A Gun for Sale (9 page)

‘Miss Maydew,’ he said half-heartedly, as if to show to the chorus the honesty of his intentions by inviting the principal boy.

‘Sorry,’ Miss Maydew said, ‘I’m dining with Bleek.’

Anne walked out on them; she didn’t want to high-hat Davis, but his presence there shocked her. She believed in Fate and God and Vice and Virtue, Christ in the stable, all the Christmas stuff; she believed in unseen powers that arranged meetings, drove people along ways they didn’t mean to go; but she was quite determined she wouldn’t help. She wouldn’t play God or the Devil’s game; she had evaded Raven, leaving him there in the bathroom of the little empty house, and Raven’s affairs no longer concerned her. She wouldn’t give him away; she was not yet on the side of the big organized battalions; but she wouldn’t help him either. It was a strictly neutral course she steered out of the changing-room, out of the theatre door, into Nottwich High Street.

But what she saw there made her pause. The street was full of people; they stretched along the southern pavement, past the theatre entrance, as far as the market. They were watching the electric bulbs above Wallace’s, the big drapers, spelling out the night’s news. She had seen nothing like it since the last election, but this was different, because there were no cheers. They were reading of the troop movements over Europe, of the precautions against gas raids. Anne was not old enough to
remember
how the last war began, but she had read of the crowds outside the Palace, the enthusiasm, the queues at the recruiting offices, and that was how she had pictured every war beginning. She had feared it only for herself and Mather. She had thought of it as a personal tragedy played out against a background of cheers and flags. But this was different; this silent crowd wasn’t jubilant, it was afraid. The white faces were turned towards the sky with a kind of secular entreaty; they weren’t praying to any God; they were just willing that the electric bulbs would tell a different story. They were caught there, on the way back from work, with tools and attaché cases, by the rows of bulbs, spelling out complications they simply didn’t understand.

Anne thought: can it be true that that fat fool… that the boy with the hare-lip
knows
… Well, she told herself, I believe in Fate, I suppose I can’t just walk out and leave them. I’m in it up to the neck. If only Jimmy were here. But Jimmy, she remembered with pain, was on the other side; he was among those hunting Raven down. And Raven must be given the chance to finish
his
hunt first. She went back into the theatre.

Mr Davenant – Davis – Cholmondeley, whatever his name was, was telling a story. Miss Maydew and Alfred Bleek had gone. Most of the girls had gone too to change. Mr Collier watched and listened nervously; he was trying to remember who Mr Davis was; Mr Davenant had been silk stockings and had known Callitrope, who was the nephew of the man Dreid owed money to. Mr Collier had been quite safe with Mr Davenant, but he wasn’t certain about Davis … This panto wouldn’t last for ever and it was as fatal to get
in
with the wrong people as to get
out
with the right. It was possible that Davis was the man Cohen had quarrelled with, or he might be the uncle of the man Cohen had quarrelled with. The echoes of that quarrel were still faintly reverberating through the narrow backstage passages of provincial theatres in the second-class touring towns. Soon they would reach the third companies and everyone would either move up one or move down one, except those who couldn’t move down any lower.
Mr Collier
laughed nervously and glared in a miserable attempt to be in and out simultaneously.

‘I thought somebody breathed the word dinner,’ Anne said. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘First come, first served,’ Mr Davis-Cholmondeley said cheerily. ‘Tell the girls I’ll be seeing them. Where shall it be, Miss?’

‘Anne.’

‘That’s fine,’ Mr Davis-Cholmondeley said. ‘I’m Willie.’

‘I bet you know this town well,’ Anne said. ‘I’m new.’ She came close to the floodlights and deliberately showed herself to him; she wanted to see whether he recognized her; but Mr Davis never looked at a face. He looked past you. His large square face didn’t need to show its force by any eye-to-eye business. Its power lay in its existence at all; you couldn’t help wondering, as you wondered with an outsize mastiff, how much sheer weight of food had daily to be consumed to keep him fit.

Mr Davis winked at Mr Collier, and said, ‘Oh yes, I know this town. In a manner of speaking I made this town.’ He said, ‘There isn’t much choice. There’s the Grand or the Metropole. The Metropole’s more intimate.’

‘Let’s go to the Metropole.’

‘They have the best sundaes too in Nottwich.’

The street was no longer crowded, just the usual number of people looking in the windows, strolling home, going into the Imperial Cinema. Anne thought, where is Raven now? How can I find Raven?

‘It’s not worth taking a taxi,’ Mr Davis said, ‘the Metropole’s only just round the corner. You’ll like the Metropole,’ he repeated. ‘It’s more intimate than the Grand,’ but it wasn’t the kind of hotel you associated with intimacy. It came in sight at once all along one side of the market place, as big as a railway station, of red and yellow stone with a clock-face in a pointed tower.

‘Kind of Hôtel de Ville, eh?’ Mr Davis said. You could tell how proud he was of Nottwich.

There were sculptured figures in between every pair of
windows
; all the historic worthies of Nottwich stood in stiff neo-Gothic attitudes, from Robin Hood up to the Mayor of Nottwich in 1864. ‘People come a long way to see this,’ Mr Davis said.

‘And the Grand? What’s the Grand like?’

‘Oh, the Grand,’ Mr Davis said, ‘the Grand’s gaudy.’

He pushed her in ahead of him through the swing doors, and Anne saw how the porter recognized him. It wasn’t going to be hard, she thought, to trace Mr Davis in Nottwich; but how to find Raven?

The restaurant had enough room for the passengers of a liner; the roof was supported on pillars painted in stripes of sage-green and gold. The curved ceiling was blue scattered with gold stars arranged in their proper constellations. ‘It’s one of the sights of Nottwich,’ Mr Davis said. ‘I always keep a table under Venus.’ He laughed nervously, settling in his seat, and Anne noticed that they weren’t under Venus at all but under Jupiter.

‘You ought to be under the Great Bear,’ she said.

‘Ha, ha, that’s good,’ Mr Davis said. ‘I must remember that.’ He bent over the wine-list. ‘I know you ladies always like a sweet wine.’ He confessed, ‘I’ve a sweet tooth myself.’ He sat there studying the card, lost to everything; he wasn’t interested in her; he seemed interested at that moment in nothing but a series of tastes, beginning with the lobster he had ordered. This was his chosen home: the huge stuffy palace of food; this was his idea of intimacy, one table set among two hundred tables.

Anne thought he had brought her there for a flirtation. She had imagined that it would be easy to get on terms with Mr Davis, even though the ritual a little scared her. Five years of provincial theatres had not made her adept at knowing how far she could go without arousing in the other more excitement than she could easily cope with. Her retreats were always sudden and dangerous. Over the lobster she thought of Mather, of security, of loving one man. Then she put out her knee and touched Mr Davis’s. Mr Davis took no notice, cracking his way through a claw. He might just as well have been alone. It
made
her uneasy, to be so neglected. It didn’t seem natural. She touched his knee again and said, ‘Anything on your mind, Willie?’

The eyes he raised were like the lenses of a powerful microscope focused on an unmounted slide. He said, ‘What’s that? This lobster all right, eh?’ He stared past her over the wide rather empty restaurant, all the tables decorated with holly and mistletoe. He called, ‘Waiter, I want an evening paper,’ and set to again at his claw. When the paper was brought he turned first of all to the financial page. He seemed satisfied; what he read there was as good as a lollipop.

Anne said, ‘Would you excuse me a moment, Willie?’ She took three coppers out of her bag and went to the ladies’ lavatory. She stared at herself in the glass over the wash basin ; there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. She said to the old woman there, ‘Do I look all right to you?’

The woman grinned. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t like so much lipstick.’

‘Oh no,’ Anne said, ‘he’s the lipstick type. A change from home. Hubbie on the razzle.’ She said, ‘Who is he? He calls himself Davis. He says he made this town.’

‘Excuse me, dear, but your stocking’s laddered.’

‘It’s not his doing, anyway. Who is he?’

‘I’ve never heard of him, dear. Ask the porter.’

‘I think I will.’

She went to the front door. ‘That restaurant’s so hot,’ she said. ‘I had to get a bit of air.’ It was a peaceful moment for the porter of the Metropole. Nobody came in; nobody went out. He said, ‘It’s cold enough outside.’ A man with one leg stood on the kerb and sold matches; the trams went by; little lighted homes full of smoke and talk and friendliness. A clock struck half-past eight and you could hear from one of the streets outside the square the shrill voices of children singing a tuneless carol. Anne said, ‘Well, I must be getting back to Mr Davis.’ She said, ‘Who
is
Mr Davis?’

‘He’s got plenty,’ the porter said.

‘He says he made this town.’

‘That’s boasting,’ the porter said. ‘It’s Midland Steel made
this
town. You’ll see their offices in the Tanneries. But they’re ruining the town now. They
did
employ fifty thousand. Now they don’t have ten thousand. I was a doorkeeper there once myself. But they even cut down the doorkeepers.’

‘It must have been cruel,’ Anne said.

‘It was worse for him,’ the porter said, nodding through the door at the one-legged man. ‘He had twenty years with them. Then he lost his leg and the court brought it in wilful negligence, so they didn’t give him a tanner. They economized there too, you see. It was negligence, all right; he fell asleep. If you tried watching a machine do the same thing once every second for eight hours, you’d feel sleepy yourself.’

‘But Mr Davis?’

‘Oh, I don’t know anything about Mr Davis. He may have something to do with the boot factory. Or he may be one of the directors of Wallace’s. They’ve got money to burn.’ A woman came through the door carrying a Pekinese; she wore a heavy fur coat. She asked: ‘Has Mr Alfred Piker been in here?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘There. It’s just what his uncle was always doing. Disappearing.’ She said, ‘Keep hold of the dog,’ and rolled away across the square.

‘That’s the Mayoress,’ the porter said.

Anne went back. But something had happened. The bottle of wine was almost empty and the paper lay on the floor at Mr Davis’s feet. Two sundaes had been laid in place, but Mr Davis hadn’t touched his. It wasn’t politeness; something had put him out. He growled at her, ‘Where have you been?’ She tried to see what he had been reading; it wasn’t the financial page any more, but she could make out only the main headlines: ‘Decree
Nisi
for Lady —’ the name was too complicated to read upside down; ‘Manslaughter Verdict on Motorist’. Mr Davis said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with the place. They’ve put salt or something in the sundaes.’ He turned his furious dewlapped face at the passing waiter. ‘Call this a Knickerbocker Glory?’

‘I’ll bring you another, sir.’

‘You won’t. My bill.’

‘So we call it a day,’ Anne said.

Mr Davis looked up from the bill with something very like fear. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean that. You won’t go and leave me flat now?’

‘Well, what do you want to do, the flickers?’

‘I thought,’ Mr Davis said, ‘you might come back with me to my place and have a tune on the radio and a glass of something good. We might foot it together a bit, eh?’ He wasn’t looking at her; he was hardly thinking of what he was saying. He didn’t look dangerous. Anne thought she knew his type, you could pass them off with a kiss or two, and when they were drunk tell them a sentimental story until they began to think you were their sister. This would be the last: soon she would be Mather’s; she would be safe. But first she was going to learn where Mr Davis lived.

As they came out into the square the carol singers broke on them, six small boys without an idea of a tune between them. They wore wool gloves and mufflers and they stood across Mr Davis’s path chanting: ‘
Mark my footsteps well, my page
.’

‘Taxi, sir?’ the porter asked.

‘No.’ Mr Davis explained to Anne, ‘It saves threepence to take one from the rank in the Tanneries.’ But the boys got in his way, holding out their caps for money. ‘Get out of the way,’ Mr Davis said. With the intuition of children they recognized his uneasiness and baited him, pursuing him along the kerb, singing: ‘
Follow in them boldly
.’ The loungers outside the Crown turned to look. Somebody clapped. Mr Davis suddenly rounded and seized the hair of the boy nearest him; he pulled it till the boy screamed; pulled it till a tuft came out between his fingers. He said, ‘That will teach you,’ and sinking back a moment later in the taxi from the rank in the Tanneries, he said with pleasure, ‘They can’t play with me.’ His mouth was open and his lip was wet with saliva; he brooded over his victory in the same way as he had brooded over the lobster; he didn’t look to Anne as safe as she had thought. She reminded herself that he was only an agent. He
knew
the murderer, Raven said; he hadn’t committed it himself.

‘What’s that building?’ she asked, seeing a great black glass-front stand out from the Victorian street of sober offices where once the leather-workers had tanned their skins.

‘Midland Steel,’ Mr Davis said.

‘Do you work there?’

Mr Davis for the first time returned look for look. ‘What made you think that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Anne said and recognized with uneasiness that Mr Davis was only simple when the wind stood one way.

‘Do you think you could like me?’ Mr Davis said, fingering her knee.