They Never Looked Inside (3 page)

The man, he felt sure, was a stockbroker, and equally he felt sure that he was known to his friends as “The Major” (1914-18 vintage). His considerable body was too tightly encased in a suit which contrived to out-savile Savile Row and his startlingly pig-like face appeared at first sight to be a healthy brick-red; it was only on closer inspection that it became evident that this colour was produced by numberless little scarlet threads, the finger-prints left by high living and much old brandy. He was wearing the tie of a very well-known cricket club. His companion was a lacquered job, very partially dressed in that shade of jet satin best calculated to set off a dead white skin (or alternatively, thought McCann, the dead white skin had been superimposed as best calculated to show off the jet satin – in those days of coupons it was difficult to tell where art ended and economy began).

They were so perfectly suited to each other and to their present surroundings that it would have caused him no surprise had they headed a male and female chorus respectively, and started some song and dance ensemble.

Fitted to each other in one way, certainly. In others, he was not so sure. He fancied the man was more likely to get his fun out of warm and grubby little typists. And the woman? Well, as far as she looked human at all, he associated her with something Middle-Eastern.

He pictured her in bed with a certain Egyptian of his acquaintance, shuddered, and finished his beer.

Quite suddenly he felt that he had had enough. The whole place, its atmosphere, its decoration scheme, its sleek waiters and impossible clientele, took him by the throat. He seized his hat, disregarded the insinuating palm of the cloakroom attendant (whose worried expression was probably due to the fact that he was having difficulty with his surtax returns) and pushed out into the night.

Descending Hay Hill an American soldier stopped him.

“Mister, what time do you make it?”

“Ten past nine,” said McCann. Unlike some of his countrymen, he liked American soldiers. He had seen them fight.

“Ten after nine, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“You wouldn’t, perhaps, be a minute or two fast?”

McCann considered the matter.

“Well, yes, I might be,” he admitted.

The American produced two heavy, expensive-looking platinum timepieces and scrutinised them carefully.

“Coming up for nine minutes past nine right now,” he said. “Five—four—three—two—one—now.”

“Thank you so much. Good night.”

“It’s a pleasure,” said the American sombrely, and rolled on his way.

Major McCann pushed on in the general direction of Shepherd’s Market.

He wanted to find a pub as different as possible from the hotel he had just left. From his pre-war recollections, this was a promising area to start in.

A name came into his head. “The Pink Elephant.”

“I beg your pardon,” said a small man, who seemed to have materialised from the pavement.

“I’m very sorry—I was talking to myself.”

“Did I hear you mention ‘The Pink Elephant’?”

“That’s right – a public house: somewhere in these parts, unless it’s been blitzed.”

“It hasn’t been blitzed,” said the small man. “It’s been closed.”

“Closed? Who by?”

“The police.”

“Oh—ah—yes. I see.” Thinking it over he was not really surprised. “Perhaps,” he went on, “you could tell me the name of some other place.”

“Depends what you want,” said the small man.

“Beer—and peace and quiet.”

“Try the Leopard. First right, down the steps, right again, and on your right.”

“Right,” said the Major. “I mean, thank you very much. I will.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the small man, and dematerialised.

As Major McCann, following these directions, approached his objective, so a sense of familiarity grew. And when he got there he recognised it quite easily, although it was (good God!) over ten years since he had been there. The faded signboard was the same, and he remembered the three awkward steps up to the saloon bar with the metal boot scraper at the bottom. He recollected vividly falling down the one on to the other, one frosty moonless night.

He wondered if Pop still owned the place.

Pop Carter had been quite a celebrity in those far-off pre-war days. A man of middle height, thick build and indeterminate class. All things to all men. Hear him talking to the famous authors who came almost nightly to the public bar and you suspected him of having a broad and Catholic imagination – listen to him swapping stories with the commercials and you were sure of it. He had acted as his own chucker-out and had been an expert practitioner with the blackthorn truncheon which hung under the serving ledge. Had he not laid out with it “Rufus” Gavigan the very night that enterprising gentleman had finished attending to the London office of the Société Anonyme, and had come to celebrate his million franc haul on Pop’s Four Star, with the result that whilst policemen beat through the streets and restaurants, bars and brothels of the West End, Rufus lay happily unconscious in the casualty ward of the Middlesex Hospital.

“Where’s Mr. Carter?” he asked the woman behind the bar.

“He’s dead,” said the woman. “Been dead for five years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I knew him well in the old days. Perhaps you remember him yourself.”

“I ought to,” said the woman. “He was my father.” She said it, however, without malice.

The Major really looked at her for the first time. He remembered, now, that Pop had possessed a wife, who sometimes “obliged” in the saloon bar, and a family who had never made a public appearance at all. He had heard that there was a daughter who had gone to a school “above her station”. This was probably the one. She seemed pleasant and capable.

“Have something yourself,” he suggested.

She gave him a quick look and paid him the compliment of accepting a gin and lime.

“I remember your father,” he said, “a very remarkable man. Quite outstanding in his own line.”

“He was a dear,” said Miss Carter, with unexpected warmth. “You heard what happened to him?”

“No—I’ve been out of touch lately.”

“He and Mother together—it happened about the end of the first Blitz. Were you in England then?”

“Yes,” said the Major, “but not in London, thank heaven.”

“I never knew two people who took less notice of things like that. You know—bombs and noises. I used to be scared stiff. And when a big one came especially near I’d start downstairs for the shelter. Then I’d stop for a minute and listen at their door. And I’d hear them snoring. So I’d hop back into bed. Pride’s a funny thing.”

“So’s breeding,” thought the Major. “It sticks out a mile, wherever you find it.”

He was often surprised at the frequency with which perfect strangers confided their life histories to him. Only that morning a man from whom he had stopped to buy a newspaper at the corner of Panton Street had spent a quarter of an hour taking him through the details of a rather optimistic pension claim.

Miss Carter returned from serving a customer with whisky (of which she seemed to have an almost pre-war stock) and picked up her gin and lime and the thread of her story.

“After all,” she said, “the house never lost so much as a pane of glass. Mother and Father were killed walking down Regent Street. It was the last bomb of the last bad raid we had in the West End.”

She stared dreamily into the cloudy centre of her glass and the Major wondered what she was seeing in it. Metal, flame, smoke, destruction, mutilation. Cordite blackened clothes. Grey skin and the rich plum colour of newly shed blood.

Or nothing at all.

“Don’t talk about it if it worries you,” he said.

“It used to worry me,” said Miss Carter. “Oh dear, how it used to worry me. But hard work’s a good cure for worry. The old man owned this place – freehold, goodwill and all. It’s not a brewer’s house, you know. And not a penny out on mortgage. I’ve been running it ever since. Coming, sir— same again ?”

It couldn’t be an easy place to run. The Leopard was not only a pub, it was a “Residential” as well. That is to say, it had half a dozen rooms available for bed and breakfast. If Pop Carter had liked you, you might stay there any time from six days to six months, a pleasant, rather hand-to-mouth existence which entailed taking your midday meal out and sharing the evening meal with the family. If Pop Carter had disliked you, your stay would have been more in the neighbourhood of six minutes, or even six seconds.

“I’ve got plenty of rooms,” he once said to a stout business man who appeared to be travelling with his secretary (possibly pressure of work dictated his idea that they should share the same bedroom) “but you’re not having one. And you can sue me for refusing to take you in. And if you do I shall charge you with stealing one of my silver tankards from the private bar. I lost three last week.”

Not that there had been much logic in the old man’s choices. It was just a question of like and dislike. He remembered “Glasgow”. She had been one of his oldest tenants. What had happened to her, he wondered.

Miss Carter anticipated the question by remarking as she returned: “If you knew Pop well, you probably met Miss Macduff.”

“I certainly did,” said the Major.

“She’s still with us – the last of the old faithfuls. Perhaps you’d like to run up and have a word with her. She moved up to Number Ten during the Blitz. Said the nearer she got to heaven the better. Do run up. She’d love to see you.”

The Major climbed the stairs and knocked at No. 10.

“Come away in,” said the well-remembered voice.

Glasgow was sitting on the edge of her bed, comfortably if informally dressed in a polo-necked primrose sweater and a kimono; and, as the Major became increasingly aware, very little else. She raised at him the bland appraising look which had first set his heart beating to double time ten years and more since.

“Why, Angus – you’re a sight for sore eyes. Sit down and talk to an old woman.”

She cleared a space for him on the bed by sweeping a few of the things that were there already off on to the floor.

“London’s a cold sad place, these days. It’s only old friends that keep me from drink and worse.”

“What’s worse than drink, Glasgow?” he said, affectionately picking up her hand.

“Come away, come away,” said Miss Macduff sternly, giving him, nevertheless, an affectionate squeeze. “No tricks, now, or I’ll be obliged to scream.”

“Surely you know me better than that,” said the Major.

“Aye, too well. It’s good to see you, though. Will you take a cup of tea? Bide awhile, and I’ll put the kettle on.”

She padded into the next room.

The Major had no real desire for tea on top of all the beer he had drunk, but hesitated to hurt her feelings. A compromise occurred to him.

“Leave the tea,” he said. “Get some knickers on and come down and have a drink in the private bar.”

Over a generous whisky Glasgow sat and listened to McCann’s opinion of the inhabitants of London.

“I’m not thin skinned,” he said, “but there’s no getting away from it, I have got a weakness for courtesy in the ordinary dealings of life. This morning, now, I jumped on to a bus which was waiting for the traffic lights. Apparently it was full up. Well, you could hardly describe that as my fault, could you? If it had happened before the war a firm but more or less polite conductor would have called my attention to the fact that I constituted one in excess of the lawful number appointed to be carried by the vehicle in question, and would have requested me to alight at the first stop. What happened today ? A henna-haired bitch (excuse me, Glasgow, she really was a bitch) started screaming at me from the top of the stairs. Since I was unable (fortunately) to understand what she was saying, and quite unable to dismount owing to the speed at which the bus was travelling, I took no action. Whereupon she descended the stairs and delivered a sharp and unexpected blow in the middle of my chest. It was only by clinging with the tenacity of a limpet that I managed to save my footing. I suppose my correct course of action would have been to have allowed myself to fall and break a leg and then to have sued the London Passenger Transport Board. Pah!”

“All conductresses are bitches,” said Glasgow soothingly. “Pray heaven we’ll soon have the boys back.”

“Then the tobacconists. Do you know, I’m already afraid to ask for a packet of cigarettes. You’d hardly think that such a simple matter could present any difficulties. I dare say you don’t even notice it? No. You’ve got used to it gradually. If it’s a man behind the counter you take your chance. You can be snappy and businesslike and adopt a sort of ‘no black market here’ tone of voice – or you can be man-to-man and confidential. In either case the result’s the same. You get no cigarettes – or ten of a brand you don’t want. If it’s a girl you feel compelled to act like a dago dancing partner making advances to a hat-check girl, in the faint hope that she’s got twenty Gold Flake under the counter.”

“All girls in tobacconists’ shops are bitches,” said Glasgow. “Have this one on me.”

At some period in the evening McCann had bought an evening paper and as Glasgow disappeared in quest of further whisky he pulled it out of his pocket and read on the front page:

CRIME WAVE HITS OXFORD STREET

Last night, and early this morning, two jewellers’ shops in Oxford Street were broken into. At the first, the thieves had a poor haul since they were unable to make any impression on the firm’s safe. At the other, the shop and premises of Cartwright & Gladstone, they removed articles to the value of £1,500, including watches, bracelets and loose stones. Mr. Finkelstein, the manager . . . [followed a long and unconvincing statement from Mr. Finkelstein, in which he tried, without conspicuous success, to explain away his folly in leaving the safe key in an unlocked drawer].

After a brutal attack on the night watchman, a Mr. Parrot, the intruders committed the wanton outrage of killing a white terrier belonging to the watchman, which had evidently tried to interfere with their nefarious activities.

A man has already been detained by the police in connection with the latter robbery.