Night Over Water (10 page)

The chairman now said to Harry: “Are you asking for bail?”

Harry pretended to be confused. “Oh! Goodness gracious! I think so. Yes—yes, I am.”

All three magistrates sat up and began to take notice when they heard his upper-class accent. Harry enjoyed the effect. He was proud of his ability to confound people’s social expectations. The reaction of the Bench gave him heart. I can fool them, he thought. I bet I can.

The chairman said: “Well, what have you got to say for yourself?”

Harry was listening carefully to the chairman’s accent, trying to place his social class precisely. He decided the man was educated middle class: a pharmacist, perhaps, or a bank manager. He would be shrewd, but he would be in the habit of deferring to the upper classes.

Harry put on an expression of embarrassment, and adopted the tone of a schoolboy addressing a headmaster. “I’m afraid there’s been the most frightful muddle, sir,” he began. The interest of the magistrates went up another notch, and they shifted in their seats and leaned forward interestedly. This was not going to be a run-of-the-mill case, they could see, and they were grateful for some relief from the usual tedium. Harry went on: “To tell you the truth, some of the fellows drank too much port at the Carlton Club yesterday, and that was really the cause of it all.” He paused, as if that might be all he had to say, and looked expectantly at the Bench.

The military magistrate said: “The Carlton Club!” His expression said it was not often that members of that august institution appeared before the Bench.

Harry wondered if he had gone too far. Perhaps they would refuse to believe that he was a member. He hurried on: “It’s dreadfully embarrassing, but I shall go round and apologize
immediately
to all concerned and get the whole thing straightened out without delay ...” He pretended to remember suddenly that he was wearing evening dress. “That is, as soon as I’ve changed.”

The old codger said: “Are you saying you didn’t
intend
to take twenty pounds and a pair of cuff links?”

His tone was incredulous, but nevertheless it was a good sign that they were asking questions. It meant they were not dismissing his story out of hand. If they had not believed a word of what he was saying they would not have bothered to challenge him on the details. His heart lifted: perhaps he would be freed!

He said: “I did borrow the cuff links—I had come out without my own.” He held up his arms to show the unfastened cuffs of his dress shirt sticking out from the sleeves of his jacket. His cuff links were in his pocket.

The old codger said: “And what about the twenty pounds?”

That was a harder question, Harry realized anxiously. No plausible excuse came to mind. You might forget your cuff links and casually borrow someone else’s, but borrowing money without permission was the same as stealing. He was on the edge of panic when inspiration rescued him once again. “I do think Sir Simon might have been mistaken about how much there was in his wallet originally.” Harry lowered his voice, as if to say something to the magistrates that the common people in the court ought not to hear. “He is frightfully rich, sir.”

The chairman said: “He didn’t get rich by forgetting how much money he had.” There was a ripple of laughter from the people in the court. A sense of humor might have been an encouraging sign, but the chairman did not crack a smile: he had not intended to be funny. He’s a bank manager, Harry thought; money’s no joking matter. The magistrate went on. “And why did you not pay your bill at the restaurant?”

“I say, I am most awfully sorry about that. I had the most appalling row with—with my dining partner.” Harry ostentatiously refrained from saying who he was dining with: it was bad form, among public-school boys, to bandy a woman’s name about, and the magistrates would know that. “I’m afraid I sort of stormed out, completely forgetting about the bill.”

The chairman looked over the top of his spectacles and fixed Harry with a hard stare. Harry felt he had gone wrong somewhere. His heart sank. What had he said? It occurred to him that he had displayed a casual attitude toward a debt. This was normal among the upper classes but a deadly sin to a bank manager. Panic seized him and he felt he was about to lose everything by a small error of judgment. Quickly he blurted out: “Fearfully irresponsible of me, sir, and I shall go round there this lunchtime and settle up, of course. That is, if you let me go.”

He could not tell whether the chairman was mollified or not. “So you’re telling me that when you have made your explanations the charges against you are likely to be dropped?”

Harry decided he ought to guard against appearing to have a glib answer to every question. He hung his head and looked foolish. “I suppose it would serve me bally well right if people refused to drop the charges.”

“It probably would,” the chairman said sternly.

You pompous old fart, Harry thought; but he knew that this kind of thing, though humiliating, was good for his case. The more they scolded him, the less likely they were to send him back to jail.

“Is there anything else you would like to say?” the chairman asked.

In a low voice Harry replied: “Only that I’m most frightfully ashamed of myself, sir.”

“Hm.” The chairman grunted skeptically, but the military man nodded approvingly.

The three magistrates conferred in murmurs for a while. After a few moments, Harry realized he was holding his breath, and forced himself to let it out. It was unbearable that his whole future should be in the hands of these old duffers. He wished they would hurry up and make up their minds; when they all nodded in unison he wished they would postpone the awful moment.

The chairman looked up. “I hope a night in the cells has taught you a lesson,” he said.

Oh, God, I think he’s going to let me go, Harry thought. He swallowed and said: “Absolutely, sir. I never want to go back there again, ever”.

“Make sure of it.”

There was another pause; then the chairman looked away from Harry and addressed the court. “I’m not saying we believe everything we’ve heard, but we don’t think this is a case for a custodial remand.”

A wave of relief washed over Harry, and his legs went weak.

The chairman said: “Remanded for seven days. Bail in the sum of fifty pounds.”

Harry was free.

 

He saw the streets with new eyes, as if he had been in jail for a year instead of a few hours. London was getting ready for war. Dozens of huge silver balloons floated high in the skies to obstruct German planes. Shops and public buildings were surrounded by sandbags, to protect them from bomb damage. There were new air-raid shelters in the parks, and everyone carried a gas mask. People felt they might be wiped out at any minute, and this caused them to drop their reserve and converse amiably with total strangers.

Harry had no memory of the Great War—he had been two years old when it ended. As a little boy he had thought “The War” was a place, for everyone said to him: “Your father was killed in The War,” like they said: “Go and play in The Park. Don’t fall in The River. Ma’s going up The Pub.” Later, when he was old enough to realize what he had lost, any mention of The War was painful to him. With Marjorie, the solicitor’s wife who had been his lover for two years, he had read the poetry of the Great War, and for a while he had called himself a pacifist. Then he had seen the Black Shirts marching in London and the scared faces of the old Jews as they watched, and he had decided some wars might be worth fighting. In the last few years he had been disgusted at the way the British government turned a blind eye to what was happening in Germany, just because they hoped Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union. But now that war had actually broken out, he thought only of all the small boys who would live, as he had, with a hole in their lives where a father should be.

But the bombers had not yet come, and it was another sunny day.

Harry decided not to go to his lodgings. The police would be furious about his getting bail and they would want to rearrest him at the first opportunity. He had better lie low for a while. He did not want to go back to jail. But how long would he have to keep looking back over his shoulder? Could he evade the police forever? And if not, what would he do?

He got on the bus with his ma. He would go to her place in Battersea for the moment.

Ma looked sad. She knew how he made his living, although they had never talked about it. Now she said thoughtfully: “I could never give you nothing.”

“You gave me everything, Ma,” he protested.

“No, I didn’t. Otherwise why would you need to steal?”

He did not have an answer to that.

When they got off the bus he went into the corner newsagent’s, thanked Bemie for calling Ma to the phone earlier and bought the
Daily
Express. The headline said: POLES BOMB BERLIN. As he came out he saw a bobby cycling along the road, and he felt a moment of foolish panic. He almost turned and ran before he got himself under control and remembered they always sent two people to arrest you.

I can’t live like this, he thought.

They went to Ma’s building and climbed the stone staircase to the fifth floor. Ma put the kettle on and said: “I’ve pressed your blue suit—you can change into that.” She still took care of his clothes, sewing on buttons and darning his silk socks. Harry went into the bedroom, dragged his case from under the bed and counted his money.

After two years of thieving he had two hundred forty-seven pounds. I must have pinched four times that much, he thought. I wonder what I spent the rest on?

He also had an American passport.

He flicked through it thoughtfully. He remembered finding it in a bureau at the home of a diplomat in Kensington. He had noticed that the owner’s name was Harold and the picture looked a little like himself, so he had pocketed it.

America, he thought.

He could do an American accent. In fact, he knew something most British people did not—that there were several different American accents, some of which were posher than others. Take the word
Boston.
People from Boston would say
Bahston.
People from New York would say Baa.uston. The more English you sounded, the more upper class you were, in America. And there were millions of rich American girls just waiting to be romanced.

Whereas in this country there was nothing for him but jail and the army.

He had a passport and a pocketful of money. He had a clean suit in his mother’s wardrobe and he could buy a few shirts and a suitcase. He was seventy-five miles from Southampton.

He could be gone today.

It was like a dream.

His mother woke him up by calling from the kitchen: “Harry—d’you want a bacon sandwich?”

“Yes, please.”

He went into the kitchen and sat at the table. She put a sandwich in front of him, but he did not pick it up. “Let’s go to America, Ma,” he said.

She burst out laughing. “Me? America? I should cocoa!”

“I mean it. I’m going.”

She became solemn. “It’s not for me, son. I’m too old to emigrate.”

“But there’s going to be a war.”

“I’ve lived here through one war, and a general strike and a Slump.” She looked around at the tiny kitchen. “It ain’t much but it’s what I know.”

Harry had not really expected her to agree, but now that she had said it, he felt despondent. His mother was all he had.

She said: “What’ll you do there, anyway?”

“Are you worried about me thieving?”

“It always ends up the same way, thieving. I never heard of a tea leaf that wasn’t collared sooner or later.”

A tea leaf was a thief, in rhyming slang. Harry said: “I’d like to join the air force and learn to fly.”

“Would you be allowed?”

“Over there, they don’t care if you’re working class, so long as you’ve got the brains.”

She looked more cheerful then. She sat down and sipped her tea while Harry ate his bacon sandwich. When he had finished he took out his money and counted out fifty pounds.

“What’s that for?” she said. It was as much money as she earned in two years of cleaning offices.

“It’ll come in handy,” he said. “Take it, Ma. I want you to have it.”

She took the money. “You’re really going, then.”

“I’m going to borrow Sid Brennan’s motorbike and drive to Southampton today and get a ship.”

She reached across the little table and took his hand. “Good luck to you, son.”

He squeezed her hand gently. “I’ll send you more money, from America.”

“No need, unless you’ve got it to spare. I’d rather you send me a letter now and again, so I know how you’re going on.”

“Yeah. I’ll write.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Come back and see your old ma one day, won’t you?”

He squeezed her hand. “’Course. I will, Ma. I’ll be back.”

 

Harry looked at himself in the barber’s mirror. The blue suit, which had cost him thirteen pounds in Savile Row, fitted beautifully and went well with his blue eyes. The soft collar of his new shirt looked American. The barber brushed the padded shoulders of the double-breasted jacket, and Harry tipped him and left.

He went up the marble staircase from the basement and emerged in the ornate lobby of the South-Western Hotel. It was thronged with people. This was the departure point for most transatlantic crossings, and thousands of people were trying to leave England.

Harry had discovered how many when he tried to get a berth on a liner. All the ships were booked up for weeks ahead. Some of the shipping lines had closed their offices rather than waste staff time turning people away. For a while it had looked impossible. He had been ready to give up, and start thinking of another plan, when a travel agent had mentioned the Pan American Clipper.

He had read about the Clipper in the newspapers. The service had started in the summer. You could fly to New York in less than thirty hours, instead of four or five days on a ship. But a one-way ticket cost ninety pounds. Ninety pounds! You could almost buy a new car for that.