Quite Honestly

Lucy had been angry when she found out I’d visited her father. She said I’d hated her when she was trying to reform me. ‘We only got close to each other when I stopped trying to change you,’ she said. When I told her I’d wanted to stop her stealing little things she told me she wasn’t going to steal little things any more, but she had a surprise for me which would make us really close for ever.

When I said that’d be nice of her she said, ‘It won’t just be nice. It’ll be amazing!’ Then she told me not to worry her dad about anything to do with us any more. ‘Dad’s got enough on his plate, what with Mum and trying to explain why God doesn’t seem to take much interest in all the terrible things that happen in the world. No need to bother him with our little problems, which aren’t going to exist any more anyway.’

That was all she said about it at the time, but of course I should have realized that something was going on. It wasn’t that Lucy changed towards me. Nothing like that at all. In fact she seemed nicer to me, what shall I call it, more loving than ever before. But she went around with a secret sort of smile on her face. So naturally, from time to time, I felt that something was going on, although I had no idea of quite what. I suppose everyone feels that, don’t they, when their girlfriend looks unusually happy. I suppose it’s a dangerous signal, one way or the other.

I noticed a bit of a change in Chippy too since he became Leonard McGrath and chair of SCRAP. He also treated me to a lot of his twisted little smiles, as though he was busy with something I probably wouldn’t understand and which was, anyway, far too important for me to know about.

Of course I still did jobs for him and when I called round to the maisonette there were the people I’d got used to working with - Screwtop Parkinson, the getaway driver, and Ozzy Desmond, the burglar alarm man, all the old lot who’d known Chippy, as I had, long before he came out as Leonard. But when I went to Connaught Square, they all seemed to stop talking when I went into a room and I had the feeling they had plans I wasn’t meant to know about.

I told Lucy how I felt Chippy had changed. It was one Sunday morning and she was in bed beside me with all her clothes off, staring at the ceiling.

‘What, pretending to be all law-abiding and reforming criminals when he’s running a whole bloody organization of cons!’

‘That’s brilliant! He’s got Gwenny and all that lot at SCRAP completely confused. He’s so daring! Like one of us.’

Funny thing was that with all this feeling of things going on that I didn’t know about, and people not telling me, I began to feel more at home with Mr Markby on my regular calls to his office. Of course I had a few secrets from him, like the way I earned my living. I told him that I was helping round a couple of restaurants in Notting Hill, where I’d found a flat. He seemed to be happy with that much explanation. Then he asked me how that friend of mine was doing, the one who’d fallen into the habit of stealing small articles of no great value.

‘Well, congratulations!’ There was a great delighted grin on my probation officer’s face, as though he was a man in a betting shop who’d just won a four selection accumulator on the horses. ‘You reformed her!’

‘Reforming people is a real talent!’ The grin seemed to fall from Mr Markby’s face and he looked troubled. ‘I’m not sure I have the gift myself.’

‘So many people come through this office.’ He was sounding really sad. ‘They’ve just come out of prison and we’re here to help them reform. And what do they do? Something calculated to send them back for even longer in prison. When I was young and enthusiastic I used to believe prison was like the National Health. You were meant to go in to it bad and come out better. But what would doctors feel like if everyone who came out of hospital felt they had to go back there immediately?’

‘Depressed is the right word for it.’ Mr Markby was clearly in a mood to tell me all his troubles. ‘I have a Jack Russell dog called Rosemary.’

‘Of course. An intelligent dog. I suppose I mean bitch, in as many ways. But if a strange man appears in the house she has an irresistible urge to bite the ends of his trousers.’

‘I’ve tried everything I could think of to reform her. I’ve put her into her bed when she does it. I’ve given her extra biscuits on the rare occasions when she doesn’t. But I really have to admit, I can’t change her behaviour patterns.’

‘Thank you, but it’s embarrassing. Sir Jonathan Peebles, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons, did us the honour of coming to a small dinner party my wife and I gave a week or so ago. I’d hardly given him a glass of sherry before Rosemary fixed her teeth in the ends of his trousers.’

‘That was embarrassing?’ It seemed to be the wrong way round, having Mr Markby making a full confession to me and expecting help and reassurance.

‘Terribly embarrassing! They were fine trousers, I would say tailor-made. Savile Row. Scottish tweed, all that sort of thing. Rosemary obviously enjoyed getting her teeth into the ends of them. Sir Jonathan has perfect manners of course, but he was certainly irritated. He said something like, “Can’t you call your bloody dog off ?” I did my best of course, but I’ve simply failed to reform Rosemary.’

At first I didn’t see the connection. Lucy didn’t, so far as I knew, bite the ends of people’s trousers. But then I said, ‘I seem to have persuaded her.’

‘Persuaded her? That’s what you did.’ He seemed to be thinking hard about it all and then he came out with, ‘Perhaps that’s because you’ve been a criminal yourself. It takes one to reform one.’

I looked at Mr Markby and I was amazed, quite honestly. A tall, sandy-haired man I couldn’t imagine climbing in through a kitchen window by night. He’d have been hopeless at it.

‘I was only joking.’ It was the first time in all my dealings with Mr Markby that I’d known him to make a joke. He dropped the idea of taking to crime and quite suddenly he asked me how old I was. When I hesitated he said, ‘I suppose you’re over twenty-five?’

‘So, A level passes wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe a Diploma in Probation Studies instead. You know what I’m talking about?’