The Night of Wenceslas Read Online Free PDF Page A

slightly hypnotized by the fivers fluttering around me as he counted. The efficient Bunface whipped away the papers with two sheets of blotting paper and I watched as Cunliffe came to his final ‘Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.’
    ‘There. Are you satisfied with my count?’
    ‘Perfectly.’ I could hardly keep my hands off them.

    A couple of minutes later he was telling me that he would communicate with me as soon as he had more news, and was taking my hand in his two again.
    ‘Think,’ he said, his large, intelligent eyes twinkling. ‘Mr Janda left certain funds with me. But think before you spend. A little splash would be understandable, but don’t throw it all away.’
    I don’t remember going down the stairs. I found myself in the M.G. wondering what I should do first. For some reason, despite the British port, I felt wonderfully clear-headed for the first time that day, perhaps for the first time that week, possibly for the first time in my life.
    There was a clear necessity to take myself swiftly off to some place of solitude with this miraculous two hundred quid and work out a few first principles. With this thought in mind I pressed the starter, and at once fell to swearing with great power and obscenity and leapt out like a madman with the starting handle. There was something that would have to come even before first principles and I drove round to the squalid enterprise of Ratface Rickett, pulling up in the forecourt with a scream of brakes.
    Ratface was not about his usual task of gloating over his petrol pumps, and I walked round to the back to find him at work in a pit inspecting the underside of a lorry with a wandering lamp.
    ‘Mr Rickett.’
    From his crouched position he looked round quickly and turned away without speaking. This familiar and expected action filled me with such pleasurable fury that I crouched like a frog, inserted my head carefully between the two front wheels and, inflating my lungs, roared: ‘Rickett! Rickett! Rickett!’ like some maniac baritone on a cracked record. Ratface straightened up as though shot, catching his head a stupefying blow, and began a sub-human, wordless moaning as he clutched his head. One word of apology would have had him swarming at me with a six-inch spanner and so, suppressing a desire to run and pretending not to notice what had happened, I called urgently,‘Come on, Rickett, surely you can finish that later – I’m in a hurry, man!’
    This attitude so surprised him that he actually crawled out after a moment or two, but his eyes were still so bloodshot and murderous that I said loudly, ‘Damn it, I’ve been yelling my head off. Didn’t you hear me down there? I’m in a hell of a hurry and I want a new battery and to settle my bill.’
    I had meant to play with him a little over the question of payment, but since the encounter had provided such reasonable value and there was, anyway, the matter of getting off the premises without his savaging me, I reluctantly paid up and took off in triumph at the first touch on the starter.
    I drove to Henley, and by a quarter past one was sitting slowly sipping a pint of beer and watching the swans.
    The young master had come into his own with a vengeance. I could almost feel the gigantic sack of loot on my shoulder like some unimaginably heavy piece of nuclear material darkly awaiting conversion into other and more useful forms. Millions of miles of dappled roads, a big house for Maminka to queen it in, an island, a pub, a boat, a small group of harlots. Or one could acquire and slowly pulverize the entire affairs of the Little Swine, selling Miss Vosper into white slavery.
    The swelling wonder of these reflections occupied the first pint, and it was as I was sipping the second that I approached cautiously the problem of Maura. I had been aware all morning of a strong resistance to the idea of reasoned thinking on this subject. I hadn’t wanted to tell her about the letter. I didn’t want to tell her