Kitabı oku: «Black As He’s Painted»

CHAPTER 1

Mr Whipplestone

The year was at the spring and the day at the morn and God may have been in his Heaven but as far as Mr Samuel Whipplestone was concerned the evidence was negligible. He was, in a dull, muddled sort of way, miserable. He had become possessed, with valedictory accompaniments, of two solid silver Georgian gravy-boats. He had taken his leave of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service in the manner to which his colleagues were accustomed. He had even prepared himself for the non-necessity of getting up at 7.30, bathing, shaving, breakfasting at 8.00 – but there is no need to prolong the Podsnappian recital. In a word he had fancied himself tuned in to retirement and now realized that he was in no such condition. He was a man without propulsion. He had no object in life. He was finished.

By ten o’clock he found himself unable to endure the complacent familiarity of his ‘service’ flat. It was in fact at that hour being ‘serviced’, a ritual which normally he avoided and now hindered by his presence.

He was astounded to find that for twenty years he had inhabited dull, oppressive, dark and uncomely premises. Deeply shaken by this abrupt discovery, he went out into the London spring.

A ten-minute walk across the Park hardly raised his spirits. He avoided the great water-shed of traffic under the quadriga, saw some inappropriately attired equestrians, passed a concourse of scarlet and yellow tulips, left the Park under the expanded nostrils of Epstein’s liberated elementals and made his way into Baronsgate.

As he entered that flowing cacophony of changing gears and revving engines, it occurred to him that he himself must now get into bottom gear and stay there, until he was parked in some subfuse lay-by to await – and here the simile became insufferable – a final to wing-off. His predicament was none the better for being commonplace. He walked for a quarter of an hour.

From Baronsgate the western entry into the Capricorns is by an arched passage too low overhead to admit any but pedestrian traffic. It leads into Capricorn Mews and, further along at right angles to the Mews, Capricorn Place. He had passed by it over and over again and would have done so now if it hadn’t been for a small, thin cat.

This animal flashed out from under the traffic and shot past him into the passageway. It disappeared at the far end. He heard a scream of tyres and of a living creature.

This sort of thing upset Mr Whipplestone. He disliked this sort of thing intensely. He would have greatly preferred to remove himself as quickly as possible from the scene and put it out of his mind. What he did, however, was to hurry through the passageway into Capricorn Mews.

The vehicle, a delivery van of sorts, was disappearing into Capricorn Place. A group of three youths outside a garage stared at the cat which lay like a blot of ink on the pavement.

One of them walked over to it.

‘Had it,’ he said.

‘Poor pussy!’ said one of the others and they laughed objectionably.

The first youth moved his foot as if to turn the cat over. Astonishingly and dreadfully it scrabbled with its hind legs. He exclaimed, stooped down and extended his hand.

It was on its feet. It staggered and then bolted. Towards Mr Whipplestone who had come to a halt. He supposed it to be concussed, or driven frantic by pain or fear. In a flash it gave a great spring and was on Mr Whipplestone’s chest, clinging with its small claws and – incredibly – purring. He had been told that a dying cat will sometimes purr. It had blue eyes. The tip of its tail for about two inches was snow white but the rest of its person was perfectly black. He had no particular antipathy to cats.

He carried an umbrella in his right hand but with his left arm he performed a startled reflex gesture. He sheltered the cat. It was shockingly thin, but warm and tremulous.

‘One of ’er nine lives gawn for a burton,’ said the youth. He and his friends guffawed themselves into the garage.

‘Drat,’ said Mr Whipplestone, who long ago had thought it amusing to use spinsterish expletives.

With some difficulty he hooked his umbrella over his left arm and with his right hand inserted his eyeglass and then explored the cat’s person. It increased its purrs, interrupting them with a faint mew when he touched its shoulder. What was to be done with it?

Obviously, nothing in particular. It was not badly injured, presumably it lived in the neighbourhood and one had always understood its species to have a phenomenal homing instinct. It thrust its nut-like head under Mr Whipplestone’s jacket and into his waistcoat. It palpated his chest with its paws. He had quite a business detaching it.

He set it down on the pavement. ‘Go home,’ he said. It stared up at him and went through the motion of mewing, opening its mouth and showing its pink tongue but giving no sound. ‘No,’ he said, ‘go home!’ It was making little preparatory movements of its haunches as if it was about to spring again.

He turned his back on it and walked quickly down Capricorn Mews. He almost ran.

It is a quiet little street, cobbled and very secluded. It accommodates three garages, a packing agency, two dozen or so small mid-Victorian houses, a minute bistro and four shops. As he approached one of these, a flower shop, he could see reflected in its side windows Capricorn Mews with himself walking towards him. And behind him, trotting in a determined manner, the little cat. It was mewing.

He was extremely put out and had begun to entertain a confused notion of telephoning the RSPCA when a van erupted from a garage immediately behind him. It passed him and when it had gone the cat had disappeared: frightened, Mr Whipplestone supposed, by the noise.

Beyond the flower shop and on the opposite side of the Mews was the corner of Capricorn Place, leading off to the left. Mr Whipplestone, deeply ruffled, turned into it.

A pleasing street: narrow, orderly, sunny, with a view, to the left, of tree-tops and the dome of the Baronsgate Basilica. Iron railings and behind them small well-kept Georgian and Victorian houses. Spring flowers in window-boxes. From somewhere or another the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

Cleaning ladies attacked steps and door-knockers. Household ladies were abroad with shopping baskets. A man of Mr Whipplestone’s own age who reeked of the army and was of an empurpled complexion emerged from one of the houses. A perambulator with a self-important baby and an escort of a pedestrian six-year-old, a female propellant and a large dog, headed with a purposeful air towards the Park. The postman was going his rounds.

In London there are still, however precarious their state, many little streets of the character of the Capricorns. They are upper-middle-class streets and therefore, Mr Whipplestone had been given to understand, despicable. Being of that class himself, he did not take this view. He found the Capricorns uneventful, certainly, but neither tiresomely quaint nor picturesque nor smug: pleasing rather, and possessed of a quality which he could only think of as ‘sparkling’. Ahead of him was a pub, the Sun in Splendour. It had an honest untarted-look about it and stood at the point where the Place leads into Capricorn Square: the usual railed enclosure of plane trees, grass and a bench or two, well-kept. He turned to the right down one side of it, making for Capricorn Walk.

Moving towards him at a stately pace came a stout, superbly dressed coal-black gentleman leading a white Afghan hound with a scarlet collar and leash.

‘My dear Ambassador!’ Mr Whipplestone exclaimed. ‘How very pleasant!’

‘Mr Whipplestone!’ resonated the Ambassador for Ng’ombwana. ‘I am delighted to see you. You live in these parts?’

‘No, no: a morning stroll. I’m – I’m a free man now, your Excellency.’

‘Of course. I had heard. You will be greatly missed.’

‘I doubt it. Your Embassy – I had forgotten for the moment – is quite close by, isn’t it?’

‘In Palace Park Gardens. I too enjoy a morning stroll with Ahman. We are not, alas, unattended.’ He waved his gold-mounted stick in the direction of a large person looking anonymously at a plane tree.

‘Alas!’ Mr Whipplestone agreed. ‘The penalty of distinction,’ he added neatly, and patted the Afghan.

‘You are kind enough to say so.’

Mr Whipplestone’s highly specialized work in the Foreign Service had been advanced by a happy manner with Foreign, and particularly with African, plenipotentiaries. ‘I hope I may congratulate your Excellency,’ he said and broke into his professional style of verbless exclamation. ‘The increased rapprochement! The new Treaty! Masterly achievements!’

‘Achievements – entirely – of our great President, Mr Whipplestone.’

‘Indeed, yes. Everyone is delighted about the forthcoming visit. An auspicious occasion.’

‘As you say. Immensely significant.’ The Ambassador waited for a moment and then slightly reduced the volume of his superb voice. ‘Not,’ he said, ‘without its anxieties, however. As you know, our great President does not welcome –’ he again waved his stick at his bodyguard – ‘that sort of attention.’ A sigh escaped him. ‘He is to stay with us,’ he said.

‘Quite.’

‘The responsibility!’ sighed the Ambassador. He broke off and offered his hand. ‘You will be at the reception, of course,’ he said. ‘We must meet more often! I shall see that something is arranged. Au revoir, Mr Whipplestone.’

They parted. Mr Whipplestone walked on, passing and tactfully ignoring the escort.

Facing him at the point where the Walk becomes the north-east border of the Square was a small house between two large ones. It was painted white with a glossy black front door and consisted of an attic, two floors and a basement. The first-floor windows opened on a pair of miniature balconies, the ground-floor ones were bowed. He was struck by the arrangement of the window-boxes. Instead of the predictable daffodil one saw formal green swags that might have enriched a della Robbia relief. They were growing vines of some sort which swung between the pots where they rooted and were cunningly trimmed so that they swelled at the lowest point of the arc and symmetrically tapered to either end.

Some workmen with ladders were putting up a sign.

He had begun to feel less depressed. Persons who do not live there will talk about ‘the London feeling’. They will tell you that as they walk down a London street they can be abruptly made happy, uplifted in spirit, exhilarated. Mr Whipplestone had always taken a somewhat incredulous view of these transports but he had to admit that on this occasion he was undoubtedly visited by a liberated sensation. He had a singular notion that the little house had induced this reaction. No. 1, as he now saw, Capricorn Walk.

He approached the house. It was touched on its chimneys and the eastern slope of its roof by sunshine. ‘Facing the right way,’ thought Mr Whipplestone. ‘In the winter it’ll get all the sun there is, I dare say.’ His own flat faced north.

A postman came whistling down the Walk as Mr Whipplestone crossed it. He mounted the steps of No. 1, clapped something through the brass flap and came down so briskly that they nearly collided.

‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ said the postman. ‘Too eager, that’s my trouble. Lovely morning, though, innit?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Whipplestone, judiciously conceding the point. ‘It is. Are the present occupants –’ he hesitated.

‘Gawn. Out last week,’ said the postman. ‘But I’m not to know, am I? People ought to make arrangements, din’ they, sir?’ He went off, whistling.

The workmen came down their ladders and prepared to make off. They had erected a sign.

FOR SALE

All enquiries to

Able, Virtue & Sons

17 Capricorn Street, SW7

II

The Street is the most ‘important’ of the Capricorns. It is wider and busier than the rest. It runs parallel to the Walk and in fact Messrs Able and Virtue’s premises lie exactly back to back with the little house at No. 1.

‘Good morning,’ said the roundabout lady at the desk on the left-hand side. ‘Can I help you?’ she pleaded brightly.

Mr Whipplestone pulled out the most non-committal stop in his FO organ and tempered its chill with a touch of whimsy.

‘You may satisfy my idle curiosity if you will be so good,’ he said. ‘Ah – concerning No. 1, Capricorn Walk.’

‘No. 1, the Walk?’ repeated the lady. ‘Yes. Our notice, ackshally, has only just gone up. For Sale with stipulations regarding the basement. I’m not quite sure –’ she looked across at the young man with a pre-Raphaelite hair-do behind the right-hand desk. He was contemplating his fingernails and listening to his telephone. ‘What is it about the basement, of No. 1,’ he rattled into it, ‘is at present occupied as a pied –’

He clapped a languid hand over the receiver: ‘Ay’m coping,’ he said and unstopped the receiver. ‘The basement of No. 1,’ he rattled into it, ‘is at present occupied as a pied-à-terre by the owner. He wishes to retain occupancy. The Suggested Arrangement is that total ownership pass to the purchaser and that he, the vendor, become the tenant of the basement at an agreed rent for a specified period.’ He listened for a considerable interval. ‘No,’ he said, ‘ay’m afraid it’s a firm stipulation. Quate. Quate. Theng you, madam. Good morning.’

‘That,’ said the lady, offering it to Mr Whipplestone, ‘is the situation.’

Mr Whipplestone, conscious of a lightness in his head, said: ‘And the price?’ He used the voice in which he had been wont to say: ‘This should have been dealt with at a lower level.’

‘Was it thirty-nine?’ the lady asked her colleague. ‘Thirty-eight.’

‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ she relayed to Mr Whipplestone, who caught back his breath in a civilized little hiss.

‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘You amaze me,’

‘It’s a Desirable District,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Properties are at a premium in the Capricorns.’ She picked up a document and glanced at it. Mr Whipplestone was nettled.

‘And the rooms?’ he asked sharply. ‘How many? Excluding, for the moment, the basement.’

The lady and the pre-Raphaelite young gentleman became more attentive. They began to speak in unison and begged each other’s pardon.

‘Six,’ gabbled the lady, ‘in all. Excluding kitchen and Usual Offices. Floor-to-floor carpets and drapes included in purchase price. And the Usual Fitments: fridge, range, etcetera. Large recep’ with adjacent dining-room, ground floor. Master bedroom and bathroom with toilet, first floor. Two rooms with shower and toilet, second floor. Late tenant used these as flat for married couple.’

‘Oh?’ said Mr Whipplestone, concealing the emotional disturbance that seemed to be lodged under his diaphragm. ‘A married couple? You mean?’

‘Did for him,’ said the lady.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Serviced him. Cook and houseman. There was an Arrangement by which they also cleaned the basement flat.’

The young man threw in: ‘Which it is hoped will continue. They are Strongly Recommended to purchaser with Arrangement to be arrived at for continued weekly servicing of basement. No obligation, of course.’

‘Of course not.’ Mr Whipplestone gave a small dry cough. ‘I should like to see it,’ he said.

‘Certainly,’ said the lady crisply. ‘When would you –?’

‘Now, if you please.

‘I think that would suit. If you’ll just wait while I –’ She used her telephone. Mr Whipplestone bumped into a sudden qualm of near-panic. ‘I am beside myself,’ he thought. ‘It’s that wretched cat.’ He pulled himself together. After all he was committed to nothing. An impulse, a mere whim induced, he dared say, by unaccustomed idleness. What of it?’

The lady was looking at him. Perhaps she had spoken to him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Whipplestone.

She decided he was hard-of-hearing. ‘The house,’ she articulated pedantically, ‘is open to view. The late tenants have vacated the premises. The married couple leave at the end of the week. The owner is at home in the basement flat. Mr Sheridan,’ she shouted. ‘That’s the vendor’s name: Sheridan.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Mervyn!’ cried the lady, summoning up a wan and uncertain youth from the back office. ‘No. 1, the Walk. Gentleman to view.’ She produced keys and smiled definitively upon Mr Whipplestone. ‘It’s a Quality Residence,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll think so.’

The youth attended him with a defeated air round the corner to No. 1, Capricorn Walk.

‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds!’ Mr Whipplestone inwardly expostulated. ‘Good God, it’s outrageous!’

The Walk had turned further into the sun, which now sparkled on No. l’s brass door-knocker and letter-box, Mr Whipplestone, waiting on the recently scrubbed steps, looked down into the area. It had been really very ingeniously converted, he was obliged to concede, into a ridiculous little garden with everything on a modest scale.

‘Pseudo-Japanese,’ he thought in a panic-stricken attempt to discredit it.

‘Who looks after that?’ he tossed at the youth. ‘The basement?’

‘Yar,’ said the youth.

(‘He hadn’t the faintest idea,’ thought Mr Whipplestone.)

The youth had opened the front door and now stood back for Mr Whipplestone to enter.

The little hall and stairway were carpeted in cherry red, the glossy walls were an agreeable oyster-white. This scheme was continued in a quite sizeable drawing-room. The two bow windows curtained in red and white stripes were large and the whole interior remarkably light for a London room. For some twenty years he had vaguely regretted the murkiness of his service flat.

Without warning he was overtaken by an experience that a less sophisticated man might have been tempted to call hallucinatory. He saw, with the utmost clarity, his own possessions occupying this light-hearted room. The Chippendale wall-desk, the crimson sofa with its companion table, the big red glass goblet, the Agatha Troy landscape, the late Georgian bookcase: all were harmoniously accommodated. When the youth opened double-doors into a small dining-room, Mr Whipplestone saw at a glance that his chairs were of precisely the right size and character.

He dismissed these visions. ‘The partition folds back,’ he said with a brave show of indifference, ‘to form one room, I suppose?’

‘Yar,’ said the youth and folded it back. He opened red and white striped curtains in the rear wall and revealed a courtyard and tub-garden.

‘Lose the sun,’ Mr Whipplestone sneered, keeping his head, ‘Get none in the winter.’

It was, however, receiving its full quota now.

‘Damp,’ persisted Mr Whipplestone defiantly. ‘Extra expense. Have to be kept up.’ And he thought: ‘I’d do better to hold my tongue.’

The kitchen was on the left of the dining-room. It was a modernized affair with a service hatch. ‘Cramped!’ Mr Whipplestone thought of saying but his heart was not in it.

The stairs were steep which ought to have been a comfort. Awkward for trays and luggage and suppose one died how would they get one out of it? He said nothing.

The view from the master-bedroom through the french windows embraced in its middle distance the Square with the Sun in Splendour on the left and – more distantly on the right – the dome of the Basilica. In the foreground was the Walk with foreshortened views of pedestrians, parked cars and an intermittent passage of traffic. He opened a french window. They were ringing the bells in the Basilica. Twelve o’clock. Some service or another, he supposed. But you couldn’t say the house was noisy.

The bells stopped. Somewhere, out of sight, a voice was raised in a reiterated, rhythmical shout. He couldn’t distinguish the sense of it but it came nearer. He went out on one of the two little balconies.

‘Air-eye-awf,’ shouted the voice, and round the far corner of the Square came a horse-drawn cart, nodding with tulips and led by a red-faced man. He passed No. 1 and looked up.

‘Any time. All fresh,’ he bawled directly at Mr Whipplestone who hastily withdrew.

(His big red glass goblet in the bow window, filled with tulips.)

Mr Whipplestone was a man who did not indulge in histrionics but under the lash of whatever madness now possessed him he did, as he made to leave the window, flap the air with two dismissive palms. The gesture brought him face to face with a couple, man and woman.

‘I beg your pardon,’ they all said and the small man added. ‘Sorry, sir. We just heard the window open and thought we’d better see.’ He glanced at the youth. ‘Order to view?’ he asked.

‘Yar.’

‘You,’ said Mr Whipplestone, dead against his will, ‘must be the – the upstairs – ah – the –’

‘That’s right, sir,’ said the man. His wife smiled and made a slight bob. They were rather alike, being round-faced, apple-cheeked and blue-eyed and were aged, he thought, about forty-five.

‘You are – I understand – ah – still – ah –’

‘We’ve stayed on to set things to rights, sir, Mr Sheridan’s kindly letting us remain until the end of the week. Gives us a chance to find another place, sir, if we’re not wanted here.’

‘I understand you would be – ah –’

‘Available, sir?’ they both said quickly and the man added, ‘We’d be glad to stay on if the conditions suited. We’ve been here with the outgoing tenant six years, sir, and very happy with it. Name of Chubb, sir, references on request and the owner, Mr Sheridan, below, would speak for us.’

‘Quite, quite quite!’ said Mr Whipplestone in a tearing hurry. ‘I – ah – I’ve come to no conclusion. On the contrary. Idle curiosity, really. However. In the event – the remote event of my – be very glad – but so far – nothing decided.’

‘Yes, sir, of course. If you’d care to see upstairs, sir?’

‘What!’ shouted Mr Whipplestone as if they’d fired a gun at him. ‘Oh. Thank you. Might as well, perhaps. Yes.’

‘Excuse me, sir. I’ll just close the window.’

Mr Whipplestone stood aside. The man laid his hand on the french window. It was a brisk movement but it stopped as abruptly as if a moving film had turned into a still. The hand was motionless, the gaze was fixed, the mouth shut like a trap.

Mr Whipplestone was startled. He looked down into the street and there, returning from his constitutional and attended by his dog and his bodyguard, was the Ambassador for Ng’ombwana. It was at him that the man, Chubb, stared. Something impelled Mr Whipplestone to look at the woman. She had come close and she too, over her husband’s shoulder, stared at the Ambassador.

The next moment the figures animated. The window was shut and fastened and Chubb turned to Mr Whipplestone with a serviceable smile.

‘Shall I show the way, sir?’ asked Chubb.

The upstairs flat was neat, clean and decent. The little parlour was a perfectly respectable and rather colourless room, except perhaps for an enlarged photograph of a round-faced girl of about sixteen which attracted attention on account of its being festooned in black ribbon and flanked on the table beneath it by two vases of dyed immortelles. Some kind of china medallion hung from the bottom edge of the frame. Another enlarged photograph of Chubb in uniform and Mrs Chubb in bridal array, hung on the wall.

All the appointments on this floor, it transpired, were the property of the Chubbs. Mr Whipplestone was conscious that they watched him anxiously. Mrs Chubb said: ‘It’s home to us. We’re settled like. It’s such a nice part, the Capricorns.’ For an unnerving moment he thought she was going to cry.

He left the Chubbs precipitately, followed by the youth. It was a struggle not to re-enter the drawing-room but he triumphed and shot out of the front door to be immediately involved in another confrontation.

‘Good morning,’ said a man on the area steps. ‘You’ve been looking at my house, I think? My name is Sheridan.’

There was nothing remarkable about him at first sight, unless it was his almost total baldness and his extreme pallor. He was of middle height, unexceptionally dressed and well-spoken. His hair, when he had had it, must have been dark since his eyes and brows and the wires on the backs of his pale hands were black. Mr Whipplestone had a faint, fleeting and oddly uneasy impression of having seen him before. He came up the area steps and through the gate and faced Mr Whipplestone who, in politeness, couldn’t do anything but stop where he was.

‘Good morning,’ Mr Whipplestone said. ‘I just happened to be passing. An impulse.’

‘One gets them,’ said Mr Sheridan, ‘in the spring.’ He spoke with a slight lisp.

‘So I understand,’ said Mr Whipplestone, not stuffily but in a definitive tone. He made a slight move.