Джон Пристли - Salt is Leaving

"We-ell." Peggy drew it out as if uncertain what to reply. "I can tell you this much. Noreen had a special secret she shared with me when we were always going out together. And I promised – cross my heart – I'd never say anything about it to anybody – and I never have and I won't break my promise-"

"You can tell me this, though." Dr Salt stared hard at her. "Could this special secret have anything to do with her disappearance – the night of September 12th?"

"No, it couldn"t. And that's something I'm absolutely positive about – I really am, Dr Salt."

Another two patrons were arriving. "I believe you, Peggy," he said quickly. "And thank you."

He walked away and went down the stairs rather slowly. An observant man for all his abstracted air, he noticed in passing that the door of the Gents was slightly ajar. Halfway down the lower flight, he stopped just as two people passed him and looked up. He caught a glimpse, the merest flash, of a young man with reddish hair and a leather jacket, who must have come out of the Gents , turning at the top of the upper flight. He hesitated, slowly descended three or four more steps, but then, just catching a sound from above, swung round and hurried back upstairs, passing the two people who had passed him. Peggy was not there and neither was the young man with the reddish hair and the leather jacket. The tin receptacle was lying on its side, with tickets spilt around, two or three yards from where it had been standing near Peggy, as if the young man had booted it hard before hurrying down the opposite stairway. Dr Salt looked at the doors marked Private , as if Peggy might be now behind one of them, waited a moment or two, then went on his way downstairs again.

3

Recovering his car from Bert, who swore he was nearly ready to offer a lovely price for it, Dr Salt drove to Olton Street, which was only about half a mile from his own flat. It was a monotonous and miserable street, filled with very thin women, very fat women, crying babies. He stopped at Number Forty-five, and Mrs Pearson had the front door open before he had reached it. She was looking rather less slatternly than usual. "Come along in, Doctor. And what about a nice cup of tea? Be no trouble."

He thanked her but said he hardly ever drank tea, which was a lie because he drank a lot of tea but not the kind that women like Mrs Pearson made – stewed tannin.

"Well, sit down then. That's right. No – you go on – I like to see a man smoking his pipe." She was, in fact, sitting very near him – they were facing each other, but it was a very small room – and he was lighting his pipe to defeat that now familiar sour smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, which had been strange to him, seven years before, after the brown and yellow people he had been attending.

"You went to the police this morning – about Noreen – didn't you?" said Mrs Pearson. "Well, I had one of them plain-clothes sergeants here this afternoon, asking me all sorts of questions. Taking an interest now – and about time."

"What did you tell him, Mrs Pearson?"

"Just what I'd told them before, only they weren't interested then. Though I'll admit that both times I'd had a drink or two with my friend, Mrs Muston, who'd egged me on to go. Well, I told this sergeant – CID chap, though he didn't look a bit clever, I must say – I told him she'd gone out that evening-"

"September 12th, wasn't it?"

"That's right – the 12th. I told him she'd gone out just the same as usual – an" looking very smart, I'll say that for her – expecting to come back – all hours, of course – an" I knew what was going on, of course – an" I'd warned her. So I told him she wouldn't have left Birkden without coming back for some of her things. Not even if he was going to buy her some clothes, whoever he was. I don't care who a girl is and what she's up to, she's not going to walk out an" leave everything. This, for instance." Rather like a conjurer now, Mrs Pearson triumphantly produced from nowhere an object that Dr Salt stared at blankly. He decided finally, while Mrs Pearson sat quietly radiating triumph, that it must be what was left of a rag doll after many years of hard wear.

"Yes, Noreen told me she'd had it ever since she was five. And she'd never stir without it – always took it on her holidays – always there on her bed. I said to that sergeant – an" he's a fool, if you ask me – 'She'd have come back for that if for nothing else.' My Peggy's just the same with her old Baby Bear. God knows what they get up to nowadays, not out of their teens, but they"re still babies in some ways-" And Mrs Pearson began to cry softly.

"We"re all babies in some ways, Mrs Pearson," said Dr Salt, feeling he ought to say something.

"Doctor, what do you think has happened to her? I know Peggy thinks she's gone to France or somewhere with some chap. But I don"t. I can't help it, I just don"t. She'd have come back for some of her things. It wouldn't have taken her five minutes to get "em. And it's no use – I feel uneasy in my mind about Noreen and I can't stop wondering about her. Three weeks – an" never a word. What's happened? Where is she, Doctor?"

"I don't know, Mrs Pearson," he said slowly as he stood up. "But I'm going to find out. And I'm not leaving Birkden until I do, even though I've had quite enough of Birkden."

"I used to think it such a nice town," said Mrs Pearson, through her final sniffles, "when I was a girl and just after I got married. But now – I don't know – it's different. Nothing like so nice and friendly-"

"Perhaps there aren't any nice towns any more, Mrs Pearson," he told her on his way to the door. "Perhaps instead of making them bigger and bigger, we ought to set fire to them and then start afresh."

"And where would we all be – camping out? Will you be seeing the police again, Dr Salt?"

He turned at the front door. "I think so. I hope so. We ought to have something to tell each other soon."

4

Dr Salt had lived well away from his surgery, which he had shared with his three partners. He had a ground-floor flat in a row of coming-down-in-the-world Victorian houses. It had its own front door to the left as you entered the still imposing hall. This door led directly into an unusually large sitting room with windows at each end of it. Here, an hour after he had left Mrs Pearson and Olton Street, which he hoped he had visited for the last time, Dr Salt was finishing a pot of China tea, without any nonsense of milk and sugar, and losing himself in a muddle of books and gramophone records. He was trying to decide which books and records he could sell or give away and which he ought to keep, packing them to be stored until he knew where he was going. And so far he had made very little progress with this rather urgent chore. He would light a pipe and then begin dipping into books instead of deciding which pile should receive them. With the records – and he had several hundreds, together with a magnificent stereophonic record player – he wasted even more time, especially where he had two versions of one work. He would play a particular movement, then try the same movement on the alternative record, which might be older and monaural and yet more worthy to be kept. And so far, though he had started on Sunday morning, he had not yet clearly separated the rejected and the accepted: it seemed to be more and more of a muddle. His heart wasn't in it. This was when he needed a woman, or at least the kind of woman who was all will and energy when faced with disorder and indecision.

He was listening to the fifth movement of the Schubert Octet in F Major, played by the Vienna Octet, when the young man with the reddish hair and the leather jacket walked in. He had found the door unlocked and apparently did not care about ringing or knocking. He was wearing dark glasses, which he might have been wearing earlier – Dr Salt had only seen him from the back – and which were certainly unnecessary late on an October afternoon.