Endless Night Read Free Page A

listened to what I said and then he took the picture out of the window and displayed it for me against a wall, holding it there for me to look at as long as I wanted. It came to me then—in the way you sometimes know just exactly how things are, that the same rules didn’t apply over pictures as they do about other things. Somebody might come into a place like this dressed in shabby old clothes and a frayed shirt and turn out to be a millionaire who wanted to add to his collection. Or he could come in looking cheap and flashy, rather like me perhaps, but somehow or other he’d got such a yen for a picture that he managed to get the money together by some kind of sharp practice.
    “A very fine example of the artist’s work,” said the man who was holding the picture.
    “How much?” I said briskly.
    The answer took my breath away.
    “Twenty-five thousand,” he said in his gentle voice.
    I’m quite good at keeping a poker face. I didn’t show anything. At least I don’t think I did. He added some name that sounded foreign. The artist’s name, I suppose, and that it had just come on the market from a house in the country, where the people who lived there had had no idea what it was. I kept my end up and sighed.
    “It’s a lot of money but it’s worth it, I suppose,” I said.
    Twenty-five thousand pounds. What a laugh!
    “Yes,” he said and sighed. “Yes indeed.” He lowered the picture very gently and carried it back to the window. He looked at me and smiled. “You have good taste,” he said.
    I felt that in some way he and I understood each other. I thanked him and went out into Bond Street.

Three
     
    I don’t know much about writing things down—not, I mean, in the way a proper writer would do. The bit about that picture I saw, for instance. It doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. I mean, nothing came of it, it didn’t lead to anything and yet I feel somehow that it is important, that it has a place somewhere. It was one of the things that happened to me that meant something. Just like Gipsy’s Acre meant something to me. Like Santonix meant something to me.
    I haven’t really said much about him. He was an architect. Of course you’ll have gathered that. Architects are another thing I’d never had much to do with, though I knew a few things about the building trade. I came across Santonix in the course of my wanderings. It was when I was working as a chauffeur, driving the rich around places. Once or twice I drove abroad, twice to Germany—I knew a bit of German—and once or twice to France—I had a smattering of French too—and once to Portugal. They were usually elderly people, who had money and bad health in about equal quantities.
    When you drive people like that around, you begin to think that money isn’t so hot after all. What with incipient heart attacks, lots of bottles of little pills you have to take all the time, and losing your temper over the food or the service in hotels. Most of the rich people I’ve known have been fairly miserable. They’ve got their worries, too. Taxation and investments. You hear them talking together or to friends. Worry! That’s what’s killing half of them. And their sex life’s not so hot either. They’ve either got long-legged blonde sexy wives who are playing them up with boyfriends somewhere, or they’re married to the complaining kind of woman, hideous as hell, who keeps telling them where they get off. No. I’d rather be myself. Michael Rogers, seeing the world, and getting off with good-looking girls when he feels like it!
    Everything a bit hand-to-mouth, of course, but I put up with that. Life was good fun, and I’d been content to go on with life being fun. But I suppose I would have in any case. That attitude goes with youth. When youth begins to pass fun isn’t fun any longer.
    Behind it, I think, was always the other thing—wanting someone and something…However, to go on with what I was saying, there was one old