detective, surely?’
‘No, no, amateur. But he’s been very successful.’
‘Gervase Fen – I don’t seem to have heard of him,’ said Fielding. Then after a moment’s thought: ‘What a silly name. Is he in with the police?’ His tone suggested Fen’s complicity in some orgiastic and disgraceful organization.
‘I honestly don’t know. It’s only what I’ve heard.’
‘I wonder if you’d mind my coming with you to Tolnbridge? I’m sick of the store. And with the war on, it seems so remote from anything—’
‘Couldn’t you join up?’
‘No, they won’t have me. I volunteered last November, but they graded me four, I joined the ARP, of course, and I’m thinking of going in for this new LDV racket, but blast it all—’
‘You look healthy enough,’ said Geoffrey.
‘So I am. Nothing wrong with me except shaky eyesight. They don’t grade you four for that, do they?’
‘No. Perhaps,’ Geoffrey suggested encouragingly, ‘you’re suffering from some hidden, fatal disease you haven’t known about.’
Fielding ignored this. ‘I want to do something active about this war – something romantic.’ He mopped his brow again, looking the reverse of romantic. ‘I tried to join the Secret Service, but it was no good. You can’t join the Secret Service in this country. Not just like that.’ And he slapped his hands together to indicate some platonic idea of facility.
Geoffrey considered. In view of what had happened it would almost certainly be very useful to have Fielding with him on his journey, and there was no reason to suspect him of ulterior motive.
‘…After all, war hasn’t become so mechanized that solitary, individual daring no longer matters,’ Fielding was saying; he seemed transported to some Valhalla of Secret Service agents. ‘You’ll laugh at me, of course’ – Geoffrey smiled a hasty and unconvincing negative – ‘but in the long run it is the people who dream of being men of action who are men of action. Admittedly Don Quixote made a fool of himself with the windmills, but when all’s said and done, there probably were giants about.’ He sighed gently as the taxi turned into the Marylebone Road.
‘I should very much like to have you with me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But look here – what about your job? One must have money.’
‘That’ll be all right. I have some money of my own.’ Fielding assembled his features into a perfunctory expression of surprise. ‘Oh, I ought perhaps to have mentioned it. Debrett, Who’s Who, and such publications, credit me with an earldom.’
Geoffrey summoned up a cheerful laugh, but there was something in Fielding’s assurance which forbade him to utter it.
‘Only very minor, of course,’ the other hastened to explain. ‘And I’ve never done a thing to deserve it, I inherited it.’
‘Then what on earth,’ said Geoffrey, ‘were you doing in that shop?’
‘Store,’ Fielding corrected him solemnly. ‘Well, I heard there was a shortage of people to serve in shops, owing to call-up and so on, so I thought that might be one way I could help. Only temporarily, of course,’ he added warily. ‘Just as a joke,’ he ended feebly.
Geoffrey suppressed his merriment with difficulty.
Fielding suddenly chuckled.
‘I suppose it is rather preposterous, when you come to think of it. By the way’ – a sudden thought struck him – ‘are you Geoffrey Vintner, the composer?’
‘Only very minor, of course.’
They surveyed one another properly for the first time, and found the result pleasing. The taxi clattered into the murk of Paddington. A sudden noise disturbed them.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Fielding. ‘The bloody net’s fallen down again.’
| A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of |
| pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love. |
| BACON |
After the dim, barn-like vastness of Waterloo, Paddington appeared like an infernal pit. Here there was not the order, the strict division and segregation of mechanical and human which prevailed at the larger station. Inextricably, engines and passengers seethed and milled together, the barriers provided for their separation seeming no more than the inconvenient erections of an obstacle-race. The crowds, turgid, stormy, and densely-packed, appeared more likely to clamber on to the backs of the trains, like children piling on to a donkey at the seaside, than merely to board them in the normal way. The locomotives panted and groaned like expiring hedgehogs prematurely over-run by hordes of predatory ants; any attempt at departure, one felt, must infallibly crush and dissipate these insects in their thousands – it would be impossible for them to disentangle themselves from the buffers and connecting-rods in time.
Amongst the crowds the heat banished comfort, but stimulated the itch to uneasy and purposeless movement. Certain main streams, between the bars, the platform, the ticket-offices, the lavatories, and the main entrances, were perhaps discernible; but they had only the conventional boundaries of currents on a map – they overflowed their banks amongst the merely impassive, who stood at the angles of their confluence in attitudes of melancholy or despair. Observed from ground level, this mass of humanity exhibited, in its efforts to move hither and thither, surprising divergences from the horizontal; people pressed forward to their destinations leaning forward at a dangerous, angle, or, peering round the bodies of those in front of them, presented the appearance of criminals half-decapitated. A great many troops, bearing ponderous white cylinders apparently filled with lead, elbowed their way apologetically about, or sat on kit-bags and allowed themselves to be buffeted from all angles. Railway officials controlled the scene with the uneasy authority of schoolmasters trying to extort courteous recognition from their pupils after term had ended.
‘Good God,’ said Geoffrey as he struggled forward, carrying a suitcase with which he made periodic involuntary assaults on the knees of the passers-by, ‘are we even going to get on this train?’
Fielding, still inappropriately dressed in the morning clothes belonging to his recent occupation, merely grunted; the temperature seemed to overcome him. When they had progressed, clawing and pushing, another two yards, he said:
‘What time is it supposed to go?’
‘Not for three-quarters of an hour yet.’ The relevant part of the sentence was drowned in a sudden demoniac outburst of hooting and whistling. He repeated it at the top of his voice. ‘Three-quarters of an hour,’ he bellowed.
Fielding nodded, and then, surprisingly, vanished, with a shouted explanation of which the only word audible was ‘clothes’.
