Be Shot For Six Pence Read online

  For four years we hung on by our eyelashes. There were big firms who didn’t like us cutting in. And some of them weren’t too scrupulous. It was a fight. I didn’t work a six-hour day then. Sometimes I didn’t get much sleep out of the whole twenty-four.

  It was the Combine Hedge Clipper that put us on top. We didn’t sell it to people. We hired it to them, with a crew that knew how to work it. Not to small gardens, but big places. It paid very handsomely, and, as often as not, got us the other orders as well.

  For some time now, I’d just sat back and let the money come in. I hadn’t realised, until that morning, that the whole idea had died on me.

  Douglas, of course, wanted to go on. On to bigger and better things. I didn’t. I wanted to back-pedal, which, come to think of it, was the situation between me and Penny, too, in a nutshell.

  The porter came into the coffee room where I was browsing through the early editions of the evening papers and said that Mrs. Pastonberry was asking for me. He had told her that he would ascertain if I was in the building.

  (Mrs. Pastonberry is Penny. Mr. Pastonberry had been a very superior sort of wholesale grocer who had married Penny when she was eighteen and lived just long enough to endow her with his considerable worldly goods before passing away as the result, it was believed, of over-indulgence in his own port.)

  “I hope that you didn’t say I was here.”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  Silly question really.

  “Well, that’s all right. Because I’m not.”

  I had lunch at the Polidor, rather a lengthy function as I met two people I knew. They had a spare girl with them and we made up a foursome. There was, I thought, a faint look of invitation in the spare girl’s eyes when we parted, but I disregarded it and went off to spend the afternoon at the zoo.

  As an antidote to mental disequilibrium there is nothing like the aquarium. Through warm, uncounted hours I lingered, staring across the glass frontier into another world. A world of strange dimensions where Time did not exist, and it was as easy to go upwards and backwards as it was forwards and downwards. A frightening world where dwelt Esox Lucius, the Pike and Maia Maia, the spider crab. A world of shadows and half-lights in which you might encounter bustling little characters like the Trigger Fish and the Schoolmaster Snapper, witless oafs like Dollo’s lung fish or, for plain horror, Silurus, the Giant Catfish, who sits white eyed in the shadow of his rocky chamber, his thick whiskers trembling as he dreams of ancient evil.

  When I got back to the Club the porter said, “Mrs. Pastonberry called, sir.”

  “She actually came here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “We put her in the small committee room.”

  “That was rather drastic. How long did she survive?”

  “She left approximately forty minutes later, sir.”

  “She’s tougher than I thought.”

  The small committee room is a terrible apartment. It contains two hundred volumes of Punch, which have been specially bound for the Club in half-yearly numbers in black buckram with the Club’s crest on the spine; a buffalo’s head with one eye, and no windows of any sort. Even bailiffs have been removed from it screaming in less than thirty minutes.

  I went up to dress for dinner.

  In the morning, Penny telephoned again.

  This time, for a change, I decided I would take the call.

  She sounded cross.

  “I tried three times to get hold of you yesterday,” she said.

  “I got the messages,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you were out at all.”

  “I assure you I was. I went to the zoo in the afternoon and the Crazy Gang in the evening.”

  “Stop behaving like a fool.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Come back here, of course.”

  “Penny,” I said. “You’re not trying. I told you. Remember? I’m not coming back.”

  “Well come out from behind that terrible Club so that I can get hold of you.”

  “One of the reasons men belong to Clubs is to protect them from people like you.”

  “That bloody porter. When I ring up now he sounds just as if he thought I was a tart.”

  “Well—” I said, diplomatically.

  The slam of the receiver going back nearly deafened me.

  I retired to the morning room and opened The Times. There was no need to hurry. If Douglas wanted me for anything he could ring me.

  The first thing I saw was the advertisement. It was at the top of the Personal Column and it said: “Attention, Philip. If you want to know the inner story, go to Twickenham and see Henry. Colin.”

  It was for all the world as if one of the figures in Madame Tussauds had stepped smartly from its dais, raised its head, and addressed me by name.

  I sat for a few minutes, staring at it, in an idiotic way as if I hoped the letters might themselves say something. I even cast my eye down the column to see if there might be anything further addressed to me; but this was the only one.

  “Attention, Philip—”

  I went over to the rack where the back numbers were stored. It was in Monday’s paper too. I must have been too pre-occupied to notice it. Monday was the first time though. I went back through several weeks to make sure of that.

  Then I put on my hat and went out quickly.

  The commissionaire in the glass hutch at the top of the stairs asked me, with all the courtesy for which this great newspaper is famous, if I would be good enough to wait. He showed me into a cubicle which had the air of an exceptionally well-appointed confessional, and said that Mr. Satterley would be along soon.

  In due course Mr. Satterley appeared. He was tiny. Smaller even than me and I am no size at all. A humming bird of a man. Neat, bright and poised.

  “You came about an announcement in our Personal Column,” he said.

  “That’s right, it’s one which appeared today. Yesterday too, I believe.”

  I took out the copy of the paper and showed it to him.

  Mr. Satterley said, “And you are interested in Axminster carpets?”

  “Not that one. The one before. The first one in the column.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “I wondered if you could tell me anything about it.”

  “There is not usually a great deal to tell,” said Mr. Satterley, politely. “We usually accept such—er—announcements, by post. Provided that they seem to us to be genuine, and not objectionable in any way – you’d be surprised how often they contain a ‘double entendre’ – we really become quite expert at spotting them.”

  “I don’t think this one is a leg-pull,” I said.

  “No. No. It certainly seemed genuine.”

  We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  Nevertheless it seemed to me that Mr. Satterley was stalling. He had not said, right out, as he easily could have done, “This announcement was sent by post.” I felt that the time had come to abandon finesse.

  “Do you know anything about the person who put this one in?”

  “I’m afraid,” said Mr. Satterley, “that I must ask you a question in return. What is your interest in the matter?”

  “I can answer that without any difficulty. I have every reason to suppose that I am the Philip to whom the message is addressed and, if I am right about that it was put in by Colin Studd-Thompson.”

  “Studd-Thompson. Yes.”

  “Did he come here with it himself?”

  “Yes, he did.” Mr. Satterley looked at me over his glasses and added, “I knew Mr. Studd-Thompson very well, of course.”

  I nodded. I was aware of Colin’s connection with The Times. One of his uncles, or maybe great uncles, had been a distinguished foreign editor.

  “He instructed me that if anyone came to inquire about the advertisement, claiming to be the Philip to whom it was addressed, I was to ask him a question.”

  “Ask away.”


  “I was to ask who Henry was.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “Henry is a woman. A charming and accomplished person of uncertain age who was at one time governess to Colin and his brother. Later on she was a governess in our family. We called her Henry because she was the eighth.”

  “The psychology of young children is a fascinating study,” said Mr. Satterley.

  He took off his glasses, polished them with little, darting, movements, replaced them securely on his nose and said: “How can I help you?”

  “I’m not too sure. To start with, it was news to me that Colin had been in England lately.”

  “I’m afraid that does not follow. This announcement was delivered to us – let me see – more than two months ago. Nearer three.”

  “Then how did it come to be put in on this particular date?”

  “Our instructions were, that if we did not hear from Mr. Studd-Thompson by the last day of any week, we were to insert the announcement during the whole of the week following.”

  In silence I tried to think this out. Silence so absolute that I could suddenly hear a woman speaking quite clearly two rooms away. She was accepting an announcement for the Births Column and seemed to be making heavy going of it.

  “I take it, then,” I said at last, “that when he failed to get through to you—”

  “We heard from him regularly for nine weeks.”

  “So you know where he is – or was?”

  “I’m afraid not. The messages were sent through our foreign correspondents. The last three came from Rome – but that does not mean that Mr. Studd-Thompson was necessarily in Italy.”

  “I see. And last Friday – or Saturday – you got no message at all—”

  “That is correct.”

  “It may have been delayed.”

  “Possibly. Our messages are not often delayed. And in any event our instructions were categoric. If we had not heard by midnight on Saturday, the announcement had to be inserted on Monday – and for the five days following.”

  “G-o-t-t—” said the shrill voice.

  “It is really rather a remarkable circumstance,” went on Mr. Satterley. “Owing to the peculiar way in which this matter has been arranged you are probably the only person in England who is in a position to find out exactly what has happened to Mr. Studd-Thompson.”

  “—f-r-i-e-d. That’s right. As in fried bread.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, I’m very much obliged to you.”

  Chapter II

  TWICKENHAM AND SLOANE SQUARE

  I walked back slowly, and rather blindly, along the Embankment. My feet took me into the little garden by Temple Station. I don’t know its name. It’s an austere place, full of office sandwich eaters at lunch time but deserted for the rest of the day; guarded at one end by John Stuart Mill and at the other by William Edward Forster.

  I settled my body carefully down on a seat facing the Embankment and allowed my mind to drift backwards for ten, for twenty, for thirty years . . .

  Myself as a new boy at a preparatory school on the South Coast. Serials in the Boy’s Own Paper had prepared me for the worst. I see now, looking back, that everyone was enormously kind and considerate, but to go from home, at the age of eight, and into exile, for the eternity of three months in a strange world; it must always be such a parting as will make the other partings of life seem unimportant.

  Colin had been the first person to speak to me. He had spoken with the patronage demanded by his superior position (for he had already been at the school for a whole term) but he had spoken kindly. The train was passing Three Bridges. He waved at a grassy knoll behind the town and said, without preamble: “Did you know they had a battle there during the Civil War, in 1640?” I said that I had not known. As the train thundered south (if such an expression can be applied to the progress of the old London Brighton and South Coast Railway) Colin told me a number of other surprising things. Soon we were friends. I cannot remember how soon, for no doubt Colin had his dignity to consider and I was remarkably unsociable, even as a boy; but friends we became.

  It proved to be almost the only genuine, lasting friendship of my life and I have no doubt that psychologists would have given themselves headaches trying to explain it. There wasn’t an ounce of sentiment in it; or, if a little of this necessary lubricant must be present, then no more than the barest drop. I think the truth is that we suited each other, like two old club men who enjoy each other’s company on the basis that they will respect each other’s foibles and listen charitably to each other’s reminiscences.

  We went to different public schools and to different universities, and saw, of course, a good deal less of each other thereafter. But whenever we did meet we seemed to pick up matters exactly where we had laid them down. (Only a few months before, happening to be walking through the Middle Temple, I heard a bland voice behind me saying, “The building is eighteenth century, and shockingly proportioned, but the foundation is four centuries older,” and I knew, without looking round, that Colin was back in England.)

  It had always been like that. The middle of the Long Vacation. A ring at the door bell, Colin’s gentle voice, so curiously at variance with his craggy face (in a dim light, not unlike the First Murderer in Ben Greet’s open-air production of Macbeth). “You must come along, Philip. Such an interesting little man. A Lithuanian. His mother was murdered by the White Russians and his father starved to death under the Red sort – I rode all round London yesterday with him on the top of a bus.”

  It was all very well for Colin. He was reading modern languages – and already spoke half a dozen of them with alarming fluency. I should have been as tongue tied with his Lithuanian as his Lithuanian would have been bored with me.

  Colin gravitated naturally to the diplomatic and I knew that he had served spells at Belgrade and Budapest, and had been in Germany so late in August 1939 that he had finally been forced to quit it, in the early hours of the morning, and on foot, at Singen.

  During the War he had been withdrawn from regular work and I should have known, if I had not been too busy to spare it a thought, that he must have been with Intelligence. His background and proclivities made it a certainty.

  I got to my feet and walked slowly down the garden. I needed the incentive of movement to get my brain working. Like an old car on a cold morning, it works quite well, but I have to start it off down a slope.

  My strongest feeling, and I must confess it now, was a very marked disinclination to interfere. Colin had clearly got himself involved in some business inside the troubled perimeter of Europe, and it must be business with an Intelligence slant to it.

  To the man in the street, who knows absolutely nothing about it, the notion of Intelligence is a not unpleasant one. I know very little more than the man in the street, but certain of my war-time experiences (which I will mention in their proper place) had made me wary. Though far from realising exactly what went on behind the discreet façade of those offices in Sloane Square and Buckingham Palace Road, I was past the honeymoon stage of my acquaintanceship with the Secret Service.

  My other reason was a very slight distrust of Colin’s motives. He had a medieval love of craft-for-crafts-sake. If he had wanted to meet me during the school holidays his normal procedure was to ring up a friend and ask him to telephone me and tell me that if I went to an address in Pentonville I would find a note telling me what to do next. That was the way his mind worked. No doubt it earned him high marks in the diplomatic but it made everyday life a little complicated.

  However, there was no need to commit myself yet. The first step was clearly marked. Since I alone knew who Henry was, I must go and see Henry. That would be a pleasure. I had been meaning to look her up for some time. When I had heard what she had to say would be the time to make my mind up about the next move.

  That settled, I again got to my feet. A little man with a long nose got up from the seat next to me and moved off in the opposite direction.

  I sta
rted out for Twickenham after lunch, and I went on foot. I enjoy walking and am not one of those who has to put on fancy dress and go all the way to Teviotdale or Exmoor before I can enjoy myself.

  I remember once – it was after my break with Eileen – I started out from Curzon Street at two o’clock in the morning, in the clothes I happened to have on at the time, and walked to Inverness. My dancing pumps finally fell to pieces at Doncaster and I replaced them by a pair of gym shoes. (It’s a fallacy that you can’t walk in gym shoes. If your feet are in good condition they are excellent foot gear for made-up roads.)

  I find that a fairly fast rate suits me. With a detour across the rough in Richmond Park I covered ten miles in well under two hours. Green Gables, Barkas Road, is on the outskirts of Twickenham. It is a nice little house, in a road of nice little houses. I know what it cost because six of us clubbed together to buy it for Henry when she retired. That was before the War. I would have cost us a great deal more now.

  Henry opened the door. She was a neat, spare, fierce figure, with the uprightness which, in this decadent age, is attributed only to royalty.

  “I’ve walked down to see you,” I said.

  “You’ve walked! All the way from London?”

  “It’s not very far.”

  “You’re sure you haven’t walked yourself into a damp sweat.”

  “I’m not sweating at all,” I said, indignantly.

  “I could lend you a dressing gown.”

  “No, really. I’m as dry as a bone. I hardly hurried at all.”

  “You’re always in a hurry.” She laid her old hand inside my coat, over my heart. “I’ll let it go this time. Come in.”

  We went into the back room, which looked through French windows onto a square of garden. It was as neat as any room could be which contained (I once counted them) forty eight framed and six unframed photographs. Most of them were boys and young men. Boys in shorts and sweaters and blazers and school caps and young men in blazers and sweaters and shorts – and in the dress and undress uniform of a dozen different Regiments of Foot Guards, Lancers and Hussars. Mostly they were private photographs, but there was one I had not seen before, cut from one of the glossy magazines.