Days of Your Fathers (14 page)

‘Would it be all right down there where you come from?' Bill asked.

‘It's what you make of it. First impressions are a lot more favourable than they used to be.'

‘There's nothing else you could do with, is there? That's a fine old Welsh dresser you're a-leaning on.'

‘It's as fine a piece as ever I saw,' the chap admitted. ‘But it's too big to go in the launch and you know that as well as I do, Mr Hackafree.'

Bill did. That was why he still had it. Everything else had been pawned with old Timothy at the port on the mainland – his stuffed raven in the glass case and his grandfather's watch and the tea-set his aunt had left him and all the blankets which hadn't got holes in them.

In spite of his needs Bill didn't like to disappoint the vicar – old Bert, as they called him – who set an infinite value on their souls. Every Sunday for fifty years the Reverend Bertram West had put on his oilskins and stowed his gear in the locker and set out across the strait for their little bit of a church; and as if he had never enough of it he bought a cottage on the island when he retired so as to keep an eye on them and enjoy their affection.

‘I ain't going to sell you what you want,' Bill said firmly. ‘But I tell you what I
will
do, seeing as 'ow you've come all this way. You give me twenty pound on it like old Timothy would, and I'll take it out again when I 'ave the money.'

The gentleman seemed a bit doubtful.

‘You wouldn't like to go 'ome,' Bill went on to encourage him, ‘and own up to them young representatives that you've done no new business at all, would you?'

‘Well, it's a deal, Mr Hackafree,' he said. ‘But it's only fair to warn you that you will not have twenty quid when the time is up because there will be a late spring and a wet summer and mighty few visitors in Herbrandsholm.'

‘I'll take my chance on that,' replied Bill, for even without tourists he could always count on the lobsters. ‘Now, how will I give it to you?'

‘Just hand it in at Old Timothy's pawnshop before midday tomorrow,' the gentleman told him, ‘and I'll have a word with him meanwhile. He hasn't got a soul at all, so he will play fair with both of us.'

In the morning the sea had gone down, and Bill Hackafree rowed himself over to the mainland and tied up at the Market Steps; then he walked along the quay to Fleming Street where Timothy had kept a pawnshop for the last thirty years, to oblige seamen in need, and his father before him.

‘I've got something for you, but I don't rightly know how to hand it over,' said Bill, when he had shut the door behind him and was alone with old Timothy in the little wooden pledge office. A lovely bit of panelling it was.

‘That's all arranged, Bill,' Timothy assured him, ‘just as soon as you put them twenty quid in your pocket, I'll have it.'

‘You'll look after it, mister, won't you?' Bill asked a little anxiously, for he did not want it put among all the old junk in the window and sold by mistake.

‘I'll keep it safe up there in its own basket,' said Timothy, pointing to a wide shelf at the back of the office where, for as long as any customers could remember, he stored a dusty collection of cannibal wickerwork, spears, paddles, charms and ghost masks. ‘And you'll be protected by the law for one year and seven days; but if the pledge ain't redeemed by then I'll have to let him have it.'

Bill Hackafree made that twenty quid last, and it added a deal of comfort to his evenings. But nothing else would
go right for him. Summer was wet and autumn stormy, and the lobsters kept out of Bill's pots as if the devil was at the bottom of them. When the year and seven days were nearly up he half thought of putting his case to the vicar; but old Bert had done so much for the island in youth and age that Bill did not like to upset him, for he was ninety-two and failing fast.

Even on his boat Bill could not raise twenty quid since he was the only chap who could keep her afloat at all. He had nothing in the world but his old age pension, and when he went to draw his week's money Peter Tollar, the postmaster, could not pay him because he had no cash in the office.

‘You been backing horses with Her Majesty's money again?' Bill asked him.

‘I promised I wouldn't and I haven't,' Peter Tollar said. ‘It was the dogs this time. And I'll get six months at the sessions if I get a day.'

‘Nothing you could take round to Timothy?' Bill asked, for it was never any good being angry with Peter Tollar.

‘Nothing that my old woman wouldn't notice.'

It was not likely she would notice a little thing like Peter Tollar's soul so Bill Hackafree told him how he had got out of his own difficulties.

‘Now, I'll tell you what we can do, Peter,' he went on. ‘We'll put yours in and we'll take mine out. How much have you borrowed, as it might be, from the Post Office?'

‘Thirty pound,' said Peter, as near ashamed as Bill had ever seen him.

‘Well, that's thirty for you and I need twenty more to take mine out. Suppose we ask Timothy for sixty. That'll give us ten quid over and we'll split it.'

Peter Tollar of course would not believe him, so Bill rowed him across to the mainland then and there. Timothy could see nothing unbusiness-like in the transaction and said he had been authorised to lend to any reasonable amount. He paid out the sixty to Peter Tollar in clean pound notes and Peter gave Bill Hackafree twenty-five of them. Bill
handed over twenty of them to Timothy, took his soul out of pawn again and put the change in his pocket.

That was a lesson to Peter Tollar, for they got back to the island just ahead of the morning launch, and a Post Office inspector stepped ashore from it all ready to audit the cash.

Peter could never keep his mouth shut; so the good news spread around among a few friends who had all grown old together and were not pestered by any young fools telling them how they ought to manage their money since the Herbrandsholm children all took jobs on the mainland as soon as they grew up.

Bill and the rest were careful to keep the secret among themselves; but what with one buying a new boat and another starting to grow daffodils on his twenty acres and Solomon Titheroe sending off his clever son to be trained as a boat-builder, it was not long before Miss Fanshawe heard a rumour of how they were coming by the money.

‘Now is there a word of truth in all this?' she asked Bill Hackafree when he was spreading a load of seaweed on her asparagus bed.

‘Well, m'lady, I couldn't rightly say as I believe it myself, not to swear by it,' Bill told her. ‘But I got the money like the gentleman promised me, and all the rest of us too. And as it stands at the moment Solomon Titheroe 'as his soul in for six hundred pound, and you can ask of 'im if you don't believe me.'

‘Then, Mr Hackafree, you will escort me to this so-called pawn-shop,' she said.

Bill was old-fashioned and he did not think Timothy's was a proper place for her. For one thing, the Fanshawes had held Herbrandsholm against the Welsh for the last thousand years, though the barbican was all they had left to show for it; and, for another, she was still a young lady of fifty.

‘If it will do for you, it will do for me,' she answered, standing no nonsense from Bill. ‘And I will tell you what I have told no one yet, Mr Hackafree. I owe a thousand pounds for income tax which my poor, dear father did not
find it necessary to pay because he hoped they did not know they were entitled to it. And I can't pay and they're going to sell me up.'

Bill Hackafree knew nothing about income tax, but he reckoned they would all rather have Fanshawes at Herbrandsholm manor than the Inland Revenue. So he borrowed a red cushion for his boat and started up the outboard motor which he had bought with the small commissions he used to take on new business and ran Miss Fanshawe over to the mainland. Timothy looked serious but after shutting himself up for five minutes in the back office where he kept the telephone he paid Miss Fanshawe one thousand six hundred pounds with no fuss at all. She gave him back six hundred to take Solomon Titheroe's pledge out of pawn and left her own.

‘I feel terrible,' she said when they were outside. ‘If you will be so good as to fetch me a large Madeira from the bar, Mr Hackafree, I shall sit down in the garden of the hotel a minute. And what will you take yourself?'

When she had recovered she walked straight round to the office of the Inland Revenue and paid out the thousand in cash. That was where she made a mistake. Month after month the Inspector bothered her with letters asking her how she came by it; he reckoned that if she had made enough money to pay his tax demand she ought to pay tax on the money she had made.

Miss Fanshawe couldn't give him any explanation, and every time she swore it was capital not income the Inspector insisted that she should prove it. She broke down and took to her bed with a nurse in attendance and the doctor calling every day.

It had never occurred to any of the old fellows who had been doing business with Timothy that they might go and die before the year and seven days were up. They did not hold with dying till they were tired of living; and with all that cash flowing they were not tired of it at all. Miss Fanshawe's illness reminded them of the terms of the bargain. They were determined to get her soul out of pawn at once,
even though the doctor told them that there was no immediate cause for alarm.

They held a private meeting below the quay at low tide but all the cash they could scrape together in this awkward emergency was ninety-seven pounds. When they called on Timothy he was no help. He said that his principal had so far made a loss on the deal and would not entertain any more advances on security of that nature. That was government policy, too, he told them.

There was nothing else for it but to ask old Bert's advice; and Solomon Titheroe, who was a churchwarden, had a word with him when he was helping him home after matins. Solomon expected him to say that the story was all nonsense – not that the vicar was an unbelieving sort of man, but religion is one thing and plain fact quite another.

Old Bert listened till he was safely home and back in his bed.

‘Solomon, you and Bill Hackafree must tell this Timothy that I am going to put my soul in and take Miss Fanshawe's out, and see that you bring him here with two thousand pounds in cash. The devil doesn't like changing with the times any more than we do, and he will be sure to reckon a priest's soul as worth more than a layman's.'

‘We all hope that you'll be with us a long time yet, sir,' said Solomon a bit anxiously.

‘That's very kind of you, old friend,' the vicar replied. ‘But you know and I know that I shall not be with you next Sunday, which will put an end to these irregularities once and for all.'

Solomon Titheroe did as he was told though the wind was getting up against the tide; and he and Bill Hackafree brought Timothy across to Herbrandsholm with a bag full of money padlocked to his wrist.

‘What was the arrangement with your principal, Timothy?' old Bert asked when all three of them were at his bedside.

‘He was to take over any pledge which was not redeemed, sir,' Timothy answered. ‘But he can't touch it before the
statutory period of one year and seven days because it would be against the law and I'd lose my licence.'

‘That's just as I remember it when I was young,' said the Reverend Bertram. ‘Now you pass over that two thousand and make a note that I give your principal the security he requires. I shall pay you sixteen hundred back to release Miss Fanshawe and, since one may as well be damned for a sheep as a lamb, Mr Titheroe will take the balance of four hundred for the Church Roof Fund.

‘But I warn you, Timothy, that I won't last even the seven days, and that gives me a whole year in your basket before you must deliver me to your principal. It's not a place my soul would choose for prayer,' he sighed, ‘but I have been told to fear no evil, and I have faith that before time is up there will be no need of money to redeem the pledge.'

Space Fiction

Pepe de Cea must have remembered that I was born in Argentina and could communicate with Spanish-speaking horses. I was also the only one of his intimate friends likely to be at home and in bed at 1.30 a.m. He did not even apologise for his arrival.

‘It's my mother-in-law again,' he explained. ‘And I will not calm myself. And I do not need a drink. Get dressed and come!'

‘Oh, God! Not donkeys?'

‘A mule. When I came home it was in the courtyard.'

Mrs Fellowes had a vague and gossamer charm. Her daughter, Barbara, who had impulsively married Pepe when he was a minor attaché in the London Embassy, inherited the charm and added the assurance proper to a young Spanish matron. Pepe adored the pair of them and welcomed the frequent visits of his mother-in-law to Madrid, although on occasion he had to explain her peculiarities to the police. Nothing could shake Mrs Fellowes' belief that Spaniards were cruel to animals. She had a habit of wandering about the more primitive quarters of the city – since animals had pretty well disappeared from the glittering centre – with a bag of carrots and breathless rebukes.

‘She hasn't stolen it?' I asked.

‘She says it chased her home trying to bite her.'

‘What is she doing about it?'

‘Nothing. It terrified her. She has gone to bed, more convinced than ever that my cruel countrymen brutalise their animals with whips and red-hot pokers.'

‘And Barbara?'

‘Barbara is with her. In the way of women they have both decided it is all my fault.'

‘I don't see how it could be. You were out.'

‘That's why.'

‘Well, shoo the mule away!'

‘I can't. You never saw such a vicious-looking brute. I think its mother was a hyaena. Its ears are about half a metre long and it bares its teeth at me.'