Be Shot For Six Pence (2 page)

“Well, no. But soon. Then you’d have to make an honest woman of me.”

“I have never been able to see where honesty comes into that particular transaction.”

“Darling, you sound grumpy.”

“I am grumpy.”

“Liver?”

“My liver is in perfect order. It just so happens that I travelled up in the train with a carriage full of people, and I started by thinking how terrible they were, and suddenly I wondered if that was what I was going to look like myself in ten years’ time.”

“Were they bloody?”

“Beyond description.” I thought for a moment to get them straight in my own mind. “They had neither the disciplined carefulness of professional men nor the undisciplined carelessness of artists. They were foaled by Money out of Timidity. They looked like burst brown paper bags.”

“It was your own fault. You should have travelled third class and enjoyed yourself. And for goodness sake stop exaggerating. There’s nothing wrong with business men. They were probably quite nice when you got to know them.”

“Kind to their families, church wardens and pillars of the local Conservative party.”

“Well, what’s wrong with people like that? Your father’s a church warden
and
a J.P.”

“What’s my father got to do with it?”

“Look, Philip.” She sat up in bed and I knew she was going to say something tricky. “I saw your father on Saturday—”

“You
what
!”

“Don’t be angry before I’ve told you. He asked to see me. I didn’t see why not. I think he’s very nice.”

“For God’s sake—”

“He wasn’t shocked, or anything like that.”

“That’s not the point.”

I found I was starting to shout, and took a hold of myself.

“What exactly are you trying to do? First you talk of children, and then you rush off to see my family. What are you? An aspiring young bride?”

“Don’t be horrid.”

“I told you not to see my father.”

“He knew all about us.”

“He knows all about myxomatosis. But he doesn’t want diseased rabbit served up for breakfast.”

“Darling. What a horrible thing to say.”

“The facts are clear enough anyway. You gave me a promise and you’ve broken it.”

I got up and pulled out my suitcase from behind the wardrobe.

I have very little use for material possessions. I keep a few spare clothes, things like my dinner jacket and my climbing kit, at the Club and I have odd garments and changes of linen scattered about in the houses of friends and relations; never more than will go in a single suitcase. Possessions attach you. Get rid of them and you take a step towards non-attachment.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Packing. Where did I leave my hairbrushes?”

“Where are you going?”

“Away.”

Penny sat up in bed abruptly.

“I believe you’re serious,” she said.

“Did I leave them in the bathroom? Of course I’m serious.”

They were in the bathroom. Also a dirty shirt and some soiled collars and handkerchiefs that I made into a bundle. The Club would be able to get them washed for me.

When I got back Penny was up. She had put on her dressing gown and, first reaction of women to a crisis, had very rapidly but skilfully made up her face.

“Got them,” I said. There was just room in the suitcase for everything.

“Darling,” she said, and there was an infinite tenderness in her voice. “I’ve just realised what’s happening. I’m dreaming all this, and in a minute I’m going to wake up.”

“You’ll wake up,” I agreed.

“But—”

“The rent’s paid to the end of the month. Not that it matters. You’ve got as much money as I have. This is the end of the instalment, Penny. I said if ever you tried to bring my family into this I’d leave you. You have and I am.”

“Is it possible that you’re being a little bit of a prig?”

“Quite possible,” I said.

“Then you’re really going? For ever?”

“For ever,” I said. “And ever.”

“You’re not even going to kiss me?”

“I don’t mind,” I said, “without prejudice.”

Two minutes later I was in the street. I got breakfast at a coffee stall and walked to my Club.

“You can have your usual room in the annexe,” the Secretary said. “Things are a bit easier now, but if you can give me any idea how long you’re likely to want it?”

“A fortnight at the outside,” I said.

I should be able to make any arrangements in that time.

At eleven o’clock I rang up the office.

Douglas answered the telephone himself. He seemed cheerful.

“I’ve just seen Carnwath,” he said, “and we’ve landed the hedge-trimming contract. Six machines, six crews, and one maintenance crew and one stores lorry. The whole outfit to be ready in three months’ time.”

“That’s good isn’t it,” I said.

“We’ll show thirty per cent clear of all overheads.”

“That on top of the Belsize contract makes it look like a record year.”

“Our only enemy,” said Douglas, “is going to be the tax collector.” But he said it cheerfully. Douglas is an accountant and enjoys fighting the tax collector. They speak the same language. I don’t think we ever do anything actually dishonest, but we seem to pay away less of our profits to the Revenue than any other company I’ve ever heard of.

“I don’t think I shall turn up today.”

“That’s all right,” said Douglas. “Everything’s under control. Why don’t you help yourself to a holiday.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

That was the trouble. Everything
was
under control. I don’t want you to get this wrong. Douglas plays absolutely fair with me. He works a twelve-hour day to my six-hour one, and we share every penny of the profits equally. My share brings me more money than I really know how to spend. But the fun has gone out of it.

When I formed the company, just after the War, it was really something. It was based on an idea I’d had that practically no one in the post-war world was going to be able to afford a gardener; or not enough gardeners for the garden they had to keep up. Acres of beds unweeded and lawns going back to rank grass, miles of hedges sprouting and un-trimmed.

We started by getting a licence for the sale in this country of a cheap American motor-mower. Then we got hold of the first really good automatic mower and weeder. It’s a Dutch machine; they built it for their tulip beds, and we adapted it and got a licence to manufacture it here.

Boy, did our troubles start then! With the mower we had only been middle-men. That’s easy. You can be a middle-man with one room, one typist, and a lot of nerve. But as soon as we started to manufacture we needed real money. That meant going to the City; and it meant debentures and preference shares and unsecured loans and arrangements of all sorts. And that’s where I brought Douglas in. I’d met him in the War and I knew he was a teetotaller and a chartered accountant. My impression was that he was an able chap; and I was right.

For four years we hung on by our eyelashes. There were big firms who didn’t like us cutting in. And some of them weren’t too scrupulous. It was a fight. I didn’t work a six-hour day then. Sometimes I didn’t get much sleep out of the whole twenty-four.

It was the Combine Hedge Clipper that put us on top. We didn’t sell it to people. We hired it to them, with a crew that knew how to work it. Not to small gardens, but big places. It paid very handsomely, and, as often as not, got us the other orders as well.

For some time now, I’d just sat back and let the money come in. I hadn’t realised, until that morning, that the whole idea had died on me.

Douglas, of course, wanted to go on. On to bigger and better things. I didn’t. I wanted to back-pedal, which, come to think of it, was the situation between me and Penny, too, in a nutshell.

The porter came into the coffee room where I was browsing through the early editions of the evening papers and said that Mrs. Pastonberry was asking for me. He had told her that he would ascertain if I was in the building.

(Mrs. Pastonberry is Penny. Mr. Pastonberry had been a very superior sort of wholesale grocer who had married Penny when she was eighteen and lived just long enough to endow her with his considerable worldly goods before passing away as the result, it was believed, of over-indulgence in his own port.)

“I hope that you didn’t say I was here.”

“Of course not, sir.”

Silly question really.

“Well, that’s all right. Because I’m not.”

I had lunch at the Polidor, rather a lengthy function as I met two people I knew. They had a spare girl with them and we made up a foursome. There was, I thought, a faint look of invitation in the spare girl’s eyes when we parted, but I disregarded it and went off to spend the afternoon at the zoo.

As an antidote to mental disequilibrium there is nothing like the aquarium. Through warm, uncounted hours I lingered, staring across the glass frontier into another world. A world of strange dimensions where Time did not exist, and it was as easy to go upwards and backwards as it was forwards and downwards. A frightening world where dwelt Esox Lucius, the Pike and Maia Maia, the spider crab. A world of shadows and half-lights in which you might encounter bustling little characters like the Trigger Fish and the Schoolmaster Snapper, witless oafs like Dollo’s lung fish or, for plain horror, Silurus, the Giant Catfish, who sits white eyed in the shadow of his rocky chamber, his thick whiskers trembling as he dreams of ancient evil.

When I got back to the Club the porter said, “Mrs. Pastonberry called, sir.”

“She actually came here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you do with her?”

“We put her in the small committee room.”

“That was rather drastic. How long did she survive?”

“She left approximately forty minutes later, sir.”

“She’s tougher than I thought.”

The small committee room is a terrible apartment. It contains two hundred volumes of
Punch,
which have been specially bound for the Club in half-yearly numbers in black buckram with the Club’s crest on the spine; a buffalo’s head with one eye, and no windows of any sort. Even bailiffs have been removed from it screaming in less than thirty minutes.

I went up to dress for dinner.

In the morning, Penny telephoned again.

This time, for a change, I decided I would take the call.

She sounded cross.

“I tried three times to get hold of you yesterday,” she said.

“I got the messages,” I said.

“I don’t believe you were out at all.”

“I assure you I was. I went to the zoo in the afternoon and the
Crazy Gang
in the evening.”

“Stop behaving like a fool.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“Come back here, of course.”

“Penny,” I said. “You’re not trying. I told you. Remember? I’m not coming back.”

“Well come out from behind that terrible Club so that I can get hold of you.”

“One of the reasons men belong to Clubs is to protect them from people like you.”

“That bloody porter. When I ring up now he sounds just as if he thought I was a tart.”

“Well—” I said, diplomatically.

The slam of the receiver going back nearly deafened me.

I retired to the morning room and opened
The Times.
There was no need to hurry. If Douglas wanted me for anything he could ring me.

The first thing I saw was the advertisement. It was at the top of the Personal Column and it said: “Attention, Philip. If you want to know the inner story, go to Twickenham and see Henry. Colin.”

It was for all the world as if one of the figures in Madame Tussauds had stepped smartly from its dais, raised its head, and addressed me by name.

I sat for a few minutes, staring at it, in an idiotic way as if I hoped the letters might themselves say something. I even cast my eye down the column to see if there might be anything further addressed to me; but this was the only one.

“Attention, Philip—”

I went over to the rack where the back numbers were stored. It was in Monday’s paper too. I must have been too pre-occupied to notice it. Monday was the first time though. I went back through several weeks to make sure of that.

Then I put on my hat and went out quickly.

The commissionaire in the glass hutch at the top of the stairs asked me, with all the courtesy for which this great newspaper is famous, if I would be good enough to wait. He showed me into a cubicle which had the air of an exceptionally well-appointed confessional, and said that Mr. Satterley would be along soon.

In due course Mr. Satterley appeared. He was tiny. Smaller even than me and I am no size at all. A humming bird of a man. Neat, bright and poised.

“You came about an announcement in our Personal Column,” he said.

“That’s right, it’s one which appeared today. Yesterday too, I believe.”

I took out the copy of the paper and showed it to him.

Mr. Satterley said, “And you are interested in Axminster carpets?”

“Not that one. The one before. The first one in the column.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I wondered if you could tell me anything about it.”

“There is not usually a great deal to tell,” said Mr. Satterley, politely. “We usually accept such—er—announcements, by post. Provided that they seem to us to be genuine, and not objectionable in any way – you’d be surprised how often they contain a ‘double entendre’ – we really become quite expert at spotting them.”

“I don’t think this one is a leg-pull,” I said.

“No. No. It certainly seemed genuine.”

We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Nevertheless it seemed to me that Mr. Satterley was stalling. He had not said, right out, as he easily could have done, “
This
announcement was sent by post.” I felt that the time had come to abandon finesse.

“Do you know anything about the person who put this one in?”

“I’m afraid,” said Mr. Satterley, “that I must ask you a question in return. What is your interest in the matter?”

“I can answer that without any difficulty. I have every reason to suppose that I am the Philip to whom the message is addressed and, if I am right about that it was put in by Colin Studd-Thompson.”