The Doors Open

by Michael Gilbert

  Young Philip Van Bright received him cheerfully, asked after McAndrews’ Persian cat – an almost legendary creature, reputed to read the daily financial columns in The Times – and asked what he could do for the Moorgate Press.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Paddy, “I want some dope about ‘Factory Fitments’.”

  He was not looking for any particular reaction and was therefore considerably surprised at the result of the simple remark.

  It was as if a blind had shut down, suddenly excluding the sun.

  (Or was he, perhaps, being oversensitive?)

  Van Bright’s voice was still courteous, if a little wary, “I’m afraid,” he said, “that we don’t – that is, what exactly do you want to know?”

  “Just your opinion of them,” said Paddy easily, “I’m not asking for any breach of professional confidence, of course–” Stick to the usual lines of sales talk, he thought, I believe there’s something fishy here – “I’m told you have had most of the dealing in their ordinary shares–”

  “Preference shares,” said Van Bright automatically. “Yes, we’ve done a certain amount.”

  “I understand they deal in all sorts of interior fitting for the normal production job – benches, lathes, machine tools, jigs, overhead transporters and so on.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Obviously a sound line in these days,” said Paddy, “if you can get the necessary permits. What was the public response like?”

  “Well–” the stockbroker seemed to be picking his words carefully and his fingers fiddled ceaselessly with a pencil. “Actually, it’s difficult to say. They’ve been fully subscribed of course. With Latham’s Steel behind them they were bound to be that–”

  “In the present state of the stock market,” agreed Paddy, “you’d get full subscription for a company to sell refrigerators to Esquimaux. But I wondered what your experience had been of dealings–”

  “There haven’t been any dealings,” said Van Bright slowly. Sensing Paddy’s astonishment he added, “That’s what I was telling you. All the shares were taken up by two or three big buyers.”

  “I see,” said Paddy. He knew better than to invite a blank refusal by asking who the buyers were. “Well, that rather accounts for it, doesn’t it.”

  When he reported the gist of this to McAndrews, the Scotsman said, “Much what I thought. They were bought out before the public list opened.”

  “Is that unusual?” said Paddy. “I mean – there must be lots of nominally public companies which are collared like that. The Bank of England itself couldn’t buy preference shares in–” he named two well-known concerns.

  “Not now,” agreed McAndrews, “all the same, it’s not quite as straightforward as you think. Mph’m. We’ll see what the gutter press has got to say about them.”

  He referred in these disrespectful terms to a rival publication, called Market News which was not quite so scrupulous as the Moorgate Press in its differentiation between fact and surmise, and had therefore a correspondingly wider if less respectable circulation.

  At the conclusion of a ten minutes’ telephone call which consisted, on his side, largely of “hmps”, McAndrews replaced the receiver and said: “So they’re back-pedalling, too. If anyone knows anything about ‘Factory Fitments’, they ought to. They were the people who put me on to Moody and Van Bright–”

  3

  It was a Friday evening some ten days later and Nap, alone, was dozing in front of the fire. Paddy was out at one of his hearty regimental reunions and unlikely to be home before midnight.

  Half of Nap’s mind was pursuing the head cashier of an important insurance corporation down the paths of conjecture; the other half was trying to decide whether he loved Patricia well enough to marry her.

  Did anybody really love anybody else well enough to want to spend all the rest of their days with them; and was that a thing which you could possibly be certain about before marriage itself? How much of it was reason and how much instinct; or was the whole thing a racket? Was the institution of monogamy just the plain reproductive urge confined to a strait jacket – the bitter pill of necessity coated by layers of saccharine?

  The Frenchman in him posed these questions coherently and the Englishman tried to answer them impersonally. Since they remained, naturally, unanswerable, he diverted his attention to more immediate matters.

  The difference, as he told himself irritably, between a story-book adventure and a real-life adventure was a matter of focus and selection. In a story everything which happened, mattered: everything was significant. That man who tapped the girl on the shoulder in the crowded street was a friend – or a dark and deadly enemy. His object was to save her or serve her, or even to seduce her. Whereas in real life he would turn out to be a complete stranger whose one desire was to borrow a match or ask the way to Peckham.

  Nap had compressed into his four months in occupied France the bits and pieces, the beginning and ends of a dozen adventure stories. He remembered the time that he had saved his life by buying a third-class railway ticket at the last moment instead of a second-class one; the nightmare evening which he had spent giving lessons in English syntax to the Chief of the SS in Besançon; he recalled the occasion on which he had been buried with full military honours and according to the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. And the people he had met. Odd, illogical, incomprehensible characters. The woman who had stood up to six hours of Gestapo questioning and screamed at the sight of a field mouse. The men who were reliable when they were sober, and the men who were only safe when they were drunk, and the glorious blacksmith of Toul who had sworn never again to be sober until the last German had left the Franche Comté (when Nap met him he had been on a fair way to redeeming his vow).

  He thought of that occasion on which he and two other agents had sat in an upstairs room in a little house in Dijon and sweated at the sound of purposeful footsteps coming up the stairs; and the door had opened to admit a travelling life insurance agent, touting for custom.

  By association, his thoughts turned to Major McCann.

  Nap knew him in the vague way that one knew dozens of people in and out of the army. They were something more than acquaintances, something less than friends.

  The circumstances of their first meeting had all the elements of drama. Nap and his friends had been leading a tip-and-run existence in one of the little backwaters round which the full tide of the German retreat was swirling. For days they had hoped against hope to see the leading allied troops. All had assumed, for some reason, that these would be Americans,

  Then one morning an armoured car had driven quietly down the village street, the pennant of a famous Armoured Division fluttering on its radiator, and halted at the street crossing. A burly figure had leaned out and enquired the road for Belfort in the most atrocious French complicated by a Lowland burr.

  Nap, who had been taking a badly needed bath in the mayor’s front parlour, had thrust his dripping top half out of the window and said politely, in English, “Straight on to the top of the hill and fork left.”

  Later he had got to know McCann better.

  Now, out of the blue, he had met him again. That was a fortnight ago. Then, after that evening, with its promise of future adventure, a complete hiatus – nothing at all. Indeed, he had had one short note, which he had assumed must be from McCann, since, though unsigned, it had the printed letterhead of The Leopard. It had stated, with bare simplicity – “See if you can find out from your friend Maria what sort of razor Brandison uses.” From the beer stains in the corner and the smear of tomato ketchup on the back, he deduced that the Major had written it over a hasty dinner.

  Outside, it was blowing up for a wild night, but the little panelled sitting-room was secure and comfortable. Nap sank lower and lower in his chair. A coal fell from the hearth. The soft chimes from one of the City clocks announced eleven. He was very nearly asleep when the telephone bell clamoured urgently.

  Lifting the receive
r he was considerably surprised to recognize the voice of Paddy’s fiancée, the self-possessed Miss Burke.

  “Why, Jenny–” he said.

  “Nap! Thank God. Listen, the most terrible thing – ”

  The note of panic came across the wire with startling clearness.

  4

  “Marriage,” said a plethoric Major, “is a state-sponsored swindle designed to relieve the authorities of their proper duty of looking after the womenfolk of this country. A Government which preaches Nationalization should have made it one of its first objects to nationalize the maintenance and upkeep of women.”

  “Are you going to let the men off?” asked Paddy.

  “We should have to contribute, of course. It would have been a form of indirect taxation – an imposition–”

  “You’ve said it,” agreed Private Abrahams (the owner of a flourishing barrow business and one of the few real capitalists present). “Just as soon as the clergyman says, ‘Do you take this woman?’ and you pipe up, like the World’s Perishing Mug and say ‘I do’ – you can hear the old trap go click. Ever after that it’s ‘pay-pay-pay’ – and nothing off for good behaviour.”

  “It isn’t what you say,” said the gloomy Corporal Botherwick, “it’s the way that you say it. You’ve gotter watch your step, see. First time I took Flo out, we went to a double feature at the local pallay. I’d had a long day on my trolleybus, and before I’d time to see whether we was watching Dorothy Lamour or Donald Duck, I’d shut my eyes and dropped clean orf. I must’ve kipped a long time, too, cos when I woke up the big picture was nearly over and him and her was going into the last big clinch. I turned to Flo and said ‘Gawd, ’ow I wish we was in bed’ – not meaning anything, see. But you know how it is once you put an idea into a girl’s head – yus, and we was married last month.”

  “Girls are funny,” said a Sergeant from one of the other companies, who seemed to have attached himself to their party. “The other day I took two of ’em to watch a football match–”

  One of Paddy’s late cooks here thrust more beer into his hand with the result that he lost the thread of this interesting discussion.

  “Hear you’re getting hitched up,” said a Captain.

  “That’s right,” said Paddy.

  “Sad,” said the Captain, “sad. The outposts falling one by one.”

  “Take my advice,” said the MO – now returned to a Harley Street practice. “If you must marry pick a good cook. Then you’ve got something to build on. A girl can learn almost anything else given time and patience, but cooks are born–”

  ‘Talking of greyhounds–” said an ex-CSM.

  The time was latish in the evening and the occasion a reunion of that ancient and disreputable regiment of the line, the first Hyde Parks. It is sometimes difficult for the uninitiated to gather what pleasure the male sex does get from standing on its feet from six to ten in the evening in barrack-like apartments, filled to overflowing with tobacco smoke, heat, light and the confused noises of pipes being knocked out, beer being pulled and lines being shot; with no exercise beyond that occasioned by a steady lifting of the right elbow; and with a rapidly diminishing grasp of such matters as everyday life, reality and the tune of the Last Train Home.

  However, by half past ten or thereabouts the crowd had begun to thin out. Paddy regretfully said his good nights, jotted down half a dozen names and addresses, collected his hat, and pushed forth into the winter’s night.

  It would be a gross exaggeration to say that he was drunk. He found it very difficult to attain that blissful state on post-war beer; and anyway, in functions of this sort he did more talking than drinking.

  As he turned into the street he saw the lanky figure of Corporal Botherwick ahead, and put on speed to catch up with him, at the same time giving him a cheerful hail.

  To his surprise the Corporal, though he must have heard him, took not the slightest notice: but actually increased his pace and more than kept his distance.

  “Odd,” thought Paddy. “What the hell’s wrong with him.”

  The mystery was solved at the next corner where one of the infrequent street lamps shone for a moment on the face of the man ahead.

  He was a complete stranger.

  Paddy walked on thoughtfully. It was not the most cheerful place imaginable. The streets were still flanked by the uncleared jetsam of the blitz. He passed a cluster of doll’s-house prefabs, a row of gaunt, gutted shops, and then an open waste where a mountainous pile of rubble gleamed in the misty moonlight.

  As a result of the company he had just left, or the last turn of the conversation, or more probably because it was a philosophical time of night, his mind was running on the mighty twin problems of Love and War. Did he really love Jenny enough? Enough for what? Enough to marry her, naturally. (Don’t be a cad, sir, of course you do. Dear little woman.) But wasn’t she sometimes a trifle – now what was the exact word? a trifle frivolous. Not quite womanly enough. (Tush, sir, do you want to marry an iceberg?)

  Here, turning a corner rather fast, he nearly collided with a small man, whose face was obscured by a checked cap, pulled down over one eye.

  This man said, “Look where yer goin’, carncher,” in such a nasty voice that War ousted Love immediately and Paddy meditated the advisability of giving him a clip over the ear, but before he could come to any decision the small man had disappeared into the surrounding dusk.

  The journey home by Underground entailed a change at Leicester Square station, and it was in the Z-shaped, cream-tiled passage which connects the Northern and the Piccadilly routes that Paddy confirmed his earlier impression that he was being followed.

  The passageway was almost deserted, for by that time of night the tide of traffic had ceased to run eastward. Ahead of him two women were turning the corner that leads down to the Piccadilly line platform. Behind came an elderly type in evening dress and two soldiers. (Gunners, he saw, from the red and blue arm flashes.)

  He stopped to light a cigarette and allowed them all to pass. The short passage was now empty, but he reserved the obstinate impression that he had heard footsteps at the corner behind him, and that the footsteps had stopped when he did. He waited for a full minute and the silence became almost uncomfortable. It was broken by a distant grumbling above his head which he took to signify the arrival of another train on the Northern line, and sure enough in a few minutes the vanguard of a further contingent appeared. A party of three girls, escorted by a sheepish youth, a clergyman, and a man with a trombone.

  “Nerves playing tricks,” thought Paddy. He moved on and joined the crowd on the east-bound platform. There had evidently been no train for some time and a fair number of people had collected.

  Paddy made his way to the far end.

  In the distance he heard the roar of an approaching train.

  At that moment, away to the left, his eye was suddenly arrested by the sight of a checked cap. He had seen that piece of headgear before, and recently. Unless he was mistaken it belonged to a bad-tempered little man who had bumped into him in the darkened streets of South London.

  Suddenly he felt caught. It was as though he was in the centre of an enormous, loosely woven net: a net whose cord had not yet been pulled, but which, if he moved off too far in any direction, would press him gently back towards the centre. Push him –

  A rather natural association of ideas, not unconnected with the approach of the train, made him step back hastily from the edge of the platform.

  He took a quick look round.

  That end of the station was almost empty, and his nearest neighbours looked harmless enough. There were two or three women. Standing next to him was an undernourished little workman. Paddy guessed his trade as fitter or mechanic, from his greasy overalls tight-clipped at wrist and ankle. On the other side of him were an old lady and a couple of shop girls. A soldier stood further back.

  He looked up the platform again. The check cap had disappeared. “I’m being a fool,” he thought. “Visio
ns of death and destruction.” The thought was still in his head as he heard the train coming. The lights shone on the rails, the noise rose to a roar and a presaging draught of cold air drove down the platform. With a final crash the red and gold monster slid into view.

  An idea flickered into his mind. Sawdust. Cheese. Coffee. Bacon. He had it! The whole thing was like a monstrous bacon slicer of the sort they used to keep on the grocer’s counter at the shop near his home. The red and gold machine, the gleaming steel rail, the irresistible weight and power driving a heavy body across a sharp –

  Good God. The workman next to him. He was falling away from him. He put out his hand – or was it already out? – it was difficult to think. He was grasping, pulling.

  A woman screamed. He caught a glimpse of the face of the train driver in his green and lighted cab, suddenly and sickeningly white.

  Then the workman was on the line and the train had passed over him.

  Paddy felt both his arms gripped. The two soldiers who had been standing behind him were shouting. He scarcely found himself able to understand what they were saying.

  “You won’t get away with it, you bloody murderer.”

  6

  Help From Uncle Alfred

  In the charge room at Great Marlborough Street Police Station the clock stood at midnight. The room was crowded. Inspector Hannibal, his voice proclaiming that he resented the unseasonable nature of the proceedings, said brusquely to the station sergeant, “Read over those three statements, please.”

  “‘I am Gunner 1034968 Churchill, A R, Royal Artillery,’” intoned the Sergeant, “‘and I was proceeding from Waterloo to Liverpool Street via Leicester Square Underground station. At approximately 10.45 p.m., I was standing on the eastbound platform of the Central Line talking to Gunner 1035655 Roberts, P T, also of my regiment. We observed a man whom I now identify and whose name I now know to be Carter, in front of us, and close to the edge of the platform. Beside him was standing another man whose name I now understand to be Sims. On the approach of an Underground train I observed Carter raise his left arm and push Sims–’”