Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper Page 9

  ‘O.K. I’ll pay in notes.’

  He carted vast sums about with him, it was a sort of complex after all those frightful years of sitting on divans wondering how far he could make 1s 8d go, let’s see, ten Gold Flake, a pint of Mild, a packet of notepaper, or else …

  ‘Thank you very much, sir. I’ll make you out a receipt.’

  ‘Right you are, old lad!’

  But he wandered out of the shop and down the hill, forgetting the receipt and his change, which was duly waiting for him when he did in fact move in. The block of flats were called Addison Heights, which wasn’t a bad idea, they were nine storeys high, and looked pretty imposing. The moment he went through the swing doors he felt pretty good, as one often did under the influence of the magical word Change. He would have a bit of a binge, ask simply everyone he knew, and tell them all to bring friends, and they’d have a good time, they’d all swim in gin and whisky, providing the shops had any left still. He’d play the piano for them, and he might even croon! His spirits rose. There was a warm, homely smell about Addison Heights, despite the newness and cleanness of everything and everyone, and he hoped he would be able to make his flat have the illusion of homeliness. And if, in the middle of the party, the bell rang and he opened the door and a sinister figure stood there, well, that was part of the drama of the time, and it was what he was playing for, was it not? Are you Mr Bowling? Yes, what can I do for you? This is Scotland Yard, and I have called in connection with the death of Harold Winthrop, at Number Forty.

  The party would break up into little, frightened groups.

  It would soon be buzzing.

  ‘I say—poor old Bill’s been arrested!’

  ‘What, dear? Arrested?’

  They’d see him marched off. He’d smile, hiding his handcuffs with his mackintosh.

  ‘It’s nothing, some mistake, I expect, don’t worry? Have a good time—or I shall worry. Queenie, you’ll look after them …?’

  He went through the swing doors and half a dozen porters in amber uniforms touched their caps respectfully.

  It was so very nice.

  CHAPTER IX

  ALICE wept what he called Elephant Tears, when he left, seizing him in a starchy embrace in the hall, and vowing she would never look at another man as long as she lived. He told her, well, that wasn’t long, was it, not unkindly, but it was so obvious, and he reminded her that she’d had a pretty good innings. ‘And don’t forget those railings have been removed, Alice,’ he wagged a finger at her. ‘Don’t want to find yourself on your back on the wet grass!’ She pouted and sulked, complaining that he hadn’t even told her where he was going, or where his letters were to be posted to. ‘Not likely!’ he said. He gave her a kiss and left.

  With Joan it had been much worse, and there had been no kiss. She’d wept too, making him explode with: ‘Was ever man so loved as I am!’ with an ironical, twisted expression on his face. He got angry with Joan, refusing to tell her where he was going, either, and refusing to promise to visit her at Smith’s.

  ‘Now my dear,’ he told her, ‘I’m not going to tell you I’m coming when I know jolly well I’m not coming!’

  ‘Please come,’ she begged.

  ‘I am not coming! And that’s that!’

  ‘I think you’re a swine!’

  ‘You must think what you like, old thing,’ he sighed, and did up his valise.

  ‘At least tell me where you’re going, Bill?’she implored.

  He said, bored, ‘Oh, Guildford, if I must say something.’

  ‘I’ll write you G.P.O., Guildford,’ she said at once, and when he had gone sat down weeping and writing to him at Guildford. ‘Darling Bill, I’m so lonely, please be kind …’ and the very next morning, after she’d kissed it and posted it, ran slap into him strolling along the High Street there, without a hat and coat. She was furious. ‘I thought you said you were going to Guildford, Bill? Of all the mean, lowdown tricks, and of all the mean …!’

  He bolted up a side street, her after him, and the public looking interested. They chased along and found themselves in Holland Walk. He ran like a hedgehog, and she ran like a hare, and was soon up to him in her red and green hat, saying how they were made for each other, and why couldn’t he be decent and give a girl a break.

  He felt strangely amused, running like this about London, and leaned up against the fence to get his breath back.

  ‘When the blitz was on,’ he commented, panting, ‘I was walking up here one night, and a shower of incendiaries dropped all round the bally place. There was a fire on the roof of one place, and I knocked the people up and helped put it out. When I’d finished, the old cow said, thanks so much, do you mind carrying these buckets downstairs before you go, I do dislike them up here. I said, but of course, madam, but mayn’t I wash up the dinner things before I go? … It was the night before that place was burnt out,’ he said, pointing at Holland House.

  ‘Bill, couldn’t we be together? A sort of trial? I know I could make you happy.’

  ‘No one can make me happy,’ he snapped in sudden anger, and started to stride off.

  Perplexed, she stared after him, her sad little voice wailing:

  ‘Oh … Bill …!’

  He had a violent reaction against the flat when he got in, and decided it was inhuman and cold. ‘It doesn’t breathe,’ he thought in sudden despair.

  He stared about it, wandering up and down the little hall and passage, liking the brown carpet, and liking the velvet curtains, and liking the pictures, such few as were there, Venice, and a boy in brown clothes staring at a blue sky, and at a Surrealist cat looking as if it didn’t know whether to have kittens or go to the pictures. The room with the balcony was nice, the bedroom was nice, the other little room was nice, and the bathroom was nice, and the kitchen was nice and had a nice electric kettle and a long distance view of the roof of the former Earls Court Exhibition.

  But it was cold and unfriendly to him and he felt it didn’t like him.

  When he discovered that it was a cold day for July, and turned the pipes on, he had an idea it was friendlier, even though it thought him a trifle eccentric.

  Then he decided that it hadn’t got enough of his personality in it yet, and not enough of his things. He played the piano for a bit, jumped up and thought he would do a tremendous shopping expedition. For once, he wished Joan was there, to help him, but to ask her would be fatal.

  He went shopping on his own, buying masses of clothes, cigars, drinks, anything that wasn’t too severely rationed, and brought the lot home in a taxi. ‘I feel like Father Christmas,’ he told the porter who helped him in, and felt brighter. But the moment the porter went, the flat was silent and sulky and didn’t make a sound of any kind at all. It just threw shadows at him, shadows of himself. ‘Oh, my God,’ he thought, and stood staring at his parcels. The flat didn’t want his parcels. ‘What’s the good of being Father Christmas,’ he thought, ‘if there’s nobody to give anything to?’ He thought: ‘I’ll go out again, or I shall go nuts!’ When the door bell rang, he jumped as if somebody had let off a Tommy-gun. He instantly thought of the police and felt his hands go clammy. He felt glad, in a way. ‘Oh, heck,’ he whispered to himself, and walked slowly to the front door and opened it. But it was only the porter once again, wanting to know if he needed the daily cleaner, any laundry collected, and would he subscribe to the Red Cross Penny A Week Fund?

  ‘Yes, old boy, rather,’ he said to everything, and presently got his hat and tootled along to see old Queenie.

  Her husband was out and she was having a bath.

  They had a chat through the half open door, Queenie saying not to come in, she wasn’t a sight for young eyes any more, and laughing.

  ‘I want to throw a party,’ he called through. ‘I’ve got a new flat, old dear, and I want you to be kind of hostess.’

  She was delighted.

  ‘A party? What fun! Of course I will! When?’

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he called. Through the cr
ack in the door he saw her soaping her knees. One of her knees had a whitish scar where she had come a cropper off her scooter as a child.

  She went in for huge soap tablets and an enormous loofah.

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t put me up for tonight, my dear?’ he called.

  ‘Tonight?’ she called, surprised. ‘What’s wrong with the flat, then?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno! They’re having the drains up,’ he improvised, laughing a little and saying candidly, ‘no, I’m lonesome tonight!’

  ‘Silly ass,’ she said. ‘Of course you can stay, dear, if you want to, you know that, Rodney’ll be pleased to see you.’

  ‘Where is the old warhorse?’

  ‘He’ll be in directly.’

  ‘He doesn’t like me, does he?’

  ‘What? He thinks you don’t like him!’

  The evening was alcoholic but unsensational.

  He spent the whole of the next morning with Queenie fixing up with people they knew to come to the party, such as were not in the Forces and so on. ‘Better call it a bottle party,’ Queenie had decided, ‘just in case of shortage.’

  He felt better.

  When he went back to the flat, he thought it was better pleased with him. A Belgian refugee was waiting to do the cleaning, a round woman in a green overall, who could not speak any English. She was sad and didn’t smile, and when he admitted her, just got on with everything as if she had been there all her life. When she saw the chaos of bottles and glasses next morning, her expression didn’t change, she just got on with the washing-up.

  … The party was a success. Nothing happened to make it so, it just was. Nothing happened of any kind. People talked and drank, and for two hours it seemed to be gathering impetus as if to reach some interesting and culminating point, such as a cabaret or stage turn, but nothing happened beyond the glasses being filled again, and then it seemed to have reached high level, where it happily remained, a drone of contented voices, alcoholic giggles, and a density of smoke which could not be released on account of the blackout. They opened the front door and it drifted slowly out there, left and right along the fifth floor corridor. Sometimes some of them went down in the lift to the club in the basement. It was a squash club, and there were three courts with dancing going on in each of them. At the cocktail bar, Mr Farthing was sitting airing his sonorous voice.

  Mrs Farthing often told everyone that Mr Farthing ought to be dead, he was far too good for this world. There was a kind of hint that she meant it, but nobody quite knew for certain what her reactions to him were. Poor Mrs Farthing had twisted legs, due to a prenatal fall, and she was obliged to walk as if she was on a very wide horse. Everyone said: ‘She is such a dear. It’s so sad. And that loathsome man …’

  Mr and Mrs Farthing were employed by the company which ran Addison Heights, and for a salary they looked after the squash club, the restaurant and a kind of furniture shop full of things to put on mantelpieces, nothing heavy, book-ends and lamp shades and paper knives and so on.

  Mrs Farthing spent all day in the restaurant, and when dinner was over (two and threepence, five courses), took the lift down to the basement. Mr Farthing spent all day in the shop which was in the reception hall next to the restaurant, and on all possible occasions hurried down, by lift or stair, to see how Daphne was getting on in the club bar.

  Although there was nearly always something very wrong with the world in general, on this particular evening Mr Farthing was in an excellent humour, Daphne having been nice to him, and a reasonable allowance of draught beer in from the brewer’s, it was getting a job to get Scotch Ale at all. Mr Farthing’s particular grievance, speaking generally, was against an entity which he sneeringly called Capitalists. It was understood all round that Mr Farthing was that very thing in embryo, and which was the very reason for his bitterness. He said in the same sentence what he thought about Capitalism, and what he would do when he made his pile, which, as his wife said, and as Euclid said, was absurd. ‘You’re impossible, Alfred!’ she said. ‘Do dry up.’ He never did dry up, his well was inexhaustible. He sat on that red stool of his, on the clients’ side of the bar, looking like an anthropoid ape. He had no forehead and a bald, sloping head, and a great, stupid jowl set in a soured line. His neck was yards thick.

  The moment Mr Bowling came into the club that first time, he spotted him. His little eyes appeared to vibrate in unison with his lips, as he labelled him out loud.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said behind his hand to Daphne, ‘another bloated Capitalist, from the look of it!’ Mr Farthing knew all about everyone at Addison Heights. When he felt he didn’t know enough about anyone, he stood one of the porters a beer and was thereby enabled to hurry to his wife and say behind his hand: ‘Told you so—Capitalist,’ and, sometimes: ‘I told you so, she’s nothing more nor less than a Pro!’ A Pro was a thing which Mr Farthing had many times picked up in the top end of the Bayswater Road, and who had done well for herself since. When Mrs Farthing said: ‘Oh, dry up for God’s sake, she’s a nice girl, leave her alone,’ he hurried down to Daphne. Putting his hand over his mouth, he said to her: ‘We’d better watch Number 167! Very tasty—very sweet!’

  When Mr Bowling came in with his friends, Daphne said:

  ‘It’s Mr Bowling. He joined the club this afternoon. But he doesn’t play squash.’

  Daphne was a large square sort of girl, and favoured a skirt which was the replica of a kilt. It was a great asset just before closing time, when men were at their most abandoned, for they would stand her Egg Flips and Advocat in order to be allowed to say: ‘Does a Scotsman wear trousers, my dear? I always wanted to know!’ At Christmas, under the influence of mistletoe, it was discovered that Daphne wore little brown drawers under her kilt, with embroidery down the outside. It had been a great occasion, only marred by the ferocity of Mr Farthing’s countenance, who sat writhing on his red stool in jealousy, unable to prove any proprietary claims. He vowed that men were very coarse, and that he hated a man who didn’t know how to hold his drink. When he saw that Mr Bowling was not only a bloated Capitalist, but was tight too, his scorn showed itself quite plainly, notwithstanding he was supposed to be host, and it was up to him to encourage business. He heard Mr Bowling’s refined accents, as he ordered expensive things like liqueurs, and he noticed his courteous treatment of Daphne (and her reaction to it, ‘Yes, Mr Bowling, we’ve still got some Kümmel, but I’m afraid it’s 1/6 here, sir?’), and he saw him pull out great wads of notes and smile round at everyone except himself. He saw Mr Bowling give him one glance and then turn away again. Mr Farthing’s jaw set. He would not forget that little incident. It was the kind of treatment he did not put up with, who did he think he was, did he realise who was the host here?

  Suddenly Mr Farthing started to talk in a very loud voice about Capitalism, never taking his eyes off Mr Bowling, who had asked for a newspaper.

  ‘I never read the newspapers,’ Mr Bowling smiled at Daphne, ‘unless I want to see something particular.’

  But Daphne hadn’t got a paper, she was terribly sorry.

  ‘It’s all right. Not important at all.’

  ‘Capitalism,’ Mr Farthing bellowed to a few cronies, but never taking his eyes off Mr Bowling, ‘has got this country into the mess we’re in. And I defy anyone to challenge me.’ He stopped. Out of the din of chatter and laughter and dancing and the dance band and the clacking of bottles and glasses, he distinctly heard Mr Bowling laugh and say to his friends:

  ‘Who is that terrible fellow?’

  Mr Farthing’s anthropoid features flushed a deep vermilion.

  CHAPTER X

  AT the red painted cocktail bar, Mr Bowling’s neighbour was drawing an arc with a small compass, so that it travelled over an imaginary map from a point bang on the Coach and Horses in Notting Hill Gate, right round, arcwise, cutting Kensington High Street, Olympia, Brook Green and Shepherds Bush. Nobody quite knew what he was talking about, at this stage of affairs, but he was a nice chap who had been expelled f
rom Eton. Unless you thought a bit, he didn’t look that type, and he was very well dressed and well off. He still wore the tie he was not entitled to, but it was rarely that anything drastic happened, the latest occasion being a few months back, when somebody had walked up and socked him in the middle of Marble Arch. What struck Mr Bowling, in his delightfully fuddled condition, was this arc; he thought: ‘Ah, my background! There is a line of pubs on that arc, and I know them all! What a wash-out!’ This started a train of thought which was gloomy. It started to make him sober. He had a gin and lime juice, which always made him sober after a binge. He began to get a bit maudlin. His head cleared and he felt tired, and he became aware that something this evening had depressed him without him realising it at the time. A chap called Mr Nandle.

  He was elderly and tall and very weak-looking in character, and he’d come in with a few people during the evening, exclaiming, ‘Why, I seem to remember you, Mr Bowling, years ago,’ and it turned out he had married a woman who had known Mr Bowling’s stepmother, back in the days when he had still been at school. And although expressions of delight were inevitable, ‘delighted to see you, old man, what’ll you have, come right in,’ it now struck him that any connections with the past depressed him to a quite unbelievable extent. He was a washout, and what was the good of looking so far back, it only made you wish for that Barrie-esque Second Chance, which could never come. Mr Nandle had gone (wearing clothes like Bernard Shaw), saying: ‘I’m going back to Knockholt now, I shall certainly have to tell the wife about this, she’ll want you to come and stay a weekend,’ but depression lingered and increased. He thought: ‘Stay the weekend? I belong to London now. My back is to this shabby arc of noisy pubs. I don’t want to think about the country or the past.’ He leaned on the counter, wanting to get tight again. Mrs Nandle, he remembered, wore tweedish clothes too, and had an extraordinary woman friend. Old Nandle used to chop wood and things, and come in and be told: ‘Did you wipe your boots? I do wish you would, Delius? Lady Wilton is coming to tea.’ It was very sordid altogether. Poor Mrs Nandle lived in a kind of No Man’s Land. She didn’t fit in here, and she wasn’t really asked to fit in with Lady Wilton either who, although only the wife of a bank account, thought she was the cat’s whiskers. ‘Why did I say I’d go down there?’ he asked himself. ‘In that dreadful little house of theirs?’ Yet he felt he would go down there. He felt there was that about the incident of meeting old Nandle again which was significant, for good or evil, in the way that such odd little reunions sometimes were. You lived to say: ‘If I hadn’t met old So-and-So that night, I’d never have done so-and-so,’ and either you were highly pleased or badly deflated.