The Suburbs of Hell Read Free Page B

we’re pals when we meet. I should say for myself that I’m quite good at bein a brother.’
    ‘I expect you are, Harry,’ Paul said, with a straight face. ‘If I met you in the Gobi Desert, that’s what I’d guess about you.’
    ‘Now you
are
pullin it,’ Harry detected.
    The big room, created not many years before from small ones which had been secretive and snug, was crowded and smoky by now, and conversations from many directions mingled in a throbbing hum like a ship’s engine. The small dog was again navigating the legs with a lost look. ‘Why,’ said Harry, sitting with spraddled legs in his captain’s chair and reviewing his fellow-citizens like a fleet, ‘I believe thass Ena’s dog, that.’
    ‘You know everything,’ Paul said. ‘That reminds me: could you give Greg and me some advice about a boat?’
    ‘To buy, you mean? Well, I know something, not a lot. But I can tell you who
not
to buy boats from. The hooman element, thass where I can always be a help.’
    ‘Harry—what do you make of Frank?’
    ‘Why, does he say he have a boat to sell? That can’t be true.’
    ‘No, nothing to do with boats. It’s just that you put me in mind of people who offer to flog you things.’
    Harry considered. ‘I don’t know all that much about him. We was both on the
Hamburg
once—we overlap by a foo months. And he stayed in my top room for a while, part-time, like. But I dint hardly know him then, and I don’t think I do now, not to say
know.
When he get married, he come ashore and start this sort of handyman business: carpenterin and house-paintin and that. What are you tryin to find out? Do you know something against him?’
    ‘No,’ Paul said, doubtfully: and then: ‘Better drop it. He saw me looking at him. He’s coming over.’
    Harry twisted in his chair and looked over his shoulder at Frank approaching. ‘Come to join us, mate?’
    ‘No, I’m off,’ Frank said. ‘I just remembered something. You’re invited to a party, at Dave’s.’
    ‘At Dave’s?’ Harry said. ‘I don’t know where Dave live.’
    ‘It’s twenty-three High Street,’ Frank said. ‘A bit after eleven. Bring a bird, if you know one, and enough to drink for yourselves.’
    ‘Well, I might,’ Harry said. ‘Shall I ask Ena? She always like a party, but I don’t think a party of Dave’s would be up her street.’
    ‘Bring her,’ Frank said, beginning to drift away. ‘You’re invited too,’ he added to Paul, and then pushed his way through the crowd to the door.
    ‘Well,’ Harry said to Paul, ‘shall you come?’
    ‘I don’t think so. If Ena goes, I might.’
    ‘I know whass in Dave’s mind,’ Harry said, ‘invitin us Old Age Pensioners. He reckons we shall get discouraged before we empty the bottles we bring. Stone me, boy, int you never gooin to finish that? What are you doin, spittin into it to make that last?’
    ‘Just a half,’ Paul said, handing over his pint. ‘Harry, do you
like
Frank?’
    Harry, standing with a pot in each hand, gave the matter his attention. He said: ‘Thass not a question I often ask myself. I like most people till they teach me different. Far as I’m concerned, the whole hooman race is on probation. Nice to see you smile, boy.’
    ‘Prat,’ said Paul. ‘Soppy prat.’
    At the end of the quay the mist was thrumming with the engines of the unseen
St Felix
, and the streetlamps, reduced to dandelion-balls of light, made islands to be crossed by the dark sudden figures of men going home from the dozen pubs of the little town.
    ‘I always think,’ said Ena, tripping along in her court shoes with her King Charles spaniel behind her, ‘they could make a spooky film in Old Tornwich when it’s foggy.’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Paul said, cheered up by the thought. ‘Nineteen-forties. Black and white. With—’
    ‘Basil Rathbone,’ Ena suggested. ‘Lon Chaney.’
    ‘I was thinking of Jean Gabin.’
    ‘Oh, foreign,’ Ena said. ‘Yes, and Valli.’
    ‘Boris