Harold Biggs sat like a statue, his pen poised above the paper, while the thought of larceny slithered into his mind like an adder and lay there, quietly coiled.
He glanced at the figure in the chair. The old woman seemed to be dozing.
He got up quietly and went out of the room and into the kitchen. His heart was leaping in his chest.
He needed time to think. He drew a glass of water from the sink tap and stood at the window staring out. Scattered raindrops fell through sunshine. Blue skies showed on the heels of the clouds, which were moving eastwards. He wouldn't get wet after all.
Dry-lipped he told himself he was entitled to claim payment, to be compensated for his trouble. But it wasn't that. He knew. It was the excitement he felt racing through his veins. The realization that he might be about to do something he had never dreamed of doing. Had never dared to dream of doing. It was like stepping into a new skin. A new person.
He went back to the front room. Mrs Troy hadn't stirred. Her chin lay on her breast. Her eyes were shut.
Biggs held his breath. The cat watched from her lap as he crossed the room silently to the cabinet.
Could he do it? Yes? No?
He opened the glass doors and took out the tankards, one in each hand, hefting them, testing their weight. His eyes, behind his glasses, began to water.
'Mr Biggs? Are you there?'
Harold froze. His back was to her.
Are you there?
He turned his head slowly — and then relaxed with a slow expulsion of breath. Her face was pointing towards the door. She couldn't see across the room. He had banked all on that.
'Mr Biggs…?'
Taking care not to make any sound, he replaced the mugs in the cabinet and shut the glass doors. Black spots danced before his eyes.
'Here I am, Mrs Troy.' He crossed the room unhurriedly to the desk. 'I'll just finish this letter now.'
Kindly remove all your belongings and leave the door unlocked…
Biggs's pen squeaked faintly on the paper.
I shall return next Saturday, a week from today, to ensure that the shed has been vacated as Mrs Troy requests.
Yours faithfully,
Harold Biggs (Solicitor's Clerk) 'I've been thinking this over, Mrs Troy.' He spoke to her from the desk as he addressed an envelope in clear capitals: mr grail, by hand. 'A letter's not enough, I feel. I ought to handle this in person. I'll be coming back next Saturday to make sure this fellow has got the message. Don't worry, I'll have him out of here, bag and baggage, I promise you.'
Because he didn't want to take the tankards now. Not today. He had thought it all out in the kitchen.
First, Grail had to be sent packing. Then, anything found missing from the cottage could be laid at his door. He'd be the obvious culprit, a man with a grievance. It was an added bonus, as far as Harold was concerned, that he did not need to trouble his conscience, either. Even if the police got around to questioning Grail they would find no evidence of the theft, no stolen goods, and the matter would be dropped.
Always supposing it came to that. Always supposing Winifred Troy even noticed the mugs had gone missing.
He sealed the envelope, got up and went over to where she was sitting.
'Do you understand, Mrs Troy?' He sat down beside her again. 'This letter's his notice to quit. I'll be back in a week to make sure he's gone. You don't have to deal with him. If he makes any objection refer him to us, to the firm. Tell him we're handling the matter.'
He didn't like it when she turned her face to him.
An exchange of glances was part of any conversation.
You looked into the other person's eyes and tried to judge their reactions. Mrs Troy's clouded gaze gave no hint of her feelings. Then he felt her fingers close on his.
'Thank you, Mr Biggs.' It was no more than a murmur. 'I'm sorry to have put you to all this trouble.'
Too late, he thought angrily, pulling his hand from hers. He didn't want to think about her, or her life.
Or how little of it was left.
'I'll be going now,' he said, getting up. 'I'll see you a week from today.'
He went out of the room without waiting for her response and left the house by the kitchen door, crossing the lawn and pausing at the shed to slip the letter under the door. The puddles in the dirt track outside the wicket gate reflected the washed blue sky.
He stopped for a moment to savour the extraordinary events of the past half-hour. He had walked across the room to the cabinet in her presence and taken out the tankards! He had done what he meant to do. Assert himself! He only wished he could bring it to Mr Wolverton's attention. Somehow ram it down his throat!
As it was, he couldn't even tell Jimmy Pullman what he'd done, or what he planned to do. It would have to remain his secret.
Always in the past he had lacked courage, he thought, needing an explanation for the mediocrity of his life. But he felt if he could do this one thing return next week and take the tankards — the whole of his future might change. In spite of everything he had a deep-rooted belief in his own good fortune.
' You're a lucky devil.'
Harold grinned at the remembered words. They had been spoken to him by a woman he had picked up one evening in the high street in Folkestone. It was in the second year of the war. He'd forgotten her name now.
They had walked arm in arm from the upper town to one of the pubs in the harbour, down the same winding road that, day by day, echoed to the marching feet of thousands of men on their way to the moored Channel steamers, and to France. (Harold heard them still in his dreams, those marching feet.) She told him her fiance had been killed at Loos and he had wondered whether this bright-eyed girl with the brassy manner might not feel contempt for a man who, with the help of weak eyesight and a cough he had learned to exaggerate, had worked himself a soft posting in the quartermaster's stores at Shorncliffe Camp. She soon put him right.
'I'll take a live man over a dead hero any day,' she declared, and proved it to him a few hours later, up against the wall in a dark alleyway behind the pub.
'You're a lucky devil.'
He never saw her again, but her words stayed with him. As the war continued, and the casualty lists lengthened, and weak eyes and doubtful lungs were no longer enough to keep a man out of the trenches, Harold had waited for the day when his name would be added to the columns marching down daily to the water's edge. It never arrived. He had remained at his post in the quartermaster's stores. And with the passing of time he came to see that what the girl had told him was true, though in a way she could not have imagined. He was specially blessed. Anointed. One of those, who, by fate or accident, was destined to escape the slaughter.
He still had the shiny new shilling he had been given when he enlisted and he had drilled a hole in it and threaded it on to his key ring. Even now, in moments of doubt or indecision, he would find himself slipping his hand into his pocket and running his thumb over the milled edge.
Amos Pike slipped into the kitchen and deposited the parcel of food he had brought in the pantry. He waited, expecting to hear the old woman's voice from the front room asking who was there. When she didn't speak he went through and found her sitting in her usual place by the window. In the fading light of early evening she seemed unusually pale and shrunken and he looked at her with cold-eyed concern.
'I brought you some things,' he said, in his dead voice.
'Thank you, Mr Grail.'
She sounded breathless, uneasy.
'I got some fish, like you asked.' He studied her face, observing the faint tremor that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
'Thank you,' she whispered again.
Pike's brow creased. He seldom conversed with anyone, but his instincts, like an animal's, were strongly developed.