Black As He’s Painted

‘Yes, sir, of course. If you’d care to see upstairs, sir?’

‘What!’ shouted Mr Whipplestone as if they’d fired a gun at him. ‘Oh. Thank you. Might as well, perhaps. Yes.’

‘Excuse me, sir. I’ll just close the window.’

Mr Whipplestone stood aside. The man laid his hand on the french window. It was a brisk movement but it stopped as abruptly as if a moving film had turned into a still. The hand was motionless, the gaze was fixed, the mouth shut like a trap.

Mr Whipplestone was startled. He looked down into the street and there, returning from his constitutional and attended by his dog and his bodyguard, was the Ambassador for Ng’ombwana. It was at him that the man, Chubb, stared. Something impelled Mr Whipplestone to look at the woman. She had come close and she too, over her husband’s shoulder, stared at the Ambassador.

The next moment the figures animated. The window was shut and fastened and Chubb turned to Mr Whipplestone with a serviceable smile.

‘Shall I show the way, sir?’ asked Chubb.

The upstairs flat was neat, clean and decent. The little parlour was a perfectly respectable and rather colourless room, except perhaps for an enlarged photograph of a round-faced girl of about sixteen which attracted attention on account of its being festooned in black ribbon and flanked on the table beneath it by two vases of dyed immortelles. Some kind of china medallion hung from the bottom edge of the frame. Another enlarged photograph of Chubb in uniform and Mrs Chubb in bridal array, hung on the wall.

All the appointments on this floor, it transpired, were the property of the Chubbs. Mr Whipplestone was conscious that they watched him anxiously. Mrs Chubb said: ‘It’s home to us. We’re settled like. It’s such a nice part, the Capricorns.’ For an unnerving moment he thought she was going to cry.

He left the Chubbs precipitately, followed by the youth. It was a struggle not to re-enter the drawing-room but he triumphed and shot out of the front door to be immediately involved in another confrontation.

‘Good morning,’ said a man on the area steps. ‘You’ve been looking at my house, I think? My name is Sheridan.’

There was nothing remarkable about him at first sight, unless it was his almost total baldness and his extreme pallor. He was of middle height, unexceptionally dressed and well-spoken. His hair, when he had had it, must have been dark since his eyes and brows and the wires on the backs of his pale hands were black. Mr Whipplestone had a faint, fleeting and oddly uneasy impression of having seen him before. He came up the area steps and through the gate and faced Mr Whipplestone who, in politeness, couldn’t do anything but stop where he was.

‘Good morning,’ Mr Whipplestone said. ‘I just happened to be passing. An impulse.’

‘One gets them,’ said Mr Sheridan, ‘in the spring.’ He spoke with a slight lisp.

‘So I understand,’ said Mr Whipplestone, not stuffily but in a definitive tone. He made a slight move.

‘Did you approve?’ asked Mr Sheridan casually.

‘Oh, charming, charming,’ Mr Whipplestone said, lightly dismissing it.

‘Good. So glad. Good morning, Chubb, can I have a word with you?’ said Sheridan.

Mr Whipplestone escaped. The wan youth followed him to the corner. Mr Whipplestone was about to dismiss him and continue alone towards Baronsgate. He turned back to thank the youth and there was the house, in full sunlight now, with its evergreen swags and its absurd garden. Without a word he wheeled left and left again and reached Able, Virtue & Sons three yards in advance of his escort. He walked straight in and laid his card before the plump lady.

‘I should like the first refusal,’ he said.

From that moment it was a foregone conclusion. He didn’t lose his head. He made sensible enquiries and took proper steps about the lease and the plumbing and the state of repair. He consulted his man of business, his bank manager and his solicitor. It is questionable whether, if any of these experts had advised against the move, he would have paid the smallest attention but they did not and, to his own continuing astonishment, at the end of a fortnight Mr Whipplestone moved in.

He wrote cosily to his married sister in Devonshire: ‘– you may be surprised to hear of the change. Don’t expect anything spectacular, it’s a quiet little backwater full of old fogies like me. Nothing in the way of excitement or “happenings” or violence or beastly demonstrations. It suits me. At my age one prefers the uneventful life and that,’ he ended, ‘is what I expect to enjoy at No. 1, Capricorn Walk.’

Prophecy was not Mr Whipplestone’s strong point.

III

‘That’s all jolly fine,’ said Superintendent Alleyn. ‘What’s the Special Branch think it’s doing? Sitting on its fat bottom waving Ng’ombwanan flags?’

‘What did he say, exactly?’ asked Mr Fox. He referred to their Assistant Commissioner.

‘Oh, you know!’ said Alleyn. ‘Charm and sweet reason were the wastewords of his ween.’

‘What’s a ween, Mr Alleyn?’

‘I’ve not the remotest idea. It’s a quotation. And don’t ask me from where.’

‘I only wondered,’ said Mr Fox mildly.

‘I don’t even know,’ Alleyn continued moodily, ‘how it’s spelt. Or what it means, if it comes to that.’

‘If it’s Scotch it’ll be with an h, won’t it? Meaning: “few”. Wheen.’

‘Which doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Perhaps it should be “weird” but that’s something one drees. Now you’re upsetting me, Br’er Fox.’

‘To get back to the AC, then?’

‘However reluctantly: to get back to him. It’s all about this visit, of course.’

‘The Ng’ombwanan President?’

‘He. The thing is, Br’er Fox, I know him. And the AC knows I know him. We were at school together in the same house: Davidson’s. Same study, for a year. Nice creature, he was. Not everybody’s cup of tea but I liked him. We got on like houses on fire.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Fox. ‘The AC wants you to recall old times?’

‘I do tell you precisely that. He’s dreamed up the idea of a meeting – casual-cum-official. He wants me to put it to the President that unless he conforms to whatever procedure the Special Branch sees fit to lay on, he may very well get himself bumped off and in any case will cause acute anxiety, embarrassment and trouble at all levels from the Monarch down. And I’m to put this, if you please, tactfully. They don’t want umbrage to be taken, followed by a highly publicized flounce-out. He’s as touchy as a sea-anemone.’

‘Is he jibbing, then? About routine precautions?’

‘He was always a pig-headed ass. We used to say that if you wanted the old Boomer to do anything you only had to tell him not to. And he’s one of those sickening people without fear. And hellish haughty with it. Yes, he’s jibbing. He doesn’t want protection. He wants to do a Haroun el Raschid and bum round London on his own looking as inconspicuous as a coal box in paradise.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Fox judiciously, ‘that’s a very silly way to go on. He’s a number one assassination risk, that gentleman.’

‘He’s a bloody nuisance. You’re right, of course. Ever since he pushed his new industrial legislation through he’s been a sitting target for the lunatic fringe. Damn it all, Br’er Fox, only the other day, when he elected to make a highly publicized call at Martinique, somebody took a pot shot at him. Missed and shot himself. No arrest. And off goes the Boomer on his merry way, six foot five of him, standing on the seat of his car, all eyes and teeth, with his escort having kittens every inch of the route.’

‘He sounds a right daisy.’

‘I believe you.’

‘I get muddled,’ Mr Fox confessed, ‘over these emergent nations.’

‘You’re not alone, there.’

‘I mean to say – this Ng’ombwana. What is it? A republic, obviously, but is it a member of the Commonwealth and if it is, why does it have an Ambassador instead of a High Commissioner?’

‘You may well ask. Largely through the manoeuvrings of my old chum, The Boomer. They’re still a Commonwealth country. More or less. They’re having it both ways. All the trappings and complete independence. All the ha’pence and none of the kicks. That’s why they insist on calling their man in London an Ambassador and setting him up in premises that wouldn’t disgrace one of the great powers. Basically it’s The Boomer’s doing.’

‘What about his own people? Here? At this Embassy? His Ambassador and all?’