The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Oh dear, the power of the professionals …

But, there was a fly in this ointment. Our hated housemaster had a spyhole set in the landing outside the dormitory. Howells was his name. Sticking his ear to the hole, he could detect a juvenile voice breaking the enforced silence within.

Flinging open the door, in he stormed! On went the lights, swish went the cane in his fist.

‘Who was talking?’ he demanded.

My hand went up. I was summoned to the middle of the room. And there, in my flimsy pyjamas, I was given six of the best on my behind. (Later, everyone wanted to see my scars).

Howells slammed in. The trick was not to make a sound. Endure! – This is what life is going to be about. Then return with dignity to your bed. Without looking back.

So what can Howells do next? Well … actually nothing. So off he clears. Putting out the lights and slamming the door behind him.

And I? You must have guessed. I am the Champion Storyteller of the Junior Dorm.

Faceless Card (#u05be873d-20e3-5cbf-a745-617b6ac1fde3)

As soon as Paul Stoneward saw Nigel Alexander come into Darwin’s Dive, the killing instinct blossomed in him like a wonderful flower. I can just imagine how it was inside Paul: every little cell waking, growing teeth, turning into sharks yawning.

Even in the most static society like ours, men divide off into hunters and hunted, wolves and sheep. Paul Stoneward was a hunter born, with a way of his own about stalking the prey.

Mr Nigel Alexander was prey. He had it stamped all over him. Ordinary citizen. Safety first. Ideas keep out. He came into the Dive at a slow trot, moving on his heels as if his toes had corns. He foamed a little from a mouth as wide as a ditch with unaccustomed exertion. Brushing past Stoneward, he sat down at his table and peered anxiously through the net-curtained window.

‘Someone you don’t want to see?’ Stoneward asked.

Nigel Alexander looked at his table companion for the first time and then back out of the window.

‘Just a business acquaintance,’ he muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

His nerves all alert, Paul Stoneward looked him over, heard him absently order an old-fashioned bromo when the waiter came. Alexander was neatly dressed; Stoneward placed him as a man with money who had no notion how to spend it. A man with half his life ahead who had no notion how to use it. Prey: Handle with Cruelty.

A youngster, slick and spick, drew up outside the bar and hesitated. He danced about, then entered. He noticed Alexander, pretended to be surprised, and came over to the table. His pale face shone with pleasure.

‘Hi, boss,’ he said eagerly. ‘I sure wasn’t sure I didn’t see that familiar back of yours ahead of me. What’s it to be? Mind if I sit down?’

‘I’ve already ordered, Johnny,’ Alexander said miserably. ‘I was just talking to my friend here …’

It did not dislodge the newcomer one bit. He sat down, put his elbows on the table top and nodded friendly fashion to Stoneward. ‘Howdy, I’m Johnny J. Flower, Mr Alexander’s chief clerk. Glad to know you.’

He was the up-and-creeping generation. No dandruff. No shyness. No doubts, no halitosis. No nothing. He began to chatter happily about ‘the business,’ how well they were doing, how good it was working for Mr Alexander. Mr Alexander tried to join in the choruses, bought the boy a pep-up and fizz, smiled, nodded like an old nag.

Business could have been better. ‘The N-Compass Co.’ had its troubles. The public just was not buying taped books like it used and that was a hard, gilt-edged fact nobody could buck. No matter how much publicity N-Compass put out for its clients, nobody could buck that gilt-edged fact. Even Mr Alexander with a smart head clerk like Johnny J. Flower could not buck that basic, gilt-edged fact. But they had done well to win the handling of the publicity for President da Silva’s Memoirs; that was a big consignment. Everyone present would surely agree President da Silva was a big guy.

‘Surely,’ agreed Stoneward, when their two pairs of cow eyes, hazel and green but so similar, turned to him, pleading with him to roll the ball along and say, ‘Surely.’

Why, da Silva was the guy who instigated the Amazon Basin scheme … billions of credits … da Silva was the guy who gave the big yes to the AAA, the Automated Agriculture Act … Yuh, a big guy … N-Compass ought to be made with da Silva’s book.

Finally Johnny said he should be getting along.

‘Off you go, boy; I’ll be along,’ Mr Alexander said, half tough, half cajoling. This obviously was not how Johnny wanted it played. He like the rest of the N-Compass staff to see him turn up with the boss, arm-in-arm, you-kiss-mine-etc. Still, he got up and went with grace, social to his clean, clean fingertips.

Paul Stoneward drank in every second of the session as if it were wine. If there was anything he loved, it was seeing the mentally dead pretend they were mentally alive. All the time that he was watching and hating Alexander and the clerk, I was sitting at the other end of the bar watching and hating Stoneward; it’s my profession.

‘Nice boy, Johnny. Don’t know how I’d manage without him,’ Alexander said, wiping under his collar with a silk handkerchief. He was getting flabby. His new collar made it clear he needed a new neck.

‘But you were trying to dodge him,’ Stoneward said lightly. He could prise this old fool open like a piggy-bank.

‘Oh, well, yes … That’s another thing. It’s just – well, never mind. I don’t think I even caught your name, sir. Paul Stoneward? Fine; never forget a name – doesn’t pay in my line of business, no sir. You see, Johnny is a very smart and bright young feller – well, you saw for yourself …’

‘You wouldn’t say Johnny was a bore?’ Paul Stoneward put the delicate point tentatively. You would not say Johnny was a smarm, a snide, a creeper, a dully without one inkling, an ostrich, a jerk who was galloping blind from cradle to grave (like you, Mr Alexander) – in short, an ideal, approve, integrated citizen of this approved and misbegotten Age of Content?

‘Why, Johnny’s a real live-wire, Mr Stoneward,’ Alexander said, with mild indignation. ‘I only said to my wife this morning, “Penelope, Johnny’s going places” and I’m not a man to make a mistake.’

Not much, you old blabbermouth. Of course you can’t see what Johnny is, just as the blind can’t see the blind. And what the hell places do you think Johnny could possibly be going to, when there are no longer any places worth going to? And what sort of romance do you and Penelope make when you are in your bed clothes? And if you knew I long – but long – to tear your typical existence apart from top to bottom …

‘It is of course a very great honour and pleasure to meet a man of your perspicacity and position,’ Stoneward said, crinkling his eyebrows into Mexican moustaches to increase the unction. ‘My place is only just round the corner from here. May I ask you up there with me now? I would be delighted to mix you another old-fashioned bromo.’

At once, Alexander looked nervous. His face took on the puckered look it had worn when he first encountered the bar. Stoneward could not quite account for the expression. Goddam it, even these Normals had their little personal quirks; since it irritated him to feel he did not know every last grey inch of Alexander’s soul, he promptly forgot the thought.

Alexander glanced at his watch.

‘The business …’ he said apologetically. ‘Most hospitable of you …’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Alexander,’ Stoneward said, lowering his eyes and easing huskiness into his voice. ‘I should have remembered what a busy man you are. It’s just – well, I’m lonely, let’s face it. There’s no Penelope for me … Just my little old self … Existence sometimes grows a wee bit … solitary.’

Don’t ham it too much, kid, and don’t spoil it all by laughing in his face. You’ve got him now; look, his eyes are misting. Love in a mystery. These slobs are stuffed rotten with kindness – you just have to touch the right button and out it oozes.

‘I’m genuinely sorry to learn that, Mr Stoneward,’ the boss of N-Compass was saying. ‘Say, call me Nigel, why don’t you, and I’ll call you Paul. I like to be friends with folk. I guess we all get lonely at times – even a happy-married man like myself. Like I always say, Paul, life is just a big question mark. Sometimes at night, when your corns are playing you up …’

‘You mean – you mean you will come on round to my place?’ Stoneward said, brightening convulsively. He could not bother even to put on a genuine act – this Alexander was too rancid to smell a stink. Subtlety is wasted on suckers.

‘Well, I didn’t say that …’

‘Ah, come on – Nigel. You’d like my room. Besides … well, I’ve come to regard you as a friend, I guess.’

‘Don’t like to say no,’ Alexander murmured, rising obediently to his feet when Stoneward did. For all his smart suiting, he looked baggy, like a fat sheep off to a ritzy abattoir, as Stoneward took his arm and led him into the sedate streets.

I left shortly after but did not follow them. Instead, I took a taxi to H.Q. Man, was I mad!

Mr Nigel Alexander was really uneasy. He chewed a toothpick to splinters. He plucked at the armpits of his shirt to ease the damp patches off his skin. When he spoke, standing in the middle of Stoneward’s room, he gazed unhappily down at the squared toes of his shoes.

‘Er … you aren’t an artist, by any chance, Paul, are you? No offence, I mean, and you’ll have guessed by now that I’m a pretty liberal man, but I mean I just have to ask the once. These pictures on your walls … And that naked statue …’

Stoneward perched himself on the edge of his desk, swung his neat legs, folded his competent hands, smiled dagger-fashion, looked artistic.

‘Why now, Nigel,’ he said with sham surprise, ‘you know as well as I do that such things as artists don’t exist any more! This is the Age of Content, when all maladjusted and non-functional groups like artists or fictioneers or drunkards have melted away. Everyone is adjusted, normal, happy.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Alexander said hurriedly, nodding rather too much. ‘I just thought … these pictures … I mean, don’t they rather look back to the old decadent pre-Content set-up? I mean, I know you are unmarried …’