11

In the days when he lived in Bryanston Square as manservant to the late Anthony Maddox, Bean had come to hate his employer. Anthony Maddox had a dog, a spaniel, whom he never treated with much kindness, though it was an affectionate creature, and when one day during a bout of teasing it bit him, Maddox made Bean take it to the vet to be destroyed.

It was not in Bean’s nature to feel self-disgust, but he many times reproached himself for obeying Maddox’s order in this matter. He should have said no. He should have given in his notice rather than have Philidor put down. Meekly, though with sorrow in his heart, he had taken the spaniel to the veterinary surgery and asked for the deed to be done. But after that he took a slow, if largely concealed and invisible, revenge. In ways of which Maddox knew nothing until the day before his death, Bean made his life a misery.

He never guessed that into every bowl of soup Bean brought him, his manservant had first spat. Nor that a spoonful of Bean’s urine went into every cup of tea and coffee. The caterpillars that Bean harvested from plants in the park (and in relation to which Maddox had a phobia) he did see, only to be told by Bean that increasing shortsightedness made cleansing lettuce of these creatures impossible. Maddox was very fond of salad but he stopped eating it. He was three times summoned for nonpayment of rates because, unbeknownst to him, Bean had appropriated the local authority’s demands before they reached him.

He parked his car on the resident’s parking to which he had a right in the City of Westminster, but many times, during the night, Bean moved it onto a double yellow line. Valuable books he borrowed from the London Library unaccountably disappeared. His electric blanket caught fire. Bean contaminated his goose liver pâté with a culture he had made out of a ham and cheese waffle removed from a park dustbin and gave him gastroenteritis. At first the doctor thought it was salmonella and this pulled Bean up short. He didn’t want to kill the man and be done for murder.

Anthony Maddox had a stroke on his sixty-sixth birthday. It seriously affected his speech. Bean cared for him devotedly, but on the day before Maddox was due to be transferred permanently to a nursing home, he unburdened himself totally to his employer.

Maddox was having his lunch. That is, it was lunchtime and Bean was feeding him, or about to feed him, soup followed by peach yogurt. The soup was a delicate pale green, prepared by Bean from fresh Aideburgh asparagus, chicken stock, and cream. He was quite aware of the incongruity of these three ingredients with the fourth. It was from such anomalies that he derived his entertainment. He would have called it his sense of humor.

A damask napkin, washed, starched, and ironed by Bean, was spread across Anthony Maddox’s shriveled throat, concave chest, and protuberant belly. The old man’s mouth was drawn down to one side and his eyes bulged. They seemed to be, but probably were not, fixed upon the glorious prospect visible through the long Georgian window, of Sir Robert Smirke’s church, St. Mary’s, Wyndham Place, its pediment, its columns, and its Tower-of-the-winds capitals. The sun shone upon its cupola, turning the brownish stone to a rich coppery gold.

Lifting the spoon to his employer’s parted lips—they were always parted these days—Bean said, “I spat in this soup while I was heating it up, sir. It’s been a habit of mine to do that these fifteen years.”

Maddox’s eyes bulged farther and he recoiled from the spoon. His mouth worked.

“Some mornings I’ve brought up a lot of phlegm, sir, and that’s gone into your soup too.” Bean spoke in his customary deferential tone. “Smarmy” was the word applied to it by one of Maddox’s friends. “I’ve pissed in your tea and coffee. Not every cup, probably every third cup. You drink rather a lot of those beverages, sir, and I couldn’t keep pace.”

Maddox vomited the soup he had already taken. His face was paper-white. Bean was very tender with him, giving him a blanket bath, making him comfortable, but Maddox had a heart attack and died in the night.

Few people kept a manservant in the eighties. Single men living on their own got in a team of cleaners once a fortnight, ate take-away or TV dinners from the microwave, had their washing done and delivered by the mobile laundry, and never needed to make their beds because they used duvets. Bean had his name on the agency’s book for months. He was living on his savings in a rented room over a newsagent’s in Lisson Grove. Anthony Maddox had left him nothing in his will, which made Bean even more pleased with himself for confessing about the spit and urine.

One day he got a job offer. The man who interviewed him was, in Bean’s own words, “weird.” He was plump and bald with a fringe of thin reddish hair growing round the naked pate and, although it was ten in the morning, wore a black silk suit over a shirt with a frilly jabot. The apartment—you couldn’t call something on two floors a flat—had weapons hanging round the walls, mostly whips, but guns too with ornamental stocks. There was a picture of a nearly naked young man with a halo round his head and his body stuck full of arrows and an even larger one of another haloed man being grilled like a piece of steak. Not that Bean ever ate steak but he sometimes cooked it—and sometimes spat on it—for Anthony Maddox.

His interviewer was called Maurice Clitheroe, a stockbroker, though he told Bean nothing of this at their first meeting. His voice was high and fluting and his way of speaking rather puzzled Bean because it seemed that everything was “painful” to him and he “suffered” a lot.

“I am painfully aware of the need of someone to look after me,” he said. “Of course I realize that you would contribute to my sufferings but that I could endure if not with equanimity, with resignation. I am afraid you may find me rather a sore subject.”

Bean had no idea what all this meant but he took the job. Beggars can’t be choosers and, living in Lisson Grove, he saw quite a lot of beggars. On bad days he imagined joining them, sitting in a porch, cap on the pavement, a dog maybe to keep him company and supply pathos. It was at first a matter of regret that Maurice Clitheroe had no dog, but later, when he understood about the whips, the visitors to the apartment, and the meaning of Clitheroe’s funny talk, he was glad. God knows what might have become of a dog in all the excitement that was so often the order of the day in York Terrace.

The boys who came had been in the straightforward beating business and some of them hardly knew their own strength. Several times Bean had to put Clitheroe to bed with arnica on his bruises and cortisone cream on his weals. The young ladies were more refined, put saddle, bridle, and bit on Clitheroe and rode him up the stairs and through the bedrooms. Once or twice since his employer’s timely death and his coming into his inheritance, Bean had happened to see one of those visitors in the street. He was out and about so much, it was inevitable.

She was soliciting in Baker Street and wearing very poor quality thigh boots and a miniskirt with a broken zip. Bean was in his new bomber jacket and baseball cap. Taking him for an American, she asked him in a mid-Atlantic accent if he would like to buy her a cocktail. For answer, he gave her one of his looks, a stare, and then a sudden swift baring of the teeth. She recoiled before telling him to sod off. That look of his always made people wince and few recovered as fast as this girl.

He went into Europa Foods, which stays open late, and bought himself some pot noodles, a jar of minced sun-dried tomatoes, button mushrooms in brine, a blueberry and almond practically fat-free yogurt, and a can of Sprite. The only other person of his acquaintance he met on the way home was the Cornells’ housekeeper out with a man friend. They looked as if on their way to the Screen on Baker Street for the eight-fifteen showing. Remembering how she had sent him up and down those area stairs some four hours earlier and again some three hours earlier, Bean said loudly, “Good evening, Valerie. Lovely evening.”

From the pavement newsstand in the Marylebone Road opposite the station he bought an Evening Standard. He wasn’t a newspaper reader, or indeed much of a reader at all, but stuff whizzed past so quickly on the telly that sometimes you couldn’t take in the details. The story about the impalement on the churchyard railings had by now been relegated to an inside page. An inquest had found that John Dominic Cahill, known as Decker, had died of stab wounds, principally of a stab wound that pierced the left ventricle of the heart. The body’s being stuck on the railing spikes was merely an artistic touch, what the coroner described as evidence of the perpetrator’s “evil and degraded sense of humor.”

Bean read all about it while the microwave was heating up his pot noodle, dried tomatoes, and button mushroom mixture. The verdict was of murder. No nonsense, Bean observed, about “unlawful killing” or manslaughter. He was a hundred percent in favor of the death penalty himself. If he had his way executions would be in public, not to mention putting lesser offenders in the stocks.

Drinking his Sprite, which had had five minutes in the freezer for a quick chill, he read an interview with Cahill’s sister, a Bernadette Casey from County Offaly, who though admitting she hadn’t set eyes on her brother or spoken to him for twenty-eight years, described him as a “lovely person” whose death had devastated her and all his other eight brothers and sisters. It was incredible to her that Johnny should have been living rough on the streets of London and she still hoped and prayed there was some mistake.

The police hadn’t got very far with finding who had done it. You could read that between the lines. Of course, it was probable that, like him and any other law-abiding citizen, they didn’t care who had done it. Wasn’t this just another bit of human detritus swept up off the streets and thrown away like litter?

Bean switched on the television. It was news time, but the murder no longer merited space on the national news. He leaned back in his chair and gave himself up to dreams: the dog of his own he wanted and would one day have when he had decided on the breed and could afford a pedigree animal, sired by a Crufts champion; ways of augmenting his income; could he manage a third daily round of dog-walking?

At this point Bean’s thoughts turned to his clientele, to the Barker-Pryces, the Blackburn-Norrises, Mrs. Goldsworthy, Lisl Pring, and the rest of them. He had hoped to discover, when he first began walking these people’s dogs, secrets of their pasts, incidents they would not want known and might pay to keep secret. But they barely admitted him to their houses, they never confided in him, they presented to him only blank and blameless facades. He sometimes thought that living for eight years with Maurice Clitheroe had given him an exaggerated idea of what the average West End dweller’s homelife was like. Perhaps they really were all innocent, happily married (or happily celibate), chaste, incorruptible, exemplary citizens.

As to the secrets he did know, if they were secrets, there was no use threatening with exposure the girl who had approached him in Baker Street, for she would very likely regard this as welcome publicity and in any case she had no money. He cheered up a bit when the notion came to him that Lisl Pring might well be bulimic. Now she was starring in a successful sitcom, she might not be thrilled to see The Sun running a story about how she binged and then stuffed her fingers down her throat.

Bean went out to the kitchen to fetch his yogurt. Next time he went to fetch Marietta he’d give the place a good sniff, checking for vomit.

•   •   •

The hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud’s smelled the same as human sweat. Very strong human sweat. Bean knew all about it. He had smelled plenty of it in Maurice Clitheroe days, especially when one of the young men came round. The hamburger stall was doubly offensive to him, for that reason, and because it emanated from meat. He wondered what had possessed him to come this way round instead of taking York Gate or Park Square, and as he passed the stall, pushing his way through the milling throng of adolescents from all over Europe, he held a tissue ostentatiously over his nose or mouth. Nobody noticed, or if they did they thought he was protecting himself from traffic emissions in the Marylebone Road.

Waxworks. Bean couldn’t see the point. He had been in there once, into the Chamber of Horrors—where else?—with Maurice Clitheroe to look at someone hanging up on a hook and that French chap stabbed to death in his bath. Maurice Clitheroe liked that sort of thing and frequented Tussaud’s. Bean fancied it had been less busy seven or eight years ago. These days it was almost impossible to make one’s way along the pavement, but he refused to be driven into the road and used his elbows. A young woman with three rings in her left ear and two in her right tried to sell him a copy of the Big Issue but drew back at the glare she got and the bared teeth.

The beggar with the dog—that was how Bean thought of him—was sitting in his usual place, halfway between Tussaud’s and York Gate. A plastic box that had once held a videocassette lay open on the pavement for the receipt of alms and the dog sat on the man’s knees, sleeping, snuggled up with its nose in a jacket pocket. The dog Bean’s expert eye identified as a beagle, lemon and white, a pedigree without a doubt.

He bared his teeth at this man too. It was a grimace that was always effective, due perhaps to its shock value. People always recoiled. Armed as usual with his camera, he stepped back to the pavement edge and took a photograph. The beggar put his arms up over his face but by that time it was too late.

Boris the borzoi was the first dog he picked up. As usual Valerie Conway made him walk all the way down the area steps. She had a message for him, she said, from Mr. and Mrs. Cornell, to keep his wits about him because there had been an epidemic of dog-stealing.

“Those dossers pinch dogs, you know,” said Valerie. “They want them to keep them warm at night and then there’s the pathos factor.”

“The what?” said Bean.

“I mean, the British feel more sorry for a dog than a human, don’t they?”

Bean stored up everything he learned on the chance it might come in useful and when he came to the flat in Devonshire Street to collect Ruby the beagle, he passed on this new information to Erna Morosini.

“Beagles are particularly in demand,” he said. “For example, that down-and-out sits outside Tussaud’s, he’s got a beagle. You can see it’s registered at the Kennel Club.” His powers of invention came into play. “They drug them to keep them quiet all day. Valium’s the favorite but Largactil runs it a close second.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me,” said Mrs. Morosini.

“We all have to face facts, don’t we, madam? I’ll be taking some photos of Ruby in the coming week. If you’re interested they’ll be very reasonably priced.”

The eyes of the Duke of Kent met his as he came back into Park Crescent, and Bean composed his features into a similar stern and haughty expression. He let himself into the gardens and he and the two dogs made their way down the sloping path to the Nursemaids’ Tunnel. On this mild afternoon of hazy sunshine it was deserted as usual and there was no sign of the key man. The gardens of Park Square were equally empty but for pigeons and sparrows on the sunlit grass and a squirrel that ran down the trunk of one tall green tree and up the trunk of another. It being Saturday, the park itself would be crowded.

Bean told Mr. Barker-Pryce about the street people stealing dogs, in his version substituting golden retrievers for beagles. Barker-Pryce said nastily that since Charlie only went out twice a day and always with Bean, it was up to him to see that no such theft took place.

Bean said, “You’re right, sir,” but with rage in his heart. He didn’t mention photographing Charlie and obviously the time wasn’t right to say anything to Lisl Pring about pictures of Marietta. He’d told her poodles were currently the beggars’ favorite prey and she’d reacted unexpectedly.

“They can have her. She’s just shat all over my kilim.”

“You don’t mean that, Miss Pring.”

Bean was shocked, by the sentiment and the language. Waiting in the hall while she went to fetch Marietta, sniffing like a hound, he opened a door that looked as if a cloakroom would be on the other side, but it was only a cupboard. A long embroidered dress on a dummy and a suit of armor, standing up as if it had a man inside it, startled him and he closed the door quickly. Remembering what Lisl Pring had said, he was deterred from saying anything to Mrs. Goldsworthy about scotties as dogs coveted for their pathos factor or bed-warming value.

The tall dosser with the beard and the Oxbridge accent passed him as he walked up Albany Street. This, at least, was one that didn’t smell. Caught short one morning, Bean had tied his dogs up to the railings and popped into the public convenience just off the Broad Walk. The tall one had been in there, strip-washing himself and drying his hair under one of the hand dryers. Bean hadn’t spoken to him and he didn’t now. He looked the other way. These people were a health hazard. Who knew why he’d been washing?

The young lady that was house-sitting Charlotte Cottage looked a bit peaky this afternoon. She was wearing black, which meant little on its own, but she had someone in there Bean recognized as one of the undertakers from a firm in the Marylebone Road. His curiosity, always active, quickened.

As he took Gushi from her, he said in his most respectful tone, “No bad news of Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris, I hope, miss?”

She wasn’t the sort to pin your ears back and he despised her for her gentleness.

“Oh, no, no,” she said in a sad abstracted way. “I’m sure they’re fine. I had a card from Costa Rica.”

Bean decided not to pursue it. He wasn’t interested in her personal tragedies. He hustled the dogs up to the Gloucester Gate and let them off on the broad expanses beyond the Parsi’s fountain. The park was as crowded as he had expected, young people lying about on the grass in various stages of undress, though the weather was far from hot and the sun kept going in. Charlie was the most friendly and uninhibited of the dogs and it brought Bean a good deal of amusement to see him bound up to some of those cuddling couples and poke his nose into their crotches and bottoms. They shrieked and cursed him. Gushi and Marietta found a picnic party and Marietta ran off into the bushes with half a Swiss roll. Usually, Bean preferred the park to be deserted, but this was the next best thing, a real crowd, most of whom seemed irritated and incommoded by the activities of dogs.

Even the sight of the woman walker with her orderly troop strolling the long path that bisects the park couldn’t entirely dispel his mood of cheerfulness. It was payday. He would collect from everyone on the way back, as he always did on Saturdays.

The undertaker had left by the time he took Gushi back. The young lady’s eyes were red. Either she’d been crying or it was conjunctivitis. He reminded her he needed paying, and she actually apologized to him when she handed over the notes. With one hand Mrs. Goldsworthy pulled McBride into the house and with the other thrust his money at him. It sounded as if she had a drinks party on the go, which Bean thought decadent at five-fifteen on a summer afternoon. He’d have bared his teeth at Lisl Pring if he hadn’t relied on her custom, her goodwill, and the money she owed him. She came to the door in shorts and a halter top, skinny midriff bare as the day she was born, and a fellow behind her also in shorts with his arms round her waist.

Mr. Barker-Pryce stank of cigars so badly that even the dog flinched. He counted out Bean’s money very slowly and then, like a bank cashier, did it all over again. Bean had to tug at the notes to extract them from the nicotine-stained fingers.

He said, “Thank you very much, sir,” and the door was shut smartly in his face.

Digging out the key from under the new wads of money, he let himself into the gardens of Park Square. A squirrel ran across the path no more than three feet from him and Ruby the beagle gave a great tug on the leash in pursuit of it. She nearly pulled Bean over. The borzoi growled at her and curled back his lips in much the same way as Bean did when displeased by the sight of someone or something.

In spite of the number of keys to the gardens that must be in circulation, the lawns and walks were deserted and the seats were empty. The wind had dropped, or had dropped in here in the sunlit space between tall trees. Flowers, unidentifiable by Bean, scented the air and almost masked the stench of fumes from the Marylebone Road. A blackbird sang.

The grass was not worn away by many feet and there was no litter to disfigure the walks or overflow from bins.

A pity dogs were not allowed to run free in here. If they were he’d never go into the park again. He made his way down the steep walled path to the tunnel, Boris and Ruby padding side by side ahead of him.

He never came down this path without a frisson of tension. His muscles always flexed and he had to keep his hands from tightening into clenched fists. But there was no sign of the key man; the tunnel was empty as it almost always was. And it was never dark at this hour, even in the middle, but invariably quite adequately lit with natural light from both ends. A momentary nasty idea came then, that the key man might be waiting at the other end, outside, just round the corner, and would step out, glittering and clinking, to fill the tunnel mouth as he reached it.

But he gave no thought to what might be behind him and was almost at the other end, having heard no footfalls, no indrawn breath, when something struck him on the crown of his head. It was like hitting his head on the beams of a low ceiling or the lintel of a door. But rather worse, for he staggered and fell over, first to his knees, then sprawled on his back. There was a moment of darkness with dazzlement, a seeing of stars, tailed comets and satellites whizzing across a black sky, and in it he must have relinquished his hold on the leash.

Bean thought he felt a hand fumbling in the pocket of his bomber jacket. He groaned and made feeble movements. Then he did hear footsteps, running away, back into Park Square. He sat up. His baseball cap had fallen off, but it had been on his head when he was struck, and Bean had no doubt it had saved him from worse damage. Gingerly, he felt his scalp and looked at his fingers. There was no blood. He hated the idea of falling and wondered if he could have broken something. Osteoporosis was not confined to elderly ladies, he had read in a health magazine.

His camera! It was gone. For a moment he thought that perhaps for once he had left it at home, but he knew its strap had been round his neck when he took the money from Barker-Pryce. As for his keys … They had been in his jeans pocket, the key to York Terrace, the keys to Charlotte Cottage and Lisl Pring’s and the one to these gardens. He ran his hand down the side of his leg, feeling for the ridges of metal, then thrust his hand inside. The keys were all there, but the pocket of his bomber jacket was empty. The wad of notes from four of his clients was gone and with it the best part of two weeks’ retirement pension. Bean’s stomach turned over. It was just as if his stomach had dropped onto the floor and done a somersault, turned itself over its heels.

At any rate he could get up. His legs were all in one piece. And he could see. The blow hadn’t detached his retinas, which was another thing his extensive medical reading had told him could happen. The two dogs were gone. Bean told himself they couldn’t get out of the gardens and dismissed wild imaginings of the two of them under the wheels of container lorries in the Marylebone Road. In vain he called them, his voice weak and reedy.

Of course he had to go looking for them himself. Boris he found rolling on the rotting corpse of a pigeon and Ruby, still attached to Boris by the leash, was running round in angry circles. Wearily he picked up the leash, his head throbbing.

One thing was for sure, he refused to go down the steps. When the Cornells’ housekeeper appeared in the area he shouted at her that if she didn’t open the front door he would leave Boris tied to the railings.

“What’s got into you?” she said.

“I’ve been mugged, that’s what’s got into me. Open the front door, Valerie. I’m not feeling at all well. I’ve probably got concussion.” After rather a long while the front door was opened. Bean saw white carpet, gilded furniture, and red lilies in a Venetian glass bowl. He unclipped the leash and Boris entered the house, as if he always went that way, padding silently, to push a door open with his long nose.

“I don’t have to remind you my remuneration is due, do I, Valerie?”

It was appalling to think of the sum that had been taken from him. He would have to plunder his savings. And the camera. Why had he never thought to insure the camera? He put up one hand to massage the lump that was swelling up on his scalp. The housekeeper came back with his money in an envelope. She seemed to be keying herself up to say something unpleasant.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” said Bean.

“And when you do, I’ll thank you to call me Miss Conway!”

She had gone red in the face with the effort of it. Bean shrugged, pocketed the envelope, and walked home to York Terrace. If you lost consciousness, however briefly, it was concussion and you were supposed to go to the doctor. But had he lost consciousness? On the whole he thought not. As soon as he was inside he phoned the police and told them he had been assaulted and all his money stolen. An officer would call, they said. Meanwhile he should see a doctor.

“I know who my assailant is,” said Bean.

“You saw him?”

“I didn’t exactly see him but I know him. He’s a vagrant, a down-and-out, goes about all covered with keys.”

“Your own keys are missing?”

Bean admitted they were not, but he was tired of this officer sounding so bored and indifferent, and said he would come down to the police station himself.