Keep It Quiet Page 8

  ‘Besides, Mr Chairman,’ the bald-headed man who had raised the point continued, ‘that annual election takes place early in the spring–’

  ‘May,’ murmured Ford.

  ‘Well, in the spring. Why worry till then?’

  ‘Quite agree, quite agree. Point merely being considered. No action being taken. Well, gentlemen, if that is all –?’

  At last Laming had had his way; the meeting was closed. He deliberately walked out with Cardonnel, anxious to restore peace after the slight acerbity that had arisen.

  ‘Ford getting very active these days. Quite unlike him. Proposing all sorts of new things. Vigorous, too – all sorts of details. Odd, very.’

  Cardonnel looked surreptitiously at the little bald-headed man bobbing along beside him. He agreed with him both as to present energy and past lack of it, but he somehow felt that it was slightly bad form for the chairman to be so ready to disparage the secretary. He left him as soon as possible. All the same he was puzzled. What was the cause of this sudden burst of activity? His nose wrinkled as he made his way through Covent Garden towards New Square. He seemed to be snuffing up the scent of something other than oranges.

  Two other members of the Committee were walking away together.

  ‘Do you suppose,’ said one of them, ‘that it is possible to imagine a worse chairman than Laming?’

  ‘Difficult, I should think. Tactless. Anxious to avoid responsibility. And that perpetual effort to stifle all discussion and close the meeting at once.’

  ‘I know. Some chairmen let people like Cardonnel talk on forever, but Laming never lets anyone say anything.’

  ‘Afraid of anything coming up. And I don’t think he quite plays the game by Ford, either.’

  ‘Which is his worst crime. When you think of the sort of people who have been chairmen in the past. The Whitehall has usually had the good luck to get hold of absolutely first-class men; it’s bad luck that one of our three years should be with this fellow.’

  ‘I agree. If Ford, by the way, is trying to do a job of work, which I must admit is a bit of a change, I’m all for backing him, despite Laming, and for that matter despite Cardonnel.’

  ‘Oh, Cardonnel’s all right really. He just has to have things done the right way or he won’t look at them. Ever been to dinner with him? No? Well, do, if you get the chance. It’s a little precise and formal, and perhaps unoriginal, but you always get good food, the exactly right concomitants and the wine that goes correctly with it. In the same way in life the details have to be right for Cardonnel, but the main idea’s right too. He’ll keep Ford up to the scratch, and perhaps worry the life out of him, but he’ll get the right thing done in the end. You know, but for him, the Committee would have no say in the running of the Club at all.’

  The other nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. And as to getting things done, it’s more than I’d say for Laming.’

  13

  The Parting Of The Ways

  Standing in the street, his bowler hat in need of being brushed, and tilted slightly too far forward, Ford looked at the club of which he was secretary. It had never occurred to him before to look at it from outside, either physically or mentally. He came to the conclusion that it needed cleaning. For a moment he had a vision of scaffolding covering the long, shallow building, and jets of steam playing all over it until it emerged almost white.

  ‘But only for a week or two,’ he reflected sadly, ‘and anyhow, as usual, we can’t afford it.’

  In his own opinion, Ford was a very economical manager, but in his own opinion alone. His only real idea was to put off spending any money until the last possible moment. He then usually found that double the amount had become necessary. As to buying in the cheapest market, it never entered his philosophy. He bought in the easiest market or let someone else do the buying – on their terms.

  But mentally he was trying for the first time in his life to see the institution as a whole, trying to visualise what sort of an appearance it must present to the outside world. People – especially his female relatives – he had found, had very odd ideas about clubs. They thought they were places of the highest luxury and considerable extravagance. Well, there were clubs where you could get the best of everything and where money was apparently not considered, but the Whitehall, like many others, was not that sort of place. Its ambition was to provide something as near as possible resembling the kind of home to which its members were accustomed, at the lowest possible price. It was, for instance, rather proud of the fact that its set club dinners cost only three shillings, so that its members could justly tell their wives that if they dined at the Club, they were not being extravagant.

  It was, moreover, a very friendly institution. If you wanted solitude and quiet, you could, as Anstruther did, obtain it, but if you wanted companionship, that too, after your first few visits, could be obtained. On the whole, Ford liked an extraordinarily high percentage of the members – extraordinary because, though nearly all the members were likeable, as in fact they were, yet as the secretary, Ford was bound to see their worst side.

  Standing in the street, and trying to recollect all his grievances, all the moments when people had been most unkind to the staff (an action which he never could stand), all the occasions on which they had been most trying and irrational and vexatious, he could hardly think of any whom he would gladly even contemplate handing over in the way which Anstruther apparently was prepared to surrender them to the mercies of some unknown person, who was clearly a sadist and who would enjoy giving pain for its own sake. He shook his head. Perhaps, on the whole, there was none. Not even – a face, sneeringly polite, presented itself to him – no, none. He could not understand it.

  Not only could he not understand the mentality of his correspondent – he did not expect to fathom that; in fact he was glad he could not – but he also found Anstruther incomprehensible. In his heart of hearts, Ford knew that he himself was a weak man, but he had thought that the doctor was a strong one, and yet apparently Anstruther had fallen in with the orders of the blackmailer quite as readily, if not more readily, than he had; moreover was falling in by doing things which Ford believed he never would have done.

  ‘Though so far I have not been asked to do anything that it has been really against my conscience to do. A few minor improvements in the Club – things I might have consented to do anyhow, though perhaps I should not have worried about, and certainly should not have hurried so much over. In which case I should have had less trouble about them. Heigh-ho,’ he solaced himself with an original reflection, ‘it’s a weary world.’

  ‘But the worst of it is, this business is not over yet. It’s all very well for me to say that I should not have been so ready to do what Anstruther did, but I have not been asked as yet.’

  His mind went back to the scene a few evenings before when the doctor had arrived in his office and told him what he had put in the personal column of The Times. He had tried to express his horror and amazement at the readiness with which Anstruther was falling into line.

  ‘But you aren’t going to do what he says?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘But – but, are you going to help him to torture people, and even possibly kill people?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that it will come to that. I’m playing for time.’

  ‘But if once you give him any poison, you can never be free of him.’

  ‘Only if he can prove I gave him the poison – and he won’t be able to. At least, not without giving himself away.’

  ‘But – but how do you propose to gain time?’

  ‘For one thing, I need know nothing about poisons as yet. You see that loophole in his letter?’

  ‘But, don’t you?’

  ‘Just the ordinary amount of knowledge one has to have – nothing specialised. I think I shall take his advice and learn about them really thoroughly. Have to start by getting a few books, by the way. I have always thought poisons must be a very interesti
ng study. Useful knowledge too, professionally. Yes, I think I shall take his advice and work the subject up.’

  Ford had breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Oh, if that’s all–’

  Once more, however, the doctor’s taciturnity had destroyed the feeling that all was well. He remembered how Anstruther, in telling him that Morrison had died of heart failure, had made him believe that he had not, and now, although all the doctor did was to look at him and walk out of the room, he managed to convince Ford that learning about poisons was by no means all. If it came to a pinch, Ford was certain that the doctor would calmly supply anything he was asked to provide.

  ‘Now why is it,’ thought Ford for the hundredth time as he prepared to cross the street and return to his office, ‘that I am contemplating putting up a fight (naturally), but that he is not? Of course it is true that he is in a worse position than I am if it comes out, or so he seems to think, but that does not seem enough. Perhaps it’s his medical training. Some of them do not seem to mind if things do hurt. I suppose Anstruther must naturally be a little hard and callous and indifferent to other people’s sufferings anyhow, but all the same – I should have thought there would have been limits, even with a doctor.’

  With this sweeping slander on the medical profession, Ford returned to his office to read a ten-page letter containing a most elaborate scheme for saving the library books from being stolen, a suggestion so complicated that it would not work even if the Committee could have screwed up the courage to face the storm of unpopularity which would descend on them if they ever put it into execution.

  On one point he had definitely made up his mind. However much he might be ordered in the letters to tell Anstruther, he was not so sure he would. The desire to be hand in glove with the doctor no longer remained. Above all, he had no wish to receive any confidences as to the transfer of poisons to someone else. So far as possible he had but one object – to have nothing more to do with it.

  14

  The Turning Of The Worm

  ‘For the life of me,’ snapped Laming, ‘I can’t make out what’s come over you, Ford. When I consented to act as chairman, I never thought I should have all this difficulty with you. Thought you were at any rate an inoffensive sort of person. And now, here you are setting people by the heels!’

  Ford had never before seen Laming angry. Somehow it seemed unnatural, and gave him the same shock that he had suffered when he had been pecked by a canary. Moreover he had no idea what his chairman was talking about. Surely he was not going back once more to the points Cardonnel had raised at the committee meeting? With a vague idea that it might appease Laming’s wrath, he got up and produced one of the suggested new tea-trays.

  ‘What on earth!’ Laming looked at him as if he had gone mad. ‘I am not referring to that sort of matter at all.’ He dropped back into his more usual jerky sentences, anger having for a time made him almost grammatical. ‘Talking about this letter. From Pargiter. Distressing man, Pargiter, but must be humoured. No point in being rude to him. In fact, have to take extra care about him.’

  Ford nodded. It was part of his philosophy, that, if a member was troublesome beyond the ordinary, an extra effort must be made on his behalf. He would have been very surprised if he had been told that those who like grumbling will always complain, and that those who do not lose their temper over every little detail are really worthy of much more attention. In an unfair world the Pargiters and their like often get an undue share of attention, and then regard it as their due.

  But so ingrained was Ford’s habit of complete subservience to the sarcastic and irritable Pargiter that for a moment he could not imagine that he had ever been anything other than almost too civil to him. He faced the chairman with an expression of completely vacant surprise. Laming was holding up a letter.

  ‘It appears,’ he chirped, turning over the paper, ‘that Pargiter met you on the stairs last night and made what he describes as “a completely inoffensive and humble suggestion”. He goes on to say that he is aware that his suggestions are not usually considered very seriously, since “it has been carefully pointed out to me by many members of the committee for some years past that despite the fact that I have been a member for nearly half a century, I am of no importance in this club”.’

  Laming shook his head. ‘Idiot, isn’t he?’ he commented brightly. ‘All the same, I don’t think you ought to have been quite so rude to him. Apparently you told him that you were doing your best, but you wished to goodness he would not want everything done at once. Rather grumpily, too, it seems.’

  Under the stare of Laming’s hard, birdlike little eyes that contained so little sympathy, Ford, to his annoyance, felt himself beginning to blush. How could he explain to the chairman the incessant badgering he was undergoing at the hands of this malicious fiend with a typewriter? How he was told to do this, and abused because the other was not being carried out quickly enough, until by now he was half mad with the worry of things. Last night, too, he had received the worst letter of all, the one with which he could not comply.

  Under the shock of it he had walked downstairs in a trance, his mind full of one thing only – the fact that he must refuse, and that refusal might mean exposure, and with that on his mind he had heard a voice say:

  ‘And when will you have the lights in the library put right?’

  Without thinking, his mind had instantly assumed that this was a hallucination, and he had snapped back to what he had thought was only the shadow of his tormentor, his plea for consideration and for time, and passed on without looking back. Unfortunately, as it now emerged, it was not a shadow, but the very real substance of Pargiter, and all that was wrong was that the connection controlling the reading-lamp was out of order – nothing to do with his tormentor’s fifth point.

  With an effort he brought his mind back to Laming.

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir. I had a headache and hardly realised what Mr Pargiter said. Indeed, I thought it was not him at all.’

  ‘All very well, but I hope that is not the kind of remark you would make to any member.’

  Trying neither to feel nor to look like a naughty little boy, Ford promised to apologise in writing to Pargiter and to be a good boy in future. It was a relief to him when Laming went.

  Very carefully, and with a furtive air, although he was all alone, he drew out from his pocket the bundle of letters from his anonymous correspondent and cursed the day when the fellow had become so proficient a typist. If only he would not write at such length! The very fact of their physical existence was becoming a problem in storage too difficult for Ford to solve.

  He could hardly put them in a folder in the filing cabinet in his office. He could not leave them lying about. If he put them with his bank he was afraid they might read them (a thought which was definitely unjust), and anyhow, he needed them for reference. He would have liked to have destroyed them, but he might one day want to produce them if he ever found out who the fellow was, though so far, he had to admit, he had made not the slightest progress along those lines. Besides, he was being ordered to do so many things that he was afraid of forgetting one of them entirely. Consequently he was reduced to carrying them about with him always. He dare not leave them when he went to have his bath, and he had even considered sleeping with them under his pillow. But sleeping or waking, never, for one moment, was he quite free from them. And now the packet was getting so large that it had ruined hopelessly the sit of his best coat, had bulged out one pocket and overflowed into another, and still the spate of letters arrived. He took them all out and for the hundredth time tried to put them in order.

  He had headed them neatly, so that he could get at once – in theory – the one he wanted. ‘The Twelve Points.’ ‘The original Warning.’ ‘Vegetables and Ventilation’ – an impossible request. You could draw up rules till you were blue in the face as to what temperature the rooms were to be kept at, but still one room would be at eighty because some malade imaginaire was afraid of catc
hing a chill, while another would be dominated by a fresh-air fiend. And as for vegetables, it seemed impossible. However, he was doing his best. Perhaps his correspondent was right and steaming them was a mistake. ‘But if,’ thought Ford, sadly, ‘the members start eating the vegetables in quantities instead of rejecting them sadly and scornfully, the coffee-room will show a loss.’ (Vegetables were included in the table money without charge.)

  Still more piles of letters. ‘Furniture.’ How could he refurnish the Club in a day, even if there were only two chairs in the whole building fit to sit on? ‘Polishing handle of front door.’ In point of fact it was lacquered and nothing could be done about it. ‘Provision of scribbling pads.’ A glad ‘Done’ had been written across this – the best idea the man had produced yet; Ford really believed it would actually prove in the end to be economical. ‘Country Membership, Consideration of Scheme.’ Well, that was not his business. Besides, to his knowledge, successive Committee after successive Committee had tried to evolve something practical and had failed.

  And so on. And so on. At last he came to the letter for which he was looking.

  My Dear Ford,

  I am glad to see that you are making occasional progress. Allowing for your incompetence [‘Why be so rude?’ Ford remembered that he had ejaculated, and then, as an afterthought: ‘Why be so untruthful?’] I must not complain.

  But there is one thing I will not stand. When Morrison was killed – or shall we say when he died of heart failure? Which do you prefer? – besides yourself and Dr ‘Palmer’, there was one other witness, the waiter Hughes.