The Man Who Won the Pools

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Christ we ran,’ Phil said. And he gave Peter a grin and walked away.

  Chapter Eight

  Keep death off the road, he said to himself as he shoved open the door of the shed where the Griffin kids’ old man let him store his motor-bike. And for a minute he was pretty doubtful. He never went on the thing – not that he’d have told anyone – with as much as a second pint in him, and all that wine and brandy came to more than that. But he was dead sober all the same. The kick in the stuff had somehow gone another way – perhaps into the excitement he’d felt during that long chinning with Peter. Now would be the time to do that thinking, he felt. He wished he could just spin into the country by himself. But he reached for a rag and dusted the pillion seat. He had his date.

  And perhaps – he decided as he wove down the High Street – it was best to march straight into this bit without thinking. They didn’t go together, Beryl and thinking didn’t. There had been a time when he had studied her, you might say. He’d studied Beryl in particular against everything he could pick up about girls in general. That was only sense. Same as with engines, you have to learn the tick if you expect results. But you couldn’t call the process thinking. And even when he’d become kind of grateful, and fond of her in an easy way in spite of having to go on having her or go cracked, you still couldn’t say there was any sort of thinking job in it. And never would be, even if they went on till they had grand-kids around them. No – Beryl and thinking didn’t go together. Or certainly not thinking big. There wasn’t much scale to Beryl, as George Pratley had hinted.

  But now he was through the crush on Magdalen Bridge, and when he gave a twist to the throttle that sent him up the Iffley Road like a bullet, it wasn’t impatience with his lot that was getting him. It was just impatience to cover the next half-mile. Think afterwards, he told himself. And start from somewhere easier – from Peter’s ideas, or George’s, or even the old chap’s in the bank. Beryl is something that happens.

  He swung round a bus and roared up the hill. By the telephone kiosk she’d be. And in a skirt. She did always dress like he told her to.

  She was waiting. He was careful always to have it that way, since Beryl liked things ordinary. She was waiting in skintight black pants that made her look like a half-naked Hottentot. And with a scarf round her head.

  Phil drew into the kerb, stopped, kicked down the parking-strut. He mustn’t be furious. She’d been thinking up a bit of what her magazines called allure. Perhaps to celebrate. He dismounted and they held hands. He drew her close and they kissed – doing a quarter turn on their hips, like on the silver screen. He passed his hands across her shoulders caressingly and then down to just below her waist. Public ritual. He stood back.

  ‘Where’s your skid-lid?’ he asked. It was the scarf even more than the pants that he didn’t like. The scarf was printed all over with luggage labels saying the names of Riviera hotels. Probably he’d never have liked it. He disliked it in some special way now, but he didn’t give himself time to inquire what. She wasn’t going without the helmet – not on his bike, she wasn’t.

  ‘I forgot it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, Phil.’

  ‘All right. But we’ll go back and pick it up on the way.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ Beryl tossed her head. ‘Not on this old thing.’ She pointed at Phil’s bike. ‘And the helmets are silly. Everybody says so. And I had my hair done. You’ll see.’

  He felt jolted. It wasn’t because of Beryl dressing silly and defiant. It wasn’t because of what she’d said. There was just something about her. She wasn’t like herself, quite. And yet she didn’t seem excited, as she would be if she’d heard. So she couldn’t have heard. After all, they never took a newspaper in her house, unless it would be the News of the World for her dad to lie in bed with on Sunday morning.‘You not heard the news?’ he asked.

  ‘News? News don’t mean a thing. Let’s go.’

  ‘This news does. It’s about us. I got something to tell you about yourself, young Beryl.’

  That was what he’d called her first, and he thought it would bring her round now. But she only looked dead scared.

  ‘Oh, let’s go,’ she said, kind of recovering herself. ‘What’s any news you’d have?’ She turned to the bike and started getting on the pillion. ‘Bought a Rolls, perhaps?’

  ‘Not yet, I haven’t.’ It wasn’t going nice or comfortable, but he was prepared to grin and be triumphant. ‘But might do.’

  ‘Might, might you? Well, Fred Prescott, now, he has. A car, anyway.’

  ‘Fred bought a car?’ Phil found this funny. ‘He didn’t tell me that this morning, Fred didn’t. Old Ruby saloon, I expect.’ He stopped, rather struck. ‘What you know about Fred Prescott’s doings, young Beryl?’

  ‘Don’t know nothing.’ Beryl spoke hastily. ‘Fred’s sister told my friend, see? Still, it’s enterprise, that is. Too careful by half, you are. Like them that choose security in the Building Society adverts, is steady Phil Tombs.’ Beryl flung up her head again like she was scared really to death to hear herself. Kid was going to cry. He stared at her.

  ‘You’ll wear mine,’ he said, and hauled off his skid-lid. ‘Won’t disgrace you by going down Sophokels Grove on the old flivver.’ Sophokels Grove was what they called her street. Beat Gas Street, come to think of it. Other extreme, you might say. Professors on the City Council. And he nipped off Ideal Séjour Cannes and the rest of them and clapped the helmet on her new perm. ‘We’ll get cracking.’ He smacked her behind, trying to get her friendly. ‘Who stuffed you in those things?’ he asked. ‘Only a blind man would put in time trying to get a girl out of pants like that. Job he’d have too. But you wait.’

  No, it wasn’t going well. It was going nasty. They’d better get into the country and start again.

  ‘Then we’re off,’ he said. ‘I want you in bluebells, see? Middle of a river of them.’ He didn’t like it as he said it. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t, being deliberate with things like that. Anyway, she didn’t react as planned.

  ‘What’s that about knowing something about myself? Who’s told you news? Never can talk straight, can you?’

  He stared at her again. For she was looking at him full of funk and he didn’t know what. And then suddenly she nipped from the pillion and grabbed him and kissed him and shoved herself up against him about two points beyond the public ritual you might say was proper in Aeschylus Avenue. The budgerigars in the windows of what these people called their lounges must be gawping at them.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Hold it. And the news will keep.’ He was determined it would keep. He didn’t quite know why, but he was clear he couldn’t come out with this enormous thing straight on top of a bad patch like this. At the same time he had an obscure feeling that he was letting Beryl down by not shouting it at once. He shoved this away. ‘Get on again,’ he said. And he said it the way she wasn’t allowed to disobey. She let him go, and climbed on.

  ‘What about you?’ she said. She meant about the skid-lid.

  ‘It’s always the one behind goes over.’ He snapped it brief and careless, since she hadn’t herself spoken like she was interested. ‘If we hit something, you’ll know, young Beryl.’

  And then they were zipping up the ring road. She was astride behind him, with one hand on the grip at the back of the saddle and the other round his trouser-belt. Soon it had shifted, this one, and shoved up the tail of his sweat-shirt, and its knuckles were on the skin at the base of his spine. But somehow that familiar half square-inch of contact had gone wrong – whether on his side or hers, he couldn’t say. And he took the corners viciously, with his bare head over the handlebars. It was hot, and the air was swimming up from the tarmac. Kind of mirage. And he found he could almost get imagining things – imagining the other girl’s face in it. Jean’s face.

  So it needn’t have been Beryl’s fault that matters still went badly later. He couldn’t help it that suddenly there was this other girl – and wasn’t he trying to treat
her as the dream she probably was? But Beryl might be sensing the dream in the air, and that was what was wrong. Only that wasn’t really the feel of it. For when he rolled over on his back in the grass, and she ought to have been doing her funny yawn and stretch, he caught her looking at him sharp and calculating and dead scared again in a way that shook him badly. He remembered Artie Coutts. Perhaps, he thought, Beryl had to tell him what he wouldn’t believe was possible, only you never knew. It must be a real crisis for a girl, that – since she could never be quite sure she’d be done right by. But, even if it was that, she’d behaved oddly. She’d clung to him as if it was the last time it would be him she’d cling to. And at the same time she’d acted like she just lacked the courage to pull out on him. There was something she wouldn’t speak out. And it didn’t make things better that, so far, he hadn’t spoken out either. It was getting crazy not to have told her by this time. So now he rolled over on his side to speak to her. And there she was, rolled over on her side towards him – with hot stormy eyes and what he somehow knew was going to be a torrent of desperate unexpected speech.

  ‘Beryl—’ he began quickly – for once more he had that obscure feeling that he was being unfair to her every minute he kept quiet about the utter change in his life. But he didn’t get any further.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ a voice said from above him. ‘You’ve gone rather badly astray, haven’t you?’

  Phil sat up and took the man in. He must have been standing nearby, waiting for what you might call a polite moment. His question had been polite, and had been put straight not sarky.

  ‘Sorry,’ Phil said.

  The man’s eyebrows lifted just a shade, as if this wasn’t the reply he’d expected. But if he was polite he was angry.

  ‘You can hardly be unaware,’ he asked, ‘that you are on private property?’

  Beryl had sat up too. She giggled. Phil felt furious, and felt at the same time a spurt of tenderness. He hated that giggle. At the time he knew that Beryl hadn’t found it easy to produce, since she was frightened out of her wits. But she felt it was the way to back him up.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve done any damage,’ Phil said. Although for various reasons he was feeling awkwardly disarranged, he managed to say it stiffly. He’d no notion of crawling to a sodding landowner. But as he spoke his glance went past Beryl to the heap of bluebells she’d insisted on tearing up. She’d said she was going to take them all home. And now they looked like a cartload. That was why this fellow was furious. ‘All right,’ Phil said. ‘I oughtn’t to have gathered all these. Careless of me. Pay if you like.’

  Beryl didn’t seem to like this. And now she managed to speak – although in rather a squeaky way that sounded ridiculous.

  ‘We thought this was a public park,’ she said. ‘Didn’t we, Phil?’

  The man turned to her courteously. He was elderly, with the sort of face they called bronzed and fit, and he was in old flannel trousers, a faded silk shirt, and a battered panama. A bleeding gentleman all right, Phil thought.

  ‘If you did that, you know, in a public park—’ and the man pointed at the bluebells— ‘I am afraid you’d be taken into a police court and fined. I don’t sue trespassers on my land. But I do try to reason with them.’

  Beryl giggled again. This time she probably couldn’t help it. But it produced almost uncontrollable rage in Phil. If the man had been his own age he’d have clocked him, he thought, and taken a chance of a successful bolt. But that was no go. And what made it worse was that the old sod was somehow hinting a streak of modified approval of Phil. And at the same time his look was saying that he didn’t think much of Phil’s taste. Yes, Phil could have murdered him.

  ‘I certainly don’t want to be paid for the flowers,’ the man said. ‘But, another time – and whether on my land or somewhere else – I would just like you to think. I don’t object to wayfarers. I don’t object, as a matter of fact, to young people seeking privacy. But I do object—’ unexpectedly, his level voice suddenly rose—‘to vandalism and hooliganism and rooting up living things.’

  ‘Everybody likes gathering flowers,’ Beryl said, suddenly defiant. ‘Fine ladies fill whole drawing-rooms with them. I seen it in the mags. And why don’t you put up notices, if you want them left alone?’

  ‘Perhaps because this isn’t a public park, and nobody ever really took it for one.’ The man turned to Phil. ‘It might be as well if you now went your way. Follow the stream – it’s very pleasant – and please don’t go into the woodland. When you come to a footbridge you’ll see a gate on your left. The lady will find a small notice on the other side of it, I believe. Go through, and you’ll be on a bridle-path. You have a perfect right there.’ The man took off his panama like Beryl might be a whole garden-party. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and walked away.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Beryl managed a peal of high-pitched mocking laughter. Phil stared at her dumbly. She was backing him up again – not that she looked as if she just loved him at the moment. Her eyes were resentful. And, correspondingly, rage once more rose in him.

  ‘The bastard,’ he said. ‘I’d very-pleasant him, I would, if he wasn’t a bleeding grandfather. Good afternoon and may I reason with you. Christ!’ He yanked Beryl to her feet so roughly that she wobbled inside her ugly black pants. ‘Come on. We’ll get out of this before I go after him and kick him on his sodding country seat.’ His fury rose higher because he felt there was something wrong with it. ‘Buy him up, I could,’ he said. ‘Buy him up and not notice it.’

  Beryl had taken a step back and was standing among the raped bluebells. She was clawing awkwardly for shoulder-straps. He stooped, picked up a flimsy garment and tossed it at her.

  ‘You’ve forgotten this,’ he said. ‘Shove it away. We’re getting out.’

  ‘Bolting,’ Beryl said suddenly jeering. ‘Why didn’t you speak up at him? I know them as would have.’

  ‘What d’you mean – you know them as would have?’ He swung round on her, obscurely catching in her words he didn’t know what. ‘It’s his land, isn’t it?’

  ‘There you are – cursing at him and not really meaning it. What did you say to his face, I ask you? Sorry and please let me pay.’ Beryl kicked the bluebells petulantly. ‘No sort of man, you aren’t. What’s that word your auntie calls you? Mardy Phil – that’s you.’

  He realised that he didn’t give a sod either way for the chap who’d turned them out. That wasn’t what had thrown him into a rage at all. His mind pulled up with a jerk, as if in a second it would come out on something it didn’t want to.

  ‘Don’t get upset, young Beryl,’ he said. ‘We’re going back to the flivver. We’re going to find a good tea. Ham, eggs, crumpets, honey, jam, everything.’ He watched a faint anticipation of pleasure struggle in Beryl’s face. ‘And I got something to tell you – something more super than you could think.’ He went over to her, put an arm round her and kissed her.

  ‘Surprise of your life.’ He swept the other arm round the bluebell glade and its enclosing woods. ‘Did I say I could buy up all this? Well, I could. Serious.’

  She drew back, round-eyed and frightened. Probably she supposed he’d gone cracked.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she said on a high note.

  ‘What I say.’ He remembered it ought to be a moment of triumph. ‘What d’you think I do Monday?’

  ‘What?’ She’d gone white.

  ‘Ask for my cards. Or not even that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘Shall.’

  ‘Why, Phil—tell me why!’ Queerly, she was in a sort of panic.

  ‘You’ll see. At tea, I’ll tell you. Come on.’

  She followed him down the little stream. He made straight for where they’d been told, without turning to look at her.

  Because it was a fine Saturday, the roadsides were lined with the cars of people picnicking. Phil wondered why they didn’t get farther afield and out of each other’s dust. Perhaps they had mo
re respect for landowners than he had. But probably, although no one car-load seemed ever to speak to its neighbours, they liked urban company and distrusted any approach to country solitude. From the portable radios the conflicting noises of several programmes jostled each other in the petrol-soaked air: from one side of the road there would be band music, and from the other the staccato jabber of some sporting commentary, wearily quickening in tempo every now and then to suggest uncontrollable excitement.

  Beryl, again on the pillion, called out to Phil to admire any particularly big or shiny car, or the deployment on the jaded grass verge of a striking display of folding furniture. There seemed to be hardly anybody out on motor-bikes, and she called attention to this too. But that was all automatic. That Phil was going to tell her something seemed to have gone out of her head again. She didn’t even begin clamouring for information when they’d sat down to tea in a kind of farm place Phil had spotted down a lane. Probably she’d decided he had just been talking big or silly because of how they’d been challenged and humiliated among the bluebells. Or perhaps – he still thought – there was something in her own mind that got in the way of her much attending to him. Anyway he had to start in on it again himself.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, putting down his cup. ‘It’s queer you haven’t heard. All over Oxford, it must be. The pools come home on me, see? And big.’ He paused. ‘Bigger than to anybody else this season.’ He looked at her and saw that her face wasn’t expressing anything. And figures, he thought, wouldn’t convey much. ‘An enormous fortune,’ he said. ‘More money than you could ever think of. Understand?’

  This time Beryl made a queer noise, and her mouth trembled. Then she took a gulp of tea.

  ‘You’re just saying it,’ she said. She was looking at him wildly, and her voice rose – so that it sounded ugly like he’d never noticed it. ‘Say you’re just saying it, Phil! Say you are!’

  He stared at her bewildered in the way he seemed always to be doing this afternoon. Nothing was as you expected when a thing like this happened. Beryl looked as if she was going to cry again, and he thought he’d try her with a cigarette. But when he put his hand in his pocket for the packet, what it came on was the scarf with the hotels on it. He had a sudden impulse, pulled this out, shoved aside some plates, and spread the thing out in front of her.