I dislike good-byes.
Why should a man invoke the Deity because he is moving his unimportant self from one place to another ?
My cousin Michael, who is used to my habits, takes no offence if I fail to do the conventional thing and I can still enjoy a very occasional week-end with him in his converted rectory in Kent. He is the mildest of men and makes his living by writing thrillers. It is a pleasure to see him at work, seated in what was once the rector’s study, gleaming kindly through his horn-rimmed spectacles at the hollyhocks and lupins which frame the croquet lawn.
Michael has a wife, a small, resolute, woman with the spirit of a grenadier and four fat daughters. I have none of these things. That is why I can only visit him very occasionally, for I am sure to come away disliking myself.
I got up at six o’clock. One of the fat daughters was singing a hymn but otherwise the house was quiet. I made myself some tea and started on the five mile walk to the station through the Kent countryside. The countryside was wide awake; it is only authors and business men who can afford to waste in bed the lovely hours between sunrise and breakfast time.
It took me a little under sixty minutes to reach the station and I was in plenty of time for the eight-three. This, I can only suppose, was the business train. When I got into the first class carriage (a non-smoker; I have not that particular vice myself and see no reason why I should tolerate it in others) it was empty. But as we stopped at station after little station it filled up, and I realised that I was in an exclusive sort of club. In fact, I am not sure that I had not stolen the oldest member’s seat. The other members were very upset about it.
They settled down after a bit, and took up the conversation, where they had left it off when they got to Victoria the morning before. Being unable to join in I contented myself with studying their faces. There were superficial differences but really they were the same face. The dropped and multiplied chins, the pursed mouths, the eyes which tried to look worldly but succeeded only in looking greedy and frightened. Little, tired eyes of men who spent their working days sitting in swivel chairs in over-heated offices thinking about money. I should have been hard put to it to say which of them I fancied least.
The svelte man in the corner with white hair, pince-nez glasses and an authoritative manner of speaking which he must have picked up from years of laying down the law to people who depended on him for their daily bread. Or the fat man with the pink tip of his nose – a tiny, unheeded, warning light showing what would happen to him if he persisted in absorbing more carbohydrates than his body could burn; or the military type, with field officer moustache and a velvet coat collar who was repeating, with the tired ferocity of a bilious tiger that all strikers were Communists and all Communists ought to be shot down. Not shot; shot down. Apparently an important distinction.
“I was lunching with Herbert the other day,” said the white haired man, “and he told me, but you’d better not pass it on,”— (since I didn’t belong to the Club I was presumably supposed to be deaf as well)—”that the Government are contemplating – definitely contemplating – legislation in the next session.”
“How do you stop strikes by legislation?” asked the military type.
“Quite simple. By restoring the full legal effect of the contract of service between employer and employee. Then any strike becomes a breach of contract, and the strikers become liable in damages. The damages would have to be paid out of union funds, which would soon be exhausted. No union funds, no strike pay. No strike pay, no strike.”
The fat man said that it sounded all right but he didn’t mind betting that the Government didn’t do it.
“They must do it,” said the white haired dictator. “Do you know how much my firm lost in the last strike?”
No one knew, so he told them.
A thin man, who had not spoken up till now, said that he saw from his paper that radioactive fish were being caught in the Pacific.
They worried about radioactive fish until the train got to Victoria.
I walked from Victoria Station to Penny’s flat in Paulton’s Square. (And if you think that Penny is a silly woman’s-magazine sort of name I entirely agree with you. And it is remarkably appropriate to this particular bearer of it.)
It was well past nine when I got there and the City boys were streaming out in their bowler hats and striped trousers with all the cares of the world in their brief-cases; but not much sign of life from Penny’s flat. I picked up the paper and milk and opened the door with my key and went in.
All the washing up which had accumulated since Friday evening was piled neatly in the kitchen. She was a methodical slut. I contemplated for a moment washing it up myself, but refrained. She would only look at me out of her melting eyes and say, “Oh darling, how sweet of you.”
I went into the bedroom. She was lying on her side with one pillow in the small of her back and the other under her shoulder and enough of her left breast showing to emphasise the relationship between us. The female breast is not, in itself, in my opinion an attractive sight, least of all at nine o’clock in the morning.
I removed two pairs of stockings from the low chair by the electric fire and sat down.
“Did you have a lovely, lovely week-end?”
“Lovely, lovely.”
“All those sweet children. It makes me maternal to think of them. Oughtn’t we to start one.”
“Right now, do you mean?”
“Well, no. But soon. Then you’d have to make an honest woman of me.”
“I have never been able to see where honesty comes into that particular transaction.”
“Darling, you sound grumpy.”
“I am grumpy.”
“Liver?”
“My liver is in perfect order. It just so happens that I travelled up in the train with a carriage full of people, and I started by thinking how terrible they were, and suddenly I wondered if that was what I was going to look like myself in ten years’ time.”
“Were they bloody?”
“Beyond description.” I thought for a moment to get them straight in my own mind. “They had neither the disciplined carefulness of professional men nor the undisciplined carelessness of artists. They were foaled by Money out of Timidity. They looked like burst brown paper bags.”
“It was your own fault. You should have travelled third class and enjoyed yourself. And for goodness sake stop exaggerating. There’s nothing wrong with business men. They were probably quite nice when you got to know them.”
“Kind to their families, church wardens and pillars of the local Conservative party.”
“Well, what’s wrong with people like that? Your father’s a church warden and a J.P.”
“What’s my father got to do with it?”
“Look, Philip.” She sat up in bed and I knew she was going to say something tricky. “I saw your father on Saturday—”
“You what!”
“Don’t be angry before I’ve told you. He asked to see me. I didn’t see why not. I think he’s very nice.”
“For God’s sake—”
“He wasn’t shocked, or anything like that.”
“That’s not the point.”
I found I was starting to shout, and took a hold of myself.
“What exactly are you trying to do? First you talk of children, and then you rush off to see my family. What are you? An aspiring young bride?”
“Don’t be horrid.”
“I told you not to see my father.”
“He knew all about us.”
“He knows all about myxomatosis. But he doesn’t want diseased rabbit served up for breakfast.”
“Darling. What a horrible thing to say.”
“The facts are clear enough anyway. You gave me a promise and you’ve broken it.”
I got up and pulled out my suitcase from behind the wardrobe.
I have very little use for material possessions. I keep a few spare clothes, things like my dinner jacket and my climbing kit, at the Club and I have odd garments and changes of linen scattered about in the houses of friends and relations; never more than will go in a single suitcase. Possessions attach you. Get rid of them and you take a step towards non-attachment.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Packing. Where did I leave my hairbrushes?”
“Where are you going?”
“Away.”
Penny sat up in bed abruptly.
“I believe you’re serious,” she said.
“Did I leave them in the bathroom? Of course I’m serious.”
They were in the bathroom. Also a dirty shirt and some soiled collars and handkerchiefs that I made into a bundle. The Club would be able to get them washed for me.
When I got back Penny was up. She had put on her dressing gown and, first reaction of women to a crisis, had very rapidly but skilfully made up her face.
“Got them,” I said. There was just room in the suitcase for everything.
“Darling,” she said, and there was an infinite tenderness in her voice. “I’ve just realised what’s happening. I’m dreaming all this, and in a minute I’m going to wake up.”
“You’ll wake up,” I agreed.
“But—”
“The rent’s paid to the end of the month. Not that it matters. You’ve got as much money as I have. This is the end of the instalment, Penny. I said if ever you tried to bring my family into this I’d leave you. You have and I am.”
“Is it possible that you’re being a little bit of a prig?”
“Quite possible,” I said.
“Then you’re really going? For ever?”
“For ever,” I said. “And ever.”
“You’re not even going to kiss me?”
“I don’t mind,” I said, “without prejudice.”
Two minutes later I was in the street. I got breakfast at a coffee stall and walked to my Club.
“You can have your usual room in the annexe,” the Secretary said. “Things are a bit easier now, but if you can give me any idea how long you’re likely to want it?”
“A fortnight at the outside,” I said.
I should be able to make any arrangements in that time.
At eleven o’clock I rang up the office.
Douglas answered the telephone himself. He seemed cheerful.
“I’ve just seen Carnwath,” he said, “and we’ve landed the hedge-trimming contract. Six machines, six crews, and one maintenance crew and one stores lorry. The whole outfit to be ready in three months’ time.”
“That’s good isn’t it,” I said.
“We’ll show thirty per cent clear of all overheads.”
“That on top of the Belsize contract makes it look like a record year.”
“Our only enemy,” said Douglas, “is going to be the tax collector.” But he said it cheerfully. Douglas is an accountant and enjoys fighting the tax collector. They speak the same language. I don’t think we ever do anything actually dishonest, but we seem to pay away less of our profits to the Revenue than any other company I’ve ever heard of.
“I don’t think I shall turn up today.”
“That’s all right,” said Douglas. “Everything’s under control. Why don’t you help yourself to a holiday.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
That was the trouble. Everything was under control. I don’t want you to get this wrong. Douglas plays absolutely fair with me. He works a twelve-hour day to my six-hour one, and we share every penny of the profits equally. My share brings me more money than I really know how to spend. But the fun has gone out of it.
When I formed the company, just after the War, it was really something. It was based on an idea I’d had that practically no one in the post-war world was going to be able to afford a gardener; or not enough gardeners for the garden they had to keep up. Acres of beds unweeded and lawns going back to rank grass, miles of hedges sprouting and un-trimmed.
We started by getting a licence for the sale in this country of a cheap American motor-mower. Then we got hold of the first really good automatic mower and weeder. It’s a Dutch machine; they built it for their tulip beds, and we adapted it and got a licence to manufacture it here.
Boy, did our troubles start then! With the mower we had only been middle-men. That’s easy. You can be a middle-man with one room, one typist, and a lot of nerve. But as soon as we started to manufacture we needed real money. That meant going to the City; and it meant debentures and preference shares and unsecured loans and arrangements of all sorts. And that’s where I brought Douglas in. I’d met him in the War and I knew he was a teetotaller and a chartered accountant. My impression was that he was an able chap; and I was right.
For four years we hung on by our eyelashes. There were big firms who didn’t like us cutting in. And some of them weren’t too scrupulous. It was a fight. I didn’t work a six-hour day then. Sometimes I didn’t get much sleep out of the whole twenty-four.
It was the Combine Hedge Clipper that put us on top. We didn’t sell it to people. We hired it to them, with a crew that knew how to work it. Not to small gardens, but big places. It paid very handsomely, and, as often as not, got us the other orders as well.
For some time now, I’d just sat back and let the money come in. I hadn’t realised, until that morning, that the whole idea had died on me.
Douglas, of course, wanted to go on. On to bigger and better things. I didn’t. I wanted to back-pedal, which, come to think of it, was the situation between me and Penny, too, in a nutshell.
The porter came into the coffee room where I was browsing through the early editions of the evening papers and said that Mrs. Pastonberry was asking for me. He had told her that he would ascertain if I was in the building.
(Mrs. Pastonberry is Penny. Mr. Pastonberry had been a very superior sort of wholesale grocer who had married Penny when she was eighteen and lived just long enough to endow her with his considerable worldly goods before passing away as the result, it was believed, of over-indulgence in his own port.)
“I hope that you didn’t say I was here.”
“Of course not, sir.”
Silly question really.
“Well, that’s all right. Because I’m not.”
I had lunch at the Polidor, rather a lengthy function as I met two people I knew. They had a spare girl with them and we made up a foursome. There was, I thought, a faint look of invitation in the spare girl’s eyes when we parted, but I disregarded it and went off to spend the afternoon at the zoo.
As an antidote to mental disequilibrium there is nothing like the aquarium. Through warm, uncounted hours I lingered, staring across the glass frontier into another world. A world of strange dimensions where Time did not exist, and it was as easy to go upwards and backwards as it was forwards and downwards. A frightening world where dwelt Esox Lucius, the Pike and Maia Maia, the spider crab. A world of shadows and half-lights in which you might encounter bustling little characters like the Trigger Fish and the Schoolmaster Snapper, witless oafs like Dollo’s lung fish or, for plain horror, Silurus, the Giant Catfish, who sits white eyed in the shadow of his rocky chamber, his thick whiskers trembling as he dreams of ancient evil.
When I got back to the Club the porter said, “Mrs. Pastonberry called, sir.”
“She actually came here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you do with her?”
“We put her in the small committee room.”
“That was rather drastic. How long did she survive?”
“She left approximately forty minutes later, sir.”
“She’s tougher than I thought.”
The small committee room is a terrible apartment. It contains two hundred volumes of Punch, which have been specially bound for the Club in half-yearly numbers in black buckram with the Club’s crest on the spine; a buffalo’s head with one eye, and no windows of any sort. Even bailiffs have been removed from it screaming in less than thirty minutes.
I went up to dress for dinner.
In the morning, Penny telephoned again.
This time, for a change, I decided I would take the call.
She sounded cross.
“I tried three times to get hold of you yesterday,” she said.
“I got the messages,” I said.
“I don’t believe you were out at all.”
“I assure you I was. I went to the zoo in the afternoon and the Crazy Gang in the evening.”
“Stop behaving like a fool.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
“Come back here, of course.”
“Penny,” I said. “You’re not trying. I told you. Remember? I’m not coming back.”
“Well come out from behind that terrible Club so that I can get hold of you.”
“One of the reasons men belong to Clubs is to protect them from people like you.”
“That bloody porter. When I ring up now he sounds just as if he thought I was a tart.”
“Well—” I said, diplomatically.
The slam of the receiver going back nearly deafened me.
I retired to the morning room and opened The Times. There was no need to hurry. If Douglas wanted me for anything he could ring me.
The first thing I saw was the advertisement. It was at the top of the Personal Column and it said: “Attention, Philip. If you want to know the inner story, go to Twickenham and see Henry. Colin.”
It was for all the world as if one of the figures in Madame Tussauds had stepped smartly from its dais, raised its head, and addressed me by name.
I sat for a few minutes, staring at it, in an idiotic way as if I hoped the letters might themselves say something. I even cast my eye down the column to see if there might be anything further addressed to me; but this was the only one.
“Attention, Philip—”
I went over to the rack where the back numbers were stored. It was in Monday’s paper too. I must have been too pre-occupied to notice it. Monday was the first time though. I went back through several weeks to make sure of that.
Then I put on my hat and went out quickly.
The commissionaire in the glass hutch at the top of the stairs asked me, with all the courtesy for which this great newspaper is famous, if I would be good enough to wait. He showed me into a cubicle which had the air of an exceptionally well-appointed confessional, and said that Mr. Satterley would be along soon.
In due course Mr. Satterley appeared. He was tiny. Smaller even than me and I am no size at all. A humming bird of a man. Neat, bright and poised.
“You came about an announcement in our Personal Column,” he said.
“That’s right, it’s one which appeared today. Yesterday too, I believe.”
I took out the copy of the paper and showed it to him.
Mr. Satterley said, “And you are interested in Axminster carpets?”
“Not that one. The one before. The first one in the column.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I wondered if you could tell me anything about it.”
“There is not usually a great deal to tell,” said Mr. Satterley, politely. “We usually accept such—er—announcements, by post. Provided that they seem to us to be genuine, and not objectionable in any way – you’d be surprised how often they contain a ‘double entendre’ – we really become quite expert at spotting them.”
“I don’t think this one is a leg-pull,” I said.
“No. No. It certainly seemed genuine.”
We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
Nevertheless it seemed to me that Mr. Satterley was stalling. He had not said, right out, as he easily could have done, “This announcement was sent by post.” I felt that the time had come to abandon finesse.
“Do you know anything about the person who put this one in?”
“I’m afraid,” said Mr. Satterley, “that I must ask you a question in return. What is your interest in the matter?”
“I can answer that without any difficulty. I have every reason to suppose that I am the Philip to whom the message is addressed and, if I am right about that it was put in by Colin Studd-Thompson.”
“Studd-Thompson. Yes.”
“Did he come here with it himself?”
“Yes, he did.” Mr. Satterley looked at me over his glasses and added, “I knew Mr. Studd-Thompson very well, of course.”
I nodded. I was aware of Colin’s connection with The Times. One of his uncles, or maybe great uncles, had been a distinguished foreign editor.
“He instructed me that if anyone came to inquire about the advertisement, claiming to be the Philip to whom it was addressed, I was to ask him a question.”
“Ask away.”
“I was to ask who Henry was.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “Henry is a woman. A charming and accomplished person of uncertain age who was at one time governess to Colin and his brother. Later on she was a governess in our family. We called her Henry because she was the eighth.”
“The psychology of young children is a fascinating study,” said Mr. Satterley.
He took off his glasses, polished them with little, darting, movements, replaced them securely on his nose and said: “How can I help you?”
“I’m not too sure. To start with, it was news to me that Colin had been in England lately.”
“I’m afraid that does not follow. This announcement was delivered to us – let me see – more than two months ago. Nearer three.”
“Then how did it come to be put in on this particular date?”
“Our instructions were, that if we did not hear from Mr. Studd-Thompson by the last day of any week, we were to insert the announcement during the whole of the week following.”
In silence I tried to think this out. Silence so absolute that I could suddenly hear a woman speaking quite clearly two rooms away. She was accepting an announcement for the Births Column and seemed to be making heavy going of it.
“I take it, then,” I said at last, “that when he failed to get through to you—”
“We heard from him regularly for nine weeks.”
“So you know where he is – or was?”
“I’m afraid not. The messages were sent through our foreign correspondents. The last three came from Rome – but that does not mean that Mr. Studd-Thompson was necessarily in Italy.”
“I see. And last Friday – or Saturday – you got no message at all—”
“That is correct.”
“It may have been delayed.”
“Possibly. Our messages are not often delayed. And in any event our instructions were categoric. If we had not heard by midnight on Saturday, the announcement had to be inserted on Monday – and for the five days following.”
“G-o-t-t—” said the shrill voice.
“It is really rather a remarkable circumstance,” went on Mr. Satterley. “Owing to the peculiar way in which this matter has been arranged you are probably the only person in England who is in a position to find out exactly what has happened to Mr. Studd-Thompson.”
“—f-r-i-e-d. That’s right. As in fried bread.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I’m very much obliged to you.”