A Start in Life

Part Three

A catchy tune was playing all over London, and I don’t remember the name of it any more, not even the tune itself. Sometimes it half comes back to me, but before it can turn fully on, I blot out my mind and fight shy of it, as if I really don’t want to remember. It was a gay, jumpy, tuneful, deathlike-trancelike tune which seemed to be everywhere, livening up the wet winter, and giving people a reason for thinking they were alive. But conductors and window-cleaners whistled it, hummed it, thrummed it on their bells and buckets as if determined to prove themselves made of flesh and blood. I first heard it on the Tube train from Hendon to King’s Cross. A long-haired youth had a transistor radio, and it broke into my speculation as to what I should do now that I had reached the smoke.

In spite of losing my car, things weren’t as bad as they might have been. I had a hundred pounds in my pocket, and supposed most people came to London with less in their wallets than that. It felt like a fortune that would never run out, to be lived on in affluence for endless weeks. I found a hotel beyond the station, that was full of old ladies and foreign students, where I could get a decent bed and breakfast for thirty bob a night. My name was Donald Charles Cresswell, and I gave my address in the book as 11 Stoneygate Street, Leicester. Why, I don’t know, because I didn’t even feel I was doing it till I had (which is always the case), though I considered only a minute later that it might one day come in useful.

My room was the smallest space I’d ever been in on which a door had closed. There was a bed, built-in wardrobe, chair and small table, and above in the ceiling was screwed a one-candlepower bulb. It really made you feel welcome, but I was in such high fettle at being in the big town at last that after a wash and brush up I went down the stairs whistling the same one-eyed tune I’d already heard with such scorn.

The counter clerk asked what time I’d be back as I handed him the key and I said: ‘Why, will I get locked out?’ and he stared at me as if I wasn’t playing the game by popping that uncivilized question.

‘No sir, but if you come in past midnight you’ll have to ring the bell.’

I thanked him very much, and stepped into the burnt air. A woman asked me to go with her but she didn’t look much good, and I thought I ought to be a bit wary of these London tarts in case she had the shirt off my back and gave me a dose of the Baffin Land clap. It was only yesterday that I’d been to bed with Claudine first and Miss Bolsover second, and that would have to last me for a while, if I weren’t to call myself greedy. Also I was flayed out with tiredness, and reckoned only on a short walk in the surrounding streets before going back to my matchbox for a hard-earned kip.

I said goodnight to her and wandered till I came to a place to eat. A cat slept in the window, but the meal was good enough, considering the price. While I got stuck into my stew, an old grey-bearded ragbag came in selling almanacks, and I bought one, giving him half a crown and telling him to keep the change. His brown eyes glinted out of all that bush: ‘Thank you, sir!’ he said, with the heaviest sarcasm I’d ever heard.

I could have kicked myself that such goodness of heart had been spurned by the bug-eaten old bastard, but by the time I was ready to throw a sharp crust of bread in his face the door rattled and he’d gone. As I chewed through my minced-up mutton and cat I wondered where he’d come from, and a low feeling gripped me when I thought maybe he left Nottingham forty years ago full of hope and promise. Perhaps he’d worked well at a good steady job, but then he’d felt the strain and taken to having a few drinks now and again. He’d got into bad company, overspent, embezzled, been sent to prison. Then his wife left him, his kids grew up not knowing him and disappeared, and he’d gone from one job to another, bad to worse, beer to meths, sleeping under bridges and on waste-grounds, walking the streets with a sandwich board on him, and finally he’d taken to pubs and cafés selling almanacks so that he was known to everyone, a bit contemptuously, as Almanack Jack. I shook off the black mood and ordered coffee, the best part of the meal, and from a good long swig I looked up to witness the return of Almanack Jack.

There were three other people in the place, but as luck would have it, he shuffled up to me: ‘You look as if you could do with a bit of advice, hearty.’

I held out my hand: ‘Going to read my palm?’ He stood by my table, tall and hefty, and not at all as old as I’d thought him at first sight. ‘Sit down, and have a cup of something.’

‘Tea,’ he said, ‘and a piece of bread and butter,’ when the waiter came over. He stank rotten, so I lit a cigarette. ‘You’re too generous,’ he added.

‘How else can you live?’

He sat down and faced me. ‘I’ve known lots of people who know how. In this piece of bread you can see the greatness of God. It gives power to nature. There’s no other way I can put it.’

‘I don’t believe in God.’

‘Neither do I,’ he said, ‘but I believe in the power of bread, and that’s the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. I like to feel the greatness of God in my belly.’

‘You’re welcome,’ I said. Hoping he was a vegetarian, I added: ‘You can have a piece of meat as far as I’m concerned.’

‘I’ll dwell on that,’ he answered. ‘Meat is the Devil, and bread is God. But since man is compounded of God and the Devil at the same time, and I don’t deny my truly human nature, then I’ll take you up on your kind offer.’ He snapped his fingers for the waiter with such experienced aplomb that I began to see a reason for his looking so healthy, and well built. He ordered stew and rice, and when the waiter brought it I asked for another coffee.

‘I don’t suppose you get much of a living flogging almanacks.’

He smothered his volcano with salt: ‘Enough. How much do you think a man needs if he isn’t God?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, lighting my last Whiff.

He looked ruefully as I crunched the packet up. ‘You can live on much less than you think,’ he said. ‘I buy my almanacks at fourpence each, and mean people give me a tanner, while others pay a shilling. Occasionally I get half a crown. I have been known to get a pound from someone who mistakenly feels sorry for me.’

‘You seem to have got yourself a nice little corner,’ I said, realizing that he was no fool, because the longer he talked the more the educated edge to his voice came through. His beard was not so much grey, as reddish-ginger, and it was obvious that in fact he couldn’t be a day over forty-five.

‘Not that it adds up to what a young fellow like you might call a good wage, but it gets me a room and a few simple eatables.’

‘Don’t you feel a bit of a shitbag though,’ I said, ‘not doing a hard day’s work? You’re living and scrounging on the backs of those who sweat their guts out, and that’s the truth.’ A piece of stew got tangled in his beard, and I wanted to pick it off and eat it rather than see it go to waste by falling on to the floor as he shook his head violently from side to side. I felt that he had no right to waste even that much food, the idle bastard. Then he gripped it in the pincers of a piece of bread and put it into his mouth.

‘You think that, do you? And why not? If you didn’t I wouldn’t be eating this meal at the moment, and that would never do. My existence like this is only possible because people like you believe in doing a fair day’s work. That’s putting it mildly, though. You see, ninety per cent of people are of such low intelligence and intellectual perception that they’d go crazy if they had no work to do. Let me show you the system, dreary and accurate though it may be. The vast teeming majority couldn’t exist without work. Their spirits would shrivel up, their bodies would perish. You need vision to be idle. But at the same time they want to hear that one golden day in the future they’ll only have to do ten hours’ work a week — but that right now civilization will go under if they don’t pull their weight.

‘It certainly will when they only work ten hours a week, and thank God I won’t be here to see it, because it won’t happen for another three hundred years. The first government that allows it will have revolution on its hands in five minutes. Oh, no, the longer and harder they work the better. That’s what people want, though you’ve got to tell them they don’t want it and that it’s a bore just so that they’ll go on doing it. God dreads idleness, you goddam bet he does, and with good reason. He’d better, otherwise the world will be full of Nimrods shooting up arrows to drag him down from his golden fur-lined palace. And it’s not only factory, farm, and office slaves who must sweat to keep alive. No, it’s also doctors, artists, lawyers who wither if they don’t get enough to do. You have to have a particular, peculiar, God-given bent to exist without work. I’m a great benefactor of humanity, because though I’m often a bastard in my behaviour I’ve never been as much of a bastard to actually deprive anyone of work by joining the task force myself. I deliberately abstain in a great spirit of self-sacrifice, even at the risk of destroying my own character. It’s an experiment I’ve been carrying on for a few years now, though not for so long that I can see how it’s going to end or who is going to get the ultimate good from it. Oh no, don’t think my life’s an easy one, though I suppose I like it, otherwise I’d change it.

‘If those who felt like me (and there are quite a few of us) suddenly decided to demand jobs, the social structure would collapse. Maybe that would be no bad thing according to certain people, but I’m no revolutionary. If ever any government threatened me with work I’d put on my dark glasses, take up my stick and kidnap a dog, tie a label on me saying “Blinded by Work”, and tap my way to the nearest seaport so as to make my getaway to foreign parts. I’ve no desire to take any man’s job, which is most likely his only reason for being on this earth at all. And if you’re appalled at the unparalleled extent of my self-sacrifice, maybe you’d like to make amends by buying me a cup of that marvellous Turkish coffee they sell here.’

‘How could anybody refuse after that little talk?’

‘People do,’ he said. ‘They’re vicious at times. Don’t think I made my decision to run this kind of life lightly. I didn’t. I was forty, in the prime of life, with a wife, two kids, a big flat, a mistress, two cars, a country cottage, as well as being near the top of my job in textile designing. It was a very comfortable and satisfying existence for the type of person I was then. I didn’t even feel that because things were so perfect there was nothing left in life for me. My decision to turn the other cheek wasn’t that shallow. But immediately I made up my mind, from one minute to the next, that the present life was no good for me, then I was a different person, and it was no longer satisfying, but a torment until I began to change it. The only thing I regret was not doing it the easy way by making the break clean enough. I was a liberal-humanitarian, so I did it by stages, thinking that this would be more effective, and that it wouldn’t allow me to change my mind, and that it would cause less pain all round. I wasn’t very strong-willed, you might say. My faith at the beginning wasn’t too strong. It had to develop, through the fire. So within the space of a few months my domiciles had come under the hammer, my wife was in a looney-bin, my children were in care, my mistress was having psychoanalysis, my job was filled by one of the hungry generation with sharper teeth than ever before, and I was in hospital with double pneumonia. But I knew that when the dust settled everybody concerned would be able to live the life they’d always wanted to lead.

‘It’s always better to act. Never stifle what you feel to be a fundamental impulse. If it causes chaos, so much the better, because maybe the right sort of order and happiness will arise from it. It can never come out of anything else, and that’s a fact, my friend. You look young and inexperienced enough to believe all I’m saying and maybe to benefit by it At least you deserve to, because I’m enjoying this coffee, even the mud at the bottom. Will you be in here to eat tomorrow night? If you are I’ll buy you a meal.’

‘God knows where I’ll be. I’ve got to start looking for a room in the morning.’ I felt at the bottom of a pit, dying from lack of sleep, so I paid my bill and trudged back to the hotel.

I must have got to sleep because it was suddenly morning, and when I looked at the fine-faced ticker-watch nicked from Clegg, it was nine o’clock. I dressed, dragged a razor over me, and went downstairs for breakfast.

It was a good meal, and I stuffed everything into me within reach, so as to get my money’s worth, and to save buying much for a midday meal. I shared a table with a melancholic blond Scandinavian from a town called Swedenborg who said he was writing articles on London vice dens. He had no appetite, so it was double toast and butter for me. He grumbled at not being able to work, because at each vice den he succumbed to much that was offered, which meant that he didn’t get back till dawn and had no time to crank up his typewriter and compose his piece. I couldn’t spend much sympathy with him, but wished him better luck, lit up a Whiff, and went out.

It was a raw morning, and though it was foul I liked it because it was in London. At the nearest newsagent’s I bought a street atlas and a copy of the local paper, two pieces of literature to see me through the day. It felt good to have my legs working again, and I was determined to walk them back into shape, for they’d grown soft in the glorious weeks of having a car. At Russell Square the ache was so sharp at my calves that I considered jumping a Tube to Soho, but gritted my toes and traipsed on, pausing now and again for a flip at the map. The girls looked lovely in their muffed-up coats, and fine sharp noses turned in the air. My eyes said good morning to each one passing, but a frosty nip was darted back as if even their cunts were cold.

The smell of the city was like Brilliantine and smoke, chicken and iron filings, and I fed on it as I walked along, even smiling at the curses of a taxi driver when I nipped too sharply on to a pedestrian crossing. You couldn’t take your rights too much for granted here, I thought, and was even glad of such cold comfort, for my backbone was made of optimism. Two million people were in their factories, shops, and offices, all endowed with the heavenly privilege of work, as Almanack Jack might have put it, and here was I for the moment at least cast in the mould of idleness that only their massive labour made possible. The very idea of it made me want to stop at the nearest bar for a cup of coffee, but what I wanted most was a piss due to the monstrous amount of tea I had put back at breakfast. I didn’t know a soul in London, and that as much as anything made me love it. With so much money I felt like a prince. I’d saved up to squander it in just this way, and to worry about it seemed more unnecessary than ever as I found a place on Tottenham Court Road to unload those pots of tea in.

That first day I walked and re-walked the whole middle area of London, and by the end of it, when I headed back in the direction of the hotel, I knew that it wasn’t as big as I’d always heard it was. The next day I did the City, and for a fortnight, till my money was near enough done for, I got familiar with most of the sprawl. At first the far-off places were known only from the Tube scheme. If I was at Bond Street and wanted to go to Hampstead I looked at the underground map and said to myself: ‘I’ll get on the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road, then turn left on the Northern Line, and go up until I see Hampstead on the station label.’ Often I’d fiddle my way down by bus until, eventually, if some foreigner (or even Londoner) stopped me in the street and asked where a certain place was I’d be able to tell them in five cases out of ten. This made me feel good, and was all very well but, as the dough ran low, it didn’t tell me how I’d latch on to any more. Not that I was obsessed by this, because I felt if it came to the worst I’d be able to do something like Almanack Jack, or get a job for a week or two, until something more money-like came along. What it would be I had no idea, and didn’t much care, because exploring this gigantic and continuous prairie of buildings during the day, and wandering around the West End like the Phantom of the Opera until late at night, didn’t leave much time or energy for serious speculation. In other words I was living the full life because I felt no real connexion to what went on around me. If I had, or began to, I should become buried in it and wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. Which was why I clung as long as possible to my arduous free wandering.

Opening my map one day near Leicester Square I saw a good-looking blonde girl coming down the street. As if puzzled and halfway lost I spoke when she drew level, asking if she could kindly direct me to Adam Street. ‘Unfortunately not,’ she said. ‘I’m not familiar too much with London because I come from Holland.’

‘Sorry,’ I replied, ‘but I thought you might have been able to tell me. You look like a typical London girl to me. I’m a stranger here as well, because I’m from Nottingham. I’m studying there at the university, doing English Literature. Watch out, or that car will take your arse off. Pardon me, it’s only a colloquial expression. I’ll explain it to you if you come and have a cup of coffee. I’m down here for a few weeks, staying at a hotel, but my mother is coming to see me tomorrow to make sure I’m not getting into mischief. It’s going to be a bore showing her around, but she insists on keeping me under her thumb, so what can I do?’ Just when she was beginning to find my gamut had a bit of a hook to it, she noticed that we were standing outside a strip club with framed photos hung up of bare women whose faces you couldn’t see for their breasts. From the pious distaste on her face she might have thought I’d try to drag her inside, drug her, and rumble her off to a miners’ club in Sheffield. So I put on an honest, half-bewildered expression, folded my map, and took her by the elbow.

A few minutes later we were sitting in the Swiss Centre having cakes and coffee. ‘You a student, then?’ I asked. She wore a nice white blouse with a brooch at the neck, looked icy and demure, the last person it seemed possible to go to bed with, so why the hell had I picked her? She blushed, though I didn’t know why, and said: ‘I’m working in this London, as an au pair girl. But I’m also studying to make my English fluent.’

‘That’s hardly necessary,’ I told her. ‘Your vocabulary dazzles me. It scintillates.’ My only chance of maintaining hold of her was to keep the talkpot boiling with words that she understood but hardly knew the meaning of. If it was English she wanted, English she would get, and since I was born talking the lingo, who could give it to her better than old Jack Spice? I said how perfectly good her English was, while at the same time using words in such a way that she thought she’d never heard them before. ‘My family dwell in a mansion-hall near Nottingham,’ I went on, ‘a place my mother had me in, with its own hallelujah-garden where an old monk chapel once stood, and where we used to see silent films as kids. A private tutor taught me, up to the year of twelve, and then I was sent to a boarding college, though I kicked up the hot dust of hell because I didn’t want to be pitched out like that. But our family is bound by the steelropes of tradition. That’s England all over, and also what’s wrong with it. There was no gainsaying them. Yet it had its advantages, because me and my three brothers, as we came of age at fourteen, were taught to drive in a dual-controlled Rolls-Royce in the private grounds, which was a useful experience. That training Rolls has been in our family for generations.

‘The more you know me the more you’ll hear about my family, because families are like iron in this country, very important, worse luck. I’ve been wanting to kick mine off like a salty boot for as long as I started to dream, but it’s no use. In any case what’s the point? When I’m twenty-one in three months’ time I’m going to get a quarter of a million in sterling cash, and a tax-free income of fifteen thousand pounds a year. So it’s hard to let that slip out of my hands. Not that it would worry me if I never got it, because I’m quite capable of being independent and earning my own living. In fact I’m seriously considering giving my money, when it’s due to me, to the Charitable Organization Inching Towards Unspeakable Suffering — otherwise known by its initials as — well, anyway, it’s such a scorching brain problem with me, my dear, that its intensity sometimes threatens to trouble my studies. However, I imagine people do have worse worries, though I can’t visualize what they are, because this certainly seems real enough to me.’

I spoke such as this, and more, not in a swift, manic, lynx-eyed way, but slowly and mellowly, as if throwing it off in a familiar drift, casually, blowing out nasal cigarette smoke and sipping my coffee. I told her my name was Richard Arbuthnot Thompson, but that I was called Michael by my friends, when they hadn’t cause to use my initials, but within an hour she was tearful and wringing her hands over my dreadful dilemma of whether or not I should accept my share of the family fortune and be imprisoned within it for life, or whether I should be poor, independent, and territorially unsung. I knew which side she’d come down on in the end, if we knew each other that long, but I let her get all deliciously upset over my nonexistent problem because it drew us together like liquid dynamite. In two hours, and a different café, we were gazing into each other’s eyes while our cigarettes burned low and our vile coffee got cold. I said that in case I did repudiate the family coffers I was already practising the holy art of self-abnegation, and though I’d be delighted if she’d eat with me, it had to be in Joe Lyons at no more than five bob a head.

So we had lunch, and I told her how much it meant to me, having found someone who actually had the greatness of mind to understand my problem and not laugh at it. Then we went into the National Gallery (free) so that I could show her what pictures were fakes, because the real ones existed in the northern wing of Nondescript Hall, which was the name of my family and ancestral home. The more I posed at being noble, the more noble I felt, and it occurred to me that you are what you tell yourself you are, not what other people tell you that you are. You’ve only got to insist loud enough, and the clouds open to let in the sort of sunshine you’ve always been looking for.

Later that afternoon my new-found girlfriend, whose name I made out to be Bridgitte Appledore, said she had to go to the house she was working at because a night of baby-sitting had been arranged. Such had been my all-day gabble that she’d told me nothing about herself, but I hoped that would come later when I’d got more of a toe-hold into her confidence.

She worked for a doctor and his wife, who lived in a big place near the BBC. When they’d gone out she came down and let me in, and up I went by lift to the fourth floor.

I’d not been into such a flat before. It was so rich it didn’t even smell rich, but was full of good furniture and paintings, books and carpets. Bridgitte told me to sit in the living-room while she put a few finishing touches to the little boy of six who still crowed from his bed. I poured a cut of the doctor’s whisky and relaxed on the long deep settee, half listening to the inane story being read to the kid, who interrupted every phrase. I spied a box of Romeo and Juliet Havanas, and lit one — a far cry from a common Whiff — with a heavy effective lighter which had a solid base of pure silver. I was tempted to put it in my pocket, but for the time being resisted it, not knowing Bridgitte well enough to betray her. She might give me away if I nicked something so early on. But I was boasting to myself in even entertaining the idea of making off with such a thing, because I wouldn’t know where to sell it without getting caught. In any case I never had been and never would be a thief because I considered that there were better methods of making your way in the world than stooping to that. I just contented myself by taking half a dozen more cigars.

She came in from the kid’s room, hot-fer-dommering in Dutch that little Crispin had jumped out of bed and shat on the floor just to annoy her. He did it almost every night and she’d found no way to stop him. She’d told the doctor and his wife but they’d laughed and said it was only his cute little way and that he’d grow out of it soon. Meanwhile she had to be patient with him. There wasn’t much else she could do because the job was easy, the pay high, and the flat in the middle of London. She came back from the kitchen with a bowl of water and a bundle of cloths, a cigarette in her mouth to stop herself being sick at the mess. ‘Is he still awake?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes. He likes to look at me cleaning it up.’

‘Let him wait,’ I said, ‘for a few minutes. Sit down and finish your smoke. Let him go to sleep before you clean it up. If he misses the show he might not bother again.’

‘You’re so clever, Mr Thompson,’ she said, but halfway through her cigarette Crispin called: ‘Come to me, Bridgitte. My room smells awfully. I can’t go to sleep until it’s clean.’

‘Ignore him,’ I said, pouring her some whisky.

‘I don’t drink,’

‘Try it. It’s good for wiping that up.’

‘Perhaps you are right.’ She took a little, but made a painface over it. Then she swallowed more, and finished off the glass. I poured her another.

‘Come in here,’ Crispin shouted. ‘If you don’t wipe my shit up, I’ll do it again.’

‘Go to sleep, you little — ’ I shouted.

‘If you don’t come and clean it I’ll tell Mummy and Daddy there’s a man in the flat, then they’ll send you away, Bridgitte.’

I went in to look at him, an angel standing up gripping the bedrail, a long white nightshirt covering down to his feet. He had a thin, well-formed face and ginger hair. I went back to the living-room. ‘They call him Smog,’ said Bridgitte. ‘On the night he was expected they couldn’t get his mother to the hospital because it was smoggy, so he was born in the ambulance car on the way there.’

He began to cry. ‘Come and wipe my shit up. Please. I’m tired.’

‘You don’t live here,’ he said, when I walked into his room. ‘Are you a burglar?’

‘No, I’m a plumber. I’ve come to fix your windpipe.’

‘What’s a windpipe?’

I noted where he’d done his mess. ‘You’re a very intelligent child,’ I said. ‘Very clever indeed to do it down there.’ Girding my stomach I got on hands and knees and put my face close to it. ‘What’s this in it?’ I asked, in a pleasant voice. ‘Oh dear! It’s full of half-crowns. My God, it is, and all.’

He leapt off his bed and knelt by my side. ‘Where? Where?’

‘There,’ I said, ‘can’t you see ’em?’ His face went close and I gave it a push so that he fell right into it. Bridgitte came running in at his scream. ‘You’ve got a bit on your face!’ I said to him. ‘What a thing to do to yourself. Bridgitte, get him into the bathroom and clean him up. He won’t do it again. Will you, Smog?’

‘You fool,’ she said.

I sat down for another drink, and in ten minutes she came in to say that Smog was fast and peacefully asleep. ‘He’ll not do it any more in such a hurry,’ I said. ‘You see if I’m not right.’

‘If he tells his parents,’ she said, half a smile coming back to her, ‘I won’t be here to see whether he does or not.’

‘Plenty of other jobs. Perhaps Mother could find a place for you at Nondescript Hall. I have a brother who needs looking after just as much as Smog, and more or less in the same way — from time to time. He’s ten years older than me and his name is Alfred. Had a nervous crisis at twenty-one because he couldn’t face inheriting so much money either. It’s the disease of our generation. Slashed his wrists, took fifty Aspros, and put his head in the gas oven, but the cook found him and snatched the pillow away because she couldn’t bear to see it getting dusty on the floor because she used it when sitting down for her tea or elevenses. So Alfred woke up with a gurgle, and then she saw the blood and called my mother, who gave her a minute’s notice on the spot and phoned the family doctor, who brought Alf round and kept the whole thing quiet. Alf has the constitution of an ox, like most of our family. Tough as nails, all of ’em, except me — and it’s one crisis after another with people like that.

‘I had tuberculosis at sixteen, and it took a year or two to get over it. Now I’ve got this question of conscience coming up, and I don’t know what to do about it. But let’s not get stuck too much on my troubles. I’m sure you’ll be as right as rain now with Smog. You can come up with me to the Hall if you get the sack. We’ll tell Mother we’re engaged to be married if you like. It won’t make her very happy, but she’ll have to take note of you. I’ll also introduce you to Alfred. When he’s lucid he’s the most charming fellow in the world. Spends most of his time rowing around our own lake and fishing in it. He catches so much that Mother’s thinking of opening a canning factory for him — tinned pike and salted minnows from the Dukeries. Good for the export trade — go all over the place.’

Her large round blue eyes were turned full on so that I continued jabbering till they dimmed a bit, then I reached over, and kissed her. I was surprised that she glued her lips on to me. From that moment the wagons rolled. We wriggled around that opulent sofa, shedding our clothes like mad animals their skins. We fell on to the floor, and when I was well into her juice-tunnel, the telephone shattered my erection as if it had been made of glass. But she wasn’t put off by it, and I managed to stay in her and set myself going again. She reached for the phone with one hand, and held my shoulder tight with the other. ‘Hello?’ she said, over my grunts. ‘Yes, it is. Dr. Anderson is out. Do you want to leave a message? You phone in the morning? All right. I’ll tell him.’ Then she began to gobble me up inside, and dropped the telephone as she fell back.

Later we sat in the kitchen to eat cornflakes and jam, then bacon and eggs. I was lucky to be in such a well-provided household. I pulled her up from the food, dancing belly to belly and back to back to Dr Anderson’s hystereo music in the living-room. She was out of breath and laughing, then stood rigid when Smog appeared at the door, looking at us with tired but curious eyes. ‘Can I do it?’ he said.

‘Go back to bed,’ said Bridgitte sternly. ‘You’ll catch cold.’

‘He wants a bit of fun just like the rest of us, don’t you, Smog?’

‘Of course.’

‘All right, get that shimmy off,’ I told him, ‘and we’ll all dance together.’ In spite of his dirty habits, and I hoped he was cured of at least one, he was a good sport, and hop-trotted between us both to Dr Anderson’s unique collection of bongo tunes. Then he sat high on my shoulders, licking a spoonful of honey while I slid around to his shouting and laughs.

‘Will you come tomorrow, because I like you?’ he said, when we’d got him on the high stool in the kitchen eating scrambled egg. ‘I like dancing, and music, and midnight feeds.’

‘If you’re a good lad to Bridgitte, I’ll come here often.’

‘If you don’t, I’ll tell Mummy and Daddy.’

‘It’s not midnight,’ I said, ‘but you’d better go to bed or your parents will be back, and if they catch us, it’s out in the street for all of us.’

He made a face as if to cry: ‘Even me?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but we’d look after you. You’d come with me and Bridgitte.’ He laughed, and said he hoped his parents would catch us in that case, but Bridgitte slipped his nightshirt on and carried him against her bare breasts to his room. When she came back the party was over, so we got dressed and cleared up the mess. Exchanging telephone numbers, soft murmurs of undying love, we finally let each other go.

The manager at the hotel started to trust me, so that instead of paying my bill every three days, it was all right now if I left it for as long as a week. He was thin and pink-faced, and what was left of his fair hair was also thin — the sort of a man who would have been melancholy and sad if he hadn’t gone into the sort of job where his living depended on him being bright and cheery. He called me Mr Cresswell, and seemed mystified by by comings and goings. One night at the bar I bought him a double brandy and gave him a Havana cigar I’d lifted from Bridgitte’s place, and from that point on we were as friendly as his job would allow him to get. I didn’t tell him anything about myself, saying I was down on business for my family, which involved a bit of research at Somerset House. This impressed him, so he left it at that, giving me a wink now and again to hope that things were going well, as if we were in some secret together, or he thought I might be coming up for a lump sum in a will. It was hard to say what he thought, for it seemed to me that the less words passing between us the better, and the more nudges, hints, and winks, the closer I’d get to winning his confidence.

Dr Anderson led a busy social life, and I was able to see Bridgitte nearly every night. In our carefree rapture we humped around on the matrimonial bed, though it needed all our stern persuasion to stop Smog joining in. As long as we promised to let him come in the kitchen afterwards he didn’t mind, happy to lay on his bed playing with bricks and rockets. But once he strayed out and stood in the doorway while I had my arse in the air, and later I had to tell him what we’d been doing. Bridgitte turned away laughing as I explained about playing at love — which was what grown-ups often do. He wanted to know if Mummy and Daddy did it too, and I said I expect they did now and again, because it’s also a way of making babies. Then I had to tell him how babies were made, and he took to me for this, sitting affectionately on my knee while he thought up other intelligent but embarrassing questions. When he finally did go back to his room he went to sleep happy. Bridgitte hadn’t done any wiping-up work since I’d rubbed his nose in it, and whenever I saw him now there was something about his earnest, unprotected face that made me feel sorry for him. I wanted him to grow quickly to be eight years of age, safe out of this vulnerable age. I knew he was all right in the way he lived, but nevertheless I was impatient and wanted to be sure, to see him suddenly older, with his face maybe cruder and tougher against the world, his body more stalwart.

There were only a few pounds left in my pocket, so I had to get out of the hotel. I owed a bill of about ten days, though this put me in some danger because I had nowhere near enough funds to pay if the manager should demand it. As far as I could make out he never slept, which maybe was why he was so thin. Even when I came in at midnight or later he’d be sitting behind the desk, and whenever I got up early in the morning he was sure to look in through the dining-room door while I was having breakfast. The idea of getting out unseen with a bulging suitcase seemed impossible.

The day I chose for my lift-off was very cold. I sat at breakfast with the Scandinavian journalist, and wondered how I would be able to say goodbye to him without betraying my intended flit. This was out of the question, so I just made polite inquiries about the article he was writing on sex and vice in London. The work itself didn’t seem to be going well, but he was nowhere near so melancholy as he had been at first, because he had become totally immersed in the subject itself. He preferred to live, he said, rather than write. It was cheap in London, but he was sending home for money till he had exhausted his subject, or until the subject had exhausted him. He’d been a different man of late because he now consumed the whole of his breakfast and, on occasion, had even tried to encroach on mine. The more his cheeks sank, the more he stooped when walking, the more he ate, the happier he felt. I asked what place he found so convivial in London that he liked so much, and he told me about The Golden Frog, so I said I might see him there some night. ‘I’ll buy you a girl,’ he said, a wide thin-lipped smile as he reached out for a piece of my toast. ‘Myself, I sometimes have two girls. Better.’

‘I always thought you were a bit of a Turk,’ I said.

In my room I stripped off and started to put my luggage on. There were three sets of clean underwear, which padded me fairly well so that I’d at least save another shilling if the gas ran out. Then there were my three best shirts, which was awkward, for I could barely fasten the buttons of the top one. Luckily, walking such distances over the last month, not to mention my antics with mistress Bridgitte, had thinned me down a bit, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. It was more difficult to get on two pairs of trousers. The first I fastened into my two layers of sock, and drew the second over them. The zips didn’t quite come up to the top, and when I tried to stand up from sitting on the bed I fell back again. Sweat was pouring off me, and it all seemed doomed to fail because once I got in the fresh air, if I ever did, I would be sure to get triple pneumonia. I pulled myself up by the bedrail and felt my face puffed out like a red balloon. Then I almost wept, because my shoes had still to be put on, and I’d have to sit down again for that. But I pulled the chair over and jerked my foot on it. This was by way of an experiment, to see whether it could actually be done, and when I saw that it could, I slid my foot down again. As the shoes were on the floor I let myself subside gradually to them, holding the bedrail and bedleg to stop a bump on to the threadbare carpet.

So far so good. I smiled at the achievement, reaching for a shoe. That was easy, but the next step was to get at the foot, when my arms and legs were encased in wood. The shoes were several paces away, so I rolled on my side and crawled, till I held them triumphantly in my hands. This, I thought, pondering on how to get them on, is real life, a test of ingenuity that one might be asked to do at any time in the future. It’s as well to get it over with, to suffer the experience once. The first time is always the hardest, I’ve no doubt of that. I could too easily have given the whole thing up, gone out in one set of clothes and abandoned the rest, but with tears of effort and frustration I was knotted in the stomach with the obstinacy to get one shoe on at least. I could always hobble to the Tube station. I smiled with relief. I would get the other one on as well.

There was a knock at the door. Faces flashed through my mind: Claudine, Miss Bolsover, my mother, Mr Clegg come for his watch back, Bridgitte, even Smog to ask more questions on how babies were made, all or one of them at this crisis of my life intent on passing the time of the day. ‘Who is it?’ I croaked.

It was the voice of the Scandinavian: ‘Kundt,’ he said. That’s what his name always sounded like to me, though I’m sure he wasn’t one — certainly not more of one than I was.

‘I’m washing at the sink. Stark naked,’ I cried. ‘See you later.’

He opened the door and walked in, looking down at me: ‘Oh, you’ve fainted, Mr Cresswell. I’ll tell the manager to get a doctor.’

‘No,’ I said, trying to smile, ‘I’m all right.’

‘You look all crimson.’

‘Put my shoe on,’ I said, ‘and I’ll be eternally grateful. But close the bloody door first.’

He did so, and laughed. ‘You Englishmen wear too many clothes. Not like the women. They have very little. I get too quick to it’ While he talked about submissive English women he rammed my shoe on and tied it, then lifted me upright like a slab of timber. He sat down. ‘I’m in love with a woman,’ he said, as if holding back gallons of melancholy tears, ‘and she went away last night. I didn’t know I was in love till this morning, and I want to write her a letter. You can help me with that.’

‘Why don’t you just go to her?’

‘She’s with her husband. But she’ll be back in a week.’

‘Your English’s good enough to write a letter,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know, Mr Cresswell, but I want to talk to you about it.’

‘I’ll see you at the Tube station at ten o’clock,’ I said. ‘We can have a cup of coffee over it.’

‘All right. I’ll go now, and wait for you. But first I must shave and need one razor blade.’ I told him to take one and he went away smiling.

The next thing was to get two jackets on my back. The sleeve-lining of the second one tore, but they both fitted more easily than I expected. I put a pair of socks in each jacket pocket, and my razor and toothbrush in the lapel pocket. Finally I got into my overcoat, put a scarf casually around my neck, and pulled on woollen gloves. Over all, on top of my head, was a cap. The great problem was: how to move? I walked across the room like a wooden dummy, and fell down. I was so padded that it caused no real noise, but I was far from the bedrail and had no way of getting up. The doorknob was close, so I got a grip on that. I heaved slowly, going up the door like a great fly, and almost made it, when the knob came off and I fell back with it in my hands. This is a pretty kettle of fish, I thought, instantly checking my blind rage. The next nearest thing that caught my eye was the sink, which had strong-looking steel supports underneath it. I took off my gloves for a better grip. If this is life, I thought, then roll on death. The sweat of it seemed to be already pouring off me. I’d always thought of myself as being strong, but it was an impossible job to get back on my feet, which it was essential to do if I was to walk free and unfettered from that hotel. But I weighed enough to cause the sink to slowly ease itself from the wall and hang by a thread on its curving bars just above my head.

I slid back in despair, crawled around the floor like a dog that had lost its bone. By the bed I sat up, then swung myself on to all fours, then on to my knees, then, by using the good old faithful bed once more, I gradually escaped my dreadful impasse. I stood, free and upright. My gloves were on the floor, but with grandiloquent contempt I decided to forget them. In any case it might look more natural if I sauntered nonchalantly through with my hands in my pockets. But could I saunter? I could only walk like a monster newly created by its master, stiff and wooden, looking for some innocent to crush or strangle. This was no good, for I had to get myself out of that place looking more or less as I did every other morning.

I spent half an hour walking up and down the room, keeping the window open to get cold air in. The effort was awful. I felt as, if I had no limbs at all, as if they’d been shot away in war, and I was a hero who had been given artificial limbs of the crudest sort, but who with fiery indomitable courage was sweating out his life in order to walk and work normally with these limbs, only to get back into his fighter plane and shoot down more German bombers. It was a real man’s life right enough while I was doing this, and after the first ten minutes I was drawing in strength and self-control I never thought I had. What was London and all the world doing while I was locked in this totally absorbing struggle? I didn’t know, because only I was concerned in it. After twenty minutes I seemed to be getting close to my ordinary walk, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted it to be more than good in case I was tempted into a too optimistic assessment of my skill. I could take no chances, and knew it was my insistence on this that separated me from the run of people who might by now have given up. Not only were part of my earthly belongings at stake, but my honour and self-respect had got involved as well, to such an extent that I’d never recognized them in this way before.

As a last gesture of bravado, when I was all set for a perfect going away, I picked up yesterday’s newspaper from the table, folded it under my arm, and strutted out. I whistled the crazy jig-like empty-brained tune that everyone else was whistling, locked my door, and stepped down the corridor. I hadn’t reckoned on the stairs, and felt my laminated interiors creaking and groaning like the timbers of an old ship as I took the steps as quickly as I could without capsizing. The manager at the counter greeted me in his usual friendly manner. ‘Off again, Mr Cresswell?’

‘A bit late today,’ I smiled, ‘but I had a report to write.’

‘It’s a hard life,’ he quipped.

‘Some have it harder,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back for dinner.’

‘Oh, I have a bill for you,’ he called as I turned to go out. ‘All made up.’

‘I’m off to the bank,’ I said. ‘Settle it when I get back.’

He smiled. ‘No hurry. Just ask for it.’ I laughed at his good nature, and he wished me good morning again. Then I dropped my newspaper.

I gripped my panic by the throat and forced it back. Because I was heavily enough dressed and must have weighed half a ton, I pushed it under the coat rack with my foot. ‘It’s yesterday’s, anyway.’

He hadn’t seen it: ‘What did you say?’ — looking up.

‘It’s cold this morning.’

‘Bitter,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a bad winter, they say.’

At the first stationer’s shop I bought sheets of brown paper and a ball of post-office string, meaning to reach a toilet where I could change, and make my surplus padding into a transportable parcel. It was later than ten when I stopped outside the Tube station, but Kundt was no longer there. He waited for no man, not Kundt, for time was precious to him. He was on his own ship and caught by a storm that made him sweat and that never let up. Every meaningful tick of time counted as he hatched and planned the delicate machinery of his gadabout life, which was probably wilder than any in London, so I knew I shouldn’t have him bothering me when I zombied in my crude way up to the station map.

I travelled as far as Leicester Square, and couldn’t sit down because of the crush of people. Neither could I get my arm up for a bit of helpful straphanging, so I was bumped around when the train stopped and started, and a man in a bowler hat swore I was knocking into him on purpose. ‘If you want a punch-up,’ I said, ‘follow me when I go out. If you don’t, shut your arse-tight mouth.’ He looked at me, but finally didn’t brace himself to taking me on, which is just as well, for I was so boarded up he could have pushed me over with one finger.

I came out of the gents carrying a big parcel and wearing my normal quota of winter clothes, feeling as if I were dressed in tissue paper. I shook and shivered and walked quickly, though I had nowhere to go. The double clothes had protected me, and now I was back on the Earth from Space, a babe unwrapped in the biting frost. I went into a phone box and dialled. A child’s voice answered: ‘Who is it?’

‘Put Bridgitte on,’ I said.

‘She isn’t here.’

‘Listen, Smog, this is you-know-who. Get her for me.’ I heard him laugh, and the phone clattered down. When Bridgitte came I asked what the score was for that night. ‘They’re staying in,’ she said, ‘so I can meet you somewhere.’

‘Make it the Cramborne, at six exactly,’ I said. ‘I’m having lunch with Mother. We’ve got to decide what to do about Alfie. He burned down the canning factory and sank his boat. It’s the straitjacket for him this time as far as she’s concerned, but I want to talk her out of it. I don’t believe in that sort of thing. By the way, I’ve changed my hotel. Mother came last night and made me leave. Said it was too sordid. I liked it, but what can you do?’

‘You have a marvellous life,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go now because Smog is kicking me. He’s pushing a hairgrip into a light socket.’ There was a click and our talk was over.

I breathed and walked better at having come back into the world as a thinner man. As I struggled in that small toilet to get my surplus off, it felt like being born, bringing the real meaning of freedom home to me. I regained a narrow contact with people who were also thin, and was able again to walk on the streets with reasonable speed and flexibility. I wandered into Soho, and passed by the Clover Leaf. I’d called there in the last month hoping to see a friendly familiar face in the form of Bill Straw, but there’d been no sign of him, and Straw by word of mouth seemed not to exist. Of course I hadn’t for a minute believed that to be his real name, because no man with such a past would be daft enough to give it. I supposed him to live, like myself, under the sky of his own flimsy lies, but only to make himself easy to know when he talked to other people. He used lies to explain himself, not to hide behind, and I knew that to begin such a process as this, one had to falsify one’s name.

It was more of a casual look than a search, some thread to remember as I walked around, that still took me back to the Great North Road. One night I dreamed about that car journey, coming down in an old-fashioned charabanc with a dozen other people, and Claud Moggerhanger in his private silver-sided bomber flying above, diving time and again till we were running through fields and the bus was a flaming ruin in the middle of the road. My dream-slime was trying to make a complete past of that day’s journey, and it was as if only something so crazy could explain the greater splintering of now.

I sipped black coffee, and wondered what news theatre to kip in until meeting Bridgitte at six. But I couldn’t bear sitting in popcorn and spit, fag ads and Flash Gordon, so walked around more streets. When I was flush for money I hadn’t the courage to descend the cellar of a strip club, but now that I was on my last few legs I didn’t hesitate, paid my membership fee and entrance fare, and sat down with a score of other deadbeats, most of them middle-aged, or foreign tourists out to be shorn like the sheep. A tart tried to get me to buy her a drink for us both, but I just sat tight waiting for the fun to start. The audience was muttering and shuffling, but the management were hoping to pack more in. Another reluctant youth was pushed down the steps, and then a dash of music from a concealed speaker marked the opening of the curtains. A wall behind had a notice on it which said: ‘Miss Felicity Lash, Beauty Specialist for Ladies and Gentlemen.’ One of the men in the audience let out a high sort of squeal, then an elderly girl came on wearing clothes of a hundred years ago. There was a bed by the wall, and when she’d straightened it neatly she began to undress. I was half asleep, but when she was naked a fire started in the building, and a fireman in full rig came in. They began a bit of parley in mime, and he pointed to the flames when she didn’t want to come with him. She panicked and screamed but he gave her arse a couple of smacks, at which she quietened down and winked at us all as he carried her off over his shoulder.

That was the first half, and it bored me so much that I would have left, except for the fact that I had nowhere to go. I think it was more of a show for women than men, though the men around me enjoyed it in a mild sort of way. In the next part a well-brought-up young girl was reading a book that looked like the Bible, and it seems that, as they say, her thoughts wandered, because a few feet away, in another part of the room, a man and woman were undressing each other. She became more and more excited at this, and eventually closed her book and reached for a candle, with which piece of tallow she started to toy with herself.

The only interesting part for me in all this was the girl of the couple who were stripping each other, because I had seen her before — and not very long ago at that. In fact she had sat in my car for several hours coming down the Great North Road, and it was none other than June. I sweated under the fact of recognition and couldn’t wait for the show to end. When the lights went up I called one of the waiters and said I’d like to buy that wonderful actress a drink. He said he’d tell her, and that she’d be out in a minute, but would I buy one in the meantime for him? I told him to drop dead, but he indicated that he wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. So I said in that case he ought to come upstairs and we’d fight it out outside, but he ignored this and said that if that was how I felt I needn’t buy him a drink, and that he’d tell Miss Booth anyway, and that he wouldn’t take what I said in bad part because judging by my voice and language I was no more than one of the boys in the place.

June came through a curtained doorway, and was led to me. ‘Oh,’ she said, knowing me immediately. ‘I thought it was a millionaire, and that my fortune was made.’

‘I hope you recovered from the car ride,’ I said.

‘Almost,’ she laughed. ‘I was shattered for a week though.’

I felt glad to see her, almost, on my side anyway, as though we’d been through death together. She was the last plant I had smelled out of the North, and now the first flower I had met in London — not counting the Dutch tulip. She had dark hair held back in two strands by ribbons, and a blouse tied in a knot at the waist, leaving a bit of bare skin between that and the short skirt. ‘How’s your little girl?’ I asked.

‘She’s wonderful. Goes to school in Camden Town. My flat mate meets her in the afternoon, and I take hers and mine in the morning. It works very well.’

‘Sounds intelligent. My mother was that sort of woman. Still works in a factory.’

‘I’m on again soon,’ she said, ‘but stay around. I’ll tell the boss you’re a friend. We don’t get crowded at this time of the day.’

‘By the way,’ I said, before she could dash off, ‘whatever happened to Bill Straw?’

She turned her saucer-eyes on me:

‘Who?’

‘The bloke you travelled down with.’

‘Him! Oh, my God. I’ll tell you about it later. So don’t go yet, will you?’ She had me on the hop, and there was nothing I could do but stay. When a story was in the offing I was all ears, like a man in chains. One listens, another talks so that nobody else can get a word in edgeways, and up to now I fit into the first bracket. The worst bother takes place between those who listen and those who talk, because the one who listens all the time is sly, and the one who talks all the time is over-confident, and if they ever come to grips, or when they do, it’s the Devil take the hindmost, with the listener never able to properly lose, and the talker never capable of really winning.

But my cogitations broke at the touch of a boot, because during the next performance a man sitting two seats to my left started shouting the show was a cheat and he wanted his money back. ‘They’re whores,’ he bawled, about June and her companions, standing up as if to charge on to the tiny stage. ‘They do these things better in Manchester, anyway.’

The manager got to him before I did, and was knocked through the curtained doorway like a shot skittle. I pulled the heckler from behind, gripped him in a half-nelson, but even so I was almost hauled like a flag up the mast of his back, could feel my arm giving and my feet trying to lift off. But I held, and gripped, and whispered in his big left ear that he should calm down or it would be the worst for him because they had Jack the Ripper on their payroll who would sell him to Pastrycooks Incorporated for making into meat pies when he’d done with him. I let go, and his whole body slumped. By this time another bouncer, borrowed maybe from the joint next door, came running down the steps. The manager was with him. What had happened to the girls behind the drawn curtain I did not know, and was just beginning to wonder when the huge man from Manchester straightened in one sudden movement.

‘You bastard!’ he cried, so that everybody heard it, and shattered me with a body blow as well.

At the sound of that cruel word my heart and stomach stayed intact for a vindictive comeback, and I slammed him so that his whole bulk dropped away and tripped on a chair. He spun like a tombstone against the manager and his bouncer friend, falling on top and putting them out till they could heave him off and get free. When he did, I remembered his insult, hit him again so that he was knocked out cold. They screwed twenty quid damages from his wallet when he came round, otherwise they’d get him to the copshop, the manager said — a tall, thin old-school-tie bloke with the right accent. Then he came back and thanked me. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I thought the drunken bastard was going to get at the girls, that’s all.’

He brought me a drink, while the show went on: ‘Do you want a job? All you do is stand around the place. Twenty pounds a week. We’ve been short of a man since we opened. You’ll have to be okayed by Mr Moggerhanger, but you’ll pass, on my recommendation.’

I gagged at the name, but asked in a cool way: ‘Do you get many fights?’

‘A few,’ he said, very reticent. ‘But it’s not too exciting on the whole.’

I wondered why not. ‘When do I start?’

‘You’ve started,’ he laughed. ‘If that was your audition you passed with flying colours.’

June congratulated me: ‘You’ll be all right working here.’

‘I’d better take the job, then,’ I laughed. ‘It’ll be somewhere to leave my parcel.’

‘I wondered whose it was,’ she said.

‘It’s my luggage. I’ve got to find a room by tonight.’

She gave me her address: ‘If you can’t find one, you can at least sleep on the floor — under the gas stove in the kitchen it’ll have to be.’

‘You’re very kind,’ I said, not too keen on such accommodation. I’d never been brought as low as that before.

‘One good turn deserves another,’ she said, biting me in half. The manager’s name was Paul Dent, and I told him I’d start at two the next day if that was all right by him. He said it was, so after hanging around another half-hour, I got out on the street, feeling a free man because I’d left my parcel down in the club. All the same, I didn’t like the idea of having to work for a living, because that wasn’t what I’d come to London for, though there seemed nothing else for it at the moment. Almanack Jack wasn’t the only one who believed in fucking up the system. He might have been right down in it as far as his neck, but I intended to earn a living out of it as well if I could. In his confused brain he was still so chuffed at having made the bloody and ragged break from his former life (and who could say that it wasn’t a pack of lies he’d told me?) that he couldn’t see like I could that all he’d succeeded in doing was cutting his own throat, so that he was already more than halfway back there.

I met my delicious Bridgitte at the place and time of our telephone choice. We sat in the pub, she at tomato juice and me with a brown ale, and I saw that tears were about to drip from those luscious blue eyes that shone with a prick-stiffening mixture of depravity and innocence. ‘You must tell me,’ I said, when she didn’t want to. ‘After all, I’ve confided in you entirely. All the intimate secrets and scandals of my family. If Mother knew, she’d go pig-crazy. But she doesn’t,’ I laughed. ‘So drink up, my butter-love, and have another dose of that intoxicating fomentation.’

‘It’s nothing, really.’ She smiled. ‘The doctor’s wife went away for a couple of days, and last night Smog came into my bed. He sometimes does, for warmth, and when he’s asleep I put him back in his own. But before I could do so, the doctor walked into my room, and pulled the clothes right back off me. He thought I was alone, and I don’t know exactly what he wanted to do. But he got a shock to see Smog curled up against me with his thumb in his mouth. He was full of anger, and dragged Smog up in the air like an animal and carried him to his own bed. Smog was screaming all night, but I couldn’t go out to him because I know the doctor would have got me, so I had to stay behind my locked door with Smog crying and the doctor playing his bongo music. I think he is more insane than his patients. This morning at breakfast he told me if I didn’t mend my ways I would have to leave. So I think I must start to look for another job. But I will see if anything happens tonight. If it does I shall go from there.’

‘When’s his wife coming back?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she left him.’

‘Is he going out tonight?’

‘I don’t think so. Otherwise I would have stayed in. He’s writing in his study.’

‘I’ll go back with you, and get into the flat. I’ll stay in your room and protect you. I know that sort of person. You can’t trust him. He’ll rape you and cut you up. You’re in England now. There’s a long tradition of that sort of thing. You remember I told you about my brother Alf? Well, he had a psychiatrist at one time who used to come to the Hall. Got quite friendly with the family in fact, and was liked by everyone, especially my mother, so that he became almost a resident headshrinker. One night he made a vicious attack on a sixteen-year-old cousin who’d come to stay with us. Fortunately, the gamekeeper saw him and raised the alarm. But it was a close call for her. You’ve got to expect it. They’ve all got a touch of the Rasputin in them. Otherwise they’re nice people. I’ve got nothing against them at all. You’ve just got to be on your guard if you’re a simple girl staying in their house. So it’d be best if I stayed with you.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘It may be that his wife will be back tomorrow, and then there will be no more danger. But if you get in all right, how will you get out?’

‘We’ll cross that barbed wire when we come to it. The main thing is to see you right. Nothing else matters. I was supposed to see Mother later on, but it’s not too important. She’ll be at the solicitors’ till quite late because they’re old friends, but I needn’t be there if I don’t want to be. In fact I think she’d rather I wasn’t, but she was too polite to say so. The trouble with her is that she’s shouting fiercely at me one day, and the next she’s so tactful and considerate. It’s difficult, but I suppose we all have others’ foibles to put up with.’

She touched my wrist: ‘I love you.’

‘That makes me very happy,’ I said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

At half past ten we went up in the lift to the flat. I took off my shoes, and followed her inside. She walked along the corridor to her room. All the lights were on, and I highstepped after her. She closed the door. We’d made it. The excitement of getting secretly in with the doctor only a few doors away in his study made us turn spontaneously to each other with relief, and we made love there and then on her single but firm bed, a bit of a bang that got us both into a sweat, even though we stripped to our ribs. I lay back smoking while Bridgitte went to let Dr Anderson know she was in, her intention being to cover a large food tray for us in the kitchen, and bring it back. I lay with my knees drawn up, a Dutch newspaper opened on them like a lectern, trying to read the swaddled and complicated words. Even backwards they didn’t make sense, so I took a pencil and fiddled with anagrams, till I’d worn out three fags and realized that my sweetheart had been gone too long for my good, and possibly for hers. So I slipped on shoes and opened the door, seeing the lighted corridor and nobody in it. There were pictures along the wall, of a Scottish castle wrapped in a muffler of mist, then one of a tall façade of Glasgow slums on washday, then a picture of an English cottage. At the front door I bumped into a hat-stand and made such a clatter that in two flips I was back at Bridgitte’s room. ‘What do you want?’ said a little voice I knew so well.

‘Don’t you ever sleep, you little bleeder?’

‘I don’t bleed,’ Smog said. A door snapped open, so I pulled him inside. ‘I want a cigarette as well,’ he said, scratching himself.

‘You can’t smoke. You’re not seven yet.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for Bridgitte.’

‘I expect she’s sitting on Daddy’s knee,’ he said, innocently.

‘Does she often do that?’

‘Only when he pulls her on.’

‘Oh,’ I said, relieved, ‘does he pull her on often?’

‘Only when Mummy isn’t here. She doesn’t like it. That’s why she’s gone away. I think she’s gone into hospital to get a divorce.’

‘Is there anything you don’t hear and see?’

‘Not much,’ he said.

‘You know, Smog, I think I like you.’

‘I like you,’ he said.

‘So will you go to bed now? Bridgitte will be cross if she finds you here.’

‘Are you going to dance tonight?’

‘Your daddy wouldn’t like it.’

‘That’s because he can’t dance.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said I, ‘give us a kiss and go back to your room.’

He sat beside me on the bed. ‘It’s so boring there. I like to smell smoke. But not cigars. They make me choke.’

‘Go and see where Bridgitte is.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘Daddy will see me. He said he’d destroy me if he saw me out of bed, but he was only being funny.’

‘Wait here till I come back then. Don’t move an inch.’

I went out along the corridor, looking into every open door. Bridgitte stood by the kitchen stove waiting for coffee to boil. I went by without her seeing me. The next room was lined with books, and a man sat writing at a desk. He had a round, pale, irritable face, with a bald head and a small moustache. Wearing a bow-tie and no jacket, he looked sober and studious, as if set for an all-night stint. By his arm was a tray with teapot and cup on it. I was about to move when he looked up and saw me: ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Just passing by.’

‘Well bloody-well pass out or I’ll call the police.’

‘I’m Bridgitte’s boyfriend.’

‘Oh, are you? Well I suppose that’s different. You’d better say goodnight then and be on your way.’

‘Is it in order,’ I said, ‘if I finish my cup of coffee in the kitchen?’

‘Do what the hell you like. Only close my door. I’m busy.’

I shut it, and went back to Bridgitte’s room. ‘You shouldn’t wander around,’ she said. ‘The doctor might see you.’

‘Never. I walk too quietly.’ There was salami and cheese, pickles and jam, black bread and coffee, as well as a cigar she’d brought out of the living-room. Smog joined us in the feast: ‘Are you going to get married?’

‘We are married,’ I said. Bridgitte blushed, as she might always have done in front of Smog, but didn’t.

‘You aren’t,’ he said. ‘But you make babies, though.’

I lit my cigar. ‘Let me know when you’ve finished, then we can tuck you up nicely in a coal scuttle. Not this one, either. Go on, get down.’ He grumbled, so I sat him on my knee till Bridgitte had done with her supper.

She came back from putting him to sleep: ‘I don’t think there’s going to be any big peril from the doctor tonight, so you can go to your mother if you wish.’ This wasn’t much to my liking, for it meant kipping down in June’s flat under a perfumed gas stove.

‘No. I’ll stay. You never know. I took a peep at him just now, and he seemed in a very agitated state. Unless of course you don’t mind taking a chance on being all alone with that brain butcher.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Please! You can stay.’

Paul Dent was right. Life at the stripperama wasn’t all whisky and kickshins. I went at two in the afternoon, and left about one the next morning, with a couple of hours off about tea-time. There was no saying how long I’d stick it, possibly as long as I didn’t get used to it. There was an occasional punch-up, which was the part I liked least. Not that I was afraid, though any sane person might have been. I just didn’t fancy ploughing like a charge of lightning into some stupid bastard who was either so insane or drunk that he could also get fleeced for ten quid because of non-existent damages. Yet that’s what some of them wanted when they came into the place, a punch in the gob, a knee in the groin, and then the added jolt of paying actual money for the underground pleasure they’d gone through. In that way they didn’t lose on the deal. Their next move after leaving the club was to go to a prostitute and have the job finished off. I made up my mind to quit as soon as something equally aimless came along.

After a while I stayed with Bridgitte all night again, and told her the sort of work I was doing. The doctor had gone out, to see his mistress, and Smog was sleeping soundly after an exhausting day at school, and five tantrums since teatime. ‘I parted company with my mother today,’ I said, lighting up a Havana, ‘and I feel good about it. I’ve given up everything, my fortune and all connexion with the family. She wanted me to sign papers but I flung them in her face. I couldn’t ponce on the working class for ever, live off land and property. For, my one and only heart, it just wouldn’t do. Of course, Mother was furious, because it went against everything she stood for. It was unprecedented. No one had ever done it so blithely before. Even poor Alfred had gone mad rather than do a thing like that. She threw that in my face as well. It was hell while it lasted, but I stood my ground. The upshot of all this is that I’m suddenly without a roof over my head, without money. But luckily I got work this afternoon helping out at an entertainment club that an old friend of mine is running. It isn’t much, and it’s long hours, but I’ll be able to keep my independence and that’s all that matters to me now. In actual fact I know I could get a couple of thousand a year off Mother whenever I liked, with no strings attached what-so-absolutely, but even that I don’t want to dirty myself with.’

I was beginning to feel that Bridgitte must be a bit mentally deficient because she believed everything I said, until it occurred to me that perhaps I was a good liar. But I was only a good liar to her, and maybe this meant that we had fallen just a little in love for them to be so effective. It was that feeling of trust we had in each other that made the lies I told so unimportant.

I went to the club every day, but got more time off the longer I worked there, and this bettering of my conditions made me less keen to give the job up, though I was still determined to. The other bouncer was Kenny Dukes, who’d been a middleweight boxer in his younger days. But now he was gone to fat and viciousness, with pink skin and half-bald fair hair, smelling of scent and immaculately dressed. The girls who worked there were afraid of him, though he had an air of gentleness, almost tenderness, about him. I could imagine he kept canaries, reared them with great love, but only for the pleasure of breaking their necks when he was in a temper about something he thought the world was trying to do to him. Then he could have a good cry and feel a new man after it. June said he was afraid of nobody but Claud Moggerhanger, but then, she added, everyone was afraid of him, though she personally didn’t know why because he was always charming and courteous as far as she was concerned.

‘He was the man who tried to run my car into the wall when I was coming into London,’ I said. We sat in a pub when some of our time-off coincided, both of us with a brandy.

She laughed. ‘I know. I knew it then, but didn’t say anything. He was only trying to run you off the road as a bit of a joke because he saw me in the car.’

‘Christ,’ I gasped, ‘what’s he to you?’

‘He’s my boyfriend.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not afraid of him, I’ll tell you that. If I see him on the road again and I’m in a good-sized car I’ll try to do the same to him.’

‘It was his idea of a bit of fun,’ she said. ‘Honestly. Anyway, he’s the man you’re working for now. He’s a good person, even though he has got a bit of a name in this area.’ Since he was her boyfriend I couldn’t say much more against him, so I shut my trap on that topic.

‘You remember Bill Straw?’ she asked. I nodded. ‘Well, when we left you a broken man at Hendon, he came to the Tube with me, and insisted on seeing me back to my flat in Camden Town. I told him not to, but he wouldn’t take no as a warning, and when we got there, Claud was already waiting, sitting inside. Bill tried to kiss me at the door, and when I told him not to be so stupid he pushed his way in. Claud stood up and came towards him. Bill’s face turned into a whited sepulchre when he recognized him. He stood gaping, still holding my valise that he’d kindly carried for me. Claud took out a couple of half-crowns and gave them to him as if he was a porter, then pushed him gently through the door so that he fell on his back. I haven’t seen him since.’

I couldn’t help but reflect that it served that Bill Straw bastard right, after he had so gleefully left me in the lurch with my ruined car. ‘I expect he’ll turn up,’ I said. ‘He was hoping to lay his hands on a few thousands in ready cash when he got here.’

‘I hope he doesn’t show his eyes when Claud’s around,’ she said. ‘He’s very possessive. He might even get upset if he saw me in here with you, but not so much because he knows about me getting that lift in your car. He doesn’t like me to have any other boyfriends, though he doesn’t care how many girlfriends I have. In fact I think he actually gets a kick out of it, the bloody Turk!’

Talk of the devil, and a few days later Claud Moggerhanger came into the club to see that all was going well. He saw me standing at the door, and recognized me, I’m sure, from the hard stare he gave. I met it, and sent it back. Ten minutes later the manager tapped me on the elbow to say that Mr Moggerhanger wanted to see me. ‘What for?’ I asked, sharp of voice.

‘I don’t know,’ he said on the way down: ‘Maybe he’s got work for you.’

‘I’ve already got some.’

‘You’d better be on your best behaviour,’ he said, so pale and serious that I laughed.

Moggerhanger filled the cubby-office, and you could tell he owned it. ‘I remember you, Michael. Do you remember me?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I got a good look at you.’

‘Well, Michael, we’d better get our relationship all correct and right from the very beginning. I think I can trust you. At least Mr Dent tells me I should be able to. Also, as I already know, you’re a good hand at driving a car. I’m going to let you into something personal: my doctor says that my ulcer is playing up, and though I enjoy driving, he advises me to get a chauffeur. I’m offering you that job — providing you’ve got a licence and haven’t any convictions.’

I was going to tell him he needn’t worry about that, but he lifted a hand full of rings and said: ‘Shut up and listen to me. First of all, you call me sir. OK? Then you have a room at my house in Ealing. Right? Then you get the same pay as you’re getting here. Agreed?’ I’d had no time to say anything, but I did get a brief nod in now and again. ‘If you consider this in the nature of a promotion,’ he said, ‘we’ll get on fine. I don’t ask much, except superlative driving and absolute loyalty. That means no talking. See all, hear all, and say nowt. A loose lip means a cut lip. I only let the silent sort of chap close to me. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good,’ he nodded. ‘A lad like you might go a long way.’ And that was that. I’d become the personal chauffeur to the biggest and richest racketeer in town.

Mr Moggerhanger fixed me up with an attic room at his big house in Ealing. My quarters, as he called them, were a room with a sloping ceiling against which I continually bumped my head, unless I went around doubled up like a collier. There were a few oddments and throwouts of furniture spaced about, which were enough for me. The floor was bare boards, covered with jagged splashes of white paint where some maniac had decorated the walls and let flip with it everywhere.

As soon as I got there Moggerhanger told me to take out the Bentley and drive it around for an hour to get the feel of it. It was like driving somebody’s living-room. You could almost stand up inside it, and touch it along at over a hundred miles an hour when you dare. I had no other thought in my head when I’d lifted off except to keep it unscratched and in one piece. My main aim was to have it out on the A4 and into the country, because I didn’t want to run it against too much traffic on my first hand-in. I acted gingerly, until I found that its acceleration and speed, not to mention its presence, overawed most other drivers. All I had to do was flash straight for a souped-up sales rep in his new Cortina as if I were intent on smashing him to bits, and he’d get out of the way sooner or later. Sometimes it was later, but he slid from my path nevertheless. The only danger was those people with foreign cars, owner-occupiers who were so convinced of their superiority over anything English that they were insane or fanatic enough not to get clear under any circumstances, and in that case I had to pull back. But I didn’t hate them for this, for in many ways they were right not to give in just because I drove a Bentley, which was after all somebody else’s.

When Moggerhanger sat in the front with me, he made remarks as if he were at the wheel himself. ‘Go on,’ he’d say, ‘step on it and you’ll get across before the lights change. Overtake that Cooper. You can see the bastard thinks he’s God Almighty. If you keep on, you can flatten him as you turn the next corner, get him up against the kerb.’ At night, when we were coming back from his ranch in Berkshire he’d say, ‘That nut should dip his headlamps. Flash him, Michael. Do a swerve and shake the shit out of him. Scrape him like a box of matches, so that he goes up in flames. I’ll foot the bill for a tin of new paint on our car.’

‘Yes, Mr Moggerhanger,’ I’d say, doing none of these devilish things to other road-users, unless they were absolutely in the wrong and I could teach them a lesson with no danger to myself. But Moggerhanger enjoyed talking like this, and that’s all that mattered. If I’d followed him to the letter I’d have been out on my arse in no time, of that I’m sure, and so I just gazed straight ahead with the poker-face I was developing fast, and said nothing except yes, Mr Moggerhanger and no, Mr Moggerhanger.

The trouble was that he belched all the time, and it stank rotten in the car. I wasn’t allowed to smile, so had to put up with it. He seemed a bit apologetic about it at first, because he said once or twice: ‘I’m only healthy when I’m belching, Michael. It’s the breath of life to me.’ He didn’t even laugh when he said it. Mostly he sat in the back with a briefcase on his knee, and a bundle of newspapers. Whenever I had to wait an hour outside the lawyers’ office I’d get stuck in and read these, every morning paper you could find, so that I caught up on the news and scandal as part of my job.

On long drives, Moggerhanger might break into a long bout of talking: ‘The only luxury in life,’ he said, ‘is to have more than one place to live. Nothing else matters. You can eat bread and oil, wear a sack, but if you’ve got a few places scattered around, plus half a dozen passports, nobody can touch you. The trouble is, I can’t wear a sack because people wouldn’t be impressed by me, and I have to eat four-course lunches otherwise they’d think I was dying and about to lose my grip. And I can’t walk everywhere or take buses because then I’d never have time to get anything done. But at least I have a flat in town, a place in Berks, a bungalow in Cornwall, and a chalet in Majorca — not to mention the abode in Ealing and a little place in Kent. That’s property, Michael, that is. And there’a a car at each place. I could live off that for the rest of my life in a quiet sort of way if anything went wrong, fundamentally wrong I mean. Of course my wife wouldn’t like it, and my spoiled daughter would gripe even more, but I do have a bit of cupro-nickel stashed away in Switzerland to stop their mouths if that should ever come about. I’ve got it all weighed up, except the weight of my fist. Only others can tell me about that, and they never do because they’d get knocked for six. Not that I think that’s the only way to deal with people, Mikey-boy, because it ain’t. I’m not inhuman. Violence never got anyone anywhere, at least not all violence, and not everywhere. I used to lean a bit too much that way, but then I saw that most of it wasn’t necessary. The reputation of being rough was all I needed to get me what I wanted. I had to punch or slash some poor bastard once in a while whether he deserved it or not, just to show my kidneys were still hard. I gradually got better with the quick lip and the flash look, and nowadays I hardly ever have to prove even to myself that I’m as tough as I once was. Life’s like that. If I say it’s funny I’ll spit blood. If I say it’s hard I’ll swallow my teeth. I don’t say anything except talk about the way it is. The war made me, or helped to. I was nearly thirty then, with such a criminal life behind me that even the Army turned up its nose. It came at the right time as far as I was concerned, though I wished it never had come when it finished and I saw what it did to so many in Europe. I never bargained for that, Mikey. None of us did. But what else could I do but take advantage of it? I was made that way, by myself and by others. I wasn’t unpatriotic. Don’t get me wrong. I’m as English to the bone as the next man — though not to the marrow perhaps. I just helped to channel certain food supplies in the right direction, and to organize exotic entertainments that might not otherwise have been available. All much of a muchness. Property was dirt cheap, and I snapped up a few big places. Went from worse to bad and bad to better, and when I find it hard to get to sleep at night I keep telling myself over and over again how much money I’m worth, in round figures, of course. Believe it or not, it actually soothes me. It’s a great big cushion I float on to. I think I’d turn queer if it weren’t for all this money! It’s all right, Mikey-moo, I shan’t, so don’t shift over. In the prime of my fifty-year-old life I’m beginning to get an ulcer, and it’s hard to say what’s giving it. All my life I’ve only needed to glance at a person to tell whether I can deal with him or not. But this spot-on ability is what built up my ulcer — over the years. So it’s my ulcer now that tells me whether or not I can treat with someone. I feel it jump, not much, sometimes more — than others, but it jumps, and I can feel it. If I look at a person and my ulcer’s quiet, then he’s OK. If it jumps, then I put on the big stuff to help me to get what I want. A perfect ulcerometer, Michael. I must patent it. Maybe everyone should have one in their guts. You’ve got to turn everything to your own advantage, especially the bad things, because if the good things help other people it’s the bad things you’ve got that help yourself. Not that I’m having everything out of life. Far from it. In the first place I don’t even know what I want. I only know what I haven’t got, which might sound like the same thing but isn’t at all. One thing I haven’t yet got is a son. I don’t drink my spinal fluid over it, but it bites me now and again. I’ve got plenty of daughters, but only one by my own wife. I’ve never had a son, though they do say it takes a real man to go on making daughters. I’ve had so many here, there and everywhere that I always know a child is mine, just because it’s a daughter. If one of my women had a son I’d know she’d been treacherous. I’d slash her till she looked like a circus tent after a stormy night, not to mention what I’d do to the real ponce-headed daddy. But it’s all talk, Michael. I don’t do much more than talk these days, I can tell you, but it’s enough, and if it wasn’t I’d soon turn to a little blunt persuasion.’

Not long afterwards he tried some of this, and was arrested on a charge of extortion. At first I was glad that the great Moggerhanger had come crashing down at last, even though I’d listened to his talk with a lot of admiration. And I thought goddammit here goes my job, but suddenly he pours into the house from a taxi, having got out on five thousand pounds bail. And then I was pleased to see him. His wife clung to him as if he’d already done twenty years in prison. ‘I wish you’d retire, Claud,’ she said, ‘and not get mixed up in things like this any more.’ She seemed to have the idea that he was the managing director of a straight factory who’d got taken in by dishonest underlings.

He gave her that impression as well: ‘No, Agnes. Who’d run things without me? Everything would fall to pieces. There are too many relying on me. Don’t worry, love. It’ll all blow calm again. There’s nothing they can put on me, and they know it. They try a little frame-up now and again in the hope that it’ll stick. They haven’t got a chance. That Detective Inspector Lantorn just won’t be sensible and let go. He’s got to show willing now and again to Chief Inspector Jockstrap, otherwise he’s a decent enough bloke. In many ways I’ve got a lot to thank him for, but we won’t go into that now, especially a few years ago when …’

He saw me listening, and though I’m sure he trusted me, some inborn caution told him not to go on. It was true that we had become quite friendly, though with a certain distance always between us. He talked to me as if I were himself, and though this sometimes made me feel as if I were no longer myself, it did make it the most interesting job I’d so far had. He had a certain flinty wisdom which I was too young to see myself as ever having. I won’t say I wanted to be like him, because I was too frightened of him for that, but I admired him nevertheless.

There was a suite of kennels outside the house. Apart from a brace of Dobermann Pinschers which served as guard dogs to his property, Moggerhanger kept a couple of champion greyhounds. One was run under the name of Long Tom, while the other was called Abel Cain. He’d bought them six months ago, but already they’d won a few races and were high up in the lists. They would have turned any Nottingham collier green with envy, if such people still kept whippets, which I wasn’t sure of, because I’d never seen them doing so in my short life.

The only blight on Moggerhanger’s arrest was that, as a condition of his bail, he was not supposed to leave town, and this came at the time when his sporting heart was set on letting Long Tom and Abel Cain race on a dogcourse in Devon. He not only stood to win fair money, but to increase the fame of his prime animals — which would jack up their price when they were worn out and he wanted to sell them. He fumed about this unreasonable confinement as I drove him from one to another of his clubs by day, and to a certain place in Knightsbridge at night outside which I had to wait in the car for several hours till he came wearily down, snappy with me, but pleased with himself. Cursing his ill-luck in this way was Moggerhanger’s method of clarifying his thoughts towards a certain plan. He proposed to invite Detective Inspector Lantern over to dinner, and I was sent to the appropriate police station at seven o’clock to bring him back to Ealing.

He had a face that was distinguished by being utterly unrecognizable. He was as tall and thin as a ramrod. His look was thin and expressionless, and with the grey suit he was wearing and the glassy stare in his eyes he could perhaps more than in any other country have vanished like a fish in water, because if there were any features at all in his face I saw that they were getting uncomfortably close to those of a fish the more I got the opportunity of glancing at him.

I sprang out and opened the back door for him as he came down the steps — as I’d been told to do. He got in and sat down without even a thank you. What went on at the dinner I shall never know. Walking the lawns outside, I certainly heard a lot of glass clinking and gruff matey laughter. I don’t suppose many people can claim to have been dined and swined at the Moggerhanger’s, but when I drove Lantorn back to his Wembley home that night he was singing Kemp Town Races all the way, even when I’d let him out and watched him go crump at his matchbox gate.

Two days later I was called at six in the morning to drive them to the racecourse in Devon. For an hour neither Lantorn nor Moggerhanger spoke a word, but sat well back behind, arms folded into their overcoats, not even glimpsing out at the ominous fish-red dawn. Two sleek greyhounds sprawled on the upholstery at their feet, opening their scissor-jaws now and again for a yawn so wide that they seemed capable of swallowing the whole car. That’s the picture I got when I heard the sharp whine of it above the purr of the engine. The sky as I went south from Wembley was purple and red as if God had slit His own throat, and was spilling Himself over the whole world. It seemed a normal, raw, unkindly London dawn, and I was glad to turn my back on it when we swung on to the Great West Road at Heston.

I cruised at fifty and sixty where I shouldn’t have done more than forty, but this was to see whether the big copper in the back would stir up and say anything. He didn’t, so I hoped a patrol car would tail us and pull us in to see why we were going so fast. Then I’d see an exchange of looks that might be interesting. There wasn’t much traffic on the way out, and I thought how good it would be to have a few hundred miles of road all to myself. If I were king I’d issue a proclamation saying that all subjects were to be off the road on such and such a day, and then I’d get into a souped-up Rolls with my prime minister, minister of war, and chief of police, and speed along freely wherever I wanted to go. As it was, any honest chauffeur making a living risked his life on England’s arterial lanes. It was good practice for my self-control, not being able to curse blind because of my passengers, as I went through town after town and there still seemed no end to getting out of London. But those at the back didn’t worry, and when Moggerhanger let out a reverberating belch Lantorn stirred and asked: ‘What did you say?’

‘Not a word,’ said Moggerhanger. Long Tom jumped on his knee at the sound of his voice, but he eased it off with the back of his hand. Moggerhanger was getting his own way and that’s all that mattered to him and his underworld. He’d asked Lantorn if he couldn’t waive his metropolitan regulations and let him go off for the day to race his favourite dogs in Devon. At first Lantorn refused just to show he had some weight to throw about, but then he relented on condition that he, James Lantorn, could go along too to keep an eye on him, and maybe win a bit of money into the bargain on these dogs Moggerhanger boasted about so much. Moggerhanger swore they were certain to win every race, and I for one knew him to be right. I was prepared to bet every pound on the dogs because they couldn’t help but win. I’d seen Claud put the dope and syringes into his small case before leaving that morning, which was something Lantorn might or might not know. But as I drove along I saw I was stupid in thinking he didn’t know, when it was obvious he knew very well, because it seemed to me that James Lantorn and Claud Moggerhanger were two of the biggest crooks in the world — as I opened up and went at sixty towards Basingstoke. If there was an angel in the car at the moment it must have been me, and I kept saying it to myself in case I should fall for the trap of being proud of it.

Lantorn must have been awake because I heard him say, when a Jaguar overtook me: ‘That bastard’s doing above seventy. I’d pull him in if I was in a squad car.’

‘It’s terrible, the sort of people you get on the roads these days,’ said Claud. ‘If it was up to me every car would cost ten thousand pounds cash, and them that couldn’t afford it could walk, or take a bus. That’d keep the decks clear. It’s getting bad, and it’ll get worse.’ He took out a bottle of brandy and a silver cup, poured a round, and passed it to Lantorn, who silted it down without a word. ‘Cards?’ said Claud. There must-have been a nod in his direction, because I heard the case come open, and the crisp efficient shuffle of a deck. Cigar smoke filtered through, and the rattle of money. Small stakes, I thought, as laughter at some surprising hand or other dinned my neck. There were light-hearted curses, a slapping of thighs, and an occasional harsh: ‘Get down, you bastard,’ as one of the dogs tried to barge its long head in, or when they hadn’t even moved but Claud had lost and wanted somebody to take it out of.

I stopped at a town traffic lights and half turned my head to see what was the score, and Moggerhanger rapped out: ‘Keep your eyes to the front, and your ears to the front. That’s what I pay you for. Not to drive. Any ragbag can drive.’ He laughed at this, and Lantorn joined in, but I shot forward on green so that the deck of cards moved. Surprisingly, Moggerhanger didn’t bury a razor in my neck or sack me on the spot. Apparently his bad hand had suddenly become a good one, and it was Lantorn who laughed on the other side of his face when he couldn’t get things back to the way they’d been before. When we stopped for a sandwich Moggerhanger looked more like the copper to me, a real hardback if ever there was one. But we felt in a better mood after eating and a mug of tea. The dogs were brought out for a piss as well, to stretch their long and lovely legs that were set, when specially primed, to win us so much goo.

At eleven o’clock, and not far from the course, I heard them packing the cards away. Moggerhanger was in a grumpy state of mind because he’d lost five quid. Being a millionaire he resented it more than a man whose last money had slipped away. ‘You’ll get it back on the way home,’ said Lantorn in a friendly manner, seeming to feel that this bad mood between them wasn’t worth such a measly sum.

‘I bloody-well will,’ said Moggerhanger, an unrealistic prophecy that seemed nevertheless to cheer him up. ‘Let’s see to the dogs, anyhow,’ he added. ‘Hold the buggers.’ I heard a couple of yelps, then a few slaps at the arse to get the stuff into circulation, so that both my passengers considered that all was right with the world.

This turned out to be more or less correct. I was told to wait in the car park while they went in and did business. I asked Moggerhanger if he would stake ten of my own quid on Long Tom, since I couldn’t be at the race myself. He snatched it and said he’d do his best but that I’d no right to ruin myself getting into the gambling habit. I’d do much better, he said, sending it to my mother who no doubt could do more worthwhile things with it. The dogs, full of pep, pulled him away, otherwise the sermon might have gone on for an hour. Moggerhanger was still full of surprises to me, which may have been why I put up with so much from him.

I went over to a restaurant and got myself a plate of steak and mashed potatoes, cabbage and bread pudding. Travelling with such people there was no telling when I’d be able to eat again. They didn’t seem interested in food, with such dog flesh and high finance on their hands. Afterwards I sat in the car and heard music on the radio, read a newspaper, smoked, lay full out along the seat and slept for an hour, a far-off announcement of winners coming over from the stadium, with the tremor of cheering and noise now and again.

It was four o’clock when Moggerhanger and Lantorn came out, flushed and half drunk both with booze and the success of their outing, regarding it as more or less over and done with. ‘All right, Michael, home we go,’ Moggerhanger said, bundling the deadbeat dogs inside like so much window-leather. ‘Step on the petrol,’ he crowed. ‘Sink the golden boot in. We cleared the decks, eh, Jimmy’ — nudging old Lantorn when they were seated. ‘By God we did. You should be of good cheer, Michael, because you’re a couple of hundred up on this little journey. Good, eh? He’s a lucky lad, ain’t he, Jimmy?’

‘I’d say so,’ said Lantorn with a chuckle.

So we sailed away eastwards towards threatening clouds. We stopped at some Wiltshire market town called Pigminster and had tea at the hotel. The dogs, who had slept like two stones since leaving the course, woke up and followed us into the lounge, and the manager was so impressed by them, being a fervent greyhound man, that he let them lie like royalty beside our table. Moggerhanger took my saucer and his own and put them on the floor, full of tea. They lapped up pint after pint, and several pots were ordered because we were all thirsty. Neither Moggerhanger nor Lantorn were sober, and their laughter gunned around the large and otherwise empty lounge. Moggerhanger threw whole cucumber sandwiches across at the dogs, whose huge jaws snapped over them like crocodiles. By their eyes, and the way their ribs trembled as the food came flying, they looked as if they needed that sustenance, to stop them caving in altogether.

It pepped me up too, and I drove on across the Plain. Moggerhanger got his friend back on to the cards, but the game had lost its spirit now that they’d made so much at the races. I tried to speculate on the amount, but didn’t get very far. If I’d won two hundred they must have made ten times as much. This thought was cut off when raindrops poxed up the windscreen, and I reached for the wipers. Grey clouds rolled low across the countryside, but the road was fairly empty and I bowled along near to seventy miles an hour, which wasn’t bad on such a narrow and rotten road.

The dogs stood together and scratched at the carpets. ‘They want to piss,’ said Claud, scooping up a few pounds he’d won. ‘Pull in when you can, Michael.’

There was a lay-by close to Stonehenge, and as soon as I opened the door they shot out with such force that I went down into the wet grass. They found a stump a few yards away, and I thought that if they emptied themselves much more they’d go down flat like balloons. Moggerhanger sat in the car and watched them proudly through the open door, while Lantorn lay with his head back after the hard day’s work and was on the point of going to sleep.

When I went to get them in, Long Tom jumped in the air, spun like an acrobat, came down facing the opposite direction, and went off sniffing from tree to tree. Abel Cain snapped at my hand to bite it when I got close, then thought it might not taste so good, and ran after Long Tom. They romped and scampered happily, and for a while I thought maybe they had a right to ten minutes of fresh air and frolic, albeit wet, before coming back into the stuffy car.

But Claud thought differently: ‘Get them in.’ I knew it was no good running, because how could I hope to catch them when they’d just won me two hundred quid against the fastest dogs in England? I crouched, and went up slowly, calling them pretty names, my hand held out as if a piece of raw steak were spread in it. They looked tempted, but only to torment me, because they turned and ran through a hedge and into the middle of a field. I chased them, aware of Claud’s bull-like roaring behind. Together with Lantorn, who had now been roused, they fanned left and right while I was beating up front. My shoes and trousers were saturated, and rain started to come down heavier.

There was no sign of the dogs, but we kept up the advance, knowing they must be in our flimsy net somewhere. I heard Lantorn coughing on one horizon and Moggerhanger cursing on the other. The afternoon was heavy and quiet but for the dogs’ names being shouted, and the occasional thin drone of a car going by on the road we were fast leaving behind. We were worried in case the dogs should double back and slip through on to it, where they’d be in danger from traffic. But as far as we knew they were still up ahead in the expanding distance. I began to reflect that this job had its good and bad points, to see that if this went on much longer I wouldn’t be able to keep my date with Bridgitte for that night. Owing to the unexpected demands of Moggerhanger I hadn’t been able to see her for a few days, and missed the occasional nestle into her naked body.

The raw wind and the blight-rain put such pretty thoughts away. I waded ahead calling for the dogs, unable to curse and wish them in hell because they had just won me two hundred quid. The great blocks of Stonehenge rose on the other side of some railings, Long Tom and Abel Cain sporting around and under them. Without considering, I lifted myself up, tearing my trousers at the arse and ankle, but doing the great feat of getting over, nearly breaking my abdomen when I landed on the sacred earth of the other side. Long Tom came up to me, and for a second I touched his collar, but he snapped free and ran back to Abel Cain, his mouth open and choking on moist wind as he snapped at his pal’s back legs.

I ran under the stones, around the supports, my lungs creaking and rending. I leapt forward and fell, sprawled along the soaked gravel and soil, damning the painted, perverted druids for all I was worth. Moggerhanger and Lantorn waited at different parts of the fence. ‘Get him,’ Claud called out. ‘Come on, Michael. There’s a bonus when you’ve got ’em in. Good lad. Good lad.’

I swerved, zig-zagged, ran, switched back, reached out, spun, ran again, circled, cut my arm on a supporting pillar so that the blood ran salty in my mouth when I licked it during a pause. Rain poured down. Lantorn had gone back, told to bring the car closer so that the dogs could be bundled in more easily when we caught them. They mocked me, tricked me, tried to bite me. I was their mortal earthly enemy, and they were my devils, cut out of Stonehenge stone and waiting for me to exhaust myself before they could turn and rend me. I fell on to Abel Cain by a ruse, but he snapped so fiercely with his ugly teeth that I was frightened and let go.

The bastards were turning ugly. As far as I was concerned they could take the two hundred quid and pad their rabbit-ribs with it. I thought of giving it up when Lantorn and Moggerhanger came into the enclosure, followed by a keeper who, however, didn’t take part in the round-up but only stood by grinning. I envied him and saw how sensible he was, but the drug that had been pumped into the dogs must have worked off because they seemed calmer. I hoped they were becoming exhausted, so that we could then lift them into the car like so many sleeping pieces of meat.

Moggerhanger spoke to them affectionately, but their eyes were mad and hollow, not of the world beyond the stones of Stonehenge, and with no effort they rallied their energy and were right away from us. Then we were all running without any purpose. I was dreading that they’d extend their field of freedom by getting outside the Stonehenge enclosure again and spreading over the whole of Wiltshire. If that happened they’d be lost for good, because Moggerhanger could hardly advertise in the papers that he’d lost his dogs, when he was not supposed to be out of London. At least I couldn’t imagine Lantorn allowing that, for it might be more than his job was worth — unless Moggerhanger were prepared to employ him at a similar sort of salary.

We ran our guts out till it got dark, and at the end only captured Long Tom, who was kicked savagely into the car by his loving master. Abel Cain was never seen again. We searched and sweated through the mouldy perishing dusk, driving to all points of the compass, then walking inwards like a military search operation. In fact it would have needed an army to track down that lousy dog which was worth its weight in gold to Moggerhanger. At nine o’clock we gave up, sat glumly in a pub saloon hardly able to talk.

Lantorn’s long face was grey with exertion, while Moggerhanger’s was pasty from shock. I just felt knackered, hardly able to get down my sandwich and tomato juice. Moggerhanger said we’d have to come out tomorrow at the slit of dawn to carry on the hunt, but Lantorn said this wouldn’t be possible while he was on bail. I thought Moggerhanger was going to slit him there and then, and both of us make a break for it, but his white gills relaxed into a smile as he downed another brandy and began to look human again. ‘It’ll be worth a few hundred,’ he said, ‘on top of the thousand you got today.’

But I could see Lantorn’s face from where Moggerhanger couldn’t, because he was sitting by his side. Lantorn had remembered what firm he was working for, and his face now showed it. ‘Couldn’t,’ he said, ‘old sport. The super’s back tomorrow and it’s more than my life’s worth.’

Moggerhanger tried it from all angles, but the more he did so the more did Lantorn dig his heels into the soil of his heart. It wasn’t that he couldn’t let Claud off the hook tomorrow. He could, and he knew he could, and do it with safety. And Moggerhanger knew as well. But for no reason at all Lantorn chose not to, and nobody could do anything about it. In this black mood we travelled back to London, and it was more like being in a boat than a car because the rain poured down all the way. Being so late, there was no thick traffic, though I was driving with my nerve-ends on the final run, which came just about midnight. There was no cardsharping, or brandy swigging, and the silence almost sent me to sleep. At one point I went straight across a red traffic light, but nobody was the worse for it. The only break was an occasional whine from Long Tom who by now was beginning to miss his mate, and perhaps still felt the boot marks that Moggerhanger had planted on it. Lantorn must have felt the most hated man in the world by the time we got home, and I sensed that his only aim left in life, if he had anything to do with the prosecution (and I knew that he had), was to get Moggerhanger the longest possible sentence for whatever he’d done wrong in the eyes of the law. Moggerhanger knew this as well, and I hoped there was something he could do about it, because out of the two rogues I was driving home I knew whose side I was on, without even having to make the choice. I suppose this was one of the reasons why Moggerhanger had taken me on and, having weighed me up, had not found me wanting in this respect. Still, I could not bask in such a man’s approval, even though I was young, because the fact that he might approve of me had nothing to do with me approving of myself — though maybe it was fast becoming so.

The next day Moggerhanger handed me a bundle of notes, and I thanked him as I stuffed them into my pocket. ‘Count them,’ he said.

‘I trust you, Mr Moggerhanger.’

‘You’re a bigger fool than I thought you were. Never trust anybody. If you do you’ll make the fatal mistake of one day trusting yourself. And any man who trusts himself is asking for trouble.’ He was in the dining-room having breakfast. ‘Pour yourself some coffee,’ he laughed, ‘and sit down when you’re talking to me.’ The Spanish servant had let me lie in till ten, so I felt refreshed after my eighteen-hour day of yesterday. I drew a large cup of coffee, with a dash of milk. ‘And while you’re drinking it,’ he insisted, ‘count that money. I shan’t be offended.’

‘It’s all correct,’ I said, flattening it into my wallet.

‘Got a bank account?’ If I hadn’t, he said I ought to open one, and offered to recommend me to his bank, which I accepted. ‘Put that two hundred on deposit,’ he said, ‘and forget about it — until you can add to it.’

‘I was thinking of buying a car, to take my girlfriend out in.’

‘Who is she?’ he asked, sharply.

‘A coloured girl from West Ken, student at London University. We clicked on a bus to Hampstead. Very platonic, though.’

He smiled. ‘Good luck to you. But don’t buy a car,’ he said, ‘till you’ve got the price of one ten times over. Then find a good one, and have the best out of it. I’ll tell you something else. Don’t get a second-hand car. Only a rich man finds a bargain, because he can get it under his own time and conditions. I didn’t have a car till there was fifty thousand quid in the bank. Then I bought a new one, for cash. I walked or used taxis till then, and it didn’t interfere with my work, or my self-esteem. It’d need a lot to do that. I run my life on ten of my own commandments. I worked them out month by month in prison as a young man, though they were a bit different to what they turned out to be later. Life smooths all edges. Pour some more coffee and I’ll run through them for you. Number one was: don’t do anything against a friend who can still help you, or an enemy who might soon be talked into doing you a good turn. Not bad, eh?’

‘Very sharp,’ I had to admit.

‘Two: don’t kill for money, spite, or love, but only to get what somebody else has got but what you consider to be your own.’

‘That’s rough.’

‘Ain’t it? Number three: when you put money into the bank don’t do it like a happy saver, but feel on top of the world, as if you’re throwing it away. But hoard your gains, because money is power over others — though never over yourself.’

I was struck by his sense, not to say flabbergasted, and hoped I’d remember all he said. There was no stopping him.

‘Four: treat the police as well as you would like to be treated if you were one of them. They are put there by society to help you keep what you have got no matter how you got it. They’re only human. Five: when you don’t know whether to say yes or no, always say yes. Six: train yourself never to love, and never to hate. Seven: if you want to make money, sell people what they need, not what they’ve been told to want. Then you’ll have earned it. Eight: people are always stupider than you think. If you don’t know this, you’ll hardly ever act. Nine times out of ten you’ll be right. But polish your powers of intuition, and plot every step intelligently. Note where there’s a chance of your being found out, and prepare to turn it to your advantage if this should happen. Nine: never be afraid, neither of God, man, nor beast. The others are always more afraid than you are. Ten: be law-abiding in every possible way, except when it stops you getting what you want. Eleven, and the last: honour thy father and thy mother. If it weren’t for them you wouldn’t be here, and if you live by these rules they’ll certainly do well by you.’

‘Sounds all right,’ I said, ‘but they’re not so easy to follow.’

‘Takes time,’ he admitted. ‘If you try hard you can do it by the time you’re thirty. But even if you only try, you’re a thousand times better off than those who don’t know about them.’

‘Do you want me to go out to Stonehenge today and look for Abel Cain? He might still be somewhere in the neighbourhood.’

He stood up and fastened his jacket. ‘I know when something’s good and lost. He’s stashed away in somebody’s barn or kennel by now. We’ll never see him again, at least not under the name he’s been known by. Thanks all the same. I’ll be off to see my lawyers in half an hour, so get the car ready. I’m going to wrap this case up so neatly in its warp and weft that that bastard Lantorn can wear it around his neck as a scarf for the rest of his life.’

In the next few days I worked day and night at the beck and call of Moggerhanger’s eleven deadly rules. One journey was to take a box of groceries to the house of his eighty-year-old mother in Hendon. I didn’t get a glance of her because the maid took them from me. Moggerhanger spent much time talking to lawyers, and during these weeks he must have dropped a couple of stone in weight, though he was loud and cheerful through it all.

Bridgitte accused me of going cold on her, and once when I went to see her Smog cried as I was about to leave. It seemed that Dr Anderson’s wife had come back, and so he had started licking his way towards Bridgitte again. This didn’t worry me, because I wasn’t the jealous sort. But Bridgitte said I ought to do something about it and that if I wasn’t jealous it proved I didn’t love her. Smog snuggled up to her and said: ‘I still love you, though,’ and she clutched him as the tears ran down her apple cheeks, her beautiful button nose an island in between. I told her that the day after tomorrow Moggerhanger’s case would be over. Then I’d make sure to spend more time with her. If he went to prison, I’d be out of a job. If he was free he’d go for a holiday, and so would I. ‘In the meantime,’ I added, when Smog had gone to his innocent dreams, ‘if that dirty bastard Dr Anderson tries to slip his hands up your clothes again you should go out and buy a lipstick that neither you nor his wife uses, and put it under her pillow so that she can find it and cause a rumpus. Then she’ll leave again, and he’ll brood so much on her going that he won’t be able to paw you.’ I threw off this idea more or less in an idle moment, never thinking she’d act on it. At least I left her calm that night, which settled my mind for all the Moggerhanger work still to be done.

The case against him was thrown out of court for lack of evidence. The headline that night said: MOGGERHANGER ACQUITTED — and I caught some of his satisfaction in the guts as I drove him from the lawyers’ on Chancery Lane. On the steps of the court he had shaken hands with Lantorn, an immortal picture for me if ever there was one. He sat with me in the front, saying nothing, looking far grimmer than he’d done while waiting for the trial, as if he had in mind some sort of cataclysmic revenge on those who’d tried to get him. The only thing was that he belched more frequently than he’d done lately, as if now that it was over his stomach could relax.

At home all was set for a quiet celebration dinner with his wife and beautiful dark-haired daughter, and his brother Charles Moggerhanger, who was the managing director of a department store in the North, and who looked after Claud’s property up that way. Charles Moggerhanger was quiet, sarcastic, and suspicious, a lightly built man of medium height with a quiet tread, a bald head, and finer features than his brother. All in all it was hard to say who would be the worse to get on the wrong side of.

While they were knocking back champagne and calling every two minutes for the Spaniard who looked after the table, I slipped away to visit Bridgitte. I hadn’t bothered to phone beforehand, and when I got there, going up in the lift and full of anticipation at getting her lips and body wrapped into mine, there was no answer to my ringing. That was bloody funny. I thought. Somebody at least had to be in, because they couldn’t all have gone out and left poor Smog alone. I rang again. I even knocked. Then I went down into the street, and phoned from the nearest callbox. My eyes were wide open, glued to the mirror, hypnotized by the continual buzzing that was never going to be answered. I unlatched myself, without getting my button-B money back.

It was raining, so I pulled my mac around me, heading for the club I used to work at. I was in time to see June at the end of her act. Paul Dent called to me like a firm old friend, and even Kenny Dukes tipped me a no-hard-feelings wink. I had heard from June that he’d smouldered with dangerous envy for a week or so after I’d got my rather special job with Moggerhanger, but at the moment he seemed convivial enough. He even offered me a drink.

A few minutes later June came to the bar: ‘Isn’t it wonderful about Claud?’

‘A foregone conclusion,’ I said. ‘Whisky?’

‘They were really out to get him, though. Tomato juice, love.’

‘He knows how to tie them up.’ We drank our doses and I sat in a stupor the rest of the evening, chatting her up between the times she was on.

In the early hours I offered to get her home in a taxi, and she accepted. ‘Sometimes my working day goes like a dream,’ she said, nestling close when we were in, ‘but today was a drag, waiting for Claud to get off.’

‘Are you in love with him?’ I asked her, my arm over her shoulder, the other in her lap.

‘He’s the only man I have anything to do with properly. But don’t talk about him. Kiss me.’

I did, and she clung to me as if I were the last man on Earth, opening me and feeling me so that I began to be a bit embarrassed in case the driver turned round, or saw us in his mirror. I tried to do the same to her, but she wouldn’t have it. We were gasping and half choking, and I suddenly let go of myself completely, at which she gave me a final kiss and drew away.

On the steps of the house she lived in I asked if I could come up to her flat. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend I’m rather sweet on at the moment. Thanks for the nice ride, though.’

‘I’ll come up and serve you both if you like.’

She smiled, giving the final rub-off: ‘I’ll serve her myself.’

‘As long as you enjoy it,’ I said, walking away.

Sodium lights flared and glowed down Camden Road, and I walked in the blackest of hugger-muggers back towards town. It would have been better, as things turned out, if I had gone to sleep it off in my room at Ealing, but my feet wouldn’t move that way. That bastion of all-devouring Moggerhangers had kept me in thrall for more than I should have let it these few months. As far as I was concerned he could rot on the dungheap of his self-invented rules, because tonight I wanted to shake it off for a few hours and roam at my own will.

Before I’d gone half a mile I dialled Bridgitte’s number again, but, like before, there was no answer. I went through multiple speculations as to what had happened, but every one of them was a tragedy, and so none sounded like the truth. There was nothing to do except wait some unspecified amount of time before getting to know what had happened, and it gnawed at my guts. I wanted to go to the flat and quietly break in, but when I got there the big front doors on the street were locked more firmly than those of a castle in the middle of a brigand-infested wilderness.

A few taxis circled Leicester Square, and a copper eyed me as I passed a closed-up picture house. I walked down Villiers Street, then up the steps on to Hungerford Bridge. The water below was circling slowly as if only a foot deep. A skyline of buildings stood under the halo of their own light that seemed to be generated by the faint traffic noise. London was beautiful at night, when most of the eight million people were asleep and I could have the feeling that all of it was for myself.

I lit a Dutch cigar and strolled on over the bridge, telling myself how good it was to be alive once all things that held me down had vanished from sight. In a corner at the top of the steps a body was hunched away from the breeze and drizzle, trying to sleep. At the noise of my footsteps his head lifted and said: ‘Got a smoke, mate?’

I stopped, and passed him one. ‘That’s all I have on me’ — wanting to tell him off for being out on a night like this, give him a lecture on not providing for himself, and maybe at the end of it recite Moggerhanger’s rules. But I sensed that this might not mean much at such a critical stage of his life.

‘Eh,’ he said, ‘a cigar! I’ll take a puff, though it won’t be any use on an empty stomach.’

I’d heard that voice before, that complained with such professional confidence. ‘I suppose you want a couple of bob for a sandwich?’

‘That’s cheap at the price,’ he said. ‘With five shillings I could get a bowl of soup as well.’

I looked close: ‘If I’m not mistaken I’m talking to the well-known and notorious Almanack Jack.’

‘Are you a copper?’ he said, a well-developed snarl. ‘If you ate, I’m an innocent man. I’ve driven a few people into the looney-bin in my time, but apart from that nobody can point a finger at me. Still, we’ve all done that sort of thing. If you’re too young for it you’ve got plenty of time yet.’

I told him who I was. ‘I don’t want to disturb your good night’s sleep, but I haven’t had a bite for fourteen hours, so I’m probably hungrier than you are. You can come to the market for a feed if you like.’

He jumped up, surprisingly agile for a man of beard and rags. ‘I got rolled,’ he told me as we walked along. ‘Some young toughs from Lambeth jumped on me and took my almanacks. They scattered them all up Northumberland Avenue, then drove off in a souped-up Zodiac. It’s happening too often these days. I’m going to fix myself up with a knife. That’ll keep the young bleeders at bay.’

I told him I was working for Moggerhanger, and he gave a whistle to show he was impressed. ‘I hope you hold your job. They say nobody works for him long.’

‘We get on fine, the two of us.’

‘Keep it that way, then you can buy me a meal now and again.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. He gradually straightened up while walking, till he seemed at last to be a little taller than I was.

We found a place, and indulged ourselves at my expense. Bacon and cheese sandwiches got washed down by innumerable bucket-sized mugs of tea. The place was full of porters and lorry drivers, as if I were back in a Nottingham café near a factory, where the blokes go because they can’t stand the better food of canteen dinners. It was warm, smoky, steamedup, and timeless, and I began to feel as tired and done in as Almanack Jack looked. In spite of his bang-about life he seemed better fleshed with food than I was, and in the end he was thumping me on the shoulder and telling me not to look so depressed. Then he fell forward on his arms and went to sleep.

He heard me stand up to get more tea and sandwiches, and when I came back he was wide awake, and started snapping into it. ‘I don’t know why you sell almanacks,’ I said. ‘You only frighten people half to death with the prophecies inside.’

‘That’s what they want,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t buy them otherwise. They’re only human, after all. If you can’t have a good earthquake or war to look forward to in somebody else’s country, life isn’t worth living.’

‘You don’t believe that crap.’

‘No. But they do. I think war is stupid as well.’

He leaned back, lit a cigar of mine, and sent the first smoke out slowly, like a calculated trick, as if knowing that he could bring it back again when it began to stray too far. The unfamiliar smell fetched disapproving looks from a couple of men nearby, but Jack was enjoying himself, as if the smell of a cigar brought back a lucidity that he’d had, once upon a time. ‘Those that indulge in war,’ he said, ‘seem to like it so much that once they start they can’t stop, like two people fucking. In fact war is a male homosexual act between consenting nations, carried out in full view of God. Otherwise it wouldn’t have gone on so long. My almanacks make no difference, whether it comes or goes. Ever tried prophesying peace? You wouldn’t sell a single copy. You’d be a bloody liar, what’s more.’

I didn’t like this idea from him, that I was a liar, but my hard-earned food was making him light-headed, so there seemed no way of stopping him, short of walking out. And I couldn’t do that because I still had half a mug of tea and a sandwich in front of me.

‘I can pick up your thoughts like a man in the park stabbing bits of toffee paper with a sharp stick. Ever since you saw me dozing on Hungerford Bridge you’ve been thinking I ought to have a shave and get a job. Don’t deny it. But just because you’ve become someone’s bodyservant, don’t get feeling so superior to me. If it hadn’t been you on the bridge just now who’d felt guilty at seeing me shivering to death and got me something to eat, another mug would have turned up sooner or later. I feel superior to you, mate, because having slipped off the social scale altogether, I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. You can’t get any higher than’ that in the world, take it from me. So when you do me a good turn, I’m not too grateful because I’m doing as much for you as you are doing for me. The unemployed should be treated as great gifts to a nation, because if they didn’t in their largeness of spirit agree to be unemployed, all the other toffee-nosed bastards who’ve got jobs couldn’t hold them. The unemployed should be fed and pampered, given double pay to what they’d get if they were working. There should be special centres where they could queue up for a daily ration of cigars. One prominent motto of my Democratic Republic of Euphoria would be: Hail to the unemployable, because they should inherit the earth in payment for letting the guilt-ridden neurotics of the world work.’

I suddenly felt the weight of Moggerhanger at one end pulling, and Almanack Jack at the other. His head fell forward, and in a few moments he was properly asleep. I got up and walked out, on foot all the way back to Ealing, brooding on the black ingratitude of such sly bastards as Almanack Jack. I took time off to phone Bridgitte’s place again, stood in a callbox at four in the morning, listening like a madman to that regular brain-sawing rhythmic buzz, feeling that if anyone were in the flat they’d have to get up and answer it or be driven as crazy as I was beginning to feel.

I wasn’t called till midday, thank God, and then only for a short visit to the lawyers. Moggerhanger didn’t want a holiday after his strain of waiting for the trial. He wasn’t that sort of man, and I should have known he wouldn’t be. In fact he was more ebullient and bullying than ever, and I began to hate his guts, though I didn’t want to quit because I liked the job so much, wanting at least to hang on to it while the mystery of Bridgitte’s disappearance was clawing at me. I also found that my heart in some way was missing Smog, which made me wonder what sort of a person I was. He’d latched so much on to the secret life of Bridgitte and myself that it almost seemed as if he were our child and not Dr Anderson’s.

My work was so hard that Moggerhanger should have had three chauffeurs instead of one, because now I was going at it from eight in the morning till sometimes ten at night. After his acquittal, business was surging. Clubs, brothels, and gambling pits were opening all over the place, and in spite of all regulations Moggerhanger was a law unto himself. The police had tried to get him, but he had beaten them with their own rules, and in consequence they treated him with far greater deference than before.

I was going fifty miles an hour along Bayswater Road at ten one night when a motor cyclops stopped us. When he peered in he said: ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know it was you, Mr Moggerhanger.’

‘That’s all right. I was busy at these papers and didn’t know he was doing half a ton. Go a bit slower, you damned fool,’ he called to me. When we got going again he apologized: ‘I had to do that, Mike. They like to keep face, these coppers. Go as fast as you like beyond the Gate. We’re late already.’

From the Arch to the Gate, through the Bush to the Scrubs, and my daily zig-zags continued. I felt a marked man going into some of the more bizarre clubs that Moggerhanger had under his thumb. There was a striptease joint in which men peeled off to the buff in some corny act or other. The spectators seemed mostly lesbians, hefty women in rural drag up from the country, or grey-haired bony-faced executive business women, too drunk and bawdy to go back to work after three in the afternoon.

After a tour of such clubs and properties Moggerhanger told me to come to the house because he’d like a word with me. I was too dead tired to wonder what was up. We went into the living-room, and he didn’t tell me to sit down. ‘I hear you were at the club last week?’

I nodded.

‘I also hear that you left with June, and that you took her home.’

‘I saw her to the door.’

‘Maybe. But you didn’t get back here till five in the morning.’

‘I walked around.’

He laughed: ‘You’ve cooked your goose. I can’t have my chauffeur messing with my girlfriend. You can get out. I’ll pay you a month’s notice. Now. Tonight.’

‘That’s not right,’ I said.

‘Go in the morning, then. If you’re here when I get back for lunch tomorrow they’ll find your body — or part of it — in the Thames by the time it gets dark.’

‘It’s a bit sudden,’ I told him, trying to sound contrite so that he might let on who had told him about me and June. ‘What are you going to do for a chauffeur?’

There was a flicker of doubt regarding my guilt: ‘Kenny Dukes is taking over.’

‘Is he then? He’s always been envious of my job, the fat snake. If he can get it as easy as this, then good luck to him. There’s never been anything between me and June.’

‘He tells me no lies,’ Moggerhanger said, as if losing my living was no more than a game to him. ‘He kept me informed which is what he’s paid to do.’

I felt like going berserk in his contemporary mansion, but turned and went out, wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and Moggerhanger. I didn’t think this would be so difficult, but regretted losing my job, though it couldn’t be said that my life crumbled because of it. My new suitcase hadn’t had time to get more than half filled in the time I’d been there so I carried it with ease towards the bus stop and headed for town, leaving the reddest sunset behind me that I’d seen in years.