Back in the days before women’s lib, designer jeans and deep-dish pizza, Big Henty’s snooker hall with its “ten-full-size tables, fully licensed bar and hot food” was the Athenaeum of Southwark. The narrow doorway and its dimly lit staircase gave entry to a cavernous hall conveniently sited over a particularly good eel and pie shop.
Now, alas, the eel and pie shop was a video rental “club” where posters in primary colours depicted half-naked film stars firing heavy machine guns from the hip. But in its essentials Big Henty’s was largely unchanged. The lighting was exactly the same as I remembered it, and any snooker hall is judged on its lighting. Although it was very quiet every table was in use. The green baize table tops glowed like ten large aquariums, their water still, until suddenly across them brightly coloured fish darted, snapped and disappeared.
Big Henty wasn’t there of course. Big Henty died in 1905. Now the hall was run by a thin white-faced fellow of about forty. He supervised the bar. There was not a wide choice: these snooker-playing men didn’t appreciate the curious fizzy mixtures that keep barmen busy in cocktail bars. At Big Henty’s you drank whisky or vodka; strong ale or Guinness with tonic and soda water for the abstemious. For the hungry there were “toasted” sandwiches that came soft, warm and plastic-wrapped from the microwave oven.
“Evening, Bernard. Started to snow, has it?’ What a memory the man had. It was years since I’d been here. He picked up his lighted cigarette from the Johnny Walker ashtray, and inhaled on it briefly before putting it back into position. I remembered his chain-smoking, the way he lit one cigarette from another but put them in his mouth only rarely. I’d brought Dicky Cruyer here one evening long ago to make contact with a loud-mouthed fellow who worked in the East German embassy. It had come to nothing, but I remember Dicky describing the barman as the keeper of the sacred flame.
I responded, “Half of Guinness ... Sydney.’ His name came to me in that moment of desperation. “Yes, the snow is starting to pile up.”
It was bottled Guinness of course. This was not the place that a connoisseur of stout and porter would come to savour beverages tapped from the wood. But he poured it down the side of the glass holding his thumb under the point of impact to show he knew the folklore, and he put exactly the right size head of light brown foam upon the black beer. “In the back room.” Delicately he shook the last drops from the bottle and tossed it away without a glance. “Your friend. In the back room. Behind Table Four.”
I picked up my glass of beer and sipped. Then I turned slowly to survey the room. Big Henty’s back room had proved its worth to numerous fugitives over the years. It had always been tolerated by authority. The CID officers from Borough High Street police station found it a convenient place to meet their informants. I walked across the hall. Beyond the tasselled and fringed lights that hung over the snooker tables, the room was dark. The spectators - not many this evening - sat on wooden benches along the walls, their grey faces no more than smudges, their dark clothes invisible.
Walking unhurriedly, and pausing to watch a tricky shot, I took my beer across to table number four. One of the players, a man in the favoured costume of dark trousers, loose-collared white shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat, moved the scoreboard pointer and watched me with expressionless eyes as I opened the door marked “Staff and went inside.
There was a smell of soap and disinfectant. It was a small storeroom with a window through which the snooker hall could be seen if you pulled aside the dirty net curtain. On the other side of the room there was another window, a larger one that looked down upon Tower Bridge Road. From the street below there came the sound of cars slurping through the slush. “Bernard.” It was a woman’s voice. “I thought you weren’t going to come.”
I sat down on the bench before I recognized her in the dim light. “Cindy!” I said. “Good God, Cindy!” “You’d forgotten I existed.”
“Of course I hadn’t.” I’d only forgotten that Cindy Prettyman’s full name was Lucinda, and that she might have reverted to her maiden name. “Can I get you a drink?”
She held up her glass. “It’s tonic water. I’m not drinking these days.”
“I just didn’t expect you here,’ I said. I looked through the net curtain at the tables.
“Why not?”
“Yes, why not?’I said and laughed briefly. “When I think how many times Jim made me swear I was giving up the game for ever.” In the old days, when Jim Prettyman was working alongside me, he taught me to play snooker. He played an exhibition class game, and his wife Cindy was something of an expert too.
Cindy was older than Jim by a year or two. Her father was a steel worker in Scunthorpe: a socialist of the old school. She’d got a scholarship to Reading University. She said she’d never had any ambition but for a career in the Civil Service since her schooldays. I don’t know if it was true but it went down well at the Selection Board. She wanted Treasury but got Foreign Office, and eventually got Jim Prettyman who went there too. Then Jim came over to work in the Department and I saw a lot of him. We used to come here, me, Fiona, Jim and Cindy, after work on Fridays. We’d play snooker to decide who would buy dinner at Enzo’s, a little Italian restaurant in Old Kent Road. Invariably it was me. It was a joke really; my way of repaying him for the lesson. And I was the eldest and making more money. Then the Prettymans moved out of town to Edgware. Jim got a rise and bought a full-size table of his own, and then we stopped coming to Big Henty’s. And Jim invited us over to his place for Sunday lunch, and a game, sometimes. But it was never the same after that.
“Do you still play?” she asked.
“It’s been years. And you?”
“Not since Jim went.”
“I’m sorry about what happened, Cindy.”
“Jim and me. Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that.
You saw him on Friday.”
“Yes how do you know?”
“Charlene. I’ve been talking to her a lot lately.”
“Charlene?”
“Charlene Birkett. The tall girl we used to let our upstairs flat to ... in Edgware. Now she’s Jim’s secretary.” “I saw her. I didn’t recognize her. I thought she was American.” So that’s why she’d smiled at me: I thought it was my animal magnetism.
“Yes,” said Cindy, “she went to New York and couldn’t get a job until Jim fixed up for her to work for him. There was never anything between them,” she added hurriedly. “Charlene’s a sweet girl. They say she’s really blossomed since living there and wearing contact lenses.”
“I remember her,” I said. I did remember her; a stooped, mousy girl with glasses and frizzy hair, quite unlike the shapely Amazon I’d seen in Jim’s office. “Yes, she’s changed a lot.”
“People do change when they live in America.”
“But you didn’t want to go?”
“America? My dad would have died.” You could hear the northern accent now. “I didn’t want to change.” Then she said, solemnly, “Oh, doesn’t that sound awful? I didn’t mean that exactly.”
“People go there and they get richer,” I said. “That’s what the real change is.”
“Jim got the divorce in Mexico,” she said. “Someone told me that it’s not really legal. A friend of mine: she works in the American embassy. She said Mexican marriages and divorces aren’t legal here. Is that true, Bernard?”
“I don’t imagine that the Mexican ambassador is living in sin, if that’s what you mean.”
“But how do I stand, Bernard? He married this other woman.
I mean, how do I stand now?”
“Didn’t you talk to him about it?” My eyes had become accustomed to the darkness now and I could see her better. She hadn’t changed much, she was the same tiny bundle of brains and nervous energy. She was short with a full figure but had never been plump. She was attractive in an austere way with dark hair that she kept short so it would be no trouble to her. But her nose was reddened as if she had a cold and her eyes were watery.
“He asked me to go with him.” She was proud of that and she wanted me to know.
“I know he did. He told everyone that you would change your mind.”
“No. I had my job!” she said, her voice rising as if to repeat the arguments they’d had about it.
“It’s a difficult decision,” I said to calm her. In the silence there was a sudden loud throbbing noise close by. She jumped almost out of her skin. Then she realized that it was the freezer cabinet in the corner and she smiled.
“Perhaps I should have done. It would have been better I suppose.”
“It’s too late now, Cindy,” I said hurriedly before she started y to go weepy on me.
“I know; I know; I know.” She got a handkerchief from her pocket but rolled it up and gripped it tight in her red-knuckled hand as if resolving not to sob.
“Perhaps you should see a lawyer,” I said.
“What do they know?” she said contemptuously. “I’ve seen three lawyers. They pass you on one from the other like a parcel, and by the time I was finished paying out all the fees I knew that some law books say one thing and other law books say different.”
“The lawyers can quote from the law books until they are blue in the face,” I said. “But eventually people have to sort out the solutions with each other. Going to lawyers is just an expensive way of putting off what you’re going to have to do anyway.” “Is that what you really think, Bernard?”
“More or less,” I said. “Buying a house, making a will, getting divorced. Providing you know what you want, you don’t need a lawyer for any of that.”
“Yes,” she said. “What’s more important than getting married, and you don’t go to a lawyer to do that.” “In foreign countries you do,” I told her. “Couples don’t get married without signing a marriage contract. They never have this sort of problem that you have. They decide it all beforehand.”
“It sounds a bit cold-blooded.”
“Maybe it is, but marriage can be a bit too hot-blooded too.” “Was yours?” She released her grip on the tiny handkerchief and spread it out on her lap to see the coloured border and the embroidered initials LP.
“My marriage?” I said. “Too hot-blooded?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps.” I sipped my drink. It was a long time since I’d had one of these heavy bitter-tasting brews. I wiped the froth from my lips; it was good. “I thought I knew Fiona, but I suppose I didn’t know her well enough.”
“She was so lovely. I know she loved you, Bernard.”
“I think she did.”
“She showed me that fantastic engagement ring and said, Bernie sold his Ferrari to buy that for me.”
“It sounds like a line from afternoon television,” I said, “but it was a very old battered Ferrari.”
“She loved you, Bernard.”
“People change, Cindy. You said that yourself.”
“Did it affect the children much?”
“Billy seemed to take it in his stride but Sally ... She was all right until I took a girl-friend home. Lots of crying at night. But I think she’s adjusted now.” I said it more because I wanted it to be true than because I believed it. I worried about the children, worried a lot, but that was none of Cindy’s business. “Gloria Kent, the one you work with?”
This Cindy knew everything. Well, the FO had always been Whitehall’s gossip exchange. “That’s right,” I said. “It’s difficult for children,” said Cindy. “I suppose I should be thankful that we didn’t have any.”
“You’re right,” I said. I drank some Guinness and sneaked a look at the time.
“But on the other hand, if we’d had-kids perhaps Jim wouldn’t have wanted to go so much. He wanted to prove himself, you see. Lately I’ve wondered if he blamed himself that we never were able to have children.”
“Jim was talking about that time when the kitchen caught fire,” I said. - “Jim spilled the oil. He’s always been clumsy.” “Fiona didn’t do it?”
“She took the blame,’ said Cindy with a sigh. “Jim could never admit to making a mistake. That was his nature.”
“Yes, Fiona took the blame,” I said. “She told me Jim did it but she really took the blame ... the insurance ... everything”
“Fiona was a remarkable woman, Bernard, you know that. Fiona had such self-confidence that blame never touched her. I admired her. I would have given almost anything to have been like Fiona, she was always so calm and poised.” I didn’t respond. Cindy drank some of her tonic water and smoothed her dress and cleared her throat and then said, “The reason I wanted to talk to you, Bernard, is to see what the Department will do.”
“What “the Department will do?” I said. I was puzzled. “Do about Jim,” said Cindy. I could see her squeezing the handkerchief in repeated movements, like someone exercising their hands.
“About Jim.” I blew dust from my spectacle lenses and began to polish them. They’d picked up grease from the air -and polishing just made them more smeary. The only way to get them clean was to wash them with kitchen detergent under the warm tap. The optician advised against this method but I went on doing it anyway. “I’m not sure what you mean, Cindy.” “Will they pay me or this American woman, this so-called “wife”,” she said angrily.
“Pay you?” I put my glasses on and looked at her. “Don’t be so difficult, Bernard. I must know. I must. Surely you can see that.”
“Pay you what?”
Her face changed. “Holy Mary!” she said in that way that only church-going Catholics say such things. “You don’t know!” It was a lament. “Jim is dead. They killed him Friday night when he left the office after seeing you. They shot him. Six bullets.”