by Otto Penzler
“And how would you know he hasn’t been here before?” snapped Mrs. Emery from her place among the trio on the other bench. “You’ve got the wrong pair of spectacles on your nose. As usual.”
“What did she say? What did she say?” Mrs. Alford boomed out. “If you’ve got anything to say, dear,” she added in a voice designed just to be heard on the other bench and which yet carried halfway across the green, “you should say it so people can hear. I’m not deaf, you know.”
“I know you’re not deaf, dear,” Mrs. Finders chipped in from the very other end of the row, “I saw you sitting at your window when I passed by yesterday, nodding away to that little music box you have when I was hardly able to hear it myself.”
“Nothing of the kind,” Mrs. Damworthy contradicted. “The wretched woman was simply nodding off. She’d sleep away the whole day if she was let.”
Now it was time for tiny dried-up Lady Bentt to intervene.
“None of all that,” she piped, “alters the fact that a young stranger has just come into the village and gone off carrying a very heavy box of some sort. I can’t help wondering what he can want.”
Speculation at once united all six of the other old ladies.
“Selling something,” suggested Mrs. Alford, to whose un-hearing ears Lady Bentt’s shrill voice seemed always to penetrate.
“If I’d had my other glasses on,” Mrs. Beastock chimed in, “I’d have seen in a jiffy just what it was he was carrying.”
“I’m sure it’s something nice,” Mrs. Capper happily chirped. “A present perhaps for somebody in the village.”
“Yes, like one of those nasty bombs,” Mrs. Damworthy boomed.
“Oh, I wish you wouldn’t talk about bombs,” said Mrs. Emery. “It’s nothing but bombs, bombs, bombs nowadays, and no one ever tells me what a hydrogen bomb is. If hydrogen’s what I mean.”
“Ah, I can tell you about that,” Mrs. Finders said with unjustified authority. “It’s all to do with H-two-O. Hydrogen bombs are just like the water bombs the nasty boys at school used to throw at us.”
The young man with the heavy crate had by now vanished in the direction of the village’s other proud amenity, the public convenience.
• • •
But only a few minutes later he appeared again with a somewhat younger stranger, equally affecting Teddy Boy garb. He it was now who was clasping to his chest the big box. Talking away together, they began to strap it back on to the rear of the motor bike. But, finding this left no room on the pillion, they eventually set off in the direction of distant, fenced and gated Goodwood House, with the Fox, if that’s what he was, in front and his fellow hen-run raider, the Cub, desperately clutching the awkward crate behind him.
“Did you hear what they were talking about?” fat Mrs. Al-ford asked loudly as they disappeared. “I thought it was something about going for a walk. But I wonder where they’re off to for that?”
“Up to no good wherever they’re going,” Mrs. Damworthy said as loudly.
“You know, I don’t think they said walk,” Mrs. Finders commented. “I think they said talk.”
“I expect they just want to have a good talk with somebody,” Mrs. Capper sweetly suggested.
There were signs of bristling all along the two benches by now. An argument to be settled, or indulged in.
But little Lady Bentt stepped in once more.
“No, no. What they were discussing was one of those new sort of wirelesses,” she piped. “You know, all sorts of people have them nowadays, the army, the police, firemen. They’re called walkie-talkies, such a vulgar expression. You can use them to exchange messages over quite a distance, I believe.”
Perhaps it was as well that the two Teddy Boys had roared noisily away. If they had heard old Lady Bentt they might have decided to shut her up.
• • •
But, as it was, when only some twenty minutes later the pair came roaring back and parked the bike once more on the convenient patch of gravel just behind the benches, neither of them took any notice of the seven old ladies sitting there in the sun. But the old ladies, every one of them, took notice that the crate, whatever had been in it, was no longer with them.
“Nah,” the Fox was saying in answer to some question the Cub had asked while the bike engine still thundered away, “can’t do nothing till the first race comes on, can we? Gotter see if it’s picking up okay, ain’t we?”
Fourteen ears stretched to hear meant that, for a time, six or seven mouths, with a lot to say, remained silent.
But soon Fox and Cub had gone far enough away for comment to be possible.
“They can’t do something, that’s what they said.”
“I saw they were worrying enough about it, whatever it was.”
“I’m sure it was only some game. You know what boys are like.”
“Boys? Youths like those are far from boyish, I’ll tell you that.”
“I can’t abide voices like theirs. Townee voices I call ’em. They’ll be from Brighton, I bet a shilling.”
“They were saying they were going to pick up some girls. Disgusting.”
Only thoughtful Lady Bentt had no comment to make.
• • •
Before long the two visitors came strolling back, still discussing their business, whatever it was.
“Yeah, but weren’t you scared?” said Cub.
“Nah.”
“But I mean, going into that place, dead o’ night an’ all.”
“Wouldn’t be such a fool go in there when that old idiot was behind the counter, taking the bets, would I? Not that ’e takes all that many. Dead-and-alive place like that.”
On they strolled.
“The bigger one said someone was an old idiot. I hope he wasn’t talking about me.”
“I don’t think it was the bigger one, dear. I think it was the younger one. I think he was doing most of the talking, the one who looks as if he’s only just out of school.”
“I could jump up and go after them, and see which one it really was. You know your sight sometimes does let you down, dear.”
“Sometimes? Huh.”
“They were talking about making bets. I never like to hear anything to do with that sort of thing. It’s not right. I’m sure of that.”
“No, no. They were talking about cinema films, what the youngsters call the flicks nowadays. Someone told me that at Midhurst last week they had one called something like Dead of Night. You all must have heard them say that, didn’t you?’
“Yes,” said Lady Bentt before another argument—well, running quarrel really—could break out. “Yes, we all must have heard those words Dead of Night.”
• • •
Though none of the old ladies went to the cinema anymore—the village might have two pubs, a public convenience and a telephone box but that was the full extent of its amenities—they all, except Lady Bentt, were full of notions about the films they never saw, whether a dozen miles away in Midhurst or in farther-off bright and breezy Brighton, which none of them had visited more than two or three times in their lives.
So, once the subject of the cinema had been brought to the fore, however mistaken Mrs. Finders may have been about those overhead words dead o’ night, the talk swung this way and that about the comparative entertainment value of films known only by their tides. Fat Mrs. Alford, though she heard less than half of the talk, was firm in her view that all the stories at the cinema were “nice.” Mrs. Beastock, who with her failing sight hadn’t seen a film since she had sleuthed along with Charlie Chan at the Opera fifteen years earlier, was trenchant in her view that everything you saw in the dark of the cinema was “very clever.” Mrs. Capper, while modestly admitting she had never been to the cinema, was certain that “nothing nasty” was ever to be seen there.
On the other hand Mrs. Damworthy condemned out of hand, and in a very loud voice, the whole art of cinematography, while Mrs. Emery recounted at length, and with interruptions, the story of the la
st film she had seen, Strangers on a Train, and how its characters had caused her intense irritation, with Mrs. Finders simultaneously recounting at equal length the story of a film that turned out after all to have been a play on her wireless.
But all that was brought to an abrupt end when Lady Bentt’s little pipe of a voice was heard saying, “Listen!”
The command—for, softly spoken though it might be, a command it was—brought a sudden silence all the way along the row. Then, bit by bit, it penetrated to each of the old ladies, even somehow to deaf Mrs. Alford, that they could hear a distant continuous spiel of talk. There was a voice—it was hard to make out—coming from somewhere saying over and over again what a fine time some people were going to have.
Suddenly doubly bespectacled Mrs. Beastock, whose hearing was perhaps more acute than any of the others, broke out in exclamation.
“It’s from the Duke’s,” she said. “It must be. I don’t know how we’re hearing it, but that’s what it is. It’s a man telling the people up there for the racing all about what’s going to happen, and sounding very excited.”
Now all of them were able to make out what was being said by that tiny, tinny, yet somehow plummy, voice that seemed in fact to be coming not from distant Goodwood House but from somewhere in the village.
It was Lady Bentt who had the final explanation.
“It’s a walkie-talkie,” she said. “Those two young men must have been putting one half of the one in that crate of theirs somewhere just outside the Duke’s grounds and have left the other half out of the way here, somewhere near the—”
She balked for an instant at the words, but then brought them out at full pipe. “Somewhere just by the public convenience.”
There was general nodding and yes-yessing agreement that this was indeed what had happened, together with a good deal of claiming to have known it all along.
“Well,” Mrs. Alford said in her unnecessarily loud deaf-person’s voice, “of course I knew all that was coming from a talkie-walkie. It’s just that they can’t get it as loud as my wireless.”
“And that,” Mrs. Damworthy announced from the other bench, “is so loud it can be heard all over the village, whether anybody wants to listen or not.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Beastock put in her pennyworth, “my sight may not be quite as good as it was, but I knew it was a talking-walker that young man was carrying. No doubt about it.”
“Walking-talker?” Mrs. Emery snapped, shrill with indignation. “What you mean is a talkie-walkie. Everybody knows it’s called that.”
“Well, I’m not sure I knew,” Mrs. Capper said gently. “I thought what he was carrying was that nice present for somebody.”
“And I think I know who’s going to be given it,” Mrs. Finders contributed. “It’s that—”
“Hush,” came Mrs. Damworthy’s strident voice. “Can’t you see the two of them are coming back again?”
But, though the Fox and his Cub could not but have heard, they were so interested in what they themselves were discussing that Mrs. Damworthy might as well have been whispering.
“But weren’t it hard to get in there?” the Cub was asking.
“Hard? Nah. Piece o’ cake. Screwdriver at the edge o’ that rotten old door, an’ Bob’s yer Uncle.”
“An’ after that all you ’ad to do was move the hands o’ that clock there on for five or six minutes. And now we’re all set.”
“All set to make damn fools of ourselves it’d be, you berk. The hands on for five minutes? They had ter go back five minutes. Back. Didn’t they?”
“Oh. Oh yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Back. Back. But what if the old geezer noticed it when he come in this lunchtime?”
“Notice? Old idiot like that wouldn’t notice if that big old clock of his fell off the wall right on his daft head.”
• • •
Plenty there for the old ladies to discuss, however little they knew what the Fox and his Cub had been talking about.
“Oh yes,” Mrs. Finders told Lady Bentt, who had squeezed down beside her today, “the young man said he moved back the minute hand of some clock somewhere. One of the boys at school played that trick once, and we all were let out ten minutes before we should have been. Yes, and I remember now. It was Peter Parker, the little monkey.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Mrs. Alford trumpeted. “It was that Stanley Sillitoe, and wasn’t he pleased with himself. Till you told Teacher, Lily Smith.”
“I never. I never,” Lily Emery (who had) exclaimed indignantly.
“No, it wasn’t Stanley,” Mrs. Beastock joined in. “I can see him now, climbing up on a desk to do it. It was Jack Parsons. Always in trouble he was.”
“I never liked that Jack Parsons,” Mrs. Finders announced. “Anything he said to me was dirty. And that’s the truth.”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Capper put in, almost indignantly, “Jack Parsons was the nicest boy in the school, he really was.”
“Of course, I was never at the school in the village,” Lady Bentt piped in now, perhaps feeling that the subject should be changed. “But I know all about tricks like that, even the girls at the school where I was used to play them.”
Her intervention did indeed change the subject. All six of the other ladies on the benches were avidly interested in Lady Bentt’s former life.
• • •
So the Fox and the Cub had been standing directly behind the benches for some minutes before Mrs. Alford, happening to turn round to ease her ample form, spotted the pair of them. She promptly issued a huge splashy whisper.
“It’s them. I hope they aren’t listening to what we’re saying.”
It was a good thing, however, that the two Teddy Boys were so engrossed in the conversation they had been having that for them the old ladies on the benches might not have existed. Not even, when after Mrs. Alford’s sploshed-out warning there had come an abrupt end to the chattering, did the sudden silence attract their attention.
“Yeah, but…” the Cub was going on, voice prickly with anxiety.
“But what? You know, pal, you really aggravate me sometimes.”
“But— But, well, how can we be sure your brother’s waiting on the other side of the street from the place in Kemp Town?”
“How can we? How can we? How d’you think we can? Ain’t the whole point of it all that there’s a phone box just beside ’im?”
“Oh yeah. Never thought about that. But all the same he might of gone for a cuppa or something.”
“Then why don’t you bloody go an’ ring him up an’ ask ’im?”
“Ring up the phone box?”
“That’s right, stupid, the phone box. They got a phone in them, ain’t they? With a phone number? What you think we took down the number o’ that one for? Why d’you think you got a handful o’ sixpences in your pocket? Go on, scram.”
The Cub walked hurriedly away.
Seven pairs of aged female eyes watched him go.
“Did I hear—I’m getting a bit deaf, you know—that he’s going to the phone box round the corner behind the church?”
“Which way did he go? I missed seeing.”
“I’m sure it’s nice of him to ring up his friend in Kemp Town, wherever that is.”
“I tell you one thing, that lad’s up to no good. I know about Kemp Town. It’s the nastiest place in Brighton. The late Mr. Damworthy told me that once.”
“And let me say I don’t think much of the way the big one talked to the smaller one. He was rude. Yes, he was.”
“No, I think it was the younger one who was rude to the older one.”
It was just as well perhaps, as the Fox stood there on his own listening out for the jabbering bursts of encouragement coming occasionally from the walkie-talkie behind the public convenience, that he did not take in any of the exchange of views just in front of him.
In less than five minutes the Cub returned, face flowing with triumph.
“Yeah, yeah,” he burst out. “He’s there all righ
t. Picked up on the first ring, an’ he’s all ready to nip across to the place. Soon as we tell ’im.”
“All right, keep yer hair on. Keep yer hair on.”
“Yeah, but…”
“What now, Chris’ sake?”
“Well, what if the old geezer somehow gets to know it’s finished? Before your brother can…”
“’Ow’s he gonna do that, stupid? All he got in that hole of a place of his is the Pink ’Un, an’ all that’s got is the lists o’ runners an’ the starting times. He’s not going to know anymore nor that, is he?”
“No. No, ’spose not.”
But then the thin trickle of sound from the direction of the public convenience took on a new, altogether more urgent note.
“Cripes, come on,” Fox yelled.
The two of them pelted off.
However, scarcely ten minutes later they were back.
“But— But—” Cub was asking, in plain puzzlement. “Why didn’t we do it?”
“Berk. You heard him saying the odds. Two-to-one on that winner. What you think we’d have made by that, fifty quid all we got to put on?”
“Oh. Oh, I see.”
So for most of the long afternoon, while the gossips sat in their long row gossiping, the two Teds kept coming back from their trysts at the hidden walkie-talkie, each time looking more disconsolate.
But then—it was when the last race of the day was being run—suddenly from the direction of the public convenience the Cub came belting along fast as he could toward the old ladies’ benches, heading for the phone box just round the corner.
“Silver Blaze, Silver Blaze,” he was repeating and repeating, as if in mortal fear he would forget the name.
And, as he drew level, “thirty-three-to-one, thirty-three-to-one.”
It was at that exact moment that little, shriveled-up old Lady Bentt suddenly leaned forward and shot out the crook-handled walking-stick that she was never without.
It caught the Cub neatly round the ankle of his right foot, and he fell with a jarring crash flat on to the sun-hardened earth in front of the startled old dears, the sixpenny pieces from his crammed pocket spilling out in a silver shower far and wide on the parched ground.
