The Complete Short Stories

The sight of so much spare space fascinated Ward. When Rossiter mentioned that Helen’s mother was ill and badly needed personal care he immediately knew where her cubicle could be placed — at the foot of his bed, between the wardrobe and the side wall.

Helen was overjoyed. ‘It’s awfully good of you, John,’ she told him, ‘but would you mind if Mother slept beside me? There’s enough space to fit an extra bed in.’

So Rossiter dismantled the partitions and moved them closer together, six beds now in line along the wall. This gave each of them an interval two and a half feet wide, just enough room to squeeze down the side of their beds. Lying back on the extreme right, the shelves two feet above his head, Ward could barely see the wardrobe, but the space in front of him, a clear six feet to the wall ahead, was uninterrupted.

Then Helen’s father arrived.

Knocking on the door of the cubicle, Ward smiled at Judith’s aunt as she let him in. He helped her swing out the made-up bed which guarded the entrance, then rapped on the wooden panel. A moment later Helen’s father, a small, grey-haired man in an undershirt, braces tied to his trousers with string, pulled back the panel.

Ward nodded to him and stepped over the luggage piled around the floor at the foot of the beds. Helen was in her mother’s cubicle, helping the old woman to drink her evening broth. Rossiter, perspiring heavily, was on his knees by the mahogany wardrobe, wrenching apart the frame of the central mirror with a jemmy. Pieces of the wardrobe lay on his bed and across the floor.

‘We’ll have to start taking these out tomorrow,’ Rossiter told him. Ward waited for Helen’s father to shuffle past and enter his cubicle. He had rigged up a small cardboard door, and locked it behind him with a crude hook of bent wire.

Rossiter watched him, frowning irritably. ‘Some people are happy. This wardrobe’s a hell of a job. How did we ever decide to buy it?’

Ward sat down on his bed. The partition pressed against his knees and he could hardly move. He looked up when Rossiter was engaged and saw that the dividing line he had marked in pencil was hidden by the encroaching partition. Leaning against the wall, he tried to ease it back again, but Rossiter had apparently nailed the lower edge to the floor.

There was a sharp tap on the outside cubicle door — Judith returning from her office. Ward started to get up and then sat back. ‘Mr Waring,’ he called softly. It was the old man’s duty night.

Waring shuffled to the door of his cubicle and unlocked it fussily, clucking to himself.

‘Up and down, up and down,’ he muttered. He stumbled over Rossiter’s tool-bag and swore loudly, then added meaningly over his shoulder: ‘If you ask me there’s too many people in here. Down below they’ve only got six to our seven, and it’s the same size room.’

Ward nodded vaguely and stretched back on his narrow bed, trying not to bang his head on the shelving. Waring was not the first to hint that he move out. Judith’s aunt had made a similar suggestion two days earlier. Since he had left his job at the library (the small rental he charged the others paid for the little food he needed) he spent most of his time in the room, seeing rather more of the old man than he wanted to, but he had learned to tolerate him.

Settling himself, he noticed that the right-hand spire of the wardrobe, all he had been able to see of it for the past two months, was now dismantled.

It had been a beautiful piece of furniture, in a way symbolizing this whole private world, and the salesman at the store told him there were few like it left. For a moment Ward felt a sudden pang of regret, as he had done as a child when his father, in a moment of exasperation, had taken something away from him and he had known he would never see it again.

Then he pulled himself together. It was a beautiful wardrobe, without doubt, but when it was gone it would make the room seem even larger.

1961

The Gentle Assassin

By noon, when Dr Jamieson arrived in London, all entrances into the city had been sealed since six o’clock that morning. The Cornonation Day crowds had waited in their places along the procession route for almost twenty-four hours, and Green Park was deserted as Dr Jamieson slowly made his way up the sloping grass towards the Underground station below the Ritz. Abandoned haversacks and sleeping bags lay about among the litter under the trees, and twice Dr Jamieson stumbled slightly. By the time he reached the station entrance he was perspiring freely, and sat down on a bench, resting his heavy gun-metal suitcase on the grass.