The Man Who Won the Pools Read online

  ‘Rubbish! I can’t have you …’

  Phil heard steps and voices in the corridor. The cramped space in the compartment made things difficult. Nevertheless he managed it – a kind of rugger tackle that would have done justice to the sodding playing-fields of Eton. Thickthorne went down with an angry shout which was quickly stilled. Very fortunately, his head had come a crack on the farther door. And Phil stooped and in a flash wrenched off his collar and tie.

  ‘What’s this, please – an accident?’

  The guard had opened the corridor door. There was a ticket-collector behind him, and some curious passengers from nearby compartments behind that. Phil, because he was kneeling beside Thickthorne and squinting under his own arm, at first saw all these people upside down. Even so, he could see the men were looking wary rather than fierce. When this sort of thing happened, no doubt they had it in the back of their minds that they might be dealing with a homicidal maniac. This gave Phil, at the start, what you might call a psychological advantage. But he must hold on to it. He remembered his clothes. They were an advantage too. But of course they had to be backed up.

  ‘Taken suddenly ill,’ Phil said in an Oxford Varsity Voice. ‘My friend Mr. Honeycombe. I was very alarmed. He’s unconscious now. I thought it was a stroke.’

  ‘Well, sir, it would have been better to find me, or one of the dining-car men. No need to stop the train. The thing is to find a doctor among the passengers.’ The guard peered past Phil at the recumbent Thickthorne. ‘And we’ll do that at once.’

  ‘He’s coming round, I think.’ Phil looked anxiously at Thickthorne, who had been no more than dazed, and whose expression was becoming that of a man about to swear violently. Taking no risks, Phil lifted up Thickthorne’s head and managed to give it another brisk crack against the door. ‘Easing him up a bit,’ he explained cheerfully. ‘And I been remembering something now. Honeycombe does have these here fits. Harmless, like. Needn’t have troubled you. Silly of me.’

  The guard was now looking not too good. In fact he was looking suspicious and had got out a notebook and pencil. Phil was aware that his Oxford grammar hadn’t quite matched up to his Oxford accent. You can’t be thinking of everything. The turn he’d put on in the Pompadour only three days ago came into his head. That had been a neater job altogether. But at least the train was moving again. The ticket-collector must have gone and given some sort of signal. The train hadn’t lost more than five minutes. The magistrate, if the thing came into court, might be a bit lenient on account of that.

  ‘Must try to find a doctor, all the same,’ the guard said. ‘We have a routine we must carry out, sir, in matters of this sort. If there’s no doctor, we’ll try water. Dashed on him, like.’

  ‘I’ll see you damned first!’ With deplorable suddenness and vigour, Thickthorne had sat up. ‘Keep your rotten water to raise steam with. You need all you can manage, in an obsolete setup like this.’

  ‘Easy, sir, easy.’ The guard was now clearly wondering whether he had to do with drunks.

  ‘A bit delirious,’ Phil said. ‘But it passes off in no time. Unless—that’s to say—Mr. Honeycombe gets excited. A doctor would be fatal. Produce a real stroke, as likely as not. You see, Mr. Honeycombe’s a Christian Scientist. He won’t have anything to do with the medical profession.’ Phil glanced at Thickthorne and saw, just in time, that he was about to utter again. He managed to give him a vigorous punch in the pit of the stomach. ‘But he allows a bit of massage,’ he said. ‘Like this.’ He gave another disabling jab. ‘And now you’d better have his name and address.’

  ‘His name and address!’ The guard could be heard breathing heavily, so that Phil was able to conjecture that he was now in a hopeful state of confused indignation. ‘May I take it, sir, that you admit pulling that there communication cord?’

  ‘Well, yes—lost my head a bit, I suppose. But it was Mr. Honeycombe that fell ill. So it’s him you want particulars of.’

  ‘You’ll allow me to make up my own mind about that. Your name and address, if you please, sir.’

  Phil provided this information with candour. The train was running at normal speed again. The little group of passengers behind the guard had faded away. Thickthorne, who appeared to have been adequately winded, had got up on a seat and lay back gasping.

  ‘Shall I give you Mr. Honeycombe’s?’ Phil asked. ‘No need to trouble him. As you see, his breath comes a bit short after he has a turn.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to be troubled in this affair but you, Mr. Tombs.’ The guard put away his notebook grimly. ‘And fined you’ll be – mark my words.’

  Phil, thus assured of substantial victory, wondered whether this was a moment at which to produce a handsome bribe. He decided against it.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ he said, still remembering the Oxford Varsity Voice. ‘What else was I to do, with poor old Honeybunny going black in the face? Have a heart, man. There’ll be an awful row if I’m had up in court – for being a giddy idiot, you know. The old pater will hate it. Far more than if I’d been had up for painting the town red. He used to do that himself, not half he didn’t.’ Phil paused hopefully. The old pater seemed to him an invention so sublime as to be virtually irresistible. And it did, at least, get results. The guard was looking at Phil, and at Phil’s clothes, in a new way. It was rather as if he was looking first at the one and then at the other. He scratched his jaw with the stub of his pencil. And then his features relaxed.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’ He tapped the pocket into which he had put the notebook. ‘I’ll bring it in as a genuine error of judgement, as you might say. And I dare say you’ll hear no more of it, son.’

  The guard was gone. The corridor was shut. Phil, if rendered a little thoughtful for a moment by the last word addressed to him, was able to take a large breath of air. He turned towards his companion, and was surprised to see that Thickthorne had managed to get to his feet and was rummaging in a suitcase.

  ‘And now,’ Thickthorne said conversationally, ‘there’s something I’d like to show you. Only rough plans, I’m afraid – but at least they’re a start. My grand project. British Omnigas. I can just run over my sketch for the plant before we get to Paddington. I’d appreciate your common-sense view.’

  ‘And thank you very much,’ Mark Thickthorne said – rather unexpectedly – as they parted on the platform. ‘You were quite right, you know. You took, if I may say so, a thoroughly down-to-earth view of the matter. I just haven’t time to do a stretch in jug. We must meet again. There’s the whole problem of colonial markets.’

  ‘Yes – perhaps we might get chinning about that one day.’ Phil hadn’t very steadily attended to Thickthorne’s further gassing away. He’d had what lay ahead of him to think of. But he found he liked the chap himself – as you often find yourself doing with somebody you’ve treated rough. So he was very ready to part on terms of great cordiality. ‘See you some more,’ he said.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Thickthorne was rummaging in bulging and untidy pockets. He produced a crumpled scrap of pasteboard and handed it to Phil. ‘Always find me through that.”

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Without much regarding it, Phil thrust the scrap away. He was rather wondering about tubes and taxis.

  Chapter Ten

  He’d better, he decided, arrive in a taxi – for mightn’t she be looking out of a window and judge him lacking in spirit if he simply trudged up on foot? But this was an instance of thinking big which didn’t, he found, wear well. He was hardly inside his cab – which smelt of dust and imitation leather and stale tobacco and stale scent – before he realised that here had been a kind of calculation not indulged in by those who go at all confidently about their affairs. Peter Sharples’s mind wouldn’t have worked that way, nor the mind of the engaging madman, Mark Thickthorne. And there was the fact, too, that this means of transport wasn’t going to give him much time to decide what to do. For he still hadn’t decided. All that about piping liquid gas across England had been
distracting. It had even been interesting, if rather crazy. He’d like – it occurred to him – to read it up a bit. But he had another job on hand now.

  His only excuse for turning up was Prendick’s offer to give him personal advice about the money. So he’d have to make a move to get at Prendick, using some version of that ‘Attention C.D.’ gambit, and then hope that this would result in his contacting the girl called Jean. It was something you saw happening in films: chaps making a pass at secretaries on their way in to see an executive. Not that his idea was what you could call a pass. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t exactly that. He remembered a chap he’d worked with who had got ill and died after days believing he was a car on an assembly line. This was like that: being trundled along mysteriously, without having much say in the matter. It wouldn’t be happening if the money hadn’t happened. Perhaps it was just an example of the danger of the general situation: the money doing things with him when he thought he was doing things with the money.

  But at least, as the taxi drew up, his heart was thumping. Suddenly, in fact, he was so frightened that it was almost like he might be sick. And, queerly, it was at the same time a moment of pure joy. He was alive all right. He’d be alive even if the money clobbered him.

  ‘I want to see Mr. Prendick,’ Phil said.

  He spoke to a little chap in a uniform. He wasn’t exactly the kind you call a commissionaire, with a belt and a smart white pouch for carrying messages in. This chap was dressed as silly as you could think, in a long brown frock coat and a brown silk hat, like he was just going to walk out into the Strand and drive away a coach and four. The place itself was all black glass, with a little fountain making a noise, and a couple of marble statues with no harm in them, except that they were under a concealed lighting which managed to make them look like dirty post-cards. It was a big place and the building was enormous. But coming in Phil had seen that half of it was empty; there had been a notice offering you superb prestige accommodation by the cubic foot. Of course the real business didn’t happen here. You kept the prestige for yourself, and the hundreds of girls on the pools did their endless job in some less classy locality.

  ‘Got an appointment, I suppose?’ the porter said offhandedly. Phil had dropped the Oxford Varsity Voice, and the porter was taking his cue accordingly.

  ‘No—no appointment,’ Phil said. ‘But Mr. Prendick’s always willing to see me. Name of Tombs.’

  The porter looked at Phil sudden and sharp, so that for a moment Phil made the reasonable guess that his name had rung a bell. But it seemed it wasn’t so, for the porter became even more casual than before.

  ‘I’ll see if anything can be done,’ he said. ‘You can sit down, if you like.’

  Phil, judging this to be uncivil, remained standing. So he saw the little porter retreat into a sort of glass box he had and pick up a telephone. He began dialling a number, and Phil walked away. He wasn’t any longer feeling frightened, but something was making him feel puzzled instead. He didn’t know what. He looked at one of the statues and confirmed that it was a rose-coloured light that made it look the way it did. High-class brothels, he told himself sagely, have them like that. He turned back and saw the porter still at his telephone. It was odd he had so much to say. But now the man put down the receiver, opened a glass panel in his box, and spoke more politely than he had done before.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bit of a hold-up.’ He picked up another instrument, and this time spoke more briefly. Then he came back into the hall. ‘Managing Director’s in conference,’ he said. ‘Just a manner of speaking, that is. Mayn’t be in today at all. Has his own entrance, of course. But his secretary can see you, if you care to go up.’

  Phil’s heart gave a jump and then fell to pounding again. It had worked out just like he wanted it. Unless – the thought came to him with sudden dismay – a chap like Prendick had bags of secretaries, and this one wouldn’t be the girl.

  ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ he heard himself say – and added: ‘Lady, is it?’

  ‘Miss Canaway. Some sort of relation of Mr. Prendick’s.’ The porter glanced sideways at a flash clock let into one of the slabs of black glass. ‘Helpful, you’ll find her, Mr. Tombs. Perfect lady, but affable-like. Don’t you mind taking up a bit of her time. She’ll like you, see?’

  Phil didn’t know whether to take this kindly in the way of honest benevolence or to be a bit high about it. But the porter had pressed a button and suddenly a kid appeared that might have been one of the Griffins back home, only he was dressed as a page, the kind you see in advertisements for cigarettes.

  ‘Gentleman for Miss Canaway,’ the porter said importantly, and the kid led Phil into a lift. It was his breathing as well as his heart now, and even his knees weren’t feeling too good. Perhaps the acceleration of the lift didn’t help; it was the kind from which you can’t see anything moving outside, but Phil was able to guess they were shooting straight to the top of the building. Then before he knew it he was out in a corridor, and the kid had opened a door and piped out ‘Mr. Tombs’ in a kid’s voice, and the door had shut behind his back and there was the girl looking at him.

  For a moment he’d wondered if it was her, for of course for days she’d been changing in his mind as he imagined her, and now here she was as she had been right at the start. But the first thing he did was to look at her eyebrows to see if they did nearly come together, the way he hadn’t noticed when he’d actually been seeing her. And they did. He made sure of this and then he looked away from her in confusion – but not in such confusion that he didn’t take in her surroundings in a way that made him gasp inside himself. The whole wall behind her was glass and one looked through it at the Thames and half London. And near each end of it, so that she was framed in this way too, was a great silver bowl filled with roses. But Jean herself – Jean Canaway – was just like she had been in his auntie’s front kitchen: alert and in control of things like he’d never seen a girl – but besides that just having everything. There were those eyes and the way she looked at him straight with them; there was the mystery of how she could dress so plain and yet have you raving at it; and above all there was her figure that it would be blasphemy to start reckoning the statistics of the way he’d sometimes done with girls.

  ‘Good morning, Mr. Tombs. We wondered whether you’d come to see us.’ She was standing behind a desk, and now she made some quite slight movement that somehow had Phil sitting opposite to her as she sat down again. ‘Mr. Prendick isn’t in this morning, I’m afraid. But I can call up the head of our advisory service in a moment.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Phil said, ‘but I don’t want him.’

  ‘I see. Then we must make an appointment with Mr. Prendick for another time.’ The girl – Jean Canaway – was smiling in a brisk professional way that made Phil’s bumping heart sink. And she was poising a pencil over a desk diary. Probably dealing with blundering oafs like himself was routine with her. And he knew – he quite absolutely knew – that if he let her make a single pencil note about him he was done for.

  ‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is for you to come out with me.’

  Jean put down her pencil. It made a click on the desk like some fine piece of machinery adjusting itself to a new situation. Then there was a second’s silence, with Phil wondering in what particular way the skies were going to fall. She was looking at him – perhaps clothes and all – without any change in that brisk smile. Or had her breathtaking eyebrows, he wondered, risen a shade, as if acknowledging some fantastic possibility? Then, astoundingly, she was not looking at him but at her watch.

  ‘That’s very nice of you,’ she said. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said through panic. ‘To lunch.’ He didn’t try to make the unfamiliar word come familiarly from him. ‘Will you?’

  She put back her head – but not too far back – and laughed – but not too loud or long.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that I’ve sat here for ages and ages dealing with p
eople to whom this firm has handed out fortunes, and that you are the first properly grateful one among them? It’s entirely delightful of you. Of course I’ll come.’

  Phil stood up. He felt that it might help to get his head above the waters that seemed to be flowing over it. But, even on his feet, he was still well out of his depth. Jean, if she had ceased to be a dream, had become a mystery. Her voice had quick shifts of pitch and colour that were like a code he’d been born without the key to. Her smile, that seemed so frank, had him guessing like it might have been the Mona Lisa’s in the picture shops.

  ‘Then come on,’ he said. Not knowing how to proceed, he spoke as if he was giving Beryl an order. And he saw that Jean was amused. ‘Only,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to be my advisory service about where we go and what we eat—see? I been in a flash restaurant once, and that was the day before yesterday.’

  Her amusement, which seemed entirely friendly, turned to curiosity which seemed not less so.

  ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

  ‘It couldn’t have gone better. I was with a nice chap – undergrad friend of mine.’

  ‘So this can’t go better?’ She was mocking now, but in a way that made his head swim in admiration of her. ‘I expect I can improve on the restaurant, even if I can’t on the company. If, that is, you have enormous sums of money to pay the bill with.’

  ‘I got a little under a quarter million pounds,’ Phil said. ‘And I’m ready to get through it all along with you.’

  There was another moment’s silence. It hadn’t sounded as he meant it to sound: a bit of chaff like you might have with any girl, and seeming to mean no more than about paying for a meal unless you cared to hear it different. So he was confused again and looked away from her at one of the big silver bowls with its massed roses.

  ‘Nice show of flowers you have here,’ he offered with false affability. ‘Posh vases, too.’ He saw the flicker of a frown on her face, as if she saw in the simple awkwardness of this something that required more thinking about than the real brashness of his last remark.