window?”
Pooley arrested his ascent and thought for a moment or two. Perhaps Archroy was cleaning his windows and forgot to remove the ladder? The small voice said, “Come now, Pooley.”
“I’ll just shin up and have a quick shufty in through the window,” Pooley told the voice. He accomplished the ascent with admirable dexterity, considering that the effects of the Professor’s sherry seemed to be increasing by the minute. The full moon shone down through the bedroom window, flooding the room with its septic light. Pooley’s head rose cautiously above the window sill and came to rest, his nose hooked over it in the manner of the legendary Chad. As his eyes took in the situation the words that escaped his lips in an amazed whisper were generally of a sort totally unprintable.
There upon continental quilt, bouncing and gyrating in a frenzy of sexual abandonment, was Archroy’s wife. Locked in passionate congress with this insatiable female was none other than John Vincent Omally, bachelor of this parish.
“Bastard,” mouthed Jim Pooley, which was at least in the Oxford Dictionary. “The conniving treacherous…” his mind sought about for an adjective suitable to the expression of his displeasure. It was during the search that Pooley’s eyes alighted upon the very objects which had led him to the unexpected viewing of this lewd and certainly x-certificate performance.
There they lay, glowing with a faint luminescence, upon the dressing-table inches away from the window. Pooley spied them with great satisfaction, feeling that his noble quest had been justly rewarded by instantaneous success achieved with only the minimum of physical exertion and with next to no danger to life or limb. This feeling of well-being was, however, almost immediately succeeded by one of disgust. For although the beans lay in attitudes suggestive of lifelessness, it was obvious to Jim from where he clung to his airy perch that they were very much on the alert. They were quite definitely watching and apparently thoroughly enjoying the erotic spectacle. They exuded such a sense of dark evil and inhuman nastiness that Jim was hard put to it to subdue the disgust which rose within him like an out-of-season vindaloo.
Taking a deep yet silent breath, he thrust his hand through the window and snatched up the sinister beans from their grandstand seats on the dressing-table. Omally’s bum, glowing ivory in the moonlight, rose and fell undeterred. Pooley thrust the beans into his coat pocket and made haste down the ladder.
Here he transferred the beans into a drawstring bag sanctified by the Professor for the purpose. “Another job jobbed,” said Pooley with some relief. The operations had been a remarkable success, handled with alacrity, diligence, dexterity and skill. High upon Olympus hosts of ancient Pooleys opened a bottle of champagne and toasted their descendant.
Pooley strode down the alley with a jaunty spring to his step. He had not gone but three yards, however, when the vengeful left pedal of Marchant caught him by the sound trouser-cuff and upended him into the muddy gloom.
“You swine,” growled Pooley, lashing out with his boots in as many directions as possible.
“Who’s there?” said a voice from an upper window.
Jim edged along the side wall of the house, gained the street and took to his heels. In the darkened alleyway Omally’s bike chuckled mechanically to its iron self and rang its bell in delight. On High Olympus the Pooleys sought other amusements.
6
Captain Carson stood upon the porch of the Seamen’s Mission taking in the fresh morning air. The Mission was situated on the Butts Estate not a stone’s throw from Professor Slocombe’s house. It was a fine Victorian building, built in an era when craftsmen took a pride in their work and knew nothing of time and a half and guaranteed Sunday working. Now the once-proud structure had fallen into bitter disrepair; its chimney pots leaned at crazy angles, its roof lacked many essential tiles, paint peeled from the carved gables. That which the tireless assault of wind and weather had not achieved without, had been amply accomplished within by woodworm and a multifarious variety of fungi, dry rot and deathwatch beetle.
The Captain stood framed in the doorway, master of his land-bound ship. Thirty years he had been at the helm. The Mission, bequeathed to the borough by a long dead Victorian benefactor and maintained by a substantial foundation, was the Captain’s pride. A fine figure of a man, still erect and dignified although now the graveyard side of seventy, the Captain took a pull upon his cherrywood pipe and let escape a blue swirl of seaman’s smoke. His white hair and tabby beard, the faded blue of his rollneck sweater, the bellbottom trousers and yachting sandals all bespoke in him a man who lived and breathed for nothing but the salt winds of the briny deep and the roar of the shorebound breakers.
Sad to say the Captain had never seen the sea. He had taken the job at the Mission at a time when jobs were few and far between and one took what one could. The only stipulation given had been that the applicant must be a man of nautical bent with a love of the sea who would maintain the Mission to the highest ideals and qualities of his Majesty’s Fleet.
Togging up at a theatrical outfitter’s with his last few pennies Horatio B. Carson applied for the post. His characterization must have been as convincing as that of Charles Laughton in
His duties were not arduous. Few if any sailors had ever honoured the Mission with their visits. However, a proliferation of down and outs, ne’er-do-wells, roguish knights of the road, shoelace pedlars and grimy individuals smelling strongly of meths and cheap sherry had soon appeared upon the doorstep. The Captain welcomed each in turn, extending to them the utmost courtesy, carrying their sorry bundles and opening doors before them.
“Here is your room, sir,” he would say, drawing their attention to the luxuriance of the pillows and the fine quality of the bedcoverings. “Our last lodger had to leave in something of a hurry,” he would explain. “He, like your good self, was a seafaring man and the doctors at the isolation hospital said that there would have been some hope of saving his life had they been able to identify the crippling and particularly virulent form of disease to which he so sadly succumbed. I haven’t had a chance to fumigate the room yet, but I am sure that your travels must by now have made you immune to most sicknesses, even of the horrendously disfiguring and painful variety which so sorrowfully took him from us.”
At this point the Captain would remove his hat, place it over his heart and look skyward. The tramp to which he was addressing this tragic monologue would follow the direction of his eyes then make his exit, often at astonishing speed, with talk of “pressing engagements” and “business elsewhere”.
In the thirty long years of the Captain’s residence, no visitor, no matter how apparent his need or dire his circumstance, be his tale one to raise a tear in a glass eyeball, no visitor had ever spent a single night within the Seamen’s Mission.
On this particular morning as the Captain stood upon the porch his thoughts dwelt mainly upon money, the strange ways of fate and the scourge of homosexuality. He knew that he could not expect many more years within the Mission and that his days were most definitely numbered. The job supplied no pension, and with the swelling list of forged signatures speaking of the enormous physical effort required of one man to maintain the Mission there had been talk of employing a younger person. The yearly meeting between himself and the Foundation’s trustees had been but a week before and he, the Captain, had handed over his tailored accounts and spoken modestly of his good works. But a new face had appeared upon the Committee this year, a young and eager face. During the previous twelve months one of the Trustees had died and the lot had fallen to his nephew to succeed him.
Young Brian Crowley had no love for elderly sea captains. His distaste for such patriarchs was only exceeded by his out-and-out hatred for tramps, loafers, down-and-outs, gypsies, foreigners and women. The limp-wristed Brian cared little for anybody other than an Italian waiter who worked at the Adelaide Tea Rooms. He had promised to set Mario up in his own restaurant, the dago waiter being a veritable “wizard-de-cuisine” and exceptionally well hung into the bargain.
The fates, which had conspired to arrange the sad demise of his dear uncle and Brian’s succession to the Foundation committee, had also decreed that this year the Council would raise their annual offer
