"What a surprise!" exclaimed my mother. "I wasn't sure I should ever see you again."
And when, against some reluctance on my part as well as against the usual resistance on my mother's, I returned to Brandenburg Square in the later part of the Monday morning, I found a transformation.
In the first place, I had to open the street door with my key. This was unknown during "business hours": the staff of Messrs Stallabrass, Hoskins and Cramp, and their sporting friends, pushed in and out so incessantly that a locked front door would have been ludicrous. It would have been entirely out of harmony with the firm's way of life and what would now be called "image".
Within all was quiet. All the room doors were shut, which was also quite unknown. This time I applied myself to several of the handles with confidence. Every door I tried was locked.
I put down my canvas bag and went outside again, the front door swinging shut behind me on its heavy spring.
The firm's unusually large brass plate had gone. Even the phantom shape of it was fainter than usual in these cases; the firm having been with us for so much less than the customary (or then customary) 40 or 80 years. I picked a bit at the screwholes, but nothing peeped out. I stood back and looked up at the windows of the house. All were shut, but there was nothing unusual about that. I had never noticed an open window on the floors occupied by Messrs Stallabrass, Hoskins and Cramp. I reflected that it would be no use enquiring in the basement, as Maureen's husband would be at the provisions shop. (I wondered for the first time who was nowadays collecting the children from school.) As people were now staring at me, I gave the front door a push and re-entered.
Maureen stood halfway up the first flight of stairs, as if awaiting me.
She wore a white blouse that some of my mother's generation would have called "skimpy", and a bright red skirt, and equally bright red shoes. Her stockings gently gleamed, her hair positively shone, and her face was nothing less than radiant.
"All silent as the tomb," she said.
"Maureen!" I cried and hugged her and kissed her. It was impossible to do anything else.
"Suddenly," she said. "Quite suddenly. During the weekend. I was very ill, you know, Roy, and then almost at once I was all right. It was yesterday, and I've been in a bit of a trance ever since. I've spent this morning buying clothes that we really can't afford, and having my hair done, and just sitting in the square, and smiling at everything."
I kissed her again.
"How long have this lot been gone?" she went on. "Gilbert's departed for the weekend and taken the children. Thought I was safely shut away. What's he up to, I wonder?"
"This lot were here when I left on Saturday. Come upstairs, Maureen."
We went up arm in arm, even though I was carrying my canvas bag.
At Mr Millar's own floor, we stopped, and, for the hell of it, I tried the handle of Mr Millar's own outer door, the door into the pink room with the cornice of flowers. This time, the door opened.
I tried to push Maureen out, but I failed. Mr Millar was hanging there, in the outer office for all to see; and from a large hook, meant for hanging overcoats on a wall, which he, or someone, must have spent much time screwing into the plaster of the ceiling, or rather, I imagine, through the ceiling into one of the wooden joists of my floor above. The most curious thing was that though there was no detectable movement of air in the room, the body swung back and forth quite perceptibly, as if it had been made of papier mâché, or some other featherweight expendable. Even the clothes looked papery and insubstantial. Was it the real Mr Millar at all who dangled there? It was remarkably hard to be sure.
A curious thing of another kind was that though, for a long time, I had been scared out of my wits by events in the house (and Maureen perhaps literally so), yet from quite soon after that climactic Sunday, I began to feel reasonably happy there almost all the time, indeed very happy indeed when I thought about Maureen or covered her sweet hair with kisses; and entirely forgot the idea of moving, or as entirely as life ever permits one to forget anything.
The Clock Watcher
Now that it has all come to an end, so that even the police are "making enquiries", I am trying to keep myself occupied for a little by writing out a story that no one will ever believe. Or no one just yet. Possibly some new Einstein will come to my rescue, sooner or later; and prove by theory what I have learned by experience. That sort of theory is thought up about every second year nowadays, though none of the theories make much difference to ordinary people's lives.
Perhaps I never was quite an ordinary person, after all. Perhaps I ceased being ordinary when I married Ursula. Certainly they all said so; said I hadn't thought what it implied, even that I had gone a bit round the bend during the last part of the war. But, when it comes to the point, not many people bother very much about who a man marries; though it can still be different when it is the case of a girl. And of course I had no parents by then.
Will anyone ever read this but me? Well, yes, perhaps they may. So I had better mention what happened to my parents, and remember to put in a word or two about other things like that. My father fell from the top of one of his buildings when I was four years old. Of course it was a dreadful thing to happen, but I was never what is called close to my father, or so it has seemed to me since, and my mother would not let me even go to the funeral, said it would be too morbid an experience for a young child, and left me locked in the bedroom when the procession left the house. Not that you could really call it a procession, I imagine. Especially as it was simply teeming with rain. But possibly I exaggerate that aspect of it as children are apt to do. My mother died during the war I was engaged in fighting. There was nothing unusual about her death. Every second person seems to die as she did, I regret to say.
So, despite a certain amount of chat, some of it fairly hostile, I was pretty much on my own at the time of my marriage, though I had managed to struggle back into my profession, and had a very fair job, all things considered, as a draughtsman with Rosenberg and Newton. I had better explain that too.
Old Jacob Rosenberg had been a friend of my father's: so much so that he went on keeping an eye on my mother until his own death about a year before hers. (He dropped dead on one of the platforms at Green Park underground station, which is just the way that I myself should choose to go.) His son, young Jacob, gave me a place in the office after I came back from destroying the Nazis. Of course, the Jews are like that: once a friend, always a friend, if you go on treating them properly. I cannot help saying it was where the Nazis went wrong. There was a great deal to be said in favour of the Nazis, of course, in many other ways. The Germans wouldn't have fought so hard and long, if it hadn't been so, quite unbelievable actually.
Rosenberg and Newton called themselves architects, but they were really something more speculative than that: more like business men with a good knowledge of construction. Not that they were not on the architectural register. Of course they were. Nor that their methods were not completely clean and honest. I saw enough of what went on to be quite sure about that, or I should not have stayed, however badly I needed a job, as I certainly did when mother proved to have left almost nothing. I think she had expected something appreciable from Mr Rosenberg's will, but all she got was — of all things — a clock. A clock. Well, the police will find the pieces of it buried in the garden, if they care to dig. .
I had learned a lot from Rosenberg and Newton before I left them to set up in a similar line of business on my own, though far more modestly, needless to say. I have been on my own for nearly three years, not very long, but my name has become quite well thought of in this extremely prosperous suburb where so many appalling, unbelievable things have been happening to me, without anyone really knowing, though not without some observing — what there was to be observed. And, even there, it is not altogether a case of so many things happening. There is only one thing really; one thing that is capable of indefinite extension.