Muriel Spark - The Ballad of Peckham Rye

‘Dirty swine, he is.’ Dixie said, ‘letting another fellow have it instead of himself.’

‘Shut up, will you?’ Humphrey seemed to say.

They got into Humphrey’s car, speedily assisted by the barman. Dougal drove, first taking Dixie home. She said to him, ‘I could spit at you,’ and slammed the car door.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Humphrey said, as well as he could.

Dougal next drove Humphrey to the outpatient department of St George’s Hospital. ‘Though it pains me to cross the river,’ Dougal said, ‘I think we’d better avoid the southern region for tonight.’

He told a story about Humphrey having tripped over a milk-bottle as he got out of his car, the milk-bottle having splintered and Humphrey fallen on his face among the splinters. Humphrey nodded agreement as the nurse dressed and plastered his wounds. Dougal gave Humphrey’s name as Mr Dougal-Douglas, care of Miss Cheeseman, 14 Chelsea Rise, SW3. Humphrey was told to return within a week. They then went home to Miss Frierne’s.

‘And I won’t even see her again till next Saturday night on account of her doing week-nights as an usherette at the Regal,’ Humphrey said to Dougal at a quarter to twelve that night. He sat up in bed in striped pyjamas, talking as much as possible; but the strips of plaster on his cheek caused him to speak rather out of the opposite side of his mouth. ‘And she won’t think of taking one day off of her holidays this year on account of the honeymoon in September. It’s nothing but save, save, save. You’d think I wasn’t earning good money the way she goes on. And result, she’s losing her sex.’

Dougal crouched over the gas-ring with a fork, pushing the bacon about in the frying-pan. He removed the bacon on to a plate, then broke two eggs into the pan.

‘I wouldn’t marry her,’ Dougal said, ‘if you paid me.’

‘My sister Elsie doesn’t like her,’ Humphrey said out of the side of his mouth.

Dougal stood up and took the plate of bacon in his hand. He held this at some way from his body and looked at it, moving it slightly back and forth towards him, as if it were a book he was reading, and he short-sighted.

Dougal read from the book: ‘Wilt thou take this woman,’ he said with a deep ecclesiastical throb, ‘to be thai wedded waif?’

Then he put the plate aside and knelt; he was a sinister goggling bridegroom. ‘No,’ he declared to the ceiling, ‘I won’t, quite frankly.’

‘Christ, don’t make me laugh, it pulls the plaster.’

Dougal dished out the eggs and bacon. He cut up the bacon small for Humphrey.

‘You shouldn’t have any scars if you’re careful and get your face regularly dressed, they said.’

Humphrey stroked his wounded cheek.

‘Scars wouldn’t worry me. Might worry Dixie.’

‘As a qualified refrigerator engineer and a union man you could have your pick of the girls.’

‘I know, but I want Dixie.’ He put the eggs and bacon slowly away into the side of his mouth.

The rain of a cold summer morning fell on Nelly Mahone as she sat on a heap of disused lorry tyres in the yard of Paley’s, scrap merchants of Meeting-house Lane. She had been waiting since ten past nine although she did not expect Dougal to arrive until ten o’clock. He came at five past ten, bobbing up and down under an umbrella.

‘They come to see me Saturday,’ she said at once. ‘Trevor Lomas, Collie Gould, Leslie Crewe. They treated me bad.’

‘You’ve got wet,’ Dougal said. ‘Why didn’t you take shelter?’

She looked round the yard. ‘Got to be careful where you go, son. Stand up in the open, they can only tell you to move on. But go inside a place. they can call the cops. Her nose thrust forward towards the police station at the corner of the lane.

Dougal looked round the yard for possible shelter. The bodies of two lorries, bashed in from bad accidents, stood lopsided in a corner. On a low wooden cradle stood a house-boat. ‘We’ll go into the boat.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t get up there.’

Dougal kicked a wooden crate over and over till it stood beneath the door of the boat. He pulled the door-handle. Eventually it gave way. He climbed in, then out again, and took Nelly by the arm.

‘Up you go, Nelly.’

‘What if the cops come?’

‘I’m in with them,’ Dougal said.

‘Jesus, that’s not your game?’

‘Up you go.

He heaved her up and settled in the boat beside her on a torn upholstered seat. Some sad cretonne curtains still drooped in the windows. Dougal drew them across the windows as far as was possible.

‘I feel that ill,’ Nelly said.

‘I’m not too keen on illness,’ Dougal said.

‘Nor me. They come to ask after you,’ Nelly said. ‘They found out you was seeing me. They got your code. They want to know what’s cheese. They want to know what’s your code key, they offer me ten quid. They want to know who’s your gang.’

‘I’m in with the cops, tell them.’

‘That I would never believe. They want to know who’s Rose Hathaway. They’ll be back again. I got to tell them something.’

‘Tell them I’m paid by the police to investigate certain irregularities in the industrial life of Peckham in the first place. See, Nelly? I mean crime at the top in the wee factories. And secondly-’

Her yellowish eyes and wet grey hair turned towards him in a startled way.

‘If I thought you was a nark -‘

‘Investigator,’ Dougal said. ‘It all comes under human research. And secondly my job covers various departments of youthful terrorism. So you can just tell me, Nelly, what they did to you on Saturday afternoon.’

‘Ah, they didn’t do nothing out of the way.’

‘You said they treated you roughly.’

‘No, not so to get them in trouble.’

Dougal took out an envelope. ‘Your ten pounds,’ he said.

‘You can keep it,’ Nelly said. ‘I’m going on my way.’

‘Feel my head, Nelly.’ He guided her hand to the two small bumps among his curls.

‘Cancer of the brain a-coming on,’ she said.

‘Nelly, I had a pair of horns like a goat when I was born. I lost them in a fight at a later date.’

‘Holy Mary, let me out of here. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going with you.’

Dougal stood up and found that by standing astride in the middle of the boat he could make it rock. So he rocked it for a while and sang a sailor’s song to Nelly.

Then he helped her to climb down from the boat, put up his umbrella, and tried to catch up with her as she hurried out of the scrap yard. A policeman, coming out of the station, at the corner, nodded to Dougal.

‘I’ll be going into the station, then, Nelly,’ Dougal said. ‘To see my chums.’

She stared at him, then spat on the rainy pavement. ‘And I don’t mind,’ Dougal said, ‘if you tell Trevor Lomas what I’m doing. You can tell him if he returns my notebooks to me there will be nothing further said. We policemen have got to keep our records and our secret codes, you realize.’

She moved sideways away from him, watching the traffic so that she could cross at the earliest moment.

‘You and I,’ Dougal said, ‘won’t be molested from that quarter for a week or two if you give them the tip-off.’

He went into the station yard to see how the excavations were getting on. He discovered that the tunnel itself was now visible from the top of the shaft.

Dougal pointed out to his policemen friends the evidence of the Thames silt in the under-soil. ‘One time,’ he said, ‘the Thames was five miles wide, and it covered all Peckham.’

So they understood, they said, from other archaeologists who were interested in the excavation.

‘Hope I’m not troubling you if I pop in like this from time to time?’ Dougal said.