by A. L. Barker
Reviewing the conversation afterwards Ralph realised that Krassner had not actually explained anything. Ralph had postulated and Krassner had accepted.
“I needed money, I had to have it and I took it from whence it would least be missed.”
“You borrowed it?”
“What?”
“You were going to pay it back?”
“Oh Lord yes,” he said very quickly and easily. As he would if it were true. It must be true, thought Ralph, because other considerations apart, how could he expect to survive if it wasn’t? “The Sweetland account gave me the maximum time, you know how Sweetland sometimes settles in January, sometimes in June. Well, he settled in January this year, in dirty fivers.”
“Which you didn’t pay in?”
“Oh I paid it in – into another part of the forest.”
“You knew it would be found out.”
“It was a risk I had to take.”
“Mr Pecry’s probably spoken to Sweetland already,” said Ralph, “about the new consultant fees.”
Krassner shrugged. “If the matter of the account had come up he’d have been after our blood by now.”
“Our blood?”
“Well, Sweetland’s on your patch and Pecry believes in the chain of command. He’d never approach me without approaching you first.”
Ralph had sometimes wondered at Krassner, more with curiosity than envy, though he would have liked to possess some of what he called Krassner’s “aplomb”. But apparently it was not worth possessing – Ralph would have expected something-carat from it, or at least a guarantee.
“What are you going to do?”
“I?” said Ralph.
Riding smooth-shod over everything had not smoothed everything for Krassner. He was in a hole, his easy manner was not easiness, he couldn’t raise two hundred pounds of his own and Ralph was saddened as he always was by all that glittered and turned out not to be gold. “Why didn’t you ask me in the first place?”
“Would you have lent me the money?”
“I think so.”
“I had to be sure, old boy. You might have refused and then you’d know I wanted it and you’d have been on the look out.”
“What did you want it for?”
“That’s my business.”
“Women, I suppose.” Ralph could not keep a tremor from his voice.
“Is that the worst you can think of?” Krassner was a good-looking man and his face broke into laughter like a flag. “What can you think of it, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not a flesh and the devil merchant, I’d say you catch life on television.”
Ralph said mildly, “Living isn’t only what you do, Krassner, there are other ways.”
“Yes, but let’s be honest –” he could still bandy the word, it was Ralph who stiffened – “your way is the straight and narrow. You’re lucky, to you doing what’s right is doing what comes naturally.”
“Is there something comic about having principles?”
“It’s not such a battle for you, old boy. You don’t know what I’m up against.”
“How can I if you don’t tell me?”
“It’s no use telling you. You’d have to be born again – a sinner.”
He took out his cigarettes – they were, Ralph observed, still in the packet – and lit one with a match. So he had sold his case and lighter. This seemed to make matters worse, it verified them and so far nothing had done that, not even the blank space on the Sweetland sheet – which simply looked innocent. Ralph had found himself having to refer back to an anomaly, almost an abstraction, certainly to a Strain on his credulity because without being the soul of honesty or the soul of anything, Krassner had made it seem inconceivable that he could cheat the firm of two hundred pounds. Two thousand perhaps. Was that the shame, that such a man should have to steal two hundred pounds?
Something landed on Ralph’s blotter and rebounded against his hand. It was the tossing-stone. He looked up and saw that Krassner had thrown it.
“Why so glum, old boy? You’re not the felon.”
He was impatient, a little annoyed. Ralph felt foolish, there was a joke somewhere which was going against himself. He put the stone into a drawer.
“Don’t call me ‘old boy’.”
Krassner said again, “What are you going to do?”
It had been on Ralph’s conscience that he would have to do something. He resented his part in the matter. He would have to have a part, in fact he already had it. It began at the moment he picked up the receipt book, or at least at the moment when the adding-machine in his brain registered that there was a gap in the sequence of stubs.
Krassner sucked at his cigarette. “The first – and last – thing you need to do is tell Pecry. That takes it right off your hands.”
“You must pay the money back. At once.”
“Certainly. Will you take a cheque?”
“You’ve got a bonus due in a couple of months. I’ll bring it forward and make it payable now.”
“On grounds of merit?”
“We must do something about that stub.” Ralph fretted around his desk searching for the receipt book.
“Why?” said Krassner. “It’s evidence. You’ll need it in Court.”
Ralph looked at him. He was smoking peaceably. “Don’t you care about being found out?”
“If I told you that being found out was the least of my worries you wouldn’t know what to say, would you, old chap?” He was bitter-pleased. At the moment this was as high as his credit went, but it was high enough for him and he was assured, perhaps, that it could never go lower.
“I’d say you were a fool.”
“Would you? Would you, by God. Well, I wasn’t born a whole man like you.”
“Me?”
“Sufficient unto yourself. In the round.” Krassner voluptuously shaped the air with his hands. “That’s you, old chap. Damn me if I wouldn’t rather be lacking and have something to go after. That’s life in my opinion.”
His opinion had never weighed much with Ralph, but life – yes, Krassner must know all about life. It was the knowledge Ralph would have wished to have, as he would once have wished to be a lion-tamer or a fireman.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” Krassner pushed the receipt-book across the desk. “Pecry will be able to tell you there’s a stub short just by looking at the thickness. Do you remember when poor old Jeffney defied security and took the overseas ledger home? Pecry bowled him out because he had spilt a drop of gravy on it.”
Ralph put the receipt-book in the desk drawer with the tossing-stone and locked it.
“Aren’t you going to take it to Pecry?”
“No.”
Krassner raised his eyebrows. “Just going to put the money back and say nothing?”
Ralph had seen the joke against himself. It was an old one. A long time ago, at school, he suffered agonies of guilt when other boys cheated. It was so burdensome that he even thought of turning Catholic so that he could go to confession and get absolution.
“Puts me in a bit of a spot,” said Krassner. “You see, that bonus was keeping a tiger at bay.”
Ralph looked up fiercely. “Get out!”
Krassner nodded and stretched himself. His chest arched splendidly, his nylon shirt snapped hard against the square of each breast. He stood up, and he had the playtime air that he used to adopt after their monthly “progress” meetings.
“I daresay you’re wise, old boy, not to tell Pecry. He’d be bound to ask why you didn’t spot it before.”
*
That was Ralph Shilling’s day, that and the encounter with the new little creature. Seeing her suddenly, out of the brown so to speak, made him wonder if she had just been born. She was so absolutely unmarked. He could not recall such newness even in a baby. Of course a baby was not completed as she was, she was a completed woman. And little she could be without diminution. Ralph then forgot her. She provided br
ight though not comic relief to the day and he had other things to think about.
He liked an even tenor. He liked the way the cat greeted him when he went into the flat. He always arrived home at the same time and the cat, waiting on the other side of the door, rose to its feet with a mutter. They did not touch each other, each ventured a little way towards a common ground where for a moment they communicated as equals. Thereafter each resumed his place, the animal’s undefined, the man’s mapped and bounded with his every breath.
The cat knew what time Ralph came home just as it knew that he shut up the flat and went away on Friday nights for the week-end. The cat absented itself and then Ralph supposed it went hunting, two days and nights red in tooth and claw. He worried about it when the weather was bad but it was always there to greet him on Sunday nights.
They did not require each other, that was the crux of their association. Anything Ralph did for the animal was permitted, even his own permission for it to sit on his chairs and come in through his window, even this was permitted him. Skirting the animal now as it crouched in the middle of his floor, it was in fact Ralph who felt gratitude for the continuum.
As Ralph saw him, Krassner was not so much a criminal, was not good or bad, except in his function as a disruptive agent. There Ralph saw him as being very good indeed. Whichever way things went, Ralph would be disrupted.
Disruption had already begun. His head was buzzing with voices – Pecry’s voice saying, “I regard it as a serious reflection on your handling of the department,” and the Chairman’s voice picking up words – “Shilling states that he was unaware” – and stripping them – “Unaware?” How shameful, how naked a word! And Bertha’s voice, “But dear, that’s not bad judgment, that’s trust. You have to trust people.”
I shan’t think about it, thought Ralph, until I have eaten. I cannot be objective on an empty stomach.
He prepared his meal of a lamb chop and frozen peas. For the cat he had bought its favourite, tinned pilchards. These he cut up and set the dish on a sheet of newspaper because the cat was a messy eater. It had a bit of beard to which particles of food clung, and a habit of chewing with its head in the air, at once ruminant and wary.
Ralph thought again of the new little creature downstairs. How she had surprised everything: she set the old place quite aback, they were not used to strangers here. Old Miss Hanrahan who had died in the downstairs flat had lived there for thirty years. Ralph himself was the latest comer and he had been at Lilliput Lodge for six years. For eighteen months after he came Madame Belmondo, in the rooms below his, would scarcely say “good morning” or “good evening” when they passed in the hall. Ralph found out afterwards that she thought he worked for the Inland Revenue.
“Off to inspect more taxes?” she said viciously one day as he raised his hat.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Of course taxes are the last thing you’d inspect, Government departments don’t put their house in order.”
When she knew that he worked for a firm of pesticide manufacturers she became friendly and even arch. Ralph was puzzled by her archness which was like the approach of men in bars offering what they called “connoisseurs’ lines”. Not that she said anything out of place, it was her beckoning and nudging looks that signified.
Ralph speared his chop and a little pink blood came through. It was not inconceivable that he would one day accept what Madame Belmondo was offering in order to find out exactly what it was.
The cat had finished its meal and looked at Ralph with an unanalysable stare, baleful and triumphant. He sometimes thought that it exulted in its power to make him provide food. It would feel powerful, coming in and dropping its flank down and getting its stomach filled without hunting, without effort. Perhaps it despised him for not providing the taste of blood. “Git!” Ralph said to it and the creature switched its tail and leaped on the window-sill.
As Ralph ate, his mind went back to the affair of Jeffney and the gravy. What a scene that had been. Jeffney had cried and actually wrung his hands and Pecry – Pecry should have paid for the performance because he enjoyed it so much. It was a rare opportunity for him to use his wit in full company. The investigation had not excluded even those who had no access and no reason for access to the ledgers, they were all present in Pecry’s office to identify the gravy stain.
Whose gravy? That was the question. “It looks like steak and kidney,” said Krassner, “with mushroom. Too dark for curry – can you rule out mulligatawny?”
Pecry sat at his desk and waited like a maestro for silence before the overture.
“I am not satisfied that everyone here has a proper conception of loyalty. Or of honesty. We must first examine what is in shortest supply – your honesty to your employers and to each other.”
Krassner always said that Pecry’s function was to louse up life but Ralph sometimes thought that Pecry was a missing link between present and far future man and was glad that he himself had already been born.
“It would seem,” Pecry had said later when the net was drawn tight, “that the working day is not long enough for you, Mr Jeffney.”
“I didn’t mind putting in some extra time, I didn’t mind at all –”
“That is, not long enough for you to do your work here in the office where you are contracted to do it.”
“This is the first time, I swear it!” Jeffney clasped his hands beseechingly and they all looked away. “I swear I have never before removed a ledger!”
“Since you had to continue to work throughout the evening I can only conclude that the work here is too much for you. Altogether too much,” said Pecry. “You could not stop for a meal, you had to go on working even while you were eating.”
“No! It was an accident, the ledger was on the table and my wife must have – as she passed – a drop of gravy –”
“You should have told me you were behind schedule. It was not your secret, Mr Jeffney, inefficiency is not anybody’s secret.” Pecry, looking round, drew them all into the net. “That’s what I mean by honesty to your employers. The principle should be paramount. Evidently it is not.”
Ralph chewed steadily at his chop. If a spot of gravy on a ledger was lack of principle, what was a deficit of two hundred pounds? It was dishonesty, he had to admit, to the most impartial assessor: to Pecry, the fanatic, it would be a capital crime. Pecry could invoke the law and for two hundred pounds he would invoke the Public Prosecutor and the Lord Chief Justice and probably M.I.5 as well.
Ralph had no fear for Krassner, whatever happened Krassner would end on top, certainly on top of the Board. He was made to best everyone without being definably better himself. Krassner would not suffer more than a temporary inconvenience, but Ralph would. He pushed his plate away and fetched a sheet of paper from the bureau. This he ruled into two columns. On the left he wrote ‘Telling’: on the right, ‘Not Telling’, and underneath each he put a subheading: ‘Losses’.
At that point it occurred to him to wonder what it was all about. Was Krassner involved with a woman? How could she cost him two hundred pounds? What was he getting for that? Ralph decided that he had a right to know, he had every right to know since he would be the loser. He wrote “reputation” on the left and then scored it through and wrote ‘standing’.
But men like Krassner did not need to pay for their women. Ralph had seen him in action. Charm was an extra dimension which took the woman right out of herself and made her at once mistress and slave and adept at a game they two would each win. On that occasion Krassner hadn’t even paid for her drinks.
Ralph wrote ‘catalogue’ in the ‘Telling’ column. He was responsible for compiling the yearly brochure of the firm’s products for circulation at home and overseas. The job carried a certain cachet and was coveted by senior members of the staff. But after one of Pecry’s showdowns there was invariably a stripping of marks of distinction or favour. It was three years since the gravy incident and Jeffney had still not been reissued with his rubb
er name stamp which Pecry had withdrawn at the time. The catalogue would certainly be taken from Ralph.
Krassner made no secret of the fact that he lost, and won, on the horses. But never large sums – “No four-legged brute’s going to skin me.” Ralph couldn’t picture him playing cards, he had too restless an eye, nor roulette – he couldn’t endure to stand and wait while fate was settled for him. certainly not by a ball and a wheel. There were other forms of gambling which required active participation – legitimate business, for instance. Krassner’s debts could be honest though his method of meeting them wasn’t.
‘Peace of mind’, wrote Ralph, large across both columns because he had already lost it and wouldn’t get it back for a long long time. The necessity of deciding was what Krassner had put on him, the necessity of choosing from two unpleasant sequences of events. Were they equally unpleasant? And, if they were equal now, might they not become wildly unequal later on? For instance, if he did not tell, if he covered up for Krassner and the whole thing came out, he would stand convicted of aiding and abetting.
If he told Pecry, if tomorrow he went to Pecry’s office: “I have just discovered, it has come to my notice, I was checking the receipt stubs, I check them regularly, yes, I’m responsible for the accounts, personally responsible, yes, no I have never delegated nor trusted – a deficit of two hundred pounds has existed for three months – yes, three months – I didn’t notice, I must have overlooked, I’m unable to account for it –” that would be item one. Pecry would sack Krassner and probably prosecute him but Krassner would amount to little more than nine days’ wonder. For Ralph there would be a process of attrition, an infinitely graduated disciplinary action.
Under ‘Telling’ Ralph wrote ‘job’. He would certainly be demoted, publicly or circuitously, whichever gave Pecry most scope. It turned him cold to think what a razor edge he was on, had unknowingly been on ever since the money became missing. Krassner’s bonus would take time to put through and there was a further hazard which money ran with Krassner: it never kept its shape. Ralph had noticed that although Krassner rarely had money in his pocket he always had much more than the market value of it in himself. Thirty pounds a week couldn’t have bought him ambience – five thousand a year couldn’t buy it for Pecry – but Krassner had it. What a pity ambience wasn’t negotiable, could put people in its debt but couldn’t repay.
