rodney’s devising), and let down the front flap of a writing cabinet. Then, uncasing the portable typewriter that had been stood beneath the cabinet, she put it on the extended flap and drew up a chair.

  She wound into the typewriter a sheet of grey paper headed with the words FOUR FOOT HAVEN in large green capitals above a printed line drawing of two dogs, one in lace cap and apron, the other bespectaded and smoking a pipe, seated in humanized postures of relaxation on either side of a fireplace.

  Mrs Palgrove began to type, addressing the letter to: Miss L. E. C. Teatime, Secretary, Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance, 31 St Anne’s Gate, Flaxborough.

  Dear Madam...

  She considered a moment and went on, striking the keys slowly but with deliberation and accuracy.

  The committee of my society considered at their last meeting a certain incident of which you must be aware and which took place on the 14th inst. I refer to the breaking open after dark of the Haven kennels (‘Rover-Holme’) and the introduction of an unauthorised animal which the committee have reason to believe was an ‘unwell’ lady dog. The result was that ‘Rover-Holme’ was empty the next day and we have had to send members with cars as far away as Chalmsbury to collect our poor animals. More than twenty are still missing and it may well be that they have fallen into the hands of the Vivisectionists. I would not have Somebody’s conscience for all the tea in China.

  THE POLICE HAVE BEEN INFORMED

  Now what my committee wish to be known is that we are not going to be intimidated by ANYBODY, no matter what that ‘Anybody’ may do next. The Four Foot Haven is a truly INDEPENDENT body and it refuses to be swallowed up by a big organisation using ruthless and un-English methods.

  Mrs Palgrove paused and read back what she had written. She pondered a full minute before adding the final paragraph.

  It may interest you to know that certain information has reached me privately concerning the disposal of funds raised not a hundred miles from here in the name of so-called ‘charity’. I am reluctant to pass this information to the authorities, but I shall not hesitate to do so if the need arises. ‘If the cap fits...etc.’ Need I say more?

  Yours very sincerely,

  Again she sat in thought, staring at the sheet of paper before her. Then, in sudden resolve, she released it from the machine, put aside the carbon copy and added her signature in large angular script. She addressed an envelope, affixed a stamp that she took from a supply in a flat tin box, folded the letter and sealed it within the envelope.

  Three minutes later, Mrs Palgrove was walking energetically along Brompton Gardens towards the post-box at the Heston Lane corner.

  The careers symposium was held in the physics lecture theatre of the Grammar School. The room was in one of the oldest parts of the building. Its loftiness, its row of narrow, pseudo-Gothic windows, its oak and cast-iron desks, radiating in rising tiers from a huge demonstration bench, all testified to mid-Victorian zeal for the propagation of science.

  Some three dozen boys had distributed themselves, mainly in the four back rows. Aware that the occasion was ostensibly one of voluntary attendance, they were in a mood to extract from it such entertainment as they could. Their headmaster sensed it as soon as he entered the room and led his guests to the line of chairs that had been prepared for them on a dais behind the demonstration bench. “Watch them, Booker,” he murmured. “I fear persiflage.”

  With much scuffling of feet and several extravagant sighs intended to sound symptomatic of premature ageing brought about by too many after-school obligations, the boys rose.

  Mr Clay waited for silence, then told them they might sit. They did so as if they had just come in from an assault course.

  The headmaster went quickly through his routine explanation of what a careers symposium was supposed to achieve and then proceeded to introduce those whom he termed “our visitors from the world of effort and accomplishment.”

  He indicated first Mr Ernest Hideaway, estate agent and valuer.

  Mr Hideaway, a merry-looking baldy with big, floppy lips and eyes that constantly monitored his audience as if on the watch for bids, was a familiar performer at these functions. The boys waited for him to play his joke. As soon as his name was mentioned, he produced from his pocket a gavel and rapped with it three times on the bench. “Sold to the gentleman on the back row!” cried Mr Hideaway. There was noisy applause. The headmaster smiled icily and held up his hand.

  “Next I should like to welcome Inspector Purbright, of the Borough Constabulary, who has very kindly taken time off from his many pressing duties so that his advice may be available to us this evening.”

  Some of the more sanguine watched for the inspector to outdo Mr Hideaway by whipping out a truncheon, but he simply smiled and continued to lean back with folded arms.

  “A no less distinguished representative of the law, though in another field, is our old friend Mr Justin Scorpe.”

  Mr Clay turned and nodded to a man with a long wooden face, whose chief occupation seemed to be putting on and taking off a pair of massive black-framed spectacles. The solicitor acknowledged Mr Clay’s tribute by looking gravely up at the ceiling and clearing his throat—an action which made his Adam’s apple look like a bouncing golf ball.

  “From the sphere of commerce we have with us Mr Barnstaple.”

  There rose
to his feet a frail man with thinning, untidy hair and very bright blue eyes. He made a stooping bob to his audience, flapped his hands once or twice, and sat down after glancing apologetically at Mr Clay.

  “We had hoped, as you know, to be favoured with the presence of Mr Behan” (the headmaster pronounced it Bee-hahn) “of the Flaxborough Timber Corporation, but unfortunately he was called away on important business and Mr Barnstaple kindly agreed to deputize for him. Mr Barnstaple is Mr Behan’s accountant.”

  This explanation having been trotted out for what it was worth—clearly very little, in Mr Clay’s opinion—the headmaster paused, clasped his hands in front of him, and gazed into the top left-hand corner of the room.