As Far as You Can Go (4 page)

It was surprising, really, how much of all this Helen was likely to believe. She had seemed suspicious when he’d
explained
about their ignorance of contraceptives, but he’d covered it quickly by saying that he thought Jennifer might be a Catholic, and everyone knew that that was how Catholic
girls made men marry them. He’d wished afterwards that he hadn’t suggested it. The trouble with girls like Helen was that they were highly susceptible to obvious ideas. He had to be careful not to get carried away about the Calcotts, too, because one day Helen had been reduced as near to tears as he’d ever seen her and begged him to let her do something to help them. There’d had to be a great deal about
old-fashioned
pride then, and afterwards there was a curious gleam in Helen’s eye. He’d once caught her looking in the London telephone directory A–D, too. He’d mentioned later, quite casually, that the Calcotts of course couldn’t afford a phone.

By eleven he had the graph ready for Crocker who smiled genially at him and asked how he was getting on. Harold told him about the fire and Crocker said “I say!” once or twice, then asked him what he was doing for the week-end. Harold said he was going to spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday with his parents in Buckinghamshire, and this led to a discussion about local golf-courses about which Harold knew nothing except their names, and these only from having had the conversation with Crocker several times before. Then Crocker twisted about on his chair for a moment before saying, “Well, my boy, we’re very pleased with the way you’re doing, you know. Keep it up.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Have a nice week-end.”

“Same to you, sir.”

Mr Crocker never came back to the office on Friday
afternoons
.

After lunch Harold idled. There was nothing for him to do, really, so people gave him tedious things they couldn’t be bothered with, saying, “I would be most awfully grateful if you could do this for me” and “Oh, thanks a lot, thanks awfully.” The telephones which rang all day, or flashed their lights, since the noise would have been impossible, were
always sluggish on Friday afternoons, and Blackett spent most of his time fussing over everyone in a high-pitched voice, getting everything finished in time for the week-end. At about a quarter to four everyone began to snap and snarl, hurrying to get away early. Harold thought about the Macaroon, which wasn’t a tea-shop but an afternoon
drinking-club
in Soho. When the thought of beer had given way to gin and tonic and that in its turn to campari and soda, he got up from his desk, where he’d been doing the
Evening
Standard
crossword, and left the office. He had practised leaving unnoticed since the afternoon early in his career with the firm on which Mr Blackett had given him both
eyebrow-waggling
and bifocal eye-switching when he had started to leave five minutes before the official time. Now he had a technique for desk-drifting till he reached the door, through which he could vanish in the back-swing from someone’s entry. Carrying a piece of paper on which he had typed the latest cricket scores and all the runners and prices for the two o’clock at Sandown, he moved surely from desk to desk, talking blandly, then, to his great triumph, used Blackett’s own slipstream to depart. Never risking the lift on the way down, he took the fire-stairs. The only danger at the bottom was an open stretch of country to the main door. One of the architect’s particularly malignant gestures had been to leave no pillars in the foyer of the building. The back door led only into a dreary warren of dustbins and coal-holes which
eventually
brought one out a quarter of a mile from where Harold left his Lambretta.

Assuming a serious business-like face, Harold strode
meaningfully
towards the door, then put on his bowler hat, pulling it down well over his face. In two minutes he was astride his Lambretta and in Cheapside, sliding through the gaps in the stalled traffic to emerge at the lights exactly as they changed from red to green.

Ten minutes later he was in the Macaroon, talking to
Dennis Moreland who was already rather drunk. Moreland had been a contemporary of Harold’s at Oxford, and had since become a junior pundit on television and in the weeklies. He had read Law, as a matter of fact, but everyone assumed him to be a classical scholar, or at the very least a historian, since he gave his opinions with the air of a man who has read so much of the best literature that he can hardly bear to look at a book again. In fact he had read very little, and it was only because book-reviewing in the weeklies never extended beyond fifteen hundred words at most, and because one could get away with virtually anything on television
provided
one remained vague about details, that he had managed to remain undetected. Also, he was remarkably clever. Someone once described him as a machine for receiving other people’s ideas and turning them out to sound as though they were his own, but this was not quite the whole truth. He had a sort of originality that he was still exploring and testing, a way of seeing things which wasn’t quite like anyone else’s, and if what he saw was still what most other clever people saw, he described it in a vigorous yet clear style that was certainly his own. Without ever knowing quite enough of what he was talking about, he talked brilliantly and no one noticed the lacunae. And he thoroughly enjoyed cutting figures on the intellectual ice of his time, knowing better than anyone how thin it was. It was the knowledge that he was really something of a fraud that made him enjoy it so much, and his daring increased with the possibilities of detection.

Harold liked him, without being quite sure why. Dennis was short and round, with a fat-cheeked face and light blue eyes under heavy black eyebrows, with thick black hair swept straight back to the nape of his neck. He treated Harold with a mixture of genial contempt and malicious friendliness, using him sometimes as a stooge and sometimes as an
intimate
companion. He had been married and divorced already, which at twenty-seven Harold considered unnecessarily
sophisticated, and he was always accompanied by some exotic creature he’d found at the studios or met the night before at a party. Somehow, though, it was never the same exotic creature twice running, and Harold wondered whether his boasts of sexual prowess weren’t more fantasy than fact. At Oxford he had been deliberately Byronic, and the Don Juan attitude was still there in emergencies. An enemy had once told him to his face that he needed more buckle and less swash.

“I’ve been telling the public about free love this
afternoon
,” he said, plonking his drink on the table. “On tape, of course. I bet they cut it out. I did a marvellous spiel about Sweden and adolescent lust and adult suicide. No one will have the slightest idea which side I’m on.”

“Have you ever been to Sweden?” said Harold.

“Sweden! Country of lakes and naked bathing! Modern architecture and ancient valour! No, of course not. But I’ve seen enough Bergman films to have a perfectly good idea.”

“I went there once, for a day,” said Harold. “It was just like Denmark.”

“And what was Denmark like?”

“I can’t really remember. It was just after the war and all I can recall is the Tivoli Gardens.”

“It certainly doesn’t sound very interesting,” said Dennis.

Harold stared at the bar, which was short and narrow, so narrow that the barmaid, who was well-built and liked to show it, bulged continually towards the customers. That was why he always sat at a table. Behind her, on a specially
constructed
shelf, stood a collection of miniature liqueurs, now going brown round the labels. It was appalling to think how many such collections there must be in the country, all of them browning round the labels, the liqueurs probably evaporated by now, the pride of barmen and barmaids from Dover to Dundee.

“Why do fads happen?” he said to Dennis.

“Fads? What sort of fads?”

“Well, collecting miniature liqueurs, for instance.”

“Someone has a brilliant idea that miniature liqueurs will be a splendid advertisement for big liqueurs, and so everyone makes them, and then miniature men are sent round the country trying to sell them to the big fat men who own pubs, and then every pub-keeper gets terribly tickled by the idea, and then everyone has a collection. It’s quite simple, really.”

“But why do all the pub-keepers get terribly tickled?”

“Because if you sat behind a bar all day, you’d be tickled if you had a heart attack. You’d be bored out of your mind.”

“I’m bored by my job, but I don’t go round collecting anything.”

“Well, you’re probably a Don’t-Know by instinct. What’s wrong with your job, by the way? Don’t you make lots of money?”

“Not yet. I will, though. It’s a boring job because it’s too easy. Don’t you ever feel you would like to do something that really occupied you full time, which used all your
capabilities
?”

“I have a series of jobs like that now.”

“Oh, come off it, Dennis. You can’t enjoy reading
all
those dreary books and seeing
all
those tedious plays and films.”

“That’s not the part which occupies me. I spend my time trying to be one step ahead of the people who read what I say. They all know as much, if not more, than I do about what I write. So I have somehow to outwit them. That’s a
full-time
job which also amuses me very much. Now I won’t review novels, because there it’s too easy—after all, it’s just a matter of opinion. But a book about, say, Voltaire, about whom I know next to nothing, there’s a real challenge.”

“Well, the only person I have to outwit is Blackett, the chief clerk, and that’s only to get away early.”

“It sounds to me, Harold, as though you’re one of the new young men. Not angry, that’s all over. But discontented.
Wanting adventure. Fed up with the limits of a welfare state.”

“I thought those people were invented when the Labour Party got in in 1945.”

“Well, let’s bring you up to date a bit. You’re the sort of conscientious man who would have gone out and tamed a couple of colonies before breakfast in the old days, steadfast in duty, believing in what you were doing. But there aren’t any colonies left, and you have all that public spirit going begging.”

“I don’t think that’s quite right either.”

“Oh, I can see a whole article about people like you. No, it would go better on television. Chaps don’t have enough to do these days, they’re complaining about the drabness of Britain, and they’re right. They want to have a ball.”

“You sound like an editorial in the
Daily
Mirror.
”

“What else do you think TV personalities are but popular journalists?”

“Good God, are you a TV personality already?”

“Not yet, no. But I will be in a year or two.
Then
buy a set.”

“Let’s have another drink,” said Harold. He didn’t like the idea of knowing a TV personality. Art and life were better kept apart, he felt. He got up to get more drinks.

“You don’t know anyone who would like to go to America for a few months, do you?” said Dennis, when Harold got back from the bar.

“Paid or unpaid?”

“Oh, very well paid indeed. The trouble is that all young people these days are vaguely liberal, and being vaguely liberal means being rather stridently anti-American. It’s what I am going to call the Compensation for Colonial Guilt one day, if I ever get around to it.”

“If you make one more journalistic generalization this afternoon I shall leave,” said Harold. “Tell me about the American trip.”

“I have this uncle,” said Dennis. “More of an aunt, really. She married him, you see. Anyway, he’s called
Dangerfield
, and he’s very rich, and wants someone to go to America and buy back the family portraits that one of his hard-up ancestors sold to Duveen or someone. You wouldn’t be interested, by any chance?”

“If you think I’m going to leave Fenway’s now,” said Harold, “after slaving away there for all these years, you’re off your head. Why don’t you go yourself?”

“I would, if I were still young,” said Dennis. “I’d go like a shot.”

“But you are young.”

“Oh, I know I am. But I can’t afford to go
on
being young. It would ruin me. I almost have a reputation to keep up, you know. If one doesn’t build on one’s own foundations, no one else will.”

“We are both hamstrung by our futures already,” said Harold theatrically. “Shades of the prison house round the growing middle-aged man.”

“You’re still young, though,” said Dennis, looking at Harold in a calculating way. “I mean, you can still afford to be
thought
young, can’t you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I think the job is just what you need before you settle down.”

“You’re wrong,” said Harold. “But if you tell me what it is I may be able to suggest someone suitable.”

“Ah. You have contacts?”

“I have a younger brother.”

Dennis began to explain. His uncle’s family had become somewhat impoverished about the turn of the century, largely because of a hereditary lack of restraint. Granville Dangerfield, the then head of the family, had twelve siblings, eight of whom were girls, to say nothing of eleven children of his own. He also had a passion for the turf, which made
him a popular figure in the circle of the Prince of Wales. All eight of his sisters had managed to marry, with sizeable portions, and Granville’s own seven daughters were
approaching
marriageable age. Being a man of honour, he wished to give his daughters respectable portions, too, but the continual drain of so much fertility on the family finances made this difficult. To add to the difficulties, the sons all inherited attractive sums on their twenty-fifth birthdays under the terms of a trust set up by Granville’s grandfather.

(“The whole story illustrates the decline of the gentry,” said Dennis. “The incontinent inevitably end up insolvent.”)

In an attempt to meet all his obligations, Dangerfield trusted intemperately to luck, and in particular to a filly called Canteloupe which had thrown her jockey at the start of a race at Epsom. It was a considerable expense in postage alone to summon the family from all over England, but
Granville
felt there was nothing else he could do. To the assembled Dangerfields, he announced the catastrophic news. They took it quite calmly, telling him to sell some of the family heirlooms, making speeches about rash speculation and the judgment of God, and then went home.