It all seemed to come together, you know. Betty not feeling herself, the money not coming in, and the bank after me. Because of course it was after me quite naturally. The bank manager knew about the nobs blacklisting my shop, and about the machine not coming, and of course he got nervous about his money and demanded it back.
(The corporal of the guard came out with two reliefs. He said: “You fellows can buzz off now, and settle down for four hours. You’ll be on again from oh-four to oh-six. Get all the rest you can. Everything been quiet?” “Pretty quiet, corporal,” answered Fremont. “There was a bit of noise earlier on, but I think they must have gone elsewhere. All Clear’s not gone, though.” “Righty-oh,” said the corporal. “Go on in.”)
4
Four hours later the two men took up their posts again. The scene was wholly different. The dead blackness had gone; there was a pattern of sharp white, grey, and black; as harsh and contrasted as the original of a Press photograph or a film “still.” The moon, a not quite perfect round, was high up in the sky, having extinguished nearly all the stars; it had a large circle of light round it, seeming to be at several hands’ lengths’ distance. The silence was even greater than before; the railroad was still, and no buses were running. Only the school lavatories kept up their periodical flushing noises.
After they had duly walked the round of the building, Fremont asked Ransom how he got out of his troubles. If he didn’t mind telling the story.
“No, I don’t mind now,” said Ransom, “though it’s not all very creditable to me. I had to have money, as I told you; and I saw a way of getting it. Never mind just how; I don’t mean getting it legally. Betty was scared and didn’t like it. But I always said there was no need ever to be found out if you knew how to dispose of the stuff. You know how the police make 90 per cent, of the arrests they do in theft cases? Not by finger-prints or any nonsense like that. Because the people who pinch need the money or whatever it is very badly and as soon as they get it start using it. That gives them away. Have sense enough to wait, and they’ll never catch you. Now, I wanted £60 for the bank and another twenty or thirty to keep going with. I had an idea where I could lay my hands on eighty or ninety quid in pound notes. But if like any fool I handed the sixty pounds back to the bank the day I got it, or soon after, I’d be rumbled right away. Even if I just kept it about the house I’d be waiting for trouble. So I had worked it out very neatly. I was going to divide it into parcels of £7 and £8. One lot I’d give to the bank, saying things were looking up and I’d got hopes of paying off the debt in bits in the next few months—as I would, in very irregular and uneven bits. One I’d keep in the till; eight pounds isn’t suspicious in a till. I’d open a post office account for me, and another for Betty, in the next town, with one of each; and I’d use another to open one for the baby that was on the way. You can do that, you know. In another post office I’d buy a couple of Savings Bonds. And the rest of the money I’d use for paying out-of-town accounts, sending the notes by registered post. Who’d ever put all these separate bits together? And no one of them would be suspicious.
“I might as well say right away that I never took that money. I meant to. I quarrelled with Betty over it, and I began to drink to screw my courage up to it.”
There had been some distant gunfire in the preceding minutes, and at this moment there was a fierce explosion of noise. A big flash momentarily showed up, black against itself, two jutting barrels; the violence of the noise caused both men to plunge backwards. “Blast it, they’re getting near,” said Fremont. “I hate that bloody gun going off. I never get used to it.”
They edged nearer the shelter of the porch; and the gun repeated its explosion. Twice more it fired; and then there came a rattle on the asphalt like hailstones falling. “Shell splinters,” said Ransom, as they both crouched right back against the door in the porch, well protected now against anything but a direct hit. The noise of the bombers was loud now. “Splinters like that, falling from five thousand feet; they’d cut your arm off easily,” reflected Fremont. “What did you do then? I mean about the money.”
“Oh, that,” said Ransom, in the dark and taking all expression out of his voice. “I got very drunk one night—helplessly, on straight gin, which I wasn’t used to. I was quite paralysed, though I got to bed, leaving Betty in the kitchen. You went through the kitchen, from the workroom, to get to the stairs to the bedroom; I don’t know if I told you. I woke up early in the morning because of the smell of gas. I found Betty still in the kitchen. She had stuffed up the doorcracks and the window and chimney, and turned the gas on and put her head in the oven. She was dead, of course. You ever seen anybody dead of gas poisoning? You don’t want to. They don’t look nice. Especially the colour they go. Like painted dolls.”
He stopped abruptly. Fremont said something, friendlily; but he did not hear it. He was seeing pictures that he had forgotten for a long time. He had sat for a very long time at the foot of the stairs. There wasn’t any sort of doubt at all that Betty was dead. But he couldn’t go through the kitchen to the front room to the telephone. The telephone was on the other side of “that.” He could hardly look at it. He certainly couldn’t pass it. It wasn’t his wife; not that thing. Undertaker and police; what did they matter? After his first run forward when he had turned off the gas, opened the window, and touched Betty and found her cold—and seen what she looked like—after that he had not been able to move. Perhaps the fumes had helped to stupefy him; certainly it had been bright light before he moved. Even then he didn’t telephone; he walked uncertainly out into the road to the policeman at the corner and said: “Stan. Come,” and P.C. Stanley Wall had looked at his face and followed him. And later that day he had taken all the money in the till and gone across to the undertaker’s and said, in carefully chosen words: “Will you take this and see to everything properly for me, Mr. Bains? I’m not quite up to it at the moment.” Then he had left the key of the house in the door, taken a very few things in a bag and walked away. He’d never come back, or left an address, or written: when the police compelled him to attend the inquest he had walked straight from the station to the coroner’s court; and straight back to the station when it was over.
Could he tell Fremont of what he had done since? Short periods of employment, always ending in the sack for drunkenness or bad work. Trouble; in the special sense of the word. In his case due to picking pockets, at which he had got pretty expert. Fortunately, he had done his time under a false name. No, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t even explain why he had gone that way, or how it was satisfactory to him, as a sort of revenge on the state of things that had done what it had to him and Betty. And anyhow, what possessed him to start talking at all like this? Silly; and pretty dangerous. What did he know of Fremont, in the last analysis? Very little.
A long-drawn and horrible scream broke out; both men crouched flat on the ground at once. Another and another followed, each ending in the crash of the exploding bomb. Each explosion was nearer by a long step, as if a giant was striding towards them.
“Christ all bloody mighty, that’s near,” said Fremont.
The earth rose, and the air smote them; the thick stone of the porch and doorway rocked round them. The noise of the explosion this time was so loud they did not consciously hear it; rather, they felt it. The scream they did not hear at all.
Astonished to be alive, the thing they first noticed was a smell. It was of dirt and burning; age-long muck had been shaken out of every crevice of the building and fallen round them and on them. Something had been burnt; the smell was rather like exploded powder; and there was a background of another, a chemical, gassy smell. The playground was invisible in a thick fog of dust hanging in the air; but as they looked it began to settle.
“I thought you two poor sods were done for,” said the corporal’s voice not quite levelly, as the door opened behind them. “Why didn’t you take shelter before? I thought Jerry’d got you.”
“He’s got the church all r
ight,” said Ransom, pointing.
The line of the church was now clear against the grey sky, and it was not the same as it had been. A portion had been clawed out of the roof just where it joined the base of the spire. The three men stared at it.
As if it had been civilly waiting to secure their attention, the spire now slowly bowed to one side and toppled over, the tip disintegrating first as it fell.
“The wardens’ll want some help with that,” said the corporal. “I’ll turn out the guard.”
5
Ransom worked in a cobbler’s shop in one of the small streets to the north of the Bank of England. He had gone there in mid-1940, not intending to stay. However, the proprietor, who had lost his only other assistant through the call-up, persuaded him to stay by raising his wages; then, after joining the Home Guard in August, Ransom had begun once again to take an interest in his work for its own sake. He was a good craftsman when he chose; his change made an immediate difference to the business. He began to think—once again after all these years—of setting up on his own.
Johnny Peters owned the shop; he was thirty-two and healthy. Two nights after Ransom’s conversation, Johnny Peters took him aside and offered him a partnership.
“It’s come,” he said. “I’m called up. Well, I expected that and I don’t complain. But the missus can’t work the shop; she’s expecting anyway. And I know you are looking out for something else. Well, I’ll make you a fair offer, George. You’re not likely to be called up, at your age; and you’re a good workman and a good fellow. I wasn’t sure, when you came, that you wanted to stick at this; but you seem to have changed, like. Anyway, I make my own judgment of people, and I’d as soon trust you. I want to make you an equal partner in this business. I put in the stock, the goodwill, the shop, the tools—all the business in fact. You put in your work. We share equal till I come back. Doris can keep the accounts and she can do all that need be done behind the counter till her time comes. It means trusting each other; that’s all.”
Ransom looked at him, cocking his head on one side. “I’ll not do you down, Johnny,” he said. He accented the you, slightly. “If Doris agrees, it’s okeydoke with me.”
Doris Peters had already agreed; and it worked pretty well. The business went on and up; and he liked Doris. He was long past the age of silliness with women (as he thought of it) even if Doris hadn’t been the way she was. But she was pleasant if undistinguished to look at; not really good-looking, but kind and placid as pregnant women often are. Her company helped to civilize him; it kept him from being morose, solitary and slovenly.
On one Monday morning, that winter of 1940-41, he set off for work in the ordinary way. There had been a raid the night before—well, you hardly troubled to mention that now. You looked at the transport notices outside the Tube stations to see what was working and what wasn’t; and judged from that whether the raid had been serious or not; that was all.
There had been no sign of its being grave, but when he got out at Moorgate station the atmosphere was strange. It was darker than it should be; heavy clouds were swirling low. Almost immediately his eyes and nose told him these were not clouds; they were smoke. But still he was disinterested; like any other Englishman or American he ordered his life on the assumption that “it wouldn’t happen” to him. He walked up Moorgate with the speculative attention of a passer-by; a hell of a lot, he thought, must have been burnt. It was quite a business to get through the damaged area to his shop.
On his right the street was as usual; from the left he was warned off by firemen. He looked up to find out why. The tall office buildings seemed as usual. It was odd that two firemen should be standing, each at the top of one of those giant expanding ladders which stand all alone, not leaning against a building. They were playing their hoses, apparently on a roof. Ransom stared at them curiously, and from them to the black windows of the offices which he passed every day and knew well. Suddenly one window was not black any more; for a few seconds, as though it was playing a game, a little flicker of flame ran up the side of one window and then vanished inside. Ransom realized that the whole of the interior of the block must be smouldering; what he saw, with its stone facade, its decorous notices and famous names, was a hollow outside.
He skirted round the fire engines—there was no other wheeled traffic, but the street was full of pedestrians—and walked on less at ease.
When he had gone a little way further north he stepped into a strange world. Suddenly he could see only a few yards before him. It reminded him of the title of a novel he had seen in the shops recently. Darkness at Noon. “Darkness at Noon”; he repeated it to himself. Smoke eddied round him, blown by the wind, capriciously clearing and thickening. He picked his way over unnumbered coils of huge hoses, which lay like snakes across the road. Sometimes one would twitch as if it were alive; there is enormous power in one of those great hoses full of water. Water lay in great lakes in the road, filling the gutters. Firemen came out of the fog towards him and passed by, looking through him with the stony stare of men in the last stages of tiredness who must still go on working. He got anxiously out of their way, tripping over a hose and soaking one leg to the knee. As he walked on, anxiety now rising in his heart, he noticed the pack became closer. Women and girls, clearly office workers, formed the majority, but there was a sprinkling of city men. They seemed to him to be walking round and round, as if they had lost their direction. He was reminded of some caterpillars that he had once been shown at the Zoo; he had been told that they had no intelligence, only instinct, and that if once you started them walking round in a circle they would go on, patiently and aimlessly, till they died.
He pushed his way through them to the corner nearest his street. Here people were standing in groups and there was a loud hum of talk; there was the sound of engines and at a distance men calling orders and instructions. He found a man he knew and asked him for news. What was burning? How far did the fires extend? The man didn’t know; but others round were full of vague and, as it proved, wild information. Of one thing they were certain; the loss of life was very small. “Pretty well everyone was in shelters.”
Could he go through? “You’re not supposed to, but no one’ll stop you. They’re too busy.”
He hesitated, and then began to pick his way cautiously down his own side-street. Now it was quiet and really dark; and on the north side, where his shop was, the buildings were obviously burning, and nobody seemed to be attending to them. The windows were all out, and from their blackness, hot, silent breaths of air came out to him. He moved out into the middle of the street, afraid that the houses might collapse on to him. He had heard of such things happening.
The big glass windows of the “Green Man,” the pub in which he took his lunches, were partly shattered, and the jagged edges remaining were blackened and opaque. Inside there was something burning—not flaming, a black pile of debris from which sprang occasional flames, and out of which stuck out what might be the glowing ends of smouldering beams. A few doors on was his own shop. The front seemed undamaged.
He walked cautiously towards it, facing the increasing heat. He put his key in the lock, as so often before, and very gently pushed the door inwards. Inside, as far as he could see, there was only darkness. His eyes were running with tears from the smoke, and he could not make anything out clearly. He took a step into the building.
His weight must have shaken something; there was a sound of a thud and a cascade. Right in front of his face, as if thrust there insolently, appeared a glowing mass, scorching him; it could have been part of the staircase. He did not wait to make sure; he backed out of the door instantly and stood in the street, well away.
There was nothing to be done but to go away.
Later in the day he found that Doris was safe, and that every building in that part of the street was totally destroyed. Nothing was left of his stock, his tools, or anything. Compensation would be paid, some time. Meanwhile, he could get a few odd pounds to go on with.
6
Months later, like so many others, he was waiting still while the government clerks tried to handle the enormous and complicated claims. He had taken a fresh job, at journeyman’s wages, and in an ill-considered fit of generosity had handed to Doris Peters most of the temporary financial aid he had been given. He had thought that it would only be a week or two before he got an award to enable him to set up the joint business again. But there seemed to be no sign of the money coming.
He had reckoned up the amount that would be needed. Once again, it came out to between eighty and ninety pounds, as a minimum. Just what had wrecked his life before.
He was very badly in need of it, about the time Grayling died, and there seemed no obvious way in which he could get it.
Chapter V
Inspector Holly contemplated some, not all, of the history of George Ransom, and gnawed his fountain pen in perplexity. He was endeavouring to give up his habit of making pencil notes, and had substituted a pen for his pencil. Forgetfully he champed on its end. Suddenly the pen split, filled his mouth with ink, and pricked his lip with a spar of vulcanite.
Somebody at the Door Page 8
