‘Stop it, E, I said supper will spoil, there really isn’t time. Oh, not here please, let’s go into the bedroom at least.’
‘Here,’ said Major Easonby Mellon firmly. And there it was. It was enjoyable, and would have been more enjoyable still if the image of Patricia Parker (Miss) had not remained so persistently in his mind. Afterwards Joan sighed.
‘Trouble is I don’t feel like getting supper now. Shall we just go to bed?’
‘Certainly not. The labourer is worthy of his hire.’
While they had supper she said, ‘Come on, what have you been doing? Tell me some of the things that have been happening, the way you always do.’
In a way Joan was not unlike Pat, he reflected, the same sort of round face and almost the same shade of brown hair. And Joan, of course, had very good legs. But the likeness only showed how unwise it was to let yourself go to seed as Joan had done, because there could be no comparison in their attractiveness. Mark you, Joan was thirty-five, or was it thirty-six? But she could never have been in quite the same class as Pat…
‘What’s been
happening
, I asked you.’ Joan’s voice had a note of querulousness, and the Major brought himself back to matters in hand.
‘Let me see, now. Friday – on Friday the chief sent for me and said the job in Norway had fizzled out. Our chap over there, Bjornson, had been selling stuff to the Russians all the time, and this story about a new rocket device was just a plant he was trying on us.’
‘He was trying to trick you? To get you sent out there so that they could kill you?’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose so. Just trying to mislead us, you know, both sides are doing it all the time.’
‘And what have you done about him, this man, Johnson?’
‘Bjornson. Nothing much. I believe the chief’s making a higher bid for his services. We want him to go on working for the Russians, naturally, that’s the chief’s whole idea.’ The Major was familiar with the work of Mr John le Carré and Mr Deighton, and moved easily in this world of the triple- and quadruple-cross. In the manner of the masters he added, ‘Spying’s a dirty business.’
He embroidered the theme. It had long ceased to be a matter of surprise to him that Joan accepted his inventions so readily. The first step, by which he convinced her that he was an agent, had been the big one. With that surmounted, why should she not believe the tales he told her about the dingy office in Soho and the erratic-tempered chief, the internecine warfare between the rival Department AX 15 and his own UGLI 3 which as he often complained occupied the greater part of their time, the troubles with men in the field and his own occasional trips abroad to rebuke one agent or bribe another, the very infrequent spurts of violence? He congratulated himself sometimes on the fact that he never pitched the stories too steep, so that there were no incidents which moved beyond his powers of invention or which seemed too outrageously unlikely. The struggles between the Chief and Birkett, who was the head of AX 15, were rather like those of a television serial in which different characters come out on top in successive weeks, and at one time Joan had got bored with them as a viewer gets bored with the repetitious activities of a favourite television character. Tonight she gave up after five minutes, and they went to bed.
‘Shall I tell you something, E?’ she asked, and went on to do so. ‘I don’t know you, do I? Not the real you. Perhaps the real you is a different person altogether from the one I know.’
He protested vigorously, but as she drifted into sleep it struck him that the phrase about being a different person embodied a truth, although she did not know it. Remove Major Easonby Mellon’s good thatch of hair to reveal an egg-bald scalp, take away his beard to show a weak chin, slip out the contact lenses which changed the colour of his eyes from brown to blue, replace the dog-tooth check with a suit of indeterminate grey, put him down in Livingstone Road, Fraycut, and he would have been recognised by everybody as Arthur Brownjohn.
Lying beside Joan, who within a few minutes had flung out an arm and like Clare in distant Fraycut begun to snore, Major Easonby Mellon thought of Pat, then Joan, then Clare. There could be no doubt that two women and two lives presented a problem, especially when a man was really interested in a third. And then, as naturally as a coin drops into its appointed slot, it occurred to him that this problem would be solved if Clare did not exist, and that it must surely be possible for a man of his ingenuity to bring about that desirable state of affairs. A life without Clare! The prospect was almost too heady to contemplate. Contemplating it, he fell asleep.
Background of a Deception
Arthur Brownjohn had always been of an inventive turn of mind, and when the war ended he joined with a man in his regiment named Maser in the purchase of a firm called Lektrek Electricals. Arthur’s share of the necessary capital had been provided by his army gratuity, together with a small inheritance he had received from an uncle. Lektreks was a flourishing little firm of electrical contractors, and the partners expected it to provide a living for them while they developed the Brownjohn Patent Clutch. This was a type of automatic clutch that had been invented by Arthur during his long periods of idleness as a sergeant in the Catering Corps. He had demonstrated it to Maser on a number of toy battery-operated motor cars, and he was certain that with a reasonably well-equipped workshop he would be able to make a prototype. The construction of this prototype, however, proved more complicated than he had expected. Months passed before it was perfected, or almost perfect, and then the blow fell. A very similar device was put on the market by one of the big car manufacturers, a device so similar that there was no question of going ahead with the Brownjohn Patent Clutch. A few weeks later Maser disappeared, and Arthur discovered that his partner had been fiddling the books by the simple process of having cheques for some accounts made payable to himself instead of to the firm.
Arthur was reluctant to close down Lektreks, for he had half a dozen other ideas in his mind for which an electrical firm would provide ideal backing – an everlasting torch with a battery which recharged itself automatically, an electrical shock cure for hay fever, an electrified rocking chair, and a vibro pad that would open the pores far better than any cream. At the same time it was obvious that the firm would not provide him with a living unless he gave to it the time that he devoted to his blueprints and experiments. Arthur saw that what he needed was, quite simply, money, but where was it to come from? He had a painful interview with his widower father, a retired customs and excise official who refused to lend him a penny and advised him to do a steady job of work. That avenue was closed, and he had no other approachable relatives. It was at this point that, like many men before him, he realised the immense usefulness of a rich wife.
Arthur’s contacts with women had been slight and few, and although he had a strong fantasy life it was not associated with girls. In adolescence he became a surprisingly good tennis player and won the championship of the local club two years in succession. The champion of a tennis club, particularly if he is young and unmarried, is a desirable object to many of the women members, and Arthur had plenty of opportunities for what in such clubs is still euphemistically called flirtation. At this time, however, he rather resembled the man who maintained that if the concept of love had not been invented people would never have experienced the state itself. He was timid, even fearful, in the presence of women, and had had sexual intercourse only once before entering the army. On this occasion he was playing for the tennis team in an away match, and one of the ladies’ doubles pair took him home and seduced him in the back of her car. In the army his sexual experiences were more frequent, but equally brief and unsatisfactory. It is not surprising that when Arthur contemplated marriage he went to a matrimonial agency. He soon saw that he had been mistaken in thinking that he was likely to acquire a rich wife by this means, but the set-up of such agencies engaged his mind. Obviously an agency needed very little capital. Might it not be possible to make money out of it? A few weeks later his agency, Marriage For All, was born.
It is hard to say what might have become of Arthur if he had not one day met a friend from his old tennis club, been persuaded to rejoin, and been partnered in a mixed doubles by a meatily handsome woman named Clare Slattery. They found that they made a good doubles pair, and although Arthur was too much out of practice to do well in the singles, they reached the final of the mixed doubles. When Clare had hit a forehand into the net to lose the final she shook Arthur’s hand vigorously and said: ‘Damned bad shot, partner, I’m sorry. Come and have a drink.’
They had two or three drinks, and under questioning from Clare, Arthur found himself telling her what he did. Marriage For All was already showing signs of being profitable, but Arthur kept this activity a close secret because of its faint absurdity. Instead he talked about his inventions, in particular about an idea he had for driving cars by a series of belts and pulleys which would dispense with the need for gears. Clare listened patiently, although with obvious scepticism.
‘Very clever. Be a long time before you make any money out of it, though.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a matter of getting going.’
‘Not relying on it, I hope?’
Arthur laughed. He had a pleasant laugh, and although his hair was rapidly thinning he was still an engaging young man rather than a rabbity middle-aged one. ‘Of course not. It’s just a sideline for my firm. I put a couple of men on it from time to time, under my supervision naturally.’
‘Not your main source of income?’
‘Oh no. We’re importers of car spares. We can undercut most British manufacturers by thirty per cent.’ In saying this he was telling part of the truth. When he and Maser had bought Lektreks there had indeed been a flourishing business in the importation of cheap spares. Neglect of it, coupled with the defalcations of Maser, had led to the loss of most of their agencies. The small workshop in Bermondsey had been sold and the staff dismissed, and Lektreks now operated from one room in an office block called Paget House, filling orders sent in by long-established clients. With what was for him considerable boldness Arthur asked, ‘What kind of job do you do?’
Clare gave one of her gusty laughs. ‘Just a bit of part time work for the WVS. I’m independent.’
There was a pause. Then Arthur suggested that they should have another drink.
During the next few weeks they played a great deal of tennis together, and Arthur made some tactful inquiries about Clare. The results were encouraging. Her father had been a fairly important administrator in the Indian Civil Service. Clare had gone to school in England but spent the holidays out in Calcutta, and after leaving school had gone there to live. When her father retired, just before the war, he had bought a house called The Laurels in Fraycut, a prosperous little town in Surrey. Arthur’s lodgings were at Stonehead, the next station up the line and a mile or two away, and he fully realised that Fraycut was one social step up from Stonehead. Rich commuters had built houses that were almost small estates on the edge of the town, and he spent an interesting afternoon looking round the place. Livingstone Road was not on this high income commuter level – in another place it might have been called suburban – but still, when he made an exterior inspection of The Laurels, he was impressed by the good bourgeois solidity of the house. Mr Slattery had been dead for a couple of years, his wife had predeceased him, and there were no other children. Altogether, Clare must be quite comfortably off. She was an attractive proposition, and the attraction was if anything increased by the fact that there was, as he put it to himself, no nonsense about her. Something about the sturdiness of her legs and the rough, slightly chapped nature of her skin seemed to put nonsense quite (to use a tennis term) out of court. After one rather gay evening at the club he proposed, standing with her just outside the club-house. He was faintly disturbed by the alacrity with which he was accepted. It was rather as if he had put his head inside the jaws of an apparently stuffed alligator and had found them decisively snapped together.
They were married at a registry office, and given a good send off by the tennis club members. His father met the bride for the first time on the wedding day, and expressed his opinion of her briefly. ‘You won’t get much change out of
her
, in bed or out of it,’ he said. Clare had mentioned more than once that the rest of the family would be coming to the wedding and that she didn’t know what they would think about it, and at the reception Arthur first really became aware of the Slattery connection, in the form of two immensely old men called by Clare Uncle Pugs and Uncle Ratty. Uncle Pugs, whose name was Sir Pelham Slattery, made a short but still rather incoherent speech about Clare being a sweet little girl who had grown up to be a lovely young woman. There was a drop on the end of his nose and Arthur waited for it to fall off. Instead tears from his eyes coursed down his cheeks as he was heard to say, ‘Wish every happiness…and all the best of…ship never…rocks…Mr and Mrs Browning.’ He sat down with the drop on his nose still there. It did not seem worth correcting his error.
A little later Uncle Ratty cornered Arthur. Red-faced and apparently in a state of permanent anger, he was a more formidable proposition than Uncle Pugs. His first words were, ‘Now you’ve got her I hope you can keep her.’
‘Keep her?’ Arthur had a vision of Clare as some great furry animal escaping from him across fields.
‘Look after her, man. Pay the bills.’
Arthur goggled. The idea was quite the reverse of that with which he had married, but he realised that this must not be admitted. ‘I have my own business.’
‘So Clare said. Selling bits of cars or something. Doesn’t sound like much to me.’
‘We have agencies.’
Uncle Ratty stared hard at him, and it occurred to Arthur that this terrifying specimen of prehistoric man from the Lincolnshire fens probably did not know what an agency was. All he said, however, was, ‘Stand on your own feet. Like cattle.’
That was what it sounded like, but Arthur thought that he must have been mistaken. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Thought it would have been plain enough,’ Uncle Ratty said, and moved away.
Arthur never discovered what he had said, nor did Uncle Pugs and Uncle Ratty appear again during his married life. They sank back into the fens from which they had emerged, communicating only by means of cards at Christmas. It was not, however, the last he heard of the Slattery connection, for it was made plain to him that the reception had been a crucial test which he had failed. He later discovered that Uncle Pugs and Uncle Ratty were distant cousins and not real uncles at all, and that in fact Clare had no close relations, but that did not affect their plain perception that he was not up to the mark. It often occurred to Arthur in later years to wonder why Clare had married him. He came to the conclusion that the idea of marrying somebody socially beneath her was really positively congenial, although she pretended otherwise. To social inferiority was added Arthur’s natural timidity, which made it easy for her to overbear him on any point, and when these qualities were topped by his disinclination for nonsense he became (as he saw afterwards) an almost ideal husband. Even the failure of the Slattery connection had its compensations so far as Clare was concerned, for it provided permanent proof both of her superiority to her husband and of the sacrifice she had made for him.
The many respects in which he found her less than an ideal wife are too obvious to need cataloguing, but one must be mentioned specifically. So far from marrying a wife happy to provide financial backing that would make it possible for him to give all his time to research, Arthur found that Clare kept her private income intact, and expected him to give her a fixed sum each week for housekeeping. Certainly he lived rent free at The Laurels, certainly also Clare was an economical housekeeper, with a liking for salads and rather sparse vegetarian dishes, but he speedily found the untruth of the old saying that two can live as cheaply as one. The truth was, as he acknowledged in his diary, that he had not grasped the realities of marriage. He had been looking for a bank account, Clare had been looking for a necessary social appendage, and she had got much the better of the bargain. Indeed, her life changed very little from what it had been when she was single. She had a number of regular commitments, which included an afternoon a week at the local Liberal Party offices, one morning a fortnight on a Children’s Care Committee, and a visit to Weybridge every Wednesday to shop and attend an art class. She took up other occupations from time to time, including prison visiting, Oxfam and the WVS work which she had mentioned to him, but these were abandoned for one reason or another. Her only problem was that of fitting a husband into the busy round. There was also the tennis club, but the charms of that faded for both of them soon after marriage. And there were social occasions on which a husband was undoubtedly useful, little evenings at home sometimes associated with the Liberal Party but more often with bridge, which both of them played. Arthur’s life was a blend of such evenings with gardening and the variety of duties that Clare found for him about the house. It was from the emotional pressures of such a life, and the financial pressure of having to pay for it, that Major Easonby Mellon was born.
Perhaps Arthur did not know himself what he meant to do with the Marriage For All Bureau after his marriage, but it was soon clear to him that it or some similar business would have to be continued, since it was his only considerable source of income. Marriage For All had the disadvantage that he was connected with it in his own person and under his own name. Supposing that he started another agency of a similar kind but run by a different person? Acting was one of the few spheres in which he had shone at school, and he had always taken an obscure pleasure in dressing up.
The idea presented several problems, but they were of a kind that Arthur took pleasure in solving. The name of Easonby Mellon, derived partly from the financier Andrew Mellon and partly from the hero of a book he had enjoyed as a schoolboy, was the least of them. The military rank seemed appropriate and the clothes, wig and beard were designed as suitable to it. The wig maker he went to appreciated the interest shown by his client. He was surprised when Arthur said that he did not want to match his original faded light brown colouring, but he asked no questions. Arthur had been keen on a red wig, which he felt would express Easonby Mellon’s personality, but he had been persuaded that a brown one with reddish tints would be far less conspicuous.