"It was me," Carter said, "thirty years ago." The girl was climbing back onto the bed.
"It's revolting," Mrs. Carter said.
"I don't remember it as revolting," Carter replied.
"I suppose you went and gloated, both of you."
"No, I never saw it."
"Why did you do it? I can't look at you. It's shameful."
"I asked you to come away."
"Did they pay you?"
"They paid her. Fifty pounds. She needed the money badly."
"And you had your fun for nothing?"
"Yes."
"I'd never have married you if I'd known. Never."
"That was a long time afterwards."
"You still haven't said why. Haven't you any excuse?" She stopped. He knew she was watching, leaning forward, caught up herself in the heat of that climax more than a quarter of a century old.
Carter said, "It was the only way I could help her. She'd never acted in one before. She wanted a friend."
"A friend," Mrs. Carter said.
"I loved her."
"You couldn't love a tart."
"Oh yes, you can. Make no mistake about that."
"You queued for her, I suppose."
"You put it too crudely," Carter said.
"What happened to her?"
"She disappeared. They always disappear."
The girl leant over the young man's body and put out the light. It was the end of the film. "I have new ones coming next week," the Siamese said, bowing deeply. They followed their guide back down the dark lane to the taxi.
In the taxi Mrs. Carter said, "What was her name?"
"I don't remember." A lie was easiest.
As they turned into the New Road she broke her bitter silence again. "How could you have brought yourself...? It's so degrading. Suppose someone you knew—in business—recognized you."
"People don't talk about seeing things like that. Anyway, I wasn't in business in those days."
"Did it never worry you?"
"I don't believe I have thought of it once in thirty years."
"How long did you know her?"
"Twelve months, perhaps."
"She must look pretty awful by now if she's alive. After all, she was common even then."
"I thought she looked lovely," Carter said.
They went upstairs in silence. He went straight to the bathroom and locked the door. The mosquitoes gathered around the lamp and the great jar of water. As he undressed he caught glimpses of himself in the small mirror; thirty years had not been kind: he felt his thickness and his middle-age. He thought, I hope to God she's dead. Please, God, he said, let her be dead. When I go back in there, the insults will start again.
But when he returned Mrs. Carter was standing by the mirror. She had partly undressed. Her thin bare legs reminded him of a heron waiting for fish. She came and put her arms round him: a slave bangle joggled against his shoulder. She said, "I'd forgotten how nice you looked."
"I'm sorry. One changes."
"I didn't mean that. I like you as you are."
She was dry and hot and implacable in her desire. "Go on," she said, "go on," and then she screamed like an angry and hurt bird. Afterwards she said, "It's years since that happened," and continued to talk for what seemed a long half hour excitedly at his side. Carter lay in the dark silent, with a feeling of loneliness and guilt. It seemed to him that he had betrayed that night the only woman he loved.
Special Duties
William Ferraro, of Ferraro & Smith, lived in a great house in Montagu Square. One wing was occupied by his wife, who believed herself to be an invalid and obeyed strictly the dictate that one should live every day as if it were one's last. For this reason her wing for the last ten years had invariably housed some Jesuit or Dominican priest with a taste for good wine and whisky and an emergency bell in his bedroom. Mr. Ferraro looked after his salvation in more independent fashion. He retained the firm grasp on practical affairs that had enabled his grandfather, who had been a fellow exile with Mazzini, to found the great business of Ferraro & Smith in a foreign land. God has made man in his image, and it was not unreasonable for Mr. Ferraro to return the compliment and to regard God as the director of some supreme business which yet depended for certain of its operations on Ferraro & Smith. The strength of a chain is in its weakest link, and Mr. Ferraro did not forget his responsibility.
Before leaving for his office at nine-thirty Mr. Ferraro as a matter of courtesy would telephone to his wife in the other wing. "Father Dewes speaking," a voice would say.
"How is my wife?"
"She passed a good night."
The conversation seldom varied. There had been a time when Father Dewes' predecessor made an attempt to bring Mr. and Mrs. Ferraro into a closer relationship, but he had desisted when he realized how hopeless his aim was, and how on the few occasions when Mr. Ferraro dined with them in the other wing an inferior claret was served at table and no whisky was drunk before dinner.
Mr. Ferraro, having telephoned from his bedroom, where he took his breakfast, would walk rather as God walked in the Garden, through his library lined with the correct classics and his drawing-room, on the walls of which hung one of the most expensive art collections in private hands. Where one man would treasure a single Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Mr. Ferraro bought wholesale—he had six Renoirs, four Degas, five Cézannes. He never tired of their presence; they represented a substantial saving in death duties.
On this particular Monday morning it was also May the first. The sense of spring had come punctually to London and the sparrows were noisy in the dust. Mr. Ferraro too was punctual, but unlike the seasons he was as reliable as Greenwich time. With his confidential secretary—a man called Hopkinson—he went through the schedule for the day. It was not very onerous, for Mr. Ferraro had the rare quality of being able to delegate responsibility. He did this the more readily because he was accustomed to make unexpected checks, and woe betide the employee who failed him. Even his doctor had to submit to a sudden counter-check from a rival consultant. "I think," he said to Hopkinson, "this afternoon I will drop in to Christie's and see how Maverick is getting on." ( Maverick was employed as his agent in the purchase of pictures.) What better could be done on a fine May afternoon than check on Maverick? He added, "Send in Miss Saunders," and drew forward a personal file which even Hopkinson was not allowed to handle.
Miss Saunders moused in. She gave the impression of moving close to the ground. She was about thirty years old, with indeterminate hair and eyes of a startling clear blue which gave her otherwise anonymous face a resemblance to a holy statue. She was described in the firm's books as "assistant confidential secretary" and her duties were "special" ones. Even her qualifications were special: she had been head girl at the Convent of Saint Latitudinaria, Woking, where she had won in three successive years the special prize for piety—a little triptych of Our Lady with a background of blue silk, bound in Florentine leather and supplied by Burns Oates & Washbourne. She also had a long record of unpaid service as a Child of Mary.
"Miss Saunders," Mr. Ferraro said, "I find no account here of the indulgences to be gained in June."
"I have it here, sir. I was late home last night, as the plenary indulgence at St. Etheldreda's entailed the Stations of the Cross."
She laid a typed list on Mr. Ferraro's desk: in the first column the date, in the second the church or place of pilgrimage where the indulgence was to be gained, and in the third column in red ink the number of days saved from the temporal punishments of Purgatory. Mr. Ferraro read it carefully.
"I get the impression, Miss Saunders," he said, "that you are spending too much time on the lower brackets. Sixty days here, fifty days there. Are you sure you are not wasting your time on these? One indulgence of three hundred days will compensate for many such. I noticed just now that your estimate for May is lower than your April figures, and your estimate for June is nearly down to the March level. Five plenary indulgences and 1565
days—a very good April work. I don't want you to slacken off."
"April is a very good month for indulgences, sir. There is Easter. In May we can depend only on the fact that it is Our Lady's month. June is not very fruitful, except at Corpus Christi. You will notice a little Polish church in Cambridgeshire..."
"As long as you remember, Miss Saunders, that none of us is getting younger. I put a great deal of trust in you, Miss Saunders. If I were less occupied here, I could attend to some of these indulgences myself. You pay great attention, I hope, to the conditions."
"Of course I do, Mr. Ferraro."
"You are always careful to be in a State of Grace?"
Miss Saunders lowered her eyes. "That is not very difficult in my case, Mr. Ferraro."
"What is your program today?"
"You have it there, Mr. Ferraro."
"Of course. St. Praxted's, Canon Wood. That is rather a long way to go. You have to spend the whole afternoon on a mere sixty days' indulgence?"
"It was all I could find for today. Of course there are always the plenary indulgences at the Cathedral. But I know how you feel about not repeating during the same month."
"My only point of superstition," Mr. Ferraro said. "It has no basis, of course, in the teaching of the Church."
"You wouldn't like an occasional repetition for a member of your family, Mr. Ferraro, your wife?"
"We are taught, Miss Saunders, to pay first attention to our own souls. My wife should be looking after her own indulgences—she has an excellent Jesuit adviser. I employ you to look after mine."
"You have no objection to Canon Wood?"
"If it is really the best you can do. So long as it does not involve overtime."
"Oh, no, Mr. Ferraro. A decade of the Rosary, that's all."
After an early lunch—a simple one in a City chophouse which concluded with some Stilton and a glass of excellent port—Mr. Ferraro visited Christie's. Maverick was satisfactorily on the spot and Mr. Ferraro did not bother to wait for the Bonnard and the Monet which his agent had advised him to buy. The day remained warm and sunny, but there were confused sounds from the direction of Trafalgar Square which reminded Mr. Ferraro that it was Labour Day. There was something inappropriate to the sun and the early flowers under the park trees in these processions of men without ties carrying dreary banners covered with bad lettering. A desire came to Mr. Ferraro to take a real holiday, and he nearly told his chauffeur to drive to Richmond Park. But he always preferred, if it were possible, to combine business with pleasure, and it occurred to him that if he drove out now to Canon Wood, Miss Saunders should be arriving about the same time, after her lunch interval, to start the afternoon's work.
Canon Wood was one of those new suburbs built around an old estate. The estate was now a public park, the house formerly famous as the home of a minor Minister who served under Lord North at the time of the American rebellion was now a local museum, and a street had been built on the little windy hilltop once a hundred-acre field: a Charrington coal agency, the window dressed with one large nugget in a metal basket, a Home and Colonial Stores, an Odeon cinema, a large Anglican church. Mr. Ferraro told his driver to ask the way to the Roman Catholic church.
"There isn't one here," the policeman said.
"St. Praxted's?"
"There's no such place," the policeman said.
Mr. Ferraro, like a Biblical character, felt a loosening of the bowels.
"St. Praxted's, Canon Wood."
"Doesn't exist, sir," the policeman said. Mr. Ferraro drove slowly back towards the City. This was the first time he had checked on Miss Saunders—three prizes for piety had won his trust. Now on his homeward way he remembered that Hitler had been educated by the Jesuits, and yet hopelessly he hoped.
In his office he unlocked the drawer and took out the special file. Could he have mistaken Canonbury for Canon Wood? But he had not been mistaken, and suddenly a terrible doubt came to him how often in the last three years Miss Saunders had betrayed her trust. (It was after a severe attack of pneumonia three years ago that he had engaged her—the idea had come to him during the long insomnias of convalescence.) Was it possible that not one of these indulgences had been gained? He couldn't believe that. Surely a few of that vast total of 36,892 days must still be valid. But only Miss Saunders could tell him how many. And what had she been doing with her office time—those long hours of pilgrimage? She had once taken a whole week-end at Walsingham.
He rang for Mr. Hopkinson, who could not help remarking on the whiteness of his employer's face. "Are you feeling quite well, Mr. Ferraro?"
"I have had a severe shock. Can you tell me where Miss Saunders lives?"
"She lives with an invalid mother near Westbourne Grove."
"The exact address, please."
Mr. Ferraro drove into the dreary waste of Bayswater: great family houses had been converted into private hotels or fortunately bombed into car parks. In the terraces behind dubious girls leant against the railings, and a street band blew harshly round a corner. Mr. Ferraro found the house, but he could not bring himself to ring the bell. He sat crouched in his Daimler waiting for something to happen. Was it the intensity of his gaze that brought Miss Saunders to an upper window, a coincidence, or retribution? Mr. Ferraro thought at first that it was the warmth of the day that had caused her to be so inefficiently clothed, as she slid the window a little wider open. But then an arm circled her waist, a young man's face looked down into the street, a hand pulled a curtain across with the familiarity of habit. It became obvious to Mr. Ferraro that not even the conditions for an indulgence had been properly fulfilled.
If a friend could have seen Mr. Ferraro that evening mounting the steps of Montagu Square, he would have been surprised at how he had aged. It was almost as though he had assumed during the long afternoon those 36,892 days he had thought to have saved during the last three years from Purgatory. The curtains were drawn, the lights were on, and no doubt Father Dewes was pouring out the first of his evening whiskies in the other wing. Mr. Ferraro did not ring the bell, but let himself quietly in. The thick carpet swallowed his footsteps like quicksand. He switched on no lights: only a red-shaded lamp in each room had been lit ready for his use and now guided his steps. The pictures in the drawing-room reminded him of death duties: a great Degas bottom like an atomic explosion mushroomed above a bath; Mr. Ferraro passed on into the library: the leather-bound classics reminded him of dead authors. He sat down in a chair and a slight pain in his chest reminded him of his double pneumonia. He was three years nearer death than when Miss Saunders was appointed first. After a long while Mr. Ferraro knotted his fingers together in the shape some people use for prayer. With Mr. Ferraro it was an indication of decision. The worst was over: time lengthened again ahead of him. He thought, Tomorrow I will set about getting a really reliable secretary.
The Destructors
1
It was on the eve of August Bank Holiday that the latest recruit became the leader of the Wormsley Common Gang. No one was surprised except Mike, but Mike at the age of nine was surprised by everything. "If you don't shut your mouth," somebody once said to him, "you'll get a frog down it." After that Mike had kept his teeth tightly clamped except when the surprise was too great.
The new recruit had been with the gang since the beginning of the summer holidays, and there were possibilities about his brooding silence that all recognized. He never wasted a word even to tell his name until that was required of him by the rules. When he said "Trevor" it was a statement of fact, not as it would have been with the others a statement of shame or defiance. Nor did anyone laugh except Mike, who finding himself without support and meeting the dark gaze of the new comer opened his mouth and was quiet again. There was every reason why T., as he was afterwards referred to, should have been an object of mockery—there was his name (and they substituted the initial because otherwise they had no excuse not to laugh at it), the fact that his father, a former architect and present clerk, had "come d
own in the world" and that his mother considered herself better than the neighbours. What but an odd quality of danger, of the unpredictable, established him in the gang without any ignoble ceremony of initiation?
The gang met every morning in an impromptu carpark, the site of the last bomb of the first blitz. The leader, who was known as Blackie, claimed to have heard it fall, and no one was precise enough in his dates to point out that he would have been one year old and fast asleep on the down platform of Wormsley Common Underground Station. On one side of the car-park leant the first occupied house, number 3, of the shattered Northwood Terrace—literally leant, for it had suffered from the blast of the bomb and the side walls were supported on wooden struts. A smaller bomb and some incendiaries had fallen beyond, so that the house stuck up like a jagged tooth and carried on the further wall relics of its neighbour, a dado, the remains of a fireplace. T., whose words were almost confined to voting "Yes" or "No" to the plan of operations proposed each day by Blackie, once startled the whole gang by saying broodingly, "Wren built that house, father says."
"Who's Wren?"
"The man who built St. Paul's."
"Who cares?" Blackie said. "It's only old Misery's."
Old Misery—whose real name was Thomas—had once been a builder and decorator. He lived alone in the crippled house, doing for himself: once a week you could see him coming back across the common with bread and vegetables, and once as the boys played in the car-park he put his head over the smashed wall of his garden and looked at them.
"Been to the loo," one of the boys said, for it was common knowledge that since the bombs fell something had gone wrong with the pipes of the house and Old Misery was too mean to spend money on the property. He could do the redecorating himself at cost price, but he had never learnt plumbing. The loo was a wooden shed at the bottom of the narrow garden with a starshaped hole in the door: it had escaped the blast which had smashed the house next door and sucked out the window-frames of No .3.