The Confidential Agent

  The race only lasted two minutes. His needle went up to sixty: he strained the engine on to sixty-two, sixty-three, for a moment he hit sixty-five, but the old Packard was no match for the Daimler – the other car hesitated, for the fraction of a minute allowing him to edge ahead; then, as it were, it laid back its ears and raced on at eighty miles an hour. It was in front of him; it went ahead into the edge of the fog and slid across the road, blocking his way. He drew up. It wasn’t probable, but it seemed to be true – they were going to kill him. He thought carefully, sitting in his seat, waiting for them, trying to find some way of fixing responsibility – the publicity would be appalling for the other side; his death might be far more valuable than his life had ever been. He had once brought out a scholarly edition of an old Romance poem – this would certainly be more worth while.

  A voice said, ‘Here’s the bugger.’ To his surprise it was neither L. nor his chauffeur who stood at the door, it was the manager. But L. was there – he saw his thin celery shape wavering at the edge of the fog. Could the manager be in league? . . . the situation was crazy. He said, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do I want? This is Miss Cullen’s car.’

  No; after all, this was England – no violence: he was safe. Just an unpleasant explanation. What did L. expect to get out of this? Or did they mean to take him to the police? Surely she wouldn’t charge him. At the worst it meant a few hours’ delay. He said gently, ‘I left a message for Miss Cullen – that I’d leave the car at her father’s.’

  ‘You bloody dago,’ the manager said. ‘Did you really think you would walk off with a girl’s bags just like that? A fine girl like Miss Cullen. And her jewellery.’

  ‘I forgot about the bags.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t forget about the jewellery. Come on. Get out of there.’

  There was nothing to be done. He got out. Two or three cars were hooting furiously somewhere behind. The manager shouted, ‘I say, old man, do you mind clearing the road now? I’ve got the bugger.’ He grasped D. by the lapel of his coat.

  ‘That isn’t necessary,’ D. said. ‘I’m quite ready to explain to Miss Cullen – or to the police.’

  The other cars went by. The chauffeur loomed up a few yards away. L. stood by the Daimler talking to somebody through the window.

  ‘You think you’re damned smart,’ the manager said. ‘You know Miss Cullen’s a fine girl – wouldn’t charge you.’

  His monocle swung furiously; he thrust his face close to D.’s and said, ‘Don’t think you can take advantage of her.’ One eye was a curious dead blue: it was like a fish’s eye: it recorded none of the emotion. He said, ‘I know your sort. Worm your way in on board a boat. I spotted you from the first.’

  D. said, ‘I’m in a hurry. Will you take me to Miss Cullen – or to the police?’

  ‘You foreigners,’ the manager said, ‘come over here, get hold of our girls . . . you are going to learn a lesson . . .’

  ‘Surely your friend over there is a foreigner too?’

  ‘He’s a gentleman.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ D. said, ‘what you propose to do?’

  ‘If I had my way, you’d go to gaol – but Rose – Miss Cullen – won’t charge you.’ He had been drinking a lot of whisky: you could tell that from the smell. ‘We’ll treat you better than you deserve – give you a thrashing, man to man.’

  ‘You mean – assault me?’ he asked incredulously. ‘There are three of you.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll let you fight. Take off your coat. You called this chap here a thief – you bloody thief! He wants a crack at you.’

  D. said with horror, ‘If you want to fight, can’t we get – pistols – the two of us?’

  ‘We don’t go in for that sort of murder here.’

  ‘And you don’t fight your own battles either.’

  ‘You know very well,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a gammy hand.’ He drew it out of his pocket and waggled it – a gloved object with stiff formalised fingers like a sophisticated doll’s.

  ‘I won’t fight,’ D. said.

  ‘That’s as you like.’ The chauffeur came edging up without a cap. He had taken off his overcoat, but hadn’t troubled about his jacket – tight and blue. D. said, ‘He’s twenty years younger.’

  ‘This isn’t the National Sporting Club,’ the manager said. ‘This is a punishment.’ He let go of D.’s collar and said, ‘Go on. Take off your coat.’ The chauffeur waited with his fists hanging down. D. slowly took off his overcoat, all the horror of the physical contact was returning: the club swung: he could see the warder’s face – this was degradation. Suddenly he became aware of a car coming up behind; he darted into the middle of the road and began to wave. He said, ‘For God’s sake . . . these men . . .’

  It was a small Morris. A thin nervous man sat at the wheel with a grey powerful woman at his side. She looked at the odd group in the road with complacent disapproval. ‘I say – I say,’ the man said. ‘What’s all this about?’

  ‘Drunks,’ his wife said.

  ‘That’s all right, old man,’ the manager said; he had his monocle back over the fish-like eye. ‘My name’s Captain Currie. You know – the Tudor Club. This man stole a car.’

  ‘Do you want us to fetch the police for you?’ the woman said.

  ‘No. The owner – a fine girl, one of the best – doesn’t want to charge. We’re just going to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘Well, you don’t want us,’ the man said. ‘I don’t intend to be mixed up . . .’

  ‘One of these foreigners,’ the manager explained. ‘Glib tongue, you know.’

  ‘Oh, a foreigner,’ the woman said with tight lips. ‘Drive on, dear . . .’ The car ground into gear and moved forward into the fog.

  ‘And now,’ the manager said, ‘are you going to fight?’ He said with contempt, ‘You needn’t be afraid. You’ll get fair play.’

  ‘We better go into the field,’ the chauffeur said. ‘Too many cars here.’

  ‘I won’t move,’ D. said.

  ‘All right, then.’ The chauffeur struck him lightly on the cheek, and D.’s hands automatically went up in defence. Immediately the chauffeur struck again on the mouth, all the time looking elsewhere with one eye: it gave him an effect of appalling casualness, as if he only needed half a mind in order to destroy. He followed up without science at all, smashing out – not seeking a quick victory so much as just pain and blood. D.’s hands were useless; he made no attempt to hit back (his mind remained a victim of the horror and indignity of the physical conflict), and he didn’t know the right way to defend himself. The chauffeur battered him; D. thought with desperation – they’ll have to stop soon: they don’t want murder. He went down under a blow. The manager said, ‘Get up, you skunk, no shamming,’ and as he got to his feet he thought he saw his wallet in L.’s hands. Thank God, he thought, I hid the papers: they can’t batter the socks off me. The chauffeur waited till he got up, and then knocked him against the hedge. He took a step back and waited, grinning. D. could see with difficulty and his mouth was full of blood; his heart was jumping and he thought with reckless pleasure – the damned fools, they will kill me. That would be worth while, and with his last vitality he came back out of the hedge and struck out at the chauffeur’s belly. ‘Oh, the swine,’ he heard the manager cry, ‘hitting below the belt. Go on. Finish him.’ He went down again before a fist which felt like a steel-capped boot. He had an odd impression that someone was saying ‘seven, eight, nine’.

  One of them had undone his coat. For a moment he believed he was at home, buried in the cellar with the rubble and a dead cat. Then he remembered – and his mind retained a stray impression of fingers which lingered round his shirt, looking for something. Sight returned and he saw the chauffeur’s face very big and very close. He had a sense of triumph: it was he who had really won this round. He smiled satirically up at the chauffeur.

  The manager said, ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right, sir,’ t
he chauffeur said.

  ‘Well,’ the manager said, ‘I hope it’s been a lesson to you.’ D. got, with some difficulty, on to his feet; he realised with surprise that the manager was embarrassed – he was like a prefect who has caned a boy and finds the situation afterwards less clear-cut. He turned his back on D. and said, ‘Come on. Let’s get going. I’ll take Miss Cullen’s car.’

  ‘Will you give me a lift?’ D. said.

  ‘A lift! I should damn well think not. You can hoof it.’

  ‘Then perhaps your friend will give me back my coat.’

  ‘Go and get it,’ the manager said.

  D. walked to the ditch where his coat lay; he couldn’t remember leaving it there near L.’s car – and his wallet too. He stooped and as he painfully straightened again he saw the girl – she had been sitting all the time in the back of L.’s Daimler. Again he felt suspicion widen to include the whole world – was she an agent too? But, of course, it was absurd; she was still drunk: she hadn’t an idea of what it all meant any more than the absurd Captain Currie. The zip-fastener of his wallet was undone; it always stuck when pulled open, and whoever had been looking inside had not had time to close it again. He held the wallet up to the window of the car and said, ‘You see. These people are very thorough. But they haven’t got what they wanted.’ She looked back at him through the glass with disgust; he realised that he was still bleeding heavily.

  The manager said, ‘Leave Miss Cullen alone.’

  He said gently, ‘It’s only a few teeth gone. A man of my age must expect to lose his teeth. Perhaps we shall meet at Gwyn Cottage.’ She looked hopelessly puzzled, staring back at him. He put his hands to his hat – but he had no hat: it must have dropped somewhere in the road. He said, ‘You must excuse me now. I have a long walk ahead. But I do assure you – quite seriously – you ought to be careful of these people.’ He began to walk towards London; he could hear Captain Currie exclaiming indignantly in the darkness behind, the word ‘infernal’. It seemed to him that it had been a long day, but on the whole a successful one.

  It had not been an unexpected day: this was the atmosphere in which he had lived for two years. If he had found himself on a desert island, he would have expected to infect even the loneliness somehow with violence. You couldn’t escape a war by changing your country; you only changed the technique – fists instead of bombs, the sneak thief instead of the artillery bombardment. Only in sleep did he evade violence; his dreams were almost invariably made up of peaceful images from the past – compensation? wish-fulfilment? He was no longer interested in his own psychology. He dreamed of lecture-rooms, his wife, sometimes of food and wine, very often of flowers.

  He walked in the ditch to escape cars; the world was blanketed in white silence. Sometimes he passed a bungalow dark among chicken coops. The chalky cutting of the road took headlamps like a screen. He wondered what L.’s next move would be; he hadn’t much time left, and to-day had got him nowhere at all. Except that by now he certainly knew about the appointment with Benditch; it had been indiscreet to mention it to Benditch’s daughter, but he hadn’t imagined then this meeting between the two. Practical things began to absorb him, to the exclusion of weariness or pain. The hours went quite rapidly by. He moved automatically; only when he had thought long enough did he begin to consider his feet, the chance of a lift. Presently he heard a lorry grinding up a hill behind him and he stepped into the road and signalled – a battered middle-aged figure who carried himself with an odd limping sprightliness.

  [2]

  The early morning trams swung round the public lavatory in Theobald’s Road in the direction of Kingsway. The lorries came in from the eastern counties aiming at Covent Garden. In a big leafless Bloomsbury square a cat walked homewards from some alien rooftop. The city, to D., looked extraordinarily exposed and curiously undamaged; nobody stood in a queue; there was no sign of a war except himself. He carried his infection past the closed shops, a tobacconist’s, a twopenny library. He knew the number he wanted, but he put his hand in his pocket to check it – the notebook was gone. So they had got something for their trouble, but it had contained nothing but his address that was of any significance to them – a recipe he had noticed in a French paper for making the most of cabbage; a quotation he had found somewhere from an English poet of Italian origin which had expressed a mood connected with his own dead:

  ‘. . . the beat

  Following her daily of thy heart and feet,

  How passionately and irretrievably

  In what fond flight, how many ways and days.’

  There was also a letter from a French quarterly on the subject of the Song of Roland, referring to an old article of his own. He wondered what L. or his chauffeur would make of the quotation. Perhaps they would look for a code: there was no limit to the credulity and also the mistrust inherent in human beings.

  Well, he remembered the number – 35. He was a little surprised to find that it was a hotel, though not a good hotel. The open outer door was a sure mark of its nature in every city in Europe. He took stock of his surroundings – he remembered the district very slightly. Attached to it was a haze of sentiment from his British Museum days, days of scholarship and peace and courtship. The street opened at the end into a great square – trees blackened with frost: the fantastic cupolas of a great inexpensive hotel: an advertisement for Russian baths. He went in and rang at the glass inner door. Somewhere a clock struck six.

  A peaky haggard face looked at him: a child, about fourteen. He said, ‘I think there is a room waiting for me. The name is D.’

  ‘Oh,’ the child said, ‘we were expecting you last night.’ She was struggling with the bow of an apron; sleep was still white at the corners of her eyes; he could imagine the cruel alarm clock dinning in her ears. He said gently, ‘Just give me the key and I’ll go up.’ She was looking at his face with consternation. He said, ‘I had a little accident – with a car.’

  She said, ‘It’s number twenty-seven. Right at the top. I’ll show you.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, it’s no bother. It’s the “short times” that are the bother. In and out three times in a night.’ She had all the innocence of a life passed since birth with the guilty. For the first two flights there was a carpet: afterwards just wooden stairs. A door opened and an Indian in a gaudy dressing-gown gazed out with heavy and nostalgic eyes. His guide plodded up ahead; she had a hole in one heel which slipped out of the trodden shoe. If she had been older she would have been a slattern, but at her age she was only sad.

  He asked, ‘Have there been any messages left for me?’

  She said, ‘A man called last night. He left a note.’ She unlocked a door. ‘You’ll find it on the washstand.’

  The room was small: an iron bedstead, a table covered with a fringed cloth, a basket chair, a blue-patterned cotton bedspread, clean and faded and spider-thin. ‘Do you want some hot water?’ the child asked gloomily.

  ‘No, no, don’t bother.’

  ‘And what will you be wanting for breakfast? – most lodgers take kippers or boiled eggs.’

  ‘I won’t want any this morning. I will sleep a little.’

  ‘Would you like me to call you later?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘These are such long stairs. I am quite used to waking myself. You needn’t bother.’

  She said passionately, ‘It’s good working for a gentleman. Here they are all “short time” – you know what I mean – or else they’re Indians.’ She watched him with the beginning of devotion; she was of an age when she could be won by a single word for ever. ‘Haven’t you any bags?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s lucky as how you were introduced. We don’t let rooms to people without luggage – not if they’re by themselves.’

  There were two letters waiting for him, propped against the tooth-glass on the washstand. The first he opened contained letter-paper headed The Entrenationo Language Centre: a typed message – ‘Our charge fo
r a course of thirty lessons in Entrenationo is six guineas. A specimen lesson has been arranged for you at 8.45 o’clock to-morrow (the 16th inst.), and we very much hope that you will be encouraged to take a full course. If the time arranged is for any reason inconvenient, will you please give us a ring and have it altered to suit your requirements?’ The other was from Lord Benditch’s secretary confirming the appointment.

  He said, ‘I’ve got to be going out again very soon. I shall just take a nap.’

  ‘Would you like a hot bottle?’

  ‘Oh no, I shall do very well.’

  She hovered anxiously at the door. ‘There’s a gas meter for pennies. Do you know how they work?’ How little London altered. He remembered the ticking meter with its avidity for coins and its incomprehensible dial: on a long evening together they had emptied his pocket and her purse of coppers, until they had none left and the night got cold and she left him till morning. He was suddenly aware that, outside, two years of painful memories still waited to pounce. ‘Oh yes,’ he said quickly, ‘I know. Thank you.’ She absorbed his thanks passionately: he was a gentleman. Her soft closing of the door seemed to indicate that, in her eyes at any rate, one swallow made a whole summer.

  D. took off his shoes and lay down on the bed, not waiting to wash the blood off his face. He told his subconscious mind, as if it were a reliable servant who only needed a word, that he must wake at eight-fifteen, and almost immediately was asleep. He dreamed that an elderly man with beautiful manners was walking beside him along a river bank; he was asking for his views on the Song of Roland, sometimes arguing with great deference. On the other side of the river there was a group of tall cold beautiful buildings like pictures he had seen of the Rockefeller Plaza in New York and a band was playing. He woke exactly at eight-fifteen by his own watch.