It was on the following day that he received a letter from Lausanne:
Dear Frank:
It’s no good pretending something will work when it obviously won’t. By the time this reaches you I shall be in Spain. I know where Charlie is, and I’m joining him. Don’t try to find me, because you won’t. But don’t worry. I shall be all right, or if I’m not I shall be all wrong in a cause I think is more important than any personal considerations. You are the best of chaps, I know, and won’t let Little Charlie down, and of course when I get back (and if I do) I’ll take on again. Sorry about the money. But really you love that stuff too much for your own good. Love,
The money, he discovered, was what he had deposited in an account for her use. She had cleared it out. Scarpered!
“I want to beat up a woman with my fists. Are you interested, and if so what would your price be?”
Francis had put his question to at least eight prostitutes on Piccadilly, and had had eight refusals, ranging from amusement to affront. Obviously he was in the wrong district. These girls, most of them fragile and pretty, were high-priced tarts, not hungry enough to consider his proposal. He found his way into Soho, and on the fourth try had better luck.
She was fortyish, with badly dyed hair and a gown trimmed with imitation fur. On the stout side, and underneath a heavy paint job her face was stupid but kindly.
“Well—I don’t know what to say. I’ve had gentlemen who had special tastes, of course. But usually it’s them that wants to be beaten up. A few slaps, you know, and some rough talk. But I don’t know. With your fists, was it you said?”
“Yes. Fists.”
“I’d have to think it over. Talk it over with my friend, really. Have you got a moment?”
From the depths of her bosom she pulled out a crucifix which, when she put it in her lips, proved to be a little whistle, on a chain. She gave a discreet double tweet. Very soon a small, dark man, quietly dressed and wearing a statesman’s black Homburg, appeared, and the woman whispered to him. “How rough would this be?” asked the man.
“Hard to say, till I got into it.”
“Well—it could come very dear. Broken teeth, now. Bruising. That could put her out of business for a fortnight. No; I don’t think we could look at it, not at any price that would make sense.”
“Would one good punch be any help?” said the woman, who seemed to have a pitying heart. “One good punch at, say, ten quid?”
“Twenty,” said the man, hastily.
They went to the woman’s flat, which was near by.
“You understand I’ve got to stick around,” said the man. “This isn’t your ordinary call. You might get carried away, and not in control of yourself. I’ve got to stick around, for both yoursakes.”
The woman was undressing, with rapid professional skill.
“No need for that,” said Francis.
“Oh, I think she’d better,” said the man. “In fact, I’d say she’d rather, seeing as you’re paying. Professional, you understand. Her birthday suit is her working clothes, isn’t it?”
“Okay. Ready when you are,” said the woman, now naked and bracing herself on stout legs. She had, Francis saw with an embalmer’s eye, an appendicitis scar of the old-fashioned kind that looks rather like a beetle with outspread legs. Francis raised his fist, and to summon anger he thought hard of Ismay at her most defiant, her most derisive, her most sluttish. But it would not come. It was the Looner who dominated his feeling, not as an image, but as an influence, and he could not strike. He sat down suddenly on the bed, and to his deep shame burst into sobs.
“Oh, the poor love,” said the woman. “Can’t you, darling?”
She pushed a box of tissue handkerchiefs toward him.
“Don’t feel it so. There’s lots that can’t, the other way, you know. They’ve very good reasons, too.”
“He needs a drink,” said the man.
“No, I think he needs a cup of tea,” said the woman. “Just put on the electric, will you, Jimsie? There, there, now. You tell me about it.” She sat beside Francis and drew his head down on her large scented breast. “What did she do to you, eh? She must have done something. What was it? Come on, tell me.”
So Francis found himself sitting on the bed with the woman, who had pulled a silk peignoir trimmed with rather worn marabou about her, and her ponce, or her bully, or whatever the term might be for Jimsie, sipping hot, strong tea, giving a shortened, edited version of what Ismay had done. The woman made comforting noises, but it was Jimsie who spoke.
“Don’t take me up wrong,” he said, “but it certainly looks as if she done the dirty on you. But why? That’s the way we have to look at it. There’s always a reason, and it may not be one you’d ever think of. Why, would you say?”
“Because she loves another man,” said Francis.
“O Gawd; sod love!” said Jimsie. “You never know where you are with it. A great cause of trouble.” And as he went on to anatomize love, as it appeared to him both as a man and as a professional dealer in sexual satisfaction, it seemed to Francis that he heard the voice of Tancred Saraceni, explaining the Bronzino Allegory. The face that was clearest in the picture, as he thought of it, was the woman-headed beast with a lion’s claws and a dragon’s tail, who proffered the sweet and the bitter in her outstretched hands. The figure called the Cheat, or in Saraceni’s Latin explication, Fraude. He must have whispered the name.
“Fraudy? I should think it was fraudy, and rotten, too, walking out on you and the baby,” said the woman.
When at last Francis was fit to go, he offered the woman two ten-pound notes.
“Oh, no dear,” said she; “I couldn’t think of it. You never had your punch, you see. Not that I’d have blamed you if you’d really socked me.”
“No, that wasn’t the agreement,” said the man, taking the notes himself, swiftly but delicately. “You’ve got to consider time spent, and an agreement entered into even if not carried out. But I’ll say this, sir. This night does you credit. You’ve behaved like a gentleman.”
“Oh, sod being a gentleman,” said Francis, then regretted it, and shook hands with them both before running down the stairs into the Soho street.
The premises of Sir Geoffrey Duveen and Company were elegant and awesome; Francis would never have presumed to enter on his own volition, but it was here that Colonel Copplestone had said he was to meet him, and the wording of the message had suggested without actually saying so that it was a matter of importance. Something of importance was just what Francis needed. He had never felt so insignificant, so diminished, so exploited in his life since the days at Carlyle Rural. He was smartly dressed and punctual as he presented himself in the great London centre of art dealing and art exportation. The Colonel was in a small panelled room in which hung three pictures that made Francis’s eyes pop. This was the sort of thing that very rich collectors could afford, and that they looked to the Duveen Company to supply.
“But you have your degree. First Class honours; I saw it in The Times. Just remind me of what that degree implies.”
The Colonel seemed inclined to brush aside Francis’s story of his marriage and its outcome as something of secondary importance. How callous these old fellows were!
“Well, it’s called Modern Greats, but the formal name is Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I concentrated on philosophy, and having a Classics degree already I had a certain advantage over the men who worked with translations; you begin at Descartes, but it’s very useful to know what came before. And modern languages: mine were French and Geran. The politics is pretty much British constitutional stuff. I did as little economics as I could. Not my thing: I prefer my astrology without water.”
“Aha. Well, you didn’t waste your time at Oxford,” said the Colonel. “Don’t let the other thing bother you too much. Painful, of course, but I can offer you something that will make you forget it—or almost forget it.”