“You missed this cup and saucer,” Emily interrupted, and brought the conversation to a close.
And it remained at a close until bedtime. Ethel and Vera came home in the interval, but had little to say to their father as once more he browsed through his scientific magazine and took not the least notice of their teenage vaporings. It was not that he had no interest in his daughters—he was merely dominated by the theories that wove constantly through his mind.
“The main thing wrong with this world, Emmy,” he said, when he and his wife had at last retired, “is that there’s too much selfishness. Too much greed. Take Bob, for example. If he were not so greedy he—”
“He knows how to take care of himself anyway, and that’s more than you can do!”
The blow went fully home, and Albert subsided, but long after his wife had fallen asleep he still remained awake, staring at the ceiling vaguely patterned from the street light outside the house. It was in the quiet of the night, when he lay like this, no longer in fear of derision or interruption, that his thoughts had a chance to link up all the scattered theories he had been gathering for so long a time. And he felt that if only he could perhaps.… Then he was asleep, to awaken again to the drabness of the autumn morning.
So to the usual routine—the hurried breakfast, then out to the Premier Cinema with its dank morning coldness and smell of amyl-acetate. His two assistants were already at work re-spooling film from the previous night’s performance. They greeted Albert perfunctorily as he arrived, but he took little notice of them. Instead he set to work with a newly purchased writing-pad and left the bulk of the projection room cleaning routine to the two boys. What he was doing he would not say, but from what the boys could see he appeared to be immersed in mathematics.
During the matinee that day he had to give his attention whether he wanted to or not, and again at the evening performance. But when the evening show was over, he made no attempt—as he usually did—to don his hat and overcoat. Instead he lingered around the winding-room with its smell of dead carbon fumes.
“Not coming, Simmy?” asked the youth who was second projectionist.
“Later.” Albert’s look was faraway. “I want to check the new program which came in this morning. We’re showing it the day after tomorrow, and I can’t entirely trust it to you lads.”
“Oh!” The boys glanced at one another, puzzled. This was the first time Albert had ever doubted their proficiency.
“Not that I’m thinking you don’t know your jobs,” Albert amended, “but we’re having the mayor or some local bigwig coming on Saturday night, and any mistakes would be fatal. See you in the morning.”
“Okay, Simmy.”
“Night, Simmy.”
To the manager Albert gave the same story, but since Albert had been in the cinema for twenty years there seemed no reason to question his purpose. In any case he had his own key. So Albert was finally left to his own devices.
It was well after half-past one in the small hours when at last he left the cinema and went home through the silent streets. He knew Emily would not be concerned by his non-arrival home, for very frequently he ran a midnight matinee to correct some imperfection in a program to be shown the following day. Nor was his guess wrong. Emily was snoring soundly when at last, after a cold supper, he got to bed—and the next morning did not even trouble to ask what had delayed him.
But even Emily began to wonder a little when Albert did not come home until the small hours for a whole fortnight. She knew midnight matinees could not explain this, and her mind began to stray towards the possibility of a meek-and-mild Albert leading a double life.
Emily was not the only one who wondered. The manager of the cinema wondered too, and since he was in command he wasted no time in getting at the truth. So, after his fortnight of mysterious nocturnal activity Albert found himself summoned to the manager’s office.
“Just checking up on something, Albert.” The manager was breezily friendly as usual. “What’s the idea of staying behind until the small hours every night for the last two weeks? Can’t be program trouble, surely?”
Albert hesitated, clearly a little startled. “Who says I’ve stayed behind?”
“Nobody. It just happens that the policeman on the beat around this cinema calls back his headquarters from the police phone on the corner around one-thirty, and each night he has noticed a figure answering your description leaving the cinema. He reported it to me, wondering if all was well. Be you, of course?”
“Yes,” Albert agreed absently. “Yes, it was.”
“Well? Why do you do it? Don’t love the place that much after twenty years, surely?”
“No. As a matter of fact I’ve been checking over the projectors. They need a routine once-over now and again.”
“Why? We have a service engineer for that!” Suspicion was slowly forming on the manager’s face, and his smile had gone.
Albert was silent; then suddenly he seemed to come to a decision. “I spent the time reading,” he said quickly. “It was the only way in which I could read in peace. At home I have a somewhat talkative wife and four children, and when a man wants to study things out he—”
“Look, Albert!” The manager’s voice was curt. “I’m not interested in your domestic life, but I am interested in the electricity bill for this cinema, and so are the owners to whom I’m responsible. You’ve no right to burn up light in the projection room for the purpose of reading until the small hours of the morning. See it doesn’t happen again, and we’ll say no more about it.”
“Well—all right,” Albert muttered, and with that took his departure.
But the odd thing was that he did not keep his word. That night he stayed again until the small hours—indeed, until five in the morning, having nailed a cardboard poster of a famous film star over the winding-room window to prevent the light being seen from outside. Then towards dawn, red-eyed and weary, he crawled home for a few hours’ sleep, and at breakfast found Emily staring at him with naked questions sparking in her eyes.
“You’re up to something!” she declared, handing across the grilled bacon.
“Oh, let me alone,” Albert growled, leaden from continuous night work and—had anybody else known it—intensely close and concentrated work.
“I won’t let you alone! For over a fortnight you’ve never come home until early morning. This time it was half-past five! I know because I was awake.”
“Turned into a burglar, pop?” asked the youngest daughter, and then shrieked with merriment.
“You’ve got to be tough to burgle,” Ethel commented, shaking her head. “Doesn’t fit dad at all!”
Albert got to his feet abruptly, his face flushed and his eyes hard. For an instant it looked as if he were going to blow his whole family wide open for the first time in his life; then he thought better of it, and without a word left the room and slammed the door.
Ten minutes later he entered the cinema, nodded moodily to the cleaner-cum-commissionaire, and then found the manager right in front of him. The manager’s
