It's a Battlefield Page 11

  In Regent Street there was a traffic block for half a mile. Looking back they could see the line of buses stretching to Oxford Circus. There was a crowd on the pavement, and a scarlet cloth was being laid down outside a cinema. Stalwart women guarded it on either side with their hats a little awry and their hands hugging black bags from which they had eaten their lunch. They were flushed and cross and excited and suspicious that someone might push in from behind.

  ‘Business at a standstill,’ said Conder. Mounted police backed their horses at the edge of the pavement, keeping the road clear. ‘If you wanted to buy something, you couldn’t. If you wanted to meet a man on business, you couldn’t. We’ll be sitting here now for a quarter of an hour. Patience,’ Conder said, ‘you’ve got to be patient. This is a State occasion. The Queen’s going to a talkie.’ The street shone in the sun, empty all the way to Piccadilly Circus; after a shower of rain the pavements steamed. An old-fashioned Daimler hummed gently round the curve of the Quadrant, and men in morning coats bowed from the hips. Then a high head of hair in a grey toque passed into the cinema. Somebody dropped a paper bag on the carpet and there was a thin sound of cheering. All the engines of all the buses started simultaneously, the mounted policemen cantered away along the empty street, and everybody began to talk. It was like the end of the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day.

  *

  Conrad Drover’s voice was high with indignation. He told the clerks one by one what he thought of them, not forgetting the young man, a nephew of the managing director, who was learning the business from the bottom. He wore a light suit and a public-school tie. ‘If I’m not here to keep an eye on every one of you.’ The young man stared back insolently. He smelt of money. A motoring paper was open on his desk; often through his glass door Conrad had heard his low penetrating voice telling the other clerks of his week-end at Brighton. ‘You aren’t worth your pay. Don’t get the idea you’re indispensable –’ They stared back at him, and he became suddenly afraid of the phalanx of hostile eyes and dived back into his room.

  It was one o’clock, but he went on tidying his papers until the clerks’ room was empty. His fingers were trembling and he felt a little weak at the knees. He knew that he was hated and he hated them all in return as schemers. If they could see a way, they would make capital even out of his brother’s condemnation. He wondered sometimes whether this would go on all through his life, fresh relays of clerks, fresh relays of intriguers for his place. It was always the same, he told himself, a chief clerk was never popular, but other men perhaps were strong enough to stay the course. They had some source of fresh strength. ‘I’m tired out,’ he said aloud, and his knuckles drummed on his desk. The sound woke him from introspection, the clerks’ room was empty now, but the shadow of the manager still passed to and fro behind his glass door; it wasn’t safe giving way even for a moment. If the manager heard him talking aloud with no one in the room, he might begin to mistrust him, his figures and his discipline; he might decide that it was time to try the director’s nephew. Conrad was quite certain that one day that would happen. Meanwhile one must be calm, develop habits, think of other things, not take the office always home with one, balance-sheets and incompetent clerks and the director’s nephew locked in the skull as securely as papers in a safe of which the combination has been lost.

  He picked his hat from a peg, his umbrella from a stand, his attaché case from the desk. It was five minutes later than his usual hour for leaving the office, and it was possible that his table at the restaurant would have been taken by a stranger.

  As he passed through the clerks’ room he saw an evening paper spread out conspicuously on the desk of the director’s nephew. It was a day old and open at the account of his brother’s appeal. There was a smudgy photograph of his brother taken on the day of his wedding. He wore a stiff collar and a dark tie, and the unaccustomed clothes brought out a likeness to Conrad. Conrad’s heart jolted. He was afraid that the manager would see it. He crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket. But the manager might want something to read at lunch and pick it out again. If I could burn it, he thought, and felt his pocket for matches. But there was no fireplace. When he heard the manager’s door open, he took the paper out of the wastepaper basket and stuffed it into his pocket.

  He argued with himself all the way downstairs: the manager must know already. True. But he must not know that the clerks take advantage of me. ‘Discipline,’ he heard the manager saying, leaning across his desk, ‘we must have discipline in the office, Drover,’ and Conrad, his lips dry with despair, knowing that he was about to be given a month’s notice, heard with astonishment and disbelief, ‘It’s because I think you will be able to keep a firm hand on the clerks that I’m appointing you to Chine’s position. You are young, Drover,’ and the manager had sucked his teeth and smiled. ‘There’s nothing a young man can’t do, given energy, given ambition.’

  Conrad was taken by surprise. All his life he had been taken by surprise. People had promoted him when he had expected dismissal; they had praised him when he had expected blame. One day, he knew, they would find out. The director’s nephew was the first.

  Nobody had taken his seat. He hardly had time to raise the menu in front of his thin melancholy irritable face before the proprietress had flung herself towards his table. He was astonished every day at her promptitude. Old enough to be his mother, in a striped jumper to match her tea-room, she moved, as he sat down, as quickly and securely between the orange and blue art china, between the small tables with their check cloths, like a cat.

  ‘Yes?’ she breathed anxiously. ‘Yes?’ and whistled with nerves down the back of his neck.

  ‘The lunch,’ he said. The à la carte menu was a façade of respectability. It contained nothing that was not already included in the lunch, each course marked a little more expensively.

  ‘The tomato soup,’ he said. ‘The steak and kidney pie.’

  ‘I’m sorry. The pie’s finished.’

  ‘I always have pie. You might have known. You might have kept –’

  ‘I thought perhaps you weren’t coming in.’

  ‘I always come in. I’ll have a cutlet. And the fruit salad.’ He realized that the menu was shaking in his hand; the coloured figures in crinolines under ‘The Sign of the Mulberry Tree’ wavered. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I believe today I’d like you to send out for a glass of stout.’

  ‘I must ask you for the money, I’m afraid.’ He could hardly hear what she said, and he told her to repeat it, nervously and irritably; he never realized that she was more afraid of him and his chief clerk’s voice than of any other customer. She had always assumed that he was a Civil Servant burdened with secrets and responsibilities. ‘A stout,’ she said archly to her assistant, ‘for our Slavedriver,’ and felt a thrill of pride when the bottle was carried in. It made the whole restaurant more masculine. ‘I think I shall change the name to the “Cocoa Tree”,’ she confided to Conrad, putting down the bottle beside him.

  He did not answer. He was thinking how Milly had said, ‘You’d be no use with a gun.’ What on earth had made her say that? He had no use for a gun. The remark worried him. He was thinking of it when he got up, paid his bill, and left the tea-room. His face was intent, full of secrecy and care, he held himself badly; no one could have told what an absurd sentence he was repeating silently. Outside he raised his hand a little way and held it stiffly. For about two seconds it was still; long enough for a shot. But what on earth would he want to shoot at? A succession of faces flickered before him: the manager, the director’s nephew, a succession of clerks, a plump man laughing outside the Berkeley, a lined yellow face smiling, his own features reflected in plate-glass. I should never have the nerve to do anything like that, he thought; shooting doesn’t do any good. A girl ran past him towards a bus stop: she was laughing to herself and there was a smut on her cheek. He became suddenly conscious that complete happiness had brushed his coat, had nearly knocked the umbrella f
rom his arm. He looked after her, but she was already out of sight, a piece of scarlet material vanishing into the interior of a moving bus.

  A flower shop filled the air with scent.

  Shooting doesn’t do any good. All one wants is a little confidence, a belief in God, a flower in the buttonhole, music from a carillon, from mid-air, ‘energy and ambition, Drover’, love, a theatre ticket, love. With decision he stepped into the shop. ‘A dozen of those saffron roses. How much are they?’ The price staggered him, but he took them; it was too late, he had asked for them, and in any case, music from a carillon, love, extravagance, a piece of scarlet material disappearing.

  When he was half a mile away he saw they had given him pink roses.

  He swung his hand to throw them in the gutter; he was furious and disappointed: but an old lady stared at him in amazement, and he lowered his hand. He pretended that he had been signalling to a friend, smiled and nodded, and turned to a shop window: it was a gun shop. Two long double-barrelled guns were hung above a stuffed pheasant in a glass case. The coincidence astonished him. He heard Milly again make a light and meaningless remark, ‘You’d be no use with a gun’, and through his own transparent image, through the umbrella and the bouquet of flowers and the attaché case, he saw a row of small metal objects; the manysided chambers caught the light like steel dice. The roar of buses sounded louder as the carillon ceased to play in the high tower of Atkinson’s.

  A little confidence, a belief in God. The manager, the director’s nephew, myself. Conrad was happy, smiling into the barred window. ‘Discipline, Drover, discipline,’ and suppose that the retort was a raised revolver. ‘I much regret . . . a month’s notice,’ the plump face staring at the plump hands on the mahogany desk, expecting a man to take dismissal in a sporting spirit, to go without complaint to the streets to the dole (but there was no dole for a professional man). Suppose instead, when that moment came, as that moment certainly would come one day, suppose instead one simply raised a hand and fired. Would the face have time to show astonishment?

  ‘You would be a murderer.’

  But I’ve seen through that; you can’t shame me any longer with a word like murderer; I know what a murderer is – Jim is a murderer. The law has told me that, impressed it on me through three long days, counsel have made expensive speeches on the point; six shopkeepers, three Civil Servants, two doctors, and a well-known co-respondent have discussed it together and come to that conclusion – Jim is a murderer, a murderer is Jim. Why shouldn’t I be a murderer myself? Always, from the time I went to school, I have wanted to be like Jim. It’s no good calling me a murderer. I’ve seen through that.

  Of course, he said to himself, I’m joking. But why shouldn’t the joke go a little further? I’ll go into the shop and think all the time, when I’ve bought what I’m going to buy, I shall never be afraid of anyone again. Of course, when the shopman asks me what I want, I’ll make some excuse, the joke will be over, there’ll be nothing more to laugh about then, I’ll go out of the shop and catch a bus.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ the shopkeeper was saying. ‘This is the very type Lord Blendowe was using last autumn. He was pleased, very pleased with it. Feel the balance, sir. Of course it’s not a gun for every occasion.’ Conrad Drover watched them from the doorway, the bouquet of roses hung down to the pavement. ‘It’s a sporting gun, sir. When the birds are coming over well and high . . .’

  They bent over the gun, they sighted it, they smoothed it with their fingers. The shopman became confidential. ‘Is it true, sir, I have heard it remarked, that Mr Jpnes had not rented a moor this year? No, not Mr Fred Jones. He’s shooting with Lord Taveril. Mr ‘Gee-Gee’ Jones, sir.’

  Conrad entered the shop. He was smiling. He laid the roses on the counter and sat down. Nobody paid him any attention. ‘No, not many Americans this year, sir. We can’t say that we’re sorry. We have few American customers. They bring their own guns across with them. Machine-guns it will be before long. We hear a good many stories of their conduct, as you might expect, sir. They’re not sportsmen, sir, they’re killers.’

  Conrad got up again and began to walk round the shop. There was a thick carpet on the floor. His feet sank in the blue and scarlet pile, and one of his roses, a little overblown, shed its petals where he walked. In all the glass cases were arms: double-barrelled guns, rifles, revolvers.

  The shopman tittered. ‘Oh, yes, I had heard that, sir. That was Lord Taveril’s shoot, was it not? Shot the beater in the leg. His lordship is often in here, sir. He told us about it himself.’

  Conrad said suddenly in his chief clerk’s voice, ‘Is nobody going to attend to me?’ The shopman looked at him, raised his eyebrows, called ‘Mr Fanshawe, forward’, and continued his story. Mr Fanshawe appeared behind the counter. He had grey hair and wore a morning coat. The sale of weapons seemed to require morning coats, deep carpets, and polish everywhere – polish on the mahogany cases, on shoes, on hair and on nails.

  ‘I wanted to buy a revolver,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Certainly, sir, single action, double action. What are you contemplating?’ He drew out a case and began to press revolvers on Conrad. ‘The advantage of this new type of safety catch, sir. . . . A little heavy perhaps, this . . . this is a beautiful little instrument, sir, perhaps the most beautiful we have ever stocked. A lady’s model, but perfectly reliable over any distance up to fifty feet.’ Suddenly Conrad thought that the joke had gone far enough; he did not want a revolver; his hand was trembling again. He said: ‘I’ll think it over.’

  Another identical grey object weighed down his hand and against his own will his fingers tightened: I shall be afraid of no one ever again: the drums of his ears beat ‘discipline, Drover, discipline’, ‘a pram on a taxi’. He almost shouted at the assistant, ‘But I have no licence.’

  ‘Of course, sir, you have to produce the licence at the time of sale. If you were a regular customer we might waive a point, but naturally you will understand, sir, that we could not take the responsibility with a stranger.’ He was breaking it gently; he was under the impression that Conrad might be disappointed at not being allowed to leave the shop with a beautiful instrument capable of killing a man with reliability over a distance of not more than fifty feet. ‘No,’ Conrad said with pleasure, very glad that his joke was over, ‘I have no licence.’

  ‘Perhaps I could interest you in a householder’s air pistol. No licence required.’ The man’s voice was perfunctory. The pomp of carpet and morning coat and glittering mahogany was not required for the sale of an air pistol.

  ‘No, no, I must see about the licence, and then I’ll return.’

  ‘You have left your flowers on the counter,’ icily.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Fanshawe had already turned his back. Conrad went out scattering rose petals. A bus went by, but no one pursued it, no one with complete happiness in her face ran past him to disappear, a scrap of scarlet material. The joke had not been very funny, hardly worth telling to Milly, hardly likely to make them both forget for a while Jim in prison, Thursday’s execution, and laugh. For the first time in his life he was touched by hatred of his brother. How long before one could smile or laugh? How long these cramped muscles of the mouth? How long the awareness that a moment’s merriment was treacherous? The palm of his hand was still cold and weighted with gun metal.

  The thought occurred to him a little later: suppose Milly has succeeded, suppose Mrs Coney has signed; suppose Jim is reprieved. The idea weighed as heavily on his mind as the revolver in his palm; the weight of eighteen years descended on him. Would even Jim want that? But it was their duty to assume that life, simply life as an abstraction, without pleasure or hope or change, was what Jim would prefer to death. If Jim died they would be marked for a long time with horror; but they would live nevertheless. There would be consolations in time; they would be able to talk naturally together; some sort of a life might be painfully constructed. But if Jim lived, they would be condemned to a kind of death them
selves. The end of the eighteen years would be always in their sight, chilling any chance merriment, the flat end to every story. Jim put his mouth against the wire netting and said, ‘It would be a good job if Milly married again.’

  In his attaché case Conrad carried a pair of pyjamas, a sponge-bag, slippers, and a few papers. He opened it in the kitchen and packed away the contents neatly in corners; Milly had not come home. He boiled the kettle and listened, washed his hands and listened; upstairs the broken front-door banged back and forth. He wondered what was keeping her, put the flowers in water; the shop had given him its poorest flowers and one rose had already shed its petals. Presently he went upstairs.

  He opened the door of Milly’s room. He did not need Jim’s photograph on a table by the bed to tell him that it was her room. He knew her scent: pretty and cheap. It had blown on him down passages: across the room where the shorthand typists sat; out of shop doors in Oxford Street; next him at the cinema. But it did not occur to him that the scent was a very common one, but that Milly was very often in his thoughts. He was never safe from her intrusion, for when the free samples of ‘Nuit d’Amour’ were exhausted, all the thousands of coupons in the women’s pages filled up, and the scent was changed (‘Vrai Paris’ seeping through his door at the office, in and out of lifts and on the moving staircase), it was still the thought and image of Milly that he noticed, for Milly’s scent too had changed. She was not bold and experimental like Kay; she could not afford to be, filling up innumerable forms, receiving the casket the size of a matchbox which had been pictured across half a page of Modern, the tiny pot of rouge, the tiny tube of cream, scent in a bottle that might have come from a doll’s house.