A Gun for Sale (13 page)

‘Only women,’ Mather said.

‘Oh dear, oh dear. I
told
Troop Leader Lance. You see, I thought if one or two Scouts, in plain clothes, of course, brought up autograph books, it would please Miss Maydew, seem to show we appreciated … the time and trouble.’ He said miserably, ‘The St Luke’s troop is always the least trustworthy …’

A grey-haired man with a carpet bag put his head in at the door. He said, ‘Mrs ’Arris said as there was something wrong with the toilet.’

‘Ah, Mr Bacon,’ the vicar said, ‘so kind of you. Step into the hall. You’ll find Mrs Harris there. A little stoppage, so I understand.’

Mather looked at his watch. He said, ‘I must speak to Miss Maydew directly –’ A young man entered at a rush; he said to the vicar, ‘Excuse me, Mr Harris, but will Miss Maydew be speaking?’

‘I hope not. I profoundly hope not,’ the vicar said. ‘It’s hard enough as it is to keep the women from the stalls till after I’ve said a prayer. Where’s my prayer book? Who’s seen my prayer book?’

‘Because I’m covering it for the
Journal
, and if she’s not, you see, I can get away –’

Mather wanted to say: Listen to me. Your damned jumble is of no importance. My girl’s in danger. She may be dead. He wanted to do things to people, but he stood there heavy, immobile, patient, even his private passion and fear subdued by his training. One didn’t give way to anger, one plodded on calmly, adding fact to fact; if one’s girl was killed, one had the satisfaction of knowing one had done one’s best according to the standards of the best police force in the world. He
wondered
bitterly, as he watched the vicar search for his prayer book, whether that would be any comfort.

Mr Bacon came back and said, ‘She’ll pull now,’ and disappeared with a clank of metal. A boisterous voice said, ‘Upstage a little, upstage, Miss Maydew,’ and the curate entered. He wore suede shoes, he had a shiny face and plastered hair and he carried an umbrella under his arm like a cricket bat; he might have been returning to the pavilion after scoring a duck in a friendly, taking his failure noisily as a good sportsman should. ‘Here is my C.O., Miss Maydew, on the O.P. side.’ He said to the vicar, ‘I’ve been telling Miss Maydew about our dramatics.’

Mather said, ‘May I speak to you a moment privately, Miss Maydew?’

But the vicar swept her away. ‘A moment, a moment, first our little ceremony. Constance! Constance!’ and almost immediately the ante-room was empty except for Mather and the journalist, who sat on the table swinging his legs, biting his nails. An extraordinary noise came from the next room: it was like the trampling of a herd of animals, a trampling suddenly brought to a standstill at a fence; in the sudden silence one could hear the vicar hastily finishing off the Lord’s Prayer, and then Miss Maydew’s clear immature principal boy’s voice saying, ‘I declare this jumble well and truly –’ and then the trampling again. She had got her words wrong – it had always been foundation stones her mother laid; but no one noticed. Everyone was relieved because she hadn’t made a speech. Mather went to the door; half a dozen boys were queued up in front of Miss Maydew with autograph albums; the St Luke’s troop hadn’t failed after all. A hard astute woman in a toque said to Mather, ‘This stall will interest
you
. It’s a Man’s Stall,’ and Mather looked down at a dingy array of pen-wipers and pipe-cleaners and hand-embroidered tobacco pouches. Somebody had even presented a lot of old pipes. He lied quickly, ‘I don’t smoke.’

The astute woman said, ‘You’ve come here to spend money, haven’t you, as a duty? You may as well take
some
thing that will be of use. You won’t find anything on any of the other
stalls
,’ and between the women’s shoulders, as he craned to follow the movements of Miss Maydew and the St Luke’s troop, he caught a few grim glimpses of discarded vases, chipped fruit stands, yellowing piles of babies’ napkins. ‘I’ve got several pairs of braces. You may just as well take a pair of braces.’

Mather, to his own astonishment and distress, said, ‘She may be dead.’

The woman said, ‘Who dead?’ and bristled over a pair of mauve suspenders.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mather said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ He was horrified with himself for losing grip. He thought: I ought to have let them exchange me. It’s going to be too much. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ seeing the last Scout shut his album.

He led Miss Maydew into the ante-room. The journalist had gone. He said, ‘I’m trying to trace a girl in your company called Anne Crowder.’

‘Don’t know her,’ Miss Maydew said.

‘She only joined the cast yesterday.’

‘They all look alike,’ Miss Maydew said, ‘like Chinamen. I never can learn their names.’

‘This one’s fair. Green eyes. She has a good voice.’

‘Not in
this
company,’ Miss Maydew said, ‘not in
this
company. I can’t listen to them. It sets my teeth on edge.’

‘You don’t remember her going out last night with a man, at the end of rehearsal?’

‘Why should I? Don’t be so sordid.’

‘He invited you out too.’

‘The fat fool,’ Miss Maydew said.

‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know. Davenant, I think Collier said, or did he say Davis? Never saw him before. I suppose he’s the man Cohen quarrelled with. Though somebody said something about Callitrope.’

‘This is important, Miss Maydew. The girl’s disappeared.’

‘It’s always happening on these tours. If you go into their dressing-rooms it’s always
Men
they are talking about. How can they ever hope to act? So sordid.’

‘You can’t help me at all? You’ve no idea where I can find this man Davenant?’

‘Collier will know. He’ll be back tonight. Or perhaps he won’t. I don’t think he knew him from Adam. It’s coming back to me now. Collier called him Davis and he said, No, he was Davenant. He’d bought out Davis.’

Mather went sadly away. Some instinct that always made him go where people were, because clues were more likely to be found among a crowd of strangers than in empty rooms or deserted streets, drove him through the hall. You wouldn’t have known among these avid women that England was on the edge of war. ‘I said to Mrs ’Opkinson, if you are addressing me, I said.’ ‘That’ll look tasty on Dora.’ A very old woman said across a pile of artificial silk knickers, ‘’E lay for five hours with ’is knees drawn up.’ A girl giggled and said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Awful. I’d say so. ’E put ’is fingers right down.’ Why should these people worry about war? They moved from stall to stall in an air thick with their own deaths and sicknesses and loves. A woman with a hard driven face touched Mather’s arm; she must have been about sixty years old; she had a way of ducking her head when she spoke as if she expected a blow, but up her head would come again with a sour unconquerable malice. He had watched her, without really knowing it, as he walked down the stalls. Now she plucked at him; he could smell fish on her fingers. ‘Reach me that bit of stuff, dear,’ she said. ‘You’ve got long arms. No, not that. The pink,’ and began to fumble for money – in Anne’s bag.

4

Mather’s brother had committed suicide. More than Mather he had needed to be part of an organization, to be trained and disciplined and given orders, but unlike Mather he hadn’t found his organization. When things went wrong he killed himself, and Mather was called to the mortuary to identify the body. He had hoped it was a stranger until they had exposed the pale drowned lost face. All day he had been trying to find
his
brother, hurrying from address to address, and the first feeling he had when he saw him there was not grief. He thought: I needn’t hurry, I can sit down. He went out to an A.B.C. and ordered a pot of tea. He only began to feel his grief after the second cup.

It was the same now. He thought: I needn’t have hurried, I needn’t have made a fool of myself before that woman with the braces. She must be dead. I needn’t have felt so rushed.

The old woman said, ‘Thank you, dear,’ and thrust the little piece of pink material away. He couldn’t feel any doubt whatever about the bag. He had given it her himself; it was an expensive bag, not a kind you would expect to find in Nottwich, and to make it quite conclusive, you could still see, within a little circle of twisted glass, the place where two initials had been removed. It was all over for ever; he hadn’t got to hurry any more; a pain was on its way worse than he had felt in the A.B.C. (a man at the next table had been eating fried plaice and now, he didn’t know why, he associated a certain kind of pain with the smell of fish). But first it was a perfectly cold calculating satisfaction he felt, that he had the devils in his hands already. Someone was going to die for this. The old woman had picked up a small bra and was testing the elastic with a malicious grin because it was meant for someone young and pretty with breasts worth preserving. ‘The silly things they wear,’ she said.

He could have arrested her at once, but already he had decided that wouldn’t do; there were more in it than the old woman; he’d get them all, and the longer the chase lasted the better; he wouldn’t have to begin thinking of the future till it was over. He was thankful now that Raven was armed because he himself was forced to carry a gun, and who could say whether chance might not allow him to use it?

He looked up and there on the other side of the stall, with his eyes fixed on Anne’s bag, was the dark bitter figure he had been seeking, the hare-lip imperfectly hidden by a few days’ growth of moustache.

Chapter 4

1

RAVEN HAD BEEN
on his feet all the morning. He had to keep moving; he couldn’t use the little change he had on food, because he did not dare to stay still, to give anyone the chance to study his face. He bought a paper outside the post office and saw his own description there, printed in black type inside a frame. He was angry because it was on a back page: the situation in Europe filled the front page. By midday, moving here and moving there with his eyes always open for Cholmondeley, he was dog-tired. He stood for a moment and stared at his own face in a barber’s window; ever since his flight from the café he had remained unshaven; a moustache would hide his scar, but he knew from experience how his hair grew in patches, strong on the chin, weak on the lip, and not at all on either side of the red deformity. Now the scrubby growth on his chin was making him conspicuous and he didn’t dare go into the barber’s for a shave. He passed a chocolate machine, but it would take only sixpenny or shilling pieces, and his pocket held nothing but half-crowns, florins, half-pennies. If it had not been for his bitter hatred he would have given himself up; they couldn’t give him more than five years, but the death of the old minister lay, now that he was so tired and harried, like an albatross round his neck. It was hard to realize that he was wanted only for theft.

He was afraid to haunt alleys, to linger in culs-de-sac because if a policeman passed and he was the only man in sight he felt conspicuous; the man might give him a second glance, and so he walked all the time in the most crowded streets and took the risk of innumerable recognitions. It was a dull cold day, but at least it wasn’t raining. The shops were full of Christmas gifts, all the absurd useless junk which had lain on back shelves all the year was brought out to fill the windows; foxhead brooches, book-rests in the shape of the Cenotaph, woollen cosies for boiled eggs, innumerable games with
counters
and dice and absurd patent variations on darts or bagatelle, ‘Cats on a Wall’, the old shooting game, and ‘Fishing for Gold Fish’. In a religious shop by the Catholic Cathedral he found himself facing again the images that angered him in the Soho café; the plaster mother and child, the wise men and the shepherds. They were arranged in a cavern of brown paper among the books of devotion, the little pious scraps of St Theresa. ‘The Holy Family’: he pressed his face against the glass with a kind of horrified anger that that tale still went on. ‘Because there was no room for them in the inn’; he remembered how they had sat in rows on the benches waiting for Christmas dinner, while the thin precise voice read on about Caesar Augustus and how everyone went up to his own city to be taxed. Nobody was beaten on Christmas Day: all punishments were saved for Boxing Day. Love, Charity, Patience, Humility – he was educated; he knew all about those virtues; he’d seen what they were worth. They twisted everything; even that story in there, it was historical, it had happened, but they twisted it to their own purposes. They made him a God because they could feel fine about it all, they didn’t have to consider themselves responsible for the raw deal they’d given him. He’d consented, hadn’t he? That was the argument, because he could have called down ‘a legion of angels’ if he’d wanted to escape hanging there. On your life he could, he thought with bitter lack of faith, just as easily as his own father taking the drop at Wandsworth could have saved himself when the trap opened. He stood there with his face against the glass waiting for somebody to deny
that
reasoning, staring at the swaddled child with a horrified tenderness, ‘the little bastard’, because he was educated and knew what the child was in for, the double-crossing Judas and only one man to draw a knife on his side when the Roman soldiers came for him in the garden.

A policeman came up the street, as Raven stared into the window, and passed without a glance. It occurred to him to wonder how much they knew. Had the girl told them her story? He supposed she had by this time. It would be in the paper, and he looked. There was not a word about her there.
It
shook him. He’d nearly killed her and she hadn’t gone to them: that meant she had believed what he’d told her. He was momentarily back in the garage again beside the Weevil in the rain and dark with the dreadful sense of desolation, of having missed something valuable, of having made an irretrievable mistake, but he could no longer comfort himself with any conviction with his old phrase: ‘give her time … it always happens with a skirt’. He wanted to find her, but he thought: what a chance, I can’t even find Cholmondeley. He said bitterly to the tiny scrap of plaster in the plaster cradle: ‘If you were a God, you’d know I wouldn’t harm her: you’d give me a break, you’d let me turn and see her on the pavement,’ and he turned with half a hope, but of course there was nothing there.