CHAPTER THREE
Harry Marks was the luckiest man alive.
His mother had always told him he was lucky. Although his father had been killed in the Great War, he was lucky to have had a strong and capable mother to bring him up. She cleaned offices for a living, and all through the Slump she had never been out of work. They lived in a tenement in Battersea, with a cold-water tap on each landing and outside toilets, but they were surrounded by good neighbors who helped one another through times of trouble. Harry had a knack of escaping from trouble! When boys were being thrashed at school, the teacher’s cane would break just before he got to Harry. Harry could fall under a horse and cart and have them pass over him without touching him.
It was his love of jewelry that had made him a thief. As an adolescent he had loved to walk along the opulent shopping streets of the . West End and look in the windows of jewelers’ shops. He was enraptured by the diamonds and precious stones glinting on dark velvet pads under the bright display lights. He liked them for their beauty, but also because they symbolized a kind of life he had read about in books, a life of spacious country houses with broad green lawns, where pretty girls with names like Lady Penelope and Jessica Chumley played tennis all afternoon and came in panting for tea.
He had been apprenticed to a jeweler, but he had been bored and restless, and he left after six months. Mending broken watch straps and enlarging wedding rings for overweight wives had no glamour. But he had learned to tell a ruby from a red garnet, a natural pearl from a cultured one, and a modern brilliant-cut diamond from a nineteenth-century old mine cut. He had also discovered the difference between an appropriate setting and an ugly one, a graceful design and a tasteless piece of ostentation; and the ability to discriminate had further inflamed his lust for beautiful jewelry and his longing for the style of life that went with it.
He eventually found a way to satisfy both desires by making use of girls such as Rebecca Maugham- Flint.
He had met Rebecca at Ascot. He often picked up rich girls at race meetings. The open air and the crowds made it possible for him to hover between two groups of young racegoers in such a way that everyone thought he was part of the other group. Rebecca was a tall girl with a big nose, dreadfully dressed in a ruched jersey dress and a Robin Hood hat with a feather in it. None of the young men around her paid any attention to her, and she was pathetically grateful to Harry for talking to her.
He had not pursued the acquaintanceship right away, for it was best not to seem eager. But when he ran into her a month later, at an art gallery, she greeted him like an old friend and introduced him to her mother.
Girls such as Rebecca were not supposed to go unchaperoned to cinemas and restaurants with boys, of course; only shopgirls and factory workers did that. So they would pretend to their parents that they were going out in a crowd; and to make it look right, they would generally begin the evening at a cocktail party. Afterward they could go off discreetly in pairs. This suited Harry ideally: since he was not officially “courting” Rebecca, her parents saw no need to look closely into his background, and they never questioned the vague lies he told about a country house in Yorkshire, a minor public school in Scotland, an invalid mother living in the south of France and a prospective commission in the Royal Air Force.
Vague lies were common in upper-class society, he had found. They were told by young men who did not want to admit to being desperately poor, or having parents who were hopeless drunks, or coming from families that had disgraced themselves by scandal. No one troubled to pin a fellow down until he showed signs of a serious attachment to a well-bred girl.
In this indefinite way Harry had been going around with Rebecca for three weeks. She had got him invited to a weekend house party in Kent, where he had played cricket and stolen money from the hosts, who had been too embarrassed to report the theft for fear of offending their guests. She had also taken him to several balls, where he had picked pockets and emptied purses. In addition, when calling at her parents’ house he had taken small sums of money, some silver cutlery and three interesting Victorian brooches that her mother had not yet missed.
There was nothing immoral in what he did, in his opinion. The people from whom he stole did not deserve their wealth. Most of them had never done a day’s work in their lives. Those few who had to have some kind of job used their public-school connections to get overpaid sinecures: they were diplomats, chairmen of companies, judges or Conservative MPs. Stealing from them was like killing Nazis: a service to the public, not a crime.
He had been doing this for two years, and he knew it could not go on forever. The world of upper-class English society was large but limited, and eventually someone would find him out. The war had come at a time when he was ready to look for a different way of life.
However, he was not going to join the army as a regular soldier. Bad food, itchy clothes, bullying and military discipline were not for him, and he looked sickly in olive drab. Air force blue matched his eyes, however, and he
