Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

Wainewright did not want to talk any more. He was looking into the mirror. Two men, awaiting their turn, were exchanging whispers and looking in his direction. He knew what they were saying. That’s Wainewright, they were saying; that quite ordinary-looking man having the lavender shampoo is Wainewright, the Wainewright who has the house where Tooth was murdered by his wife.

He smiled. But then old Pewter flipped the linen cover from the man in the chair on Wainewright’s right – a big, swaggering man with a humorous, rosy face. One of the whispering men got up and said, in a voice that shook with awe: ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Al Allum?’

The big man nodded gravely. ‘ That is my name,’ he said.

‘May I shake hands with you? Would you mind?’

‘Not at all.’ The big man held out a heavy, manicured fist, caught the stranger’s hand in a grip that made him jump, gave Pewter a shilling, and went out with a cordial and resonant ‘Good-bye’.

The man who had shaken hands with him said to Pewter: ‘I’ll give you two shillings for that shilling Al Allum gave you just now.’

The old man handed him a shilling with a faint smile. The other man, putting it in his breast-pocket, explained: ‘It’s for my boy. He’s crazy about Al Allum: you know what kids are.’

Somebody else said: ‘The greatest comedian alive today, Al Allum. Ever see his fake conjuring sketch? Brilliant!’

‘Brilliantine?’ asked Flickenflocker.

‘Cream,’ said Wainewright.

‘Mmmmmyah! … There.’

As Wainewright was paying his bill he said to the cashier: ‘Is your clock right?’

The girl replied: ‘It wouldn’t be working in a barbershop if it was.’ Everybody laughed. A man said: ‘Dead clever, that!’

Mr Wainewright went out.

The city muttered under dry dust and blue smoke; the day was warm. Girls passed looking like bursting flowers in their new summer dresses. Wainewright looked at them. Here – passing him, jostling him and touching him with swinging hands in the crowded street – here walked thousands of desirable young women with nothing more than one-sixtieth of an inch of rayon, linen, or crêpe de Chine between their bare flesh and his eyesight. Why – ah, why – did his destiny send him out to walk alone? What’s wrong with me? Wainewright asked himself. Tramps, cripples, hunchbacks, criminals, horrible men deformed and discoloured and old – they all know the love of women. What’s wrong with me? What have they got that I haven’t got? I am a man of property … still a young man. He stared piercingly at a pretty girl who was slowly walking towards him. Wainewright felt that his eyes were blazing like floodlights. But the girl, looking at him incuriously, saw only a small ordinary man with mild, expressionless eyes; if she thought of him at all, drawing conclusions from what she saw, she thought of him as a dim and boring little family man – a nobody – the same as everybody.

Mentally addressing the passing girl, That’s what you think, said Wainewright. If I told you who and what I am you’d change your ideas quickly enough, Blondie! He stopped to look at hats in a shop window. A furry green velour caught his eye, and he decided to buy a hat like that – a two-guinea hat, a real Austrian hat and not a ten-shilling imitation such as Tooth used to wear. That, and a younger-looking suit, a tweed suit; a coloured shirt, even…. Why have I waited so long?

Wainewright was not a drinking man. Alcohol gave him a headache. But now he felt that everything was changing inside him: he was getting into step with life. Now he wanted a drink. He walked jauntily to the ‘Duchess of Douro’. Tooth had taken him there once before, one Saturday afternoon several months ago. Wainewright remembered the occasion vividly: he had not yet come into his inheritance; he worked for his living then. His aunt was still alive. He was waiting: she could not live for ever. His little Personal Expenses Cash Book said that Wainewright had had seven hair-cuts since then. This made five months since his last drink of beer with Tooth.

Tooth was a tall dark man, strongly built, bright with the sickly radiance and the good-fellowship of the travelling salesman. He resembled one of those wax models that make cheap clothes attractive in the windows of mass-production tailors: he had the same unnatural freshness of complexion, the same blueness of chin, agelessness of expression, and shoddy precision of dress. Tooth wore Tyrolean hats and conspicuous tweeds. He liked to be seen smoking cigars. Yes, with his fivepenny cigars he was a man of personality with a manner at once detestable and irresistible – a way of seeming to give himself body and soul to the achievement of the most trivial objects. He could not accept the finality of anybody’s ‘No’. Argument, with Tooth soon became acrimonious, full of recrimination. Women described him as ‘masterful’; Tooth would shout for twenty minutes over a bad penny, a bus ticket, or an accidental nudge of the elbow.

‘Have a drink,’ Tooth had said.

‘I couldn’t really, Tooth.’

‘You can and will, cocko. There’s a girl in the ‘Douro’ I want to introduce you to. A blonde. Genuine blonde: I found out. Eh? Ha-ha! Eh? Come on.’

On the way to the public-house Tooth talked:

‘Having the car painted. Just as well: I always seem to get myself into bother when I’m out in the car. Be lost without it, though. Tell you about the other night? Listen: I’m on my way to Derby. Listen. Listening? Well … listen:

‘On the way I meet two girls, sisters. Both ginger; one slim and the other plumpish. So I say: “Want a ride?” And so they say: “Yes”. And well … after a few miles we pull up …’ Tooth became briefly but luridly obscene. ‘But listen: the joke of it was this; I ran ’em about fifteen miles farther on and we pulled up at a sort of tea-shop place and went in for a cup of tea. Listening? Well, I order tea and cakes and things, and I say: “Excuse me, my dears, I’ve got to see a man from the Balkans about a boarhound,” I say. “Pour my tea out and I’ll be right back,” I tell ’em. So I nip out, start up the old jam-jar, and scram before you can say knife. Eh? Ha-ha! Eh? Eh?’

‘But what happened to the girls, all that way from home?’

‘That’s their look-out. I told you I had to get to Derby, didn’t I? What was I going to do with ’em in Derby? Have a heart! Ah-ah, now you’re coming in here to meet the nicest barmaid in London. No nonsense. Shut up. Come on in now.’

He crashed through the grouped drinkers, pulling Wainewright after him. A tall young woman with honey-coloured hair, whose face was strangely expressive of lust and boredom, dragged languidly at the handle of a beer-engine. But when she saw Tooth she smiled with unmistakable sudden joy. Only a woman in love smiles like that.

‘Baby,’ said Tooth, ‘meet Mr Wainewright, one of the best.’

‘Why, Sid! Why haven’t you been to see me for such a long time?’

‘Been busy. But I’ve been thinking of you. Ask George Wainewright. We met in the City. He wanted me to go with him to a posh week-end party in Kingston. (He’s a very well-to-do man.) But I insisted on coming here. Did I or did I not, Wally?’ said this pathological liar.

The compulsion of Tooth’s glance was too strong. Wainewright nodded.

‘See, Baby? Now, what’ll we have?’

‘I, ah, a small shandy.’

‘Oh, no, George. Not if you drink with me, you don’t. None of your shandies. Drink that stuff and you don’t drink with me. You’re going to have a Bass, a Draught Bass. That’s a man’s drink. Baby, two Draught Bass.’