The Man Who Won the Pools Read online

  ‘Look,’ he said, like it might be to a small kid. And he put a finger on the scarf at random. ‘Read that.’

  Beryl gulped. And she looked at him resentfully, so that he thought she was still obstinately thinking he was kidding her.

  ‘Can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I can.’ He looked. ‘It says Negresco, Nice.’ It was a queer name, he found himself thinking, to give a hotel. ‘We could go there, we could.’ He shifted his finger to another luggage label. ‘Reserve, Miramar. Place called Cannes. And another there too. Gonnet et Reine. I tell you, we could go any of these places. We could go all of them. Grand tour, Beryl. And in that Rolls.’

  There was a silence. He was thinking as he spoke how crazy it all was. He was talking like a millionaire in a novelette setting about seducing a shop-girl. Whereas he had seduced Beryl – if she hadn’t seduced him – months and months ago. And now she was producing the sort of sniff that went before she was going to cry.

  ‘No kidding,’ he said desperately. The woman was coming to see if they wanted more cakes or more hot water. She’d think it was just a lovers’ quarrel, no doubt. But if it was, it was a balmy one. ‘No kidding. Of course we got to think sensible.’

  ‘And you never told me.’

  She had cried out, and he was astonished.

  ‘What you mean – never told you?’

  ‘It happened weeks ago—months ago. I’m sure it did. And you never told. It’s mean you are—mean, mean, mean!’

  He wasn’t angry – or he didn’t know he was. The thing had knocked the poor kid silly.

  ‘Of course it didn’t,’ he said. ‘Think! You can’t hide a thing like that for weeks. And why should I? I only knew – knew for certain, that is – yesterday afternoon. And it just hadn’t begun to happen, last time we were out.’

  He saw the scarf begin to move on the table between them. Beryl was plucking at it. Then suddenly she had crumpled it up and was weeping into the cheap fabric and its resplendent labels. Royal et Westminster, Venise et Continental, Suisse et Îles d’Hyères, L’Ensoleillee, Pin Doré, Aiglon, Pare: one by one they darkened beneath the large slow tears.

  Part II

  London

  Chapter Nine

  Phil found he didn’t know why he was on the 10.20 on Monday morning. Until after he’d been to the Savings Bank and taken out all he had there – for somehow he hadn’t felt like facing old Sackbutt’s place again so soon – he hadn’t really been sure of what he was doing. But now here he was, with this abandoned old cemetery going past him on the right like a wrecker’s yard, and London just over an hour ahead.

  Or rather he knew a number of whys, but they didn’t seem to add up.

  Sunday had been far worse than he’d expected. It was really true that people came and sat on the doorstep. Orders of magnitude again, he saw. Shift the decimal point one to the left and it might only have been a small-time crowd hoping to cash in with some kind of low-class confidence stuff – that or honest enough bread-line white-collar blokes trying to sell the usual junk on commission. But, with the decimal point where it was, it had been different. There had been the local M.P., offering to give friendly advice as required. The titled lady hadn’t turned up – or not the one with daughters. But there had been another one with dogs, and her idea was that she and Phil should own a lot of horses together. She wouldn’t be able to put up much of the capital, she’d explained, and her punch-line had been that she had horses in her blood. She’d looked like a horse, too, Phil remembered, so perhaps a stallion had got at a female ancestor of hers the way you read in mythology. A pity he hadn’t shot that one at her, he thought. There had been several clergymen. And there had been people he just knew the name of, making out they were quite pals, with an eye to sponging later on. After a bit Phil had just cleared out again and spent most of the day in hiding. But Oxford was a rotten place to hide in. That was one reason why he was going to London now.

  But not just in this way. He had on his best suit – the one made in the expensive shop in Reading. Lovat, the stuff was called. He had on his blue homespun tie, and plain natural silk shirt, and the shoes he’d one day marched in and bought in the shop in Turl Street. Long before what had now happened to him, it had amused him – having an eye for clothes as he had – to work up this disguise. Sexton Blake or his boy Tinker couldn’t have done better. Until Phil opened his mouth, Phil wasn’t Phil at all. Which could, upon occasion, make opening his mouth satisfactorily disconcerting. And when Phil now grinned at the thought of this, he found himself even grinning in the right way. He stood up for a copy of The Times he’d pitched into the rack. It wasn’t because he really wanted to get behind The Times – his grin broadened as he saw there was a joke in this – and so complete the disguise. It was that he liked the feel of the fit of the trousers round the hips and in the crutch, and the jacket that didn’t hump up his shoulders with padding the way the clothes from cheap places did. When he sat down again it was with the air of one too accustomed to modest luxury to notice it. He’d bought himself, of course, a first-class ticket.

  Sodding little Kipps, another Phil seemed to murmur in Phil’s ear. But he didn’t take this seriously, any more than he did his auntie nattering at him that it was vanity would get him. He was all right. Even now – with this queer feeling he had of firm ground shelving away beneath his feet and new forces swaying him so that at any moment he’d have to strike out and swim – even now he was all right. He put a hand in a jacket pocket – you let these sort of pockets go a bit baggy – and brought out a pipe and a tobacco pouch. With these he began to experiment. After all, his life was going to be experiment now – experiment with the sky the limit.

  But another reason for his being on this train was Beryl. When he’d been trying to explain things to her – still in that kind of farm where they’d got a very good meat tea – he’d told her how when you have a lot of money you invest it and have a private income. And he’d told her about Prendick and his crowd in London, and how they ran something they called an advisory service. He’d thought Beryl wasn’t understanding a thing, but she’d surprised him by saying at once that he must go up to London and see about it. It was queer how she’d suddenly turned keen on the idea of investment – not knowing, he could pretty well have sworn, of the existence of it ten minutes earlier. And when he’d said old Sackbutt could fix him up just as well as Prendick’s lot, she said No, because nothing was any good in Oxford compared with London, as you could tell by the rotten old shops. Oxford banks would be stick-in-the-mud joints, just like the places sold you brassieres and beauty packs. He’d better go, and do it all thorough. A week it might take him, Beryl had said.

  He’d stared at her, feeling she needed thinking about. But of course what was in his head was something else, and he had to face it. He was going to find Prendick’s place, and find Prendick’s secretary, and discover whether she existed, whether there was the slightest sense in which she really did exist for him. If she didn’t perhaps she’d fade like a dream – a dream that has come up at you out of nowhere and that is the only real thing while you’re dreaming it and that sinks away again unresistingly when you wake up. It was also possible, of course, that she wouldn’t fade like a dream even after she’d turned out to be one as far as he was concerned. He thought he could take that, an unrequited passion or whatever it was called, better than this coming and going like an obsession of something he’d invented, you might say, on the strength of eighty seconds’ experience or thereabouts.

  This Jean – why, he knew nothing about her. He couldn’t even see her now. When he tried to, she was no more than a silhouette against the dusty sunlight of the mean little street behind her. He mightn’t recognise her if he came face to face with her – and yet here he was kidding himself like out of one of Beryl’s mags. As he told himself this, Phil felt himself blushing above that nice blue tie. And then suddenly – it shook him – one of those psychological things occurred, and there was Jean’s face
clear in his mind, and he realised, Yes, that he’d known that her eyebrows were like that, rather level, and fine without seeming to be plucked – but only now he’d noticed this other thing about them, that they almost came together the way some people’s do, and that it seemed to be just this tiny blemish that carried the final shock of her, you might say, straight down his spine. It didn’t make sense that in an instant and all inside his head he should be seeing, far clearer than a photo, and in some details for the first time, a face that seconds ago he’d decided he could no longer see at all. And now it was gone again, leaving his whole body as if he’d been running hard. If it didn’t shake him. He’d be thinking he had an imagination next.

  Then, like when you wake up and hear the first stroke of the hour, the last stroke of which has wakened you, with just that kind of time-jerk that would set you thinking if you weren’t hurried on, Phil heard a voice in this railway compartment that for minutes hadn’t been existing for him.

  ‘Imagination,’ the voice said disgustedly. ‘They haven’t a glimmer of it. They can’t see.’

  There was only one other passenger in the compartment, so if he wasn’t talking to himself he was talking to Phil. A look at him suggested that he was talking to himself, or at least that he was the sort of person who might go in for that kind of thing. He was about five years older than Phil. And he wasn’t nearly so well dressed. Indeed you might have thought that he was travelling first-class either dishonestly or by mistake. Only – Phil saw almost at once – you’d have been wrong. It was just that the young man didn’t much think about what he was wearing. Or about his hair – for that was untidy to the point of drama, without, clearly, his spending a penny to get it that way. As it fell over an abnormally high and bumpy forehead, and impended above abnormally glittering eyes, Phil – or the part of Phil that acknowledged the authority of comic strips – knew at once that this was a mad scientist. The young man spoke again.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Mad scientist. Colossal brain, and no human feelings at all.’

  Phil was so surprised by this challenging and even unmannerly clairvoyance that he remained mute.

  ‘But don’t you agree with me?’ The young man had been looking at his watch. ‘They can’t even run their trains to time. The whole public transport system in this country is simply the next thing to lunacy. Wouldn’t you say?’

  Phil felt it was his turn to disconcert. He crossed his beautifully trousered legs. He took a puff at his not too new pipe. He assumed the expression of perfect diffidence that is the hard core of the outfit of the English officer and gent.

  ‘Transport?’ he said. ‘Never given it a bleeding thought, I haven’t, mate.’

  ‘Then you ought to. Everybody ought to.’ The young man’s expression hadn’t flickered, and Phil had to conclude that his little stroke decidedly hadn’t come off. ‘For instance,’ the young man went on urgently, ‘have you ever considered what the railways are for?’

  ‘To get you and me to London, I suppose.’ Phil now spoke civilly. He rather liked the way his silly trick had been ignored.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense. The rational way to get you and me to London is by some sort of vertical take-off aircraft – that or on a light monorail. This sort of thousand-ton saurian monster—’ and the young man gave British Railways an unsparing kick with an ill-polished shoe— ‘has only one conceivable economic function. And that’s to carry coal.’

  ‘All right,’ Phil said. ‘Let it carry coal. I don’t mind.’

  ‘But precisely what I’m saying is that you ought to.’ The young man now spoke with surprised indignation, as if Phil were a trusted ally whose unexpected frivolity was letting him down badly. ‘I said conceivable economic function. Actually, that belongs to the past. But they can’t see it. Now, just what—’ and the young man flung out a pointing hand at the lines of metal flashing by as the train passed Reading— ‘just what did they call all that when they put it down? By the way, my name’s Mark Thickthorne.’

  ‘Phil Tombs is mine. What did they call it? The permanent way, I suppose.’

  ‘Exactly! There for ever and ever, like the dividends they were going to get out of it all. But it’s obsolete. Trundling coal around at all is obsolete. All those rails ought to have been melted down, and all those tracks turned into arterial roads half a generation ago. But no – the way’s permanent. It makes you weep.’

  ‘You got to have coal, haven’t you?’ Phil said.

  ‘Of course you don’t have to have coal. What you have to have is power. Yet among the political chaps it’s only the Liberals that have had a glimmer. And they got it all wrong. Electricity, they said. Turn it all into electricity at the pithead. Now, what do you think of that?’ The young man called Mark Thickthorne paused on what was perhaps only a rhetorical question. But Phil felt prompted to speak up.

  ‘All my eye,’ Phil said. ‘You’d be fighting the heat all the time. The cooling’s nine parts of generating electricity in a big way. And what’s the use of hollaring for water by the million gallons in the English colliery country. I ask you! Ashamed, they ought to have been. The thing’s just not technical.’

  ‘Exactly. And I see you have thought about it.’ Mark Thickthorne was delighted. He gave British Railways another kick for good measure. ‘But what about gas? What about gas, Tombs, my boy?’

  Phil had some thought of taking offence at this. It was what might be called familiar. He remembered how Prendick had called him ‘Tombs’, and that somehow it hadn’t been quite nice. The comparison showed him, somehow, that this was all right.

  ‘Gas?’ he said. ‘Any fool can make gas. At a pit-head. Or down on the seam, if you want to. But what good’s gas? All stink and volume. And you couldn’t pipe it, man. Not really big. Think of the mains you’d need. Think of your pressure.’

  ‘All right. Think of your pressure.’ Thickthorne was leaning forward eagerly. ‘But not just of a gentle squeeze. Not just of your urban gasometer. As liquid – that’s how gas should travel.’

  ‘It does – in a small way.’

  Thickthorne nodded. It was almost a conspiratorial nod.

  ‘And in a middling way, too,’ he said. ‘You know it’s already coming in in tankers – while English coal is still shunted about on these idiotic railways? I tell you, I’m going to stop coal. I’m going to stop railways. I’m going to have all the coal that’s mined running through pipes like water from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Phil said. He had decided that Mark Thickthorne really was pretty mad. ‘Just how do you begin? Buy a coal-mine, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, but I’ve got that – or at least my father has. We sit on the stuff, as it happens. Only there’s a lot of law to cope with. And, meanwhile, these unspeakable railways go on. For passenger transport, they’re unutterably absurd. Do you realise, for instance, that we can’t get off the things when we want to? And yet we’re not in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We’re on the surface of a perfectly ordinary bit of England.’

  ‘But your vertical take-off aircraft wouldn’t be. And I don’t believe even your monorail …’

  ‘Well, I’m going to stop the railways. And that reminds me.’

  Thickthorne, who had been getting more and more excited, stood up as he spoke, crossed the compartment, and vigorously wrenched down the communication cord.

  ‘Every now and then,’ he said, ‘I do that for a start.’

  Phil stared aghast at his new acquaintance.

  ‘What you do that for?’ he asked. ‘Cost you five pounds, it will. Showing off, I call it.’

  ‘Showing off?’ Thickthorne was indignant. ‘It’s a demonstration. Isn’t that the first thing needed, when there’s a deadweight of inertia against you?’ As he spoke, this strange young man was pitched backwards upon the seat. The train had braked violently, and was now slowing down with an effect of comprehensive shuddering.

  ‘Inertia?’ Phil said. ‘They’ll tell you about inertia whe
n they get along here. Dislocates the schedule, a thing like that does. And did you say you done it before?’

  Thickthorne nodded – vigorously but at the same time just a shade uncertainly.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘It comes on me, to tell you the truth. All this obstruction put up against a perfectly rational plan. It makes me wild. They’ve no common sense.’

  ‘Common sense!’ Phil found himself speaking with robust pity. The guard, he supposed, would be along within a couple of minutes. ‘It won’t be just five pounds, either – not if you done it before.’

  ‘That’s true. As a matter of fact, the beak was a bit ratty last time. Anti-gas, I thought. Called me a gas-bag, I remember. Said he’d know how to deflate me if it happened again.’

  ‘He’ll put you inside, if you ask me.’ Phil said this with a certain satisfaction. Hadn’t he plenty to think about without getting mixed up with a young idiot blowing his top like this? But he looked at Thickthorne and saw that he wasn’t scared. He was just one for doing a damned fool thing when it came to him. Which was all right, after all. ‘Here,’ Phil said, ‘you get down on the floor. Between the seats – quick.’

  ‘No good trying to hide. They know it’s this compartment.’ Thickthorne pointed at the depending communication cord, which hung in a loop over the corridor window. ‘Simple as that.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you hide. Do like I say.’ The train was now at a standstill, and they only had seconds. ‘You’re ill – see? Scared me, it did. And I lost my head.’