A Disturbing Influence by Julian Mitchell Page A

else. You can go into a shop without feeling morally obliged to help the shopkeeper make his living, if you see what I mean. But when Jack took over from his father things began to change. And now you find yourself buying something much grander and more expensive than you really want, and though he sells good stuff it’s somehow uncomfortable. For one thing you feel a fool if you walk around in a smart new suit—people aren’t used to that sort of thing in Cartersfield—so you end up with a suit you never wear, still needing a cheap one, but no longer able to pay for it. Basically, I think, we’re the sort of people who like to buy things, but hate having them sold to us. That’s all we have against Jack, really, he makes us feel uneasy. And though we admire him for his push and his go and all the rest of that commercial cant, we don’t really like him. He belongs, perhaps, in a slightly bigger town. He’s tall, and his hands are always a little too clean, and he wears thick-rimmed glasses. It’s those glasses, perhaps, which make us uneasy. His old dad always wore gold-rimmed ones, and we don’t care much for change.
    Well, what he’d done was quite simple. Some frightful fellow, as Hobson put it, had come round trying to buy advertising space, or whatever they call it, in the fields along the new bit of road.
    ‘Had a letter from him myself,’ said Hobson. ‘Wrote and told him what I thought about the idea. Chap never answered.’
    But Jack, never slow to see where the good things in life, such as his Jaguar, came from, was much more accommodating to the advertising man, a thickset sad-looking fellow called Richards, and before anyone knew what was happening Richards had arranged for the billboard with its sickening young man to be put up right away, thus giving, though not, I think, intentionally, a terrible shock to old Hobson as he made the turn off the by-pass into his drive.
    Now I don’t know what Hobson did that night, after Jack left the receiver off, but next morning he was still exploding with an extraordinary regularity. It was as though the bile springs gushed four times an hour, on the quarter, or like one of those hideous banging things that the idiot children tie to my drain-pipe every Guy Fawkes Night. I have earplugs, actually, not that the idiot children know that, but not even earplugs could have silenced Hobson. So incensed was he that he was prepared to stoop, to let his principles slide, to make any and every effort to get moral support against Jack. He wanted, it seemed, to have him ostracized, or, as he put it, ‘exported’. We met, as it happened, outside the Brunswick Arms, and for five minutes he gave me a pithy and extremely unfair statement of the situation as he saw it, not that he could see very much that morning, blind as he was with rage.
    When he’d temporarily calmed down, though the springs of bile continued to gurgle away, we went into the public bar, since I was leading the way. Hobson looked a little startled when he saw where he was, no doubt remembering hours in the sergeants’ mess, but he looked round and said ‘Good morning’ affably enough to the two or three soaks who were there.
    ‘Ah, Palmer. Good morning to you.’
    ‘Good morning, Brigadier,’ said Sam, trying not to look surprised to see Hobson and me together. ‘A glass of sherry?’
    ‘Make it two halves,’ I said.
    At this Sam looked incredulous. The feud which Hobson and I had been conducting for several years in a desultory fashion was well known. We never actually came out and told each other to our faces that we hated each other’s guts, but our relations were, as they say, strained. We represent, in our different ways, the radical and the reactionary as far as these exist in a place like Cartersfield. Harry Mengel, who is an active radical, doesn’t really count, because he’s interested in national affairs. Hobson and I never lowered ourselves to discuss anything but local issues.