The Night of Wenceslas Read Free

the year,’ the man said, coming back. ‘Souped up, of course. Take a decko if you like.’ He opened up the bonnet. A lethal-looking supercharger winked in the sun. ‘Goes like a bomb and steady as a train.’
    I walked back to Paddington in a trance without looking at the flat, and took the train to Bournemouth, and leaned out of the window seeing the car all the way.
    I bought it a week later, sick with relief at finding it still there.
    In terms of hard cash it might not have been the keenest bargain of my life; in all other terms it was certainly so. It was still the chink in the grimy barriers building up round me; still, in a way, my defence against Maura. The thought of selling it made me feel sick.
    I slowed at the corner and tooled along to number seventy-four rather slowly, listening to a peculiar sort of rattle from the clutch every time I changed gear. This was something new. I wondered if Ratface had been tinkering with it, whether he’d been tinkering with it all along so that he’d have to repair it, but after a moment of viciousness dismissed the idea. He wasn’t a bad Ratface at heart; this last was only one of a series of bills he had let me run up. By the sound of the clutch – a fiver’s worth, I thought – I’d be owing him a bit more soon.
    I drew into the kerb, let myself into the house, walked up the three flights. There was a note stuck under the plant on the plush tablecloth. It was in Mrs Nolan’s indelible pencil and read:
        
    Mr Whistler. Your young lady phoned. She said she phoned your office at 5.30. Will you ring her at home when you get in. L. Nolan .
    I thought Maura could wait a bit. I hung up my mac and went out to the bathroom for a wash and came back and smoked a cigarette, sitting on the divan with my feet up on the edge of the coverlet. I wondered what I was going to tell Maura.
    I had known her only for six months, but already, it seemed, for a lifetime. She was Irish, red-headed, and she had digs in a square off Gloucester Road, not far away. It was Maura who had given the Little Swine his soubriquet, and she who had manoeuvred me into today’s confrontation. Maura said the position was ridiculous. She said I was either a partner or I wasn’t. She said anyone with thirty per cent of the firm’s shares should count for something. She said the business must be making some profits, and where were they?
    I had not even got round to that one with the Little Swine.
    Even worse than her constant preoccupation with the Little Swine was her mania about my Uncle Bela. Bela was my mother’s brother. He had emigrated to Canada several years before the war and now lived in Vancouver. He had never married and on a trip to England to see Maminka after we had arrived from Czechoslovakia, he had told her I would be his heir.
    Any family such as mine with European connections and relatives who have emigrated have figures such as Bela. I had a hazy recollection of a large asthmatic man always supposed by my father to be excessively mean. It was a fact mat he had never helped Maminka in any way, and the only present he had ever given her was a rather flashy zircon brooch which she never wore.
    Bela’s name was seldom absent for long from my mother’s lips; she took it for granted that he would leave me at least a dollar millionaire, and her only hinted criticism was that he had not already settled the money on me.
    It was probably because he had entered Maminka’s mythology more than anything else that made me regard Uncle Bela as a somewhat dubious prop. She wrote to him regularly and I knew that she managed to contrive some mention of me in every letter. As he seemed to take equal pains never to refer to mein his infrequent and curiously uninformative replies, it seemed obvious he had regretted his earlier impulse. He operated a cannery and the only reference he ever made to his financial affairs was his annual comment that the fruit was very poor and very expensive.
    Although