THE FIRM OF Fenway, Crocker and Broke was extremely respectable and well-established. No one was quite sure what had happened to Mr Fenway, who had founded it in the 1840s, but Mr Crocker’s photograph hung in the waiting-room, and it showed a stern bearded man of about forty-five with a high collar and morning coat, leaning against a mantelpiece on which stood three cups. Harold always assumed that these were awarded for probity, and that Mr Crocker had won them all outright. Mr Broke’s son was still alive, and occasionally dropped in to see how things were going.
There were seven active partners, one of whom, Mr Hansett, was in his sixties and on the verge of retirement. It was for Mr Crocker’s grandson that Harold worked, an amiable and not wholly stupid man of forty-eight, with black straight hair and a paunch that he would rub from time to time, particularly after lunch, saying, “Must do something about this before it gets out of control.” He lived near Marlow and played a good deal of golf, but weight lost on the links seemed always to be made up again in the bar. Harold spent most of his time compiling complicated graphs of stock prices, and when he would bring one in to Crocker, who had a Carlton House desk perpetually littered with papers and ashtrays, he was always astonished to find him actually working, usually on the telephone.
He would wave Harold to put the graph on the desk, then make more waving motions to indicate that Harold should wait a moment. After what sounded like intense financial wrangling, he would suddenly and without any change of tone arrange a lunch with his unseen fellow-negotiator and then end the conversation with inquiries about wife, fishing or hunters. With a salvo of personal regards he would ring off, then turn to Harold and ask him how he was getting on. Then he would examine the graph with great care, ask a few small points which Harold assumed must be to test his understanding of the business, and say “Jolly good.” Working for him was pleasant, since he was always jovial in the mornings, and came back only briefly after lunch. If Harold made a mistake, Crocker would point it out without making him feel a complete fool.
It was Mr Scott who was Harold’s connection with the firm. He was the most senior partner after Mr Hansett, and was Harold’s uncle’s brother-in-law. When Harold came down from Oxford his father asked him for the hundred thousandth time what he wanted to do. With a misunderstood sarcasm Harold said his only ambition was to be very rich, and his uncle, who happened to be staying at the time, approved strongly and suggested he get in touch with Jimmy Scott. Since he genuinely had no idea at all of what he wanted to do, except that he didn’t want to work if he could possibly avoid it, and facing the fact that continued idle lounging around at home would be worse than having a job, what with parental indignation and parental friends, Harold surprised himself by actually going to see Scott, and still more by joining the firm in a very junior capacity to learn the business and pass the necessary exams. He was paid very little, but with the small allowance from his father he was able to afford Craxton Street and an occasional theatre and the tepid embraces of Helen Gallagher and eventually the secondhand Lambretta. And now he was in sight of a very well-paid job and a better flat and even marriage and a secondhand car. The only trouble was that the job was too easy. Being a bill-broker was, as he’d told Mr Douglas, money for jam. Once you’d learnt the basic rules and the particular complications of the business, all you had to do was lend short and borrow long. You were a vital cog in the financial set-up of England, you made money hand over fist, and you tried not to remember that some countries got on perfectly well without businesses like yours at all.
It was like everything else, thought Harold, edging the Lambretta past an ambassadorial Rolls Royce at a traffic-light, perfectly all right in its own way, but never extending one to one’s full capacity. One just chugged along in low throttle, knowing that things would go on going on until the whole world disappeared in a giant toadstool cloud, and if it didn’t, then one would go on going on. Never opening up. Of course, English roads were impossible, anyway.
He accelerated past a bus and turned sharply left off Cheapside to his private parking-place, underneath the windows of a royal and ancient livery company. He unstrapped his umbrella and bowler hat from the carrier, dusted down his trousers, squared his shoulders and prepared for another morning’s graph-plotting.
Fenway, Crocker and Broke had recently moved into a new building whose lift frequently stuck. Harold always took it in the hope that it would stick with him in it, thus giving him the opportunity to meditate on life and death instead of sitting at his desk. But it never did. Smoothly but noisily it took him to the twelfth floor. As he stepped out he saw the clock showed nine-twenty which meant that he was ten minutes early. Nine-twenty, and he felt absolutely exhausted already.
He pushed through glass doors into the long low room in which he worked. There were about twenty desks, all covered with telephones and files and papers, and two especially large ones which had a dozen telephones each. Glass ran the length of the room on both sides, giving the occupants a view of an almost identical building on one side and the skeleton of another almost identical building on the other. Since the City had gone in for reconstruction all new buildings looked the same, or else they were all designed by the same architect who had simply fallen in love with one idea. Harold thought of him maniacally drawing the same plans over and over again, making tiny alterations in the detail to fool the client, while pale and frightened assistants brought him cups of strong tea without milk or sugar. At the end of the day he retired to the penthouse of one of these buildings and gloated over the rooftops at what he had done, counting each hideous lift-machinery hut as a personal triumph. Then, when the light finally failed, he would go home to a suburban villa and amuse himself with his hobby, the imaginary construction of neon advertisements in the most prominent positions in the City.
There were, as usual, a few clerks and secretaries already there, standing by the window that overlooked the scaffolding of the new building.
“Good morning,” said Blackett, the senior clerk, as Harold joined them. “I don’t see how they ever get a building finished at all, do you? Look at them, sitting there drinking tea.”
“Oh, but they start earlier than us,” said Sheila, Mr Scott’s secretary.
“Yes,” said Blackett. “I dare say that’s true, Sheila. They arrive here before we do, certainly. But what do they do? They have breakfast. And when breakfast’s over it’s time for the first tea-break, isn’t it?”
Harold said nothing, thinking how nice it must be to lay bricks and carry hods and work cranes and drink tea all day, knowing that when it came to knocking-off time you had at least something physically there to show for your efforts. Blackett he had always put down as a Daily Telegraph reader, and possibly even a contributor of letters to the editor about the need for tightening up on the unions, the sort of man who would carry a stopwatch about with him when he retired so as to report the exact amount of time spent not-working by manual labourers. That sort of thing could easily become an obsession.
Not, of course, that people weren’t idle, anyone with any sense scrounged a few minutes a day from his employer, it gave the dreariness of work a little adventure to see just how much one could get away with. But the sense of moral superiority that the Blacketts of life waved about like the membership card of some exclusive club, or an invitation to a royal garden party, was simply disgusting. And anyway Blackett, with his finicky hands and passion for paper-clips, was one of the things Harold disliked most about Fenway, Crocker and Broke. It wasn’t anything specific that Harold disliked, it was simply the sum of Blackett, the individually harmless characteristics which amounted to a porcupine of irritations. His way of rubbing his hands together, for instance, after leaving the lavatory, as though no towel could ever quite get them dry. The bifocals, for another, which he used for such self-conscious effects of eye manœuvre. The careful creases in his shiny trousers, so that one could tell they were pressed every night and probably cleaned only once every six months, and the way his sideboards were trimmed above the ear-pieces of his spectacles, particularly annoyed Harold. And then he had a peculiar snuffling little laugh, like a stifled whinny. But none of these things really depressed Harold in themselves, it was the total effect of assurance and probity and correctness, the undeviating loyalty to the firm, the unfailing catching of trains, all of which shone out of his grey eyes and from his bald head. Mr Hansett always said that Fenway, Crocker and Broke would collapse when Blackett left, and he didn’t know how they would ever get on without him. Blackett’s pigeon chest would swell, stuffed with these crumbs of conventional praise, till Harold wished it would burst. He could get on without Blackett perfectly well right now.
He went to his desk and began to prepare a graph. The one thing to be said for this hack work was that it didn’t require any imagination at all, and left Harold plenty of time to think about other things, such as Helen Gallagher. He’d met her almost a year ago at a party, and she had been slightly tight by the time they went home, and allowed him to kiss her with some ardour and to tamper with fair success with her underwear. Encouraged by this Harold had pursued her again, this time to meet a sober indignation.
“But you allowed me to do that last time,” he said, feeling his cheek where she’d slapped him suddenly and hard.
She turned scarlet. “Did I?”
“Yes. And furthermore——”
“Then you must have taken advantage of me. I knew I’d had too much wine cup.”
“Not at all. You actually helped me at one moment.”
“What moment?”
“When I was trying to get off——”
“I don’t want to know,” she said, quickly.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Helen.”
“Let’s talk about something quite different.”
Which they did. But a few weeks later Harold had, through sheer persistence, won back all the lost ground and made a few new bridgeheads. And about a month after that he actually got her to go to bed with him. This wasn’t really as interesting as had seemed likely, but then the first time was never too good, it was the follow-up that was most rewarding. But somehow it wasn’t. Although Helen was really rather a nice girl, in a coy way, and had a neat way of dressing and a satisfyingly shaped body, her mind never stopped listening for door-bells or Mrs Fanshaw’s footsteps above, and it was quite obvious that her heart was only in it through a sense of duty. She was, after all, twenty-five, and beginning to worry about the future. The combination of fear and calculation which Harold detected in even her warmest embrace irritated him profoundly. After a time he realized that he didn’t even like her very much. It was much easier to have Helen around than to go out and find someone else, she was quite affectionate and reasonably acquiescent, but the only reason he continued seeing and sleeping with her was that he felt rather guilty about having started the thing in the first place, and was bone idle and probably undersexed. All of which depressed him, but somehow the affair kept going, and they even spent a week together with his parents, who found her very nice, darling, but one should look around when one was young, shouldn’t one? Her parents luckily lived conveniently far from London, so he could avoid meeting them. He felt that to be introduced to them might be fatal. Helen was always referring to them in what she imagined was a subtle way, telling him how her sister had already got a son and was expecting another baby soon and how much her parents liked being grandparents (something Harold refused point-blank to believe) and how her father was really quite well off, and what nice things her sister had got as wedding-presents, and how beautiful the wedding had been, and how much her father and mother liked their son-in-law, till Harold told her briefly and pointedly that he wasn’t considering marriage for several years, “until he was well established with the firm”. He had quite a good story worked out about how the firm preferred people to wait till they were partners before they married, and he even went so far as to invent an imaginary man called George Calcott who had had a very promising career ruined by marrying against the advice of Mr Hansett. Poor fellow, he had never been made a partner, and was going to shoot himself in despair next time Helen brought the subject up.
As he worked at the graph Harold added a few details to George Calcott’s married life which he had already made pretty unhappy. The Calcotts seemed never to have heard about contraceptives, for one thing. They lived in a miserable flat in Fulham and the smell of babies was simply overpowering. There were four children already, and another on the way, and all were sickly in one way or another, and the cost of preventing them dying was beginning to sap George’s own health. The National Health Service helped, of course, but there were all sorts of things necessary for sick babies for which doctors simply wouldn’t give prescriptions. Jennifer Calcott was a nice girl, too, which made it all so sad, and a couple of years ago, she had been distinctly pretty. But now she never seemed to find the time to wash her hair, even, and what with the number of nappies drying in the kitchen there never seemed to be room for her own and George’s dirty clothes, which were gradually blocking the back door. A man had already been round twice from the local Health people, but there was virtually nothing that could be done, and George hadn’t had a clean shirt for weeks. The strain was beginning to show in his work, which had been getting very careless recently, and Harold was doubtful whether he would be able to keep the job, particularly as Mr Hansett had turned sharply against him since the wedding. The office had given them a silver tray when they married, but that had been sold long ago, of course, and they couldn’t get much for it because their names and the date of the wedding had been engraved on it and jewellers weren’t madly interested in having to melt things down. It wasn’t, after all, as though the Calcotts were famous enough to sell their unwanted trays at high prices as association pieces. George had spent night after night trying to take his name out of his books with ink eradicator, but you could always tell, especially if you were a secondhand bookseller.
It was surprising, really, how much of all this Helen was likely to believe. She had seemed suspicious when he’d explained about their ignorance of contraceptives, but he’d covered it quickly by saying that he thought Jennifer might be a Catholic, and everyone knew that that was how Catholic girls made men marry them. He’d wished afterwards that he hadn’t suggested it. The trouble with girls like Helen was that they were highly susceptible to obvious ideas. He had to be careful not to get carried away about the Calcotts, too, because one day Helen had been reduced as near to tears as he’d ever seen her and begged him to let her do something to help them. There’d had to be a great deal about old-fashioned pride then, and afterwards there was a curious gleam in Helen’s eye. He’d once caught her looking in the London telephone directory A–D, too. He’d mentioned later, quite casually, that the Calcotts of course couldn’t afford a phone.
By eleven he had the graph ready for Crocker who smiled genially at him and asked how he was getting on. Harold told him about the fire and Crocker said “I say!” once or twice, then asked him what he was doing for the week-end. Harold said he was going to spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday with his parents in Buckinghamshire, and this led to a discussion about local golf-courses about which Harold knew nothing except their names, and these only from having had the conversation with Crocker several times before. Then Crocker twisted about on his chair for a moment before saying, “Well, my boy, we’re very pleased with the way you’re doing, you know. Keep it up.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Have a nice week-end.”
“Same to you, sir.”
Mr Crocker never came back to the office on Friday afternoons.
After lunch Harold idled. There was nothing for him to do, really, so people gave him tedious things they couldn’t be bothered with, saying, “I would be most awfully grateful if you could do this for me” and “Oh, thanks a lot, thanks awfully.” The telephones which rang all day, or flashed their lights, since the noise would have been impossible, were always sluggish on Friday afternoons, and Blackett spent most of his time fussing over everyone in a high-pitched voice, getting everything finished in time for the week-end. At about a quarter to four everyone began to snap and snarl, hurrying to get away early. Harold thought about the Macaroon, which wasn’t a tea-shop but an afternoon drinking-club in Soho. When the thought of beer had given way to gin and tonic and that in its turn to campari and soda, he got up from his desk, where he’d been doing the Evening Standard crossword, and left the office. He had practised leaving unnoticed since the afternoon early in his career with the firm on which Mr Blackett had given him both eyebrow-waggling and bifocal eye-switching when he had started to leave five minutes before the official time. Now he had a technique for desk-drifting till he reached the door, through which he could vanish in the back-swing from someone’s entry. Carrying a piece of paper on which he had typed the latest cricket scores and all the runners and prices for the two o’clock at Sandown, he moved surely from desk to desk, talking blandly, then, to his great triumph, used Blackett’s own slipstream to depart. Never risking the lift on the way down, he took the fire-stairs. The only danger at the bottom was an open stretch of country to the main door. One of the architect’s particularly malignant gestures had been to leave no pillars in the foyer of the building. The back door led only into a dreary warren of dustbins and coal-holes which eventually brought one out a quarter of a mile from where Harold left his Lambretta.
Assuming a serious business-like face, Harold strode meaningfully towards the door, then put on his bowler hat, pulling it down well over his face. In two minutes he was astride his Lambretta and in Cheapside, sliding through the gaps in the stalled traffic to emerge at the lights exactly as they changed from red to green.
Ten minutes later he was in the Macaroon, talking to Dennis Moreland who was already rather drunk. Moreland had been a contemporary of Harold’s at Oxford, and had since become a junior pundit on television and in the weeklies. He had read Law, as a matter of fact, but everyone assumed him to be a classical scholar, or at the very least a historian, since he gave his opinions with the air of a man who has read so much of the best literature that he can hardly bear to look at a book again. In fact he had read very little, and it was only because book-reviewing in the weeklies never extended beyond fifteen hundred words at most, and because one could get away with virtually anything on television provided one remained vague about details, that he had managed to remain undetected. Also, he was remarkably clever. Someone once described him as a machine for receiving other people’s ideas and turning them out to sound as though they were his own, but this was not quite the whole truth. He had a sort of originality that he was still exploring and testing, a way of seeing things which wasn’t quite like anyone else’s, and if what he saw was still what most other clever people saw, he described it in a vigorous yet clear style that was certainly his own. Without ever knowing quite enough of what he was talking about, he talked brilliantly and no one noticed the lacunae. And he thoroughly enjoyed cutting figures on the intellectual ice of his time, knowing better than anyone how thin it was. It was the knowledge that he was really something of a fraud that made him enjoy it so much, and his daring increased with the possibilities of detection.
Harold liked him, without being quite sure why. Dennis was short and round, with a fat-cheeked face and light blue eyes under heavy black eyebrows, with thick black hair swept straight back to the nape of his neck. He treated Harold with a mixture of genial contempt and malicious friendliness, using him sometimes as a stooge and sometimes as an intimate companion. He had been married and divorced already, which at twenty-seven Harold considered unnecessarily sophisticated, and he was always accompanied by some exotic creature he’d found at the studios or met the night before at a party. Somehow, though, it was never the same exotic creature twice running, and Harold wondered whether his boasts of sexual prowess weren’t more fantasy than fact. At Oxford he had been deliberately Byronic, and the Don Juan attitude was still there in emergencies. An enemy had once told him to his face that he needed more buckle and less swash.
“I’ve been telling the public about free love this afternoon,” he said, plonking his drink on the table. “On tape, of course. I bet they cut it out. I did a marvellous spiel about Sweden and adolescent lust and adult suicide. No one will have the slightest idea which side I’m on.”
“Have you ever been to Sweden?” said Harold.
“Sweden! Country of lakes and naked bathing! Modern architecture and ancient valour! No, of course not. But I’ve seen enough Bergman films to have a perfectly good idea.”
“I went there once, for a day,” said Harold. “It was just like Denmark.”
“And what was Denmark like?”
“I can’t really remember. It was just after the war and all I can recall is the Tivoli Gardens.”
“It certainly doesn’t sound very interesting,” said Dennis.
Harold stared at the bar, which was short and narrow, so narrow that the barmaid, who was well-built and liked to show it, bulged continually towards the customers. That was why he always sat at a table. Behind her, on a specially constructed shelf, stood a collection of miniature liqueurs, now going brown round the labels. It was appalling to think how many such collections there must be in the country, all of them browning round the labels, the liqueurs probably evaporated by now, the pride of barmen and barmaids from Dover to Dundee.
“Why do fads happen?” he said to Dennis.
“Well, collecting miniature liqueurs, for instance.”
“Someone has a brilliant idea that miniature liqueurs will be a splendid advertisement for big liqueurs, and so everyone makes them, and then miniature men are sent round the country trying to sell them to the big fat men who own pubs, and then every pub-keeper gets terribly tickled by the idea, and then everyone has a collection. It’s quite simple, really.”
“But why do all the pub-keepers get terribly tickled?”
“Because if you sat behind a bar all day, you’d be tickled if you had a heart attack. You’d be bored out of your mind.”
“I’m bored by my job, but I don’t go round collecting anything.”
“Well, you’re probably a Don’t-Know by instinct. What’s wrong with your job, by the way? Don’t you make lots of money?”
“Not yet. I will, though. It’s a boring job because it’s too easy. Don’t you ever feel you would like to do something that really occupied you full time, which used all your capabilities?”
“I have a series of jobs like that now.”
“Oh, come off it, Dennis. You can’t enjoy reading all those dreary books and seeing all those tedious plays and films.”
“That’s not the part which occupies me. I spend my time trying to be one step ahead of the people who read what I say. They all know as much, if not more, than I do about what I write. So I have somehow to outwit them. That’s a full-time job which also amuses me very much. Now I won’t review novels, because there it’s too easy—after all, it’s just a matter of opinion. But a book about, say, Voltaire, about whom I know next to nothing, there’s a real challenge.”
“Well, the only person I have to outwit is Blackett, the chief clerk, and that’s only to get away early.”
“It sounds to me, Harold, as though you’re one of the new young men. Not angry, that’s all over. But discontented. Wanting adventure. Fed up with the limits of a welfare state.”
“I thought those people were invented when the Labour Party got in in 1945.”
“Well, let’s bring you up to date a bit. You’re the sort of conscientious man who would have gone out and tamed a couple of colonies before breakfast in the old days, steadfast in duty, believing in what you were doing. But there aren’t any colonies left, and you have all that public spirit going begging.”
“I don’t think that’s quite right either.”
“Oh, I can see a whole article about people like you. No, it would go better on television. Chaps don’t have enough to do these days, they’re complaining about the drabness of Britain, and they’re right. They want to have a ball.”
“You sound like an editorial in the Daily Mirror.”
“What else do you think TV personalities are but popular journalists?”
“Good God, are you a TV personality already?”
“Not yet, no. But I will be in a year or two. Then buy a set.”
“Let’s have another drink,” said Harold. He didn’t like the idea of knowing a TV personality. Art and life were better kept apart, he felt. He got up to get more drinks.
“You don’t know anyone who would like to go to America for a few months, do you?” said Dennis, when Harold got back from the bar.
“Paid or unpaid?”
“Oh, very well paid indeed. The trouble is that all young people these days are vaguely liberal, and being vaguely liberal means being rather stridently anti-American. It’s what I am going to call the Compensation for Colonial Guilt one day, if I ever get around to it.”
“If you make one more journalistic generalization this afternoon I shall leave,” said Harold. “Tell me about the American trip.”
“I have this uncle,” said Dennis. “More of an aunt, really. She married him, you see. Anyway, he’s called Dangerfield, and he’s very rich, and wants someone to go to America and buy back the family portraits that one of his hard-up ancestors sold to Duveen or someone. You wouldn’t be interested, by any chance?”
“If you think I’m going to leave Fenway’s now,” said Harold, “after slaving away there for all these years, you’re off your head. Why don’t you go yourself?”
“I would, if I were still young,” said Dennis. “I’d go like a shot.”
“But you are young.”
“Oh, I know I am. But I can’t afford to go on being young. It would ruin me. I almost have a reputation to keep up, you know. If one doesn’t build on one’s own foundations, no one else will.”
“We are both hamstrung by our futures already,” said Harold theatrically. “Shades of the prison house round the growing middle-aged man.”
“You’re still young, though,” said Dennis, looking at Harold in a calculating way. “I mean, you can still afford to be thought young, can’t you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I think the job is just what you need before you settle down.”
“You’re wrong,” said Harold. “But if you tell me what it is I may be able to suggest someone suitable.”
“Ah. You have contacts?”
“I have a younger brother.”
Dennis began to explain. His uncle’s family had become somewhat impoverished about the turn of the century, largely because of a hereditary lack of restraint. Granville Dangerfield, the then head of the family, had twelve siblings, eight of whom were girls, to say nothing of eleven children of his own. He also had a passion for the turf, which made him a popular figure in the circle of the Prince of Wales. All eight of his sisters had managed to marry, with sizeable portions, and Granville’s own seven daughters were approaching marriageable age. Being a man of honour, he wished to give his daughters respectable portions, too, but the continual drain of so much fertility on the family finances made this difficult. To add to the difficulties, the sons all inherited attractive sums on their twenty-fifth birthdays under the terms of a trust set up by Granville’s grandfather.
(“The whole story illustrates the decline of the gentry,” said Dennis. “The incontinent inevitably end up insolvent.”)
In an attempt to meet all his obligations, Dangerfield trusted intemperately to luck, and in particular to a filly called Canteloupe which had thrown her jockey at the start of a race at Epsom. It was a considerable expense in postage alone to summon the family from all over England, but Granville felt there was nothing else he could do. To the assembled Dangerfields, he announced the catastrophic news. They took it quite calmly, telling him to sell some of the family heirlooms, making speeches about rash speculation and the judgment of God, and then went home.
In the negotiations which followed with a well-known transatlantic entrepreneur, Dangerfield found himself being offered more than he expected for the things he least wished to part with, notably the family portraits and a collection of snuff-boxes which his father had spent nearly fifty years assembling. The things he would gladly have got rid of, such as his grandfather’s collection of china and some regency silver that had been in the bank since it had been given to him as a wedding-present by one of his numerous aunts, were praised by the dealer as remarkable of their kind, but he added that at current market prices Dangerfield would be best advised to hang on to them. So, with considerable reluctance, he sold the snuff-boxes, and when they didn’t yield enough for his purpose, he yielded and allowed the family portraits to go. He then shut up his house and went to live in London, saying that if a man couldn’t dine with his ancestors around him he had better dine at his club, which he did for the rest of his life. His daughters all married suitably, and his sons respectably, but when he died, in 1907, it seemed as if the family portraits would never be returned.
By a series of accidents, his third son eventually inherited, the first never having married, the second having been killed in the First World War. This third son, Edward, married a nice girl of good family and lived at Dangerfield House. He had started life under good auspices, with the Prince of Wales as a proxy godfather, and everything he did seemed to go right. He was a cautious man, and invested his money soundly, the more soundly because he knew what he was doing, having entered a merchant bank as a young man of twenty-one, straight down from Cambridge. Keeping most of his money in solid securities, he played the market with the rest, and during the course of the twenties managed to make several hundred thousand pounds, about which he told no one. His caution stood him in good stead when the crash came, for he had become uneasy at the giddiness of the market and sold all his speculations exactly three months before the disaster struck. When he died it was discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that he was not merely a rich man, but a very rich man indeed.
His heir, also called Edward, was too busy being a cavalry officer during the Second World War to realize quite how rich he had become. His father had shown a most unusual restraint about having children, and Edward had only one brother and a sister. The brother was killed during the Normandy landings, and the sister married a promising young solicitor. Thirty-three when the war ended, Edward had inherited his father’s business acumen and chose as his wife a girl who had only slightly less money than he. Danger field House was repaired (it had been nearly demolished by prisoners of war) and repainted. The Cotswold Hunt received a large subscription so that Edward’s children might hunt during the holidays. He himself continued to work in the same firm as his father, and to adopt identical financial policies. A good deal of his capital was invested in the West Indies, where it doubled itself satisfactorily in a very short time.
It occurred to him one day, as he was sitting in his study and gazing at the picture which hung above his chimney, an early Munnings that displeased him, that it would be extremely pleasant, and probably not impossible, to try and recover the family portraits. It would certainly cost a good deal, but he could well afford it, and it would be satisfying to restore what his grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ reckless breeding had compelled them to part with. Apart from anything else, it would be a tribute to his, and his father’s, virtues of thrift and restraint. He set about trying to find what had happened to them.
The collection had been bought en bloc by a Cincinnati businessman, who had given some of the portraits to that city’s art gallery, from which they could not now be recovered. But his family had been less fortunate than the Dangerfields in 1929, and indeed the son and heir had shot himself, some said only just in time, since a Grand Jury was anxious to question him about certain share issues. In the sale which followed this calamity, the remaining pictures had been widely dispersed. Some were known to have gone to museums, some to dealers. The business of tracing them presented all sorts of problems. Not being willing to do it himself, Edward Dangerfield was looking for someone to do it for him. But he distrusted dealers, having examined with care the transactions by which the pictures had originally been sold, and there seemed no way of convincing him that there were some trustworthy experts. From time to time he was introduced to young men trying to make names for themselves in the art world, but he declared stubbornly that he wasn’t allowing any damned pansy to get his hands on his ancestors, and anyway none of them looked as though he could be trusted.
(“Quite right,” said Harold, who had met and disliked many such potential gallery-owners.
“Not at all,” said Dennis. “Some of them are not only honest, but nice, too. They’re only doing the same sort of thing as I do—it’s a different field, that’s all.”
Harold refrained from comment.)
There was one picture in particular that Dangerfield was anxious to recover. It was a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard of a young man with auburn hair. His father had often told him that he looked exactly like it, which was enough to make it desirable in itself. What made it even more desirable was the legend attached to it. Edward Dangerfield was a great supporter of the monarchy, and could be moved almost to tears by the royal Christmas speech: the missing miniature had a royal connection, and with Elizabeth the First at that. The auburn-haired young Dangerfield was said to have been one of her more ardent and assiduous courtiers. He had presented the miniature of himself to the old Queen only a few months before he was executed for an alleged part in the revolt of the Earl of Essex. The Queen had sent the portrait to his widow.
Edward Dangerfield’s father (and Dennis Moreland) doubted the story, Mr Dangerfield on historical grounds, Dennis out of cynicism. The Queen, said Dangerfield’s father, was a vain old harridan who would have been insulted by a picture of a young man: what she really wanted was a picture of herself painted to make her look younger than she really was. Anyone fool enough to draw attention to her age and his youth got what he deserved, and what was a married man doing sending his picture to an old woman anyway? In any case, the young man had gone too far in some way or another, and the Queen was notorious for not liking young men who went too far.
Dangerfield himself believed the legend passionately, and whatever the truth of it, there was no doubt that there had been a young auburn-haired Dangerfield at the time, that Hilliard had painted the miniature, and that shortly afterwards the subject had been decapitated. To bring the miniature back into the family, his remote descendant was prepared to pay a quite unreasonable amount of money. Dennis, as a well-informed nephew-about-town, had been asked to try and find someone altogether reliable, heterosexual and honest to go to America and find the miniature and such other of the family portraits as might still be in private collections.
“You’d better advertise in The Times,” said Harold finish ing his drink. “You know the sort of thing—‘WANTED: Young man prepared to go anywhere, do anything, apply Box 999.’”
“No,” said Dennis, shaking his head irritably. “They don’t go like that, anyway. They go: ‘Public schoolboy, 24, fed up with Welfare State, too poor to throw it all up, will go anywhere, do anything, for MONEY.’ But that’s not the sort of person my uncle wants. He wants someone who’s happy in his present job. And, more important, a sound man, who knows how to haggle and things. You know how much pictures cost these days. And the family portraits are bound to be owned by successful tycoons. Uncle Edward thinks only someone with tycoon characteristics will be able to persuade them to sell. He’s prepared to pay a great deal, but not without trying every sentimental trick in the book first—the sanctity of the family, tradition, all those awful things.”
“But won’t the person have to know about pictures, too?”
“Heavens, no. All he has to do is recognize them when he sees them. And that will be easy enough. They were all photographed before they were sold. My uncle isn’t interested in their aesthetic worth, you see, Harold. It’s strictly a matter of sentiment and money.”
“It sounds a ridiculously simple way of having a good time in America for a few months.”
“Well, you can go, if you want to. You have a solid business background. You’re not very knowledgeable about art. The only count against you is that awful girl, whatever she’s called. Helen.”
“I must go,” said Harold, getting up. “I promised I wouldn’t be late. Thanks for reminding me.”
“Oh, God,” said Dennis. “Sit down a moment, please, Harold. You will seriously damage my self-esteem if you make me feel you’d rather be with her than me. And anyway, I’m offering you a job.”
“I don’t want it,” said Harold. “Besides, I’m neither reliable nor honest.”
“Oh, I expect you are,” said Dennis. “Most Englishmen like you are reliable when it’s someone else’s money they’re handling. There’s some book about how all the English are anally directed, which means they care madly about their own money, but wouldn’t touch anyone else’s.”
“I suppose bank robbers aren’t English.”
“Very often not, I dare say. Communists, most of them. What is robbery but the forcible sharing out of private property?”
“I’d rather like to rob a bank,” said Harold. “It would be rather interesting, wouldn’t it? I mean, as a challenge to one’s intellect.”
“Working for my uncle would be like robbing a bank. He’s offering unlimited travelling expenses and masses of pocket-money. He probably owns a state or two in America. He owns lots of islands you’ve never heard of in the West Indies.”
“It would be nice to go to America,” said Harold dreamily. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”
“Are you serious?” said Dennis. “I mean, Uncle Edward would probably like you.”
“No, no,” said Harold, alarmed. “Look, I really must go. Helen will be furious if I’m late again. And you’re beginning to wear thin as an excuse.”
“I hope she hates me,” said Dennis. “If there were more to her, I might manage to hate her back.”
“Good-bye. See you soon.”
“Oh, go away,” said Dennis. He got up and went to the bar.
Outside it was rather bright, the sun quite hot between some ugly clouds, like squeezes of purple toothpaste. Harold hoped strongly that the weather wasn’t going to break. He was supposed to start his holidays at the end of next week. It would be typical of it to turn nasty now.
He sighed as he got on the Lambretta. He really ought to try and make up his mind to be nicer to and about Helen or to give her up altogether. For a moment he thought of the vague open spaces which talk of America had brought to mind. But all that was romanticism. Real life was English girls, and their notion of fair-play in the sex-war: all men should start with their right hands tied behind their backs with unbreakable throngs of gentlemanliness and decency. He could fail to turn up for the date, of course. But that wouldn’t help, she would simply come round to see where he’d got to, pretending she thought he must be ill. (At times it was definitely useful to be without a telephone. But then without a telephone one couldn’t even dial 999, and to fail to dial 999 when given the opportunity is to say No to the question of Life and something for which one can never forgive oneself.)
Fretting in the jammed streets of every Friday evening, he threaded his way towards Helen and a free dinner, with some unambitious and already, in the imagination, tedious copulation to follow. He pretended he was a cowboy and his Lambretta a horse, but the illusion only made traffic-lights more irritating.