As far as I could tell, Shirley had never held a grudge about our lapsed romance. It was my fault it ended. By the end of the summer before I went up to Cambridge I’d been bored. I slept with one of her friends, who then saved me the trouble of telling Shirley myself. Shirley didn’t seem surprised. While I was away at university she wrote me the occasional letter about what she was reading and listening to, hardly referring to our relationship. Whenever we ran into each other on my occasional visits home, she seemed happy to flirt in her slow-motion way, sometimes as if we were the vaguest of acquaintances, at others as if passion must soon overtake us. I retained a guilty fondness for her, and I was afraid of what might be in store for her, which I thought might be nothing much. Her position at Vlaminck’s suggested that I was right. But it was not my business to save anyone, having failed to save myself, was it?
Men, so far as I knew, partly from Smallbone’s observations, seemed to come and go in Shirley’s life without commitment or on their part or resentment on hers. They were a mixture – layabouts from the local university, a trawlerman, at one point a failed priest-turned-librarian. She remained attractive in a half-aware way, always beautifully dressed and made up, as if the call might at any moment come to be somewhere else. Of course she would never really strike out on her own account, though I gathered she had moved out of her mother’s to an address I hadn’t bothered to discover. When I visited the shop she was happy to advise me on my purchases. At that time I was collecting all and any editions of Greene, Ambler and Geoffrey Household, as well as occasional rarer items, all of which she had read and remembered. She absorbed books as she smoked dope – in large quantities, content to go on doing so, rarely expressing any opinion beyond yes or no.
Now, from her position at the bar, she raised in my direction a glass of Babycham that had been poured the moment she arrived. The two men looked incuriously over at me for a moment. Claes raised his hat formally as if I were a stranger. I had never seen Shirley mixing socially with her employer. The combination seemed faintly monstrous. She smiled at me, then turned back as Claes resumed his monologue.
‘Drinking alone?’ asked Smallbone as he climbed breathlessly on to the stool next to mine. He smoked too much.
‘If I’m left in peace to get on with it and have a read at the paper.’
‘I’ll have a brown mix,’ he said. I caught Stan’s attention. Smallbone lit a Regal and looked about him critically. He was getting fat, working in his mother’s stamp shop, ‘pro tem’, as he put it, since completing his own history degree at the local university just as les evenements erupted in local form on the campus with the occupation of the Senate House in protest at the university’s investments in South Africa. He made me feel like a monster of ambition. Smallbone’s father had been a Labour councillor, in the teeth of his wife’s Daily Express-minded antagonism. Perhaps seeing the advantages of a quiet life, Bone himself affected the Telegraph (which he claimed had the best racing coverage) but admired Anthony Crosland. At least, unlike me, he had politics of a sort. He seemed to have given up reading, though, in favour of following the horses and going to the dog track in the far-off east end of the city, as well as committing himself to an exhaustive and indiscriminate pursuit of the opposite sex. The day would come soon enough, he had explained, when he could not get his hole, so until then what was the point of wasting time on things of the mind?
‘Oh aye. They’re in, then,’ he said, nodding towards the group in the snug.
‘I can’t work out what Shirley’s doing with that lot,’ I said. ‘Socially, I mean.’
‘Perhaps that’s where she gets her dope. Or maybe she’s become one of them.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t care about that sort of thing. Not as far as I know. She just thinks people should be nice to each other.’
Bone adopted an Ed Murrow voice. ‘Democracy is under threat tonight, not from Hitler’s bombs but an equally deadly source. For the Munich beer-hall read Greenland Street. The fascists, for which read the British Patriotic Party, are putting up a candidate in the by-election, using the democratic process in order to threaten democracy itself. Good night and good luck.’
‘They’ll lose their deposit,’ I said.
‘I dare say,’ said Bone. ‘But they’re vicious bastards. And they’ve got Allingham standing, after all. Someone people are likely to have heard of. Another Old Blakean, of course. Not that Blake’s advertise it.’
‘No, but his books are all in the library. He sends them. Vegetarianism, indecisive battles, the Jewish plot. The last sort don’t get put on display, of course. How serious are this BPP lot, really, compared with Allingham? It sounds like playacting.’
‘Depends how you define it. They are play-acting, but they seem to mean it anyway. That business last year with the petrol bomb thrown through the window at the hostel where the Nigerian medics stay – you were still away at the time – Claes’s little band were meant to have done it.’
‘This is according to your mother, I take it?’
‘One thing my mother has got is sources. That’s probably why she walks that way. Anyway, she probably agrees with Claes and his lot. She thinks the Nigerian medics are taking our boys’ jobs. She’s not very sophisticated in her analysis.’
‘I suppose not. And the police did nothing.’
‘Not enough evidence, apparently – not that they’d care about a gang of coons.’ I stared at him. ‘I mean, that’s how the police would look at it. You know what they’re like. But it got in the paper, with a photograph of Claes and his goon squad, composed of Lurch and a few others in camouflage gear, stood round this old half-track they’ve got parked in a yard somewhere, preparing to go on manoeuvres on the Plain of Axness. They said they were unjustly blamed because they’re English patriots. Which Claes isn’t, of course. And where the hell did Lurch spring from?’
‘East of the river, obviously. Your stamping ground.’
‘Piss off,’ said Bone amiably. ‘I go there for anthropological reasons.’
The city was divided by a muddy trench, the Ouse. Dwellers in the east were known to be inbred lunatics. According to Smallbone, however, the web-footed women were strangely susceptible to his indefinable charms.
‘How many of this lot are there?’ I asked. ‘I mean, running about in old lorries . . .’
‘Who knows? Depends on the state of the moon, I should think.’
‘But Shirley? I mean, she’s—’
‘A woman? No flies on you, are there? She is indeed. I’d give her one. It must be my turn one day.’
‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said. ‘You be nice about Shirley.’
‘Of course she’s a nice girl. All the better,’ said Smallbone, rubbing his hands together. ‘All the better for the Bone.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Now then, fair’s fair. You had your go.’
But Smallbone would have to wait. Rackham had just entered the snug. Over his shoulder hung a camera case. He said nothing but looked at Shirley in his bloodlessly amused way. She finished her drink and left, taking his arm. Claes carried on talking.
‘Now I’ve seen everything.’ Smallbone groaned. ‘That corpse Rackham. Is she fucking blind?’ Rackham was, in fact, rather handsome in his saturnine way.
‘De gustibus, I suppose. Rackham’s not actually a paid up one of them, is he?’ I asked, more nonchalantly than I felt. Rackham? But Shirley used to go out with me.
Smallbone shrugged. ‘Well, hardly. Not with the teaching, surely.’ In one of those unstated ways in which Blake’s was so effective, it was understood that staff did not undertake public political activity or make their allegiances known, though for the most part, Blake’s being Blake’s, these were self-evident. Rackham had not precisely breached this protocol, any more than he had committed any overt offence in the library. He had simply come in to meet a girl at the pub. He was too old for her, I thought, by a couple of decades. But he didn’t act or somehow look that way. Once again he was hard to place. Perhaps ‘act’ was the word: the cinema was full of leading men far older than their love interests.
‘He must be a wrong ’un, though, Bone. Look at the company he keeps.’
‘Yes, Maxwell, but look who’s talking, eh? Perhaps Rackham’s a fellow traveller, a dabbler, someone who gives them intellectual weight. Claes would like that. Rackham’s a poet, you tell me. Or else they want to have a go on his boat so they can claim to have a navy.’ Rackham was a keen sailor, active in the sailing club at Blake’s. His impressive motor yacht Lorelei was moored in the creek.
‘At the end of school today, when I was in the library, I think he meant to insult one of the sixth form, a Jewish boy, Feldberg,’ I said.
‘He’s the bright one, yeah? Samuel Feldberg’s lad.’
I described what had happened. It seemed to grow vaguer in the telling, though my disquiet hadn’t gone away.
‘Did the boy complain?’ Bone asked, putting on his overcoat.
‘No, he didn’t.’ I stood. Bone turned away, eager for the off, but I hesitated and he turned back. ‘It was something and nothing. But I was there. I saw it. I told Feldberg off for being insolent in return.’
‘Well, then.’
‘Well, then, what?’
‘Well, then, actually I dunno, Maxwell. Is it important? You said it was something and nothing. And the staff always have to back each other up. You know that. Let it go.’
‘It wasn’t quite nothing.’
‘And now you seem to be feeling guilty. Not much use, though, is it?’
‘I think I told Feldberg off because I didn’t do anything about Rackham.’
‘That’s too subtle for me. But there’s not much you can do now, is there?’
‘Perhaps I could talk to Feldberg.’
‘And say what? You’ll just look like a pillock. Let it go, man. He’s probably forgotten by now. Save it for another day. I’m just going for a quick recce of the bint situation.’
Smallbone, I suspected, would be intending to buy some contraceptives. The local chemist would probably have informed his mother if he’d tried it there. Given the implacable, grasping disposition of the rusted machine in the Gents he might be a little while. And if there were any women he knew in the bar, it would further extend the delay while he rehearsed a few introductory moves.
I ordered another half. The street door opened and Maggie Rowan came in.