However, they more than made up for their reticence once they reached the Fatted Pig.
Though its publican, Mr. Andrews, looked at them suspiciously when they showed up at a time when they should have been busy making deliveries for Matthews, he served them beer nonetheless and took their money.
“I wager it was Pardlow,” said Will. “He told Ruth and then she told Matthews.”
“Blooming pity we can’t ask him,” said Tom. “The poofter’s gone and made that just a little difficult.”
“Or it could have been Ruth it came from,” suggested Will. “She told somebody else and they told Matthews.”
“All I know is that someone’s going to pay,” grumbled Tom.
“Cor!” cried Jerry Castle, tipping backward on two legs of his chair. “Will you give a listen to yourselves? Cain and Pat are dead—dead. We just had our jobs terminated by that human tin of stinking pilchards, who only hired us in the first place because we were happy to sit the war out on our arses — this whole escapade one bloody disaster — and then the two of you still refusing to surrender the football and exeunt the bloody field. I’m exeunting the field, lads. I’m joining the army and kill me some sons-of-Huns. But first I’m going to the one I wronged and set things to rights, so I don’t have that on my conscience.”
“You have a conscience, Castle?” laughed Katz. “What’d you do? Dig one out of the shilling bin at Woolworths?”
“You’re right. I’ve got no conscience. I never had a conscience. My kind is expendable, gentlemen. But here’s the difference between me and the two of you: I know I’m a worthless placeholder in this world gone crackers. The two of you — you’re both too daft or just too full-blooming deranged to see it in yourselves.”
Will made as if to push Jerry backward, toppling him to the floor, but Jerry quickly righted himself. “So they win,” said Will with a sardonic smile.
“The girls? Okay, they win. Ask me if I care a rap one way or another.”
“Pat is dead,” pressed Tom. “And that girl’s father killed him.”
“I’m not like Cain,” said Jerry. “I never fancied putting a wig on the lad and taking him for a twirl round the dance floor at the Palais. In fact, if you want the truth, I always found Pat to be a bloody nuisance and Cain a sexual miscreant, and I know you won’t deny it, Holborne, because you once saw the man in action. Why else did he always turn pansy yellow every time you went at him? I don’t care to avenge anyone’s death. I just want to break up this miserable little society of ours and let each of us go our bloody way.”
Jerry got up.
“Where are you going?” asked Katz.
“If I’m lucky, someplace I can avoid the two of you whilst waiting to go wynken and blynken with the eternal poppies.”
Jerry drifted out of the pub.
Will looked at Tom and Tom looked at Will with reflective gazes that revealed nothing. Then Will turned to the bar. His eyes clapped on the large ceramic pig sitting on the top shelf and looking very much like an oversized piggy bank. The pig’s expression matched that of the pig on the sign which swung over the door to the tavern — self-pleased, blissfully unaware that he might at a moment’s notice be converted into a tasty loin of pork or piping hot pork pie.
“She treated us like pigs,” said Will to himself, though his statement could not help being audited by his increasingly besotted and equally belligerent companion.
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who treated us like pigs?” asked Katz. “I thought they all did.”
“Ruth. The one who wouldn’t have anything to do with us. I remember that sour look she gave me when Carrie and me were crooning like cats at the Palais.”
Katz laughed. “We all looked at you like you were dotty. You were making a bleeding disturbance.”
“She gave you that look too, Tom. She gave it to all of us. Like she was some bloody toff—better than the whole lot of us.”
Katz took a pull on his beer. “Maybe she is.”
“Bollocks.”
Will sank deeper and deeper into vengeful thoughts — thoughts of how he might right things in a very different way than that sought by his now foolishly forgiving former friend Jerry Castle.
Night and darkness came quickly. Maggie had been home for several hours and didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She’d yet to hear anything from her mother, but held to a shred of hope that some valuable piece of information might somehow find its way to her — perhaps from a go-between of some sort. With the mandatory blackout now drawing down upon both Maggie and all her fellow Londoners, she thought she might walk over to the Balham Underground station.
Maggie had got quite good at negotiating the streets in the darkness. Even though she generally took along her torch, it having been recently fitted with both new Number Eight batteries and a fresh globe, she rarely used it. Perhaps it was the carrots her mother, with typical wartime economy, had put into nearly every soup and casserole she served, or the fresh bilberries Maggie loved (berries which were keen for the eyesight and thought to give R.A.F. pilots the upper hand over their German adversaries).
Maggie had thought during her trip back into the city with Ruth that a very good place for a fugitive and his “gun moll”—as the Americans so colourfully put it (or at least those Americans who worked on the Warner Brothers gangster pictures) — to go “underground” was actually to go underground — that is, to lose themselves among the throngs of Londoners who queued up each night to shelter themselves from bombing raids by descending like Lewis Carroll’s Alice into the city’s deepest rabbit holes. Maggie could easily fancy her mother and the man who would have become her father, should things have transpired differently, spending long evenings in the Balham tube — and perhaps a good part of their days Underground, as well.
Maggie had nearly convinced herself to take a look when there came a knock at the door. She hesitated. She peeled up one corner of the blackout paper that covered the front window. Through the exposed glass she got a sideways view of the front step…and the man standing upon it. It was Jerry Castle, the person in all the kingdom she least desired to see again.
“I’ve come to apologise,” said Jerry to the door.
“I’m over here at the window,” Maggie shouted through the glass, her lips all but pressed against the spot where she’d turned up the gummy paper. “Apologise to me over here at the window and then pop off.”
Jerry wheeled round to address the windowpane. “I’m sorry I behaved so abominably. I am an abominable person and deserve to be removed from your life forever. I am without any hope of redemption. Accept this apology and I’ll be on my way.”
“Apology accepted. Now go.”
“I’m going to enlist.”
“You’re making a list? What list?”
“No. To enlist. In the army.”
“Oh. Well. Take care of yourself. Cheers.”