The Confidential Agent

  ‘Nobody,’ the manageress said, ‘has been in here but myself – and Else.’

  ‘I told Else to let nobody in.’

  ‘You ought to have spoken to me.’ She had a square strong face ruined by ill-health. ‘Besides, there’s nobody would go into your room – except those with business there.’

  ‘Somebody seemed to take an interest in these papers of mine.’

  ‘Did you touch them, Else?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  She turned her big square spotty face to him like a challenge: an old keep still capable of holding out. ‘You see, you must be wrong – if you believe the girl.’

  ‘I believe her.’

  ‘Then there’s no more to be said and no harm done.’ He said nothing: it wasn’t worth saying anything – she was either one of his own or one of L.’s party. It didn’t matter which, for she had found nothing of interest, and he couldn’t move from the hotel: he had his orders. ‘And now perhaps you’ll let me say what I came up here to say – there’s a lady wants to speak to you on the telephone. In the hall.’

  He said with surprise, ‘A lady?’

  ‘It’s what I said.’

  ‘Did she give her name?’

  ‘She did not.’ He saw Else watching him with anxiety; he thought – good God, surely not another complication, calf-love? He touched her sleeve as he went out of the door and said, ‘Trust me.’ Fourteen was a dreadfully early age at which to know so much and be so powerless. If this was civilisation – the crowded prosperous streets, the women trooping in for coffee at Buzzard’s, the lady-in-waiting at King Edward’s court, and the sinking, drowning child – he preferred barbarity, the bombed streets and the food queues: a child there had nothing worse to look forward to than death. Well, it was for her kind that he was fighting: to prevent the return of such a civilisation to his own country.

  He took off the receiver. ‘Hullo. Who’s that, please?’

  An impatient voice said, ‘This is Rose Cullen.’ What on earth, he thought, does that mean? Are they going to try to get at me, as in the story-books, with a girl? ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Did you get home safely the other night – to Gwyn Cottage?’ There was only one person who could have given her his address, and that was L.

  ‘Of course I got home. Listen.’

  ‘I’m sorry I had to leave you in such questionable company.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘don’t be a fool. Are you a thief?’

  ‘I began stealing cars before you were born.’

  ‘But you have got an appointment with my father.’

  ‘Did he tell you so?’

  An exclamation of impatience came up the wire. ‘Do you think father and I are on speaking terms? It was written down in your diary. You dropped it.’

  ‘And this address too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d like to have that back. The diary, I mean. It has sentimental associations with my other robberies.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ the voice said, ‘if only you wouldn’t try . . .’

  He stared gloomily away across the little hotel hall – an aspidistra on stilts, an umbrella rack in the form of a shell-case. He thought: we could make an industry out of that, with all the shells we have at home. Empty shell-cases for export. Give a tasteful umbrella stand this Christmas from one of the devastated cities. ‘Have you one to sleep?’ the voice asked.

  ‘No, I’m just waiting to hear what you want. It is – you see – a little embarrassing. Our last meeting was odd.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Well?’ He wished he could make up his mind as to whether she was L.’s girl or not.

  ‘I don’t mean on the ’phone. Will you have dinner with me to-night?’

  ‘I haven’t got the right clothes.’ It was strange – her voice sounded extraordinarily strained. If she was L.’s girl, of course, they might be getting anxious – time was very short. His appointment with Benditch was for to-morrow at noon.

  ‘We’ll go anywhere you like.’

  It didn’t seem to him as if there would be any harm in their meeting as long as he didn’t take his credentials with him, even in his socks. On the other hand, his room might be searched again: it was certainly a problem. He said, ‘Where should we meet?’

  She said promptly, ‘Outside Russell Square Station – at seven.’ That sounded safe enough. He said, ‘Do you know anyone who wants a good maid? You or your father, for instance?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Never mind. We’ll talk about that to-night. Good-bye.’

  He walked slowly upstairs. He wasn’t going to take any chances; the credentials had got to be hidden. He had only to get through twenty-four hours, and then he would be a free man – to return to his bombed and starving people. Surely they were not going to throw a mistress at his head – people didn’t fall for that sort of thing except in melodrama. In melodrama a secret agent was never tired or uninterested or in love with a dead woman. But perhaps L. read melodramas – he represented, after all, the aristocracy – the marquises and generals and bishops – who lived in a curious formal world of their own jingling with medals that they awarded to each other: like fishes in a tank, perpetually stared at through glass, and confined to a particular element by their physiological needs. They might take their ideas of the other world – of professional men and working people – partly from melodrama. It was wrong to underestimate the ignorance of the ruling class. Marie Antoinette had said of the poor, ‘Can’t they eat cake?’

  The manageress had gone. Perhaps there was an extension and she had been listening to his conversation on another ’phone. The child was still cleaning the passage with furious absorption. He stood and watched her for a while. One had to take risks sometimes. He said, ‘Would you mind coming into my room for just a moment?’ He closed the door behind them both. He said, ‘I want to speak low – because the manageress mustn’t hear.’ Again he was startled by that look of devotion – what on earth had he done to earn it? a middle-aged foreigner with a face from which he had only recently cleaned the blood, scarred. . . . He had given her half a dozen kind words: in her environment were they so rare that they evoked automatically – this? He said, ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘Anything,’ she said. She was devoted too, he thought, to Clara. What a life when a child had to fix her love on an old foreigner and a prostitute for want of anything better.

  He said, ‘Nobody at all must know. I have some papers people are looking for. I want you to keep them for me until to-morrow.’

  She asked, ‘Are you a spy?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘what you are.’ He sat down on the bed and took off his shoes: she watched him with fascination. She said, ‘That lady on the ’phone . . .’

  He looked up with a sock in one hand and the papers in the other. ‘She mustn’t know. You and me only.’ Her face glowed: he might have given her a jewel; he changed his mind quickly about offering her money. Later perhaps when he was leaving, some present she could turn into money if she chose, but not the brutal and degrading payment. ‘Where will you keep them?’ he asked.

  ‘Where you did.’

  ‘And nobody must know.’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  ‘Better do it now. At once.’ He turned his back and looked out of the window. The hotel sign in big gilt letters was strung just below: forty feet down the frosty pavement and a coal cart going slowly by. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I’m going to sleep again.’ There were enormous arrears of sleep to make up.

  ‘Won’t you have some lunch?’ she asked. ‘It’s not so bad to-day. There’s Irish stew and treacle pudding. It keeps you warm.’ She said, ‘I’ll see you get big helpings – when her back’s turned.’

  ‘I’m not used yet,’ he said, ‘to your big meals. Where I’ve come from, we’ve got out of the way of eating.’

  ‘But you have to eat.’

  ‘Oh,?
?? he said, ‘we’ve found a cheaper way. We look at pictures of food in the magazines instead.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you. You’ve got to eat. If it’s the money . . .’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not the money. I promise you I’ll eat well to-night. But just now it’s sleep I want.’

  ‘Nobody’ll come in this time,’ she said. ‘Nobody.’ He could hear her moving in the passage outside like a sentry: a flap, flap, flap; she was probably pretending to dust.

  He lay down again on his bed in his clothes. No need this time to tell his sub-conscious mind to wake him. He never slept for more than six hours at a time. That was the longest interval there ever was between raids. But this time he couldn’t sleep at all – never before had he let those papers out of his possession. They had been with him all across Europe, on the express to Paris, to Calais, Dover; even when he was being beaten up, they were there, under his heel, a safeguard. He felt uneasy without them. They were his authority and now he was nothing – just an undesirable alien, lying on a shabby bed in a disreputable hotel. Suppose the girl should boast of his confidence, but he trusted her more than he trusted anyone else. She was simple: suppose she should change her stockings and leave his papers lying about, forgotten. . . . L., he thought grimly, would never have done a thing like that. In a way the whole future of what was left of his country lay in the stockings of an underpaid child. They were worth at least £2,000 on the nail – that had been proved. They would probably pay a great deal more if you gave them credit. He felt powerless, like Samson with his hair shorn. He nearly got up and called Else back. But if he did, what should he do with the papers? There was nowhere in the little bare room to hide them. In a way, too, it was suitable that the future of the poor should depend upon the poor.

  The hours passed slowly. He supposed that this was resting. There was silence in the passage after a while; she hadn’t been able to spin out her dusting any longer. If only I had a gun, he thought, I shouldn’t feel so powerless; but it had been impossible to bring one: it was to risk too much at the customs. Presumably here there were ways of obtaining a revolver secretly, but he didn’t know them. He discovered that he was a little frightened. Time was so short – they were certain to spring something on him soon. If they began with a beating up, their next attempt was likely to be drastic. It felt odd, lonely, terrifying to be the only one in danger; as a rule he had the company of a whole city. Again his mind returned to the prison and the warder coming across the asphalt. He had been alone then. Fighting was better in the old days. Roland had companions at Roncesvalles – Oliver and Turpin: the whole chivalry of Europe was riding up to help him. Men were united by a common belief. Even a heretic would be on the side of Christendom against the Moors; they might differ about the persons of the Trinity, but on the main issue they were like rock. Now there were so many varieties of economic materialism, so many initial letters.

  A few street cries came up through the cold air – old clothes and a man who wanted chairs to mend. He had said that war killed emotion: it was untrue. Those cries were an agony. He buried his head in the pillow as a young man might have done. They brought back the years before his marriage with intensity. They had listened to them together. He felt like a young man who has given all his trust and found himself mocked, cuckolded, betrayed. Or who has himself in a minute of lust spoilt a whole life together. To live was like perjury. How often they had declared that they would die within a week of each other, but he hadn’t died: he had survived prison, the shattered house. The bomb which had wrecked four floors and killed a cat had left him alive. Did L. really imagine that he could trap him with a woman? and was this what London – a foreign peaceful city – had in store for him, the return of feeling, despair?

  The dusk fell; lights came out like hoar frost. He lay on his back again with his eyes open. Oh, to be home. Presently he got up and shaved. It was time to be gone. He buttoned his overcoat round the chin as he stepped out into the bitter night. An east wind blew from the City: it had the stone-cold of big business blocks and banks. You thought of long passages and glass doors and a spiritless routine. It was a wind to take the heart out of a man. He walked up Guilford Street – the after-office rush was over and the theatre traffic hadn’t begun. In the small hotels dinners were being laid, and oriental faces peered out from bed-sitting-rooms with gloomy nostalgia.

  As he turned up a side street he heard a voice behind him, cultured, insinuating, weak: ‘Excuse me, sir. Excuse me.’ He stopped. A man dressed very oddly in a battered bowler and a long black overcoat from which a fur collar had been removed bowed with an air of excessive gentility; he had a white stubble on his chin, his eyes were bloodshot and pouchy, and he carried in front of him a thin worn hand as if it were to be kissed. He began at once to apologise in what remained of a university – or a stage – accent: ‘I felt sure you wouldn’t mind my addressing you, sir. The fact of the matter is, I find myself in a predicament.’

  ‘A predicament?’

  ‘A matter of a few shillings, sir.’ D. wasn’t used to this; their beggars at home in the old days had been more spectacular, with lumps of rotting flesh uplifted at the doors of churches.

  The man had an air of badly secreted anxiety. ‘I wouldn’t have addressed you, sir, naturally, if I hadn’t felt that you were – well, of one’s own kind.’ Was there really a snobbery in begging or was it just a method of approach which had proved workable? ‘Of course, if it’s inconvenient at the moment, say no more about it.’

  D. put his hand into his pocket. ‘Not here, if you don’t mind, sir, in the full light of day, as it were. If you would just step into this mews. I confess to a feeling of shame – asking a complete stranger for a loan like this.’ He sidled nervously sideways into the empty mews: ‘You can imagine my circumstances.’ One car stood there, big green closed gates: nobody about. ‘Well,’ D. said, ‘here’s half a crown.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ He grabbed it. ‘Perhaps one day I shall be able to repay . . .’ He was off with lanky strides, out of the mews, into the street, out of sight. D. began to follow. There was a small scraping sound behind him, and a piece of brick suddenly flew out of the wall and struck him sharply on the cheek. Memory warned him: he ran. In the street there were lights in windows, a policeman stood at a corner, he was safe. He knew that somebody had fired at him with a gun fitted with a silencer. Ignorance. You couldn’t aim properly with a silencer.

  The beggar, he thought, must have waited for me outside the hotel, acted as decoy into the mews: if they had hit him the car was there ready to take his body. Or perhaps they only meant to maim him. Probably they hadn’t made up their own minds which, and that was another reason why they had missed, just as in billiards if you have two shots in mind, you miss both. But how had they known the hour at which he would be leaving the hotel? He quickened his step, and came up Bernard Street, with a tiny flame of anger at his heart. The girl, of course, would not be at the station.

  But she was.

  He said, ‘I didn’t really expect to find you here. Not after your friends had tried to shoot me.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘there are things I won’t and can’t believe. I came here to apologise. About last night. I don’t believe you meant to steal that car, but I was drunk, furious. . . . I never thought they meant to smash you as they did. It was that fool Currie. But if you start being melodramatic again. . . . Is it a new kind of confidence trick? Is it meant to appeal to the romantic female heart? Because you’d better know, it doesn’t work.’

  He said, ‘Did L. know you were meeting me here at seven-thirty?’

  She said, with a faint uneasiness, ‘Not L.; Currie did.’ The confession surprised him. Perhaps, after all, she was innocent. ‘He’d got your notebook, you see. He said it ought to be kept in case you tried anything more on. I spoke to him on the telephone to-day – he was in town. I said I didn’t believe you meant to steal that car and that I was going to meet you. I wanted to gi
ve it back to you.’

  ‘He let you have it?’

  ‘Here it is.’

  ‘And perhaps you told him where, what time?’

  ‘I may have done. We talked a lot. He argued. But it’s no use you telling me Currie shot at you – I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Oh no. Nor do I. I suppose he happened to meet L. and told him.’

  She said, ‘He was having lunch with L.’ She exclaimed furiously, ‘But it’s fantastic. How could they shoot at you in the street – here? What about the police, the noise, the neighbours? Why are you here at all? Why aren’t you at the police station?’

  He said gently, ‘One at a time. It was in a mews. There was a silencer. And as for the police station, I had an appointment here with you.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. Don’t you see that if things like that happened life would be quite different? One would have to begin over again.’

  He said, ‘It doesn’t seem odd to me. At home we live with bullets. Even here you’d get used to it. Life goes on much the same.’ He took her by the hand like a child and led her down Bernard Street, then into Grenville Street. He said, ‘It will be quite safe. He won’t have stayed.’ They came to the mews. He picked up a scrap of brick at the entrance. He said, ‘You see, this was what he hit.’

  ‘Prove it. Prove it,’ she said fiercely.

  ‘I don’t suppose that’s possible.’ He began to dig with his nail at the wall, looking for something: the bullet might have wedged. . . . He said, ‘They are getting desperate. There was the business in the lavatory yesterday – and then what you saw. To-day somebody has searched my room, but that may be one of my own people. But this – to-night – is going pretty far. They can’t do much more now than kill me. I don’t think they’ll manage that, though. I’m horribly hard to kill.’