The Confidential Agent

  The porter looked at him with sharp suspicion. He said, ‘To sit at. What d’you think?’

  ‘But the benches won’t move.’

  ‘That’s true. They won’t.’ He said, ‘Darn it, I’ve been here twenty years an’ I never thought of that. You’re a foreigner, ain’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re sharp, foreigners.’ He stared moodily at the table. ‘Most times,’ he said, ‘they sit on it.’ Outside there was a cry, a roar, a cloud of white steam, wheels pounding past and fading out, a whistle again and silence. He said, ‘That’ll be the four-fifty-five.’

  ‘An express?’

  ‘Fast goods.’

  ‘But not for the mines?’

  ‘Oh no – for Woolhampton. Munitions.’

  D. bent his arms for warmth and walked slowly round the room. A tiny pillar of smoke fumed upwards in the grate. There was a photograph of a pier: a gentleman in a grey bowler and a Norfolk jacket was leaning over a hand-rail talking to a lady in a picture hat and white muslin – there was a perspective of parasols. D. felt himself touched by an odd happiness, as if he were out of time altogether and already belonged to history with the gentleman in the bowler: all the struggle and violence over, wars decided one way or another, out of pain. A great Gothic pile marked ‘Midland Hotel’ stared out across some tramlines, the statue of a man in a leaden frock-coat, and a public lavatory. ‘Ah,’ the porter said, giving the coal-dust a stir with a broken poker. ‘What you’re looking at’s Woolhampton. I was there in 1902.’

  ‘It looks a busy place.’

  ‘It is busy. An’ that hotel – you won’t find a better in the Midlands. We ’ad a Lodge dinner there – in 1902. Balloons,’ he said, ‘a lady sang. An’ there’s Turkish baths.’

  ‘You miss it, I daresay.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There’s something to be said for any place – that’s how I look at it. Of course at Christmas time I miss the panto. The Woolhampton Empire’s famous for its panto. But on the other ’and – it’s ’ealthy ’ere. You can see too much of life,’ he said, poking at the coal-dust.

  ‘I suppose this was quite an important station once.’

  ‘Ah, when the mines was working. I’ve had Lord Benditch waiting in this very room. And his daughter – the Honourable Miss Rose Cullen.’

  D. realised that he was listening avidly, as if he were a young man in love. He said, ‘You’ve seen Miss Cullen?’ and an engine whistled somewhere over the waste of rails and was answered, like a dog calling to other dogs in the suburb of a city.

  ‘Ah, that I have. The last time I saw her here, it was only a week before she was presented – at the Court – to the King an’ Queen.’ It filled him with sadness – the vast social life going on all round her in which he had no part at all. He felt like a divorced man whose child is in another’s custody – somebody richer and abler than himself; he has to watch a stranger’s progress through the magazines. He found he wanted to claim her. He remembered her on the platform at Euston. She had said, ‘We’re unlucky. We don’t believe in God. So it’s no use praying. If we did I could say beads, burn candles – oh, a hundred things. As it is, I can only keep my fingers crossed.’ In the taxi, at his request, she had given him back his gun. She had said, ‘For God’s sake be careful. You are such a fool. Remember the Berne MS. You aren’t Roland. Don’t walk under ladders . . . or spill salt.’

  The porter said, ‘Her mother came from these parts. There’s stories . . .’

  Here he was: shut out for a little while from the monstrous world. He could see, from the security and isolation of this cold waiting-room, just how monstrous it was. And yet there were people who talked of a superintending design. It was a crazy mixture – the presentation at Court, his own wife shot in the prison yard, pictures in the Tatler and the bombs falling; it was all hopelessly jumbled together by their mutual relationship as they had stood side by side near Mr K.’s body and talked to Fortescue. The accomplice-to-be of a murderer had received an invitation to a Royal Garden Party. It was as if he had the chemical property of reconciling irreconcilables. After all, even in his own case, it might have seemed a long way from his lectures on Romance literature to the blind shot at K. in the bathroom of a strange woman’s basement flat. How was it possible for anyone to plan his life or regard the future with anything but apprehension?

  But he had to regard the future. He came to a stop in front of a beach scene – bathing huts and sandcastles and all the dreary squalor of a front reproduced with remarkable veracity – the sense of blown newspapers and half-eaten bananas. The railway companies had been well advised to leave photography and take to art. He thought: if they catch me, of course, there is no future – that was simple. But if, somehow, he evaded them and returned home, there was the problem. She had said, ‘It’s no good shaking me off now.’

  The porter said, ‘When she was a little thing she used to give away the prizes – for the best station garden in the county. That was before her ma died. Lord Benditch, he always overmarked for roses.’

  She couldn’t come back with him to his sort of life – the life of an untrusted man in a country at war. And what could he give her, anyway? The grave held him.

  He went outside; it was still pitch dark beyond the little platform, but you were aware that somewhere there was light. Beyond the rim of the turning world, a bell, as it were, had rung in warning . . . perhaps there was a greyness. . . . He walked up and down, up and down: there was no solution except failure. He paused by a slot machine – a dry choice of raisins, chocolate creams, matches and chewing-gum. He inserted a penny under the raisins, but the drawer remained stuck. The porter appeared suddenly behind him and said accusingly, ‘Did you try a crooked penny?’

  ‘No. But it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Some of them are so artful,’ the man said, ‘you can’t trust them not to get two packets with one penny.’ He rattled the machine. ‘I’ll just go an’ get the key,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, we can’t have that,’ the porter said, limping away.

  A lamp lit each end of the platform; he walked from one to the other and back again. The dawn came with a kind of careful and prepared slowness. It was like a ritual – the dimming of the lamps, the cocks crowing again, and then the silvering of the sky. The siding loomed slowly up with a row of trucks marked ‘Benditch Collieries’, the rails stretched out towards a fence, a dark shape which became a barn and then an ugly blackened winter field. Other platforms came into sight, shuttered and dead. The porter was back, opening the slot machine. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s the wet. They don’t care for raisins here. The drawer’s rusty.’ He pulled out a greyish paper carton. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there you are.’ It felt old and damp to the fingers.

  ‘Didn’t you say it was healthy here?’

  ‘That’s right. The ’ealthy Midlands.’

  ‘But the damp . . .’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but the station’s in the holler – see?’ And sure enough the dark was shredding off like vapour from a long hillside. The light came drably up behind the barn and the field, over the station and the siding, crept up the hill. Brick cottages detached themselves; the stumps of trees reminded him of a battlefield; an odd metallic object rose over the crest. He said, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ the porter said, ‘that’s nothing. That was just a notion they got.’

  ‘An ugly-looking notion.’

  ‘Ugly? You’d say that, would you? I don’t know. You get used to things. I’d miss it if it weren’t there.’

  ‘It looks like something to do with oil.’

  ‘That’s what it is. They had a fool notion they’d find oil here. We could’ve told ’em – but they were Londoners. They thought they knew.’

  ‘There was no oil?’

  ‘Oh, they got enough to light these lamps with, I daresay.’ He said, ‘You won’t have so long to wait now. There’s Jarvis
coming down the hill.’ You could see the road now as far as the cottages; there was a little colour in the east, and all the world except the sky had the blackness of frost-bitten vegetation.

  ‘Who is Jarvis?’

  ‘Oh, he goes into Benditch every Sunday. Weekdays too, sometimes.’

  ‘Works at the mines?’

  ‘No, he’s too old for that. Says he likes the change of air. Some says his old woman’s there – but Jarvis, he says he’s not married.’ He came plodding up the little gravelled drive to the station – an elderly man in corduroys with bushy eyebrows and dark evasive eyes and a white stubble on the chin. ‘How’s things, George?’ the porter said.

  ‘Aw – might be worse.’

  ‘Going in to see the old woman?’

  Jarvis gave a sidelong and suspicious glance and looked away.

  ‘This gentleman’s going to Benditch. He’s a foreigner.’

  ‘Ah!’

  D. felt as a typhoid-carrier must feel when he finds himself among the safe and inoculated: these he couldn’t infect. They were secured from the violence and horror he carried with him. He felt a long inanition as if at last, among the frost-bitten fields, in the quiet of the deserted junction, he had reached a place where he could sit down, rest, let time pass. The voice of the porter droned on beside him – ‘Bloody frost killed every one of the bloody. . . .’ Every now and then Jarvis said, ‘Ah!’ staring down the track. Presently a bell rang twice in a signal box; one noticed suddenly that unobtrusively the night had quite gone. In the signal box he could see a man holding a teapot; he put it down out of sight and tugged a lever. A signal – somewhere – creaked down and Jarvis said, ‘Ah!’

  ‘Here’s your train,’ the porter said. At the far end of a track a small blob of steam like a rose advanced, became an engine, a string of vibrating carriages. ‘Is it far to Benditch?’ D. asked.

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t be more than fifteen miles, would it, George?’

  ‘Fourteen miles from the church to the “Red Lion”.’

  ‘It’s not the distance,’ the porter said, ‘it’s the stops.’

  A row of frosty windows split up the pale early morning sun like crystals. A few stubbly faces peered out into the early day; D. climbed into an empty carriage after Jarvis and saw the porter, the general waiting-room, the ugly iron foot-bridge, the signalman holding a cup of tea, go backwards like peace. The low frosty hills closed round the track: a farm building, a ragged wood like an old fur toque, ice on a little ditch beside the line – it wasn’t grand, it wasn’t even pretty, but it had a quality of quiet and desertion. Jarvis stared out at it without a word.

  D. said, ‘You know Benditch well?’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘You might know Mrs Bennett?’

  ‘George Bennett’s wife or Arthur’s?’

  ‘The one who was nurse to Lord Benditch’s girl.’ ‘Ah!’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  Jarvis gave him a long suspicious look from his blue pebbly eyes. He said, ‘What do you want her for?’

  ‘I’ve got a message for her.’

  ‘She’s one door up from the “Red Lion”.’

  The woods and meagre grass gave out as they pottered on from stop to stop. The hills became rocky; a quarry lay behind a halt and a rusting single line led out to it; a small truck lay overturned in the thorny grass. Then even the hills gave out and a long plain opened up dotted with strange erratic heaps of slag – the height of the hills behind. Short unsatisfactory grass crept up them like gas flames; miniature railways petered out, going to nowhere at all, and right beneath the artificial hills the cottages began – lines of grey stone like scars. The train no longer stopped; it rattled deeper into the shapeless plain passing halts under every slag-heap dignified by names like Castle Crag and Mount Zion. It was like a gigantic rubbish heap into which everything had been thrown of a whole way of life – great rusting lift-shafts and black chimneys and Nonconformist chapels with slate roofs and hopeless washing darkening on the line and children carrying pails of water from common taps. It was odd to think the country lay only just behind – ten miles away the cocks were crowing outside the junction. The cottages were continuous now, built up against the slag and branching out in narrow streets towards the railway: the only division the tracks to each black hill. D. said, ‘Is this Benditch?’

  ‘Naw. This is Paradise.’

  They ground over a crossing under the shadow of another heap. ‘Is this Benditch?’

  ‘Naw. This is Cowcumberill.’

  ‘How do you tell the difference?’

  ‘Ah!’

  He stared moodily out – had he got an old woman here or was it for the change of air he came? He said at last very grudgingly as if he had a grievance, ‘Anyone can tell Cowcumberill ain’t Benditch.’ He said, ‘There’s Benditch,’ as another slag-heap loomed blackly up and the long grey scar of houses just went on. ‘Why,’ he said, working himself up into a kind of gloomy and patriotic rage, ‘you might as well say it was like Castle Crag – or Mount Zion, come to that. You’ve only got to look.’

  He did look. He was used to ruin, but it occurred to him that bombardment was a waste of time. You could attain your ruined world as easily by just letting go.

  Benditch had the honour of a station – not a halt. There was even a first-class waiting-room, bolted, with broken glass. He waited for the other to get down, but Jarvis outwaited him, as if he suspected he was being spied on. He gave an effect of innocent and natural secrecy; he distrusted, as an animal distrusts, the strange footstep or the voice near the burrow.

  When D. left the station the geography of his last stand stood plainly before him – one street ran down towards the slag-heap and another street crossed it like a T, pressed up under the black hill. Every house was the same: the uniformity was broken only by an inn sign, the front of a chapel, an occasional impoverished shop. There was an air of rather horrifying simplicity about the place, as if it had been built by children with bricks. The two streets were curiously empty for a working-class town, but then, there was no work to go to: it was probably warmer to stay in bed. D. passed a Labour Exchange and then more grey houses with the blinds down in the windows. Once he got a glimpse of horrifying squalor in a backyard where a privy stood open. It was like war, but without the spirit of defiance war usually raised.

  The ‘Red Lion’ had once been a hotel. This must have been where Lord Benditch stayed: it had a courtyard and a garage and an old yellow A.A. sign. A smell of gas and privies hung about the street. People watched him – a stranger – through glass, without much interest: it was too cold to come out and exchange greetings. Mrs Bennett’s house was just the same grey stone as all the rest, but the curtains looked cleaner; there was almost a moneyed air when you looked in through the window to the little unused and crowded parlour. D. beat the knocker; it was of polished brass, in the shape of a shield and a coat of arms – the Benditch arms? – a mysterious feathered animal seemed to be holding a leaf in its mouth. It looked curiously complicated in the simple town – like an algebraic equation, it represented an abstract set of values out of place in the stony concrete street.

  An elderly woman in an apron opened the door. Her face was withered and puckered and white like old clean bone. ‘Are you Mrs Bennett?’ D. asked.

  ‘I am.’ She barred the way into the house with her foot like a doorstop on the threshold.

  ‘I have a letter for you,’ D. said, ‘from Miss Cullen.’

  ‘Do you know Miss Cullen?’ she asked him with disapproval and incredulity.

  ‘You will read it all there.’ But she wouldn’t let him in until she had read it, very slowly, without spectacles, holding the paper up close to the pale obstinate eyes. ‘She writes here,’ she said, ‘that you’re her dear friend. You’d better come in. She says I’m to help you . . . but she doesn’t say how.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s so early.’

>   ‘It’s the only train on a Sunday. You can’t be expected to walk. Was George Jarvis on the train?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah!’

  The little parlour was crammed with china ornaments and photographs in tortuous silver frames. A round mahogany table, a velvet-covered sofa, hard chairs with twisted backs and velvet seats, newspaper spread on the floor to save the carpet – it was like a scene set for something which had never happened, which would never happen now. Mrs Bennett said sternly with a gesture towards a silver frame, ‘You’ll recognise that, I suppose?’ A white plump female child held a doll unconvincingly. He said, ‘I’m afraid . . .’

  ‘Ah!’ Mrs Bennett said with a kind of bitter triumph. ‘She hasn’t shown you everything, I daresay. See that pin-cushion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was made out of her presentation dress – what she wore to meet Their Majesties. Turn it over and you’ll see the date.’ It was there – picked out in white silk – that was the year he had been in prison waiting to be shot. It was one of the years in her life too. ‘And there,’ Mrs Bennett said, ‘she is – in the dress. You’ll know that picture.’ Very formal and absurdly young and recognisably Rose, she watched him from a velvet frame. The little room seemed full of her.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I have never seen that either.’

  She glared at him with satisfaction. She said, ‘Oh well, old friends are best, I daresay.’

  ‘You must be a very old friend.’

  ‘The oldest,’ she rapped out at him. ‘I knew her when she was a week old. Even His Lordship didn’t see her then – not till she’d passed her first month.’

  ‘She spoke of you,’ D. lied, ‘very warmly.’

  ‘She had cause,’ Mrs Bennett said, tossing her white bony head. ‘I did everything for her – after her mother died.’ It’s always odd, learning the biography of someone you love at second-hand, like finding a secret drawer in a familiar desk full of revealing documents.

  ‘Was she a good child?’ he inquired with amusement.

  ‘She had spirit. I don’t ask for more,’ Mrs Bennett said. She went agitatedly around, patting the pincushion, pushing the photographs a little this way and that. She said, ‘Nobody expects to be remembered. Though I don’t complain of His Lordship. He’s been generous. As was only proper. I don’t know how we’d manage otherwise with the pits closed.’