What Mrs Barclay's mind said was 'Good Heavens!' What her voice said was 'But what a wearing life! And in this climate!'
'Oh no,' said Kif. 'Oh no!' He was struggling against a dawning feeling of—not quite disappointment, but of being done out of something; a feeling that there was something wrong somewhere. Mrs Barclay had turned the tap labelled 'Gracious small-talk.' Kif knew only the mixture as delivered by the taps 'Chumminess' and 'Motherliness'. He was looking for familiar signposts and had not yet realised that he was in the wrong landscape. The homeless Tommy had been a very different proposition in Margaret Barclay's eyes from this uninteresting nobody in a suit of too obvious a cut. Ann had once said—not to Kif—that her mother would excuse at muffler, but not a collar of the wrong kind. Not that Kif wore the wrong kind of collar—he saw too many of the right kind in the course of his days work to make that kind of social mistake—but…The 'but', from Mrs Barclay's point of view, was a very big one. She would be nice to him, poor dear. That went without saying. Margaret Barclay was never not nice to anyone. Of course she would be nice to him.
'Are you quite strong again? You were in hospital with—pneumonia, was it?'
'Pleurisy. Yes, I'm all right again, thanks.'
A little silence.
In Mrs Barclay's mind: 'Quite attractive in a way, but of course not possible.'
In Kif's: 'She couldn't have gone out, or I'd have heard the door.'
The door opened and Ann's voice said: 'You know, Mother, I think it would be better if I took Lavender's—' Kif had got to his feet, and she stopped, looking calmly at him.
'Why, good lord, it's Kif,' she said suddenly, and went over to him smiling with her hand outstretched. 'Good Lord!' she said again.
He grinned down at her wordlessly. He had not remembered her as so small. But all the rest was the same: the vividness, the directness, the taking him for granted. She was even dressed as she had been that last night in some dull-surfaced stuff of a clear green. Nothing shone about her but her eyes and the hair under the hat.
'And what are you doing now?' she asked, resting on the arm of a chair. 'Found the ideal job?'
So she had remembered that. 'Not quite, but very nearly. I'm a bookmaker's clerk with a stake in the firm.'
'Congratulations! I see you at thirty with a large watch-chain across your middle and a flat in—in Half Moon Street, let us say. If I come to your firm'—she did not ask the name of it—'will you give me a point over the odds?'
'We might. But don't mortgage the chickens.'
'Oh, you've heard about that? Well, it's not very nice on wet days, but it's heavenly on fine ones. Is bookmaking very exciting?'
'Fairly,' Kif admitted.
'Between you and me and the hen-house door, it's more than chicken farming is. But then, noblesse oblige, back to the land, a stake in the country, justifying one's existence!' She laughed. 'Well, I must fly. I'm awfully glad to see you looking so full of beans. No more trouble here?' She tapped his chest lightly. 'That's good. Good-bye. It's rotten luck Tim's away. You'll look us up again, won't you? I wish I hadn't to go out.' She made the characteristic little gesture with her hand from the door and was gone.
'Yes, it really is bad luck that Tim should be away.' Kif came back to the realisation of Mrs Barclay. 'But you will stay and have tea, won't you?'
'No, thank you. I—I've got to meet a chap.'
'I really don't want to keep you, my dear boy, if you must go, but I should be delighted if you could wait. Alison won't be long in bringing it.'
'No, really, thanks very much.' He must get out of the house. Out into the air.
'Well, you must come again when Tim will be at home.' She went with him to the hall door. 'He will be very disappointed at missing you. Stop. You had better let me have your address.'
Kif gave her his business card.
'Good-bye, my dear boy. I am sorry you won't stay. But I am delighted to see you again and looking so well and and prosperous.' She patted his arm and waited at the door smiling as he went up the path under the red ramblers to the gate.
Two hours later he threw away the butt of his twentieth cigarette and kicked himself mentally.
'Don't be a fool! Don't be a fool! They're not worth it.'
'Ann,' said his other half.
'But you're only one in a hundred to her. What did you expect? She was very nice.'
'Well, Mrs Barclay. Was all that kindness just bunk? How could it be bunk?'
'Just bunk. It was all eyewash. They're not worth bothering about. Just you wait, and you'll show them. You're just as good as they are.'
'But, Good God! I didn't want to hang on to them. I only wanted to see them all again.'
'Yes, but how were they to know that? They were afraid you were going to. They simply choked you off.'
'Tim wouldn't have been like that.'
'Wouldn't he?'
'No, he wouldn't! he wouldn't!' his mind cried out. 'He wouldn't. Tim's not like that.'
'Well, just wait and see if Tim comes.'
So with a mind half protesting half leering Kif went back to supper alone at Fitzmaurice Lane. And far beneath his arguing mind was a sore spot that no argument reached.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For the next few months Kif was busy. When he remembered the Barclays a dull rage swept him—Tim had not come—but otherwise he was completely happy. He liked Hough and had developed a reluctant respect for the shrewd brain that was Collins. Collins was the most single-minded man he had ever met; nothing but business—his business, of course—existed for him. Hough was a normal man who liked his wife, and theatres, and a drink, and good company, and other pages of the penny press besides the sporting one; but none of these things existed for Collins. And then, towards autumn, business, which had been surprisingly good for the first year of racing after the war, began to stagger. The volume of betting was unchanged, but several of their clients had lucky coups which it took all the firm's resources to pay. Only the coolness and resource of Collins saved them once or twice.
'It's a hell of a nuisance,' grumbled Hough in the train one day. 'Wonder what that chap Fotheringham in Leeds does. Something to do with a stable, I'll be bound. He couldn't know all about these eight-to-ones and ten-to-ones unless he was on the inside. Wish he hadn't picked on us just when we wanted to earn our winter keep.'
'But he's been a client of ours all along,' Kif pointed out. 'We've had some of his.'
'Well, he's having the devil's own luck now. If Collins weren't so keen to get some of it back he'd close his account.'
It was the end of October, and for the last fortnight things had been better. Kif whistled as he climbed to the office on a Tuesday morning to meet Hough. Monday had been a blank day with no racing, and he felt already the itch to be back in the excitement of work. He had spent the week-end with cousins of Mrs Hough's at Brighton, and nothing in the last two days had pleased him like the prospect of his work this morning. He hoped anxiously that the fog would prove to be lighter in the country than it gave promise of being in London. Still whistling, he turned the handle of the door and found it locked. Strange. Hough might not have arrived, but Collins, if he were out, would not leave the office without even the office boy to answer the telephone. Perhaps he hadn't arrived, and the office boy was ill. Perhaps…His key turned in the lock and he went in.
The office was quite deserted. A loose-leaved calendar on the mantelpiece waved with the wind of his entrance and subsided. The table was clear of papers as he had seen it on his first visit, except for an envelope lying mathematically in the middle of it. Kif's heart missed a beat at sight of it as if he had come on a bomb. He walked round to the front of the table and regarded it without picking it up. On it was written in Hough's writing 'Vicar'. With a mind suddenly blank of surmise and a faintly unsteady hand he opened it.
'DEAR VICAR,
Collins has gone. Lit out. I came up here this morning to arrange things for tomorrow and found him gone and of course every
thing gone with him. There was ten pounds left in the bank—in case of questions, I suppose. No money has been paid out for a fortnight. He had the nerve to leave the accounts ready. There is nothing to do but clear out. Even if we got Collins it wouldn't help. We're done for. I have managed to cash the £10, and with what I can borrow that will take Ethel and me out of this damned country. I am leaving you in the lurch quite deliberately. If anyone had told me yesterday that I would do that I would have knocked him down. Now I can't think of anyone but Ethel. You are alone and can look after yourself. If she asks about you I shall say we went fifty-fifty in what was left. There is a pound note in the left-hand drawer in case you are on the rocks. If we ever meet again you can kill me, but don't tell Ethel why.
HENRY HOUGH
P.S.—Collins was Fotheringham. There is no such person known in Leeds. What bloody fools we've been.'
Kif put down the note and drew Collins' chair from the knee-hole of the table. He sat down in it stumblingly. His knees were trembling and he felt sick and shaky. He put his elbows on the table and rested his head on his hands, but his arms were shaking so that they were no support, and he withdrew them and sat with a blank mind, drawing a hand over his forehead, which was cold and damp. Presently he picked up the letter and re-read it absently, as one reads an advertisement in the Tube. But before he had come to the end for the second time he had come alive again, and feeling poured through him agonisingly, as blood through a frozen limb. Collins! He would find Collins if he had to work his way round the world to do it, and when he found him he would kill him. He would put his sinewy hands on that mean neck and throttle the life out of him. He would beat him into unrecognisability. Hough he hardly thought about, and it never occurred to him to doubt Hough's honesty. Hough had been wronged too, ruined. Ruined! He was ruined. His money gone. Hopelessly gone. All his plans gone. He was left with a pound note…He snatched out his pocket-book. He had a ten-shilling note in his pocket-book and five and threepence halfpenny in loose change in his pocket. He opened the top left drawer and found the note. One pound fifteen and threepence ha'penny. And he paid his landlady on a Wednesday. That was tomorrow. He would have to look for a job, of course. Any kind of a job that would keep body and soul together. Never any more the happiness of taking a job 'until'. He was a beggar. A year ago he might have faced the fact with the courage of ignorance. Now he knew what the chances of success were. It would be a body-and-soul job for ever. The realisation was too bitter to be borne. For the first time since he was thirteen Kif broke down. He laid his head on his arms and sobbed—hard dry tearless sobs that hurt him and brought no relief. When they ceased from exhaustion he stayed as he was, despairingly indifferent. The light came and went as the wisps of fog passed between the window and the opposite chimneys. Footsteps came and went on the stairs. The rumble of traffic came through the closed window in a steady monotone. Kif lay motionless.
It was nearly an hour later than he lifted his head. The first thing that his eyes lighted on was the watch on his wrist. Good heavens, he would miss his train! And then he remembered. It was finished. Even the racecourse was closed to him for some time to come. He sat up and pushed his fingers through his thick disordered hair; his gaze wandered round the office. Collins had made a pretty tidy job of it. Or was it Hough? No, Collins, probably; it would be like him. He drew out the wastepaper basket; it contained the accounts for the previous week made out by Collins and torn across by Hough. One by one he opened the drawers and ran a sensitive hand into the further ends of them. He had no definite purpose; at the back of his mind was a faint hope that something of value had been overlooked. But there was nothing. Once his finger-nail caught in something and he drew out a square of pasteboard. A visiting card. He turned it over. 'Timothy R. Barclay.'
So Tim had come!
It did not seem to matter very much at the moment somehow. It wasn't his relations with anyone that mattered. It was life and himself. He, Kif, was what counted, and he was being overwhelmed, drowned. Quite unconsciously he put the card into his pocket; but it was as a souvenir, not as a gage for the future. He finished his examination of the drawers, picked up his hat from the chair on which he had dropped it at his entrance, cast a last glance round the office and went out, slamming the door behind him.
Only poets and martyrs greet calamity without seeking that fortification of the common man, a drink. Kif had a large whisky in a bar in Leicester Square. He did not like whisky—beer was his habit—and he could not afford it, but both seemed somehow excellent reasons for indulging in it. He waited hopefully, staring at the lettered mirrors, for the transformation which should ensue, but the drink had no effect, mental or physical, beyond eliminating the queer empty feeling that had settled below his heart. Disgusted, he went out into the grey streets again and walked to Fitzmaurice Lane. He must tell his landlady that one room would have to suffice from now on. And he would have another look at this morning's paper, which he had skimmed so light-heartedly such a short time ago. It already seemed long ago that he had opened that letter in the office. Years. Time had nothing to do with a clock ticking, it appeared. He had lived years since he set out from Fitzmaurice Lane this morning, and yet the race-trains were not yet at their destination; the day's work had not started.
He told Mrs Connor simply that the firm had gone to blazes, snatched the paper which he saw lying among the wreckage on the kitchen table, and went abruptly upstairs out of the range of her anxious eyes and tentative sympathy. He wanted no one's sympathy. What he wanted was Collins' blood. His impotence made his anger a living thing that mauled him in spasms which left him weak and sick. He found it easier not to think of Collins; the searing agony of his helpless rage was unbearable. He shut the bedroom door behind him, stood a moment looking incredulously at the quiet room, and then, flinging the paper on to the bed, he crossed slowly to the fireplace and with arms propped on the mantelpiece surveyed the row of photographs as if he had never seen them before. There were several army groups, one of Tim, Jimmy and himself in the early days of training, a studio portrait of a little Parisienne who had lightened the leave he and Carroll had spent in Paris, one of a hospital sister, and in the middle, slightly in front of the rest, Marcelle. It was a snapshot taken before he had met her, but it represented her as he always thought of her. Her smooth head was bare and the eyes looked straight at him, gravely smiling in sympathy with her gravely smiling mouth. A wind blew her full skirt to her and lifted a single tendril of hair from her centre parting. Kif had never seen the Samothrace Victory and might not have liked it if he had, but he was intensely aware of the living beauty of that photograph of Marcelle.
'Marcelle,' he said. He had always liked the sound of it. A lovely name. He took the photograph up after a little and sat down with it on the edge of the bed. He had gone to look for Marcelle on the first possible occasion after his return to France from hospital, but he had not found her. She and her mother had gone to Paris, he was told. No one knew their address. In those days of flux no one knew anything. The belle-soeur of Madame, it was said, kept a blanchisserie in the Raspail district; that was all they could tell him. Kif accepted the inevitable, and Marcelle stayed with him as an unspoilt memory, without sting and without regret. In Paris, it is true, he had inveigled his companion into spending nearly a whole morning among the streets between the Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse. He had even penetrated into a small laundry on the Boulevard Montparnasse under the pretext of asking his way. When Carroll showed signs of impatience he was assured that he was seeing the Latin quarter—a thing which everyone did. But when at last Carroll's desire for the Place de l'Opéra grew too insistent to be comfortably ignored, Kif went away from the district that somewhere held Marcelle, with a regret that was more sentimental than poignant.
Now he sat moving her photograph gently from side to side so that the eyes followed him. Occasionally he bent forward and scrutinised it more closely. Slowly the strain in his face relaxed, the murder faded from his eyes.
He propped the photograph on top of the pillow, and opened the paper at Advertisements.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was the end of December. The wave of hysteria which descends on the city at Christmas time had passed. The crowds had the spent disgruntled look of those who have worked themselves up to a crisis which has eluded them. Goodwill was at a premium; and the weather was bitter.
A squall of thin sleet tore on an east wind up Oxford Street. The water spouted from the shop-fronts and sluiced across the pavements in a thick ripple. The gutters were the beds of evil-looking streams. A baleful pale light lay on the street under the black sky. There was comfort neither in heaven nor earth. Kif, sheltering in a doorway, looked at his leaking sodden beets and cursed. He remembered suddenly the doctor's injunction of nearly a year ago. No colds! He uttered a short stifled laugh. A young woman who was finding temporary refuge in the same doorway glanced at him hastily and opening her umbrella went out into the storm. Kif was aware neither of her presence nor of her departure. He felt ill, and it was not always easy to tell what was real and what was not. If he were to be really ill, that might end in a hospital and warmth and comfort, even if he pegged out afterwards. But there probably wouldn't be any such luck. It was only that he was short of a meal. Old soldiers never die, and all the rest of it. Only it would be dissolving to-day; not fading. He laughed again. A man coming abruptly round the corner of the doorway with his head down cannoned into him and apologised breathlessly as he turned down his collar and shook the wet from himself.
'It's the kind of day—' he said, straightening himself.
'Well, I'm damned…! Well, I'm damned!' he repeated, rallentando.
'Carroll!' said Kif.
'A bull,' said Carroll, beaming on him.
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