It’s a Battlefield (2 page)

‘It's a battlefield,' said the secretary. ‘Back and forth into the lobby. I know for certain he had no tea.'

I shall go over the ground myself, the Assistant Commissioner thought. The photograph of the two wooden chairs and the pressed grass did not tell enough.

‘I don't want him to break down now, with two clear years in sight. Of course at the Dissolution he'll get a peerage.'

The Assistant Commissioner brought his mind back with difficulty from the Streatham villas. ‘It was – er – about Drover . . .?' Somebody in another corner of the lounge began to laugh. ‘My dear, it was divine. They tied the pram on top of the taxi and Michael –'

‘Yes,' the secretary said, ‘it was about Drover. Now that the appeal has failed, it all rests on the Home Secretary. The poor dear man is worried, very worried, and all on top too of the licensing.' The secretary's wide pale face glistened softly under the concealed lighting and he leant forward with an infinite suggestion of frankness, with an overwhelming effect of guile. ‘To tell you the truth, he'd have been glad, he'd have been tremendously relieved, if the appeal had been allowed.'

‘Impossible,' the Assistant Commissioner said, ‘there was no possible – er – line that the Defence could – could take.'

‘Exactly. I was in Court. The Minister, you see, thought that the L.C.J. might give some excuse for a reprieve. But there was nothing at all to get hold of.'

‘The policeman died,' the Assistant Commissioner said stubbornly, ‘we got the man.'

‘But the Minister, you know, doesn't want the poor devil's blood. Nobody does. It was a political meeting. Everyone was excited. Drover thought the bobby was going to hit his wife. He had the knife in his pocket. That, of course, is the snag. Why did he carry the knife?'

‘They all do,' the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘Helps to scrape away oil, mud. Cut up bread and – er – cheese.'

‘Have another whisky?'

‘No, no, thank you.'

The private secretary laid a square white hand on the Assistant Commissioner's arm. ‘You know we must help him. He's in the devil of a state.'

‘Do you mean – Drover?'

‘No, no. The Minister, of course. My dear chap, if you could have seen him this afternoon. The devils. They made him fight every inch of the way; the Local Option Clause; the Tied Houses. And he's never at his best when he misses his cup of tea. Really, you know, I could almost have wept. And I had to send him in a note that Drover's appeal had failed. We must help him, or he'll never get through the Session.'

‘Anything that I can do,' the Assistant Commissioner began in an embarrassed way. He was embarrassed because he did not know what the devil it was all about. He was annoyed that the working of his mind should be blocked like this. The Drover case was over; the Paddington trunk case, the Streatham murder required all the thought he could give to them. He ought, he knew, to leave them to his subordinates in the Criminal Investigation Department, the specialists in finger-prints and blood tests, the detective-in-spectors who could go through the routine of inquiry blindfold. But it was his weakness, though in the east, in the enervating heat, it had been his strength, that he could never leave his department alone.

The private secretary's amiability spread luxuriantly like a quickly-growing creeper. ‘I knew we could rely on you.' He proceeded to put the matter into a Parliamentary nutshell; the antitheses and balancing clauses, the calculated touches of humour when he spoke of the Opposition, had as little meaning to the Assistant Commissioner as the jargon of an art critic. ‘You mean,' he said, ‘that the Home Secretary would like to reprieve him?'

‘Ah,' the private secretary wailed softly, leaning back on the leaf-green sofa, dabbing gently again and again at an automatic lighter, ‘how you simplify. The affair is more complex than that. But we can start from that basis – the Minister would like to reprieve. But, you see, there are the strikes.'

‘The strikes?'

‘The cotton workers are out, and the railwaymen may be out next week. Drover is a Communist. Will it be taken as a confession of weakness if we reprieve him?'

The Assistant Commissioner opened his mouth to speak; he wanted to affirm that politics were not his business, but the secretary forestalled him. ‘And if we hang him, will that be regarded too as a confession of weakness? Will they imagine that we are afraid to be magnanimous?'

‘They?' the Assistant Commissioner asked. ‘Who are they?'

‘The Communists.'

‘Ten – er thousand members.'

‘Yes, yes, officially, but every striker, while he is out, is a Red more or less. One doesn't trouble about shades.'

‘But what can they do?'

The private secretary leant forward and remarked impressively: ‘If resentment kept them out a week longer, if over-confidence kept them out a week longer, it would cost the country fifty million.' He tapped the Commissioner's knee. ‘More taxes and we lose the next election. What happens then?'

The Assistant Commissioner did not answer. Stooping over the trampled grass on Streatham Common, he would not have raised his eyes to a pyrotechnic display at the Crystal Palace, however brightly the sky was lit by rockets. The private secretary laughed and said, again with a frankness which gave the impression of deep guile: ‘No peerage for the Minister anyway. And no under-secretaryship for me.'

‘I don't understand,' the Assistant Commissioner began. It was one of his favourite expressions; extraordinary the number of occasions on which he could apply it: on first nights; when discussing the latest novel; in a picture gallery; when faced with an example of corruption. But turning over in mind the woollen béret, noting the texture of the wool, the pattern of the crochet, he understood more than the most sensitive artist, noticed more than the most inquisitive woman.

‘The Minister argued in this way. You, more than any other single man, have your fingers on London: the poorer parts in particular.'

The narrow yellow face showed no pleasure; the Assistant Commissioner loved accuracy. ‘The poorer parts only. I don't – er understand
this
place.'

‘Oh,' the secretary said with airy amusement, ‘I can answer for this place. If you can answer for – shall we say the docks, for Paddington, Notting Hill, and King's Cross, the suburbs, Balham and Streatham, the –'

‘Streatham,' the Assistant Commissioner murmured, interrupting the secretary's shabby pageant.

‘If during the next week you can send in a private report on what you think the effect of a reprieve or an execution would be –'

‘I don't like it,' the Assistant Commissioner said with an unusual lack of hesitation.

‘A personal favour, dear chap,' the private secretary pleaded, ‘because he's so tired, so worried –'

‘He's got the report of the case, the judge's notes.'

‘But if you could see him now, fighting every inch of the way, local opinion, tied houses.'

‘If he finds it hard to decide, he might see the man for himself.'

‘Would that be possible? Not for the Minister, of course, he's far too busy with the licensing, but perhaps for me.' The secretary smiled and tapped his cigarette. ‘He depends, you know, a good deal on my advice.' Modestly he held the Minister's dependence up under the wide concealed light as a whimsical curiosity, a quaintly ugly antique.

‘I'll take you to the prison now if it would – er interest, help you.'

‘Does that mean that you consent, that you'll let us know,' he dabbed again at his automatic lighter, ‘what people think about it?'

Again the Assistant Commissioner corrected him: ‘The poorer parts,' and again with a studied gesture towards the leaf-green sofas and the two women whom he had left and who now smiled at him from a far corner, the secretary answered for the Berkeley. ‘Oh, I can speak for the rest.'

The Assistant Commissioner, digging blunt nails into the sofa and heaving himself upright, said sharply: ‘Have you ever been inside a prison?'

‘Never.'

‘You will be – interested.' He watched the bland face with distaste: he distrusted any man who showed so little sign of employment. Light employment, ‘half-time work', had no meaning for the Assistant Commissioner, throwing his whole shrewd slow mind into every detail of his duty, into a crocheted béret, a second-hand trunk, a park chair, a cloakroom ticket; nor did the men with whom he spent his days disguise the fact that they worked – worked seriously, with a sense of responsibility, to keep life in them – detectives, bus-drivers, pawnbrokers, thieves.

‘Most interesting, I'm sure.'

He preferred the morbid watchers at the prison gates, waiting for the striking of the clock, the posting of the typed notice (‘carried out in the presence of .the Governor, the prison doctor . . .'). Shivering in winter with the early cold, in summer touched by the pale heatless sun, they were made aware of what it was that kept them safe behind their shop counters, in their walk from fishmonger to grocer: they knew something of the stones, the rope, and the lime (‘The executioner was Pierpoint').

‘I have never seen a murderer,' the private secretary said. ‘As far as I know of course.'

Yes, the Assistant Commissioner thought, I prefer those others. He said: ‘We can take a bus from the Ritz.' He did not see why the country should pay for a taxi in order to satisfy the private secretary's interest, or to help the Home Secretary to a decision which he should be able to reach without difficulty, all the papers being before him, including the judge's notes.

‘I have a car just round the corner.'

Something worried the Assistant Commissioner. He stood hesitating on the threshold of Piccadilly. Something had been said which he did not understand, it belonged to an alien world, but it was his duty to understand, something about. . . . The lights were all lit, the shop girls crowded the pavement on the way to the Underground. ‘What were they saying?' he asked, ‘about a pram on – er a taxi?'

The secretary laughed. ‘A pram – on a taxi – how can I tell?' He laughed so loudly that two shop girls turned small vivid faces towards him; a clerk in dark clothes, carrying an attaché case, halted suddenly and stared at them, watching the two men turn the corner, rolling the phrase over on his tongue: ‘A pram on a taxi,' convinced that he would never forget the meaningless joke which had set the men laughing.

The secretary sat with his bowler hat upon his knees, his right arm through a rest, talking of this and that. The blinds clicked down in the windows of the Knightsbridge
modistes
, and the end of Sloane Street was lost in blue haze; in the King's Road furniture was being carried indoors for the night. ‘But perhaps you don't read novels.' Over Battersea Bridge the gulls came sweeping down to the level of the glass, and the lights from the Embankment crossed the grey flow, touched two barges piled with paper, rested on the mud, and the stranded boats and the walls of the mill. ‘It all depends, of course, on her husband.' The fish-and-chip shops were opening, and all down the Battersea Bridge Road and past Clapham Junction, through a wilderness of trams and second-hand clothes shops and public lavatories and evening institutes, the Assistant Commissioner wondered, as he often wondered, at the beauty of the young tinted faces. Their owners handed over pennies for packets of fried chips, they stood in queues for the cheapest seats at the cinemas, and through the dust and dark and degradation they giggled and chattered like birds. They were poor, they were overworked, they had no future, but they knew the right tilt of a béret, the correct shade of lipstick. ‘I should so much prefer Oslo.' They are admirable, he thought, and as the car left the crowds and the tramlines, he was saddened for a moment like a man leaving his home. Candahar Road, Khyber Terrace, Kabul Street, the Victorian villas wavered in the mist like a shaking of shakos in old imperial wars.

The car climbed a hill and crossed the railway line by an hotel. Turning, the beams of the head-lamps caught a few bare trees, and a sandpit where children played in the dark. The car followed a long straight road beside the cutting, and a train overtook them, tearing south, dropping sparks on the roof. The secretary nodded towards a dark mass across the line. ‘Is that the prison?'

‘A school for girls.'

The car turned again; a policeman opened the door of a blue box beside a public-house, and a red tongue of light flickered up a glass globe on the roof. They drove between an allotment and a nursery garden towards a gate twenty feet high and, behind a wall, the roofs of square buildings and a tall hexagonal tower. ‘We are here,' the Assistant Commissioner said, and they both sat quiet for a moment in the car, while a train went by unseen past the allotments, and the nursery gardens. ‘Odd to hear that in your cell,' the secretary said with a touch of gloom.

‘They can tell the time by it,' the Assistant Commissioner said.

The gates slid softly open pushed by a warder along a metal run, then closed behind them. They were surrounded by stone and hard lamplight. Somewhere a great many men were singing. ‘Block C's at a concert,' the chief warder explained, and passing the door of the hall, they heard the tinkle of a piano which had not been tuned for a long time. Up in the glass chamber at the top of the hexagonal tower warders walked to and fro.

‘The Governor's at the concert,' the chief warder said.

‘Don't disturb him. This gentleman wants to take a look at Drover.'

The chief warder turned his old benevolent eyes towards the secretary. ‘Has the gentleman been here before?'