When Seymour came out of the cinema he found his path obstructed by a line of men carrying placards. In the darkness he couldn’t quite see what the placards said. The men didn’t really attempt to block him. They parted and let everyone through.
‘Socialists!’ said a man beside Seymour, contemptuously.
Chapter Six
In most parts of the East End uniformed policemen always went in twos. Seymour was usually not in uniform and, besides, knew the East End and was known in it, so he hadn’t normally bothered to. Nevertheless, he always, and especially after dark, walked carefully. He had developed a sense which told him when he was being followed.
It was telling him now. He stopped outside a shop and looked in, as if he was examining the strings of brightly coloured and variously shaped pasta, and glanced back along the street. A man in a trilby hat was hovering outside a taverna. He seemed to make up his mind and went in. Further along the street two men were talking unhurriedly. An ox-cart came down the street and stopped outside the taverna. The driver and his mate got down and began to unload the barrels.
Seymour walked on. If it hadn’t been for this he would have enjoyed the freshness of the morning, with its smells of baking and of coffee, the fresh smell of the water the shopkeepers were sprinkling on the dust they had just swept out of their shops, the freshness of the sea breeze creeping up into the tired, stale alleys.
After a while, as the feeling persisted, he turned aside into a small piazza where there was an open-air market. Fish gleamed on stalls, crabs hung from hooks, sea spiders glistened in shells. Seymour walked through the vegetable stalls loaded with aubergines and tomatoes and peppers of all colours, green, red and yellow, and then out on the other side to where melons were piled on the ground in mountains and where a mother was washing a small child’s face, not in water, because the pump was on the other side of the market, but in melon juice.
He doubled round, turned up a side street, and came out on to the road he had originally been on. He did not step out on to it, however, but hung back in the shadow.
A little later he saw the man in the trilby hat come quickly out of the market and look up and down the street. He spotted Seymour and walked, seemingly casually, across the street to the other side and studied the contents of the window of a gentlemen’s outfitter.
Seymour continued to be conscious of his presence behind. He never came close, however, so Seymour knew that this was a different kind of follower from the ones you got in the East End.
When he arrived at the Consulate Koskash handed him a large envelope from Kornbluth. It contained the preliminary medical findings on the body. He did not at once have time to read it, however, as two more people came to express formal condolence. They came from other consulates, of which there were, not surprisingly, a great many in Trieste. Seymour had been hoping, following the conversation with Maddalena yesterday, that someone else might come forward. Lomax had obviously had acquaintances from outside the diplomatic community. Where were they?
By the time he had got through the consular condolences it was late in the morning and the heat was building up. He decided to get away from the Consulate before anyone else came. He wanted to read in peace the material Kornbluth had sent him.
Koskash, ever polite, came with him to the door. Across the road, leaning apparently casually against a wall, was the man in the trilby.
Koskash laughed.
‘So you, too, have been honoured! You know what they say here? They say that in Trieste the sun is so bright that everyone has a shadow.’
So that was the kind of follower it was. Seymour was quite taken aback. Why should the authorities be watching him? The thought came into his mind that perhaps, having mislaid Lomax, they did not wish to mislay him. But that seemed unlikely. From what Koskash had said, it was almost a matter of routine, the style of the place. But what sort of place was it where everyone had a shadow?
He found himself near the Canal Grande and on an impulse turned in towards it and walked along beside the boats to the cafe where he and Kornbluth had sat the other day.
There were people already at the tables, clerks from the big offices looking down on the canal having their midmorning coffee, storemen already three-quarters of their way through the day sitting down with the captains of the boats, discussing cargoes. In the boats themselves men were working hard on the loading and unloading. This was the time, before the sun got too high, to do the heavy work.
At the end of the canal the women were sitting again on the steps of the church stitching. Occasionally one of them would take her work down some steps on one side of the church. After a while, he thought he had worked it out. There was probably a basement workshop there. The women working there would rather do their stitching outside on the steps.
As he watched, a small procession came out of one of the side streets and stopped in front of the church. It consisted mostly of women. Two held a banner, others gave out leaflets. One woman stood up beside the banner and began to address the women on the steps.
A man came up from the basement and shouted at the speaker, who took no notice. The man hurried away and the speaker went on speaking. The women on the steps listened quietly, no longer chattering.
Suddenly the man appeared once more, this time with a group of policemen. They barged at once into the procession, scattering people, banner and leaflets. Some women fell on to the steps. They picked themselves up, retrieved their leaflets and the banner and regrouped further along the quay.
Unnecessarily heavy-handed policing, thought Seymour, with the critical eye of the professional. Why not just tell them to move on? The other way merely stored up trouble.
The re-formed procession came down the quay towards Seymour but just before it reached him it turned off. There were about a dozen women and one or two shabbily dressed men. One of the women seemed familiar to Seymour but he didn’t see how this could be and thought he must have made a mistake.
The procession came closely enough, however, for him to be able to read the banner. It was a Socialist banner of some sort; the Socialist Workers Party of Trieste, he thought he read.
He felt a twinge of nostalgia. Demonstrations like this were a familiar feature of the East End. Many of the immigrant families had been obliged to leave their original countries because of their political views and they often brought their principles with them. There were all sorts of little radical groups in the East End. They usually were little; most people followed the immigrant strategy of keeping their heads down. But there were always some who wouldn’t, who argued that what was right in Hungary or Poland or wherever was right in England, too.
Seymour’s own sister was one of these. She was a Socialist, too, which was why she came now into his mind. Socialism was quite strong in Whitechapel, especially among the Jews and in the Jewish tailors’ workshops which were common in the East End, workshops like the one at the end of the canal. She had started going to Socialist meetings when she was still at school and that had led on to other things, to fundraising bazaars, to taking part in demonstrations like this one and to standing on street corners distributing leaflets.
That was the bit that had got Seymour. He had no objection to Socialism as such. In the East End you rather took it for granted. It was the things that went with it.
When the children were small, Seymour’s mother had had to go out to work, which meant that his sister had had to look after him. She had taken him to the meetings she attended, which were often in private houses. It was there that he had first met the various languages of the East End. When he had gone home he had mimicked them, and it was hearing him do this that had made Old Appelmann realize the boy’s extraordinary ear.