5

Mr Nox was hunched and rounded, wizened like a nut. He suffered from rheumatism in the winter, but during these hot summer months he had come into his own and felt he had the advantage of his fellows: he scarcely noticed the heat. Only when the blisters rose on the backs of his hands would he glance above him to confirm that the trouble came from a sun that was too naked in the sky. His small flat was neat and clean, every book in its place, every pencil sharpened for use. He did the work himself, made his bed, carried laundry to the launderette, sewed on his buttons, cooked his food, and twice a week ran a vacuum-cleaner over his carpets. He had been productive all his life, and had won, he felt, his way in the world. He intended to go on that way, to make no changes except the ones that were forced upon him, to earn money, though it was not much, until his brain stopped, bogged in senility. Mr Nox took pupils. He taught them mathematics or, if they preferred, Italian. He did not visit; his pupils came to him. He was urged to take more by the agency that sent them, but he wished only to work in the mornings: he knew it was easy to become fatigued and he wished to spare his strength, to spread it over several years rather than wear it away all at once. He had never taught until he reached retirement, but he found that he was good at it and he made his charges high. His pupils themselves said he was good; good as a tutor but a little dry as a man. They thought him humourless, for he did not often smile; and when he had taught them what they wished to know they tended to forget that he had played a part in their lives.

Mr Nox’s bell rang. He greeted the man who stood at the door with the suggestion that they should spend the hour in the sun on the roof. The man, whose name was Swingler, seemed a little doubtful. He considered that the roof, cased as it was in lead, would be, at midday, somewhere to avoid. ‘As you wish,’ murmured Mr Nox, wiping the cream from the backs of his hands with a handkerchief. ‘I had prepared myself for the roof, but no matter. Sit down and tell me what, if anything, you have to tell.’

‘This time again there is nothing, I am afraid. I have drawn a series of blanks. You must take my word for it that I have worked carefully on your behalf.’

‘Indeed. I have no option but to take your word.’

A month ago the agency had sent along Swingler. He wished, he said, to learn Italian because he felt Italian would help him in his business.

‘I know little of Italian business expressions,’ Mr Nox had said, ‘having never had to use them.’

‘I am not in that kind of business.’ Swingler scratched the palm of his left hand with the fingernails of the right, making a noise as he did so. ‘I am a private investigator. I run a small detective agency. Specializing in divorce really.’

Mr Nox had given him his first Italian lesson without thinking further about his pupil’s profession. But the second time he came he questioned him more closely.

‘You say divorce, Mr Swingler. But you take on other cases, I presume? What kind of investigating do you do beyond divorce?’

Again there was the scratching of the left palm and a twitching began in Swingler’s face, for he was a nervous man.

‘Very little, Mr Nox, beyond divorce. Marital troubles are, as you might say, my bread and butter. Mainly I watch people. A husband for a wife, a wife for a husband. I follow the party here and there, check on liaisons, observe, report. We do get the occasional case of someone who is dodgy in the business world, embezzling and that. And once in a while there is a wretched creature who is being blackmailed. Cases, you know, where discretion is necessary, which the police could not be trusted in. Our telegraphic address is Discretion, London.’

‘Would you watch a man for me?’

Swingler was surprised. Anything was business if it was honest, he said. He laughed nervously.

‘I will make a deal with you, Mr Swingler. I will teach you Italian in return for your professional services. How does that strike you? All fees, except your expenses, to be foregone on either side. Does the proposition interest you?’

‘All propositions interest me, Mr Nox, you know.’ He laughed again, as though apologizing for himself.

‘Good. Then here are the details. There is a man who in the interests of a small proportion of the public must be promptly discredited. I need not dot all the i’s. He seeks a position for which he is unworthy, let us say that and no more. I have reason to believe that there are things in his life which do not bear scrutiny. It may well be that to you the habit I am about to describe is a common one and widely practised, but to the others in this affair it is enough to make them think again. Would you like to make a note, Mr Swingler? The man’s name is Jaraby, he lives at 10 Crimea Road, SW17. Mr Jaraby is in the running for the presidency of a certain society, an association of Old Boys of a certain school. Now a position like that calls for impeccable respectability, as the position of headmaster does, or that of a judge. You understand me, Mr Swingler?’

Swingler nodded sagely, agreeing, and intimating that he understood.

‘This man Jaraby is an old man, older than I am. Say about seventy-two or three. He sees me, rightly, as an enemy and, wishing to ingratiate himself with me, he some months ago offered to do me a favour. Not to put too fine a point on it, he offered to introduce me to a brothel. He claimed it was a good, clean place and went into some details about the nature of the services offered. I declined, but found the information interesting. You may say that Jaraby, having made this offer to me, had given me all I needed. But you do not know Jaraby: he is a wily bird, and it is my word against his. We are all elderly men, Mr Swingler; we see in each other the possibility of poor memory and misunderstood words. Jaraby would talk himself out of my accusation as it now stands. What I need is proof, what I need is your report, signed and sealed and irrefutable. I need it in writing from a disinterested person that Mr Jaraby’s practice is to visit a house of ill-fame.’ Mr Nox had half hoped that Swingler would say that that was easily achieved; that all he had to do, if Mr Nox remembered the name and address of the place, was to sit down and cook the evidence. But Swingler was cagey; Swingler had a lot to lose. He said instead:

‘So you want me to watch Mr Jaraby and – excuse me, Mr Nox – catch him in the act?’

‘To see him enter the place once or twice would be quite sufficient.’

‘You will get no statements from the inmates. They will not give away their clients, or indeed themselves.’

‘That is not necessary. Just your statement on paper in combination with my reported conversation will damn him.’

‘It is a difficult job. I might watch the house for weeks before he made a visit.’

‘Ah, Mr Swingler, that is surely your problem.’

‘It might be simpler for me to approach matters from the other end, to strike up a friendship with one of the girls and get her to tip me off when he was due to arrive – assuming of course that he makes an appointment. It would have to be cunningly done and very sub rosa, if you know what I mean. Like I say, they will not split on their clients, but if I handle with care we might get round that one.’

‘Jaraby pressed the address on me. I can let you have that.’

‘A help, Mr Nox, a help.’

But as events turned out it was little help at all. The girl with whom Swingler struck up a friendship revealed that clients came and went and no one was the wiser. One might serve a man for twenty years and yet not know his name. And there was no appointments system.

‘So there is still nothing to report?’ Mr Nox said on this particular occasion. ‘You are keeping an eye on him, though?’

‘The trouble is, Mr Nox, I cannot cast a wide net. I do not have the personnel to watch the house and our party’s movements constantly. I have chosen certain times and devoted an hour or so to surveillance. He shops himself for vegetables, that I can tell you, but alas, little else.’

‘The vegetables do not interest me at all. It is clear he slips away while you are elsewhere. Now, have you any suggestions?’

‘Sooner or later I should catch him. We call it making a strike. Or what I may do is leave him for a while and then devote a week or more to the business. Except that we do not know how frequently he visits. The law of averages is only half on our side.’

‘Time is running out. I may have to give you more lessons in Italian and ask you to intensify the operation.’

‘I would watch the house you say he goes to rather than his own, except that he may have changed it or likes variety. I think a lot about the case. I feel that light will break sooner or later.’

‘Sooner, Mr Swingler, rather than later. As I say, time is running out.’

‘Or I may have an idea. It may be that we are approaching this from altogether the wrong angle. How would it be if we tempted him?’

‘Tempted him?’

‘With a woman of the kind he fancies. A casual meeting in a café or something.’

‘You know best. We may have to resort to that, but I do not greatly care for the sound of it. It is his own rope with which Jaraby should hang himself.’

‘Any port in a storm, Mr Nox.’

‘I need evidence. I will leave it to you to sort out how you come by it. After all, it is your job.’ But Swingler, who was getting on well with his Italian, was in no hurry.

When his pupil had gone Mr Nox cooked chops for his lunch. He did not like Swingler. He had got into the habit of washing his hands when Swingler left the flat. He did not like him because he could not explain to him. Swingler would not understand if he said: ‘It is simply that I bear a grudge against Jaraby. He is well fitted for the task before him and should acquit himself nicely. To be wholly truthful, I am doing the Association a disservice by attempting to bring all this to light. There are skeletons in all our cupboards, Jaraby’s is no worse than any other.’ He could not admit to Swingler that he cared little himself for the Association, that if a less able man than Jaraby were chosen it would not matter to him as long as Jaraby was shamed in the process. Some devil within him had urged him to get himself on to the committee, so that he might, by some chance that had not then been apparent, cook Jaraby’s goose. Jaraby was an influence in his life, but he could only confess it to himself. Jaraby was a ghost he had grown sick and tired of, which he could lay only by triumphing in some pettiness.

Unlike the other man, Mr Nox was not lonely. He was alone in the world and would die unmourned, but he had faced loneliness as a boy and come to terms with it then. It was like getting over measles, knowing that they had taken their toll but would not return. As he walked about his flat, seeing to his needs, he felt that he had never been young; that his life had been a mere preparation for the state he now found himself in, that this was his realm and was no imposition. As with the heat of the present months, he had the advantage over those who had grown old with him; they at an ebb, he at a flow. When he sighted himself in a mirror he knew that this was as he was meant to be, not the cranky child or the man of middle age. And often when Mr Nox reflected on these things he concluded that in his time of power he should crow over Jaraby, as Jaraby in his power had crowed over him. There was a logic and a justice in nature; he could not see that nature might be otherwise. It was not even so much the long memory of the ill Jaraby had done him that caused Jaraby to linger in his mind; it was the redress of a balance that had slumped so far out of true as to offend the senses. To tidy a human situation, that was all Mr Nox desired.

He shredded cabbage and timed its cooking. As he stood by the stove his one nagging regret slipped irritatingly into his thoughts. His life had been ordinary. He would have liked to have written his memoirs, but he knew there was nothing to write. ‘The tragedy,’ he sighed, ‘of those who come into their own too late.’