Trickery Read online

  ‘Don’t you ever mention Jackie to my dad, Claud Cubbage, or that’ll be the end of it. If there’s one thing in the world he can’t abide it’s greyhounds. Don’t you ever forget that.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Claud said.

  ‘Tell him something else – anything – anything to make him happy, see?’ And with that she led Claud into the parlour.

  Mr Hoddy was a widower, a man with a prim sour mouth and an expression of eternal disapproval all over his face. He had the small, close-together teeth of his daughter Clarice, the same suspicious, inward look about the eyes, but none of her freshness and vitality, none of her warmth. He was a small sour apple of a man, grey-skinned and shrivelled, with a dozen or so surviving strands of black hair pasted across the dome of his bald head. But a very superior man was Mr Hoddy, a grocer’s assistant, one who wore a spotless white gown at his work, who handled large quantities of such precious commodities as butter and sugar, who was deferred to, even smiled at, by every housewife in the village.

  Claud Cubbage was never quite at his ease in this house and that was precisely as Mr Hoddy intended it. They were sitting round the fire in the parlour with cups of tea in their hands, Mr Hoddy in the best chair to the right of the fireplace, Claud and Clarice on the sofa, decorously separated by a wide space. The younger daughter, Ada, was on a hard upright chair to the left, and they made a little circle round the fire, a stiff, tense little circle, primly tea-sipping.

  ‘Yes, Mr Hoddy,’ Claud was saying, ‘you can be quite sure both Gordon and me’s got quite a number of nice little ideas up our sleeves this very moment. It’s only a question of taking our time and making sure which is going to be the most profitable.’

  ‘What sort of ideas?’ Mr Hoddy asked, fixing Claud with his small, disapproving eyes.

  ‘Ah, there you are now. That’s it, you see.’ Claud shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. His blue lounge suit was tight around his chest, and it was especially tight between his legs, up in the crutch. The tightness in his crutch was actually painful to him and he wanted terribly to hitch it downward.

  ‘This man you call Gordon, I thought he had a profitable business out there as it is,’ Mr Hoddy said. ‘Why does he want to change?’

  ‘Absolutely right, Mr Hoddy. It’s a first-rate business. But it’s a good thing to keep expanding, see. New ideas is what we’re after. Something I can come in on as well and take a share of the profits.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  Mr Hoddy was eating a slice of currant cake, nibbling it round the edges, and his small mouth was like the mouth of a caterpillar biting a tiny curved slice out of the edge of a leaf.

  ‘Such as what?’ he asked again.

  ‘There’s long conferences, Mr Hoddy, takes place every day between Gordon and me about these different matters of business.’

  ‘Such as what?’ he repeated, relentless.

  Clarice glanced sideways at Claud, encouraging. Claud turned his large slow eyes upon Mr Hoddy, and he was silent. He wished Mr Hoddy wouldn’t push him around like this, always shooting questions at him and glaring at him and acting just exactly like he was the bloody adjutant or something.

  ‘Such as what?’ Mr Hoddy said, and this time Claud knew that he was not going to let go. Also, his instinct warned him that the old man was trying to create a crisis.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, breathing deep. ‘I don’t really want to go into details until we got it properly worked out. All we’re doing so far is turning our ideas over in our minds, see.’

  ‘All I’m asking,’ Mr Hoddy said irritably, ‘is what sort of business are you contemplating? I presume that it’s respectable?’

  ‘Now please, Mr Hoddy. You don’t for one moment think we’d even so much as consider anything that wasn’t absolutely and entirely respectable, do you?’

  Mr Hoddy grunted, stirring his tea slowly, watching Claud. Clarice sat mute and fearful on the sofa, gazing into the fire.

  ‘I’ve never been in favour of starting a business,’ Mr Hoddy pronounced, defending his own failure in that line. ‘A good respectable job is all a man should wish for. A respectable job in respectable surroundings. Too much hokey-pokey in business for my liking.’

  ‘The thing is this,’ Claud said, desperate now. ‘All I want is to provide my wife with everything she can possibly desire. A house to live in and furniture and a flower garden and a washing-machine and all the best things in the world. That’s what I want to do, and you can’t do that on an ordinary wage, now can you? It’s impossible to get enough money to do that unless you go into business, Mr Hoddy. You’ll surely agree with me there?’

  Mr Hoddy, who had worked for an ordinary wage all his life, didn’t much like this point of view.

  ‘And don’t you think I provide everything my family wants, might I ask?’

  ‘Oh yes, and more!’ Claud cried fervently. ‘But you’ve got a very superior job, Mr Hoddy, and that makes all the difference.’

  ‘But what sort of business are you thinking of?’ the man persisted.

  Claud sipped his tea to give himself a little more time and he couldn’t help wondering how the miserable old bastard’s face would look if he simply up and told him the truth right there and then, if he’d said, What we’ve got, Mr Hoddy, if you really wants to know, is a couple of greyhounds and one’s a perfect ringer for the other and we’re going to bring off the biggest goddam gamble in the history of flapping, see. He’d like to watch the old bastard’s face if he said that, he really would.

  They were all waiting for him to proceed now, sitting there with cups of tea in their hands staring at him and waiting for him to say something good. ‘Well,’ he said, speaking very slowly because he was thinking deep. ‘I’ve been pondering something a long time now, something as’ll make more money even than Gordon’s second-hand cars or anything else come to that, and practically no expense involved.’ That’s better, he told himself. Keep going along like that.

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Something so queer, Mr Hoddy, there isn’t one in a million would even believe it.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Mr Hoddy placed his cup carefully on the little table beside him and leaned forward to listen. And Claud, watching him, knew more than ever that this man and all those like him were his enemies. It was the Mr Hoddys were the trouble. They were all the same. He knew them all, with their clean ugly hands, their grey skin, their acrid mouths, their tendency to develop little round bulging bellies just below the waistcoat; and always the unctuous curl of the nose, the weak chin, the suspicious eyes that were dark and moved too quick. The Mr Hoddys. Oh Christ.

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘It’s an absolute gold-mine, Mr Hoddy, honestly it is.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when I hear it.’

  ‘It’s a thing so simple and amazing most people wouldn’t even bother to do it.’ He had it now – something he had actually been thinking seriously about for a long time, something he’d always wanted to do. He leaned across and put his teacup carefully on the table beside Mr Hoddy’s, then, not knowing what to do with his hands, placed them on his knees, palms downward.

  ‘Well, come on man, what is it?’

  ‘It’s maggots,’ Claud answered softly.

  Mr Hoddy jerked back as though someone had squirted water in his face. ‘Maggots!’ he said, aghast. ‘Maggots? What on earth do you mean, maggots?’ Claud had forgotten that this word was almost unmentionable in any self-respecting grocer’s shop. Ada began to giggle, but Clarice glanced at her so malignantly the giggle died on her mouth.

  ‘That’s where the money is, starting a maggot factory.’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

  ‘Honestly, Mr Hoddy, it may sound a bit queer, and that’s simply because you never heard it before, but it’s a little gold-mine.’

  ‘A maggot factory! Really now, Cubbage! Please be sensible.’

  Clarice wished her father wouldn’t call him Cubbage.

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