God Is an Englishman (106 page)

She had intended on arrival to go straight to the yard and take a look at the tangle she would have to unravel in the morning, but now she was here she jibbed at the prospect. The yard could damned well look to itself. There were days, weeks, even years to attend to any thing she was likely to find down there, so she directed her steps to wards her lodging, reflecting that the last time she had passed along this road she had thought of Adam Swann as a dying man and the time before that, on the occasion of his last visit, had lectured him merrily on the art of handling women. She must have made her point. He had gone straight home and handled Henrietta with such address that she was now carrying his fourth child in her womb and his busi ness concerns in her head.

She let herself in, expecting her landlady to call from the kitchen but there was no greeting and she thought, with a spurt of irritation, “The old slut is over at that sister of hers, and now I shall have to get my own supper if I want any,” and she opened the door of her sitting room to see Wickstead standing there, gazing thoughtfully into the street.

She exclaimed, dropping her hand luggage with a clatter,
“You!”
and he turned and looked at her, as though by no means sure of his reception. He recovered almost at once, however, smiling his slow, impudent smile, so that she remembered his perfect teeth and at the same time was conscious of a rather disturbing sensation under her breasts and rush of colour to her cheeks that caused her to fall back a step. He was beside her then, heaving her bag on to the sofa and saying,

“Did I frighten you? I’m very sorry, I didn’t think that was possible,” and she snapped, “For God’s sake, don’t treat me as if I was a dragon! How do you come to be here? Who told you where I lived? How did you get in?”

“Well, now,” he said, genially, “let’s take those questions in order. I’m here to ask you advice on an important question—important to me, that is, and I was given your private address at the yard. As to getting in I didn’t pick the lock as you’re entitled to expect. Your landlady told me you would be home on the afternoon GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 570

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train and that I could wait if I cared to. She’s had to go out and asked me to apolo gise. It seems her niece is having a baby and she was in a tizzy on account of it having arrived a week early.” He dropped his bantering manner and suddenly became solicitous. “You look tired and hungry. Your dinner’s in the oven, shepherd’s pie and apple tart, and I went out and bought this as an appetiser,” and he produced a bottle of hock and set it down on the table. She said, impatiently,

“Wait here. I am tired and I am hungry.” Then, more affably, “Have you eaten?”

“Yes, but I should enjoy sharing a glass of hock with you.” His charm was infectious and she suddenly felt very glad to see him, not only a liberty, but apparently as irrespressible as when she had parted from him on the Harwich platform some months before. It seemed much longer, like meeting someone remembered from childhood, and as she went into the kitchen, retrieving her warmed-up meal, she thought, “Something very odd is happening to me! Why should I feel so wretched at the prospect of Henrietta’s baby and so delighted at meeting up with a professional thief ? Am I so far re duced that I welcome a scoundrel, so long as he has a pleasant smile?” and suddenly she felt more excited than hungry and spooned a small helping of pie on to a plate her landlady had left to warm, carrying it through to the sitting room where he was uncorking the wine. She said, trying hard to sound casual: “I’ve been in London since June. Mr. Swann was badly injured in that rail crash at Staplehurst,” and he said, “Yes, so they told me at the yard. How is he?”

“Making very good progress in Switzerland. He had a leg ampu tated.” He looked at her curiously and she wondered how much he knew of her involvement with Swann. More than was good for her, prob ably, if he had taken heed of gossip at the yard, and thinking this she said, “You took a mad risk to go back there. Weren’t you afraid they would send for the police the moment you showed up on the premises?”

“Not in the least,” he said, “I wouldn’t have bet much against you not showing me the door but I’d have staked all I have you said noth ing about that job of mine that misfired.” He found glasses and poured the wine, and it occurred to her that this trick of knowing where things were, and making himself at home in a stranger’s house, was part of his stock-in-trade. She sat and began to eat while he remained standing and lifted his glass. “Here’s luck,” he said and then, swallowing hard, as though in need of stimulation, “You once hinted your firm could use a man like me, so long as he kept his hands in his pockets when he wasn’t driving.

Was that Bible Class talk, or did you mean it?”

“I meant it then but I’ve revised it since.”

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For a moment he looked dismayed, but his mercury bobbed up as he said, with a wry grin, “Oh, well, it was worth a try,” and reached for his hat.

“Don’t be in such a damned hurry,” she said, feeling a malicious pleasure in regaining the initiative. “I simply don’t see you as a waggoner and that’s all I meant by revision. You’d get bored in a month and go to stealing again. If I was employing you, and had the slightest expectation that you would adapt to honest work, I’d give you real responsibility. I’d put you on commission, too, so that the harder you worked the more you’d earn.”

“You’d do that? Without worrying what I was up to when your back was turned? How could you, when you know I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life? Unless it was a plant, like that time I was hanging around waiting for Beckstein’s diamonds.”

“Because I got the impression you don’t steal for gain.”

“Why else would a man steal? ”

“For all kinds of reasons. From habit. From necessity. From motives of pride and revenge. Even from a love of walking a tight rope.” He looked across at her steadily and there was mischief in his eyes. “You’ve thought about it a great deal, haven’t you?”

“I’ve thought about you, yes. Wondered about you, too. What you were doing, whether you were back in prison or still on the run. But mostly, as I said at the time, what a waste you represented.”

He pondered this while she finished her pie and started on the apple tart.

“Don’t you want your wine?”

“Does that mean you want it?”

“Yes, it does. It wasn’t easy to bring myself to this point. It was the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make.”

She tasted the wine, set down her glass, and refilled his. “Drink if it helps,” she said, but he left the glass on the table and said, slowly, “I’m not on the run. I didn’t tell you the full truth about that. About everything else but not that. I’m out on licence, with two years unexpired sentence hanging over me but if I’m caught on a fresh crib it would mean seven to ten years, plus the outstanding two. That’s slow death. There’d be no going back after that.”

“Why did you lie about that?”

“It seemed the best way to head off a lecture on the rewards of industry.”

“And the real reason?”

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“What’s the connection?”

“It was something similar that earned me a big cut in sentence. I’m a good swimmer and in Gibraltar harbour I saved two marines from drowning when their gig capsized. Their Commandant wrote to London, and because he was highly placed, and could pull strings, they gave me a conditional pardon; with instructions to report weekly, of course.”

She stopped eating. “You mean you deliberately threw away a chance like that?”

“It wasn’t much of a chance. I had a record, and no trade. I knew I could do better than beg and I have.” He began to brag. “These aren’t the usual swagman’s duds. This suit of clothes was made to measure.” Suddenly she wanted to laugh. His mixture of vanity and jaunty self-justification were so much at odds with what she took to be the real Wickstead, a man who had come near to admitting that he was lost in the dark. She said, “You’ve come so far, Wickstead…What’s your other name?”

“Tom.”

“You’ve come this far, Tom, so why sit there fidgeting, like a young man trying to nerve himself to ask a girl for a dance? I mightn’t say no and if I do I’ll spare your pride. You’ve been thinking, too, since we last met. You’ve been assessing your chances of starting out all over again. Well, that’s the most sensible thing you’ve ever done, so you don’t have to apologise for it. I’ve been thinking along the same lines concerning myself.”

“
You
have?”

“We’ll come to that. For the time being let’s confine ourselves to you. If you’ll give me your word that you genuinely want a job, that you would give it a fair trial and promise to come to me if you de cide you made a wrong decision, then I’d find a place for you. Old Duckworth has come into a little money and only stayed on to oblige me. You can take over tomorrow as yard foreman, at fifty shillings a week and the standard rates of commission on new business. It isn’t much but it could be. More than half of Swann’s foremen have moved on to a deputy manager’s post, and that carries a bonus rate of two per cent on local turnover. I know a man much younger than you who is making three hundred a year. Will you want time to con sider that?”

No, he said joyfully, he wouldn’t and she remembered Henrietta had made an identical reply when she had put her proposition to her back in July. It reminded her that she was so concerned with solving other people’s problems that she never had time to solve her own. She said, as he began to stammer his thanks, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 573

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“That’s you accounted for, and I don’t want any earnest protestations until the trial period has expired. In the meantime there’s one small thing you could do for me, Tom.”

“What is it?”

She measured him with her eye and stood up, having emptied her glass and set it down with a flourish.

“You can do what I asked Swann to do the last time he was here. You can come round here and kiss me.”

He looked so taken aback that she felt sorry for him, but then, as he hesitated, she felt less sorry than indignant. “It’s not a condi tion, damn it!

You won’t be expected to do it every morning you report to the yard. It’s a…a gesture, and I’m terribly much in need of a friendly gesture. More than you are if the truth’s known!”

He moved in smartly then and his gaiety reassured her, so that when she felt his arms encircle her she changed her mind about the kind of kiss she had in mind.

She was in no doubt as to the reason behind the invitation. It was just the same as when Adam had stood there. All she wanted, but that most desperately, was to feel a woman again, and he seemed to understand this very well, perhaps too well.

He kissed her fondly but expertly, more expertly than she had ever been kissed, and the sensation under her breasts returned so that she was unable to conceal the pleasure his embrace brought her. She could have stood there being kissed for as long as he was disposed to remain, but when his pleasure revealed itself in a slight increase of pressure at her waist and shoulder she quietly disengaged, remember ing that Mrs. Sprockett might come bustling in at any moment, and that her personal dignity would be involved. She wanted him, as much as she had wanted his predecessors, but not furtively, the way he had always lived until now, but she was exhilarated to note that he was the more breathless of the two when he said, in a rather hushed voice she had never heard him use, “Is it because things have gone wrong with you since we parted?”

She replied, equably, “No, Tom, or not in the general way. Cer tainly not any way I could explain. Let’s just say I suddenly felt very lonely; as lonely as you appear to be.”

“You mean, we might give one another a hand?”

“Why not? Without obligations on either side. And I mean what I said about a trial period. You can walk out on the job at any time and all I ask is that you will tell me, and not just disappear, with anything that belongs to us, or our customers.”

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He said, thoughtfully, “That quip of yours—about walking a tight rope—it probably seems an exciting life to safe people looking in but it isn’t, you know.

It’s hell all through unless you’re drunk, and if you’re drunk you botch it sooner or later. That brush with you in Harwich did more to destroy my nerve than anything behind me, and you can’t play my game if your nerve isn’t up to it. I walked about all that night, seeing how it would end. Early one morning in a prison yard, with the chaplain snuffling his prayers, and a drop straight out ahead of me.”

“Don’t, Tom. Don’t talk that way!”

“I have to. If you’re prepared to take me on trust you should know how it is.

The truth is you can’t really worst them. Nobody has that much luck and this kept recurring to me. Before it was light I dropped the revolver into the dock and I haven’t done a job since. Unless you count fencing those watches you found in the trunk.”

“Where have you been?”

“Tramping. Thinking things over flat on my back and looking up at the sky.” He was silent for a moment. “Are you religious? I don’t mean in the going-to-church sense. Do you believe in a plan of some kind?”

“If I do it isn’t the one they preach about in pulpits.”

“That’s what I decided. That’s based on property and education and the handicapping is badly arranged. Brains, background, the kind of upbringing a person has…”

“People like you put too much emphasis on those things.” She was thinking, curiously enough, of Henrietta, and the neatness with which she had eased herself into the management of the net work with no other qualification beyond a need to hold fast to a man’s affection. She thought of Adam, too, in his earlier days, with nothing to guide him but instinct and a muddleheaded obstinacy, who had yet succeeded in translating extravagant dreams into realities.