It’s too soon, Hutchman decided, relaxing slightly after the uneasy experience of seeing himself on the screen. I can cope with the police, and the others still have no idea who it is they have to hunt.
“Right, lad!” Atwood bustled out of another door, wearing a hairy coat which gave him bearlike proportions. His sparse locks had been slicked down across his enormous skull with water. “Where’s your car?”
“Car?” Hutchman had parked his car on a cindery patch at the side of the house, and had been planning to leave it there.
“It’s raining out there, lad.” Atwood spoke with ponderous exactitude. “My van is out of action and the Cricketers is a good half-mile from here. If you think I’m going to walk it in the rain, think again.”
Hutchman, needled by the other man’s unvarying boorishness, was tempted to call the expedition off, but reminded himself that the car no longer fitted the broadcast description. It would, in any case, be no more noticeable in a pub car-park than sitting virtually on its own beside the house.
“My car’s just outside the door,” he said. They ran to it in chilling rain. Atwood jigged impatiently until Hutchman opened a door for him, then he threw himself into the seat with an impact that rocked the car on its suspension. He slammed the door with similar violence, making Hutchman wince.
“Let’s go,” Atwood shouted. “We’re wasting good drinking time.”
As he started up the engine Hutchman tried to recapture the odd craving for pints of stout which had gripped him on Sunday night on the way to Crymchurch police station, but all that happened was that he got a cold feeling in his stomach. With Atwood directing, he drove out to the main road, the blue-white lighting of which emphasized the drabness of the buildings, and along it for a short distance to an unimpressive red-brick inn. Hutchman surveyed the place gloomily as he got out of the car. On every past occasion when he had become involved with a dedicated beer drinker and been dragged off to the area’s reputed sole source of good ale the pub concerned had always turned out to be remarkably dismal. This one was no exception to what apparently was a natural law. As they ran to the entrance through the rain he experienced a sad conviction that it was a warm starry night far to the south in Crymchurch. I’m lonely without you, Vicky…
“Two pints of special,” Atwood called to a barman as soon as they got inside the public bar.
“Make that a pint and a whisky,” Hutchman said. “A double.”
Atwood raised his eyebrows and parodied Hutchman’s homecounties accent. “Ho, pardon flipping me! If you wants whisky, Trevah, you can flipping well pay for it.” He leaned on the dark wood of the counter, shaking with amusement, then doggedly pursued his joke. “Ay’m reduced to common beastly beer this month — pater has cut may allowance, you see.”
Giving way to his annoyance, Hutchman took the thick roll from his pocket and threw a five-pound note onto the counter without speaking. When his drink came he drained the glass. The liquid warmed his stomach immediately, then seemed to follow an anatomically impossible radiant course into the rest of his body. During the following two hours he drank fairly steadily, paying for most of the rounds, while Atwood engaged the barman in a long, repetitious dialogue on football and greyhound racing. Hutchman wished for someone to talk to, but the barman was a tattooed youth who viewed him with scarcely veiled hostility; and the only other customers were silent, raincoated men who sat on bench seats in darker recesses of the room.
Why is everybody doing this? He was filled with a dull wonder. Why are they all here, doing this?
There was a doorway behind the counter which led into the select bar, and through it Hutchman caught brief glimpses of a queenly barmaid. She seemed to laugh a lot, gliding easily through the cozy orange light of the other room. Hutchman prayed for her to come and talk to him, vowing he would even refrain from looking down her blouse if she would only lean on his part of the bar and talk to him and make him feel partly human again. But she never entered the public bar and Hutchman, absurdly, was trapped with Atwood. As his loneliness grew, the familiar lines from Sassoon returned with almost unbearable poignance… and tawdry music and cigars, I oft-times dream of garden nights, and elm trees nodding at the stars… his throat closed painfully… I dream of a small fire-lit room, and yellow candles burning straight, and glowing pictures in the gloom, and friendly books that hold me late…
Sometime later the young barman drifted away to other company and Atwood, after a disappointed look around the room, decided to focus his conversation on Hutchman. “Good paying job, a draftsman’s, isn’t it?”
“Not bad.”
“What’s the screw?”
“Ten thousand,” Hutchman guessed.
“What’s that a week? Two hundred. Not bad. Does it cost much to get a boy in?”
“How do you mean?”
“I read that when a kid’s going to be an architect his folks have to put so much…”
“That’s architecture.” Hutchman wished the barman would return. “A draftsman serves an ordinary apprenticeship so it wouldn’t cost you anything.”
“That’s all right then.” Atwood looked relieved. “Happen I might put young Geoff into being a draftsman.”
“Supposing he doesn’t like it?”
Atwood laughed. “He’ll like it all right. He can’t draw very well though. The other day he tried to draw a tree — and you should’ve seen what he did! All whirls and squiggles it was. Nothing like a tree! So I showed him the right way and — give the lad credit — I must say he picked it up right fast.”
“I suppose you showed him how to do a comic-book tree?” Hutchman dipped his finger in a spot of beer and drew two straight parallel lines surmounted by a fluffy ball. “Like that?”
“Yes.” A suspicious look passed over Atwood’s slablike face. “Why?”
“You fool,” Hutchman said with alcoholic sincerity. “do you know what you’ve done? Your Geoffrey, your only child, looked at a tree and then he put his impressions of it down on paper without reference to any of the conventions or preconceptions which prevent most human beings from seeing anything properly.” He paused for breath and, to his surprise, saw that he was getting through to the big man.
“Your boy brought you this… holy offering, this treasure, the product of his unsullied mind. And what did you do, George? You laughed at it and told him that the only way to draw a tree was the way the tired hacks who work for the Dandy and the Beano do it. Do you know that your boy will never again be able to look at a tree and see it as it really is? Do you realize he might have been another Picasso if — “
“Who d’you think you’re kidding?”Atwood demanded, but his eyes were clouded with genuine concern. Hutchman was tempted to confess he had only been playing with words, but the giant was discovering that his privacy had been invaded by a stranger and he was growing angry. “What the hell to you know about it, anyway?”
“A great deal.” Hutchman tried to be enigmatic. “Believe me, George, I know a great deal about such things.” I’m the ground zero man. Didn’t you know?
“Get stuffed.” Atwood turned his head away.
“Brilliant,” Hutchman said sadly. “Brilliant repartee, George. I’m going ho… to bed.”
“Go ahead. I’m staying on.”
“Please yourself.” Hutchman walked to the door with unnatural steadiness. I’m not drunk, officer. Look! I can crawl a straight line. It had stopped raining, but the air outside was much colder than before. An icy, invisible torrent flooded around him, robbing his body of heat. He took a deep breath and launched himself through the darkness in the direction of his car.