“Nor should I,” said Mr. Petre coolly.
“Of course not,” and Terrard laughed nervously. “No. Naturally. Well, your name, you see....” He looked at his watch. “Shall we go and see the place now, or after lunch?”
“Come down and lunch with me,” said Mr. Petre—he felt it was the least he could do under circumstances so grand. “And we could go and look at it afterwards.”
Terrard excused himself a moment, to buy a paper he said. And so he did buy a paper; but he also telephoned to Broad Street. Then he returned to his millionaire in the Louis Quinze grill room of the Splendide.
They lunched. They proceeded. And Mr. Petre gazed for a good ten minutes on sodden grasses waving in the wind, tall and dirty stalks and broken palings; the poor abandoned acres of bare land lying there doing nothing, with the enormous wealth of London all around. It was like seeing a hole in the middle of the sea, and wondering why the water did not pour in and flood it; wondering why the huge appetite of London did not snap up such a morsel, why the jostle of London didn’t crowd that vacancy with London once again.
It was an odd ritual, this looking at the nothingness of the Paddenham Site. It might just as well have been foregone. But Terrard was not wrong in his psychology. Looking at a purchase discussed is the beginning of possession, and as they walked away and Terrard explained, amid the dodging of the traffic and the crowds, the importance of a rapid decision, Mr. Petre was prepared for the next step. They picked up a rotor taxi and were crawling towards the City.
As they went Charlie explained their goal. In the office they were bound for they would meet the man who could treat for Williams—for the Vendor: and he had full powers.
Charlie knew what they would take. He repeated to Mr. Petre frankly that less than 700,000 was no use, but that 800,000 would fetch them. They wouldn’t dare stand out for more. All that was needed was plain speech and no haggling: take it or leave it.
In a large, very dirty room that looked out through dirty windows upon a court off Broad Street Mr. Petre was solemnly introduced to maps, to abstracts, to memoranda, to as many papers as would have taxed in so brief a time the brain of the most practiced at conveyance. But he took the onset solidly, and Terrard, standing at his elbow, a little hard spectacled man who was doing the honors of the treat, and a busy clerk who came in and out with new papers as they were needed, and withdrew those done with—all secretly agreed, each in his own heart, that they were dealing here with such a brain as they had never met before.
Mr. Petre had such a way of spreading a parchment and holding it down firmly with both hands while he mastered its contents, of peering at the smaller details of a plan, of smiling sardonically at illegible pencilings in the corners, of copying into a pocket book chance details such as “not 5½—8½” and “This must be corrected by comparison with No. 10”; he had such a rapid fashion of putting aside what he chose to regard as insignificant (though they might have thought it essential) and of delaying upon little things which they had disregarded, but which he for some deep reason of his own would closely examine, that they were impressed as they had never yet been impressed; and the hard little man in spectacles, silent upon nearly every other experience in his career of purchase and option and foreclosure, would recount in his later years over and over again to whomever would hear, the strange happenings of these two hours. For two hours only were taken up in the great decision.