The Complete Pratt (93 page)

It could be more tragic than you know, thought Henry.

‘It was, Hilary,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘That’s exactly what it was. And at the time, when it happened, Henry, I think you felt there was a chance, didn’t you?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Henry. ‘Yes, I did.’

Geoffrey Porringer returned, waving the brochure.

‘There we are, Hilary,’ he said. ‘One brochure.’

Hilary studied the brochure with as much interest as she could muster.

‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘Very reasonable.’

‘We like to think so,’ said Geoffrey Porringer.

In the train, on the journey from a fading evening of sodden sheep to a sodium night of glistening roofs, Hilary said, ‘I thought you were exaggerating, but they’re every bit as bad as you said.’

‘Auntie Doris and Geoffrey Porringer?’

‘No. His blackheads.’

At Leeds, she caught the train north and this time she didn’t turn away abruptly. She leant out of the window. He walked beside her. ‘Love you,’ she said. ‘Love you love you love you.’ He began to trot, he was out beyond the canopy, in the rain again. ‘Love you,’ she yelled again. He stopped right at the end of the platform, where it narrowed to a wedge. Smoke from the engine swirled around him, but every now and then it cleared and there she was, moving furiously, unashamed of love, of sentiment, of intensity, of banality, of childishness, unable to be hurt by any separation that was merely geographical. He watched until the last of the twelve bogies was invisible, and then he turned away. Rain streamed down his face. Tears streamed down his face. Never had his face been bombarded by so much water in one weekend.

President Eisenhower spoke of the ‘abiding strength’ of the Anglo-American alliance. Israel continued to refuse to withdraw her
forces
from Gaza. Canada refused to support demands for Israel to withdraw, and threatened to withdraw her troops from the emergency force unless the United Nations force was empowered to patrol the Israeli–Egyptian border and to remain to keep the peace after the Israeli withdrawal. Workers at Briggs Motor Bodies voted to defy their union and continue their strike.

‘Hello, boys and girls,’ typed Henry, bashing the keys angrily. ‘Some of you Argusnauts are already making contributions to next Christmas’s toy fund, so that less fortunate children can have a treat. Well done, each and every one of you.

‘Special thanks this week for Dora Pennyweather, aged 11, who made six super teddy bears. I’m so sorry I couldn’t meet her when she handed them in at our office.’

That afternoon, he interviewed Bill Holliday for ‘Proud Sons of Thurmarsh’. He felt that this would make him the laughing stock of the whole town.

The dun-coloured bus growled irritably through the southern suburbs. Rows of semi-detached houses breasted the sweeping hills. Some had dark red brick ground floors and stucco above. Some had brick centres and stucco edges. Some had bay windows topped by tiny tiled roofs. Some had decorated brick arches round the doorways. These brave attempts at individuality only emphasized the sameness of it all. Towns didn’t grow organically any more. They were planned by bureaucrats, and people were moved around to fit the plans. Society would pay for all this deadness, thought Henry, as the inexorable bus took him nearer and nearer to Bill Holliday, whom he was convinced was at the centre of all the dirty work surrounding the development plan.

Bill Holliday’s office was a glass island in a sea of cars. In front of it, rows of used cars. What mechanical horrors did the gleaming, seemingly innocent bonnets conceal? Behind the office, on the rolling slopes of what had once been prime farmland, an alp of rust rose out of a glistening porridge of mud. The office had wide windows on both sides, as if Bill Holliday actually wanted to see all this. It had a fluffy white carpet and two soft armchairs covered in imitation tiger skin. There was a glass-fronted drinks cabinet.

‘Brandy?’ said Bill Holliday.

Refusals crunched round Henry’s brain like old cars under a
bulldozer
. I don’t while I’m on duty. It might affect my judgement. I wouldn’t soil my gullet with your ill-gotten gains, you murderous bastard.

He finally decided upon, ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Cigar?’

Ditto.

Puffing, choking, sipping, choking, at three-fifteen on a grey afternoon, Henry felt a bit of a villain himself. And liked the feeling, which was alarming. He apologized for the misprint. Bill Holliday laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘“Ow”! It just about sums up our engagement.’ He sighed. ‘She wants me for my money. The jewellery I buy her. I want love.’ Love? You? Mr Scrap? The man you wouldn’t buy a used car from? Love? ‘People laugh when I say this, but I’m a deeply loving person. I love kids. Angie doesn’t want kids. Tell you who I’d like to meet on your rag. Oops, sorry. Paper.’ He roared with laughter. ‘Uncle Jason. Loves kids, that bastard. White-haired old bugger, is he?’

‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Yes. White-haired old bugger.’

‘Grand. I’m an unashamed sentimentalist. They don’t make them like that, any more.’

Henry took a deep breath and plunged in, hoping to catch Bill Holliday off guard.

‘My Uncle Teddy ran the Cap Ferrat,’ he said. ‘You knew him, didn’t you?’

‘Oh aye. Angie and I went there, oh, what, must have been four times.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t five?’ Henry tried not to sound terrified. ‘Are you sure you didn’t go there once more, without Angie?’

‘What?’ Bill Holliday looked more puzzled than alarmed. ‘On me own? I wouldn’t have dared go without Angie.’

Henry had the uneasy feeling that all avenues led to brick walls. He began his interview. Bill Holliday defended his line of business. ‘Folk think it’s a dirty business, ’cos of t’great mounds of cars. What silly buggers don’t realize is, if it weren’t for my mounds, where’d cars be? Eh? All over t’bloody town. All over t’bloody Dales. Right?’ He defended greyhound racing. ‘When have six dogs had to be destroyed after pile-up over Bechers? Eh? Sport of kings? Piss off. Give me dogs any day.’

He refilled Henry’s glass and led him to the window. They gazed in awe at the pile of rusting Fords, Morrises, Humbers, Standards, Armstrong-Siddeleys. At the top of the pile, an Austin Seven was lying across a Daimler.

‘Equal, at last, in death. Like folks,’ said Bill Holliday.

Henry looked at him in surprise.

‘This is just a molehill, compared to what’s to come,’ said Bill Holliday. ‘Motoring will increase tenfold. Old cars will increase tenfold. It’ll be folk like me what saves the world from choking. Does the world thank us? Does it buggery.’

Henry watched a beautiful old Riley being crushed flat. He shuddered.

‘How would tha like to be crushed like that?’ said Bill Holliday. ‘Wouldn’t be much fun, eh?’

He roared with laughter.

Henry didn’t.

A patrol of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders was ambushed by mountain tribesmen in the Western Aden Protectorate. Fighting flared up on the Aden frontier, threatened by 4,000 Yemenis. Security forces arrested 189 men in 4 days in the mountains of Western Cyprus. In Thurmarsh a crate of surgical trusses fell from a crane and nearly killed Uncle Jason. These were dangerous days.

He was on his way to catch the bus to Hexington, where he would interview Colonel Boyce-Uppingham, Chief Torch Bearer of the Arc (?) of the Golden Light of Our Lady, in the Athenaeum Club in Doncaster Road. Being early, he’d gone to have another look at the planned development area. The southernmost warehouse in Glasshouse Lane was still in use, although it was lorries now, not boats, that used its wharf. Pleased to see some life in this dying area, Henry watched as a crane slowly manipulated a crate, which contained, though he didn’t yet know it, a consignment of surgical trusses for export to Portugal. One moment he was looking up into a blue sky streaked with mackerel clouds. The next moment he was watching a crate falling towards him, growing larger and larger. He hurled himself to the right, tripped and fell. The crate smashed into the pavement, inches from his head. It
burst
open. Wood and splinters filled the air. Surgical trusses, intended for the hernias of Lisbon and Oporto, rained down on a terrified young English journalist.

He sat up. He stood up. His heart was thumping. His legs felt weak. He leant against the warehouse wall. The crane driver yelled out, pitifully inadequately, ‘Sorry!’

The landlord of the Artisan’s Rest hurried over. ‘I saw that,’ he said. ‘Tha were lucky!’

A corner of Henry’s mind debated the philosophical aspect of this. In all probability, no crates of surgical trusses had fallen that day in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Australasia, Africa or the Indian Subcontinent. The only crate had fallen inches from Henry. It could have been worse, but … lucky?

He accepted a large brandy on the house. As he walked away, he reflected on what a week it was becoming for large brandies in the afternoon.

He wondered which of his colleagues would have written the story that would have gone beneath the headline ‘Journalist (21) crushed by surgical trusses’.

He thought of all the other things that might fall on him – decaying Georgian stonework, disintegrating meteorites, wing-flaps off old planes, swans cut short by blood clots in mid-flight. Life was incredibly dangerous.

And then it struck him, like a falling crate of surgical trusses. The obvious fact, which hadn’t occurred to him, because this was Thurmarsh, not Chicago, this was real life, not a novel, he was Henry Pratt, not a gangster. The crate had been meant to kill him. Somebody – Bill Holliday, or his evil-faced brother Stan, or both, or somebody else – was trying to rub him out.

He began to think of what might hit him by design. Packing cases pushed from attic windows. Sharp slates dropped off roofs. Bullets from hidden snipers. Meat pies lobbed from the Rundle Café. He arrived at the bus station in no fit state to conduct an interview, which might explain, though it couldn’t excuse, the fiasco that was to follow.

Hexington Hall was a minor stately home, with an unimposing classical stone frontage, set in scruffy park-land. A pale, male
secretary
led Henry across a large entrance hall, gliding as if on wheels, his buttocks firmly clenched against the expected flood of pornography. Henry caught a glimpse, through open doors, of rooms where once the living had been gracious.

The large drawing-room smelt of damp and righteousness. Courtly ancestors in darkened oils looked down on tables covered in piles of leaflets.

Colonel Hubert Boyce-Uppingham shook his hand with surprising gentleness. They sat in leather armchairs in front of a modest fire of dead wood from the estate. The Chief Torch Bearer had short, crinkly hair, an aquiline nose, and dark eyes which glittered with intelligence, or fanaticism, or malice, or a combination of all three. Henry wasn’t yet sure.

‘I know your niece,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Colonel Boyce-Uppingham sounded as if this was so unlikely that only good manners deterred him from disputing it. He changed the subject humiliatingly, launching into his theme, not with loud military briskness, as Henry had expected, but with the more dangerous, soft, silkily reasonable tones of the man who has never doubted that he is right. ‘It’s only straws in the wind as yet.
Waiting for Godot. Look Back in Anger
. A French revue in which a horse “defecates” on stage.’ An acolyte with acne, serving tea and a digestive, barely interrupted the flow. ‘Where will it end? With four-letter words on television and the live sexual act performed on stage by the Thurmarsh Repertory Company.’

Henry looked up and saw, to his horror, right above his head, a huge chandelier.

Totally unheard by Henry, totally unaware that he was totally unheard by Henry, Colonel Hubert Boyce-Uppingham was warming to his theme. ‘The military mind is trained to enter the mind of the enemy, in order to anticipate his moves. Monty did it with Rommel. That’s why he beat him. That’s what I’m doing.’

Journalist crushed by chandelier! Henry longed to move. He didn’t dare. He was petrified.

‘So I become the enemy,’ said Colonel Boyce-Uppingham. ‘So who am I, this enemy? I’m a greedy man. I’m an unattractive man, rejected by women. I’m a man with hatred in his heart.’

Henry looked up, at the single chain which held up the mighty
chandelier
. Which of them could have sawn through it? The spotty server of tea? The slinking, sliding secretary? Bill Holliday, visiting to collect an old car? He shivered, despite the fire.

‘So, I will wreak my revenge on the sex that has rejected me. On the God who has given me no charm. Making a fortune as I do so!’

Colonel Boyce-Uppingham paused, for dramatic effect. Like a passenger who wakes when the car stops, Henry hurtled back to consciousness. He began to scribble, self-protectively. Reassured by this activity, Colonel Boyce-Uppingham resumed.

‘I want to exploit women for money,’ he said. ‘I want to own and exploit “ladies of the night”.’ Even in the mind of the enemy, he couldn’t bring himself to avoid euphemism entirely. ‘I want to open filthy strip-clubs, where their bodies will be humiliated by men with hungry eyes. I want to fill the land with naughty magazines, a tidal flood of filth.’

Henry’s mouth sagged open. His pencil could hardly keep up. This was dynamite. The chandelier was almost forgotten.