A Gun for Sale

       'You might have told me,' the Chief Constable said. 'If I'd known Sir Marcus was coming... How did you snare the old boy?'

       'He invited himself,' Mrs Calkin said proudly. 'So I rang up the Mayoress.'

       'Isn't old Piker coming?'

       'He hasn't been home all day.'

       The Chief Constable slipped off his uniform jacket and put it away carefully. If the war had gone on another year they'd have made him a coloneclass="underline" he had been getting on the very best terms with the regimental headquarters, supplying the mess with groceries at very little more than the cost price. In the next war he'd make the grade. The sound of Sir Marcus's car on the gravel brought him downstairs. The Lady Mayoress was looking under the sofa for her Pekinese, which had gone to ground defensively to escape strangers; she was on her knees with her head under the fringe saying, 'Chinky, Chinky,' ingratiatingly. Chinky growled out of sight. 'Well, well,' the Chief Constable said, trying to put a little warmth into his tones, 'and how's Alfred?'

       'Alfred?' the Mayoress said, coming out from under the sofa, 'it's not Alfred, it's Chinky. Oh,' she said, talking very fast, for it was her habit to work towards another person's meaning while she talked, 'you mean how is he? Alfred? He's gone again.'

       'Chinky?'

       'No, Alfred.' One never got much further with the Mayoress.

       Mrs Calkin came in. She said, 'Have you got him, dear?'

       'No, he's gone again,' the Chief Constable said, 'if you mean Alfred.'

       'He's under the sofa,' the Mayoress said. 'He won't come out.'

       Mrs Calkin said, 'I ought to have warned you, dear. I thought of course you would know the story of how Sir Marcus hates the very sight of dogs. Of course, if he stays there quietly...'

       'The poor dear,' Mrs Piker said, 'so sensitive, he could tell at once he wasn't wanted.'

       The Chief Constable suddenly could bear it no longer. He said, 'Alfred Piker's my best friend. I won't have you say he wasn't wanted,' but no one took any notice of him. The maid had announced Sir Marcus.

       Sir Marcus entered on the tips of his toes. He was a very old, sick man with a little wisp of white beard on his chin resembling chicken fluff. He gave the effect of having withered inside his clothes like a kernel in a nut. He spoke with the faintest foreign accent and it was difficult to determine whether he was Jewish or of an ancient English family. He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth. If there was a touch of Jerusalem, there was also a touch of St James's, if of some Central European capital, there were also marks of the most exclusive clubs in Cannes.

       'So good of you, Mrs Calkin,' he said, 'to give me this opportunity...' It was difficult to hear what he said; he spoke in a whisper. His old scaley eyes took them all in. 'I have always been hoping to make the acquaintance...'

       'May I introduce the Lady Mayoress, Sir Marcus?' He bowed with the slightly servile grace of a man who might have been pawnbroker to the Pompadour. 'So famous a figure in the city of Nottwich.' There was no sarcasm or patronage in his manner. He was just old. Everyone was alike to him. He didn't trouble to differentiate.

       'I thought you were on the Riviera, Sir Marcus,' the Chief Constable said breezily. 'Have a sherry. It's no good asking the ladies.'

       'I don't drink, I'm afraid,' Sir Marcus whispered. The Chief Constable's face fell. 'I came back two days ago.'

       'Rumours of war, eh? Dogs delight to bark...'

       'Joseph,' Mrs Calkin said sharply, and glanced with meaning at the sofa.

       The old eyes cleared a little. 'Yes. Yes,' Sir Marcus repeated. 'Rumours.'

       'I see you've been taking on more men at Midland Steel, Sir Marcus.'

       'So they tell me,' Sir Marcus whispered. The maid announced dinner; the sound startled Chinky, who growled under the sofa, and there was an agonizing moment while they all watched Sir Marcus. But he had heard nothing, or perhaps the noise had faintly stirred his subconscious mind, for as he took Mrs Calkin in to the dining-room he whispered venomously, 'The dogs drove me away.'

       'Some lemonade for Mrs Piker, Joseph,' Mrs Calkin said. The Chief Constable watched her drink with some nervousness. She seemed a little puzzled by the taste, she sipped and tried again. 'Really,' she said, 'what delicious lemonade. It has quite an aroma.'

       Sir Marcus passed the soup; he passed the fish. When the entree was served, he leant across the large silver-plated flower bowl inscribed 'To Joseph Calkin from the assistants in Calkin and Calkin's on the occasion...' (the inscription ran round the corner out of sight) and whispered, ' Might I have a dry biscuit and a little hot water?' He explained, 'My doctor won't allow me anything else at night.'

       'Well, that's hard luck,' the Chief Constable said. 'Food and drink as a man gets older...' He glared at his empty glass: what a life, oh for a chance to get away for a bit among the boys, throw his weight about and know that he was a man.

       The Lady Mayoress said suddenly, 'How Chinky would love these bones,' and choked.

       'Who is Chinky?' Sir Marcus whispered.

       Mrs Calkin said quickly, 'Mrs Piker has the most lovely cat.'

       'I'm glad it isn't a dog,' Sir Marcus whispered. 'There is something about a dog,' the old hand gestured hopelessly with a piece of cheese biscuit, 'and of all dogs the Pekinese.' He said with extraordinary venom, 'Yap, yap, yap,' and sucked up some hot water. He was a man almost without pleasures; his most vivid emotion was venom, his main object defence: defence of his fortune, of the pale flicker of vitality he gained each year in the Cannes sun, of his life. He was quite content to eat cheese biscuits to the end of them if eating biscuits would extend his days.

       The old boy couldn't have many left, the Chief Constable thought, watching Sir Marcus wash down the last dry crumb and then take a white tablet out of a little flat gold box in his waistcoat pocket. He had a heart; you could tell it in the way he spoke, from the special coaches he travelled in when he went by rail, the Bath chairs which propelled him softly down the long passages in Midland Steel. The Chief Constable had met him several times at civic receptions; after the General Strike Sir Marcus had given a fully equipped gymnasium to the police force in recognition of their services, but never before had Sir Marcus visited him at home.

       Everyone knew a lot about Sir Marcus. The trouble was, all that they knew was contradictory. There were people who, because of his Christian name, believed that he was a Greek; others were quite as certain that he had been born in a ghetto. His business associates said that he was of an old English family; his nose was no evidence either way; you found plenty of noses like that in Cornwall and the west country. His name did not appear at all in Who's Who, and an enterprising journalist who once tried to write his life found extraordinary gaps in registers; it wasn't possible to follow any rumour to its source. There was even a gap in the legal records of Marseilles where one rumour said that Sir Marcus as a youth had been charged with theft from a visitor to a bawdy house. Now he sat there in the heavy Edwardian dining-room brushing biscuit crumbs from his waistcoat, one of the richest men in Europe.