A Gun for Sale (22 page)

‘Keep moving,’ the small man said, covering Buddy through his pocket, pressing the pistol against his side. ‘
Me
a casualty,’ he said, ‘that’s a good one,’ laughing without mirth. ‘Get in through that gate or you’ll be the casualty? –’ (they were opposite a small garage; it was empty; the owner had driven to his office, and the little bare box stood open at the end of a few feet of drive).

Buddy blustered, ‘What the hell!’ but he had recognized the face of which the description had appeared in both the local papers, and there was a control in the man’s action which horribly convinced Buddy that he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. It was a moment in his life that he never forgot; he was not allowed to forget it by friends who saw nothing wrong in what he did. All through his life the tale cropped up in print in the most unlikely places: serious histories, symposiums of famous crimes: it followed him from obscure practice to obscure practice. Nobody saw anything important in what he did: nobody doubted that he would have done the same: walked into the garage, closed the gates at Raven’s orders. But friends didn’t realize the crushing nature of the blow: they hadn’t just been standing in the street under a hail of bombs, they had not looked forward with pleasure and excitement to war, they hadn’t been Buddy, the daredevil of the trenches one minute, before genuine war in the shape of an automatic in a thin desperate hand pressed on him.

‘Strip!’ Raven said, and obediently Buddy stripped. But he was stripped of more than his gas-mask, his white coat, his green tweed suit. When it was over he hadn’t a hope left. It was no good hoping for a war to prove him a leader of men. He was just a stout flushed frightened young man shivering in his pants in the cold garage. There was a hole in the seat of his pants and his knees were pink and clean-shaven. You could tell that he was strong, but you could tell too in the curve of his stomach, the thickness of his neck, that he was beginning to run to seed. Like a mastiff he needed more exercise than the city could afford him, even though several times a week undeterred by the frost he would put on shorts and a singlet and run slowly and obstinately round the park, a little red in the face but undeterred by the grins of nursemaids and the shrill veracious comments of unbearable children in prams. He was keeping fit, but it was a dreadful thought that he had been keeping fit for this: to stand shivering and silent in a pair of holed pants, while the mean thin undernourished city rat, whose arm he could have snapped with a single twist, put on his clothes, his white coat and last of all his gas-mask.

‘Turn round,’ Raven said, and Buddy Fergusson obeyed. He was so miserable now that he would have missed a chance even if Raven had given him one, miserable and scared as well. He hadn’t much imagination; he had never really visualized danger as it gleamed at him under the garage globe in a long grey wicked-looking piece of metal charged with pain and death. ‘Put your hands behind you.’ Raven tied together the pink strong ham-like wrists with Buddy’s tie: the striped chocolate-and-yellow old boys’ tie of one of the obscurer public schools. ‘Lie down,’ and meekly Buddy Fergusson obeyed and Raven tied his feet together with a handkerchief and gagged him with another. It wasn’t very secure, but it would have to do. He’d got to work quickly. He left the garage and pulled the doors softly to behind him. He could hope for several hours’ start now, but he couldn’t count on as many minutes.

He came quietly and cautiously up under the Castle rock, keeping his eye open for students. But the gangs had moved on ; some were picketing the station for train arrivals, and the others were sweeping the streets which led out northwards towards the mines. The chief danger now was that at any moment the sirens might blow the ‘All Clear’. There were a lot of police about: he knew why, but he moved unhesitatingly past them and on towards the Tanneries. His plan carried him no further than the big glass doors of Midland Steel. He had a kind of blind faith in destiny, in a poetic justice; somehow when he was inside the building he would find the way to the man who had double-crossed him. He came safely round into the Tanneries and moved across the narrow roadway, where there was only room for a single stream of traffic, towards the great functional building of black glass and steel. He hugged the automatic to his hip with a sense of achievement and exhilaration. There was a kind of lightheartedness now about his malice and hatred he had never known before; he had lost his sourness and bitterness; he was less personal in his revenge. It was almost as if he were acting for someone else.

Behind the door of Midland Steel a man peered out at the parked cars and the deserted street. He looked like a clerk.
Raven
crossed the pavement. He peered back through the panes of the mask at the man behind the door. Something made him hesitate: the memory of a face he had seen for a moment outside the Soho café where he lodged. He suddenly started away again from the door, walking in a rapid scared way down the Tanneries. The police were there before him.

It meant nothing, Raven told himself, coming out into a silent High Street empty except for a telegraph boy in a gas-mask getting on to a bicycle by the Post Office. It merely meant that the police too had noted a connection between the office in Victoria Street and Midland Steel. It didn’t mean that the girl was just another skirt who had betrayed him. Only the faintest shadow of the old sourness and isolation touched his spirits. She’s straight, he swore with almost perfect conviction,
she
wouldn’t grass, we are together in this, and he remembered with a sense of doubtful safety how she had said, ‘We are friends.’

2

The producer had called a rehearsal early. He wasn’t going to add to the expenses by buying everyone gas-masks. They would be in the theatre by the time the practice started and they wouldn’t leave until the ‘All Clear’ had sounded. Mr Davis had said he wanted to see the new number, and so the producer had sent him notice of the rehearsal. He had it stuck under the edge of his shaving mirror next a card with the telephone numbers of all his girls.

It was bitterly cold in the modern central-heated bachelor’s flat. Something, as usual, had gone wrong with the oil engines, and the constant hot water was barely warm. Mr Davis cut himself shaving several times and stuck little tufts of cotton-wool all over his chin. His eye caught Mayfair 632 and Museum 798. Those were Coral and Lucy. Dark and fair, nubile and thin. His fair and dark angel. A little early fog still yellowed the panes, and the sound of a car back-firing made him think of Raven safely isolated in the railway yard surrounded by armed police. He knew that Sir Marcus was
arranging
everything and he wondered how it felt to be waking to your last day. ‘We know not the hour,’ Mr Davis thought happily, plying his styptic pencil, sticking the cotton-wool on the larger wounds, but if one knew, as Raven must know, would one still feel irritation at the failure of central heating, at a blunt blade? Mr Davis’s mind was full of great dignified abstractions, and it seemed to him a rather grotesque idea that a man condemned to death should be aware of something so trivial as a shaving cut. But then, of course, Raven would not be shaving in his shed.

Mr Davis made a hasty breakfast – two pieces of toast, two cups of coffee, four kidneys and a piece of bacon sent up by lift from the restaurant, some sweet ‘Silver Shred’ marmalade. It gave him a good deal of pleasure to think that Raven would not be eating such a breakfast – a condemned man in prison, possibly, but not Raven. Mr Davis did not believe in wasting anything; he had paid for the breakfast, so on the second piece of toast he piled up all the remains of the butter and the marmalade. A little of the marmalade fell off on to his tie.

There was really only one worry left, apart from Sir Marcus’s displeasure, and that was the girl. He had lost his head badly: first in trying to kill her and then in not killing her. It had all been Sir Marcus’s fault. He had been afraid of what Sir Marcus would do to him if he learnt of the girl’s existence. But now everything would be all right. The girl had come out into the open as an accomplice; no court would take a criminal’s story against Sir Marcus’s. He forgot about the gas practice, as he hurried down to the theatre for a little relaxation now that everything really seemed to have been tidied up. On the way he got a sixpenny packet of toffee out of a slot machine.

He found Mr Collier worried. They’d already had one rehearsal of the new number and Miss Maydew, who was sitting at the front of the stalls in a fur coat, had said it was vulgar. She said she didn’t mind sex, but this wasn’t in the right class. It was music-hall; it wasn’t revue. Mr Collier didn’t care a damn what Miss Maydew thought, but it might mean
that
Mr Cohen … He said, ‘If you’d tell me what’s vulgar … I just don’t see …’

Mr Davis said, ‘I’ll tell you if it’s vulgar. Have it again,’ and he sat back in the stalls just behind Miss Maydew with the warm smell of her fur and her rather expensive scent in his nostrils, sucking a toffee. It seemed to him that life could offer nothing better than this. And the show was his. At any rate forty per cent of it was his. He picked out his forty per cent as the girls came on again in blue shorts with a red stripe and bras and postmen’s caps, carrying cornucopias: the dark girl with the oriental eyebrows on the right, the fair girl with the rather plump legs and the big mouth (a big mouth was a good sign in a girl). They danced between two pillar-boxes, wriggling their little neat hips, and Mr Davis sucked his toffee.

‘It’s called “Christmas for Two”,’ Mr Collier said.

‘Why?’

‘Well, you see, those cornucops are meant to be Christmas presents made sort of classical. And “For Two” just gives it a little sex. Any number with “For Two” in it goes.’

‘We’ve already got “An Apartment for Two”,’ Miss Maydew said, ‘and “Two Make a Dream”.’

‘You can’t have too much of “For Two”,’ Mr Collier said. He appealed pitiably, ‘Can’t you tell me what’s vulgar?’

‘Those cornucopias, for one thing.’

‘But they are classical,’ Mr Collier said. ‘Greek.’

‘And the pillar-boxes, for another.’

‘The pillar-boxes,’ Mr Collier exclaimed hysterically. ‘What’s wrong with the pillar-boxes?’

‘My dear man,’ Miss Maydew said, ‘if you don’t know what’s wrong with the pillar-boxes, I’m not going to tell you. If you like to get a committee of matrons I wouldn’t mind telling
them
. But if you
must
have them, paint them blue and let them be air mail.’

Mr Collier said, ‘Is this a game or what is it?’ He asked bitterly, ‘What a time you must have when you write a letter.’ The girls went patiently on behind his back to the jingle of the piano, offering the cornucopias, offering their collar-stud
bottoms
. He turned on them fiercely. ‘Stop that, can’t you? and let me think.’

Mr Davis said, ‘It’s fine. We’ll have it in the show.’ It made him feel good to contradict Miss Maydew, whose perfume he was now luxuriously taking in. It gave him in a modified form the pleasure of beating her or sleeping with her: the pleasure of mastery over a woman of superior birth. It was the kind of dream he had indulged in adolescence, while he carved his name on the desk and seat in a grim Midland board school.

‘You really think that, Mr Davenant?’

‘My name’s Davis.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Davis.’ Horror on horror, Mr Collier thought; he was alienating the new backer now.

‘I think it’s lousy,’ Miss Maydew said. Mr Davis took another piece of toffee. ‘Go ahead, old man,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’ They went ahead: the songs and dances floated agreeably through Mr Davis’s consciousness, sometimes wistful, sometimes sweet and sad, sometimes catchy. Mr Davis liked the sweet ones best. When they sang, ‘You have my mother’s way’, he really did think of his mother: he was the ideal audience. Somebody came out of the wings and bellowed at Mr Collier. Mr Collier screamed, ‘What do you say?’ and a young man in a pale blue jumper went on mechanically singing:

‘Your photograph

Is just the sweetest half …’

‘Did you say Christmas tree?’ Mr Collier yelled.

‘In your December

I shall remember …’

Mr Collier screamed, ‘Take it away.’ The song came abruptly to an end with the words ‘
Another mother
’. The young man said, ‘You took it too fast,’ and began to argue with the pianist.

‘I can’t take it away,’ the man in the wings said. ‘It was ordered.’ He wore an apron and a cloth cap. He said, ‘It took
a
van and two horses. You’d better come and have a look.’ Mr Collier disappeared and returned immediately. ‘My God!’ he said, ‘it’s fifteen feet high. Who can have played this fool trick?’ Mr Davis was in a happy dream: his slippers had been warmed by a log fire in a big baronial hall, a little exclusive perfume like Miss Maydew’s was hovering in the air, and he was just going to go to bed with a good but aristocratic girl to whom he had been properly married that morning by a bishop. She reminded him a little of his mother. ‘
In your December
…’

He was suddenly aware that Mr Collier was saying, ‘And there’s a crate of glass balls and candles.’

‘Why,’ Mr Davis said, ‘has my little gift arrived?’

‘
Your
– little –?’

‘I thought we’d have a Christmas party on the stage,’ Mr Davis said. ‘I like to get to know all you artistes in a friendly homey way. A little dancing, a song or two,’ there seemed to be a visible lack of enthusiasm, ‘plenty of pop.’ A pale smile lit Mr Collier’s face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s very kind of you, Mr Davis. We shall certainly appreciate it.’

‘Is the tree all right?’

‘Yes, Mr Daven – Davis, it’s a magnificent tree.’ The young man in the blue jumper looked as if he was going to laugh and Mr Collier scowled at him. ‘We all thank you very much, Mr Davis, don’t we, girls?’ Everybody said in refined and perfect chorus as if the words had been rehearsed, ‘
Rather
, Mr Collier,’ except Miss Maydew, and a dark girl with a roving eye who was two seconds late and said, ‘You bet.’

That attracted Mr Davis’s notice. Independent, he thought approvingly, stands out from the crowd. He said, ‘I think I’ll step behind and look at the tree. Don’t let me be in the way, old man. Just you carry on,’ and made his way into the wings where the tree stood blocking the way to the changing rooms. An electrician had hung some of the baubles on for fun and among the litter of properties under the bare globes it sparkled with icy dignity. Mr Davis rubbed his hands, a buried childish delight came alive. He said, ‘It looks lovely.’ A kind of Christmas peace lay over his spirit: the occasional memory of Raven
was
only like the darkness pressing round the little lighted crib.