Back Room Girl: By the author of Paul Temple

CHAPTER III

A Man’s Life

Was he as woman-proof as he had boasted? Roy asked himself as he went into the chalet and set about getting breakfast. Fine man’s man you are now, he reflected, getting all excited about seeing a woman’s footprint in the sand. Ah well. He flipped Angus a couple of biscuits from the table’s edge – he seemed to prefer them served that way – and as he ate he looked around the chalet. A trifle bare, he thought, but pretty comfortable on the whole and a darned sight better than some of the dumps you were in during the war. And you’re on your own, with no one to please except yourself. Then he suddenly realized that he was not alone, that visitors had passed within a stone’s-throw of his door not so long ago. He found the thought somewhat disturbing.

He’d had to pig it a bit the first week or so while he was moving in and getting the place to rights, and had felt that the whitewashing, the distempering and the painting, which he had done himself, would never be finished, especially the cleaning up afterwards. At first he had been too tired at night to do much writing, but gradually existence here, as in Fleet Street, had settled into a more or less regular routine, with this difference – it was a routine of his own choosing. No one told him what to do or where to go. He got up when he liked, ate when he liked, worked at the book when he felt like it, or in the garden he had made; slept, walked, swam, sunbathed, or just loafed around as the fancy took him. He observed only one general rule – when it was fine he stayed outdoors as much as possible, saving the indoor jobs for when it was cool or wet.

After the hurly-burly of Fleet Street it seemed an ideal existence, so much so that he was thinking of staying here indefinitely. If he could make enough money out of his writing to live, not luxuriously, but simply as he was doing now … That was the snag, but he had high hopes of the book, which was going well, and maybe the Tribune would serialize it before it was published – if it ever was. He had also had one or two promising ideas for other books.

‘I could think of a hell of a sight worse existence than this, couldn’t you, Angus?’ he asked the dog. Angus amiably chuntered agreement in the way Cairns do, for all the world as if they were talking. Angus, in fact, was having the time of his life. All through the war he had stayed with Roy’s sister in Cheshire, seeing his master only when he came on leave and then not for long. He did not know what had led to his being brought to this seventh heaven, but he was all for staying here as long as possible.

Roy had found him an ideal companion, for the dog had kept him from feeling too lonely. The thing he had missed most had been the sound of other human voices – he had thought that would be the cacophony he would be most glad to get away from – and he had slipped into the habit of talking aloud both to himself and to the dog. When he thought he was doing too much of it – he’d heard it was one of the first signs of madness! – he got on his cycle and, with Angus running alongside him and barking madly, sped off along the cliff road towards Torcombe to spend the evening in the smoke-room of the Cliff Top Inn playing darts, draughts or dominoes and drinking ale with the fishermen, with whom he sometimes went out in their boats.

He knew that they thought him a bit of an odd bird, but gradually they had come to accept him, and he found himself looking forward to their company. Ruddy-faced Tod Murdock, the landlord, a retired deep-sea fisherman, his wife and daughter Modwen, always made him feel at home there. For the rest, when it was fine (and he had been very lucky in the weather that summer, the villagers told him) he worked in the garden he had made alongside the chalet. The soil, previously uncultivated, was rich. He had grown some fine peas and beans – Tod told him he ought to have entered some in the Torcombe Allotment Association’s show, and had bought most of his surplus – and the other vegetables were looking fine. He had also planted various flowers in nooks and crannies along the banks of his little stream, from which he got his water, which flowed clear and cold past the chalet. It looked a picture now.

When it was too hot for gardening, he sunbathed or swam in the deep blue water of the little cove. At first he had worn bathing trunks, but as the days went by and he did not see anyone near the cove, he discarded them, and most of the time he went about naked, feeling a freedom of body movement that he had never known before. He had been fit enough when he was in the Service, but two years of Fleet Street life, irregular hours and too many cigarettes had taken the edge off that. Now, however, there was again no trace of flabbiness on any part of his six foot, well-knit frame and his skin was a rich golden brown.

He had found that outdoor work had caused the rhythm of his life to slow down – he had soon discovered that gardening can’t be rushed – except when the fury of creative writing caught him in its grip, sometimes for hours at a stretch, so that he neither ate, drank nor slept, but worked on in the soft light of his oil lamp until either inspiration failed him, or his back and fingers ached so much that he could no longer sit at the typewriter at the desk he had rigged up on the verandah. After a long spell such as this he was more physically tired than any amount of digging or sawing up logs in readiness for the winter could make him. After such a phase, he would fling himself down on the divan on the verandah and sleep the sleep of exhaustion until the early morning sun on his face woke him.

As he cleared away after breakfast, Roy’s mind switched from considering his mode of existence to the effect the discovery of the footprints had had on him. He was vaguely disturbed to find that it had aroused once more all the sense of curiosity which had made him one of Fleet Street’s crack crime reporters. He had imagined he had lost that during the months of his Crusoe-like existence in the Cove, but perhaps it was true as they said, ‘Once a newspaperman, always a newspaperman’. Already he was beginning to sense a story in those footprints.

‘Blast, blast, blast!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘Why the hell did this have to happen just when things were going so well?’

Angus looked up inquiringly, and then followed him out to the pool Roy had made in the stream and watched him wash the breakfast things. When they were clean Roy stood up and looked around him. In the pale morning sunlight the cove looked its loveliest. It was going to be another hot day, just right for sunbathing followed by a good long swim.

‘Well, go ahead and swim,’ Roy told himself again aloud. ‘Forget you ever saw the footprints. You don’t have to try to find out where they go. There’s no news editor badgering you now. Try minding your own business for once. Don’t get tangled up in anything that may spoil all this and take your mind off the book. That’s what you’ve come here to write – not hectic news stories about glamorous women smugglers. You’re not a crime reporter any more. You’re really enjoying yourself and living your own life at last. Why spoil it?’

He turned to walk back to the chalet, and as he went the crime reporter answered him. ‘It won’t do any harm to find out where the footprints go,’ this voice insisted insidiously. ‘Besides, you may not be able to find out. You’re no Boy Scout and you can’t go and ask the Yard about it. Those prints have rather spoiled your beautiful dream, haven’t they? You know you’ll never rest now until you get to the bottom of it all, so you might as well get on with the job.’ He could almost hear Jim Tailby’s voice echo – ‘And mind it’s a good story!’

The crockery in his hands had dried in the sunshine by the time he got back to the chalet. Mechanically, his mind still on other things, Roy replaced it on the shelves. Then he put on a sports shirt and a pair of old flannels just in case he met anyone. He went outside again, closing the door behind him and locking it. Angus ran ahead, knowing he was going for a walk. Roy had gone a few yards towards the beach when he realized that this was the first time he had locked the door of the chalet since he had got out of the habit after the first week he had been there.

‘Idiot,’ he muttered to himself. But he didn’t go back.

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