held the watch to his ear.
‘It’s 11.20,’ I told him.
He shushed me and his eyes rolled gently to demonstrate the expertise with which he was listening to the silent mechanism.
I could take a hint. Hallam had the door open before I had even said, ‘Well I must …’
He walked behind me through the hall to make sure that I didn’t steal the lino. A fanlight over the entrance let a William Morris design in coloured sunlight fall across the stone floor. Fixed against one wall was a pay telephone with notices and old undelivered mail marked ‘Inland Revenue’ tucked behind the telephone directories. One notice said ‘Miss Mortimer is away in Spain on business.’ It was written in lipstick on the back of a used envelope.
At waist level the old brown wallpaper had suffered a series of horizontal white gashes. From the floor under them Hallam picked up a tin that had the words ‘Acme Puncture Outfit’ enmeshed in a design of scrolls, daisies and bicycle wheels. He made a clicking noise with his tongue and put the tin on top of the A – D telephone directory.
Hallam gripped the huge street door with two hands. Another notice on it said ‘Slamming this at night disturbs early risers.’ The Daily Mail and the yoghurt were still in the same position and from farther down the street I could hear the clink of milk bottles.
Hallam offered me a hand like a dead animal. ‘Best enzyme man,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘In the world,’ I said, and eased sideways through the partly open door.
‘Give him this,’ said Hallam. He pushed a wrapped cube of Lyons sugar into my hand.
‘Semitsa?’ I said very quietly.
‘The milkman’s horse, you silly. There. Friendly creature. And if you do see Confucius …’
‘OK,’ I said. I walked down the steps into the hot dusty sunlight.
‘My goodness. I haven’t paid you back for the gasmeter shilling,’ said Hallam. It was a simple statement of fact; he wasn’t turning his pockets out.
‘Donate it to the RSPCA,’ I called. Hallam nodded. I looked around but there was no sign of Confucius anywhere.
1 Over £2,000.
ROBIN JAMES HALLAM
Saturday, October 5th
After his visitor had left Hallam looked in the mirror again. He was trying to guess his age.
‘Forty-two,’ he said to himself.
His hair was all there, that was one good thing. A man with plenty of hair looked young. It would need a little colouring of course but then colouring his hair was something he had thought of doing for years before he had this problem of finding a new job. ‘Brown,’ he thought, ‘a mousy brown.’ So that it wouldn’t be too obvious; no point in going in for one of those really bright colours because it would be spotted as phoney in two minutes. He turned his head and tried to see how much of his profile he could see in reflection. He had a lean, very aristocratic Anglo-Saxon face. The nose had sharp ridges and the cheekbones were tight under his skin. A thoroughbred. He often thought of himself as a racehorse. It was a pleasant thought and one that was easily associated with acres of green grass, horse shows, grouse-shooting, hunt balls, elegant men and bejewelled women. He liked to think of himself in that context even though his function as a thoroughbred was nearer the seat of Government. He liked that; the seat of Government. Hallam laughed at his reflection and his reflection laughed back in a friendly, dignified, handsome way. He decided to tell someone at the office but it was difficult to decide which one of them would appreciate the joke – so many of them were dullards.
Hallam walked back to the gramophone. He stroked the shiny immaculate veneer top and took pleasure in the silent way it opened; well-made – British made. He selected a record from his large collection. They were all there, all the finest composers of the twentieth century. Berg, Stravinsky, Ives. He selected a recording of a work of Schönberg. The shiny black disc was impeccable. It was as hygienic and dustfree as as as … why wasn’t there anything as clean as his records? He put it on the gramophone and applied the pick-up head to the merest brim of the record. He did this skilfully. There was a faint hissing noise, then the room was suddenly full of rich sounds: ‘Variations for wind band’. He liked it. He sat well back in his chair, fidgeting his back to find the exact position of maximum comfort like a cat. ‘Like a cat,’ he thought and he was pleased with that thought. He listened to the plaited threads of the instrumental sounds and decided that when the music stopped he would have a cigarette. ‘After both sides,’ he thought: ‘after I’ve played both sides I will have a cigarette.’ He rested back in the chair again, pleased with the self-imposed discipline.
He thought of himself as a monk-like person. Once, in the toilet at the office, he had heard one of the junior clerks refer to him as an ‘old hermit’. He had liked that. He looked around at his cell-like room. Every item there had been carefully chosen. He was a man who understood quality in the old-fashioned sense of the word. How he despised those people who have a fancy modern oven and then only heat frozen supermarket food in it. All he had was a gas ring but it was what you cooked on it that counted. Fresh country eggs and bacon, there was nothing in the world to beat that. Cooked carefully, cooked in butter even though he wasn’t a man given to extravagance. Few women understood how to cook eggs and bacon. Or anything else. He remembered a housekeeper he had had at one time, she always broke the yolks of the eggs and had tiny black burnt specks on the whites. She didn’t clean the pan properly. It was as simple as that. She didn’t clean the pan properly. The times he had told her. He walked across to the washbasin and looked in the mirror. ‘Mrs Henderson,’ he mouthed the words, ‘you simply must clean the pan with paper – not with water – thoroughly before you fry eggs and bacon.’ He gave a pleasant smile. It wasn’t a nervous smile, on the other hand it wasn’t the sort of smile that encouraged argument. It was in fact exactly the right sort of smile for this situation. He rather prided himself on his ability to provide the right sort of smile for every occasion.
The music was still playing but he decided to have a cigarette anyway, he certainly wasn’t going to become a slave to his own machine. What he decided to do was to compromise. He could have a cigarette but it would be one of the Bachelor brand – the cheap ones that he kept in the large cigarette box for visitors. He rather prided himself on his ability to compromise. He went across to the cigarette box. There were four in there. He decided not to take one of those. Four was about right. Yes. He got a Player’s No. 3 from a box of twenty that he kept in the cutlery drawer. ‘Thirty-nine,’ he thought suddenly. ‘That’s what I shall give as my age.’
The sound ended abruptly. Hallam took the record and washed it and dressed it and put it to bed with tender devotion. He remembered the girl who had given him the record. That red-haired girl he met at the awful Saddle Room. A pleasant girl in a way. American, volatile, rather incoherent in her speech mannerisms, but then Hallam supposed that there were no proper schooling facilities in America. He felt sorry for the girl. No he didn’t. He didn’t feel sorry for any girls, they were all … carnivorous. What’s more some of them were none too clean. He thought about this man that Dawlish had just sent along to see him; he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had been to school in America. Hallam picked up the Siamese cat.
‘Where
