The Human Factor Read online

  ‘You can’t get them there. They are very inexpensive.’

  ‘I don’t want to seem niggardly.’

  ‘Then go for quantity. Tell him to get three pounds of them.’

  ‘What is the name again? Perhaps you would tell the porter as you go out.’

  ‘Is my check over then? Am I clear?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes. I told you it was purely formal, Castle.’

  ‘Good shooting.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  Castle gave the porter the message. ‘Three pounds did ’e say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Three pounds of Maltesers!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I take a pantechnicon?’

  The porter summoned the assistant porter who was reading a girlie magazine. He said, ‘Three pounds of Maltesers for Colonel Daintry.’

  ‘That would be a hundred and twenty packets or thereabouts,’ the man said after a little calculation.

  ‘No, no,’ Castle said, ‘it’s not as bad as that. The weight, I think, is what he means.’

  He left them making their calculations. He was fifteen minutes late at the pub and his usual corner was occupied. He ate and drank quickly and calculated that he had made up three minutes. Then he bought the Yardley’s at the chemist in St James’s Arcade, the Earl Grey at Jackson’s, a Double Gloucester there too to save time, although he usually went to the cheese shop in Jermyn Street, but the Maltesers, which he had intended to buy at the ABC, had run out by the time he got there – the assistant told him there had been an unexpected demand, and he had to buy Kit Kats instead. He was only three minutes late when he rejoined Davis.

  ‘You never told me they were having a check,’ he said.

  ‘I was sworn to secrecy. Did they catch you with anything?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘He did with me. Asked what I had in my macintosh pocket. I’d got that report from 59800. I wanted to read it again over my lunch.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, he let me go with a warning. He said rules were made to be kept. To think that fellow Blake (whatever did he want to escape for?) got forty years freedom from income tax, intellectual strain and responsibility, and it’s we who suffer for it now.’

  ‘Colonel Daintry wasn’t very difficult,’ Castle said. ‘He knew a cousin of mine at Corpus. That sort of thing makes a difference.’

  CHAPTER II

  CASTLE was usually able to catch the six thirty-five train from Euston. This brought him to Berkhamsted punctually at seven twelve. His bicycle waited for him at the station – he had known the ticket collector for many years and he always left it in his care. Then he rode the longer way home, for the sake of exercise – across the canal bridge, past the Tudor school, into the High Street, past the grey flint parish church which contained the helmet of a crusader, then up the slope of the Chilterns towards his small semi-detached house in King’s Road. He always arrived there, if he had not telephoned a warning from London, by half-past seven. There was just time to say good night to the boy and have a whisky or two before dinner at eight.

  In a bizarre profession anything which belongs to an everyday routine gains great value – perhaps that was one reason why, when he came back from South Africa, he chose to return to his birthplace: to the canal under the weeping willows, to the school and the ruins of a once-famous castle which had withstood a siege by Prince Louis of France and of which, so the story went, Chaucer had been a Clerk of Works and – who knows? – perhaps an ancestral Castle one of the artisans. It consisted now of only a few grass mounds and some yards of flint wall, facing the canal and the railway line. Beyond was a long road leading away from the town bordered with hawthorn hedges and Spanish chestnut trees until one reached at last the freedom of the Common. Years ago the inhabitants of the town fought for their right to graze cattle upon the Common, but in the twentieth century it was doubtful whether any animal but a rabbit or a goat could have found provender among the ferns, the gorse and the bracken.

  When Castle was a child there still remained on the Common the remnants of old trenches dug in the heavy red clay during the first German war by members of the Inns of Court OTC, young lawyers who practised there before they went to die in Belgium or France as members of more orthodox units. It was unsafe to wander there without proper knowledge, since the old trenches had been dug several feet deep, modelled on the original trenches of the Old Contemptibles around Ypres, and a stranger risked a sudden fall and a broken leg. Children who had grown up with the knowledge of their whereabouts wandered freely, until the memory began to fade. Castle for some reason had always remembered, and sometimes on his days off from the office he took Sam by the hand and introduced him to the forgotten hiding-places and the multiple dangers of the Common. How many guerrilla campaigns he had fought there as a child against overwhelming odds. Well, the days of the guerrilla had returned, daydreams had become realities. Living thus with the long familiar he felt the security that an old lag feels when he goes back to the prison he knows.

  Castle pushed his bicycle up King’s Road. He had bought his house with the help of a building society after his return to England. He could easily have saved money by paying cash, but he had no wish to appear different from the schoolmasters on either side – on the salary they earned there was no possibility of saving. For the same reason he kept the rather gaudy stained glass of the Laughing Cavalier over the front door. He disliked it; he associated it with dentistry – so often stained glass in provincial towns hides the agony of the chair from outsiders – but again because his neighbours bore with theirs, he preferred to leave it alone. The schoolmasters in King’s Road were strong upholders of the aesthetic principles of North Oxford, where many of them had taken tea with their tutors, and there too, in the Banbury Road, his bicycle would have fitted well, in the hall, under the staircase.

  He opened his door with a Yale key. He had once thought of buying a mortice lock or something very special chosen in St James’s Street from Chubb’s, but he restrained himself – his neighbours were content with Yale, and there had been no burglary nearer than Boxmoor in the last three years to justify him. The hall was empty; so seemed the sitting-room, which he could see through the open door: there was not a sound from the kitchen. He noticed at once that the whisky bottle was not standing ready by the syphon on the sideboard. The habit of years had been broken and Castle felt anxiety like the prick of an insect. He called, ‘Sarah’, but there was no reply. He stood just inside the hall door, beside the umbrella stand, taking in with rapid glances the familiar scene, with the one essential missing – the whisky bottle – and he held his breath. He had always, since they came, felt certain that one day a doom would catch up with them, and he knew that when that happened he must not be betrayed by panic: he must leave quickly, without an attempt to pick up any broken piece of their life together. ‘Those that are in Judaea must take refuge in the mountains . . .’ He thought for some reason of his cousin at the Treasury, as though he were an amulet, which could protect him, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and then he was able to breathe again with relief, hearing voices on the floor above and the footsteps of Sarah as she came down the stairs.

  ‘Darling, I didn’t hear you. I was talking to Doctor Barker.’

  Doctor Barker followed her – a middle-aged man with a flaming strawberry mark on his left cheek, dressed in dusty grey, with two fountain-pens in his breast pocket; or perhaps one of them was a pocket torch for peering into throats.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Sam’s got measles, darling.’

  ‘He’ll do all right,’ Doctor Barker said. ‘Just keep him quiet. Not too much light.’

  ‘Will you have a whisky, Doctor?’

  ‘No, thank you. I still have two more visits to make and I’m late for dinner as it is.’

  ‘Where could he have caught it?’

  ‘Oh, there’s quite an epidemic. You needn’t worry. It’s only a light attack.’


  When the doctor had gone Castle kissed his wife. He ran his hand over her black resistant hair; he touched her high cheekbones. He felt the black contours of her face as a man might who has picked out one piece of achieved sculpture from all the hack carvings littering the steps of an hotel for white tourists; he was reassuring himself that what he valued most in life was still safe. By the end of a day he always felt as though he had been gone for years leaving her defenceless. Yet no one here minded her African blood. There was no law here to menace their life together. They were secure – or as secure as they would ever be.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I was worried. Everything seemed at sixes and sevens tonight when I came in. You weren’t here. Not even the whisky . . .’

  ‘What a creature of habit you are.’

  He began to unpack his briefcase while she prepared the whisky. ‘Is there really nothing to worry about?’ Castle asked. ‘I never like the way doctors speak, especially when they are reassuring.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Can I go and see him?’

  ‘He’s asleep now. Better not wake him. I gave him an aspirin.’

  He put Volume One of Clarissa Harlowe back in the bookcase.

  ‘Finished it?’

  ‘No, I doubt whether I ever shall now. Life’s a bit too short.’

  ‘But I thought you always liked long books.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll have a go at War and Peace before it’s too late.’

  ‘We haven’t got it.’

  ‘I’m going to buy a copy tomorrow.’

  She had carefully measured out a quadruple whisky by English pub standards, and now she brought it to him and closed the glass in his hand, as though it were a message no one else must read. Indeed, the degree of his drinking was known only to them: he usually drank nothing stronger than beer when he was with a colleague or even with a stranger in a bar. Any touch of alcoholism might always be regarded in his profession with suspicion. Only Davis had the indifference to knock the drinks back with a fine abandon, not caring who saw him, but then he had the audacity which comes from a sense of complete innocence. Castle had lost both audacity and innocence for ever in South Africa while he was waiting for the blow to fall.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you,’ Sarah asked, ‘if it’s a cold meal tonight? I was busy with Sam all evening.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He put his arm round her. The depth of their love was as secret as the quadruple measure of whisky. To speak of it to others would invite danger. Love was a total risk. Literature had always so proclaimed it. Tristan, Anna Karenina, even the lust of Lovelace – he had glanced at the last volume of Clarissa. ‘I like my wife’ was the most he had ever said even to Davis.

  ‘I wonder what I would do without you,’ Castle said.

  ‘Much the same as you are doing now. Two doubles before dinner at eight.’

  ‘When I arrived and you weren’t here with the whisky, I was scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘Of being left alone. Poor Davis,’ he added, ‘going home to nothing.’

  ‘Perhaps he has a lot more fun.’

  ‘This is my fun,’ he said. ‘A sense of security.’

  ‘Is life outside as dangerous as all that?’ She sipped from his glass and touched his mouth with lips which were wet with J. & B. He always bought J. & B. because of its colour – a large whisky and soda looked no stronger than a weak one of another brand.

  The telephone rang from the table by the sofa. He lifted the receiver and said ‘Hello,’ but no one replied. ‘Hello.’ He silently counted four, then put the receiver down when he heard the connection break.

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘I expect it was a wrong number.’

  ‘It’s happened three times this month. Always when you are late at the office. You don’t think it could be a burglar checking up to see if we are at home?’

  ‘There’s nothing worth a burglary here.’

  ‘One reads such horrible stories, darling – men with stockings over their faces. I hate the time after sunset before you come home.’

  ‘That’s why I bought you Buller. Where is Buller?’

  ‘He’s in the garden eating grass. Something has upset him. Anyway, you know what he’s like with strangers. He fawns on them.’

  ‘He might object to a stocking mask all the same.’

  ‘He would think it was put on to please him. You remember at Christmas . . . with the paper hats . . .’

  ‘I’d always thought before we got him that boxers were fierce dogs.’

  ‘They are – with cats.’

  The door creaked and Castle turned quickly: the square black muzzle of Buller pushed the door fully open, and then he launched his body like a sack of potatoes at Castle’s flies. Castle fended him off. ‘Down, Buller, down.’ A long ribbon of spittle descended Castle’s trouser leg. He said, ‘If that’s fawning, any burglar would run a mile.’ Buller began to bark spasmodically and wriggle his haunches, like a dog with worms, moving backwards towards the door.

  ‘Be quiet, Buller.’

  ‘He only wants a walk.’

  ‘At this hour? I thought you said he was ill.’

  ‘He seems to have eaten enough grass.’

  ‘Be quiet, Buller, damn you. No walk.’

  Buller slumped heavily down and dribbled onto the parquet to comfort himself.

  ‘The meter man was scared of him this morning, but Buller only meant to be friendly.’

  ‘But the meter man knows him.’

  ‘This one was new.’

  ‘New. Why?’

  ‘Oh, our usual man has got the flu.’

  ‘You asked to see his card?’

  ‘Of course. Darling, are you getting scared of burglars now? Stop it, Buller. Stop.’ Buller was licking his private parts with the gusto of an alderman drinking soup.

  Castle stepped over him and went into the hall. He examined the meter carefully, but there seemed nothing unusual about it, and he returned.

  ‘You are worried about something?’

  ‘It’s nothing really. Something happened at the office. A new security man throwing his weight about. It irritated me – I’ve been more than thirty years in the firm, and I ought to be trusted by this time. They’ll be searching our pockets next when we leave for lunch. He did look in my briefcase.’

  ‘Be fair, darling. It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the job.’

  ‘It’s too late to change that now.’

  ‘Nothing’s ever too late,’ she said, and he wished he could believe her. She kissed him again as she went past him to the kitchen to fetch the cold meat.

  When they were sitting down and he had taken another whisky, she said, ‘Joking apart, you are drinking too much.’

  ‘Only at home. No one sees me but you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for the job. I meant for your health. I don’t care a damn about the job.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘A department of the Foreign Office. Everyone knows what that means, but you have to go around with your mouth shut like a criminal. If you told me – me, your wife – what you’d done today, they’d sack you. I wish they would sack you. What have you done today?’

  ‘I’ve gossiped with Davis, I’ve made notes on a few cards, I sent off one telegram – oh, and I’ve been interviewed by that new security officer. He knew my cousin when he was at Corpus.’

  ‘Which cousin?’

  ‘Roger.’

  ‘That snob in the Treasury?’

  ‘Yes.’

  On the way to bed, he said, ‘Could I look in on Sam?’

  ‘Of course. But he’ll be fast asleep by now.’

  Buller followed them and laid a bit of spittle like a bonbon on the bedclothes.

  ‘Oh, Buller.’

  He wagged what remained of his tail as though he had been praised. For a boxer he was not intelligent. He had cost a lot of money and perhaps his pedigree was a little to
o perfect.

  The boy lay asleep diagonally in his teak bunk with his head on a box of lead soldiers instead of a pillow. One black foot hung out of the blankets altogether and an officer of the Tank Corps was wedged between his toes. Castle watched Sarah rearrange him, picking out the officer and digging out a parachutist from under a thigh. She handled his body with the carelessness of an expert, and the child slept solidly on.

  ‘He looks very hot and dry,’ Castle said.

  ‘So would you if you had a temperature of 103.’ He looked more African than his mother, and the memory of a famine photograph came to Castle’s mind – a small corpse spread-eagled on desert sand, watched by a vulture.

  ‘Surely that’s very high.’

  ‘Not for a child.’

  He was always amazed by her confidence: she could make a new dish without referring to any cookery book, and nothing ever came to pieces in her hands. Now she rolled the boy roughly on his side and firmly tucked him in, without making an eyelid stir.

  ‘He’s a good sleeper.’

  ‘Except for nightmares.’

  ‘Has he had another?’

  ‘Always the same one. We both of us go off by train and he’s left alone. On the platform someone – he doesn’t know who – grips his arm. It’s nothing to worry about. He’s at the age for nightmares. I read somewhere that they come when school begins to threaten. I wish he hadn’t got to go to prep school. He may have trouble. Sometimes I almost wish you had apartheid here too.’

  ‘He’s a good runner. In England there’s no trouble if you are good at any sort of games.’

  In bed that night she woke from her first sleep and said, as though the thought had occurred to her in a dream, ‘It’s strange isn’t it, your being so fond of Sam.’

  ‘Of course I am. Why not? I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it. A little bastard.’

  ‘That’s what Davis always calls him.’

  ‘Davis? He doesn’t know?’ she asked with fear. ‘Surely he doesn’t know?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. It’s the word he uses for any child.’

  ‘I’m glad his father’s six feet underground,’ she said.