Black As He's Painted

  ‘Certainly,’ said the lady crisply. ‘When would you –?’

  ‘Now, if you please.

  ‘I think that would suit. If you’ll just wait while I –’ She used her telephone. Mr Whipplestone bumped into a sudden qualm of near-panic. ‘I am beside myself,’ he thought. ‘It’s that wretched cat.’ He pulled himself together. After all he was committed to nothing. An impulse, a mere whim induced, he dared say, by unaccustomed idleness. What of it?’

  The lady was looking at him. Perhaps she had spoken to him.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Whipplestone.

  She decided he was hard-of-hearing. ‘The house,’ she articulated pedantically, ‘is open to view. The late tenants have vacated the premises. The married couple leave at the end of the week. The owner is at home in the basement flat. Mr Sheridan,’ she shouted. ‘That’s the vendor’s name: Sheridan.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Mervyn!’ cried the lady, summoning up a wan and uncertain youth from the back office. ‘No. 1, the Walk. Gentleman to view.’ She produced keys and smiled definitively upon Mr Whipplestone. ‘It’s a Quality Residence,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll think so.’

  The youth attended him with a defeated air round the corner to No. 1, Capricorn Walk.

  ‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds!’ Mr Whipplestone inwardly expostulated. ‘Good God, it’s outrageous!’

  The Walk had turned further into the sun, which now sparkled on No. l’s brass door-knocker and letter-box, Mr Whipplestone, waiting on the recently scrubbed steps, looked down into the area. It had been really very ingeniously converted, he was obliged to concede, into a ridiculous little garden with everything on a modest scale.

  ‘Pseudo-Japanese,’ he thought in a panic-stricken attempt to discredit it.

  ‘Who looks after that?’ he tossed at the youth. ‘The basement?’

  ‘Yar,’ said the youth.

  (‘He hadn’t the faintest idea,’ thought Mr Whipplestone.)

  The youth had opened the front door and now stood back for Mr Whipplestone to enter.

  The little hall and stairway were carpeted in cherry red, the glossy walls were an agreeable oyster-white. This scheme was continued in a quite sizeable drawing-room. The two bow windows curtained in red and white stripes were large and the whole interior remarkably light for a London room. For some twenty years he had vaguely regretted the murkiness of his service flat.

  Without warning he was overtaken by an experience that a less sophisticated man might have been tempted to call hallucinatory. He saw, with the utmost clarity, his own possessions occupying this light-hearted room. The Chippendale wall-desk, the crimson sofa with its companion table, the big red glass goblet, the Agatha Troy landscape, the late Georgian bookcase: all were harmoniously accommodated. When the youth opened double-doors into a small dining-room, Mr Whipplestone saw at a glance that his chairs were of precisely the right size and character.

  He dismissed these visions. ‘The partition folds back,’ he said with a brave show of indifference, ‘to form one room, I suppose?’

  ‘Yar,’ said the youth and folded it back. He opened red and white striped curtains in the rear wall and revealed a courtyard and tub-garden.

  ‘Lose the sun,’ Mr Whipplestone sneered, keeping his head, ‘Get none in the winter.’

  It was, however, receiving its full quota now.

  ‘Damp,’ persisted Mr Whipplestone defiantly. ‘Extra expense. Have to be kept up.’ And he thought: ‘I’d do better to hold my tongue.’

  The kitchen was on the left of the dining-room. It was a modernized affair with a service hatch. ‘Cramped!’ Mr Whipplestone thought of saying but his heart was not in it.

  The stairs were steep which ought to have been a comfort. Awkward for trays and luggage and suppose one died how would they get one out of it? He said nothing.

  The view from the master-bedroom through the french windows embraced in its middle distance the Square with the Sun in Splendour on the left and – more distantly on the right – the dome of the Basilica. In the foreground was the Walk with foreshortened views of pedestrians, parked cars and an intermittent passage of traffic. He opened a french window. They were ringing the bells in the Basilica. Twelve o’clock. Some service or another, he supposed. But you couldn’t say the house was noisy.

  The bells stopped. Somewhere, out of sight, a voice was raised in a reiterated, rhythmical shout. He couldn’t distinguish the sense of it but it came nearer. He went out on one of the two little balconies.

  ‘Air-eye-awf,’ shouted the voice, and round the far corner of the Square came a horse-drawn cart, nodding with tulips and led by a red-faced man. He passed No. 1 and looked up.

  ‘Any time. All fresh,’ he bawled directly at Mr Whipplestone who hastily withdrew.

  (His big red glass goblet in the bow window, filled with tulips.)

  Mr Whipplestone was a man who did not indulge in histrionics but under the lash of whatever madness now possessed him he did, as he made to leave the window, flap the air with two dismissive palms. The gesture brought him face to face with a couple, man and woman.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ they all said and the small man added. ‘Sorry, sir. We just heard the window open and thought we’d better see.’ He glanced at the youth. ‘Order to view?’ he asked.

  ‘Yar.’

  ‘You,’ said Mr Whipplestone, dead against his will, ‘must be the – the upstairs – ah – the –’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ said the man. His wife smiled and made a slight bob. They were rather alike, being round-faced, apple-cheeked and blue-eyed and were aged, he thought, about forty-five.

  ‘You are – I understand – ah – still – ah –’

  ‘We’ve stayed on to set things to rights, sir, Mr Sheridan’s kindly letting us remain until the end of the week. Gives us a chance to find another place, sir, if we’re not wanted here.’

  ‘I understand you would be – ah –’

  ‘Available, sir?’ they both said quickly and the man added, ‘We’d be glad to stay on if the conditions suited. We’ve been here with the outgoing tenant six years, sir, and very happy with it. Name of Chubb, sir, references on request and the owner, Mr Sheridan, below, would speak for us.’

  ‘Quite, quite quite!’ said Mr Whipplestone in a tearing hurry. ‘I – ah – I’ve come to no conclusion. On the contrary. Idle curiosity, really. However. In the event – the remote event of my – be very glad – but so far – nothing decided.’

  ‘Yes, sir, of course. If you’d care to see upstairs, sir?’

  ‘What!’ shouted Mr Whipplestone as if they’d fired a gun at him. ‘Oh. Thank you. Might as well, perhaps. Yes.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir. I’ll just close the window.’

  Mr Whipplestone stood aside. The man laid his hand on the french window. It was a brisk movement but it stopped as abruptly as if a moving film had turned into a still. The hand was motionless, the gaze was fixed, the mouth shut like a trap.

  Mr Whipplestone was startled. He looked down into the street and there, returning from his constitutional and attended by his dog and his bodyguard, was the Ambassador for Ng’ombwana. It was at him that the man, Chubb, stared. Something impelled Mr Whipplestone to look at the woman. She had come close and she too, over her husband’s shoulder, stared at the Ambassador.

  The next moment the figures animated. The window was shut and fastened and Chubb turned to Mr Whipplestone with a serviceable smile.

  ‘Shall I show the way, sir?’ asked Chubb.

  The upstairs flat was neat, clean and decent. The little parlour was a perfectly respectable and rather colourless room, except perhaps for an enlarged photograph of a round-faced girl of about sixteen which attracted attention on account of its being festooned in black ribbon and flanked on the table beneath it by two vases of dyed immortelles. Some kind of china medallion hung from the bottom edge of the frame. Another enlarged photograph of Chubb in uniform and Mrs Chubb in bridal array, h
ung on the wall.

  All the appointments on this floor, it transpired, were the property of the Chubbs. Mr Whipplestone was conscious that they watched him anxiously. Mrs Chubb said: ‘It’s home to us. We’re settled like. It’s such a nice part, the Capricorns.’ For an unnerving moment he thought she was going to cry.

  He left the Chubbs precipitately, followed by the youth. It was a struggle not to re-enter the drawing-room but he triumphed and shot out of the front door to be immediately involved in another confrontation.

  ‘Good morning,’ said a man on the area steps. ‘You’ve been looking at my house, I think? My name is Sheridan.’

  There was nothing remarkable about him at first sight, unless it was his almost total baldness and his extreme pallor. He was of middle height, unexceptionally dressed and well-spoken. His hair, when he had had it, must have been dark since his eyes and brows and the wires on the backs of his pale hands were black. Mr Whipplestone had a faint, fleeting and oddly uneasy impression of having seen him before. He came up the area steps and through the gate and faced Mr Whipplestone who, in politeness, couldn’t do anything but stop where he was.

  ‘Good morning,’ Mr Whipplestone said. ‘I just happened to be passing. An impulse.’

  ‘One gets them,’ said Mr Sheridan, ‘in the spring.’ He spoke with a slight lisp.

  ‘So I understand,’ said Mr Whipplestone, not stuffily but in a definitive tone. He made a slight move.

  ‘Did you approve?’ asked Mr Sheridan casually.

  ‘Oh, charming, charming,’ Mr Whipplestone said, lightly dismissing it.

  ‘Good. So glad. Good morning, Chubb, can I have a word with you?’ said Sheridan.

  Mr Whipplestone escaped. The wan youth followed him to the corner. Mr Whipplestone was about to dismiss him and continue alone towards Baronsgate. He turned back to thank the youth and there was the house, in full sunlight now, with its evergreen swags and its absurd garden. Without a word he wheeled left and left again and reached Able, Virtue & Sons three yards in advance of his escort. He walked straight in and laid his card before the plump lady.

  ‘I should like the first refusal,’ he said.

  From that moment it was a foregone conclusion. He didn’t lose his head. He made sensible enquiries and took proper steps about the lease and the plumbing and the state of repair. He consulted his man of business, his bank manager and his solicitor. It is questionable whether, if any of these experts had advised against the move, he would have paid the smallest attention but they did not and, to his own continuing astonishment, at the end of a fortnight Mr Whipplestone moved in.

  He wrote cosily to his married sister in Devonshire: ‘– you may be surprised to hear of the change. Don’t expect anything spectacular, it’s a quiet little backwater full of old fogies like me. Nothing in the way of excitement or “happenings” or violence or beastly demonstrations. It suits me. At my age one prefers the uneventful life and that,’ he ended, ‘is what I expect to enjoy at No. 1, Capricorn Walk.’

  Prophecy was not Mr Whipplestone’s strong point.

  III

  ‘That’s all jolly fine,’ said Superintendent Alleyn. ‘What’s the Special Branch think it’s doing? Sitting on its fat bottom waving Ng’ombwanan flags?’

  ‘What did he say, exactly?’ asked Mr Fox. He referred to their Assistant Commissioner.

  ‘Oh, you know!’ said Alleyn. ‘Charm and sweet reason were the wastewords of his ween.’

  ‘What’s a ween, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘I’ve not the remotest idea. It’s a quotation. And don’t ask me from where.’

  ‘I only wondered,’ said Mr Fox mildly.

  ‘I don’t even know,’ Alleyn continued moodily, ‘how it’s spelt. Or what it means, if it comes to that.’

  ‘If it’s Scotch it’ll be with an h, won’t it? Meaning: “few”. Wheen.’

  ‘Which doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Perhaps it should be “weird” but that’s something one drees. Now you’re upsetting me, Br’er Fox.’

  ‘To get back to the AC, then?’

  ‘However reluctantly: to get back to him. It’s all about this visit, of course.’

  ‘The Ng’ombwanan President?’

  ‘He. The thing is, Br’er Fox, I know him. And the AC knows I know him. We were at school together in the same house: Davidson’s. Same study, for a year. Nice creature, he was. Not everybody’s cup of tea but I liked him. We got on like houses on fire.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Fox. ‘The AC wants you to recall old times?’

  ‘I do tell you precisely that. He’s dreamed up the idea of a meeting – casual-cum-official. He wants me to put it to the President that unless he conforms to whatever procedure the Special Branch sees fit to lay on, he may very well get himself bumped off and in any case will cause acute anxiety, embarrassment and trouble at all levels from the Monarch down. And I’m to put this, if you please, tactfully. They don’t want umbrage to be taken, followed by a highly publicized flounce-out. He’s as touchy as a sea-anemone.’

  ‘Is he jibbing, then? About routine precautions?’

  ‘He was always a pig-headed ass. We used to say that if you wanted the old Boomer to do anything you only had to tell him not to. And he’s one of those sickening people without fear. And hellish haughty with it. Yes, he’s jibbing. He doesn’t want protection. He wants to do a Haroun el Raschid and bum round London on his own looking as inconspicuous as a coal box in paradise.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Fox judiciously, ‘that’s a very silly way to go on. He’s a number one assassination risk, that gentleman.’

  ‘He’s a bloody nuisance. You’re right, of course. Ever since he pushed his new industrial legislation through he’s been a sitting target for the lunatic fringe. Damn it all, Br’er Fox, only the other day, when he elected to make a highly publicized call at Martinique, somebody took a pot shot at him. Missed and shot himself. No arrest. And off goes the Boomer on his merry way, six foot five of him, standing on the seat of his car, all eyes and teeth, with his escort having kittens every inch of the route.’

  ‘He sounds a right daisy.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘I get muddled,’ Mr Fox confessed, ‘over these emergent nations.’

  ‘You’re not alone, there.’

  ‘I mean to say – this Ng’ombwana. What is it? A republic, obviously, but is it a member of the Commonwealth and if it is, why does it have an Ambassador instead of a High Commissioner?’

  ‘You may well ask. Largely through the manoeuvrings of my old chum, The Boomer. They’re still a Commonwealth country. More or less. They’re having it both ways. All the trappings and complete independence. All the ha’pence and none of the kicks. That’s why they insist on calling their man in London an Ambassador and setting him up in premises that wouldn’t disgrace one of the great powers. Basically it’s The Boomer’s doing.’

  ‘What about his own people? Here? At this Embassy? His Ambassador and all?’

  ‘They’re as worried as hell but say that what the President lays down is it: the general idea being that they might as well speak to the wind. He’s got this notion in his head – it derives from his schooldays and his practising as a barrister in London – that because Great Britain, relatively, has had a non-history of political assassination there won’t be any in the present or future. In its maddening way it’s rather touching.’

  ‘He can’t stop the SB doing its stuff, though. Not outside the Embassy.’

  ‘He can make it hellish awkward for them.’

  ‘What’s the procedure, then? Do you wait till he comes, Mr Alleyn, and plead with him at the airport?’

  ‘I do not. I fly to his blasted republic at the crack of dawn tomorrow and you carry on with the Dagenham job on your own.’

  ‘Thanks very much. What a treat,’ said Fox. ‘So I’d better go and pack.’

  ‘Don’t forget the old school tie.’

  ‘I do not deign,’ said Alleyn, ‘to reply to that
silly crack.’

  He got as far as the door and stopped.

  ‘I meant to ask you,’ he said. ‘Did you ever come across a man called Samuel Whipplestone? At the FO?’

  ‘I don’t move in those circles. Why?’

  ‘He was a bit of a specialist on Ng’ombwana. I see he’s lately retired. Nice chap. When I get back I might ask him to dinner.’

  ‘Are you wondering if he’d have any influence?’

  ‘We can hardly expect him to crash down on his knees and plead with the old Boomer to use his loaf if he wants to keep it. But I did vaguely wonder. ‘Bye, Br’er Fox.’

  Forty-eight hours later Alleyn, in a tropical suit, got out of a Presidential Rolls that had met him at the main Ng’ombwana airport. He passed in a sweltering heat up a grandiose flight of steps through a Ruritanian guard turned black, and into the air-conditioned reception hall of the Presidential Palace.

  Communication at the top level had taken place and he got the full, instant VIP treatment.

  ‘Mr Alleyn?’ said a young Ng’ombwanan wearing an ADC’s gold knot and tassel. ‘The President is so happy at your visit. He will see you at once. You had a pleasant flight?’

  Alleyn followed the sky-blue tunic down a splendid corridor that gave on an exotic garden.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked on the way, ‘what form of address is the correct one for the President?’

  ‘His Excellency, the President,’ the ADC rolled out, ‘prefers that form of address.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alleyn, and followed his guide into an anteroom of impressive proportions. An extremely personable and widely smiling secretary said something in Ng’ombwanan. The ADC translated: ‘We are to go straight in, if you please.’ Two dashingly uniformed guards opened double-doors and Alleyn was ushered into an enormous room at the far end of which, behind a vast desk, sat his old school chum: Bartholomew Opala.

  ‘Superintendent Alleyn, your Excellency, Mr President, sir,’ said the ADC redundantly and withdrew.

  The enormous presence was already on its feet and coming, light-footed as a prizefighter, at Alleyn. The huge voice was bellowing: ‘Rory Alleyn, but all that’s glorious!’ Alleyn’s hand was engulfed and his shoulder-blade rhythmically beaten. It was impossible to stand to attention and bow from the neck in what he had supposed to be the required form.