the respectable wastes of Kilburn.
Examining the area, Edward liked it. There is about Kilburn a sort of faded respectability, of self-righteous drabness, that appealed to him. For the true copper’s dominant characteristic, if the truth be known, is neither those daring nor vicious qualities that are sometimes attributed to him by friend or enemy, but an ingrained conservatism, an almost desperate love of the conventional. It is untidiness, disorder, the unusual, that a copper disapproves of most of all: far more, even, than of crime, which is merely a professional matter. Hence his profound dislike of people loitering in streets, dressingextravagantly, speaking with exotic accents, being strange, weak, eccentric or simply any rare minority – of their doing, in short, anything that cannot be safely predicted.
So Kilburn was reassuring: but on the other hand it had something else that equally appealed to Edward which was that, although proper, it was also in an indefinable way equivocal. As you walked through its same and peeling (though un-slummy) streets, the façades of the houses hinted, somehow, that all was not as it seemed behind those faded doors and walls. This straitlaced seediness, this primped-up exterior behind which lurks something dubious and occasionally horrifying, is the chief feature of whole chunks of mid-twentieth-century London – as, indeed, of many of its inhabitants: the particular English mixture of lunacy and violence flourishing inside persons, and a décor, of impeccable lower-middle-class sedateness. This atmosphere appealed to Edward who, like all coppers, shunned clear pools (and even turbulent torrents) and preferred those whose surface, though quite still, could easily be stirred up into muddy little whirlpools. For if the copper is a worshipper of the conventional (so far as the world at large outside him is concerned), he is also in his inner person (being the arch empiricist) something of an anarch: a lover of stress and strain and conflict, wherein he himself may operate behind that outward, visible order he admires.
The flats the girl had in mind were of more recent construction – one of those countless, anonymous 1950blocks which, in spite of their proliferation, have as yet entirely failed to transform London from what it still after years of bombing and rebuilding essentially remains – a late-Victorian city. The block was tall and oblong-square and bleak and domestically adequate: perfect, in fact, for their intentions.
‘Okay dear,’ said Edward. ‘You check with your friend and find out what the score is on the financial side, and I’ll consult files and sources – very discreetly, of course – to find if anything’s known to us about it. If both things tally, well, let’s move in. I’m really getting tired, when I see you, of having to act as if I was a criminal.’
‘The key money may be quite a bit,’ she said. ‘Something like fifty, I should imagine.’
Edward winced. ‘Well, that’s not the chief difficulty,’ he said. ‘Our chief obstacle is the place: if we find that’s all right, the money will look after itself – it’ll have to.’
He pressed her two arms, but only so, because the place was too public now for kissing; and each of them felt as well that the unknown tenants of the block were already curious neighbours. He ran for a bus and sat in a rear seat, eyeing his fellow travellers with the proprietory air of his profession as if they were all (and, indeed, the entire population of our islands) the potential inhabitants of some vast, imaginary jail. Passing the Metropolitan theatre of varieties he glanced out idly, and immediately left the bus. For he had noticed a person there whom an inborn and constantly developing instinct told him he should watch and follow.
This person set off along the Harrow Road in the direction of the monumental metal bridges over the tangle of lines just outside Paddington railway station. The person’s
Examining the area, Edward liked it. There is about Kilburn a sort of faded respectability, of self-righteous drabness, that appealed to him. For the true copper’s dominant characteristic, if the truth be known, is neither those daring nor vicious qualities that are sometimes attributed to him by friend or enemy, but an ingrained conservatism, an almost desperate love of the conventional. It is untidiness, disorder, the unusual, that a copper disapproves of most of all: far more, even, than of crime, which is merely a professional matter. Hence his profound dislike of people loitering in streets, dressingextravagantly, speaking with exotic accents, being strange, weak, eccentric or simply any rare minority – of their doing, in short, anything that cannot be safely predicted.
So Kilburn was reassuring: but on the other hand it had something else that equally appealed to Edward which was that, although proper, it was also in an indefinable way equivocal. As you walked through its same and peeling (though un-slummy) streets, the façades of the houses hinted, somehow, that all was not as it seemed behind those faded doors and walls. This straitlaced seediness, this primped-up exterior behind which lurks something dubious and occasionally horrifying, is the chief feature of whole chunks of mid-twentieth-century London – as, indeed, of many of its inhabitants: the particular English mixture of lunacy and violence flourishing inside persons, and a décor, of impeccable lower-middle-class sedateness. This atmosphere appealed to Edward who, like all coppers, shunned clear pools (and even turbulent torrents) and preferred those whose surface, though quite still, could easily be stirred up into muddy little whirlpools. For if the copper is a worshipper of the conventional (so far as the world at large outside him is concerned), he is also in his inner person (being the arch empiricist) something of an anarch: a lover of stress and strain and conflict, wherein he himself may operate behind that outward, visible order he admires.
The flats the girl had in mind were of more recent construction – one of those countless, anonymous 1950blocks which, in spite of their proliferation, have as yet entirely failed to transform London from what it still after years of bombing and rebuilding essentially remains – a late-Victorian city. The block was tall and oblong-square and bleak and domestically adequate: perfect, in fact, for their intentions.
‘Okay dear,’ said Edward. ‘You check with your friend and find out what the score is on the financial side, and I’ll consult files and sources – very discreetly, of course – to find if anything’s known to us about it. If both things tally, well, let’s move in. I’m really getting tired, when I see you, of having to act as if I was a criminal.’
‘The key money may be quite a bit,’ she said. ‘Something like fifty, I should imagine.’
Edward winced. ‘Well, that’s not the chief difficulty,’ he said. ‘Our chief obstacle is the place: if we find that’s all right, the money will look after itself – it’ll have to.’
He pressed her two arms, but only so, because the place was too public now for kissing; and each of them felt as well that the unknown tenants of the block were already curious neighbours. He ran for a bus and sat in a rear seat, eyeing his fellow travellers with the proprietory air of his profession as if they were all (and, indeed, the entire population of our islands) the potential inhabitants of some vast, imaginary jail. Passing the Metropolitan theatre of varieties he glanced out idly, and immediately left the bus. For he had noticed a person there whom an inborn and constantly developing instinct told him he should watch and follow.
This person set off along the Harrow Road in the direction of the monumental metal bridges over the tangle of lines just outside Paddington railway station. The person’s
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