Moggerhanger

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I opened two tins of Bogie as Dismal’s bonus for his help on the trip. Bill robbed the kitchen cupboard of Bakewell tarts, Swiss puddings and a tin of fancy biscuits. “As soon as you’ve eaten your little snack,” I said, putting the kettle on at his request, “you can stack those bundles of heroin by the levers in the signal box. Clegg’s up there, so he’ll help you. And stop thinking of Runna-Runna. If you take that option, it’ll be your funeral.”

“That’s not very encouraging, as a remark. Anyway, why do you suppose that subject is still on my mind?”

“Because you’re eating enough to get all that way without the necessity of inflight refuelling. But if you are still hankering for Runna-Runna, forget it. You might make it to the Hook, but you’d be taken prisoner at the first stop in Germany. Imagine being sent to a POW camp, when you’d avoided it all through the War. You’d never live it down. Nothing to eat except stuff from Red Cross parcels. You’d be so hungry you’d even swallow the plumb stone in the jam with the escape compass inside. So pass me one of those custard creams before they’re all gone. I didn’t even know we’d got any.”

Clegg came in at the kettle whistling. “Have you seen her?”

“Seen who? My mother and her girlfriend seem to have left.”

“They did — for London, an hour ago.”

I pitied Mabel and Blaskin, until wondering what he might get up to with Doris. “What are you on about, then?”

“Your current girlfriend arrived just after lunch, and woke me from my nap. She’s a lovely looking woman. Said you’d given her the address. She was so distressed though that I put her in your bed upstairs. Men are so bloody to their ladies these days. She told me her name was Sophie.”

I staggered, but only inwardly, and walked quietly upstairs, in case I disturbed her sleep, only wanting to gaze on her bewitching features. But she heard the door click. “Is that you, Michael?”

I knelt by the bed for a kiss. She turned towards me, to show a swollen eye, and a bruise on her cheek. “This is the most wonderful surprise, sweet sister, only tell me who knocked you about, so that I can slaughter him.”

“My husband and I quarrelled. He got angry when I said I didn’t care about him having a mistress. He went absolutely bananas, and threw me out of the house. So I came here, hoping you’ll let me stay until tomorrow, by which time he’ll have calmed down. Either that, or he’ll be away with his girlfriend. If he takes her to the house in Italy I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll look after you for as long as you like, dear sister.” Our kisses were so passionate we could have made love there and then, but I resisted, saying tea was on the go downstairs, and if she wanted me to bring a cup for her I would.

Was her arrival good luck, or Fate? Too happy to care, I took her tea and biscuits, then went back to the kitchen. “Cleggie,” I said, the three of us munching away. “I have a problem.”

He straightened his glasses. “You always have.”

“But this one’s special.” I told him of all we’d done that day, then reeled out our options with regard to what was in the Roller.

It took some time for him to pull his thoughts together under one roof. “I wouldn’t do either of those things. Get rid of the stuff as soon as you can. Take it all to Lord Moggerhanger, where it belongs. Honesty is the best policy, but since I realise you’re hell-bent on resolving matters in your own way, because you never were one to take good advice, I’ll say no more. If you try to blackmail your employer I wouldn’t like to think how it will turn out.”

I looked at Bill, who said: “I give in. No Runna-Runna. We’ll con Moggerhanger for fifty thousand each, though I’ll regret such a soft option till my dying day.”

“Things never did come cheap,” I said, “so I’ll give Moggerhanger a bell tomorrow, to explain the situation. If there’s no other objection to the proposal I’ll consider it settled, and after such a heavy day go upstairs to rest. You keep things going, Cleggie. Provide all the biscuits Bill can eat, and dish out unlimited Bogie for Dismal.”

Who could resist? I’d be the first one as ever did. After the first few kisses she said: “Strip off, Michael, darling. My breasts are aching for you. I need hardly mention about the other place.”

For those who have been gently brought up, if such there are anymore, let me say that going to bed with your half sister is the ultimate aphrodisiac. It was like being in love at thirteen but, not having anybody to make love to, and when you were about to burst, having a dark-haired princess who knew more about you than you know yourself come naked into your arms. Such joyful music I wanted to go on forever, freedom, guilt and the absolute pleasure of doing what we wanted with each other in the hope of finding a part of ourselves never come across before. Neither of us, we said, had experienced such a meltdown into mutually consuming love.

After a couple of hours I felt an irritating itch for a tasteful after-sex cigarette, but she wanted to stay under the sheet. “Don’t break the dream.”

I eased her away. “I won’t. But there’s the rest of our lives to get all we want.”

“I’ve never been so happy.”

“Nor me,” I had to say, but it was time to get up.

After another delaying kiss I pulled on my shirt, and told her I was going downstairs to arrange our wedding dinner. A bad mood was filtering in, proving me to be a member of the middle class at last, being afflicted with post coitum triste, or whatever it was. “There’s a bottle of champagne in the fridge, so we can start the meal with a toast.”

“Maybe I should go home,” she said, “and make sure Gerald hasn’t done a Cicero in the bath. He threatens to, at times.”

“Wouldn’t it be dashed convenient if he did? But he doesn’t sound the sort to top himself. Since he can’t feel he’s betraying you anymore he’ll pick up with another tart so that he can betray his present dolly bird. Some men are like that. Don’t ask me how I know. As long as they have somebody to do it on, they’re never too unhappy. No wonder he clocked you a couple for telling him he wasn’t betraying you. You were lucky to get away with your life.”

The sheet almost fell from her breasts when she laughed, at which I nuzzled her, to stop them getting chilly. “It’s like when we were on the train,” she said, “the things you’re saying. I can’t get over me being your half sister. I’m only disappointed we didn’t have the same mother. That would have been even more wonderful. We’ll have to manage it better in the next life.”

I finished dressing. “I’ll take you to London tomorrow in the Rolls Royce. We’ll get there in style.”

“She’s an absolute queen,” Bill said, all of us at table lifting our glasses to her. I couldn’t stop him telling about the day’s adventures, and relating in detail his (failed) scheme for taking over Runna-Runna. She relished his enthusiasm, which riled me somewhat at her perhaps thinking he was a better storyteller than I was. We sipped champers and picked at the hors d’oeuvres. “You might have become a real queen,” he went on. “Just think of it: the pair of you on a coconut throne. I’d have crowned you with palm oil myself.”

Sophie was coy, cutting her lamb from the leg taken out of the deep freeze by Clegg on our arrival. At midnight we brushed past Bill on our way to bed, ignoring his sly wink. At the moment anyway I wanted to sleep with Sophie every night for the rest of my life. But we only made love once, then fell asleep.

Moggerhanger had at least let me finish breakfast before lifting his phone, though he hadn’t waited till close to lunch in case I’d already gone where he couldn’t find me. “Upper Mayhem,” I said.

“I know it is. And you, if I’m not mistaken, are my bugbear of the moment, Michael Cullen. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“I was when I went to bed last night, but who I am at the moment only time will tell. What can I do for you, Lord Moggerhanger, that I haven’t done already?”

“Michael, did you get the materials from Doggerel Bank, or did you not?”

“I did. The operation went like a dream. The Three Musketeers did their work superbly.”

“Three?” I caught amazement in his tone. “You’re counting Kenny?”

“Oh no. There was Bill Straw, Dismal, and me. A perfect team. The trouble was, no sooner were the goods in the boot than those counterfeit coppers topped and tailed us, and took everything into their so-called safe keeping. I’m mortified you thought we’d do a runner with two million quid’s worth of the hardest drugs in the Kingdom. How could you? Don’t you know by now that you can trust me? All I hope is that those hired thugs delivered the goods safely back to you, unless they did a runner and are already living it up on the Costa del Sol. Nothing would surprise me. I’d never seen such villains.”

The pause was of the sort that Blaskin would have marked down as significant, or even pregnant. “Michael, I’ve had a sleepless night, and when that happens I can be very fractious. I won’t be blunt with you. I will be straight, instead. When those actors — though one had once been a real policeman, before his fingers got too sticky by fining motorists on the spot with a fake book of tickets — when, I say, they rolled into my compound last night I was waiting. They had already phoned to say mission accomplished, and given me an ETA, so I was delighted when I heard the sound of their horns as a signal of success. They jumped out of the cars and fell about laughing, and banging themselves on the back, though I realised they might be half drunk. What are you finding so funny?”

“My sister’s tickling me in the privates. She’s a real devil. Get away, Sophie,” I called, though she was out for a walk along the platform. “It’s all right now, sir. She’s very playful, since our romp in bed last night.”

“Stop arsing around. Any man who would go to bed with his sister is depraved beyond all imagining, as is he who even thinks about it. But let me go on. I didn’t even bother to look for the stuff till after they’d swilled down a pot of Mrs Blemish’s tea. Then we searched both cars from stem to stern, and what should have been there wasn’t.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “Though I wish I’d seen their faces.”

Another hiatus.

“I’ve grown to believe there’s no such thing as impossible in whatever you’re concerned with,” he said, “so let me tell you there’s nowhere in the world beyond the reach of my long arm. Now tell me where the stuff is. You left poor Kenny in the horsebox near Stamford, or so I was informed on phoning the restaurant. He was giving everybody hell and they were about to call the police.”

“You mean the real ones?” I sounded scandalised.

“Shut up! You couldn’t resist a cheap laugh at those careless but well meaning lads. But the fun’s over. So where is the stuff?”

“In a location you’ll never find.”

His chuckle neither deceived nor frightened me. “What do you hope to gain by these childish manoeuvres, Michael?”

“A hundred thousand pounds. Fifty for me, and fifty for Bill. Dismal just barked that he’d be satisfied with a carton of twenty-four tins of Bogie dog food.”

He spoke so quietly I could hardly make out the words. “Listen, you scumbag, you slum brat, you bastard from the boondocks, if that stuff, plus the Roller, isn’t back in my compound within twenty-four hours I’ll have your miserable life snuffed out. One shot will do, with nobody the wiser who did the job.”

Now it was my turn. “You just listen to me, you drug dealing scourge of the world, you fuckface of a syphilitic racketeer”—I prayed for Blaskin’s expertise with words to help me out, but no more would come — “let me tell you that the dope is packed in the Roller, and if we don’t receive two packets of a thousand fifty-pound notes, and not counterfeit either, within the aforesaid twenty-four hours, we’ll spray gasoline over the car and set fire to it with whatever’s inside. I’m serious, though why you should quibble about a mere hundred thousand from at least two million to me shows a lack of worldliness, sophistication and plain good sense, which I always thought you had in good measure.”

“You’re diatribe was totally unnecessary, Michael, not to say unwarranted.”

“So was yours. I lost my temper. I beg forgiveness.”

“Granted. It’s understandable, but don’t forget I have the power.”

“You don’t have the goods, though. While they’re in my possession it’s me who has the power. I could drive the Roller to the nearest constabulary headquarters and hand in the present of the year, but I’d prefer us to have the fifty thousand each, and for you to have your two million. I don’t see that as an unjust solution to the problem. Anyone who did I would think of as unreasonable.”

His laugh was almost human. “Michael, you seem to have matured in the last few years. I’d be proud if I could believe I’d been in any way responsible. But I hope you’ll forgive me when I say that your maturity lacks that final polish of English common sense. You know the sort of man I am. In fact of all my entourage I don’t think there’s anyone who knows me as well as you. And that being the case, how can you imagine for an instant that I would knuckle under to what can only be called blackmail, and allow myself to be threatened by a guttersnipe like you?”

“Lord Moggerhanger, as one guttersnipe to another, how can you be so unrealistic as to imagine I’m capable of behaving in any other way? All this jockeying in the insult stakes is unnecessary. Knowing your time to be as valuable as mine, why can’t we come to a quick decision?”

“You’re putting me into a very invidious position.”

“There’s nowhere else I would like to put you, but it’s only invidious on your part to the tune of a hundred thousand pounds, and a crate of Bogie. It could be invidious to the tune of a lot more. My companion in arms and maybe villainy wanted to make away with every last grain, but I argued him out of it, and got him to agree to the hundred thousand because I didn’t want to be unfair to you. I’m not ungrateful for all you’ve done for me, especially when you had me framed and put inside thirteen years ago. I don’t easily forget a favour like that. Otherwise, our association has been mutually beneficial, since I’ve learned so much from you, but when you’ve handed over the cash I think we’ll call it quits, though I must say I’m enjoying our little talk. We haven’t had one on anything like equal terms before.”

“Equal terms!” he cried.

“Yes. You know, I have, you want. What could be more equal than that? I suggest you accept the situation and get that money — plus Bogie — up here as soon as possible, so that Bill and I can resume the even tenor of our zigzag ways, singing like a couple of Carusos as we count it. All you have to do is cough up, and put a good face on the matter.”

Another wait, but I was prepared for all of them. I’d got him where I wanted, and he knew it. “You know what I’d like to do, don’t you, Michael? Ideally, I mean.”

“Of course. You want us to drive the car and its contents to Ealing like obedient boys, get a long talking to about my recalcitrance,”—thank you, Blaskin, for that word — “and then touch my cap with gratitude on getting your handout of a thousand or so. Then you would let me walk away feeling happy I’d still got all my fingers.”

“That’s a fair account of my feelings. I know from experience that your imagination knows no bounds, but it’s the kind of imagination which is no imagination at all. It’s rather a millstone around your neck that could lead you into such trouble you’d soon have no imagination left because you’d be dead. Neither of us would like to see that, after such a long and fruitful association, would we, Michael?”

“Lord Moggerhanger, forgive me if I’m feeling a little bullish. Although I don’t want this conversation to go on as long as the Congress of Vienna, however long that event did go on, I must remind you that I’m acquainted, as you know, with William Straw, ex-sergeant of the Sherwood Foresters. To say we’re blood brothers is no exaggeration, and if anything were to happen to me he would turn himself into a one-man assassination squad from which, believe you me, you would have no escape. Bill is what used to be known as a gentleman ranker, and he has all the martial talents of that breed. If a hair of my head was harmed he would go into action with such alacrity that even you, with all your so-called protection from the riff-raff of South London, wouldn’t be able to avoid a fate that didn’t bear thinking about. He would kill you quickly and efficiently, because time is money for him too. As well as that he would delight in picking off your progeny, devastating each of your scattered properties, and sowing the grounds of your ruined main residence with salt in a way that would make Carthage look like the vicar’s croquet lawn. In short, he would kill you, even if he lost his own life in doing so, though that would be an unlikely outcome. I would do the same for him. So your threats are idle, and can’t have any place in this discussion. Just face the fact that I have you over a barrel, because if we don’t come to an agreement soon I’ll jack up the pay-off to sixty thousand each, instead of fifty.”

He sounded as if he’d not only lost his marbles but a stone of weight as well. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“Not as hard as I could.”

“You’re a bastard of the worst sort.”

“And rather proud of it. Start moving. Get the money. Come up on the train. I’ll be outside the station in your Rolls Royce — or perhaps on the platform. Get off the train alone. If you bring anyone else, or try to pull a fast one, Bill will see to you in no uncertain terms. Your minions wouldn’t stand a chance. He would be in his element letting off a few well-aimed shots. He doesn’t fuck about.

“To continue. Sit over a cup of tea in the refreshment room. I shall meet you there. If in the future you try to get back at me, and I’m killed, or injured, or abducted in any way, I shall be leaving a briefcase with instructions that it should be handed over to the police. Its contents will prevent you having a comfortable retirement. Be sensible. Forget your losses, such as they will be.”

“Have you been up all night planning this?” he croaked.

Because everything had come out unrehearsed I hoped it would get us what we wanted, though of course I couldn’t be sure until it had. It wasn’t the moment for overconfidence. “We went over the scheme till agreeing on every detail,” I told him. “It was a lot of work and trouble for such a small percentage of what’s in your Rolls Royce. In fact I’m disappointed you haven’t offered a tad more than fifty thousand each out of the goodness of your heart. What’s the sense in making all this fuss over such a trivial sum?”

He was so long in coming back I thought I’d talked him into the ground. “Michael,” he said, “the reason I’m reluctant to comply with your demand is that you haven’t earned it. I pay generously for what people do, you know that, but in this case you’re asking for a sum which would cover at least a year of your work.”

“I’m fed up with this chatter,” I snapped. “We’ll meet the sixteen-forty-five tomorrow, and you will get off it. You don’t need cash from the bank. You keep more than that in your safe for pay-offs to whoever won’t accept cheques, or in case you have to go abroad at short notice.”

I put the phone down on Moggerhanger, which showed more than anything that I had crossed the Rubicon, mentally thanking Blaskin again for providing me with such an abundance of classical allusions. On my way to engineering Moggerhanger’s discomfiture gave me far more pleasure than a trip to Runna-Runna.

Everything said had been overheard, Dismal smiling as much as a dog can at my insistence on the Bogie. Bill shook my hand as if to take it away and fill a meat pie. “I don’t know where you found the chutzpah.”

“It’s the Irish in me. Let’s hope it works.”

“It will. You stitched him up like a tailor in a sweatshop. I was full of admiration the whole way through.”

“You deserve cakes and coffee,” Clegg smiled. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Make it strong,” I said.

Moggerhanger, in lounge suit, bowler hat, and navy blue overcoat with a carnation in the buttonhole, lifted the carton of Bogie onto the platform, and reached for the suitcase. He looked worried on calling a railway man to carry his luggage to the buffet, handing out a paper tip for the trouble.

I signalled him out to the parked Roller, which meant another note for the railway man on bringing the luggage over. He must have thought it was his birthday, because Moggerhanger was always generous when it suited him. Dismal was in the front seat trying to work the steering wheel, and Bill came out of the back to take the Bogie and the money. “My lads have got you covered. I’ll spend ten or fifteen minutes checking the amount. Find yourselves a cup of tea, and then come back.”

“Such precautions aren’t needed,” Moggerhanger said. “You can see I’m alone.”

Bill showed an old walkie-talkie I’d given Smog years ago for Christmas. “Do as I say, or I’ll call one of my ex-army pals to come and give you a pasting.”

It’s quite unnecessary to describe Moggerhanger’s look, because who can’t imagine it? In the refreshment room he pushed aside a plastic cup of what looked like Dismal’s piss on a bad day. “I’m not making any more conditions with regard to the transaction, Michael. After all, you’re only doing what I would have done in your place forty years ago. I’ve handed the money over with good grace, and with no trickery or malice aforethought. But I do have one favour to ask of you.”

“I might be amenable.”

“I’d like you to drive the Roller back to Ealing for me tomorrow. You have the money, so I can trust you to make the delivery of all that’s inside.”

“Why don’t you take it back yourself this afternoon?”

“I’ve got this terrible lumbar pain, that’s why, and a couple of hours at the wheel would be agony, especially in the rush hour traffic. Another thing is, I want you to take your kit from the garage flat. I’m sure you’ll understand I’ll never want to see you again.”

His seemingly reasonable request went through my brain like a cloud of dolly mixtures. Why not? There couldn’t be anything amiss with a more formal ending to our association, apart from which I very much fancied having Sophie beside me in the Rolls Royce when I gave her a lift to town in the morning.

“I only ask you,” he went on, “not to bring that damned dog with you. Whenever I had him on the premises he invariably took a malicious delight pissing over my carpets. He’d make a point of coming into my study — and you know how silently he can move — from the more than adequate latrine of outside, I might say, to do the business on my prime Bokhara. I can’t think what he had against me.”

“He never does it at my place.” I must have been the only person to like and understand such a dog. “Maybe it’s because we only have rush mats on the floor. He’s the best behaved canine friend a man could ever wish for.”

He turned a bottle of HP sauce so that the cradle of democracy faced him. “Your companion in villainy seems to be taking his time. It wouldn’t surprise me if such a daft berk like that hasn’t run away with the money, not to mention all the parcels in the boot. Nothing surprises a man of my age.”

Once a notion entered Bill’s addled head you could never tell if it would ever dislodge. I saw the picture of him at the wheel of the Roller, all windows open, and him singing aloud what would become the National Anthem of Runna-Runna as he headed at top speed towards Harwich.

Moggerhanger had a good laugh, his only one that day I supposed, when I jumped up and ran to see, I said to him, how matters were progressing. At the station entrance I was ready to kill myself, because the car wasn’t where it should have been. Would I have to stay in Moggerhanger’s employment for the next five years while I tracked Bill down and killed him? Kenny Dukes and all the rest would be on expenses as well, as we searched one South Sea island after another, and even then Bill would knock us off one by one as we waded ashore on hitting the right one.

The car slid into the concourse and stopped by the kerb, Bill’s shaven head coming out to say: “Thought I’d scarpered to Runna-Runna, did you Michael? Can’t say I wasn’t tempted, but I never leave a mate in the lurch. Everything’s all right in the suitcase. All the notes add up. We’re in the clear.”

Moggerhanger was on his feet when I got back. “I’ll take the next train, now that you’re satisfied.”

“And you can expect me tomorrow, about midday,” I said, looking forward to a night in a London hotel with Sophie. “That’ll give us time to get our cash into the bank.”

He was irritated, as opposed to angry. “Stop distrusting me. It’s not valid, so late in the day.” He put out a hand. “No hard feelings, Michael. The time for that has passed, so we might as well shake on it.”

The gesture made me wary, and he noticed it. “Michael, you’ve nothing to worry about. If there was no honour among thieves how would the world keep turning?”

Nobody knew that more than he, so I took his hand, and assumed that everything would be all right. He looked somewhat older getting onto the train. “Serve him right,” Bill said. “I hope superannuation isn’t the worst thing that’s going to happen to him. We can go home now, and have a slap-up tea. Counting so much money’s made me hungrier than I’ve ever been, except for one time in Normandy when …”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I shouted, but joyful at our success.

“All right, so we pulled it off, the coup of our lives. But I shan’t go on. What a genius you are! Fifty thousand each. I can’t wait to begin spending it.”

I drove, because I found it relaxing. “Why not use a bit at a time, live off the proceeds?”

“Not my style, old cock. What if after six months I’d only got through ten thousand, and then one night I went to sleep and never woke up? Or suppose I got in a fight and was killed? Or say I went for a swim at Skeggy after a night with two tarts in a boarding house, went out too far, got cramp, and sank like a millstone? You know what the North Sea’s like at Skeggy. What then, with forty thousand still unspent in the bank? If there was such a thing as hell, and I went to it, as I surely would, my tears of regret would put all the fires out. There’d be the Devil to pay to get them going again, and I wouldn’t have the forty thousand to give him for the water bill, would I? No, Michael, what I want is a good time, and when I’ve spent every last tanner I’d rely on the Good Lord to look after his own.”

Who would want to argue against such recklessness? I’d turn Upper Mayhem into the Old Railway Hotel, I informed him, and earn more than enough to live on. Any profit would go into extensions. The signal box, for instance, I would kit out as a four-poster luxury suite, videos of steam trains available so that couples could plug them into the speaker system and fuck to the rhythm of the Flying Scotsman clawing the miles up to Edinburgh.

Then again, Sophie might pay her way into the business from her divorce settlement or, failing that, we could live on our pooled money for ten years in a Turkish village. But if she got the house in Italy with the divorce, we’d hole up in bliss till the cash ran out. And yet, best of all, surely, would be for me to exist in idle modesty at Upper Mayhem, the hotel business being too risky, and too much like hard work. I’d stay in Upper Mayhem for as long as the money allowed, and do any strong arm work that turned up to make it last longer. I explained these options to Bill, who kept his nose in the air and didn’t comment.

Clegg was watering geraniums by the waiting room, and on our telling him about the success of the venture he shook his head as if not believing we could have pulled off something so perilously clever. I felt the same, but spreading the money over the kitchen table we were all convinced the day had gone well. “Open two cans of Bogie for Dismal,” I said. “And how is Sophie? Is she up yet?”

“Up? She certainly is. She left an hour ago with her husband,” Clegg said. “He came here in a blood-red Mustang — a magnificent car, by the way — and after a rather loud argument she got in with him. He drove off with her like a rocket. I think she left a note in the bedroom.”

To call what boiled in my system bile would be just about right, though it was reinforced with an inner tantrum of murder, rage and grief. I could go on, except my mind wouldn’t click further into the thesaurus mode, before running two steps at a time up the stairs, almost cracking my kneecaps on trying to make it three so as to get a split second sooner at the paper.

“My darling Michael, I have to leave. Gerald insists. If he knew I was scribbling this he’d strangle me. Oh no he wouldn’t! But don’t despair, dear brother, I’ll see you as soon as I can, and we’ll be intimate again. Can’t wait. Love you, Sophie.”

Still incensed at such running away, I didn’t care whether or not I did see her again. At the same time I had to thank her for lifting me to a state of morale which had enabled me to deal so successfully with Moggerhanger. Then again, she had been responsible for my telling him I would drive his goods to Ealing, and I wouldn’t now be able to show her off beside me in the Rolls Royce.

“My aim in life is to have nothing ever happening,” I said to Bill when he laughed at Sophie’s deserting me.

Dismal snapped his jaws into a pile of disgusting Bogie, while we swilled tea and worked through a tin of custard creams. “It sounds as if middle age is getting at you,” Clegg said. “Things will always happen, especially to you, and you’re not old enough to wish they wouldn’t.”

Bill took up the last two biscuits. “If things stopped happening to me I’d know I was dead.”

“Yeh, but if you go on scoffing every crumb in the house like that we’ll have to shell out a couple of hundred quid at the supermarket tomorrow.”

“You’re worrying me,” Bill guffawed. “What will we do for money at the checkout?”

Clegg laughed so loud that only a hand to his mouth stopped his teeth breaking should they hit the teapot. “What neither of you irresponsible types realise,” he said, “is that it’s about time you settled down and had a family. There’s nothing like it to steady a chap.”

“I had three kids with Bridget,” I reminded him, “and then she left me.”

“Still, why not start again?”

I wondered who it would be with if I did. Kids by Sophie would have a hard time sorting out their relations, so I thought how perfect to have children with my beautiful wife Frances. She was too busy curing the ills of the world, but with a little encouragement she might be more than willing to cure mine. I felt lust and love for her, and pictured how magnificently sensual she would appear with a seven-month belly, far more so than any woman I’d known in that state. Bridget when pregnant had never had the delicate liveliness and intelligence I foresaw in Frances’s features.