Under his feet in the basement someone was moving the furniture about the spouse, he thought. A train hooted and a smother of smoke fell into the street.
Over his head Mr. Drewitt began to speak there was nothing anywhere to keep out sound. Then footsteps Mr. Drewitt's smile went on as the door opened.
'What brings our young cavalier?'
'I just wanted to see you,' the Boy said. 'See how you were getting along.' A spasm of pain drove the smile from Mr. Drewitt's face. 'You ought to eat more careful,' the Boy said.
'Nothing does it any good,' Mr. Drewitt said.
'You drink too much.'
'Eat, drink, for tomorrow...' Mr. Drewitt writhed with his hand on his stomach.
'You got an ulcer?' the Boy said.
'No, no, nothing like that.'
'You ought to have your inside photographed.'
'I don't believein the knife,' Mr. Drewitt said quickly and nervously, as if it was a suggestion constantly made for which he had to have the answer on the tongue.
'Don't that music ever stop?'
'When I get tired of it,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'I beat on the wall.' He took a paperweight off his desk and struck the wall twice; the music broke into a high oscillating wail and ceased. They could hear the neighbour move furiously behind the shelves. 'How now! a rat?'
Mr. Drewitt quoted. The house shook as a heavy engine pulled out. 'Polonius,' Mr. Drewitt explained.
'Polony? What polony?'
'No, no,' Mr. Drewitt said. 'The rank intruding fool, I mean. In Hamlet.'
'Listen,' the Boy said impatiently, 'has a woman been round here asking questions?'
'What sort of questions?'
'About Spicer.'
Mr. Drewitt said with sickly despair: 'Are people asking questions?' He sat down quickly and bent with indigestion. 'I've just been waiting for this.'
'There's no need to get scared,' the Boy said.
'They can't prove anything. You just stick to your story.' He sat down opposite Mr. Drewitt and regarded him with grim contempt. 'You don't want to ruin yourself,' he said.
Mr. Drewitt looked sharply up. 'Ruin?' he said.
'I'm ruined now.' He vibrated with the engines on his chair, and somebody in the basement slammed the floor beneath their feet. 'What ho, old mole!' Mr.
Drewitt said. 'The spouse you've never met the spouse.'
'I've seen her,' the Boy said.
'Twenty-five years. Then this.' The smoke came down outside the window like a blind. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'that you're lucky?
The worst that can happen to you is you'll hang. But I can rot.'
'What's upsetting you?' the Boy said. He was confused as if a weak man had struck him back. He wasn't used to this the infringement of other people's lives. Confession was an act one did or didn't do oneself.
'When I took on your work,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'I lost the only other job I had. The Bakely Trust. And now I've lost you.'
'You got everything there is of mine.'
'There won't be any more soon. Colleoni's going to take over this place from you, and he's got his lawyer.
A man in London. A swell.'
'I haven't thrown my sponge in yet.' He sniffed the air tainted with gasometers and said: 'I know what's wrong with you. You're drunk.'
'On Empire burgundy,' Mr. Drewitt said. 'I want to tell you things. Pinkie, I want' the literary phrase came glibly out 'to unburden myself.'
'I don't want to hear them. I'm not interested in your troubles.'
'I married beneath me,' Mr. Drewitt said. 'It was my tragic mistake. I was young. An affair of uncontrollable passion. I was a passionate man,' he said, wriggling with indigestion. 'You've seen her,' he said, 'now. My God.' He leant forward and said in a whisper: 'I watch the little typists go by carrying their little cases. I'm quite harmless. A man may watch. My God, how neat and trim!' He broke off, his hand vibrating on the chair arm. 'Listen to the old mole down there. She's ruined me.' His old lined face had taken a holiday from bonhomie, from cunning, from the legal jest. It was a Sunday and it was itself.
Mr. Drewitt said: 'You know what Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked where Hell was? He said: 'Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it.' ' The Boy watched him with fascination and fear.
'She's cleaning in the kitchen,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'but she'll be coming up later. You ought to meet her it'd be a treat. The old hag. What a joke it would be, wouldn't it, to tell her everything. That I'm concerned in a murder. That people are asking questions.
To pull down the whole damned house like Samson.'
He stretched his arms wide and contracted them in the pain of indigestion, 'You're right,' he said, 'I've got an ulcer. But I won't have the knife. I'd rather die. I'm drunk too. On Empire burgundy. Do you see that photo there by the door? A school group. Lancaster College. Not one of the great schools perhaps, but you'll find it in the Public Schools Year Book. You'll see me there cross-legged in the bottom row. In a straw hat.' He said softly: 'We had field days with Harrow. A rotten set they were. No esprit de corps.'
The Boy didn't so much as turn his head to look--he had never known Drewitt like this before: it was a frightening and an entrancing exhibition. A man was coming alive before his eyes: he could see the nerves set to work in the agonised flesh, thought bloom in the transparent brain.
'To think,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'an old Lancaster boy to be married to that mole in the cellarage down there and to have as only client' he gave his mouth an expression of fastidious disgust 'you. What would old Manders say? A great head.'
He had the bit between his teeth; he was like a man determined to live before he died; all the insults he had swallowed from police witnesses, the criticisms of magistrates, regurgitated from his tormented stomach.
There was nothing he wouldn't tell to anybody. An enormous self-importance was blossoming out of his humiliation; his wife, the Empire burgundy, the empty files, and the vibration of locomotives on the line, they were the important landscape of his great drama.
'You talk too easily,' the Boy said.
'Talk?' Mr. Drewitt said. 'I could shake the world.
Let them put me in the dock if they like. I'll give them revelation. I've sunk so deep I carry' he was shaken by an enormous windy selfesteem, he hiccuped twice 'the secrets of the sewer.'
'If I'd known you drank,' the Boy said, 'I wouldn't have touched you.'
'I drink on Sundays. It's the day of rest.' He suddenly beat his foot upon the floor and screamed furiously. 'Be quiet down there.'
'You need a holiday,' the Boy said.
'I sit here and sit here the bell rings, but it's only the groceries tinned salmon, she has a passion for tinned salmon. Then I ring the bell and in comes that pasty stupid I watch the typists going by. I could embrace their little portable machines.'
'You'd be all right,' the Boy said nervous and shaken with the conception of another life growing in the brain 'if you took a holiday.'
'Sometimes,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'I have an urge to expose myself shamefully in a park.'
'I'll give you money.'
* 4 No money can heal a mind diseased. This is Hell, nor are we out of it. How much could you spare?'
'Twenty nicker.'
'It would go only a little way.'
'Boulogne why not slip across the Channel?' the Boy said with horrified disgust. 'Enjoy yourself' watching the grubby and bitten nails, the shaky hands which were the instruments of pleasure.
