would be better. Twenty years rent free and all found wasn’t so bad, ask anyone who knew about these things, these years between wars? Ask them! What a joy this new war was, after the disappointment of Munich! ‘It’s Peace,’ the placards all said. Hell, the same old humdrum, on we go as before! And then September the third. And then at last the bombs. Frightening, yes, but thrilling. Change. Who looked forward to the next peace, and the cold, starving agony nobody knew how to prevent?
He started up a coughing fit.
He swore. Somebody tapped angrily on a wall. ‘Bitch,’ he said. A man couldn’t even cough in his own home.
Suddenly it dawned on him that this wasn’t much of a home. The one thing which had made him stick his marriage was the bit of a home, it was the carpet, a nice red one. And then a direct hit, and the whole lot gone, how glad he was. Coughing, then, in the dust and mess, he’d thought, well, thank God, now a wealth of ugly memories are gone forever, photographs, books, ornaments, yes, even the bloody carpet, you can have the lot! They stood imprisoned together in a kind of black pit and she’d started up that screaming right in his ear, and he’d put out his hand. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No …!’
‘Well, shut up screaming, we’re not trapped, there’s a light, it’s the street!’ It was the Fulham street. ‘See?’
But she screamed like a maniac.
It was easy to stop it.
The insurance money came to a thousand quid.
Not surprising a chap began to get ideas. And you could say it was for art?
He stumbled from pub to pub and liked to say:
‘I’ll get somewhere with my music now! No more worry! No more drabness! And nobody can say I’ve done nothing for the war? Two years in the Civil Defence? My home hit, everything gone? I’ve lost the lot, my dear chap, but I’m not grumbling! I’ll pick up again! Watch me!’
He kept on with the firm and went to see ‘the office’ just as usual, and was just as patient with Mr Watson, his most self-centred client. Mr Watson depressed him very much, a dreary fellow in a brown trilby hat, with a brownish outlook. He thought we should lose the war, because he didn’t think any Empire had the right to rule for more than a thousand years. He wasn’t a conchie, but on his own admission, only because he had not the moral strength to face a tribunal. All he thought about was whether his money was safe, and whether his various bits and pieces were safely covered by insurance policies. He never missed a premium, never had a drink, never had a woman. He said so. It was the way he put it. Women were a sort of meal. But he was never hungry. He’d been married, but you could only imagine what it must have been like. Perhaps just at Christmas, just to cheer the old woman up.
Mr Watson lived in Fulham too, Number Ten, Peel Road, one of a row of little red houses. At the back was a row of little gardens, mostly full of potatoes and cabbages now, the war effort. Quite a lot of houses had been hit in Fulham, so that London looked like a dirty old woman who had had a lot of her teeth out. She grinned, waiting for the dentist to come back again and pull out a few more. Perhaps the dentist would come again and perhaps he wouldn’t, for the present her agony was almost forgotten. The neighbours thought: ‘Yes, but she looks tidy again. More or less.’ Mr Watson had a married daughter called Mrs Heaton who came up from Kingston about twice a year. She wore rather cheap furs and ran a baby Austin. Mr Bowling was very interested because he knew she wouldn’t get a penny when Mr Watson died, although she fondly thought she was going to get everything. Mr Watson had one day confided his will. The money was going to a dogs home. Mr Watson had been so fond of a spaniel which had passed on, he would not purchase another dog. But he liked to visit various doggie establishments, and in the parks would stop all and sundry and enquire of the owners their endearing habits. So there was something human about him, like there was about everyone if you searched really hard. After his wife’s funeral in Fulham, and after he had got his affairs a little in order, War Damage Claim safely listed and sent in, and his furnished room in Notting Hill Gate chosen, a nice long way off, Mr Bowling sat on his divan and had a bit of a think about Mr Watson. He thought how awful he was about money, it was dreadful wanting money just for the sake of having it in the bank, better to collect fag cards, for all the good it did you or anybody else. You could forgive a decent motive. You could not forgive miserliness. It was, he confessed to himself, a little like trying to find a reason for murdering Mr Watson, but it had to be admitted he was a fair and sporting choice. If he was a happy, generous man, one would not dream of plotting against him, it wouldn’t be cricket. And then, another sound reason, he’d fled from town when the Huns started coming, and crept back when the Huns had gone again. The man simply asked for it. Asked for it. He must die for Art! That was what it would amount to. His death would get a bit of good music printed and published. He would leave something to posterity after all.
He sat and tried to think about money. He was not good at it. He was too artistic, too creative, if you wanted to know. The mere thought of insurance made him shudder, but a chap had had to do something. Salary and commission, that’s what it had boiled down to. ‘Oh, I tootle round,’ was what he explained to friends. ‘See what I can pick up. What about you, old man? Your life insured? Why not come to my people?’ There wasn’t much in it. But it scraped up a living. Hardly enough to get tight on, though, let alone keep a wife. As for kids! ‘No, siree! No bally fear!’
In his new room at Number Forty, he thought:
‘If old Watson wrote out a policy saying that if he kicked the bucket he’d leave a couple of thousand quid to me, then it would be worth bumping him off. That’s the ticket, I think?’
Yes, but how to make him do that? Forgery? No, that wouldn’t be cricket, a chap wasn’t a criminal.
He thought:
‘A pot of paste. If I pasted the policy he thought he was signing—over the real one, allowing only the bottom for the signature? Then he’d sign the one that mattered to me, and a steaming kettle would do the rest. By jove, yes! Think it would work? Or would he spot it?’
He kicked off his shoes and lay down flat. ‘I wonder,’ he thought.
Mr Bowling’s background was in reality so little a background at all, that to paint one at all needs a cycloramic effect. It was a colourful fusion of people in shabby places. Had they homes, it would have been a Dickensian background; but these homes were, in the main, furnished, single rooms, occasional flats. Sir Hugh Walpole wrote of duchesses and balls and stately houses, of the hills and lakes of Cumberland. Mr Bowling had had relations with a substantial background once, but his story removed him from it as a child, and placed him, for want of a better description, with the Moderns, though not the Moderns who belonged to Noel Coward. They didn’t drink cocktails, they drank mild and bitter, or draught cider when really hard pressed, and fell about Hammersmith’s houses filled with it and Red Biddy. No mansion-flats for them, and less and less evening dress. They didn’t go to theatres. They went to pubs and concerts, dodged or seduced landladies, and remained the people who mattered when England went to war. They knew the Labour Exchange and the Army Medical Board better than most. They had no influence, no wires to pull, and told each other: ‘I hear they’re taking on men, four quid a week, dear. Why not pop along and see? I know it’s not you—but it’s better than this?’ You went along and the chap was decent, but he saw you were a gentleman and he was slightly embarrassed. He was afraid the work was dirty and rough. ‘No clerical jobs, you see, they’re all taken.’ They thought at the Labour Exchange that an actor, author or musician temporarily a bit desperate for cash, could only fit into clerical work, and there was none. ‘Would you drive a Sainsbury’s van?’ they sometimes asked. ‘But it’s hardly you, it is. I don’t suppose they’d take you on.’ You couldn’t even draw the dole, because you hadn’t been a salaried worker for at least six months. You had to queue up with the scum of the earth (which you never did) and be ‘on the Parish’. Very tasty. But how different when the same government who thus humiliated you decided to go to war! ‘Bloody heroes now,’ Mr Bowling laughed good-naturedly at Queenie about it. ‘Nothing too good for us now, what?’ He was perfectly good-tempered about