Lonely Road (9 page)

Man proposes, but God disposes. She got influenza and had a whole week off duty; that knocked her back over three pounds, with her living expenses, doctor’s fees, and medicine. Since she had been back her business had been rotten, and she had been forced to draw still further on her little store. Finally, the manager told her that she must get a new pair of shoes because hers were getting so shabby.

I don’t think I’ve ever been really short of money, all my life; all my life I’ve never had to work harder than I wanted to. It took me a little time to realise the magnitude of the disaster. I said:

“Isn’t there anyone who you could borrow from, and pay them back later?”

She eyed me for a moment quite inscrutably. “I expect so. I know lots of gentlemen who come here who would lend me money if I asked them.”

There was a subtlety in that that put me in my place; I remember thinking how very wearing it must be to be on the defensive all the time. I said:

“I don’t mean strangers. But haven’t you got any relations, or anyone like that?”

She smiled, and softened a little. “There’s only Billy. He’s doing awfully well. He’s my brother, you know—I told you about him before.”

This was the business I had come to Leeds about. For a
moment I wondered absently whether anyone at Scotland Yard really cared a tinker’s curse about the peace of the realm, or whether they just sat there and earned their money in the job that they were paid to do, comfortably unimaginative.

“You could go to him, couldn’t you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know where he is. I wouldn’t mind borrowing from him.”

I wrinkled by brows in perplexity. “Don’t you know where he is at all? I mean, you could get in touch with him if there was trouble at home, or anything like that?”

She shook her head again. “He’s down in the south somewhere, but I don’t know where. If anything happened really, I suppose we’d ask the wireless. Like those S O S messages they always have.”

She said: “He never was one for writing much, or reading a book. And they’re the same at home.”

I took her out upon the floor for a waltz and thought about what I had learned. It was clear that she could tell me nothing of her brother’s whereabouts, and, frankly, I was glad. I hadn’t fancied the job from the outset, and now it seemed to me that I was free to go back to London and report that I could find out nothing. The police, I thought, could get along and do their own dirty business now.

I knew what they would do. They would assume that I had been clumsy in my methods. They would begin where I left off and have her up and put her through a sort of Third Degree. In the end such an interrogation might quite well prove awkward for the police, but that was their look-out; it seemed to me that this girl had trouble coming to her more serious than the loss of her holiday. I wondered absently what they would trick her into saying about brother Billy.

We went back to the table. I offered her a cigarette, and then I sat there silent, staring out across the floor at the dancers and the band, wondering what would come of this affair. Some little movement of her roused me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was going to sleep.”

She laughed. “What were you thinking about?”

I smiled. “As a matter of fact, I was just thinking there must be some way of getting in touch with your brother, if you wanted to. Do you know the number of his lorry? You could do it that way.”

She shook her head. “I only saw it just the once.”

“You know what make it was?”

She looked worried. “He did say. Something beginning with D. Not David.”

I nodded slowly. “Was it a Dennis? A thirty-hundredweight Dennis?”

She brightened. “That’s what he said—I remember now. Thirty-hundredweight Dennis. Are they good?”

“I think they’re very good,” I said. “There’s an awful lot of them about, though. You wouldn’t find him that way.” I eyed her for a moment. “I don’t suppose you could pick that lorry out from amongst a lot of others like it in the street, could you?”

She laughed and dimpled. “Oh, yes. It’s got horseshoes on it.”

“Horseshoes?”

“M-m. They’re ever so lucky. Billy said it isn’t easy to get horseshoes now.” It seemed that he had decorated his lorry with a shoe on the radiator and another on the tailboard at the back. “So I’d just go along the line till I saw a lorry with a horseshoe on the front, and I’d know that was the one, you see.”

We went and danced again, but I asked her no more questions. She had told me all she knew, and my work in Leeds was done. She had no means of getting into touch with her brother, though she could identify the lorry; it was very probable that she could identify it even in its present burnt-out state. That was my report to Sir David Carter; I had done what I could for them, and they must get on with their investigation in their own way now.

As the evening went on, things improved. Her depression disappeared and I had little to do but listen while she talked
to me about the little matters of life; how she had been teaching her friends to swim, and how they had got tickets for a trade show at the talkies, and they were lovely. She had changed her rooms since I had been there last because her landlady got ill; and she liked the tweed of my suit, it was ever so soft and nice. A quickstep wasn’t a slow foxtrot and I mustn’t dance it like one. Phyllis had got a boy who was doing awfully well in Bradford and was taking her out quite a lot; wasn’t it lovely for her? The band was leaving next week because they had had a row with Mr. Banks; it was awful, and the new one was coming from Wimbledon. Two of the men professionals had left and gone roller-skating at Scarborough. The cat in the kitchen of the restaurant had had kittens and the cook said she might have one, but she would have to see her landlady about it first.

I don’t know how she did it, but she got me talking to her that night. I don’t generally say very much; I sit and hear what other people have to say. But that night I remember doing what I could to make her see my life; I sat there talking to her about the things I like. The way the porpoises come come up and play round the vessel on a summer evening, diving underneath her keel all silvery and green, and coming up alongside her to blow. The subtlety of the tides and the pleasure of the dawn at sea after a night on deck, and the smell of bacon from the galley. The great loneliness of a bell-buoy, the smell of oilskins and salt water, and the crash and thudding of the cold grey seas when you’re beating on a wind in winter. The slow framing of a vessel in the yard, the smell of hot tar, the litter of oak shavings on the slips and the piles of sawdust by the droning band-saw in the shop.

And she said: “You do like your work, don’t you? I mean, the sea, and ships and all.” She was looking at me rather queerly.

I smiled. “I’m frightfully sorry—I must have been boring you stiff. I expect everyone you get in here wants to start talking about his job.”

She shook her head. “They don’t—not much. Sometimes
it might be nicer if they did … I’ve never heard anyone talk like you. I’ve been to the seaside, but I didn’t know it was like that. You’ve been a sailor, haven’t you?”

I nodded. “I was in the Navy in the war.” And then, to kill those memories, I took her out and we danced again very merrily, and coming back I said: “You’d like a banana split after that, wouldn’t you?”

She dimpled. “It would be lovely. I haven’t had one, not for ever so long. Fancy you remembering!” And so we ate these things and counted the cherry stones, and danced, and smoked and danced again.

Till in the end the opening bars of a tune brought us both up to our feet staring at each other in amazement, for it was midnight and the band was playing God Save the King. The table before us was littered with spoilt menus of sundaes and ices, because I had drawn a ship for her, and she had drawn a pig, and from that we had progressed between the dances through the whole field of animal and naval art. I stared across the table and said:

“I had no idea it was so late.” Then we went together to the desk and I paid her her dances and her tip. She took the money without glancing at it, but stood looking up at me a little wistfully, and she said:

“You’ll come in again some time, won’t you?”

My work in Leeds was finished; I had nothing now to do but to get back to London and report. I said: “Of course I will, Miss Gordon. I’ll probably come in to-morrow night.”

She smiled. “That’d be lovely.” And so I walked back to my hotel and up to bed, tired and content.

I had all next day to kill. I took the Bentley after breakfast and went out of the city rather aimlessly in the direction of York. In an hour or two I was well back into the past and wandering all through the lanes and byways of the York and Ainsty country, where I used to stay with my uncle Jim in the holidays, long before the war. They used to mount me on a strawberry roan, a beautiful little mare. They’re none of them there now. Arthur Cope was killed at Passchendaele,
and Mary married and went out to India, and Uncle Jim died soon after the war, and I went wandering through the lanes that day in my expensive car alone. Things change.

I was slowly making up my mind. My report to the police was that the girl could probably identify the lorry even in its burnt-out state; she had no means of access to her brother. I knew what they would do. Rightly or wrongly, Norman would “pull her in” and take her down to see the burnt-out wreck; if she identified it she would be submitted to a sort of Third Degree in the hope that she would let slip some admission which would put them on to the track of her brother. The police were right. Their business was to catch criminals, to rout out the whole truth of this affair, and that was undoubtedly the way to set about it.

The most that I could do was to make things a little easier for her.

Eight o’clock found me back in the Palais at the conclusion of a very boring day. The girl was there, waiting for me in the pen. I went to get her, and she came out to meet me on the way.

“It was nice of you to come,” she said simply. I don’t know why, but something in the way she said that startled me. She said it almost humbly, as if in dancing with her I was doing a great kindness to a lonely girl.

We went and danced, and chose a table by the floor, ordered our coffee and danced again. We were very well together by that time; the band was good and the floor clear. I had never danced so pleasantly in all my life. She was less depressed than she had been the previous evening. She chatted freely to me of her little interests, and presently I asked if she had thought any more about her holiday.

She shook her head. “I saw Ethel to-day, and she’s fixed up to go with another girl in her office. Scarborough it was, you know.” She stared absently around the room. “I’ll stay on here and maybe get a holiday in the autumn.”

I said: “It’s rotten luck.”

She turned to me and smiled. “No good getting mopey
about things, is it? I expect you’ve found that. It doesn’t do any good.”

I was silent for a moment. “No,” I said at last, “I don’t know that I have.” She looked puzzled. “But anyway,” I said, “I’ve never had to lose a holiday like this. So I don’t count.”

She eyed me seriously. “I’ve not lost my holiday. It’s just that I haven’t the money to do what I’d like to do. Seems to me it’s just a question of being happy with what you can get, and not bothering with the things you can’t afford. It’s the same for everyone that way.” She bent across the table to me, earnestly. “I mean, it is, isn’t it? I mean, you’re fond of the sea and ships and things. But you don’t go worrying because you can’t go on an ocean cruise on a liner, like they advertise. To Monte Carlo, and that. Fares from a hundred and fifty guineas.”

“No,” I said, “I’ve never worried about that. But then I don’t specially want to go.”

She said: “You couldn’t go if you did want to, and so you just don’t want to. It’s just like me and Scarborough—only you’re more sensible.” She smiled, a little bitterly.

“I think it’s you who’s the sensible one,” I said quietly, and we went and danced again. I had no courage to match the courage she had shown, no experience to help her in the disappointment of her holiday. All that I could do would be to give her money and so spoil her confidence.

She began to tell me about the various habitués of the place, pointing them out to me one by one. She had something of a flair for character and a very shrewd knowledge of men—the chief defensive weapon in her armoury. I rallied her on this and provoked her to a laughing defence of her judgment. She said: “You just get to know. I mean, you don’t have to dance with a man more than once or twice to know what he’s like and what he does.”

I laughed with her. “Including me, I suppose.”

She dimpled. “You told me all about yourself, so that doesn’t count.”

“Tell me something that you’ve found out for yourself,
that I didn’t tell you.” I paused. “I’ll give you an easy one. What’s my income?” I asked, a little ironically. “How much money would you say I made a year?”

She blew a long cloud of smoke, and eyed me for a minute. “Not less than six hundred,” she said at last. “I don’t think very much more.”

I smiled. “Why not more?”

“You’d have got married,” she said simply. “A man like you.”

I laughed; I had no answer to that deductive reasoning. “That wasn’t a very good one,” I remarked. We sat for a moment in silence looking out upon the floor and at the dancers in the moving, changing light. At last I said:

“As a matter of fact, I make a good bit more than that.” About forty times as much, but there was no point in splitting hairs. “I didn’t tell you any lies when I said I worked in a shipping office in the south. I do work there, but I’m the owner of the line. The ships are mine.” I paused. “And then, of course, there’s other things.…”

I smiled. “And so you’re a bit off the map about me getting married,” I said. “I could afford to, but it’s never quite come off. You’ll have to think again for that one.”

“You’re too particular,” she said. “It’s not often that I’m wrong like that.”

We went and danced again; it was a quickstep and a merry one at that, so that we were laughing when we came back. I said: “This holiday of yours. Will you be here next week?”