David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

It was only then he realised that of course something had.

He paused in a doorway and took the letter out of his pocket again. Having been hand-delivered, the unmarked envelope gave no indication of the sender. The note itself held no more information (beyond the fact that the writer had an odd taste in ink) than the address, a reference to Paul’s ‘present difficulties’ and an admonition to be prompt.

An unwonted flush of embarrassment stole over him at the thought of a third party being privy to his financial circumstances. In particular at the manner that had occasioned them. Then it occurred to him that it might actually have been Valentine who had sent the note. Before embarrassment could turn to anger, though, he reasoned that since the man had already helped himself to Paul’s money, there couldn’t be much left to interest him. Still, there was always the possibility that Valentine had passed Paul’s name onto some other confidence-trickster who might be looking to pick over the remains.

He gave another ineffectual curse and screwed up the note and was on the point of hurling it into the gutter when he noticed that the man in the cap was standing on the pavement some hundred yards or so behind him. This time his attention appeared to have been caught by a notice board advertising a piano recital to be given that afternoon. It had caught Paul’s eye as he had passed as he had wondered if the free recital might include refreshment. Failing to see any immediate connection between Corinthian capitals and piano recitals, Paul loitered behind a lamppost and tried to get a better look at the man.

Being oddly familiar, the thought had occurred that the fellow might be some old sweat from his regiment who had spotted him on the street and was trying to pluck up the courage to ask for a handout. But despite this vague familiarity he couldn’t quite put his finger on, the man didn’t look like any old sweat he had ever seen. He studied the man in the cap for a moment or two before coming to the conclusion that the man wasn’t trying to pluck up courage to approach him, but rather doing much the same as Paul was himself, watching him in as unobtrusive a manner as he could. Alarmed that the man might be looking to dun him for some debt that he had forgotten or, worse still, be a bailiff waiting for a less public opportunity to serve him with a summons, Paul hurried on still clutching the balled letter.

He couldn’t actually remember having any outstanding debts beyond those to his landlady and his club, although he couldn’t discount the possibility. His memory had not been all it had used to be since he had been wounded.

This possibility added a new dimension to his situation. The more he thought about it the more Burkett’s message — assuming it had nothing to do with Valentine — began to take on the appearance of the proverbial straw within the reach of the proverbial drowning man. He was certainly having trouble keeping his head above water. He straightened out the note once more. Whitehall wasn’t far, yet he wondered if he should take a cab to shake off the man in the cap. As he folded the note into his pocket for the second time, though, his fingers brushed against the few remaining coins that stood between him and total insolvency. He glanced at his watch. There was at least an hour until the appointment and so he decided to walk, to take a roundabout route and his chances with the man in the cap.

The morning was clear. Beyond his own clouded horizon, it was a perfect summer day. Reaching the river, he stopped. He had walked almost to The Strand, cutting this way and that through side streets to the Victoria Embankment. Confident he had lost the man in the cap, he leaned against the wall and smoked a cigarette. A barge was plying its way up-river beneath the Charing Cross Bridge, the sun as it played on the bow wave turning the water into a sequinned swell. The cough of its engine on the morning air repeated like the hacking of a consumptive and Paul allowed himself the momentary fancy of imagining he might be hearing the sound of a dying empire. The old orders were passing; the Russian monarchy had fallen and the Austrian empire was in tatters. Whoever was the loser now — Germany or Britain — surely would not survive. Yet on such a morning the thought brought nothing worse than a sense of the feyness of life, a vestige of fin de siècle nostalgia amid the horror.

In this frame of mind it was almost tempting to regard his own situation as little other than a passing inconvenience. Even his hunger pangs could be seen as simply one of life’s temporary vicissitudes. A matter of luck which, when examined dispassionately, could be viewed as a sort of tide given to washing in upon one and out again with a certain — if unpredictable — regularity. He just happened to be unfortunate in that, at the moment, its tendency was to be washing out. He had found that out the previous evening when he had tried his hand at the gaming tables in an attempt to parley his last pound or two into a sum sufficient to tide him over until payday. But luck — as luck would have it — hadn’t favoured him. The cards were not running his way. In fact, instead of easing his situation he’d ended up watching what little money Valentine had left him dribble away across the baize.

But since he had always believed one made one’s own luck — bitter pill though it was to swallow — he had to admit that a good part of his present adverse fortune could be put down to sheer bad judgement. The fact was that a good friend of his — who, as it turned out, had deserved neither the adjective nor the noun — had skipped town two days earlier having added what cash Paul kept in his rooms to the totality of his savings; money which Valentine had already prised from what had been far too loose a grip.

To Paul’s cost, Valentine had persuaded him to invest in what he had described as a new and exciting (‘Oh, a very exciting’) chemical process for extracting radium from pitchblende. While Paul hadn’t fully understood the method as Valentine had explained it, it had sounded very plausible. Up-to-the-minute, particularly as conveyed by Valentine’s boyish enthusiasm. Paul’s real problem was that science had never been his best subject at school. He had never really got a handle on it, then or since. The closest he had got to being adept at anything remotely scientific was, after entering the trenches, acquiring the mental facility of tracking the trajectory of any artillery shell likely to land anywhere near him. But then most soldiers learned that trick (or, fatally, didn’t) and he supposed that it was more a case of an instinct for personal survival than any innate ability to comprehend trigonometry and vectors and all the other paraphernalia of applied mathematics. And even that trick, although indescribably useful, could not always be relied upon — as witness his five months in hospital.

He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt over the embankment into the river. If he was going to be honest, he had to admit that all the self-recrimination about science was in reality no more than an excuse; what really lay at the root of his problem was that he had been taken in by Valentine. The man had been a confidence trickster. Facing the truth of the matter at least made him feel better. Not as good a decent lunch might have done but at least that showed one couldn’t live off self-deception.

He looked back along the street. There was no sign of the man in the cap and the fact made him wonder if the man’s apparent interest had been no more than his own imagination, another variant of self-deception. He turned and headed towards Whitehall.

Whitehall Court turned out to be a gothic pile standing between the Embankment and Whitehall, a building he must have passed a hundred times without paying it any attention. The War Office was around the corner — a fact he knew from having been summoned there shortly before being wounded and where he had undergone a curious interview, the purpose of which had never been explained. He had eventually put it down to his promotion which had come through shortly afterwards. He had never been quite able to reconcile this, though, with some of the uncomfortable questions about his background and friends he had been asked. Or, come to that, the nagging suspicion that his promotion had really been meant for someone else, the other Paul Ross perhaps.