Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? Read online

  Having ruled this out as an alterative, he pondered other alternatives. Another alternative was that the gentleman sitting next to him was an inept functionary of Isobel Absalon. The word ‘inept’ was used advisedly here. Marguerite’s thinking was that perhaps Isobel Absalon had been able to communicate with this gentleman in her employ (and notice how the word ‘gentleman’ takes on a different hue when associated in this way with being in the employ of the tantalising Isobel Absalon) and had informed him of the presence of Marguerite on the top deck (of only two, note; he preferred ‘upper’ to ‘top’ deck for this reason ie that it was less liable to mislead people into thinking that there were intermediate floors between ‘bottom’ and ‘top’ decks), perhaps by speaking into a microphone placed discreetly on or just inside the lapel of her upper garment, whatever that was, a microphone that transmitted her whispered utterances into the ear of the upper deck functionary, the right ear, note, which had not been visible to Marguerite since it was the ear that was on the window- rather than the Marguerite-side of the seat that he had shared with the suspected functionary. Would he not want to check whether an earpiece was visible in the ear of the suspected functionary and wouldn’t standing up in the aisle in the classical way allow him to make such a check? No on both counts. He didn’t want to check because he felt that he wouldn’t be able to check without drawing attention to himself, as it was known, and even if he did want to check, he knew that any functionary worth his or her salt, if that was the correct expression, would have discreetly dispensed with the earpiece long before saying ‘Excuse me, please’ in the way described and getting to their feet, as it was known, thereby potentially exposing the ear in question to surveillance and to counter surveillance, counter counter surveillance, counter counter counter surveillance and so on. So he did not want to check whether there was an earpiece of this sort in the ‘shadow ear’, as he now referred to it, of the suspected functionary of Isobel Absalon who had now reached his full height, and was preparing to move past Marguerite and into the aisle, if any preparation were needed at that moment in that regard. Marguerite had in fact judged that it was better to turn away from this gentleman, just as he had turned away to look over his shoulder to observe the top of the stairs, rather than turning towards him, as standing up in the aisle in the classical way would surely have ultimately entailed. The reason he had made this decision was, in short, to ensure that his face was averted throughout from the gentleman’s gaze on the basis (and this is described extensively in the training manuals) that one often could not see what was right under one’s nose.

  23

  Marguerite decided to follow the gentleman now, in an attempt to effect the following results: firstly, he wished to brush past the conductress, thereby effecting slight but definite bodily contact with her; that is, he wanted his physical body to be in contact with her physical body under the auspices of trying to squeeze past her, as it was known, down the aisle on the top deck of the bus following the gentleman’s lead. The second of his mission aims, as he now thought of them, in moving past the conductress, was to move past her without paying his fare, using the man as ‘cover’.

  There were no ticket barriers on buses, he reflected, at least not in the sense that there were ticket barriers at train and underground stations. However, there were clear similarities between the situation that Marguerite found himself in at that moment, atop a double decker bus following a man who was approaching the conductress. One of the similarities was that the conductress could act, in a sense, as the gatekeeper even though, as has been stated, there was no gate in the sense that a ticket barrier at a train or underground station could be seen as a gate designed to keep those who haven’t paid from passing through it. She could, if she chose, act in this way. She could even act as the gate itself, perhaps indicating that she was taking on this role by lowering her arm in front of the first passenger hoping to disembark, that is, the gentleman who had just got up from his seat9, in imitation of a barrier. It would be more reminiscent, Marguerite thought, of a road rather than a train or underground barrier; on reflection he wasn’t sure why he had thought this – it was perhaps to do with the fact that road barriers, in his experience, were long and thin, reminiscent, in a way, in other words, of the arm of the average human female, although the differences between female arm and road barrier were also manifold. One typical difference was that the typical female arm tended not to be striped and certainly was not striped, as far as Marguerite could see, in the case of the bus conductress, whereas the road barrier did tend to be striped – to make it more visible, he thought. Note that the stripy long-sleeved female pullover (or other striped long-sleeved upper body garment worn by girls or women) with the sleeve perhaps momentarily pulled over the hand in question could resemble, pretty well, the road barrier, but this confluence of circumstances (the female wearing such a garment with the end of the sleeve pulled over the hand on that arm, which, just at that moment she wished to use in a way that imitated a road barrier) was exceptional and unlikely, Marguerite thought, to occur whilst he was still on the bus; he therefore dispelled it from his mind, if dispel is the correct term in this situation and, further, if it can be used in this way as a verb.

  So much for the similarities between the female arm, under certain conditions, and the road barrier. The main difference, to Marguerite’s mind, between the two was that the axis of operation of the road barrier was from the vertical (some would say ‘erect’) to the horizontal (no-one would say ‘flaccid’) whereas the female arm would be tempted to remain – rather the female mind would be tempted to keep the female arm (one and the same female, this is) – in the horizontal plane whilst traversing, that is swinging around rather than down, ninety degrees, just as, note, the barrier at an underground or train station would tend to open and close. The reason, presumably, that underground and train barriers opened in this way rather than in the same way as a road barriers was to avoid hitting someone on the underside of the chin; similarly the reason they closed in the way that they did rather than in the way that road barriers typically closed was to avoid the equally dangerous and perhaps fatal smack on the head. There were similarities, in other words, between the female using her arm as a ticket barrier, and the action of both the train stroke underground and the road barrier. No doubt these could be explicated more fully. However, Marguerite, for the time being, was preoccupied with hoping that the conductress did not detain him or the man in front of him as they moved towards her. The reason that he hoped the conductress wouldn’t detain him or them in this way was that he thought it would jeopardise his two mission aims: he was hoping to disembark without paying, remember, given the shortness of his funds; secondly, he thought that if the conductress chose to use her arm in this way then it would reduce Marguerite’s chances of squeezing (or, at the very least, brushing) past her and gaining, momentarily, definite bodily contact with her, something that was wholly unlike the experience of contact with the mechanical form of ticket barrier that one typically finds at the rail and underground termini and at intermediate stations within the city in which he was currently located and no doubt in other towns and cities in the rest of the country, in other countries within that continent and, indeed, on other continents.

  Another reflection related to the term ‘brush with’, which, as most people will probably understand, typically goes with ‘the law’ as in ‘brush with the law’. Did he see the conductress in this way, ie as ‘the law’ within the constrained context in which he was currently located? If so, did this add a frisson of excitement sufficient to take his mind from the charms of Isobel Absalon who could, at that moment, have been making her way to the top deck? He thought the answer was yes to both questions. In fact, in answering ‘yes’ to the latter question he thought that he would, by implication, be answering ‘yes’ to the former and so, for reasons of brevity he answered simply ‘yes’ to the latter and left the reader to work out for themselves what his sotto voce reply to th
e former would have been.

  The classical ‘brush with the law’ did not, he noted, as he approached ‘the law of the bus’, that is (for the hard of hearing) the conductress, involve actual physical contact; at least in his experience it did not involve actual brushing, in the way that he soon hoped to be brushing up against, or simply against, the fragrant (he assumed) law of the bus, meaning (for the partially sighted, this time) the bus conductress.

  9. The proverbial straw came before the monthly meeting. As I took my seat I could sense an air of uneasiness in the room, rather than the normal pre-meeting bonhomie. I could sense Harold Absalon’s presence beside me as I was taking my papers out of my briefcase. Looking up, I could see that he was waiting to take my seat, with a broad, unapologetic smile on his face. My seat!

  24

  Marguerite paused, momentarily, in the aisle, to allow a trim, well-dressed woman to enter it from his left. The woman had been sitting on the side of the two-person seat10 next to the aisle, which meant that there was no intermediary between her and Marguerite, in the sense that, in the situation where she had been sitting on the half of the seat next to the window on either side of the bus, as in the case of the gentleman who had been sitting next to Marguerite, and if the other, aisle side of the seat had been occupied by someone then, in effect, that person might have had to act as an intermediary between the woman and Marguerite, assuming that they actually exited their seat and moved into the aisle, which Marguerite had chosen not to do, for the reasons previously stated, in the case of his own erstwhile ‘neighbour’, to allow the woman in question free passage in the sense of freeing up space for her to exit from that shared seat area rather than free in monetary terms since there was no part of the bus that counted as being exempt from paying the requisite fare, unless one included the driver’s cab, which Marguerite did not, dismissing it in his mind as a ‘non-public’ or ‘restricted’ area. The person, then, who had hitherto been sharing the seat with the woman, if they were schooled in the traditional way for that part of the world, would have put themselves out, so to speak, particularly if they were a gentleman, that is, into the aisle down or perhaps up which Marguerite had been making steady and even speedy progress, would, in other words, depending on the timing, and on gender differences and other demographics, put themselves directly in Marguerite’s path, with or without Marguerite’s permission, to enable the luscious lady who, although he (the sharer) was not then sharing a seat with was still sharing the space between seats with and could therefore still, conveniently, be referred to as ‘the sharer’ – in fact both the intermediary, as he has also been referred to, and the woman in question, as she (etc), could both, to Marguerite’s mind, be referred to as ‘sharers’ up until the moment that the intermediary entered the aisle, in which case Marguerite would recommend referring to them both as ‘erstwhile sharers’ – to exit.

  To recapitulate: the most important conditions for the sharer nearest to the aisle to lend themselves to being referred to in this way as an intermediary were: a) an indigenous (to the isles or part thereof that constituted the country in which the action was taking place), traditional schooling, meaning they would momentarily relinquish their half of the seat completely to facilitate egress from that specific area rather than leaving their backside planted and swivelling in their seat, as was the continental fashion sometimes adopted, now, to Marguerite’s disappointment, by the inhabitants of the isles (etc) in question (including, of course, himself, for his own reasons) and, b) an exchange, whether verbal or non-, between said intermediary and the person approaching them down the aisle – Marguerite in the case currently under investigation.

  Note that in saying, or thinking, that the woman had been sitting on half of the two-person seat, that this was only a very rough measure. The actual proportion of the seat occupied depended, in part, on the size of the backside; whether or not her legs were splayed or, in the more usual, demure, fashion for women, more or less together; whether her elbows were more or less tucked into her body (the rest of it, that is); whether her hands were clasped together or resting on her legs or otherwise in close proximity to each other; and whether her torso was either leaning away from the occupant of the other half (etc) of the seat or was more or less upright, that is, not leaning excessively in the direction of the other person with whom she had been sharing a seat.

  But given that the woman in question had not been sharing a seat with anyone prior to entering the aisle and, in any case, had been sitting in the aisle seat, there was no intermediary in the situation currently under investigation. It could not, note, be said that ‘she acted as her own intermediary’ for what Marguerite hoped, fervently, would be obvious reasons. Despite not being able to use this epithet, at least not in the narrow context currently under investigation, there had been an exchange, note, between the woman in question and Marguerite. He had instinctively indicated by an almost imperceptible pause before crossing the area of egress from the seat that she had hitherto been occupying (alone, remember) that she could move into the aisle ahead of him; the recognition that this could help him by providing further cover for his own exit from the bus had been a secondary concern, albeit one that followed immediately after his chivalric impulse to set the fair maiden free. In fact she was a brunette. It depends on how one interprets the term ‘fair’: briefly, it could be taken to mean internally pure and unstained; Marguerite left it at that for the time being and probably for ever.

  He had waited instinctively for her to enter the aisle in front of him, not, then, just because his detecting textbooks would advise this as the favoured manoeuvre in that situation since it would provide what is known as further ‘cover’ for his operations along the top deck of the bus, but initially purely for reasons of chivalry. In other words, even though he knew that following close behind this woman as she moved towards the conductress was the city sleuth’s textbook solution par excellence in this situation, he had only realised this after his instinctive deferral to the woman on the grounds of being a gentleman. He could see that his grounding in the investigative arts seemed to slip, in other words, in preference to a softer, more gentlemanly pre-existing training.

  His investigative instincts had, in fact, let him down in this instance. The softening of his approach and his regression to a non-urban middle age (in the historical rather than personal sense) had backfired. He knew it had backfired because he had an almost imperceptible and immediate sense that the woman whom he had made way for had recognised him. Now, following closely behind her, he had an almost tangible sense that she was, as speedily as possible, accessing her possibly capacious cerebral reels (to borrow a term from one of his superiors), trying to put a name, as it was known, to his face.

  10. I have replayed that scene over and over in my mind, running different permutations of what I could have said to him. What I actually did was hurriedly gather my papers together, put them under my arm and leave the meeting in abject humiliation. The door was slammed behind me and I could hear roars of laughter at some derogatory quip that he’d no doubt made about me after I’d left.

  25

  It wasn’t like the three of them – Marguerite and his two fellow passengers – were a tidy line. Nor, in a sense, were they really a ragged line. They weren’t really a line at all, was what he was thinking. They were three individuals, a group, one could say, of individuals, two of whom perhaps knew each other; this ‘each other’ he inserted on the basis that if the woman in front of him knew him then surely it was likely that he also knew her. Surely the reciprocal relation of knowing would pertain in this context. What conditions would be needed for it not to pertain, he pondered, as, continuing to follow her, he looked at her backside moving in its short, snugly fitting, blue pinstriped skirt?

  He was not famous, as far as he knew – and surely he would know if he were famous. It would have to be a very particular kind of fame for him not to be aware of it, surely. But he
was, he thought, well known. In fact, he realised, as he looked down at the woman’s shapely legs moving below the skirt, he was well known for having avoided fame throughout his illustrious career. Part of the name that he had made for himself, then, related to the fact that no-one truly knew him and part of what they didn’t know was his name. People respected the fact that, for someone so effective in his investigative approaches as Marguerite was, so few people knew about him. That was what he had made his name for; that and his thoroughness. In fact it could be said that his thoroughness and his discretion, if we can use that latter term, were one and the same thing in that it was his thoroughness as applied to keeping a low profile that had resulted (with other factors of course, which he cannot go into now, despite his thoroughness) in his making a name for himself. That so few knew this name did not mean that it hadn’t been made. What he was struggling with here, as may be apparent, was the colloquial use of the term ‘making a name for’ (and could that phrase be said to have anything but a colloquial use?) and the fact that very few people really knew him or his name. The distinction Marguerite then made in his mind was another masterstroke, he thought, another way in which people following in his footsteps, as it were, would henceforth try to emulate his every investigative move: one could make a name for discretion in this way – there were precedents in this, was what he was saying; just look at the Scarlet Pimpernel, surely the epitome of discreet notoriety. Marguerite knew that he did not exceed the Pimpernel – if he thought that he did then he would have said that he epitomised this discreet notoriety and the Pimpernel would refer to himself as being nearly as discreetly notorious as Marguerite. There was, of course, one key difference between these two undercover agents, though, which was this: Marguerite was working for the good whereas the Pimpernel worked on the side of evil; that, at least, was Marguerite’s recollection of the Pimpernel, not that he had ever met him of course (and if he had, he may not have known that he had).