A Voice Like Velvet
Martin Edwards
Donald Henderson
A sensational wartime crime novel about a BBC announcer who abuses his position to commit crimes against the rich and famous…By day Ernest Bisham is a velvet-voiced announcer for the BBC; the whole country recognises the sound of his meticulous pronouncements. By night, however, Mr Bisham is a cat-burglar, careless about his loot, but revelling in the danger and excitement of his running contest with Scotland Yard. But as he gets away with more and more daring escapades, there will come a time when he goes too far . . .When Donald Henderson’s Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation, his publishers were keen to capitalise on their author’s popularity, quickly reissuing The Announcer (originally published under his pen-name ‘D. H. Landels’) with the more alluring title A Voice Like Velvet. Despite a small edition of just 3,000 copies, it was his best reviewed work, as suspenseful and offbeat as his earlier success.This Detective Club classic includes an introduction by The Golden Age of Murder’s Martin Edwards, who explores Henderson’s own BBC career and the long established tradition of books about gentlemen crooks. The book also includes a rare Henderson short story, the chilling ‘The Alarm Bell’.
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
Copyright (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This Detective Story Club edition 2018
First published in Great Britain as The Announcer by Hurst and Blackett 1944
‘The Alarm Bell’ first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine by Mercury Publications, Inc. 1945
Introduction © Martin Edwards 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008265342
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008265359
Version: 2018-04-11
Dedication (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)
FOR
R. E. SIMONS
(In Rome)
AFFECTIONATELY
Although the descriptions of Broadcasting House are authentic and come from first-hand experience, all the characters in this book are entirely fictitious. No portrayal of any BBC announcer, or any other person, is in any way intended.
Table of Contents
Cover (#uf580aaa3-836c-50f7-8b4c-91da167dc26a)
Title Page (#u4864003d-a98c-5369-9c6a-beed5d877f32)
Copyright (#ue5ba73f1-baee-5065-a3d7-ca7e04ff51d8)
Dedication (#ud5179ea4-1767-53bb-8156-c7de18e96144)
Epigraph (#u35cb6bc1-3972-5819-9407-0c322e1bd690)
Introduction (#u99385ab7-7760-5a01-a004-d219377315a7)
Chapter I (#ub1d9a98b-9b5e-5c49-9607-4280b636d1f9)
Chapter II (#u08df3a84-c192-53bd-ac3d-f61d3781020e)
Chapter III (#ub2a4a5d1-264a-57fb-9a40-84b3e6a19a0d)
Chapter IV (#u6c82f009-37f4-572d-a3e5-e3be49845fba)
Chapter V (#uc4a05d28-08b6-5ad6-8960-0e89ea9c1dfe)
Chapter VI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter IX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter X (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXIII (#litres_trial_promo)
The Alarm Bell (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
The Detective Story Club (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)
A VOICE LIKE VELVET recounts the misadventures of Ernest Bisham, a middle-aged BBC radio announcer who just happens to be a highly accomplished cat-burglar. An unlikely premise? Perhaps, yet the author was careful to include a disclaimer making it clear that Ernest isn’t based on anyone in real life, let alone at the BBC. The story is skilfully written and quietly suspenseful. Like the rest of Henderson’s unusual, off-kilter crime fiction, however, it has suffered long and undeserved neglect.
So often, the fate of a novel—whatever its quality—depends upon how effectively it is first presented to the reading public. Hurst and Blackett published this book in October 1944 with the unexciting title The Announcer, and subtitled it simply ‘a novel’. Certainly, Henderson offers an intriguing and perceptive study in character, but it would surely have been wise to market the story as a crime novel—which, unquestionably, it is. Yet it seems to have been regarded as belonging to a different category from the author’s crime writing, and was therefore published under one of his pen-names, D. H. Landels, even though the previous year Constable had published Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper under Henderson’s own name, and that novel became the most successful of his short life.
When Random House published this book in the US in 1946, they changed the title to A Voice Like Velvet (a phrase which crops up in the narrative) and made no bones about the criminous nature of the story: ‘People who have a weakness for stories about gentlemen crooks—and judging by the popularity of Raffles, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, etc., there are thousands of them—will be delighted to make the acquaintance of Ernest Bisham.’ This time, the novel appeared under Henderson’s own name, and the blurb made the most of his earlier success: ‘Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation in mystery circles two years ago. His new book is the kind that English writers, for some reason, do much more expertly than our own. You will be seeing it on the screen before long; we hope it will not be too different from this fourteen-karat original.’ This was more like it in terms of exploiting the book’s commercial potential, and the critics were impressed. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, appreciated the way Henderson ‘combines a psychopathic study with [an] effective hare and hounds adventure’. But he was a writer forever dogged by bad luck. He died the very next year, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, no screen version of the novel was ever made. Not even (or perhaps especially not) by the BBC.
The crime story focusing on a criminal, rather than a detective, pre-dates Raffles, the ‘amateur cracksman’ created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung towards the end of the nineteenth century; in fact it pre-dates the detective fiction genre. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) was published almost half a century before Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which is commonly regarded as the first detective story. Through the years, the criminal protagonist has maintained an appeal to readers, as witness the success of Patricia Highsmith’s books about Tom Ripley and Jeff Lindsay’s about Dexter Morgan. (Incidentally, British readers unfamiliar with Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford may like to know that he was a swindler created by George Randolph Chester early in the twentieth century.)
So Henderson was working in a long-established tradition, but A Voice Like Velvet has a distinctive flavour. Ernest’s activities may remind us of Raffles, but Henderson explores his character’s state of mind in a way that Hornung never attempted. He also teases his readers, who cannot be sure what fate has in store for Ernest. As a crime writer, Henderson belongs to that loose group of authors who were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the work of Anthony Berkeley’s alter ego Francis Iles, author of two ground-breaking crime novels of the early Thirties, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. Richard Hull, Bruce Hamilton, C. E. Vulliamy and Henderson were among those whose mysteries, like Iles’ masterpieces, brimmed with irony and an awareness of the fallibility and limitations of conventional systems of justice.
It would be a step too far to describe Ernest as a self-portrait, but certainly he and Henderson had much in common, including a failed first marriage. Both men worked for the BBC, and A Voice Like Velvet wittily portrays everyday life at Broadcasting House. Before the Second World War, Henderson had spent years as an actor, as well as writing novels and plays, but success in all these fields proved elusive and he was often desperately short of cash. In his unpublished and incomplete memoir The Brink, rescued from oblivion by Paul T. Harding in 2010, Henderson said: ‘I offered my services to the BBC, feeling that my experience as a writer might be of some use in wartime … Knowing little or nothing of the BBC until this date, I was a bit surprised … to be offered a technical job in no way suited to a writer … I was an assistant in a department … called the Recorded Programmes Department, and my duties were twofold; I had to put on gramophone records whenever told to do so, by day or by night—and I had to give “ten second cues”, in studios, when various programmes were to be recorded for transmission at later dates … The most restful of the transmissions I was called upon to do was undoubtedly The Morning Service, as this only involved one disc lasting the conventional three minutes. There was always a soothing hymn.’
Although Henderson resented the BBC’s bureaucracy, the salary compensated for the need to battle with red tape. After years of poverty and struggle, a steady job ‘meant marriage and starting a home at last … As I was getting on for forty, I got more money than much cleverer people, simply and solely because they were younger.’ It was while Henderson was at the BBC that Constable accepted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and this boosted his confidence. He proceeded to write a light comedy called A Man of Character, and then wrote this book.
In The Brink, he said: ‘By the time I was working on [A Voice Like Velvet] I had been appointed an “assistant” in the Home News Talks Department … Here I was in a splendid position to study “announcers”, for they would come into the News Room—an enormous, noisy place filled with erudite and striking literary personalities—a quarter of an hour or so before each news bulletin was due to be read to the waiting world.’
For Henderson, Broadcasting House had ‘none of the glamour or romance of the theatre. There seems to me to be a continual safety-first feeling in the air.’ So far as the BBC was concerned, he was an outsider. A rather different picture of life in Portland Place is presented in Death at Broadcasting House, published in 1934 by Val Gielgud and (under the pen-name Holt Marvell) Eric Maschwitz, both of whom were senior and experienced Corporation men. Their novel, an entertaining if relatively orthodox whodunit, proved highly successful and was filmed, with Gielgud himself playing one of the suspects.
Restless by nature, Henderson wasn’t suited to conventional working life. He moved to the Features & Drama Department, concentrating on the former rather than the latter. However, curiosity was apt to get the better of him. On one occasion, he was sent ‘to visit a factory on the outskirts of London where they were making Rose Hip Syrup, as well as extracting certain properties from the glands of animals. Both the rose hips and the glands appeared to be stacked overnight in a vast refrigerator thick with artificial snow. I was so absorbed by this that I stayed in it far too long and nearly caught pneumonia.’
As his personal finances improved, Henderson felt he could afford to resign from the BBC staff. However, he continued to work for the Corporation on a freelance basis, which ‘seemed more fitting for a writer, rather than continuing on the inside, posing as a producer’. He wrote occasional radio plays for the BBC, including The Trial of Lizzie Borden which, like several passing references in A Voice Like Velvet, illustrates his long-term interest in ‘true crime’. He shared this fascination with the detective novelist John Dickson Carr, who also worked for the BBC during the Second World War, and who encouraged Henderson to tackle the story of Borden, sensationally acquitted in 1892 of murdering her parents with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden was first broadcast in July 1945, and a Radio Times article publicising the play noted that Henderson had spent seven months working as a scriptwriter on Front Line Family, ‘the famous daily serial which BBC listeners overseas have been hearing throughout the war’. Paul Harding’s researches in the BBC archives reveal that on one occasion, Henderson was called upon to write a special episode at a few minutes’ notice. He completed the script within a couple of hours, earning praise from the BBC and an enhanced fee of twelve guineas. Front Line Family, later known as The Robinson Family, was the BBC’s first venture into soap opera—much to the consternation of those, like Val Gielgud, who feared that it would lead to creeping Americanisation of the Corporation’s output—and was a forerunner of Mrs Dale’s Diary and The Archers. Henderson’s predecessors as writers on the series included Alan Melville, who had published a handful of lively detective novels in the Thirties and later became a popular broadcaster, and Ted Willis, who went on to earn fame as the creator of Dixon of Dock Green, and ultimately received a life peerage. Like them, Henderson had a talent to entertain, but sadly enjoyed much worse fortune.
In 1945, Henderson discussed with Gielgud and Michael Sadleir the possibility of adapting Sadleir’s popular novel Fanny by Gaslight for radio, but the project fizzled out, as did a proposal to write a light-hearted radio thriller in six parts called The Haunted Wireless. He considered that ‘book writing is thoroughly odd’, but kept working on novels and also adapted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper for the stage. Tragically, he died of lung cancer when he was only 41 years old, at a time when his work was finally beginning to achieve recognition after years of setbacks. A Voice Like Velvet was, he said sadly, ‘perhaps the best reviewed of all my books, [but it] was only allowed one edition of three thousand copies.’ Among those who heaped praise on it in Britain was the influential critic James Agate, whose laudatory notice in the Daily Express was headed: ‘Ah, just the sort of book I like.’
Thanks to the Detective Story Club, this highly readable tale of a scoundrelly BBC presenter can finally enjoy the new lease of life it has merited for many years.
MARTIN EDWARDS
February 2018
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
CHAPTER I (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)
MR ERNEST BISHAM kept as still as possible behind the green velvet curtains and listened to a clock ticking. Suddenly he slipped from behind the curtains and made for the door. He went unchallenged along a corridor and opened the first door he came to. Nobody was in it, it was a bedroom. He went to a window and softly opened it. A few minutes later he was hurrying along a side street and panting slightly. He was not so young as he had been, and he was not so slim as hitherto.
He couldn’t find a taxi, so he got a bus and reached Waterloo Station a little before eleven. Comfortably, he caught the eleven-five for Woking and sat in a first-class carriage, lighting a cigar, and knowing: ‘That porter recognized me again—he knows I’m Ernest Bisham, the Announcer!’ He still got a kick out of it, in spite of much recent mental research. Then he sat back and relaxed, thinking: ‘I promised myself I would never do it again. But I’ve failed myself again. It’s worse than smoking.’ He made a new promise to himself not to do it again, he really would get caught one day, and think of his position now! But he recognized that it meant giving up the biggest thrill of his life, not excluding that first time he had sat at the microphone and read: ‘And this is Ernest Bisham reading it.’ Deep in his overcoat pocket his fingers touched something hard.
Mr Bisham had recently arrived at one of those stages any intellectual man can arrive at during middle life, if he is honest: which stage was to take a day off and have a serious look at himself. So he spent a rather windy March day looking at himself, and in the evening asked Mrs Bisham to have a look at him too. Unfortunately, the evening was interrupted by the arrival of Mr Bisham’s sister. Bess Bisham had the knack of interrupting things. She always brought a bit of an atmosphere with her and somehow or other induced a pause. Even before her brother had become the famous announcer, Bess had possessed a tremendous sort of family consciousness and now it seemed ideal for her to go about saying her brother was, ‘the BBC announcer, you know’. But she was a good sort, and she made a good friend if anyone took the trouble to be patient with her and not laugh at her war efforts.
Mrs Bisham went in for a good deal of sewing in wartime, and she strained her eyes and her pink lips at it, looking genial and concentrative at the same time, with three little lines over the bridge of her large nose. She had a beautiful petal-like skin, it was really the skin of a young girl. Yet she was on the hefty side, in an elegant kind of way. She was called Marjorie, with a j, not a g, and she spent her time saying she must not get snobbish, in spite of the rather snobbish district, and in spite of the determination of the public that announcers must become, and remain, the very hallmark of English respectability. This was all very fine, in its way, but the public might surely be entitled to like its announcers human, in addition? They were human beings, weren’t they? And she had quite a dread of Ernest becoming pompous and inhuman. He was already a borderline case. But both Marjorie and Bess knew that the Bisham family had ‘arrived’ when Ernest came home one night a year or two before and said, as he threw his hat on the hall table: ‘Thank God—they’re transferring me from the Overseas Service! I’m going to be at Broadcasting House! You’ll hear my name on the air!’ As a matter of fact, it was the day Rommel had used up all his best cards and the war, for us, seemed suddenly to have reached a happier turning point.
CHAPTER II (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)
HIS new duties were more of a relief than an excitement to Ernest. It was a long time yet from the advent of the General Forces Programme and a long time before he was to say it was the So and So News and it was ‘read by Ernest Bisham’. He liked broadcasting, and he knew quite a lot about it; the public knew, or thought it knew, all about the wonderfully glamorous life of an actor: but if it had ever been an actor it would know something about such snags as being out of work, or of being in a three years’ run with matinees three times a week. But to Bess and Marjorie, who thought the radio full of glamour and romance—which it was, of course—it was as if Ernest had been made Lord Privy Seal. They joined hands and did an excited and rather ungainly sort of dance in the lounge, tilting over a small Chinese table with the silver cigarette-box on it, and only stopping because one of the servants happened to come in. You could not dance with BBC announcers in front of the servants, however closely connected. As the particular servant said (she was sacked for it later, when it came out): ‘Blimey, it’s like dancing with God!’ She was sacked because of the religious implications, quite apart from anything else that might be read into it. Bess advising Marjorie: ‘You owe it to Ernest to live very differently now, dear. And what about a bigger house?’
Ernest, however, had a particular affection for Tredgarth, The Ridgeway, Horsell, Woking. He often pleased Marjorie very much by saying he had never been happy anywhere else, and that Tredgarth, in spite of its frightful name, had brought him a happiness he had never known before.
‘And by that, of course, I mean you have brought it, Marjorie! For it was your house!’
Ernest paid compliments in rather a stately manner. He was a bit ponderous, rather as if he was reading it out to fifteen millions at six o’clock, or to twenty millions at nine o’clock. But although he said this and laughed, she usually blushed, for he was always sincere.
‘It’s nice of you to say so, Ernest.’
‘I mean it.’
‘I know you do.’
They had the habit of linking arms and wandering around the house or the garden. There were little stone toadstools, and carved garden imps called Rufus and Redbreast. A small, pale boy, in stone, called ‘Norman’ in gilt lettering, was standing beatifically under a fine tree with his hands extended as if measuring the air. There was a little garden shed for Shorter, the gardener, to have tea in. Being a BBC official, the question of alcohol, for Ernest Bisham, needed intensely delicate thought, yet it seemed reasonable to fill Tredgarth cellars as full as possible in case of weekend guests. They were not obliged to drink. There was always a pin of Best Bitter, and a thinning shelf of gin, whisky, brandy, port and sherry. The cigar department was so depleted that there remained only a box of a hundred Coronas from Throgmorton Street, and two boxes of fifty from Piccadilly. The garden was full of leeks and sprouts and celery dug into trenches, though in another part there were delphiniums, forget-me-nots, fuchsia and dahlias. Marjorie and Ernest were both rather vague about gardens and staff arrangements, leaving most of it to Bess, who more or less lived there with them. Bess disappeared at long intervals, but always turned up, usually in the morning after a tinny toll call which asked: ‘I’m in Folkestone, is the bath water hot? I heard you at eight, Ernest, you sounded rather hoarse.’ Within two hours she would arrive in very large boots and a tin helmet and, ‘Oh, a hundred Churchman Number One, for Ernest, canteen prices—or are you saving your voice?’
Generally speaking, it was calmer when Bess was away, for the servants didn’t worry about anything, least of all work, and when she came back, they did, and it was never long before one of them was being threatened with the sack, Marjorie privately protesting: ‘Please, Bess, don’t offend them, we only get servants at all because Ernest happens to be Ernest Bisham, the announcer. And even under these circumstances the servant problem is becoming increasingly difficult.’ But Bess said that no young person ought to take a servant’s job in these days unless they were pregnant. She saw women down coal mines, even, and applauded the Russian women fighting at the front. ‘Why don’t you look for an elderly couple? That’s all you need for this place.’
At dinner, Bess often looked quite feminine, especially after her masculine and muddy arrival as an ATS sergeant. Her grey hair was a bit short, but that was regulations; she was fond of saying that her hair had at one time reached down to an unmentionable part of her back, but even now she went in for oddly feminine blouses with little tassels down the front. If there were guests to sherry or ‘warish’ dinner, she behaved formally and discussed the War Cabinet. If there weren’t, the subjects she chose depended on whether Ernest was at home or at the BBC. If he was at his place at the head of the table, she discussed what she would like to do with one or two of the other announcers; if she was alone with Marjorie, she never failed to lower her voice and say: ‘Well, my dear—is it a success?’ For Bess had been more or less the cause of the marriage, or at any rate the instrument of it, and for a time there did seem to be a doubt of its success. But that applied to the early stages of any marriage, didn’t it? Was it a success now? Marjorie was rather difficult to draw out. It was often difficult to know if she was merely reserved, or somewhat evasive.
Marjorie Bisham knew quite well what it was that Bess wanted to know. Bess had the forgivable curiosity possessed by some spinsters of her age. And if she sometimes felt a small irritation over Bess, she didn’t remember it for long and had developed quite a deep affection for her. She often felt sorry that Bess had never married, and now never would, and she once told Ernest she thought Bess was happier in her present state; Bess made a sort of profession of being a snob. ‘She enjoys the reflected glory you bring her, Ernest! You must never let her down,’ she teased him. But it didn’t matter being a snob if you enjoyed it and were one for a particular reason. She and Ernest both had to be rather snobbish now and then, even if they were only pretending. At times perhaps they did really feel above other people. Then, it was awful to catch yourself at it. Everyone lived in a particular little world—didn’t they?—within the outer world, and they had to live according to those particular standards. The alternative was to get out and live in another one. Mrs Bisham now knew that this particular world was one which she had chosen deliberately—having got out of another which hadn’t fitted her at all. She had confided the details to Bess just before she’d decided to marry Ernest. And perhaps because Ernest, too, had been living in a world which hadn’t suited him at all, the new world he found with Marjorie succeeded instantly—in the outward and practical sense.
In the emotional sense, however, as Bess suspected, it had not succeeded at all. Ernest and Marjorie had married without really being in love with each other at all. It was one of those practical and smiling marriages and there evidently weren’t going to be any children. Marjorie got sad-eyed and went for long walks in a large white mackintosh, returning to have tea by herself in her room. Bess had to have tea with Ernest in the drawing-room, when she would be at leisure to demand what on earth was the matter with him. Sometimes, even, guests would arrive, having been invited by Marjorie herself, but who now genuinely pleaded a headache. The elderly Wintles might come, bringing their brownish son called Jonas, who was said to have already had a tragic life, though not yet twenty-one, and, with his dead brothers, had been amongst the First of the Few. Poor Jonas seemed to admire Ernest, in a distant sort of way, and was always saying he was ‘browned off’ about this or that. He seemed to admire Marjorie, in a poodle-like way, and when she wasn’t on view he would declare to Bess he was ‘utterly browned off to hear it. Can I do anything, Miss Bisham?’ But there seemed to be nothing he could do, or anyone else.
There was one shadowy evening over muffins, when just such a situation caught her once more. Marjorie had pleaded a headache, though refusing a doctor, and the guests this time were a bunch of rather nice people called the de Freeces, three rather tall cousins, or some such relationship, who spent the days nodding their greying heads and saying that the war would first of all be over by the spring, and then by the summer, and then by the coming Christmas. Then they would have to start all over again from scratch. They came on this occasion because Marjorie wanted to go and do some local part-time work in a new factory. And they rang the rusty bell sharp at four, all ready to nod their heads and say it was all arranged about the factory, it was nuts, and it was two shillings an hour if it was Sundays. But of course Mrs Ernest Bisham wouldn’t want to do it for the money, they knew that, dear. Famous announcers must be very rich, and hadn’t Mrs Bisham a little money of her own, didn’t they say? And no doubt he had? Anyhow, they had such a charming house, all wandery and sort of part of the scenery, like a gingerbread cake. They arrived full of everything, and were ‘mortified’ to hear that Mrs Bisham was ‘indisposed’, making her sound like a famous actress who has really had a row with the leading man, except, of course, that in this case the leading man was far too charming. His manners were enchanting and it was such a thrill seeing the actual person who read the news over your wireless. It was fascinating.
But Bess wasn’t at all fascinated; at least, not when the de Freeces had twittered away again.
She said, about Marjorie:
‘I’m beginning to wonder why you married her! It surely wasn’t because I suggested it?’ Though if it had been a glaring success, she would have claimed this at once. ‘Much better if you’d stayed as you were, Ernest. Much better.’ She sat with a leg thrown over a bony knee balancing a Coalport teacup. Her stockings never fitted her thin legs very tightly, and her spoon never fitted the Coalport saucer very well, because of the depth of curve there.
Ernest, looking rather fat in a blue pin-stripe, stood by the high brick mantelpiece, staring with some embarrassment down at the log fire. He told her he wished she’d mind her own business and concentrate on a marriage of her own. He didn’t intend to hurt her; it was just a brotherly remark. She replied quite brightly that he couldn’t hurt her feelings like that; he knew quite well who she would have married if she’d had the chance, but men had never looked at her ‘like that’, least of all him, and so that was that. Then she said she really liked Marjorie, and she declared that Marjorie was not the ‘type’ to shut herself up in her room like this, she was too kindly. It meant that Marjorie was really becoming ill. You could be emotionally ill as well as merely having the measles. ‘But I suppose men can’t be expected to realize that! I like Marjorie much better than I thought I did. She’s all right. And you started off all right—what’s gone wrong? The first gloss has worn off, I suppose! Well, you’re very stupid. I hope you’re not behaving as if either of you is young? She is just right for you if only you give her a chance, Ernest, and handle her properly. It’s your fault if you’re pulling in different ways. Remember, she’s been married before. She knows something about men.’
‘I’ve been married before too,’ he remarked sombrely.
‘I should think the least said about that the better! What I’m trying to say is, if you wanted to play the bachelor, why didn’t you stay one? You’re still much too married to your radio, I suppose that’s it. All this success has gone to your head. You can’t treat Marjorie like that and expect to get away with it. She doesn’t look like a girl, but at heart she is one. Treat her like one.’ She stared across at him.
He was large and he was certainly getting rather plump. His shoulders were extremely large. When he wandered to the piano and played some Chopin his backview looked massive and pompous. But he looked distinguished. His greying hair did.
‘I know you always pretend to think I’m a bore,’ she called through the music. ‘But you do listen to me, even if you pretend you don’t. Why don’t you buy her a dog?’
The music stopped.
His large head turned slowly and he was grinning.
‘Buy her a dog?’ he exclaimed, amused.
She had the strange notion that now he was in profile he looked sleek and slim. The shadows, of course. He would make a magnificent cat burglar!
A quaint litle shudder ran down her spine. Imagine a scandal like that! Their family! And an important man like Ernest!
‘You’re getting inhuman and pompous,’ she heard herself exclaiming. ‘We all are, perhaps. We’re so stuck up in our little world here. There’s danger in it and it’s time we grew out of it. So many important things are happening everywhere.’ She heard herself talking about China and Russia, and the new world after the war, and saying how could it be a better world unless individuals, actual individuals, started to improve themselves, and to rid themselves of their own little weaknesses? She said she was just as guilty as anybody else.
But he was walking up and down with his cup and a piece of ginger cake and roaring with laughter about the idea of buying his wife a dog.
‘I meant a puppy, of course,’ she said crossly.
He suddenly put down his cup and his cake.
‘She knows she can have everything she likes,’ he said a little sharply, and left the room. He didn’t bang the door. He seemed to slide through doors.
His movements were oddly stealthy, weren’t they, for so large a man. Yet, for instance, you heard of huge men who could dance delightfully, whereas little men fell upon you like a ton of bricks. She supposed he had learned it in the studios. He would often talk about how you could leave the studio while somebody else was still on the air. He was often interesting about it at dinner. He would speak about ‘suspended microphones’ instead of ‘table’ ones. It was most interesting.
And then, one Saturday, he did buy Marjorie a puppy.
CHAPTER III (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)
THE moment reminded Marjorie of an occasion when she was very little. Her father had bought her a puppy in almost identical circumstances. Here was new proof that the history of our lives repeated itself. She hadn’t got on with her father, whose rather new title had gone to his head, and somebody had told him that the only way to win her love back was to buy her a pony or a puppy. As she already had two ponies, he bought her a puppy, and she felt at once that if he was capable of buying a little girl a puppy—somebody else had given her the ponies—he couldn’t be as bad as the neighbours said his title indicated. And it was only a knighthood anyway. She hugged him and pretended to herself that she didn’t a bit mind his full lips, and she pretended it was merely childish to think that love had anything to do with the shape of the mouth. She forced herself to kiss his mouth, and when his lips felt dry and hot and full against hers, she pretended it was only because he was old now that she didn’t like the feel of him. He dribbled, but that didn’t matter at all, he had bought her a Cocker spaniel, black. It was sweet. It writhed round, and yards of red tongue hung out, and shining white teeth flashed in the firelight. And although quite soon it was dead, and its donor too—they both met with a fatal accident in the farmyard via a new bull—the thought of them both returned, as such thoughts would.
Marjorie had been brought up in the country kind of way, with plenty of money—or, rather, no awareness of it at all as a subject—and with all the familiar country attributes such as hunting, or following the hunt in cars, and shooting pheasants and hares, and playing tennis with drearies, and motoring out to some glamorous country hotel in the hopes of meeting a rich man—Daddy said always marry someone who was rich—who hadn’t got full, dry lips. Nearly all of them had, with tedious habits to match. There was something so dull about most men. You didn’t seem to meet one in ten who was worth talking to, and there was said to be a statistical shortage of men in any case, due to the Great War. So as for meeting one in a hundred who was worth real consideration? Their conversation was one long drawl, or else it was hearty and alcoholic fatuity. Was it because they were English? Suddenly it dawned on her that she was already bitter. Yet her function as a woman had somehow to be fulfilled. She was aware that she wanted to have children. She had never known her mother, who had died of Bright’s Disease when she was a very small child, and any supplementary guidance seemed persistently lacking. She was taught by strange governesses, none seeming to have the maternal touch, and she lived through one or two little country schools in a lost and dreamlike fashion. She needed individual attention, and somehow never got it. It was probably her own fault, she often thought. As for her father, he was a queerly impersonal man, busy at the life of village squire, without managing to impress very much. When the new bull trod on the spaniel and got her father against the wall, he was ill for quite a long time with his fractured pelvis. Then, certainly, he did seem to become aware of his daughter, and he died wondering why he hadn’t married again, if only to give her some brothers and sisters, and a set of uncles and aunts.
Not a month after his funeral, Marjorie rather desperately lost her head and married the only possible man within range. He was called, ridiculously, Captain Bud. To her secret shame, she was to be called Mrs Bud. But she expected to lose herself in motherhood. Captain Bud hadn’t a penny, but he proceeded to get through most of hers in no time. He was a dreadful little man, and she knew it, but she was terrified of being homeless after being so safe. Her home had had to go to some unknown cousin under the entailed will, and to escape to London with Captain Bud, and to be secretly married there, seemed the only reasonable solution to her problem, and it passed for romance.
Captain Bud had lived down the lane in a council cottage. He had a certain way with him, and he had dandruff on his coat collar. He was short, and people cattily said he would need a pair of stilts to marry Marjorie in. He was in an insurance house and didn’t say much about his title of captain. He was fifty-two. Marjorie had the notion that young men were bores, lots of girls didn’t like men of their own age, and she met Captain Bud at a hunt ball in Maidstone. Captain Bud, though quite properly introduced through suitable friends, had arrived without his white gloves, if, indeed, he possessed any, and she often felt that she married him solely because of this and the crumpled look of his tails. Everyone present treated him like dirt, and pointed to his dandruff in a Countyish manner, and although she wanted to treat him like dirt, something seemingly pathetic in his pasty face made her feel fatally sorry for him. She defied everybody by dancing with him, and afterwards lost her party and let him motor her to Tonbridge to a teabarn, where there was cream and night dancing. To her astonishment she noticed herself seeing him to his council cottage, which was an inverted procedure for a man and a woman, surely, and she heard herself agreeing to do it again on the morrow. When he kissed her, she was quite surprised to find he was good at it and his lips were quite intriguing. In about a fortnight she was telling herself she could ‘change him’, and at any rate she could brush his coat collar for him and stop people talking about his dandruff. He was decidedly a bit short for her, but it was all right, and she suddenly thought they were made for each other, it was perfect nonsense saying you had to marry somebody of your own age and your own class. She asked many of her Kent friends what they thought, but when they seemed rather quiet she put it down to envy. Captain Bud moved out of his council cottage and they rented a thin, tall house in Belgrave Square. The captain declared it was the grandest day of his pretty variable life, and he proceeded to hit the high spots in no uncertain manner.
Thinking of him now, when she had to—for memories chose the queerest times to thrust themselves upon one—she often thought what a contrast there was between Mr Bisham and Captain Bud.
Ernest always inspired her and made her feel conscious of her increasing position in society. Bud had always made her feel conscious of having married beneath her, which was a horrible thing to think, let alone feel. She would think: ‘Now I know I’m a born snob,’ and she would turn from Bud in disgust. He was called Fred.
Fred Bud liked pubs. He liked to totter out of one and into another, and he liked to know the Christian names of the owners. He liked to know the Christian names of most of the customers too, and he liked saying, ‘What’ll y’have?’ to all and sundry, though, if any of them failed to return in kind he was singularly quick on the uptake.
In a few short months Marjorie was filled with a kind of horror at herself for having even contemplated him.
And she fled.
And she very soon found that the position of a young girl who is stupid enough to flee even from Satan himself, unless it is legal, is a very acute one. As her solicitor told her, she should have come to him first. She should have come to him on the quiet, and together they would have set a trap to catch Captain Bud when he was up to one of his larks, which were inevitably a neat fusion of alcohol and other women. As things were, the captain, now on the alert, was also now the innocent party, in the eyes of the world, and he could rush round to all his friends and say his wife had run out on him after only a few months, and that he could but conclude there was a man involved somewhere. This he did, adding that he had spoilt her from the word Go, and been sorry for her, but that now he had no option but to divorce her for desertion whether he managed to catch the co-respondent or not. He proceeded to write her two carefully worded letters asking her to return to him. But, as she knew, and her solicitor friend knew, Bud knew quite well she would be too proud to do this even if she wanted to. Marjorie made another mistake in being too thoroughly embarrassed to tell her solicitor everything, but she just couldn’t, he was an old family friend of her father’s. Had she done so, she might have got a divorce from Bud, with a bit of luck and a bit of added scandal. But she dodged this and the next proceeding was to wait three years until Bud brought his desertion case. As she heard from various sources, Bud spent the interim using such of her money as he controlled, and in telling his friends: ‘Damn nuisance this three years wait, old man, but it’s useless to expect any new evidence. I thought there was a man, but I doubt it now. Dear old Marjorie had absolutely no sex appeal, absolutely none at all.’
Marjorie’s solicitor had side whiskers. He was of the old school of thought, as the saying went, and although his stern countenance had been shocked out of its composure by one or two tasty cases, his mind had never really entered the wild arena which made up the present decade. Even when the blitz shattered his famous office chandelier, under which, it was said, Oscar Wilde had once passed—though on his way to a more go-ahead solicitor—the dignity of the premises remained. Pictures of other side-whiskered solicitors still lined the cracked walls, and the frosted glass on the doors still bore the names of the titled partners. Marjorie’s solicitor still sat in his accustomed swivel chair with the grey stuffing coming out of it, surrounded by the dust of centuries, jewels from the chandelier, bits of glass and a shattered book-shelf. And he sounded very pained to have to tell Marjorie that her case was ‘over yesterday. You’re a divorced woman, my dear,’ he said throatily. He still thought it was a dreadful thing to be, even though she was entirely innocent and had never done anything in her life more abandoned than have three brown sherries. To Marjorie, however, the news came like the announcement of a school whole holiday. She thought at once and, in fact, exclaimed: ‘I’m a free woman again, then! It’s all over and I’m free! It’s all been a sordid and dreadful dream!’ Her strange and immediate impulse was to dash to the nearest Lyons and have a cup of tea in the friendly din there. But she had to be polite and stay until her solicitor had made a pained and stately speech.
‘My dear child, you mustn’t mind my offering you a little advice. I’m sure this unhappy business will be an object lesson to you. Men are very unscrupulous, and this little … amateur gentleman belongs to a very common kind. I do most sincerely hope you will treat me as a friend, more of a friend, after this … distressing incident—if you can call a thing that has gone on for four years an incident? Please don’t go hotheadedly into a marriage again without asking my advice, my dear! I’m old enough to be your grandfather, and I was a friend of your father’s. And remember, you must marry some money next time. This man Bud has cost you most of your inheritance.’
This part of the sorry business pained him even more than the other part, and Marjorie noticed he could hardly bring himself to speak of it. But in the end it was just no good speaking of it, he said; they must speak of the present, and of course the future, not the past. The past was dead. When she thought of the past, she must think only of the happier memories, as we all had to. It was awful thinking about our mistakes. There was her father to think of, he pointed out, even though it was not very nice to think of that bull; he had always distrusted Shorthorns. She must not remember her tears. After that, he rang for some coffee, only to be told that all the firm’s cups had been broken by blast, and that the firemen had sprayed their specially imported coffee with some eighty odd gallons of dirty river water. It was still all over the general office floor. His elderly clerk looked rather like a Walt Disney spaniel which had just picked itself up after falling nine hundred feet down a lift shaft. He was permanently pale and panting. Marjorie’s solicitor dismissed him courteously and said it was no fault of his about the cups or the coffee.
‘No, Sir Tom,’ the old man quivered, pleased, and he shambled out with his trousers hanging.
‘Well, I’ll go,’ Marjorie said, still thinking of the friendly din in Lyons teashops. ‘And I can’t thank you nearly enough for … well, everything.’ She really meant for not charging her very much, but it was difficult to say that.
On the way out, he asked her what her plans were. When she sounded vague, he suggested that she should put the little money remaining into a bit of property, such as a new house. He said she wasn’t getting any younger, if he might say so, and the great thing was to have a roof over her head. And she had to live somewhere. He said why didn’t she live where he did, amongst her own kind? He lived near Woking, in Surrey, and there was golf and the pine trees were very healthy. He and his wife would help her make some friends. ‘And it’s near to London. But you’re fond of London, perhaps, and want to live there?’
‘No,’ she hesitated. ‘There’s the club. And I like theatres. But I think I’m used to the country.’
Pleased, he said the country was the best idea. Why didn’t she come down for a weekend and have a look round? She thought, well, he can’t be too old fashioned, or he’d frown at a divorced woman! Perhaps people weren’t ever what they seemed? Perhaps they just had to pretend? And times really had changed, hadn’t they? It really wasn’t quite so monstrous for a woman to have been divorced—even if she was guilty? And she wasn’t guilty. She was just silly.
In any case, if people were still so stupid as to mind if somebody had played one or two bad cards in their day, well, good luck to them.
She suddenly saw herself as a kind of Woking Merry Widow!
Yes, it would be rather amusing to buy a house down there, and make people wonder about her. She would make a few intimate friends, no doubt, and the rest could wonder about her to their hearts’ content. She would do the garden with a sad expression in a brown, floppy hat. She would do any war work that cropped up. Nobody would guess her advanced age, and people would wonder why on earth she hadn’t been called up; they’d probably put it down to her kidneys. If life was to be fun, you had to make it so; you had to create some situation whereby Life was inclined to have a go at you. It could surprise you. If you felt secretly lonely and often miserable, nobody need guess it. And who knew what might not happen?
In a burst of excitement she bought Tredgarth, a white mackintosh, a lawn-mower—and a radio. Before the furniture arrived she turned on the radio in the empty hall and tuned in to the Overseas Service. A resonant and attractive masculine voice said, quite untruthfully, that she had just been listening to excerpts from ‘Peer Gynt’.
CHAPTER IV (#ulink_7920e7ae-1d2b-5a6f-8a44-8feeffa86b20)
BRIEF but repeated mental excursions into the past being the hobby and the habit of the many, Mr Bisham often forgave himself for indulging it. He was also of the variety who found singular fascination in revisiting scenes from his past, if circumstances made it reasonably easy and attractive. If he passed through Putney, his head always turned towards a particular road and a big house on the far corner. One day, he realized, he might be revisiting the house where he lived now, a solitary figure in a brown overcoat and long white beard, staring sadly at the past which was still safely Now. Mr Bisham liked to dream, and he was decidedly introspective. He never knew whether it was a good habit or a bad one. Perhaps, like most habits, it had its good and bad points. The subconscious mind made a fascinating study, didn’t it? The mind had such depths, you could explore and explore, and it didn’t matter much where you were or what you were doing. You could watch yourself. He was standing in his bedroom-cum-study upstairs at Tredgarth now, watching himself as he had been standing behind those strange velvet curtains in a strange house. There he had stood, with his heart thumping as it always did, and his senses aware of the exotic. As a matter of fact, under the tension, he had thought of quite ridiculous things, such as liking Saturday nights, and hating rugger, but liking soccer and his prep school. It was odd. And now, standing in his bedroom, and looking at the necklace in his hands, instead of concentrating on the rare beauty of it, and regretting that he dare not give it to Marjorie for their wedding anniversary, or for her birthday, or for Christmas, or for any other time, he suddenly started thinking about the two and sixpenny necklace he had given to Celia that time, and for just the same kind of reason. Locked up in their flat, he had had emeralds and turquoise brooches and sapphire pins by the dozen; but they were dynamite. He thought now, as he had often thought then: ‘She doesn’t know, and she must never know.’ And as he made no money out of it, he had regretted not being able to buy a safe. Yet, he thought now, was there any reason why he shouldn’t buy a safe now? He was Ernest Bisham, the famous announcer, and surely it would not be odd for Ernest Bisham to own a safe? One of his most distinguished colleagues owned a fruit farm! That was no more curious than a safe? Besides, he surely owed it to Marjorie? She must never be hurt. He owed it to Bess, and she must never be hurt. Poor old Bess, who believed in him so, but who didn’t really know him at all. Marjorie didn’t know him either. How could she? A woman had to know all about a man—or feel that she knew all about him. And he well knew that it was because she didn’t feel it that things were not quite right between them.
But where this was true of Marjorie, it was not true of Celia. Celia had no brains, and very little perception. She was just a sex machine. She would probably have been thrilled if she’d ever tumbled upon the truth about him! She adored the pictures! Indeed, it might have saved them! But, if Marjorie ever found out? He often imagined her horrified expression, with Bess, haggard, in the background. Old Marjorie would cry: ‘Whatever do you do it for, Ernest?’ He would smile and say regretfully: ‘I can tell you why I started it, Marjorie! And perhaps the reason is still the same! I wanted to!’ ‘Wanted to!’ they would cry in horror. Then he might say there had never been any money in it, but it had saved him a few times, financially, in a small and sordid way. Now, he might say, he did it partly because he found it irresistible, and partly because in his present exalted position the thrill was so intense through the risk being so much greater; moreover, opportunities for meeting the wealthy had never been quite so splendid before he had become an announcer. He now met rich eccentrics, and rich widows—well, too often. And some of them were very talkative. This did not make it particularly easy, but it made it both attractive and possible.
He stood looking at the proceeds of his latest robbery, and thought how nice his wife would look in some of it. How thrilling it would be to see her face light up if he gave her the pearl necklace that might have cost him so dear. There was something to solve here, it was galling. This necklace would have been wasted on Celia. But Marjorie would be a perfect setting for it. She had height, and grace, and she had a really lovely throat.
Hearing someone moving in the house, he put the valuables back in a copy of the Sunday Times and locked it away in a deep drawer in his desk. He kept thinking how much he would like to give Marjorie the necklace. But it would be the act of a lunatic. The papers were full of it, not forgetting photographs. The worst must never happen, and he felt so sure it never would, providing he used his brains. Fate didn’t suffer fools, and he had always conceded that. He thought of Marjorie when he had given her the puppy. He had suddenly seen that there could easily be love between them. Imagine giving her the product of the adventures that ran the risk of costing them both so dear! When he gave her the puppy, she had looked up with such a lovely expression, like an excited child. She was sensitive.
Locking the drawer and putting the key in his pocket, he sat down in his armchair and idly took up the newspaper. His latest adventure was spread about wherever there wasn’t any war news. He sat frowning and wanting to think about Marjorie and the future, but his thoughts were flooded with memories of Celia—and the past.
Mr Bisham, amidst the stress of present problems, found it comfortable to tell himself he ought never to have met Celia. In the same way, it was comfortable to think that Marjorie ought never to have met that dreadful fellow Captain Bud. One of the first things she had suggested was that she and Ernest should tell each other everything they thought conducive to a successful second marriage. To this he had agreed; and whereas he had told her everything except the darkest secret in his life, she had told him absolutely everything. But if you were going to say that all couples who made dreadful marriages ought never to have met each other, it wasn’t going to get you anywhere. So perhaps it was better to think how character forming it was, or how character damaging. It was a kind of fast trick pulled by Life, or Fate, which had a perverted sense of humour at times; it was rather like a man who knows you are sincere and so pulls a fast one. It was true that later on it could make it up to the victims, who lay flat on their beds feeling rather tired. Life was a great one at timing, too, better than the very best actor. These little jokes always happened at the psychological moment; either you were broke, or desperate in some other way; Fate waved a wand shaped like a devil’s tail—and the trouble began. And the worst of it was it could go on and on; for, easy as it always was to get into trouble, it was perfectly frightful trying to get out of it. It was like trying to reland on a rocky coast when the storm was at its height. As a boy, Mr Bisham thought that his one and only bit of trouble was likely to be his father. He had much in common with Marjorie, for his mother had died before he had been old enough to know her, and for some hidden reason which even Bess didn’t know, Mr Bisham Senior had kept no photographs of her and never spoke of her. Even more queerly, Bess had herself been banished the Putney house when still a girl, and sent to a relative in far away Norfolk. Ernest knew nothing of her existence until he was adult, so strange were the ways of fathers. He never even contemplated enquiring about his mother, for his father was a formidable kind of man who didn’t go in for talking. He went in for silences. He was very high up in one of the Ministries, and his work in the Great War appeared to have been of a vital and secret nature. There were clues of various kinds that he had made the name of Bisham a very strong and reliable one, and perhaps it was the very knowledge of this that had perversely inspired Ernest to his unusual hobby, which he had first regarded, sinfully, indeed, as a profession. There were plenty of clues, too, that people were afraid of Mr Bisham Senior, and this also seemed to be a sort of challenge. Clerks would call at the Putney house, moving rather furtively, and they would timidly ask if they might be ushered into the Presence. And one of them always asked, pale, ‘What kind of mood is he in this morning, young man?’
The house in Putney was square and formidable itself, cold through unnecessary coal economy, and all the doors seemed frightened to open. Where the Bisham relations hid, never came to light, and it was only later that he discovered Norfolk was the place. The only touch of humanity at all was old Mrs Clarkson and a series of charwomen who crept about with buckets to do the doorsteps. They stayed till they could stand the silences no longer and then fled from the place. Mrs Clarkson seemed to stand it; Ernest always supposed she was adaptable, like an old cat, and he grew very fond of her. She was always there all through his prep school days at Harrogate, and his public school days, and whenever he came back for holidays she looked after his clothes and tried hard to take the place of a mother or an aunt. She was a beady-eyed old thing with a witchlike chin, and he still remembered her frequent position, peeping at keyholes in his interest, to see how the latest silence was getting on within. Ernest got through unbelievable silences, usually with Havelock Ellis propped up against the water-jug, and now and again a spot of Meredith. It had long since dawned on him that life wasn’t playing fair by him. What was the use of being taught the public school notion that you must always be a sportsman and a gentleman, if life didn’t keep to the same rules? He was still at his public school when it occurred to him he might have to take the matter into his own hands sooner or later, but before he was quite ready to do so a schoolboyish incident set a strange train of thought seeping through his young mind. He was dared to climb through the Headmaster’s study window one wintry night and steal his birch. His reaction to this challenge startled even himself. He at once accepted the challenge and with an outward air of complete calm proceeded to accomplish the unnerving feat. He still remembered the intensity of his feelings in the darkness of that awe-inspiring study; the speaking furniture and the distant footsteps in the quadrangle outside: his noiseless return, with the birch prized out of the locked cupboard with a bit of wire. Moreover, on a second challenge, he calmly took it back again. And he remembered being asked: ‘But I say, man, weren’t you dead scared of being caught? It would have meant six of the best!’
‘I knew I wouldn’t be caught,’ he had answered, modestly but firmly.
‘Burglars always get caught!’
‘No! You only hear about the ones who get caught!’
He was still sure of this and applied it to every crime. He was quite satisfied that an intelligent person could go all through life and not be caught—providing he wasn’t a fool and used his brains. He believed in the power of circumstances, and Fate, but not in this one direction. He believed a man could achieve anything he really wanted to achieve, if his mind was constantly applied to it. There was no question of getting caught. Yet this did not detract from the thrill—for he had no proof of his belief until life was over.
Arriving home with these newly forming beliefs after his last term at school, he decided it was time to take his life in his hands so far as his father was concerned. Ever inclined to be impulsive, he took it into his hands after a singularly long silence at breakfast, by hurling Havelock Ellis across the room. It landed with a report like a revolver shot up against the buff wall. Mr Bisham Senior, however, carefully counted four minutes by his gold watch before looking up and saying, economically:
‘Well?’
It was rather bad luck on Ernest to achieve such a discouraging start, especially when he had planned it all so carefully through many agonized nights. But having launched his attack, so to speak, he made a brave attempt to push ahead with it, despite enemy resistance at once hardening. He pleaded, simply, that as his school days were now at an end, he felt he would now like to take his life into his own care and keeping. What he also meant was that he would like a bit of income to do it with, but his nerve went before he could get this out. Deeds didn’t unnerve him, words did. His father looked gaunt, distinguished, eminently successful—and completely unlovable. Ernest knew what he himself must look like in contrast: a pale, scraggy and overgrown youth full of the usual inhibitions and frustrations, and yet at the same time an up-to-date edition of the very man he detested.
He failed, however, to achieve a bridgehead.
At any rate, he achieved one ambition that morning: he made his father speak! And it was amusing to remember now that his father told him scathingly—in answer to a remark about refusing to go to college or to any Ministry either: ‘I should have thought you would have wanted the name of Bisham to be a household word! I know I did, when I was your age!’ How queerly prophetic! It was a household word now all right: it went into every room, in cottage and castle; it even went into that very dining-room, likely as not, in that sinister house in Putney! Life, then, had the pleasing habit of righting itself, and apologizing for what it had done before. Did it stay right, and penitent? That was the next intriguing wonder. But in the days of the Putney house, life had seemed, as it often did to worried youth, most unlikely ever to right itself. In a burst of rage and daring he walked out of the house. Rather, he ran out of it. It was brave to think that he had walked out without any money at all, even though he had only gone along to Mrs Clarkson’s peculiarly smelly house off Hammersmith Broadway. He wasn’t the first person to have taken such a risk, and he wouldn’t be the last; but at the time he thought he was, which was the important thing. Mrs Clarkson’s house had green plastered walls, oddly like the walls of his study at school. And, so great was man’s desire for a sense of safety and familiarity, that he pinned up one of his study pictures. It was called Dad’s Girl, a rather out-of-date blonde sucking orangeade through a straw. The picture had often been used for target practice by the cads, and it had dart, boot, and kiss marks on it.
He hadn’t taken to the idea of a public school, and rather regretted leaving the smaller pond of a preparatory school. He supposed he was rather feeble about it, and not a little ungrateful, yet somehow when the prospectus arrived from the Bursar that morning, he was far more aware of his silent father’s antics with toast and butter and marmalade, than he was of the contents of the illustrated brochure. There were tough-looking boys swinging on ropes, and there was a large matron standing grinning threateningly in a brown doorway. A huge swimming bath looked singularly cold, and deep, and there was an immensely high diving board.
There was an unnerving picture of the Headmaster, with bull-like features and bulging eyes, with both ears torn to shreds through hearty games of rugger. He seemed to be riddled with learning. Staff: Headmaster (since 1908)—P. H. Quantam, MA, Late Scholar of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; VIth Form Master at Worcester College, Oxford; late Exhibitioner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
There followed an imposing list of Assistant Masters to the Senior School, only slightly less riddled with learning, and a list of the Assistant Masters to the Junior School, ‘for boys under fourteen’. In small print at the top, The Visitors were mentioned, and they appeared to be Vice-Chancellors, Presidents and Wardens and Chairmen of Governors. Wardens? A mental picture of Dartmoor came, a little mistily. The pater’s scrunching echoed sharply while he was thinking of Mr Quantam’s birch rod, which he would be sure to have, because here it said: ‘… Any boy failing to take part in school games without special permission in advance from the Headmaster, thus spoiling the game for his fellows, is liable to corporal punishment.’ And it said the playing field was the finest in the whole South of England!
He spent all that morning staring glassily at the prospectus, and accusing himself of being dreadfully ungrateful and feeble, and not like other boys. Yet he felt queerly pleased to be ‘different’.
He felt he already knew the school inside out, and it was as chill inside as it was out.
It was also vast. There were five hundred boys.
There were four Houses, called North, South, East and West. He was to go to West House, under Mr and Mrs Deem. The pater had evidently already seen them, and he thought Mr Deem ‘a fine man’, and Mrs Deem ‘extremely sensible’.
There was an OTC, and several vigorous sergeant-majors; there were various quite incomprehensible things printed here and there in Latin, and not only in Latin, but in Roman figures as well; there was a Chapel covered in ivy, lists of places which were out of bounds (penalty—a flogging), lists of Distinguished Old Boys, which appeared to be very broadminded, including abbots, airmen and actors. Nearly all seemed to have been shot in some war or other.
There was a picture of ‘a lecture room’, and ‘the new laboratory’, and ‘a classroom’, and ‘the cloisters leading to Big School (fifteenth century)’.
He felt unsettled and uneasy.
But he liked things to be gentle and settled, he liked reading by the fire better than charging about with heavyweights in the bitter wind. He had never been flogged, and dreaded even meeting Mr Quantam, let alone being flogged by him. He was prepared to loathe everyone. It was a sentence, and he disapproved of prisons.
Also, the town was associated with his sentence of incarceration. He soon hated the trams and the wide congested Broad Street, and saw nothing picturesque about the Old Prison and the Old Castle, which represented to him nothing but a minimum distance for alternative Sunday walks. There was a smelly tannery on the route, and there was the empty shop where somebody had had his head battered in, though nobody had been hanged for it yet. The police knew who it was, but there wasn’t enough proof. This was to be most attractive for a few terms, but soon it was a bore. It wasn’t even fun any more, then, seeing strange men pass the shop, and thinking: ‘Perhaps you’re the murderer himself—walking about free!’ The town was noted for museums and soap. Nearly every big building was either a museum, or else it was a soap factory. There were hundreds of lime trees and horse chestnut trees, and tram lines wandered everywhere, making cycling slightly dangerous. There were rows of big, dull houses, red and grey, with strong drain pipes, and they were one and all studded with brass plates: doctors, dentists, surgeons and psychologists, for there was a well-known hospital just out of the town of vast dimensions.
There was a college of dubious repute, several squalid schools one never played or mentioned, and a theatre which was now given over to the amateurs, when it was not a cinema.
The trams clanged continually through everything, and you could hear them in the distance at night. They made you feel that you were indeed in a cell. The world was very far away, and your sentence was years yet. You were only fourteen or fifteen, and you wouldn’t leave until you were at least seventeen.
These were the years which were supposed to decide what a man was going to be and do in the world.
Queerly, hardly anybody asked Ernest what he was going to be or do.
There was too much routine, too much going on, for masters to ask that.
Each new arrival was the same.
He would reach the school gates and there, up the long lime tree-bordered drive, with the cricket pavilion away over there on the left of School Field, was the school itself spread out in its familiar splendour. You couldn’t see North House or East House, for they were right behind the quadrangle, near the laboratories and the sanatorium. But you could see South House away there on the left, and straight up the drive past ‘porter’s lodge’ was West House. Taxis were going up the drive and down it, and up and down the other drive past the chapel, empty or laden with trunks.
Rooks sat about dismally on the tower of Big School.
Porter’s white cat strolled out of the lodge, licking its chops. Porter and his fat old wife came out as if to sniff the smell of the new term. They were called Mr and Mrs Gray, but when you saw Mrs Gray, which was rarely, you said for some reason or other, ‘Hallo, Mrs Porter,’ and when you saw porter, you said, ‘Hallo, Gray.’ He was very popular and nice, and always on your side, even when he came into the classroom with a note from the Head to be read out. While the master was reading it threateningly out, old Gray always winked slyly, and at a certain point in the recitation rubbed what he liked to call ‘yer bum’, with circular motions of his free hand. ‘Boys are reminded of two things: The new school fields in Elliot Road are out of bounds except for prearranged matches; two boys were severely flogged this morning for removing test tubes from the laboratory without permission.’ The Grays’ little cottage was practically hidden by its own drainage system, which was a sea of pipes, all of which dripped and gurgled behind patchy clusters of dirty-looking ivy. The atmosphere within looked pitch black, and smelt vaguely of tea.
He would say: ‘Hallo, Gray—hallo, Mrs Porter,’ and old Gray would twinkle and call out (he knew absolutely everyone’s name): ‘Ha’r, young Bisham, well, how are we, then, glad to be back? Watch out for yer bum this term, my lad; be sure to do that, sir! I’ve had to get in two dozen new birch rods, ’cos of the way you all went on last term!’
‘Oh, get on, Gray,’ one always called out. ‘I know you’re ragging!’
Mrs Porter would be bending over three square inches of flower border, and revealing parts the size of an elephant.
Ernest saw his younger self pulling his cap off and start throwing it up and catching it. Once, he had had a fight in the drive, well, a wrestling match, and his enemy had thrown his cap into the bushes, just there by the Head’s garden. In getting his cap, the Head’s face had appeared over the wall. His bulging eyes, thick lips and shredded ears. The moment had been extremely painful for all concerned, for not only were the bushes out of bounds, but it was also Sunday, ‘the day of rest, have you forgotten, may I ask?’ the Head had coldly wondered.
Both boys had been mesmerized in the drive, usually the scene of happier moments, when one rushed up and down at the school rugger match, shouting hoarsely: ‘Play up, school! Schoo … ool!’
Old Rags had said through his nose (he always rasped things through his nose):
‘Come and see me tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.’
It had been unusual. Boys who were boarders were rarely dealt with by the Head, they were usually handed over to their Housemaster. Anything was better than having Rags lamming into you. Which would it be, a flogging or a caning? Queerly, it was recognized that when the Head sent round a notice that a boy had been ‘caned’, it was far worse than being ‘flogged’. The former meant six of the very best, and the latter meant only about three. It was freakish.
Appearing, however, at ten, after a light breakfast, it had appeared necessary to remind Old Rags what they were outside his ghastly study for. He really seemed to have forgotten.
‘Er, in connection with an … incident in the bushes, sir, yesterday,’ young Cobalt had got out. His eyes were like the eyes of a snared rabbit. Ernest had a new and odd sensation of being thrilled.
He had a silk handkerchief down his pants; they said that took off the sting, and wasn’t noticed if he felt you. There had been an interesting pause. Lame Miss Nutley, wearing a green jumper and pince-nez, had come out of the study with a handful of papers. She was the Head’s secretary. She went dot-and-carry-one and vanished, her right hip rather crooked. Mr Friday, short and white whiskered and Bursar, and wearing gold glasses flat on his forehead, and wearing a parson’s collar, came out with his hands, as ever, tucked behind his gown, and walking with his little knees going outwards. The Head’s mortar-board towered above his bull-like features, and he licked at his chops like he always did every morning in chapel, as if he was exploring avidly round his tremendous teeth, in search of juicy bacon rind. There was a glimpse inside the Head’s study—which you could have and welcome. There was the famous cupboard.
Looking back, it seeemed to be a time full of quaint character studies, and other lessons.
An amazing time, now and then, but much more often tedious.
Growing up was a slow affair, and masters never grew up. They had no chance to.
No, he hadn’t liked his public school as much as he suspected he ought to have liked it. Everyone else seemed to like it, and apart from surface grumbles, nobody else seemed to mind being birched, or made to go for long and stupid walks on Sunday afternoons to some curious woods where shop girls hung about behind bushes and went: ‘Here they come, Doris! I’ll take the tall one!’ It was probably quite fun if you were ready for it, but Mr Bisham hadn’t yet got hair down his front, and so the point was entirely lost. Another thing everyone but himself seemed to be fond of, was rushing about the rugger field in an icy north-east wind, with somebody else doing a hearty tackle and bringing you down with a thud onto the frozen turf. Ernest Bisham’s idea of a thrill was rather different, and he found the only way to achieve it was to search for it in something by Conan Doyle. Another less known author also assisted his desire for drama, and there were moments when he donned a mask, made up out of a handkerchief soaked in school ink, and with a water-pistol tackled the more unmuscular from behind door or hedge. ‘I say, it’s that absolute swine Bisham,’ thin, piping voices would declare, enraged to the Heavens. ‘You scared me out of my wits, man!’ It was humiliating to know that a water-pistol held no fears, and that he was recognized at once solely because nobody else wanted to play this particular game. It was considered childish. Once, holding up Mr Deem, in error for a prefect, Ernest Bisham got six of the best and the advice: ‘If you want to dramatise yourself, Bisham, you’d better join the dramatic society.’ But when he did so they made him play Ophelia, which was somehow or other unsatisfying. Later, he joined the debating society, and although he attacked the public school system with some apparent success, claiming that it deprived chaps of all individual attention at the most critical time of their lives, he was thereafter labelled as a pansy, and for some reason a socialist. His unpopularity was odd, considering his ready manner, and sometimes he would be asked why he deliberately made himself unpopular. He would always explode with a protesting laugh, but, unable to reply adequately, he would wander away to beat a tennis ball up against the wall by himself, and thinking: ‘As soon as I leave here I shall be popular all right!’ He attacked the system of imprisonment, instancing Dartmoor, rather well at another debate, but likened it to the public school system. For that, he had to run the gauntlet of wet towels dressed in his pyjama jacket.
Now, when he sometimes sat on a public platform, much more cautiously airing the same views, whatever he said seemed to be greeted with popular applause. He would wait confidently for his cue, knowing whatever he said would be successful. ‘… So I will now call upon Mr Ernest Bisham, the well-known announcer, who has very kindly come all the way to Manchester to be with us today!’ To a storm of applause, he would stand before a sea of curious faces, and he would proceed to get in as much of his views against prison life, and its silly inhumanity, or his views against the repulsive habit of flogging, without letting it be thought he was either a socialist or airing the views of the BBC. At the end, there would be another storm of applause, and silly faces would throng round him and voices would say: ‘We always listen when you read the news, Mr Bisham! My mother-in-law thinks your voice is by far the best!’ Not one of them cared the slightest about his views on anything, least of all sex life in prisons. But it amused him, as life amused him with its odd antics. When magazines asked him if they could print his photograph and an article about his life, he was studiously vague about certain years. It was strange how lumps of years could safely be dropped from an article. It was a technique. And it was often convenient. Impossible to say: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, during those years I was simply appallingly broke. I had the dreariest of jobs—until my father died, you know—mechanic, salesman, oh, and cat-burglar.’ One item would be very colourful. ‘I must tell you about the afternoon I walked into a jewel shop in the city. I asked to see some rings and the bloke showed me about ten on a narrow tray. I said, thanks, chum, and stuffed them in my pocket. I strolled out—you mustn’t run when you’re a professional thief—each moment expecting bells to ring and hands to seize my left shoulder. But the shopkeeper must have had one or two, for in about two seconds I was outside and lost in the crowds.’ An asterisk and italics at the bottom of the page could add, in a dignified way: ‘By the way, I sent the rings back. When I got home that desperate day I found I’d landed a job. And in any case it’s too risky trying to sell jewellery of that kind in London.’ Yes, indeed, and it was still a problem to know what to do with it. The prisons were full of blokes who had tried to solve this unsatisfactory problem. He often thought old Mrs Clarkson might have had some useful suggestion to make. Her house was full of the most shadowy, stooping characters. They would creep furtively up her dark stairs at all hours, not a few going to bed during the day instead of during the night. But he had never risked it. He went on doing various little cat burglaries, just for the thrill, and to prove his beliefs about never getting caught, and in the hopes that one day he would think of what to do with the proceeds. Sometimes he chucked the proceeds into the Thames when he got bored with looking at them. Now and then he sent later proceeds to insurance houses he felt he might have cost too dearly. Mrs Clarkson would be curious about his little newspaper parcels and think they were fish and chips. She would accuse him of not liking her food.
He didn’t know what he would have done without her help in the first days of his break with home. And he often wondered now if it was Mrs Clarkson who had first given him his interest in the word ‘bulletin’. She certainly brought regular news bulletins to him for several years, scurrying back to the shabby little Hammersmith house to say: ‘No, Master Ernest, I tried again—but he just won’t speak. We shall have to wait.’ When at last Mr Bisham Senior’s obituary did appear in The Times, his will was reported to have mentioned a figure as large as thirty-three thousand pounds—five of which he was obliged to leave to his son through his mother’s will. His son instantly got an advance, threw a lot of surplus jewellery into the Thames and drank gin with Mrs Clarkson until midnight, when they changed to draught Burton. By four o’clock in the morning they were both completely and contentedly under the weather. They lost no time declaring that the old man hadn’t been such a bad sort after all, erroneous though the belief was in the cold light of day, Mrs Clarkson insisting that he had been a sort of Dick Whittington in his younger days, ‘and very human about ladies, my dear, excepting his own family, that is.’ Mrs Clarkson did not at once let drop certain pending surprises about the Bisham family, but proceeded to read the story of Dick Whittington to Ernest Bisham, who sat in her brown armchair with his feet on the table. It was Mrs Clarkson reading it.
He was never very partial to Dick Whittington’s story, having no particular fancy for Lord Mayors or for cats, though Mayors were jovial fellows with plenty of food and cash, and Mrs Clarkson had a cat in her kitchen with a highly developed dramatic sense, being fond of springing from great heights across gaps of at least fifty feet, or hurtling itself from the very jaws of infuriated Hammersmith buses into the basement area.
Mrs Clarkson then slyly proceeded to make certain strange suggestions. She was going to have her house repainted, inside and out, and so Ernest was to take the opportunity, ‘now that dear father has passed away’, of going on a short visit to, ‘a sort of family relation, a kind of distant cousin, in another part of London’. She said she had always wanted to see Master Ernest, and she might turn out to be useful to him over a career, or something in that line, you never knew. Startled, for Ernest had been unaware of any such watching interests in his background, he cross-examined Mrs Clarkson in some detail. But all he got was: ‘Never mind about the whys and wherefores, dear. And don’t ask her any questions, either. She is very reserved and a little prim, as the saying goes. But she likes young people and is keen on educational matters. Go and stop with her, it can’t hurt, and I’ll get on with the house.’
She was called Miss Wisdon, and her house was in Chepstow Walk, Notting Hill Gate. It was hard saying good-bye to Mrs Clarkson, and to thank her for all she had done.
‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘And Miss Wisdon is quite decent. Don’t rub her up the wrong way.’
‘No,’ Ernest said.
‘And I expect her Mr Edwards will come and see you and see what he can do.’
‘Oh?’ he said, startled again.
‘Don’t rub him up the wrong way,’ she strongly advised him. ‘Then you’ll be all right.’
‘Yes. But who is he …?’
‘You’ll see in good time,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll see you again soon. Be sure to write, or it will rub me up the wrong way.’
‘Yes, I will. Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye, dear,’ she said, and decided to kiss him, a little after the fashion of a mallet going conk up against a tub.
Conk!
Conk!
‘Well, good-bye, Master Ernest!’
‘Good-bye, Mrs Clarkson …!’
The parting seemed quite a sorrow, another rooting up. And although he did see her again soon, when the painting was finished, he had really said good-bye, for she died later that summer, and he was not again to live in the Hammersmith house.
He took a taxi to Miss Wisdon’s. He had been told she was ‘poorly’, or she would have come to collect him herself. He reached Miss Wisdon’s at six o’clock. He walked up the pathway of a tiny three-storied house. It was of the dimity variety, and in the garden were large stone toadstools. There was a note jutting out of the front door letter-box with his name on it explaining economically: ‘Pull string.’ He pulled and there was a long key on the other end, so he let himself in. In the little green glass hall was a second note propped up against a large brass pot with a fern in it. It was as economical as the first. ‘Upstairs.’ He felt Miss Wisdon was very rash with her trusting notes and he went upstairs feeling a little polite. On a door a third notice said: ‘Knock.’ He had reached the Robbers’ Cave. A thin voice said to come in.
Miss Wisdon was a little old-fashioned lady who belonged to the Victorian era, and who had no wish to modernize herself. She turned out to be good-hearted and easily scandalized. She was one of the world’s fussers, everything must be in its place before she could settle. The tea must be laid properly, with things in the right position, and if one of her stone toadstools fell over there was conversation to last the week. Tea must be exactly at four and the silver must be polished on Tuesday mornings between eleven and twelve. Maids who came in and ‘did’ for her rarely stopped long, they were ‘rude’, and they went out into the night (and sometimes the day) never to return. She liked being made a fuss of and was used to it, particularly from the mysterious Mr Edwards, a gentleman she regarded with considerable reverence and awe.
Scarcely anything was said about family matters, Miss Wisdon explaining, with familiar reasoning, that Ernest’s father had been ‘difficult but least said soonest mended’. It seemed she was a distant relation of Ernest’s mother and had always wanted to take an interest in him. She was shocked to discover he had no evident plans for a career, but she had already spoken to her old friend, Mr Edwards, who was an accountant, and so it seemed his future was in his hands! There were introductions which he was going to be so good as to give him, so that he could get started in a job. Miss Wisdon said of him: ‘He’s such a very busy man, but he has found time to dine with us on Tuesday.’ Then she said he was not able to come until Thursday. It seemed only fitting that Miss Wisdon should keep a cat. She hated dogs. ‘They water my doorstep.’ She said: ‘And Iris is afraid of them.’ Iris was her cat, a dreary thing, Ernest thought, though he tried to like her. She was a tabby. He never once saw her move from the kitchen chair while he was in the house, even for most pressing reasons, and could only assume she absorbed everything in some mysterious way. If he must have a cat, give him Mrs Clarkson’s black Tom, which fought like a virago, and feared neither man nor machine. Iris just sat, and the expression in her pink eyes was of an actress watching her understudy take over. When he gave her any fish she just turned her head away. But when Miss Wisdon did, she was good enough to allow herself to be fed piecemeal. Miss Wisdon bent over her, looking like a Victorian music-hall turn, turning to Ernest with pride in her eyes.
CHAPTER V (#ulink_eac4467f-cb83-5e8a-b951-f704861b3561)
ERNEST was really rather dazed at this period of his life. He was ‘resting’. He had a good think, but let life do the worrying for a change. And he met his first dangerous woman at Miss Wisdon’s house, or to be precise, over Miss Wisdon’s fence. She was a girl of sixteen called Violet. She was fond of chocolate, eating it with her mouth open the whole time, without spilling any of it, and without offering him any. She had raven black hair shaped like a worn-out mop, and a hefty-looking father who wandered about the narrow garden as if he was looking for something. Miss Wisdon didn’t ‘know’ them; they were sanitary inspectors who had come into a bit of money, or they would have been still in Battersea by the gasworks. Violet was fond of standing on the manure heap at the bottom of her garden with her legs wide apart. She balanced herself there in order to stare at him and whatever was going on at any of Miss Wisdon’s windows. The only thing which ever did go on at her windows was a dancing yellow duster, in the mornings. For the rest of the day there was just Ernest for Violet to look at. She thought he made a change. She asked him point blank to kiss her at their third meeting by the manure heap, chocolate and all. He thought it would be like kissing an éclair. ‘You’ve never kissed a girl,’ she challenged him, ‘have you?’
‘I may have done,’ he told her, embarrassed.
‘Where?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘When, then?’
‘I can’t remember now.’
‘I knew you’d never! You went red as red!’
‘No, I didn’t! In any case, why should I tell you?’ he said, stung, but curious about her and this odd phase of his unsatisfactory life.
‘I didn’t want to know,’ she said, womanlike.
Then she said:
‘All the boys are after me. I go to the pictures twice a week.’
‘Oh?’ he said.
‘Joo go to the pictures?’
‘Now and then.’
‘I like Charlie Ruggles,’ she said in a certain way. ‘He’s up the road this week.’
‘I’ve seen it,’ he said, deciding quickly.
‘What’s it about, then?’
‘Well, if I tell you,’ he said glibly, ‘it’ll spoil it for you.’
Her long red tongue travelled down a yard of chocolate.
‘You haven’t seen it. And you’ve never bin with a girl. And you’re a dirty little liar.’
She ran up the garden and then ran back to say:
‘You can call me Violet. But I shall call you Squit.’
Then she ran away again.
It was Squit Bisham, watching her!
On Thursday afternoon when Mr Edwards was expected to dinner, Violet came to her manure heap when Bisham was thoughtfully weeding Miss Wisdon’s aster bed.
‘Hullo, Squit,’ she said.
‘Hallo,’ he said, generously.
‘Dad and Mum have gone out to supper. Take me to the pictures and we’ll be back by nine o’clock. We’ll have a good time.’
She looked flushed and pretty in a rough way. She was still licking chocolate. He was rather interested in the feminine figure at this time. But was it wise to take up with her? He thought of women in terms of marriage, and there was something a little unromantic about marrying a Sanitary Inspector’s daughter. He was very snobbish at this time. Violet was in a very chatty mood, called him Squit in quite a friendly way, and it obviously didn’t occur to her that he could refuse. She told him all about her grandma, who had the dropsy, giving interesting details. Finally she said he was to slip out into the street in exactly an hour’s time.
‘See? Have you got any money?’
‘Well, yes. But …’
‘Enough for chocolates? I hate half doing things.’
‘Look,’ he faltered, ‘I’m afraid I can’t come tonight. Somebody’s coming to dinner.’
Her brow darkened.
‘Who? That Mr Edwards?… That’s fine, leave them together, they’re madly in love with each other, didn’t you know that? Tell Miss Wisdon you want to go for a long walk.’
‘It isn’t so easy as that!’
‘You dirty little squit!’
‘I’d like to come some other night,’ he protested.
‘You’re afraid,’ she said.
‘I’m not …!’
‘Yes, you are! You’re afraid of girls!’ The contempt in her voice hurt badly. ‘I shall never speak to you again!’
She turned and ran up the garden, long legs white in the sunshine.
The incident clouded an evening already a little overcast. Mr Edwards’s arrival did nothing to cheer, nor did his after-dinner comments. During dinner he made no comments at all. Miss Wisdon had warned him in advance not to speak to him unless spoken to, Mr Edwards liking to eat in silence and to masticate his mouthfuls fifty-six times. He sat at table staring over his head at the bust of Robespierre on the bookcase. He was tall and stern and high-collared, and Miss Wisdon treated him like God. He treated her with great courtesy and respect too, speaking of her to him as ‘a great lady, so good and kind’. There wasn’t the feeling they were madly in love with each other, but he gathered at the finish he was a Trustee, and that she had done a great deal for the Chapel at which he was Sidesman. Dinner was prolonged and Ernest sat wondering what he would say to him afterwards, and whether Violet really thought he was afraid of girls, and whether he had better invite her to the pictures fairly soon. Miss Wisdon had said in scandalized tones before dinner: ‘I hope I didn’t see you talking to the girl next door, dear? She is not at all suitable and we do not know them.’ At the close of dinner Mr Edwards gravely said a grace, and Miss Wisdon in hushed tones said she now thought Mr Edwards might like to speak to him alone, and she went gravely out. He opened the door for her and she went off to the drawing-room, giving him a little pat on the cheek as if to say: ‘It’s quite all right, your future is assured—thanks to Mr Edwards!’
‘So kind and good,’ Mr Edwards said as he returned to his place. He was getting out a little cigar not much bigger than a cigarette.
He thereupon grew very pompous and talkative, asking a lot of questions about his life, and about his schools, and about how he liked being with good, kind Miss Wisdon, and whether she ever spoke about him. He replied that she frequently did and he looked very pleased in a clouded sort of way. Suddenly he got up and went to the fireplace and clasped his hands behind his coat tails. He said he understood that Ernest was worried about his future, but that now it was settled, and that he was to start on Monday in the West End of London, in a Banking and Insurance House called Ponds Corporation Limited. There was a sinister silence.
It suddenly came to Ernest that it was time he emerged from his dazed condition and took a serious interest in things.
He tried very hard to convince Mr Edwards about certain musical ambitions, which he didn’t really possess, but they sounded better than mentioning burglary.
Mr Edwards didn’t look the type to understand cat-burglaries.
Unfortunately, he didn’t understand music, either.
Ernest became aware that he had reached a time in life when certain decisions had to be made. He had some money now, but not so much as all that, and he supposed Mr Edwards was right in saying he ought to ‘do’ something. Why not learn banking, from the bottom rung of the ladder? It was so safe, Mr Edwards said he thought.
Mr Edwards said that music was ‘very unsatisfactory’, and, although Ernest knew he was pulling Mr Edwards’s leg, he kept on about music, so as to keep off the difficult subject of banking.
He also said there was no need for Mr Edwards to bother about him. It was only Miss Wisdon’s idea.
‘Only?’ frowned Mr Edwards.
‘It’s very kind of her, of course.’
‘She is very good and kind …’
‘I know. But there’s no need for either of you to bother about me, Mr Edwards. Thank you very much. Things will sort themselves out, I’ve no doubt.’ He added vaguely: ‘I might write a symphony.’
Mr Edwards was horrified.
‘Composing?’ he said, standing. He seemed fascinated by him. ‘But I thought you wanted to carve out a career for yourself. I know you have a little money now. What’s better than to learn banking? Then you will be able to look after it.’
‘I loathe money and banks,’ Ernest said sadly.
This winded him completely. He looked quite at a loss until his brain cleared with:
‘I must remember you are still very young.’ He seemed much happier. ‘How old are you?’
‘Getting on for thirty.’
‘Much older than you look. But nothing wrong with that age to enter a sound firm like Ponds Corporation. In fifty years—providing you work hard—you’ll probably be earning between ten and twenty pounds a week. This music phase of yours—there’s nothing wrong with it—will of course pass. Here is your letter of admission. I have already written to the bank on your behalf.’
Thus this ancient problem was no easier for Ernest than for a multitude of others. It had come to him later, that was all. Just before he was ready for it. Income versus Art, and all the arguments about playing for safety, or playing for your beliefs and your secret faith in yourself. He could never agree with those who thought an artist could not create what he wanted to create without that frightful preliminary toss-up. Perhaps one day it would be possible for the boy who wanted to paint or write or sing or play to get on with it at once without money worries, in the same way that the would-be businessman could get on with it from the word go, and paid for it into the bargain. Until the present, the would-be creators, who had problems enough to decide if they were even sufficiently gifted, had to set out into the darkness of probable hunger and squalor, at tenderer years than thirty. It was time that Dickens’s garret was burned down and forgotten. Mr Edwards was no better and no worse than his predecessors. He put it down to Ernest’s youth and said quite sharply: ‘Take my advice and put music out of your head.’ He would have said much worse about cat-burglary.
‘Supposing Beethoven had done that,’ Ernest explained, flushed. ‘Or Schubert.’
He let out a guffaw. ‘So you fancy you are Schubert?’
‘No,’ he said, getting bored. What ought he to do with his life? There was such a lot of it.
‘We all have young ideas,’ Mr Edwards said.
‘Did you?’ he asked.
Mr Edwards went into the drawing-room presently, shaking his head and looking very cross. Ernest heard him telling Miss Wisdon that he had been a little rude ‘and ungrateful’, and that he was afraid he was stupid into the bargain. He admitted Ernest looked intelligent enough to grow out of it ‘in time’. When he had gone, Miss Wisdon asked him in scandalized tones if he had been ‘polite to Mr Edwards? He’s such a great man, and Chapel.’
‘I tried to be,’ he said. ‘But I’m older than he thinks.’
‘I hope you will make a better impression on Ponds Corporation, dear. You are not at all old. Thirty is nothing. For a man.’
‘I want to learn about music. Not about banking, Miss Wisdon,’ he decided to explain. ‘When anyone wants to learn about banking, they’re received with open arms! Everyone understands immediately. They don’t get told, oh, you must go and write a symphony, here’s a letter of introduction, you will start on Monday at two pounds a week. Then, after fifty years, if you have written enough symphonies, you may earn ten pounds a week.’
‘Don’t scream, dear,’ prayed Miss Wisdon, scandalized afresh. ‘You look quite flushed, I’m sure you’ve got a headache.’
And she asked him if he needed aspirin or Enos. He chose aspirin.
Next morning he saw Violet balanced as usual on her manure heap. He had been set to sweep in between Miss Wisdon’s row of stone frogs, by the sun-dial. Violet was wiping her tongue along a stick of liquorice and eyeing him with that kind of disfavour which was also speculative. A high wind blew her mop in an easterly direction.
‘Squit,’ she said.
‘Good morning,’ he said, by now resolved to ease his ruffled vanity by some display of manhood. ‘I wanted to speak to you.’
She turned her back, but he noticed she didn’t run away.
‘Would you like to come to the pictures?’ he enquired nervously.
‘Seen everything,’ her back said.
‘Well, we could go to a theatre.’
‘What sort?’
‘Something musical, if you like.’
‘When?’
‘Saturday. Tomorrow. I’ve decided to start a job on Monday and I’ll be leaving here.’
She swung round.
‘Leaving?’
‘Yes. I didn’t come here for always. Miss Wisdon only did it to oblige. My other house is being painted.’
She would not commit herself, but he felt certain she would turn up, if only because he secretly prayed she wouldn’t. She ran in, and then ran back to say she had examined the papers and he could take her to the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a twopenny bus ride, and that if she turned up, she’d meet him there in time for the first house. ‘I say if. I ought not to come out with you at all, after the way you treated me.’
‘It’s very kind of you.’
‘I wouldn’t do it for everyone.’
‘Well, thank you.’
He retired to wait in dread for the following evening.
When it came, he told Miss Wisdon he thought he would go and make sure of how to reach Ponds Corporation, so as not to be late for Monday morning, and she was very pleased, though she told him not to linger long in the West End on a Saturday night. She looked very grave about this, and so did Iris. The future seemed a dizzy and bewildering affair, and his evening with Violet offered some light relief. Perhaps it was at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, once again within sound of music, or at any rate musical noises, that he decided Ponds Corporation could not be allowed to hold him for long, if at all. Violet turned up on the tick. She looked surprisingly nice, a trifle startling, wearing a little red hat with a huge white feather jutting out of the top of it. She was for a time surprisingly shy and subdued, blushing profusely when she said: ‘Hullo, Squit!’
‘Good evening, Violet,’ he said, raising a felt hat bought that very morning. ‘It is most kind of you to have come.’
‘I bet you thought I wouldn’t,’ she said.
They went in. They were both very shy until a turn came on called ‘The Orchestra Conductor’, in which a man climbed up out of the orchestra pit with a fiddle and started to conduct the orchestra. A fat lady hurried on as if she was the outraged manageress about to send him off the stage. In two seconds they were fighting with such astonishing abandon, mainly involving the violin and the manageress’s skirts, that the audience, led by Violet, was in an uproar of delight, Violet rocking to and fro and reaching crescendo with the cry: ‘Ooh, my dear, she’s got her behind in his face …!’ It was a great success, and Violet kept up her enthusiasm with such verve that the gentleman in front kept turning round and asking her if she would mind keeping her hands to herself. What she said to him would not bear mentioning, but he got up and walked off to the bar with an expression of extreme horror on his face. Violet was very interested in the bar, but it was still a little improper for ladies to be seen in bars, so she had to be content with ice cream and chocolates. Out in the street again he had his first hint that something was wrong with the post-war world. Out-of-works were parading with banners round Shepherd’s Bush Green. The banners cried: ‘We want work. Where are your promises? We are the heroes!’ He took Violet home on the 17 bus. When they got off it was dark and she said: ‘We won’t go in yet,’ in sinister tones. She took him along a side street to some trees she seemed to know. He felt very nervous indeed. She said he had been ‘sweet’, and wasn’t quite the squit she thought, and that the rest of the evening was on her.
‘Oh?’ he said, puzzled. He was very young about women.
‘I love you. You’re sweet.’
They were under the tree.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ he began.
‘No, don’t you understand? I’ll be your girl. I thought you were a sissy, but you’re not.’
‘A sissy?’
‘Oh, stop kidding,’ she giggled, ‘you are a One,’ and she dug him in the ribs. ‘Shall I take off my hat? Or what?’
He supposed he owed quite a lot to Violet; for breaking the ice, as it were. She was quite nice about things, almost motherly. He supposed she was a naughty little girl. But he remembered her now as a cockney girl who got him the biggest black eye of his life. When they got to her door at last he thought the evening was over. But thrills were the spice of life to her. She whispered that pa and ma would be in bed, and that they would have five minutes in the parlour, ‘so long as we are quiet’. Unfortunately, she omitted to inform him about the stairs leading off the hall to the basement. Tip-toeing in with beating heart, he missed his footing and fell with prolonged and resounding thuds down the twenty-four steps to Violet’s dropsical grandma’s kitchen. Dropsical grandma evidently slept there, for nightmarish screams broke out on the instant, being taken up by the sounds of creaking beds above, opening doors and a male voice bawling: ‘Who’s muckin’ abart darn there?’ Followed the massive vision of the Sanitary Inspector himself, replete with blunderbuss. Much of what he called him was now happily lost in the limbo where lurk all such unhappy misdemeanours, but he remembered a cuff which sent him reeling some four hundred yards backwards down the corridor. ‘You whipper-snapper,’ was one thing the Sanitary Inspector thought about him. ‘You seducer of innicent gells! Get art—afore I chuck you art!’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/donald-henderson/a-voice-like-velvet/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.