London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  But there was more than an extra chair that distinguished this cell from the others in the same gallery. There were the privileges that went with it. For a start, there were the meals. In all the other cells, the food was the same. It was prison food. There was none of the Bisto smell about it. But in a remand cell there is no kind of restriction. You simply have your meals sent over from the restaurant opposite. Or from the Ritz or the Savoy, for that matter, if you can afford it.

  And it is not only a question of meals. There is the business of visitors. Within reason there is no limit on the number of visitors a remand man can receive. And this is as it should be. A man in remand isn’t guilty. He’s only suspect. And he can’t be kept in prison too long either. The Barons had all that out with King John years ago. So there he is, the man on remand, not yet in Hell and certainly not in Heaven. It’s a kind of well‐ventilated, carefully supervised, rather chilly Limbo that he inhabits.

  Percy had only just seen his last visitor. It was Mr Barks, his solicitor. He seemed a nice man, Mr Barks. He had been picked on in court and made to represent Percy, just like that. He was all right, he was. What was more, he was Mr Barks of Barks, Barks and Wedderburn and Barks – though which one of the Barkses, Percy wasn’t quite sure. Top dog of the whole lot of them probably, from the look of him. Very much the gentleman, with horn‐rimmed spectacles and a watch chain and an umbrella with a gold band round it. And, considering he was doing it practically for nix, very conscientious and helpful. He’d been along twice already, and this was his third visit. The only thing about him was that he was a bit brusque. He didn’t treat Percy very nice. When Percy told him, naturally, that he’d never set eyes on the Bentley that They were talking about, and that he’d bought the Lalique Lady and the coach lamps and the bedside rug in an all‐night coffee‐bar from someone he didn’t know, Mr Barks had been quite rude to him. If Percy wasn’t going to tell him the truth, Mr Barks said, he’d chuck up the whole case. He was there to help Percy, he went on, not to listen to a lot of lies that wouldn’t deceive a child. And the way he went on you’d think he’d got a right to speak to Percy like that. But Percy saw through him. Mr Barks wasn’t there really to help him. That was simply his line of talk. Underneath it all he was just one of Them. After he had heard Percy to the end, he said that they were going to plead guilty. And when Percy said that he didn’t want to, Mr Barks told him quite curtly that he knew more about the law than Percy did. So that was that. Percy was guilty because Mr Barks said he was. That was justice.

  ‘Just you wait till I’m on the level with a solicitor of my own I pay money to,’ Percy kept telling himself. ‘Then we’ll see. No more pleading guilty then. Not guilty, m’lud: that’s what it’ll be when I’ve got a solicitor of my own, someone I pay money to.’

  All the same, he couldn’t help laughing. It wasn’t half funny the way Mr Barks talked about it all. He didn’t say ‘you,’ he said ‘we.’ ‘We’re going to plead guilty,’ was what he’d said, just as though it was Mr Barks with his rolled‐up umbrella who was pleading guilty to stealing the Bentley.

  Then an unpleasant doubt crossed Percy’s mind. Suppose Mr Barks were pleading guilty only because it was the quickest way of getting things done. Suppose he had said to himself: ‘There’s nothing in this for me. Let’s plead guilty and get back into the money.’ That wasn’t a nice thought, was it? It still seemed possible that for twenty‐five pounds or so, Mr Barks might be persuaded to change his plea. Percy decided to put it to him next time he saw him. He hadn’t actually got twenty‐five pounds. But he could find it.

  Not that he was worrying. Luckily for him, he wasn’t the worrying sort. Mr Barks had promised to try some sort of First Offenders racket that he said he knew how to operate. It sounded all right the way he put it. It just didn’t sound likely, that was all.

  The funny thing was that Percy had got Them foxed. From the way They behaved you could see that They didn’t know anything. They’d got him there, where They wanted him, the man They were looking for, the non‐stop car bandit, and They were so dumb They didn’t know Their luck. He wanted to laugh at Them for it. It was funny, wasn’t it, when you came to think about it?’

  ‘In any case I’m O.K. this time,’ he told himself. ‘If it’s First Offenders, I’m O.K. And if it’s three months, who minds that? Do it on my head. I’m O.K. either way.’

  Three months! The words came back to him as a kind of echo. Who minds? Well, there was one person who’d mind all right. And that was him. And also Jackie. She’d be wondering whatever had become of him. She’d think he was unfaithful or something. He couldn’t bear that. Not when he wasn’t. And how did he know what Jackie would be doing with herself ? There were a lot of very undesirable characters round Victoria way. She might get herself into bad company with him not there to protect her. She might be unfaithful to him. That was what hurt. That was what maddened him. Not to be able to get out even for five minutes to explain.

  Through the iron grille of the door he saw the blue back of a warder passing.

  ‘They don’t know the harm they’re doing keeping me here,’ he told himself. ‘I’ll go after Them. I’ll get damages. They don’t know the harm They’re doing.’

  Chapter XXXV

  1

  In the morning – the morning after the row – Bill’s landlady took matters into her own hands and gave him notice for having had a ‘person’ in his rooms. Nothing like it, she said, had ever happened in any house of hers before. She spoke as though it were something which, left unchecked, would contaminate the rest of Belsize Park, spread across London, and ultimately corrupt Society as a whole.

  They were both there when the landlady knocked at the door and delivered her ultimatum. Doris stood over by the window looking into the street and trying not to listen while Bill and the landlady had their discussion in the passage outside. But she was too much dazed by everything that had happened to take proper notice of it. The whole of yesterday evening was tangled and distorted in her mind as though all the brightest colours she could think of had suddenly run into each other. It had been a slashed, fork‐lightning kind of evening. Looking back on it, it was like an evening in somebody else’s life…

  They left the house together, arm‐in‐arm, shortly after half‐past eight and found a little restaurant near the Underground Station where they could get some breakfast. It seemed a specially providential little restaurant when they reached it, because the only other source of breakfast in Belsize Park was the dining‐room of Bill’s boarding‐house – and of course he wasn’t allowed in there any more. It was a pretty silent sort of breakfast, however.

  ‘I do feel awful,’ Doris said at last. ‘Your Finals to‐day, and being turned out of your digs just because of me.’

  Bill only laughed. To‐day looked like being the end of everything so far as he was concerned, and he couldn’t take the business of the landlady seriously enough to mind about it.

  ‘Wasn’t going to stop there anyhow,’ he told her. ‘Never really comfortable, you know.’

  Then because it was late Doris said that she had to be leaving, and Bill insisted on going all the way to the office with her. It wasn’t until he had said good‐bye to her in Clifford’s Inn that he properly realised the state he was in. Here he was on the way to the Examination School, when he should have been composing himself for the ordeal of Finals, and all that he could think about was the feel of Doris’ head on his shoulder and his arms wrapped round her.

  It was like that, too, in the Examination School. He found himself one of forty‐five young men, all about his own age. The invigilator, a hushed, respectable consultant who wasn’t above picking up an odd hundred guineas by marking examination papers, told them that they could begin, and sat back in his chair on the dais reconciling himself to the boredom of the next three hours. It was the fifteenth examination in clinical medicine over which he had presided, and it did not differ in the minutest particular from the fourteen preceding ones. Two Jew
s and an Indian wearing a sports‐coat and turban, started writing immediately as though conscious that with all the stuff bottled up in them they were heading straight for Harley Street. And the rest read their examination papers closely and anxiously, turned over, and then hurriedly re‐read the first side, fidgeted with their fountain pens, coughed, gazed upwards at the ceiling, wrote slowly and laboriously.

  At the end of half an hour the invigilator, because he had pins‐and‐needles in his leg, got up and began to move about. It was then that he noticed a young man sitting towards the back, who didn’t seem to realise that the examination had begun. He had a vacant, moony expression on his face, and was apparently drawing with the back of his nib on the blotting paper. In the course of his rounds the invigilator paused discreetly to have a look. The young man’s blotting paper was covered with a dense pattern made up of five letters. There was ‘Doris’ in large Roman capitals; in cursive script; in small italics; in a high, backward hand with extra serifs to all letters; and in what looked like cuneiform. At the moment the engrossed young man was decorating a large capital ‘D’ with a design of ivy and holly‐leaves.

  At one o’clock the invigilator called a halt, and Bill looked gloomily at the numbered pages in front of him. He didn’t seem to have written so much as some of the others. By now, the two Jews and the Indian had great dossiers in front of them. And that wasn’t all. Bill had his own views on the quality of what he had managed to do. ‘I only wish I knew how I’d been spending the last five years,’ he thought gloomily. ‘I only wish I knew.’

  He forgot his gloom, however, at the thought that he’d at last be able to phone Doris. And because he couldn’t wait to get to a proper call‐box, he used the telephone in the porter’s desk in the front hall. It was an awkward, cumbersome instrument of the old candlestick kind. And it was very public with the porter standing there beside him, and the lobby full of people. But it worked: that was the only thing that mattered. He was able to catch Doris before she went out to lunch.

  ‘I was hoping you’d phone,’ the voice at the other end said. ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

  ‘But I want you to,’ Bill said. ‘I want you to more than anything, my little…’ He remembered where he was and stopped himself. ‘Come and meet me as soon as you get off. I’m through here at five.’

  ‘You won’t like what I’m going to say,’ Doris told him.

  Bill felt a large cold patch in the middle of his stomach as though an ice‐pack had been placed there.

  ‘Then don’t say it,’ he told her, trying to sound light and carefree. ‘Don’t say it. Just come. See you at the Tea Kettle at six.’

  ‘All right,’ Doris’ voice answered. ‘I’ll be there. But you won’t like it…’

  Her voice trailed off and it ended in what sounded suspiciously like a swallow.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Bill told her. ‘Don’t worry. I love you.’

  He couldn’t help about the porter this time. He did love her. And he felt distinctly better now that he’d told her so again. They were three words that he’d been wanting to say all the morning.

  2

  Altogether, it was a day of telephoning. First, Doreen phoned up the office to say that she had a migraine and the doctor wouldn’t allow her outside the flat. Then, later in the morning, Mr Perkiss rang up Doreen. And only just in time, too. She was just on the verge of another nasty bout of suicide when the bell rang.

  Indeed, she could hardly have been in lower spirits. The fact that she had lost Doris for a friend wasn’t the only thing that was worrying her. By nine‐thirty when he still hadn’t phoned, it seemed that she’d lost Mr Perkiss as well. She’d made two perfectly good attempts to phone him herself and each time, though she was sure that he was there, his secretary had said that he wasn’t. It was no wonder that she had a migraine. And if it got any worse she really would have to call a doctor. After all, it wasn’t her fault that things hurt her so. It was just the way she was made.

  And then everything cleared up magically when Monty rang her. He sounded so calm and experienced that she couldn’t help simply loving him. She didn’t know that he had been plucking up his courage for a whole three‐quarters of an hour beforehand, reaching out for the receiver at one moment and thrusting it away from him at the next. When he did finally get through to his little Doreen – she was twice his size really, but he always thought of her as ‘little Doreen’ – he had made his mind up. He told her that he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving the flat where they had been so happy together and offered to take care of Doris’ share of everything. When Doreen had accepted – and she didn’t see what else she could possibly do in the circumstances, even though she hated, simply hated, the idea of being a drag on anyone, Mr Perkiss suggested very delicately that as he was closing his flat anyway she might let him come up to the studio for a few nights so that she shouldn’t be lonely. In her present state, Doreen accepted that, too. And in his snug cosy office in Duke Street, Mr Perkiss sat back, rubbing his small pink hands, and feeling what he really was – Edwardian.

  Ever since he had separated from Mrs Perkiss fourteen years before, he had been imagining some really daring piece of naughtiness like this.

  3

  The Tea Kettle, where Bill and Doris met, was one of those half underground tea‐rooms with orange topped tables arranged cornerwise, and horse‐brasses and pictures of cats on the walls, and pale lady‐like waitresses in long overalls the colour of the table tops. The waitresses all looked the same – slim, long nosed and fair haired; and the elderly lady – slim, long nosed and white haired – who sat behind the cash‐ desk at the door was an example of what the younger waitresses might eventually become if only they stuck at it and didn’t get too familiar with any of the customers. The elderly lady wore black – an obvious promotion from orange – and a large butterfly‐wing brooch. Altogether there was an air of dignified and frustrated gentility about the place, as though waiting at table were beneath the waitresses and taking cash was rather belittling to the cashier.

  Not that the Tea Kettle was any different from a hundred other little tea‐rooms all of the same kind in various parts of London. It was the kind of sub‐restaurant that abounded – The Five O’Clock, Polly’s Pantry, Kate’s Cafe, The Robin Tea Rooms (with a coloured cut‐out of an outsize robin in the window) and Queenie’s. There was a whole flock of Blue Birds as well fluttering over the city and even nesting quite far out in the suburbs. The only thing that was wrong, from a man’s point of view, with some of these feminine tea‐cabins was that as the slim young ladies never – on account of their figures – ate anything more sustaining than two pieces of cinnamon toast at a sitting, they had no idea of an appetite like Bill’s.

  Bill had been there for some time, reading a rather worn copy of Scottish Country Life when Doris arrived, and he saw at once that she looked tired. She was paler than usual, which made her seem fragile and forlorn. He wanted to soothe, and caress her. The professional side of him also thought of prescribing an extract of hog’s stomach for anæmia. But, in the end, all that he did was to squeeze her hand before she drew it away from him, and pass her the menu which had been written out in hand by one of the long nosed young ladies.

  ‘I’ll have an hors d’oeuvres,’ she told him. And because she was a girl the sight of a sardine with a yellow and white segment of hardboiled egg and a half tomato backed up by a few leaves of pale lettuce appeared in her eyes to be entirely satisfying. Bill surveyed the menu from top to bottom as though hoping to find a portion of roast beef and Yorkshire, or a chump chop, lurking somewhere on it, and then ordered scrambled eggs on baked beans.

  But even though it was in a way her favourite kind of food, Doris made no attempt to eat it. She tailed the sardine, took a speck of black off the hard‐boiled egg, and pushed the plate away from her.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.

  There was something in her voice that Bill didn’t like: the ice‐pack returned to its p
lace in the centre of his stomach. But he was determined to get in his word first.

  ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘I want you to marry me. Straightaway. At once.’ ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about,’ she told him.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to get married. Not yet.’

  ‘Don’t want to get married?’ he repeated. ‘Not want to?’

  ‘It isn’t exactly that,’ she explained. ‘It’s different somehow. I just don’t want you to feel you’ve got to marry me because of what happened last night.’

  The ice‐pack melted as she was speaking, leaving a wet sticky feeling in its place. He leant forward and managed to get hold of her hand again.

  ‘But I want to marry you,’ he said.

  ‘You know it’d be silly,’ she answered. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. You aren’t even qualified yet.’

  ‘I shall be by the autumn.’

  She broke off suddenly.

  ‘Oh Bill,’ she said. ‘I meant to ask you as soon as I saw you. How were the Finals.’

  Bill grinned.

  ‘Oh them,’ he said. ‘They’re jam. They’re a walk‐over.’

  ‘But you ought to get established first,’ she went on. ‘You know you ought. It’s a frightful drag on a young doctor being married.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  She was right, of course. He’d known several men who just hadn’t been able to make the grade and had drifted away into East End panel practices.

  ‘Doreen said it. She said…’

  ‘And what the hell’s Doreen got to do with it?’ he asked. ‘She doesn’t know anything about anything.’

  It surprised Doris to think that Doreen didn’t know. It had always seemed to her that she knew everything.