The Confidential Agent (23 page)

‘Here's your train,' the porter said. At the far end of a track a small blob of steam like a rose advanced, became an engine, a string of vibrating carriages. ‘Is it far to Benditch?' D. asked.

‘Oh, it wouldn't be more than fifteen miles, would it, George?'

‘Fourteen miles from the church to the “Red Lion”.'

‘It's not the distance,' the porter said, ‘it's the stops.'

A row of frosty windows split up the pale early morning sun like crystals. A few stubbly faces peered out into the early day; D. climbed into an empty carriage after Jarvis and saw the porter, the general waiting-room, the ugly iron foot-bridge, the signalman holding a cup of tea, go backwards like peace. The low frosty hills closed round the track: a farm building, a ragged wood like an old fur toque, ice on a little ditch beside the line – it wasn't grand, it wasn't even pretty, but it had a quality of quiet and desertion. Jarvis stared out at it without a word.

D. said, ‘You know Benditch well?'

‘Ah!'

‘You might know Mrs Bennett?'

‘George Bennett's wife or Arthur's?'

‘The one who was nurse to Lord Benditch's girl.' ‘Ah!'

‘You know her?'

‘Ah!'

‘Where does she live?'

Jarvis gave him a long suspicious look from his blue pebbly eyes. He said, ‘What do you want
her
for?'

‘I've got a message for her.'

‘She's one door up from the “Red Lion”.'

The woods and meagre grass gave out as they pottered on from stop to stop. The hills became rocky; a quarry lay behind a halt and a rusting single line led out to it; a small truck lay overturned in the thorny grass. Then even the hills gave out and a long plain opened up dotted with strange erratic heaps of slag – the height of the hills behind. Short unsatisfactory grass crept up them like gas flames; miniature railways petered out, going to nowhere at all, and right beneath the artificial hills the cottages began – lines of grey stone like scars. The train no longer stopped; it rattled deeper into the shapeless plain passing halts under every slag-heap dignified by names like Castle Crag and Mount Zion. It was like a gigantic rubbish heap into which everything had been thrown of a whole way of life – great rusting lift-shafts and black chimneys and Nonconformist chapels with slate roofs and hopeless washing darkening on the line and children carrying pails of water from common taps. It was odd to think the country lay only just behind – ten miles away the cocks were crowing outside the junction. The cottages were continuous now, built up against the slag and branching out in narrow streets towards the railway: the only division the tracks to each black hill. D. said, ‘Is this Benditch?'

‘Naw. This is Paradise.'

They ground over a crossing under the shadow of another heap. ‘Is
this
Benditch?'

‘Naw. This is Cowcumberill.'

‘How do you tell the difference?'

‘Ah!'

He stared moodily out – had he got an old woman here or was it for the change of air he came? He said at last very grudgingly as if he had a grievance, ‘Anyone can tell Cowcumberill ain't Benditch.' He said, ‘There's Benditch,' as another slag-heap loomed blackly up and the long grey scar of houses just went on. ‘Why,' he said, working himself up into a kind of gloomy and patriotic rage, ‘you might as well say it was like Castle Crag – or Mount Zion, come to that. You've only got to look.'

He did look. He was used to ruin, but it occurred to him that bombardment was a waste of time. You could attain your ruined world as easily by just letting go.

Benditch had the honour of a station – not a halt. There was even a first-class waiting-room, bolted, with broken glass. He waited for the other to get down, but Jarvis outwaited him, as if he suspected he was being spied on. He gave an effect of innocent and natural secrecy; he distrusted, as an animal distrusts, the strange footstep or the voice near the burrow.

When D. left the station the geography of his last stand stood plainly before him – one street ran down towards the slag-heap and another street crossed it like a T, pressed up under the black hill. Every house was the same: the uniformity was broken only by an inn sign, the front of a chapel, an occasional impoverished shop. There was an air of rather horrifying simplicity about the place, as if it had been built by children with bricks. The two streets were curiously empty for a working-class town, but then, there was no work to go to: it was probably warmer to stay in bed. D. passed a Labour Exchange and then more grey houses with the blinds down in the windows. Once he got a glimpse of horrifying squalor in a backyard where a privy stood open. It was like war, but without the spirit of defiance war usually raised.

The ‘Red Lion' had once been a hotel. This must have been where Lord Benditch stayed: it had a courtyard and a garage and an old yellow A.A. sign. A smell of gas and privies hung about the street. People watched him – a stranger – through glass, without much interest: it was too cold to come out and exchange greetings. Mrs Bennett's house was just the same grey stone as all the rest, but the curtains looked cleaner; there was almost a moneyed air when you looked in through the window to the little unused and crowded parlour. D. beat the knocker; it was of polished brass, in the shape of a shield and a coat of arms – the Benditch arms? – a mysterious feathered animal seemed to be holding a leaf in its mouth. It looked curiously complicated in the simple town – like an algebraic equation, it represented an abstract set of values out of place in the stony concrete street.

An elderly woman in an apron opened the door. Her face was withered and puckered and white like old clean bone. ‘Are you Mrs Bennett?' D. asked.

‘I am.' She barred the way into the house with her foot like a doorstop on the threshold.

‘I have a letter for you,' D. said, ‘from Miss Cullen.'

‘Do you know Miss Cullen?' she asked him with disapproval and incredulity.

‘You will read it all there.' But she wouldn't let him in until she had read it, very slowly, without spectacles, holding the paper up close to the pale obstinate eyes. ‘She writes here,' she said, ‘that you're her dear friend. You'd better come in. She says I'm to help you . . . but she doesn't say how.'

‘I'm sorry it's so early.'

‘It's the only train on a Sunday. You can't be expected to walk. Was George Jarvis on the train?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ah!'

The little parlour was crammed with china ornaments and photographs in tortuous silver frames. A round mahogany table, a velvet-covered sofa, hard chairs with twisted backs and velvet seats, newspaper spread on the floor to save the carpet – it was like a scene set for something which had never happened, which would never happen now. Mrs Bennett said sternly with a gesture towards a silver frame, ‘You'll recognise that, I suppose?' A white plump female child held a doll unconvincingly. He said, ‘I'm afraid . . .'

‘Ah!' Mrs Bennett said with a kind of bitter triumph. ‘She hasn't shown you everything, I daresay. See that pin-cushion?'

‘Yes.'

‘That was made out of her presentation dress – what she wore to meet Their Majesties. Turn it over and you'll see the date.' It was there – picked out in white silk – that was the year he had been in prison waiting to be shot. It was one of the years in her life too. ‘And there,' Mrs Bennett said, ‘she is – in the dress. You'll know
that
picture.' Very formal and absurdly young and recognisably Rose, she watched him from a velvet frame. The little room seemed full of her.

‘No,' he said, ‘I have never seen that either.'

She glared at him with satisfaction. She said, ‘Oh well, old friends are best, I daresay.'

‘You must be a very old friend.'

‘The oldest,' she rapped out at him. ‘I knew her when she was a week old. Even His Lordship didn't see her then – not till she'd passed her first month.'

‘She spoke of you,' D. lied, ‘very warmly.'

‘She had cause,' Mrs Bennett said, tossing her white bony head. ‘I did everything for her – after her mother died.' It's always odd, learning the biography of someone you love at second-hand, like finding a secret drawer in a familiar desk full of revealing documents.

‘Was she a good child?' he inquired with amusement.

‘She had spirit. I don't ask for more,' Mrs Bennett said. She went agitatedly around, patting the pincushion, pushing the photographs a little this way and that. She said, ‘Nobody expects to be remembered. Though I don't complain of His Lordship. He's been generous. As was only proper. I don't know how we'd manage otherwise with the pits closed.'

‘Rose told me she writes to you – regularly. So
she
remembers you.'

‘At Christmas,' Mrs Bennett said. ‘Yes. She doesn't say much – but, of course, she hasn't time in London with parties and so on. I thought she might have told me what His Majesty said to her . . . but then . . .'

‘Perhaps he said nothing.'

‘Of course he said something. She's a lovely girl.'

‘Yes. Lovely.'

‘I only hope,' Mrs. Bennett said, looking daggers across the china ornaments, ‘she knows her true friends.'

‘I don't think she'd be easy to deceive,' he said, thinking of Mr Forbes and the private detectives and the whole dreary background of distrust.

‘You don't know her like I do. I remember once – at Gwyn Cottage – she cried her eyes out. She was only four and that boy Peter Triffen – deceitful little monkey – he'd got a clockwork mouse.' The old face flushed with ancient battle, ‘I'll be sworn that boy never came to any good.' It was strange to think that in a way this woman had made her. Her influence had probably been as great as the mother's who had died; perhaps the old bony face sometimes bore expressions he could detect in Rose, if he knew her better. The old woman said suddenly, ‘You're a foreigner?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ah!'

He said, ‘Miss Cullen will have told you that I'm here on business.'

‘She didn't write
what
business.'

‘She thought you could tell me a few things about Benditch.'

‘Well?'

‘I wondered who was the local union leader.'

‘You don't want to see
him
, do you?'

‘Yes.'

‘I can't help you,' Mrs Bennett said. ‘We don't mix with
their
kind. An' you can't tell me Miss Cullen wants anything to do with that lot. Socialists.'

‘After all . . . her mother . . .'

‘We know what her mother was,' Mrs Bennett said sharply, ‘but she's dead now, an' what's dead's forgotten.'

‘Then you can't help me at all?'

‘Won't's the word.'

‘Not even his name?'

‘Oh, you'll find that out soon enough. For yourself. It's Bates.' A car went by outside; they could hear the brakes go on. ‘Now who,' Mrs Bennett said, ‘would be stopping at the “Red Lion”?'

‘Where does he live?'

‘Down Pit Street. We had royalty once,' Mrs Bennett said, with her face against the window, trying to see the car. ‘Such a pleasant-spoken young man. He came into this house and had a cup of tea – just to show him there was miners' folk who kept their homes clean. He wanted to go into Mrs Terry's, but they told him she was sick. It's as bare as a bone at Terry's. That's why, of course. It wouldn't have been nice for him.'

‘I must be going.'

‘You can tell her from me,' Mrs Bennett said, ‘that she's got no business with Bates.' She spoke with bitter and wavering authority, the manner of one who could at one time have commanded anything – ‘Change your stockings. No more sweets. Drink up that medicine,' – but is now afraid that things have changed.

Luggage was being carried into the ‘Red Lion', and the street had come alive. People stood in knots, defensively, as if ready to retreat, watching the car. He heard a child say, ‘Is it a Dook?' He wondered whether Lord Benditch was already acting. It would be quick work: the contract had been signed yesterday. Suddenly a rumour began; you couldn't tell where it started. Somebody called out, ‘The pit's opening.' The knots, converged together, became a small crowd; they stared at the car as if on its polished and luxurious body they could read definite news. A woman raised a feeble cheer which died out doubtfully. D. said to a man, ‘Who is it?'

‘Lord Benditch's agent.'

‘Can you tell me where Pit Street is?'

‘Turn left at the end of the road.'

People were coming out of their houses now all the way along; he walked against a growing tide of hope. A woman called up to a bedroom window, ‘The agent's at the “Red Lion”, Nell.' He was reminded of an occasion when in the hungry capital a rumour spread that food had arrived; he had watched them swarming down on to the quay, just like this. It hadn't been food but tanks, and they had watched the tanks unloaded with angry indifference. Yet they had needed tanks. He stopped a man and said, ‘Where's Bates?'

‘Number seventeen – if he's there.'

It was just beyond the Baptist chapel, a grey stony symbol of religion with a slate roof. A ‘Wayside Thought' said enigmatically, ‘The Beauty of Life is only Invisible to Tired Eyes.'

He knocked on the door of No. 17 again and again; nobody answered, and all the time the people went by – the old mackintoshes which wouldn't keep out the cold, the shirt too often washed for any warmth to be left in the thinned flannel. They were the people he was fighting for, and he had a frightening sense now that they were his enemies: he was here to stand between them and hope. He knocked and knocked and knocked without reply.