The Man Who Won the Pools Page 3

  Chapter Two

  They parted very casual, Phil and Peter, outside the gaol, since they had swung round that way after running to the end of New Inn Hall Street. It looked as if the copper hadn’t blown his whistle after them at all, but perhaps just after some fool motorist crashing the lights up by what Peter called the Corn. Imaginary coppers right enough, Peter said, just like when he and his gang had used to be raiding the condemned back-to-backs behind the Gas Works for the waste-pipes in the kitchen sinks.

  Better part outside the gaol than inside, Phil said. But, although they both laughed like anything, a man could have told they were surprised with themselves – Phil because he’d never done this sort of thing before, only heard of it or sometimes watched it, and Peter because it was like something in the library catalogue, Memories of My Dead Life. And Phil had done it because he was excited and it looked as if he was upset about this thing he hadn’t let on about, and Peter had done it because they’d been pals for outside of a half-hour or so.

  Only Peter Sharples, of course, had paid his bill. And now he said a queer thing.

  ‘What’ll you do?’ he said, still flushed and laughing. ‘Send them a P.O.?’

  Just for the moment, Phil thought he was adding a bit to the joke. But no, Peter meant it – which to Phil’s mind was to ditch the joke altogether. And Phil ought to have gone straight to that vocabulary he kept and fished out something about the creeping paralysis of bourgeois morality. That would have been a good one. But all he managed was to say ‘Well, p’raps’ awkwardly and unconvincingly, and this had the effect of making their parting a bit flat. He thought of saying carelessly, ‘What’s that college of yours call itself?’ but it turned out he didn’t care to. Anyway, there’d be something in the Reference Library that gave the names of all the undergrads and their colleges, if he ever wanted to get on to this Peter Sharples again. So he said ‘So long’ like it might be to a man in the next street. Only, fifteen yards on he turned his head and gave a wave, and he gave a grin too that said they’d had a bit of fun all right.

  He’d walk down to the corner by King’s where perhaps he’d look at the motor-bikes. And then he’d go back by Quaking Bridge, and if anything had broken at his auntie’s – well, that was it.

  You might get rid of the old machine, Phil said experimentally to himself as he put his nose like a kid to King’s window. You might have a brand new Ducati 125, one of the best of the Italian jobs. Cut your time to the works by seven minutes or eight, he said to himself, experimenting again.

  But the Ducatis didn’t somehow look as interesting as they’d looked a week ago. Not my class, he said to himself sardonically as he walked on – and realised that he’d taken a first quick look at the heart of the matter. It made him want to walk faster and farther, so over the bridge he went straight on past Morrell’s, and past the boozer Morrell’s has right on the spot, and then down the Hamel. Light, a bit of stray evening light was glinting back at him from the gasometers straight ahead, and the smell of that morning’s cattle market was coming at him from the left, and then he passed the Duke of York and was in what some funny had named New Street. The funny must have planted down New Street where there wasn’t anything before, and been so proud of it that he’d called it New Street just like that. Perhaps it was the same genius who, a stone’s throw away, had planted down Gas Street, and called it Gas Street. Think of that, Phil asked himself. Think of building two rows of houses for human beings to live in, and calling the result Gas Street.

  He went on down New Street till he came to the Primitive Methodists 1843. He always stopped there – it was an example of that damn fool habit he had of stopping like he was one of the absent-minded professors the rest of the town was built for. You’d think the Primitive Methodist crowd had never got much beyond their first primitive state, whatever that was. The place looked it hadn’t even been broken into by tramps for a hundred years, and opposite it was this random patch of demolition, as if somebody had had a good idea but hadn’t got very far with it. And straight ahead down New Street, down this vista – that was the word – of Victorian or whatever it was meanness, shining in that evening light that could do something even with the gasometers, was Christ Church College’s tower – only it wasn’t a tower but a sort of pepperpot such as giants might own if they had a fancy for everything superior around them. Phil Tombs looked at this tower, Tom Tower, closing the vista of New Street, and told himself that you don’t get things as ruddy beautiful as that by accident. And not just by paying up neither, he told himself. The bleeding thing means something. So, for that matter, does the Primitive Methodists 1843. Buildings do mean things. Funny how everything solid expresses something that isn’t solid at all.

  He might go on to Carlo’s, they’d be frying there, and take a bit of fish back to auntie, she liked that. He might put off getting back by going a bit farther round still – say to the Poodle Parlour at the corner of Wood Street: it always tickled him as something really silly and innocent, a Poodle Parlour did. But no, he must go home.

  And a queer sort of home it was, he told himself as he now walked rapidly on. A queer sort of home for anybody, let alone for him who had been making fourteen nicker a week these last six months. But for a long time he’d thought he’d keep on with auntie until he could move out with her to one of the estates; and then when it became clear she wasn’t going to move, thank you, not until they took the roof off her, he’d stayed on because it seemed the only thing to do about her. And a daft and dirty old wreck of a woman she was heading to be, he thought dispassionately.

  Suddenly there was a whistle and a yell from some way ahead, and then a second yell answering the first, and after that three kids on bicycles came hurtling out of different side roads like they were hunting someone and had picked up a hot scent. You less and less saw kids at all around these streets – or anybody else for that matter, since half the houses were empty and most of the others sheltering old crawlers like auntie. There was something cheerful about the way these three came hurtling towards him, two on flash bikes all gears and bells and lamps and water-bottles and gleaming handlebars, and the third on an old bone-shaker might have been off a heap of scrap. But they were all the same sort of kids, and Phil knew them well enough: young Arthur and Harry Griffin from the top of his own street, and the third was from the entry just beyond the local, only he’d never known his name.

  ‘Hi’ ya!’ Phil called out to the kids, because somehow there seemed to be a hell of a lot of life in them. And they yelled and whistled and came hurtling on, and he saw there must be something they were wild with excitement about. They were staring at him wide-eyed, and he thought they were going to shout something understandable when suddenly Harry Griffin that was in front swerved to the gutter and did a turn-about at speed in the narrow street that you’d think would have made him a fortune on the dirt-track. The other two followed, and the kid whose name Phil didn’t know nearly came a cropper, probably because of a bit of wheel-wobble on his old machine; and then all three were in full retreat up the road, as if Phil was something out of a flying saucer they were going back to headquarters to report about.

  He went on. It was near dusk now, and that was the time the place looked more than ever like the week after the Last Days of Pompeii. Only the folk hadn’t vanished beneath lava or whatever it was, but had been shunted out to one estate or another: Minchery Farm or Wood Farm or Blackbird Leys, without much wanting, most of them, to be as truly rural as such fool names sounded. And each lot shunted out meant another rat-hole of a house waiting for demolition. Only it all happened a bit slowly, because of the nature of the bourgeois mind, and at the Town Hall they kept on drawing up no end of plans, full of arterial roads and civic amenities and what have you, and meanwhile the kids broke any windows that were left, and sometimes chaps came and boarded them up, and sometimes nobody bothered.

  Phil Tombs turned a corner and there was his auntie’s house, third in the row. There were people, and ther
e was young Arthur Griffin yelling and yelling ‘ ‘E’s coming! Phil Tombs is coming!’ and then he saw on the bit of demolition right opposite what looked like hearses, only he saw they were two long black cars. Prestige, he said to himself, without a hint of ostentation. And he felt sudden terrible fear and a terrible excitement and then there was a blinding flash right in his face because somebody, a press photographer it must be, had taken his photograph.

  Chapter Three

  His first thought had been to clock the chap with the camera for his doing that without a by-your-leave. And his second was why he put on jeans when he had all those good clothes he’d look well in? But he hadn’t time for much thinking. For here was this crowd of neighbours, old folks mostly, crowding round and clapping and raising a ragged sort of cheer. And the kids, the Griffins and that lot, had started up with ‘Happy Birthday to You’, and it was all noisy and confused and friendly enough in the dusk when suddenly there was a flare of light and he saw in a dazzled way a fellow up on the roof of a van with something trained on him like it might be a gun, but of course it was a telly camera. Like a flash he imagined his own face, surprised and scared and silly, as it would flicker later that night on all the bleeding telly-boxes in England. And he thought he was trying quick to give his head this little jerk that got the curl down over his forehead. But in fact what he’d done was to swing round and let England and all have nothing but the rump of him. Instantly he felt chaps patting him on the back, and there was another cheer that he knew, this time, was an organised one for the benefit of the mikes. And his auntie’s house was straight in front of him, two up and two down, shabby and condemned and lingering, and now blazing and blazing, it seemed, in all this light hurled at it. He had a glimpse of the geraniums he did for auntie in the window-box looking queer. It was some sort of fluorescent lighting that played tricks with colour, he thought. And then he was over the door-step – the only hearth-stoned one in the street – and inside the house and expecting he didn’t know what.

  What did they do – supposing you’d been fool enough not to put a cross in the place saying No Publicity – in a matter of £20,000 or thereabouts? His head was in a whirl and his orders of magnitude not working this time and it would have been no surprise if he’d found they’d brought over Gracie Fields from the Isle of Capri. But there were only two old men and two young ones – that and his auntie, sitting behind the corner of the dresser and crying into her apron.

  The two old men were different types. One was all Van Heusen and short black jacket and striped pants like he might be a top-class family solicitor in an Ealing comedy, and it was plain he meant to take the floor. The other old man was older and you might say remote; he was in oldish no sort of clothes that you could tell were expensive and a striped tie. The two young men weren’t different; they were the same one as the other: ordinary clever-dicks you could see, and each of them had a pencil and a scribbling pad. Phil didn’t like the look of them. So he thought he’d better start.

  ‘See here,’ he said all tough, ‘what’s this, anyway? I didn’t ask for it, did I? You’re upsetting my aunt.’

  As soon as he began to speak, the young chaps’ pencils began to move across their reporters’ notebooks. Phil turned on them.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he said, and got a challenge into it that stopped them dead. There was a bit of silence like what comes before a ruck in a pub. And at that his auntie looked up from her apron. Years with that husband of hers had taught her to chip in quick when it looked like being a row.

  ‘Oh, our Phil,’ she cried – and it might have been over something despairing – ‘they say you’ve won the pools, and me never knowing you did them!’

  ‘Of course I do the pools,’ Phil said. He heard his own voice almost as if it was angry. But it was only that all this was bewildering, with none of the feelings you’d guessed at when you’d sometimes thought of it happening. ‘I done the pools for years.’

  ‘Just so.’ It was the black-jacketed man that came forward on this. ‘Very happy indeed to meet you, Mr. Tombs.’ He held out a fat white hand that Phil found himself shaking. And at this there was another flash in his face, so he knew the photographer must have slipped in behind him. His auntie gave a scream, but the black-jacketed man went on with what might have been a speech. ‘It’s always a pleasure, Mr. Tombs, to meet our clients in a personal way. And above all, I need hardly say, to make the acquaintance of a regular investor in such happy circumstances as these. And it is regular investment, mark you—’ and at this the black-jacketed man glanced at the young clever-dicks, so that they took heart and began scribbling again— ‘that is likely to be crowned with such well-deserved success as we are witnessing now.’ The black-jacketed man paused and looked in a pursy sort of way past Phil’s left ear, so that Phil turned and saw that somebody had managed to push up the window from the outside, not without cracking one of the panes in its rotting sash, and thrust in the telly camera. His bewilderment grew, and he felt a lot of senseless fright, and in one small clear area in his head he was aware of resentment because of being called an investor. Bad language, that was – like calling a bookie a Turf Accountant or the never-never Lifetime Credit.

  ‘Very pleased, I’m sure.’

  It was with dismay that Phil heard himself mumble this. The feeling was rather shameful, like being a beaten man in an apprentices’ scrap.

  ‘And now, I think, we might have the formal occasion.’ The black-jacketed man looked round the little room. ‘If Mr. Prendick is ready, that is.’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to say if Mrs. Tombs and her nephew are ready.’ The other old chap, Prendick he must be, said this in an ironical way, like it was a snub polished as smooth as a pebble to his understrapper – who took it with a dignified smile, that being what he was paid for. Then this Prendick got off the kitchen chair he’d been sitting in as if it was a fauteuil and walked over to Phil’s auntie. He had about two yards to go in the crowded space, but he made it like it was a leisured stroll in the drawing-room of Buckingham Palace.

  ‘Now, Mrs. Tombs,’ he said, ‘would you care to come into this photograph with your nephew? They seem to think that you and I should both be in it. In fact, I suppose I must be handing over the cheque.’

  ‘And with Mrs. Tombs looking over Mr. Tombs’s shoulder.’ Black-jacket was now fussing around, and more men were crowding into the room. A couple of them were halfway up the staircase that rose from within a yard of the street door, and Phil thought he could hear the rotten treads crumbling beneath them and the crazy banister cracking as they hauled some of their equipment into position. There was a lot of noise from outside now. The whole district must be gathered in the narrow street.

  ‘Is it for the papers?’ Phil’s auntie asked this in a quavering voice, so that you’d never have guessed how she could still give it to you if she wanted to.

  ‘For the papers, certainly.’ Mr. Prendick was easy and soothing. ‘If you have no objection, that is. And it gives a lot of pleasure, don’t you agree? I always think people like the pictures in the papers. It’s nice to see what’s going on in the world. And of course this is rather a red-letter day for your lad. And what a nice young fellow he is.’

  ‘ ‘E were a mardy one as a nipper, our Phil. But I wouldn’t saw owt against him now. Steady work and steady money – that’s ‘is motto. And he’ll make as good a husband as it’s given to a man to be – which don’t say much, as far as my experience goes.’

  The clever-dicks were scribbling again. And, for all Phil knew, the telly might be working and the old woman’s cackle tumbling into every front kitchen in Britain. He scowled fiercely, and immediately saw that it was on himself that the bleeding thing was trained at the moment. He was in for this, and it was just no good getting ratty. He looked at the clever-dicks and told himself he needn’t give a sod for them. He could offer them that much money that they’d grovel for it or perform tricks like a dog.

  ‘But not in my apron, love. I won’t have my pho
to taken in my apron – not with Phil famous.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not very properly dressed myself.’ Prendick was helping Phil’s auntie to her feet, and Phil found himself disliking the man for having got round her like this, although her calling him ‘love’ was no more than her normal Yorkshire way with anyone she didn’t hate the guts of. ‘But we certainly won’t hurry you,’ Prendick was going on. ‘All these people are here to behave entirely as you wish. Badger—’ and Prendick turned to Black-jacket— ‘clear these men off that staircase at once. Mrs. Tombs wants to go and tidy up.’

  There was more scurrying, and Phil’s auntie was escorted to the stair-foot by Prendick as if she was Marilyn Monroe attending a première. At the same moment the street door opened, and Phil had a glimpse of a copper now keeping guard on it outside. But a girl was being allowed to come in. And Phil had never seen such a girl.

  She was in a plain tailor-made and a little plain felt hat and there was a faint touch of lipstick to her lips and nothing else. She had a figure that did something to him at once in an immaterial kind of way, and it seemed crazy that he should so much as notice her, considering what he had on his plate. Yet here he was, having to lock his knees to prevent them behaving funny, and he saw in a flash that his auntie’s door had opened on this girl like one of those bits in a film that gets you because it’s a symbol. She was a quintessence, that was the word, of the whole brave new world that this might or might not be leading to. And then in a second it was all over.

  ‘Oh, Jean—there you are.’ Prendick was smiling at the girl in his charming elderly way. ‘Be frightfully clever, my dear, and find a telephone, and let them know we’ll be at least half an hour late for dinner.’