The Ballad of Peckham Rye (13 page)

‘Rev up to it, son. Groove in.’

Tony turned, replaced his beer on the top of the piano, and rippled his hands over
‘Ramona’.

‘Go, man, go.’

‘Any more of that,’ said the barmaid, ‘and you go man go
outside.’

‘Yes, that’s what
I
say. Tony’s the pops.’

‘Here’s a pint, Tony. Cheer up, son, it may never happen.’

At ten past nine Trevor Lomas entered the pub followed by Collie Gould. Trevor edged in
to the bar and stood with his back to it, leaning on an elbow and surveying as it were
the passing scene.

‘Hallo, Trevor,’ Dixie said.

‘Hi, Dixie,’ Trevor replied severely.

‘Hi,’ Collie Gould said.

Beauty, who was on her fourth Martini, bowed graciously, and had some difficulty in
regaining her upright posture.

The barmaid said, ‘Are you ordering, sir?’

Trevor said over his shoulder, ‘Two pints bitter.’ He lit a cigarette and
blew out the smoke very very slowly.

‘Trev,’ Collie said in a low voice, ‘Trev, don’t muck it
up.’

‘I’m being patient,’ Trevor said through half-closed lips.
‘I’m being very very patient. But if —’

‘Trev,’ Collie said, ‘Trev, think of the lolly. Them
notebooks.’

Trevor threw half a crown backwards on to the counter.

‘Manners,’ the barmaid said as she rang the till. She banged his change on
the counter, where Trevor let it lie.

Dougal and Humphrey approached the bar with four empty glasses. ‘Ginger ale
only,’ Dixie called after them, since it was Humphrey’s turn.

‘One Martini. Two half milds. One
gin
and ginger ale,’ Humphrey said
to the barman. And he invited Trevor to join them by pointing to their table with his
ear.

Trevor did not move. Collie was watching Trevor.

Dougal got out some money.

‘My turn,’ Humphrey said, fishing out his money.

Dougal picked half a crown from his money and, leaning his back against the bar, tossed
it over his shoulder to the counter. He then lit a cigarette and blew out the smoke very
slowly, pulling his face to a grave length and batting his eyelashes.

Beauty shouted, ‘Doug, you’re a boy! Dig Doug! He’s got you, Trev. He
does Trevor to a T.’ Tony was playing the ‘St Louis Blues’.

‘Trev,’ Collie said, ‘don’t, Trev, don’t.’

Trevor raised his sparkling pint glass and smashed the top on the edge of the counter. In
his hand remained the bottom half with six spikes of glass sticking up from it. He
lunged it forward at Dougal’s face. At the same swift moment Dougal leaned back,
back, until the crown of his head touched the bar. The spikes of glass went full into
one side of Humphrey’s face which had been turned in profile. Dougal bent and
caught Trevor’s legs while another man pulled Trevor’s collar until
presently he lay pinned by a number of hands to the floor. Humphrey was being attended
by another number of hands, and was taken to the back premises, the barmaid holding to
his face a large thick towel which was becoming redder and redder.

The barman shouted above the din, ‘Outside, all.’

Most of the people were leaving in any case lest they should be questioned. To those who
lingered the barman shouted, ‘Outside, all, or I’ll call the
police.’

Trevor found himself free to get to his feet and he left, followed by Collie and Beauty,
who was seen to spit at Trevor before she clicked her way up Rye Lane.

Dixie remained behind with Dougal. She was saying to him, ‘It was meant for
you.
Dirty swine you were to duck.’

‘Outside or I call the police,’ the barman said, bouncing up and down on the
balls of his feet.

‘We were with the chap that’s hurt,’ Dougal said, ‘and if we
can’t collect him
I’ll
call the police.’

‘Follow me,’ said the barman.

Humphrey was holding his head over a bowl while cold water was being poured over his
wounds by Tony, who seemed to take this as one of his boring evening duties.

‘Goodness, you look terrible,’ Dougal said. ‘It must be my fatal flaw,
but I doubt if I can bear to look.’

‘Dirty swine, he is,’ Dixie said, ‘letting another fellow have it
instead of himself.’

‘Shut up, will you?’ Humphrey seemed to say.

They got into Humphrey’s car, speedily assisted by the barman. Dougal drove, first
taking Dixie home. She said to him, ‘I could spit at you,’ and slammed the
car door.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Humphrey said, as well as he could.

Dougal next drove Humphrey to the outpatient department of St George’s Hospital.
‘Though it pains me to cross the river,’ Dougal said, ‘I think
we’d better avoid the southern region for tonight.’

He told a story about Humphrey having tripped over a milk-bottle as he got out of his
car, the milk-bottle having splintered and Humphrey fallen on his face among the
splinters. Humphrey nodded agreement as the nurse dressed and plastered his wounds.
Dougal gave Humphrey’s name as Mr Dougal — Douglas, care of Miss Cheese-man,
14 Chelsea Rise, sw3. Humphrey was told to return within a week. They then went home to
Miss Frierne’s.

‘And I won’t even see her again till next Saturday night on account of her
doing week-nights as an usherette at the Regal,’ Humphrey said to Dougal at a
quarter to twelve that night. He sat up in bed in striped pyjamas, talking as much as
possible; but the strips of plaster on his cheek caused him to speak rather out of the
opposite side of his mouth. ‘And she won’t think of taking one day off of
her holidays this year on account of the honeymoon in September. It’s nothing but
save, save, save. You’d think I wasn’t earning good money the way she goes
on. And result, she’s losing her sex.’

Dougal crouched over the gas-ring with a fork, pushing the bacon about in the frying-pan.
He removed the bacon on to a plate, then broke two eggs into the pan.

‘I wouldn’t marry her,’ Dougal said, ‘if you paid me.’

‘My sister Elsie doesn’t like her,’ Humphrey said out of the side of
his mouth.

Dougal stood up and took the plate of bacon in his hand. He held this at some way from
his body and looked at it, moving it slightly back and forth towards him, as if it were
a book he was reading, and he short-sighted.

Dougal read from the book: ‘Wilt thou take this woman,’ he said with a deep
ecclesiastical throb, ‘to be thai wedded waif?’

Then he put the plate aside and knelt; he was a sinister goggling bridegroom.
‘No,’ he declared to the ceiling, ‘I won’t, quite
frankly.’

‘Christ, don’t make me laugh, it pulls the plaster.’

Dougal dished out the eggs and bacon. He cut up the bacon small for Humphrey.

‘You shouldn’t have any scars if you’re careful and get your face
regularly dressed, they said.’

Humphrey stroked his wounded cheek.

‘Scars wouldn’t worry me. Might worry Dixie.’

‘As a qualified refrigerator engineer and a union man you could have your pick of
the girls.’

‘I know, but I want Dixie.’ He put the eggs and bacon slowly away into the
side of his mouth.

The rain of a cold summer morning fell on Nelly Mahone as she sat on a heap of disused
lorry tires in the yard of Paley’s, scrap merchants of Meeting-house Lane. She had
been waiting since ten past nine although she did not expect Dougal to arrive until ten
o’clock. He came at five past ten, bobbing up and down under an umbrella.

‘They come to see me Saturday,’ she said at once. ‘Trevor Lomas, Collie
Gould, Leslie Crewe. They treated me bad.’

‘You’ve got wet,’ Dougal said. ‘Why didn’t you take
shelter?’

She looked round the yard. ‘Got to be careful where you go, son. Stand up in the
open, they can only tell you to move on. But go inside a place, they can call the
cops.’ Her nose thrust forward towards the police station at the corner of the
lane.

Dougal looked round the yard for possible shelter. The bodies of two lorries, bashed in
from bad accidents, stood lopsided in a corner. On a low wooden cradle stood a
house-boat. ‘We’ll go into the boat.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t get up there.’

Dougal kicked a wooden crate over and over till it stood beneath the door of the boat. He
pulled the door-handle. Eventually it gave way. He climbed in, then out again, and took
Nelly by the arm.

‘Up you go, Nelly.’

‘What if the cops come?’

‘I’m in with them,’ Dougal said.

‘Jesus, that’s not your game?’

‘Up you go.’

He heaved her up and settled in the boat beside her on a torn upholstered seat. Some sad
cretonne curtains still drooped in the windows. Dougal drew them across the windows as
far as was possible.

‘I feel that ill,’ Nelly said.

‘I’m not too keen on illness,’ Dougal said.

‘Nor me. They come to ask after you,’ Nelly said. ‘They found out you
was seeing me. They got your code. They want to know what’s cheese. They want to
know what’s your code key, they offer me ten quid. They want to know who’s
your gang.’

‘I’m in with the cops, tell them.’

‘That I would never believe. They want to know who’s Rose Hathaway.
They’ll be back again. I got to tell them something.’

‘Tell them I’m paid by the police to investigate certain irregularities in
the industrial life of Peckham in the first place. See, Nelly? I mean crime at the top
in the wee factories. And secondly —’

Her yellowish eyes and wet grey hair turned towards him in a startled way.

‘If I thought you was a nark —’

‘Investigator,’ Dougal said. ‘It all comes under human research. And
secondly my job covers various departments of youthful terrorism. So you can just tell
me, Nelly, what they did to you on Saturday afternoon.’

‘Ah, they didn’t do nothing out of the way.’

‘You said they treated you roughly.’

‘No, not so to get them in trouble.’

Dougal took out an envelope. ‘Your ten pounds,’ he said.

‘You can keep it,’ Nelly said. ‘I’m going on my way.’

‘Feel my head, Nelly.’ He guided her hand to the two small bumps among his
curls.

‘Cancer of the brain a-coming on,’ she said.

‘Nelly, I had a pair of horns like a goat when I was born. I lost them in a fight
at a later date.’

‘Holy Mary, let me out of here. I don’t know whether I’m coming or
going with you.’

Dougal stood up and found that by standing astride in the middle of the boat he could
make it rock. So he rocked it for a while and sang a sailor’s song to Nelly.

Then he helped her to climb down from the boat, put up his umbrella, and tried to catch
up with her as she hurried out of the scrap yard. A policeman, coming out of the
station, at the corner, nodded to Dougal.

‘I’ll be going into the station, then, Nelly,’ Dougal said. ‘To
see my chums.’

She stared at him, then spat on the rainy pavement.

‘And I don’t mind,’ Dougal said, ‘if you tell Trevor Lomas what
I’m doing. You can tell him if he returns my notebooks to me there will be nothing
further said. We policemen have got to keep our records and our secret codes, you
realize.’

She moved sideways away from him, watching the traffic so that she could cross at the
earliest moment.

‘You and I,’ Dougal said, ‘won’t be molested from that quarter
for a week or two if you give them the tip-off.’

He went into the station yard to see how the excavations were getting on. He discovered
that the tunnel itself was now visible from the top of the shaft.

Dougal pointed out to his policemen friends the evidence of the Thames silt in the
under-soil. ‘One time,’ he said, ‘the Thames was five miles wide, and
it covered all Peckham.’

So they understood, they said, from other archaeologists who were interested in the
excavation.

‘Hope I’m not troubling you if I pop in like this from time to time?’
Dougal said.

‘No, sir, you’re welcome. We get people from the papers sometimes as well as
students. Did you read of the finds?’

Towards evening a parcel was delivered at Miss Frierne’s addressed to Dougal. It
contained his notebooks.

‘I hope to remain with you,’ Dougal said to Miss Frierne, ‘for at least
two months. For I see no call upon me to remove from Peckham as yet.’

‘If I’m still alive …’ Miss Frierne said. ‘I saw that man
again this morning. I could swear it was my brother.’

‘You didn’t speak to him?’

‘No. Something stopped me.’ She began to cry.

‘Who put the pot of indoor creeping ivy in my room?’ Dougal said. ‘Was
it my little dog-toothed blonde process-controller?’

‘Yes, it was a scraggy little blonde. Looks as if she could do with a good feed.
They all do.’

Mr Druce whispered, ‘I couldn’t manage it the other night. Things were
difficult.’

‘I sat at the Dragon in Dulwich from nine till closing time,’ Dougal said,
‘and you didn’t come.’

‘I couldn’t get away. Mrs Druce was on the watch. If you’d come to that
place in Soho —’

Dougal consulted his pocket diary. He shut it and put it away. ‘Next month it would
have to be. This month my duties press.’ He rose and walked up and down Mr
Druce’s office as with something on his mind.

‘I called for you last Saturday,’ Mr Druce said. ‘I thought you would
care for a spin.’

‘So I understand,’ Dougal said absently. ‘I believe I was researching
on Miss Coverdale that afternoon.’ Dougal smiled at Mr Druce. ‘Interrogating
her, you know.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Her devotion to you is quite remarkable,’ Dougal said. ‘She spoke of
you continually.’

‘As a matter of interest, what did she say? Look, Dougal, you can’t trust
everyone —’

Dougal looked at his watch. ‘Goodness,’ he said, ‘the time. What I came
to see you about the question of my increase in salary.’

‘It’s going through,’ Mr Druce said. ‘I put it to the Board that,
since Weedin’s breakdown, a great deal of extra work falls on your
shoulders.’

Dougal massaged both his shoulders, first his high one, then his low one.