Sky High (12 page)

She started at Liz who stared back.

The woman said something abrupt in a foreign language. Liz shrugged her shoulders. The woman shrugged hers, turned ponderously, and disappeared into the back parts.

Liz went on down the street.

She could not help reflecting that it made a nice change from Brimberley.

Her troubles really started when she found that not only did No. 233 not exist, but that it could never have existed. Charing Cross Road came to a stop somewhere just over the 200’s. Careful research disclosed a shop on the right-hand side, near the Tottenham Court Road Tube Station, numbered 208. The other side seemed to tail off at somewhere about 197.

This brought her up all standing.

Could the numbers have been changed? She put the question to a policeman, who admitted that he did not know and referred her to a postman. The postman, an old cheerful man, said that he had been up and down the Charing Cross Road for forty years and hadn’t noticed any change to speak of. Was she certain that the number really was 233? People’s writing on envelopes, he had found, was quite unreliable. He had himself once gone all the way, in the snow, with a letter to 76 Bradford Mansions only to find that the address was intended to be 16 Beaufort Mews. Perhaps this one was meant to be 133. He rather thought that 133 Charing Cross Road was a public house.

Liz thanked him and took herself into one of the milk bars, where she ordered a cup of coffee. She felt deflated. Before starting out she had ascertained that the firm of ‘Ardee’ did not feature in any telephone or trade directory. Now, if she had got the address wrong, it looked as if she had wasted her trip to town.

She thought about the postman’s suggestion, but it hardly seemed helpful. This address had not been in handwriting. It had been printed. How could Tim have mistaken ‘1’ for ‘2’? There was not the slightest similarity.

She took out an envelope and printed 233 squarely on it. She turned the envelope round and looked at it upside down. It looked no better this way, so she righted it again. At that moment the glimmer of an idea lit in her mind.

She took a bus right back to the place she had started from. She trudged once more, slowly up the pavement on the East side where the odd numbers ran. This time she found No. 15, which was a tobacconist’s. No. 21 had sunk without trace. Then came a large corner block which looked big enough to have swallowed up two or three numbers.

Pursuing her idea, she turned right at the corner. Sure enough, a little way down the side street, there
was
a door, on the right-hand side. And on the fanlight was painted the number, 23B. Taken all in all it was a triumph of deductive reasoning.

She peered into the doorway.

Judging by the nameplates and cards, screwed, tacked and pinned to the inside of the doorpost, the occupants of 23B were a versatile crowd. Reading from the bottom upwards there appeared, on the left, Mr. Skouros, who reconditioned furs, The Registered Office of Bancos Ltd. (philatelic dealers), Miss Chartrelle (hair therapist) and Miss Yvette Colouris (occupation unstated). On the right were Messrs. Crake and Crake, accountants, the U-Know Press Cutting Agency. Angus Romanes (consultant) and—wait for it—yes! Ronald Dowbell, photographic artist.

‘Ronald Dowbell,’ said Liz. ‘R.D. – Ardee – Bob’s your uncle.’

She advanced up the stairs.

The premises of Ronald Dowbell occupied the whole of the top storey and looked as if they had been there for some time. A door at the head of the staircase invited her to knock and enter and Liz knocked and entered. After this the proceedings slowed down. There seemed to be no one at home. It was a small, almost bare waiting-room, furnished with a table, three chairs to match and an enormous old-fashioned screw-operated letter-press.

Liz sat down patiently and tried to read the magazines. None of them was less than six months old.

After about ten minutes of this, she got up and walked round the room. There were three doors leading from it. She knocked at them in turn. Nothing happened. She then opened them. The first revealed a large cupboard full of shelves, and a single, old, wrinkled umbrella hanging, like a strip of dried seaweed, from a nail. The second door was locked. The third opened on to a corridor.

The corridor seemed to go on quite a long way. Evidently the premises of Ardee were somewhat larger than they seemed from the outside.

She stopped to listen. At the far end she seemed to catch a murmur of voices. She walked towards it. The voices came from behind a door at the very end. One was gruff and peremptory and male. The other was indeterminate.

‘Sheep as a lamb,’ thought Liz, and gently opened the door.

A dwarf with a hunched back and an alarming scowl was doing something with an enormous camera on a truck. A young man, with a little, monkey face and waved hair was sitting under several bright lights, in front of the camera. Both seemed startled to see Liz.

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Liz. ‘I wanted to find out if anyone was about.’

‘Whadyer want?’ said the dwarf.

‘I wanted some attention.’

‘We only deal with the trade.’

‘Oh,’ said Liz. ‘And just how do you know that I’m
not
the trade.’

The young man giggled. The dwarf continued to stare at Liz as if he hardly believed she existed.

‘Whadyer want?’ he said at last. He didn’t seem able to think up anything better.

‘What we’d better have,’ suggested Liz, ‘is a word in private.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ said the young man. ‘I’m quite comfy.’

The dwarf gave him a dirty look, then pushed past Liz, out of the door, and down the corridor. It wasn’t exactly a gesture of courtly invitation, but Liz grasped her umbrella a little more firmly and followed. He led the way into an office. It was a small room, and rendered smaller by the clutter which filled it. The walls on three sides were lined with shelves and the shelves were jam-packed with papers. They covered the table. They encroached on to the floor. They continued, in piles, on top of shelves, reaching up to the ceiling like tropical undergrowth blindly seeking the light.

‘Now wassit about?’ said the dwarf brusquely.

He did not sit down, although there was a chair behind the desk, and Liz was unable to, since the other chairs were both deep in unfiled correspondence.

‘When you send out photographs,’ she said abruptly, ‘do you put Ardee – A-R-D-E-E – on them?’

‘We useter,’ said the dwarf cautiously.

‘So a photograph with Ardee on it must be one of yours?’

‘Could be.’

‘If I described a photograph to you, do you think you could trace it?’

‘What do
you
think?’ The dwarf’s eye flickered up and down the shelves. Liz saw his point. She tried another tack.

‘Do you do private sittings?’

‘Private,’ said the dwarf more thoughtfully. He managed to invest the single word with a deep edge of grimy disreputability.

‘I mean,’ said Liz hastily, ‘if someone just walked in and asked you to take his photograph, would that be the sort of business you’d do?’

‘Certainly not. We work for the trade.’

Liz nearly said ‘What trade?’ but funked it.

‘You work for agencies?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Which ones?’

‘All the big ones.’

From the depths of her memory Liz fished up a name.

‘Bart’s.’

‘That’s right. Bart send you?’ For the first time Liz seemed to be making sense to him,

‘Not exactly,’ she said. Thank you all the same. I may be back.’

‘Any time,’ said the dwarf impassively.

Liz trudged back up the Charing Cross Road. The attendant was standing in the doorway of the contraceptive shop. He recognised Liz and winked at her. Liz winked back.

Bart’s office was at the top of the building behind the Collodeon Theatre. It, too, was up three flights of stairs, with no lift, but at that point any resemblance to the Ardee Photographic Studios ceased.

To begin with, it was full of people; not the helpless, costive crowd traditionally associated with such places, but a fluid one. People came in and held short and serious conversations, with a young man who was perched on a sofa reading a shiny periodical, with a young lady who came in from time to time from the back premises, with each other. When they had finished their conversations they went, and others came. Everyone talked rapidly but confidently. Everyone oozed personality. Everyone seemed to be roughly two and a half times their normal selves.

Liz, sitting squarely in a corner, decided that it was, in principle, not unlike a French eighteenth-century salon.

Eventually, by doing absolutely nothing, she attracted a certain amount of attention, and during a lull in the proceedings the young man came over and sat down beside her and asked, was there anything he could do for her?

‘Just a word with Bart,’ said Liz.

‘A word with Bart?’ said the young man. ‘Oh, I don’t—what exactly was it about?’

‘Nothing important,’ said Liz shortly.

This seemed to disconcert the young man. He looked covertly at Liz again, trying to rationalise her old but nicely-cut tweeds, her expensive shoes, her impossible hat.

‘Was it personal?’

‘In a way,’ said Liz.

‘Financial?’

‘I suppose you could describe it as that.’

The young man got to his feet rather thoughtfully and said something to the girl. The girl cut short a conversation with a grey-haired old bouncer in full morning dress and went out of the room.

Five minutes later she reappeared and asked Liz for her name. Liz gave it, spelling it patiently. The girl disappeared, reappeared, and said that if Mrs. Arsite would come along Mr. Bart was free for a few minutes.

As she followed the girl Liz realized that everyone in the room had stopped talking and was trying to calculate, on insufficient data, who she might be. She felt a little surprised at herself.

Bart was as she remembered him, a round brown indestructible ball of a man with the thick lips and high cheeks of his Russian parents, and the manners of a man who had been doing immense favours to other people since before he can remember and is getting a bit tired of it. It was clear that he did not recognise Liz.

‘I see you don’t know me,’ she said, as cheerfully as she could. ‘Why should you? It was fifteen years ago. I was running the Bramshott and District Pageant – the last big one we had before the war. I borrowed two professional players from you – one for Charles the Second and Sidney Herbert and the other for Nell Gwynne and Florence Nightingale.’

‘But I remember perfectly,’ said Bart, untruthfully. ‘I have no doubt we can help you. Again a pageant? Yes?’ He looked approvingly at Liz. ‘I have exactly the man. Last Tuesday he is Canute at Canvey Island. This weekend, Guy Fawkes, at Staines. Versatile.’

‘Well, no,’ said Liz.

‘Not a pageant?’

‘Not a pageant. Something quite different. It was really your help I wanted.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s not—I mean, I’m not collecting for anything,’ said Liz hastily. ‘It’s your professional help that I want. It’s a curious story.’

‘Curious stories. I hear them a hundred a week,’ said Bart.

‘But this is quite uncommonly curious,’ said Liz. She told the story quickly. She was aware that she was there under false pretences, but she did not intend to abandon the ground until she was actually thrown out.

It was difficult to tell if Bart was interested or not. He said, ‘Yes, of course I know Ronald Dowbell. They do a lot of work for us. Theatrical work. We are their biggest customers. But why should an Army officer go to them from us? I do not understand that.’

‘He wouldn’t,’ said Liz. ‘I expect he just walked in – like I did – and they took his photograph. The thing is, I can’t make them search for the original, but you could. I’m sure they’d do it to oblige you—’

‘Perhaps—’ said Bart. He was too much of a gentleman to add what was plainly uppermost in both their minds.

At that moment a small door behind Bart’s desk swung open and a big, black-haired man came in. There was no need to speak his name. His face said it for him. He was without doubt the greatest tenor in the world.

Bart jumped to his feet, bounced forward with outstretched hand and said, ‘A pleasure. My dear Florimond.’

‘Florrie!’ said Liz.

The black-haired man shook Bart by the hand, came forward with calculated deliberation, and kissed Liz, first on one cheek, then on the other.

It was as if someone had turned on a large electric fire and pink lighting had sprung up all round the cornices.

‘My dearest Liz,’ said the famous voice. ‘What gifts the Gods do drop into our undeserving laps. I come in, expecting to do no more than a little business with ugly old Bart, and who do I find—?’

He waved a hand. It was a gesture to the leader of the orchestra. It was a signal to the electrician. More sympathetic spotlights. A soft preliminary note of music.

‘My dear Florimond. You know Mrs. Artside—?’

‘The name,’ said Florimond, ‘is Liz. Do I know her? The answer is “Yes”. I have been in love with her for thirty years. Even since she was six,’ he added gallantly.

Now how was it, thought Liz, that some people could say things which they didn’t mean and which they didn’t even mean you to think they meant, and yet you liked them none the less? Italians, especially.

‘What chance brings you here? Do not tell me. I shall guess. Bart has at last found a composer talented enough to write an opera around your personality.’

‘I had no idea,’ said Bart. ‘Does Mrs. Artside—?’

‘She has a perfectly natural basso. Rounded. Unique. Hamlet as a woman you have seen. Now Falstaff. Conceive the possibilities.’

‘Now really,’ said Liz. ‘Behave. It’s no use, Florimond, I’m not for sale. Sit down.’

Florimond seated himself obediently, yet with a swirling gesture that turned Bart’s office chair into the imperial throne of the Romanoffs.

‘I did not come here for an audition,’ she went on. ‘I came here to get Mr. Bart’s help.’

‘Which I am certain he will give to you.’

Bart was certain, too. So was Liz. Rarely had anyone’s status altered quite so rapidly. If Mrs. Artside was a friend of Florimond, if she knew him well enough to tell him to sit down and stop talking, then Bart was prepared to spend the whole day humouring her.