Moggerhanger

Chapter Two

“There are more funerals to go to when you get older,” Blaskin was saying. “My appointment’s book is full of them, but I never go to any, in case I catch cold and die. I’m not much above sixty, but I crossed the good old River Rubicon a long time ago.”

In the beginning was the word, which he would sooner or later use to start a novel. Whatever word was put into his mind switched him into full spate at the sight of me in the doorway.

“People are cracking up so fast you’d think God had auctioned off His old fashioned single shot musket and gone back to the Middle East to buy a machine gun for a guinea. I’m afraid to open The Times and read the obituaries of those who have popped off at my age or younger. Or I’m terrified at finding my own obituary — though I should be so lucky — and then where would I be? I’d have to get up from my cosy study and find out who it was had killed me, so that I could kill him, then do the right thing and die.”

I sat on the sofa without waiting for the invitation. Nearer seventy than sixty, my father didn’t look much above fifty. Unlike most people, it was boozing, smoking, and humping young women that had stopped age crumbling him. He was tall and lithe, and not the man to get on the wrong side of.

I hadn’t called to hear about the dead and dying but to unload my troubles, if such they turned out to be, though I should have known that a walking penis like Blaskin would only hear me when he was ready, the drunken bastard so needing to whinge about his hard life as a novelist that he had neither time nor space for anybody else.

“Of course, God does scythe down the young as well.” He smiled at the notion, drawing red fire to the tip of a choice Havana, and giving the glass of five-star Napoleon a touch of his rubbery lips. “If he didn’t, a superabundance of the vicious young would kill too many of us off in our prime, in their scramble to get old and enjoy the durian fruits of age themselves. Life is a battlefield, and no mistake.”

As if even speech wore him out — though it never could — he lay back in his armchair, the folds of his Mandarin-style dressing gown falling around a long body terminated at the top by a head utterly bereft of hair. The long white scar down the middle of his pink scalp, which he swore came from a too close encounter with German shrapnel at the Gothic Line in Italy during the war was, so I believed, the hatchet mark of a maddened husband.

His lips and nose were large, forehead noble — to be fair — but his big ears hadn’t been serviceable enough to hear a jealous husband on the stairs, nor his blue eyes sufficiently acute to see him, before the unclothed woman by his side could scream a warning. He used the incident, properly disguised, in one of his immortal novels — as he liked to call them — telling how the husband had gone to board a plane for Hong Kong and, finding the departure time put back five hours, went home to spend it with his ever-loving wife. Catching her in bed with Blaskin, he went calmly to the kitchen for a sharp and shining cleaver, and came out to do the business.

Back from the hospital, bandaged like a mummy of Ancient Egypt, Blaskin consoled himself that he had lived through an unusual experience. The marks of a lifetime gave such a raffish aspect to his appearance that even young girls, out of curiosity mostly, wanted to get closer, and he had never been one to turn them down.

How long he would maunder on didn’t bear thinking about, and I could have waited more patiently had a drink been on offer but, from malice rather than meanness, his generosity was erratic. Him being my father it would be difficult flattering him into pushing the bottle forward, so I had to wait on my feet till his drawling smatter of tabletalk came to an end, and he looked up as if seeing me for the first time. I might have been a piece of driftwood instead of his only son. “And what, dear boy, brings you here, so close to dawn?”

Mabel Drudge-Perkins came from the kitchen with a beaker of powdered chicory for me, and a silver pot on a tray with cup and saucer for Blaskin, the aroma of his coffee suggesting the best mocha. Did she think I was the window cleaner, or the plumber? She got a nod, but no thank you.

Mischief in Blaskin’s eyes led to a touch on her arse as she leaned gracefully to pour for him. “How kind of you, my love,” he said.

She was in her middle forties, fair hair neatly bunned, cold blue eyes, straight nose, censorious lips, and sculptured bosom under a white blouse buttoned to the neck. Her lips were set in a curve of eternal disappointment, perhaps after a decade of living with Blaskin, because if his first purpose on earth was serial philandering, and the next an indulgence in writing novels, a third was to torment her sufficiently to make sure she would never leave him.

“Don’t go away, darling. I know you like your elevenses in the kitchen so that you can cool the coffee with your tears, but I prefer to have you with me now and again, and not only in bed. I’m a modern man, after all. Women’s Liberation rules my heart.” He turned to me. “As I hope it does yours, my one and only — or so I have to take your mother’s word for it — son.”

“Bollocks.” I admired his tomahawk parenthesis, and was not unpleased when Mabel’s left eye flickered at my language.

“You see, Michael,” he said, “it’s not done to use a swear word in front of a lady. The world is full of divine, courageous, energetic, beautiful, intelligent and self-sacrificing women, who are too often married — or otherwise associated with — brutal, ugly, unfeeling and treacherous men. It’s very sad, but that’s why, if you fall off the carousel of matrimony, it can be dashed hard to take up with someone again.”

Mabel watched her lover sip from the superfine Meissen cup. “That’s very true, Gilbert,” she said, with a glint of fight in her eyes, “so men such as you have to be careful, and not drive them too far.”

“The likes of me,”—her phrasing clearly displeased him — “were born careful, but this coffee, my love, tastes so good you must have put in a fair measure of deadly nightshade. You do excel yourself now and again.”

“Which reminds me,” she said, “isn’t it time you tidied your study? It’s in an awful mess.”

“Let it stay that way. Neatness is a sign of old age. As long as it’s in a state of squalor I know where everything is. Your passion for creating order out of chaos has cost me a novel or two in the past. Ever since we got together you’ve wanted to destroy me as a writer so that I’ll pay unremitting attention to you, and if it wasn’t for a beautiful foreign girl coming through the door now and again to talk to me about a thesis on my work I might forget I ever was a writer.”

A glint in her eye told me she might think that would be no bad thing, while I began to wonder whether there could be any paternal connection when he rattled on so cruelly, but my mother, meeting him again twenty years after the event, had persuaded me, and him, that such was the fact. Around the time of my conception she had been a factory worker, and more liberated than most women today, as free as dandelion fluff, with maybe a different lover every night — or so my grandmother had once said, thinking me too young to understand.

How Blaskin had been deceived I didn’t know. There wasn’t much physical similarity between him and me, yet I dreaded living till sixty and going bald. I was the same height, and might still inherit a scar down my skull. He and my mother were convinced I was his son, and perhaps it was true. Only the uncertainty was precious, but if I was, everything being possible, how could I be disappointed? Whomever I came from I was still me.

“Yes,” he said to Mabel, “I recall the heady days when I first got you over the bath and shafted you like the devil I was. Do you remember, my delectable ice maiden? Her scream, Michael, when she had an orgasm, sounded like another execution in Red Square. Then she said she hadn’t had one, to take me down a peg or two.”

“I hate you, Gilbert, I really do.”

“For God’s sake leave her alone,” I said.

He laughed, hardly on his worst form. “She loves it. Why does she sit there if she doesn’t? Oh, I know, she wants to see how far I’ll go, but curiosity will be her downfall. In any case, my delicious icing cake, you’ll be here forever. When we did a runner to the South Seas three years ago she tried to kill me, then got frightened at the notion of having nothing left to live for if I popped my clogs. So she nursed me back to health, and her sentimental attention almost put me back at death’s door. Being a novelist I know her better than she does herself, and she doesn’t appreciate the advantages of being so understood and affectionately cared for.” He tinkled the silver apostle spoon around the empty cup. “Whenever I hear your melodious voice, dear Mabel, my heart’s no longer a desert. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Something like that. I don’t know whether or not I love you, Gilbert, but you’re certainly a factor in my life.”

Though I didn’t like having such a grand seat at the Wimbledon sex war they made it hard for me to go back on the street and think ordinary peoples’ lives were more exciting. Strawberries and cream would have been a help. I recalled Geoffrey Harlaxton treating me to prime seats once, but here I was at a different match, unable to escape Blaskin’s Great Game playing before my eyes and too close to the insides of my ears. If this was how Englishmen treated their women I was as Irish as my mother claimed our antecedents to be. I knew I was different. I charmed women, made them laugh and feel wanted, looked on older ones as queens, and younger ones as princesses, so as to get any of them sooner into bed.

“Whenever,” Blaskin began coolly, which I knew he wouldn’t be for long, “somebody says you’re a factor in their life, especially your wife or paramour, tell her, in no uncertain terms, to spirit herself away and never come back.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

“Do.” He turned. “Mabel?”

“Yes, Gilbert?”

“I want you out of the flat for the rest of the day. I’m expecting a foreign research student in an hour, so go and spend a happy time shoplifting in Harrod’s. You’ve no idea how skilful she is at it, Michael. She takes a reticule, dresses like a Chelsea woman locked out of the Flower Show, and comes home laden with goodies. Nowhere’s safe in that establishment, from the furniture department to the food hall. I hope she’ll be caught one day and get put inside for a year, so that I can have a mite of peace. Trouble is though she would be in her element there, and set up a workshop for petty thieving in no time. But she’s too damned clever to get caught.”

“It’s fiction, Mr Cullen.” She blushed, as I took out a cigarette and waited for Blaskin’s next serve. “All fiction,” she said, though with such a smile I couldn’t take it for the truth.

“Oh no it’s not. She brought back that box of Romeo and Juliet cigars last week, which turned into scotch mist as soon as I had my hands on them. But to return to the topic of heretofore. Whenever I’m expecting a research student I contrive to be struggling with the vacuum cleaner as she comes through the door. She sees my sad attempt to get it going. I can’t even find the socket to plug it into, so the dear girl takes it with a smile of ‘Oh what can you expect from a such a great novelist?’ and ends by hoovering the flat more thoroughly than Mabel ever could, who’s English to the bone. Then, to reward my pretty little student, I fumble around the kitchen, as if to get something to eat. She gives a little tinkling laugh of disbelief as I put spaghetti into a saucepan with no water, and ends by cooking a wonderful continental meal, the sauce enough to melt the tastebuds. It’s not the watery soft cabbage, brown paper roast beef, rehydrated potatoes and tinned carrots I get from Mabel, who tries to outdo my old boarding school. Nothing like that. It’s a meal fit for a gentleman. I open a couple of bottles of choice wine, the label depending on her nationality, to encourage my gorgeous student further, and after the last delicious drops of her coffee we fall into bed for the best of desserts.”

“Every word he speaks is false,” Mabel said. “I can’t think why he doesn’t save it for a novel. It might be so much better there, though I doubt it.”

“He used it in the novel before the last,” I reminded her. “I’ve read them all, and it wasn’t very convincing, either.”

She turned from me and said: “Gilbert, I’m sick and tired of hearing you say such awful things before me over and over again. It bores and distresses me terribly. I can’t listen to anymore of it.”

I was ready to agree, and take her part, until she came close to the tears he so much wanted to see. “The next thing he’s going to say, Michael, is that I’m a lesbian.”

“I know she’s improving when she realises what I’m going to say next. But I only say such things to amuse her. A man who can’t make a woman laugh is the lowest of the low. Besides, darling,” he said to her, “you have such a wonderfully shaped behind to inspire me, like jelly escaped from its mould. Still I love you to madness, and you know it. I’ve never loved anybody else. There, what more can I say? In any case, you come from very good stock, a fact that means so much to me, such a line of nobility I’m sure your family has a long entry in the Almanac of Gotha.”

I couldn’t have stopped her. Nobody could. I knew what was coming and so, I’m sure, did Blaskin, who went on full red alert, though he was unable to prevent a real life happening that would certainly read well in a future novel. Wasn’t his popularity with readers based on the fact that he could always ‘make something happen’? Now he had. Perhaps it was what he had hoped for all along.

Mabel stepped to the tray by his side, lifted it high, and let all that was on it fall squarely over him. Cup and saucer, milk and sugar, napkin and spoon struck his baldness and ricocheted over the carpet. “There, you foul beast. That’s what you wanted, and now you have it.”

He pushed the tray aside. “You’ll only have to clean everything up.”

Her eyes were gleaming. “The student will have to do it, won’t she? If she comes.”

“Oh, she’ll come all right, much sooner than you ever did.”

“You never made me come,” she cried. “Never. You’re not capable of it.”

“I know. Only a lesbian could make you come, if she rowed you like a galley slave.”

She turned to me. “What did I tell you. I said he’d bring that up sooner or later.”

I made such a good spectator my neck was turning to rubber. If I could write a book, I thought, I’d put him in it, and make sure he died by the end. “Leave me out of it,” I said.

“I did make you come,” he said, “when I tried the other place, because you said that was what you wanted. You cried for an hour afterwards, out of guilt and the fact that you enjoyed it so much, and only stopped when I made you a cup of cocoa.”

“Scratch an Englishman,” she smirked, “and you find a Turk. We all know how true that is, don’t we?”

“Oh yes,” Blaskin smoothed the top of his head, as if the old scar itched from the grains of sugar, “people have been know to say I had a touch of the tarboosh!”

I admired her dignified restraint on saying: “It’s a mistake, Gilbert, to imagine you can get to know yourself through sexual promiscuity. That sort of thing is only for the beasts. Not that I think you have a real self, though if you did I wouldn’t like to know you. You’d probably be far worse than you are now.”

He took a propelling pencil and a miniature notebook from his dressing gown pocket. “Wonderful! Go on, my usually taciturn victim. Tell me more. It’ll fit very well into kickstarting a part of my novel.”

She arched her back to get full height. “I’m not a victim.”

“You are sometimes,” he said moodily. “And then, how victims strike harder when they do!”

“You have an ideal relationship,” I said, though my irony was, for the moment anyway, beyond them. “It’s like Darby and Joan.”

“Or Punch and Judy,” she said.

“Call it Box and Cox,” Blaskin broke in. “But she’s a difficult woman, Michael. She could only love a man if he satisfied her unfulfilled romantic yearnings, and I can’t do it because I never had anyone to practice on for when I met her.” He put a hand to his brow to simulate despair. “Oh God, but I’ve done my best to bring her to life.”

I gave Mabel high marks for self-possession when she said: “Please, Gilbert, I wish you wouldn’t talk in that way. I really can’t think you mean all you say. I’m sure you don’t mean it. You should be more dignified, and take yourself seriously.”

More than six feet tall, he stood against the hangings of the high windows, and put a hand into his breast pocket. “Whoever takes themselves seriously should never have been born, especially a novelist. Oh dear, why didn’t I save that for the thesis girl? What was it I said, Michael? I’ve forgotten already.”

I told him. He was eternally spouting cracker mottoes, though I kept the observation to myself. If I’d said a tenth as many hard words to Frances as he diatribed to Mabel I would have been booted out long ago, and quite right. Perhaps they carried on in such a way only to entertain their guests, and had rehearsed this session during the night for my benefit.

“Michael,” he said, “I can’t stand this life anymore. She’s killing me. The only relief is when I put in some work on my book, unless she’s thrown out what I’ve done so far into the Serpentine. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Everything to do with your work is precious to me,” she said. “You know that by now.”

“Then where’s the handwritten manuscript of No Poppies in Eritrea, my first book of poems as a young subaltern? I was looking for it last week, to drool over how good I was in my younger days.”

“I remember you taking it to Bertram Rota when you were out of funds.”

“Hell’s bells and buckets of Flanders blood! You don’t say? I can’t believe it.”

“I saw you put it under your coat.”

“What about my essays A State of Rage? And the novel I wrote under the name of Sidney Blood The Ogres’ Orgy? And Sonnets From Burnt Oak? I got the Wurlitzer Prize for that. I haven’t seen them anywhere.”

Her expression was sinister. “Gone. All gone. You sold them all.”

“What, even The Secret Journal of the Ladies of Llangollen?”

“That too.”

He clutched his head. “My heart’s breaking. I’m losing my grip on life, and you’re no help.” He turned to me. “She’s lying. She was probably drooling over the last one. You can never get the truth out of someone who’s trying to kill you.”

“I’m only doing it as your muse,” she said, “to encourage you. You can’t complain about that.”

“Let’s go into my study, Michael,” he said. “I’d rather hear what you’ve come to tell me.”

We left Mabel humming to herself and clearing up the detritus from the tray. His study was the largest room of the flat, all available wall space fitted with mahogany bookshelves from floor to ceiling, except for one section where a framed chart — at which I looked with fascinated concern — depicted the ages at which every great writer of the past had died, from Antiquity to Sidney Blood and Gilbert Blaskin.

“It was done by Mabel,” he said. “Her only work of art. She’s waiting to take it out of the glass and lovingly write in of my demise.” He turned it to the wall. “I took it to the dustbin some time ago but she brought it back. She swabs it clean of tobacco smoke every morning.”

“What a way to live.” I sat in the armchair, while he lay on the sofa staring at papers stacked on his desk, waiting for the will to go across and start work. “What are you writing these days?”

“I wish I could tell you. Two hundred pages done, and I don’t know what it’s about.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to my readers, but to me it does.” He opened a large wooden cigar box and gave me a tube. “Light up. It won’t kill you. I’ve been hoping they will me for years, but nothing does, as long as I go on working. I survived the war, except for a scratch or two, and am too old to die young, so God can fornicate with Himself. There’s nothing like a good cigar after coffee, except brandy perhaps. And so, my only begotten son, and bastard that you are, what can I do for you?”

“I’m not a bastard. Not that I mind, but you did marry my mother. Or are you a victim of Alzheimer’s already?”

“How can I forget her?” He went to the desk, and tapped out a word. “It’s a few years since I met her. Did she go back to that commune in Turkey?”

“The last time I heard, she was in Nottingham.”

“Ah! What a divine place!” He blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. “That’s where we fell in love. I was walking by the Council House one afternoon, and she came towards me, but instead of passing by she took my arm, as bold as brass. ‘Tommy,’ she said — I was a Second Lieutenant, but it meant nothing to her — ‘I like you. Let’s go into Yates’s and have a drink.’ We fell madly in love, even before we got to our second glass. What black passion! There’s no love like the first, Michael, and the first is always the last.”

“And I was the result?”

“You were, my boy. You were born after I left. I was already in North Africa. But I never forgot Nottingham and your cavalier young mother. She would lead me into that little grubby house and, whenever there was time, and there always was, we’d go at it even before she got out of her overalls. The more she reeked of disinfectant from the factory the more I liked it. Life hasn’t been the same since, except in my novels.”

“It’s so long ago, though.” I thought about my early affairs in Nottingham, when I’d had spiky Claudine Forks, and shafted Gwen Bolsover who I hoped was also pregnant when I left. “I’m surprised you remember it.”

“All the past is like yesterday,” he said, “no matter how far off it seems.”

“Have you written about the time with my mother?”

“That would break the spell. We can’t throw magic away like that. There are some things that even novels don’t deserve.”

He didn’t believe that for a moment, and I expected to see all the details soon enough in print. He went back to his desk, to type a phrase this time. “So why are you in trouble? I want the whole truth, so help me Ghengis Khan!”

White and curving vampire teeth seemed to grow out of his jaws. I had called for an hour, not to talk about my life, which was mine and mine alone, but to delay getting home, when I’d have to tell Frances I’d been thrown out of the agency. I explained to him nevertheless that I’d lost my job and why, no reason not to, it didn’t matter to me, and in any case it was my notion of good breeding to pay for the mouthwash coffee, the cigar and, such as it was, the entertainment. Having a father still alive at my age might be a bore, but it had its obligations.

He leaned at ease. “Fact is, no son of mine ought to have a job. It’s undignified. Shows lack of style. It’s bad taste. I’d be ashamed to meet him on the street. I never had a job except in the army, but that was soldiering. You come from too good a line to have a job.”

“But you have one.”

“Writing?” He laughed. “If anybody asks me what I do I tell them it’s not work, it’s a crucifixion, but I certainly don’t use that ghastly word. No, you’ll have to pull yourself together and support yourself some other way. Jobs are for those with prolish souls.”

“My mother worked in a factory.” He warranted a smack across the chops. “Was she a prole?”

“Certainly not. She only did it during the war.”

He was right. To my knowledge she hadn’t done a stroke since. I too thought nine to five work was anathema, proving in some way that he was my father. Why I had let myself be steered into a job I’ll never know. Geoffrey Harlaxton had flattered me about the efficacy of my lies, after I had stopped him being all but murdered by his wife for his carelessness with other women. And Frances might not have married me if I hadn’t shown some enthusiasm to become employed. So when offered a job at the advertising agency I said yes, because how could I resist her glistening eyes beneath those gold rimmed spectacles, winking me towards a walking yet very delectable doom?

He reamed his cuticles with a paperknife. “Tell me what you intend doing.”

“I’ll take a fortnight to think things over. I’ll get in my car, go on the road. I can reflect while driving. A spot of aimless motoring will be the best way to flush that crooked advertising agency out of my system. I’ll go to Nottingham, and see how my mother is.”

The point of the paperknife pricked his tender flesh. “Oh hell!” He leapt up. “Now look what you’ve made me do!” His pain and anguish was a rare treat. “For God’s sake,” he said, “if you do see your mother, don’t encourage her to come and call on me.”

“I thought you still loved her?”

“I do, no doubt, but I don’t want her around my neck. I’m approaching the age when I can have all the women I want, but the trouble is,” he added mischievously, “so is she.”

I would say he was longing to see her, that he couldn’t live without her, and that if she descended on him and seduced Mabel he deserved no less.

“On your way out,” he said, “tell Mabel to stop sulking in the kitchen and bring some bandages to staunch this blood. It’s a task she’ll enjoy. I do like to give her at least one treat a day.”