‘Mother told Angela you would be here.’
‘That was silly of her.’
‘Henry!’
‘I do not like Angela,’ I said coldly. ‘I do not intend to be here for lunch next Sunday. Is that quite clear?’
‘But you must… you can’t leave me to deal with them all alone.’
‘You’ll just have to restrain Mother from issuing these stupid invitations. Angela is the umpteenth unattractive heiress she’s invited this year. I’m fed up with it.[17]’
‘We need…’
‘I am not,’ I said stifly, ‘a prostitute.’
She stood up, bitterly offended. ‘That’s unkind.’
‘And while we are at it[18], I wish the beetles good luck. This damp decaying pile of a house eats up every penny we’ve got and if it fell down tomorrow we’d all be far better off.’
‘It’s our home,’ she said, as if that was the final word.
When it was mine, I would get rid of it; but I didn’t say that, and encouraged by my silence she tried persuasion. ‘Henry, please be here for the Filyhoughs.’
‘No,’ I said forcefully. ‘I won’t. I want to do something else next Sunday. You can count me right out.[19]’
She suddenly and completely lost her temper. Shaking she said, ‘I cannot stand much more of your damned autistic behaviour. You’re a spoilt, bad-tempered bastard.’
Hell, I thought by the Serpentine, was I really? And if so, why?
At three, with the air growing cold, I got up and left the park, but the office I went to was not the elegant suite of Anglia Bloodstock in Hanover Square. There, I thought, they could go on wondering why the ever-punctual Henry hadn’t returned from lunch. I went instead by taxi to a small dilapidated rubbish-strewn wharf down in the Pool, where the smell of Thames mud at low tide rose earthily into my nostrils as I paid the fare.
At one end of the wharf, on an old bombed site, a small square concrete building had been thrown up shortly after the war and shoddily maintained ever since. Its drab walls, striped by rust from leaking gutters, badly needed a coat of ‘snowcem’; its rectangular metal windows were grimed and flaking, and no one had polished the brass door fittings since my previous visit six months ago. There was no need here to put on a plushy front[20] for the customers; the customers were not expected to come.
I walked up the uncarpeted stairs, across the eight foot square of linoleumed landing and through the open door of Simon Searle’s room. He looked up from some complicated doodling on a memo pad, lumbered to his feet and greeted me with a huge handshake and a wide grin. As he was the only person who ever gave me this sort of welcome I came as near to unbending with him as with anyone[21]. But we had never done more than meet now and again on business and occasionally repair to a pub afterwards. There he was inclined to lots of beer and bonhomie, and I to a single whisky, and that was that.
‘You haven’t trekked all the way down here about those yearlings?’ he protested. ‘I told you.’
‘No,’ I said, coming to the point abruptly. ‘I came to find out if Yardman would give me a job.’
‘You,’ said Simon, ‘want to work here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well I’m damned.’ Simon sat down on the edge of his desk and his bulk settled and spread comfortably around him. He was a vast shambling man somewhere in the doldrums between thirty-five and forty-five, bald on top, bohemian in dress and broad of mind.
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ he said, looking me up and down. A more thorough contrast than me in my charcoal worsted to him in his baggy green corduroys would have been hard to find.
‘I need a change.’
‘For the worse?’ He was sardonic.
‘Of course not. And I’d like the chance of a bit of globetrotting[22] now and then’.
‘You can afford to do that in comfort. You don’t have to do it on a horse transport.’
Like so many other people, he took it for granted that I had money. I hadn’t. I had only my salary from Anglia, and what I could earn by being frankly, almost notoriously, a shamateur jockey. Every penny I got was earmarked[23]. From my father I took only my food and the beetle-infested roof over my head, and neither expected nor asked for anything else.
‘I imagine I would like a horse transport,’ I said equably. ‘What are the chances?’
‘Oh,’ Simon laughed. ‘You’ve only to ask. I can’t see him turning you down.’
But Yardman very nearly did turn me down, because he couldn’t believe I really meant it.
‘My dear boy, now think carefully, I do beg you. Anglia Bloodstock is surely a better place for you? However well you might do here, there isn’t any power or any prestige. We must face facts, we must indeed.’
‘I don’t particularly care for power and prestige.’
He sighed deeply. ‘There speaks one to whom they come by birth. Others of us are not so fortunate as to be able to despise them.’
‘I don’t despise them. Also I don’t want them. Or not yet.’
He lit a dark cigar with slow care. I watched him, taking him in[24]. I hadn’t met him before, and as he came from a different mould from the top men at Anglia I found that I didn’t instinctively know how his mind worked. After years of being employed by people of my own sort of background, where much that was understood never needed to be stated, Yardman was a foreign country[25].
He was being heavily paternal, which somehow came oddly from a thin man. He wore black-rimmed spectacles on a strong beaky nose. His cheeks were hollowed, and his mouth in consequence seemed to have to stretch to cover his teeth and gums. His lips curved downwards strongly at the corners, giving him at times a disagreeable and at times a sad expression. He was bald on the crown of his head, which was not noticeable at first sight, and his skin looked unhealthy. But his voice and his fingers were strong, and as I grew to acknowledge, his will and character also.
He puffed slowly at the cigar, a slim fierce-looking thing with an aroma to match. From behind the glasses his eyes considered me without haste. I hadn’t a clue as to what he was thinking.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll take you on as an assistant to Searle, and we’ll see how it goes.’
‘Well. thank you,’ I answered. ‘But what I really came to ask for was Peters’s job.’
‘Peters’s…’ His mouth literally fell open, revealing a bottom row of regular false teeth. He shut it with a snap. ‘Don’t be silly, my boy. You can’t have Peters’s job.’
‘Searle says he has left.’
‘I dare say, but that’s not the point[26], is it?’
I said calmly, ‘I’ve been in the Transport Section of Anglia for more than five years, so I know all the technical side of it, and I’ve