talking nonsense.
But the fact that I put the paper back in my pocket instead of throwing it away was, I think, significant. Almost without my knowing it, the seed of the idea was swelling in my mind. That evening when I arrived at my flat, the seed bore fruit. There were two letters for me. Both had the word “regret” in the first line.
I had a bath, changed my clothes, sat down by the fire and lit a cigarette. For ten minutes I remained there, thinking. Then I got up. There was, after all, no harm in writing. It would probably come to nothing, anyway. Besides, even if I were offered the job, I could always change my mind.
“By the way,” I remarked casually later that evening; “just as a matter of interest, I’ve written for that Italian job. I wouldn’t take it, naturally, but there’s no harm in seeing what it’s all about.”
“I thought you’d be sensible, darling,” said Claire.
2
Four days later I received a letter from The Spartacus Machine Tool Company Limited of Wolverhampton. It was signed by a Mr. Alfred Pelcher, the Managing Director, and requested me to call upon him at Wolverhampton the following day. “Should,” the letter concluded, “our meeting not produce any result to our mutual advantage, we shall be pleased to refund to you the travelling expenses from London.”
That sounded fair enough. The following day I walked out of Wolverhampton station and asked to be directed to the Spartacus Works. After a bus ride and a ten-minute walk, I came to them, a dingy, sprawling collection of buildings at the end of a long and very muddy road. The view did nothing to raise my drooping spirits. Neither did my reception.
As I approached, a decrepit looking gate-keeper appeared out of a wooden office and asked my business.
“I want to see Mr. Pelcher.”
He sucked his teeth and shook his head firmly. “No travellers seen except on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a waste of time to try other days.”
“I’m not a traveller. I have an appointment with Mr. Pelcher.”
He bridled. “Why didn’t you say so? I’ve got my job to do. I can’t be expected to know everything. I’m not,” he added unnecessarily, “a ruddy crystal gazer. Here”-he grasped my arm-“over there and up the stairs.” He indicated a flight of steel stairs set against the side of a black brick building on the opposite side of the yard and retired, muttering, to his office.
I thanked him, clanked up the stairs and pushed open a door marked “S ALES O FFICE AND E NQUIRIES. P lease walk in.” Beyond it was a small frosted glass window, labelled “K NOCK.” I knocked. The window slid open with a crash and a fat, pale youth with the beginnings of a moustache peered through at me.
“I want to see Mr. Pelcher.”
“Reps., Tuesdays and Thursdays,” said the youth severely. “There’s a notice at the gate. I don’t know what some of you chaps are coming to. It’s a waste of your time and mine. You can’t see him now.”
“I have an appointment.”
He shrugged. “Oh well! Name?”
“Marlow.”
“O.K.”
The window slammed again and I heard him asking over a telephone for Mrs. Moshowitz. Then: “Is that Mrs. Mo? This is your little Ernest speaking from the Sales office.” There was a pause. “Now, now! Naughty, naughty,” he went on playfully. He lapsed suddenly into the lingua franca of the gangster film. “Say, listen, sister. There’s a sucker here named Marlow. He claims he has an appointment with the Big Boy. Shall I let him have it in the stomach or will the Big Boy give him the works himself?” Another pause. “All right, all right, keep your stays on.” He slammed down the telephone, reappeared at the door and announced that he would himself take me across to Mr. Alfred’s office.
We descended the stairway, turned to the right along an alleyway littered with rusty scrap and climbed up another flight of stairs to a door with a Wet Paint notice hanging on the handle. My escort kicked the door open with his heel and informed the elderly and harassed-looking Jewess who glared at him indignantly across a sea of blue- prints that I was the man for Mr. Alfred.
This I was beginning to doubt. What I had so far seen of the Spartacus Machine Tool Company had impressed me so little that I was within an ace of leaving then and there, without seeing its Managing Director or troubling about my travelling expenses. I was a fool, I told myself, to have wasted a day on such a wild goose chase. But it was too late to think about that now. I was being shown into Mr. Alfred’s room.
It was large and very untidy. Stack upon stack of dusty files and tattered blue-prints formed a sort of dado round the green distempered wall, the upper part of which was decorated with many framed catalogue illustrations of machines and two yellowing gold-medal award certificates from Continental trade exhibitions. A coal fire smoked below a mantelpiece groaning under a pile of technical reference books, an Almanach de Gotha, a bronze Krishna mounted on a teak plinth and a partly concealed copy of Etiquette for Men. In one corner was a bag of golf-clubs. In the centre of the room, behind an enormous table strewn with labelled machine parts, correspondence trays, wooden golf tees, engineering trade papers and boxes of various sorts of paper clips, sat Mr. Alfred Pelcher himself.
He was a small, bald, cheerful man of about fifty with rimless, bi-focal spectacles and a soft, soothing manner which suggested that he had judged you to be in a very bad temper and was determined to coax you out of it. His dress-clearly the product of a compromise between the demands of a morning in the office and an afternoon’s golf- consisted of a black lounge suit jacket, a brown cardigan and a pair of grey flannel trousers. He had a habit of wrenching desperately at his collar as if it were choking him.
When I entered the room he was fiddling busily with the curser of a two-foot slide-rule and transferring the results of his calculations to the margin of a copy of The Times Trade and Engineering Supplement. Without looking at me he waved the slide-rule in the air to indicate that he was nearly finished. A moment or two later he dropped the slide-rule, sprang to his feet and shook me warmly by the hand.
“How very good of you to come all this way to see us.” He pressed me into a chair. “Do sit down. Now let me see, it’s Mr. Marlow, isn’t it? Splendid.” He waved a deprecatory hand at his marginal calculations. “Just a little problem in mechanics, Mr. Marlow. I’ve been trying to work out approximately how many foot-pounds of energy an eighteen handicap man saves on an average round by having a caddy to carry his clubs for him. It’s a tremendous figure.” He chuckled. “Do you play golf, Mr. Marlow?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“A great game. The greatest of all games.” He beamed at me. “Well, well now. To business, eh? We wrote to you, didn’t we? Yes, of course.” He relapsed into his chair again and stared at me through the lower half of his spectacles for fully thirty seconds. Then he leaned forward across the table. “ Se non e in grado,” he said deliberately, “ di accettare questa mia proposta, me lo dica francamente. Non me l’avro a male.”
I was a little taken aback, but I replied suitably: “ Prima prendere una decisione vorrei sapere sua proposta, Signore.”
His eyebrows went up. He snapped his fingers delightedly. He lifted the slide-rule, banged it down on the table and sat back again.
“Mr. Marlow,” he said solemnly, “you are the first person to answer our advertisement who has read it carefully. I have seen six gentlemen before you. Three of them could speak tourist French and insisted that most Italians would understand it. One had been in Ceylon and had a smattering of Tamil. He declared, by the way, that if you shouted loud enough in English anyone would know what you were driving at. Of the other two, one spoke fluent German, while the last had been on a cruise and spent a day in Naples. You are the first to see us who can speak Italian.” He paused. Then a sudden expression of alarm clouded his features. He looked like a child who is about to be hurt. “You are an engineer, aren’t you, Mr. Marlow?” He plucked anxiously at his collar. “You are not, by any chance, an electrician or a chemist or a wireless expert?”
