Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2It was on a Sunday, exactly ten days before what the press simply and unanimously called “the great fog,” that Mr. Evan Pinkerton made up his mind to it and went from one room to another in his drab cheerless house in Golders Green, carefully locking each window. That it was a Sunday, and just ten days before the fog, Mr. Pinkerton later remembered very precisely. During the next fortnight he looked back many times, with a memory sharpened by various emotions, at each happening in the series of events that he had plunged into. For on various occasions it seemed highly probable to Mr. Pinkerton that he would shortly not be able to look back at all, by reason of the violent cessation of his being, or that at best he would be so totally insane as to make looking back not worth his while. And it was the apparently simple business of closing up his house that catapulted Mr. Pinkerton into the most mystifying and amazing adventure that he had ever had . . . and he had had many, in the company—usually reluctant—of his friend Inspector Bull of New Scotland Yard.

Mr. Pinkerton went from room to room, drawing each shade to precisely that point at which the pale February sun could not filter through and fade the red and green turkey carpets, but also at which burglars casually passing by would not immediately recognize that the house was deserted. It was a point on which the late Mrs. Pinkerton had been most firm. Mr. Pinkerton, possibly in answer to some deep atavistic urge that made primitive man offer sacrifices to propitiate the dead, and keep them happily but firmly on the other side, did as many of the things Mrs. Pinkerton had insisted upon as were possible without interfering too greatly with his freedom as a widower. Or possibly it was because he had never actually brought himself to believe that Mrs. Pinkerton had really shuffled off her material being. There was always the ghastly possibility, to his mind, that if he wasn’t distinctly careful about it he might come back to Golders Green some day and find her sitting in the kitchen, grey and vinegary, waiting to nag at him and reduce him again to the wretched unhappy state of bondage in which he had always lived since he was a small boy. First as the charity ward of two determined maternal aunts in Wales, second as an underfed, underpaid undermaster in a Welsh school, and third as scullery and pot boy in her boarding house there in Golders Green.

Not that he had minded all of it. Since the day that a raw recruit to the Metropolitan Police had come up from Wiltshire to take the converted box room on the top storey, it had been rather exciting, now that he could look back on it and forget the scullery end. When their lodger became a member of the C.I.D. of New Scotland Yard he moved into Mrs. Pinkerton’s first floor front, and lived among her massive mahogany furnishings, the only person Mr. Pinkerton had ever seen who would not have been completely overwhelmed by them. Large, tawny and deliberate, Inspector Bull lived there placidly, going out each day to a world of assorted crime that glowed in the dark winter of Mr. Pinkerton’s existence like the tropic sun. It glowed so brightly that purple patches began to flower dangerously in the waste land of his grey little soul. No one ever knew it, of course. He continued to carry his wife’s lodgers their kippers, cold toast and tea and polish their boots—polishing all the rest of them quickly so that he could linger over the stout regulation boots of Inspector Bull. But it emboldened him to get off to the cinema more often, with pennies he saved by walking to the Edgeware market, where kippers were a ha’penny cheaper.

At the cinema Mr. Pinkerton’s life scaled to dizzy heights. Seated in the stuffy smoke-filled gallery of the local theatre, watching Passion’s Hirelings, he was his own man for two hours at a stretch. He learned many things there. Life among the Americans, for example, was an open breathing book to him. He had never met an American, but he knew well that they were a glamorous, incredibly rich, lawless and sinful race, very apt to shoot on sight if indeed they waited that long. From time to time Mr. Pinkerton actually found himself viewing Life through the double barrel of a sawed-off shotgun as with a pair of opera glasses hired for 6d. from the young lady usher.

The zenith, however, came on those rare occasions when Inspector Bull in his room reached for the buzzing telephone—not included in the 25/- a week for bed and breakfast—bellowed into it that he was on his way, and allowed Mr. Pinkerton to follow him through the mazes of violent crime until they came out at the other end and the papers carried a few words: “. . . was hanged in Pentonville this morning.” Mr. Pinkerton had a collection of such clippings, neatly laid away with his pass book and a copy of Mrs. Pinkerton’s death certificate.

Finally Mrs. Pinkerton had gone to her eternal reward, though Mr. Pinkerton piously hoped she had not been held to anything so meagre as what she actually merited. In particular he hoped that the one act of not making out a sixpenny will form could be put on the credit side because of the £ 75,000 it automatically provided him with, instead of on the debit side of excessive penuriousness where it actually belonged. And still Mr. Pinkerton never spent sixpence of it for the cinema, or threepence for an ice at the Corner House, without expecting to see her materialize suddenly at his side and snatch her £ 75,000 up into the astral plane. In any case he spent very little, for the simple reason that he was a Welshman, and it never occurred to him to spend money in any but the most cautious fashion.

Mr. Pinkerton opened the door of the first floor front and gazed wistfully at the big room with its mammoth mahogany wardrobes and huge double bed. He had occupied it himself from the day Inspector Bull left it for a semi-detached villa in Hampstead. That was after the dreadful business in Caithness Road. They had pursued the Fulham Road antique dealer to the mountains of Wales, and caught him there just as he was about to slay a girl with cornflower eyes and golden hair. She was Mrs. Bull now, and in a sense it was because of her that he stood wistfully looking round the room, feeling more lonely and old and unimportant than he had done since that rainy night at the Simeon Temperance Hostelry for Men in Oxford.

Perhaps even before that, because this was a loneliness that was going to last. His friendship with the Bulls could never be quite the same, because they’d not have the time for him any more. He had realized that for some time now. Actually he had nothing against babies. People had to have them, as Mr. Pinkerton knew as well as anybody else. That did not change the fact that they took time—and room. In fact the room in Hampstead that he and the Bulls had always regarded as his own was now a nursery, with an extraordinary lot of lacy cots, baskets, wooly animals and gee gees of various sizes sitting about, waiting for their young owner to arrive and take possession. And his place under the plane tree would be a shady spot for the pram.

True, Margaret had made it perfectly clear that the day bed in Inspector Bull’s den was always at his disposal. Being a woman she had no way of knowing that that was like telling a minor canon he could pitch a tent in the centre of the bishop’s private tennis court and make himself quite at home.

It wasn’t the same. They would be nice to him, of course, but nevertheless he’d be in the way. Instead of talking about crime with Inspector Bull in front of the fire, Mr. Pinkerton would have to watch the man from Scotland Yard on his great hands and knees on the parlour floor playing puffer. It was a dismal prospect. He wasn’t jealous of the baby; it wasn’t that. It was just that already he could see his big friend disintegrating into a bonded family man while crime unchecked flourished like the green bay tree. Instead of bellowing “Coming!” into the phone when a call came, Inspector Bull would be turning a deaf ear to anything but the creaking wheels of the gee gee that had been left all night in the rain.

“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought. “That’s very silly. I’m sure it won’t be as bad as that.”

But he wasn’t sure at all. He had never personally known a baby, but he had taught several after they had got to be ten years old, and he had regarded them much as he would have regarded a cloud of bats from hell.

Mr. Pinkerton pulled down the shades behind the heavy lace curtains, almost upsetting the aspidistra in the green majolica jardiniere that Mrs. Pinkerton had bought at Woolworth’s. His bag, a bright yellow pigskin that Mrs. Bull had given him, was already packed and waiting in the hall below. He looked about him again. It was a sort of hopeless farewell. Mr. Pinkerton was going. He was going to devote himself, as so many lonely old men had done since the eighteenth century, to study at the British Museum. He had seen ever so many of them every time he went there. Some days before he had looked at a room in Bloomsbury Square. It was a location that had been decided by the bared chest of Charles James Fox in his toga, a pigeon on top of his head, one Christmas day. Remembering it now, in some way it buoyed Mr. Pinkerton’s waning faith in the hardihood of Englishmen. He wanted it badly, as an antidote to Inspector Bull reduced to playing puffer.

Mr. Pinkerton locked the door behind him and put the key behind the water spout where Mrs. Pinkerton had always left it. He went slowly down the steps, closed the gate and went towards the underground station, a grey distressed little rabbit of a man, entirely unaware of the incredible adventure that was sitting patiently on the porch of the British Museum, waiting for him to walk into it.