His courage was leaving him again now, ebbing away as though some mysterious tide had turned inside him. He felt weaker. Curiously weaker. And the taste of that last cigarette returned to his mouth making him long for another one. It was possible – just possible – that there might be one in his coat pocket. But he felt too feeble, too feeble and depressed, even to get up and see. He just lay there limp and inert as though he were sleeping. Even his eyes were closed now.
He wasn’t asleep, however. He was simply exhausted. His mind hadn’t stopped working. The front part of it, the part that ached for a cigarette, had given up. But from the back there came the gleam of distant flashes. Strange, disconnected glimpses of things that might have been part of a pattern of which the whole was withheld from him. And not pictures only. Voices, too. Unfamiliar, discordant voices. Voices that poured out confidences. Voices that left him aghast and frightened. There was one of them speaking now. It was a girl’s voice.
‘I suppose I’d got it coming to me,’ it was saying. ‘I took risks. I had to. I was one of the lonely ones. I don’t blame anyone. Not even him. We both of us lost our heads. That’s all it was. And it was nice while it lasted. I’d have done anything for him. He knew it. I’d have kept myself for him, if he’d wanted me. I only filled in with other chaps when he wasn’t there. I did really.’ The voice became choked with crying, and Mr Squales missed a few words. He had lost the thread of what it was saying, and could understand less than ever, when it resumed. ‘But he didn’t ought to have done what he did. He didn’t ought to have hit me. Not even if the cops was after him. He wouldn’t have hit me with the thing if he’d loved me. But don’t let them hang him. I wasn’t dead when I fell out. It was the fall what did it. We were doing sixty…’
Mr Squales roused himself with a start. It wasn’t the first time lately that these queer fits of abstraction had come over him. And it was always the same. First the pictures. Then the voices.
‘I’m not well,’ Mr Squales repeated. ‘Perhaps I’m really ill. Something serious, I mean. Like a break‐down. If I could raise the money I’d see a specialist.’
And what about Percy? After all, it was his morning as much as anybody’s else. How is he getting on by now?
Well, take a look in his bedroom and see for yourself. There he is lying curled up, like a baby, fast asleep. It’s the sleep of the just he’s sleeping. He’s enjoying the rest that comes of a clear conscience. You can see that. But wait a minute. Appearances don’t prove anything. It was after three before he had drowsed off into the light slumber that grew deeper as the morning came. And if you look closer you’ll see that his hair is all damp and matted where he’s been lying on it. And the pillow’s damp too.
That’s because Percy cried himself to sleep again last night. And that makes a whole week of it.
Chapter XVIII
1
They were on the phone now. It had been Doreen’s idea. But as Doris was paying half of everything she had to contribute her share, of course.
At the start there had been some friction about it. Doris said outright that they couldn’t afford it and added that, so far as she knew there wasn’t anyone who would want to ring her up. Doreen, however, was set on the thing. It would drive her to the brink of suicide, or over it, she declared, if she had got to live forever, completely shut off from the whole world simply because Doris wouldn’t ever agree to anything. And she went on to say that Doris had no conception, literally no conception, of what she was missing by not being on the phone. There were always dozens of people ringing up dozens of other people, she said, to fix up last minute engagements that simply couldn’t be arranged in any other way. She made it sound as though, simply by sending a couple of men along to connect the thing, the Postmaster‐General could convert their life overnight from an affair of Lyonses and milk‐bars into a whirl of Berkeleys and Savoy Grills.
It hadn’t, as a matter of fact, quite worked out like that. They had been on the phone for just over three days, and so far the bell hadn’t rung once. But it would begin to ring in earnest, Doreen persisted, as soon as people realised that they could get them.
This afternoon – it was Saturday – was quiet enough in all conscience. Doreen had gone out with a middle‐aged someone called Monty, and Doris was all alone. Before she had left Doreen had explained all about Monty. He was, she said, absolutely mad about her and was always sending her flowers and ringing her up at the office, and things. She didn’t herself, it appeared, care for him in the least: it was simply that sometimes she had to accept his invitations just to pacify him. All the same, he was rather a pet, she admitted. He always bought her a rose or an orchid or something and laid it beside her place on the table whenever they were dining out anywhere.
Compared with the sort of time Doreen would obviously be having with Monty, the flat seemed strangely silent and unexciting. Doris had washed up the breakfast things that made a little slum of their own in one corner of the kitchenette, and was standing by the window, staring across the roof tops to the trees of Primrose Hill. The tops of the houses were sharp and regular and looked as though a child had cut them out of creased cardboard. It was while she was standing there that she suddenly confessed to herself that she was homesick. She had been suspecting it for some time and now she knew. For a moment she considered the idea of going over to Dulcimer Street. But she couldn’t do that, she realised. She had been home last Saturday, and she didn’t want her mother to get the idea that she wasn’t enjoying being free and independent up at Hampstead.
She was still standing there at the window when the phone bell started ringing. Doris started. Adelaide was not an automatic exchange, and the rings were long and sustained with a suggestion of fire and panic about them.
But it was only Bill. And it was Doreen, of course, that he wanted. It wasn’t anything important, he explained. It was simply that he’d lost his hat and was ringing up to see if he’d left it there last time. When Doris told him that they hadn’t got his hat he didn’t seem surprised – it was evident that he had lost hats before – and he was just ringing off again when he suddenly stopped himself.
‘You doing anything?’ he asked.
‘Me?’ Doris answered.
‘Yes. Like to come out somewhere?’
‘I would rather,’ Doris told him.
‘Got to be cheap,’ he warned her.
‘I don’t mind,’ Doris answered.
There was a pause during which he seemed to be thinking. She could hear him patiently breathing into the mouthpiece.
‘Any idea?’ he asked at last.
‘Oh, just anywhere.’
There was the sound of further breathing.
‘Well anyhow, I’ll come along and pick you up,’ he said. ‘We’ll decide where to go to, then.’
In the end it was the Zoo they decided on. Bill seemed rather surprised when Doris suggested it. But it was certainly a relief. He’d only got ten shillings until Monday and if Doris had suggested going down West, he wasn’t sure how they’d get back again.
They set off up the Adelaide Road arm‐in‐arm – Bill had taken hold of Doris’ arm and shoved it absent‐mindedly through his almost as soon as they left the house – and climbed the steep path leading to the top of Primrose Hill.
Then, if you had stood there on the summit under the pink hawthorn, looking out over London – almost standing on top of it as it were, with St Paul’s and Big Ben underneath your feet – you would have seen Bill and Doris going down the long walk on the Regent’s Park side. They made rather a gay pair – Bill in a green sports coat and grey flannels and Doris in a yellow dress. Somehow they made everyone else who was out that afternoon seem rather heavy and middle‐aged.
When they arrived at the North Gate they found that they were not the only ones who had thought of going to the Zoo. Simply because it was the first hot day of summer – it would be June tomorrow – half London had turned out to drink bottled lemonade and consume great slabs of Nestlé�
��s chocolate and study natural history. There was a queue at the gates already, and the turntables were clattering with the noise of broken farm machinery. Then the turnstile clattered personally for Bill and Doris, and they were swept in with the dispersing crowd.
Once inside the difference was amazing. The temperature seemed to rush upwards. It was as though within those revolving iron gates everyone had been suddenly transported into the blazing tropics. Men, quite respectable men with stiff collars, were going about with handkerchiefs tied round their heads to keep off the sun and mothers of families were loaded up with surplus clothing like a race of female umpires. And the queer thing was that, in the midst of this sun‐baked crowd that milled round and shrieked with delight at the monkeys and chattered, there were little pin‐points of another life, impinging. From the back of dim cages, strange quiet eyes looked out at the human jungle and small furry backs turned themselves contemptuously.
‘Bit of a crush, isn’t it?’ Bill remarked.
It was the first thing that he had said for some time and Doris was almost surprised to find herself still with him. Now that she really looked at him she was surprised to notice how shabby he was. Not shabbily shabby. But shabby in a cheerful, unminding sort of way. His green sports coat was bound up in leather at the cuffs and elbows, giving him a kind of amateur vanman appearance. And his trousers weren’t any better. They were very light, but also very dirty. They looked as if he made a special point of wearing them whenever he was oiling things. Even his shoes seemed to have suffered. They were of dark chocolate suède with deep spongy soles that opened out – ‘like a camel’s,’ Doris thought suddenly – every time he set his foot down.
Then she forgot about Bill, and went on rediscovering the Zoo. It was years since she had been there. And the astonishing thing was that the place hadn’t altered. It was simply stuck there in time. Everything was just as it had been when she had first gone there as a little girl. The bison, in his eighth of an acre of rolling prairie, was leaning up against the bars to have his forehead scratched, and didn’t look any older. The sea‐lions were the same. And coming up the path towards her was a schoolboy carrying the same peacock feather which she had first seen stolen when she was eleven. There was even the same old man, with the round blunt face – rather like one of the great cats himself – who was tickling the same cheetah in the same spot under the chin.
‘What about some tea?’ Bill asked, abruptly coming back into her life again.
They went into the restaurant. And there were the same plates with the same lion stamped on them…
When they came out of the Zoo, they made their way across Primrose Hill again back to Adelaide Road. They were tired, now. The tropical life inside the Gardens had exhausted them. Bill was so done in that he wouldn’t come up with Doris. He said the stairs were too much for him, and just slouched off on his camel’s feet.
But Doris wasn’t alone. Doreen had got back by then. She, too, was exhausted. But with a different kind of exhaustion. She was dazed. Mr Perkins, it seemed, had been more than usually indulgent. They had drunk champagne at lunch and he had given her an enormous cartwheel box of chocolates and asked her to marry him. The only thing that upset her was that she had left the chocolates in the taxi on the way home.
Doris’s afternoon rather amused her.
‘Did you go alone?’ she asked.
When Doris told her, Doreen wasn’t pleased. She blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke and looked straight at her.
‘Look here, young lady,’ she said, ‘don’t you start stealing my friends, or there’ll be trouble.’
2
Percy was in the washroom at the back of the garage. A new edition of the evening paper had just come out and he wanted to go somewhere private and read it.
But there was nothing about him in it. There hadn’t been for three days now. It was as if they had forgotten him. It was just as though it hadn’t happened. That was the funny thing about it. Simply going on living, simply waking up with another night gone by, made it seem that there was nothing behind him to be afraid of. Nothing that shouldn’t be there. Nothing that made you jump when you remembered it. It was still less than a month since That Night, but already life was becoming clean again.
Monday had been a black day. The Evening News had printed a paragraph about him then. It was only four lines. But it said that an early arrest was expected. Just that. Not a hint of how much They knew, or when They were coming for him, or even if it was him at all. Merely that an early arrest was expected. His heart had hammered as he read it, and he had to take a glass of water out of the washroom tap marked not for drinking because his throat had gone so dry. Those four lines upset him properly, they did. He went on feeling faint even after the water. And he felt sick. His stomach seemed to have dropped right down to his knees somewhere.
Just thinking about the Evening News was bad enough. The words kept on repeating themselves whisperingly in his ear when he wasn’t expecting them. But it was all right. He’d got a charm against them. Something that he’d cut from the Star last Saturday. It was in his pocketbook now. Putting the catch up on the door so that no one should disturb him, he unbuttoned his coat and pulled out the cutting. It had been opened up and flattened out so many times that it almost broke into three pieces where the folds had been. And the type had become smeary. But the message was clear enough. There was hope and freedom and salvation in that piece of newspaper. ‘…shortly before the crime was committed,’ the extract ended, ‘the murdered girl was seen in the company of two men, one aged about forty and heavily built, wearing glasses, and the other tall grey haired and walking with a slight limp. The police believe the shorter of the two men may be able to assist them in their enquiries.’
Percy knew that sentence by heart. But he read it again just the same.
‘If it’s two men they’re looking for,’ he told himself, ‘I’m O.K. If it’s either of them, I’m still O.K. They don’t sound like me. They’re not my type. And if it’s two men They’re looking for, I’m O.K.’
But you couldn’t be sure. Perhaps the Star reporter didn’t know. Perhaps it was just something that he’d made up in the way journalists do. Or perhaps They had told him that just to put the real murderer, the man They wanted, off the scent. Perhaps the Star and the Evening News were both saying the same thing only in different ways.
Well, he couldn’t stay there all day. They’d be asking him if he’d taken something. Because he should have been out on the pumps really. So he folded up the piece of paper and stowed it away in his pocketbook again. But with the thought that it might just be a piece of bluff, something They’d put over him, all the magic had gone out of it. That sick feeling in his stomach had come back again.
On the way out he caught sight of himself in the little circular mirror engraved with the words JEYES FLUID, that was stuck on to the washroom wall. He paused and regarded himself. Somehow the sight comforted him. He still looked the same. Taking out his pocket comb he ran it once or twice through his hair, so that the wave showed. It was almost corn‐coloured, Percy’s hair.
‘If it’s two men They’re after, I’m O.K.’
Chapter XIX
1
There is a lot in rent collecting. More than Mr Josser had realised. It is the sort of profession that you can take up in youth, and still be finding out more about it by the time you have reached middle age. Some men never become good collectors.
The trouble with Mr Josser, of course, was that he had started too late in life. Sixty‐three is old to begin learning new tricks. And some of the tenants weren’t slow to notice it. In consequence, they tried all the old dodges. And succeeded. When he called, they were out. They were ill. They were indifferent. They were destitute. Those careful notes of the previous collector turned out to be no use at all to him. Instead of presenting the problem as it really was, they skirted it. Take No. 8 Reginald Buildings, for instance. You could go there at any time in the twenty‐four hours and you wou
ldn’t find a soul. It was a posse of sheriffs and not one elderly collector who was needed to track down a tenant like No. 8.
All the same, Mr Josser was enjoying the work. He was doing something, that was the point. Earning his own living again. Not being a drag on anyone.
It meant more than he had realised having a definite job in mind when he got up in the morning. Not that any man in his senses would want to go out on a morning like this. Mr Josser, surveying it from behind the long curtains of Dulcimer Street, saw that it was real dirty weather. He’d heard the rain rattling on the window during the night. And now that the downpour had stopped temporarily, the whole of London was steaming like an equatorial forest. You couldn’t see the sky. In its place was a low sponge‐like blanket that had descended to the height of the roof tops, and was hanging there, caught up in chimney pots and telegraph wires. The other end of the street just lurked in the mists, sweating unhealthily. Pedestrians were swallowed up as they approached it as if they had passed through a curtain.
The nature of the day hadn’t escaped Mrs Josser either.
‘If you want to go out, I can’t stop you,’ she said. ‘But it’ll probably be your last. You and your chest on a day like this.’
It was, in fact, the third time that she’d said it. And she took an entirely unrealistic view of the whole affair. It was as though Mr Josser’s job, his pound a week employment, were some kind of silly hobby like butterfly hunting, that could be indulged on fine days but not on wet. The fact that to‐day was a Friday and that Friday was a big day for rent collecting apparently meant nothing to her.
‘You and your chest,’ she said again. ‘It’s just asking for trouble.’ But Mr Josser was determined. He’d got seventeen addresses to visit, and he didn’t want to take all day over them. So he finished his last mouthful of cold sausage, drank another cup of strong, sweetish tea and went through to the bedroom for his goloshes. He hadn’t worn them since the winter and had forgotten that they had a hole in them. All the same, they were rubber, and they gave him confidence. Then he put on his raincoat, fastened his little strip of scarf round his neck to keep the drips out and hung his umbrella over his free arm.
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