The Collected Short Fiction Part 31

"Fancy anything for the Cambridges.h.i.+re?"

I could but shake my head. From one point of view, I could see that Mr Millar might hope for more lively company.

"What about the tennis this summer? Good to have it back, don't you think?"

"Good to have a lot of things back."

"But there's a lot that won't come back so soon."

"Yes," I said. "That's true."

"I shouldn't wonder if there's never proper polo to watch again. Not polo worth watching."

He was sitting sideways at his desk, showing me his left profile. I have said little-indeed, as I see, virtually nothing-about Mr Millar's appearance. Perhaps it is because there is so little to say. As far as I recall, he was a slender, dark man of medium height. He was cleanshaven, always a trifle black in the jowl-but only a trifle. I suppose he was 40; maybe a well-preserved 50. He had a wad of blackish hair, carefully trimmed round the edges, so that it seemed to fit his head like a cap, and always honeyed with brilliantine. He was at all times well dressed; at all times noticeably so, but not in a pejorative sense, except, conceivably, for such details as the suede shoes I have mentioned (he was wearing a townsman's country suit with them, it being the eve of the weekend). His counterparts are to be seen everywhere, at all times . . .

I think I might even say that Mr Millar belonged to a type whose members tend to make one feel that their thoughts are elsewhere. But few of them carry this impression as far as Mr Millar carried it. Even at that first (but almost only) meeting, I sensed that Mr Millar's thoughts were as far away as those of Boris G.o.dunov, who had, some said, made away with the rightful heir; or even of our own misled Macbeth.

"While you're here," said Mr Millar, "there's something I'd like to explain. It seems a good opportunity."

"Oh yes," I said, slanting my sherry gla.s.s, now once more less than half full.

"We're very busy just now. I often have to stay on. So don't be surprised if you hear sounds."

"I'm glad you've mentioned it."

"I didn't want you to think we'd got the burglars in." Mr Millar laughed his metallic laugh. "I supposed at first I could come to an arrangement with the girl in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Rather a sweet person, don't you think?"

"From what I've seen of her," I said.

"But of course she has her family to think about and all that sort of thing. So I've decided to shake down up here. After all, why not?" Mr Millar's colourless eyes roamed uneasily round the room, almost, it seemed, as if he thought his question might be answered. His gaze then proceeded to traverse the ceiling. To me his news was so unwelcome that again I could find nothing whatever to say.

"You're one of these famous authors, I'm told?"

"I aim to be," I replied.

"I once thought I'd write a book myself."

"Had you a subject in mind?" I enquired without a trace of sarcasm.

"I'm sure I had," said Mr Millar. "G.o.d knows what it was!" He laughed again. "Let me fill you up."

"I really ought to be on my way."

"Just one more before you go," said Mr Millar, making a discernibly minimal effort to retain me. He was waving the bottle about nervously, but managed to concentrate enough to refill my gla.s.s.

"Yes, a sweet little person that!"

I smiled as man to man; or rather that was how it would have been if both of us had been men, instead of one of us an adolescent and the other a simulacrum.

"Man was not meant to live alone. Don't you agree?"

"There are arguments on both sides," I replied.

"You wait till you're older," said Mr Millar, and laughed his laugh. "You can't talk till then."

"I live a long way away, you know," he continued. "I couldn't possibly go home every night when we're so infernally busy. Couldn't stand the f.a.g of it."

"I suppose it's a good thing accountancy's so prosperous." But I was quite surprised that Mr Millar claimed to have a "home", however distant.

"Yes, I suppose it is if you care to see it like that."

I rose. "Anyway, I must leave you to it."

"Glad you were able to come."

He saw me only to the door of his sanctum; then turned back, his mind concentrated upon someone or something else, one shrank from thinking what.

From then on, as I might have known, Mr Millar seemed to remain in his office almost every night. The rest of them disappeared at more or less the usual hour, but Mr Millar would continue pottering up and down stairs, locking and unlocking doors, carting small objects from place to place, making and answering late telephone calls, sometimes talking to himself as he roamed. When his shuffling about stopped me working (which, I have to acknowledge, was only occasionally), I would quietly open my door and shamelessly eavesdrop down my dark stair. But Mr Millar's activities seemed so trivial and futile as to be hardly worth spying on for long, and the chatter he addressed to himself (quite loudly and clearly) was not so much obsessive as escapist. The burden of his thoughts had long ago driven him out of his own personality, even when he was by himself. He had become a walking sh.e.l.l from which the babble of the world re-echoed.

Did he ever really sleep? And, if so, on what? His sanctum had offered nothing but the floor when I had been in it; but, as I have said, I never entered it again. I suppose a sofa could have been introduced without my meeting it coming upstairs or hearing it bruise the new paintwork. I did not know whether Mr Millar locked his door, the outer one or the inner one, when finally he ceased to travail on the staircase and from room to room. a.s.suredly, I never heard him snore through the ceiling; although his bleak sanctum was immediately below my bedroom. But snoring is always absurd, and absurd was never quite the word for Mr Millar.

That was how it was in the early days of Mr Millar's virtual residence beneath me. (I often wondered about the terms of his lease. It was as well that the agents we had to deal with were so easy-going.) But before long Mr Millar began to receive visitors.

I had observed that rather late in the evening he seemed often to be out of the building. I would wander downstairs for some reason, or come back from the gallery of a theatre or the front rows of a cinema (my mother warned me about the effect on my eyesight). At any time between, perhaps, nine o'clock and two o'clock, I would find the lights on, and some of the doors still open, but no sight or sound of Mr Millar. I supposed that even he had had to seek a bite of food. I never looked into any of the open rooms, because I feared that Mr Millar would spring from behind the door, cry Peep-bo, and do me a hideous mischief; but I think I was right in supposing him out of the office at these times, and this was confirmed when he got into the way of not returning alone.

Normally I only heard voices; voices and trudging steps, coming up the stairs, often very slowly, and then interminable talk on the floor below me, though sometimes there were other noises less easily definable, or explicable. More often than not, the voices were female; and, more often than not, very common voices, even strident, though I could seldom hear precise words. Up to a point the explanation was obvious enough: in those days, and before Mr R. A. Butler's famous Act, there were streets in the immediate area where it was far easier to pick up a woman and do what you liked to her than to pick up a taxi. On other evenings, Mr Millar's late callers were men, and several of them at a time, and as rough-spoken as the women. But the women also usually came several at a time: several at a time and apparently all friends together.

I really had no will to investigate closely: Mr Millar both bored me and alarmed me, in oddly equal measure. But the noise that he and the late callers made together was sometimes a serious nuisance, though the things I have described did not happen every night.

An unfortunate development was that I felt inhibited from bringing in my own few friends, especially my few but precious girl friends. One never quite knew what would happen, and explanations were at once ridiculous, unconvincing, and sinister. It was impossible to devise even an invented explanation that meant anything. A very young man who can bring no one home is at a major disadvantage. I found myself spending far longer periods as a hermit than I cared for. I perceived that I was being handicapped by circ.u.mstances even more than by temperament in making new approaches. Moreover, Mr Millar had not only altered the atmosphere in the house, but had already brought about an indefinable change in me.

It first struck me in the matter of Maureen. Maureen had ceased to visit me, and when we met by chance, we were strangers. We stared into one another's eyes coldly, as if divided by incommunicable experiences. What horrified me, when I thought about it, was that I realized I did not care. And I had previously become far fonder of Maureen than I had ever been able to make real to her. Nor was it that another had taken her place. Far from it. It had somehow diminished.

In the end, and inevitably, I met, or at least encountered some of Mr Millar's late visitors; on the doorstep, or surging upwards with Mr Millar in the midst, or, once or twice, standing silently on the staircase waiting for something to happen. It was especially odd to come upon these complete strangers standing about one's own staircase late at night. Never did they think of speaking to me; but then the persons actually accompanying Mr Millar, sometimes arm in arm with him, never spoke to me either, though often plainly embarra.s.sed, even startled, to see me. Least of all at these times did Mr Millar himself speak to me. He kept his eyes away from me in his usual way; apprehending me and making way for me, drawing the others back, all as if with his pineal gland.

Mr Millar's callers looked as they sounded, only sometimes still rougher. Hogarthian groups can be entertaining in a picture but seem less so when encountered going the other way on a narrow stair. The men callers looked like small-size professional criminals; with violence taken for granted, and a bad end also. I noticed that the s.e.xes were seldom mixed among Mr Millar's callers, though once I did encounter a very pregnant girl, horribly white, being dragged upstairs by a man with gashes all over his face. Men and women alike tended to become silent even among themselves when they saw me; and when I did catch things they said, the things were always ba.n.a.lities worthy of Mr Millar himself. Never was there any question of a "revelation". But then about Mr Millar, though everything was in a sense wide open, nothing was revealed from first to last.

An almost ludicrously flat explanation of the late callers occurred to me at one time. Was it not possible that these people, or some of them, really were clients; concerned with small enterprises, cafes for example, which, though doubtless shady, still needed to keep accounts of a kind, perhaps several sets of them (as my great-uncle would have said)? The people might have reasons for not calling during the daytime. They might even have good and honest reasons: the demands made by one-man and one-woman businesses. Thus, further, might be explained, or partly explained, Mr Millar's policy of sleeping in the office, and his claim that business required it. And indeed that explanation may have been a true one as far as it went; whatever else may be said or surmised about the late callers. It struck me also, however, that at no time did I seem to see any other persons who could be thought of as friends of Mr Millar. One would suppose that these late callers were his friends; even his only friends. Certainly he treated them as friends: with uneasy shoves in the ribs, and sidelong jocularities, and teeth-flas.h.i.+ng After-yous.

Looking back on it all, it seems to me that it slowly worked up. There appeared to be nothing stable about Mr Millar's life in any of its aspects: one doubted whether he slept regularly, ate regularly, ever saw the same friend twice; had any underlying framework of habit and routine. None the less, there was a perceptibly advancing intensification as the pageant of his life with us flowed on; at once ludicrous and alarming, as everything else about Mr Millar-and steadily more embarra.s.sing for me, in every sense of that epithet.

Indeed, I suppose I should try to say a word about why I did not myself soon move out; or at least seek some other abode sooner than I did.

About this I could rationalize unanswerably. With truth I could say that three rooms at a low rent in central London were exceedingly hard to find, and that everyone I knew told me I was very lucky and should sit tight at all costs-not that any of them knew in the least what the costs were. I could stress how notional was my cash basis, so that almost any change, not absolutely compelled, would indeed on balance be almost certainly for the worse. I could point out that the inconvenience (or menace) linked with Mr Millar was by no means continuous. Even towards the end, or apparent end, of his sojourn, there would be several evenings in each week when there was no trouble at all except the marginal one connected with his own, solitary fumblings and mumblings. And then there was the important problem, one which I could never forget, presented by my mother's strong, though mainly silent, wish to have me back with her at the cottage. Any weakening on my part would probably lead to my giving up my London life completely, and the new friends I had made. They were few, but I felt that they were nearly a matter of life or death to me, even though Mr Millar was a problem there too.

All these things were entirely enough to settle the matter. But what really settled it was, I think, something quite different. It was as if Mr Millar had injected me with a lightly paralysing fluid, coc.o.o.ned me in an almost indetectable glaze or fixative; diminis.h.i.+ng my power of choice, weakening my rational judgment, to say nothing of the super-refinement that had been put upon it by the super-refinement of the way I had been brought up. Though, when I thought about it, I was antagonized by almost everything to do with Mr Millar, yet I realized that he was an experience (or ordeal) I might be unwise to avoid. I could not live for ever as a child, free and light as air. As we acquire weight in the world, we lose it within ourselves. Maturity is always in part a matter of emptying and contracting. By that standard, Mr Millar, almost weightless, almost adrift, almost without habits (where a baby has nothing else), had pa.s.sed beyond mere maturity; but contact with him amounted to a compressed and simplified course in growing up. Mine was similar to the real reason why a schoolboy does not run away from the school he hates.

One evening-it was perhaps seven o'clock-came Maureen, once more tapping gently at my door.

"How are you getting on?" she asked. It was the first time in months that actual spoken words had pa.s.sed between us; and never before had she been able to visit me except in the afternoon, between her job and collecting the youngest child.

She was wearing a short, sleeveless grey dress, with a scooped out neck: very little of it altogether in fact; and with several stains on the front, left there by cooking, or the children. She wore no stockings and a pair of high-heeled shoes that more or less matched her dress. She had left off her slide, and her hair was drooping over her eyes, so that she had to look up from under it. Her hands were in need of a wash, and there was even a small grimy patch on her face.

It was summer, and I was wearing simply a s.h.i.+rt and trousers.

I stepped up to her and held her tightly and kissed her as if it were for ever.

"Stranger!" said Maureen affectionately.

I took off her dress, quite gently; and then wriggled her out of her underclothes, which were charming.

We lay down together on my cheap bed, neither glamorous nor particularly comfortable.

"What about you?" asked Maureen.

So I removed my own clothes, which I had quite forgotten about; and I put her shoes neatly alongside one another.

We were together for three or four hours, until long after it was dark, listening to our hearts, and, intermittently, to the sounds of London.

I did not ask her about her husband and family, nor did she expound; and when suddenly she said, "I'm going now," my luck was in, or ours, because Mr Millar was not even walking from room to room with bits of paper in his hands, let alone entertaining the visitors. I should have hated Mr Millar to have seen me kissing Maureen goodbye.

"When can I see you again?"

"I simply can't tell you. We must make the best of the present." Talk about maturity! I still had far to go, and perhaps had even experienced a setback, a reversion to happy childhood.

I have said that the pageant (or mirage) of Mr Millar's life seemed steadily to work up, to intensify.

One thing that was a new embarra.s.sment as far as I was concerned was that Mr Millar was drinking. The ludicrous side of it, if one saw it like that, was that large crates of cheap spirits were continually being delivered to the house by men in peaked caps. Remarkably often they rang my outside bell instead of the one appertaining to Messrs Stallabra.s.s, Hoskins and Cramp. I would toil down, with all the men in their braces staring at me as if they had never seen me before, and all the girls giggling, and then have to toil up again; the b.o.o.by who had fallen into the trap. (Mr Millar himself continued almost invisible during working hours, at least as far as I was concerned. For a time I wondered whether he did not use the day for sleeping.) I have described the spirits that were ceaselessly delivered as "cheap": they were gins made by brewers, and whiskies not made in Scotland or in Ireland; both with jazzy labels on the bottles.

The alarming side of Mr Millar's new propensity was that now when I returned home, I would sometimes find him not wandering about, but sprawling or huddled on the staircase, very white and dishevelled, breathing hard, and once or twice with the pupils of his eyes unnaturally turned upwards. The stairs would smell of drink, sometimes the whole house, though I do not think I ever actually saw Mr Millar with a gla.s.s in his hand or a bottle (after that first uneasy party with him, of course). None the less, he must have been drinking heavily, if one might judge by the deliveries; and I began to fear worse consequences, such as delirium tremens, concerning which I felt the apprehension that arises from total ignorance. My great-uncle, again, had been terrifying on the subject without going much into detail, "while your mother's in the room", as he had said. Nor did the possibility of finding Mr Millar lying dead on the stairs rather than merely insensible at all attract me.

In the meantime, the aspect of the matter, not necessarily either funny or frightening, which none the less gave me the most trouble was that Mr Millar, instead of merely talking to himself, had begun to warble and carol, to bawl and bellow. He seemed capable of keeping it up, at least intermittently, for hours on end, as he fussed around.

When he was j.a.ping his late-night friends, the noise could be appalling. The urban sons of toil, even when the nature of their toil is probably criminal, are seldom slow in striking up, nor, traditionally, are the daughters of joy, who seemed to const.i.tute the larger part of Mr Millar's acquaintances.h.i.+p. Indeed, the police came ringing in protest: at my bell of course. And, on another occasion, banging and thumping at the outer door; a small posse of them, to judge by the sound; and by the stamping when once they had got in.

As far as I was concerned, there was occasionally another kind of interruption. I would hear hysterical shouting in the room below me and then steps running up my own uncarpeted stair. There would be frantic pounding at my attic door, and when I opened it, a dishevelled girl too distraught to say what was the matter. I would glance over her shoulder as she stood there crying and raving and beating at me to let her in; and there would be Mr Millar at the bottom of the stair, comparatively calm, though not always entirely steady. He never spoke a word at these times, but seemed merely an uneasy spectator, collapsed against the banister. One might have thought him genuinely embarra.s.sed and baffled by what had happened: resolved not to take the risk of saying a word when someone else was dealing with the situation.

In all the circ.u.mstances, I could not possibly admit the girl, so I would edge her downstairs again, saying that I would see her safely out into the street, and of course trying to buck her up, though I had no idea how best to do that. We would creep past Mr Millar, sometimes with my arm round the girl's shoulders; and he would never say a word of any kind, or make a move.

On one of these occasions, out of the four or five that I suppose there were in all, I was much frightened. It was bad enough to have to drag the girl past Mr Millar himself standing there watching; but on the occasion I refer to, when I reached the bottom of my stair, which ran straight up between two walls, I found that standing beside Mr Millar, and previously hidden from me, were two huge louts in cloth caps. They looked like chuckers-out or unsuccessful bruisers, but now they were as still and silent as Mr Millar. I did not find it easy to continue downwards with the shrinking girl at my other side, pressing herself against the wall; but I managed it and, as usual, nothing further happened. When I came up again after these incidents, Mr Millar had usually withdrawn into his room and shut the landing door. This time all three of them had disappeared. I expected some kind of rumpus to resound from below me; but none did.

On another occasion, I remember that the girl was of a different type from the usual: standing ashake on my dingy doorstep, she told me that she had met Mr Millar at Wimbledon, but, though she knew she had been a fool, she had no idea it would be like this. "I had no idea it could be," she said, her eyes boring into me. She very much wanted me to telephone the police but I thought it would solve nothing and end nothing. Moreover, I should have had to borrow Mr Millar's telephone. So I just manoeuvred her out in the usual way, and in the street she recovered remarkably. "I'm most awfully sorry to have been so silly," she said. Then she added, "Curse it, I've left my coat behind and it's a new, summer one."

Going down for my post a day or two later, I found Mr Millar's male staff chucking a girl's coat from one to another in the big ground floor room; s.n.a.t.c.hing at it and yelling at each other in mock antagonism. I supposed it was the same coat. I remember the colour still; a rather unusual greenish yellow, like yerba de mate.

Nor, very evidently, were lawn tennis and improvised office throwabouts and kickabouts (more usually with a waste-paper basket) the only sporting interests of the firm. Every day I noticed communications from bookmakers; and others with continental stamps that I identified as coming from operators of casino systems. (My great-uncle yet again, I fancy.) I suppose now that the bookmakers' letters can only have arrived during the racing season, and that I must tend to exaggerate their continuity. But I truly remember a very large number of them. I suppose there is a possible link between accountancy and the computation of odds; and even more, one would think, on the tables than on the turf. I came to modify my speculations about what Mr Millar did during the day: since he went to Wimbledon, he might well go to race meetings also, as well as on occasion simply sleeping.

Certainly there were sometimes "sporting types" about the building during the day. I do not refer here to the evening bashers and barrow boys, but to men in tweeds, with rolled umbrellas and public-school idioms. They would exchange loud badinage with the firm's staff, slap the bottoms of the girls (remarkably hard, I thought), and be gone in fast, popping cars almost as soon as they had come. One of them is a.s.sociated with a development that was particularly upsetting; and thus with my decision to move out.

Up to a point, I could not mistake this particular man. The noise of his car was both doubly loud and very distinctive. I could always hear him approaching from afar. And when he had arrived, he immediately clumped upstairs with a quite particular firmness. He always climbed right up to Mr Millar's own second floor, and there, with clatter and circ.u.mstance, he would open Mr Millar's outer door, using, apparently, a key on his own ring. He would go inside, be heard loudly tumbling things about for a minute or two, and then emerge, relock the door, and clump off again. The whole performance was regularly audible through my window, door, and floor; right through to the long withdrawing thunder of the man's machine.

Originally, I supposed that it was Mr Millar himself arriving and departing; Mr Millar who had left something behind, or wanted to see how things were getting on. But one day I met the stranger. His car roared up just as I was about to go out. In came a round, red-faced, stocky man in a green suit and a green pork-pie hat. He threw back the front door and gave me a really heavy push against the wall-in fact, seriously bruising my elbow, as I later found, so that for several days I had some difficulty in writing. Before I could say a word (if I could have thought of one) he was well upstairs with his familiar clump. I knew that from those around I could expect laughter rather than sympathy, so I continued on my way.

All the time I was in Brandenburg Square, I spent nearly every weekend with my mother. On the few occasions when I did not, but stayed up in London, either to complete some work or to spend time with a friend, I thought I had established that Mr Millar took himself off; as, of course, one would expect. I a.s.sumed that he withdrew to the home he had mentioned to me over the sherry; difficult though I had found it to imagine.

Some time (I cannot remember how long) after my direct encounter with the sporting man in the green suit came one of these London weekends. I think my mother had departed to stay with my father's stepsister in Frinton, as, since my father's death, she had grown into the way of doing several times each year. By now I had ceased inviting people round to see me even at these rare weekends, so disconcerting was the atmosphere in my house. And, at that particular weekend, it was possibly as well that I had.

Everything remained silent and as usual on the Sat.u.r.day night, while I worked away on some rubbish from Major Valentine; but after I had gone to bed, quite late, I was awakened by the noise of somebody moving about downstairs.

Almost my first conscious thought was that the noise was nothing like loud enough to have actually awakened me. Then I remembered that it was a Sat.u.r.day-Sunday night when there should (as I thought) have been no noise inside the building at all. I realized that my unconscious mind might have taken stock of this fact and sent out an alarm. I was frightened already, but that thought made me more frightened.

The noise was totally unlike the usual stamping and banging. I could hardly hear it at all; and was soon wondering whether the whole thing was not fancy, a disturbance inside my own ears and head. But I could not quite convince myself of this as I lay there rigid with listening, while the gleam from the street lamp far below seemed to isolate my small bedroom from the blackness of so much around me. I began to wonder if this might not be purely a conventional burglary. I could just see the time by my watch. It was ten minutes past three.

It was my duty to take action.

I made my muscles relax, and with a big effort jumped out of bed. In the most ba.n.a.l way, I seized the bedroom poker. (At that time, even central London attics still had fireplaces.) I opened the door into my sitting-room, darker than the bedroom, but not so dark that I could not cross with cert.i.tude to the outer door, where the light-switch was. Without turning on the light, I opened the outer door. I looked down my pitch-dark flight of stairs. When a light was on further down I could from this point always see the glow. Now there was no light.

I became aware that a smell was wafting up. It was quite faint, at least where I was, but, none the less, extremely pungent and penetrating. I must admit that the expression "a graveyard smell" leapt into my mind at the first whiff of it. Even a faint whiff was quite enough to make me feel sick in a moment. But I managed to hang on, even to listen with all the intentness I could muster.

There could be no doubt about the reality of the sounds beneath me; but every doubt about what caused them. Something or someone was shuffling and rubbing about in the almost total darkness: I found it impossible to decide on which landing or on which part of the staircase. In a flight of rather absurd logic, the thought of a blind person came to me. But, truly, the sounds hardly seemed human at all: more like a heavy sack wearily dragging about on its own volition, not able to manage very well, and perhaps anxious not to disturb the wrong person.

As well as feeling sick-really sick, as if about to be sick-I was trembling so much that no difficult further decision was needed: investigation was just physically impossible. I withdrew into my own territory, and locked my door as quietly as I could. By conventional standards, I suppose I had heard enough to justify a robbery call to the police, but I do not think it was only the lack of a telephone that deterred me. I sat there in the dark, with my handkerchief held tightly to my nose. Soon I began to feel chilled, and crept back to the comfort of my blankets.

Mercifully the smell did not seem strong enough to penetrate, but I pressed my face hard into the pillow, and lay listening, stretching my ears hard for sounds I dreaded to hear, eager above all to draw no attention to myself. And thus, in the end, despite all discomforts, I fell asleep.

And on the Sunday morning, while I was still trying to eat my breakfast, I heard the first, distant roar of the green man's noisy car. I heard him throw open the street door with a bang and come clumping up the many flights of stairs. Neither he nor anyone else connected with the firm downstairs had ever before entered the building on a Sunday when I had been there. The man did not even pause at Mr Millar's level, as he usually did, but came straight up to the attic. I could feel my flesh creep obscurely as I heard him. Horrors often come in pairs. Instead of ringing my bell, he waited silently for a moment. Perhaps he a.s.sumed that his advent was sufficiently apparent already, as indeed it was. However, since I did nothing, he delivered an immense kick at the lower rail of the door.

I opened up with as much as I could manage of dignity. At least the faint smell seemed gone.

"Thought you would have heard me," said the man, in a thick but (as we said in those days) educated voice.

"I did."

"Well then," said the man; but as if he were offhandedly agreeing to take no exception to a slight. He stared at me hard: his manner was most unlike Mr Millar's. Nor was he wearing or carrying his pork-pie hat.

"Seen anyone about?"

"Since when?" I asked.

"Yesterday or today," said the man, as if it hardly needed saying, which of course it did not.

"No," I said truthfully. "No, I don't think so."

"Or heard?" asked the man, staring at me still harder, consciously breaking me down.

"What should I have heard?"

"People or things," said the man. "Have you?"