Coronation (4 page)

A police constable was standing on the pavement talking with two thick-set men in the drab, unmistakable garb that proclaimed them plain-clothes detectives. Will stepped up to the policeman. ‘Beg your pardon, but could you tell me where No. 4 might be, Officer?’

The constable eyed him gravely; his two companions stirred inside their mackintoshes and moved just that fraction of an inch nearer.

Fear came to Clagg in a sickening wave. There was something familiar in these attitudes. He had seen groups such as these on street corners in Little Pudney, and had observed just such grave concentration as some shady-looking stranger had passed by.

‘Now why would you be wanting No. 4?’ asked the constable.

Clagg produced his blue and gold embossed tickets, and suddenly the feel of them was no longer a comfort to him as they had been from the time he had first possessed them. Now, as he held them in his fingers, it was as though, quite suddenly, they had been drained of all their beauty and virtue.

One of the men in plain clothes said, ‘Here’s another.’ His eyes travelled to the group surrounding Will – the wife, the children, the obvious grandmother – and he added, half under his breath, ‘And the family too, that’s rotten!’ The two men came closer to inspect the tickets.

‘Well, now,’ the P.C. said gently, ‘if there was a No. 4 it would be here. But as you see –’

As they could all see indeed! They turned to follow the line of the constable’s look and saw what he saw, and what they had seen before, and what no amount of looking or staring or fearing or wishing or hoping could change. There was no house there at all, only a gap in which grew the ubiquitous fireweed where once had stood the bombed and burned out Nos. 4 and 5.

Mrs. Clagg did not yet understand and her gaze wandered, uncomprehending, from the policeman to the empty space, to her husband’s face which had now gone quite white with an alarm that could no longer be conquered. Granny Bonner’s mouth was falling into a grim line and the wrinkles crossing her brow doubled. There was no doubt in
her
mind as to what was afoot. In the thickening atmosphere of apprehension the children began to look anxiously into the faces of their elders.

The second plain-clothes detective asked, ‘Can you tell us who sold you these tickets?’

In one sickening, heart-breaking moment the heretofore good, decent, honest British universe was collapsing about Clagg. And standing there among the shards it came to him that he must face the fact that his cousin Bert was either a crook himself or the biggest fool in the world. Neither of these contingencies was to be admitted before a stranger. ‘No,’ he replied.

Granny’s eyes glowered behind her spectacles. Her arms went akimbo in the gesture that Clagg knew all too well; she was going to make a speech. ‘If it was me,’ she snapped, ‘I’d tell ’em. I have a good mind to right now –’

‘Be quiet!’ ordered Will, and the menace that flamed suddenly into his heavy, anguished face frightened and silenced her. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He thought he was doing us proud. It could happen to anyone.’

Now, for the first time, the full import of the catastrophe was brought home to Violet Clagg, who translated the empty space where the house should have been into her own terms of disaster. ‘Then there won’t be any bubbly!’ she wailed. For at that moment this was as far as she could see and tears commenced to fall from her eyes. Frightened, Gwenny began to cry too without knowing why.

Johnny asked, ‘Dad, what’s happened? What’s wrong, Dad?’

Will Clagg replied bitterly, ‘We’ve been swindled!’

The wind sighed around the curve of the Crescent and blew bitingly from the gaping hole. Behind its chilly front the light drizzle turned into heavy rain. Granny reached for the children, tugging their raincoats tighter about them and buttoning up their collars with the harsh, jerky movements employed by grown-ups with their young when they are irritated. ‘If I ever lay my hands on that Bert –’ she muttered, yanking at the buttonhole of Johnny’s collar so that the boy said, ‘Ow, Granny!’ and stiffened in resistance.

The first detective pounced upon the name. ‘Bert, eh? Bert who?’

Will turned on Granny savagely. ‘I told you to keep your bloody mouth shut!’ Then to the detective, ‘Bert nobody! I bought ’em from a fellow in the street outside St Pancras.’

And there they were, the two groups with a wall between them – the constable, the two suspicious detectives and the innocent Claggs, with the latter somehow forced into the position of being not
quite
that innocent. They had something to hide. Clagg had nothing against the police and always got on well with the men on post back home, yet he was of that environment to whom a copper was a copper and never wholly to be trusted.

Violet Clagg said weakly, ‘But look at the name of the comp’ny on the tickets where it says No. 18 Victoria Road. Maybe we could go there and get our money back.’

The second detective said wearily, ‘Ma’am, we’ve been there already. That’s another hole in the ground. So far it’s been mostly Americans and Australians that’s got stuck with these.’ He snorted. ‘Description of man selling same – two eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth. But if you could help us with this ’ere Bert we might have a chance to collar one or two of those spivs—’

Clagg snatched the tickets back from the detective who was holding them and asked angrily, ‘Would it get us what’s called for – a view of the procession, breakfast and that there buffet lunch with champagne?’

‘No,’ replied the detective, ‘but—’

‘Then there wasn’t any Bert,’ Clagg said curtly. ‘Come to think of it, it was more like Joe or Sam.’

The two detectives and the policeman stood regarding him heavily at this obviously mendacious statement. They made a kind of static islet in the constantly moving stream of people. Here were more Londoners come from all quarters of the vast city, visitors from out of town, vendors of programmes, flags, balloons and souvenirs, all swarming in one direction. The rain poured down upon them and they simply ignored it. For them it didn’t exist. Nothing could dampen their enthusiasm or extinguish their gaiety of spirit, their pride in being British and their joy in being alive that day. The area was full of the sounds of the eternal shuffling of feet, of laughter and chatter, shouts and cries, and one heard the word ‘Everest’ a great deal. Every so often parties holding valid and proper tickets detached themselves from the stream and entered into valid, proper and existing houses where genuine seats were built behind
bona fide
transparent windows and where no doubt breakfast, lunch and champagne
would
be served.

It was obvious to Clagg that there was nothing more to be gained by remaining there. He gathered up his family with a gesture. ‘Come along, let’s get out of here.’

A gust of wind bounced drops of rain off the helmet of the policeman and ballooned the tan mackintoshes of the two detectives. One of them said, ‘Just a moment, sir. We’d better have those tickets,’ and reached out his hand. From somewhere inside himself the constable produced a note-book and pencil stub, which he shielded from the rain with a cupped hand. ‘I’ll have to have your name and address, sir.’

Clagg turned upon them angrily. ‘What the devil for? I’ve paid for them! All right, so I’ve got stuck. Can’t you leave us be? We’ve ’ad it! We’re making no complaint.’

The detective said, ‘Evidence, sir. You want those fellows laid by the heels, don’t you? That’s a cruel hoax they’ve worked. Look at you and your family—’

Johnny Clagg wailed, ‘I wanted to keep mine as a souvenir.’

The detective’s hand was still outstretched for them. There was nothing for Clagg to do but give them over. The man inspected them gravely, nodding his head. His partner said, not unkindly, to Johnny, ‘When we’ve done with them we’ll send ’em back to you, if you like. They might just help us to catch those twisters now, mightn’t they?’

The constable poised his pencil again. ‘Your name please, sir?’

In his anger it was on the tip of Will Clagg’s tongue to reply, ‘John Smith,’ but he suddenly found his wrath shifting not only to the swine who had perpetrated this filthy trick, but to his cousin Bert as well. Was there not some kind of a law against giving a false name and address to the police? From being an innocent victim of a rotten swindle he was finding himself manoeuvred on to the side of the crooks, not only defending them but on the verge of himself becoming an accomplice by giving a wrong name and address. ‘Will Clagg,’ he replied, ‘No. 56 Imperial Road, Little Pudney.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Foreman, No. 2 Rolling Mill, Pudney Steel Works.’

The constable’s eyes rested upon Clagg’s form for an instant in an appraisal that Clagg felt was not unadmiring. In that glance the constable had acknowledged him as a person of worth and importance, and Clagg experienced a moment of warmth for and understanding of the policeman engaged in his duty.

‘Wife’s name?’

‘Violet Clagg.’

‘Wife’s mother or yours?’

‘Wife’s. Elsie Bonner.’

‘Kids?’

‘John J. and Gwendoline R.’

‘There now,’ said the policeman having finished his writing, ‘you wouldn’t want to change your mind about that there Bert, would you?’

For a moment Clagg was tempted. If the crooks
might
be traced through his cousin . . . Then his loyalty asserted itself again. ‘No!’

The constable nodded as though he understood and said, ‘If we ever turn those fellows up, you’ll be notified.’

Clagg merely said, ‘Come on,’ again to his family and they began to move off. The two detectives watched them go with sad, too-wise eyes.

*

The three grown-ups, and in particular Will Clagg, were too numbed for the moment by the disaster to know what they were doing or which way they were going. It was bad luck, therefore, that instead of heading for Wellington Place, where the barriers were still open, they moved, stunned and defeated, in the opposite direction towards Belgrave Square.

Gwenny was not only too young to understand what had happened, but likewise too absorbed in the anticipation of seeing the Queen in her golden carriage. But Johnny, who was older and wiser, had a moment of panic communicated to him by the behaviour of the grown-ups. He was aware that there was something very wrong with the tickets they had bought and he had never seen the great god who was his father so flustered or put out. Yet not that easily was this figure demolished. Dad always somehow managed to set right things that had gone wrong and would undoubtedly do so again. In the meantime here he was for the first time in his life plunged into the excitement that was London on Coronation Day. Somewhere the soldiers he had come to see would be forming up for the grand processional parade and sooner or later he was bound to encounter them. His faith in his father remained undiminished.

Not so Granny, whose tongue had not stopped clacking from the moment they had got out of earshot of the detectives. The rise and fall of her querulous voice ran on and on like some incongruous background commentary on the wireless, on the gullibility of men, but in particular the stupidity of Bert and Will.

‘Oh do be quiet, Mum,’ Violet said suddenly and sharply, and to her own great surprise. ‘It wasn’t Will’s fault or Bert’s either. They both wanted us to have the best there was.’ She was startled at her own temerity at speaking up thus to her mother, but the feeling of her husband’s pain and humiliation had communicated itself to her and touched her and she had spoken before she was aware of it.

‘Humph,’ said Granny, ‘you’ve got to stick up for him, of course. You know as well as I do that I’m right.’ But she subsided then and walked along through the cold, steady rain, her lips moving silently, her gimlet eyes hard and angry.

Will Clagg’s preoccupation as they retreated from the scene of their defeat was not so much who was to blame or the extent of his responsibility for what had happened and was happening; it was his world which had been shattered. Over and above his concern for the disappointment his children were about to suffer was the realisation of the penetration of his safe, homely British world by something evil, crooked and destructive.

An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay was what Will Clagg had always delivered and received. He lived in simplicity and decency under a reasonably secure system. True, there were police and there were thieves and murderers, yes, and tricksters too on a grand scale, and the newspapers were always entertainingly full of robberies and bashings, rapine and murder, kidnapping and arson, gigantic swindles and the mulctings of widows and orphans. But all these things always happened to someone else. Never before had any crime been directed at him, since he had never owned anything worth stealing. For the first time, then, he had been compelled to acknowledge the savage jungle surrounding him. Curiously enough, his usually stolid mind provided a sudden moment of imaginative creation in which he saw the counterfeiters in their den bending over their engraving tools and stamping machines, grinning and sniggering as they mocked up the tickets with which to cheat Will Clagg and his family.

Clagg had suffered a blow. He was aware that neither he nor life thereafter would ever be quite the same again. He had learned a crushing lesson with regard to bargains, but it was his family who would most truly suffer from it and it was this that angered him almost to the point of tears. He was so completely helpless. The crooks would never be turned up. And what if they were? The Coronation with all the joys and excitement they would miss would long be over.