The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss
‘They visioned me that one of the floats had picked you up – and not Jubal. Is there any hope for him, Rog, or is that a foolish question?’
‘I can’t give you a sensible answer. He was a strong swimmer. They may find him yet.’
I spoke to Sloe over the heads of a crowd of people. Mokulgu, surely enough, had been washed away. The survivors, homeless and bereaved, crowded on to high ground. Sloe had generously thrown open most of her house as a sort of rest-camp-cum-soup-kitchen. She superintended everything with a cool authority which suitably concealed her personal feelings. For that I was grateful: Sloe’s feelings must be no affair of mine.
She smiled at me before turning to address someone behind her. Already the light was taking on the intensity of early evening. Above the babble of voices round me came the deep song of speeding water. It would continue for months yet: Africa was ruptured at her very heart, beyond man’s mending.
Instead of flowing northward, fertilizing its old valley, Victoria crashed into our lake, adding its burden to the weight of water rolling west. While twenty-one million people perished of drought in Egypt, as many perished of flood and typhoid in the Congo.
I seemed to know what was coming as I stood in the crowded room, knowing Jubal dead, knowing the nation of Africa to be bleeding to death. We were dying of our own wounds.
The ten years to follow would be as terrible as the ten years of the Massacre, when every member of the white race had been slain.
Now we negroes, in our turn, stood at the bar of history.
When it comes to human nature, there’s nobody to beat Henshaw. He has the humanest nature I have ever met: how he kept it intact working 33 years for old Sowerby, I don’t know. He once told me that his secret was that he suffered fools gladly; however that may be, we always get on splendidly together.
‘Nick your chin every morning to let him see you’ve shaved, say “Morning, sir” when he comes in, and you’ll be OK’, Henshaw told me, the day I started work at Sowerby’s. The ‘he’ he referred to was Sowerby; the way Henshaw pronounced it, it was a fitting epithet.
Apart from an almost faceless woman who came from ten till one each day, to add up figures in the ledgers, Henshaw and I were Sowerby’s only staff. Sowerby’s is a poky bookshop and stationers the Chancery Lane end of High Holborn. Its aspect is prim but seedy; it is surrounded by piles of masonry too loud to be called building and too lewd to be called architecture. (That’s what I once heard an intellectual say; we used to get them in from the insurance offices nearby.)
I stared at Henshaw; thin and dry, 54, with a poor head of hair that made him look like a shabby eagle. He wore dim, stately suits. He was a tradesman and a gentleman, but a tradesman first, and being a gent did not stop him being a good sort.
Henshaw stared at me; thin but shiny, 24, with thick, rimless glasses and a detestably round face. My ice-blue suit was my only suit, and my digs were in Tabernacle Place. I was miraculously ignorant then.
For some reason, Henshaw liked me. Now I’ve cultivated my intelligence a bit with correspondence schools he might not like me so much.
The business of his getting the sack did not crop up until I had been 18 months at Sowerby’s. Henshaw was a permanent fixture sort of chap; only an old swine like Sowerby could have thought of sacking him at all.
Not that Sowerby was a nuisance. Each day, he came in, passed around the stands and tables to the back of the shop, climbed up three steps and entered a tiny cubicle lined with dirt and leather. There he stayed till closing. At a misty window set in his wall we occasionally saw his beer-coloured eyes watching us.
‘I don’t believe he is anyone at all,’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘I think he’s empty.’
‘You shouldn’t say that,’ Henshaw advised, turning his head away from the misty peephole to add, ‘because the little ferret probably lip-reads.’
‘I don’t believe he exists,’ I said, likewise turning away and pretending to polish a cobweb.
‘He’s just terribly shy. When we’ve gone and the shop’s closed and the blind’s down, he whips off all his clothes and dances in the window.’
People sometimes entered Sowerby’s and bought pencils, or books on primitive peoples. In the lunch hour, while I gutsed a bun in the background, we were sometimes quite crowded. The customers would scrape their bodies round our trays, picking up volumes here and there. Occasionally I would have to serve. I’d put on a really crack Foyles accent and say, ‘Out of stock’, or ‘Out of print’, or ‘Banned as obscene’, just as Henshaw had taught me.
To him I owe my wealth of book lore.
It was during these rush hours that the disappearances started. Something about jurisprudence went missing on Monday, and on Wednesday it was a marked copy of Atrocities in China. On Friday it was a first edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Westward Ho!, if my memory serves me right.
‘How do you know they’ve been pinched?’ I asked Henshaw.
‘That Westward Ho!’s been there longer than me: it was always too pricey,’ Henshaw said. ‘As for the others, you didn’t sell them, nor did I. Ergo, old chum, some fly boy’s whipped ’em.’
It was the very next morning, Saturday, and I was in our packing room (8 by 6) smarming back my hair in the mirror; Henshaw came in and said, ‘Hey, Nobby, guess what. I’ve got the push.’
‘You’re kidding!’ I exclaimed, wiping the brilliantine off my comb. But when I looked up I could perceive like a flash he was serious. For one thing, he was out of puff; that’s how it takes you, poor devil, when you are 54.
Apparently, Sowerby had popped out of his cubicle on Friday night as Henshaw was getting his raincoat on. He said that Henshaw was in charge of the shop: it was his responsibility to see those three books were replaced. If they weren’t back by Monday night, Henshaw must leave the following Saturday.
‘Silly little B, what’ll he do without you?’ I asked. ‘If you leave, Mr. Henshaw, I come too.’
He was touched at this, and found us some chewing gum in one of his pockets.
‘That may not be necessary,’ he said. ‘I reckon I know the thief. If I spotted him and phoned the police, could you tackle him, Nob?’
Bravely refraining from asking the thief’s size, I said I would. Henshaw told me to look out for a cadaverous chap with bow tie and plastic mack.
On Monday morning I had to deliver a fat account book at Lincoln’s Inn, a heavy affair with blank pages, which cost about five times as much as any book with printed pages. As I re-entered Sowerby’s, my place of rightful employment, at eleven-thirty hours – sorry, I’m talking like the statement I had to make later! As I nipped in, there was this cadaverous fellow with a bow tie and plastic mack, picking over the erotica.
Henshaw was up a ladder, innocent as you please, dusting a run of Hellenic Journal; who Helen was I couldn’t care less, but she had never been given such a going over. He slipped me down a note which read ‘Thief (q.v.) – with Accomplice – are here. Police phoned for – two plain clothes also in shop now – watching suspect (cf.) – awaiting false move. Don’t let on’.
Looking innocuous, I barged round the shop slapping books into place. Several so-called customers were about, but I soon decided which the two coppers were. Once was spotty with huge black glasses, loitering by Travel; the other was cheery and clean-looking, and standing quite near Cadaverous, looking about. He winked at me, a gesture I returned.
The thief’s accomplice was also easy to guess. He stood over by the Art case, face buried in A Hundred Further Studies; he was well set