Out of the Blackout (6 page)

Somehow by the end of breakfast there was no question that the mission would be undertaken.

Simon did not do anything about it at once. He took his suitcase along to King's Cross, and put it in the Left Luggage. He had an appointment at the Zoo for 11.15, and he took the tube to Baker Street. In the administrative offices that straddle the Zoo he was told that he would in the next day or two get a letter offering him the appointment. It was his if he wanted it.

‘And we very much hope that you
do
want it,' said the Head of the Scientific Staff.

‘Thank you,' said Simon. ‘I think I do.'

‘Marvellous. Delighted all this grilling hasn't put you off. You'll have three months' notice to give, I imagine, but with the summer vacation coming up, that might shorten it, perhaps? See what they say. We can be in touch as soon as we know when you can take up the appointment. We might be able to help you get somewhere to live.'

‘That's kind of you,' said Simon. ‘But just possibly I may be able to get something for myself. I have relatives . . .'

Before he left the administrative block at the Zoo, he asked if he might use a telephone. It would sound better, he thought, if the call did not come from a call box. He decided to assume a slight accent, so that if this attempt aborted and he had to find some alternative way of approaching them, his voice would not be recognized. Some instinctive caution told him not to broaden his natural West Country burr. He assumed the accent he knew well from his last few years: that of Leeds.

‘Islington 4565,' came a voice at the other end, after he had let it ring five or six times. It was an old voice, a woman's voice, and it had once been a powerful mezzo—not a voice for telling good tidings to Zion, but one for launching Verdian imprecations. Now it was muffled and cracked by age.

‘Good morning, I'm sorry to bother you, but I heard you might have a room to let.'

‘Oh,' said the voice. There was a silence while she pondered. ‘Well, I don't know . . . Mr Blore has been saying he might be moving soon, but he hasn't given notice.'

Spot on! said Simon to himself. First time! They do let rooms.

‘It must be Mr Blore I heard it from,' he said. ‘At a party. I shan't be wanting the room while summer' (he brought out this Leedsism with a sort of bravado) ‘but it would be very convenient if I knew it would be waiting for me when I move down.'

‘Well, as I say, he's not given his notice,' said the voice—hesitant, but as if hesitancy was not her natural mode. ‘If he's leaving now he'll have to pay us two weeks' rent. That's in the agreement.'

‘If he did leave before I was ready to take over the room, I'd be willing to pay from the time he left.'

‘Oh . . . well, that's fair,' said the voice. It was the tone of one who called ‘fair' anything advantageous to herself. But he seemed to have kindled sparks of interest. She added: ‘Of course, we'd want to
see
you.'

It was a reasonable enough request, and just what Simon wanted, but the tone in which she said it was unendearing. There were plenty of Leeds landladies, Simon knew, who wanted to
see
their potential student lodger, but had unaccountably let the room already when they opened the door and found he was black. Was this the reason now, or would he have to present proof that he was house-trained, Christian, or non-smoker or drinker? The whimsical requirements of landladies could be legion.

‘Yes, of course,' he said, in his most boyishly ingratiating tones. ‘It would be quite easy for me to come round.'

‘Provided it's clear I'm making no promises,' said the voice, with a nagging, grudging insistence. ‘Would fiveish suit you? Then Len would be home.'

‘That's fine,' said Simon. ‘Fiveish it is.'

When he put the phone down he felt very pleased with himself, and nervously excited. He had another brisk walk around the Zoo, struck up a friendship with the squirrel monkeys which was to last all his working life, and ate a goodish lunch at the Restaurant. But by three he could contain his impatience no longer. He walked along Albany Street to the Regent's Park tube, and took a ticket to the Angel, Islington.

He had his Geographers' London with him, and he purposely avoided Miswell Terrace. He did not want to be seen hanging around before his appointment, and the form behind that voice
on the phone could well be a peerer, a discreet puller-apart of lace curtains. He walked instead around every other street in the vicinity. Most of them were rows of terraced houses, built early in the last century. They were not unattractive, but their neglected state made them appear skimpy and mean. Many were down at heel, some derelict, and there lay over the district a miasma of half-heartedness, littleness, failure. The unlovely council flats were better: jollier, more open. In one of the streets there was a cheerful, dirty collection of market barrows, with friendly, untrustworthy sellers. He lingered round Sadler's Wells. Elizabeth Fretwell in
The Girl of the Golden West.
No time for that tonight: he would get the 8.50 train back to Leeds. He turned away from the posters and went back to the dingy streets of terraced houses. Really, though they once had greater pretensions, now their effect was not unlike Farrow Street, Paddington. The Simmeters, presumably, had moved sideways, rather than up or down. What, he wondered, had made them move at all?

At a quarter to five he stood at the end of Miswell Terrace. One more of what he already had seen many of. He could see No. 25: as dank and dejected as the rest. At ten to five he was ringing on its doorbell.

Just when he was considering ringing again, a door opened somewhere inside the house, and light penetrated the mottled glass of the front door. He heard heavy footsteps, saw a looming shadow on the other side of the glass. Two locks were turned, and then the door was opened.

She was a heavy old woman, in a shapeless black woollen dress, with a plum-coloured cardigan over it, and slippers on her feet. She was now fat, but Simon guessed she must once have been a fine figure of a woman, in a massive kind of way. Her cheeks were now round, and there were rolls of fat around her neck, but the impression she gave was not comfortable. The mouth was hard, the eyes calculating, and behind all the flabbiness Simon sensed a lifetime of grim purpose and iron will.

‘So you've come,' she announced.

She squeezed her mouth into no similitude of a smile, but from the way she stood regarding him, right hand on hip, Simon could have sworn he sensed a silent satisfaction that he was white.

‘Yes, I've come.'

‘What's your name, then?'

He smiled, and watched her as he said: ‘Simon Cutheridge.'

No flicker passed across that hard face. Simon felt sure that the name meant nothing to her.

‘And where are you from?'

‘Leeds,' said Simon. He had already decided that for the moment he would say nothing of Yeasdon.

‘Could hear it was the North somewhere,' said the old woman, with a trace of contempt she took no trouble to disguise. It's common knowledge, her manner seemed to say, that Northerners are inferior: if
I
think so, it's common sense, and
everybody
thinks so. ‘You'd better come in. Though really, I don't know . . . Mr Blore's said nothing to me about leaving, not immediately. Nor to Len either, because I asked him at dinner-time.'

‘If I could just leave you my address and telephone number in Leeds, so that if he does leave you could contact me. It would save you the expense of advertising.'

‘It would do that, I suppose,' she said, with that same grudging tone she had used throughout, but with a tiny sparkle in her eye. ‘Well, you'd better see the room.'

That was more than Simon had dared to hope. She switched on a light—a dim bulb behind a basic shade, that gave a dubious illumination to hall and stairway. Both had been redecorated in the last year or two, with a miserable cheap wallpaper with a tiny pattern of brown leaves. It had left it indescribably cheerless. The old woman cared nothing about his impressions of the place. She turned and began labouring up the stairs.

‘It's a nice room, very nice,' she said, as she paused for breath on the first landing. ‘There's everything there, all nice and convenient. And a gas ring . . .'

She began again, heaving her bulk towards the top floor, jangling her keys as if she were a wardress. Simon made a mental note not to leave anything of a personal nature in his room, if it ever became his. At the top landing the woman turned on another dim light—this time a bare bulb. There were two rooms on this floor, both of them with Yale locks fitted. The woman pondered over her keys, selected one, then opened the door of the room straight ahead.

The bedsitter thus revealed was small, and predictably depressing. There was a sofa-bed against one wall, and an old, recovered armchair drawn up to a gas fire. On a laminated shelf by the mantelpiece was the gas ring that was apparently one of the attractions of the place. Under the window, curtained with dirty lace, was an infirm wooden table with an aluminium and plastic chair pulled up to it. The only signs of life and individuality were the mug and dirty plate on the table, the assorted paperbacks scattered around, a copy of
Playboy,
and the pictures which had been pinned to the walls—a large Lowry, a Labour Party poster, and a girlie calendar.

‘Yes, well it looks very . . . nice,' said Simon.

The woman sniffed, and looked venomously around the walls.

‘He
put those up.'

‘It's just what I need—really. I'm grateful to you for showing it to me.'

‘Don't mention it,' muttered the woman, in her tight-lipped way.

‘If I could perhaps pay some kind of deposit . . .'

‘Well, I don't know about that. Seeing as how we aren't sure as Mr Blore is leaving. I don't know what would be right . . . Oh, that's Len now. He'll know. You'd better talk to him about it.'

From two flights down Simon had heard the sound of a key in the door, and the door opening. He mentally noted that the old woman's hearing was unimpaired. She ushered him out, closed up the room, and began labouring down the stairs, clutching hard at the banisters and breathing heavily. Simon followed her down, his heart beating. When she had regained the hall, she turned to a door which divided the family's living quarters from the rest of the house. She called:

‘Len!'

The man who came to the door and faced them across the little hallway was fairly tall—perhaps close on six feet—with square shoulders. But his chest was hollow, his frame bony, his face sunken, and he gave an impression of meagreness, of having aged prematurely. He wore a fawn cardigan, buttoned around his stomach, and he was clutching an evening paper. What struck Simon was his manner: under a hearty exterior he seemed unaccountably nervous, and he rubbed his hands together a good deal, perhaps because when he did not they
tended to flutter. He greeted Simon with an ingratiating eagerness which, in its effect, was the reverse of welcoming.

‘Ah—you're the young man. Nice to meet you. Well—that's very satisfactory!'

He had closed the door to the family quarters, and when they had shaken hands they stood in the cramped little hallway. Obviously it was not going to be easy to gain admittance to the inner sanctum of the Simmeter family life. The old woman was looking at Len, behaving towards him in a way that Simon found hard to comprehend, as it seemed a compound of opposites—both commanding, yet almost fawning, strong-minded yet nervous and uncertain. Had the relationship changed as she had grown older and feebler? Had she once ruled with an iron hand, and now was uncertain of her power?

‘He wants to pay a deposit,' said the old woman, looking at Len.

Len Simmeter's manner became still more friendly, without the slightest degree of warmth behind it.

‘I don't see why not, Ma. That's very generous of him.'

‘Not at all,' said Simon. ‘I thought that if Mr Blore
did
give notice in the next three months, then I'd have the right to the room.'

‘And so you would,' said Len. ‘Quite so. And we'd return it to you if he stayed put. Naturally. Very fair arrangement all round. You told him the rent for the room, Mother?'

‘No, I didn't.' Again she looked at him, covertly, uncertain whether she had done right or wrong. She seemed to have done right.

‘Well,' said Len Simmeter, rubbing his hands, ‘it's four pounds ten a week—' It was, for those times, decidedly steep. But Len had left his voice on a rising intonation, so that if Simon protested he could add: ‘but for you we'll say four pounds.' However, Simon had made up his mind, and he quickly accepted.

‘That seems very reasonable,' he said, with a naive smile. ‘I know that things down here cost that bit more than they do up north.'

‘Quite. You've no idea—what with the rates, and overheads, and everything. This lot we've got lording it at the LCC at the moment don't help matters either. What they're not willing to do with other people's money! You're like pigs in clover up north, so I've
heard, where prices are concerned!' He was protesting too much, and he pulled himself up short. ‘Moving south, eh? Got a good job down here, then, have you?'

‘I'm going to be working at the London Zoo. On the scientific staff there.'

‘Nice! Very good! Work with a bit of class—professional, like. Well, young feller-me-lad, if you'd like to leave your name and address, and this deposit you mentioned, we can be in touch as soon as things sort themselves out at this end.'

Simon tore a piece of paper from his pocket book, and wrote on it against the wall his name, address, and telephone number. He registered with satisfaction that the name seemed to mean nothing to Len either. Then he took from his wallet two five-pound notes. Len Simmeter, who had been standing by rubbing his hands, took them from him, just a shade too hurriedly.