A Disturbing Influence by Julian Mitchell

wouldn’t believe it,’ said Jack. ‘Twice he’s threatened to court-martial me, and once to sue me for spoiling his property. He talks like a sergeant-major who’s been reading some law book. You’d never believe the things he says.’
    Everyone looked at him, and someone laughed loudly, but on the whole the reaction was indifferent.
    ‘How much do you get for that sign, Jack?’ said Sam.
    ‘A nice little bit,’ said Jack, and he laughed some more, though not quite so loudly as before, then he finished his drink and said: ‘Tell him I was here, will you?’
    Then he went out. We could hear him starting up his Jaguar, and then he roared off to tell the story somewhere else.
    ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Sam.
    ‘The Brigadier won’t be in here,’ said Harry Mengel, ‘not bloody likely.’
    There was a general agreement.
    ‘Silly bloody fool,’ said someone, but as no one was quite sure which man he was talking about, no one took him up.
    The truth was that no one cared very much for Brigadier Hobson. We tolerated him, and we let him think he was someone important, but we didn’t pay very much attention to him, and we laughed more at him than with him, not that he was much of a man for jokes. He used to come into the Brunswick Arms every Sunday morning after church for a glass of sherry. Sam always said that he was the only man in Cartersfield who ever drank the stuff, and that it was more trouble than it was worth keeping a bottle just for him, but then Sam was lying, of course, because there were always men dropping in, with blonde women of doubtful age tagging along behind them, on their way to or from Maidenhead, and the blonde women always asked for sherry, whatever time of day or night they might happen to be passing through. Anyway, Hobson didn’t spend much time in the Brunswick Arms on other days of the week, and when he did come it was inevitably to the private bar, never to the public one, so we hardly saw him. We’d hear him asking for his sherry and saying: ‘Good morning, Palmer,’ and Sam would wink at us and give him his drink, and then he’d put his head round the partition and say: ‘Good morning,’ and we would all say: ‘’Morning, Brigadier,’ and this always annoyed him, because he wanted us to call him ‘Sir’, but we were damned if we were going to do that, sherry or no sherry. Then his head would go back round the partition again, closely followed by his little white moustache.
    But if we didn’t care much for Hobson, we weren’t exactly crazy about Jack Solomons, either. His family have always lived in Cartersfield, and when his father died we all felt quite sorry, because he was a nice man in a way—he ran the drapers’, and though you can never get anything you want in Cartersfield shops, he was quite friendly and open about admitting that he hadn’t got whatever itwas you wanted, and that he would really much rather you didn’t ask him to order it for you. Jack was smarter than that, he expanded the store, modernized it a bit, generally chivvied the place up, and now, instead of being a sort of funeral parlour hung with cheap suits, it’s a coffee bar hung with cheap suits, only without the coffee. And he actually presses you to buy something, which his father would never have dreamed of doing, and he goes out of his way to suggest that he can always order what he hasn’t got in stock. Now the whole point about a place like Cartersfield is that you can dream about getting yourself, say, a new suit, without ever thinking you’ll really do so. You go into a shop and look at patterns and rub cloth between your thumb and finger and nod sagely, and then you say: ‘I don’t think this is quite what I’m looking for, but I’ll think about it,’ and then you go away and don’t think about it, but you do feel virtuous because you have, after all, tried, and when you simply have to get a new suit, you go in and buy one off the peg in ten minutes like everyone