“He really is a bloody barbarian.”
“Sol sometimes has an unfortunate way of putting things, that’s all.”
“If he’s trying to stop us getting garages—”
“Look, he wants garages, we all want garages. There was a stupid argument about coloured people, nothing else. Sol puts people’s backs up.”
“I’ll say he does. And he wants to look out for himself with that coloured chap, Kabanga. I hear he was with that woman of Kabanga’s last night.”
“Who was?”
“Grundy.”
“That’s nonsense. You can take it from me. I said good night to him at about half past nine. He was going home then.”
“This was later, about eleven.”
“Where did you hear that tale from?”
Felix looked a little uncomfortable. “Never mind. They were together, over by the shrubbery near Kabanga’s house. He was kissing her. That’s the story.”
“I don’t believe a word of it.” Dick Weldon was naturally polite, but now he very nearly turned his back on Felix Mayfield, and picked up his flexihose again.
This bit of gossip had been given to Felix and Steffie Mayfield by their fourteen-year-old daughter Jill. Just off the High Street there was a coffee bar called the Aficionado. The interior of this bar was filled with posters of bull fights, around the walls were photographs of matadors, and the bar was a meeting-place for the local teenagers. Jill Mayfield had gone there that morning with Adrienne Facey, who was fifteen, and Jennifer Paget. It was Jennifer who had broken into her juniors’ discussion of pop music with the news.
“What were they doing?” asked Adrienne, a girl startlingly like her mother.
Jennifer looked down at her coffee. “Well, you know.” Adrienne whispered. “Oh, no. You know, they were – he was holding her tight.”
“Kissing?” asked Jill.
“Yes, they were kissing. And he was holding her.”
“I don’t see how you could see them,” Adrienne said. “It’s jolly dark.”
“Well, I could. I’d taken Puggy out for a walk.”
“You must have been close.”
“I was close enough. You can’t mistake him, with that ginger hair.”
“In the dark?”
“The street light isn’t that far away, and Puggy went near them.”
“I think he’s very attractive for an old man,” Jill said dreamily. “I mean, I like old men myself.”
“How could you see it was that girl? If she was kissing him, I mean,” Adrienne asked.
Jennifer’s spotty face was flushed. “I could see and it was her. I saw them both.”
The subject was dropped, but both Jill and Adrienne repeated the story when they got home, Jill delightedly and Adrienne sceptically. It was already a subject of discussion in the Paget household.
“I do quite honestly think that chap’s a bit much,” Peter Clements said.
“What chap?” Rex Lecky was reading the script of a new television play in which he had a part. He sat sideways in a great vessel of a chair, with one leg cocked over the side. His shoes were hand-made, his trousers tight and narrow. He looked even younger than he was. His dark hair was brushed forward in a manner currently fashionable.
“Grundy. He really wrecked that meeting last night. I said we ought not to agree to pay more money for those garages. Those of us who’d got them already. Of course it’s not really a charge for the garages, it’s for upkeep. I wonder if I was right.” There was silence. “You might say something.”
Rex looked up. “Sorry. I thought it was Clements soliloquising.”
“After all, we’re part of a community, and I suppose it’s not unreasonable really. I wonder if I ought to have a word with other people to see what they think.”
“Dear Peter. So public spirited.” Peter glared at him. Rex put down his script. “He’s a terrific roughneck, Grundy, but in that roughneck way he’s got a lot of charm, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You’re just trying to needle me.”
“No, I honestly think it. A tremendous lot of charm.”
“I’m going out.” Rex nodded, and returned to his script. At the door his friend paused. “I think Grundy’s a boor and a bore.”
Peter picked up his rather elegant walking-stick, which stood in the hall, and went out into the September sunshine. He spent the next hour and a half in calling on several Dell-dwellers who lived in the numbers between 1 and 50, telling them about the committee meeting and Grundy’s atrocious behaviour, and asking whether they would be prepared to pay the extra money involved. To his surprise most of them felt that the waste patch was such an eyesore that they would do almost anything, including paying the extra upkeep cost, to get rid of it.
Grundy spent that afternoon with his friend Theo Werner, in the first-floor room that in most Dell houses served as a bedroom, but which Grundy had turned into a working study. They discussed the problems of Guffy McTuffie.
Guffy was a child of the small agency which Grundy had started when he came out of the Army after the war and discovered his complete lack of any obvious commercial talent. His father had been a moderately successful Irish actor, a big magniloquent expansive extroverted ginger man who never tired of telling about the part he had played in the glorious days of the Troubles, a part which varied from a major role in the storming of the Post Office to exploits as what he called the good right hand of Michael Collins. Holding out his own hairy freckled hand in front of him, Pat Grundy would repeat the words that Michael Collins had used so often: “I’d sooner lose this right hand than I’d lose Pat Grundy.” His hearers in bar rooms and boarding houses were only occasionally enthralled, and the small ginger-haired boy who knew the stories by heart passed through the usual stages of fascination, adoration and repulsion. He had been given the name of Solomon partly because of the nursery rhyme, which appealed to his father’s simple sense of humour, but also because Pat hoped that his son would combine, as he said with wearisome frequency, “the wisdom of a Solomon with the courage of a Grundy.”
Solomon Grundy spent his childhood in theatre dressing-rooms, among bits of stage scenery, in boarding houses, and in railway station waiting-rooms. His mother, an Irish woman who was frail, pathetic and often ill, could not bear that he should be parted from her. Sometimes he went to school, once he went to a boarding school for a couple of terms, but for the most part she educated him herself, teaching him to read and write. She took refuge in her son from the drunkenness and unfaithfulness of her husband. Pat Grundy made only a few appearances in the West End, but he could always obtain a place in touring repertory companies. Mrs Grundy died of cancer when her son was sixteen years old, and Pat was killed during the blitz on London, when a bomb scored a near miss on the shelter in which, a trouper to the end, he was entertaining the shelterers with dramatic impersonations of characters from Dickens. Solomon was called up, fought in Africa, Italy and France, took a commission and reached the rank of captain. In the mess his colleagues found him reticent and self-contained. He rarely joined in the good-natured horseplay that is common among soldiers, and when he did there was nothing good-natured about his violence. After he broke the arm of a fellow officer who had played a practical joke on him, everybody became a little afraid of Solomon Grundy.
He had read a good deal in the Army, and when he came out wrote a number of short stories, none of which was printed. He drifted into advertising, and after a couple of years as a copywriter started an art agency with an artist who worked in the same firm, Theo Werner. The agency led a struggling existence for some time, before the birth of Guffy McTuffie.
Guffy was a comic strip character. The essence of him was that, although a coward by nature, he was led to perform courageous actions. When, for instance, a gang of teenage bandits took over Slumside, where Guffy was paying a visit, he went down to their headquarters and talked to them, chattering with fear. When the gang attacked him, Guffy overthrew them with judo. When they practi
sed judo on him it turned out that he had become proficient in oduj, a higher form of wrestling. This particular adventure ended with Guffy raising funds for a community centre, which, as created by Archie Accurit the architect with the new build-it-in-a-day material Prefabconstricuct, proved such an attraction that leaders of industry put up new factories, concert halls and theatres were erected, Slumside was transformed, and Charlie Corncrackle the teenage gangster found himself isolated, saw the error of his ways, became a missionary in the Noncongelical Church, and was last heard of in Congojumbaland where he was helping the natives to rule their own country.
Who had thought of Guffy McTuffie? This was something that Grundy himself could no longer remember. He had been elaborated in casual talk, drawn by Theo as a little man with a big head, an inquiring look and a single lock of hair that would never stay down, and had been sold at once to a national newspaper. As time passed Guffy had come to occupy more and more time, and to provide a larger share of Grundy’s and Theo Werner’s income. Guffy’s activities were protean. He had solved the problems of young lovers, obtained a new drainage system for Middletown, rescued a would-be suicide from the top of a tall building although terrified of heights himself, and exposed an atom spy group. Guffy had become much more concerned lately with politics, the fate of the world, and nuclear disarmament, and in the new series that was now being designed and drawn, “Guffy’s Sooperdooper Bomb”, he was going to bring the world leaders to a disarmament conference and then compel them to make peace by the threat of using his Sooperdoopernootral Bomb, designed by his friend Snowy Syentist, which had the effect of neutralising all other bombs and rendering them useless.
Comic strips are prepared long in advance, and Theo had been drawing some of the final scenes of this particular series. Theo Werner was a few years older than Grundy, a puckish little Austrian whose family had fled from his country when Hitler took over. He pranced round the study now, showing the big drawings he had put on card.
“Here you are, Sol my dear, here’s Krosscross talking to Johnno, they’re going to shut Guffy up, Krosscross wants to seal him in the Crumlin, Johnno’s going to bury him in Castle Knocks. And there’s Hum-hum.” Theo giggled with pure enjoyment. Krosscross and Johnno were deep in discussion, and stiff-necked Hum-hum trailed behind them, holding up a tiny model of the Tower of London, saying: “Let’s stuff Guff in here.”
Grundy laughed half-heartedly. Werner broke off.
“What’s wrong, Sol? You’re not up to the mark, as they say.” Theo liked occasionally to drop in an “as they say” or “as you put it” to show that he was a foreigner.
“Nothing.”
“Yes. You haven’t got your usual zing, my dear. I shall tell Marion.”
“Perhaps she knows already.”
“What have you done to your face?”
“A cat scratched it.”
“We are in rapport, you and I, eh? When anything bothers you I know it.”
“Perhaps. These are fine. Clacton’s got the outline.”
Clacton was the editor of the paper that ran the strip, and he had the whole new story in rough outline. These were the finished drawings that would appear in the paper.
Werner cocked his head to one side. “And you do not know why he has asked to see us tomorrow, eh?”
“To talk about the next series, very likely. But he didn’t say.” Grundy rose from the desk, shook his shoulders as though he were dispersing rain. “Let’s have a drink.”
“A sooperdooperexcellent idea.”
Marion liked Theo, who always paid her extravagant compliments which she enjoyed, although she publicly disapproved of them. Theo stayed for half an hour talking to them both, had two drinks, then said, “I must get back to my Lily of Laguna, as they say.” Lily was the latest of the series of mistresses in occupation of his Earl’s Court flat.
Marion had become quite animated. “They don’t say anything of the sort.”
“Don’t they? I am an Austrian idiot.” He kissed her hand, then her cheek. “Goodbye, my charming hostess. Farewell, old Sol. See you in the morning.”
Grundy showed him out, then returned to the living room. He looked at Marion, seemed about to speak, then poured another drink. Then spent Sunday evening in finishing the papers, drinking, and watching television.
On Monday morning The Dell was transformed from its weekend leisure. From eight o’clock onwards affectionate fathers said goodbye to wives and children, and hallo to those other much-loved children, their cars. Slick, spry, jaunty, some wearing suits of uncommon elegance and carrying umbrellas, others a little more bohemianly dressed, they put on their business faces, got out their cars, revved them up, turned into Brambly Way, and were sucked into the metropolis. Dick Weldon went to his architect’s office, Felix Mayfield, smartest of the smart, to the elegant Georgian house recently acquired by his advertising firm, a local doctor to his surgery, and a dentist to face the array of bad teeth in his waiting-room. Jack Jellifer went to an appointment with an editor to whom he hoped to sell a series of articles on “Great Dishes of the East.” Mr Belando, one of those disturbing horses of a different colour, went to a job in his country’s consulate, and Mr Kabanga went – well, nobody yet knew exactly where he did go. Sir Edmund, watching the cars turning out of The Dell from the bow window of his house in Brambly Way, deplored the vehicular – as he deplored the architectural, the moral, and almost all the other – habits of the age. The Dell children went to school, the Dell wives did the necessary jobs around their wonderfully labour-saving houses, in which many of them were helped by dailies who obliged for a couple of hours. Then they went shopping in the High Street or arranged flowers or read the papers or went in for a chat over a cup of coffee. Their lunches were light, for the children stayed at school, and all except a few local husbands were up in London. Dinner was the meal of the day, dinner preceded by a cosy little drink, and it was towards dinner that the Dell wives bent their culinary thoughts.
AdArt Associates, the firm owned by Grundy and Werner, occupied three rooms on the second floor of a street in the dubious area between Long Acre and the Strand. Two girls, or women, or secretaries sat at typewriters in the outer office, and the partners had a small room apiece. Since AdArts’ business consisted essentially of selling the work produced by other people, nothing more was necessary. On this Monday morning Theo Werner, bow-tied, and wearing a dashing cardigan and what almost looked like winkle-picker shoes, was ebulliently cheerful, Grundy more uncommunicative than usual. They went together to see Clacton.
Clacton was a big rumpled man, an able editor who, like so many editors in these days, exercised little real power. When challenged about this in a television interview, Clacton had said that he made his own decisions, and no doubt in a sense this was true, but it was truer and more important that his individual decisions had to accord with the policy of managers who had a collective, not an individual, face. As soon as they entered his office, Grundy, whose sensibility in such matters was acute, realised that Clacton had something disagreeable to tell them. Theo, who was oblivious to such fine shades of feeling, was still smiling when the blow fell. Clacton delivered it with the briskness which is really kind. The paper didn’t like “Guffy’s Sooperdooper Bomb,” and wasn’t going to use it.
Theo’s look changed almost comically. “Not to use it? But it was agreed, you agreed yourself. It has been drawn, it is finished.”
Clacton nodded. “I know. It’s tough.”
“But what is the matter with the series?”
“It doesn’t feel right.” Clacton hesitated. “I’ll tell you what’s been said upstairs. It’s subversive.”
“Subversive.” Grundy laughed. “A comic strip. How timid can you get?”
Theo, however, looked thoughtful, even grave. Subversive was a word he understood, one that carried a heavy weight of emotional meaning from the past.
“That’s all very well, Sol, but you’ve got to see it their way.” Clacton was earnest. “Kr
osscross is Kruschev, right, and Johnno is Johnson. You’re putting them on the same level, aren’t you, the same moral level I mean. They both do everything they can to stop the chap who wants disarmament. We’re a radical paper, you know that, but they don’t like it upstairs and I can see what they mean.”
Grundy roared with laughter. “Come off it, Clack.”
“I’m serious.”
Theo also was serious. “So we change this a little and make it okey dokey, as they say.”
“I’m afraid not. They’ve turned down the whole of this one, just like that.”
Grundy was about to speak, but stopped as a boy came in with coffee. When the door had closed he said, with brow corrugated and lower lip thrust rebelliously out,
“This is all balls, Clack. We’ve got a contract.”
“Yes. For a year.”
“Supposing we push it, suppose we say that we like this and we don’t agree to scrapping it.”
Theo made a deprecatory gesture. Clacton looked lugubrious.
“There’s something else I ought to tell you boys. There’s a general feeling that the whole tone of Guffy over the last year or so hasn’t been right. That one about the elections, you remember, and the series about the crooked building contractors, they weren’t right.”
“You’ve changed your mind. You liked them at the time,” Grundy said sarcastically.
Clacton spread out his hands. “I’m on your side, boys, you know that. But we all have to face the facts of life.”
“You mean you haven’t got a mind to change, they make it for you upstairs?”
Clacton was not a man to lose his temper, but his voice hardened perceptibly. “All right. You don’t want it easy, you can have it hard. The view upstairs is that the last four Guffy stories stink. They’re preaching some sort of phoney radicalism, and what’s worse they’re not funny any more. This isn’t just somebody blowing off, it’s based on several samples of reader reaction. You can try to get back to your old style if you like, though they doubt if you can do it. So do I, to be frank. Otherwise we finish with the story that’s running now, and you’ll get a cheque for the rest of the year.”
The End Of Solomon Grundy Page 5
