‘Does she have a name, Mr Gaskell?’
‘Lucinda Matthews.’ I had the feeling that he was reading from the slip that visitors have to fill out.
The name meant nothing to me but I thought it better not to say so. ‘I’ll be down,’ I said.
‘That would be best,’ said the security man. ‘I can’t let her upstairs into the building. You understand, Mr Samson?’
‘I understand.’ I looked out of the window. The low grey cloud that had darkened the sky all day seemed to have come even lower, and in the air there were tiny flickers of light; harbingers of the snow that had been forecast. Just the sight of it was enough to make me shiver.
By the time I’d locked away my work, checked the filing cabinets and got down to the lobby the mysterious Lucinda had gone.
‘A nice little person, sir,’ Gaskell confided when I asked what the woman was like. He was standing by the reception desk in his dark blue commissionaire’s uniform, tapping his fingers nervously upon the pile of dog-eared magazines that were loaned to visitors who spent a long time waiting here in the draughty lobby. ‘Well turned-out; a lady, if you know my meaning.’
I had no notion of his meaning. Gaskell spoke a language that seemed to be entirely his own. He was especially cryptic about dress, rank and class, perhaps because of the social no-man’s-land that all senior NCOs inhabit. I’d had these elliptical utterances from Gaskell before, about all kinds of things. I never knew what he was talking about. ‘Where did she say she’d meet me?’
‘She’d put the car on the pavement, sir. I had to ask her to move it. You know the regulations.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Car bombs and that sort of thing.’ No matter how much he rambled, his voice always had the confident tone of an orderly room: an orderly room under his command.
‘Where did she say she’d meet me?’ I asked yet again. I looked out through the glass doors. The snow had started and was falling fast and in big flakes. The ground was cold, so that it was not melting: it was going to lie. It didn’t need more than a couple of cupfuls of that sprinkled over the Metropolis before the public transportation systems all came to a complete halt. Gloria would be at her parents’ house by now. She’d gone by train. I wondered if she’d now decide to stay overnight at her parents’, or if she’d expect me to go and collect her in the car. Her parents lived at Epsom; too damned near our little nest at Raynes Park for my liking. Gloria said I was frightened of her father. I wasn’t frightened of him, but I didn’t relish facing intensive questioning from a Hungarian dentist about my relationship with his young daughter.
Gaskell was talking again. ‘Lovely vehicle. A dark green Mercedes. Gleaming! Waxed! Someone is looking after it, you could see that. You’d never get a lady polishing a car. It’s not in their nature.’
‘Where did she go, Mr Gaskell?’
‘I told her the best car park for her would be Elephant and Castle.’ He went to the map on the wall to show me where the Elephant and Castle was. Gaskell was a big man and he’d retired at fifty. I wondered why he hadn’t found a pub to manage. He would have been wonderful behind a bar counter. The previous week, when I’d been asking him about the train service to Portsmouth, he’d confided to me – amid a barrage of other information – that that’s what he would have liked to be doing.
‘Never mind the car park, Mr Gaskell. I need to know where she’s meeting me.’
‘Sandy’s,’ he said again. ‘You knew it well, she said.’ He watched me carefully. Ever since our office address had been so widely published, thanks to the public-spirited endeavours of ‘investigative journalists’, there had been strict instructions that staff must not frequent any local bars, pubs or clubs because of the regular presence of eavesdroppers of various kinds, amateur and professional.
‘I wish you’d write these things down,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard of it. Do you know where she means? Is it a café, or what?’
‘Not a café I’ve heard of,’ said Gaskell, frowning and sucking his teeth. ‘Nowhere near here with a name like that.’ And then, as he remembered, his face lit up. ‘Big Henry’s! That’s what she said: Big Henry’s.’
‘Big Henty’s,’ I said, correcting him. ‘Tower Bridge Road. Yes, I know it.’
Yes, I knew it and my heart sank. I knew exactly the kind of ‘informant’ who was likely to be waiting for me in Big Henty’s: an ear-bender with open palm outstretched. And I had planned an evening at home alone with a coal fire, the carcass of Sunday’s duck, a bottle of wine and a book. I looked at the door and I looked at Gaskell. And I wondered if the sensible thing wouldn’t be to forget about Lucinda, and whoever she was fronting for, and drive straight home and ignore the whole thing. The chances were that I’d never hear from the mysterious Lucinda again. This town was filled with people who knew me a long time ago and suddenly remembered me when they needed a few pounds from the public purse in exchange for some ancient and unreliable intelligence material.
‘If you’d like me to come along, Mr Samson…’ said Gaskell suddenly, and allowed his offer to hang in the air.
So Gaskell thought there was some strong-arm business in the offing. Well he was a game fellow. Surely he was too old for that sort of thing: and certainly I was.
‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Gaskell,’ I said, ‘but the prospect is boredom rather than any rough stuff.’
‘Whatever you say,’ said Gaskell, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.
It was the margin of disbelief that made me feel I had to follow it up. I didn’t want it to look as if I was nervous. Dammit! Why wasn’t I brave enough not to care what the Gaskells of this world thought about me?
Tower Bridge Road is a major south London thoroughfare that leads to the river, or rather to the curious neo-Gothic bridge which, for many foreigners, symbolizes the capital. This is Southwark. From here Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury; and a couple of centuries later Shakespeare’s Globe theatre was built upon the marshes. For Victorian London this shopping street, with a dozen brightly lit pubs, barrel organs and late-night street markets, was the centre of one of the capital’s most vigorous neighbourhoods. Here filthy slums, smoke-darkened factories and crowded sweat-shops stood side by side with neat leafy squares where scrawny clerks and potbellied shopkeepers asserted their social superiority.
Now it is dark and squalid and silent. Well-intentioned bureaucrats nowadays sent shop assistants home early, street traders were banished, almost empty pubs sold highly taxed watery lager and the factories were derelict: a textbook example of urban blight, with yuppies nibbling the leafy bits.
Back in the days before women’s lib, designer jeans and deep-dish pizza, Big Henty’s snooker hall with its ‘ten full-size tables, fully licensed bar and hot food’ was the Athenaeum of Southwark. The narrow doorway and its dimly lit staircase gave entry to a cavernous hall conveniently sited over a particularly good eel and pie shop.
Now, alas, the eel and pie shop was a video rental ‘club’ where posters in primary colours depicted half-naked film stars firing heavy machine guns from the hip. But in its essentials Big Henty’s was largely unchanged. The lighting was exactly the same as I remembered it, and any snooker hall is judged on its lighting. Although it was very quiet every table was in use. The green baize table tops glowed like ten large aquariums, their water still, until suddenly across them brightly coloured fish darted, snapped and disappeared.
Big Henty wasn’t there of course. Big Henty died in 1905. Now the hall was run by a thin white-faced fellow of about forty. He supervised the bar. There was not a wide choice: these snooker-playing men didn’t appreciate the curious fizzy mixtures that keep barmen busy in cocktail bars. At Big Henty’s you drank whisky or vodka; strong ale or Guinness with tonic and soda water for the abstemious. For the hungry there were ‘toasted’ sandwiches that came soft, warm and plastic-wrapped from the microwave oven.
‘Evening, Bernard. Started to snow, has it?’ What a memory
the man had. It was years since I’d been here. He picked up his lighted cigarette from the Johnny Walker ashtray, and inhaled on it briefly before putting it back into position. I remembered his chain-smoking, the way he lit one cigarette from another but put them in his mouth only rarely. I’d brought Dicky Cruyer here one evening long ago to make contact with a loud-mouthed fellow who worked in the East German embassy. It had come to nothing, but I remember Dicky describing the barman as the keeper of the sacred flame.
I responded, ‘Half of Guinness…Sydney.’ His name came to me in that moment of desperation. ‘Yes, the snow is starting to pile up.’
It was bottled Guinness of course. This was not the place that a connoisseur of stout and porter would come to savour beverages tapped from the wood. But he poured it down the side of the glass holding his thumb under the point of impact to show he knew the folklore, and he put exactly the right size head of light brown foam upon the black beer. ‘In the back room.’ Delicately he shook the last drops from the bottle and tossed it away without a glance. ‘Your friend. In the back room. Behind Table Four.’
I picked up my glass of beer and sipped. Then I turned slowly to survey the room. Big Henty’s back room had proved its worth to numerous fugitives over the years. It had always been tolerated by authority. The CID officers from Borough High Street police station found it a convenient place to meet their informants. I walked across the hall. Beyond the tasselled and fringed lights that hung over the snooker tables, the room was dark. The spectators – not many this evening – sat on wooden benches along the walls, their grey faces no more than smudges, their dark clothes invisible.
Walking unhurriedly, and pausing to watch a tricky shot, I took my beer across to table number four. One of the players, a man in the favoured costume of dark trousers, loose-collared white shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat, moved the scoreboard pointer and watched me with expressionless eyes as I opened the door marked ‘Staff’ and went inside.
There was a smell of soap and disinfectant. It was a small storeroom with a window through which the snooker hall could be seen if you pulled aside the dirty net curtain. On the other side of the room there was another window, a larger one that looked down upon Tower Bridge Road. From the street below there came the sound of cars slurping through the slush.
‘Bernard.’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘I thought you weren’t going to come.’
I sat down on the bench before I recognized her in the dim light. ‘Cindy!’ I said. ‘Good God, Cindy!’
‘You’d forgotten I existed.’
‘Of course I hadn’t.’ I’d only forgotten that Cindy Prettyman’s full name was Lucinda, and that she might have reverted to her maiden name. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
She held up her glass. ‘It’s tonic water. I’m not drinking these days.’
‘I just didn’t expect you here,’ I said. I looked through the net curtain at the tables.
‘Why not?’
‘Yes, why not?’ I said and laughed briefly. ‘When I think how many times Jim made me swear I was giving up the game for ever.’ In the old days, when Jim Prettyman was working alongside me, he taught me to play snooker. He played an exhibition class game, and his wife Cindy was something of an expert too.
Cindy was older than Jim by a year or two. Her father was a steel worker in Scunthorpe: a socialist of the old school. She’d got a scholarship to Reading University. She said she’d never had any ambition but for a career in the Civil Service since her schooldays. I don’t know if it was true but it went down well at the Selection Board. She wanted Treasury but got Foreign Office, and eventually got Jim Prettyman who went there too. Then Jim came over to work in the Department and I saw a lot of him. We used to come here, me, Fiona, Jim and Cindy, after work on Fridays. We’d play snooker to decide who would buy dinner at Enzo’s, a little Italian restaurant in Old Kent Road. Invariably it was me. It was a joke really; my way of repaying him for the lesson. And I was the eldest and making more money. Then the Prettymans moved out of town to Edgware. Jim got a rise and bought a full-size table of his own, and then we stopped coming to Big Henty’s. And Jim invited us over to his place for Sunday lunch, and a game, sometimes. But it was never the same after that.
‘Do you still play?’ she asked.
‘It’s been years. And you?’
‘Not since Jim went.’
‘I’m sorry about what happened, Cindy.’
‘Jim and me. Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. You saw him on Friday.’
‘Yes, how do you know?’
‘Charlene. I’ve been talking to her a lot lately.’
‘Charlene?’
‘Charlene Birkett. The tall girl we used to let our upstairs flat to…in Edgware. Now she’s Jim’s secretary.’
‘I saw her. I didn’t recognize her. I thought she was American.’ So that’s why she’d smiled at me: I thought it was my animal magnetism.
‘Yes,’ said Cindy, ‘she went to New York and couldn’t get a job until Jim fixed up for her to work for him. There was never anything between them,’ she added hurriedly. ‘Charlene’s a sweet girl. They say she’s really blossomed since living there and wearing contact lenses.’
‘I remember her,’ I said. I did remember her; a stooped, mousy girl with glasses and frizzy hair, quite unlike the shapely Amazon I’d seen in Jim’s office. ‘Yes, she’s changed a lot.’
‘People do change when they live in America.’
‘But you didn’t want to go?’
‘America? My dad would have died.’ You could hear the northern accent now. ‘I didn’t want to change.’ Then she said, solemnly, ‘Oh, doesn’t that sound awful? I didn’t mean that exactly.’
‘People go there and they get richer,’ I said. ‘That’s what the real change is.’
‘Jim got the divorce in Mexico,’ she said. ‘Someone told me that it’s not really legal. A friend of mine: she works in the American embassy. She said Mexican marriages and divorces aren’t legal here. Is that true, Bernard?’
‘I don’t imagine that the Mexican ambassador is living in sin, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But how do I stand, Bernard? He married this other woman. I mean, how do I stand now?’
‘Didn’t you talk to him about it?’ My eyes had become accustomed to the darkness now and I could see her better. She hadn’t changed much, she was the same tiny bundle of brains and nervous energy. She was short with a full figure but had never been plump. She was attractive in an austere way with dark hair that she kept short so it would be no trouble to her. But her nose was reddened as if she had a cold and her eyes were watery.
‘He asked me to go with him.’ She was proud of that and she wanted me to know.
‘I know he did. He told everyone that you would change your mind.’
‘No. I had my job!’ she said, her voice rising as if to repeat the arguments they’d had about it.
‘It’s a difficult decision,’ I said to calm her. In the silence there was a sudden loud throbbing noise close by. She jumped almost out of her skin. Then she realized that it was the freezer cabinet in the corner and she smiled.
‘Perhaps I should have done. It would have been better I suppose.’
‘It’s too late now, Cindy,’ I said hurriedly before she started to go weepy on me.
‘I know; I know; I know.’ She got a handkerchief from her pocket but rolled it up and gripped it tight in her red-knuckled hand as if resolving not to sob.
‘Perhaps you should see a lawyer,’ I said.
‘What do they know?’ she said contemptuously. ‘I’ve seen three lawyers. They pass you on one from the other like a parcel, and by the time I was finished paying out all the fees I knew that some law books say one thing and other law books say different.’
‘The lawyers can quote from the law books until they are blue in the face,’ I said. ‘But eventually people have to sort out the solutions with each other. Going to lawyers is just an expensive way of putting off what
you’re going to have to do anyway.’
‘Is that what you really think, Bernard?’
‘More or less,’ I said. ‘Buying a house, making a will, getting divorced. Providing you know what you want, you don’t need a lawyer for any of that.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s more important than getting married, and you don’t go to a lawyer to do that.’
‘In foreign countries you do,’ I told her. ‘Couples don’t get married without signing a marriage contract. They never have this sort of problem that you have. They decide it all beforehand.’
‘It sounds a bit cold-blooded.’
‘Maybe it is, but marriage can be a bit too hot-blooded too.’
‘Was yours?’ She released her grip on the tiny handkerchief and spread it out on her lap to see the coloured border and the embroidered initials LP.
‘My marriage?’ I said. ‘Too hot-blooded?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps.’ I sipped my drink. It was a long time since I’d had one of these heavy bitter-tasting brews. I wiped the froth from my lips; it was good. ‘I thought I knew Fiona, but I suppose I didn’t know her well enough.’
‘She was so lovely. I know she loved you, Bernard.’
‘I think she did.’
‘She showed me that fantastic engagement ring and said, Bernie sold his Ferrari to buy that for me.’
‘It sounds like a line from afternoon television,’ I said, ‘but it was a very old battered Ferrari.’
‘She loved you, Bernard.’
‘People change, Cindy. You said that yourself.’
‘Did it affect the children much?’
‘Billy seemed to take it in his stride but Sally…She was all right until I took a girl-friend home. Lots of crying at night. But I think she’s adjusted now.’ I said it more because I wanted it to be true than because I believed it. I worried about the children, worried a lot, but that was none of Cindy’s business.