I Shall Not Want (52 page)

“Why don't you drink something?” he asked.

She ordered port, pecking at it politely like a lady, and let her hand rest lightly on his arm. He moved away a little but the hand remained there; it followed his arm. And, now that the others had seen that the gentleman
was free with his money, they moved in closer still, and exchanged winks every time John Marco's hand showed itself to be something less than steady. That such a one should drink himself silly in their presence seemed a piece of almost unthinkable entertainment.

The others had all crowded round him by now; they were as close as sheep sheltering. He was aware of the hot, stifling odour of their bodies; but he did not stir. There was one man in particular who fascinated him: he was doing card tricks. In his sordid, dirty fingers the cards melted magically into the air and re-formed themselves again before his eyes, like wonders. The man seemed to have some power over these pieces of pasteboard that was denied to the rest of mankind. He was a Merlin with a broken nose and an almost green bowler set so low on his head that the thing crowned him like a helmet. There were others, too, whom John Marco could not see so plainly—men with red, glistening faces and loud guffaws; leering unpleasant men; and men like himself who could do no more than sit back and undo their waistcoats and fumble for their glasses and laugh a little sometimes. And always on his arm was the soft pull of the woman who had come over to him and now sat on the couch beside him, her foot touching his.

When her drink was finished—and even in those dainty ladylike pecks it disappeared—he told her to re-order and because there were so many others near him whose glasses were empty, too, he told them too to call for what they wanted. He drew from his pocket a gold sovereign case and every eye in the room seemed to be mesmerised by it. It was the woman beside him who called out shrilly for the change when the landlord was slow in bringing it; she seemed to have appointed herself his protectress and he did not stop her when her fingers plunged into his pocket pouring in the silver coins.

It was late by now and there were some in the bar who had been drinking all the evening; their heads were full of the fumes. And in that state, tempers and
convictions ran high. The trouble started in one corner. There was a big man, hairy and unshaven, who rose suddenly in his place and shot the dregs of his glass into his neighbour's face. The other man jumped to his feet—he was less than half the size of his opponent—and aimed one of those wild silly blows that are as much intended to satisfy honour as to hit anything. But the fact that he had been struck at, that he had been assaulted, was sufficient for the aggressor. He raised his fist—it was large and heavy like a boxer's—and let drive at his assailant's chin. There was a sound like the snapping of a stick, and the man went down. Then, proud and victorious, the unshaven one stepped over his victim and made his way towards the door. He was in the full pride of his blood by now and, coming upon John Marco suddenly, he stopped. The fact that a stranger was in the pub was something that he resented: he was in a mood when people did things only by his permission. Raising his hand again—it was cut and bleeding across the knuckles by now—he knocked John Marco's glass onto the floor and stood there grinning. It was the woman again who attempted to save John Marco. She shot out her little pointed shoe and caught the big man on the shin. He stared at her stupidly for a moment and then caught her across the face with the back of his hand. Immediately she started screaming, and every man in the room who fancied himself came forward. By the time the landlord had scrambled over the bar to save the glasses, the fighting on the sandy floor was general.

John Marco's chair was jerked away from under him—he tried feebly to save himself: he did everything feebly now, he was so blurred—and the next moment he saw the chair being waved wildly in the air and heard it come down on someone's head; then it fell to the ground amid a splinter of glass. He was sprawling now amid the sawdust and dottle that was everywhere, and he pulled himself up onto his knees, clinging to the edge of a table as he did so. But the
tide
of battle surged towards him once more.
There was a charge of sweaty bodies, and he was down again. Something struck him on the temple; and when he raised his hand to his face there was blood on it. Then, with the breaking of one of the lamps, the smell of gas filled the room, and the landlord began calling for the police.

It was as John Marco staggered to his feet that he felt a tug—a short, imperious tug this time—at his elbow and saw the woman from the couch standing beside him. She was beckoning him towards the door at the other end of the room. He followed her with faltering, uncertain steps and found that they were in the private bar. There was another door to the bar; and that one led into the street.

They went through it together. Out there in the night, the police whistles were sounding. The woman was supporting him by now.

iii

The room in which John Marco woke was a frowsty little cell of a room with wall-paper that plunged before his eyes in whorls and spirals of gaudy roses. He lay back trying to remember. But his ears were still full of the sound of fighting and the noise of glass being shattered. He recalled dimly the empty street into which he had been led out of all that tumult; recalled also how, at last, he had fallen and how the woman who had been with him had appealed to the loitering gentlemen of those parts to carry him.

His whole body felt bruised and damaged; there were little flames of pain in every part of him. And when he raised his head, the blood drummed and battered on his ears. But suddenly he threw back the cherry-coloured coverlet that was over him and sat up on his elbow. He had remembered suddenly why last night he had gone out at all.

The movement disturbed the other occupant of the room. She was standing over by the dressing-table clad in a dirty wrapper that fell away from her disclosing her
faded satin stays, and she came over and stood by him. He recognised her suddenly as the woman who had sat beside him on the couch. She was smiling.

“Feeling better?” she asked brightly.

He stared at her, scarcely comprehending.

“Did you bring me here?” he asked.

She nodded.

“We carried you,” she said.

He passed his hand across his forehead.

“Where are my clothes?” he demanded.

“On the chair,” she answered. “They undressed you when they brought you here.”

She turned back to the dressing-table—there were large photographs of herself all over it—as though she had lost all interest in him, and he slid out of bed. His head reeled as he got onto his feet and his legs felt unsteady. But he pulled his clothes onto him and pushed his feet into his boots.

“I must reward this woman,” he was thinking. “She saved me, and I must repay her.”

As he stood there, his hand was straying over him—into his waistcoat pocket, his breast pocket, the pocket at his hip. But they were empty. His money, his watch and the watch-chain with the half-ring on it, his pocket-book, had all gone.

“I've been robbed,” he said. “Someone's gone over me.”

The woman shrugged her shoulders.

“You were drunk last night,” she answered.

“You brought me here to rob me,” he said.

This time she did not even move.

“The police would have had you if I hadn't,” she answered. “You can still go to them. Tell them where you spent the night.”

John Marco did not reply. He was dressing quickly, feverishly; dragging the clothes on to him. And the woman on the other side of the room seemed prepared to ignore him again. She was boiling a kettle on a spirit stove and
washing up a cup, with an odd saucer with cigarette ash on it, in a hand basin. John Marco knotted his silk cravat round his neck—even the tie-pin was gone too—and went over to the mirror.

It was not a wholesome face that looked back at him; and he stood there peering at it. The stubble of his beard showed grey and harsh, and his forehead where the man's foot had kicked it was stained and angry. A thin dried trickle descended from it.

Taking up his overcoat that was lying across the bed he put it on, turning up the collar around his face. There was no place here where he could wash the wound; the hand basin at which the woman was standing now had a plate and knife and fork in it as well. He turned his back on her and, with his hat in his hand, in the same way in which he walked up the aisle of St. Mary's Parish Church on Sundays he went towards the door.

The woman reached out her hand towards him.

“Is that all the thanks I get?” she asked. “Is that all you're going to say to me?”

Because he did not answer she came over and leant against the door-post watching him go.

“You look such a pretty gentleman,” she said.

John Marco told the doorman to pay the cabby and went straight up in the lift to his private office. From the time he entered until his door had shut behind him had not been more than a couple of minutes; but even so his appearance had been noted and speculated upon. There were whispers. The doorman contended that Mr. Marco had met with an accident. But the lift girl who had actually been closeted with him confessed in the privacy of the lady's rest room that she believed that he had been fighting. The one point of agreement was that something sinister and unusual had happened to the man.

And John Marco did nothing to dispel the rumour. On the contrary, he fed it. He locked himself in. Mr.
Hackbridge who knocked on the door once or twice had to go away again, and only the shadow of John Marco as he passed and re-passed the glass panel of his door—he seemed simply to be pacing up and down the room as if trying to make up his mind about something—showed that there was anyone there.

It was not, indeed, until nearly lunch-time when he opened his door and called for his secretary. And from the way he behaved he might have been brazening the whole thing out. He was still unshaven and the broken bruise on his forehead, even after the blood had been washed off it, caught the eye immediately and held it.

But he was still the same John Marco; he might have been awake all night in his study thinking out the flood of instructions which he released—the fresh showcards, the messages of complaint to unlucky members of the staff, new ideas for window dressing, stricter regulations about talking, and the first draft of an ambitious plan for next Christmas. As the girl jotted down the last item she raised her eyebrows a little: Mr. Marco was proposing that every one of the assistants should be put into fancy costume from the beginning of December until Christmas Eve. The silver and gold Christmas tree that had stood in the central hall on the previous year, even the gay balloons at the opening, now seemed no more than trite and obvious pieces of invention.

It was late in the afternoon when the girl took up the last of the papers and left him. And with her departure John Marco Ltd. and all of its million and one affairs deserted him again and he was left once more with the memory of Louise and that locked and desecrated bedroom. He went over to the window and stood gazing down into the street below. The lights were beginning to come on, and the passers-by, as they came for a moment into the circle of each lamp, filled him with a new feeling of his own loneliness; they all seemed so busy, so happy,
this race of little people six storeys below him.
They
had homes to go to, wives or husbands waiting for them. From that high window in the corner of the store, they seemed like contented domestic dolls all hurrying back to their own nurseries.

And what was
he
going back to? Not to that fine house of his; there would be no meaning in that now. And for all he knew Louise might have left it already. At this very moment she was probably in the infatuated arms of this young man, who had seemed so young, so much younger than herself, when he had glimpsed at him.

John Marco passed his hand across his forehead: it was wet and sticky. He could no longer think clearly. But through the haze of his own mind he saw the bleak pathway of the future. He would sell the house, of course, that is what he would do, sell it as it stood, with everything that he and Louise had bought still in it. And their friends, their new friends, the Carbeths, and the Henriques and the Clyde-Dawkins, would have to find some other table to dine at. This whole chapter in his life, the only chapter he could remember in which the pages had seemed pleasant as he had turned them, had suddenly been closed on him; and the rest of the book did not now seem worth opening.

Then out of the shadows of his mind, unexpected and uninvited, the memory of his son came springing. There was no clear picture, no portrait of him; only the dim image of a boy making a silent pilgrimage through the sunny park. But the image remained; and the curiosity within him deepened. The boy, of course, would be older by now, different; he must be in his middle teens already. Would he even know him? John Marco wondered. If they met in public they might pass unrecognised, sit opposite staring at each other like strangers. But if that were so, those missing years might have worked otherwise as well; they might have freed the boy. Perhaps he was no longer
under Hesther's domination; perhaps already he had begun reaching out towards the world of men that was denied to him. And as the thought came to him John Marco realised that even now he was not left quite alone, that somewhere in the stone forest of London there was another human being who belonged to him.

He stood for a moment longer by the window. But he was impatient by now, drumming on the sill with his fingers. Then he went over to his desk and, sitting down, addressed a letter to Hesther's solicitors. It was a cold, formal document, one that gave no hint of the feelings that were stirring inside him. It stated merely that as Mr. Marco had never rescinded his rights over the child he now wished to see him, to ascertain whether the boy were being properly cared for and brought up. It also went on to say that if the boy were in need of money for his education, John Marco would be prepared to meet any reasonable demands. When he had finished the letter he signed it with his careful, copper-plate signature, sealed down his envelope and rang for his secretary to collect it.