Old Sins (9 page)

He was silent for a bit, and then he said, ‘Do you know what I’d really like, sir?’

‘A bit of crumpet?’ said Julian in what he knew was a horribly inappropriate bit of flippancy.

‘Well, that too, sir. Don’t think I’d do anyone much justice, though. But even more than that, sir, I’d like a cup of tea. Strong, and lots of sugar. Could you manage that for me, do you think? I’d be very grateful.’

‘Of course,’ said Julian, relieved to be able to do anything so constructive.

He came back to find Johns looking calm and composed, almost peaceful. ‘Feeling better?’

‘Yes, sir, yes I am. In a way. You’ve been very good to me, sir. I do appreciate it. I’m a bit of a liability, aren’t I?’

‘Well,’ said Julian, smiling at him, ‘I can’t pretend you’re an enormous help at the moment. But don’t worry, Johns, you will be. We’ll get our pound of flesh. And I expect one hell of a bender at your expense when we finally get back home.’

‘Right you are, sir. You’re on.’

He looked at Julian, and Julian looked at him, and they both could see with awesome clarity what the other was thinking.

‘I think I might have a nap,’ said Johns, suddenly brisk. ‘I think I’d like to be alone for a bit, sir, if you don’t mind.’

‘Sure,’ said Julian. ‘Sorry to keep rabbiting on.’

‘Oh, no, don’t apologize, I’ve enjoyed this evening.’

Jesus God, thought Julian, the poor sod’s in absolute fucking agony, shitting himself with pain, and he manages to tell me he’s enjoyed himself.

‘Good,’ he said, ‘anything else I can get you?’

‘Well, yes, sir, there is. My rucksack. There’s just a few things in it I’d like to go through. Pictures of Susie, and the little ones. Odds and ends. Would you mind? It’d help me to settle.’

‘Of course. I buried it at the back of the barn. Won’t be a tick.’

He gave it to Johns; he knew what was in it, what Johns really wanted, and Johns knew that he knew. ‘Good night, Johns. God bless you.’ He was surprised to hear those particular words come out; it was not a phrase he was in the habit of using. But it meant comfort and home; it was childhood and happiness; it was safety and courage.

Johns smiled. ‘I hope so, sir.’

Julian heard the pistol go off before he reached the house; he stumbled as if he had been hit himself, and felt hot tears in his eyes. ‘Stupid fuckers,’ was all he could say, ‘stupid, stupid fuckers.’ And he said it over and over again in a kind of blind, hopeless fury as he dug a grave and buried Johns. When he had finished he sat and looked at the sky for a long time, and
promised himself that the very first thing he would do when the war was over was find Susan Johns and tell her that her husband had been the bravest man in the whole of France. He wrote when he returned to England and told her that her husband had been shot by the Germans and hadn’t known anything at all about it; it seemed the only way he could salvage any comfort for her, and indeed even when he knew her quite well, he never told her the truth.

He had quite a lot of trouble finding her when he came home. The street she had lived in, the address Johns had given him, had been completely levelled, but he doggedly followed a trail which the woman at the corner shop gave him, and finally found her living in Acton with her two little girls, doing shift work at a soap factory. He kept in close contact with her; he liked her, she was pretty and immensely brave. She was also very bright. When he first found her she was deeply depressed, due as much, he thought, to her enforced cohabitation with an appalling mother as the loss of a husband she had hardly known; he would take her out to tea at Lyons’ Corner House where she ate hugely and unselfconsciously (‘You would too,’ she said when he first commented on her enormous appetite, ‘if you had to live on what my mum produces. A hundred and one ways with dried egg, and they’re all the same’), and encouraged her to talk about her life, about her two little girls and the hopelessness of her situation, and what she would have liked to do if things had been different; surprisingly it was not to live in domestic bliss with her Brian (or another Brian) for evermore, but to get a job working as a pharmacist.

‘I liked chemistry at school, and I always fancied playing around with all those bottles, and mixing medicines.’

‘Well, why don’t you try to do it now?’ he said, watching her with a mixture of admiration and amusement as she spread jam on her fourth toasted teacake.

‘Because I couldn’t cope with all the drama,’ she said. ‘Mum would go on and on, saying I’d got a perfectly good job already, and what did I want to change it for, and moan because it would mean more work and worry for her while I was getting it together, and anyway I might not be any good at it, and then where would I be? On the National Assistance. No, ’fraid it’s
not to be. But I would have liked it. Can I have one of those cream cakes, please?’

‘Of course. Well, I promise you one thing, Mrs Johns. I may have just the job for you myself one day, when my company gets off the ground, and then I shall come and offer you riches beyond the dreams of avarice to do it for me.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ she said, grinning at him, and pausing momentarily in her task of choosing precisely which of the four cakes before her was the jammiest and the sickliest. ‘Pull the other one.’

Julian was surprised by how hurt he felt. ‘I mean it. Just you wait and see.’

‘OK. I’ll have the doughnut, please.’

It was with a degree of self-satisfaction therefore, and a strong temptation to say that he had told her so, when he took her out (to the Kardomah this time) and offered her the job as laboratory assistant in Morell Pharmaceuticals. But if he was expecting her to be impressed and grateful, he was disappointed.

‘Thank you for asking me,’ she said, spreading her teacake with honey and tipping half the sugar bowl into her cup (her mother’s cooking had not improved along with the raw ingredients available to her), ‘but I really don’t think so. I don’t think I could.’

‘Oh, nonsense, of course you could. It’s not difficult and it’s a lot more interesting than putting soap into boxes –’

‘Cartons,’ said Susan pedantically.

‘– and you’d enjoy it.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean I couldn’t do it, of course I could, and I daresay yes, I would enjoy it, but how would I ever get there every day? And how do I know you won’t go bust and leave me out of a job? And what would I tell Mum? She wouldn’t like it.’

‘Tell Mum she isn’t going to get it,’ said Julian lightly, and was vaguely surprised and pleased when she laughed. ‘You can get there on a bus, it’s not far, and whenever I can I’ll give you a lift, I can easily come your way. You don’t know I won’t go bust, but if you work your backside off and help me, I probably won’t. Come on, Susan, it’ll cheer you up and it’s a terrific opportunity for you. You could end up as managing director of Morell Pharmaceuticals.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Susan, ‘and pigs might fly. Girls don’t get to be managing directors, Mr Morell, at least not if they went to secondary mods and have two kids to worry about.’

‘Well, that’s just where you might be wrong. I believe in women. I think they’re terrific.’

‘Yeah, I bet you do. Between the sheets.’

‘No, Susan.’ Julian was angry suddenly. He pushed his hair back and stirred his tea so hard it slopped into the saucer. ‘That’s very unfair. If I thought women were only good for sex, I wouldn’t be offering you a job, would I? I’d be looking for a man. And trying to seduce you instead of employing you.’

Susan looked him very straight in the eyes. ‘You wouldn’t bother seducing me,’ she said. ‘Girls like me don’t belong in your world.’

‘Susan,’ said Julian, ‘I would very much like to bother seducing you. I think you’re lovely. I think you’re brave and pretty and clever. But I wouldn’t insult you, that’s the point. I want you to do something much more important than going to bed with me. I want you to work for me. How do I make you understand?’

Susan smiled suddenly. ‘You just have. And thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me. Ever. Except for Brian when he first asked me to marry him. All right, let’s get down to business.’

‘Does that mean you’ll come?’

‘I don’t know. How much are you going to pay me?’

‘Four pounds a week.’

‘Not enough.’

Julian was impressed.

‘It’s the going rate.’

‘Yes, but it’s a risk.’

‘All right. Five pounds. But that’s bloody good and you’ll have to earn it.’

‘I will. Don’t worry.’ She was silent for a bit, thinking. ‘OK. I’d like to come very much. Thanks. Now I must go and collect Jenny and Sheila. They’re with the child minder.’

‘Is she good?’

‘She’s OK. I don’t have much choice. She’s kind enough. You can’t hope for much more.’

‘And how are they?’

‘All right. Jenny’s a bit delicate. She’s got a cough. It keeps both of them awake at night. And Sheila has a lot of tummy upsets.’

Julian handed her two bottles of Morell’s Cherry Linctus. ‘Try this. I think you’ll find it’ll help.’

‘Thanks. When do I start?’

‘Monday week. That’ll give you time to give in your notice. Honestly, Susan, you are doing the right thing. Shall we drink to our association?’

‘Not with alcohol, I hate what it does to people. So let’s stick to tea.’

‘All right,’ said Julian. ‘I don’t think the Kardomah has a very good wine list, as a matter of fact.’ He smiled at her and raised his cup. ‘To you. And me. And Morell Pharmaceuticals. Long may we all prosper.’

Susan clinked her cup against his. ‘Cheers. And thank you. Especially for saying you’d rather I worked for you than went to bed with you. That’s really nice.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Julian, slightly surprised by the pleasure she took in what she might well have considered a rather dubious compliment. ‘I promise you, Mrs Johns, that I will always maintain our relationship on that basis.’ He wondered if it was a promise that he would regret making.

Susan Johns proved to be a moderately good chemist and a brilliant administrator. From the day she arrived at the lab, everything fell into a state of perfect order. Jim Macdougall, who had gone into paroxysms of anxiety at the news that Julian had hired a woman, and a young one at that, was by the end of the first week grudgingly acknowledging that she had her uses, and by the end of the second totally, and by his own admission, dependent on her.

‘The lass is a marvel,’ he said, ‘she has a complete inventory of all our stock, she has tabs on what we need to replace; she has a new ordering system, she has every invoice cross-referenced under product and outlet – she worked out that system with your mother, by the way – she seems to understand exactly what our priorities should be, and she works unbelievably hard. And doesn’t even stop for a lunch break.’

‘What a paragon,’ said Julian, laughing, careful not to
remind Jim that he had given Susan a week and prophesied endless disasters as a direct result of her arrival, including the botching of formulations, loss of customers, and the clear possibility of the whole place being burnt down. ‘Does she have any vices at all? Don’t you think she might be making off with the tea money, or smuggling out cases of cough linctus to sell on the black market?’

‘Oh, aye, she has her faults,’ said Jim, quite unmoved by this attack. ‘She’s a clock watcher for one, which is one thing I can’t abide. Off on the stroke of five, no matter what has to be done.’

‘Yes, but she has to collect her children from their child minder,’ said Julian, ‘and you just said yourself she worked through the lunch hour. So you can’t really complain about that.’

‘I’m not complaining,’ said Macdougall indignantly, ‘just telling you how the lassie works. And then she does eat a lot of the time. She may not take a lunch hour, but she’s always picking at something. If it’s not sandwiches, it’s crisps, and if it’s not crisps, it’s sweets. It’s a marvel she’s not the size of a house. Little slip of a thing, you’d imagine she lived on air.’

‘Well, neither of those things sounds very serious to me,’ said Julian. ‘And I’m delighted she’s working out so well. Do you like her? Is she nice to work with?’

‘Oh, aye, she’s very nice. Not much of a talker, keeps herself to herself, but then that’s rare enough in a woman, and something on the whole to be thankful for. No, I’ll admit I was against the idea, but I was wrong and I’m delighted to say so.’

‘Good,’ said Julian, ‘she likes you too. She says you’re a good bloke. Which is high praise, I can tell you. She certainly wouldn’t say that about me. Now, Jim, I want to talk to you about something else. How’s the indigestion tablet coming along?’

‘It’s fine. Real fine. I have the prototype ready now, and we could start selling it into the pharmacies in a month or two, I reckon.’

‘How are we on the packaging? Are those boxes really going to be adequate, or should we go into bottles?’

‘Well, bottles will be safer, and will keep the tablets in better condition. But they’ll cost twice as much.’

‘We’re up to our necks in debt already. Can’t we get away with paying those wretched women a bit less to pack the stuff?’

‘No, you bloody well can’t.’ It was Susan’s voice; she had come back, to collect some order books she had promised Jim to go through that night, and which he’d been unable to give her earlier; she had one child in her arms, and was trailing the other by the hand. All three looked half asleep.

‘Susan,’ said Julian, ‘what on earth are you doing here with those children at this time of night? It’s nearly seven.’

‘I know, and I was going to do it tomorrow, but then I thought the orders were so important, and Mum’s out tonight, so I’ll have a bit of peace and quiet and I could really make a big impression on them.’

‘Have you trekked all the way back here from Acton? On the bus?’

‘Yeah, well, it didn’t take that long. I saw the bus coming, so I thought what the hell, might as well. Sheila was asleep anyway. And I’m glad I did come back, otherwise I wouldn’t have heard you plotting to do those poor bloody cows out of their money.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Susan,’ said Julian in exasperation. ‘Nobody’s planning to do anybody out of anything.’