‘Well, but no better than us. I don’t know why you sit up talking at nights with him.’
Humphrey sat up late in Dougal’s room.
‘My father’s in the same trade. He puts himself down as a fitter. Same job.’
‘It is right and proper,’ Dougal said, ‘that you should be called a refrigerator engineer. It brings lyricism to the concept.’
‘I don’t trouble myself about that,’ Humphrey said. ‘But what you call a job makes a difference to the Unions. My dad doesn’t see that.’
‘Do you like brass bedsteads?’ Dougal said. ‘We had them at home. We used to unscrew the knobs and hide the fag ends inside.’
‘By common law,’ Humphrey said, ‘a trade union has no power to take disciplinary action against its members. By common law a trade union cannot fine, suspend, or expel its members. It can only do so contractually. That is, by its rules.’
‘Quite,’ said Dougal, who was lolling on his brass bed.
‘You can use your imagination,’ Humphrey said. ‘If a member is expelled from a union that operates a closed shop…’
‘Ghastly,’ said Dougal, who was trying to unscrew one of the knobs.
‘But all that won’t concern you much,’ Humphrey said. ‘What you want to know about for your human research is arbitration in trade disputes. There’s the Conciliation Act 1896 and the Industrial Courts Act 1919, but you wouldn’t need to go into those. You might study the Industrial Disputes Order 1951. But you aren’t likely to have a dispute at Meadows, Meade & Grindley. You might have an issue, though.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Oh, a vast difference. Sometimes they take it to law to decide whether an issue or a dispute has arisen. It’s been as far as the Court of Appeal. I’ll let you have the books. Issue is whether certain employers should observe certain terms of employment. Dispute is any dispute between employer and employee as to terms of employment or conditions of labour.’
‘Terrific,’ Dougal said. ‘You must have given your mind to it.’
‘I took a course. But you’ll soon get to know what’s what in Industrial Relations.’
‘Fascinating,’ Dougal said. ‘Everything is fascinating. to me, so far. Do you know what I came across the other day? An account of the fair up the road at Camberwell Green.’
‘Fair?’
‘According to Colburn’s
There is here, and only here, to be seen what you can see nowhere else, the lately caught and highly accomplished young mermaid, about whom the continental journals have written so ably. She combs her hair in the manner practised in China, and admires herself in a glass in the manner practised everywhere. She has had the best instructors in every peculiarity of education, and can argue on any given subject, from the most popular way of preserving plums, down to the necessity of a change of Ministers. She plays the harp in the new effectual style prescribed by Mr Bocha, of whom we wished her to take lessons, but, having some mermaiden scruples, she begged to be provided with a less popular master. Being so clever and accomplished, she can’t bear to be contradicted, and lately leaped out of her tub and floored a distinguished fellow of the Royal Zoological Society, who was pleased to be more curious and cunning than she was pleased to think agreeable. She has composed various poems for the periodicals, and airs with variations for the harp and piano, all very popular and pleasing.
Dougal gracefully cast his book aside. ‘How I should like to meet a mermaid!’ he said.
‘Terrific,’ Humphrey said. ‘You make it up?’ he asked. ‘No, I copied it out of an old book in the library. My research. Mendelssohn wrote his ‘Spring Song’ in Ruskin Park. Ruskin lived on Denmark Hill. Mrs Fitzherbert lived in Camberwell Grove. Boadicea committed suicide on Peckham Rye probably where the bowling green is now, I should imagine. But, look here, how would you like to be engaged to marry a mermaid that writes poetry?’
‘Fascinating,’ Humphrey said.
Dougal gazed at him like a succubus whose mouth is its eyes.
Humphrey’s friend, Trevor Lomas, had said Dougal was probably pansy.
‘I don’t think so,’ Humphrey had replied. ‘He’s got a girl somewhere.’
‘Might be versatile.’
‘Could be.’
Dougal said, ‘The boss advised me to mix with everybody in the district, high and low. I should like to mix with that mermaid.’
Dougal put a record on the gramophone he had borrowed from Elaine Kent in the textile factory. It was a Mozart Quartet. He slid the rugs aside with his foot and danced to the music on the bare linoleum, with stricken movements of his hands. He stopped when the record stopped, replaced the rugs, and said, ‘I must get to know some of the youth clubs. Dixie will be a member of a youth club, I expect.’
‘She isn’t,’ Humphrey said rather rapidly.
Dougal opened a bottle of Algerian wine. He took his time, and with a pair of long tweezers fished out a bit of cork that had dropped inside the bottle. He held up the pair of tweezers.
‘I use these,’ he said, ‘to pluck out the hairs which grow inside my nostrils, and which are unsightly. Eventually, I lose the tweezers, then I buy another pair.’
He placed the tweezers on the bed. Humphrey lifted them, examined them, then placed them on the dressing table.
‘Dixie will know,’ Dougal said, ‘about the youth clubs.’
‘No, she won’t. She doesn’t have anything to do with youth clubs. There are classes within classes in Peckham.’
‘Dixie would be upper-working,’ said Dougal. He poured wine into two tumblers and handed one to Humphrey.
‘Well, I’d say middle-class. It’s not a snob business, it’s a question of your type.’
‘Or lower-middle,’ Dougal said.
Humphrey looked vaguely as if Dixie was being insulted. But then he looked pleased. His eyes went narrow, his head lolled on the back of the chair, copying one of Dougal’s habitual poses.
‘Dixie’s saving up,’ he said. ‘It’s all she can think of, saving up to get married. And now what does she say? We can’t go out more than one night a week so that I can save up too.’
‘Avarice,’ Dougal said, ‘must be her fatal flaw. We all have a fatal flaw. If she took sick, how would you feel, would she repel you?’
Dougal had taken Miss Merle Coverdale for a walk across the great sunny common of the Rye on a Saturday afternoon. Merle Coverdale was head of the typing pool at Meadows, Meade & Grindley. She was thirty- seven.
Dougal said, ‘My lonely heart is deluged by melancholy and it feels quite nice.’
‘Someone might hear you talking like that.’
‘You are a terror and a treat,’ Dougal said. ‘You look to me like an Okapi,’ he said.
‘A what?’
‘An Okapi is a rare beast from the Congo. It looks a little like a deer, but it tries to be a giraffe. It has stripes and it stretches its neck as far as possible and its ears are like a donkey’s. It is a little bit of everything. There are only a few in captivity. It is very shy.’
‘Why do you say I’m like it?’
‘Because you’re so shy.’
‘Me shy?’
‘Yes. You haven’t told me about your love affair with Mr Druce. You’re too shy.’
‘Oh, that’s only a friendship. You’ve got it all wrong. What makes you think it’s a love affair? Who told you that?’
‘I’ve got second sight.’
He brought her to the gate of the park and was leading her through it, when she said,
‘This doesn’t lead anywhere. We’ll have to go back the same way.’
‘Yes, it does,’ Dougal said, ‘it leads to One Tree Hill and two cemeteries, the Old and the New. Which would
