Fear to Tread (19 page)

Formed in 1947. Authorised capital of one hundred pounds. Issued capital five pounds. Registered office at 5, Strudwick Road, N.7. The usual memorandum – which generously permitted a company with three pounds capital (and ninety-seven more in reserve) to do anything from promoting a luxury hotel to running a liner. Normal articles. Nothing in the charges register. No accounts.

One of the issued shares was held by Mr. Henry Holloman, one by Mrs. Anita Holloman, three by Mr. Arthur Harbart. The directors were Mr. and Mrs. Holloman. The secretary was Mr. Holloman.

Mr. Bertram’s pencil paused for a moment in its scribbling. Far down in the distant, undusted recesses of his mind a memory had stirred. He was unable to pin it down. Such a memory was like quicksilver. If you tried to grasp it, it was gone. He pursued it with a growing sense of frustration. A futile attempt. Perhaps he would remember it later, when he had stopped thinking about it.

His pencil resumed its scribbling.

It was Todd who got the news, in the young hours of Monday morning, as he was beginning to think of going home to bed. The “Sub” who brought it up was worried. “You knew the man, didn’t you?” he said. “Then perhaps you can suggest what we’re going to call him.”

“You couldn’t print anything I should call him,” said Todd savagely.

“We thought of ‘Clubman’ but that’s a bit dated.”

“Call him a journalist,” said Todd. “That covers almost everything.”

So that was how Mr. Wetherall (and a lot of other people) read about it over their Monday morning breakfasts.

“Tragedy at Pinner,” it said. “Journalist killed.”

“A heavy transport lorry, drawing a 3-ton trailer, on long distance haulage ran out of control at Pinner yesterday evening when the steering locked. Fortunately the streets were not crowded at the time. The lorry mounted the pavement and hit and killed Mr. Marshall Pride, who was a well-known figure in journalistic and literary circles. The lorry passed right over him and death must have been instantaneous. The breakdown gang were still at work an hour later trying to lift the wreckage.”

Mr. pride’s death was announced on the Monday morning; on Monday afternoon Sammy started work at Hollomans; on Tuesday evening he wrote a letter to his sister Peggy.

“This is a queer sort of place and no mistake,”
he wrote, in his well-formed cursive hand,
“if I had known the job meant staying nights I might have thought twice about it Mr. Holloman is a case he looks like Boris Carloff only worse Mrs. Cameroni she is the woman who does for us here is deaf but not a bad old girl I think everyone else is round the bend except me I get off Saturday p.m. and will be with you for tea Dont eat all the sanwich spread before I get there your loving brother Sammy.”

Sammy sealed this with several loving kisses and determined to slip out and put it in the box at the corner of the road as soon as Mr. Holloman had departed up West on business. So far as he could gather he usually went out in the evenings and was not expected back before eight.

Precise information was hard to come by. First there was Mrs. Cameroni, who acted as housekeeper to the establishment, got the meals, tidied up and fussed round generally. She seemed a decent enough person and for some time, under the impression that she was his employer’s wife, Sammy had addressed her as Mrs. Holloman. Nor had she corrected him;, simply because, as he had discovered by accident that afternoon, she never heard him, being not only deaf but, like many deaf people, defiant of her infirmity.

Then there were the girls.

Sammy had had great hopes of the girls. There were two of them, a floppy blonde and a thinner girl with mouse-coloured hair and a band round her teeth. They formed the packing-room staff.

Sammy was fond of girls in a general sort of way. He liked them better in quantities than singly. He enjoyed the chi-hying and the repartee and the general give and take.

Accordingly, during the lunch interval, he had made his way into the packingroom. The girls had suspended their packing of Mother Mankeltows Mucillage of Mollasses and were sitting on a bench eating sandwiches out of a bag.

At first all had gone well; indeed, from the beginning almost too well. Sammy’s opening remarks had been received with smiles. Even his ordinary conversation was smiled at. Everything was smiled at. Neither girl seemed to have a great deal of conversation in return. The blonde girl did nothing but smile. The mouse-coloured girl squeaked and said something which sounded like “Ham for lunch” but she mouthed her words so that it was difficult to establish anything beyond the fact that it was an effort at goodwill.

After a few minutes of this Sammy withdrew.

“Just my luck,” he said to himself. “Two girls, and both of them barmy.” In fairness he added: “They seem to get through their work all right.” He had never seen such workers.

He had restored his spirits by standing himself an expensive lunch, which he could not afford, at the Corner Dining Rooms.

The morning had been spent copying addresses into a book. When he got back after lunch he had been summoned to the presence and introduced to the more important branches of his work.

“There are certain basic mixtures,” explained Mr. Holloman, “that we use in most of our preparations.”

He was a tall man, thin but with obvious strength in his long bones. He had the mottled, peach-veined face of an old country clergyman, white tufts in each nostril, and the shadow of an imperial in the unshaven patch under his full lower lip. His least prepossessing characteristic was his head of hair. If it had been a wig, thought Sammy, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But since it clearly wasn’t a wig, it looked somehow abnormal and horrible, a wolf’s pelt of thick, black and grey hair. He had black hairs on the back of his hands, too. His eyes were hot brown, and his voice was like treacle. It reminded Sammy of the voice of a minister whose services had once attracted large congregations in the New Cut, until he had disappeared as a result of over-enthusiasm in training female members of the choir.

“I shan’t bother you with all our little technical secrets,” went on Mr. Holloman. “But I can see you’re a smart boy, so I might as well tell you at once that you will find that most people are fools where their own health is concerned.”

Sammy nodded. He felt interested in spite of himself. Such a diagnosis agreed very well with his own observations. He had had an aunt who had spent all her money on an Elixir of Life. It had done her no visible harm, but at ten shillings the bottle it had consumed a great deal of money which, in Sammy’s view, she might more profitably have saved and left to her nephews and nieces.

“There’s one born every minute,” he agreed.

“We have just finished the diarrhoea and prickly heat and are preparing for the coughs and colds. In the profession we refer to them as catarrhal afflictions.” Mr. Holloman smiled genially. “We use nothing but simple wholesale ingredients. Phenol”—he indicated a large stoppered jar full of a pinkish disinfectant—”and sodium chloride.” This was in a cardboard box.

“Looks just like salt,” said Sammy.

“I shouldn’t wonder if you were right,” said Mr. Holloman. “Our standard gargle and throat spray, two shillings and sixpence the bottle, contains one measure of dilute phenol – measure it out in that little glass jar – to four measures of sodium chloride. You can use a tablespoon for that. The rest is
aqua pura.”

“Where do I get that?”

“Out of the tap.”

“Do you mean you can sell that stuff for half a dollar a bottle?”

“It is often difficult to meet the demand for it.”

“Cor!” said Sammy. His respect for Mr. Holloman increased.

“There are, of course, certain overhead expenses, connected with advertising and the like, which you would not appreciate. There is the bottle itself – a scandalous price these days, though we usually succeed in getting them back by offering a small rebate. One of your jobs will be to clean the returned bottles. See that you do it thoroughly. Our clients are not of the highest class, and we had a bottle returned the other day nearly one-third full of gin, which I can assure you was
not
in it when it was dispatched. Finally, and possibly of more importance than anything else, there is the label. One to each bottle.” Mr. Holloman extracted a gummed label from a cardboard box. It was quite an imposing and well-printed affair. It had “Hollomans’ Special Gargle Mouthwash and Throatwash” in old-fashioned lettering and a portrait of a man with a long beard, an eyeglass and a high collar. On the left of the portrait was a list, in small print, setting out the honours and awards which had fallen to the gargle in its long life (First prize, Palace of Health, Chicago 1888. Grand Prix. Exposition de Sante, Bruxelles 1893, etc.). On the right in larger print, was a summary of the conditions which it was guaranteed to cure or alleviate (Catarrh, Hay Fever, Tonsilitis, La Grippe, Pleurisy, Asthma, Biliousness, Constipation and Consumption).

“The label is most important,” said Mr. Holloman. “I should say of paramount importance. And you must be particularly careful to place the right label on the right bottle. Your predecessor had to be asked to leave after an unfortunate incident in which he sent out a dozen of Embrocation for the Legs and Thighs labelled as Blood Tonic. Strictly, and between you and me, the difference in the ingredients was not large, but there was a principle at stake.”

Sammy had spent an interesting afternoon. He was no ball of fire at mathematics but it didn’t need an accountant’s brain to see the margin of profit in selling salt and water at two and sixpence a bottle. A certain amount of outlay would be needed for printing and advertising, but as soon as that was paid for—

Sammy swam away into a happy daydream and inadvertently doubled the dosage of phenol in a whole box-full of gargle, which, as Mr. Holloman sharply pointed out, halved the profit, since phenol was virtually the only ingredient which cost anything.

After tea he was introduced to another branch of the trade.

“Ointments, or unguents, as you must learn to call them, are in a way an even better line than medicine. Certain of the more tiresome and restrictive of the various Acts of Parliament that hamper the druggist, do not apply to ointments, and there are other considerations with which I will not weary you.”

“I’m not tired at all,” said Sammy, and he meant it.

“Splendid,” said Mr. Holloman, with a smile which lifted the lip and revealed a row of small, shark-like, side teeth. “Youth is the time to learn. The trouble about unguents is that it is more difficult to persuade people that they stand in need of them. With medicines it is different. With a little effort anyone can believe anything about their own insides.
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
With the external parts it is more difficult. I therefore devised what has turned out to be one of my most successful dual remedies. It is to cure harshness, roughness, staleness or irritation of the skin. It is also effective against eczema, ringworm, corpulence and baldness, but these are only by the way. Its main purpose is that you should at once apply it if you feel any uneasiness of any sort about your skin. We send it out in two caskets, at half a crown each, with full directions for use. You apply a little from the brown casket, and that brings out the latent condition. In other words, if you had itched a little before, you will now begin to itch like anything. This is not surprising when you consider that the ointment in the first casket contains a high proportion of powdered rosa canina, known to the ignorant as itching powder. Five minutes later, when you can bear it no longer, you apply some ointment from the green casket, and the itching stops at once. You are absolutely cured. This line has been so successful that I fear our rivals have paid us the compliment of imitation. Some people have no idea of commercial morality.”

Later, when Sammy was thinking of packing up for the day, Mrs. Cameroni blew in. She was a large, cheerful, untidy woman and to Sammy she represented the only homely touch in the place. If she hadn’t been deaf, he decided, she’d have been quite good value.

In self-defence she had acquired a certain facility for lip reading, but principally she followed a system of guessing what you would be likely to be saying. Conversation was a lottery.

“Lovely evening,” she said.

“Scrumptious,” agreed Sammy.

“That’s right. Keep cheerful. Your first job, I expect.”

Sammy nodded.

“Work hard and you’ll do all right. He don’t pay badly. Not but what he can afford to, the money he makes. Comes rolling in. Rolling.” Mrs. Cameroni held her hands six inches apart to indicate the width of the roll.

“Seems a pretty good racket to me.”

“You want to leave those girls alone, though. They’re not quite—you know. You wouldn’t believe it, one of ‘em had a baby just before she came here. It’s not right, you know. A girl like that. She ought to be stabilised.”

“They’re both barmy, aren’t they?”

“Lovely stuff. Why, I’m telling you, he gave me a bottle the other day, free and for nothing. Two and ninepence it’d have cost me in the shop. I rubbed it on my leg, and I was soon skipping round, I can tell you. Felt as if I was on fire. You just keep your mind on the job, put the bits in like he tells you, and shake it up well, and you’ll make your fortune too. It’s just what a smart boy like you wants. Get into a profession. Well, I mustn’t stand here gossiping all day. Got my husband’s supper to cook. Works all day at the National Gas Board and the temper he’s in when he comes home in the evening, you wouldn’t credit it. Talk about gas!”

After Mrs. Cameroni had gone, Sammy took another look into the packing room. The two girls were finishing for the day, too. One was carefully making up her face at a mirror, the other was sitting on a chair, in a startlingly disengaged attitude, as if someone had put her down there and forgotten about her.

Sammy went back to his room and sat for a few minutes swinging his legs. He heard the clatter of feet and the banging of the door as the two girls left. He was alone in the house. He was in charge. It was part of his job to look after things in the evenings when Mr. Holloman was out.