The Case Of William Smith (5 page)

On that Thursday morning, the undercoating having dried on the Dumble Ducks, they were being decked out in green and bronze metallic paint, with exciting touches of red and blue, and yellow bills. At the far end of the conservatory old Mr. Bindle was telling the boy Robert all the things that boys had never been allowed to do when he was young. From long habit Robert, whom everyone but Mr. Bindle called Bob, was able to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ at the right places and go solidly on thinking about the model aeroplane he was making at home in his spare time. He was a long, rangy boy with a freckled face and competent hands, and, waking or sleeping, he very seldom thought about anything but aeroplanes. Neither he nor Mr. Bindle took any interest in Mr. Smith and Miss Eversley who were painting ducks at the parlour end of the workshop.

William was pleased with his duck. It had a cream breast, brown and green plumage, enormous yellow feet, and a rolling eye. It waddled, and its beak gaped. He was pleased with it, but a good deal of his mind was taken up with something else. Thursday is early-closing day in the outlying parts of London. He wanted to know what Katharine was going to do when she put on her hat and left the shop at one o’clock. Suppose she went to bed at about eleven, that left approximately ten hours in which things could be done. He wondered what sort of things she was going to do.

This happened every Thursday morning. It also happened on Saturday evening when the long, deserted hours of Sunday began to loom up. Saturday was worse than Thursday, because at the very lowest reckoning there were about fourteen hours of Sunday during which Katharine would not only not be with him, but would be walking, talking, and doing things with other people. Every time a Thursday or a Saturday came round his feelings on the subject became more acute. Today they were rapidly approaching the point where he would no longer be able to keep them to himself. He may never have heard of the poet who declared that he either fears his fate too much or his deserts are small who dare not put it to the touch to gain or lose it all, but he certainly would have agreed with him. The trouble was that he did fear his fate and was most wholeheartedly convinced of the smallness of his deserts. Yet what he had not so far dared put to the touch was no matter of headlong wooing, but the mere ‘Madam, will you walk, madam will you talk?’ on a Thursday or a Sunday afternoon.

By a quarter to one and his fourth duck, he got it out.

‘What do you do on your half-day?’

Katharine was putting a bright blue patch on her duck’s head and shading it off with green metallic paint. She said,

‘Oh, different things — ’

Once started, William could go on. In a sledge-hammer kind of way he enquired,

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘I haven’t really thought.’

‘You wouldn’t — I suppose — you couldn’t — I mean you wouldn’t — ’

Katharine looked up, wanted to laugh, wanted to cry, looked down again. Her lips quivered into a very faint smile.

‘I might.’

‘Oh, I say — would you really? I’ve wanted to ask you for ages, but I didn’t know — I mean I thought — I mean you must have lots of friends — ’

She looked up again. He had a smear of paint on his left cheek. She said,

‘Are you asking me to go out with you?’

‘Well, I was — but of course — ’

‘You can’t back out of it now — it would be frightfully rude. Where shall we go?’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘I’d like to go somewhere in your car and then come back to my flat and have tea, because it isn’t any fun driving after dark.’

‘You wouldn’t really, would you? It’s a most frightful old thing, more or less made up out of scrap-iron. Everyone laughs at it, but it goes. Only it isn’t the sort of thing — ’

‘You’ve got a very unbelieving nature. I’ve told you what I’d like to do. Did you really mean to paint that duck black? Because that’s what you’re doing.’

William contemplated his work with horror. The duck, funereally black except for a squawking beak and an un-painted eye, leered back at him. He brightened.

‘I don’t know about meaning to, but touched up with the metallic green he’ll be rather effective — the bold, bad, buccaneering drake. And I think he’d better have an orange-coloured beak and feet. He’ll have to dry first. It isn’t worth starting anything else — it’s just on one. You’re quite sure — ’

Katharine said, ‘Quite,’ without looking up.

‘Then I’ll go along and get the car. Miss Cole can shut up. I’ll be waiting for you where Canning Row comes in.’ He grinned suddenly and said, ‘She goes the other way.’

They drove out over Hampstead Heath. The car deserved all that William had said about it, but it was quite obviously the pride of his heart. With his own hands he had assembled it from the scrap-heap, tinkered here, straightened there, contrived, coerced, and finally applied two coats of enamel. Katharine, who remembered other cars, had a ridiculous softening of the heart for this one.

They stopped and had lunch, and then went on again through a winter afternoon with a pale gold sun in a pale blue sky and mist coming up out of the ground. Katharine found she did not have to talk at all. She only had to sit there and every now and then say, ‘How lucky,’ or, ‘That was very clever of you,’ whilst William recited the saga of how he had picked up his tin kettle bit by bit. He was perfectly happy and completely absorbed. If everything else about him changed, she thought, that was one thing which would never alter, his capacity for being absorbed in whatever it was he happened to be thinking about at the time. If he was thinking about her he could paint a duck black without knowing it, but if he happened to be thinking about the duck he might not notice whether she was there or not. At least — well, she wondered. She was so taken up with her own thoughts that she missed the soul-stirring narrative of how William had acquired a fog-light, which was a pity, because it threw considerable light upon his energy, perseverance, and resource.

They got to the flat, which had been lent to Katharine by a friend who had gone abroad.

‘I had to let my own — it was too expensive — so I don’t know what I should have done if Carol hadn’t come to my rescue.’

The flat was a cluster of rooms built over a garage in a mews. William drove between tall brick pillars on to what looked like a cobbled village street with a row of cottages on either side. In the last of the daylight the scene was picturesque. Children bowled hoops and roller-skated. There were lines of washing, and lines from which washing had been taken in, one of them made of two skipping-ropes tied together. There were wide garage doors in many shades of paint and corresponding degrees of decay. Flights of concrete steps guarded by iron railings ran up to the flats above. They had gabled roofs and occasionally window-boxes, empty now. The railing of Katharine’s steps was painted scarlet, and so was the front door.

Standing at the top while she found her key, she drew William’s attention to the view. Behind the roofs of the houses opposite tall, bare plane trees stood out black against a stretch of pale-green sky. Between the gables lights sparkled like fireflies. Away to the left someone was hammering on metal, bang, clang, bang, and two radio sets were contending. The learned professor who was giving an instructive talk was obviously being turned up louder and louder in an attempt to drown the crooner next door, but the saccharine melancholy pursued and overtook him.

They went in and shut the door. The sounds receded without being lost. Katharine switched on the light, showing a narrow passage which turned at right angles. There was a living-room, two bedrooms, a dressing-room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. When she had shown William where to wash his hands she put on the kettle and then went into her bedroom and drew the curtains.

Carol’s taste in chintzes was cheerful. Curtains and bedspreads were canary-yellow, with a pattern of blue and purple zig-zags and triangles. All the furniture was briskly modern. Katharine went over to the bright yellow chest of drawers, picked up a large standing photograph, and put it away in a drawer. Then she took off her tweed coat and skirt, hung it up in the yellow cupboard, and slipped on a long-sleeved woollen dress. It was halfway between blue and green in colour, and it did very becoming things to her skin. Even without lipstick and powder she looked all lighted up. But this was not the shop — lipstick and powder there would be.

She found William in the sitting-room, the gas fire lighted, and the curtains drawn. He explained that he thought she would be cold, and helped her to get the tea. They might have been doing it for years. Actually, when she came into the room he was sitting at the piano picking out a tune with one finger. As she was pouring out the tea she came back to that.

‘Do you play the piano?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I don’t know very much about myself. My memory only goes back to ’42.’

She said, ‘Yes — you told me. I wondered how far it went. You see, it’s obvious that you must remember quite a lot-reading, writing, arithmetic. What else?’

He said, ‘Yes, I never thought about that. That sort of thing is all there. The usual history and geography seem to have stuck — schoolboy Latin — maths. I learnt German in the camps, and I rubbed up my French a whole lot. You know, that’s one reason I don’t think I’m William Smith, because he left school at fourteen and he wouldn’t have learned French or Latin. Mine weren’t anything to boast about, but I did learn them.’

‘And the piano?’

He laughed.

‘You heard me!’

‘You were picking out a tune. Do you know what it was?’

‘Well, it was trying to be Auld Lang Syne.’

‘Why?’

He gazed at her.

‘I don’t know — it just came into my head. When you come to think of it, it’s odd to remember tunes and forget people, isn’t it? There must be people I used to know walking around, and I might bump into them and never know them. That gives you an odd feeling. I used to think about it a lot and wonder if I should run into any of them, but it never happened until the other day.’

Katharine put down her cup.

‘You met someone — the other day — who knew you?’

He nodded.

‘The night I was hit over the head. It was the chap Abbott from Scotland Yard, the one who picked me up and brought me home.

‘He knew you?’

‘Well, sort of half and half. He said we’d been at a do together at the Luxe before the war, and I danced a lot with a girl in a gold dress who seems to have struck him all of a heap — which, I expect, is why he remembered me. But when it came down to names he couldn’t get any farther than Bill. You know, I always had a feeling that the William part of my name was all right.’

‘But he must remember some of the other people who were there.’

‘He says he doesn’t. It’s a long time ago — he’ll have been at hundreds of shows since then. You know how it is — things get run together in your mind. Look here, I could make toast at this fire if you’d like some.’

They made toast.

William ate a hearty tea. Afterwards he told Katharine that painting the duck black by accident had given him a very good idea for a really black bird, and which did she think would be the best name — the Rookie Raven, or the Kee Kaw Krow.

When she said she liked the Krow best he demanded pencil and paper and produced sketches. He sat on the hearthrug with a block propped against his knee, his fair hair sticking up on end, and a fiercely concentrated expression on his face. He was, for the moment, apparently quite inaccessible to anything except Krow. Yet when Katharine said idly, ‘What made you think of the Wurzel Dogs?’ he answered her at once in an abstracted voice,

‘Oh, I had a dog called Wurzel once.’

She almost stopped breathing. She let a little time go by, then she said in the same gentle voice,

‘When was that?’

He said, ‘I was ten,’ and came to with a start. ‘Oh, I say — I remembered that!’

‘Yes, you did.’

He was staring at her, intent and strained.

‘I remembered it then, but I don’t now. I’m only remembering that I remembered it.’

She said quickly, ‘Don’t try like that. It came when you were thinking about something else. I’m sure it won’t come when you’re trying.’

He nodded.

‘No — things don’t, do they?’ He leaned over and laid the sketches on her knee. ‘Look — what do you think of those?’

He had drawn every conceivable aspect of the Krow — the solemn, the rampant, the jaunty, the belligerent, the predatory. To each of them he had managed to impart the vitality which made all his creatures seem alive even in the wood.

‘They’re very good indeed.’

He said, ‘Wait a bit,’ took them back, and plunged again.

His hand just touched hers as it gathered the papers. It shook a little. He stopped it almost at once, but it showed him that he couldn’t really trust himself. He must do a little more to the Krows, and then he must get up and go away, because if he stayed he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t make love to Katharine, and of course he couldn’t do that. She was all alone here, and she had asked him to tea. He couldn’t possibly take advantage of her kindness. And of course he couldn’t make love to her at the shop. The sort of employer who takes advantage of his position to embarrass the girls who work for him rose with horrifying distinctness. He plunged back into the Krows.

Katharine watched him. It wasn’t very difficult to guess what he was thinking. It gave her that feeling between laughter and tears which she had so often when she was with William Smith. He was in love with her, and he wanted to tell her about it, but didn’t like to because she worked at Tattlecombe’s and it might make it difficult for her. She wasn’t quite sure whether she wanted him to say anything yet. It was the kind of moment in their relationship, exquisite and fleeting, which had its own particular charm just because it could not be indefinitely prolonged. It had the quality of a February day. The picture rose before her mind — a light air stirring, a hand’s breadth of blue in the sky, the almost imperceptible drifting of the clouds, a little mist to enhance and enchant the half-seen landscape — fruit, flower, and all still a dream of the bud. It had its charm — but February passes on its way. Like Faust she could have said, ‘Schöner Augenblick verweile doch.’