The fog was thicker here. Pender could no longer see his quarry, but he heard the footsteps going on before him at the same even pace. It seemed to him that they were two alone in the world — pursued and pursuer, slayer and avenger. The street began to slope more rapidly.
Suddenly the dim shapes of the houses fell away on either side. There was an open space, with a lamp vaguely visible in the middle. The footsteps paused. Pender, silently hurrying after, saw the man standing close beneath the lamp, apparently consulting something in a notebook.
Four steps, and Pender was upon him. He drew out the sandbag.
The man looked up.
“I’ve got you this time,” said Pender and struck with all his force.
Pender had been quite right. He did get influenza. It was a week before he was out and about again. The weather had changed, and the air was fresh and sweet. In spite of the weakness left by the malady he felt as though a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He tottered down to a favourite bookshop of his in the Strand, and picked up a D. H. Lawrence “first” at a price which he knew to be a bargain. Encouraged by this, he turned into a small chop-house, chiefly frequented by Fleet Street men, and ordered a grilled cutlet and a half-tankard of bitter.
Two journalists were seated at the next table.
“Going to poor old Buckley’s funeral?” asked one.
“Yes,” said the other. “Poor devil! Fancy his getting sloshed on the head like that. He must have been on his way down to interview the widow of that fellow who died in a bath. It’s a rough district. Probably one of Jimmy the Card’s crowd had it in for him. He was a great crime-reporter — they won’t get another like Bill Buckley in a hurry.”
“He was a decent sort, too. Great old sport. No end of a leg-puller. Remember his great stunt about sulphate of thanatol?”
Pender started. That was the word that had eluded him for so many months. A curious dizziness came over him and he took a pull at the tankard to steady himself.
“...looking at you as sober as a judge,” the journalist was saying. “He used to work off that wheeze on poor boobs in railway carriages to see how they’d take it. Would you believe that one chap actually offered him—”
“Hullo!” interrupted his friend. “That bloke over there has fainted. I thought he was looking a bit white.”
Q. Patrick
Little Boy Lost
Q. Patrick’s stories exploring the morbid aspects of juvenile delinquency have poignancy and macabre insight. Here is a truly harrowing tale of what goes on in the head and heart of a child.
The day his father died was chiefly memorable to Branson Foster because he was allowed to sleep in the small dressing-room off his mother’s bedroom. An end was thus made to the nights in the fourth-story attic where the little boy had lain obdurately awake, afraid of the hostile darkness, resenting the adult injustice that separated him from the mother who adored and spoiled him. It was his father who had been responsible for his exile, and now that formidable presence, whose black mustache smelt of mouthwash and the top of breakfast eggs, was gone.
His father’s death brought Branson not only comfort but freedom from the fear that had haunted him since his eighth birthday. The question of his departure to a boys’ boarding school had lapsed. Branny’s mother had given him tearful reassurance on that point as she kissed him goodnight and tucked him under the delicious warmth of the quilted eiderdown.
“You are the man of the house now, darling. You must stay and help your poor mummie run this silly old girls’ school.”
Almost certainly, the vague, bewildered Constance Foster never dreamed that her passionate adoration might be harmful for a son of nearly nine. In 1915, small English seaside resorts had not heard of mother-fixations. Nor was Dr. Sigmund Freud even a name at Oaklawn School for Girls in Littleton-on-Sea. With the death of her husband it seemed only natural to her that mother and son, sharing a common grief, should cling even closer together.
After the funeral, at which the wheezing voice of the vicar had consigned the mustache to eternal rest, Branny’s bed was put permanently in the little room adjoining his mother’s. Attics, Mrs. Foster argued, were dangerous in wartime. From then on, going to bed became a pleasure rather than a terror for Branny. He could read as long as he liked and when his mother came upstairs, he could hear her gentle movements through the quarter-opened door and bask in the warm certainty of her nearness and safety. And during her frequent spells of poorliness — for Mrs. Foster considered herself frail — he could tiptoe into her room when his anxiety for her goaded him too painfully, and satisfy himself that the fragile, cherished figure in the bed was actually alive and breathing.
Almost every day of this new life brought a major or minor delight. The older girls made much of their headmistress’s only son in his bereavement. The younger girls constituted a respectful audience for whose benefit he could strut as the only male in a household of women. And as a symbol of his importance, he was permitted full use of the front stairs, strictly forbidden to housemaids, girls, and even to junior mistresses.
Each golden day reached its climax in the evening when instead of taking plain supper in the school diningroom, he had light tea alone with his mother in his father’s erstwhile study. Often the meagre wartime fare would be augmented by a boiled egg, a tin of sardines, or some similar delicacy.
His mother would watch him devour these with a smile half-excited, half-guilty, murmuring:
“It’s naughty of me, I know, in wartime, but a growing boy really does need it.”
Luckily for the finances of Oaklawn School, she did not entertain a similar sentiment with regard to the forty or fifty growing girls under her care.
The middle weeks of the summer term passed for mother and son as an idyl. Mrs. Foster looked prettier than ever in her widow’s weeds which lent an air of pathos to the soft brown eyes and heightened the ethereal pallor of her perfect skin. She was careful to present the world with a decorous show of grief. But inwardly she, like her son, was happier than she had been in years. Her husband’s hand, heavy as his mustache, was no longer there to suppress her natural volatility. Branny spoiled her as she spoiled him. With her son she could yield to her moods of almost childish gaiety. She could also indulge the tendency to poorliness which Mr. Foster had so unimaginatively discouraged. When the responsibilities of her position became too irksome, it was delightful to pamper a mild headache in a darkened room while Branny hovered with solicitude and eau de cologne.
As sole principal of Oaklawn School, Mrs. Foster dreamily muddled the accounts, allowed the servants and tradespeople to lead her by the nose, and let institutional discipline slide.
But, halcyon as this period was, it carried in it, unknown to Branny, the seed of its own destruction. The late George Foster had bought Oaklawn School for Girls with his wife’s money and had made her joint principal. But he himself had owned two-thirds of the goodwill and knowing his Constance, had anticipated just such a situation as had now arisen. He had loved the school, built it up through his own labors, and had made testamentary precautions to preserve it.
Hence the invasion of the Aunts. This started by what, in the second World War, would have been termed “infiltration.”