Fowlers End (34 page)

I asked, “What was the cause of all this?”

“Oh, Costas’ trousis exploded. You know, they was cooking soup—I mean, home-made, and that’s tricky stuff. He was wearing overalls—I mean, a bib-and-brace—and it seems he must ‘ave upset some o’the stuff over ‘imself. So when ‘e changed to scram, ‘e left this bib-and-brace behind ‘im. Old Sam comes in, in a rage, to find out why the cafe ain’t open, sees these trousis, and goes berserk. ‘E chucks ‘em out o’ the window, right across the road. They blew down a wall. Somebody ‘ad dropped the word, anyway, that there was a dynamite outrage being planned on the premises. So, by shee
r chance, the busies got ‘ere just when the trousis went bang.”

I told him that I, too, had been suspected of an attempt with a time bomb on Charing Cross Station; and that I had had a fine time of it.

He replied, “I shouldn’t be a bit surstonished; you bloody near was. Lucky for you, I got at the keyster with my little pair o’ pliers while you was out at the back. I disconnected that one.” He took down a fire bucket and pointed out twenty-three things that looked like exaggerated sticks of shaving soap.” ‘Ome-made dynamite, tell your mum, and by the smell of it about eighty-five per cent nitroglycerin.
Before we do another thing, let’s get rid of it. If it was anything else, I’d say, ‘Chuck it into Godbolt’s.’ But there’s a risk implied ‘ere. Lately that vicious bastard ‘as been taking to reprisals. I found three dead cats in the vestibule this morning, and one of ‘em I distinctly recognized—a drowned tabby we gave ‘im three days ago. That bloody boy Tommy ‘as been bought over. It’s sabotage. What a little
agent provocateur
‘e turned out to be! ... No, if this was something ‘armless, like shit or something, ‘e’d be welcome to it. But—and I was in the Engineers, and I know— this ‘
ere dynamite is unstable. I never did trust that Greek’s cooking. What we got to do is, get it out o’ the way.” “How?” I asked.

“We could send it to the War Office. Then it goes off, and that’s a hanging matter—twenty-odd sticks o’ dynamite in Whitehall, and the least you can do is blow the arse off somebody round the Admiralty. Maybe we better bury it.”

“Where?”

“I would suggest somewhere round Ullage, in the swamp. Point is, to get it there—I wouldn’t trust myself with this stuff on a bicycle, on these roads. Better put it in a shopping bag and walk it.”

We did this thing and buried the dynamite in an inaccessible slough. Copper Baldwin comforted me, saying, “It’s bound to deteriorate. Sometimes it takes twenty years to go off. But the way we planted it, I think it will just be washed away.”

“But say it goes off?” I asked.

“There won’t half be a shower of mud,” said Copper Baldwin, “but you and me’ll be well out o’ range, and the cry will be ‘Poor old Ullage, serves it bloody well right!’ Did you get the bees-and-honey?”

“The money? Yes, I got it,” I said.

“Then, after tomorrow, cocko, we are company directors,” said he.

“I was one, once,” I said.

“I thought there was a peculiar kind o’ look about you,” he said.

Swallowing this insult, I asked, “Incidentally, Copper, how did the police get the wire on Costas? Who gave them the word?”

Copper Baldwin was lighting a cigarette while I spoke. Before the match flame went out on a puff of smoke, I saw him wink and heard him say, “Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.
Verb sap.”

13

I ALWAYS consider the following day, Monday, as the eventful one. This, no doubt, is the quality of youth which takes its history in sips and has no memory.

First of all, I was made into a limited company. Copper Baldwin came in with two hundred pounds, and I produced out of thin air (as it must have seemed) the five hundred pounds I had promised. Misgivings were already getting hold of me, so I kept the remainder next to my skin. This was a most sickening day. It got at my stomach and spoiled my appetite. I felt as I believe Ivar Kreuger felt in the small hours before he did away with himself. The weight of the guilt of the whole world was on my shoulders, and there was a Horatius’ Bridge between my gullet and my diaphragm where
those behind cried
Forward
and those in front cried
Back,
making a clattering great lump there—a broken formation of myself. As for my heart, it seemed to me that it retrenched. First, it shrank to the size of a marble and made a piteous noise against my ribs; then it got to be, by sheer self-inflation, the size of a lung; but, deflating, got so heavy that I was afraid to take my left boot off. I knew that what was hurting my heel was a nail but—the way I felt that day—I couldn’t be sure.

We worked all night getting ready for Monday, the “Change Day,” pasting up posters. I was already so nervous that I got myself involved in the sticky side of a twenty-four sheet and slapped down the various parts of a forty-eight sheet upside down and in reverse—which turned out to be the best bit of publicity the Pantheon had ever had. That evening, trying to make head or tail of it and failing in the attempt, Sam Yudenow said to me, “Now this I call nishertive. You’re learning, Daniels, you’re a comer. Good boy, get the buggers guessing. You and me, we’re thinkers, we read. But rah
nd Fowlers End, give the sods puzzles. This is
originality, and you can regard your wages raised as from any moment now.... Between ourselves, confidentially, what is this forty-eight sheet?”

I said, “I’m afraid I was a little upset. That fortyeight sheet advertises three different pictures,” and waited for the outburst.

But he said, “Quite right. When I get a anspiration, I could show Sam Katz something yet! Grauman? Let ‘im keep his Chinamen. Lavendrop, take a pair scissors and get cracking on the eight sheets and the double crowns! ... Oh, Jesus, will nobody never understand that nobody never understands nothing but what they don’t understand—specially rahnd Fowlers End? A yobbo looks at a forty-eight sheet. It says, say, ‘Norma Talmadge.’What does that name mean to him? All he can think of, the layabout, is to say, ‘So what’s Norma Talmadge?’ Anyway, as you know, rahnd Fowlers End they o
nly go to the pictures to eat miv one hand a sausage and miv the other to have a feel in the dark sequences. This way, son, you ‘ave aroused the public imagination. The public says, ‘What the f.... is this?’And it comes twice.... Ah, when Yudenow meets Katz, hire an evening suit!”

I remember, vaguely, that I had put together—thinking they were parts of the same poster—Maria Korda in
Lady of the Pavements, The Four Feathers,
and Gloria Swanson in
Sadie Thompson.
People did, indeed, suck their thumbs as they looked. But this was by no surrealistic design of mine: I was so emotionally disturbed on account of impending legal business that once I fell off the ladder and hit Copper Baldwin in the face with the paste brush. He, too, was in a state of exaltation. Having sat down in a paste bucket, he got up and said in a shamefaced manner, “Nothing like this ‘as ‘
appened to me for forty years.” Then he went away, convinced that he was drunk, and pasted up double crowns at such extraordinary angles that medical
opinion in Fowlers End attributes to this the fact that the old-age pensioners to this day hold their heads on one side. Truly, we had had a hard time of it becoming executives.

First, there was a little argument concerning the name of the company we were going to float. As I reasoned, my mother, June Whistler, Copper Baldwin, and I were shareholders. I counted myself in on more or less metaphysical grounds: it was
my
mother’s money, after all, and
my
June Whistler’s. My mother’s maiden name was Morgan, and June’s middle name, as she reluctantly divulged, was Puddingberry. Legitimately combining names, I argued, why not call ourselves “J. P. Morgan”?

Copper Baldwin said, “Cocko, don’t carry a good thing too far. But I’ll tell you what. My father’s name was Baldwin but my mother’s name was Steel. What about ‘Baldwin Steel’?”

I said, not without irony, “No Rockefellers in your family, by any chance?”

“Thank Gawd we never ‘ad no Dutchmen, but there was a Ford—”

“No, wait a minute; a motor company is going to buy our land,” I said. “Best not annoy them, perhaps?”

“Could put us in a better bargaining position.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Copper—they’d be on the wire in half a second.... Look, your nickname is Copper and my Christian name is Daniel—”

“Then, for Christ’s sake, call it Daniels Copper Enterprises! It sounds like metal, and it looks like a five-to-two. I mean, a Jew. Most of the
bourgeoisie
are Gawd’s chosen people, and a Biblical name makes their ‘air curl.”

“So be it,” said I heavily.

“Daniels Copper,” said Baldwin, with glum satisfaction. “That’ll do. Daniels Copper Limited.”

It was he who led me to the offices of a firm of attorneys in Chicken Lane, Threadneedle Street, uncomfortably
close to my Uncle Hugh. I kept looking over my shoulder, half expecting to see him grinning at my heels and smelling of mixed grill out of Pimm’s. Threadneedle Street is formidable, but Chicken Lane is terrifying: it is the ghost of a street. The Great Fire of 1666 skipped it, and the more’s the pity. Men digging to lay drains constantly find human bones—victims of the Great Plague of 1665. You can smell them still, if you try. Even on a busy day, when it is full of people coming or going—for nobody seems to have any real business there—it preserves an atmosphere of senile decay. If you
want to explore it, go there between Saturday evening and Monday morning, during which period the City lies like a dog in the shade.

We went on a business day. Near the top of Chicken Lane was one of the last of the old cook shops, as we used to call them; one of those places into which one used to walk and ask for a pint of soup and a pennyworth of bread—threepence. There, in the good old days of the depression, they sold meat by the ounce—you could, for example, order four ounces of roast beef, pease pudding, and cabbage, put down a shilling, and get threepence change. I believe it was the forerunner of the cafeteria: you grabbed knife, fork and plate, waited in line, and gave your order to the carver, who justly weigh
ed it out. There were no tables; you ate standing at a shelf, and very good it was, too.... I am letting nostalgia get at me again, forgetting that if I had kept the appetite I had in the old times I should by now have sunk into the ground by sheer dead weight. Still, perversely, my mouth waters at the memory of how it used to water at the sight of that bubbly-looking beef and those sizzling sausages. The aroma of the onions permeated the lane. I say nothing of the pork, which, with its glazed surface, was far more beautiful to me than old mahogany to a connoisseur.

Copper Baldwin dragged me past a bookshop, saying, “Yes, I know all about that. Romance. Chuck your life away for ‘alf a volume o’ Macaulay’s
History of England
out o’ the penny tub, and go wivout your lunch. It’s a bloody mug’s game. There’s public libraries, aren’t there? What was Carnegie for? ... This is what I love about the capitalist system—they got to take it but they got to give it back. ‘Ospitals, the works o’ Sir Walter Scott, slum clearance, the League o’ Nations, shit-houses, Zionism, the Salvation Army, and pie in the sky—” Getting cantankerous, he argued with himself. “An
d what’s the matter wiv pie in the sky? At least that’s one promise you’re certain not to live to see unfulfilled.”

I said, “For Christ’s sake, Copper, shut up. You’re making me nervous.”

“Then don’t be, cocko. You are going to meet Mr. Payne of—” he repeated the name of the firm with relish— “Payne, Payne, Payne, Payne, Rackham, Rackham and Payne.”

These old City lawyers—the more names they paint up and the dirtier they get, the more respectable they become. I had a cousin once by the name of Everingsley who qualified and set up in business as a solicitor near Hatton Garden. People shunned him like a leper. But when, acting on the advice of my Uncle Hugh, he called himself Everingsley, Everingsley, Son and Everingsley, he made a go of it.

I believe there was only one Payne, but he looked like a concentration of several generations of them as he sat, making a pyramid of his bony hands and swaying his head like a snake in a stiff collar. I do not know why, but his office made me feel cold through and through. Three of its walls were covered with black-framed certificates of incorporation printed in red; but on the wall over where he sat hung a stuffed trout and a photograph of an old lady who
might have been himself in disguise. He kept in a kind of cubbyhole a little woman of an age that I could not determine; but by the odor she gave off I thought he must have kept her there for at least thirty years. And I could just imagine him putting her out at night for five minutes and then locking her up with a saucer of milk while he wriggled away about his nocturnal business. Or flapped, for he wore a morning coat with long tails much too big for him.

My first impulse was to run away, but Copper Baldwin had a nerve grip on me just above the elbow, and his fingers were like steel. So what could I do but bow politely? “Meet Mr. Laverock,” said Copper Baldwin, quick as a mongoose.

I behaved like an idiot, pointed to the name of the firm on the glass door, and said, “Mr. Payne? Or Mr. Payne?”

Then June Whistler came in, dressed all in black and wearing a little golden cross on her breast. She must have thought that she was going to be asked to swear to something, because she was carrying a prayer book, brand new. Evidently she had stopped to buy it on the way, at that benevolent place near Cheapside where they sell Bibles and stuff in various languages. As it transpired, June’s prayer book was in Swahili, but we didn’t need it anyway. Goodness knows what I signed: I only know that I became Managing Director of Daniels Copper Limited. Secretary: J. Puddingberry Whistler. Directors: P
ercival Clarence Baldwin (I never saw him blush before) and Ezra Payne.

I left my mother out of it: Uncle Hugh would have got to hear of it, and I wanted no discussion with that man. It was not that I didn’t love him, only he had no faith in my acumen as a man of business, thereby wounding me in my tenderest sensibilities. Tit for tat, I had long prophesied the collapse of Uncle Hugh and his system—which, by some prestidigitation or trick of catching a point of balance, was
still there. But I did not want him to know that I was speculating in real estate; he would only have asked me irritating, unanswerable questions about what had happened to my principles and so forth.... And so a hearty laugh, and lunch at Tozer’s, a real City man’s lunch—a Dover sole; steak-and-kidney pie made with mushrooms, oysters and skylarks; a piece of very ripe Stilton cheese; a glass of port—disgusting! But thinking of it I had a mad desire to excuse myself for ten minutes, rush out to that cook shop, and devour a plate of boiled beef and carrots, simply to clarify my intellect.