The Higher They Fly by Christopher Hodder-Williams

Author:Christopher Hodder-Williams [Hodder-Williams, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2019-04-08T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

From the moment when Fleming and Scrivens entered the room, the voltage of anxiety shot up to the upper extreme of the dial.

Scrivens, having let drop a small fragment of unofficial sympathy toward Fleming, now resumed his former attitude of cold impartiality and conveyed the impression, if anything, that a word of encouragement expressed out of school had been designed to take the sting out of all that applied now. Looking at him, it was impossible to gauge what his true feelings were.

He shut the door behind Fleming, whom he introduced formally to Dawlish. Gregg sat, motionless and inscrutable, as if he were now the one who would be hardest to convince. As an act of diplomacy it was a sound one; but it was unnervingly convincing at a time when Fleming felt so very much alone. Fleming looked briefly at the three men; and during the noncommittal preliminaries of the conversation he concentrated on Dawlish in an effort to assess him.

To Fleming, Stuart ‘Sandy’ Dawlish appeared the typecast of a company director. He had, one would have thought, been prised from some mould labelled Men Of Stature in a foundry where citizens were manufactured with all the reliable knowhow of much experience. The compositors who had assembled his personality had made no slip in their faultless application of well-tried principles of letterpress; there were no incongruous mismatches of fount, and the layout was as conservative as it was uninspired. One was only left wondering whether this obsessional caution in choice of type-face stemmed from the unrevealing nature of the text. It was apparently so predictable that it gave no guide whereby its personality could be expressed in the smallest deviation from classical rules.

Mr Dawlish had been to one of the right schools—though his parents had studiously avoided what they considered to be the snob factories which called themselves Stowe and Eton and the rest. Nevertheless, in the school Dawlish had attended there prevailed a rough-hewn path, defined in its boundaries by the conventions of the young gentry, who were allowed to bully the weaker ones so that the strong might emerge in bowler hats and umbrellas, fit for the challenging perils of the stock-market.

The use of the word ‘gentry’ was a necessary password among Mr Dawlish and his fellow products, who inherited automatic security through pronouncing certain words properly and avoiding others. If you met a bowler-hatted questionmark in the precincts of Pall Mall after office hours, if you weren’t quite sure that he qualified to be taken into your club, there were certain simple tests you could set him which would reveal at once his eligibility or otherwise for a drink among your proven friends. Be he too effusive or contrariwise too shy; should he not know exactly how to address the man at the door, or else tip the taxi driver beyond the accepted shilling piece, well . . . the chap was not quite . . .

You couldn’t catch Dawlish out on any of these vital attributes of the gentleman.

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