His room had, of course, been disturbed. He unlocked a drawer in his dressing-table and found that two notebooks were missing. His portable typewriter had been opened and clumsily shut. Ten five-pound notes were, however, untouched in another drawer by the person who had climbed to his room while Leslie had engaged Miss Frierne in talk.
He came down to the kitchen where Miss Frierne sighed into her tea.
‘Next time that Leslie comes round to the back door have a look, will you, to see who he’s left at the front door. His father’s worried about his companions after school hours, I happen to know.’
‘He only wanted to know if you had any errands to run. I daresay to help his mother, like a good kid. I told him I thought you’re short of bacon for your breakfast. He’ll be back. There’s no harm in that boy, I know it by instinct, and instinct always tells. Like what happened to me in the street today.’ She sipped her tea, and was silent.
Dougal sipped his. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you’re dying to tell me what happened.’
‘As true as God is my judge,’ she said, ‘I saw my brother up at Camberwell Green that left home in nineteen- nineteen. We never heard a word from him all those years. He was coming out of Lyons.’
‘Didn’t you go and speak to him?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t. He was very shabby, he looked awful. Something stopped me. It was an instinct. I couldn’t do it. He saw me, too.’
She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and patted beneath her glasses.
‘You should have gone up to him,’ Dougal said. ‘You should have said, “Are you…” – what was his name?’
‘Harold,’ she said.
‘You should have said, “Are you Harold?”, that’s what you ought to have done. Instead of which you didn’t. You came back here and gave a doughnut to that rotten little Leslie.’
‘Don’t you point your finger at me, Dougal. Nobody does that in my house. You can find other accommodation
Dougal got up and shuffled round the kitchen with a slouch and an old ill look. ‘Is that what your old brother looked like?’ he said.
She laughed in high-pitched ripples.
Dougal thrust his hands into his pockets and looked miserably at his toes.
She started to cry all over her spectacles.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t your brother at all,’ Dougal said.
‘That’s what I’m wondering, son.
‘Just feel my head,’ Dougal said, ‘these two small bumps here.’
‘There are four types of morality in Peckham,’ Dougal said to Mr Druce. ‘The first category is -‘
‘Dougal,’ he said, ‘are you doing anything tonight?’
‘Well, I usually prepare my notes. You realize, don’t you, that Oliver Goldsmith taught in a school in Peck-ham? He used to commit absenteeism and spent a lot of his time in a coffee-house at the Temple instead of in Peckham. I wonder why?’
‘I need your advice,’ Mr Druce said. ‘There’s a place in Soho -‘
‘I don’t like crossing the river,’ Dougal said, ‘not without my broomstick.’
Mr Druce made double chins and looked lovingly at Dougal.
‘There’s a place in Soho -‘
‘I could spare a couple of hours,’ Dougal said. ‘I could see you up at Dulwich at the Dragon at nine.’
‘Well, I was thinking of making an evening of it, Dougal; some dinner at this place in Soho -‘
‘Nine at the Dragon,’ Dougal said.
‘Mrs Druce knows a lot of people in Dulwich.’
‘All the better,’ Dougal said.
Dougal arrived at the Dragon at nine sharp. He drank gin and peppermint while he waited. At half past nine two girls from Drover Willis’s came in. Dougal joined them. Mr Druce did not come. At ten o’clock they went on a bus to the Rosemary Branch in Southampton Way. Here, Dougal expounded the idea that everyone should take every second Monday morning off their work. When they came out of the pub, at eleven, Nelly Mahone crossed the street towards them.
‘Praise be to the Lord,’ she cried, ‘whose providence in all things never fails.’
‘Hi, Nelly,’ said one of the girls as she passed.
Nelly raised up her voice and in the same tone proclaimed, ‘Praise be to God who by sin is offended, Trevor Lomas, Collie Gould up the Elephant with young Leslie, and by penance appeased, the exaltation of the humble and the strength of the righteous.’
‘Ah, Nelly,’ Dougal said.
Chapter 7
‘YES, Cheese?’ Dougal said.
‘Look, Doug. I think I can’t have this story about the Dragon at Dulwich, it’s indecent. Besides, it isn’t true. And I never went to Soho at that age. I never went out with any managing director -‘
‘It will help to sell the book,’ Dougal said. He breathed moistly on the oak panel of Miss Frierne’s hall, and with his free hand drew a face on the misty surface where he had breathed.
‘And Doug dear,’ said the voice from across the river, ‘how did you know I started life in a shoe factory? I mean to say,
‘I didn’t know, Cheese,’ Dougal said.
‘You must have known. You’ve got all the details right, except that it wasn’t in Peckham, it was Streatham. It all came back to me as I read it. It’s uncanny. You’ve been checking up on me, haven’t you, Doug?’
‘Aye,’ Dougal said. He breathed on the panel, wrote in a word, then rubbed it off.
‘Doug, you mustn’t do that. It makes me creepy to think that people can find out all about you,’ Miss Cheeseman said. ‘I mean, I don’t want to put in about the shoe factory and all that. Besides, the period. It dates me.
‘It only makes you sixty-eight, Cheese.’
‘Well, Doug, there must be a way of making me not even that. I want you to come over, Doug. I’ve been feeling off colour.’
‘I’ve got a fatal flaw,’ Dougal said, ‘to the effect that I can’t bear anyone off colour. Moreover, Saturday’s my clay off and it’s a beautiful summer day.’
‘Dear Doug, I promise to be well. Only come over. I’m
‘Rambling,’ Dougal said.
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘I’ll see you at four,’ Dougal said.
At the back of Hollis’s Hamburgers at Elephant and Castle was a room furnished with a fitted grey carpet, a red upholstered modern suite comprising a sofa and two cubic armchairs, a television receiver on a light wood stand, a low glass-topped coffee table, a table on which stood an electric portable gramophone and a tape recorder, a light wood bureau desk, a standard lamp, and several ash-trays on stands. Two of the walls were papered with a wide grey stripe. The other two were covered with a pattern of gold stars on red. Fixed to the walls were a number of white brackets containing pots of indoor ivy. The curtains, which were striped red and white, were drawn. This cheerful interior was lit by a couple of red-shaded wall-lamps. In one chair sat Leslie Crewe, with his neck held rigidly and attentively. He was dressed in a navy-blue suit of normal cut, and a peach-coloured tie, and looked older than thirteen. In another chair lolled Collie Gould who was eighteen and had been found unfit for National Service; Collie suffered from lung trouble for which he was constantly under treatment, and was at present on probation for motor stealing. He wore a dark-grey draped jacket with narrow black trousers. Trevor Lomas, dressed in blue-grey, lay between them on the sofa. All smoked American cigarettes. All looked miserable, not as an expression of their feelings, but as if by an instinctive prearrangement, to convey a decision on all affairs whatsoever.
Trevor held in his hand one of the two thin exercise books he had stolen from Dougal’s drawer. The other lay
