A Start in Life

Part Four

The fact that I had nowhere to go and no one to see didn’t worry me a bit. That is to say, it did worry me, because I was only human, after all, though it didn’t put me off doing what I had to do. The only flaw was that I had no idea what I had to do, or even what I wanted to do. But I was on a half-empty bus going east, and at the moment that was enough for me, because if there was one thing I liked doing in life it was watching buildings and people from the safe top deck of a bus, especially after having worked for a few months as a chauffeur, in which I’d been so engrossed in driving a car that it’d been impossible to see a thing. I felt like a king, able to smoke and relax, and touched my pocket to make sure the table lighter was still there. I’d lifted it on my final plunderer’s run through Moggerhanger’s downstairs hall, and it now weighed heavy and fat in its silver lining, something he’d never see again because I’d pawn it at the first opportunity. It was a lovely piece of work, and I’d had my eyes on it for some time, but now that it was in my pocket I began to wonder whether I’d done the right thing. The arm of Moggerhanger’s vengeance might reach a longer way than I imagined. He was the sort who valued even the most trivial of his knick-knacks, and the one that currently nestled in my pocket was a bit more than that. Still, even with Moggerhanger, possession was nine-tenths of the law, and I was after all only following the gist of his jungle commandments which, shuffled up tight into one slick pack, said that you must get anything you want no matter at what cost to others. Maybe he wouldn’t miss it till Kenny Dukes was well and truly taken on, and then would blame him for it, slit his throat like the no-good pig he was.

I dropped off the bus in Piccadilly, and stood looking at the lights, but I hadn’t the sort of heart that got glad at them. I preferred faces, because they could at least look back, and who knows? I thought, one of them might recognize me at the same time that I recognized it. I walked on into Soho. Not that I was lonely. That would never do, and I’d deny it to my dying breath, but I did wonder again where Bridgitte Appledore had gone, and even cast my mind back to the days of Miss Bolsover and Claudine Forks. I stood by a pub bar with my case at my feet, supping a bitter pint and slewing a sly eye now and again at the women’s faces, but bringing no response. Even the men who were with them weren’t jealous enough to resent my stares. So I went into another house, and then up a curving alleyway somewhere off the Strand, careful not to get drunk because I wasn’t in the mood for that.

One crumby pub was bunged up to the gills, but along the bar was a face I’d seen before, though for some moments I couldn’t say where, not knowing whether it was from months or years ago. He was a tall man, dressed in a high-necked sweater and an expensive tweed jacket, the sort of casual gear that must have cost far more than a good suit. His face was, I suppose, sensitive because of the thick lips, putty skin, and pale eyes. He wore a hat, but in spite of this I was struck by the length of his face and head, which did not, however, make him as ugly as it should have done. In observing to this extent what he looked like, it came to me quite quickly that I’d first glimpsed him in the pub where I stopped with June and Bill Straw on my way down from Nottingham, and it was sharp-eyed June who told me he was a writer by the name of Gilbert Blaskin. If I was mistaken in any way, it was only that I remembered him as not being quite so tall as he certainly was now, but I felt no doubt as to who it was because faces are about the only thing I have much memory for, except remembering what’s happened to me in the past — which I was able to do from a very early age, as soon as I realized that a certain amount of time had been put behind me in which events had occurred that I could look back on, especially those that in some way joined me to other people.

As I looked at Blaskin’s face I went off into a reverie, thinking that the longer I lived the richer became my past, though sometimes things were too hectic for me to find time to reflect on it, and that was bad, for in those moments I usually committed my most foolish actions, for I forgot to think about my past, which was the only thing to tell me who I was and where I was, and why I was where I was. But while I pondered on my past, there was the added and built-in disadvantage that it didn’t allow me to consider whatever future might be coming to me. So I never had time to think seriously on what I was about to do, and this was not a good thing in someone as witless and reckless as myself. But thinking so much about the past (not being a philosopher, there never seemed much else worth thinking about) should at least — one would imagine — have guided me in a friendly and wise way to formulate some rules of conduct from which I could benefit. You’d have thought so. Perhaps because I never finally trusted the past, it didn’t stand by me to the extent of doing me any good at all.

So I edged nearer to hear what Gilbert Blaskin was saying to the girl who looked on with such respect as every word came out. She was small and thin, with a pale doe-face and glasses, hair shorter than mine and freckles around the bridge of her nose. The author himself had a double brandy at the elbow, his back nonchalantly to the bar.

‘I have an aunt who lives in Knightsbridge,’ he said, ‘but I have to forgive her for that. Otherwise she’s one of those monstrous people you never wish to meet. She helped me when I was young and struggling, when I lived on letters telling me what rubbish I wrote. I ate at least one a day, plain, and stirred the rest into an omelet. No, she couldn’t bear to think of me scrounging. So she helped me, and not long ago I gave her a present to mark the publication of my tenth novel. A little dog, the most disturbed and snappy little brute I could get my hands on, which cost me all of twenty pounds. She loved it, until it started to bark. The trouble was, it didn’t like her, and went on barking. It was hysterical. I called on her after a week, and it was still barking, except when it was eating its steak. I told her to have it put to sleep, but she couldn’t do that, looked at it lovingly. Then it got more hysterical. It was well behaved as far as house-training went, but this continual barking from her favourite chair was having its effect. She dug out a record of Hitler’s speeches, and the ranting of that madman stopped the dog, so that it listened, entranced. After that, whenever it went into a fit of barking she’d put this record on, and right away it was reduced to silent admiration. Of course, where she found that record I’ll never know, but I admire her ingenuity.’

The girl, whose eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger throughout the story, reached for her shandy, while Blaskin burst into a great peal of horsey laughter, and pulled back his arm so violently that he knocked his double brandy over. ‘Fuck it,’ he said to the girl, wiping the sleeve of his jacket. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that.’

‘Let me get you another, Mr Blaskin,’ I said. ‘A double brandy and a pint of bitter,’ I called. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m a great admirer of your books. I’ve read every one of them. In one way, they actually stopped me going crazy. I lived in a place called Nottingham, and they inspired me into getting away from it, especially that terrific book you wrote about the man who lived up that way and became a writer. I thought that was great. I felt exactly like he did, in some parts. I can’t tell you what a lot of good it did me to read it.’

He must have been used to this sort of thing, because he offered me his hand to shake, and said how pleased he was that his work after all was having some effect on people like me. I went on telling him how good his books were, though in fact I’d only read one of them, or tried to, because I couldn’t get more than halfway, and had given it to Claudine for a birthday present, which made her see how different I was from other boyfriends, because none of them had given her a book before. She’d read it to the end and thought it was wonderful.

I told him I’d seen him in a pub on the A1 road but had been too shy to talk, and he said he remembered the place, being on his way back from Sheffield where he’d been to give a lecture on the modern novel and its place in society. He’d also spent a week cooped up in his flat with dysentery after the meal he’d eaten at the place I’d seen him in.

‘It’s a wonder you didn’t get anything worse,’ I said, ‘the things they dish out on the roads in this country,’ and he said how much better it was to be driving around France in the car, and I said I hadn’t had that pleasure yet. He introduced me to his girlfriend, who had lost much of his attention because she idolized him too much to make positive statements of admiration as I did. Her name was Pearl Harby, and I noticed her looking at me with big eyes as well. He didn’t explain who she was or what she did, but in the next opening of his brandy-mouth he wanted to know what I was doing in town.

‘I’m a chauffeur,’ I said, ‘or was until tonight. I left the job because the bigshot I drove was in such a hurry to get back from the country today that he told me to go over the speed limit through a built-up area. I thought it was dangerous, because kids were coming out of school. A big argument followed, and when we got back I told him I didn’t want to stay any more.’

Blaskin laughed: ‘You’re brash, and young, otherwise you’d have found some way out of it. What other jobs have you done?’

‘Estate agent, clerk, bouncer at a strip club, garage mechanic, to name a few. I’ve done most things.’

‘Can you type, dearest?’ he asked Pearl Harby.

‘No, Mr Blaskin.’

He turned to me. ‘Can you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good speed?’

‘Any speed.’

He ordered more drinks, all round. ‘I want somebody to type my novel. My secretary walked out on me because I was randy and tried to drag her into bed when she brought me my breakfast this morning. My wife left last week so she can’t type it, and the publisher’s clamouring at my shoulders. When can you start?’

There could only be one answer to that question: ‘Now.’ This pleased him, as it pleased everyone, and when he asked me where I lived I said where my own two feet are touching the ground.

‘You lucky bastard,’ he said jovially.

I stiffened: ‘Nobody ever calls me a bastard and gets away with it’ — my hand gripping the beer mug to rip him open with.

He laughed: ‘Well, let me be the first. Let’s be jolly and gay. I hate serious people. They take to politics and ruin everything.’ He dipped down and put his arm round Pearl Harby, dragging her close for a big kiss. I couldn’t very well smash the glass into his bald head, so held back till he stood upright again, but by then it was too late. My anger had gone and for the first time in my life I thought what the hell does it matter if someone does call me a bastard? It’s only in fun, and they can never know the truth anyway.

Most of the people in the room began moving towards the stairs. ‘We’re going up for a poetry reading,’ Gilbert said. ‘Come and listen. There may be a fight — you can’t tell, once poets get together.’

I pushed down the rest of my beer and joined the crush, making a way through with my suitcase. A girl in front didn’t like this at all, for she glazed me with the fire of her blue eyes and tut-tutted sharply. All I could do was smile, and change it to a flat look when her boyfriend swung round to find out whether I was trying to get off with her. Gilbert and Pearl came up the stairs in the gap I made. ‘What do you carry in that case?’ he asked.

‘Ashes,’ I said. ‘Mother, Father, two brothers, a sister, and four cousins.’

He held me grimly by the shoulder: ‘Listen, you aren’t a writer by any chance, are you?’

‘I’ve got more to do with my life.’

‘And you haven’t thought of becoming one?’ We were stopped at a small table and had to pay half a crown to get in.

‘Forget it,’ I said. He smiled with relief, while I paid all the fares and we passed into a large room with rows of wooden chairs laid out in it.

He leaned across Pearl Harby: ‘There’s a big attraction tonight, a working-class poet from Leeds.’

‘You don’t say?’ I said.

‘Ron Delph. The club invited him to read his poems. It’s hard to get poets to read their own work, but we’re hoping things will improve.’

‘Does it pay much?’ I said.

‘Five pounds, and expenses. Delph won’t live in London. He works in a brewery office, and won’t leave. Here he is!’

As soon as the name of Delph was mentioned I saw June’s face again while she’d told her story, that flash of it in my driving mirror. I was interested to know what he looked like after her information that he was the one who’d jaggered her with a daughter. He stood up front by a table, stared at everybody for a long two minutes. Then he took a bus or train ticket out of his pocket, and read in a loud monotone something like:

We enjoyed that, because though it might have been ordinary, he made it sound good. He tore the ticket into quarters, and threw it like confetti towards us. He was tall, had dark flat hair, and looked like a conjuror, because next he took a roll of toilet paper out of a shopping basket, and began undoing it, tearing it off sheet by sheet, and with everyone saying ‘Shit’, which he went on to say about a few hundred times.

We were held, hypnotized, pushed into silence — except for a few ignorant bastards who let out a giggle now and again, and someone who called: ‘Pull the chain, Ron, pull the chain’ — and nearly stopped the show. The tension was hardly to be borne as he got to the end of the roll, and especially when, with the final tear-off, he didn’t intone the expected word but spelled it slowly, letter by letter, S — H–I — T. A great noise of clapping spread in the room, as if a wooden ship of long ago were grinding itself up a long stretch of seashore rocks.

His next poem was about a man who accidentally stepped on a butterfly and killed it, and ends in tears of remorse for his savage act. ‘After the last General Election,’ Ron shouted, ‘my mother became Minister of Culture. She changed her name and put in for a new past, then marched down Whitehall to the marital music of a grenade of budgerigards.’

‘By God, he’s got talent,’ said Blaskin, lighting a cigarette and resting his head back on fag-smoke air, the schizophrenic’s pillow he always carried about with him.

‘But I’m not a poet of the niggling moral doubt,’ Delph shouted, picking a button off his jacket (which I’m sure he’d loosened deliberately hours before) and throwing it into the mouth of someone on the front row who yawned. ‘I’m in it for the quick quid and all expenses paid, and I want everybody to know it. I’m not a death-wish beetle eating away at the fabric of society. I’m just looking for a patron to buy me a coin-op laundry so I can sit in the warmth of it and spread my bed while my living goes on earning itself all around me. So if anybody knows a millionaire with the right incline I’ll note his post-office box in my little black book and — ’

‘Poems,’ a voice shouted from the back. ‘You’re a self-indulgent prole. Let’s have a poem.’

Delph stared hard in the man’s direction. ‘I’ll put you on my death list, if you aren’t careful.’ He held us all by sleight of hand and slight of brain, took a pound note from his lapel pocket and passed it to the front row so that it could be certified as real. Taking it back, he held it by the tips of two fingers, as if not wishing to be too much contaminated by it. Then he drew the ashtray to the middle of the table, fished out a box of matches, and lit the banknote, holding it upright so that it burned slowly, shouting a slow incantation before the flame got to his fingers and he let go:

He crumpled the charred paper of the note with an asbestos thumb, then blew the black powder of it towards the audience: ‘Go, little turds, God give thee good passage — ’ And for a moment I wished I had stayed at Moggerhanger’s because then he went on to recite a poem called Elegy on the Death of the Pennines, which consisted in reading all the words from a pocket dictionary beginning with P, and this went on for about twenty minutes, so that I began to think I was going crazy, which may have been the effect he was aiming for, because I had a suspicion that under that crackpot flamboyant style was a sly and cunning bastard who had weighed up the balances of every pickled word. One or two people in the audience did in fact break under this sustained barrage and shouted out as if their hearts had cracked, but the teeth and tank tracks of Ron Delph’s subliminal intelligence went on and on to the very end, so that they just had to sit back and sweat it out. Gilbert Blaskin’s shanks began to twitch, and I thought maybe he’s going to split at the fleshpot mouth, and then where will my typing job get to? — but the look on his face was rapt and angelic, and his zipped-up tailor-made boots beat time to that demonic shunting forth of just plain words. I stayed above it all, after that first shiver, sidestepped it, and kept my eyes wide open and my heart well dyked against the waves of pure emotion building up in the room. They were rapt and stoned while I was able to look around me at their ossified faces in the grip of this mad hypnotical impostor.

It took a few seconds for them to realize that he had finished. They were stunned. From the seabed where he had held them they started to cheer and clap and rave, getting themselves up to some sort of air again. He was sweating, worn out, haggard as he stood like a totem post in front of the table. Blaskin pulled along the row, ran to congratulate him.

When they stood talking together later, I heard him mentioning manuscripts, and a publisher for them. Delph flipped his ash at random and didn’t seem much interested. A girl with green eyes and yellow hair had an arm through his, and giggled at Blaskin whenever he spoke. Delph patted her on the head, as if to encourage her. ‘My Pandy,’ he said, ‘she perpetually takes the piss out of you metropolitan ponces’ — unable to slip from his groove of the letter P. ‘She’s a proper Persian pussycat is our Pandy, and I’m planning to get my pump into her, aren’t I, pet?’

‘Oh,’ she pouted, ‘what a plague you are.’

‘It’s just that I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Let’s pile downstairs for a pint.’ The wave of the audience went with him, and it was my opinion that he wanted a pasting, but to hint as much to anybody else would have got a leg torn from me. So I picked up my case and pushed down after them.

‘I don’t write all my poems,’ Ron was saying with a sandwich in his mouth. ‘I find some of ’em, pick ’em up, practice ’em, polish ’em — purloin them from time to time and purvey them to you pansies down South. Pot of port, love?’ he said, at Pandy. ‘Last time I came down I gave a great show. I read a Tube map, pure and simple, name after name, round and round. Went off. I was as cool as a landmine. Burnt my fingers on that map because some ice-cold swine in the audience ups and shouts. “What about copyright? London Transport wrote that poem.” So I read it again, went right back to Cockfosters and crept in little circles till I got to Ealing, and by that time he was on the floor with the rest of ’em frothing to death.’

‘Oh, Ron,’ said Pandy, ‘you’re perky tonight.’ He slid another sandwich in his mouth, followed by a pickled onion: ‘I’m still steamed up, the pistons wumphing away. Allus like that after a perf.’

It became clear to Blaskin that he’d never get a word in edgeways so he said: ‘Let’s be off.’ I picked up my case and went outside into the lamp and starlight. He walked ahead down the alleyway, and Pearl Harby took my arm in hers. She was suspiciously quiet with me, but I didn’t fancy a gang-bang with Gilbert Blaskin. It felt comforting nevertheless, and I was sorry when she let go as we hit the wider spaces of St Martin’s Lane.

He was rocking a bit, after a few hours on double brandies, and when he swayed at his car door, trying to open it, a policeman who’d watched him from the shadows said: ‘I hope you aren’t going to drive that Jaguar.’ Gilbert swung round, a look on his face as if about to let go a flow of bad language or vomit.

‘I’m Mr Blaskin’s chauffeur,’ I said, ‘and I’m taking him home.’ I pulled open the door, and Gilbert, having second thoughts on sending his richest prose against the copper’s clock, bent to get in.

‘That’s all right,’ said the policeman, and walked away. Pearl hunched in the back, and soon I was steaming through Trafalgar Square. ‘I thought I’d save you a bit of bother,’ I said.

He seemed sober enough now: ‘Perhaps it’s just as well. I had a nasty bang a month ago, though it wasn’t my fault. Some unthinking advertising yobbo pulled out too suddenly and I crunched him, spun off, bounced against a lorry, ricocheted into another car, scraped a bus, and hit the back end of a van. Came to rest halfway up a lamp-post. Hardly got scratched. The police were mystified at this, thought I must have been drunk. I enjoyed every minute of it, till I suddenly realized it was real, and that I might actually have been killed.’ He held an arm over to the back seat, and in my mirror I saw Pearl take it with both hands and kiss his fingers passionately, not a word passing between them.

We went up to his fourth-floor flat near Sloane Square. He switched on a tape of Duke Ellington, but low so that we would be able to hear him talk if he said anything. Standing by the hall door he took off his hat and coat, and invited me to do the same. I was struck by the length of his absolutely bald head, a shining pink up from the palest of eyebrows, over the top and down to the back of his neck. Along the middle of his dome was a neat and curving scar caused, I was to hear later, by a murderous husband who happened to have a cleaver in his hand when catching Gilbert and his wife. The long-healed wound, which I thought must almost have killed him, made his head, especially from the back, look like nothing less than the limb that had got him into such trouble in the first place.

He sent Pearl into the kitchen to make coffee: ‘That’s what women and disciples are for,’ he said, sprawling back in a wide armchair, ‘to clean your glasses, fill your pipe, and tuck you up at night when you go to bed slightly drunk.’

‘I believe in treating them better than that,’ I said, deliberately sanctimonious so as to draw him out.

‘That’s because you’re young,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll learn.’

I was always being told that, and it riled me. They said it in order to bring me round to their opinions. As far as I was concerned I’d learned already, but I had yet to find out how wrong I was. ‘They stay longer if you treat ’em better,’ I said.

‘Who wants them to stay? There are plenty more where they come from. They never get wise, either, so don’t tell me that.’

Pearl came in with a tray. ‘Do you take it black or white, Mr Blaskin?’

‘Better give it to me black, Pearly dear. That’s the way I’m feeling tonight, so watch your bum when we get to bed. I’m the sex maniac incorporated tonight.’

Her face went vermilion at this, so she turned to pour coffee for me. ‘Do you want me to leave?’ I asked Gilbert. There was a row of small pictures along the deep-blue wall behind his chair, of horses floundering to death, and jolly huntsmen in their bloody jackets lying on top of them with gritty smiles.

‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘unless you can’t stand my personal remarks to Pearl. You don’t mind, do you, lovely?’

She didn’t speak, tried to smile, but the coffee went down her wrong throat and she coughed to clear it out. I offered to start typing his novel right now.

‘The morning’s better,’ he said. ‘I can’t be bothered to find it. I think I put it in the bread bin. Or maybe it’s under my pillow. Or in the airing cupboard. Anyway, don’t bother me with such supremely unimportant questions. I think I’m going to have a thought.’ He lifted himself a little, and one of his profundities splintered the room.

‘It’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but how much are you going to pay me while I work for you? I was getting twenty a week at my last job.’

He threw his cigarette towards the electric fireplace but it landed on the carpet. ‘What’s all the hurry?’

‘I’ve got to go out and find a room for the night.’

He glared at Pearl, who still had her nose in the coffee: ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s the spare room if you want it. We can talk terms in the morning.’

It didn’t seem a bad place to hole up in if Moggerhanger should think to hunt me out for the theft of his cigarette lighter. ‘Darling,’ Gilbert said to Pearl, singing like a canary, ‘are you going to sit there watching a hole burn itself in my best carpet? One of my great great-uncles looted it from India, and that would be a sad end for it.’

I found the spare room, and on my way called at the kitchen, taking half a cold chicken from the fridge, as well as a few slices of Miracle Bread from the bin, and a tin of orange juice and two bananas. So I lay in bed and puffed myself on Blaskin’s goodies, while he was in the main room doing his best to stuff Pearl Harby.

I woke in the morning to the noise of Handel’s Messiah, which seemed a mockery to the confusion I felt inside me, because for a while I didn’t know where I was. Then the music made me want to laugh, because it was so great to hear first thing up from the dreams of oblivion that no matter where I was I felt glad to be alive and wanted to go on living for ever. Looking out I saw a great façade of drainpipes and back windows, lit up by the sun. By my pocket watch it was almost ten o’clock, and the smell of breakfast filtered under the door, together with the music singing ‘O my people’ which, the longer it went on, made me want to cry with joy, booming as if the world was full of drums and voices, so that when I lay down again, with my eyes closed, it began to pull me backwards by the feet, back towards some great river I’d never get out of.

I dressed to my shirt and trousers, then hungrily followed my nose. Blaskin was sitting in a grandad-armchair at the end of the kitchen table, a wine-dark dressing-gown looped around him, frowning over the various plates of breakfast that Pearl had laid out. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is serious in the morning. In the morning you realize with deadly dread that the past is the present, because whatever has happened in the past is part of now. To know this gives you an angel’s grip on life, but it’s a bitter pill, just the same.’

He began eating, and Pearl, whiter than the night before and far more haggard, wrote quickly in a pad by the side of her cornflakes, maybe what he was saying, though I couldn’t be sure, because at the same time she breathed heavily as if she were making up a shopping list. ‘My next novel is to be called Motto by Gilbert Blaskin. People may think I’ve gone crackers, using a title like that, but it’s the thought that counts.’

I launched a thousand cornflakes into a dish of milk. ‘I’ll give you two pounds a week with your room and food,’ he offered.

‘Two pounds fifteen,’ I haggled.

He glared at me. ‘Two pounds ten.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said, thinking to take it for as long as it suited me.

‘My novel is about a man who came out of a Christmas cracker, and lived by the same motto, through thick and thin, until he gets run over by a bus while being chased by the police for firing an air-gun at a horse-guard’s horse. Pearl, the bacon’s cold.’ I couldn’t see myself lasting very long in this place, though I thought that if I was here for the next half-hour I’d be all set to hang on as long as I liked.

She stopped writing: ‘What was the motto, Mr Blaskin?’

‘You’ll have to search the novel for that. It’s a quarter of a million words long and based on the Oedipus legend told backwards. It consists of four fateful words, but it does for our hero. Two will be hammered into his feet to lame him, and the other two will put out his eyes. That’s how he gets run over. He can’t see. Also he can’t run, but he hobbles very well. They find a copy of the Factories Act in his pocket, which is the only pornography he ever allowed himself. Also, of course, the pertinent question may be brought up as to how a blind man can aim an air-gun at a horse. The fact was, he didn’t need to run at all, would merely have been bound over, or patted on the head and given a safe seat by the Conservative Party. Such is life, he said, as they lifted the bus off him a few seconds before he expired!’

I got up and put the coffee back on the stove, while he chewed the fat of his insane liver that lived off the fat of the land. I wished I’d been working in a factory so that I could have told him to belt up and get some real work done.

His novel, a pile of paper tied up in purple cloth, was taken from a locked safe in his study and carried to my room as if it were the royal baby, and set on a table where I was to copy it on to a typewriter. I did ten pages the first day, but after that I speeded up to thirty or forty. It was better than I thought it would be, after all the gobbledegook he spouted when he wasn’t actually writing, and at the end of each day I quickly read what I’d done to make sure I’d missed no part of the story. Pearl sat in the living-room copying his notes, and writing her own book on what the great man said, and what his ideas were. She must have been more of a genius than he was to fathom that lot out. And while we were busy Gilbert himself was in his study, writing to the record of Handel’s Messiah, which he played over and over again. He said that with such music he fancied himself in the wilderness, with no other soul nearby for a hundred miles, and that’s what he liked because it kept his thoughts on an inspired and elevated level. Sometimes when he was in the kitchen or living-room eating in silence he would get a glazed look over his eyes and cry out: ‘Pass my pen. And some paper. I can feel it. Something’s coming!’ Pearl would usually hustle to do his bidding, so that he was able to scribble a few lines of whatever it was, then get back to the serious business of eating or throwing back brandy.

There were times when Gilbert Blaskin went into what I came to recognize later in life as a mood of cosmic despair. It seemed to me, nevertheless, only right that an author should subside into this misery, even though it might be self-induced for the benefit of his work — as I sometimes suspected it to be. In order to work himself into it he had first to have an audience which, because they were black days for him, consisted only of me and Pearl. He also needed to say something funny, not necessarily so to him, but he had to see us laugh before he could get really depressed. I told myself I was only staying there to escape the wrath of Moggerhanger when he discovered I’d filched his heirloom, but partly, and maybe even mostly, it was because I couldn’t contain my curiosity regarding the inner life of this weird person. I didn’t like myself for it, either, and said ten times a day that I’d slide out as soon as I’d had my fill.

One night Gilbert Blaskin (who hasn’t heard of him?) was booked for the Royal Court Theatre nearby. He dressed in his best suit and bow-tie because it was a first-night performance, and before leaving he went — all spruced-up as he was — into the kitchen, looking for his lighter, which he found, and put into his pocket. His eyes then caught sight of a full cool bottle of milk, so without thinking he pushed in the top, upended it at his mouth, and began to gurgle it down. I was on the other side of the table cutting into a steak that Pearl had just grilled for me, and saw that half the milk was spilling down Gilbert’s immaculate togs. I was too fascinated by this spoliation to say anything, though I know I should not have been, but ought to have opened my mouth about it at the beginning. By the end he didn’t need to be told, though I did tell him, for he felt his saturated front with horror. Then he shrugged, wiped it with a tea towel, and went out cursing his luck. This depressed him for a start.

I couldn’t stand the flat, so went for a walk towards Victoria, drinking in the drizzle as if it were the best and freshest moisture in the world when it fell against my face. The station held me in its movement, and I drifted along one platform after another, till I wandered on to one from where trains left for Paris and Italy. People were kissing and saying goodbye before setting off towards the coast. It made London seem smaller and less important, and myself less rooted in it, thrilled me to realize that I had enough money in the bank to get on one of those trains whenever I liked, and go a long way, not only there, but even back if I wanted to, or had to. It calmed me, and I walked home through Eaton Square.

It was still early, so I went into the kitchen to make coffee. Pearl hadn’t heard me come in, because she was standing at the stove with only a thin pair of pants on and nothing else, not even carpet slippers. ‘You look marvellous from behind,’ I said, ‘but turn round, love, and let me see the front.’

For the first time her face had an expression on it, of dis-content that was near to tears, so I went over and tried to comfort her, though my eyes weren’t too long on her face. There were scars on her back and sides, as if she’d been stitched up for some good reason or other. When my fingers touched one she shrugged them away pettishly. Then she nestled close and said: ‘Why didn’t he take me with him? I’ve known him for a month but the only time we went anywhere together was to that poetry reading where we met you.’

‘Maybe he’s meeting somebody else,’ I said, kissing her forehead. ‘But don’t let it worry you if he is. He can’t help it. He’s just rotten. He has to be, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to write his books.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘that’s what I keep telling myself. I didn’t expect anything when I first met him, and then when I didn’t get anything I began to expect something. It’s so stupid of me.’

‘It is,’ I had to admit. ‘I don’t really know why people expect things of each other in any case.’

‘Well,’ she said, trying to smile, ‘it’s not as bad as you make it, because I don’t expect anything from you, but you’re being kind and trying to comfort me.’

‘Don’t let that worry you,’ I said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s my nature to be kind to people.’ She was right though. I had no thought of getting her into bed just because she was Blaskin’s mistress. For that’s what she was no matter how he snubbed her. However, she stood a bit too long leaning her naked top into me, and soon I began to kiss her lips, and out of her tears she began to respond.

‘I’ll put you to bed,’ I said, and when she nodded, I walked her into the main bedroom. In case she was feeling cold because of her tears, I filled a hot-water bottle, but she said she didn’t need that sort of heater, so I let it drop and took off my clothes to lie by her side. In fact I found her to be burning like a big hot coal, and of its own accord my piece found its way there, and of its own accord her birdcage welcomed it till my vulture sank its head for joy and flooded her to the brim so that I was also scorching. I was flushed with love, but she wouldn’t let me kiss her lips or touch her on the tenderest spot with my fingers, so after a while I got out of bed and dressed, left her content as far as I could tell, and went into the kitchen to look for something to eat.

While I was chopping off slices of salami she came in wearing a thick sunflower dressing-gown: ‘I’m hungry, too, now that I’ve got over my fit of melancholic jealousy.’ I made her a sandwich, thick with German mustard, and she ate greedily, which put me off her a bit because though I like to see a woman eat (it gives me more of a kick than if she had loosened her own blouse) I don’t like to see one as voracious as Pearl Harby now was. So I turned my back on her and got the coffee. In any case, she was eating so quickly that she reached out for the salami before I could offer her some more, and soon there was none left for me. Never mind, I thought, she’s been disappointed in love, and that explains everything, or is supposed to.

‘My father worked in the railway yards at Swindon,’ she said, sitting herself comfortably on my knee, ‘and one night he was killed by a German landmine that lit up his life beautifully before it blacked him into a thousand pieces. I was six at the time and there was no funeral because he didn’t exist. It must have landed right on the parting of his hair. A year later my mother died of bronchitis, and I was taken to live with an aunt and uncle, who already had a little girl of their own, called Catherine. The man, unlike my father, had got on in the world, as they say, and he was a solicitor in Cowminster, a small Wiltshire market town. He was very respected, but apart from having done what he regarded as his duty by adopting me, he really had no love for me. He was cold towards me, as if he thought I was going to jump into his bed and force him into an unnatural crime, or as if I was going to alienate him from his own daughter. In my bewilderment I was a bit afraid of him, and it took me a good two years not to be, and to adjust to the new situation. He could tell I was afraid of him, and resented it because he thought it meant I didn’t love him as I should for having had the kindness to take me in.

‘Well, he didn’t realize that I was a child, and had no consciousness. I only loved him, for a few minutes, when he was giving me something, and so he resented it too, that I didn’t love him all the time, even though he didn’t really love me. But neither of them knew that for several years I was still grieving for my real parents, and I wasn’t able to tell them this. They spoke about them now and again, but in a very matter-of-fact way, almost as if they were still alive, and as if I were on holiday with them. Of course, they loved Catherine as their true daughter, and nobody could blame them for that or expect it to be any different, but I felt it sharply. To make up in some way for my desolation I fell in love with Catherine, because much of what she got from her parents she gave to me, because she was very kind and sweet. She was two years older, a girl with blonde hair and grey eyes, slightly fat from overfeeding and too much indulgence, but we were good friends, and my life after a year or so became much more settled, and I eventually did get to think more tenderly of my new parents.

‘The mother was kind to me, and tried to love me, and helped me a great deal. Most of all, I grew up in a mildly intellectual atmosphere, which could never have been the case with my real parents, and this certainly did a lot to make my life richer. The house was full of books, books read, books talked about. I found out later that most of them were no good, all second-rate except for writers like Dickens and Thackeray, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. So I read those avidly, because I was soon able to tell what books were good and what were trash. Catherine went to a grammar school, and I followed her there as soon as I was old enough. If only she had been my real sister, then I wouldn’t have gone through so much suffering because of her. All the love I had in me I put on to her, and when I saw her getting a crush on somebody else, whether boy or girl, I got so jealous and tormented that I thought I’d have to kill myself to get over it! It was crazy, and bad for both of us. Not that she didn’t love me as well, in her way, as a friend, though at times this was almost enough to make me happy and satisfy me, but mostly she was interested in everything and just wanted to get on with her self-absorbed life.

‘Our parents noticed how I mooned after her, but they thought I had only the same worshipful regard for her as they had, because after all she was their only child. I always felt that I was nowhere near as good-looking and well favoured as she was, which wasn’t all that true, but that’s what I felt at the time. It’s terrible being a child, when you don’t know what’s happening to you. You’re just at the mercy of these supercharged underground emotions that gnaw you away like black midnight wolves, and you suffer because you can’t tell what’s happening to you. You’re able to see it more clearly when you get older, but by then it’s too late to do any good, and in any case underground emotions are still taking you to pieces and not putting you back together again, just as they were then, and you still don’t have the detachment to know what’s happening. In fact I suppose it’s even more dangerous because you think that you do, and actually get the illusion that you are in control of yourself. I have the horrible feeling this goes on all your life, and that at death the final question whose answer can solve everything and tell you everything can only be answered after death itself, which really is too late. It gives me the horrors, throws me into despair if I go on thinking about it for too long. But as there’s no answer, I try to block it out, though I’m not always capable of it.

‘For a year or two Catherine went cold towards me, and I was put into a walk of death by it, getting thinner and, it seemed to me, smaller so that I was only a few inches above the earth. Once when I was walking alone along a lane I thought I was small enough to get into a pothole in front of me, curl up and go to sleep in it so that I’d be perfectly safe even if a car went over it. But I did very well at school, and surprised everybody by being best in the class at almost everything.

‘Catherine had been used to having her own way, and she’d been seeing a boy for a few weeks. I think they’d been making love because a group of us used to go out on our bikes at the weekend, and sometimes Catherine and her boyfriend would creep off for half an hour. Then he went away with his parents and didn’t write to her, and she was shocked as she’d never been before. I found his address and wrote, telling him how upset she was, but nothing came of that, which was good I suppose. She used to come into my room at night and weep, and get into my bed for some sort of comfort. Now it was my turn to put on weight, and for Catherine to get thinner — but only for a time because soon she more or less forgot about him.

‘We became very close to each other after that, and she loved me as if I’d been through her experience, as if it ran in my blood as well as hers. We were both young women by now, and our parents, apart from pushing us gently along the educational railway, more or less left us alone. They were generous with pocket money, so we were able to buy extra dresses and what paperbacks we needed, and go to the cinema now and again. Neither of us went with boys, though we were well looked at by any we happened to meet, and many of the boys in the sixth form were friendly with us. But I think we were both mad for a time. We talked crazily about books, films, paintings, plans for the future. We were going to become teachers or doctors and go to Africa together. It was a marvellous age of innocence. We took our baths at the same time. We often slept in the same bed, not being able to stay apart after an enthralling conversation. We even started to learn Swahili, so that we’d know at least one African language. If I told Gilbert any of this he’d mock me to death, but I know I can tell you. Our parents thought we were model daughters, because we helped in the house whenever we could, though this really wasn’t necessary because we were well-off enough to have an Austrian maid, and a man to look after the garden. We went to Wales or France for holidays, and life was good for all of us.

‘The boy Catherine had known two years earlier came back, and she went out with him. He left again after a month and she was pregnant. We didn’t know what to do. She was let down, and horrified. We talked for hours, wondering whether to try and find out how to get rid of it, or tell our parents, or whether she should say nothing, but just go off to university and perhaps have the baby in secret. The weeks went by and we even prepared an elaborate plan for both of us to kill ourselves. It was as if I were pregnant as well, I felt so much a part of her. What we did was worse than anything. We decided to run away together. We discussed it with such enthusiasm as the final, sensible, unalterable answer to the disaster, that all our troubles seemed to be over. I shall never forget the illumination I felt during those few days. I walked as if I were sanctified. It’s crazy. It was crazy, absolutely mad, yet it’s the most wonderful memory.

‘There was seventy pounds between us, and we decided to go to London, find a room, get jobs, and pool whatever we earned. It seemed as if she were no longer pregnant, for in our keenness to escape we almost forgot the blow that had caused it all. I had the insane idea of driving to London in our father’s car. Some nights he and Mother would go to see friends on the other side of town, which meant that if we went away in it it would have to be in the evening. Catherine had taken some lessons, and drove rather well. I had seen her, and I couldn’t drive at all.

‘We hurriedly packed our cases and put them in the car. She drove though the open gate, and both of us were trying not to laugh out loud at this easy getaway, all set as we were for a long and happy life together. It was a fine summer’s evening, with a few hours of daylight left, as Catherine took the car slowly but confidently along the lane and towards the main road. There was hardly any traffic, and she seemed radiant. But there were tears on her cheeks: “Do you think we should?”

‘“What else can we do?” I answered, touching her wrist. “It’s wonderful to be leaving everything behind.”

‘She smiled: “All right. It is.” From the other side a car was approaching the brow of a hill, not going very fast, and at the same time a lousy motorcyclist was overtaking the car. He actually missed us, but his sudden black appearance startled Catherine so that she screamed, and our car went through a hedge and down a slope. The world rushed over me like a blanket, hammers beating at me though the woollen padding. Then I was being pulled clear.

‘The blackness came back, and I opened my eyes in hospital. I asked about Catherine, and was told she was all right. She was in a better state, in fact, than I was. Both my legs were broken, my ribs were smashed, and I’d been concussed, apart from sundry other wounds. When I left hospital Catherine was married to her boyfriend, who’d been made to admit his part in getting her pregnant. She went to live with him near Newcastle, and now they have three children. I was able to say goodbye to her, but we hardly knew each other. I was said to be the evil one who had led her into bad ways, and I didn’t deny any of this. It would at least give her something to remember me by.

‘I haven’t seen her since, and we never write. I did my time at Bristol, and worked as a private teacher. Then I got the bright idea of doing some postgraduate work on the modern English novel, though whether I’ll ever get beyond Gilbert Blaskin I don’t know, because I’ve fallen in love with him. Not that that’s rare, because I fall in love rather easily. Don’t ask why. I miss my real parents still, and because I didn’t get that jealous and possessive love from my second parents, I’m still looking for it. But what you look for you never get — or so I’m beginning to think, and the idea frightens me a bit. But I can’t help looking. It’s a sort of heartless search that’s been built into my nature. I fall in love because I want something, not because I have something to give, and that’s what men see, and what puts them off when they’ve finally got to the end of me in bed.’

‘You shouldn’t worry about anything,’ I said. ‘Everybody gets what they want. I’m convinced of it — even though I might not.’

‘I don’t want pity,’ she said, a wonderful smile which showed that she was no cynic about her life, though she’d try to convince everybody that she was.

‘You’ll get no pity from me,’ I told her. ‘I only feel sorry for people who haven’t got enough to eat, or who’ve got an incurable sickness.’

‘How right you are,’ she said. ‘I wish people often said that sort of thing to me.’

I felt good at hearing this. ‘It’s true,’ I went on, ‘the body has to be seen to first. If that goes, there’s nothing left. If you’re fed and healthy you’ve always got a chance of getting through somehow.’

‘It’s easy to say that,’ she said, ‘but you’re right. I know you are.’

‘Forgive my big mouth,’ I said. ‘I’m worse than Gilbert in my own narrow way. But I know that what I say is true.’

‘Keep on saying it,’ she said, ‘so that I’ll believe it. Sometimes I feel like walking off the edge of the world because everybody I meet agrees with me when I say things are terrible, and I can’t see what the point of life is.’

I got up to boil water for coffee. ‘If I ever write a book I’ll call it How to Stop Worrying — and Drop Dead!’

She squeezed my hand affectionately, as if it were real love she felt: ‘Gilbert doesn’t know I love him. I’d never tell him. As soon as you tell someone you love them, they can then do their worst to you.’

‘But if you don’t tell them, they may never know.’

‘Maybe he’ll find out,’ she said, hopefully. ‘I’ve given lots of signs. Things can’t be worse than they are now, but it’s when I think that things might start to get better that I get frightened, because that’s when the worst really happens.’

She had me sweating at these twistings and turnings, burning through my flimsy front of simplicity and common-sense, so that I started to imagine that whatever she said was right, ‘I mistrust myself and my emotions all the time,’ she went on. ‘but only so that I might be able to get to know myself, not in order to destroy myself — which seems to be where it’s heading me.’

‘It’s a way of destroying others,’ I told her, a bit too strongly. She lifted my hand to her mouth, and I thought I was all set for a tender kiss. Her eyes closed, as if what I said was a revelation to her instead of the deadly insult she took it to be. Her small sharp teeth ground into the gristle of my wrist.

‘You bastard!’ I shouted, never having called anyone else such a thing in my life before, shooting back from the bloody witch. ‘What was that for?’ I had to move because the pain was killing me, so I walked over to the stove, but the kettle wasn’t yet boiling.

‘You deserved it,’ she said, beginning to smile. ‘I never wanted to destroy anybody. People can only destroy themselves.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, thinking about revenge. ‘Coffee?’

‘Please, love.’

‘Do you often bite people, or is it just when you’re hungry, like?’

‘Oh, stop it, can’t you?’

‘Drink this, then, you bitch.’

Gilbert came in, slumped down in such a way that I knew the play had been no good. ‘The kitchen sink,’ he said. ‘A slice of life. Full of dirty dishes. They didn’t even throw them at each other. Very good dialogue, though. All talk.’

Pearl put a hand on his shoulder and let him sip her coffee. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘Had supper,’ he said, ‘with the man who wrote the play. He thinks my novels are trash, and I drink his plays are bunk, so we drowned our mutual comradeship in wine. I was going to show a bit of solidarity by saying we were both writers after all, but he started talking about decorating the house he’d just bought, and wondering which was the best car to buy.’

‘But you’ve got these things already,’ Pearl reminded him, unnecessarily, I thought.

‘So’s he. But he wants more and more. But God forgive me, he’d be all right if only he’d write a play with a happy ending, and leave me to write my tragic novels. Still, I can’t expect to corner the market forever. I’m so incriminatingly selfish. What have you two been doing in my absence? Fornicating on my best bed?’

‘Wandered like a ghost around Victoria Station for a couple of hours, then walked up West.’

‘I see she’s bitten you,’ he laughed. ‘Somebody ought to punch some sense into her, the bloody vampire. Or am I talking to the woman you love?’

‘Bollocks,’ I said.

‘Like that, is it? Never mind. I had a letter today to say that an admirer of mine had produced my fourth novel in an edition of illuminated braille, so that it would be seen as a beautiful object while being read. Can you imagine that? But then somebody told the visionary who’d done it that the blind couldn’t see, so he shot himself in despair. I sympathize with him because he was trying to light up the darkness of the world, and though he was foolhardy and mad, as it turned out, it was a commendable thing to do. Light up your hearts! That’s what I’m for, to persuade people against their better instincts that life is worth living. Do not despair, says Gilbert Blaskin. He’ll do that for you. Gilbert will lighten the loads of all of you. But who, dear God, is going to lighten his load? Life falls twice as heavily on him ladies and gentlemen, but he’s not supposed to notice it because he’s helping you not to notice yours. The trumpets shall sound, but Gilbert will never be able to unload his load, caught as he is in the desert between Pimlico and Earl’s Court.

‘I saw my wife at the theatre with a gaggle of friends. I never left her, but caused her to leave me. I wanted to leave her for years but couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I made her life such a misery that she was forced to clear out to stop herself going mad or getting strangled. I wanted to get rid of her so as to have a free hand with my girlfriend whom I intended to marry. But as soon as my wife left me I lost all enthusiasm for my girlfriend. Don’t ask me why. The bullets of introspection don’t go that far. Maybe they do in the characters I conjure up, but not in me. So I broke things up with my girlfriend, and asked my wife to come back. But she laughed at me and wouldn’t, having discovered that she’d wanted to leave me for years, but hadn’t been able to do it till I’d forced her to. And now I’m here in these rooms of memory which even my delectable and scorching Pearl can’t rub out. And if she can’t, there’s no one else who can. The trouble is I’m not even in love with my wife, and if she came back I’d only get rid of her again after a month — no, a week. By God, Michael, life’s not easy. If you think it is just jump in the toilet and pull the chain after yourself. They say the sewers in New York are full of alligators because people have flushed them down there when they no longer want to keep them as pets. I think God or some swine has flushed a few into me to keep me lively and kicking. I’ll pop somebody into my mouth one day armed with a quick-firing double-barrelled rifle to hunt those alligators out, even though I die over it.’

He went on like this, slooshing his tripes with brandy now and again, till he fell off the chair, and we had to drag him to bed. I left Pearl to tuck him in.

I sat in my room making plans for departure. Gilbert hadn’t yet read the typed copy of his novel. When he did there’d be a shock for him. It wasn’t that I hadn’t made a good job of it. The typing was clear and firm, the paper white and clean between the lines, and maybe even some people would consider it to be a novel. I’d started off with Gilbert’s true text, but halfway through I got bored by the story, and at the point where his hero was sitting outside a Paris café and wondering whether to go back to his girlfriend in London, or down to his boyfriend in Nice, I reached up to the shelf behind me and brought down Roderick Random by Henry Fielding* and typed twenty pages of that, which, if anything, lent a bit of quality to Blaskin’s thin-blooded crap. More pages were ploughed in from other novels, though I understood that this wasn’t exactly what the author wanted. Considering that I’d spent three weeks over the work, he might have been irritated by this and given me the push, so I decided to take fate once more into my own hands and light off before he got wind of the disaster. Then I thought I was being too hurried about it, that if I didn’t lose my nerve, and stayed, maybe he wouldn’t bother to read the novel before sending it to his publishers. And once it got there maybe nobody would tumble to what had been done, and print it with the fond thought that Mr Blaskin had at last set off on better and richer ways, something they’d been secretly hoping for ever since they’d mistaken his first novel for a work of art. Maybe the reviewers would even praise the newly emerging quality of his invention. In which case he’d actually have something to thank me for — if I was still around.

I decided to move on, though not at midnight, because it was always better to look for a bed in, the morning, when the memory of one was still with you. Another thing was that I needed a room of my own, an absolutely set pad where I could come and go of my quick will. I’d dallied long enough at Blaskin’s for Moggerhanger to have given me up as lost, if he’d even bothered to miss me or imagine I could ever be found, which I was beginning to doubt now that my hope and initiative were coming back, blinding me to all caution. Another fact was that Blaskin had given me no money, when he’d solemnly promised fifty bob a week. I’d reminded him of it in good terms a time or two, but like all people who are ultra-sensitive in everything, and don’t miss a splinter of what goes on anywhere, it went over his head completely — or at least he acted as if it did.

When I considered that all were asleep I crept out of my room and found his coat hanging up in the hall. I removed two five-pound notes, which I thought to be honest payment for all the work I’d done on his novel. There were sixty pounds in the wallet altogether, and I could have lifted all of it, but I knew in my heart that Blaskin would call the police without hesitation if he thought I’d robbed him unjustly, for he was one of those people who loved the world as long as the people in it interested him. After that, it was back to the jungle for all concerned.

I had to get out of the flat while he and Pearl were still asleep, and to save time packed my case the night before. I stood with the light off and my curtains open, watching the opposite buildings. A woman leaned in white underwear, and a man’s arms pulled her to him, out of my sight. Then the blind went down. A huge dog, as big as a man and with a head twice the size, pressed at one window, and seemed to be barking, though I couldn’t hear it, pawing the glass as if it were locked in and there was no escape. I wished someone would pull that beast away so that I couldn’t see it any more. I turned my head to another range of windows. In some, there was washing, because most of the rooms seemed to be kitchens. Light bulbs were often bare, a few were shaded. A shadow moved across a window now and again, too quick to see whether it was man or woman. I wondered how many of them had to get up in the morning and go to work. I felt hatred of those who didn’t, as if I was the only person in the world with the right to be idle. Just as I could never feel sympathy for anyone unless they were without food, so I would never go to work unless I were starving. But as I looked at those massed windows covering the whole sky, I felt this sentiment crumbling. It just wasn’t worthwhile. It cut me off too much, from all those people in the world I most wanted to know. It was as if I had to break my own bones in order to join them, that was the only trouble. The longer it went on like this, the harder it would be, though at the same time I devoutly wondered whether I’d have the brains to stay away from their terrible anonymity without falling as low as Almanack Jack. To join them, all I had to do was switch on my own bedroom light, and stand there, imprisoned in the oblong of window so that they on the other side could then see that I was a prisoner like the rest of them. But I got into bed in the dark.

A few hours later, with something lurking at my window that looked like morning, I was awake, croaking for a pot of liquid to drink but knowing I’d have to wait till I got clear and found a café. I dressed in two minutes and, taking one last glimpse around the flat, made for the door with my case attached to my hand. I shivered, as if I’d made too many departures in the last few months, and wasn’t sure that I wanted to go. I wasn’t even getting kicked out, but that didn’t seem to matter, for I was moving, and, at this time of the morning, that was that.

A man standing by the door, about to press the bell, got as big a shock as I did. He was tall, well built, had thinning hair, and wore a pale short mackintosh. I tried to keep my voice down: ‘What do you want?’

He lisped: ‘Mog wants his flash back.’

I didn’t know what he meant. ‘You’ve got the wrong house.’

‘Moggerhanger sent me. He wants his lighter back.’

‘I haven’t got it any more.’

‘He wants ’is flash back.’

‘I ain’t got the thing,’ and shut the door behind me: ‘Shift out of the way. I’m going down.’

He bumped me so hard that I dropped my case: ‘Mr Moggerhanger wants ’is flash.’ He took a cut-throat razor from his pocket, opened it, and grinned: ‘He told me to make the sign of the cross if you don’t hand it over.’

I saw that glint, and took the hint, and bent down to snap open my case, scrabbling under a heap of shirts and dirty underwear. ‘I was going to call in and bring it back today,’ I said, pushing it into his hand. He pressed the fuse, saw the flame, looked at it as if he thought it a pretty sight that he could gaze on all day. After a final grin at its beauty, he blew it out and put it in his pocket, the razor held all the time in his other hand.

‘That all right?’ I said, trying to stay calm and smile. He lifted the razor and drew it across my face, without touching flesh. I cried out, but he laughed, kicked my case down the stairs, and walked through the mess.

I picked up the bits and put them back. On his progress he’d trodden on a tube of toothpaste and squashed it flat, so that a white jet of it had shot across the carpeted stair. A cold sweat was all over me, and my hand trembled so that I could hardly put a necktie back into the case. I knelt to do my work, and thought of going into the flat, to fall asleep and tell myself afterwards, when I got up to a good breakfast and decided to stay, that this had been a mere bad dream. But the door was locked and I had no key, and in any case I would not have done it.

The longer I sat the better I felt, and I suddenly urged myself to close the case and stand up. In my pocket were cigarettes and matches, and when I found that my feet weren’t yet ready for me, I smoked casually as if resting before my long journey down to the street. It was eight o’clock by my watch, and apart from feeling sick I wanted some breakfast, so with a good heave I was standing at last, ready to descend.

The air smelled good, smoky and full of petrol, the very stuff of life, as Gilbert Blaskin might have said. People were already going to work, and I wished them luck and a long run as I walked my case towards King’s Road. I found an eating place and stuffed myself back to health and strength on bacon and pancakes and coffee, soon feeling cocky again after my fright from Moggerhanger’s one-man execution squad. Opening my street map I wondered where I was going to live, what four walls, if any, I’d inhabit before the day was out. With two hundred and fifty pounds in the bank I was the king of kings — though not for ever. I thought of walking into a hotel, but would only do that at the last moment, if I couldn’t get anything but a slice of pavement before darkfall. With so few possessions my case wasn’t heavy as I walked towards Victoria, but I didn’t like being seen dragging it around. A man with a case looks like a traveller, or a thief, or someone too innocent to be out on the street. You can’t swagger and feel good with a suitcase. Even if it weighs nothing you’re marked off from the rest of the people into which you should be able to melt for cover if you feel like it.

So I dropped it in the left-luggage at the station and strode on through streets that hadn’t yet lost their freshness and interest. The market in Soho was out, an abundance of barrows lining the streets, now packed with mid-morning shoppers. I bought a Spanish newspaper, which I couldn’t read, and sat in an Italian place for a cup of black coffee, sipping it down between puffs at a cigar. Whenever I did a bunk or otherwise left anywhere, I always wore my best suit. Why, I don’t know, but it made me feel good when I had nowhere to go. And because it bolstered my spirit at such a time, it was also plain to me that I wasn’t feeling easy in such a state of homelessness, and that I had to get out of it quick. The sensible thing, in view of Moggerhanger’s hostility (I had no way of knowing whether this morning’s threat was only the beginning of it) would be to get out of town for a few weeks, so as to avoid being seen in the area where he owned half the clubs.

Yet I couldn’t tear myself away, and I’m glad I didn’t, because when I went into an Italian place for lunch (I was hungrier than usual when on the loose) I sat down and saw the back of a head farther up the room belonging to somebody who’d taken a small table all to himself, and it was of a shape that caught a snipe of recognition in me. I waited for him to turn, but he casually faced the other way as if not caring to show his face too openly. Sometimes he seemed on the point of doing so, out of boredom at looking at the wall, which was the only thing in front of him. For a second I saw a little to the side of his face, and his way of moving convinced me that I had seen that turnip-head before. All through the minestrone I plugged my mind in every place to bring back some memory with the label of a name stuck to it I searched all over the place, even going through every film I’d seen in the last ten years in the hope that some far-off face in one might lead me to the actual face I was trying to remember.

Thinking he’d never turn, I picked up my knife and dropped it, but too many other people were talking and eating around me, and he didn’t hear a thing. There was a rack by his side, on which hung a good-quality light overcoat, a hat, and a cashmere scarf. I looked down to eat when my veal came, but noted that he was ahead in his meal, and that the waiter was taking his coffee. Cigar smoke drifted above his head, which was now bent at the table as if he were reading a newspaper. He called for his bill, and the waiter treated him like a regular client who left good tips. I tried to catch some words, but they were lost. He stood for the waiter to help him on with his coat, and as soon as he half turned my heart jumped at the sight of him.

When I called his name, not too loud but only so that he would hear me, he looked in my direction as if I’d sworn at him. It was Bill Straw, the knowledgeable glutton who’d come down to London with me from the North. He wore a light grey suit, a silk shirt, and a small-knotted dark tie, and still had the cigar in his teeth. I remembered his face as having been prison-pale and unshaven, but now it was lean and tanned, and full of vigour so that he looked ten years younger. But there was no mistaking old Bill Straw, my erstwhile friend from back on the road.

He came closer, looked at me with his grey eyes, and smiled: ‘Well, my old flower, I thought you’d been swallowed up. It seems that long ago to me.’

‘Centuries,’ I said, shaking the offered hand. ‘Sit down and have some more coffee.’

‘I will,’ he answered, ‘If you’ll have a brandy — on me.’

‘You don’t look the same any more.’

‘I’ll never be like that again,’ he told me. Even his way of speaking had changed. A far-off look came into his eyes: ‘No, you’ll never see me as I was when you picked me up on the Great North Road.’

‘Not old Bill Straw,’ I said, too jocularly by half, because he flinched from it.

‘You want a bit of smoothing down,’ he said. ‘You’re too rough. And by the way I’m not Bill Straw, so do me a favour and forget that. I’m known as William Hay — to all my acquaintances and to my employers. It’s also written in my passport. I’m a company director by profession. This is just to get the record straight, though don’t think I’m not still a human being, because I am. I’ve succeeded in doing away with the life I had before coming to London this time. But I don’t forget you, because you helped me. I say,’ he said suddenly, with a bit of old mateyness, ‘you haven’t seen that June on your wanderings, have you?’

Over a couple of brandies I told him honestly all that had happened since we parted at Hendon on our way in. He was impressed at hearing that I’d actually succeeded in getting on the wrong side of Moggerhanger. ‘I know blokes who have nightmares about that,’ he said. ‘He’s dangerous, so don’t tangle further with him. You’d better take a few hints from me.’

‘You’ve done so well by the look of it,’ I said, ‘that it might not be a bad idea.’

He looked deadpan at this: ‘You are a bit green. Right from when you gave me that lift, and let me con you out of so much grub on the way down. I don’t know how you’ve survived this long. More by luck than experience, from what you’ve told me. But I suppose it’s about time you were taken in hand. You’d better bunk up at my place for a while. I kicked my umpteenth girlfriend out last night, so you can stay there till I get another one. I’ve got a flat over in Battersea. Small and quiet, but it’s convenient. You remember I told you on the A1 that I had a few thousand to collect from a job I’d done bird for? Thought I was lying, didn’t you?’

He laughed, and lit another Havana. ‘I wasn’t I’ve often told the truth to people who think that with a face like mine I can’t help but lie. An old trick. Well, it was stashed away safely for me, and what’s more it had been piling up interest the years I was in prison. A tidy sum of five thousand three hundred! Couldn’t believe such loyalty from the others. But I’d stood by them, you see, right through everything, and they knew it. So it’s still getting interest for me. Invested in good old British industry by a broker I was put on to, curling in as much as eight per cent. The fact was, I hardly needed to touch it, just three hundred to fit myself out, because I was put on to some very profitable work, just the stuff for the likes of me, because it takes me off the island, to the hot spots of the mainland, and a bit beyond at times. I won’t say too much yet, but I didn’t get this tan potholing in the Pennines. Still, I don’t forget somebody who helped me when I was down and out. Not me, not the new man nor the old. When you picked me up, I don’t know whether you knew it or not, but I was ready to die. I was done for and finished, inside and out, stomach and heart. I felt I was trudging towards the end of the world in that rain, with cars and lorries splashing me up as they went by, the cold eating into me so that I was snatched and perished.’

He called for more brandy, as if these recollections threatened to swamp his new-found heart. ‘I didn’t do much,’ I said. ‘I just felt sorry to see this bloke, and stopped my rotten old car that I was so proud to be in.’

‘You did well though, helping William Hay. That part of me has snuffed it. For ever, I hope.’

‘Here’s to you, then,’ I said, sipping the best brandy.

‘I’ve got a good job now, Michael. Travelling. I’ve become an experienced traveller in the last few months. I’ve been to the Middle East. I’ve been over the North Pole. I’ve been all over Europe. Mind you, I earn every penny of it. I’ll tell you that for a start. Every bloody penny that gets stashed into my bank is earned by the sweat of my brow. That’s why I have to eat two or three big meals a day. I’ve got to stay strong and full of energy for the work I do, otherwise I might break down, and that’d be no good at all, because then I’d lose my job, and worse. It’s not an easy life, even though I do look well and prosperous. In fact, in some ways it’s the hardest bloody job I’ve ever done, but it pays well.’ He cackled: ‘It pays well, I will say that for it.’

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I was all avidity to find out. The place was emptying, and he suggested that we go for a stroll. He had to walk five miles every day when he wasn’t working, to keep himself trim for when he was. ‘I have to eat a lot and walk a lot,’ he laughed, as we went out through the door, bowed at by the manager after William had insisted on paying my bill.

‘You’re not a bad walker yourself,’ said William, when we had reached the inner circle of Regent’s Park, as if he were putting me through some kind of test. ‘I’ll take it on trust that you’re a good eater.’ I felt we’d come too far already, and didn’t exactly see the point of planing one’s feet off in this way. I wasn’t hungry for praise about my standards of endurance either, so began to think of cutting back to town. ‘What we’ll do,’ he said, ‘is veer towards Baker Street, and go down through Victoria to Battersea, then you can pick up your case before we cross the river.’

‘You do this every day?’ I said. Though he kept up a killing rate he didn’t seem the least bit tired or ruffled, could have looked to any passer-by as if he’d just stepped out of a taxi, and was only walking a few hundred yards before getting where he wanted to be.

‘You have to look like a gentleman,’ he said, ‘yet be very tough in your fibres. That was dinned into me, during training.’

‘What training?’ I asked, a faint regret now at the different standards of our appearance.

‘Training. The first week they thought they’d never get me out of my old life. But after that I caught on so quickly that the man in the iron lung was amazed. I always was a slow starter, but that’s what makes me good in the end. There’s many of those chaps (and women, mind you) who’ve latched on with beautiful speed, but often they’re the first to crack. That’s what the Lung says, and I quite believe him. He’s got many a tale to tell, has that pasty-faced bastard.’

‘It all sounds Swahili to me. Besides, I’m hungry. We must have done four miles already. Let’s go into the next place for something to eat.’

He stopped and bent down, lifting the bottom of his left trouser-leg and unclipping his suspenders so that he could roll his sock. Attached to the inside of his ankle was a multi-coloured watchface, a pedometer, I supposed, after he’d spoken. ‘Three and a quarter,’ he said, doing himself up coolly, and carrying on the walk. ‘I wear this just to see that I don’t cheat myself.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said, ‘I’m bloody famished. I could still do with an ox-eye on toast.’

‘Ah!’ he laughed. ‘Your belly’s groaning for grub already. If you aren’t careful we’ll take you on. There’s allus room for a new hand. But I can’t go into this crummy bar. Let’s find a more decent place lower down. That’s part of my job, too. A gentleman can’t be seen in a pig-bin like that.’

‘I’d like to know what you’re up to.’

‘I can’t even light a cigar as I walk along. But it’s all good discipline, and that’s healthy for any man, being made to do something that your system kicks against. You’re able to see a lot in life, and what more can you want than that? You might think I’m talking a bit overmuch, but that’s also part of the training. You have to be able to embark on a sea of diverting and intelligible talk at the drop of a hat, because a man who talks is always less suspicious that one who can only look dumb and stand with his trap shut. You’ve got to say the right thing, and say it with confidence. No stammer or foot-shifting, or they’re on to you right away. Those airport bastards don’t think twice about tipping your pockets up if your left eyelid seems a bit out of place.’

We went into a respectable fodder bar on Wigmore Street, and sat down for a few choice dishes. ‘So you’re a smuggler?’ A plum-coloured flush went down his cheek. ‘You’re worse than the man I took you for.’

‘We never use that word where I come from. I’m a company director, a travelling gentleman involved in the export trade.’

‘Sorry, William.’

‘You’ll have to curb your big mouth, that’s the first thing. Until you do that you’ll get nowhere.’

‘Christ,’ I said, making a cut so that the yellow middle of the egg ran all over my toast, ‘everybody I meet makes it his job to teach me something.’

William forked into his cake. ‘You were born lucky, in that case. Make sure you take ’em up on it. Otherwise you’re throwing your luck away. I’m no fool, Michael, though I have been, so listen to me, and learn all you can from everybody. You didn’t learn much at school, I suppose. That means you were bright. You were too full of understanding to bother with what they had to tell you. But all that’s behind you now. You got through it without too much bother. They didn’t succeed in training you either for a prison or a factory. But now you’ve got to listen to people who try to teach you something, because they aren’t teachers. They do it out of the goodness of their hearts, as one human to another, and they get nothing out of it. That’s like gold, so for God’s sake don’t scoff at it.’

I’d never known him so serious. ‘All right, but I still have to pick and choose about what I want to learn.’

‘Admitted, but only after you’ve taken it in. Come on, eat up. We’ve got our walk to finish. I know you eat fairly quickly, but you’ll have to do better than that. A slow eater is a slow thinker, and slow thinking wouldn’t be much good to me. Above all, you have to look calm and think quick, otherwise your goose is cooked, whether it’s Christmas or not.’

His flat was quiet and out of the way, more in Clapham than Battersea, and I was there a few weeks before being introduced to the man in the iron lung. Out of gratitude and friendship (I didn’t consider I’d earned it, though William, who had an exaggerated conscience in some things, thought that I had) he gave me the run of the place. This meant spending much time on my own, because every few days he went away on a trip.

But in between these goings away I would accompany him on long walks. Sometimes we’d go to a gymnasium or a swimming bath because he insisted on us keeping fit. As a result of this I became slightly leaner, firmer in the muscles. He also told me to use less stodge, and whenever possible we ate thick steaks and drank red wine. This treatment suited me fine, but I knew it couldn’t all be free, and wanted to know the reason for it, though I realized that nothing would be told me, till William was good and ready, so I didn’t lose face by asking questions which would not be answered. That also was part of the training.

In his looser moments William hinted that I would become wealthy enough if I was taken on, that my standard of life would leap should I succeed in the first three trips. The only difficulty was to get me taken on, but this might not be impossible providing his own recommendations were firmly given. Fortunately, I was tall enough, and had a good face and figure for the work, which, with a bit of coaching and, later, actual training, would be quite acceptable. He himself had been so successful in the first months of initial forays that if he put up a candidate they would most likely listen to him. The fact was, also, that beginners were always in great demand, not because they fell by the wayside (though some did, of course), but because of that perpetual and reliable quality known as beginner’s luck.

After one successful trip a beginner was in most cases no longer used, and he had to be content with the first handsome hand-out, and then retire to the life from which he had come. The man in the iron lung, as he lay and looked at them, was such an expert reader of faces (and handwriting, because on every occasion he would get them to copy five lines and then judge them by it), that he could tell not only whether a man had presence, courage, and nerve for the job but, above all, whether he was lucky. Like Napoleon with his generals he had to know if the candidates for smuggling gold out of the country had a built-in streak of luck that would last them for more than one trip. William, much to his own surprise, had passed this test, and now seemed to be on the permanent staff of the organization, which gave him the confidence to assume that he could get me into it for one trip at least which, if all went well, would net me two or even three hundred pounds on my return.

As soon as these definite terms and possibilities were mentioned I began to feel the stony cravings of ambition harden in my stomach. Some would call it foolish greed and they’d be wrong, because I not only wanted money but also the experience and prestige that would go with it. I saw it as a way of breaking out of a fixed imprisoning period of my life, and though there was some risk (that William played down) I was anxious to get taken on and go through with it. When I was in town, or sitting alone in William’s flat listening to the foreign records he’d brought back from his expeditions, I got the black sweats because I wondered whether I’d have the backbone to succeed in something like this. I put it to William, but he laughed and said he’d gone through exactly the same doubts, and what’s more it was good to have them because you were no good if you didn’t. Those who didn’t feel this never got through the training. They didn’t even begin it because the man in the iron lung had only to see their handwriting to know that they were too brittle to have doubts about themselves, in which case he wouldn’t waste time and effort training them. Of course, William said, he didn’t want to push me too hard in this because, after all, I had to make up my own mind. I might be thrown out on first appearance as being totally unsuitable, but he didn’t think so, and in any case the decision to make this first appearance before the man in the iron lung had to be taken finally by me and me alone.

The cunning bastard knew that by this time I was too intrigued to draw back, but I still had my doubts about how suitable I was because, as I’d always known, there’s a certain idleness in me, an inability to think to the end of everything that starts for no other reason than that I can’t be bothered. I think: what’s the point? and the flashlight of a bright idea soon gets lost in the fog.

I started to grow a moustache, because William said it would improve my appearance, and thus my chances of being accepted. Fortunately, I looked at least twenty-five, which was also good, because no one looking too much like a youth would ever be used. I never of course imagined this might be some kind of game or trick on his part because I had the evidence of his rise to affluence before me, and I thought that if I could get on to the same railroad, then all well and good. He wondered whether I ought to start smoking a pipe, because that always creates a good impression, he said, especially if it’s full but unlit when you’re on the way through and they sense the opportunity to do a small kindness in the midst of their restrictive work by asking few questions so that you can get quickly to the other side and then light up. I gave it a try, but even with the weakest tobacco I almost vomited after every puff. It wasn’t the strength of the weed so much as the way it hit the back of the mouth and ricocheted down the throat as soon as it came in. So he told me to go on smoking Whiffs, but that while filing through the customs, it might be better to smoke nothing at all.

Life was dull during these weeks, but I didn’t mind that, because I found it interesting — as it were. In my idleness I sensed that my appearance was changing to the world, while my attitudes to the world weren’t altering at all. The world saw a different man, while I saw the same world, though at the same time I saw the world seeing a different man. That made me feel good, because I became bigger to myself. Thinking I was short on cash William bought me a best-quality electric shaver for eleven pounds. ‘Pay me from your first lump sum,’ he said, as we came out of the shop.

‘What if I never get it?’ — not so stone-sure as he was.

‘In that case, you’ve got something for nothing. But from now on get used to having it with you, so’s you can shave at least twice a day. Treat it as a natural extension of your graballing hand.’

‘Shall I get a bowler hat as well?’

‘They’d tumble to you in a flash. For a face like yours you’ll need a hat like mine. We’ll go up Regent Street and buy one now. Then you can wear it every time you go out.’

The grooming was on in earnest, because on our way to the hatters I was steered into Simpsons for a haircut. Cunning old William had phoned from the flat and made an appointment, so that we went through the doors dead on time in spite of what seemed like casual and aimless progress there. He told the barber exactly what to do, how my hair should be short on top and someway down the neck at the back, with longish sideburns. I protested, but he told me to shut up, and I was on my way to his throat when the scissors scraped along the inside of my ear and the barber screamed and jumped back, thinking I was about to go berserk. ‘Get on with it then,’ I shouted. ‘Only do it quick or I’ll cut my own throat without waiting for you to do it.’

They were glad to see the back of us, though not of William, because he left a ten-bob note for a tip. ‘You’re more trouble than a bloody baby,’ he said, and, after we’d been to the hat-shop, ‘Now who’s that coming towards yourself in that mirror over there?’

‘Where?’ I said. ‘Where?’ — looking straight into it, at this smart young fellow I didn’t for a moment recognize. I tipped my hat to him, and wondered what the hell would happen next.

The following morning Mr Hay went on a trip to Beirut, and I was left again to wander the town. But I had been given instructions as to what I should do, each daily walk marked on a map in different-coloured pencil. William stipulated that I must carry my briefcase, which he had already filled with short lengths of lead so that it felt on lifting like a twenty-pound weight hanging from my arm. What’s more, he had taken the key so that I couldn’t throw any of it out. There was, of course, no reason why I should have carried the briefcase at all, but because this was an important part of my training I didn’t want to spoil any chance of getting into their racket simply by being idle and unable to carry the right weight when it came to a test. The first day took me to the middle of town and back, and I don’t know whether it was part of a laugh on William’s part, but it so happened from the map that I was to turn around at the Old Bailey.

The idea that I was to take this weight, and wear my hat, and walk in a casual way as if I had little more than a copy of that morning’s newspaper in my briefcase was, as I found after the first hundred yards, easier said than done. In the middle of Battersea Bridge I wanted to put it down and sit on it because I was sweating like a dog. When I picked it up again I wanted to sling it in the river. But I carried on, recalling as I walked how my Irish ancestors (one of them anyway) had survived the Famine created by the callous English in order to come over and build the railways for them, digging out their navigating guts as they linked up one place to another. So bearing this picture, I struggled through Chelsea, hoping I didn’t look too much like a coalman about to deliver his last load of the day.

By the time I got back to the flat my arms felt a foot longer, but the second day was worse because though by then I’d got used to carrying the actual weight, I had been specially requested to put on the expression of nonchalance. If it was impossible to do this on setting out, it was even more difficult by the time I was on the return leg. The walks had been planned so that they got longer each time, and when I was putting the key into the flat door I cursed myself for a fool and swore I’d clear out as soon as I got my clothes together. It had drizzled and rained much of the day, what’s more, and this only increased my exhaustion and despondency.

After a bath and a few mugs of tea I began to lose my rage. From the height of the flat I could look out, and see that the rain had stopped. The sun was shining somewhere, and softened the light, giving a rich and vivid colour to the air. It made me think of the marvellous and narrow life I’d left behind in Nottingham, though it didn’t inspire me to go back there. Then I had a vision of all I could do in this soft and beautiful world if I had money, and that since I might be put in the way of getting plenty if I followed William’s advice, I might as well persist in this short stretch of training he had set for me during his absence. It would be weak and foolish to give up now, and I had never considered myself either weak or foolish. I put on a record, and fell asleep before the first side ended, not waking up until the following morning, when the treadmill began all over again.

I had broken through, picked up that briefcase like an old friend, as if we’d already done a full year of days together. With a newspaper under the other arm I whistled along, even saying a cheery good morning to a copper on the bridge — knowing old Hay would approve of that. This was the longest trudge of all, but I knew I could make it. I walked from Battersea to the middle of Hampstead, changing the briefcase over now and again, but only as if to give the other hand the privilege of holding it. On the map there was a blue circle around the Tube station at Hampstead, which meant I was to have lunch there, and I made it a good one, dawdling so long at the Pimpernel that it was almost three o’clock before I left.

The day was fine, except for a bit of wind which nearly blew my hat off a time or two, and I actually enjoyed the walk, the weight no longer so oppressive that I couldn’t look around me and take things in. My route led down through the streets towards Finchley Road, and I was passing a row of large houses which were used as private schools. Boys came out wearing fancy caps with tassels, and the girls with grey bowlers, accompanied by maids or parents. There was a queue of glossy cars waiting by the kerb, and a lot of honking from some that wanted to turn round and get out of the cul-de-sac. It was amusing to pick my way through, and assume the easiness of a father going there casually from the office (after a hard day since eleven o’clock) to pick up his Crispin and Felicity. But I stopped to watch a little boy with a briefcase stand outside a door at the top of some steps. He wore his cap at such an extremely cocky angle that it was about to slide off. The heavy black glasses were so big over his eyes that they almost covered his face. Compared with the rest of the kids swarming down the steps he was very small indeed, yet through this disguise of posh-school clobber I would have known him anywhere.

He jumped up on the concrete wall, which sloped steeply towards the gate-post, put his briefcase on it, and slid at a great rate to the bottom, falling off so that his cap went one way and his glasses the other. The school door opened, and Bridgitte ran down the steps, picked him up, smacked his face, and collected his things together. ‘You shouldn’t hit a kid like that,’ I said. ‘It’s just high spirits.’

She glared at me without recognition. ‘Mind your own business. I’m his mother.’

‘Are you? I must be his father, then. Don’t you know me, darling?’

She looked again, but Smog cried: ‘It’s Uncle Mike! Have you come to take me away?’

‘You!’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Thanks for the welcome. I thought we were old friends — until you vanished out of my life.’

‘I’m Mrs Anderson now,’ she said, ‘thanks to you. And the mother of this.’

‘It’s not possible,’ I laughed, taking it bravely.

‘It is, let me tell you.’ Smog snuggled up to my legs. Then he danced around me. He tried to pick up my briefcase, but stopped when his face turned purple. He kicked it, and stubbed his toe, came close to tears. Then he laughed and grabbed me again. ‘Still the same old Smog,’ I said, pulling his cap off and putting it in my pocket.

‘He’s not,’ she said, ‘he’s worse. I took him to Holland last month and he wrecked my father’s farm. He laid it waste singlehanded, and my father won’t see me again.’

I was mystified at the fact that, as she said, she was now Mrs Anderson, and I tried to cover my wound by banter. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘we don’t call him Smog any more. It’s forbidden. It’s very bad for him.’

‘It can’t make him much worse than he is, can it, Smog?’

He looked up: ‘No, it can’t actually. Will you buy us some cakes?’

‘You’d better ask your mother.’

‘She’s not my mother. My mother went away, and divorced Daddy because she found him in bed with Bridgitte.’

‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘You can’t trust anybody these days, can you? Never tell anybody that you love them. That’s my motto from now on.’

‘Poor you,’ she said.

‘Let’s find a place to have some tea,’ I said, taking Smog’s hand and offering my arm to Bridgitte. We walked down the hill, looking as united a group as ever was.

‘You set the whole thing off,’ she said, as if wishing I never had, which made me see a glimmer of hope over the opposite rooftops. ‘You remember,’ she went on, after we’d found a corner table in a respectable place near Swiss Cottage, ‘when we last met, and I told you that Donald — that’s my husband’s name — had been trying to make up to me — I mean make me, as you say — and you said I should slip some lipstick in his bed so that his wife would find it, and throw him out? Well, I was putting it in there, very neatly, when he was out, or so I thought, but he was in, and standing watching me. He saw me take the lipstick from my pocket and pull back the bedclothes, then bend over to set it under the pillows. When I’d done this he asked me what I thought I was doing, and I was so confused that he jumped on me and pulled my clothes off. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t fight him. I was shouting for help, and calling your name, but then I saw that it was no use, and he did everything to me, as well as beating me, because he saw I’d been trying to do him some harm with the lipstick.

‘Then — I’m sorry Michael — but there was nothing I could do about it. I forgot everything. He did, too, because he’s told me so since, and while we were there, his wife came in and saw us. She’s tall and thin and has nearly no breasts, though she’s very good-looking at the face. She shouted it was the last straw, packed her things, and went in a taxi. The next day she came with a vehicle and took half the furniture. I was surprised she didn’t take Smog, but she didn’t because Donald told me she was going to live with her own lover who wouldn’t have put up with him for a single minute. Then I found out that they were divorced already, had been for a year! So we got married because he said he loved me, and we were still living together, anyway. I liked him, just a little bit, you know.’

‘I phoned you,’ I said bitterly, ‘night after night, and I called at the flat as well.’

‘We went to Scotland for a fortnight, and then we gave up the flat. We live in Hampstead now in a house.’

‘Things happen too fast to me. I’m still in love with you.’ It was the truth. She was no longer dressed like the gorgeous au pair girl of old, but had put on a few years of maturity with the clothes of a London wife, not to mention her added responsibilities.

‘I can’t say anything,’ she nudged me. ‘You understand?’ — a glance at Smog who now had all three cups in front of him and was filling them with the remains of the tea, water, milk, and sugar, as well as the stinking contents of the ashtray.

‘At least give me your telephone number so that we can have a secret word together now and again. There’ll be no harm in that.’

‘I hope not,’ she said, smiling as she wrote it out for me. She stood up to go. ‘Come on, Smog.’

‘I haven’t finished my chemical experiments.’

‘Smog, don’t be a little bastard. Come on.’

He stood up and put on his cap, backwards. ‘I’m not a little bastard. I want to go with Michael.’

‘You can’t,’ I said, ‘not yet.’ As I shook hands for the farewell she said: ‘You look more prosperous.’

‘Changed my job. I work for the Bank of England. Just been to see a client who has an overdraft. If we can get him to settle it, England’s balance of payments will be OK — for this month anyway. I get all sorts of special missions like this. Mother pulled a few strings to get me the job. I don’t mind using her if I’m in an especially tight corner.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she laughed. ‘But we won’t go into that.’

I smiled, as if I thought she was being facetious, not trusting me on such a trifle: ‘That’s all right. So we’ll be in touch?’ I put an end to it rather coolly, though I feel we parted with mutual twelve per cent interest in each other.

I was too occupied in the next few weeks even to talk to anybody on the telephone. The day arrived when William, who claimed he’d put in an excellent word for me, said that the man in the iron lung would like to make my acquaintance. Before this came we went on the longest walk of all — to Highgate and back — after which I felt as fit and lean as a tiger, for the continual weight I carried was turning me into a savage, though in my face I had to show no emotion at all, unless it was that of a man mulling over some mild assignment that may possibly be fatal for others but in no way for himself.

We went to an immense block of old-fashioned flats near the Albert Hall, and William was greeted at the entrance by the doorman as if he himself had been a millionaire tenant there for twenty years. He took us up in the lift and rang the bell so that neither William nor I need take off our gloves. We were shown into the richest flat I had ever seen, a hall with pictures and vases that my fingers itched to latch upon. Then I remembered my newly opening prospects in life, and in any case they were things I couldn’t properly hide on me. A butler took us into a smaller room, which had a few simple chairs around the walls and a table in the middle. There were copies of Country Life and The Connoisseur on the table, though neither of us read, but sat there without talking.

I felt my heart trying to push its way through to fresh air, and I wanted to light a cigarette, but sensed that William would have disapproved, and in any case there were no ashtrays. So I calmed myself by saying I was man enough not to get upset at this ordinary happening of being forced to wait. The last few weeks were beginning to show me that emotion must always be kept in the negative, must never be developed into a picture for the rest of the world to see. A man who shows nothing of his inner turmoil is always more formidable than one who can’t help but do so and who doesn’t even realize what a fool he makes of himself when he does. At the same time you have to be careful not to let this façade of calmness destroy the actual feelings inside, because that would be cutting off your nose to spite your face, as they say. I was mulling on the fact while we waited, that thought and self-examination, more than anything else, was what kept you looking as if nothing could ever break in from the outside world.

We were shown in by a tall young man with dark hair, and a soft, half-smiling face. The room was so long that the ceiling seemed lower than the one outside. There were no carpets on the floor, but a black and white design in soft lino tiles. It was less furnished in every respect, except for a few maps that had been framed, and hung in odd places along the walls. At the other end of the room a large relief map of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, had been fixed to the ceiling. Red string connected various places on it, so that it looked like the sales map of some large export firm, except for its peculiar position.

What drew me most of all was a huge glass case built from the floor almost up to the ceiling, and a sort of bed inside this aquarium, with one large face — so large that it must have been in some way magnified — looking out of it at the top end. From this immense transparent construction came pipes and wires, and by the side at the other end was a huge rubber bag inflating and deflating the heart of the man inside this miracle of modern science set before my eyes. He lay under a counterpane, but with enough of his body visible to show that he was dressed in a normal suit, with a collar and tie at the neck. He sloped on a backrest, it seemed, though only a little, so that he could look sideways at the ceiling. Papers and booklets were spread over the bed, but at the moment he was mainly interested in me, as I advanced with William across the room, still carrying my briefcase. His face was pale, and rather fat, and his small brown eyes fixed me firmly. ‘Good morning, sir,’ William said. ‘I’ve brought the new man along.’

‘Let’s see him then,’ a voice replied, not from the iron lung, but out of a speaker by the side, though there was no doubt that it was the man within the iron lung who had spoken. As I went close I saw, on a built-in ledge within reach of his hand, a Luger automatic pistol. What good that would do him in a dust-up I couldn’t imagine, yet I suppose it gave him some comfort to have it close by.

‘A man,’ said the rather cracky voice that came out of the speaker, ‘must be able to carry half his own weight, without showing it. Can you?’

I made a quick reckoning. Last time, the scales had spun up to well over twelve stones, so six times fourteen came to more than eighty pounds. The idea frightened me, but instead of telling him to hire a team of yaks, I said I could, providing the packer knew his job. The speaker laughed. It surprised me that during the whole interview he asked so few questions, but I supposed that William had kept him well supplied.

‘Ask Stanley to put the flak-jacket on him,’ he called, and the tall dark pansy who had let us into the flat came back with a trolley laden with long thin blocks of metal. A coat was spread over the handles and I was told to put it on. William helped me. It had long thin pockets inside, which I supposed were to receive the metal on the trolley. These were said, by running commentary from the man in the iron lung, to weigh a pound each, and one by one fifty of them were put away there, while my shoes were getting so glued to the floor that I looked down to see if I were making a hole in it. My shoulders took the weight, but I also felt it at my ribs, as if they were about to be pulled apart.

‘Feeling all right?’ he grinned from behind his perspex.

‘Fine,’ I smiled, at the fortieth bar and ready to swing over on to his floor. I pretended my life was at stake, as if I’d be shot if I weren’t able to put up with it. To take my mind off the weight (which, you must admit, wouldn’t make that much difference) I began to think of all the things I’d done since reaching London. Flight into London it had been, indeed and by God, and the one bright star was Bridgitte Appledore, whom it looked like I wouldn’t see till I got out of this madman’s den. I wanted to see her alone, and make loose so that I got through to her warm sweet nut and full white breasts and lovely astonished face that frowned but enjoyed it all by the time it was nearly finished. But maybe she’d be hotter after her months with Dr Anderson, because husbands were often good for warming up whorish wives for their lovers to get the cream of — though my wife would never be like that, for I’d settle her myself. Be that as it may, I now had sixty bars in my thick gabardine mac and it was considered enough — seeing as they didn’t want to break my back first go.

A smile made his face even paler. I felt one on my own, without having put it there. It was the smile of illumination that comes before death. I was lit up inside, ready and light in weight for what came next. ‘Go to the other end of the room and back,’ the man said from the safety of his iron lung. I was prepared to fly, but for my sixty shackles. Maybe my convict ancestors had been laden like this when due for Botany Bay.

I knew before I started that the best trick would be not to walk too slow. That would bring me down. So I went with reasonable speed though not too quickly, one leg taking the weight of the other in an even balance, and the rhythm carried me along, though I don’t suppose I looked too happy about it. But while I was going from them they couldn’t see my face, and by the time I turned and started to stride manfully back the mouth was screwed shut and my gills, though in no way twisted, couldn’t have been anything but purple.

Back at Lungville he said to me: ‘Now write your name and address on that sheet of paper.’ I bent stiffly to get at the pen and do as I was told, then stood straight again. I heard a murmur of ‘Good, good,’ as if Lungy had said it to himself and not into the inside mike. ‘Now do your stuff,’ he told William, who took the paper I had written on and pushed it into a tube contraption normally used in department stores for sending change from cash desk to counter. The next second it was inside the iron lung and being studied by Pasty-face through a magnifying glass. ‘While I’m doing this, you can walk up and down a few times.’

‘And take your briefcase,’ said William. ‘Just to show what you can do,’ he added with a wink, dropping something in front of me that looked like a passport: ‘Pick that up while you’re at it, my old flower!’

‘Get it your bloody self,’ I said, with a look of murder.

‘It’s part of the job,’ he told me, as if I’d hurt and insulted him.

‘I haven’t clocked-on yet.’

William patted me on the back: ‘But you will soon, and this is one of the things you might have to do. So don’t let me down. Just imagine you are carrying fifty thousand quid’s worth of gold, and now that you’ve come to the customs bloke you’ve dropped your passport. You’d have to pick it up as if you’d got nothing in your pockets, wouldn’t you?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I get the idea.’ I went out at a right angle and let my hand drop, coming up again so quickly with the passport in my hand that I astonished myself at having done it with such ease.

‘He’s passed,’ ‘I heard the voice say from inside the lung. ‘His writing shows it, anyway. Strength, caution, speed, confidence. It’s all here. Put him on that job to Zurich at the end of next week.’

‘What about money?’ I asked politely.

He coughed. ‘When you come back you’ll get three hundred. Stanley will give you twenty pounds now on account, if you need it.’

‘I do,’ I said, still having more than two hundred from my Moggerhanger days, but knowing that you could never have too much in hand.

The time until my first trip was spent in more training. I worked up the weights till I went into the streets with a full load of over fifty pounds, plus the briefcase, walking to a specified point, getting on a bus for a few miles, then sitting down in a stipulated café to a cup of coffee. I’d finally take a bus back to Knightsbridge, and drag a few hundred yards to the flat where I’d be divested of my straitjacket. When it came off I felt weightless and naked, and I’m sure I looked shiftier when I went out in normal gear than I ever had when loaded.

The night before the trip I phoned Bridgitte to wish her goodbye. A man picked up the phone and snappily demanded who it was, so I put on an imitation Dutch accent and said I was Bridgitte’s brother. When I heard her call out that she had no brother, I raved that I had meant cousin — she must have at least one cousin. ‘Who is it?’ she asked. I told her I was going to Rome in the morning for a few days, but that I’d try to see her as soon as I got back. I heard a blow, a cry, a sound of quarrelling. The line went dead.

*Michael Cullen’s mistake. As everyone knows, this novel was written by Tobias Smollett — though Cullen is by no means the first to make such an error. Author.