The news, nevertheless, had to be broken. Anderson broke it, gently and carefully, like eggs into a basin “I’m taking a long holiday,” he said, and added with what he hoped was an obvious note of irony, “At the directors’ request.” When he told Lessing the copywriter shook his head, eyes grave behind his hornrims. “Bad luck,” he said. “Kiddy Modes?”
“No,” Anderson answered. “Life. The missing wail in the nursery.” Lessing looked puzzled. “This is Blythe-Pountney, who is taking over from me.” Blythe-Pountney twitched, winked and shuffled. Greatorex was brought from his corner desk and introduced. “Are you leaving us for good, Mr Anderson?” he asked.
“For good or ill. Never be surprised by sudden departures in the world of advertising, Greatorex.”
Blythe-Pountney said to Lessing: “You’ll be working for me on that – um, ah – new account, won’t you? Hey Presto. Big stuff. I like it. Scope for ideas. Let me see what you’ve done on Monday.”
“With you.”
“What’s that? What’s that?” Blythe-Pountney winked.
“Andy and I work with each other.”
Blythe-Pountney twitched. “That’s what I said.”
“The word is with, not for.”
“Oh.” Twitch and two-step. “Oh yes. Jolly good. Yes, I see.” A gargantuan wink. “With, not for. Yes, I see your point.”
In the studio Wyvern carefully wiped off paint and took the hand offered by Blythe-Pountney with an accompanying two-step. Wyvern said nothing at all, but Blythe-Pountney seemed hardly to notice silence. He stuck his nose into the rough lay-outs Wyvern was making for Hey Presto, was enthusiastic about some designs for labels that had already been rejected by a client, pinched the arm of a girl working as apprentice in the studio, and criticized a photographic montage of buildings which was being pieced together for a construction company. “Modernistic stuff, eh, modernistic. Very interesting. Like it, do you? Can’t say I do myself. Simple, strong, vital, that’s what I find clients generally like. Just like the girls,” he said with a wink and a sudden dig of his elbow at Wyvern. “Most interesting place in an advertising agency is the studio, I always say. Like to spend all my time in it. Got some layout ideas myself, you know, full of ideas. Be bringing them down to you; you’ll be seeing a lot of me. ’Bye till Monday.” Blythe-Pountney two-stepped forward, grasped Wyvern’s hand, winked and two-stepped away. Anderson said: “I’ll be in tomorrow, Jack, to clear up and say goodbye.” Wyvern stood, hands on hips, looking after them.
When Blythe-Pountney had gone Anderson sat in his office, staring at the diminishing finger of sunlight on the carpet. His mind had gone back, for no obvious reason, to the day in his boyhood when, coming downstairs to breakfast, he had seen by his mother’s plate the salmon-pink writing paper and recognized Elsie’s hand. His mother had wept, shouted, screamed at him; but when she knew that Elsie was going to have a baby shouts and screams were replaced by gentle wheedling. “You don’t really want to marry her, do you, dear? A girl of that class. You’ve made a mistake, but we must see if you can’t patch it up, so that you can wait until Miss Right comes along.” Patching-up meant the last letter in the salmon-pink envelope to say that Elsie had gone to Bradford, but what else did it mean? His father and mother had spoken of the affair thereafter only as a narrow escape from danger, a trap which through their cleverness had never, quite, been sprung. But what had happened to Elsie? He could recall nothing of her but a nervous giggle, employed upon the most inappropriate occasions. On the common under the bushes Elsie had giggled and giggled, quite unable to control herself. She remained as a giggle and a salmon-pink envelope, but what had happened to the seed within her? Had it been allowed to live? Was a child of his loins, a young man or woman, now talking with a Bradford accent, training as engineer or student of ballet? How astonishing that in all these years he had never thought of Elsie Smith and of their child. One brings down the curtain, Anderson thought, and never looks behind it And why was he looking behind it now? Suppose the seed exterminated, might one say that murder had been done when Elsie was sent to Bradford?
The thin beam of sunlight had vanished when, looking up, he saw Reverton standing, pipe in mouth, smiling a little ruefully. Vincent, Reverton, Wyvern, Lessing, which of them gave my wife his – blessing? “I’ve come to say good-bye,” Reverton said, with such finality in his voice that Anderson was startled.
“Good-bye?”
“I shan’t be in tomorrow. Going down to see Crunchy-Munch. I was sorry to have to butt in with my own ideas there, but you know how it is sometimes. Anyway, it’s over now. Andy, it’s all for the best, believe me. It may be only temporary.” A far-away look came into Reverton’s eyes. “We’ve had some good times together. I’ll miss you, Andy. We’ve been a great team, but I’ve got the firm to think of. We must all think of the firm. Frankly, I’ve had a feeling lately that you haven’t really been – believing in your work.” Tribute had been paid in sentiment. Reverton took the pipe from his mouth, looked at it, tapped it on his heel. “You won’t forget the Hey Presto when you come in tomorrow, will you? Divenga rang up about it today. As a matter of fact, there’s some snag.”
“Snag?”
Reverton was looking hard at his pipe. “This particular sample may not be absolutely suitable for every type of skin. He doesn’t want us to go on using it. Seems it contains some substance which may irritate the delicate white skin, though it’s quite all right for dark skins. They’re sending over other samples which have gone through some new refining process. They’re experimenting all the time, you know that.” Reverton paused, apparently expectant of a reply. When he did not get one he said again: “You won’t forget to bring it back tomorrow. I shouldn’t go on using it.”
“I won’t forget.”
“No hard feelings, Andy.”
There should be hard feelings, Anderson thought, but in fact there are no feelings at all, nothing but numbness and a memory of Elsie Smith. “No hard feelings.”
“Sure you’re all right?”
“Perfectly.”
“Well.” Reverton tucked away the pipe, shot out his muscular reliable hand. “Good-bye, Andy, and good luck.”
“Good-bye.”
The afternoon grew darker. Anderson sat at the desk while spots of light appeared in the offices visible through the window. At last he got up, put on his hat and raincoat and reached the door. There he switched on the light and stood looking at the desk still littered with papers, the green carpet, the hatstand; items in a dead life. He said aloud, not knowing what he meant. “It won’t do.” As he walked away from the office the telephone was ringing. It seemed somehow to be a comment on his career.
7
The sense of impending event, awful in its significance, disastrous in its effect, that hung over Anderson was accompanied by a strange numbness and emptiness. He was frightened at the thought of return to his fiat; the disordered presence, the empty drawer, the dirty sink, the Inspector’s presence hanging about the place like his cigar smoke, were things that moved through his numbness to cause irrational apprehension. It was with a sense that he had absolutely nothing to do but wait, combined with a contradictory feeling that some kind of action was demanded of him, that Anderson turned into the Stag after leaving the office. There, sitting in one of the partitioned alcoves, hat on back of head, sat Wyvern. He pointed a finger at Anderson.
“Bang bang bang, so they got you. The gipsy’s warning was right. Let me set them up. Cheers. Let me guess what my old pal Rev said to you. He said: Good-bye Andy, it’s been lovely knowing you; if I were a crocodile I’d weep; I’m sorry, but you’ve stopped believing in your work. Right?”
“Not far wrong.”
“I know I’m not far wrong. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But why did they fall for this St Vitus? Because of his old school tie? He’s no advertising man; he just stocks a nice line of bull. Anybody with half an eye can see that. Well, he’d better not come playing around in my department or he’l
l be out on his ear.”
“Another beer.”
“Thanks, mine’s a Bass. It’s a damned shame the way they’ve treated you. It is the boot, isn’t it? Rev said you were taking a long rest, and might not come back.”
“I shan’t come back.”
Wyvern held his long nose with two fingers. “When you smell stinking fish, there you smell advertising. That’s my view of the profession.”
“There’s nothing like that to it,” Anderson said wearily.
“They’ve got as much right to get rid of me as I’ve got to leave them. I don’t complain.”
“Then you bloody well should complain. When I think of those complacent bastards sitting there and then think of my old mother –” Wyvern tilted his glass and took a long drink. “Though from what they tell me you’ve been a bit off the beam lately. I mean old boy, magic calendars and letters flying about to the wrong people – they just won’t do.”
“Who told you?”
“My ear is to the ground,” Wyvern cupped one ear. “What are you going to do for that little girl?”
“Jean Lightley, do you mean?”
“Jean Lightley,” Wyvern made a noise. “I mean Molly.”
“I’d forgotten about Molly.”
“Ah, there you are. But she hasn’t forgotten you. She wants you, Andy.”
Anderson thought of the long chalky nose, the ride in the taxicab and the tears staining the little squares of colour. He Said flatly: “But I don’t want her.”
“Why did you make her think you did, then? Why did you sleep with her?” Anderson stared in astonishment at the face stuck forward indignantly into his own. “Hell, man, everybody knows it. You’ve only got to look at her and see the difference.”
“You can’t see a difference,” Anderson said mechanically. He was looking at a hat which lay on a table by one of the alcoves opposite. The hat was a bowler, rather old but quite respectable. A coat, beside it, was dark blue. The occupants of the alcove were invisible, but it seemed to Anderson that he knew both hat and coat.
“Shall I tell you the trouble with you? I feel all the sympathy in the world with you, the dirty way you’ve been treated, but shall I tell you the trouble with you? Self-centred, you’re too damned self-centred, Andy. Suppose we were all like that? Take me and my mother now, what do you think happened the other night? I was just going out—”
A hand, holding a glass of beer, was visible outside the partition. The beer was placed upon the table by the hat. Before the hand was withdrawn Anderson saw the thick, hairy wrist. At the same time he heard a laugh, light and boyish. The laugh, like the overcoat, belonged to Greatorex. Anderson stood up suddenly and knocked over the table. Beer flowed over the floor and on to Wyvern’s lap. “Sorry,” Anderson said. “Sorry.” He got out of the alcove and ran from the pub without looking into the alcove opposite.
8
Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road. Neon signs flashed at him in coloured lights messages which had a desperate depth of meaning. BOVRIL – BOVRIL – BOVRIL, said the lights in Trafalgar Square, where the fountains played excitingly their song of sexual aspiration. In Leicester Square the houses of pleasure invited him, Gable and Grable, Garbo and Harpo, Tracy and Lamarr. In Piccadilly Circus a sign said excitingly DRAIN IT TO THE LAST DROP. Ah, to belong again to the world of Bovril and Moussec, to know and love the realities of Gable and Grable, to be unconfused by the agonies of choice. Reality, said Dr Johnson, leaning forward and pinching one elegant thigh with his rude fingers, Here is reality, sir. Thus I confute you. Oh, Anderson cried, wandering among the civilization of the Corner House and the Milk Bar, jostling gum-chewing girls, passing the contraceptive doorways of chemists – oh to believe that such a visible world exists in its ideal simplicity. a world away from the disordered flat, the anonymous letter, the unseen figures in the alcove. He stopped outside a cinema which said MORE BRUTAL BENNY – MORE LUSCIOUS LUCY – FIERCER AND FRANKER THAN EVER. Lucy Lalange presented an expanse of thigh ten feet high. Brutal Benny Baily stood snarling by her side. Anderson passed over his pieces of silver and went inside.
Within the air was warm, delicious; he shivered with ecstasy in his thin raincoat; his shoes sunk in rubbery pile. From the walls, as an epauletted attendant conducted him towards Mecca, looked down benevolently the gods whose names were music, whose words were law, whose look was love – Astaire, Iturbi, Goodman, Dorsey, Bogart, Cagney, Scott and Ladd, Turner, Stanwyck, Lockwood, Bergman. Under different names from those given them at birth, serenely fixed in one attitude, displaying forever a smile or a fist, the gods watched the progress of this neophyte in the service of reality.
Upon the screen, when Anderson first saw it, enormous faces met, blonde and dark hair mingled, Benny Baily’s voice, right, warm, American, said to Lucy Lalange Everything is going to be all right. But everything was not all right. The music emphatically discordant, recorded the progress of Benny Baily, sitting grimly at the steering wheel of a long, lean car. Rain drove at the windscreen, scenery slipped by, Benny stared ahead, moving the steering wheel rapidly from time to time as the car shaved others by the width of a coat of paint. Round and round, ceaselessly, Benny’s jaw moved, masticating the juice of the healing gum. Now a barrier had been placed across the road to stop him – poof, he was through it without so much as a batted eyelid, his jaws moving a little faster to indicate strain. And now a rapid patter of shots came from behind bushes, the windscreen glass splintered. Benny drew a revolver from under his armpit. Crack, crack, crack through the car window and a villain, his face distorted ludicrously, staggered and fell. Round the hairpin bend – and far, far below, another car was visible racing along the ribbon of road. For a moment Benny stopped chewing.
But back in the city two men had come for Lucy Lalange. Flashing badges beneath their coat lapels, they pushed her into a car and drove away. Pug-nosed, cauliflower-eared, hard lipped, squint eyed, they were not the cops Lucy in her sophisticated innocence had taken them for, but gangsters. Out of the car and through a back door they hustled her (a quick cut revealed the front of the building as an exclusive night club), and into a room containing a safe, a settee, and a carpet. In this room a thinly moustached man sat picking his teeth.
Now Benny’s jaws were at work again. His long greyhound of a car nosed its way round bends, skidded with two wheels the edges of precipices, ate up the shiny road. Slowly, and then quickly, it gained on the other car, whose occupant, weak and shifty-eyed, looked nervously back at overtaking Nemesis.
Shifty turned the car into a side road and scrambled down a hillside, clinging to bushes with one hand, holding in the other a bag. But Benny is after him, now he is on him, he grasps Shifty round the neck. Shifty struggles, however, writhes and writhes, brings up his knee to a vital part. Benny staggers, falls to his knees, drops to the ground, and Shifty draws back his foot for a kick that will send Benny half a mile down the hillside to the rocks below. We see the look of pleasure on Shifty’s face, cut to the root in its heavy steel-tipped boot drawn back to kick, cut back to see dismay replace Shifty’s gloating expression. Benny has his teeth sunk deep into Shifty’s calf, Benny has him down, Benny gives Shifty’s neck one quick backhand butt with the heel of his hand. Shifty’s neck is broken, head hangs sideways, tongue drops out. He is no good any more. Benny pitches him down on to the rocks, looks in the bag, nods to show that the bonds or jewels are still there and says reflectively “Where’s my gun?” The audience laughs, Benny finds his gun and starts chewing again.
(Anderson became aware of a pressure against his left leg. Without looking away from the screen he pressed back.)
Back in the gangster’s office Lucy Lalange has been tied up. She is required to tell something or do something; it is not clear which. It is abundantly clear, however, that she refuses. Her head shakes from side to side, her great eyes roll about in terror. Pug-nose One, thin lipped, hits her across the face, quickly back and forth. The c
hief goes on picking his teeth. Pug-nose Two, who lights a gas ring, chuckling. Benny, looking “Aw chief, gimme a chance – why don’t you gimme a chance?”
(A hand found Anderson’s hand. Pointed nails dug into his palm.)
In police headquarters the superintendent puts down the telephone. A car is out, two cars, three cars, a whole fleet of cars screaming along the road. The gangster chief nods to Pug-nose Two, who lights a gas ring, chuckling. Benny, looking at the loot, has somehow discovered the gang chief’s complicity. Jaws moving faster than ever, he is on his way back. Quick cuts show Lucy’s rolling eyes, the police cars racing, Pug-nose Two heating curious instruments over the gas flame, Benny racing and chewing, the gangster chief picking his teeth.
(The hand moved up Anderson’s arm, nails tearing at the skin. A foot found his foot.)
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