Pointer ignored the reminder of this misfortune and said some harsh things about the indifference of the police to pubic-spirited inquiries. Hoole nodded agreement while he strolled alongside, happily sniffing the June air and saluting, with benign superiority, such of his fellow citizens as happened to be at their doors and dispensing those misleadingly affable salutations that are customary in small country towns.
The optician was a short, apple-cheeked man. His plumpness seemed to consist of compressed energy that he was at pains to keep from being transformed into unseemly haste or excitement. He had a femininely smooth chin, tucked well in, a beakish nose pinched at the bridge by new old-fashioned rimless glasses, an unlined expanse of intelligent forehead, and sparse but primly disciplined hair. His almost permanent smile might have been that of a man slightly mad, yet supremely fastidious in his eccentricity. Unlettered locals deeply respected Mr Hoole’s air of donnish self-confidence, but they were suspicious and resentful of what they termed his “sarky” sense of humour. On the topic of explosions, Pointer found his companion somewhat unresponsive, and the subject had been abandoned by the time they emerged from East Street into the fan-shaped area of Great Market. This green-centred triangle, containing a bus stand and a maze of cattle pens, was dominated by Chalmsbury’s war memorial (commemorative of 1914-18 only; an addendum relative to the more recent conflict was still the subject of somewhat acrimonious argument in the Town Council). It consisted of a short oval column, set upon a plinth, and bearing the bronze figure of a heavily moustached infantry officer in the act, apparently, of hurling a pair of binoculars at the Post Office.
At the further end of Great Market, Pointer entered his office, leaving Hoole to pursue a leisurely course through Church Street, now tight as a gut with vans and trucks and cars and droves of seemingly immortal cyclists, across St Luke’s Square and over the Borough Bridge to Watergate Street. Here were his consulting rooms, as he called the cupboard-like quarters squeezed between a furniture store and the melancholy mock-magnificence of the Rialto Cinema.
Looking at some stills outside the picture house was a big, loose-legged man in a brown, chalk-striped suit. His hands, clasped behind him, looked like a pair of courting Flamborough crabs. The back of his neck had the colour and texture of peeled salami.
Hearing Hoole’s key in the shop door, the man turned.
“Hello there, Sawdust.”
Hoole did not look round immediately. He knew who stood there. Only one person in Chalmsbury delighted still to use the epithet earned long years ago at the Grammar School by the boy Hoole’s shameful propensity for being sick in class and requiring the attendance of the caretaker with his bucket of sawdust and his deep, contemptuous sighs. Stanley Biggadyke, his chief tormentor at that time, had a memory crammed like a schoolboy’s pocket with revolting oddities and carefully preserved bits of ammunition.
“Morning, Big.” Hoole had used the pause to quell a strong temptation to outdo the other’s offensiveness. He held open the door and grinned a bland, unmeant welcome.
Biggadyke stepped past him and peered round the dark little box of a shop. “Somebody’s pinched those glasses you did for me,” he announced.
“Pinched them?”
“Well they’ve gone, anyway. I’ll have to have another pair.”
“Have you the prescription?”
Biggadyke gestured carelessly. “I’ve got nothing. I thought you kept all that sort of thing.”
Hoole pulled out a drawer in a small filing cabinet and fingered quickly and delicately through cards. He eased one up. “You had those spectacles six years ago. I’ll have to test your eyes again.”
Biggadyke’s mouth, which was normally kept hanging slightly open like a ventilator in the dark red heat of his complexion, shut and twisted. “Trust you to pile on the extras. All right. Sawdust, let’s get on with it. I’ve been waiting half the morning for you already.”
Hoole opened a door at the back of the shop and preceded Biggadyke up a short flight of narrow, carpeted stairs to the room above. Other customers, he knew, would soon be arriving for appointments but they would have to wait. He couldn’t trust himself to face a postponed encounter with Biggadyke in anything like his present state of self-control.
Calmly he switched on the lamps over his charts and padded around making preliminary adjustments to pieces of equipment that his patient eyed with sceptical amusement. “All part of the act, eh, old man?”
The optician hummed good-humouredly. When he was satisfied with his arrangements he motioned Biggadyke to sit in the padded, upright chair facing a mirror in which the charts, behind and above the chair were reflected.
The sound of a horn, strident and imperious, penetrated the quiet, shuttered room. Biggadyke raised his head and scowled. “That’s my bloody car.” He listened a while, then relaxed. “Kids. Carry on, Sawdust.”
Hoole opened a small, glass-fronted case. “You can drive all right without glasses, then?”
“I can drive blindfold, cock.”
Hoole grunted and sorted out a tiny brown bottle and a dropper from the contents of one of the shelves. “Hold your head well back and look to one side.”
Biggadyke winced as Hoole let fall four or five drops of icy liquid into each red-rimmed eye. “Just blink them in,” said Hoole. “They won’t hurt.”
“You didn’t do this last time.”
“It’s better if I can take a good look inside. That’s what this stuff is for. Keep your head back a few minutes.”
Hoole had good reason to remember ‘last time’. It was the only occasion—since his schooldays, at least—on which he had allowed himself to fall victim to one of Biggadyke’s practical jokes. The town, he supposed, was still enjoying the story. A choice fragment of the Biggadyke legend. ‘He’s a card, old Stan; a proper rum ’un’. How rum could one get, Hoole asked himself. He glanced, almost apprehensively, at the reading chart. The four biggest letters that formed its top line were just as they ought to be: black, solid, meaningless. Not—his scalp tingled at the recollection—as they had unaccountably appeared to prim old Mrs Garside when she had taken the chair and been asked to read them immediately after Biggadyke’s last visit to his consulting rooms. Hoole looked just once more to satisfy himself that Biggadyke had not again, in an unobserved moment, superimposed that frightful four-lettered
