Under the Net, Page 2

  ‘You arrived just like that,’ said Madge.

  It was true. I sighed.

  ‘Come here,’ I told her, and held out my hand. She gave me hers, but it remained as stiff and unresponsive as a toasting-fork, and after a moment or two I released it.

  ‘Don’t make a scene, Jakie,’ said Madge.

  I couldn’t have made even a little one at that moment. I felt weak, and lay down on the divan.

  ‘Eh, eh!’ I said gently. ‘So you’re putting me out, and all for a man that lives on other people’s vices.’

  ‘We all live on other people’s vices,’ said Madge with an air of up-to-date cynicism which didn’t suit her. ‘I do, you do, and you live on worse ones than he does.’ This was a reference to the sort of books I sometimes translated.

  ‘Who is this character, anyway?’ I asked her.

  Madge scanned me, watching for the effect. ‘His name,’ she said, ‘is Starfield. You may have heard of him.’ A triumphant look blazed without shame in her eye.

  I hardened my face to make it expressionless. So it was Starfield, Samuel Starfield, Sacred Sammy, the diamond bookmaker. To describe him as a bookie had been a bit picturesque on Finn’s part, although he still had his offices near Piccadilly and his name in lights. Starfield now did a bit of everything in those regions where his tastes and his money could take him : women’s clothes, night clubs, the film business, the restaurant business.

  ‘I see,’ I said. I wasn’t going to put on a show for Madge. ‘Where did you meet him? I ask this question in a purely sociological spirit.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Madge. ‘If you must know, I met him on a number eleven bus.’ This was clearly a lie. I shook my head over it

  ‘You’re enlisting for life as a mannequin,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to spend all your time being a symbol of conspicuous wealth.’ And it occurred to me as I said it that it mightn’t be such a bad life at that.

  ‘Jake, will you get out!’ said Magdalen.

  ‘Anyhow,’ I said, ‘you aren’t going to live here with Sacred Sam, are you?’

  ‘We shall need this flat,’ said Magdalen, ‘and I want you out of it now.’

  I thought her answer was evasive. ‘Did you say you were getting married?’ I asked. I began to have the feeling of responsibility again. After all, she had no father, and I felt in loco parentis. It was about the only locus I had left. And it seemed to me, now that I came to think of it, somehow fantastically unlikely that Starfield would marry a girl like Magdalen. Madge would do to hang fur coats on as well as any other female clothes-horse. But she wasn’t flashy, any more than she was rich or famous. She was a nice healthy English girl, as simple and sweet as May Day at Kew. But I imagined Starfield’s tastes as being more exotic and far from matrimonial. ‘Yes,’ said Madge with emphasis, still as fresh as cream. ‘And now will you start packing?’ She had a bad conscience, though, I could see from the way she avoided my eye.

  She started fiddling with the bookshelves, saying, ‘I think there are some books of yours here,’ and she took out Murphy and Pierrot Mon Ami.

  ‘Making room for comrade Starfield,’ I said. ‘Can he read? And by the way, does he know I exist?’

  Well, yes,‘ said Magdalen evasively, ’but I don’t want you to meet. That’s why you must pack up at once. From tomorrow onward Sammy will be here a lot.‘

  ‘One thing’s certain,’ I said, ‘I can’t move everything in a day. I’ll take some things now, but I’ll have to come back tomorrow.’ I hate being hurried. ‘And don’t forget,’ I added fervently, ‘that the radiogram is mine.’ My thoughts kept reverting to Lloyds Bank Limited.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Madge, ‘but if you come back after today, telephone first, and if it’s a man, ring off.’

  ‘This disgusts me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Madge. ‘Shall I order a taxi?’

  ‘No!’ I shouted, leaving the room.

  ‘If you come back when Sammy’s here,’ Magdalen called after me up the stairs, ‘he’ll break your neck.’

  I took the other suitcase, and packed up my manuscripts in a brown-paper parcel, and left on foot. I needed to think, and I can never think in a taxi for looking at the cash meter. I took a number seventy-three bus, and went to Mrs Tinckham’s. Mrs Tinckham keeps a newspaper shop in the neighbourhood of Charlotte Street. It’s a dusty, dirty, nasty-looking comer shop, with a cheap advertisement board outside it, and it sells papers in various languages, and women’s magazines, and Westerns and Science fiction and Amazing Stories. At least these articles are displayed for sale in chaotic piles, though I have never seen anyone buy anything in Mrs Tinckham’s shop except ice cream, which is also for sale, and the Evening News. Most of the literature lies there year after year, fading in the sun, and is only disturbed when Mrs Tinckham herself has a fit of reading, which she does from time to time, and picks out some Western, yellow with age, only to declare half-way through that she’s read it before but had quite forgotten. She must by now have read the whole of her stock, which is limited and slow to increase. I’ve seen her sometimes looking at French newspapers, though she professes not to know French, but perhaps she is just looking at the pictures. Besides the ice-cream container there is a little iron table and two chairs, and on a shelf above there are red and green non-alcoholic drinks in bottles. Here I have spent many peaceful hours.

  Another peculiarity of Mrs Tinckham’s shop is that it is full of cats. An ever-increasing family of tabbies, sprung from one enormous matriarch, sit about upon the counter and on the empty shelves, somnolent and contemplative, their amber eyes narrowed and winking in the sun, a reluctant slit of liquid in an expanse of hot fur. When I come in, one often leaps down and on to my knee, where it sits for a while in a sedate objective way, before slinking into the street and along by the shop fronts. But I have never met one of these animals farther than ten yards away from the shop. In the midst sits Mrs Tinckham herself, smoking a cigarette. She is the only person I know who is literally a chain-smoker. She lights each one from the butt of the last; how she lights the first one of the day remains to me a mystery, for she never seems to have any matches in the house when I ask her for one. I once arrived to find her in great distress because her current cigarette had fallen into a cup of coffee and she had no fire to light another. Perhaps she smokes all night, or perhaps there is an undying cigarette which burns eternally in her bedroom. An enamel basin at her feet is filled, usually to overflowing, with cigarette ends; and beside her on the counter is a little wireless which is always on, very softly and inaudibly, so that a sort of murmurous music accompanies Mrs Tinckham as she sits, wreathed in cigarette smoke, among the cats.

  I came in and sat down as usual at the iron table, and lifted a cat from the nearest shelf on to my knee. Like a machine set in motion it began to purr. I gave Mrs Tinckham my first spontaneous smile of the day. She is what Finn calls a funny old specimen, but she has been very kind to me, and I never forget kindness.

  ‘Well, now, back again,’ said Mrs Tinckham, laying aside Amazing Stories, and she turned the wireless down a bit more until it was just a mumble in the background.

  ‘Yes, unfortunately,’ I said. ‘Mrs Tinck, what about a glass of something?’

  For a long time I have kept a stock of whisky with Mrs Tinckham in case I ever need a medicinal drink, in quiet surroundings, in central London, out of hours. By now they were open, but I needed the soothing peace of Mrs Tinckham’s shop, with the purring cat and the whispering wireless and Mrs Tinckham like an earth goddess surrounded by incense. When I first devised this plan I used to mark the bottle after every drink, but this was before I knew Mrs Tinckham well. She is equal to a law of nature in respect of her reliability. She can keep counsel too. I once overheard one of her odder-looking clients, who had been trying to pump her about something, shout out, ‘You are pathologically discreet!’ and this is how she is. I suspect indeed that this is the secret of Mrs Tinckham’s success. Her shop s
erves as what is known as an ‘accommodation address’, and is a rendezvous for people who like to be very secretive about their affairs. I sometimes wonder how much Mrs Tinckham knows about the business of her customers. When I am away from her I feel sure that she cannot be so naive as not to have some sort of appreciation of what is going on under her nose. When I am with her, she looks so plump and vague, and blinks in a way so much like one of her cats, that I am filled with doubt. There are moments when, out of the comer of my eye, I seem to see a look of acute intelligence upon her face; but however fast I turn about I can never surprise any expression there except one of beaming and motherly solicitude and more or less vacant concern. Whatever may be the truth, one thing is certain, that no one will ever know it. The police have long ago given up questioning Mrs Tinckham. It was time lost. However much or little she knows, she has never, in my experience, displayed either for profit or for effect any detailed acquaintance with the little world that circulates round her shop. A woman who does not talk is a jewel in velvet. I am devoted to Mrs Tinckham.

  She filled a papier mâché beaker with whisky and passed it over the counter. I have never seen her take a drink of any kind herself.

  ‘No brandy this time, dear?’ she asked.

  ‘No, the damned Customs took it,’ I said, and as I had a gulp at the whisky I added, ‘Devil take them!’ with a gesture which embraced the Customs, Madge, Starfield, and my bank manager.

  ‘What’s the matter, dear? Times bad again, are they?’ said Mrs Tinckham, and as I looked into my drink I could see her gaze flicker with awareness.

  ‘People are a trial and a trouble, aren’t they?’ she added, in that voice which must have greased the way to many a confession.

  I am sure that people talk enormously to Mrs Tinckham. I have come in sometimes and felt this unmistakably in the atmosphere. I have talked to her myself; and in the lives of many of her customers she probably figures as the only completely trustworthy confidant. Such a position could hardly help but to be to some extent lucrative, and Mrs Tinckham certainly has money, for she once lent me ten pounds without a murmur, but I am sure that gain is not Mrs Tinckham’s chief concern. She just loves to know everybody’s business, or rather to know about their lives, since ‘business’ suggests an interest narrower and less humane than the one which I now felt, or imagined that I felt, focused with some intensity upon me. In fact the truth about her naïveté, or lack of it, may lie somewhere between the two, and she lives, perhaps, in a world of other people’s dramas, where fact and fiction are no longer clearly distinguished.

  There was a soft murmuring, which might have been the wireless or might have been Mrs Tinckham casting a spell in order to make me talk to her: a sound like the gentle winding of a delicate line on which some rare fish precariously hangs. But I gritted my teeth against speech. I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic way. The thing had possibilities, but as yet it lacked form. If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth; when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that? I met Mrs Tinckham’s gaze, and although her eyes told nothing I was sure she knew my thoughts.

  ‘People and money, Mrs Tinck,’ I said. ‘What a happy place the world would be without them.’

  ‘And sex,’ said Mrs Tinck. We both sighed.

  ‘Had any new kittens lately?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Mrs Tinckham, ‘but Maggie’s pregnant again. Soon you’ll have your pretty little ones, won’t you, yes!’ she said to a gross tabby on the counter.

  ‘Any luck this time, do you think?’ I asked.

  Mrs Tinckham was always trying to persuade her tabbies to mate with a handsome Siamese who lived farther down the street. Her efforts, it is true, consisted only of carrying the creatures to the door, and pointing out the elegant male with such remarks as, ‘Look at that lovely pussy there!’ - and so far nothing had come of it. If you have ever tried to direct a cat’s attention to anything you will know how difficult this is. The beast will look everywhere but where your finger points.

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Mrs Tinckham bitterly. ‘They all dote on the black-and-white Tom at the horse-meat shop. Don’t you, you pretty girl, yes,’ she said to the expectant tabby, who stretched out a heavy luxurious paw, and unsheathed its claws into a pile of Nouvelles Littéraires.

  I began to undo my parcel upon the table. The cat jumped from my knee and sidled out of the door. Mrs Tinckham said, ‘Ah, well,’ and reached out for Amazing Stories.

  I glanced hastily through the manuscripts. Once before, in a rage, Magdalen had torn up the first sixty stanzas of an epic poem called And Mr Oppenheim Shall Inherit the Earth. This dated from the time when I had ideals. At that time too it had not yet become clear to me that the present age was not one in which it was possible to write an epic. At that time I naively imagined that there was no reason why one should not attempt to write anything that one felt inclined to write. But nothing is more paralysing than a sense of historical perspective, especially in literary matters. At a certain point perhaps one ought simply to stop reflecting. I had contrived in fact to stop myself just short of the point at which it would have become clear to me that the present age was not one in which it was possible to write a novel. But to return to Mr Oppenheim; my friends had criticized the title because it sounded anti-Semitic, though of course Mr Oppenheim simply symbolized big business, but Madge didn’t tear it up for that, but out of pique, because I broke a lunch date with her to meet a woman novelist. The latter was a dead loss, but I came back to find Mr Oppenheim in pieces. This was in the old days. But I feared that the performance might have been repeated. Who knows what thoughts were passing through that girl’s mind while she was deciding to throw me out? There’s nothing like a woman’s doing you an injury for making her incensed against you. I know myself how exasperating it is of other people to put themselves in positions where you have to injure them. So I scanned the stuff with care.

  Everything seemed to be in order, except that one item was missing. That was the typescript of my translation of Le Rossignol de Bois. This Wooden Nightingale was Jean Pierre Breteuil’s last book but two. I had done it straight on to the typewriter; I’ve translated so much of Jean Pierre’s stuff now, it’s just a matter of how fast I can type. I can’t be bothered with carbons — Ihave no manual skill and you know what carbons are - so there was only one copy. I had no fears for this though, as I knew that if Magdalen had wanted to destroy something she would have destroyed one of my own things and not a translation. I made a mental note to collect it next time; it was probably in the bureau downstairs. Le Rossignol would be a best-seller, and that meant money in my pocket. It’s about a young composer who is psychoanalysed and then finds that his creative urge is gone. I enjoyed this one, though it’s bad best-selling stuff like everything that Jean Pienre writes.

  Dave Gellman says I specialize in translating Breteuil because that’s the sort of book I wish I could write myself, but this is not so. I translate Breteuil because it’s easy and because it sells like hot cakes in any language. Also, in a perverse way, I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge. The last but one. Les Pierres de l‘Amour, which I had read in Paris, was undoubtedly another winner. Then there was a very recent novel called Nous Les Vainqueurs, which I hadn’t read. I decided to see my publisher and get an advance on The Wooden Nightingale; and I would try to sell him an idea I had in Paris about a collection of French short stories translated and introduced by me. That was what my suitcases were full of It would keep the wolf at a distance. Anything rather than original work, as Dave says. I reckoned I had about seventy pounds in the bank. But clearly the immediate and urgent problem was to find a cheap and sympathetic place in which to live and work now that Earls Court Road was closed to me.

  You may be thinking that it was rather unkind of Magdalen to throw me out with so little ceremony, and you may think too that it w
as soft of me to take it so quietly. But in fact Magdalen is not a tough. She is a bright, sensual person, simple and warm-hearted, and ready to oblige anyone provided this doesn’t put her to any trouble; and which of us could say more? For myself, I had a bad conscience about Madge. I said just now that I lived practically rent-free. Well, this wasn’t quite true; in fact, I’d lived entirely rent-free. This thought annoyed me a little. It’s bad for one’s locus standi to live on a woman’s charity. Also, I knew that Madge wanted to get married. She hinted as much to me more than once; and I think she would have married me at that. Only I had wanted otherwise. So on both these counts I felt I had no rights at all at Earls Court Road, and only myself to thank if Madge looked for security elsewhere; though I think I was quite objective in judging Sacred Sammy to be no cert, but a pretty long shot.

  At this point perhaps I should say a word about myself. My name is James Donaghue, but you needn’t bother about that, as I was in Dublin only once, on a whisky blind, and saw daylight only twice, when they let me out of Store Street police station, and then when Finn put me on the boat for Holyhead. That was in the days when I used to drink. I am something over thirty and talented, but lazy. I live by literary hack-work, and a little original writing, as little as possible. One can live by writing these days, if one does it pretty well all the time, and is prepared to write anything which the market asks for. I mentioned before that I am a short man, but slight and neatly built would describe me better. I have fair hair and sharp elfish features. I am good at Judo, but don’t care for boxing. What is more important for the purposes of this tale, I have shattered nerves. Never mind how I got them. That’s another story, and I’m not telling you the whole story of my life. I have them; and one effect of this is that I can’t bear being alone for long. That’s why Finn is so useful to me. We sit together for hours, sometimes without uttering a word. I am thinking perhaps about God, freedom, and immortality. What Finn would be thinking about I don’t know. But more than this, I hate living in a strange house, I love to be protected. I am therefore a parasite, and live usually in my friends’ houses. This is financially convenient also. I am not unwelcome because my habits are quiet and Finn can do odd jobs.