The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (37 page)

Promptly the reply came, in a large envelope: the scroll of appointment was inside. In a long confused letter, indignant and hurt and apologetic, the former department head thanked the Unit and Excal for the cheque. But, he said, he felt obliged to return the scroll of appointment. In his day he encouraged his staff to believe, as he
himself was encouraged, that Excal did a thing well or not at all. As for the silver pin, he was keeping that for the time being; he awaited their instructions.

They urged him to keep the pin. And nothing more was heard from him until the end of the year.

Less disastrous, though perhaps more embarrassing, was the administrative error which sent an inadequately briefed Knight Companion, a former messenger, to visit a retired Excal director. The short biography provided was democratically defective and the messenger knew nothing of the eminence of the person he journeyed to succour. Pertinacious in the face of kindly surprise, his chivalry at last turned to doubt and then was dissipated in anxiety. The former director appeared; the messenger bowed low, presented a packet of Co-op tea, and withdrew.

Whymper had made much in his handouts of having a messenger and a department head as Knights Companion. But now they decided that there ought to be some parity between the visitor and the visited. It was also decided to abandon the fixed gift allowance for a sliding scale related to the status of the person visited. It was, too, at this time, disillusionment with the Knights Companion momentarily going deep, that the Yorkshire accountant suggested that bills for gifts should be sent direct to the Unit. This would mean more work, but the accountant produced some figures to show that if as a result of this precaution two or three shillings were saved per visit—and it might be more, for some shops could be persuaded to give Excal a discount—the Unit would gain or at worst break even.

‘What we need,’ he said, ‘is more staff.’

The request for more staff, enthusiastically put up by Whymper and Mr Stone, was as enthusiastically greeted by Sir Harry. And more staff was recruited, so that the female flurry towards the lavatories between twelve-thirty and one and five and five-thirty became disturbing: tock-tock-tock on brisk heels, pause, flush, tock-tock-tock: like a lazy sea whipped to spasmodic but towering fury on a steep rocky shore.

Two further irregularities came to light, and to the first there appeared to be no solution. A series of aggrieved complaining letters in various shaky hands revealed that a Knight Companion was using his right of entry to homes to propagate the creed of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The gifts he took, and for which the Unit had been paying for some weeks, were copies of
Let God Be True
and an annual subscription to a magazine called
Awake!
Eighteen letters were hastily dispatched, warning the Knights Companion against such practices, and to the Witness himself there went a letter informing him that he was struck off the roll of Knights Companion. A calm reply was received. The Witness wrote that what he had done was legitimate, since the truth had to be spread by whatever means. Authority always feared the truth and the action of the Unit did not surprise him; but he would continue with his ‘preaching and publishing work’. He carried out his threat, and for long the district remained disturbed, as could be seen from the concentration of red on the wall-map, where blue pins indicated satisfaction, red dissatisfaction, and yellow cases to be investigated by the Unit itself.

It was decided that in future Knights Companion would be carefully sounded for the depth of their religious convictions. More work was involved, because Personnel did not have the necessary information. And Whymper, saying it in much the same way as he used to say, ‘The treatment of the old in this country is scandalous’, said, ‘That’s the terrible thing about living in a pagan country.’ (This was Mr Stone’s first intimation that Whymper might be a Roman Catholic.) ‘A man works forty, fifty years for a firm, and no one cares whether he is Muslim or Buddhist.’

The other irregularity was discovered by chance. A Knight Companion claimed to have visited ten persons in his area, and was sent £5. The very day the cheque was sent, however, Pensions reported that one of the pensioners had moved to another address a fortnight before the date mentioned by the Knight Companion. Investigation revealed that the pensioner had not been visited at all. A further stern letter was sent, a further set of insignia recalled, and
Whymper decreed that in every list of pensioners sent out thereafter to Knights Companion one dead pensioner should be included.

*

At the dinner parties they had begun to give—the guests senior officials from Welfare, Personnel and Pensions, Miss Millington despairingly praised by her mistress for her chips and her fish—these were the stories that Margaret and Mr Stone told. They had thought their life’s store of stories completed; now they had the joy of acquiring new stories almost every week. The story of the cat and the cheese, through which Mr Stone and the Tomlinsons had sat so often, was forgotten, almost as completely as the cat: the animal had ceased to dig up the garden, which Mr Stone on free evenings and on weekends diligently cultivated, with the now superfluous but still reverential encouragement of Margaret and Miss Millington.

To some of these dinners Whymper came. He astonished them the first time by appearing in formal wear, his jacket sitting uncomfortably as always on his soft round shoulders. At the first meeting he was excessively courtly towards Margaret, and displayed none of the brusqueness or desire to shock which Mr Stone had feared. He was courtly, but he was severe. His eyes were narrowed; his mouth determinedly set, giving an unconvincing tightness to his jaw. He smoked innumerable cigarettes, tapping them in his way and rolling them slowly between his lips. He said little. He resisted all Margaret’s brightness, and she was intimidated by him. She thought she had failed with Whymper, and so did Mr Stone. But he came again, and again, accepting each invitation with alacrity; and each time he appeared in formal clothes. Margaret persevered in her brightness, and gradually Whymper thawed, acquiring something of his office manner. He sprawled in his chair, his legs wide apart, his back humped; his eyes lost their severity and uncertainty; and he occasionally gave that titter which Mr Stone found coarse and irritating in the office but which he was now glad to hear in his home.

‘Tell me, Mr Whymper,’ Margaret said one evening, in her best
imitation of the actress, ‘what do you think of all this talk about virgin birth?’

‘What they call virgin birth I call grudge birth,’ Whymper said. ‘Somebody had it in for the husband.’

Margaret saw it before Mr Stone. She forgot the actress, her mouth went square with delight, and she gave a great guffawing laugh, widening her knees and leaning towards Whymper.

Their friendship grew firm. He became a regular visitor to the house and often had dinner alone with them, so that at times Mr Stone wondered whether Whymper, in spite of his smart, busy appearance, had no other friends. In his usual way of not letting civility stand in the way of honesty, Whymper spoke his mind about Margaret’s clothes and the food she offered. Mr Stone suffered, but Margaret was delighted. It was ‘just like Whymper’. This recognition pleased him, and he made an effort to please. He became Bill to Margaret, and she Margaret to him, while Mr Stone remained simply Stone, spoken in a mock-formal, affectionate way at home, seriously at the office.

Sometimes Olive and Gwen were among the guests. Gwen was as sour-sweet as ever. But she had been slimming—it showed in the slight looseness of skin about her neck—and she had at last managed to impose some shape on her body. She wore her brassières tight, so that her large breasts were pushed upwards. They impended; they dominated. But they were shapely, and she was not without attraction when she was seated. When she stood up the impression was spoilt. For her hips were wide, and though not disproportionately so, the foolish child, in an effort to emphasize her breasts, wore tight-waisted dresses and sometimes broad belts which exaggerated the broadness of her hips.

Gwen was always a strain, and so now Mr Stone began to find Olive. He wanted her admiration, but he thought her only tepid. In spite of all the show of friendship, the exclamations at this new decoration and that, in spite of the ease with which she and Margaret
spoke, it was as if Olive had withdrawn from the household, and could no longer fully participate in its joys or sadness. Even when Margaret was out of the room she spoke as if Margaret were still there. And Mr Stone was disappointed. He expected something sweeter and more conspiratorial.

*

The leaves on the tree in the school grounds faded and fell, revealing once more the houses of the Monster and the Male (ferreting this autumn into the earth for a purpose which Mr Stone in spite of long observation could not ascertain). The pilot scheme ran its course and could be pronounced a success. Impressive sums had been spent; but the achievements were impressive. The Unit had been licked into shape. Administration had been simplified, liaison with Pensions and other departments regularized; and expansion could be easy. The usefulness of the scheme had been proved beyond doubt. The Knights Companion not only uncovered cases of distress and need; they also uncovered many cases of neglect and cruelty. Whymper fell on these with zeal, wrote them up in
Oyez! Oyez!,
the Unit’s cyclostyled newsletter, and reproduced photographs of the Knights Companion concerned, encouraging the others to a more rigorous investigation of their charges. The protective function of the Unit became increasingly important, beyond what Whymper or even Mr Stone had envisaged. And the name of the Knights Companion, in which Mr Stone had at first discerned only Whymper’s irreverence and professional enthusiasm, though Whymper always spoke it with the utmost earnestness and had indeed once roundly abused the junior accountant for speaking it with a smile of complicity, the name of the Knights Companion became a reality. For the operation had become a crusade.

It was another example of Whymper’s flair, and Mr Stone was admiring. And such was Whymper’s zeal, so great his delight at proofs of the scheme’s usefulness, that Mr Stone could not be sure
that Whymper had not committed himself without reserve to the cause. It was hard to tell with Whymper. In this respect he was a little like Evans, ex-RAF. He permitted himself moments of mockery, particularly at the petty crookedness which came to light, but he was quick to snub anyone, even Mr Stone, who attempted to do likewise. So that there were occasions when Mr Stone felt that he, absorbed in administration, and Whymper, speaking with the accents of passion, had exchanged roles.

‘The thing’s a success,’ Whymper said, looking at the map with its blue pins everywhere, its obstinate patch of red, and its now liberal sprinkling of yellow. ‘But what is success? We have a lot of letters, we can quote a lot of figures, the Knights are as happy as sandboys. But it isn’t enough. Stone. A rescue here and a rescue there is all very well. But in a few months even that will become routine. Everyone will become bored, even the Knights. We want something big. Something explosive. Something that will drive the whole thing along on its steam for a year or so.’

This was Whymper, dissatisfied with a thing as soon as it began to run smoothly, needing the stimulus of fresh ideas, and always slightly unsettling to Mr Stone, who was content but not surprised at the proofs of the usefulness of his project, and whose delight in the creation of the Unit was doubled by its smooth functioning and the daily contemplation of real men and women, with serious lives of their own, engaged in the working out of a project he had sketched in words, in the pool of light in his study.

Then they discovered the Prisoner of Muswell Hill.

Late one afternoon Mr Stone received a telephone call from a man who announced himself as Mr Duke. Mr Duke was distracted and much of what he said was unintelligible. But Mr Stone gathered that Mr Duke had been recently appointed a Knight Companion, that he had on that day sported the silver knight on his lapel for the first time and gone out to pay his visits. The first two pensioners he called on were dead, and had been dead for years.

‘I bought a walnut cake for them,’ he said repeatedly, as though distressed by its perishable quality.

One of the pensioners was indeed dead. But Pensions reported that the other was alive, or that at any rate pensions were still being sent to him. A yellow button went up like a quarantine flag over Muswell Hill, and an investigator was sent out the next morning. She returned just before lunch, quite shaken, and told this story.

The address had turned out to be in one of the respectable redbrick streets of Muswell Hill. The house was not noticeable if one walked past it quickly, for red brick is red brick and there are more rank gardens in Muswell Hill than the borough of Hornsey would care to admit. It was only on scrutiny that one noticed that the house was derelict, the window frames washed of all paint, that the curtains had a curious colourlessness, and that about the structure there was that air of decay which comes from an absence of habitation. The walk up to the front door had strengthened that impression. The bells were rusted; so was the knocker. She had knocked and knocked. At length there was movement, and as soon as the door was opened she was assailed by the smell of dirt and mustiness and cats and rags, which came partly from the house and partly from the cheap fur coat that the woman who opened was wearing. This woman was about fifty, of medium height, with pale-blue eyes behind pink-framed spectacles. Her eyes were searching but held no suspicion. Behind her in the dark hallway there was continuous movement, and she held the door as much to prevent the escape of what was behind her as to deny entry to the investigator. The movement continued, little rubbings, bristlings, soft thumps. The house was full of cats. Her father, the woman said, was dead. She had already told them he was dead. Why did they want to hear it again?

The investigator forced her way into the hall. Cats rubbed against her legs, and to the protests of the woman in the fur coat she responded with something like bullying. There were many letters in the hall: a mound of football coupons, letters from various
government departments, and all the literature the Knights Companion Unit had sent out. Breathing with difficulty, the investigator had searched the house, and in a room bolted from the outside had found her pensioner. The smell was even more disagreeable than that downstairs. The man did not see her; the room was in darkness; he was lying on a bed of rags. ‘He doesn’t like cats,’ the woman in the fur coat said. The man appeared to have lost the gift of speech; what he uttered were gruff little noises. The investigator pulled down curtains, an easy task; with greater difficulty she opened windows. And then at last the man spoke, a sentence of pure foolishness. But here the investigator broke down and sobbed.