The Walking Stick

  He went across for his leather jacket, put it on over his shirt, his face drawn as it might have been with pain. As he got to the door, I said: ‘Wait.’

  He stopped short. ‘What for?’

  ‘Don’t go tonight. Let’s leave it a day or so. You haven’t to tell them till Sunday.’

  ‘It’ll make no difference. Best get it over.’

  ‘I don’t want to be left, Leigh. I can’t bear to be alone tonight in this studio. I feel – surrounded by all these buildings – they’re all empty at night. Can’t we . . . talk? Let’s eat a meal and try to forget it. It’s been on my mind night and day this week. Let’s try for an hour or two to think of something else.’

  That night we made love but it wasn’t a success. Not either way. The loving kindness had evaporated too and left only a sort of exhaustion of spirit. I woke about six-thirty and found him gone, the place empty. He came back at seven-thirty in time for breakfast, said he’d just been walking.

  While we were having breakfast a barge came alongside the warehouse next to us and began to unload timber. The rattle of the derrick and the clank and thump of the timber did not encourage talk between us.

  You don’t stop loving a man because of one thing. Last Saturday was still so near that one kept harking back, trying to remember. I desperately wanted to comfort him, to care for him, to please him, but there wasn’t any way. I felt now that whatever happened, even if I agreed, our feeling for each other was stained, spoiled. Whoever gave way, you lost.

  He worked Saturday morning, and I didn’t. I shopped for the weekend, in and out of the crowds, waiting in the butcher’s, picking Cox’s on a fruit stall, remembering tooth paste, limping – though not limping nearly as much – along the pavement, waiting at the traffic lights, shopping bag heavy on arm. People thronging, pushing; greedy faces, mean faces, kindly faces, ailing, lonely, drink-flushed, self-satisfied, oversatisfied, underprivileged faces, new faces wrinkled in prams, old faces ready for the box. All little egos, all wanting personal comfort, personal gratification, personal attention. I, I, the most important word in everyone’s language. They differed from the crowds in Hampstead, which were better dressed, more casually at ease, more sophisticated, perhaps more decadent; but it was a superficial difference, not a fundamental one. All subscribed to the same motives, the same end.

  And what was that end?

  I could have cried in the street, wept with indecision. Anyway, to do what Leigh asked was ‘out’ for me. Then what? Leave him? Would I be able to now? I seemed at this time to need him with an urgent emotional need. No one in all my life meant anything like him. We were lovers, companions, friends, helpmates; instead of being one against the world it was two. This was the fundamental thing: my whole life was changed because I was sharing it. It’s the one vast difference between loneliness and non-loneliness, the bridgeable and the unbridgeable gap. I couldn’t do without him.

  And since we became lovers our complete relationship had changed. I was no longer a step ahead of him, in that he was the wooer and I the chooser. He’d never suggested or implied that the pendulum had swung the other way. But if it came to the point might it not be so?

  Did I need him more than he needed me? Perhaps you could only know when it was too late.

  When I got home the barge had unloaded, so quietness again. A hazy sort of day, and the studio had absorbed some of the river damp, mirrors misted, chairs clammy. I dusted a bit, rearranged my plates on the mantelpiece, shortened the stems of Philip’s chrysanthemums. Even with the windows shut I could hear a cox coaching his crew from the Wapping side of the river. ‘One-two-one-two-one-two.’

  I blew out an uncertain sigh. Maybe I was making too much of it all. Let him tell these people, no, and there’d be an end: in a couple of weeks it would all be forgotten. We’d go out tonight and ignore this silly sordid tangle.

  On the table by the door was his post, which had come since he left. I never touched his letters normally, even his open flaps; but there were three today that looked like bills. They were. £33.10.0., £9.11.3., and £41.5.0. All accounts-rendered with ‘please remit’ or ‘an immediate payment will oblige’.

  I went to his desk, got envelopes, wrote cheques for all three, put them in my coat pocket to post them. My balance was going down. We were probably just paying our way with what we earned but I never saw his money and never knew how much he paid toward overheads, how much he allowed the bills to drift.

  He was right. I’d never been short of money before. Wasn’t now – yet. But might be.

  I put two pork chops on for lunch, peeled potatoes, cut up a turnip. Then with a few minutes to spare I made a bit of pastry and tried my hand at a jam tart.

  No luck with a different job for him. I’d tried to encourage him to look for something which would make use of his talents as a draftsman. It was very much up to me to help him in some practical way, but as yet I hadn’t been able to find the way. To find worthwhile work, a new view of life for him, a new self-respect. Worthy but dull? Wasn’t it Nabokov who had said that the only alternative to banality was perversity? But we had the potentiality for happiness together, however it might be realized. God knew that was rare enough. Two against the world.

  I was of course running him into extra expense merely by living here. Also, quite by the way, he was paying to have his wife watched.

  When he came in I was looking through a book of his early sketches that I hadn’t seen before. He said: ‘Your horrible firm’ll be selling those at a hundred guineas a time in the year 2000.’ And laughed.

  ‘Artists should always have children,’ I said, ‘then at least somebody benefits.’

  ‘Well . . . you said it.’

  Lunch was ready and we sat down to it. Joy to find his mood changed. This was the man I knew, could be natural with. I didn’t ask the reason – if any – for the change, but gratefully took up where a week ago we’d left off. He’d bought tickets for an ice-hockey match, and we spent the afternoon there. In the evening we drove through Rotherhithe Tunnel and went to a public house on the Isle of Dogs, but this was less popular and less noisy than the one where we had met Jack and Ted.

  I suppose I drank too much. Unusual for me; but I suppose this was the relief. On the way home I said:

  ‘What have you decided to tell them?’

  ‘Who? . . . Oh. I can only tell them what you’ve decided. But can it. It’s been a good evening. We don’t want to spoil it now, do we.’

  ‘Leigh’ – I struggled with curious emotion – ‘you’ve never actually told me what they want to know – have you?’

  ‘You haven’t given me a lot of encouragement – have you?’

  ‘Well, what is it? At least I ought to hear that.’

  We dived into the tunnel. ‘Details? I don’t know ’em myself. They obviously’d like to know the general security arrangements, that’s all. You can imagine as well as I can – what nightwatchmen, what alarms, when they come on, who’s responsible – all that. If they think it’s too tough an assignment they’ll scrub it, as I said before. But until they know . . .’

  ‘Can’t they find all this out easily enough for themselves? It would cost a lot less than £500.’

  ‘They don’t believe in taking chances.’

  Silence till we got home.

  Ideas. If I did agree to help, it would warm our love again – so very important – but need I (privately) commit myself too deep? With the best will in the world, there was a limit to what I could find out. With a little less than the best will . . . Even if ‘they’ refused to pay the £500, I would have appeared to do my best. So long as nobody suspected – Leigh especially.

  ‘Ask them what they want to know,’ I said.

  Conspiracy is the oddest thing. It spawns in the mind, and the mere circulation of thought carries the spawn into far corners. Conflicts develop in the strangest way. ‘Thou shalt not’ can be eroded from many sides.

  Of course it’s not easy to be half committed –
or not easy for someone who hasn’t cultivated the talent of deception – this I would have realized on a less emotional evening. Yet even in the grey light of Sunday morning – and that of other mornings – I didn’t repudiate.

  You can be over seven years with a firm and yet have hardly any idea. Security precautions are just something you never take notice of. You leave at six or seven in the evening and come again next morning at nine-thirty. Doors are locked; men come on duty; but it’s all of utterly no importance.

  So when someone asks you, you have to start from scratch. And move cautiously for your own sake. (I hoped still that the whole idea would be scrubbed, as Leigh called it; if I had any influence it would be; but if it wasn’t, if ‘something’ happened, I wanted no finger of suspicion pointed.)

  Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night and said, you fool, you screaming asinine little fool, you female Judas, you twisted little beast; and the man beside me was asleep, a heavy young man, solid limbed, white limbed, gentle handed, kind mouthed; so I said, well, there it is, you trade love for integrity; and what is integrity? Can you feel it, can you taste it, as you can feel and taste love? Four syllables; four socks on a line; and as significant, no more so – or only more so because of breeding and tradition. To whom anyway did I fundamentally owe any loyalty except to Leigh? And I would turn over and try to hold his hand, as if that were the only certain thing in a world that didn’t seem to have a lot of certainty any more.

  ‘They’re not ordinary nightwatchmen,’ I said. ‘They’re Safeguards. You know, there are lots of organizations now. Securicor are the biggest, I suppose. Safeguards send two men round every night. They come on at seven and stay till seven the next morning. We don’t pay them. We pay the firm Safeguards so much a year for over-all protection.’

  ‘Is it always the same two men?’

  ‘No, I think they change every week. I suppose that’s part of the system.’

  ‘Are there burglar alarms as well? I’ve never seen any wires when I’ve called for you.’

  ‘Yes, there are two circuits. One operates on the windows and doors. I was looking today. It works by buttons. All the buttons are pressed down and then the alarm is switched on. If anyone opens a window or door the button flips up and the circuit is broken and sets off the alarm.’

  ‘The other?’

  ‘It works in the strongroom but I don’t know how. It sets off separate bells on the roof if anyone goes in or opens the door.’

  ‘Where is the strongroom?’

  ‘In the basement. Not far from where I work. There’s a safe inside, and steel filing cabinets and some shelves.’

  ‘What’s the make of the safe?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Leigh put down his pencil. ‘Well, it’s a start.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He yawned and stared at the paper. ‘I honestly don’t know what else they want, but I’d think a plan of the place would be useful. It’s such a honeycomb.’

  ‘There is a plan on a wall in Peter Greeley’s office; I expect I could draw a rough diagram from memory.’

  ‘You give me the diagram; I’ll draw it.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Why not? It’ll show we’re doing our best. That’s what matters most.’ It was as if he had cottoned on already to my idea.

  But it was three floors, and though I could more or less remember, I couldn’t fit the rooms over and under each other. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’ll do for the time being. Any idea what routine these Safeguard blokes follow?’

  ‘I think they must patrol. I think they have machines they clock in at certain times.’

  He nodded. ‘Where are their headquarters?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Won’t it be in the telephone book?’

  ‘Yeh . . . I was just wondering.’

  On the Friday he was late back and said: ‘I didn’t see this man until today. He thinks it’s a good start. But he wants more details. I suppose it stands to reason.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  Hand on my arm. ‘Deborah, you’ve been a real sweetie, doing this. I hope you’ve not felt too bad about it.’

  I smiled. ‘I’m beginning not to know how I feel. You’re doing a sort of Pavlov’s dog on me, and in the end I shall be a nervous wreck.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ He scowled at me, but in worry not anger. ‘Not even as a crack. If this is doing anything serious to you, for Christ’s sake, we’ll turn it in.’

  Serious? What was serious? Seriously, I could no longer judge; that far the jest was true. ‘Tell me what they want now.’

  He took out a creased sheet of typing paper. On it was written:

  (1) Name of safe and number. Very important to get number right. You have to have safe open to see number which is always on middle bolt of the three that move to lock the safe when you turn the handle.

  (2) Position of alarm switches. Where they switch off.

  (3) Type of strongroom alarm and how operated.

  (4) Any private line between Whittington’s and Safeguard’s head office in the Strand?

  (5) Name of guards now doing duty.

  (6) Who do they take over from at night, and who takes over from them in the morning?

  Leigh was watching me as I read this.

  I said dryly, ‘Well, there’s no harm in asking.’

  ‘It’s a pretty tall order, I must say.’

  ‘Leigh, I’ve been thinking over the people at our bonfire party. You said this man was there. I can’t begin to guess who it is.’

  ‘Don’t try, love. It’s better not.’

  ‘You always make it sound so dramatic. Is Jack Foil in this?’

  ‘Why bother to ask? The less you know, the better.’

  He looked very young. Sometimes I felt so much more than a year older. Perhaps I ought to have thought for us both, to have gone on refusing to do this thing. But although in character I was more mature, maybe better balanced, physically he was the master. I suppose if there’s any excuse for me, that’s it.

  I needed an excuse during the next two weeks at Whittington’s. I suppose in seven years I’d been in the strongroom thirty or forty times and seen the safe opened every second visit. But I’d gone in casually with someone, or got one of the directors to open the door because I wanted the records of 1963 sales, or something of the sort. I’d done this with a perfectly clear mind and face, never bothering to think about it. But now I needed an excuse, and it took me ten days to think up something that sounded genuine to my own sensitive ears. Then I had to get John Hallows to open the door, which made matters worse, it being him. And then unlock the safe.

  He left me for about three minutes which was more than enough . . . 951063 . . . On the middle bolt, as they’d said. Copied now on a corner of my catalogue. When he came in again to lock up I said: ‘Is this room on some sort of a burglar alarm at night?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought I heard one of the Safeguard men talking about it this week—’

  ‘Yes, there’s a trembler alarm over there. It’s at the back there, between the cupboards. When it’s set, if anyone opens the door or tries to break in, opening it alters the air pressure in the room and that sets the trembler off.’

  ‘Ingenious.’

  ‘Yes, if anyone tried to get in here they’d be in for a few nasty surprises.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, and so meant it.

  ‘Answer to questions,’ I typed before Leigh got home.

  (1) Safe. Pemberton. Number 951063.

  (2) Alarm switches in director’s private room on ground floor, controlling both systems.

  (3) Strongroom has a trembler alarm.

  (4) Cannot tell if there is any private line.

  (5) Names at present Webster and Troon.

  (6) They take over from a director and at least one of our own attendants. In the mornings, Mr Sloane, foreman, and two cleaners arrive at seven, others at seven-th
irty.

  When I’d finished I pulled it out of Leigh’s old machine and read it through.

  I was helping – already more than I had ever intended to. But when and how to stop? For a few minutes I had been tempted to give them the wrong numbers of the safe, but to tell them any deliberate lie which later could be checked was asking for trouble of the worst kind. For Leigh as well as for me. So I was now co-operating in a prospective burglary. This was a confused dream, a sleazy nightmare. It was like being ill; you lost your sense of reality. You said, Is this really happening to me? and you answered, Yes, but it still had no conviction.

  I screwed the paper in a ball, but before I could find the waste-paper basket Leigh came in, so I gave him the paper instead. This is the rationale of nightmare. Take only one step out of reality, and all the rest logically follows.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Perhaps it is more like driving in an unknown town and taking the wrong spoke at a roundabout. You go on quite happily for a time afterward, not realizing your whole direction has changed and you’re heading north instead of south.

  The information was passed. No comeback. Leigh hadn’t received the money but he seemed to have no doubt he would get it. He was in his cheerful mood and carried me along. Except for two Saturdays when he went with Ted Sandymount to watch Charlton Athletic, he seemed to see less of his other friends, and I began to feel that with luck we might break free of them even yet. Weekends, apart from the two matches, we spent together, Saturdays mainly looking for a shop or some small premises that we might rent.

  Sunday mornings sometimes at low tide Leigh would wander off on his own along the river beach. It was more than I could do, what with the big stones, and here and there walls and jetties to climb; but he enjoyed it, came back knee-wet and muddy. I thought then that he would have really liked to live on an island like Gauguin, existing on a few pounds a year, carefree, responsibility free, free to laze and wander and paint . . .

  Sarah got engaged to Philip, and Leigh and I twice went to have drinks in his rooms. Although so different in temperament, Philip and Leigh got on together; I could see an agreeable future in their friendship. Once Sarah suggested calling at Jack Foil’s antique shop but I headed her off.