A Gun for Sale (3 page)

He said, ‘It’s a silly song.’

She said, ‘It’s a lovely song – Jimmy. I simply can’t call you Jimmy. You aren’t Jimmy. You’re outsize. Detective-sergeant Mather. You’re the reason why people make jokes about policemen’s boots.’

‘What’s wrong with “dear”, anyway?’

‘Dear, dear,’ she tried it out on the tip of her tongue, between lips as vividly stained as a winter berry. ‘Oh no,’ she decided, ‘I’ll call you that when we’ve been married ten years.’

‘Well – “darling”?’

‘Darling, darling. I don’t like it. It sounds as if I’d known you a long, long time.’ The bus went up the hill past the fish-and-chip shops: a brazier glowed and they could smell the roasting chestnuts. The ride was nearly over, there were only two more streets and a turn to the left by the church, which was already visible, the spire lifted like a long icicle above the houses. The nearer they got to home the more miserable she became, the nearer they got to home the more lightly she talked. She was keeping things off and out of mind: the peeling wallpaper, the long flights to her room, cold supper with Mrs Brewer and next day the walk to the agent’s, perhaps a job again in the provinces away from him.

Mather said heavily, ‘You don’t care for me like I care for you. It’s nearly twenty-four hours before I see you again.’

‘It’ll be more than that if I get a job.’

‘You don’t care. You simply don’t care.’

She clutched his arm. ‘Look. Look at that poster.’ But it was gone before he could see it through the steamy pane. ‘Europe Mobilizing’ lay like a weight on her heart.

‘What was it?’

‘Oh, just the same old murder again.’

‘You’ve got that murder on your mind. It’s a week old now. It’s got nothing to do with us.’

‘No, it hasn’t, has it?’

‘If it had happened here, we’d have caught him by now.’

‘I wonder why he did it.’

‘Politics. Patriotism.’

‘Well. Here we are. It might be a good thing to get off. Don’t look so miserable. I thought you said you were happy.’

‘That was five minutes ago.’

‘Oh,’ she said out of her light and heavy heart, ‘one lives quickly these days.’ They kissed under the lamp; she had to stretch to reach him; he was comforting like a large dog, even when he was sullen and stupid, but one didn’t have to send away a dog alone in the cold dark night.

‘Anne,’ he said, ‘we’ll be married, won’t we, after Christmas?’

‘We haven’t a penny,’ she said, ‘you know. Not a penny – Jimmy.’

‘I’ll get a rise.’

‘You’ll be late for duty.’

‘Damn it, you don’t care.’

She jeered at him, ‘Not a scrap – dear,’ and walked away from him up the street to No. 54, praying let me get some money quick, let
this
go on
this
time; she hadn’t any faith in herself. A man passed her going up the road; he looked cold and strung-up, as he passed in his black overcoat; he had a hare-lip. Poor devil, she thought, and forgot him, opening the door of 54, climbing the long flights to the top floor, the carpet stopped on the first. She put on the new record, hugging to her heart the silly senseless words, the slow sleepy tune:

‘It’s only Kew

To you,

But to me

It’s Paradise.

They are just blue

Petunias to you,

But to me

They are your eyes.’

The man with the hare-lip came back down the street; fast walking hadn’t made him warm; like Kay in
The Snow Queen
he bore the cold within him as he walked. The flakes went on falling, melting into slush on the pavement, the words of a song dropped from the lit room on the third floor, the scrape of a used needle.

‘They say that’s a snowflower

A man brought from Greenland.

I say it’s the lightness, the coolness, the whiteness

Of your hand.’

The man hardly paused; he went on down the street, walking fast; he felt no pain from the chip of ice in his breast.

3

Raven sat at an empty table in the Corner House near a marble pillar. He stared with distaste at the long list of sweet iced drinks, of
parfaits
and sundaes and
coupes
and splits. Somebody at the next table was eating brown bread and butter and drinking Horlick’s. He wilted under Raven’s gaze and put up his newspaper. One word ‘Ultimatum’ ran across the top line.

Mr Cholmondeley picked his way between the tables.

He was fat and wore an emerald ring. His wide square face fell in folds over his collar. He looked like a real-estate man, or perhaps a man more than usually successful in selling women’s belts. He sat down at Raven’s table and said, ‘Good evening.’

Raven said, ‘I thought you were never coming, Mr Cholmon-deley,’ pronouncing every syllable.

‘Chumley, my dear man, Chumley,’ Mr Cholmondeley corrected him.

‘It doesn’t matter how it’s pronounced. I don’t suppose it’s your own name.’

‘After all I chose it,’ Mr Cholmondeley said. His ring flashed under the great inverted bowls of light as he turned the pages of the menu. ‘Have a
parfait
.’

‘It’s odd wanting to eat ice in this weather. You’ve only got to stay outside if you’re hot. I don’t want to waste any time, Mr Chol-mon-deley. Have you brought the money? I’m broke.’

Mr Cholmondeley said: ‘They do a very good Maiden’s Dream. Not to speak of Alpine Glow. Or the Knickerbocker Glory.’

‘I haven’t had a thing since Calais.’

‘Give me the letter,’ Mr Cholmondeley said. ‘Thank you.’ He told the waitress, ‘I’ll have an Alpine Glow with a glass of kümmel over it.’

‘The money,’ Raven said.

‘Here in this case.’

‘They are all fivers.’

‘You can’t expect to be paid two hundred in small change. And it’s nothing to do with me,’ Mr Cholmondeley said, ‘I’m merely the agent.’ His eyes softened as they rested on a Raspberry Split at the next table. He confessed wistfully to Raven, ‘I’ve got a sweet tooth.’

‘Don’t you want to hear about it?’ Raven said. ‘The old woman …’

‘Please, please,’ Mr Cholmondeley said, ‘I want to hear nothing. I’m just an agent. I take no responsibility. My clients …’

Raven twisted his hare-lip at him with sour contempt. ‘That’s a fine name for them.’

‘How long the waitress is with my
parfait
,’ Mr Cholmondeley complained. ‘My clients are really quite the best people. The acts of violence – they regard them as war.’

‘And I and the old man …’ Raven said.

‘Are in the front trench.’ He began to laugh softly at his own humour; his great white open face was like a curtain on which you can throw grotesque images: a rabbit, a man with horns. His small eyes twinkled with pleasure at the mass of iced cream which was borne towards him in a tall glass. He said, ‘You did your work very well, very neatly. They are quite satisfied with you. You’ll be able to take a long holiday now.’ He was fat, he was vulgar, he was false, but he gave an impression of great power as he sat there with the cream dripping from his mouth. He was prosperity, he was one of those who possessed things, but Raven possessed nothing but the contents of the wallet, the clothes he stood up in, the hare-lip, the automatic he should have left behind. He said, ‘I’ll be moving.’

‘Good-bye, my man, good-bye,’ Mr Cholmondeley said, sucking through a straw.

Raven rose and went. Dark and thin and made for destruction, he wasn’t at ease among the little tables, among the bright fruit drinks. He went out into the Circus and up Shaftesbury Avenue. The shop windows were full of tinsel and hard red Christmas berries. It maddened him, the sentiment of it. His hands clenched in his pockets. He leant his face against
a
modiste’s window and jeered silently through the glass. A girl with a neat curved figure bent over a dummy. He fed his eyes contemptuously on her legs and hips; so much flesh, he thought, on sale in the Christmas window.

A kind of subdued cruelty drove him into the shop. He let his hare-lip loose on the girl when she came towards him with the same pleasure that he might have felt in turning a machinegun on a picture gallery. He said, ‘That dress in the window. How much?’

She said, ‘Five guineas.’ She wouldn’t ‘sir’ him. His lip was like a badge of class. It revealed the poverty of parents who couldn’t afford a clever surgeon.

He said, ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’

She lisped at him genteelly, ‘It’s been vewwy much admired.’

‘Soft. Thin. You’d have to take care of a dress like that, eh? Do for someone pretty and well off?’

She lied without interest, ‘It’s a model.’ She was a woman, she knew all about it, she knew how cheap and vulgar the little shop really was.

‘It’s got class, eh?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, catching the eye of a dago in a purple suit through the pane, ‘it’s got class.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you five pounds for it.’ He took a note from Mr Cholmondeley’s wallet.

‘Shall I pack it up?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The girl’ll fetch it.’ He grinned at her with his raw lip. ‘You see, she’s class. This the best dress you have?’ and when she nodded and took the note away he said, ‘It’ll just suit Alice then.’

And so out into the Avenue with a little of his scorn expressed, out into Frith Street and round the corner into the German café where he kept a room. A shock awaited him there, a little fir tree in a tub hung with coloured glass, a crib. He said to the old man who owned the café, ‘You believe in this? This junk?’

‘Is there going to be war again?’ the old man said. ‘It’s terrible what you read.’

‘All this business of no room in the inn. They used to give us
plum
pudding. A decree from Caesar Augustus. You see I know the stuff, I’m educated. They used to read it us once a year.’

‘I have seen one war.’

‘I hate the sentiment.’

‘Well,’ the old man said, ‘it’s good for business.’

Raven picked up the bambino. The cradle came with it all of a piece: cheap painted plaster. ‘They put him on the spot, eh? You see I know the whole story. I’m educated.’

He went upstairs to his room. It hadn’t been seen to: there was still dirty water in the basin and the ewer was empty. He remembered the fat man saying, ‘Chumley, my man, Chumley. It’s pronounced Chumley,’ flashing his emerald ring. He called furiously, ‘Alice,’ over the banisters.

She came out of the next room, a slattern, one shoulder too high, with wisps of fair bleached hair over her face. She said, ‘You needn’t shout.’

He said, ‘It’s a pigsty in there. You can’t treat me like that. Go in and clean it.’ He hit her on the side of the head and she cringed away from him, not daring to say anything but, ‘Who do you think you are?’

‘Get on,’ he said, ‘you humpbacked bitch.’ He began to laugh at her when she crouched over the bed. ‘I’ve bought you a Christmas dress, Alice. Here’s the receipt. Go and fetch it. It’s a lovely dress. It’ll suit you.’

‘You think you’re funny,’ she said.

‘I’ve paid a fiver for this joke. Hurry, Alice, or the shop’ll be shut.’ But she got her own back calling up the stairs, ‘I won’t look worse than what you do with that split lip.’ Everyone in the house could hear her, the old man in the café, his wife in the parlour, the customers at the counter. He imagined their smiles. ‘Go it, Alice, what an ugly pair you are.’ He didn’t really suffer; he had been fed the poison from boyhood drop by drop: he hardly noticed its bitterness now.

He went to the window and opened it and scratched on the sill. The kitten came to him, making little rushes along the drain pipe, feinting at his hand. ‘You little bitch,’ he said, ‘you little bitch.’ He took a small twopenny carton of cream out of
his
overcoat pocket and spilt it in his soap-dish. She stopped playing and rushed at him with a tiny cry. He picked her up by the scruff and put her on top of his chest of drawers with the cream. She wriggled from his hand, she was no larger than the rat he’d trained in the home, but softer. He scratched her behind the ear and she struck back at him in a preoccupied way. Her tongue quivered on the surface of the milk.

Dinner-time, he told himself. With all that money he could go anywhere. He could have a slap-up meal at Simpson’s with the business men; cut off the joint and any number of veg.

When he got by the public call-box in the dark corner below the stairs he caught his name ‘Raven’. The old man said, ‘He always has a room here. He’s been away.’

‘You,’ a strange voice said, ‘what’s your name – Alice – show me his room. Keep an eye on the door, Saunders.’

Raven went on his knees inside the telephone-box. He left the door ajar because he never liked to be shut in. He couldn’t see out, but he had no need to see the owner of the voice to recognize: police, plain clothes, the Yard accent. The man was so near that the floor of the box vibrated to his tread. Then he came down again. ‘There’s no one there. He’s taken his hat and coat. He must have gone out.’

‘He might have,’ the old man said. ‘He’s a soft-walking sort of fellow.’

The stranger began to question them. ‘What’s he like?’

The old man and the girl both said in a breath, ‘A harelip.’

‘That’s useful,’ the detective said. ‘Don’t touch his room. I’ll be sending a man round to take his fingerprints. What sort of a fellow is he?’

Raven could hear every word. He couldn’t imagine what they were after. He knew he’d left no clues; he wasn’t a man who imagined things; he knew. He carried the picture of that room and flat in his brain as clearly as if he had the photographs. They had nothing against him. It had been against orders to keep the automatic, but he could feel it now safe under his armpit. Besides, if they had picked up any clue they’d have stopped him at Dover. He listened to the voices
with
a dull anger; he wanted his dinner; he hadn’t had a square meal for twenty-four hours, and now with two hundred pounds in his pocket he could buy anything, anything.

‘I can believe it,’ the old man said. ‘Why, tonight he even made fun of my poor wife’s crib.’

‘A bloody bully,’ the girl said. ‘
I
shan’t be sorry when you’ve locked him up.’

He told himself with surprise: they hate me.

She said, ‘He’s ugly through and through. That lip of his. It gives you the creeps.’