The Man Whose Dream Came True (6 page)

Was it rubbish? Tony and the gang played roulette, but few of them used any sort of system, and he could not make up his mind. After a time the rest of them got bored, and turned to other things. The gang’s exploits were not remarkable. They took girls up into the nearby woods where Tony was initiated into sex, and they also pilfered goods from shops in Lewisham. The usual technique was for three of them to go in and talk to the assistant while a fourth took something off the counter or stall. The things were not of much value. Sometimes Creighton sold them, at other times they threw them away. Then four of them, including Tony, were caught in Woolworth’s and brought into Juvenile Court, where they were all put on probation. The effects of the affair reverberated through the Jones household. Mr Jones came back specially from Gloucester to speak for his son in Court. Later, at home, he was almost incoherent with rage.

‘That a son of mine should–’ he began, and tried again. ‘I can’t understand it when you come from a good home. You all come from good homes.’ Later he said, ‘I should have known. Look at this last report, doesn’t try. Doesn’t
try.
Why don’t you try, eh? You’ll come to a bad end. He’ll come to a bad end, Sheila, I’ll tell you that.’ A quick switch of attack. ‘And you know whose fault it’ll be. Yours.’

His wife put a hand to her wide bosom. ‘Mine?’

‘Too much freedom. If you hadn’t given him so much freedom–’

‘I must see to the potatoes.’ She elevated slowly from the chair in which she had been sitting and floated out of the room.

The Creighton affair marked another turning point. In a way Tony had been terrified by the serious way in which everybody treated something so simple, something as you might say that everybody did, but what was chiefly borne in on him was the difference between practice and precept. He had often jumped off a bus with his father before the conductor had got round to collecting the fares. His father had winked and said, ‘Freeman’s ride, Tony, that’s the best.’ At Christmas time they had more than once gone to a brewery where one of the men would come out in a van and stop round a corner. Bottles of whisky would be exchanged for money, and after the van had driven away Mr Jones would chortle. ‘Half price, less than half price. Makes it taste better.’ How was the man able to sell them whisky at less than half price? Another wink. ‘Don’t ask, son. It fell off the back of the van.’ When he understood what this meant he wondered: what was the difference between whisky falling off the back of the van and things disappearing from a store counter?

At fifteen he got his first job, as an insurance company clerk. He had been working for three months when he came home one evening to find supper in the oven. There was no sign of his mother. He ate supper and waited for her to come home. At eleven o’clock he went upstairs and found her lying fully dressed on the bed, with an empty bottle that had contained sleeping tablets by her side. She must have taken them immediately after putting his supper into the oven. She left no message, but there were a number of letters on the dressing-table, written to her husband by a woman who signed herself Nora. These letters, left carelessly in an old overcoat, were thought to provide the reason for her death. Tony wondered – but this was much later – whether the loss of love or of respectability had been the decisive stroke. Or had she simply wanted to move over into the spirit world about which she was so curious?

Three months after his wife’s death Mr Jones married Nora, a brawny peroxide blonde with a flat Midlands voice, and soon after that Tony left the insurance company and went down to Widgey. He never returned to Eltham and never wrote to his father. He had had many jobs since then, but had held none for more than a few months before going to Leathersley House. He had sold insurance, had acted as debt collector for some bookmakers, and had worked as a salesman on commission for several firms. In all of these occupations he had practised a little fiddle, something had dropped off the back of the van as it were. He had kept back some of the insurance premiums, put a percentage of the collected debts into his own pocket, and with the co-operation of somebody in the office of a firm of vacuum cleaner manufacturers had sold a number of cleaners which never passed through the company books.

Such activities meant that you could never stay in one place for long, and Tony would have accepted if he had known it the philosophical idea that life itself implies movement, a permanent flow. Every so often, when he was in the money, he would play roulette, but he had never possessed enough capital to give any system the financial backing it needed, and the result almost always showed itself on the losing side. After leaving Eltham he abandoned the undesirable Jones, and since then had called himself Scott-Williams, Lees-Partridge and Bain-Truscott. He usually placed his origin in the colonies, and said something deprecating about his name. For a short time he had cherished ideas of becoming a journalist, and had taken a course in shorthand and typing at evening classes. He had found it impossible to get a job on a paper, but these accomplishments had been useful when at times he had been compelled to do secretarial work for private employers. Most of these jobs bored him quickly. Others involved too much work, and in two cases he had been dismissed because the lady of the house made advances which were noticed by her husband. There was something hungry but yearning about Tony’s looks that was especially attractive to women over forty. Such women, he slowly realised, wished to be a mother to him and at the same time wanted him to be a lover to them. There was something vaguely disagreeable about this, but the thought had crossed his mind that he might marry one of these ladies. The proposition, however, had never been a practical one because they always had husbands.

Easter was over and only half a dozen people were staying at the Seven Seas, a young couple who looked as if they were just married, a husband and wife in their seventies, he wearing a deaf aid and she tottery, a rabbit-faced clergyman whose lips moved ceaselessly perhaps in prayer, and Mrs Harrington. Supper was tomato soup, thinly sliced cold meat and salad, and ice cream. Obviously this was one of the bad days. Widgey appeared only intermittently at meals, and was not present at this one. The food was eaten almost in silence. The young couple whispered to each other as though in church, the clergyman’s lips moved, Mrs Harrington viewed food and company with a fixed smile. Only the deaf old man said, ‘What’s this, then, what’s this?’ as each course came up. ‘Tomato soup…it’s cold meat, dear, mostly ham I think,’ his wife quavered and then powerfully repeated as he turned towards her the deaf aid which made a slight whistling sound.

Afterwards he signed the visitors’ book firmly, ‘Anthony Bain-Truscott,’ with a fictitious address in London, and went to see Widgey. She sat in an armchair in the parlour reading a romance called
Love and Lady Hetty.
She put the book down, marking the place carefully.

‘Just having my evening cupper. Want one?’ She took the kettle off a small gas ring, got two unmatching cups from a cupboard, made tea, rolled a cigarette and said, ‘Well?’

The tea was very hot, thick and in some mysterious way very sweet, although she had put in no sugar. ‘How do you mean, Widgey?’

‘What’s up? Landing here without even a telegram. What name, by the way?’

‘Bain-Truscott.’

‘Tony for me.’ She swilled tea round her mouth. False teeth clattered slightly. ‘No need to say anything. Any real trouble, I’d like to know.’

‘There’s nothing.’ But he felt an urgent need to talk about the way in which he had been deceived. ‘It was a damned girl.’ He told her about the Fiona who had turned out to be Mary and was indignant when she laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, ash dropped from her cigarette. She drank some more tea, stopped coughing.

‘Glad it’s no worse. You ought to settle down.’ He did not answer this. ‘Broke, are you?’

‘I’ve got some money.’

‘Your father wrote the other day, asked if I’d heard from you. Don’t worry, I won’t tell him you’re here. He’s had an accident, broken his leg, laid up.’

‘Let him rot.’

‘He’s not my favourite man.’

‘He killed mother.’ He wondered why he spoke so fiercely when he had never been close to his mother as he had to his father.

‘Sheila killed herself. She was a stupid cow. She should never have married.’ She did not amplify this statement.

The conversation made him uncomfortable. He said flirtatiously,
‘You
ought to marry again, Widgey.’

‘Who’d have me? They’d be marrying the Seven Seas. But you should think about it, you’re getting on. Sure you aren’t in trouble?’

‘Oh, Widgey.’

‘Just I’ve got a feeling. Hardly ever wrong, my feelings.’

‘They’re wrong this time,’ he said a little snappishly. As he bent to kiss her he caught her characteristic smell of tobacco blended with something both sweet and sharp like eau-de-cologne. The past rolled over him in waves, the years of bucket and spade holidays, the years when he had come down alone and walked about looking for girls. One of the rolling waves was composed of pure affection. ‘I won’t be any trouble.’

‘I don’t mind a little trouble. I just wish you knew what you were doing, that’s all.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ He made a gesture that embraced his well-cut clothes and his personality. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she said flatly. He went upstairs, and to bed.

He spent the next forty-eight hours recovering his poise, as others convalesce from influenza. There could be no doubt that the Fiona-Mary affair had been a fiasco. He recalled it continually like a man exploring a sore place with his tongue, feeling each time the shock that had run through him on reading the story in the paper. The thought that he had been deceived was hard to endure.

Southbourne had grown dramatically since the war, sprouting a holiday camp and glass cliffs of flats, but it was still a small resort, a lesser Hastings rather than a miniature Brighton. He walked up and down the promenade as he had when a youth, moving very slowly like a man recovering from illness. He wandered beside the sea, played the slot machines on the pier, and on a day of blustery rain listened to the concert party in the Pier Pavilion. The season had not begun, and there was only a sprinkling of people in the canvas seats. Afterwards he went into the café under the Pavilion’s dome, ordered a pot of tea and toast and sat staring through the plate glass window at the sea.

‘Mr Bain-Truscott. I thought it was you.’ Mrs Harrington stood beside his table. ‘Isn’t this the most awful weather?’ She hovered, twirling a damp umbrella. At his suggestion she sat down and drank a cup of tea. They laughed together when the waitress said that a pot for two would cost more than a pot for one.

‘English seaside resorts.’ Tony shook his head. ‘Can you wonder more and more people go abroad for holidays.’

‘Are you a great traveller?’

‘I know France pretty well. Mostly around Paris.’ One of his secretarial jobs had taken him to France for a week. It was the only time he had been out of England.

‘Ah, Paris in the spring,’ Mrs Harrington sighed.

He moved off this dangerous ground. ‘You’re taking an early holiday.’

‘Not exactly a holiday. We used to live here and Alec Widgeon was a great friend of Harrington’s. I still know several people here. And of course I visit his resting place.’ From a crocodile bag she drew a small lace handkerchief and delicately wiped not her eyes but her nose.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘How could you know. It was a motor bus. Driven by a coloured person. I miss him greatly, although of course he is over there.’

He was about to ask where, when he remembered her attention to the cards. Her brown Pekinese eyes looked into his. ‘Harrington was a very vital man.’

He did not know what to say, and remained silent. ‘You’re Widgey’s nephew, aren’t you? She’s a remarkable woman. Such intensity of feeling. I really think she
knows
things. Was your mother her sister?’

‘Yes.’ He started to explain about the colonial origins of the Bain-Truscotts. Mrs Harrington waved a jewelled hand and said it added distinction. She was wearing a diamond clasp that must be worth a lot of money if it was real, and no doubt it
was
real. And that large emerald ring – he became aware that she had said something and asked her to repeat it.

‘I wondered what
you
were doing here.’

‘I sometimes come down to stay with Widgey. And I’ve had rather a shock. I thought I was going to get married, but it was broken off.’

‘You’ll think I’m a prying old woman.’ She gave a trill of falsetto laughter.

‘You haven’t been prying at all. And I think of you as just the same age as myself.’

‘That’s very nice even if you don’t mean it. Remember, there are just as good fish in the sea.’ Her hand, podgy and slightly wrinkled but ablaze with the stones she wore, touched his. As they walked back to the Seven Seas he asked her to call him Tony. He learned her name which, rather dismayingly, was Violet.

On the following day they were going out of the door at the same time, and he accompanied her on a tour of the town’s jewellery shops. She was looking for a pearl choker and examined some that cost three and four hundred pounds, but she did not neglect rings and bracelets. He was impressed by the professional way in which she looked at the things and bargained with the jewellers. In the end she placed a diamond and ruby pendant round her ample neck and asked him if he liked it. He said truthfully that it was very pretty.

‘You really think so?’ She said to the jeweller, ‘I’ll give you a hundred and fifty.’

The price was a hundred and seventy-five. The man raised his hands in despair, but she got it at her price after some haggling.

‘Will you take it off, Tony.’ He stood close behind her, his fingers touched the back of her neck, warm and smooth. He was aware of a faint tremor in her body as he undid the clasp. In the glass her brown eyes, warm and ardent, looked into his.

‘You’ll think I waste money, but you’re wrong,’ she said afterwards. ‘I may be a fool about a lot of things but I know what I’m looking at with stones. I don’t keep them for ever. I sell them after a few years, and I almost always make a profit.’

‘I thought you were wonderful. I could never have got the price down like that.’

‘Nothing to it. He wouldn’t have liked it if I’d just said yes to the asking price.’

He decided to make his financial situation clear. ‘A hundred and fifty pounds. By my standards it’s a fortune.’

She patted his hand. ‘Dear Tony, you’re so straightforward. That’s one of the things I like about you.’

That evening they had a séance, or rather a table rapping session. It was against Widgey’s principles because she only approved of seeing the future in the cards, but it turned out that the deaf man and his tottery wife were interested in the world beyond, and the five of them sat at the round table in the parlour with the lights out. For some minutes nothing happened.

‘What’s that?’ said Deaf aid. ‘I heard something.’

They sat in silence. Tony repressed an inclination to giggle. Three sharp knocks were heard. Mrs Deaf aid grunted something unintelligible. Widgey said, ‘Have you got a message? Is it for one of us? Two raps means you have.’ Two knocks sounded. ‘Is it for Mr Bennett?’ So that was Deaf aid’s name. One knock only. ‘For Mrs Bennett?’ Again one knock. ‘For Mrs Harrington?’ Two knocks. ‘Is it a close relative?’ Two knocks. ‘Her husband?’ Two knocks.

Tony’s right hand was gripped by Mrs Harrington’s left. She held it tightly, the rings pressed into his fingers. She continued to hold it as questions and answers continued, slowly because as always in table rapping the answers were confined to plain ‘yes’ and ‘no’. When she herself began to ask questions about life over there her hot fingers slithered over his palm. It appeared that Mr Harrington was happy on the other side, although he missed Violet.

‘You were always so busy down here. Are you – is there enough for you to do?’ Two knocks, rather peremptory.

Falteringly Mrs Harrington continued. ‘I have bought a pendant and I should like your opinion on it.’

The response to this was an absolute fusillade of knocks, irregular ones which gradually became fainter.

‘Don’t be angry,’ Mrs Harrington said pleadingly. ‘Don’t go away, I have so many more questions.’ She asked some, and then Mrs Bennett put a question or two, but the spirit refused to respond.

‘We may as well call it a night,’ Widgey said. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back. Mrs Harringron took away her hand. As often happens when lights are turned on after darkness, the blinking faces looked guilty. Mrs Harrington was flushed. ‘It’s strange that it becomes difficult when you reach a really interesting point.’

Widgey rolled and lit a cigarette. ‘Why should they answer if they don’t want to?’

Mrs Bennett agreed. ‘They don’t want to know about our lives. Why should we expect to know everything they think and do?’

The conversation continued in this vein. Widgey went out and made them all a cup of tea. They dispersed, the Bennetts first, then Mrs Harrington and Tony. Her room was number eleven, on the floor below his. She opened the door, turned back to him, took his hand.

‘I want you to know that I’m grateful.’

‘What for?’

‘You were so sympathetic. I know you must think I’m foolish.’ Her hand still held his, she had moved inside the room and it followed that he was now standing inside the doorway.

‘I don’t think anything of the sort.’

‘Come in.’ The injunction was not necessary for now he was quite certainly in the room. He closed the door. Around Mrs Harrington there hung always some curious scent, rather like low-lying mist clinging to the ground on a damp morning, but in the bedroom this heavy cloying smell was thick, as though he were in the lair of some powerful animal.

‘Look.’ She extended her arm, pointing, and for a moment he was absorbed in the spectacle of the arm itself, revealed as the sleeve of her dress moved up, a fine thick object against which the gold bracelet gleamed. The arm appeared to be pointing at the bed, but now she moved away from him and returned with a framed photograph which she pushed into his hand. It showed the head and shoulders of a tight-faced man whose brow was corrugated by a frown. What was he worried about?

‘Harrington.’ She spoke reverentially.

Tony returned the photograph to its place beside the bed. Beside it stood another, of a pleasant large house standing in considerable grounds. ‘Is that your home?’

‘Yes. It’s William and Mary. Very pretty, don’t you think?’

It was more than pretty, it was tangible evidence of large sums of money, which he saw suddenly adhering to her.

‘Harrington was a passionate man. I am a passionate woman.’ He was overpoweringly conscious of her nearness. The scent of her somehow gave the ordinary bedroom the atmosphere of a hotel room used by dozens of men and women for sexual purposes.

‘Oh, Tony, Tony.’

‘Violet.’ In the moment before being enclosed by those plump white arms be thought: I am lost. Then the arms clasped him firmly and bore him back on to the bed which creaked, and even swayed disturbingly, under their weight. Her mouth opened like a sea anemone and sucked him in.

He went quietly up the stairs to his own room at six o’clock the following morning. Violet had told the truth in saying that she was a passionate woman.