The Franchise Affair (19 page)

“And that, I think, disposes of any question of our leaving The Franchise. Sugar, sergeant?”

Robert returned to the subject when the police had taken their departure, and Bill had fetched a brush and shovel from the kitchen and was sweeping up the broken glass in room after room. Again he urged the wisdom of a hotel in Larborough but neither his emotion nor his common sense was behind the words. He would not have gone if he had been in the Sharpes' place, and he could not expect them to; and in addition he acknowledged the wisdom of Mrs. Sharpe's view about the fate of the house left empty.

“What you want is a lodger,” said Stanley, who had been refused permission to sweep up glass because he was classed as walking-wounded. “A lodger with a pistol. What d'you say I come and sleep here of nights? No meals, just sleeping night watchman. They all sleep anyhow, night watchmen do.”

It was evident by their expressions that both the Sharpes appreciated the fact that this was an open declaration of allegiance in what amounted to a local war; but they did not embarrass him with thanks.

“Haven't you got a wife?” Marion asked.

“Not of my own,” Stanley said demurely.

“Your wife—if you had one—might support your sleeping here,” Mrs. Sharpe pointed out, “but I doubt if your business would, Mr.—er—Mr. Peters.”

“My business?”

“I imagine that if your customers found that you had become night watchman at The Franchise they would take their custom elsewhere.”

“Not them,” Stanley said comfortably. “There's nowhere else to take it. Lynch is drunk five nights out of seven, and Biggins wouldn't know how to put on a bicycle chain. Anyhow, I don't let my customers tell me what I do in my spare time.”

And when Bill returned, he backed Stanley up. Bill was a much married man and it was not contemplated that he would ever sleep anywhere except at home. But that Stanley should sleep at The Franchise seemed to both of them a natural solution of the problem.

Robert was mightily relieved.

“Well,” Marion said, “if you are going to be our guest at nights you might as well begin now. I am sure that head feels like a very painful turnip. I'll go and make up a bed. Do you prefer a south view?”

“Yes,” said Stanley gravely. “Well away from kitchen and wireless noises.”

“I'll do what I can.”

It was arranged that Bill should slip a note into the door of Stanley's lodgings to say that he would be in for lunch as usual. “She won't worry about me,” Stanley said, referring to his landlady. “I've been out for nights before now.” He caught Marion's
eye, and added: “Ferrying cars for customers; you can do it in half the time at night.”

They tacked down the curtains in all the ground-floor rooms to provide some protection for their contents if it rained before morning, and Robert promised to get glaziers out at the earliest possible moment. Deciding privately to go to a Larborough firm, and not risk another series of polite rebuffs in Milford.

“And I shall also do something about a key for the gate, so that I can have a duplicate,” he said as Marion came out with them to bar the gate, “and save you from being gate-keeper as well as everything else.”

She put out her hand, to Bill first. “I shall never forget what you three have done for us. When I remember tonight it won't be these clods that I shall remember,” she tilted her head to the windowless house, “but you three.”

“Those clods were local, I suppose you know,” Bill said as they drove home through the quiet spring night.

“Yes,” Robert agreed. “I realised that. They had no car, for one thing. And ‘Foreign bitches!' smells of the conservative country, just as ‘Fascists!' smells of the progressive town.”

Bill said some things about progress.

“I was wrong to let myself be persuaded yesterday evening. The man on the beat was so sure that ‘everyone would go home when it grew dark' that I let myself believe it. But I should have remembered a warning I got about witch-hunts.”

Bill was not listening. “It's a funny thing how unsafe you feel in a house without windows,” he said. “Take a house with the back blown clean off, and not a door that will shut; you can live quite happily in a front room provided it still has windows. But without windows even a whole undamaged house feels unsafe.”

Which was not an observation that provided Robert with any comfort.

I
wonder if you would mind calling for the fish, dear,” Aunt Lin said on the telephone on Tuesday afternoon. “Nevil is coming to dinner, and so we are going to have an extra course of what we were going to have for breakfast. I really don't see why we should have anything extra just for Nevil, but Christina says that it will keep him from making what she calls ‘inroads' on the tart that is going to do again on her night-out tomorrow. So if you wouldn't mind, dear.”

He was not looking forward greatly to an extra hour or two of Nevil's society, but he was feeling so pleased with himself that he was in a better humour to support it than usual. He had arranged with a Larborough firm for the replacement of the Franchise windows; he had miraculously unearthed a key that fitted the Franchise gate—and there would be two duplicates in existence by tomorrow; and he had personally taken out the groceries—together with an offering of the best flowers that Milford could supply. His welcome at The Franchise had been such that he had almost ceased to regret the lack of light exchanges on Nevil lines. There were, after all, other things than getting to Christian-name terms in the first half-hour.

In the lunch hour he had rung up Kevin Macdermott, and arranged with his secretary that when Kevin was free in the evening he would call him at 10 High Street. Things were getting out of hand, and he wanted Kevin's advice.

He had refused three invitations to golf, his excuse to his astounded cronies being that he had “no time to chase a piece of gutta-percha round a golf course.”

He had gone to see an important client who had been trying to interview him since the previous Friday and who had been provoked into asking him on the telephone if “he still worked for Blair, Hayward, and Bennet.”

He had got through his arrears of work with a mutely reproachful Mr. Heseltine; who, although he had allied himself on the Sharpe side, still obviously felt that the Franchise affair was not one for a firm like theirs to be mixed up in.

And he had been given tea by Miss Tuff out of the blue-patterned china on the lacquer tray covered by the fair white cloth and accompanied by two digestive biscuits on a plate.

It was lying on his desk now, the tea-tray; just as it had been a fortnight ago when the telephone had rung and he had lifted the receiver to hear Marion Sharpe's voice for the first time. Two short weeks ago. He had sat looking at it in its patch of sunlight, feeling uneasy about his comfortable life and conscious of time slipping past him. But today, the digestive biscuits held no reproach for him because he had stepped outside the routine they typified. He was on calling terms with Scotland Yard; he was agent for a pair of scandalous women; he had become an amateur sleuth; and he had been witness to mob violence. His whole world looked different. The dark skinny woman he used to see sometimes shopping in the High Street, for instance, had turned into Marion.

Well, one result of stepping out of a routined life was, of course, that you couldn't put on your hat and stroll home at four o'clock of an afternoon. He pushed the tea-tray out of his way, and went to work, and it was half-past six before he looked at the clock again, and seven before he opened the door of Number 10.

The sitting-room door was ajar as usual—like many doors in
old houses it swung a little if left off the latch—and he could hear Nevil's voice in the room beyond.

“On the contrary, I think you are being extremely silly,” Nevil was saying.

Robert recognised the tone at once. It was the cold rage with which a four-year-old Nevil had told a guest: “I am extremely sorry that I asked you to my party.” Nevil must be very angry indeed about something.

With his coat half off Robert paused to listen.

“You are interfering in something you know nothing whatever about; you can hardly claim that is an intelligent proceeding.

There was no other voice, so he must be talking to someone on the telephone; probably keeping Kevin from getting through, the young idiot.

“I am not infatuated with anyone. I never
have
been infatuated with anyone. It is you who are infatuated—with ideas. You are being extremely silly, as I said before. . . . You are taking the part of an unbalanced adolescent in a case you know nothing about; I should have thought that was sufficient evidence of infatuation. . . . You can tell your father from me that there is nothing Christian about it, just unwarranted interference. I'm not sure it isn't incitement to violence. . . . Yes, last night. . . . No, all their windows broken, and things painted on their walls . . . . If he is so interested in justice he might do something about that. But your lot are never interested in justice, are they? Only in injustice . . . . What do I mean by your lot? Just what I say. You and all your crowd who are for ever adopting good-for-nothings and championing them against the world. You wouldn't put out a finger to keep a hard-working little man from going down the drain, but let an old lag lack the price of a meal and your sobs can be heard in Antarctica. You make me sick . . . . Yes, I said you make me sick . . . . Cat-sick. Sick to my stomach. I retch!”

And the bang of the receiver on its rest indicated that the poet had said his say.

Robert hung up his coat in the cupboard and went in. Nevil with a face like thunder was pouring himself out a stiff whisky.

“I'll have one too,” Robert said. “I couldn't help overhearing,” he added. “That wasn't Rosemary, by any chance?”

“Who else? Is there anyone else in Britain capable of an ineffable silliness like that?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, didn't you hear that bit? She has taken up the cause of the persecuted Betty Kane.” Nevil gulped some whisky, and glared at Robert as if Robert were responsible.

“Well, I don't suppose her stepping on the
Ack-Emma
bandwagon will have much effect one way or another.”

“The
Ack-Emmal
It isn't the
Ack-Emma
. It's the
Watchman
. That mental deficient she calls father has written a letter about it for Friday's issue. Yes, you may well look squeamish. As if we weren't coping with enough without that highfalutin nugget of perverted sentimentality putting in its sixpenceworth!”

Remembering that the
Watchman
was the only paper ever to have published any of Nevil's poems, Robert thought this showed slight ingratitude. But he approved the description.

“Perhaps they won't print it,” he said, less in hope than looking for comfort.

“You know very well they will print anything he chooses to send them. Whose money saved them just when they were going down for the third time? The Bishop's, of course.”

“His wife's, you mean.” The Bishop had married one of the two grand-daughters of Cowan's Cranberry Sauce.

“All right, his wife's. And the Bishop has the
Watchman
for a lay pulpit. And there isn't anything too silly for him to say in it, or too unlikely for them to print. Do you remember that girl who went round shooting taxi-drivers in cold blood for a profit
of about seven-and-eleven a time? That girl was just his meat. He sobbed himself practically into a coma about her. He wrote a long heartbreaking letter about her in the
Watchman
, pointing out how underprivileged she had been, and how she had won a scholarship to a secondary school and hadn't been able to ‘take it up' because her people were too poor to provide her with books or proper clothes, and so she had gone to blind-alley jobs and then to bad company—and so, it was inferred, to shooting taxi-drivers, though he didn't actually mention that little matter. Well, all the
Watchman
readers
lahved
that, of course; it was just their cup of tea; all criminals according to the
Watchman
readers are frustrated angels. And then the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the school—the school she was supposed to have won a scholarship to—wrote to point out that so far from winning anything was she that her name was 159th out of two hundred competitors; and that someone as interested in education as the Bishop was should have known that no one was prevented from accepting a scholarship through lack of money, since in needy cases books and money grants were forthcoming automatically. Well, you would have thought that that would shake him, wouldn't you? But not a bit. They printed the Chairman's letter on a back page, in small print; and in the very next issue the old boy was sobbing over some other case that he knew nothing about. And on Friday, so help me, he'll be sobbing over Betty Kane.”

“I wonder—if I went over to see him tomorrow—”

“It goes to press tomorrow.”

“Yes, so it does. Perhaps if I telephoned—”

“If you think that anyone or anything will make His Lordship keep back a finished composition from the public gaze, you're being naïve.”

The telephone rang.

“If that's Rosemary, I'm in China,” Nevil said.

But it was Kevin Macdermott.

“Well, sleuth,” said Kevin. “My congratulations. But next time don't waste an afternoon trying to ring up civilians in Aylesbury, when you can get the same information from Scotland Yard by return.”

Robert said that he was still sufficiently civilian not to think in terms of Scotland Yard at all; but that he was learning; rapidly.

He sketched the happenings of last night for Kevin's benefit, and said: “I can't afford to be leisurely about it any more. Something must be done as quickly as possible to clear them of this thing.”