‘It’s quite simple,’ said Fred, trembling. ‘I see you’re not interested in it. I’ll take it away.’
‘It isn’t so simple as that,’ the man said. ‘Someone has found out something that someone has got to forget—or there may be trouble, and we don’t want any trouble, do we?’
‘No,’ said Fred mechanically.
‘I’m not mentioning names,’ the man went on, ‘it’s better not to mention names, we haven’t mentioned names, have we?’
‘You know my name,’ Fred said.
‘Yes, but we’re not interested in your name. It’s our names that matter. She’s Wendy and I’m Bill—those are our names. You can call us by them, if you like.’
Fred Cross had never felt less inclined to be on Christian-name terms with anyone.
‘And you might want to write to us,’ Bill went on. ‘You might want to send us a Christmas card, for instance.’
‘I don’t think I shall,’ Fred said.
‘You never know,’ Bill said. ‘Now here’s an envelope.’ He fetched one, slightly soiled, from a heap of litter on the table. ‘Have you a pen?’
Using the typescript as a desk, Fred set himself to write; his hand was shaking.
‘Mr. and Mrs.——’ he wrote, and stopped. Then he remembered: Whiston, of course. ‘Mr. Whiston, please. A telephone call for Mr. Whiston, please.’ But his hand was shaking too much. To gain time he raised it from the envelope and said:
‘But you haven’t told me your name.’
‘Didn’t we tell you?’ the man asked. ‘It was very careless of us. Are you sure we didn’t?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Fred.
‘What an extraordinary thing. We didn’t tell you our name, or our address, or anything?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Fred.
‘Could you find your way here, if you wanted to pay us another visit?’
Suddenly Fred wondered if he could frighten them, and rashly said:
‘I think I could.’
‘Oh, you think you could? Well, just to make it easier for you, here’s our name and the address,’ Bill said, standing behind him. ‘Take it down.’
Fred bent his head and set himself to write.
‘Allbright,’ said the dictating voice.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Allbright, Flat C, 19 Lavender Avenue, S.W.17. Got that?’
Fred did get it, but he couldn’t say so, for his head was lying on the typescript, and he was unconscious. When he came to he was in hospital. A policeman had found him stretched on the pavement in a deserted street. Almost his first inquiry was for his precious typescript, and almost the first action when he left the hospital was to get in touch with the man whom he had turned so inhospitably from the door. All the newspapers had reported his misadventure, and none of them failed to observe that the typescript had bloodstains on it. At last it was in the news, and this may have turned the scale in Fred’s favour; at any rate the publisher accepted it.
Yet more publicity followed. The name of Allbright conveyed nothing to the police, but the name Whiston did.
‘You were lucky you didn’t let on you knew it,’ the police told Fred, ‘or you would have got a bigger bashing than the one you did get.’ They had more serious charges against William Whiston than the assault upon Fred Cross, but that was one charge. Another Fred Cross soon figured in the proceedings, a much more sensational one; but he did not altogether steal the limelight from our hero, for the newspapers dared not mention him and his black doings without making it quite clear that he must not be confused with another Fred Cross, the well-known author, whose long-awaited work on the Jacobean Dramatists was soon to be given to the world. But one important piece of evidence in the case, a small black notebook containing a list of the names of a gang against whom William Whiston had a grudge, was never submitted to a publisher.
THE PYLON
The trees sloping inwards, and the hedge bounding the field beyond, made a triangle of green in which the pylon stood. Beyond it, fields again and then the railway embankment. Beyond the embankment more hedges making transverse lines, and then the roofs of houses bowered in trees, sloping up to the wooded hill-crest, outlined against the sky. But that was a mile, perhaps, two miles away; whereas the pylon——
There was general rejoicing when the pylon disappeared: Mummy was glad, Daddy was glad, Victor was glad and Susan was glad. The morning when it happened they all crowded to the window as if they had never seen the view before. Nor had they—the view without the pylon. Ever since they came to the house ten years ago it had been there—an eyesore, a grievance. ‘It would be such a lovely view,’ they used to say to visitors, ‘if it wasn’t for the pylon!’
The pylon used to stand between two trees, a fir-tree and a copper beech, directly in front of the window, just beyond the garden. Instead of concealing it, they framed it. Every so often Victor, the optimist, now sixteen, would say, ‘Daddy, I’m sure those branches are coming closer together! Next year, you’ll see, they’ll hide it!’ And his father would reply, as like as not, ‘They’re not growing any nearer—they’re growing farther apart! Fir-trees and beech-trees don’t agree, you know!’
There it stood, between the trees, rearing its slender tapering height against the wooded hillside, the line of which it maddeningly broke, topping with its incongruous yard-arm the ancient earth-work that crowned the hill.
Now it was gone, and in its place they saw the trees that it had hidden and, more especially, two Lombardy poplars growing so close together that if you walked a little distance, either way, they looked like one.
And Laurie, the youngest of the family, too, was glad at first, or thought he was. When he heard his parents saying to visitors, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, the pylon’s gone!’ he would echo, in a grown-up manner ill-suited to his eleven years, ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful?’ Not that he disliked the pylon on aesthetic grounds, but he thought it was the proper thing to say.
But whereas their grievance against the pylon had been vocal for many years, their gratitude for its departure was comparatively shortlived. They would still say, ‘How marvellous without the pylon!’ but they didn’t really feel it, and after a month or two they didn’t even say it, taking their deliverance for granted, just as when an aching tooth is pulled out, one soon ceases to bless the painless cavity.
With Laurie, however, it was otherwise. Being outwardly a conformer—indeed a rather zealous conformer—he had joined in the delight his elders showed over the pylon’s downfall. He tried to gloat over the square patch of concrete, marking its site, which the demolition squad hadn’t bothered to clear away. But when he stood in front of the window, whichever window it might be—for having a southern aspect, most of the windows of the house had once looked on the pylon—and set himself to gloat, sometimes he would find his eyes straying, even shying away from, the remnant of its ruin. To the others the pylon had been an eyesore and a grievance; to him it was a landmark and a friend. How tall and proud it used to be—one hundred and seventeen feet high—the tallest object in the neighbourhood—taller than the hill itself, he liked to think, though his mind told him that its superior height was only a trick of the perspective.
From surveying the pylon-less gap with a lack-lustre eye it was a short step to trying to imagine it with the pylon there. And then Laurie realized that something had gone out of his life—some standard, was it, by which he had measured himself? No, not exactly that, nor only that. The pylon had symbolized his coming stature, his ambitions for himself as an adult. One day his short, plump body would shoot upwards, tall and straight as the pylon was; one day his mind, that was so dense in some ways, and so full of darkness, would fine down to an aery structure that let the light in everywhere and hardly cast a shadow. He would be the bearer of an electric current, thousands of volts strong, bringing light and power to countless homes.
The pylon, then, had served him as a symbol of angelic strength. But in other moods it stood for something different, this grey-white skeleton. In meaner moods, rebellious moods, destructive moods, he had but to look at it to realize how remote it was from everything that grew, that took its nourishment from the earth and was conditioned by this common limitation. It was self-sufficient, it owed nothing to anyone. The pylon stood four-square upon the ground, but did not draw its sustenance from the ground. It was apart from Nature; the wind might blow on it, the rain might beat on it, the snow might fall on it, frost might bite it, drought might try to parch it, but it was immune, proof against the elements: even lightning could not touch it, for was it not itself in league with lightning?