A Disturbing Influence (21 page)

‘I
’
M GOING
tomorrow,’ he said.

Four men stirred in the shadows.

‘It’s been fun,’ said David. ‘But now it’s good-bye.’

‘Nothing tonight, then?’ said Dick Thomson.

‘No. I’ve got you a couple of bottles, though, if you want them. Here you are.’

Jack Tarrant took the bottles and said: ‘Thanks, David.’

‘I’d keep clear of the gravel-pits for a week or two. People seem upset about the damage down there.’

Dennis Palmer chuckled.

‘Where are you going?’ said Allen.

‘London. Then—anywhere. I don’t know. I’m recovered now, you see. I’ll have to get myself some work to do. Abroad, probably.’

‘You don’t have to work.’

‘My father wouldn’t agree with you about that, Allen.’

They stood in silence round the car, then Jack said: ‘Where shall we go?’

‘We could go down by the canal,’ said Dennis.

‘No,’ said Allen, suddenly and violently. ‘Not there.’

‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Allen.’

‘Thanks a lot, David,’ said Dennis. ‘We’ll be seeing you.’

‘I doubt that,’ said David. ‘Have a good time.’

The three disappeared into the shadows, leaving Allen and
David. David listened to them go with an odd expression almost of regret on his face.

‘David, if I came to London, do you think you could find me a job?’

‘No.’

‘Can’t you? Please. I’d like to get away from here. I’m sick of this place.’

‘I can’t find you a job, Allen. I don’t have one myself.’

‘But I’ve got to get away from here, really I have.’

‘Why? What have you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything. I just want to get away. And when you were talking about those places last night I knew I just couldn’t stay here all my life, repairing cars at Trinder’s. That’s no life. And then Ruth keeps getting after me. She wants me to marry her.’

‘Well, why don’t you?’

‘I’m twenty-one. I don’t want to tie myself down. Kids all over the place. I’ve seen that happen to others. I don’t want to start changing the baby yet. There’s plenty of time for that later. I want to get out. Like you were saying last night. I want to see some of the world.’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ said David.

‘Oh yes, you did,’ said Allen. ‘I want to try some of that life. I’d like to go to Texas, all those places.’

‘I can’t find you a job in Texas,’ said David.

‘I’ll work my way there. I’ll join the merchant service. I’ve been in the Army. I might as well try what it’s like at sea. I reckon I can put up with most things.’

‘But I can’t get you a Seaman’s Union card, Allen.’

‘I know that. But I’d like to go to London first. Look around a bit. Can’t one of your friends find me anything?’

‘You really enjoyed it last night, didn’t you?’

‘I had a terrible head this morning,’ said Allen, smiling foolishly. ‘But I remembered what you said.’

A curious look of inward glee came over David’s sallow face,
and his smile seemed even more crooked than usual as he said: ‘I tell you what, Allen. I’ll give you the address of a friend of mine. He might be able to help you. He may offer you some pretty odd jobs. Do you mind that?’

‘I can do anything.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

Allen looked away and said: ‘If I can only get away from here for a bit.’

‘All right.’ David wrote something on a slip of paper and gave it to Allen. ‘Just tell him I sent you.’

‘Thanks a million, David.’

‘Just ring him up and mention my name, and he’ll find something for you, I’m sure.’

Allen said: ‘Thanks, David. I don’t know why, but today I just felt it so strongly. I’ve really got to get away.’

‘Well, I hope you get where you want,’ said David. He rested his arm for a moment on Allen’s shoulder. ‘So long.’

‘So long, David.’

The car moved off, heading away from Cartersfield. Allen looked at the piece of paper with a name and address which he had never heard of. Then he slipped it carefully between the folds of his handkerchief, put the handkerchief in his pocket, and disappeared into the shadows towards the canal, where the others would have arrived by now.

*

‘Where’ve you been these last few days?’ said Ruth.

‘I’ve been around.’

‘You weren’t in church yesterday, and you weren’t at the dance Saturday night. What’s up with you?’

‘I’ve been minding my own business.’

‘You wouldn’t have been down at the gravel-pits, setting the place on fire, by any chance?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. I was out with some of the boys, that’s all.’

‘Huh,’ said Ruth. She rearranged some tubes of lipstick in the showcase.

‘Listen, it’s none of your business where I spend my time. Where I go is
my
business.’

‘Now you listen to me, Allen Bradshaw. I’ve been going with you for a long time, now, and I’ve put up with a lot. I’m not putting up with much more. Understand?’

‘Suits me,’ said Allen. ‘I’m going away, anyway. I’m going up to London. There’s no way to get on here.’

‘You’re what?’

‘I’m going up to London.’

‘What’s wrong with Cartersfield? It’s suited you pretty well up to now, hasn’t it?’

‘Well, it doesn’t suit me any longer, that’s all’

‘What do you mean, it doesn’t suit you?’

‘I’m going away, Ruth, that’s all. There’s no point in arguing about it. I want to see a bit of the world before I settle down in some mouldy town like Cartersfield. Maybe I’ll be a merchant seaman.’

‘You didn’t like the Army much. What makes you think you’ll like being at sea?’

‘I want to see a bit of the world, that’s all,’ he said stolidly.

Mr Hudson came into the shop and looked at them for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders angrily and went back into the prescription department.

‘What’s got into you, Allen? You never used to be like this.’

‘Nothing’s got into me. I told you. I want to see——’

‘You want to see a bit of the world,’ she said angrily. ‘You talk such nonsense. What do you want to go seeing the world
f
or
?’

‘I want to see it, that’s all.’

‘I suppose you’re tired of me. You’ve got another girl, that’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so daft.’

‘Who is she, I’d like to know. I’d wring her neck if I could get my hands on her. Putting silly ideas in your head. Who is she?’

‘There isn’t any she. And no one’s been putting ideas in my head. Stop imagining things.’

‘Is it because I went out with that nephew of the vicar’s?’

‘No, it’s nothing to do with that. I told you.’

‘Well, what
is
it?’

‘Oh, leave me alone, can’t you?’ said Allen. ‘I told you. If you don’t believe me, I can’t help it.’

‘Well,’ said Ruth. She stared at him hard. ‘And here you’ve been telling me all these years that you love me. We’d better get a few things straight, you and me. If you think I’m going to sit here cooling my heels while you go gadding about the world you’ve got another think coming, that’s all.’

‘Well, I’m going tomorrow morning.’

She looked at him, then burst into tears and rushed into the back of the shop.

Allen stood there a moment, looking after her, then he shrugged his shoulders and went out into the street. It was still hot, it had been hot for so many weeks now that no one commented on it any longer. He lit a cigarette and started off towards Trinder’s.

*

At eleven o’clock that night Dr Nye’s phone rang, and he leaned across his wife to answer it.

‘Old Hobson’s had a stroke, I think,’ he said. ‘Poor old boy.’

‘Poor Evangeline,’ said Marjory Nye.

‘You go back to sleep,’ said Nye. ‘He probably won’t die for several days, if at all. He’s as tough as nails.’

‘Don’t forget to put your coat on,’ she called as he left the
bedroom
. ‘I don’t want you catching cold.’

H
ARRY MENGEL
wouldn’t go. He hadn’t liked the man, he said, and the man hadn’t liked him, and anyway he owed him a great deal of money, and he wouldn’t believe the man was honest till the will was proved: besides, he said, he was a married man now, and he couldn’t trust Joan to look after the shop for him, and she didn’t want to go, either, and what the hell did I think I was doing going to his funeral when everyone knew I’d hated his guts?

I had, too, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to see him buried. I like to pay my respects to my enemies, and old Hobson was an enemy of the highest class, a man with whom I had absolutely nothing in common, whose every opinion was loathsome to me, who treated me like some menial, and who had a wife called Evangeline, which is going about as far as you can go in picking a wife with a wholly suitable and ridiculous name. But I need enemies, I’m really no good without someone to fulminate against, and there weren’t that many people in Cartersfield who were worth fulminating against. Because to detest someone, he’s got to be worthy of your detestation, and most of the people in Cartersfield aren’t even worth as insipid an emotion as liking, let alone a
full-blooded
hatred. And that was why I was at his funeral, to everyone’s surprise, including my own, and one or two people tried to hint that it wasn’t in the best of taste for me to show up, but that just shows the sort of people one’s up against.

I wish I knew what really killed the old fool, but I don’t, and I
refuse to believe that it was anything as trite as a heart attack. Men like Hobson have a heart attack every time they open a newspaper, and call it indigestion. All I know is that he sat up with a gun trying to shoot whoever it was smashing his bathing pool, and a few days later he was dead, and everyone said it was those Teddy boys who were responsible. At least fools of a lesser quality than Hobson thought so, men like the headmaster. He gave the whole school a lecture one morning at Assembly, and told them that morale wasn’t as high as it should be, whatever that might mean, and then he said morals were loose, and everyone immediately thought another couple of kids had been caught necking without any clothes on, but it wasn’t that, alas. ‘Some boys,’ he said, ‘it has been brought to my notice’ (he always inverted everything, so you had to wait till the end of a sentence to find out what was going on, and rearrange it to make sense. While you were doing that you missed the next sentence, so you were grateful, in a way), ‘have been engaged, wantonly, in the destruction of private property, to all our disgust. Those who are guilty will understand to what I refer. I know who they are. I want them, of their own accord, to come, of their own free will, and own up to me. I shall be in my office throughout the hour set aside for lunch. And I may warn you all, even those who have no knowledge of this matter, as yet, that if this vandalism recurs, the matter will be taken up by an authority higher than mine.’ For a moment I hoped he meant God, but he didn’t, he meant the police, though no one there would have guessed, because he walked out then to a thunderous silence, no one having a clue what he was talking about. Silly idiot, he really believes people understand and use his kind of language.

Luckily he called in the staff during the morning break to ‘apprise’ us, as he put it, of what the hell he had been talking about. Some joker had carried one of the henhouses Hobson left down at his stinking gravel-pit (those places have long been insanitary in my opinion) to an island and left it there filled with whisky bottles. He even hinted that there were other more distressing discoveries,
though we had to imagine those for ourselves, and I think he was making them up. Well, what interested me was who would have both the strength and the sense of humour to do such a thing to Hobson, but no one had any idea, and of course no boy went and spilled the beans to the headmaster, he just wasn’t the sort of man who could get away with a bluff, and when he said he knew who was responsible the lie was taken exactly for what it was worth, that is to say it probably never even entered the calculations of any of the guilty ones as a remote possibility, supposing any of the guilty ones to have been present.

About that I’m not so sure, because I caught one of my brighter pupils at the end of the last hour that afternoon and asked him what it was all about. He was called Richard Thomson, and his father had a farm over at Mendleton. It was his last term, so he hadn’t got much to lose.

‘I don’t know a thing about it, Mr Drysdale, honest.’

They all say that. ‘Now come off it,’ I said. ‘You live a mile and a half away, and you haven’t heard or seen anything? Nothing at all?’

‘No, sir, I haven’t seen a thing.’

‘Look, Thomson, Dick, whatever you call yourself, you know me, and I know you, and I’m not asking you to incriminate yourself, though you’ll be lucky to stay out of the courts all your life, if you ask me. I’m asking you for information, that’s all. What’s going on down there?’

‘I really don’t know, Mr Drysdale. I’m not one of that sort.’

‘What sort?’

‘The sort that does that sort of thing.’

‘Sort,’ I said, ‘what do you mean, sort? Don’t they teach you in English not to say sort? Say what you mean. What sort of thing? And what sort of people?’

‘Jesus, Mr Drysdale—–’

‘Don’t swear in front of a master. Swear as much as you like at home, in front of your mother and father, but
never
in front of a master. Go on.’

‘Honest,’ he said, and he tried to look pious and innocent, a thing I loathe in a boy, ‘I don’t know what goes on.’

‘Well, why did you tell me you weren’t one of that sort?’

He opened his mouth to say he didn’t know anything about it, Mr Drysdale, honest he didn’t, again, so I said: ‘Oh, get out, you make me sick.’ Because if there was one thing that was obvious it was that he
did
know something. A boy never admits to total ignorance unless he is implicated in the crime in some way or another, it’s an infallible rule with adolescents. If they’re really innocent they’ll tell you what they heard in the playground or the lavatory, total fabrication, probably, but something. But then it was a hot day, and I had been a bit short with him, and perhaps he was just scared, though I didn’t think so. He’d once put a heavy roller in the canal, with some other boys, and he didn’t scare easily. But I couldn’t be bothered with him, and anyway he would never have had the guts or imagination to move the second hut, and then set an island on fire. Those gravel-pits were scenes of great social activity in warm weather, especially at week-ends, with the young men flashing about in front of the girls, thinking they were sexy, I suppose, showing off by diving and disappearing under the water with goggles and breathing-pipes, pretending they were submarines, ha, ha. It was as bad as Blackpool or Brighton, only they didn’t have piers, thank God, and people eating jellied eels and candy floss all over the place. They drowned someone every year or two, and often they didn’t find the body, because the water was very deep in some places, and very shallow in others, and so it was almost impossible to drag for the corpse. I always maintained that we had a Cartersfield Monster, like at Loch Ness, which liked to eat people, but then I was told I was in bad taste again, so I knew I’d scored a hit and was satisfied to leave it at that.

I was thinking about the possibility of the Monster being real, actually, as I stood at the edge of the crowd and watched them lower old Hobson into the earth. Everyone had talked about orgies down at the gravel-pits, not that anyone in Cartersfield has the remotest
idea of what an orgy is. Hobson obviously thought an orgy was a sort of pillow-fight, remembering midnight feasts in the
dormitories
at Sandhurst or whatever benighted school produces men like that, and everyone else thought they were something to do with the cinema. I’m convinced that Harry Mengel, for instance, particularly as he was only just back from his honeymoon, a notorious time to develop new sexual fantasies, would consider an orgy was
something
to do with gaggles of girls with practically no clothes on, and those clothes mere diaphanous wisps, lying around on
multi-coloured
velvet cushions in flickering million-watt torchlight, waiting for Nero or some other piece of historical clap-trap to come home from the arena. Cecil B. de Mille and other kings of the celluloid Orient have a lot to answer for, if you ask me, though I am not the man to object to reinterpretation of biblical classics in Freudian terms and with additional dialogue. Anyway, I was thinking how very little like an orgy was the scene round the grave in Cartersfield churchyard. Everyone was there, and a lot of people I’d never seen before—the people Hobson was always invoking when he wanted to get something done, I suppose—all suitably black, and sweating, like me, because it was another boiling day, and poor old Jim Nelson, the grave-digger, must have had a pretty hard time because the earth was as dry as a bone. Usually Cartersfield
churchyard
is a sort of quagmire, and you can hear a splash as the coffin goes in, because the water-level is higher than the legalized depth of a grave. I’m not much of a man for funerals, actually, but this one did have that advantage—no splash—and anyway the people were all at their absolute worst, which gave the occasion a peculiarly macabre charm. Henderson hardly seemed to know what was going on, turning over two pages at once at one moment, and looking round in a bewildered way as though it was the first time he’d ever presided over someone’s interment, and making a wholly
incomprehensible
speech (I suppose he thought it was a sermon) about how we all loved old Hobson. Mrs Hobson’s back was as straight as ever, and she didn’t even wear a veil, letting everyone see and know
how well she was taking it, and she had quite a lot to take, because her awful son Hubert, who was an interior-decorator in London and hadn’t been seen for years, was sitting beside her and ogling one of the choir-boys almost audibly, and his suit was so well cut it seemed to cling to him. I have a suspicion it was made of satin, but I didn’t try to get near to confirm this. The Gilchrist family were all there playing the role of Lord of the Manor for all it was worth, the old man reading something in a voice which rang round the church like a gong, and his wife looking thoroughly sensible but sad, and the two children obviously wishing they hadn’t come, the girl overcome by the whole thing and the boy muttering to himself all the time, though what I don’t know. Then old Nye, the doctor, sat looking at his watch all the time in a callous way, while his wife kept nudging him. I was sitting at the back, and after a while I just couldn’t stand it, so I slipped quietly out into the porch and listened to the drone inside, and looked at the sun pouring down outside, and suddenly I became extremely angry that poor old Hobson should have to go this way, with an idiot like Henderson mumbling nonsense and Gilchrist being self-important and Evangeline (how could she have stuck with that name all her life?) being ostentatiously brave, and Hubert being ostentatiously repulsive, and everyone wishing the whole thing would be over. I hadn’t come to see the old fool mocked.

I went and hid behind the church till they should come out, so I could join in again when they finally dumped him, and I thought about why I was there, and I decided that he’d become a habit with me, like tobacco, and though you may know tobacco is killing you, you go on smoking it because you like it, the actual smoking. And Hobson and I had smoked at each other often enough. And I felt he’d been cheated, he shouldn’t have died in that scruffy way, just keeling over suddenly and then being hurried into the ground by a lot of people who didn’t give a damn, really. I was going to miss him, I realized, to my intense annoyance. It was as though he’d been a nice wall to lean against all my life—or for the last ten years
and more—and now the wall wasn’t there any more to push against and write rude words on. It was like being north and suddenly
finding
that south had disappeared. We’d been opposites, you see, and what he believed to be true I knew to be false, and vice versa. Even in a miserable hole like Cartersfield living isn’t just a matter of occupying space, you have to exist, whether you like it or not, in relation to other objects occupying space, and when one of the space-fillers goes there’s a vacuum, and, if I remember rightly, nature abhors a vacuum. And you have to go and look at the hole where the person used to be, whether you loved the person or hated him, or even if you felt totally indifferent to him, and no one could say that I had ever felt indifferent about Hobson.

I was really getting quite sentimental about the whole business (funerals always make people cry, because the script is so good), and beginning to think that perhaps I’d better go home, when they all came out of the church, the pall-bearers wobbling under Hobson’s weight in the hot sun, so I went and joined them, discreetly hovering at the edge of the crowd and trying not to let myself get angry when women took out handkerchiefs and strong men allowed a single tear to start from the edge of their right eye. Hubert kept peering over his mother’s shoulder to see if there was anything in the throng for him, and I managed to catch his eye and glare at him,
whereupon
he looked, to my horror, delighted, so I didn’t look in that direction again. The whole thing was a farce, it was extremely hot, everyone was longing to get his coat off, Hubert was wondering what there was in the will for him, Gilchrist was still overcome with how well he’d read in the church, Nye had slipped off, it all looked like one of those awful historical paintings where it’s quite obvious that the figures are all models hard up for a little extra cash.

At last it was all over, and everyone went away, asking each other in low voices to come and have a drink tomorrow, and I was in a fearful rage by that time, so I simply went home and put on some reasonable clothes and started off on a walk across country,
heat or no heat. And what really annoyed me, I think, was that no one seemed to realize that however much of a fool Hobson had been, and he had been a really very big one most of the time, he did stand for things. He had poisonous opinions, but he followed them through to their logical conclusions and then tried to put them into effect, when there wasn’t someone like me to shout from the
roof-tops
that it was a monstrous invasion of liberty, or some equally idiotic phrase which woke people up. He had absolutely nothing to do, but he was alive, so he took it on himself to try and run the place, imposing his poisonous opinions and generally making a complete cock-up of everything, but at least he did
try
, which is more than can be said for anyone else. He was, too, the last representative in our parts of the really old days, when people thought a gun-boat was something you wore on your foot and kicked people with, when you could say ‘British’ with the absolute conviction that you meant ‘best.’ I don’t, of course, say that his conviction was good for Britain, or even for Cartersfield, and it didn’t do him or Evangeline much good, either, I dare say, but it was something that was once real for a good many people, and isn’t any longer, except for people like Hobson and a lot of frauds who’ve shut their minds to everything that’s happened since they learnt, unfortunately, to speak. But Hobson had left the nursery, you could say that for him, he wasn’t spilling patriotic baby-food down his bib like an Empire Loyalist, he knew what things were like once, and he felt they ought to be like that still. And when you come to think of it, a life in the Army has probably stayed more in touch with 1900 than any other life you can live these days, what with polo and the Guards and all that expensive rubbish.