The Flying Goat (15 page)

‘You seem to have forgotten,' Stacey said, with patience, ‘that you're talking about Mr. Montague.'

‘No, no,' Rankin said. ‘No. Everybody in Nulborough did the same for them boys – got 'em stew and tea and cocoa and all the like o' that – everybody. All except Mr. Montague.'

Stacey did not speak. He sat quite still. He felt a small aperture in his mind open and let in a small slit of light.

‘All except Mr. Montague,' Rankin said, ‘and
Miss Montague. No stew for them kids, no cocoa, not a drop o' tea. No bath. You couldn't wonder what happened – one of 'em got pneumonia and died, and in a week the other two asked to be moved.'

Stacey, watching the small aperture of light in his mind grow larger, could not speak. Then Rankin said a surprising, irrelevant thing.

‘He never had more than half an egg for his breakfast. Mr. Montague half an egg, Miss Montague half an egg.'

Rankin stood silent, looking at Stacey. It was as though he had finished sticking in the pins of his words, as though he had at last made a pattern of them, like the pattern on a pin-table. He seemed to stand there and say: ‘Now it's your turn. You shoot. See if you can get the ball in the right hole,' his small ironical print-black eyes speaking for him.

Stacey did not speak, and Rankin, after asking if there was anything more that he needed, turned to go. Stacey stopped him at the door.

‘You know anybody else,' he said, ‘who might tell me anything?'

Rankin said: ‘Miss Montague might.' He paused. ‘I say she might. But Brierley's the man you ought
to see. Started here as compositor in 1892 and worked himself up to manager. Left just before you came. I say left.'

‘Where's he live?'

‘Eighteen Denmark Street. You'll pass it on the way up to Miss Montague.'

As Rankin left the office, Stacey remembered something and called after him: ‘I'll drop in and see you about one.' Alone, he contemplated the small aperture of light in his mind. He tried to bring pressure on it, as he had done on the window, in order to make it open wider. In this uncertain state of mind, he got his keys out of his desk and unlocked the door which led into Mr. Montague's office and went in. He looked cursorily over Mr. Montague's desk and went to open and shut one or two of the pigeon-drawers, not at first reading anything. Then journalistic curiosity got the better of him, and he sat down on the old-fashioned swivel-chair and began to read, here and there, some of Mr. Montague's papers. He found a copy of Mr. Montague's birth certificate; it showed his registration as a child in a small town in the county of Essex, his father a solicitor's clerk, his mother described as a machinist. The date was 1865. In
the same drawer he found envelopes containing copies of Mr. Montague's life policies. Below them were letters from Mr. Montague's London brokers, and from them it seemed that Mr. Montague had held substantial holdings in steel generally, and in arms particularly. One letter acknowledged the transference, in Mr. Montague's name, of some £8000 from investment in Public Utilities to investment in the share organizations manufacturing arms. Turning over more papers, Stacey came across a series of hotel bills. These were all for hotels in various parts of London, but appeared otherwise to have nothing to do with each other. Then Stacey noticed that they were bills, always, for double rooms taken and vacated on the same days of the week, Friday and Saturday. In another drawer he found two bills, both from the same hotel, dated as recently as July of the current year. The hotel was near Paddington Station and he put one of the bills in his pocket.

In his own office the telephone rang.

Answering it, he heard the crackling echo of Miss Montague's voice. He had already spoken to her once that morning, to convey the regrets of convention. Now he heard her asking if he would go
up and see her. He said he would be there in half an hour.

Hot air pressed down on him in a series of dusty waves as he spoke into the antiquated wall mouthpiece. Hanging up the receiver, he made one more effort to open the window, banging it with his fist, so that the office would be fresh when he came back. The window would not budge.

He went downstairs, gave instructions that he would be out till 1.30, and then backed his car out of the cinder-yard running up by the works entrance. He calculated that he could give the man named Brierley twenty minutes and still arrive punctually for Miss Montague.

Denmark Street ran along the old part of the town, by the now culverted river, just before a steep rise in the land. Beyond it short streets rose steeply to the district popularised by the pre-war manufacturers, who had built large red-brick laurel-encompassed houses in what had then been cheap land. Brierley's house was number eighteen in a row of thirty-six. They were old stone houses rendered over with thin pumice-coloured cement, against the dampness of the river flowing partly underneath them.

Brierley's door was opened by a young man of twenty-six or more, whose face to Stacey seemed partially familiar. He had a screw-driver and a coil of insulated wire in his hands, and inside the room Stacey could see the man he took to be Brierley, sitting at a table strewn with the parts of a dismantled wireless set.

‘Mr. Brierley?' Stacey said. ‘I dropped in to tell you that Mr. Montague was dead. Perhaps you heard.'

Brierley got up from the table. He was dressed in engineer's blue overalls, a big man, with a greasy face and bright grey eyes that were like polished machine bearings. ‘Come in a minute,' he said, and Stacey stepped straight from the street into the room, telling Brierley, as he automatically wiped his shoes on the door-mat, who he was.

‘I've got to get an obituary notice, and a pretty big one, for to-morrow,' he said. ‘You were with Mr. Montague a long time and I thought perhaps you could tell me something.'

‘Yes,' Brierley said, ‘I could tell you something.' He looked at Stacey with eyes that were as bright but as dead as steel. Then suddenly they were alive, angrily set in motion. ‘For a start,' he said, ‘I'll tell
you what to write at the top o' that notice. Write – “A Bloody Good Job”. Write that.'

Stacey became aware again of the aperture of light in his mind. He looked at Brierley's eyes. He remembered another man he had interviewed, in Madras, after a railway accident in which the young girl he was about to marry had lain for two hours with crushed legs. He saw the same energy of pained fury generated in Brierley's eyes with the same inability to escape, to spring out of the latent flesh and direct itself. It occurred to him suddenly that the balls of Brierley's eyes could slot into the pattern made by Rankin's pins: the two were connected, component, springing from the same hatred.

‘Sit down,' Brierley said. He looked at the young man. ‘You'd better go and get that detector valve,' he said. ‘We shan't get much forrader without it.'

The young man went out, and Stacey, the impression of familiarity still with him, sat looking after him, semi-consciously. Then Brierley sat down and they looked at each other across the litter of tools, screws, wireless parts. Brierley's eyes were still.

‘Anything else you'd like me to put?' Stacey said.

‘Yes.' Brierley said, slowly. ‘Find out the bloody truth and put that in.'

‘I'd like to. But – '

‘Put that kid in,' Brierley said. ‘Yes, him. My daughter's kid. – Montague's kid. That's
one
bit of truth you can put in.'

Stacey sat quiet, his mind clear. ‘And another bit?'

‘Add up,' Brierley said, ‘the interest on a hundred and twenty-five quid for thirty-six years.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

Brierley said: ‘Montague came here and started in a small way in 1892. In 1899 he was a bit rocky and he asked if I'd lend him some money. I'd just had a hundred and fifty left me by an old uncle up in Sheffield – so I lent him a hundred and twenty-five. Well, I was green and never asked for an agreement and he never suggested it. When I asked for repayment he said, “I'll make you foreman and give you a ten shilling rise and pay it back that way.” Like a fool I took it. Then he got on a bit and started the paper and I asked him if he'd give my daughter a job. She was eighteen then. Well, he gave her a job in the office – meant late hours, but she liked it. Then you see what happened.'

They looked at each other, the bright machine eyes of Brierley, livid with the furious but directionless power of the revived hatred. ‘But you did something about that?' Stacey said. ‘Made Montague pay?'

‘No,' Brierley said. ‘He denied it. Then he half admitted it, but said that if we done anything I should lose my job. Well, there was only one printing works in this town then.'

There was nothing, Stacey felt, that he could say; but in his mind he began to see the small steel balls of one circumstance and another falling into the holes made by the imaginary pattern of Rankin's words. He picked up his hat and got up to go. Brierley got up also.

‘You know I can't put it in,' Stacey said.

‘Yes, I know! And he knew. When you get back to the office you look up the files. Read the bloody editorials. I set every one of 'em up for nearly forty years. Read the council reports, Moral Welfare, every damn thing, also who gets the biscuit every time? Montague, always Montague. He knew there were things you couldn't print.'

Stacey could not say anything. He shook hands with Brierley. The large heavy-veined hands of the
older man were trembling. Then Brierley opened his mouth as though to say something else, but refrained, and Stacey knew that there was still something else, something important and perhaps painful, which had not been said.

He went out into the street, into the hot sunshine. He drove the car up the hill, coming to the Montague house in about five minutes. Set back behind a hedge of laurel and a small plantation of lime and pink may and covered almost entirely with virginia creeper, the house revealed no character. He walked up the gravel drive, pulled the brass door-bell, and was shown finally into the drawing-room, where Miss Montague was waiting for him. The blinds of the room were drawn and the whole effect – the yellowish light, the rarefied silence, the semistale smell of upholstery, all reminded him of the East. He had interviewed many second-rate opera singers, in many such shaded and faded rooms, in Calcutta.

Miss Montague, a straight hipped, thin woman already all in black, with a square gold locket at her neck, looked ill. She struck him as being a woman who had for years concealed the fact that she thought for herself. Her mind was like a prayer
book with a safety clasp: tight-shut, secure, hiding something, hiding perhaps the texts of old resolves and ambitions and even desires. She looked hungry, not merely emotionally and mentally, but physically. She looked as if she had lived, for the past twenty years, on sandwiches of india-paper. He remembered Rankin, the half egg for breakfast, the wartime story of meanness. It astonished him to see no meanness in Miss Montague's face, but only, uppermost, a look of hungry martyrdom.

He felt hungry himself, having breakfasted at his lodgings at eight. The hot sunshine had tired him, and he would have been glad of a cup of coffee.

He sat down on the sofa, carefully, between the geometrically placed cushions of dark plum velvet, and Miss Montague sat in a chair opposite. They had already exchanged the formal regrets over the telephone. Now she simply said:

‘It is very good of you to come. This afternoon I expect the relations. I have been on my feet since half-past four.'

He heard in the voice the same skin-and-bone expression as he saw in her face. For want of something to say, he threw out a large hint about some refreshment.

Much to his surprise she took it. She said: ‘Perhaps that's what's the matter with me. I haven't eaten since last night. I came over faint a few minutes ago. Could you eat something, Mr. Stacey?'

‘I feel so hungry,' he said, ‘I could eat a plate of fried eggs.'

She looked startled. Fear and temptation, with some kind of hesitant courage, filled and emptied her eyes.

‘You could?' she said.

‘I could!'

She seemed to think, to weigh the consequences of a decision. Then: ‘I believe I could,' she said, ‘myself.'

She got up and pulled the porcelain bell-handle by the fireplace, and when the girl answered, said:

‘Oh, Emily. I think I could eat some breakfast now. Mr. Stacey is going to have some with me. We are going to have bacon and eggs. Have we some rashers?'

‘Only two, Miss. It's Thursday.'

‘Don't worry about me. I never eat more than one rasher,' Stacey said.

‘I could do some fried bread, Miss,' the girl said.

‘Fried bread,' Miss Montague said. ‘You like fried bread, Mr. Stacey?'

‘I love it.'

‘Could you eat one egg or two?'

‘Well, thank you,' Stacey said, ‘I think I could eat two eggs.'

‘And some tea, Emily, please,' Miss Montague said. ‘On the small table in here.'

As they sat waiting for the meal to come, Stacey explained his intentions: how he would devote the two whole middle pages of the paper, suitably black edged, to Mr. Montague, outlining his career, his achievements in spheres of social activity. He explained how he had already sent out his reporters to get, from important local people, tributes to Mr. Montague's life and work and how he would print these tributes in three or perhaps four columns. He explained how he himself would write the obituary notice, the tribute that would express the loss of a paper, the employees and the community.

‘But,' he said, ‘I don't want to do anything you don't approve. Also there must be many things about Mr. Montague which you could tell me. Things which would help me to write the article.'

She sat looking at the wall with tired, hungry
eyes, careful not to look at him. He waited for her to say something, but she sat completely silent. He recalled Rankin, Brierley, who had both spoken so readily. He saw how hard it was, one way or another, for her to say anything at all.