Two days later, travelling by a very early train, Bartels went to Manchester, as he had planned. In the evening, he sat in the writing room of his hotel. He felt cold, tired, and dispirited. The room was curiously named, because there were no pens, no writing paper, no blotting paper, and the inkwells were dry. But there were a few shoddy desks, and if you asked, they would reluctantly give you a few cheap sheets of headed notepaper at the reception desk.
There was a smouldering fire in the grate, but in spite of the fire the room was chilly, and a raw wind hammered periodically at the windows.
Round the grate sat three other commercial travellers. Bartels, trying to compose a letter to Beatrice, was distracted by their conversation.
Two of the men were in their thirties, thin, sharp-featured, red-faced fellows. The third was about fifty, a pale-faced man with a bald head and signs of exophthalmic goitre. Their talk ranged from world politics and the atom bomb to the current trade position.
Later, one of the men dropped his voice and began to talk about somebody called Fred with whom the three had been drinking earlier.
Fred, it appeared, was unfaithful to his wife, and he was regarded with amused admiration by the three before the fire. They related the various excuses he made to his wife, and laughed at his astuteness. Fred was a bit of a dog.
Bartels wondered why they bothered to lower their voices, since every word was audible to him. He also wondered why they thought Fred was so clever.
Fred wasn’t clever. Anyone with half a brain could deceive his wife, provided his wife was a normal, trusting individual. What was clever about pulling the wool over the eyes of somebody who trusted you? What’s so frightfully bloody clever about that? thought Bartels irritably. Children can do it. Even dogs.
He felt like throwing down his pen and shouting: “What do you oafs know about the inner subtleties of deception, of the deceiver who suffers more than the deceived? You clods! You sit here, crouched round the fire, smirking and leering, and what do you know of the pain of the imagination? You, who snigger like smutty-minded schoolboys, what right have you to gabble about infidelity?”
He pictured the look on their faces as they swung round at his words. Indignation at the insults, first, then a strained look as they tried to puzzle it all out, and then, of course, the reproaches:
“Excuse me, old man; but this happens to be a private conversation.”
“No need to be insulting, old man.”
“Who are you, anyway, to come butting in?”
He picked up his pen, and began to write, trying so to concentrate on his thoughts as to exclude the talk around the fire.
Dearest Beatrice, he wrote, but above the rattle of the window-panes, he heard the fat man’s wheezy voice:
“So Fred says without a second’s hesitation, “All right, dear,” he says, “if you don’t believe I stayed there, ring ’em up and ask ’em, write to ’em, do what you like, dear, if you don’t believe me,” and then the three pips goes and he cuts off with a quick goodbye. Of course, he knew she wouldn’t have the nerve.”
A louder gust of wind rattled the windows and drowned the rest. Bartels gazed at the notepaper. Dearest Beatrice. The lout Fred was a fool; otherwise his wife would not be suspicious. You can deceive your wife for years and years, thought Bartels drearily, if you’re not a boorish, ham-fisted clot like Fred. There must have been a time when Fred’s wife was as trusting as Beatrice.
Bartels sighed.
He crumpled the sheet of notepaper up because he had smudged it, and took another, and wrote a brief letter to Beatrice saying that he hoped to be back on the next day but one.
Then he went up the narrow, winding staircase to his room at the top of the hotel. The room was cheerless and sordid, a measure, he supposed, of his own lack of success as a wine salesman. He wondered why they couldn’t take him off the road, give him a job in the office. He’d be all right in the office. He was no good on the road. Hadn’t got the aggressiveness, the smooth talk, the self-confidence.
Sometimes he asked himself why they sent him out at all. Did they, too, suffer from pity, and talk behind his back, and say: “Poor old Barty, he’s no good, of course, but we can’t sack him. Had a hard time, in the war, you know. Keeps our name before the buyers, but that’s about all.”
He felt the blood mounting to his face as, for one moment, he wondered whether Lorna Dickson’s feelings, also, were based on pity. He thrust the thought from him, and gazed round the room, noting despondently the mass-produced furniture, the linoleum-covered floor with the narrow strip of carpet by the bed, the windowpanes of frosted glass so that you could not see out of them, and the one harsh electric-light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling.
There you had it all within four walls, the furnishings of failure, the symbols of the commercial traveller who was no good, who never had been any good, and who, despite all his efforts, never would be any good.
He undressed in the freezing, unheated room and crawled into bed, and lay in the darkness. He thought of the lout Fred, who was so devoid of finesse that he was hard put to it to lull the suspicions of his wife, and he wondered what the wife was like. Did she sit by her fireside, alone, bitter, and in tears, the unwanted woman; or pace up and down, up and down, like the wife of the former district commissioner used to do in the house in Melville Avenue?
He turned over on to his side. A chambermaid, with unexpected zeal, had placed a stone hot-water bottle in the bed. He pressed his feet harder against it to gather the warmth.
He thought that although she didn’t realize it, Fred’s wife had little to worry about. Fred would grow tired of his bits of stuff. Fred would always come home in the end. All the Freds in all the world would always come home in the end. But I’m different, he thought. For me there is no lighthearted dalliance; there never could be, because if you’ve got any imagination you can’t just love ’em and leave ’em; not if they’re sensitive, and if they’re not sensitive you don’t fall for them.
The warm air from the bottle and from his body, trapped within the bedclothes, slowly surrounded him, soothing his nerves and lulling the agitation in his mind.
He was comfortable now, warm and comfortable, and had no wish to fall asleep. Instead, he wished to stay awake a while with the image of Lorna before his mind’s eye, to feel in imagination the softness of her lips and the silkiness of her shoulders beneath his hand.
But the day’s events intruded. It had been a bad day, of course; there was nothing unusual about that. Buyers had been obstinate, some even refusing to see him. There ran through his mind the old time-honoured excuses which he had heard so often over the years:
“Mr Fowler asks if you will excuse him this time, as he is very busy.”
“Mr Roberts has the auditors with him and regrets he cannot see you.”
“Mr Martin is in the middle of stocktaking, and is sorry he cannot have the pleasure of seeing you on this occasion.”
“Very nice of you to call. Mr Andrews has asked me to say, however, that he is well satisfied with his present suppliers and sees no reason to change.”
The list of his wines ran through his head. Once he had thought them colourful and romantic. Even now they had a lilt about them, though, as he grew sleepier, the music was interrupted with snatches of his own sales talk, with thoughts of Lorna and Beatrice, and quantities and prices, and still more sales talk…St Emilion, St Julien, Bordeaux Rouge; Medoc, Beaune, Pommard; Chambertin, Beaujolais Superieur-“we have a most interesting parcel of Beaujolais.”
A most interesting parcel of Beaujolais, and at a keen price, and just the thing for your clientele. A full-bodied wine for the North, and Lorna came from the North…I love you, Lorna; I love you, Barty; I shall understand if it’s too hard, Barty, I shall understand…Bordeaux Rouge, Pommard, Medoc…Lorna, darling Lorna, don’t say that you, too, suffer from pity?…Lorna, my love…Cut the commission. Five percent on bulk wines. Two hogsheads, four hogsheads, eight hogsheads, and quarter bottles to contend with high restaurant prices.
Quarter bottles, a mixed case of eight quarter bottles, and pamphlets and a map for the Bordeaux wines. Of interest to customers, a help to the waiter! The trend to expect is a rise in Burgundies…It’s not what a man does, or even whether he succeeds, it’s how he does it that counts said Lorna once…Dear, sweet Lorna…A narrow market, a narrow market, wine fifteen shillings, duty twenty-six shillings, three-and-six freight and insurance, ten shillings bottling, price in bin fifty-four-and-sixpence, and a most interesting parcel of Beaujolais.
One hundred gallons, forty-eight dozen, two hogsheads. Four hogsheads. Eight hogsheads. Something special in St Julien, St Emilion, Medoc, Beaune, Chambertin, Macon, and Bordeaux Rouge…Don’t ever leave me, that’s what the hand of Beatrice had said to him in the dark…I need you.
Bartels sighed, confused, more than half asleep.
Beaujolais…a most interesting parcel of Beaujolais…A most interesting parcel of altrapeine…Just in case…I must buy a most interesting parcel of altrapeine…Somehow…Tomorrow. Without fail. Altrapeine…of interest to the customers, a help to the waiter. Bartels smirked once, drowsily, then slept.
Although Bartels fell asleep without too much trouble, he had a restless night disturbed by dreams. In one he was offering a sample of Beaujolais to a buyer, but he couldn’t make the wine come out of the bottle because, try as he might, he was unable to tilt the bottle to the right angle; meanwhile the buyer waited, watching and sneering.
In another dream, Beatrice and Lorna alternately reproached him and wept, while the dog Brutus lifted his heavy brown-and-white head and looked at him mournfully and said, “It can’t be done, it can’t be done, and well you know it, young man.”
And once he woke, sweating and trembling, and clutching the bedclothes, his heart racing and thumping, from a dream in which he found himself locked in a cabin on a ship. When he rattled the handle and called for help, the voice of a man he knew to be Fred shouted through the ventilator: “It’s false, old man. It’s not a handle at all, old man. We’re at the bottom of the sea, so why worry, old man? If you don’t believe me, ring me up, write to me, do what you like, old man.”
The chambermaid woke him at 7.45, in the half-dark, with a cup of lukewarm, red tea. He heard her set the cup of tea on the chair by his bedside and move towards the door. He raised himself on one elbow and said: “May I have a bath-towel, please? They’ve only given me a hand-towel.”
The maid was a middle-aged woman with a lined face rendered discontented and querulous by too much work, too much stair-climbing, too much clearing up of other people’s disgusting messes. She turned at the door and looked at him in surprise, and said in a flat Lancashire accent: “Bath-towel? You don’t get bath-towels in this hotel. Not in this hotel.” She went out.
Bartels gulped down the red, bitter tea, and lay back, trying to summon the energy to get out of bed into the cold air. But he was tired from his restless night, and his limbs ached. He closed his eyes, intending to rest for ten minutes. When he awoke, it was a quarter to nine.
He made his way to the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and opened the door. A man was sleeping on a camp bed near the bath. He returned to his bedroom. At 9.30 he went down to the dining room, and sat at a table by himself. There were marmalade stains and toast crumbs on the cloth.
“Good morning,” he said to the waitress. “What’s for breakfast?” He tried to sound cheerful. He was sorry for waitresses in seedy hotels. She replied:
“Breakfast? You’ll be lucky if you get a cup of tea and a slice of toast. Breakfast finishes at nine thirty.”
“Well, it’s only just nine thirty,” he replied wearily.
“It’s two minutes past.”
He looked at the clock. She followed his glance, and said: “That clock’s slow. Staff breakfast time is between nine thirty and ten; that’s the trouble, see? Besides, we don’t get paid between nine thirty and ten. I’m willing to serve the stuff, but the chef, he won’t have it, see? That’s the trouble.” She paused and smiled grimly. “When I first came here, I was ashamed to face the customers; now I’m as bad as the rest.”
Bartels said: “Bring me what you can, then. It can’t be helped.”
Surprisingly, having gained her point, she took his order without further fuss.
It was a shocking breakfast. He asked for tea and cereal, and he was brought coffee and porridge. This was followed by a piece of shrivelled smoked haddock. Instead of sugar for the porridge, there was watered-down syrup in a jug. Sugar for the coffee consisted of two tiny cubes, and there were two thin wafers of margarine for the toast.
In the middle of eating his porridge, Bartels heard a man shout plaintively across the dining room: “Can’t I ’ave my ’addock, Miss?”
Five years after the war, thought Bartels, and no breakfast after 9.30 except on sufferance. He picked disconsolately at his fish, and thought of his uncle James, in his loud check suits, his jaunty brown bowler hat and white socks.
Uncle James would have raised hell. He would have stormed and banged and called for the manager, and sent the coffee back, and had sugar for his porridge and butter, and lots of it, for his toast.
Finally, he would in all probability have got away from the hotel without paying his bill, and even, with the help of the genius of aunt Rose, have borrowed a fiver off the manager-to be paid back, tenfold, of course, when the great case was won.
But they were proper salesmen, and I am not, thought Bartels, I am just a bum commercial traveller who is now going to sneak out and buy some poison, if I’ve got the guts.
Bartels had no difficulty at all in buying a two-ounce bottle of altrapeine. The only mistake he made, and, as it turned out, it hardly mattered, was in trying to be a little too clever.
On the way out of the hotel he stopped by the letter-rack and examined some of the letters. What he wanted was a genuine name and address which was easy to remember. One of the letters was addressed to: A. Thompson, Esq., 99 Rugely Avenue, Bradford. He thought that would do very well. That would look as well as any other name in a poison book.
The chemist shop he decided to patronize was a large one in the middle of the city. He stood outside it a moment, watching the people enter and leave. Then he went in, and made his purchase.
He thought the assistant might ask him what he wanted such a dangerous drug for, but he didn’t. It was absurdly easy, thought Bartels, as he handed over the money, and took out his pen to sign the dangerous drugs book.
It was then that he made a slight slip, owing to the fact that, to make himself less easily recognizable should anything ever go wrong, he had removed his spectacles before entering the shop.
He tried to sign his name in the wrong column.
It gave him a bit of a shock, of course, because the assistant laughed as he corrected him and Bartels did not wish to attract attention, either by causing laughter or in any other way.
Later that day, he turned his car towards London. Once or twice he put his hand into his overcoat pocket to make sure the bottle was really there, that the whole thing was not a dream. His mind was not yet one hundred percent attuned to murder. But it was by the time he reached London.