Under the Net Read Free Page B

of Mrs Tinckham’s success. Her shop serves as what is known as an ‘accommodation address’, and is a rendezvous for people who like to be very secretive about their affairs. I sometimes wonder how much Mrs Tinckham knows about the business of her customers. When I am away from her I feel sure that she cannot be so naive as not to have some sort of appreciation of what is going on under her nose. When I am with her, she looks so plump and vague, and blinks in a way so much like one of her cats, that I am filled with doubt. There are moments when, out of the comer of my eye, I seem to see a look of acute intelligence upon her face; but however fast I turn about I can never surprise any expression there except one of beaming and motherly solicitude and more or less vacant concern. Whatever may be the truth, one thing is certain, that no one will ever know it. The police have long ago given up questioning Mrs Tinckham. It was time lost. However much or little she knows, she has never, in my experience, displayed either for profit or for effect any detailed acquaintance with the little world that circulates round her shop. A woman who does not talk is a jewel in velvet. I am devoted to Mrs Tinckham.
    She filled a papier mâché beaker with whisky and passed it over the counter. I have never seen her take a drink of any kind herself.
    â€˜No brandy this time, dear?’ she asked.
    â€˜No, the damned Customs took it,’ I said, and as I had a gulp at the whisky I added, ‘Devil take them!’ with a gesture which embraced the Customs, Madge, Starfield, and my bank manager.
    â€˜What’s the matter, dear? Times bad again, are they?’ said Mrs Tinckham, and as I looked into my drink I could see her gaze flicker with awareness.
    â€˜People are a trial and a trouble, aren’t they?’ she added, in that voice which must have greased the way to many a confession.
    I am sure that people talk enormously to Mrs Tinckham. I have come in sometimes and felt this unmistakably in the atmosphere. I have talked to her myself; and in the lives of many of her customers she probably figures as the only completely trustworthy confidant. Such a position could hardly help but to be to some extent lucrative, and Mrs Tinckham certainly has money, for she once lent me ten pounds without a murmur, but I am sure that gain is not Mrs Tinckham’s chief concern. She just loves to know everybody’s business, or rather to know about their lives, since ‘business’ suggests an interest narrower and less humane than the one which I now felt, or imagined that I felt, focused with some intensity upon me. In fact the truth about her naïveté, or lack of it, may lie somewhere between the two, and she lives, perhaps, in a world of other people’s dramas, where fact and fiction are no longer clearly distinguished.
    There was a soft murmuring, which might have been the wireless or might have been Mrs Tinckham casting a spell in order to make me talk to her: a sound like the gentle winding of a delicate line on which some rare fish precariously hangs. But I gritted my teeth against speech. I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic way. The thing had possibilities, but as yet it lacked form. If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth; when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that? I met Mrs Tinckham’s gaze, and although her eyes told nothing I was sure she knew my thoughts.
    â€˜People and money, Mrs Tinck,’ I said. ‘What a happy place the world would be without them.’
    â€˜And sex,’ said Mrs Tinck. We both sighed.
    â€˜Had any new kittens lately?’ I asked her.
    â€˜Not yet,’ said Mrs Tinckham, ‘but Maggie’s pregnant again. Soon you’ll have your pretty little ones, won’t you, yes!’ she said to a gross tabby on the counter.
    â€˜Any luck this time, do