The Man Who Won the Pools Page 4

  ‘We’ll certainly be that.’ The girl called Jean, who must be this Prendick’s secretary, nodded to him briskly like an equal. She gave a look round the whole set-up, including a glance at Phil that made him feel he was an easy sum she’d worked out quick and dropped into a filing cabinet. ‘I’ll telephone from the pub at the corner. And then wait in the car.’

  She was gone. If she’d walked out taking that whole £20,000 with her Phil Tombs couldn’t have felt more deprived.

  And now Prendick was coming at him – crossing the jaspé lino Phil had put down for auntie at Christmas with his air of moving over acres of gracious living. ‘I hope,’ he murmured, ‘you don’t mind all this, Tombs? It won’t last long.’

  Phil had never had ‘Tombs’ said to him in that tone before. ‘Tombs’ had always sounded as if it was made to go with ‘Look lively, can’t you?’ or ‘Take that lot over to the tool room, d’you hear?’ He naturally expected ‘Mr. Tombs’ on formal occasions – and it was ‘Mr. Tombs’ he’d been getting from Badger the Black-jacket. But the nature of Prendick’s ‘Tombs’ of course he picked up at once. It was clubman nattering to clubman, or Eton nodding to Harrow during the cricket match. And how to react, Phil didn’t know at all. He wasn’t going to be condescended to, he wasn’t. And he felt that this pass of Prendick’s wasn’t quite right. A real aristocrat – you might put it this way – would have murmured every one of these words except just that ‘Tombs’. For your name, spoken like that, presumes something that ten minutes’ acquaintance just can’t have created. That was it.

  ‘I can take it,’ Phil said. ‘Fair’s fair. You get the publicity, and I get the cheque.’

  ‘Ah, yes—the cheque.’ Prendick, for all his casual air, was looking thoughtfully at Phil. I’m being sized up, Phil thought. And, well, he thought, that too is fair enough in a way. It’s probably one of their anxious moments. They hand out big money like this often enough. And what do people do with it? Prendick and his crowd must be anxious that people don’t do anything too silly until a bit of time’s passed, so that the pools and whatever people do do don’t stick out too plainly as cause and effect. That’s it, too.

  ‘At least you’re not a fool,’ Prendick said.

  Phil was startled. He had a notion the man had read his mind. And he had a notion too that suddenly the man had said something spontaneous and honest. So he respected Prendick more. Which didn’t mean he liked him.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ he said.

  ‘The fact is, you know, that it’s rather a devilish lot of money.’

  ‘I can count, can’t I?’ Phil said.

  ‘And you can count on us, if I may say so. Badger over there will presently be telling you about our advisory service. Investment, and so forth. We try to make a good show of it. Have it run by very decent chaps. And they’ll meet your convenience, as Badger would say, to talk about things at any time.’

  ‘Thanks again. But all I want is that all these people should blow. TV and Jesus knows what! A bloody balls-up, I call it.’

  Prendick looked at him seriously. ‘Just say blow,’ he said, ‘and I’ll clear them out instantly.’

  ‘Let them be.’ Phil felt that he was behaving very badly. His language was never refined. He kept right out of it anything you might call the Secret Life of Philip Tombs. Still, he didn’t often pitch words about like that. It was a queer way to behave when on the threshold of a fortune. But he resented these people. He resented their power to sweep up hundreds of thousands of shillings from all over England and tumble them into anybody’s lap. Crazy of him, perhaps. But, at the moment, he had a feeling like that. ‘Let them have their fun,’ he said. ‘You hand me the cheque. I grin at the cameras like I’m feeling kind of lucky. And auntie cries into her only handkerchief.’

  ‘Then let’s get it over.’ Prendick smiled his consciously sensitive smile. ‘But about that advisory service. If you don’t feel like contacting my people, I’ll be delighted if at any time you contact me direct. Write to the firm, but put “Attention C.D.” on the envelope. It’s a kind of code that will bring your letter straight to my desk.’

  Chairman of Directors, Phil thought. Aloud, he said: ‘Ta. I can write. They taught me.’

  Prendick smiled as if this was a nice joke said in a friendly way.

  ‘Here’s your aunt,’ he said. ‘So let’s get on with it. The admirable Badger will stage-manage us.’

  And in half an hour it was all over. They’d gone. The vans and the two big black limousines were gone from the little street. Even the crowd was gone, and nobody came to the door. Phil was surprised at that. But none of his pals lived down here – and his auntie didn’t do much among the neighbours. Only the Griffins and some other kids were still about. But they must have thought Phil had fetched that copper, for they were hostile now. Two or three times they came dashing up to the window, jeering and running off again, and once they threw an old cabbage stalk into the room. It was a good thing it was a mild early-summer night. Because that window wasn’t going to shut again, not without a major repair to it. The TV crowd had wrecked it. They’d wrecked auntie’s geraniums in the window-box. And that banister had gone all right. There was a tear in the lino. The blue glass mug saying ‘My Dear Girl’ had been swept off the mantelpiece so he’d had to kick the bits into the hearth. They’d made the whole place a shambles. And of course it didn’t matter, they thought, because they’d left behind them all the lolly in the world.

  Phil went into the back kitchen and made his auntie a Bengers. He got himself out an ale. He wondered if he was mental, not normal, because his mood didn’t seem to be right. He went back and sat with auntie. He saw, as she sipped the Bengers, that a lot of her mind was coming back to her, the way it sometimes did. Perhaps she’d be gay about it. But she wasn’t.

  ‘It’s a power of money, is it?’ she asked. Her tone put him on the defensive.

  ‘Yes, it’s a bleeding lot.’ He hadn’t looked at the cheque to see what were the odd pounds. ‘But it don’t mean a thing.’

  ‘Fine day, it doesn’t.’

  ‘Well, it means you can take the weight off your feet, auntie, from now on. I can fix that. Get out to one of the estates, and have a girl in.’

  ‘A girl in! At my age? You’re mental, you are.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking. I’m mental. But I expect it’s just the shock.’

  ‘Shock! If you’re not mental, you’re mardy, Phil Tombs.’

  ‘That’s what you told them, isn’t it?’

  ‘I was brought up hard, and I was brought up respectable. I know what money is. Ten bob too little – which is what it was with us, regular – and it’s bellies going wrong on too much potato and too much bread. Ten bob too much and it’s gin instead of the beer, and then where are you. The root of all evil, money is. That’s in the Book.’

  ‘I don’t believe in the Book.’

  ‘Well, you believe in books all right. Got a cupboard of them, as I know very well. I hope they’ve put some sense in your head, our Phil. For you’ll need it.’

  He wanted to tell her to shut her gob. Instead, he got her out some arrowroot biscuits.

  ‘I haven’t got my teeth,’ she said.

  ‘Dunk them.’

  She dunked a biscuit in the Bengers and let her chaps work on it.

  ‘You’re a good lad,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m telling you. You always did take a telling. But you’ll have to take it from those gentlemen now.’

  ‘Bugger those gentlemen,’ he said violently. ‘I can manage by myself, can’t I?’

  ‘It’s vanity that’s like to get you, our Phil. Look at all them clothes upstairs. There’s a hundred pound in them, if there’s a penny.’

  ‘It’s right to be well dressed. But I don’t give a sod for them really, I don’t.’

  ‘And that Beryl,’ she said, her mind wandering about a bit. ‘Is she fit to have money like that?’

  ‘You leave Beryl alone.’

  ‘Leave her
alone? It’s more than you’ve done, ain’t it? Don’t think I don’t know. What are young people coming to? That’s what I ask.’

  ‘It’s what they asked when you were a kid too, I expect. And Beryl’s all right. She don’t want money.’

  ‘So much the worse for her. When a man’s got money, he starts going after them that will take it quick. Haven’t I seen it? Haven’t I seen lads get a packet on compensation after something that hasn’t even hurt them, and leave some decent girl and be off up to London with their head full of the strippers and dirt like that? I’ve seen it, I tell you.’

  ‘Leave off,’ Phil said. ‘I haven’t got a bit on compensation. I’m not planning a spree. I’ve got big money and I’ve got to think big.’

  ‘What keeps a working man respectable is having to count his pints. That’s what I say.’

  He stood up and drained his pot. Her mind would go on round in a circle and always she’d be attacking him. That was because she liked him always speaking her fair. It was her great luxury, having him sulky perhaps and going his own way, but never casting a bad word at her. And of course, going on lodging with her. What she’d do if she didn’t do house for him he didn’t know. Although often now it was him that did house for her. His grand-auntie, she was really, and getting on. She’s still almost clean here, he thought. But what will she be in a Sunset Home? He felt very glum.

  It still wasn’t late. But he got her up the stairs and then he tidied round. He shoved the lid of the copper between the broken window sashes. He sat down for a bit and felt he was clean shagged. This Peter Sharples and the lark in the Pompadour. It seemed a hundred years. And that girl.

  He went up to his room, thinking perhaps he’d have his record-player. His auntie never minded that, and in the street it was all right until the Radio Luxemburg close-down. He put on one of his classicals. But somehow it worried him. He unlocked the cupboard on the books his auntie was jealous of. You couldn’t say they were in any sort of order. Dennis Wheatley. The Communist Manifesto. Hemingway. What Has Religion Done for Mankind? The Decameron. Essays in Criticism Second Series by Matthew Arnold off a barrow. The Book of the Thousand and One Nights. Tom Jones. Teach Yourself Damn All in Umpteen Volumes. The Mickey Spillane he’d had off a boozed-up Yank. Pressing Problems of the Closing Age by Christabel Pankhurst. All Dickens given away by a newspaper back when his old man was a kid. Roderick Random. The Mysterious Universe. Love Play in Marriage by a Physician. Bevis. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Father and Son. Typee.

  Bevis was the best and then Typee, and the man on Love Play couldn’t ever have tried. They weren’t all he’d read, but he had no illusions. You couldn’t exactly call me educated he said to himself, and grinned into the rather bigger looking-glass he’d bought a week ago in the open-air market. But here I am, and the world’s suddenly become what they call my oyster.

  He emptied his pockets, and his clocking-in card was like something in a museum. He opened the window and tossed the newspaper in an untidy sprawl into the yard. He stamped himself out of his jeans and almost threw them out too. He stripped. And then he got in front of the mirror again.

  His shoulders were in the right ratio to his hips and his belly was a straight line and there wasn’t much doubt about what one of those books called his genital status. It was true he was a bit spotty, and his body was the colour of something pitiful ripped out of its shell. But that could be put right. And, such as he was, he was looking at himself dead straight in the glass. Still naked, he went over to the window and stuck his head and shoulders out. You’ll be sticking your neck out all right, he thought. There was one of their college bells going but he didn’t give a sod. He brought out the Camels he’d forgotten about, thinking he’d have a drag. But then he forgot, and just went on staring out of the window till it grew chilly. After that he got into his nylon pyjamas. And after that he thought to take a look at this cheque.

  He looked for quite some time and it was as if great chords were sounding. His orders of magnitude had been all wrong. Of course Chairman-of-Directors Prendick and that lot would never have created like that over a mere twenty thousand. The cheque must be one of the very biggest ever. It said just under a quarter of a million pounds.

  Chapter Four

  A couple of kippers was what his auntie had for Phil next morning. It was what he always liked on Saturday when on the five-day week. But he’d only worked down one side of the first when there came a bang on the door and the postman handed in a wad of stuff tied up in string.

  ‘More coming in the van, mate,’ he said sardonic, and slammed the door behind him. An old-fashioned socialist, he was, that would sometimes spend half an hour chinning about Opiates for the Workers, and Wage Serfs chained to Bread and Circuses. So it was clear how he felt. But it’s plum cake and all Bertram Mills this time, Phil thought. And he cut the string and began sorting the things over. His auntie had taken one look and gone into the back kitchen. It was the beginning of the unknown for her, and she didn’t like it.

  He didn’t much like it himself by the time he’d got some way through, although there was one about Gentlefolk in Reduced Circumstances that rather took his fancy. He might ask the postman about that one; it was a new light on the Class War, it seemed to Phil. Some were just circulars, and he thought poorly of the blokes who’d hurried hopefully along to the pillar-box with them. But most were letters, slap-up personal and with a three-penny stamp. Smart staff-work there, he had to admit, considering that his address could only have been in the late-night finals. And if this lot was only a sample of what was coming to him later in the day you’d be surprised to know how many Helping Hands England had to hold out to you. There was an M.A. Cantab, that would read with him, ‘formally or informally’, in Current Affairs, General Literature and recent books affording a view of the Structure of Modern Society. There was a clinic who would cure him of inebriety – which wasn’t a bad shot in the dark, considering how he might well have been behaving last night up to closing time. There was a Titled Lady (anonymous in the first instance) who had Daughters. He could hardly believe that one – but there it was, complete with a cornet, or was it a coronet, on the envelope. He’d have the daughters all inside of a week, he told himself cheerfully, and finish up with the old trout herself by way of payment. Then he tore up that one quick and opened one from a lady, untitled, dying of cancer. There were Investment Consultants, as you might well expect. There was a Villa going on the Riviera. There was one from an accommodation address about a man who’d like to tour the Continent with him and who enclosed a photo. It was a queer photo, and he laughed at it before stuffing it in the stove out of his auntie’s way – him not being that way inclined. But there was another with other photos that shook him. Sex rearing its Ugly Head, he told himself – but his own head swam in a way he didn’t fancy at eight o’clock in the morning, and he burned all that too. Then he discovered there wasn’t anything else that seemed improper, which was slightly disappointing. So he ate his second kipper soberly, reflecting that his auntie wasn’t far wrong about what a young chap might be prompted to, going round with sudden money. He thought he’d better think about Beryl. And then he thought about that girl last night.

  Her name was Jean and she must be about his own age. Except that she worked for Prendick, he didn’t know another thing about her. Or only, that was to say, that she behaved in a special way inside his head, not letting herself be treated there like any ordinary desirable girl had to let herself be. That was a queer way of putting it, but it was something he couldn’t get clearer. He couldn’t picture her taking off so much as a glove or a shoe. He couldn’t picture himself just touching her hand with his hand. For a minute he wondered if it was perhaps because she wasn’t normal, perhaps one of the ones you read about in some of the psychological books. But almost straight away he knew that to be nonsense, and he might have got round to putting some simple name to the state of his case – being no fool, as Prendick had said – when his reflecti
ons were broken into by a knock at the street door.

  What made him think quick, of course, was that nobody walked straight in. It was one of the things his auntie couldn’t get over, the way they behaved down here. The rent-collector and the man who took the shillings out of the gas-meter walked in regular without a knock, and anybody else knocked with one hand and turned the handle with the other. So here was a stranger, and it didn’t take much telling what sort of stranger he would be. It was only common sense that a lot of the kind of people who’d sent all these letters and circulars should try their luck in person. Phil didn’t know how he’d manage if an M.A. Cantab, came in, or for that matter a titled lady with her daughters behind her. And he wasn’t, not this morning, going to stop and find out. So he was into the back kitchen and with the door shut in a jiffy. He made a grab at the shelf where his auntie kept the housekeeping money.

  ‘I’m taking ten bob,’ he called, while she stared at him. ‘There’s someone at the door. Perhaps it’s your Health Visitor.’ And he slipped into the yard and was over the fence before she could reply.

  It was a lovely day – a day so lovely you could tell it before you were past the lavatory and the coal-place. Then he was over in what old Ma Huggins called her garden – and fair enough since it was chock-full of annuals although no bigger than a snot-rag. He went through where there had been a wooden gate before some realist took it for kindling, and then he thought he’d nip round and take a quick look down the street.

  His auntie had answered the door, he saw, and whoever it was had gone inside. But that didn’t leave the place deserted again, not by any means. There were two men in hats, the kind that might want to be selling you insurance, who walked straight past his nose. They didn’t see him because they were looking at the numbers on the doors, and when they weren’t doing that they were looking at each other like they might be two dogs approaching the same bone. And from the other direction was coming another man in a hat, but more the kind that might be offering you a two-hundred-per-cent-automatic washing-machine for ten nicker down. But that wasn’t the lot, because there was a car in bottom gear that looked to be stopping any moment. And, to crown all, what if there wasn’t a chap from the Salvation Army, clutching a collecting-box and flipping across the street on feet as flat as yesterday’s pale ale. Phil hurried away quick.