Half a Crown (33 page)

“I was exhausted,” I said. “Thank you for letting me sleep.”

“I’ll make some sandwiches,” my mother said, getting up. “Go ahead, I can listen while I cut.” They had no servants, I realized. She had to do everything herself. Perhaps a woman came in once a week to clean, and no doubt people helped them in the bar, but otherwise all the work of the house fell on her. I thought I should offer to help, but I knew she would decline, so I sat where I was.

I went through it all for them—meeting Sir Alan, the riot, Betsy, the proposal, the arrest, the rescue, the attack on the Bermans, the escape, and then coming to them. Partway through my mother put down a big plate of beef and mustard-and-cress sandwiches, the bread cut thickly and liberally buttered, and we munched our way through them as I talked. They were not wonderful sandwiches, but they were the sandwiches of my childhood. I talked on, with my mouth full. They interrupted often, asking questions and clarifications. When we finished the sandwiches my mother got out a plate of scones and a pot of jam. I was touched that she had thought me worth baking for.

“So you really could have married a lord,” my mother said.

“A sir,” Raymond corrected her.

“A baronet,” I corrected both of them.

“But you’d have been Lady Bellingham?” my mother asked.

“I would, but I didn’t want to be, and it’s all immaterial now because he’s certain to have been arrested too, and very unlikely to have escaped,” I said.

“And you really have been accepted at Oxford?” Raymond asked. He sounded envious, and I wondered if university had been a dream of his at one time, like Jude the Obscure.

“I have,” I said.

“Maybe she’ll go to Oxford and then marry a lord afterwards,” my mother said, proudly.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to go at all.” It hit me then. “I don’t know what I can do. I have no idea. I need to find out if Uncle Carmichael is still free, and if he is then get in touch with him, somehow.”

“You could telephone his flat,” Raymond said. “Or better yet, I could, and see who answers. I could be anybody. I’ll call from the pay phone in the bar.”

I looked at him with respect. “That’s a very good idea.”

“I told you he was clever,” my mother said, smiling at him loyally.

“Ask for Jack, that’s my uncle’s servant.” I stuttered a little on the last word. I hadn’t told them what Penn-Barkis had told me about Carmichael and Jack. “He’ll know everything, if he’s there, and if he is, I’ll talk to him. If someone else is answering, you could say you were a friend of his. He could have any number of friends, he’s bound to.”

“Bound to,” Raymond agreed. “Or I could just be the fishmonger ringing up to say I had a couple of nice trout.”

We all got up and went into the bar, which looked sad and deserted now it was empty. It was a big room, full of wood and polished horse-brasses and smelling of beer and men. “This is a big bar,” I said.

“Roadhouse, we are,” Raymond said. “This is a big step up for us,
we started off in a tiny little place, and the brewery keep moving us up because we do so well. It’s your mother, she charms the customers.” He smiled fondly at her. “Hush, now.” He pressed a button on the till and it shot open. He took out two pennies. “Number?”

I told him the number, and he dialed. It rang and was picked up on the third ring. “Is that Jack?” Raymond asked. “I’m Tom from Tom’s Fresh Fish, and I’m ringing to say I’ve got a nice couple of trout. That isn’t Jack, is it? Well, who are you then? Oh. Well, tell Jack I’ve got the fish, if you see him in the next hour or two, after that it’ll be too late.” He put the receiver down and turned to me with a long face. “That was someone very anxious to know who was calling, and definitely not Jack. Police of some sort, I’d say. I think your uncle’s in very bad trouble, my dear.”

“He’s not really her uncle,” my mother put in. “She can stay here. Nobody’ll come looking for her here.”

It was true, and it was even tempting. I could stay there and get to know my mother again. If it was true that she was dreadfully vulgar, then it was also true that I was a frightful snob.

“No, I have a better idea,” Raymond said, grinning, and shut the till with a snap. “Didn’t you say it’s tonight you’re supposed to be presented to the Queen?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, you should go. They won’t be expecting you, so they won’t be trying to keep you out.”

“They will be expecting me,” I said. “My name is on an invitation.”

“Yes, the Queen’s men will be expecting to let you in,” Raymond agreed, almost bouncing in his excitement. “But the ones who are trying to get you, Penn-Barkis and that awful Bannister, they won’t. It’ll be the last place they’d look for you. They’d never think you had the nerve to show up there, just where you’re supposed to be.”

“I suppose not,” I said. “But what good would it do if I went?”

“Why, you could tell Her Majesty about it, just like you’ve told us, and she’ll see it’s all sorted out. She needs to know about her uncle trying to grab power again, the so-called Duke of Windsor. And she needs to know what abuses are going on in the name of the law.”

“But—,” I said. I didn’t know where to start explaining about the role of a monarch in a constitutional monarchy.

“That’s right,” my mother said. “You’re surely not saying that she knows about all this, Elvira?”

“No,” I said, faintly. “But—”

“Well, they’re her government, aren’t they?”

This was unanswerable. I nodded. “But—”

“It’s been needing something like this,” Raymond said. “Look at all these protests, round the country. People have had enough. People don’t want this kind of thing. Death camps on British soil, that’s more than enough. Normanby getting away with murder, locking up people for saying no to him. That’s not what we voted for.”

“You did vote for him,” my mother said, slyly.

“I did the first time,” he said. “After those terrorists at Farthing killed that Thirkie. I wanted a bit of law and order and decent sorting out. But now it’s gone too far. Arresting young girls for dancing with the wrong men, what’s the world coming to?”

“That’s right,” my mother said.

“And the thing is, we can’t tell Her Majesty,” Raymond said. “We couldn’t walk up to her and say it, because her guards and people wouldn’t let us near. And you can bet they keep it from her very carefully, make sure she doesn’t get word. But you have this chance, this presentation, but you aren’t like the girls she usually meets who don’t know anything about this any more than she does. You know. You’re one of us, but you’ve got an invite like you’re one of them. And you should go and tell her.”

“So I should,” I said. I hadn’t gone mad or anything, it was just that they both seemed so sure. I remembered Aunt Katherine talking
about meeting the Queen, and I suddenly thought, why not? I’d been rehearsing and practicing for months to be presented, why shouldn’t I make it mean something? The worst that could happen was no worse than could quite likely happen to me anyway. And if they dragged me away from a presentation it would at least be a scandal, people would at least know about that. It would be something I could do. Raymond was right, things had gone too far. “I can’t just turn up as I am. They’d never let me in any more than they would you.”

“I can lend you a dress,” my mother said.

I did my best not to shudder. “It’s not that. I have an invitation, but it’s at the Maynards’. And Mrs. Maynard has to present me. That’s on the list.”

“Will she still do it?” Raymond asked.

“I don’t even know if they’re free,” I said. “They arrested Mr. Maynard at the same time they arrested me.”

“They don’t keep people like that for long,” my mother said. “One law for the rich and one law for the poor.”

“There is one law for rich and poor alike, that prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges,” I said. It was one of Uncle Carmichael’s favorite quotations, and it came from Anatole France, and that’s all I know about it.

“That’s lovely,” Raymond said. “Prevents them all from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges. I’d like to have that done as a sampler. You may think I’m a rich man—well, not by your standards, but I’ve done well for myself in the trade. I’m comfortable now. But I started at the very bottom, and I’m still an employee. I’d love to go into business for myself, that’s our dream, isn’t it, Irene, but we’ve never had the capital to take the risk.”

“We could call the Maynards and see if they’re there, and if they’re going to see the Queen tonight,” my mother said, reaching for the telephone.

“Not from here,” Raymond said.

“But you said—”

“We’ve used this phone now. They could trace that the two calls both came from it. We need to go out to the pay phone on the corner.”

“You seem to know a lot about this,” I said.

“Just what I’ve read,” he said, shyly. He took a handful of pennies from the till.

“Always got his nose in a book, he has,” my mother said, proudly.

“And you should tell her to go out to another box and call you back, if she is there. They might be listening to her telephone, but they can’t get every pay phone in London, and they can’t tap it quickly enough.”

“Her mother wouldn’t let her go out,” I said. “Not just like that.”

We went out of the front door of the pub to a telephone box on the corner of the street. Across the road I could see people going in and out of the Underground station. “In that case, you should tell her to meet you somewhere, but somewhere that means something else. Like say the Dorchester but mean the Ritz.”

“The Ritz isn’t a bad choice, if I need to get changed,” I said. It has the most enormous ladies’ rooms, with huge gold-framed mirrors.

“But you haven’t arranged beforehand to mean the other place,” Raymond said. “Most codes need to be arranged in advance. You need to say something she’ll understand and they won’t, like the place where you dropped your hanky.”

“All right,” I said, my head spinning with all this.

“Now, what shall I say to get her on the line?” Raymond asked me.

“Ask for Miss Maynard, and say—” Invention failed me. “Say it’s about the flowers,” I said. “That should fetch her. Or if it gets her mother, I’ll speak to her.”

Raymond went inside the box and made the call. Then after a moment he beckoned, stepped out, and I went in. “It’s her!” he said.

“Betsy?” I asked, picking up the receiver.

“Oh, thank God,” Betsy said, fervently.

It was so strange to hear her familiar voice, exactly the same as it always was, as if nothing had changed. “I have to be quick—is your father all right?”

“Yes, they let him go on Sunday night, late. But they won’t say anything about you—have they let you out? Are you coming home?”

“It’s more complicated than that. But are you still going to the palace tonight?”

“Yes, Mummy insisted. I didn’t want to go without you.” She sounded as if she might be about to cry.

“Will your mother still present me, if I’m there?”

“Oh, Elvira, I can make her, but can you really be? That would be so wonderful.”

The pips went, and I deposited another two pennies for another three minutes. Raymond had left a little pile of them beside the slot for me. He was making a thumbs-up sign to me outside. He was terribly common, but really the salt of the earth, as my aunt Katherine would have said. I felt sorry for having hated him all these years when I could have known him instead.

“Are you sure you can make your mother do it? Because if she won’t, this won’t work at all,” I said, when the money had gone in and the pips had gone away.

“She’ll do it. I promise.” Betsy never promised if she wasn’t going to deliver.

“Then I’m coming. I don’t think I should risk coming to the house to get my dress and my invitation, but could you bring them?”

“Where?”

“To the place where we had tea with Jean Evans,” I said. I knew she’d remember that, meeting Sergeant Evans’s wife had been memorable. Mrs. Evans had loved the Ritz, the chandeliers, the little cream cakes, the glamour of it all. “Don’t say the name! But come about an hour early. Bring my dress and my shoes and my flowers and my invitation.”

“And will you come home with us afterwards?” she implored.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see you there at six, Bets, all right?”

“All right,” she said, and the pips went again, and we shouted good-bye at each other over them. I collected the rest of the pile of pennies and stepped out of the phone box.

“I’m going to see the Queen,” I said to their expectant faces.

His immediate problem, Carmichael thought, as he made his way cautiously from the opposite end of Green Park, was that he was too conspicuous. Too many people knew what he looked like. His face had been so frequently on television. People often recognized him, and would continue to. And yet disguise wasn’t the answer either; there were few amateur disguises that didn’t look like disguises, especially to a trained eye. He had compromised by having his hair cut in a gentlemen’s salon on Piccadilly. He’d have dyed it if dyed hair on a man wasn’t so conspicuous as to scream for attention. His brown hair was streaked with enough silver that he could have justified it as vanity, except that he wanted to be inconspicuous. Jack had said his silver hairs were distinguished, he thought, and paused in his stride, as if the absence of Jack were a physical pain.

The trees in Green Park were greening up nicely, with the young fresh green that only comes in spring. The leaves on the beeches here were still tiny, no more than a mist of green, seen more clearly from the corner of the eye. Green Park was right in the middle of London, off Piccadilly, by the Ritz and the Royal Academy. In summer it was full of weary office workers eating sandwiches at lunchtime, but now on a chilly April day there were only a few brisk walkers, wrapped up in their own thoughts and raincoats.

Carmichael had taken what precautions he could by coming early and from the wrong direction, so the pattern of watchers stood out clearly when he was still far enough away among the trees that they hadn’t seen him. He slipped away, wondering whether Jacobson was dead, in custody, or turned coat. The last he thought the least likely, considering that Jacobson was a Jew. It needn’t be a betrayal. Perhaps they were only listening in to his home telephone. When he realized he was clutching the thought to him as a comfort, he bit his lip, hard. How could he reach Elvira without Jacobson?