by John Bingham
I was very happy during those last few months. Collet, witness of the unhappy incident in the train with Prosset, was Head House Prefect, and he and I and all of us of the same age, though technically divided into prefects and non-prefects, formed a happy and good-natured band. I used to get out of bed sometimes, when the rest of the dormitory was asleep, and go to the big window at the end of the long rows of cubicles, and stand gazing out at the House playing yard when it was soft and white in the moonlight. The sight of it and of the school buildings in the distance, and the feeling of being surrounded by friends who liked me and whom I liked filled me with a delightful melancholy.
I knew the end of the stage was approaching and that nothing could stop it, and I began to count the days, almost with dread, until the end of term, savouring each moment to the full. Perhaps subconsciously I loved the security of it all and was loath to leave the pleasant harbour. It may well be that if I had not had a rather curious home background, if I had had the absolute security which parents and a real home can give, I would not have felt that way.
I hardly gave Prosset a thought. The sight of his curtains in one boy’s study, his cushions in another, his patch of carpet in a third aroused no emotion in me at all, except an occasional feeling of distaste and of appreciation of my new freedom. Only at Whitsun did it seem a little strange to be going out for the annual jaunt with the stolid Crane. All my memories of Whitsun had been gay amusing ones; at Whitsun, Prosset, Trevelyan and I had invariably been bound together with bonds of good humour, good fellowship and laughter. Yet it was on a Whitsun weekend, curiously enough, that in the fullness of time I thought of killing Prosset.
Crane and I decided that on the Whitsun holiday, a Tuesday, we would cycle in leisurely fashion into Avonham, arrive there in time for lunch at the Swan, go to a cinema in the afternoon, have tea, and cycle back again in equally leisurely fashion. It was all a bit different from former years; there were no wild plans to see how many miles we could cover, no dashes into pubs for cider, or quick dips in the river, but it was pleasant enough.
We’d drank sherry, sitting sedately in the garden of the Swan, had our lunch, saw the film, and after tea strolled around the town for half an hour peering into shop windows.
One shop in particular fascinated us. It was a kind of general emporium for lethal weapons. It had guns and air pistols in the window; also fishing rods, hooks, artificial minnows and flies, rabbit traps, mousetraps, and even a swordstick and walking-stick gun. There were one or two wicked-looking coshes, presumably for nightwatchmen or gamekeepers, and right in the corner of the window I saw a pair of aluminium knuckledusters. Some of the air pistols, Belgian made, were quite cheap in those days, and there was one model with a price tag showing only 12s 6d.
Crane, who was always very well off for pocket money, said, “I’ve a good mind to buy one.”
“What for?”
“We could shoot sparrows and things out of the study window.”
“Well, but you’ll never be allowed to keep it at the House.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not even allowed to have blank-cartridge pistols.”
“But this is an air pistol. That’s different.”
I shook my head. “You’ll have to hand it in. You’ll get six from old Buckley if you’re caught with it.”
“Well, anyway, let’s go and have a look inside.”
We went in and looked around. Crane examined one of the pistols. Perhaps it did not look so good at close quarters, as indeed he maintained, or perhaps he had thought over what I had said. He decided not to buy one.
But I bought a knuckleduster for 2s.
I remember thinking in the shop about how I had lain in bed, not really believing in ghosts, but nevertheless half listening for footsteps in the passage, wishing I had some weapon of defence to bolster up my courage, however ineffective such a weapon might have proved against an astral visitor. But I bought the knuckleduster chiefly because I thought it would be nice to carry something about with which one could defend oneself if one were ever in a tight corner. Life lay before me, and one never could tell. I knew that it would not only give me a feeling of security on black nights in dark lanes, but that the mere fact of carrying it about would provide a pleasant inward feeling of drama. I would be going about armed, even if not armed exactly to the teeth.
Nevertheless, I felt a bit sheepish about the whole thing. So much so that I waited until Crane had wandered off to the far end of the shop before I picked a knuckleduster out of a box on the counter and silently handed the shop assistant the money. I don’t know what he thought. Probably he thought nothing; he was a sluggish-looking, red-faced yokel. I slipped the knuckleduster into my right-hand trouser pocket, and carried it there without telling a soul for some thirteen years. Sometimes, as I felt it against my thigh, I was glad I had it. I never needed it, but it was comforting.
I received a letter from Prosset in the course of the term. He was, it seemed, having a very good time in Ireland, fishing and riding, and was in no great hurry to start work in London in the bank.
I replied. I need not have answered, of course, but I imagine he would have written again. Perhaps I could have answered in less cordial terms, though it is doubtful if that would have had any effect on him, except to cause him a little passing bewilderment. Anyway, now that he was no longer overshadowing me I saw no necessity to be boorish. I did not even wish to hurt his feelings. He was, I thought, a figure of the past. I wrote approximately as follows:
My Dear J. P.
Thanks very much indeed for your letter. You seem to be having a very good time, and I envy you your fishing. I went down to Somerset during the holidays and got a little shooting, but otherwise have not done very much. Things are just the same here. I go around with Crane. We cycled to Avonham and back for the Whitsun free day, but it wasn’t like the old days. We miss you at the House. Looking forward to seeing you in London before long.
Yours ever,
Mike
Could I have left the letter unanswered, and broken with him at that point? I submit the answer must be no, and that common politeness compelled me to reply.
It was my intention to go into the Sudan Civil Service. Well, I failed at the personal interview. I was not altogether surprised.
Directly I entered the interview room, and saw the interviewer impeccably dressed in a well-tailored suit looking me up and down and noting my cheap, skimped clothes, I suspected he would give me an adverse report. Nowadays I can easily imagine what he wrote: “This candidate did not make a good impression. He is very ordinary in appearance, appeared ill at ease and embarrassed, and to lack the necessary personality. His academic qualifications, if they may be described as such, are undistinguished. I understood from the talk I had with him that in the absence of parents domiciled in Britain, he has been largely brought up by his aunts. He wears spectacles. I feel, in short, that other candidates are more suitably endowed for the vacancies which are to be filled. Not recommended.”
It was Aunt Nell who came to the rescue.
My Aunt Edith wrote to her to see if she knew anybody who would “give Michael a start,” as she put it.
Aunt Nell wrote back a cold little note saying she would see what could be done. She and Aunt Edith had never been warmly disposed to each other since my Aunt Edith had paid a visit to Aunt Nell many years before, and had announced within ten minutes of her arrival that the house had an “atmosphere” which she viewed with misgiving.
Asked what she meant exactly, she said she felt the dead around her, and very close at that. Aunt Nell never invited her again.
A month later, a letter arrived from Somerset. It was addressed to me. A certain Lord Betterton, it seemed, owned a string of provincial newspapers. Lord Betterton, through a mutual friend, had let it be known that if in the intervening period I would care to learn some shorthand and typing, then in three months’ time he would instruct the London office in charge of his provincial offi
ces to find me a post on one of his newspapers as a reporter.
“This job will make a man of you,” said Aunt Nell in a postscript. I did not consider the inference complimentary.
It was during those three months that I first met Kate Marsden. We sat at adjoining desks in the typewriting room of the commercial school where I was trying to learn as much shorthand and typing as I could in the time.
We were not allowed to rub out typing errors, and there was in the room an individual who made her way around the desks keeping an eye on the toilers, exhorting here, reprimanding there, and in general acting like a more humane overseer in a Roman galley.
But Kate Marsden had a secret rubber.
Working with furtive speed, it was possible to rub out an occasional typing error without the slave-driver seeing, thus saving yourself the trouble of having to type out the whole exercise again.
So I was really attracted to Kate through her India rubber, and in those days there was certainly little else about her to attract a young fellow with romantic ideas about rescuing beautiful women from runaway horses. She was about eighteen then, a thin, bony girl with lank hair of the type that is blond on top but grows rapidly darker towards the roots. Her complexion was sallow, none too clear, and when she typed or did shorthand she was inclined to peer closely with grey eyes which I guessed would one day be fitted with spectacles. Her mouth, though wide, was perhaps her best feature, for when she smiled you caught a glimpse of a generous nature; it was far too broad a smile for classical beauty, but there was something rather attractive about it. Anyway, it was silly to think of Kate in terms of classical beauty.
One afternoon, because my aunt was going to be out in the evening, I asked Kate Marsden if she would care to come to a cinema with me. She hesitated, and I am not surprised; for if she was no Venus, I was certainly no Greek godling. She said she would have to ring up her parents, and it appeared that she lived near Sevenoaks and travelled up and down to London each day.
When she had done so, we went to the Dominion Cinema, saw some Wild West film or other, and afterwards had a snack at Lyons Corner House in Oxford Street. It wasn’t much of an evening out, but it was all I could afford.
It was the first time in her life she had been invited out. She was desperately anxious to show how much she was enjoying it, but apart from that she was no conversationalist. She was shy and sensitive and would colour up for little or no reason. I knew what an agony it was to feel the crimson wave mounting in your cheeks, and to know that nothing could stop it. I sympathized. I suppose Kate and I were somewhat similar types in those early days.
It is pleasant for a young man who is not sure of himself to feel that his efforts are appreciated, so I too enjoyed the outing. Thereafter, until I left London, I used to take her out to the cinema and to Lyons regularly once a week. My Aunt Edith, always generous even though her tipping standards were outmoded, would give me the necessary money with a coy joke every Friday morning.
The last three times I took Kate out we held hands in the cinema, and when I saw her off at the station we kissed each other good night. There was no warmth in our kisses. That was all there was between Kate and me, before I left London. We were hardly sweethearts. We were just a naive young couple experimenting diffidently with flirtation. Testing our wings.
But before I left, I saw Prosset again.
The telephone rang, and my heart gave a funny sort of jump at the sound of his voice. He said he had already been in London some weeks, but had been very busy fitting up his flat; I suppose the man actually assumed that I would be disappointed because he had not rung up before.
“You’ve got a flat, have you?” I said. “Sounds fine.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a flat in the proper sense of the word. Why not come round this evening for a snack and a glass of beer?”
I did not want to go, of course, but I had no excuse ready. Anyway, if I hadn’t gone then, he would have pinned me down for some other evening.
“There’s nothing I should like better,” I said.
He gave me his address in Oxford Terrace, near Paddington, and I agreed to go round about 6:30.
I can see now that it was in reality a pretty dreary sort of dump; but it was his first independent dwelling, and he was naturally proud of it. I thought it was quite nice, too, at the time, and rather envied him living in it. It was a large basement room in a terrace of houses lying back from the thoroughfare. It had a stone floor covered with a square of cheap carpet, and a divan bed set against the wall opposite the windows. There was a grate for a coal fire, and a small gas fire and a gas ring on the shilling-in-the-meter principle. Two brown upholstered armchairs, a square table and two hard chairs bought from some mass-production furniture store completed the main furnishings. The walls had been distempered a pale-cream colour, but by now there were patches where it was flaking off. For some reason, there were bars on the windows, and in daytime the room was none too bright. Next door was a small bathroom, hand basin and lavatory.
Prosset looked a little less suntanned than usual, as a result of working all day in a bank, but otherwise fit. He greeted me warmly enough, and as he showed me his flat pointed out with satisfaction that although he paid no more than other lodgers in the house, he had a private bathroom; probably this was thrown in as an added inducement to somebody to come and live in this basement. Lodgers were choosy in those days, and landlords were glad to get them. But the place certainly had one advantage, in that it had its own outside door at the foot of the area steps, so that you could go in and out and usually be unobserved.
He had bought a couple of bookcases, a wireless set, a table lamp, two or three cheap prints showing people hunting foxes, and a couple of extra cushions for the divan. After chatting for a while, he produced a pork pie, bread, butter, cheese, and a bottle of beer, and we fell to. He was, it seemed, getting on very well at the bank.
“Only doing unimportant routine stuff, of course, but I think the manager likes me all right. He hasn’t said anything, of course.”
“But you can tell by his manner?”
Prosset nodded. “He’s keen on rowing, too. Thank God I did rowing at school instead of cricket. I’ve joined the bank rowing club. They’re not too hot, frankly. I think he’s glad to have somebody from his own branch with a few guts, if you ask me.”
“What about going abroad?”
Prosset looked a bit rueful. “I don’t suppose they’ll let me go until I’ve done a couple of years, at least, in London. There are a lot of chaps keen on going East, of course, but I think my manager’s fairly influential. If I get to know him well, down at the rowing club, he’ll probably wangle something.”
“As long as he wangles it in the right direction,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“He may like to keep you, if you row too well.”
Prosset’s chin went up defiantly in the old way. His eyes darkened. “If he did, I’d leave.”
“What would you do?”
He shrugged his shoulders and took a pull at his beer. “I reckon I could turn my hand to most things.”
I thought he probably could, too, and I wished I felt so confident about myself. He lit a pipe. I think he smoked a pipe largely because he thought it suited his face; he also smoked cigarettes, but later I noticed that when women were present he stuck to his briar. He smoked a short, squat pipe with a round bowl and a silver band; more often than not it was unlit and he sucked at dead ashes.
“What about you?” he asked at length, filling my glass. “What about the Sudan Civil?”
“That’s all washed out. They won’t have me.”
“Won’t have you? What on earth happened?”
“I don’t know. They just turned me down.”
“Good heavens!” He pondered for a few seconds. “I suppose they just thought you were not the right type.” He said it in a tone which indicated that, viewing the matter dispassionately, he reluctantly saw their point of view, unple
asant though it was for me.
“Well, what are you going to do, old man?” he asked.
“I’m going to be a newspaper reporter.”
“A reporter? Good Lord!”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Only it means you’ll be stuck in England. Poor old Mike! When do you start? Which newspaper?”
“I start in a month or so on some provincial paper or other. My aunt knows somebody who knows somebody else—that sort of thing.”
He looked at his watch absent-mindedly. “It may be quite fun. You never know.” It was clear he thought it a somewhat remote possibility. “You may be investigating murders before long, like on the films,” he added.
“And I may not. What do you do with yourself every evening?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Muck about, you know. Go and have a beer in some pub, or poke about in Soho, or go to a flick.”
“Alone?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I go with some chap from the bank. And I’ve met a girl I’m quite keen on. As a matter of fact, I told her I’d probably bring you along to the Mitre, off Dean Street, about 8:30, if you’d care to come. Do you know the Mitre?”
I said I did not. Prosset smiled, brushed some ash off the lapel of his coat, and stood up. “It’s about time you began to see a bit of life. Care to come along? She’ll be pleased to meet you. I’ve often spoken about you.”
It was obvious he was rather proud of this girl and wanted to show her to me. I agreed readily enough, and in due course we set out.
“Yes, this girl’s a bit of all right, old man,” said Prosset as we sat on top of a bus.
