Kif: An Unvarnished History

by Josephine Tey

  'It's the only place,' Kif said.

  The little man subjected him to a mild stare through his glasses and a keen examination without them, and said at last: 'Come back to-morrow afternoon.'

  On the morrow Kif was provided with an introduction to the manager of a garage off the Edgware Road, and for the next six months he earned forty honest shillings a week as washer there from nine to six daily.

  The manager had received him without comment beyond explaining the conditions and the work, and had dismissed him to his labours with a casual: 'I expect you'll do all right.' The foreman had not been so reticent. When he had finished a harangue on what was and what was not to be done he added: 'And no tricks. You see, I know all about you.'

  'Well, you have the advantage of me,' said Kif, 'but I expect I'll learn all about you in time.' And after that the foreman, except for some nagging, left him alone.

  The work was monotonous but cheerful. New faces came and went continually, and Kif found it bearable. He planned to stay there at least a year, by which time he would have earned a recommendation which had no taint of prison about it, and then to make an attempt to get back to the Turf. Without doubt the happiest months of all his life were those he had spent as clerk to Hough & Collins, and he wanted to get back to the life—with a stake in the game. He felt vaguely that the concentrated excitement of one night's 'job' did not compensate for the monotony, however comfortable, in between adventures, and the risk of several years super-boredom thrown in. Life was so short—so short—that he must pack it with the maximum of living. So he was willing to trade twelve months' monotony with Fate for the chance of living the kind of life he wanted afterwards. It was a gamble. And it did not come off.

  He was hosing a car after coming back from his mid-day meal one muddy December day when Rice, the foreman, appeared and said: 'Hand it over before there's trouble. We don't want the place to get a bad name just through you.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'I'm telling you to hand over that fur. The lady who left the Daimler this morning left it in the dickey and it's gone.'

  'Well, she should have locked the thing.'

  'You have a nerve. Have you pawned it already? If not, hand it over.'

  Kif was stammering with rage. 'Do you actually think I'd touch a mangy bit of ratskin—'

  'It's sable,' said the literally minded Rice.

  'What do you think I am? A shop-lifter?'

  'I don't know what your department in thieving is, but I do know you're a dam' jailbird, and we've no use for you here.'

  Nor I for you,' said Kif, and hit him. 'Take that.'

  He picked up the hose he had dropped, turned off the water and, having removed the hose to its appointed place, rolled down his sleeves.

  'I'll have you up for assault,' said Rice, hugging his jaw.

  'Do,' said Kif, 'and I'll sue you for libel. You can tell the boss I've quit.'

  But he met the manager at the office door on the way out.

  I'm going, sir,' he said. 'Every time someone's mislaid a spanner since I came here they looked sideways at me, and now someone's lost a fur, and I'm supposed to be able to produce it. They didn't teach conjuring in quod.' He turned up his coat collar preparatory to braving the winter atmosphere.

  'That's a pity, Vicar,' said the manager. 'Don't you think you have been too thin-skinned, perhaps There's bound to be a lot to put up with for a little. You'd find things easier after a bit, I'm sure. Think it over!'

  'Well, I've just landed the foreman one,' said Kif.

  'Oh?' the manager's eyes were almost amused. 'Hit Rice, have you? In that case I think perhaps it would be better for you to go. Your resignation is accepted with regret. Come into the office, and I'll give you what is owing to you.'

  'There's nothing owing to me,' said Kif. 'Thanks all the same.' And he moved away.

  'All right, Vicar. If you ever want a job in the future, come and see me.'

  Kif was halfway down the street before it occurred to him that the manager had accepted without question his implied statement that he knew nothing of the theft.

  Kif made three more attempts to earn the recommendation he hankered after. One was in a garage, and one was as a packer in a West End store, but in both places his history leaked out, and things were made very much more unbearable than they had been under Rice. Indeed his fellow packers—youths of nineteen and twenty who had been just too young to see active service—struck work when they found that the management, who knew Kif's record, expected them to work with a 'convict'. They weren't over particular, they said, but they had their pride. So Kif went.

  A week later by a piece of sheer luck he obtained work as traveller to a firm of crimped-case makers. This he secured through his own efforts, and, afraid that if he enlisted the aid of the only people who would vouch for him the truth might cause a rebuff, he resorted mistakenly to covering his tracks by inventing a past for himself. He had been in Ireland for the last two years, he said, and though he had done travelling work, he had lost his job when the firm went phut. But before that he had been with Vidor & Pratt, the soap people.

  He risked that scrap of truth, hoping that the London address would be sufficient to reassure them without further investigation. Once more it was a gamble, and this time it came off. An agent had died suddenly and they were in a hole. Kif was given his credentials, his samples, and was sent out. He spent a busy and profitable five days among the bakers and confectioners of the suburbs, and though he disliked the work he was elated as he turned in to the office to report on Saturday morning at the prospect of keeping it. The distributing manager was complimentary and pleased, and Kif received his paltry pay with more satisfaction than he had ever had on taking the contents from a safe. He had one ambition, and one only: a clean sheet for a year, and then the Turf. And he had what looked like a chance.

  He went out of the office with his head in the air, brushed past another of the salesmen coming in to report, and went downstairs three at a time.

  The new-comer stood looking after him and then came slowly in to the desk.

  'Who was that?' he asked.

  'Our new man on Denny's round.'

  Was he ever with Vidor & Pratt, the soap do you know?'

  'Yes, why?'

  'Because I was with them too. Is his name still Vicar?'

  On Monday morning by the first post Kif received a note saying that Messrs Blewbury would require his services no longer, and enclosing a cheque in lieu of notice; and when Kif went to the office to attempt an explanation and understanding the office boy assured him that the manager was out.

  'What kind of out?' Kif asked.

  'You know,' said the boy. 'Washout.'

  Meeting Kif's eyes he instinctively lifted his elbow in a protective gesture, but Kif turned on his heel and walked away. Down on the pavement again he stood looking through a mist of anger at the world. He felt physically sick with rage and disappointment. He grabbed the rail of the bus he boarded as if he would wrench it from its socket. From its top he viewed Holborn, shining after a spring shower, in unseeing bitterness. He was finished. Never again would he subject himself to that, even to get the thing he wanted most. There were other things in life besides the best. He had had high-falutin notions, that was what was wrong. And life was too short for high-falutin. He would take the best of what came his way from now on, but he wasn't going to sweat blood for anything. Nothing was worth that.

  As they came into Oxford Street his eyes lighted on a familiar doorway and woke in intelligent vision. That was where he had run into Angel that morning two—three years ago now. He remembered his cracked boots, his soaking clothes, his semi-starvation and weariness. Well, thank God he didn't have to go back to that. He had learned a thing or two since then.

  Over a very good lunch in Regent Street he continued to review the situation. He had been a fool, anyhow, to save the money Carroll had banked for him. Look what had happened last time he put all his eggs in one basket
. As for his dreams of making Baba his wife, that too was a wash-out. If anything she cared less for him now than when she first refused to consider marriage with him. He would hold her better by a present prodigality than by any glory to come. He realised that now. And as for racing, there were other ways of enjoying the Turf besides bookmaking. There was nothing to hinder his going racing any day as a private individual.

  But he knew suddenly and quite certainly that he would never do that. The second-best theory did not apply to this. A sick stab shot through him. He got up hastily, paid his bill, and went out.

  At Northey Terrace he found Baba poised in front of the living-room mirror engaged in deciding the most suitable situation for the boutonnière which was to be the finish of her toilet. At sight of Kif she arrested the dabbing movements with which she was pursuing her experiments and said in surprise:

  'Hullo! I thought you were selling paper frills.' In her voice was the faint scorn—a scorn so faint as to make even its existence doubtful—with which she invariably referred to his attempts at work. Her attitude had annoyed Kif without dismaying him—he still took his own line in most things; now he was almost unaware of it. For once it coincided with his own view of the matter; he had been a fool.

  'Wash-out,' he said. 'But I've got a week's pay for nothing. They gave me that rather than see my face again. Were you going out with anyone?'

  'No, I was just going shopping.'

  'Well, it's too late for a matinée. Let's go and have tea somewhere.'

  He pinned the boutonnière on the under side of the lapel for her and they sallied forth together. It dawned gradually on Baba that the Kif by her side was not the Kif she had known yesterday. He no longer hankered after straight jobs for no earthly reason. (Kif had never told Baba of his great ambition; that, quite typically, he would have kept to himself until it was on the point of realisation.) And there was in the recklessness of his expenditure a suggestion of celebration which she did not understand.

  'Are we celebrating something?' she asked at last, having revolved the matter and arrived at no conclusion.

  'We're blowing my last pay,' said Kif succinctly. 'Oh? Have the employment agencies turned you down for good?'

  'No, the other way about.'

  'Oh!' She thought for a little, and then smiled at him dazzlingly. 'I think Father's been missing you. He says he's getting old, and that's something new for the old boy.'

  Mr Carroll had refrained from the day on which Kif obtained his first work from suggesting his participation in any 'job'. Kif was, in fact, ignorant as to whether in the nine months that had passed since then, Carroll had worked at all. (It may be said here that he had not.) Baba's remark was meant as encouragement to a prodigal, but Kif changed the subject abruptly. His only interest at the moment, it seemed, was to spend what he had received that morning; to buy things for her. And in that Baba came happily to his assistance.

  A week later Kif and Mr Carroll did a job in Grafton Street, the staff-work of which had been simmering pleasantly in Carroll's brain for six months or so. The job, which occupied them from Saturday night until early on Monday morning, involved a dizzy climb to the roof of a five-storey building, a promenade over two neighbouring roofs, the breaking of a skylight, the lowering of themselves into a questionable dark, the forcing of two doors, the boring of a hole in the floor of an office, through which they dropped to their goal below. In this last drop Carroll slipped and broke two fingers of his right hand. He splinted them with Kif's help, handed over his tools, and with Kif's coat and his own settled himself comfortably in a near-by corner. 'This is your affair, my boy,' he said. And after that he said nothing; he watched in silence. And Kif faced the safe in that mixture of pride and trepidation of a small boy who had been asked for the first time to come out to the floor and do the sum on the board for all to see; the board looks queerly perpendicular and the floor as big as a desert, but he knows how to do the sum! Kif went to work unhurriedly, his hands choosing and rejecting with their habitual neat deliberation, his reckless eyes absent, absorbed. When the door of the 'fire and burglar proof' swung on its hinges, he turned suddenly to the silent Carroll and smiled a whimsical smile that was very good to see.

  'After you, sir,' he said, with a little gesture of his hand to the yawning door.

  Carroll's mild blue gaze caught and reflected his pupil's laughter.

  'I congratulate you,' he said. 'That was as pretty work as I ever did myself.' And he came over to inspect the contents with the gratified air of one accepting an invitation.

  The safe contained two ledgers, share certificates, a letter written by a famous society hostess to an actor, and ten pounds.

  Carroll, who had made no secret of his hope of from two to three thousand pounds as the result of the week-end's work, said: 'Dear, dear! Who would have thought it!' And at the inadequacy of the remark Kif, whose mind was already thronging with curses, sat back on his heels and laughed helplessly.

  Carroll pocketed the bank-notes, examined the ledgers to see that there was nothing of value between their pages, and came back to the letter. They both knew by reputation The woman who had written it, a diplomat's wife, liked and respected both by her own crowd and by her more casual acquaintances. Since the owner of the safe was not a friend of the lady and since the letter was exceedingly compromising, its preservation could only be for blackmail. Carroll, having read it a second time, lit a match and applied it to a corner of the sheet.

  'I didn't know he was as black as that,' he observed mildly, as he powdered the last ash to dust with a plump forefinger. 'Let us have some sandwiches.'

  'Yes, but—' Kif paused, weighing one of Baba's neat little packets in a contemplative hand.

  'But what?'

  'She won't know that it doesn't exist any longer. He'll just go on as if it were there.'

  'Yes. Quite true. I hadn't thought of that.'

  'Let's write and tell her it's gone up in smoke.'

  'And present the police—Oh, but of course—I see. Yes, we could do that. Yes, certainly we could do that.'

  It was Sunday afternoon, and broad daylight, and there was no hope of making their escape for nine or ten hours yet, and they settled happily to the composition of a letter which would inform their host's victim that she need be a victim no longer. By the time they had finished the production—execrably typed by Kif on their host's paper—they both felt friendly and warm toward the woman they had never seen, as one does to a life one has saved.

  'MADAM' (they wrote):

  'This is to inform you that we have to-day, Sunday, March 4th, at the above address destroyed a letter written by you which we found in the course of our business. We feel sure that you will be glad to know what has become of it, and since we do not believe that the late owner would be anxious to inform you we have taken it upon ourselves to do it. We also undertake never to mention the existence of the said document, though for obvious reasons we refrain from signing our names.'

  The style was Carroll's, but the moving spirit was Kif's, and I have reproduced the letter so that the woman, if ever her eyes light on this page, may know the story of the boy whose idle thought brought her out of hell.

  They amused themselves with the ledgers until the early quiet of a Sunday night had settled on the streets and they deemed it safe to make their get-away. To retrace their steps with their impedimenta and the handicap of Carroll's maimed hand was an uneasy business, and Kif breathed a sigh of relief as they dropped safely to the deserted pavement of a yard and walked out unchallenged into the street. As he let himself into 18 Dormer Street in the chill dark of the early mornings he was sleepy and tired, but satisfied for the moment. There had been no tangible reward for all their effort, but that did not matter much; he had had twenty-four hours of very good entertainment.

  So Kif drowned in the excitement of adventure the forlorn ache that ate sometimes like a toothache into his indifference, and between times did his best to ignore it. He took to spending his morn
ings in and out of the West End bars with one or another of 'the crowd', spotting winners, discussing the day's news, and exchanging mild drinks, exactly as his more fortunate fellows were doing all along Piccadilly, St. James' Street and Pall Mall. Baba, who had disapproved strenuously but ineffectually of the washing and packing jobs—she had found the pliant Kif as malleable as stone when he so pleased—was delighted at the change. This was Kif as she would have him; well dressed—her interest in the dungareed Kif had waned perceptibly—and possessed of leisure and money. And presently Kif, almost unconsciously, resigned himself to his milieu. The Carrolls and their friends were the only constant quantity in a life that lacked foundation; and his natural egotism was satisfied by being accepted as one of themselves and a personality. He accompanied Baba here and there when she expressed a wish to be squired—to the Old Bailey or to one of the sale-rooms which she haunted—but usually he was to be found in one or another of the rendezvous of his acquaintances.

  To provide the necessary spice in such a life he betted cheerfully and recklessly on anything that provided an adequate gamble, and when he was unlucky went short until the tide turned. In the following November—almost a year after Kif's final attempt to tread the path of his ambition—Carroll and he had planned a raid on the house of a Levantine diamond merchant who lived with a plump, famous, and notoriously unfaithful wife at Kew. It was the first 'villa' affair that Kif had taken part in since Carroll had screwed up the scullery window on that wet night more than three years ago; most of Carroll's business was concerned with office safes and jeweller's premises. The layout had been studied with the care that Carroll habitually gave to preparing the plan of attack—he did few jobs, but those he did were perfect. Mrs Lisman was in Biarritz at the moment, and her maid was on holiday. Mr Lisman dined at home every night except on Thursdays, when he attended some weekly festivity and returned home between two and three o'clock just sufficiently sensible to be able to put himself to bed. There were three maids and a butler, all of whom retired at eleven, when the butler went round switching off lights and locking up. One of the maids had insomnia, but she was also dull of hearing. There was a burglar alarm of a well-known and almost infantile design, and a safe on which Mr Carroll was itching to try his quality.