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  On the night that I introduced Bertega and his wife to Jean we dined in the Penthouse and Bertega and I exchanged stories about events in our common businesses and discussed the current world economic situation. Bertega said that at last the seeds that he and friends of his had sown in the Italian unions years ago were coming to fruition and they were being split wide open. The resulting greater rate of inflation that would exist for a while could be absorbed in the long term, after stability had been seen somehow miraculously to return. He told me that he’d entertained a member of the Communist high command at his house outside Turin and he’d told Bertega that the Party appreciated the way that the political shake-up that would follow the union business would suit the Party very well indeed.

  As far as Christina and Jean were concerned, well, if Christina were ever to be extended an invitation to dinner for four at Buck House, she would make a point of first consulting her engagement book before accepting; in other words, Christina concealed her patronage in the manner of the natural aristocrat.

  After dinner we sat around for a while and then Bertega joined me at the drinks and told me about the new piece of merchandise he had with him. Naturally he hadn’t brought it into the country himself; he’d had the taxi stop for a few moments between here and Claridges and taken delivery of it from the proprietor of a newsagent’s that provided newspapers from all over the world for Soho’s cosmopolitan population. This was never mentioned, of course. Bertega would almost certainly realise that as a matter of course one of my employees would be able to tell me exactly how many times he went to the bathroom during his brief stay.

  Fine, I said when he mentioned the goods. We’d all go through into the projection theatre. When I said all, Bertega glanced at Jean, who was out of earshot, talking to Christina. The film, he explained, was what one would expect. It happened to be a record of the period of captivity of the daughter of an Italian industrialist. The two-million-pound ransom had been paid. The girl had not been returned to her family. Bertega glanced at Jean again. You understand, he said to me.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. My old friend, I told him, if my judgement could not be trusted, then whose could?

  That was good enough for him, he said. We all went through into the theatre.

  THE SEA

  IN MABLETHORPE, THEY OPEN at ten o’clock, in the season or out of it.

  My occasional trips into town are not influenced by this fact alone, because I constantly have with me whatever I need. It’s just that the act of driving into the town and of going from place to place gives me the illusion that the hours are actually passing by, not just standing still like the timeless void in which my mind stands motionless.

  I walk down the concrete ramp and cross the promenade and continue away from the sea along the broad street to the single-storey arcade. The emptiness more than ever continues to give the impression of the Western town that waited for Frank Miller to get off the train and meet up with his brothers.

  I stop off at the newsagent’s on my way to the South Hotel. In summer you couldn’t see the newspapers for postcards, buckets, spades and other seasonal ephemera. Now the counter that faces you on entering is covered only with sets of newspapers. I buy the Mirror and the Telegraph and while I’m waiting I notice, as I always do, a set of about a half a dozen copies of The Stage. I know two members of the community whose lives wouldn’t be the same without it, one of them Howard from the Dunes, but in a place like this, who else would be in the market for that kind of paper?

  The South Hotel is a hotel in name only. In Mablethorpe, there are no hotels, only boarding houses. The South faces north. That’s the kind of place Mablethorpe is. But the South looks like a hotel, at least. The gas holder apart, it’s the town’s tallest building, all three storeys of it. Like everything else in the town, only part of it is used. The whole town is just the sum of parts of its buildings. Unsurprisingly, it seems half empty even when it’s full.

  In the South’s case, the action’s downstairs. A conglomerate of bars designed to stuff in as many of the summer people as possible. The South stands on a corner of the street and the biggest of the bars runs the whole length of the building on the street side. It’s so long there are three separate entrances on the street frontage. No steps up, of course, or anything flashy like that. Just straight in off the street.

  I push one of the double doors and walk in.

  Inside, out of season, it’s got all the charm of a crematorium; as though that’s what the architect designed it for, except that on his plans he got the scale wrong. The enormity of the bar is exaggerated by its present clientele, which at the moment numbers four. None of them is a day under sixty. The really depressing thing is that I now know them all, to nod to, in the same way I’ll know the others who’ll be coming in later, to reach the lunchtime peak of about a dozen customers.

  The actual bar counter is almost as long as the room itself, disappearing into the distance to where the four dartboards are placed at equal intervals. From where I enter, the dartboards look as big as bull’s eyes from seven foot six.

  I cross the industrial carpeting to the bar and Jackie the barman closes and folds his copy of the Sun; my drink is waiting for me by the time I reach the counter.

  “Morning, Mr. Carson,” he says, putting the drink on the soak mat for me. “All right?”

  I take some money from my wallet and put a pound on the counter.

  “I’m well, Jackie,” I say, “thank you. What will you have?”

  “I’ll just have ten penn’orth, thanks very much.”

  He gives me my change and sticks his half of bitter under the brandy optic. The act of him doing that and of me putting my money away gives us a natural break so that neither of us will have to carry on talking to each other. I take a sip of my drink and walk over to one of the endless leatherette seats by the window that looks out on to the street. I put my drink down on the table in front of me and begin to glance through the Mirror, but as usual there is nothing. There’s been nothing for two months now; the news editors, although they’ve got far more on their files than they can ever print, ran out of new developments ages ago and tried to keep it alive with speculation disguised as reporting, but they finally gave up. The last thing was, I was dead along with some of the others or I’d gone to Australia, or somewhere, and the Law had been extremely glad to be reported as saying that the gangland killings had seemed to serve their purpose, in that those that had been put down had been put down and that was an end of it. Of course, there were still areas under investigation. As for the Law, they were quite happy for the press to clutch at straws, so long as the straw didn’t come from the foundations of their own house.

  I finish the Mirror and I’m just starting on the Telegraph when the door is pushed inwards and in comes Eddie Jacklin. A copy of The Stage is rolled up in one hand, and with it he beats the palm of the other, as if he’s keeping time with the number that’s in his head and dancing in his walk. Eddie’s around thirty but was born out of time; his soul-era is the fifties, music from which period he re-creates in his various acts. Out of season he runs a Country and Western group round the local pubs, and sometimes at the Dunes when it occasionally gives itself an evening airing; but when the season comes he’s resident at the Dunes full time, doing the full bit—playing with his group, doing his Roy Orbison impressions, organising talent shows for adults and for kids, lunchtime shows, compering the wrestling, the full bit. Although he wears the wide lapels and the rest, he’s never been able to bring himself to comb his hair other than in a style of the period he really belongs to. And even though what Eddie does is never going to threaten Freddie Starr’s corner or get him within a million miles of New Faces, he’s in his own eyes a local star. In the eyes of the locals, he’s a shithouse; the senior citizens patronise him, play up to his ideas about himself, the joke being to treat him as the star he thinks he is. Eddie’s totally unaware of all of this; he reacts to the greetings he gets during his progre
ss through the town with the insincere humility all the big stars have. The only person he’s different with is me. Oh, he gives me the razzmatazz but he’s slightly unsure of his delivery. I both worry him and intrigue him. There’s the smell of a different world about me, and he’s bright enough to recognise at least one source of the aroma. What am I? he wonders. Some eccentric Val Parnell, taking a break from the pressure of others’ international stardom? Whatever he wonders, one thing he’s certain of: I’m the kind of person who knows some people.

  So as usual, when Eddie enters, he pretends at first not to clock my presence as he swings on his way across to the bar and by the time he gets there he’s thrown out a couple of distracted “Hi’s” to the customers.

  “Morning, Eddie. How’s it going?” asks Jackie, because Eddie wants him to.

  “Oh, you know,” Eddie says. “You know what it’s like on amateur night. They let you have their music beforehand, but you never get time to go through it with them. So on the night, when they lose, they blame the backing for not doing it right.”

  Slight non-glance in my direction to see if I’m clocking his routine. Jackie puts a pint in front of Eddie.

  “That’s why I’m setting up this morning, just in case the lads can get in early tomorrow so it might give one or two of the punters a chance to go through their paces.”

  Eddie drinks, then acts his recognition of me over the top of his pint. He lowers his glass and walks over to where I’m sitting, sits down.

  “Busy?” I ask him.

  “Busy? I’m trying to get the acoustic balance right all by myself,” he says. “That’s the trouble. The other lads are only semipro; during the day I have to do their work for them. And some of them are married, and they can’t go home at night and have their tea and come straight out again. So that leaves me driving the equipment to the gigs during the day so’s we’re not wasting half the evening setting up. Sometimes Cyril can get an hour or two away to give us a hand. He works for the Electricity Board.”

  “An impresario’s work is never done,” I say to him.

  “Yeah,” he says, laughing only to show me that he’s the kind of fellow who can take a joke.

  He takes another sip of his drink.

  “Take tomorrow night,” he says. “I’m organising the whole fucking issue. A lot of work. Twenty different acts. We’ve even got somebody reciting poetry; ‘If’ or something. But it’s all a waste of time.”

  “Why’s that, Eddie?”

  He leans towards me slightly.

  “Well,” he says, “I know you wouldn’t let on, but the winner’s already fixed up.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. Not that she doesn’t deserve it. She’s great. I’ve asked her if she’ll join the group for the summer season.”

  “That good, eh?”

  “Fan-bloody-tastic. The group’s rehearsing tonight. I’m hoping she’ll be able to drop in and go through her numbers with the lads.”

  “She a local girl?”

  “I dunno. I think she did Butlins at Skegness last season. I think she is.”

  A fellow in Electricity Board overalls comes in, looks around. Eddie clocks him.

  “That’s Cyril,” Eddie says, downing his pint. “Better not hang about; he hasn’t got long.”

  As Eddie moves off, he says, “If you’re around tonight, why not drop in and catch the rehearsal? Unless you’re already doing something else.”

  “Thanks. I might do that.”

  “Great.”

  Eddie and Cyril go out. I smile to myself. As if I’m not doing anything else.

  No, I’m not doing anything else.

  Only time.

  THE SMOKE

  I DECIDED TO TALK to Mickey about it. He had nothing to do with the collectors other than on the odd occasion I’d had reason to send him to go and talk to one or two of them.

  “After what the accountant said,” I told him, “it doesn’t look like the kind of pilfering we allow for anyway. So we’ve got to make a decision on the odds. Because of the amount involved, I’d suggest starting at the top, with the ones who are the last to collect the money before it’s delivered here. At any rate the accountant thinks that way.”

  Mickey thought about it.

  “Do you really think they’d try it on? I mean, Hales, Wilson, Chapman, Warren. They make a lot of bread. Would they risk what they already get? And risk what they’d get if they were sussed out?”

  “Money has a funny effect on people, Mickey,” I said to him. “Corrupting. Sometimes it makes them act very peculiar.”

  Mickey thought some more.

  “And the accountant’s sure that’s what the books say?” he said.

  “As sure as he could be. Naturally he didn’t have everything entirely at his disposal.”

  “And supposing all four of them are at it?”

  “Then we’ll find out all four of them are at it, won’t we?”

  Mickey lit a cigarette. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to talk to them. But if I invite them here and they’re the ones who’re at it, they might not come, if you get my meaning, and once we’ve talked to one, and supposing it’s not him, and the others get wind, then there’ll be nobody to talk to at all.”

  “So you’d like me to bring them along to Sammy’s?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who would you like to see first?”

  “I don’t know. Try Ray Warren.”

  Mickey blew smoke from his cigarette upwards towards the ceiling.

  “I think,” Mickey said, “I think Ray’s gone to Bolton for a few days. His mother’s in a terminal situation.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’ll leave it to you, then.”

  Mickey nodded. There was a short silence.

  “I don’t know,” Mickey said. “People. They never cease to amaze me.”

  THE SEA

  IT’S ONLY A QUARTER of an hour’s drive from Mablethorpe to the bungalow, but after I’ve finished reading the papers in the South and get back into my car and drive along the street and out of the town, I don’t turn off the main road and head for the bungalow; instead I keep going and without doing above fifty I’m in Grimsby inside three-quarters of an hour.

  Grimsby is a place that looks exactly the way it sounds; life imitating art, so to speak. A huge chunk of its centre’s been cleared out in recent years and replaced with an enormous self-contained shopping precinct, with piazzas, the lot. Piazzas in Grimsby. Still, they have cod and chips in Benidorm. It’s a small revenge perhaps.

  I park the car in the multi-storey and when I’ve found my way out of this tower I make my way on to the confines of the basilica and wander through the pedestrian thoroughfares until I come to a built-in pub called the Monastic Habit. It’s got a restaurant that is not quite half bad; young execs and a big demand for prawn cocktails from their escortees.

  I take my place at a table for two against the gauze-draped picture window that offers me an uninterrupted view of Sketchleys and John Menzies and the Vallances on the other side of the pedestrian thoroughfare.

  A waitress comes to take my order and I order the fish. When in Rome.

  I also get her to send over the wine waiter and I choose the wine and ask for it to be brought straightaway; when he returns with it he pours it for me to taste but I waive the ritual and he adds some more to my glass and retires hurt.

  While I’m waiting for my meal to arrive I turn my attention from the commercial aspect outside to the cluster of the better halves of young marrieds at the small cocktail bar across the room. They’re all wearing credit-account machine tailoreds and drinking halves of keg. There’s a couple of groups of them, and in each group there’s the token secretary brought along to remind the collected marrieds that each one is still singularly a bit of a lad.

  A man of the same ilk except five years on and perhaps with an office all to himself is sitting alone on one of the high stools, nursing a tomat
o juice, doing a crossword in the newspaper that’s folded and balanced on his legs.

  I take a sip of my drink and while I’m doing that a girl in her early twenties comes into the restaurant and goes over to the cocktail bar. She looks good in one of those double-breasted PVC macs, trench-coat length, leather boots that stop just below the knee. Beneath her maroon coat I can see the rolled top of a white cashmere sweater softly emphasising the clear line of her jaw. Her fair hair would be about shoulder length if it hadn’t been dressed so that it turned under, hiding the back of her neck in a soft inward-turning wave. As she crosses the room her walk is confident, unhesitant, expressing a certain self-containment, all combining to give her an air of authority that she obviously feels she doesn’t have to work at.

  When she reaches the bar, she sits down on one of the bar stools so that there is just a single stool between her and the man with the crossword. The barman steps forward and waits. She takes her purse out and puts a five-pound note on the table and gives the barman her order; he goes off to work the vodka optic. While she’s waiting she takes out a packet of Dunhill’s and lights up. Meanwhile, her arrival has not gone unnoticed by the man with the crossword. He gives her an up and down but returns to his crossword when he sees that she’s impassively clocked his appraisal.

  And you can’t really blame him. She’s a very good looking girl, very even features, excellently made up, the kind of look of the girls who hand over the prizes on the quiz programmes on TV, or decorate the latest models at the Motor Show.

  I cast a professional eye over her and along with considering the former association of ideas the possibility of her being on the game roams through the corridors of my mind. In the Smoke, it would have been a certainty; but here, the air of respectability very carefully prepared to cloak the nature of her business until she herself revealed what she wanted the prospective punter to know, here, in a town like this, all that would be a waste of time. A brass here would be highly polished in a different way, to express her occupation, not to conceal it.