The Man Whose Dream Came True (5 page)

The picture showed a girl wearing a mini-skirt and a sleeveless brocaded blouse with a hooded headdress through which part of her face was visible. The story was headed: ‘Millionaire’s Daughter Starts Yashmak Fashion’ and it began:

Fiona, up-and-corning daughter of industrial merger-maker Jacob Mallory, is touring Europe in search of something new in the fashion line to rock the younger set. Fiona’s landed up in Ismir, Turkey, where she’s certainly shaken the natives. It’s not the mini-skirt that shocks them, they’ve seen those before, or even the local dress turned into something so, so sophisticated in the form of the brocaded blouse. No, its the way Fiona uses that traditionally concealing yashmak combined with the rest of the outfit that produces an effect on males. Just imagine what a glance from under that hood will do to them over here. Fiona, a working fashion-spotter for Philippa Phillips Associates, is going on looking for that elusive new something in Greece and Yugoslavia before she comes home.

He went into the living-room and sat down. He felt as dazed as somebody involved in an accident. As he read the story again his lips moved like those of a man spelling out the words. Then he got up, went into the bedroom and opened her case. She had taken clothes out of it last night, and now it was empty. Her handbag was on a chair. He opened it and spilled out the contents. Lipstick, keys – and a letter. The envelope said: ‘Miss Mary Tracey, The Cottages, Frankfort Manor.’ Tracey – the butler’s daughter. It was like some wretched stage farce. No doubt The Cottages were the servants’ quarters.

‘What are you doing?’ The words were whispered. She was watching him from the bed.

He handed her the paper. There was a smell of burning. It was the toast in the kitchen. The smell pervaded the flat. Tears welled into her eyes. She did not speak.

‘Well?’ he said questioningly, although he knew the answer. ‘You’re Mary Tracey. The butler’s daughter.’

‘He’s a handyman.’

‘I suppose you’re a housemaid.’

‘I help in the house.’

Another Doris. ‘That’s why you took me back. Because you knew nobody would be there.’ She didn’t contradict him. ‘And I believed you. What a fool.’

She blew her nose. ‘Sometimes she gives me clothes and I wear them when I go into town.’

‘Your father’s in it too? I spoke to him.’

‘I told him I would speak if a friend of Fiona’s rang up. I thought–’ She didn’t say what she thought.

‘What the hell were you doing in the Golden Sovereign?’

‘I know Claude.’ Claude? ‘Armitage. He’s – he used to be a boy-friend of mine. I worked there for a bit, in the cloakroom.’

A hat check girl. How could he have failed to recognise her for what she was? She went on.

‘But I do want to get away. And I do have that dream, I think of myself as a princess waiting for somebody. You’ve burned the toast. Shall I make some more?’

Did she think he was going to sit down to breakfast with her? The thought of all the money he had spent, the flat, the food and drink, the roulette last night, rose in his mouth like bile. ‘You can leave. Any time. Now.’

‘You don’t want to go on with it? I suppose you wouldn’t. Still, let’s have breakfast.’

She got out of bed and moved towards the kitchen. He took her by the shoulders. ‘I said you could leave now.’

‘I don’t see why you’re so het up. After all, you’ve had some fun out of it, and you’ve got plenty of money.’

‘Plenty of money,’ he said bitterly. A moment afterwards he regretted the tone in which he had spoken, but it was too late. She began to laugh.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t got any money. Oh, that’s good, that’s really good.’

‘I spent it on you.’

‘“There’s plenty more”,’ she mimicked him. ‘So you were after my allowance? And I only said it because I didn’t want you to think I’d be too much of a burden. It really is funny.’ Her tone and accent changed so that he could not think how he had ever been deceived. ‘I suppose you fiddled this place too.’

‘It’s rented.’

She stopped laughing. ‘But you’re clever. Why don’t we do something together?’

‘What?’

‘I’m not staying at home, you know, I’m getting out. This is what I want, what we both want.’ She put a finger in her mouth, bit a nail. ‘Let’s team up.’

‘Why don’t you just go?’

‘After breakfast.’ While she was eating her toast she continued to talk. ‘I’ve got a thing for you. And I’m not a fool, you know. We’d make a good team.’

‘I want you to leave.’

She packed her things into the little suitcase. ‘Better luck next time. You might wish me that too.’ He did not reply. ‘Trouble is you’ve got no sense of humour.’

When she had gone he lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. He had several days to run before his week’s tenancy was out, but what use was the flat to him now? With less than fifty pounds of his money left he did what he had done before. He took refuge with Widgey.

A Dream Of Loving Women

Widgey had not changed in the two years since he had last seen her. The ash was long on the cigarette that stuck out of the corner of her mouth, and she sat at one side of a table in her private parlour with cards in front of her and a woman on the other side of the table. The woman was perhaps fifty, certainly younger than Widgey, and her fingers were crusted with jewels. She nervously twisted a gold bracelet on her left arm.

‘A black ace, a red ten, a black queen. Not the queen of spades, that’s something,’ Widgey was saying as he opened the door. She said hallo to Tony without surprise, holding up her face so that he could kiss her cheek. Ash dropped on the table and she brushed it away. ‘That explains part of it.’

‘What does it explain?’ The woman opposite panted like a Pekinese.

‘Ace of clubs, ten of diamonds, queen of clubs. Means an unexpected visitor. I thought it would be for you, but it’s for me. My nephew Tony. This is Mrs Harrington.’

‘But it’s
my
future you were reading.’

‘You just can’t tell, dear. Come for a visit? You can have your old room, thirteen.’

‘You mean to say you don’t mind?’ Bulbous Pekinese eyes rolled at Tony.

‘Course he doesn’t, he’s not superstitious any more than I am. He doesn’t believe the cards and I don’t really.’ Widgey re-shuffled expertly, stubbed out her cigarette, rolled another with paper and tobacco from an old metal case. ‘Just they seem to come true, that’s all.’

‘Why are you starting again?’

‘He disturbed the flow, and anyway when one thing’s happened you always want to shuffle again, gets confused otherwise. Let’s see now, two of diamonds, eight of spades, jack of hearts, not very exciting. See you later,’ she called to Tony.

Room thirteen was an attic, from which across the roofs of houses you could glimpse the sea. As he looked round at the cracked wash basin, the rose-patterned paper which didn’t quite cover the whole wall because Widgey had bought a discontinued line and there had not been enough of it, at the painted chest of drawers scarred by cigarette burns and the disproportionately large mahogany tallboy which she had bought with him at a sale for thirty shillings, he felt a sensation of relief. He threw himself on the bed, which was placed so that you were likely to strike your head on the coved ceiling if you got up from it hurriedly, then after a few minutes began to unpack his things. The painted chest was still uncertainly balanced because one leg was shorter than the other three and the little piece of cork under it became displaced as soon as anything was put inside. And, yes, the top drawer still contained ‘The Bible For Commercial Travellers’, bound in red leather with the editorial injunction on the opening page:
‘Read this book
and it will bring you comfort.’ He turned to the back flyleaf and saw that the old message was still there, written in a flowing commercial traveller’s hand:

‘If no comfort obtained try ringing Anna,’ followed by what was presumably Anna’s telephone number. He had come home.

He had first visited the Seven Seas Hotel when he was five years old, brought down by his father and mother to see ‘the place where Belle’s set up to poison people’, as his father put it. That was during the war. There was barbed wire along the sea front, they had to bring ration cards, and his father complained that they did not get enough food to fill a gnat’s belly. Mrs Widgeon – her name was Arabella and she was his mother’s sister – was the wife of a heroic fighter pilot who had been wounded, discharged from the service, and was in the process of dying quietly. His father was of the opinion that Alec had opted for a quiet life and that there was not much wrong with him, and he did not really change this view even after Alec had proved his case by dying just after the war ended. For years they had taken their family holiday at the Seven Seas, but his father had never really liked it. It was, he contemptuously said, not a proper hotel but a boarding house, which served only breakfast and an evening meal. After his mother died and his father married again, Tony had come down alone. If room thirteen was free he always stayed in it.

He could never remember Widgey looking any different from the way she looked now, a small woman with grey untidy hair who rolled her own cigarettes and always had one in a corner of her mouth. She ran the Seven Seas with the accompaniment of a continually changing staff, and she must have been less haphazard than she seemed because people came back year after year. Or perhaps it was the haphazardness they liked. Certainly it had always delighted Tony. There was no regular time for the evening meal at the Seven Seas, or rather there was a time but it was most erratically observed. There were no rules about not taking girls, or bottles, or both up to your room. Widgey had never applied for a drinks licence but drink often appeared mysteriously on the tables. Evenings of sparse meals would alternate with occasions when the astonished guests would see a turkey or a goose brought into the dining-room, to be carved by Widgey and served with the appropriate trimmings, cranberry jelly, apple sauce, stuffing. There was no question of the door being locked at eleven. The sign in the hall ‘Last In Please Lock Up’ sometimes led to a reveller returning at three in the morning and finding the door locked against him, but Widgey would wave aside apologies and complaints when she staggered down in her dressing gown to open it.
Never apologise, never explain:
she might have adopted the motto had she known it. Her charm for Tony was that she was never surprised, reproachful, or disappointed by the conduct of others. In adolescence the Seven Seas became increasingly for him a home from home.

Home was a semi-detached house in Eltham, one of London’s more undistinguished outer suburbs. The house was one in a long group put up during the nineteen twenties in the worst period of between-the-wars jerry building, and it fronted on to a main road where the traffic roared past both night and day. His remembrances of childhood were patchy. Going to the local school, writing his name
Anthony Jones,
and being upset because a teacher said ‘Jones, that’s the most common name there is,’ wishing he had a brother or a sister, a terrible time in the school lavatories one afternoon with some older boys, good reports changing to critical ones. (‘His ability is clear, but doesn’t try hard… Can do well enough but doesn’t seem interested.’) His father was away a lot during the week, because he was a traveller. Tony told this to other boys, and could never understand why they were not more impressed. In his mind he saw his father travelling from one place to another, going to strange cities where wonderful things happened to him. On Friday, or sometimes Thursday, evenings when Mr Jones came home in the little car and brought a big battered brown case into the house and said that it had been a good week or a bad week and that now he must do his reports, Tony associated these reports with travel, something similar to the essays he was asked to write in school about the most exciting thing that had happened on your holidays. Not until he was eleven years old did he realise that his father’s travelling was not done for pleasure but to sell things, at one time electrical equipment, at another a new kind of electric lamp, at another still a range of toys.

Mr Jones was a short stout man with a thick moustache and an ebullient way of talking. When, on returning after the week’s travelling, he exclaimed ‘Hallo hallo, what have we here?’ and lifted Tony on to his shoulders, the boy was conscious of a pungent smell which he eventually recognised as a blend of cigarette smoke, beer and male sweat. Mr Jones was a great sportsman or at least a great watcher of sport, and in the winter they always went together on Saturday afternoons to watch a professional football match. At the match he would shout criticism freely. ‘Pass, you fool,’ he would cry. ‘Don’t fiddle faddle with the ball, man, get rid of it…what’s happened to your eyesight, ref, go and get some glasses…dirty, send him off.’ Occasionally they would find themselves in a nest of opposition supporters and then a verbal altercation might go on throughout the match. When the exchange of insults seemed likely to reach the point of blows Mr Jones would calm down suddenly. ‘What’s up then, what’s the matter, it’s a game, isn’t it?’ he would say, adding afterwards to his son, ‘Just as well you were there, I almost lost my temper with that fellow, I might have done something I’d have been sorry for.’ On the way home they often fell in with a bunch of home supporters and the discussion, no longer an argument, would be continued.

On Sunday mornings they would kick a ball about in the small back garden or on the nearby common. Tony would stand between a cap and a scarf placed to represent goal posts and would dive to try to save his father’s rather feeble shots. ‘That was great,’ Mr Jones would say after these occasions, which ended with him panting hard from the reputedly weak heart which had kept him out of the armed forces. ‘You’re going to be a smashing little goalkeeper, you’ll be playing for the school in no time.’ The truth was, however, that Tony was no good at games, and didn’t like them. Awareness of this was kept from his father until the day when Tony said he had been picked as goalkeeper and Mr Jones turned up to the match on Saturday morning to find that his son was not even a spectator. There was no row afterwards, but the occasion marked the end of something in their relationship. Afterwards Tony went to no more professional matches, and before long Mr Jones also stopped going.

At about the same time, when he was thirteen, Tony became aware of other things about his father. The smell that had seemed in childhood to be warm, comforting and safe, became extremely disagreeable. He learned to identify the evenings when his father came home more than usually cheerful as those on which beer could be smelt strongly on his breath, and indeed it seemed to him at times that his father’s whole body reeked of beer and that the smell permeated his clothes. He associated this smell in some way with the incident in the school lavatories, which had never been repeated. And he wondered for the first time about his father’s relationship with his mother. When Mr Jones came home he would embrace his wife in a bear hug and say something like ‘Give us a buss, Sheila, me bonny lass. You’re a sight for sore eyes and no mistake.’ His mother would accept this embrace rather as if she were a statue with movable arms, which she laced in a loose and formal manner behind her husband’s back. After a moment she would move away and say that she must get supper. Her husband, duty done, then dropped into an armchair, put on his slippers, and asked how every little thing was going on at school. Was this the way all mothers and fathers went on, could it be said that they loved each other. This was a question to which he never found an answer. Certainly they never had rows, there was hardly ever an argument, although Mr Jones was argumentative enough with the neighbours who came in sometimes for a drink or coffee. At any sign of family argument, however, his wife would say that she must get the lunch or the supper or clean the bedrooms, or wash some clothes.

He saw much more of his mother than of his father, yet she was never so real a presence to him. Like her sister she was untidy and vague, but unlike Widgey she was shapelessly fat, with an indeterminate figure shrouded in sacking-like dresses of anonymous colour. Like her sister again she was interested in the unseen world, but where Widgey read the future in cards, and had once possessed a tarot pack before evolving her own system of interpreting ordinary playing cards, Mrs Jones was interested in spiritualism. She took the
Psychic News
and similar periodicals and was a member of a Spirit Circle which held regular séances. Occasionally she went to meetings in central London, and at one of these she herself had fainted after receiving a spirit message from her brother Jack who had been killed in an air raid. Sometimes Tony would come home from school and find his mother, with three or four other ladies, sitting round an ouija board or conducting spirit rapping sessions at a table. He would go into the kitchen and eat his bread and butter and jam listening to the murmur of voices, raised occasionally to small screeches of pleasure or dismay, that came from next door. When the session was over Mrs Jones would float in at the kitchen door, rather like a spirit herself, and ask whether he wanted anything more to eat. Then he did his homework, and after that in the summer went out to play with other boys on the common, in the winter stayed in and read books. Television was not yet endemic, and they had no set in their home.

When he grew up he wondered often whether she had wanted a child, and concluded that upon the whole she hadn’t. She never spoke harshly to him, saw that he was clean and that his clothes were neat, but as he looked back it seemed that she had shown him no sign of love. Sometimes the ladies who came to the table rapping sessions would say what a delightful boy he was, so good looking, so quiet, so well behaved. His mother would smile vaguely and agree with them, but did she really think so? ‘He’s no
trouble,’
they would cry as if this were some kind of miracle, and this was true until the time of the Creighton affair, when he was fourteen years old.

Creighton was a big, rather stupid boy who had a gang of which Tony became a member. His qualification was the possession of a roulette wheel. The wheel had been bought by his mother at a sale, in a lot together with a pair of Victorian vases, which were what she really wanted, and a number of books. Among the books was one called
The Winning Rules, Or Roulette Practically Considered
by Sperienza, a gentleman who had played the game for many years at Monte Carlo. From this book Tony learned that you may bet en plein or à cheval, on a transversal or a carré or on one of the even chances. He learned also of systems that practically guaranteed you against losing, the Infallible System, the Wrangler’s System, the D’Alembert System, and many others. He discovered the meaning of martingales and anti-martingales, intermittences and permanences. Why was it necessary to work, he asked his father, when you could play the Infallible System instead? His father merely said that he shouldn’t believe any of that rubbish.