‘Oh, good evening, Mr Joolby,’ she exclaimed, sparkling triumphantly over her success at the doorway. ‘Of course I guessed that Mr Ikey was telling fibs but I didn’t know that I should find you here. I suppose that George is up in the attic as usual? He might just as well be a member of the Carlton for all that I see of him nowadays.’
‘No, my dear, here I am,’ proclaimed George, emerging from his particular shadow. ‘Only you oughtn’t to be, after the place is shut up, you know. It isn’t prudent.’
‘Well, someone had to do something about it. I did go round to Padgett Street first and Mr Peke there—no, that isn’t right, is it? but I know that it’s some kind of a fancy dog. Anyhow, he seemed to be telling the truth when he said that you “not is” there, so there was nothing for it but to come on here and chance it.’
‘But what’s the matter, Cora?’ asked Larch. ‘Has anything happened?’
‘Only the landlord this time, my lad—the gas-man was yesterday and the furniture people—oh, you’ve been home since then, haven’t you, and know all about those beauties.’
‘But I thought that I left enough to tide over the most pressing. We figured it out, if you remember, and it seemed—’
‘So I thought, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out quite as we figured, boy, and some of the others got more pressing,’ said Mrs Larch calmly. ‘At all events I left the landlord sitting on the landing.’
‘He means it?’
‘I’m afraid he most decidedly does. There was that nasty little air of finality about the way he picked his teeth with a bus ticket as he talked—I think he must save them up for it—that, as the Sunday school poem says: “Is a certain forerunner of sorrow”. “Come now, Mrs Larch,” he said, running his suety eye over everything I’d got on, “you can’t be hard up you know and you’ve had a cart-load of warnings. Doesn’t your husband make good money?” “Better than most husbands at his job do, I will say,” I replied, “but, you know, it’s always the cobbler’s wife who has the worst shoes, and just at the moment—”’ She finished up with the conventional little laugh and held out a hand towards him.
‘Come, George, fork out. I’m sorry if you’re rocky too but it’s an absolute that it’s no good going back without it.’
‘“Rocky”, my God!’ said George, echoing her shallow laugh. ‘Well—but how much do you need to square it?’
‘Oh, a couple might do just to carry on—and of course as many more as you can spare me.’
‘A couple, eh, my girl?’ he replied, fishing deeply into both his trouser pockets. ‘You don’t mean tanners by any chance? Well, that’s the state of the exchequer.’ Two sixpences and a few coppers were the result of his investigation.
‘I see. No winners among them today, I suppose, and you’d rather gone it? I might have guessed as much. Well, that being that, Mr Joolby will have to advance you a trifle.’
‘What me? Two quids?’ exclaimed Mr Joolby aghast. ‘You can’t be serious. Everyone know that I never advance anything until afterwards and your husband has been paid for a full week and this is only Friday. Oh, I couldn’t—’
‘All right; only if you don’t our place will be sold up and then where are you going to find George when you want him?’
This was so plainly common sense that there could be only one outcome (to say nothing of the pressure of another development that was duly formulating) but even as he would have capitulated one of the freakish impulses, that occasionally brought out the shifty grin, moved Joolby to change his purpose. Instead of the amount required he slyly picked out another paper and Cora found herself being offered a wholly unexpected five-pound note—in point of fact one of George’s most recent productions.
‘Oh, Mr Joolby, that is kind—’ she began gratefully and then flashed to what it was—sensed it in Larch’s instinctive frown, in Joolby’s half averted face, creased with foolish enjoyment. She bit on to the unpleasant tremor: very well, only Joolby should never again enjoy at her expense that particular satisfaction.
‘Well, of all the—’ she mock-indignantly declared, and entering into the spirit of the thing crumpled up the note and playfully flung it back at the ogre. ‘Nice fix it would be for you, Mr Joolby, if I was nicked for planting a snide ’un. They’d be here after George like one o’clock and then what would become of all the work you’ve paid him for doing?’
‘That’s all right, Mrs Larch—it was only our fun,’ protested Mr Joolby, leering like his ancestral satyr. ‘It isn’t likely that we’d risk anything of the sort just now, is it? But I will tell you this: when we get the right stuff you needn’t be afraid of walking into the Bank of England with your paper.’
‘I daresay. But in the meantime I am afraid of the bailiff walking into our flat with his paper. George there knows well enough. I must have something before I can go back and that’s all there is about it.’
‘Well, so you shall have,’ promised Mr Joolby, calling up all the blandishment of his suavest manner. ‘And that is not all; I may as well tell you now, though I hadn’t intended to until it was quite settled. Very soon we shall have a nice regular job for you with good wages—oh, a splendid position in a beautiful house with very little to do and everything found that you require.’
If Mr Joolby expected the enchanted lady to fall upon his neck (metaphorically, of course, for physical contact was a thing sheerly inconceivable) he was a little out of his reckoning. Cora Larch had experience of considerable slices of life in various aspects. During periods of George’s compulsory withdrawal it had been necessary for her to fend for herself, nor, in truth, had she ever found any particular difficulty in so doing. But as a result of the education that had thereby accrued she now approached Mr Joolby’s surprising proposal in the spirit that prompts a creature of the wild to walk all round a doubtful morsel before venturing to touch it.
‘Oh, and what sort of a job is it, may I ask?’ she guardedly inquired. ‘And for that matter, what sort of a house where everything is going to be so fairy-like?’
‘Well, you see, it’s like this,’ explained Mr Joolby. ‘The time’s come when we must have another place—it’s getting too risky for all of them to be in and out so often of my shop, to say nothings about coming direct here when at any time one might be followed. Then very soon there will be others—foreign gentlemen—that we may want to put up for a few nights at a time. Oh, I can tell you it won’t be altogether money wasted.’
‘No, I’m sure it won’t if you are doing it, Mr Joolby,’ agreed the lady. ‘Still, I don’t see—’
‘Well, as I’m telling you I’ve taken a private house in a different name—a furnished house right across the other side of London. It must be conducted quietly on highly respectable lines so that it would never occur to anyone outside that it wasn’t thoroughly dull and bourgeois. With the milkman and the baker calling every day that oughtn’t to be difficult. Nothing impresses the neighbourhood so favourably as two or three bottles of milk taken in regularly every morning and put out again at night. It must be that crooks aren’t supposed to drink it. And any account of yourself that you want to put about—we will make that up—you can safely pass on to the baker.’
‘Well?’ Mr Joolby seemed to think that everything necessary had been said, but Mrs Larch was still expectant.
‘Well; don’t you understand? You are to be as housekeeper, manage the place and arrange for whoever we send to stay there. All the bills will be paid—only don’t be extravagant of course. Deal at the multiple shops and there’s a nice street market—and you will have a pound a week for wages.’
‘H’m; it sounds promising,’ admitted Mrs Larch. The