A Disturbing Influence (9 page)

Well, sitting in the ‘den’, which was more like the dressing-room of one of the seedier kinds of chorus-girl, but which Hobson had tried to make habitable by adding pictures of his regiment sitting with folded arms, cartoons of himself in his polo-playing days, culled, I am sure, from regimental magazines, and even a snapshot, much enlarged, of what appeared to be Monty ticking him off very sharply—sitting there, with his past on the walls, Hobson became slightly less gloomy.

‘I’m damned if I’m beaten yet,’ he said, sucking hard on his pipe, which immediately went out. He tried to light it again, burning his
fingers with monotonous regularity, the grate slowly filling with matches. Watching him, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. But at the same moment Hobson had his.

‘I’ve got it!’ he said, and let his pipe alone for a moment. ‘I’ve got it, Drysdale, by God if I haven’t!’

‘What?’ I said.

‘I’ve got the way to dish that fellow Solomons. Can’t think why it never occurred to me before. A night manœuvre. Are you game?’

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘What is the plan?’

‘We simply go and chop the damned thing down. Chop it down and take it away. Throw it in the gravel-pit lake.’

‘I don’t think you can really get away with that,’ I said. ‘It sounds a bit too much like John Buchan to me.’

‘Damned good writer, Buchan,’ said Hobson, looking at me suspiciously. ‘Met him once. Awfully nice chap.’

‘I dare say he was,’ I said, ‘but you still can’t go round destroying property. There are laws against it.’

‘Ah,’ said Hobson, ‘but you see they’d never suspect me. They’d think it was those Teddy boys from Slough.’

‘Brigadier, I’ve never heard anything so immoral in my life.’

‘Never cared much for morality,’ said Hobson. ‘Not my line. Always liked men with some guts. Never liked sending people to the colonel just because of a bit of high spirits. Hated having to deal with defaulters. Got to have discipline, of course. But there’s no point in sending a man to jail just because he has high spirits.’

Well, as you may imagine, I was more than a little taken aback by this side of a man who I had always supposed hankered to be made a magistrate. His idea had excited him, he looked positively happy.

‘By God,’ he said, ‘I’ll show that Solomons.’

I’d never felt sorry for Brigadier Hobson before, but I did now.

‘Now come, Brigadier,’ I said, ‘you know as well as I do that you
can’t go and chop down a billboard in the middle of the night. You’ll be fined. You’ll be the laughing-stock of the whole town.’

‘Do you really think so?’ he said. Underneath all his bluster and beefiness, I decided, Brigadier Hobson was just another child who has never grown up. I teach children, so I know what the percentage is, and it’s a lot higher even than you might think. Now he looked like a schoolboy cricketer in the rain. But I can’t feel sorry for Hobson for very long, and anyway I had an idea of my own, and furthermore I suddenly saw how I might bargain with Hobson, my idea for his support against carnival bunting.

‘I have an idea,’ I said, ‘which, if you will forgive my saying so, is better than yours, Brigadier. But first, let’s talk about the carnival.’

‘The carnival?’

‘You’re chairman of the committee, aren’t you?’

‘I am, yes. What is it?’

‘I expect you’ve heard that certain people, and I needn’t name them, but they are mostly tradesmen, people like Solomons, in fact, though he’s not actually one of them—certain people are planning to turn the town into a sort of coffin this year. You do put a flag on a soldier’s coffin when you bury him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Drysdale, we do.’

‘Now you and I would agree, I think, that the carnival is an excellent thing, but it ought to be kept in its place, that’s to say Ponting’s meadow.’

‘Of course,’ said Hobson, ‘Ponting is very decent about it.’

‘And we’d agree, too, that we don’t want Teddy boys and hooligans coming to Cartersfield and turning the place upside down, just because we’re having a carnival. We don’t want them smashing up the Flower Show as they did at Blockley last week, do we? We like a roundabout, but we don’t want any skyrockets in Cartersfield.’

‘Skyrockets?’ said Hobson, horrified.

‘They’re extremely noisy things that whizz round,’ I said, not wishing to enlighten him too much. ‘If we’re to keep that sort of
thing out, Brigadier, if we’re to keep Cartersfield’s carnival for
ourselves,
we don’t want to fill the streets with flags, do we? Everyone passing through will think it’s a World Fair. Our carnival must be kept strictly for ourselves.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Hobson. ‘A World Fair?’

‘Well then, I can rely on you to veto the suggestion of flags.’

‘Now wait a minute,’ said Hobson. ‘I don’t see anything wrong with flags.’

‘It’s the first step, Brigadier, the first step.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear your idea about Solomons.’

‘I must feel I have your support on this matter,’ I said.

‘Blackmail,’ said Hobson, ‘sheer blackmail.’

‘Well, if you don’t like my idea, you needn’t support my notion of keeping Cartersfield clean,’ I said.

He looked at me angrily. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got to offer.’

‘It’s very simple. Solomons’ billboard is about six feet his side of the fence. You build a billboard of your own, right up against the fence, and you’ll block his out completely. And on your billboard you put whatever you like—“
HELP STAMP OUT BILLBOARDS
”, for instance. Then let him see what
he
can do.’

Hobson looked at me for a full minute, then he said: ‘I’ve got to give it to you, Drysdale. That’s an absolutely first-class idea. Absolutely first-class. I’ll do it tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow is Sunday.’

‘All the better. I think I know some chaps who don’t mind earning a little extra money by working on Sunday.’

‘Well, it’s your billboard,’ I said, ‘you do what you like. But I hope I can rely on you to quash the flag nonsense.’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ‘you’re absolutely right about it. Have another drink.’

We’d just got settled again, and he was beginning to expand on some of the pranks he’d been up to as a young man, when his wife came in.

‘Evangeline, Drysdale here has just given me the most brilliant
scheme for getting that damned billboard down. We’ll build a sign ourselves, slap bang in front of it.’

She looked at him as though he was mad, and then at me, accusingly. Then she said: ‘Did you feed the cat?’

‘Cat? No.’

She went out again.

‘Always on about that damned cat,’ said Hobson.

Well, though I have occasionally regretted helping Hobson, things turned out exactly as I had planned. It was one of my greatest political triumphs, and no one but Hobson knew whose idea it was. He built his sign in front of the adolescent with the comb in his hand, and Jack Solomons was furious and threatened to go to court, but he was as powerless as Hobson had been, and eventually the sign came down, though not before Mr Richards had had an interview with Brigadier Hobson that left him looking sadder than ever. The day after Solomons took his sign down, Hobson removed his. Neither has spoken to the other since, needless to say, and, equally needless to say, Hobson soon convinced himself that the idea was his in the first place.

He was loyal to his word, though, about the flags, and having been a chairman for a good many years he was able to get his way without anyone quite knowing how. The day after the committee met he rang me up.

‘There will be no flags,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Brigadier.’

‘I must tell you, Drysdale, that I think you behaved none too well about this matter.’

‘I must tell you, Brigadier, that but for me you would now be the laughing-stock of the whole neighbourhood, and possibly even in jail.’

The conversation didn’t last much longer, but it left us where we’d been before the whole question of billboards came up, that is to say in outspoken opposition. As I say, we don’t much care for change in Cartersfield. But it looks as though the question of
bunting may come up again this year, and I don’t know quite where to find an ally. I may even be reduced to suggesting to Hobson that I may have to suggest to Jack Solomons that his field would make a splendid site for a petrol station. But I may have to admit defeat. I rather enjoy defeat, it puts one in such a strong position if anything awful happens. And so often it does, very satisfactorily. My only regret about the whole billboard issue was that I stopped Hobson chopping the bloody thing down. I’d give anything to see that man in the prisoner’s dock.

I
T
WAS
a slack morning at Trinder’s, and Archie Ransome, who worked the petrol pumps, rarely had to leave his electric fire to answer the honk of waiting cars. His little cubby-hole behind the showroom was just right, he thought, with its fire and its chair and a packet of Woodbines always at hand. What more could a man want at his age? His white dustcoat, an innovation of Sid Trinder’s when petrol came off the ration, was smeared with oil, and his moustache was stained yellow with tobacco at the right side. His cap, worn low down over his eyes, had been given him twenty years ago by Mr Thompson-Crowley. Archie’s first job, aged thirteen, was stableboy at Mendleton Hall, and in seventy years he’d advanced from feeding horses to filling cars, by way of chauffering. When Mr Thompson-Crowley died, playing croquet with his
granddaughter
in 1937, a young barrister bought Mendleton Hall, and Archie, then sixty, had to move. With the small capital he had received from Mr Thompson-Crowley for his years of faithful service he set up a one-man taxi business in Cartersfield, moving the six miles from the village without any apparent reluctance. But the war came and put an end to that, and after the war, in which he was a mainstay of the Mason’s Arms platoon of the Home Guard, he went to Trinder’s. And there he stayed. Occasionally Sid Trinder would ask him if he didn’t want to retire.

‘Retire?’ he would say. ‘Why would I want to do that, Mr Trinder?’

And so he stayed on. He filled tanks with a scrupulous accuracy and never gave incorrect change. No one could see any reason why he shouldn’t stay on. He was one of the best-known people in Cartersfield, and Trinder’s without him became unthinkable. When Richard Dimbleby came from the BBC with
Down
Your
Way
, Archie was an obvious choice. Asked if he would like to have his life all over again, he said he didn’t think he’d want it any other way; his pet aversion was people who smoked while their cars were being filled up, he liked to go to horse shows, and he chose as his tune ‘Just A’Wearyin’ For You’ by Carrie Jacobs Bond. His wife, who was a few years younger, hobbled arthritically round their council house down by the station, and they watched television in the evenings. Sometimes their elder son and his wife, who lived a few doors down, came in and watched with them. He was a porter. Their other son had emigrated to New Zealand after the war, and wrote once a year to say how he was getting on.

Someone hooted, and he got out of his chair and went out to the pumps. It was early May, a day of bright sun and cold wind, with a few puddles from yesterday’s rain still lying in the garage’s yard.

‘How are you, Archie?’ said Jack Solomons. He stood beside his white Jaguar, hands in pockets.

‘Pretty good, thank you, Mr Solomons.’

‘Chilly today, isn’t it?’

‘The wireless says it’ll be warmer this afternoon. We’re in for a warm spell, they say.’

‘Oh, they’re always wrong,’ said Solomons.

‘I don’t know about that, Mr Solomons. They’re more often right than wrong, I’d say.’

‘Well, maybe. Give me ten gallons of the best, would you?’

‘Right you are, Mr Solomons.’

He unhooked the nozzle and started the pump. As he took off the cap of the petrol tank he said: ‘Looks like your car could do with a wash, Mr Solomons.’

‘You’re right there, Archie. Do you think they could manage that this morning?’

‘What time would you want it?’

‘Not till after lunch. There’s nothing much going on at the shop. I thought I’d take a breather and get her filled up.’

‘There’s George,’ said Archie. ‘I expect he can manage it for you, Mr Solomons. Hey, George,’ he called to another man in a white dustcoat who was walking across the yard.

‘Just a moment,’ he called back. He wrote something on a
notepad,
tore off the sheet and slipped it under the windscreen-wipers of a Morris 1000.

He came over to the pumps and said: ‘Good morning, Mr Solomons, can we do anything for you?’

George Nisbett was the foreman, a bustling white-haired man who’d been a sergeant in the RAF during the war, working on the maintenance of bombers.

‘You’ll think I’m lazy,’ said Solomons, ‘but I’m damned if I can be bothered to wash my own car. Can you do it for me?’

‘We can, Mr Solomons. What time would you like it? Would one o’clock be soon enough?’

‘That would be fine. My wife wants it this afternoon.’

‘Very good, Mr Solomons.’

‘And how’s Mrs Solomons?’ said Archie.

‘She’s very well, thank you.’

‘I’ll have someone bring it up to you when it’s ready, Mr Solomons. Just as soon as it’s done.’

‘Fine,’ said Solomons. ‘Charge it up, would you?’ He nodded casually to them and walked off towards the High Street, hands still in pockets.

‘Quiet morning, eh, Archie,’ said Nisbett, scribbling on his pad.

‘Suits me,’ said Archie. He put the cap back on the petrol tank, wiped his hands on a rag, then on his coat, and went back to his cubby-hole.

Nisbett got into the Jaguar, made a turn and drove through the yard to the repair shop. The mechanics were standing in a group with mugs of tea in their hands, talking.

‘Come on now, lads,’ said Nisbett. ‘Tea-break ended five minutes ago. Let’s get a move on.’

There was a general gulping of tea and stubbing of cigarettes. They all wore blue overalls of various dirtinesses. While the others moved back to work, one young man in very new overalls which were much too baggy for him began to gather up the mugs and spoons on a tray.

‘When you’ve done that, Allen,’ said Nisbett, ‘you can take Mr Solomons’ car out to the washing bay and wash it. Get it clean, mind. Don’t leave any flies on the radiator, remember. O.K.?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Allen. He was seventeen, just out of school, with brown eyes and a trace of red in the brown hairs which fell over his eyes.

‘And don’t call me “sir”, you monkey. You’ll have plenty of that when you’re called up. And don’t forget the wheels. And brush it out inside. I want you to make a really good job of it.’

Allen blushed and said: ‘I’ve never driven one of them.’

‘Here, I’ll show you. It’s just the usual shift.’ Nisbett
demonstrated
quickly. ‘Now, look sharp with those mugs and get on with it.’ He walked off to another part of the repair shop.

Allen took the tray through the office and into the little
washroom
. When he came out again the two secretaries looked up.

‘Well,’ said Joan Cartwright, ‘if it isn’t Mr Neverbeenkissed.’

‘I think he ought to be a film star, don’t you?’ said Betty Tarrant. She was blonde and twenty, given to silver nail-varnish.

‘To think of it,’ said Joan. ‘Seventeen and never been kissed. A nice-looking kid like that.’

‘What do you know about it?’ said Allen, blushing. ‘Want to try?’

‘You’ll kiss my arse, the lot of you, if you don’t get some work done,’ said Sid Trinder from an inner office.

‘Really,’ said Betty. ‘Such language. And from the boss.’

Allen went out, still blushing. He got into the Jaguar and started it, then gingerly put it in reverse. It wasn’t as difficult as he’d thought. He’d only been at Trinder’s a week and large cars still frightened him. He drove into the washing bay and took down the hose. The jet of water made a satisfactory tingling noise against the bodywork of the car.

Nisbett came in and said: ‘Good lad, you remembered to shut the windows this time.’

In his first week at Trinder’s Allen often wondered how he could possibly keep his job. He knew a fair amount about the inside of an engine, but a lot of simple things still baffled him. And he’d get very tense when given something to do, making easy jobs seem like gigantic labours. He’d forget obvious things, too. When he’d washed Brigadier Hobson’s car with the windows open Nisbett had treated him to a piece of parade-ground language that he didn’t think he could ever forget. And then there had been the time he simply could not get a car to start, and eventually one of the older mechanics had come over to see what was the matter, and he’d forgotten to switch the ignition on. Yet he knew he was perfectly capable of good work. And he wanted to do good work, too, he wanted the money.

If he had money—not very much, just a few spare pounds a week—he could take Ruth out. As he washed the car he thought about Ruth. Polishing the white car he imagined to himself that it was her white body he was stroking. He knew her arms were white, but there were a lot of white things he hadn’t yet seen, and which he didn’t know for sure were white, things he wanted very much to see and touch, things he had never seen on any woman, but which boys at school had talked about in a sniggering way, things they had boasted about seeing and touching. Allen suspected that most of them were as ignorant as himself. Not all of them, of course. There had been a girl in the fifth form who suddenly had to leave and later had a baby, and the boy, who was in Allen’s form, had to leave too, though they hadn’t married. It was odd, Allen thought, the way this
boy had never joined in the sniggers and whispers of the others, had never shown any particular sign of being interested in women. And the girl hadn’t been much run after, either. Though she was pretty, all right. When he thought of what they had done together he found himself blushing again. Well, he’d learned something from that incident: never take risks. If his mother knew the way he thought about Ruth …

Ruth worked at G. H. Hudson’s, the chemist’s. She, too, was seventeen. He’d known her all his life, but never very well till they found themselves sitting next to each other in Mr Drysdale’s maths class. That was last year. He would watch her as she wrote, trying to catch her eye and hold it, but when she lifted her head it was rarely to look at Allen. She would glance at him, and sniff, but that was all. She was very quick and pert in her answers, too. But after school she would relent a little. They would go to the cinema together, and sometimes she would come and watch him playing football, but not often. Their evenings were too full of
homework
, and then Ruth left school. ‘I see,’ said Mr Drysdale at the beginning of the next term, ‘that the nation has lost yet another of its bright mathematical hopes to the world of commerce.’ This had annoyed Allen, though he couldn’t say why. The rest of the class had laughed, rather self-consciously, but he couldn’t see the joke. Ruth wasn’t stupid. Mr Drysdale was always making remarks that Allen couldn’t understand.

Next Easter Allen had left school, and a fortnight before he started work he’d gone to a dance at the Lord George Brunswick Memorial Hall. He stood with a group of other boys watching the band and the dancers. A group of girls stood on the opposite side of the hall. Occasionally one or other of the boys would cross the floor to ask a girl to dance with him. When he came back they would all ask him how it had been. The boy always made some disparaging remark. After a while Allen went up to Ruth. He felt very shy coming up to the group of girls, who all stopped giggling to watch him.

‘Would you like to dance?’ he said, abruptly. He meant to sound confident, but the words came out rather rudely.

‘With you?’ said Ruth. ‘Thanks, but I don’t dance with
schoolboys.
That’s cradle-snatching.’ She nudged the girl beside her. Both tittered.

‘I’m not a schoolboy,’ said Allen.

‘Aren’t you, now? Well, well. Quite grown up, aren’t we?’

‘Come on, Ruth,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to dance?’

‘I’m not sure if I do,’ she said lightly. Her foot tapped to the rhythm of the band. ‘
Can
you dance?’

‘Of course I can,’ said Allen. ‘Anyone can dance.’

‘Well, all right. Lindy, will you hold my bag?’

The other girl took it without saying anything. Then as they moved off she called: ‘Happy landings.’

They moved round the floor once without either of them speaking. Ruth’s eyes were on the other dancers, Allen’s mostly on his feet.

‘So you
can
dance, Allen.’

At once he lost the step. ‘Sorry.’ They went round the floor twice more, then the number ended.

‘Thanks,’ said Allen.

‘Thank
you
,’
said Ruth.

They stood for a moment awkwardly, still half in the dance embrace. Then Ruth said: ‘Oh, Lindy’s waving, excuse me.’

When he returned to the boys’ group someone said: ‘Didn’t know you were hot on her, Allen.’

‘I’m not hot on anyone,’ said Allen.

‘We saw you. Holding her like that.’

‘How else do you expect me to hold a girl?’

‘I could tell you.’ There was a general snigger.

‘Well,’ said Allen, ‘what are you doing standing around, then?’

The other boy imitated the headmaster: ‘“We must learn to be patient.”’ The headmaster said it every speech day, about any and
every thing. Everyone laughed, and Allen didn’t feel he had to answer.

‘Ladies and gentle
men
, boys and
girls
‚’
said the band-leader over the loudspeaker, ‘take your partners,
please
,
for the last dance.’

This was the signal for a general mixture of groups. Allen, failing to obtain Ruth, stood and watched her dance with Bill Ponsonby, the mayor’s son. To his surprise he felt extremely jealous. What hope could he have against the mayor’s son? He left the hall quickly to avoid the national anthem, and went home.

‘Did you have a good time?’ said his mother when he came in.

‘All right. You should be in bed, Mum.’

‘You can’t expect me to sleep easy in my bed,’ she said, ‘not while you’re running round the town after some girl.’

‘What d’you mean? It’s not late, only twelve.’

‘
Only
twelve,’ she said sarcastically. ‘
Only
twelve.’

‘I don’t have nothing to get up for in the morning.’

‘You could think of your mother, sitting here alone all evening.’

‘Well, what d’you expect me to do about it? Sit here with you?’

She glared at him. Then she said: ‘All right, I know. You’re as bad as your father. You want one thing and one thing only, and till you’ve got it you won’t be satisfied. Who is she?’