"What's upsetting you?" the Boy said. He was confused as if a weak man had struck him back. He wasn't used to this the infringement of other people's lives. Confession was an act one did or didn't do oneself.
"When I took on your work," Mr. Drewitt said, "I lost the only other job I had. The Bakely Trust. And now I've lost you."
"You got everything there is of mine."
"There won't be any more soon. Colleoni's going to take over this place from you, and he's got his lawyer.
A man in London. A swell."
"I haven't thrown my sponge in yet." He sniffed the air tainted with gasometers and said: "I know what's wrong with you. You're drunk."
"On Empire burgundy," Mr. Drewitt said. "I want to tell you things. Pinkie, I want" the literary phrase came glibly out "to unburden myself."
"I don't want to hear them. I'm not interested in your troubles."
"I married beneath me," Mr. Drewitt said. "It was my tragic mistake. I was young. An affair of uncontrollable passion. I was a passionate man," he said, wriggling with indigestion. "You've seen her," he said, "now. My God." He leant forward and said in a whisper: "I watch the little typists go by carrying their little cases. I'm quite harmless. A man may watch. My God, how neat and trim!" He broke off, his hand vibrating on the chair arm. "Listen to the old mole down there. She's ruined me." His old lined face had taken a holiday from bonhomie, from cunning, from the legal jest. It was a Sunday and it was itself.
Mr. Drewitt said: "You know what Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked where Hell was? He said: 'Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it.' " The Boy watched him with fascination and fear.
"She's cleaning in the kitchen," Mr. Drewitt said, "but she'll be coming up later. You ought to meet her it'd be a treat. The old hag. What a joke it would be, wouldn't it, to tell her everything. That I'm concerned in a murder. That people are asking questions.
To pull down the whole damned house like Samson."
He stretched his arms wide and contracted them in the pain of indigestion, "You're right," he said, "I've got an ulcer. But I won't have the knife. I'd rather die. I'm drunk too. On Empire burgundy. Do you see that photo there by the door? A school group. Lancaster College. Not one of the great schools perhaps, but you'll find it in the Public Schools Year Book. You'll see me there cross-legged in the bottom row. In a straw hat." He said softly: "We had field days with Harrow. A rotten set they were. No esprit de corps."
The Boy didn't so much as turn his head to look--he had never known Drewitt like this before: it was a frightening and an entrancing exhibition. A man was coming alive before his eyes: he could see the nerves set to work in the agonised flesh, thought bloom in the transparent brain.
"To think," Mr. Drewitt said, "an old Lancaster boy to be married to that mole in the cellarage down there and to have as only client" he gave his mouth an expression of fastidious disgust "you. What would old Manders say? A great head."
He had the bit between his teeth; he was like a man determined to live before he died; all the insults he had swallowed from police witnesses, the criticisms of magistrates, regurgitated from his tormented stomach.
There was nothing he wouldn't tell to anybody. An enormous self-importance was blossoming out of his humiliation; his wife, the Empire burgundy, the empty files, and the vibration of locomotives on the line, they were the important landscape of his great drama.
"You talk too easily," the Boy said.
"Talk?" Mr. Drewitt said. "I could shake the world.
Let them put me in the dock if they like. I'll give them revelation. I've sunk so deep I carry" he was shaken by an enormous windy selfesteem, he hiccuped twice "the secrets of the sewer."
"If I'd known you drank," the Boy said, "I wouldn't have touched you."
"I drink on Sundays. It's the day of rest." He suddenly beat his foot upon the floor and screamed furiously. "Be quiet down there."
"You need a holiday," the Boy said.
"I sit here and sit here the bell rings, but it's only the groceries tinned salmon, she has a passion for tinned salmon. Then I ring the bell and in comes that pasty stupid I watch the typists going by. I could embrace their little portable machines."
"You'd be all right," the Boy said nervous and shaken with the conception of another life growing in the brain "if you took a holiday."
"Sometimes," Mr. Drewitt said, "I have an urge to expose myself shamefully in a park."
"I'll give you money."
* 4 No money can heal a mind diseased. This is Hell, nor are we out of it. How much could you spare?"
"Twenty nicker."
"It would go only a little way."
"Boulogne why not slip across the Channel?" the Boy said with horrified disgust. "Enjoy yourself" watching the grubby and bitten nails, the shaky hands which were the instruments of pleasure.
"Could you spare some small sum like that, my boy? Don't let me rob you--though, of course, 'I have done the state some service.' "
"You can have it tomorrow on conditions. You got to leave by the midday boat stay away as long as you can. Maybe I'll send you more." It was like fastening a leech onto the flesh he felt weakness and disgust. "Let me know when it's finished and I'll see."
"I'll go, Pinkie when you say. And you won't tell my spouse?"
"I keep my mouth shut."
"Of course. I trust you, Pinkie, and you can trust me. Recuperated by this holiday I shall return "
"Take a long one."
"Bullying police sergeants shall recognise my renewed astuteness. Defending the outcast."
"I'll send the money first thing. Till then you don't see anyone. You go back to bed. Your indigestion's cruel. If anyone comes round you're not in."
"As you say, Pinkie, as you say."
It was the best he could do. He let himself out of the house and, looking down, met in the basement the hard suspicious gaze of Mr. Drewitt's spouse; she had a duster in her hand and she watched him like a bitter enemy from her cave, under the foundations. He crossed the road and took one more look at the villa, and there in an upper window half concealed by the curtains stood Mr. Drewitt. He wasn't watching the Boy he was just looking out hopelessly, for what might turn up. But it was a Sunday and there weren't any typists.
He said to Dallow: "You got to watch the place. I don't trust him a yard. I can just see him looking out there, waiting for something, and seeing her..."
"He wouldn't be such a fool."
"He's drunk. He says he's in Hell."
Dallow laughed: "Hell. That's good."
"You're a fool, Dallow."
"I don't believe in what my eyes don't see."
"They don't see much then," the Boy said. He left Dallow and went upstairs. But, oh, if this was Hell, he thought, it wasn't so bad: the old-fashioned telephone, the narrow stairs, the snug and dusty darkness it wasn't like Drewitt's house, comfortless, shaken, with the old bitch in the basement. He opened the door of his room and there, he thought, was his enemy he looked round with angry disappointment at his changed room the position of everything a little altered and the whole place swept and clean and tidied. He condemned her: "I told you not to."
"I've only cleared up, Pinkie."
It was her room now, not his: the wardrobe and the washstand shifted, and the bed of course she hadn't forgotten the bed. It was her Hell now if it was anybody's he disowned it. He felt driven out, but any change must be for the worse. He watched her like an enemy, disguising his hatred, trying to read age into her face, how she would look one day staring up from his basement. He had come back wrapped in another person's fate a doubled darkness.
"Don't you like it, Pinkie?"
He wasn't Drewitt: he'd got guts; he hadn't lost his fight. He said: "Oh, this it's fine. It was just I wasn't expecting it."
She misread his constraint. "Bad news?"