A Start in Life

Part Five

They loaded me up at the flat and William drove me to the airport. He had only got back from a diamond trip the night before, but wanted to be the one to see me off. ‘You’ll do marvels. You’re a bloody wonder-boy. I’ve never seen anybody carry so much with such a cold look in his eye. I mean it. You’ll be perfect.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Stop the cackle. I can’t stand it so early in the morning. I still need fifteen more cups of coffee, so I hope there’ll be time at the buffet.’

I’d been to the airport the day before, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a cap as if going to wait for somebody, so I knew my way through. I said goodbye to William, then got out of the car so that he could drive home and get some sleep. I felt utterly cool and unconcerned about carrying gold out of the country, because it seemed such a harmless and easy thing to do. It wasn’t stealing, and that made it all right. I was only a highly paid pack-mule.

I booked in, got on the escalator, and made straight for the departure lounge, feeling it would be better not to delay in case this feeling of righteousness deserted me. Bustling in the crowd around the newspaper and souvenir kiosk at the other end, I saw the bluff familiar head of Moggerhanger. What he was doing at the airport I didn’t know, and had no wish to find out, but it made just one more good reason for getting through the formalities quickly. My ticket was checked, and then I walked towards the passport man, a real old Twitchbollock standing behind a pulpit. Nearby was a customs officer who glanced at everybody as they went by. I looked ahead, through the door, as if anxious to get at one of the coffee urns beyond, and this disinterested craving for another dose of breakfast put a normal look on my face at a point when I was about to get nervous. There was a beautiful dark-haired girl in front of me, and after my passport was seen to I took a view of her legs when I should have been giving the customs man a dirty look. I heard no voice asking what I was taking out, felt no hand on my shoulder, and then I was through, and in, and out, and at the counter, and sweating so much under my armour-plated coat that black spots flitted in front of my eyes. I deliberately lingered by the part of the counter that was still in sight of the customs man, not out of crackpot bravado, but only to emphasize to him, if he ever had any suspicions, that I felt no reason to vanish into the crowd.

With half an hour before my plane number came up, I had two cups of coffee and a sandwich, then strolled to the newspaper counter and bought a copy of The Financial Times. My legs and shoulders were aching from too much weight. It was still not ten in the morning, and due to the cups of poisonous coffee, I had to go to the lavatory. I was far too clever to take my coat off before sitting down, knowing that I’d find it hard to get it on again. At the same time all was not well, because when I had finished, I couldn’t get up. The coat hung around me like a cloak of rock. In one way I didn’t want to get up, but to sit there and muse in my own stink till someone found me, or until I recovered my determination and picked myself to pieces, bar by bar, when I’d walk away from the airport and vanish for ever — as far as the man in the iron lung was concerned. But having followed this line through to the stupid and bitter end, I began to consider how it might be better if I got upright and went on my way. After all, I was being trusted with a big job, and if I muffed it William Hay would get his face bashed in and get sent back to being plain Bill Straw on the run from all the right-thinking criminals in society.

I stayed a minute on my knees, hand resting on the rim of the toilet. It was hard to move from this position, but at least I was mobile, because even if I got no more upright than this I’d be able to shuffle across the departure hall and up the plane steps on my knees, giving out that I was on a pilgrimage to my favourite saint’s shrine at Lourdes where I was hoping to get my mother cured of a fatal illness. No, that wouldn’t do, so I crawled around the wall and back again. This hadn’t been part of the training, though I saw now that it should have been, and would have to get the syllabus amended when I got back, if I got back, if ever I came out of jail. I was on top of the toilet now, and by a quick but risky flip backwards my feet hit the ground in the right place, and I was shaken but standing, just as the number of my plane was announced as departing from Gate Number Thirteen. I fastened my trousers, then the coat, picked up my briefcase, and was on my way to the pressurized unknown.

The plane sagged as I stepped on board — or I thought it did, and the heat of the jungle hung over me as soon as I sat down in that long stuffy plane. I’d often wondered whether I’d be afraid of going off the earth in this way, but now I was too exhausted to care. I had no reactions at all, except a heavy pressure pushing me back towards the seat — something I didn’t need because I was well bedded there already. The plane went straight into the clouds, followed the white carpet all the way. I’d got by a window, and a young girl sat next to me. Her elbow pushed into my ribs by accident, then sprang back at the touch of solid iron that she met. The central heating must have been full on, because she took off her coat, then her jacket. A bracelet hung from her wrist, but there were no rings on her fingers. There was a bump under the plane, as if we were climbing a hill, and her hand clutched the seat. It was only now, five miles off the earth, that I wondered what it would be like leaving it.

My luggage allowance was wrapped around me like solid gold armour, and I was naturally led to wonder whether such padding would be any good if the aeroplane crashed on landing. Certainly, if the wings I could see out of my window were ripped off, it wouldn’t help me. We’d go down like a stone, and maybe my weight would even pull it a bit faster, and later my body would be found twenty feet under the earth, a knickerbocker glory all wrapped up in the golden handshake.

At six miles up I noticed an ordinary housefly loose in this lovely immaculate jet. Such a scruffy little surviving bastard was a sign of reassurance, made me laugh at it, something more homely and normal than myself and the eighty others lined up and down. That fly will go far, I thought, having passed the survival test this far up, the only real eleven-plus of any life. The stewardess was selling drinks a few seats away, and swayed, grabbing an overhead rack when the plane banked sharply. Again the girl by my side gripped the armrest. ‘Are you nervous?’

‘A bit.’ She half turned her face to me, and I wondered whether other people bumped into chance meetings as often as I did. It struck me for the first time that society was formed so that they would, and nobody could escape because we were all part of a warp and weft that fitted into one homely worldwide rag. ‘I’ve flown dozens of times,’ I said, the wheels always oiled by a good old-fashioned lie.

‘So have I. But I can’t get used to it. I don’t know why.’

‘There’s only one cure,’ I told her. ‘Talk. And drink. Be with somebody you can talk to — about anything, it doesn’t matter — and have a couple of brandies, or glasses of champagne.’ I called the stewardess: ‘Half a bottle of dry, love. All right?’

‘Thank you,’ she smiled, and I felt how pleasant travelling was. It took the weight off me, back and front. I had seen her before, but only from a distance, and I doubt that she had seen me, and if she had it hadn’t been long enough for future recognition. ‘I was your father’s chauffeur,’ I said, ‘until I got a better job.’

‘I hate to be recognized,’ she said stonily. ‘It embarrasses me.’

‘Sorry. I only told you I knew you in case you might recognize me first. Then you might be annoyed. Cheers I’

She drank the whole glass: ‘This was a good idea, anyway.’

‘Here’s to you, Miss Moggerhanger.’ I said Polly under my breath, for I’d seen her black smouldering hair wrinkling from always too far away, as she rode a horse to the stable when she was back from riding, her plum-coloured shirt or jumper jumping nicely as she jogged along. Or she’d be dressed in a smart suit as she got demurely into somebody’s E-type for a fashionable night in town. I felt very good, as if my head had no top to it, but couldn’t have said whether meeting Polly Moggerhanger was a lucky day in my life or not. Since I’d had nothing to do with it, it wasn’t for me to say.

‘I thought I could get into a plane at least and not be recognized,’ she pouted, ‘but there’s no damned hope even of that.’

‘It’s no use worrying,’ I said, watching the colour get to her cheeks as she gobbled back the rest of the drink. The stewardess was coming with trays of lunch, but I ordered more champagne. ‘Helps the food to float down,’ I said. I was beginning to feel better from it myself, but only now remembered William’s sternest warning: ‘Don’t drink, not alcohol. Not a drop. It’s fatal. Don’t bloody-well countenance such a thing going between your lips, Michael.’ He’d repeated it over the weeks of preparation, and I’d agreed to never, never, never touch it, because I didn’t need it and didn’t like it. One, I suppose, would have been all right, especially since there was a meal to go with it, but two of those little champagne landmines at thirty thousand feet and eleven in the morning put the cobwebs back in front of my eyes, notwithstanding the fact that the ice had been broken with a pretty young woman talking easily by my side. There’s no doubt that the Moët Chandon helped her, for while we were smoking our cigarettes I held her hand, and she made no brisk move to get it away.

‘My father brought me to the airport,’ she said. ‘There are times when he doesn’t even want to let me out of his sight. It gets very bloody tiresome. He thinks I’m going to Geneva to see a girlfriend of mine from finishing school, and I am, but only for an hour if I can help it. After that I’ll have three delicious days on my own, rent a car, drive along the lake, see who I can get to know, and have a ball.’

She asked what my work was, and I said I was travelling for a business firm. ‘Ah’ — her smile alarmed me because it was almost a sneer — ‘it’s smuggling, I suppose. How much does that coat weigh that you can’t take off?’

‘It’s chilly at this time of the year,’ I said, sweating blood.

‘That coat would keep you warm at the North Pole. I’ve seen ’em before.’

‘I had a chill all last week,’ I said, ‘and I’m still recovering, so I keep well wrapped up. I fell in the river. For a dare, really. My girlfriend dared me to do it, and I did, just dropped in like a stone. It’s a wonder I didn’t get anything worse, it was so filthy.’

‘Why did she want you to do that?’ Polly asked, bending her head with interest, so that some of those black curls fell on to the white skin of her neck. I wanted to touch it, but held back, though I set myself to do it some time or other.

‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been at sixes and sevens these last weeks. We don’t really get on. It’s impossible, and I’m thinking I might not see her again. I knew, when she dared me to jump into the river, that she’d be horrified if I did. So I did it, thinking we couldn’t hate each other any more than we did already. But I was wrong. We did. Yet we’re still together. Anyway, I’ve been uneasy about it ever since we’ve met. She’s from a rich family, you see, and I don’t hold that against her, but she doesn’t really know how to live. It’s ruined her, somehow, spoiled her. I’ve known a few girls who came from rich families, and they’ve all been the same: very difficult, and also not very good in bed. I always prefer a more ordinary girl for that sort of thing. It somehow works better. They’ve got less on their backs. Not that it matters to me any more. I’ve really decided not to see Joan again, even though I know I won’t be able to make it with any girl for another few months, not till I get over it. It always takes me a while to recover from something like this. It devastates me. I’m too sensitive about it. I just can’t run over to another girl and start from scratch again. I have to hide away somewhere, or busy myself in work. I’m not the flippant type, though I certainly wish I was. Not that I get too serious when I meet a girl, but if I really do know her for a long time it often takes just as many weeks or months to forget her after we’ve parted. You see what I mean?’

She nodded, and the curl shook on her neck, a sight that set me talking onwards so that I wouldn’t pick it up to kiss it. ‘I think at the bottom I don’t like life, but when I’m with a person whom I consider sympathetic and intelligent, somebody I can talk to with more than polite phrases that last only a minute and a half, then I soon get on top form. I’m not talking about love, mind you. I don’t think that comes into it with a person like me. I’ve never told anyone I love them, but I let the attachment speak for itself. As soon as love is mentioned it flies out of the window. I can just become very very intimate with a girl, so that a real bond exists when we are together, and we have wonderful tender times in bed. But love as a question or, worse, as a statement, never comes up between us, at least not from me. If a girl mentions it I feel that the end is near, and even if I still keep up exactly the same intensity of the bond, she on her part begins to grow cooler. I’ve seen it more than once. But if neither of us says it, the association goes on, and only ends when it is absolutely time for it to end, no sooner and no later. And it’s also a strange thing, that when the girl first mentions the word love in any way, and the association ends, then whenever we meet casually afterwards neither of us feels any friendship, but when love has never been mentioned during an association and it finishes on its natural rhythm, and when the girl and I bump into each other later, we meet as the best of friends, and might even spend that night in bed together and have an absolutely marvellous time.’

‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘very true.’ And though I chatted away like this I knew it was only the bubble-vat of champagne inside my gut that was doing the thinking. I had one idea at that moment, which was to get into bed with Polly Moggerhanger. It was as if my life depended on it, I didn’t know why, because in spite of all my talk, or maybe even because of it, I didn’t think at all about the situation I might be slipping into. If William Hay’s number-one caution had been that I mustn’t drink, his second had been that I should not talk, not to anyone while I was on such a journey. But since I had started to talk, so that I was even fascinated by it myself, I went on to more dangerous ground when I casually told her the name of the hotel I would be staying at in Geneva in case she felt like phoning me up. Before I could stop her, or tell her it wouldn’t be necessary, she was writing it down in a little beige address book with a diamond at the head of the pencil — a present from Daddy, no doubt. I was both thrilled and horrified, but both feelings were dulled by the after-effects of the champagne, and I was almost asleep by the time the plane settled itself on the final skid-bumps for landing, though I went on talking, nevertheless, to pretty Polly, who gripped my hand.

I fastened my coat, and gripped the rail firmly so as not to slide head first on to the tarmac. I felt the need for glasses, seeing everything with less clarity than usual, so swore to have my eyes tested as soon as I got back. Something genuinely had snapped in them, not from the champagne which, after all, had been a very small amount, but due to the fact that I had never been so exhausted in my life, so racked out, as it were, and again I swore that this would be my first and last trip on such kind of work.

No one bothered me at the passport window, and soon I was lifting my arm for a taxi to take me to a prearranged office address in the suburb of Eaux-Vives. Polly, who’d gone out in front of me, was met by her girlfriend’s family, and driven in a very large car to some villa along the lake.

The lift at my rendezvous didn’t work, which meant an act of self-escalation foot by foot up three flights of stairs. I cursed them blind at the dead weight, step by step, sweating upwards, standing often to grunt my breath, so that a kind and elderly gentleman on his way down looked at me in alarm as if I were in the throes of a heart attack. I smiled to say I was all right, but he stood looking at me as I continued up, as if he didn’t believe me, and was about to shuffle off and get one of those famous Swiss doctors to run off with my corpse. I was at my lowest gasp up the final flight, and I felt worse than I’d done since leaving William’s flat, so that it was only now that I fully realized I was in a foreign country for the first time in my life. Why it only came at this point, I’ll never know, but it did, and there was no great thrill about it either. I forgot all about it as soon as I pressed my sweating fingertips on the bell.

An office boy who looked thirty-eight under his rimless glasses and scrubbing-brush hair asked me what I wanted, and after I said Mr Punk he changed colour and beckoned me into a sort of waiting-room corridor. I pulled him back when he was about to disappear and told him in sign language to get me a drink of water — though he understood English as well as I did. He gave me ice-cold water in a paper cup, then went to report my arrival. There were chairs all round the room but I stood up and leaned against the wall, too weary and frightened of death to sit down. I began to have delusions that I’d landed in the wrong place, and that if I weren’t careful I’d get rolled of my gold and thrown plumb-line into the gutter. I thought it best to stay on my feet so that I could run if anything threatening threatened to happen, but before I could start my looney-bin screaming from under a chair, Mr Punk himself came in, with a wide even-toothed smile on his face, which seemed merely a bigger and more genial version of the office boy’s. He held out his hand for a brief shake, and said in perfect English: ‘I’m pleased to see that you have arrived safely. Everything all right?’

‘Good,’ I said, ‘except that through some strange fluke I’m dying of thirst.’

He laughed, heartily, and slapped me on the back: ‘They all say that. Come into my office and get out of that coat. It’s warm for the time of the year. How do you like Switzerland?’

I went before him, ignoring his inane question, and he shut the door, when it suddenly occurred to me that he was waiting for the magic-password phrase which would absolutely establish my credentials. ‘I’ve got some good news about Sir Jack Leningrad. He’s much better. And he sends his fondest wishes.’

‘Ah,’ he replied, with a deadpan businesslike face. ‘I last met Mr Leningrad in Canterbury.’

‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake help me off with this coat.’

Underneath, I was as wet as if I’d been dipped into a vat of warm water, soaked from my suit down to underwear and skin. He opened a cupboard and took out an identical mackintosh coat to the one I’d been wearing except that it had no inside pockets. ‘Put this on, you’ll catch cold. We lost one traveller like that a few years ago — he died of pneumonia. We don’t want to lose you, because according to Mr Leningrad they have high hopes of you. You’re one of their promising young gentlemen.’ I wrapped myself up and drank another paper cup of water. ‘What I suggest now,’ he said, ‘is that you go by taxi to your hotel and take a hot bath. It usually makes quite a difference.’

It was a small room, looking out on rooftops and pigeons. I hung up my suit to dry, then got into the bed and didn’t wake up for four hours, by which time it was dark, and I was hungry. The fact that I’d just earned three hundred pounds cheered me up no end, and I went downstairs to the dining-room to celebrate with an elaborate dinner and a bottle of rosy wine. Sitting alone, feeling relaxed and haggard, I hoped I looked interesting to the other people in the room. I hung on in the pleasant atmosphere after the meal and chewed through a few long cigars. I went to sleep that night musing on how pleasant life could be if only one had money. Nothing else seemed to matter except money, and though this came as a slow and pleasant revelation, I knew, at the same time, that I’d always known it, right from birth. I wondered if any bastard had ever wanted anything more than that. I wasn’t completely rotten (not by any means) in that I wanted power as well as money. Nothing like that. I only wanted money, a desire that could do no harm to anyone, and I’d do anything and go to great lengths to get it. To want power seemed to me vile, but to want money was noble.

The desire — not that I’d needed to make it plain by thinking about it — lit a new light inside me, and, in my mind’s eye, a halo around my head. I had the idea that if I kept this picture of myself clean and uncompromised, I’d never have any trouble carrying my little bits of gold through the customs. The pure of heart shall inherit the earth, and what could be more pure of heart than a simple good-natured desire for money and an easy life that would harm none of my fellow men? The wish to acquire money without working for it was a virtue that few people shared with me. They worked for it, and by this got power over others. If they didn’t get power over others, then at least they got power over themselves, and I didn’t want even this. For if I got power over myself it might break my innocence, put a look back in my face that would be spotted a mile off by any customs man — something which clicks within them because they can’t help having it themselves.

After breakfast in my room, the telephone rang, and a girl asked to speak to me. It took a few moments to realize it was Polly Moggerhanger. Either there was something wrong with my memory or I wasn’t the sort of person I thought I was. Since leaving her at the airport she had not come once into my mind, and now that she was speaking brightly into my ear I was so shocked and surprised to hear her that I didn’t know whether or not I was pleased about it. She told me she’d had the most boring time yesterday with her friend and her family, and that if she didn’t get out of it she’d go crazy and scream. It was a nice picture, but I couldn’t let her do it, so I invited her to lunch.

I didn’t know of any good restaurants in Geneva, so eating on the hotel premises might give her the idea that I did, but that I was merely being idle or pressed for time. I could hardly remember her from the desperate haze of yesterday, and thought that when I saw her maybe I wouldn’t want to spend more time with her than lunch. There was a strong feeling in me to be on my own for a while in these strange surroundings — which seemed stranger the longer I was in them. It was as if yesterday’s trip had taken me across an important borderline, and as usual, though I felt this strongly, I didn’t quite know what the consequences would be. In fact I didn’t know, in any way, at all, but when I saw Polly walking into the hotel lounge I realized that I no longer wanted to be alone for the next couple of days.

It came out over lunch that she was very unhappy, and didn’t know what to do with her life — which seemed to prove that her despair wasn’t monumentally serious. But when I said that unhappiness was the spice of life, and that if you weren’t unhappy you were dead, she became a lot more cheerful. ‘I’ve had an ideal life,’ she told me, ‘being the daughter of someone like my father, as you can imagine. He doted on me, and gave me everything I wanted, which suited me fine. It certainly kept me very content for a long time. But when I first started having men friends, he got meaner, though he didn’t make too open a row about it. It got so I thought I was doing something wrong when I had it in somebody’s flat or on the back seat of a car, and it stopped me getting all my thrills out of it for a year or two. Parents think they own you, just because they brought you up.’

‘I hope it’s different now,’ I said, dipping into my water ice. ‘Not for my sake, but for yours.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

‘I won’t,’ I answered. ‘It’s not my problem, is it? But where shall we go this afternoon?’ When she had no idea I said we ought to bus along the lake to the castle of Chillon, and when I went on about Bonivard and Byron’s poem, she thought it an exciting plan, because though she’d heard of it herself, she was more than pleasantly surprised to find that I was no stranger to it, imagining perhaps that a born smuggler like me could never know of things like that. I didn’t really, but had read of it in a tourist hand-out from the hotel only that morning. Yet I was able to tell her, truthfully and with an offhand candour, about Byron’s pad at Newstead where I’d been a time or two on a bus in my childhood and youth — on one occasion with my mother who was visiting a tubercular friend in the nearby sanatorium. It gave us something to talk about, with which to break through to the comfort of more private things, whispering sugar-nothings into a sweet ear of corn as we sat on the bus, the lake glinting in our eyes at every new bend. When I ran out of topics I asked her what she wanted from life, and she said that she didn’t know. ‘I haven’t been brought up to want anything, because I had everything I wanted.’

‘There must be something you want, though, that your old man can’t provide.’

‘Tell me what you want,’ she said, ‘and then perhaps it will remind me of what I could want. Maybe I’ve been too happy to want much.’

‘Or too unhappy,’ I said, mixing her up, often the best way of getting the truth out of people. Since I wasn’t in love with her, or even falling for her, I could try this kind of trick.

‘I’m not neurotic,’ she said defiantly, ‘if that’s what you mean. My father’s started going to a psychiatrist, but I never will.’

I nearly slipped off the seat at the idea of the great Claud Moggerhanger spilling his past every Tuesday and Thursday on a headshrinker’s couch. In fact, when the humorous point had gone, it actually disturbed me to think of it. ‘What does he go there for?’

She took the cigarette I offered. ‘Maybe to relax, to pass the time. He’s nowhere near barmy, believe me. But he likes to keep up to date with the fads. All the Moggerhangers do.’

‘Even you?’

‘You just tell me what you want out of life,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll tell you.’

‘I don’t want to have to wonder what I want,’ I said, doing my best. ‘I want to live so that I never have to stop to ask myself what my ambition is or what I’m going to do. That’s what everybody does. They want this job or that house or a car. They want to become a foreman, a director, or a manager. They have hopes of owning this or that, or they set their target on marrying a certain woman who it looks impossible for them to get. And when they have all these things they’ll want something else, and when there’s nothing else for them to want, or their spirit is so broken that they can’t want or strive for anything in any case, they have a convenient accident and die, or just die. To want is the Devil’s own trick. To live without wanting is God’s blessing — though I don’t believe in God or the Devil. Yet it was a black day in my life when I switched from not wanting to wanting, and I don’t know when it happened. Probably before I was born, when I was still in my mother, or during the few minutes before my first feed. But I still only swing between the two like a skinned monkey looking for its skin. One minute I want, and the next minute I’m full of innocence. It’s all mixed up mostly, because often when I want so that I’m ready to die getting it, that’s when everything is hopeless and there’s not a chance of me getting it. When I’m in the agreeable mood of not wanting, all I want to do is to stay alive. In the wanting frame of mind I’m so much full of want that I don’t know what I want, or if I do it’s so many things that I don’t know what to try for first, and so end up not trying for any of them. So I get blown around like a straw, and in the meantime live more or less all right by doing as little work as possible.’

‘It doesn’t seem to me that you’re telling me the truth.’

I laughed. ‘It doesn’t seem so to me, either. But I’m trying, though. You tell me what truth is, and I’ll give you an everlasting lollipop. I won’t know what I want till I’ve got it, and that’s the truth, but it frightens me. It means I’ve got no control over my life, and though I’ve no right to have any because I’m so lazy, the fact gnaws at my craw nevertheless. What I often want is to have a few thousand pounds every year so that I could buy a small house and live there without worrying or doing any work.’

‘That’s not much,’ she said. ‘You could easily get that.’

‘Could I?’ I was encouraged.

‘It doesn’t seem too much to me. I’m surprised you want so little.’

This flummoxed me, and for a while I didn’t know how to go on. We got to Chillon, and didn’t go to the castle but sat at a café and went on talking while we held hands. First we were outside, but then a great thunderstorm burst over the lake, and we went in, to get more cream cakes and coffee down us. The sky was pink, and a flash of lightning split it like a pomegranate. Then it turned suddenly metal-blue, and a ripple of far-off thunder exploded into a great noise, shaking the floor under my feet.

‘The greatest torment in life,’ I said, ‘is not to know what you want out of it, but I don’t know what I want out of it because I don’t know what it can give me. That’s what education is for, I suppose. It doesn’t teach you much, I’m sure, but it tells you what you can get, or expect. And the fact is that I don’t want any career or job that can be offered to me. Apart from the fact that I’m not fit or qualified to get anything that might appeal to me, I don’t trust any of them to do me any good. It’s not that that sort of thing isn’t for the likes of me, so much as that I’m not for the likes of them. The fact is that nothing I could do is of any value to people, though even if it were I still wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to be used, and I don’t want to use, so you can see how difficult it is for me to tell you what I want out of life. I can easily tell you what I don’t want. Maybe I won’t always feel like this, but I certainly can’t tell at the moment. A long-term policy isn’t my cup of tea. All I’d like right now is for us to be back in my room at the hotel, so that we can be alone together.’

She showed her milk-white teeth in a laugh, which made a great contrast to her dark ringlets. ‘You’re just greedy,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know what you want out of life you just end up grabbing all the small things, and getting nothing big and worthwhile.’

‘That’s a good philosophical point,’ I said. ‘But if you live well until you’re ninety, then go out with a hallelujah on your lips, what bigger thing do you want than that? The best life is one that doesn’t give you time to think. My life is already ruined by talking like this. Yours will be too if you aren’t careful. We’re birds of a feather, in a way, and after so much thinking we ought to enjoy it and not bother too much with what we want out of life. So let’s get away from this view of walls and water and go back to my room at the hotel.’

‘I know I shouldn’t,’ she said, to my surprise, putting her arm through my arm, and squeezing it so that I got the warmth of her body, ‘but I feel like that as well.’

We walked back towards the bus, and I felt like a hero, as if all I lacked was a pipe in my mouth, and I was back at the age of fifteen, a firestone dip to centuries ago. If every year seemed like a hundred I really would live for ever. I was embarrassed at the tiddlywink leaping around inside my trousers, but the golden coat hit it safely till it quietened down a bit. We necked a few kisses in the bus, but the honest Swiss stared, so we left off and sat, almost glumly, not able to say much, now that we had committed ourselves.

It started to rain, and I wondered if she wanted to back down, but she didn’t. Nobody said anything at the desk when I asked for the key and we went up to my room, not like in deep-blue puritanical old England, or so I had heard. As soon as we got inside and I’d seen to the lock we gobbled all over each other under the roof and the rain, to the tune of the wet pigeons warbling outside. It was afternoon and almost evening, and our naked bodies skimmed about like a couple of snakes, and I swamped her before even getting in. We didn’t seem to mind which end was which, and Polly Moggerhanger did as much gobbling as I did, which I wasn’t used to at all up to then. Not only I knew what I wanted (in this, at any rate) but she did too, and I hadn’t met such an even match before. It was the sort of lovemaking that pulled my backbone out of place, seemed to heave my spine off centre. Yesterday’s colossal expenditure of energy had put me in the way of showing Polly what was what, because I felt as if I’d been worn down to a pole so that not much of my body was left to feed off me. It had only itself to look after, and so could give all its attention to the present requirements, a perpendicular mangonel stiffening my attacks so that at some moments she was both delighted and frightened.

Four hours later we crept down to the dining-room for refuelling, both of us bruised and wacked-out, and quiet as we sat looking at each other, waiting for the food to come, which we then went into with the same gusto as had been previously used in attacks on each other, not talking much during the whole meal, as if our first prolonged time together had accounted for fifty million words that we need not now ever say.

Even so, it wasn’t exactly like a church between us, and I had to keep my end up by telling her stories out of my rich past and varied family. She enjoyed those most about my drunken Irish grandparents, so once on to this line I could go on for a long time without running short of material, and I found myself making up stories, recounting them as if they were true, because she could never know the difference as long as my voice didn’t hesitate or change tone. Music was playing in the background from The Merry Widow, or some such Viennese slop, and I said: ‘Do you remember, darling, how we climbed the Matterhorn in 1905? What a lovely time we had — though it was a pity when our ten guides fell two thousand feet and were never seen again. What a beautiful view from the top! I shall never forget it, because this music reminds me of it. Fortunately, the guide carrying our portable gramophone wasn’t one of those who slipped, and we put on this record and listened to it while we drank our champagne.’

I made up fantasies of what we’d done during the life we’d been together, trekking across deserts that had killed all but one of our hundred camels by the time we walked into the last oasis (where our Rolls-Royce was waiting), sweating through jungles where two of our children had been eaten by tigers (she laughed aloud at that one) and I had been brought to the edge of death by a savage dose of Blackhead Fever. We sat over our wine till the waiter brought the bill as a gentle hint that the place was about to close down, and then we went up to my room again, and made use of the night for as long as we could keep awake.

We travelled back to London on the same plane. I thought this was a bright idea in case any of the customs men remembered my face. If they did, and wondered why I was going out, they would know the reason if they saw me coming back with a beautiful young woman. And if I left through the airport next week they might think I was only off on the same dirty errand again. I felt that William Hay would approve of this bit of bluff. The long bus of a plane was only half-full, and after the light went out about removing our safety belts, and the long climb towards heaven began, I told Polly to come with me to the back of the plane. ‘I want to go to the toilet,’ I said, giving a wink, ‘so keep me company on the way.’

There was no one around the doors, so I opened one and told her to get inside. Then I followed in, and snapped the catch behind us. ‘What an idea!’ she said, ‘I’d never have thought of it. I suppose you’ve done this often with your casual pick-ups?’

We closed in a bout of hugger-kiss: ‘I just thought of it. There’s no other place except the baggage compartment and I don’t know how to get to that — unless I ask the pilot for a key. But I’m so much in love with you that I can’t bear not to be able to touch you in the right places. Anyway I’ve got a question, and it’s the sort I can’t ask unless I’m able to kiss you while I’m doing it.’

She leaned against the sink. ‘What is it?’

‘Will you marry me? I know it’s absolutely potty to ask, but I’m doing it without too much thought, because that would spoil it. Don’t answer me. I don’t want to know yet. I just want to say how I can’t bear for us to come back to earth after these few days. If you’ve no wish to see me again, I’ll understand. But I don’t feel like that, and don’t want you to think I do, even if you decide you want to feel that way. I’m not spoiling it, either, by asking you to marry me. You don’t know me yet. Maybe you never will, but you will with every minute you stay with me. I just want you to know when you walk off this plane how intensely I feel, and I can’t think of any other way to tell you than this. Even asking you to marry me isn’t the end of it. It’s only as serious as a passionate kiss, but that is very serious with me.’

Her full and pretty face was turned to me, and I could see my own face in the mirror behind her, full of pain and confusion, greed and lies and love.

The plane dropped a few feet, and she clung to me. ‘So don’t answer,’ I went on. ‘That’s not what I want, not urgently. I’m saying this so that you’ll know I’m honest and am telling no lies. It’s something I suddenly wanted to say. I’ve never said it before, and I’ll never say it again, not to anyone else. Just remember it, sweet Polly, and tell me anything you like for an answer, but don’t talk about what I’ve just said, unless you absolutely must because it’s burning its way out of you. Then I’ll hear it and wallow in it, because I feel about you as I never have for anyone else before.’

We went beyond speech, touched and teased each other, sometimes her eye’s closed, sometimes mine, as we kissed and struggled to get our way in that impossibly furnished room. Fortunately the engines made enough noise, due to those superlative modern designs that put them near the tail, and our cries weren’t heard. The door handle rattled when we were too far gone to take much notice, and presumably whoever wanted to use the place for its proper purpose had found the opposite one vacant or had waited till it was. Polly got her full coming, because she finally sat on me and worked herself up and down, and I got it too, a fountain of thick elixir shooting into the flesh-filled sky of her.

When we crept back to our places the stewardesses gave us funny looks as they handed our trays of food. One of them smiled at me on every trip up and down the gangway, and she was so much Polly’s opposite that I was quite attracted by her, and wanted to take her up to the back as well in my beastly and incorrigible fashion. But we tucked into our second breakfast as if we hadn’t eaten for a week, and this time I ordered a full bottle of champagne, which the stewardess presented to us with exaggerated ceremony as if we had just been married and were going to England for our honeymoon. I began to wonder whether the captain himself wouldn’t be down to congratulate us and wish us long life together as part of the airline’s service, because certainly the engineer gave us a knowing gaze as he went to the back of the plane, as if the girls had been talking about us up front and spilling what they’d thought we’d been doing.

Polly ate with her head down, all modesty, and I thought that maybe she was reflecting on our adventure and, caught in the public gaze because of it, was holding it against me and wouldn’t want to know me any more when we’d landed. But she said: ‘I remember that when we first met you said you never told anyone that you were in love with them, that it wasn’t the sort of thing you did, that you just let the relationship develop, and never used the word love.’

‘I’ve been waiting for you to bring this up. It’s true. I don’t know what’s come over me since then. This is so new, I haven’t felt such a thing about anybody before, and that’s why I say it. Obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ she said.

‘I talk too much.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ she answered. ‘I like it in fact. All the boys I’ve known don’t talk. Not the way you do. They say things, but they don’t talk. Your sort of talk makes me feel human, but theirs just makes me feel more and more apart from them. Not that I believe everything you say. Belief doesn’t come into it. But people aren’t together unless they talk.’

‘Or do the other thing.’

‘You’re mostly silent then.’

‘My mouth is otherwise occupied,’ I said, feeling slightly disturbed by her new mood of seriousness.

‘I don’t believe anything,’ she said, ‘when it comes to talk. I’ve been let down so often, except by my own father, and he isn’t a man who talks very much, not to me, anyway. I only believe things when they’ve happened, and then I know whether I’ve been let down or not. I’m so mixed up, Michael, I don’t know what to say.’

I felt sorry for her, and in some strange way for myself as well. Just after making love was a bad time to strip oneself down to the fibres like this, though God knows there didn’t seem any other time when it might be possible to do it properly. She was right, I suppose, in choosing to do it now, though I might have been the one to start it if she hadn’t. I’d noticed before that the worst quarrels, or the most intense talk, only come after a wonderful bout of love.

‘I’ve had more of a sheltered life than you imagine,’ she said. ‘The people I should have been staying with in Geneva have already phoned my father to say I haven’t been seen these last two nights. In any case he’ll be waiting for me at the airport when we land, so maybe you’d better not come out with me, especially since he knows you.’

I was only too willing to accept her advice, not wanting to tangle with Moggerhanger a second time. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I had been strenuously advised by William Hay not to get into trouble during my run of smuggling trips. It was a pity though that I couldn’t go through the customs with Polly on my arm, which had been the reason for my arranging to travel back with her. I gave my telephone number, and took hers, neither of us knowing when we’d be able to contact each other again, never mind see each other. The light went on to douse fags and fasten seat belts, and we suddenly broke through the clouds to see Battersea Power Station below, without having had any time at all even to get properly stuck in to the unresolved questions that were starting in earnest to eat us away.

I went down the steps behind Polly, feeling like one of the walking wounded as I let her get far in front. But I ran and caught her up, and we kissed wildly before turning into the arrival lounge.

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I held back from saying it, but I do.’ She went to the ladies, and I walked up and down. Half in fun I glanced at the messages rack, and saw an envelope with my name on it. I took it down and tore it open, thinking it was for someone of the same name but curious to see what it said. ‘Number nine is good today. Hope you had a successful trip to Leningrad.’ So I let Polly get her luggage first, and she went through the customs with only a brief question from them and a half-smile. And I went through Gate Nine as instructed, though I saw no reason to do so because I only said I had nothing to declare, which was the truth for once, and then I was through and out of the place in time to see Moggerhanger’s head going down the steps to the floor below.

I hung around a while, then went below and got the bus back to town.

William was waiting at the flat, himself just back from a quick trip to the Lebanon. He sat on the living-room couch in his dressing-gown, and Hazel came in with a tray of coffee. She was a whore from Soho, with a hard face and voluptuous body, who visited him now and again, and he gave her the wink to clear out while we were talking. His cigarette smoked from a ridiculously long holder, and he sat back to hear my story, which I supposed he might deliver later to the Jack Leningrad Organization. Either that, or I had too big an idea of their thoroughness, and if this was the case then I must already be getting too outsized for such an outfit.

‘You’ve got something else for next week,’ he said when I’d finished. As he swallowed his coffee the skinbone and ligaments of his throat shook and convulsed, as if he’d been hit there with an invisible rubber sledgehammer while it was on its way through. ‘They’ll tell you where to in the morning.’ He poured another cup, while Hazel sang to herself in the bedroom.

‘What are you going to do with the money you earn?’ I asked.

‘Haven’t thought about it yet, my old lad. Mother’s coming down from Worksop next week to spend a couple of days. I’m fixing her up in a hotel. I’ll shunt her round the usual tea-caddy places, like Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace.’

‘Sounds lovely. In fact it’s touching.’

‘Don’t get bloody sarky, Michael. I’m only human, after all.’

‘That’s the trouble with both of us, I suppose.’

‘What’s splitting your tripes, though? I’ve seen plenty of blokes come back, and they’re usually cock-a-hoop with having done it in safety, but you’re a bit down in the sludge about it.’

‘I’m different. It wears me out, and I can’t help but show it.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You’re the genuine bloody article, and that’s a fact. It’s better you’re like that, right in touch with yourself, than some of the over-confident young hotheads we could get our hands on. Just the sort we need, you are. When you decide to put on an act your soul goes into it so that nobody would ever twig. Get some snooze, then we might go out for a quiet feed somewhere. I’ll pack Hazel off. She won’t mind. Won’t bloody-well have to.’

‘Thinking of getting married?’ I asked.

‘Not in this game. Later, maybe.’ Neither of us had our feet on the ground, but we belonged to the world, for all that. But as I lay down in the spare room and thought about Polly, I got frightened, as if only now the full trembles at passing the customs loaded with gold had come upon me. The sky seemed black and I shook in every limb. The reality of my trip seemed like a dream, and like a dream it made me more afraid than reality. I felt a coward, and thought I might not do it any more. Yet when I woke up I knew I would, because being with an aim, an ambition, or even a plan, robbed me of that final edge of courage that helped me to stand by a negative decision. All this is hindsight perhaps, but hindsight is still only part of what existed at the actual time. My memory is clear enough for me to know this. My only positive act, if it can be so called, and I believe it can, was to let myself drift with events, out of curiosity to see where it would take me, and out of lethargy because I didn’t have the wit or strength to do anything else. But I told myself to fight off the black and woolly dog, not to worry, to hold on, to calm myself and let life take its course since I wasn’t able to steer the crazy airship of it, comforting myself with the thought that maybe I’d be more and more able to as I got older. But this last was only half hinted at, a grain of dust in the middle of the moon that I might never be able to get out to the light of day. I wondered what was in that grain, whether I would ever catch it between my two thumbnails like a flea and split it from end to end so that blood ran out.

William was waking me up but my head felt as thin as a post. He pushed a cup of tea towards my face and the smell of it went into me like jollop. ‘Get this,’ he said, a wide grin behind the steam. ‘It’ll help you to stand on your feet instead of your arse. You can’t stew in your own self all night.’

‘Why not?’

‘You might well ask, but you can’t. Here’s your wage packet from the gaffer. There’s thirty tenners in it. The easiest putty you’ll ever earn.’

I took the long envelope and put it under my pillow. ‘It wasn’t that easy.’

He sat in the armchair and watched me with his gimlet grey eyes, that were full of expression when they were trying to read me, as they were now. ‘What’s biting you, then?’

‘The rats. They’ve been at me since last Saturday afternoon. Ever been in love, Bill?’

His left leg jerked back, as if the reflexes under the knee had been hit. ‘It wasn’t the air hostess, was it? If it was, forget it. Under their white aprons they’re just like anybody else.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘The answer’s no,’ he said. ‘I was in love with my father, but he was killed down the pit when I was seven. While he was alive I didn’t know I was in love with him, but when he died I knew I’d never get over it and love anybody else — except maybe my mother, but she’s still alive, so it’s still only an infatuation. There’s lots of women I like, and some I wanted to marry, but as for love, I can’t say I have. I’ve often wondered about it, when it’s going to happen and if it ever will, but I’ve been waiting so long that I’ve given up hope. I broke my heart as a kid, before I could understand what was what, not altogether over my father, but over what came after. The general misery of our lives. There was nothing to live for except life itself, nobody even to say we were living like this so that tomorrow would be better. I couldn’t stand it. I was made to despair too young. After that I couldn’t fall in love — not at all.’ He flicked his ash halfway across the room. ‘I’m not moaning about it. I sometimes think that English hearts weren’t strong enough to bear that much.’

‘Don’t you want revenge, then?’ I said, thinking how much better off I’d been than he had.

‘On who? Even if I knew I wouldn’t want it. I wasn’t so crushed that I wanted revenge. Revenge is the last resort of the dead in spirit. I enjoy life too much to think about that. As for love — we always get back to it, don’t we? — well, I’m resigned to it never happening, but don’t think I’m unhappy about it because I’m not. That’s the way my life went, and now that I know it’s settled that way, I feel easier in myself. It’s no use clamouring over things your common-sense tells you you’ll never get, is it? Some people I suppose would eat their own bollocks to save their fingernails, but not me, mate. I’m doing all right now, and I want it to stay like that till I decide what to do with the money I’m piling up. I’ll be worth a lot soon, and do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy a smallholding, go into the market-gardening business. I’ll get a cottage and three or four acres in Notts with the cash I’ve stashed. My mother can stay with me if she likes, and if I meet a woman who’ll team up and work at it the same as I do, then I’ll be satisfied.’

‘I hope you make it then,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s true that you have to be forty to realize what you want out of life.’

‘I’ve known that since I was twenty. But I’ve not admitted it to myself or spoken it out loud. It’s been laying low. I only yap about it now that there’s a chance of it coming about, and no fucking peradventure about it. But tell me the stuff on this bint that’s got your heart going up and down like a yo-yo. I can envy you that much at least.’

‘It’s somebody I met before I went away, but there’s no point talking about it.’

‘There’s every point. If you don’t talk you choke, and if you choke you rot. You go all black inside and explode when you’re fifty. Horrible mess. I believe it’s called cancer, the plague that afflicts the silent type with the stiff upper lip.’

‘Well, I’ll never get that disease. I’ll just have to get in touch with her.’

‘Let’s get out,’ he said, ‘and get in touch with some food. I’m hollow.’

We went to the restaurant in Soho where I’d first met up with him again after our trip from the North, and drank a bottle of wine each, because William said it was his birthday. He insisted that we do no less because it was, he said, with beady eyes set on me, the first one he’d spent in affluence for a good few years. And not only that, but a birthday was always special and not to be treated lightly because it meant that you had survived another year of life, had fenced off death, maiming, starvation, and black night of one sort or another. You could put your fingers to your nose at the year that had gone, while setting yourself to greet the oncomer with respect. ‘A birthday is a time to count the miracles,’ he went on, ‘and tot up my luck. When I was a kid nobody bothered with them. They went by unnoticed because we were too busy breathing. The fact that I’ve got time to remember it these days shows how well-off I am.’

‘You’re in a fine mood,’ I laughed, ‘but how old are you?’

He sliced up his escalope. ‘Thirty-nine’s the score, and I feel every year of it.’

I went with him to St Pancras Station to meet his mother. When he saw her come out of a second-class carriage he started shouting, ‘I sent ten pounds for you to travel first class, and now you do this dirty trick on me. It ain’t right, Ma.’

‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ I backed away because I couldn’t believe all that screeching came from her. In any case she aimed it at me, and for a moment I thought she was right off her pot and that she took me for William, but then it was plain that the mechanism of her eyes was at fault. ‘What would I do in first class, you great loon? You don’t know who you might meet in them places. And don’t snap at me like that. Nobody’d know you were my own son. After all I’ve been through! I’ve a good mind to get back on this train and go back to Worksop.’

William turned pale, but bent down to kiss her. ‘Don’t do that Ma,’ he pleaded like a little boy, ‘I wanted you to do it in comfort, that’s all.’ This seemed a bit rare when I remembered his own journey. He’d certainly rung a lot of changes in his belfry during this last year. ‘Where’s your suitcase?’ he asked, when the circle of listeners began to clear off.

She was a small thin person, an absolute proud wreck, with a pale-blue coat and a powder-blue hat over her coal-grey hair. She had glasses and false teeth, and it wasn’t possible to tell her age, though in spite of these trimmings she was nearer sixty than forty, shall I say. ‘I forgot it. Like as not it’s in the carriage still.’

‘I’ll go and get it.’ When I came back with it, my socket tearing at its load, I saw them going towards the exit, where William had a taxi waiting. The taxi driver swore at the weight of it: ‘What’s in here, lead?’

‘Gold bars,’ Bill laughed. ‘She brings her own coal with her!’

His mother pulled me into the taxi beside her: ‘It’s nice to have two young men with me, on my first trip to London. It is a big place, isn’t it, Bill? Bigger than Worksop, anyway.’ I got out at Cambridge Circus, not wanting to hear her comments on Nelson’s Column.

I walked into the Square, nevertheless, and joined the throng. My hat was jerked off by the wind, and I ran across the flagstones to get it, under the spray of both fountains, scattering pigeons right and left. I looked at every girl’s face to see if it was Polly Moggerhanger’s. I don’t think I was in love with her. There was too much of a bite in it for that, as if I was the apple that Eve had bitten, rather than Adam himself who’d got booted out of paradise and must finally have felt proud of it.

I bought a tin of corn from a stand and fed the pigeons, holding my palm flat and watching a bit of real greed as they jostled each other to gobble it up. I liked their button eyes, as they pecked and trusted me not to grab them while they had their fill. I bought tin after tin, and the more they scoffed the more wary they got, so that while I could have snatched them easily when they were hungry, I had only to lift a finger now and they went off in a cloud. I was a friend of all the world, in my coat of many colours, and the corn vendor gave me a couple of free tins till finally the pigeons were strutting over the corn without picking it up, because other people were podging them as well.

I went into a callbox and dialled the Moggerhanger number. A woman answered, maybe her mother. ‘Is Polly in?’

‘No,’ she said, and hung up. I walked towards the Strand hoping to see her. A jeweller’s window interested me for a few minutes, then I doubled back and went into Lyons for lunch. I wasn’t hungry and left the plate spilling with cake-scraps and cellophane. I poured half a bottle of red sauce over it and shambled away.

There was a queue outside a theatre, so I followed it in and paid thirty bob for a seat. When the National Anthem played I didn’t stand up, because I would have felt stupid if I had. But the rest of the herd were on their feet, and a voice behind said that I should show respect, so I called out, still on my arse, that if I did get up it would only be to push his patriotic face in. I didn’t hear anything more, and the lights went down.

A man came on the stage and went rampaging through somebody’s living-room, shouting how rotten the world was. His wife came in, and he shouted at her till she couldn’t do anything else but burst into tears. He was well dressed and well fed, and didn’t look as if he had much to complain about, but when his wife’s brother came in and told him to pack it in, he went for him as well, bawling until he too sat on the settee with his head in his hands feeling like the biggest rotter in the world and not knowing what to do about it. The hero didn’t tell him, but just went on raving, and when the brother’s girlfriend came in he shouted at her till she went into hysterics and he had to throw water over her from the tap, still raging as he did it. When an older woman hove in who seemed to be his mother, he started on her, so that the scene looked like a cross between a looney-bin and somebody’s living-room where the television set had broken down. Then the mad bastard started shaking his fist at the audience, calling us some wonderfully colourful phrases. At this I got up and pushed along the row so that people threatened me for making such a noise, but with as much disturbance as I could muster, I went out into daylight. That’s what you get from joining a queue, I thought, though strangely enough I felt better than I had before I went in.

I walked to Finchley Road and met Bridgitte coming up the steps towards Smog’s school. She was dressed more like her old au pair self in a set of black slacks and a mauve jumper. Her face was thin and pale, unlike her normally white and buttery Dutch skin, and she was dark under the eyes as if she’d been through a rough and sleepless time since we’d last met. She smiled and held out her hand.

‘Why didn’t you phone?’ I said, accusingly.

‘Oh, I did, but a man answered and told me you were out of the town.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘I went up to the estate, to see Mother. She’s had a stroke, and it don’t seem she can last much longer. If she does pop off I’ll come into half a million, though she threatened to leave it to a dogs’ home when I was there, speaking only from the right side of her mouth. Anyway, that’s unimportant. How are you?’

‘I don’t know. My husband went away yesterday, to Glasgow for a week, to a sort of conference. At least, that’s what he said, so don’t laugh. But it’s true because I saw all the letters he received about it.’

A heavy weight hit me in the shoulder, and when I spun round another one caught me in the gut. It was Smog’s satchel, packed with books that taught him how to read and write. I hoped it would be soon, then forgave him: ‘If you were two inches taller, I’d blow your block off. Don’t do it when you are older or you’ll get what for.’

Bridgitte clouted him on the back of the head and sent one school cap skimming under a car. He was about to dive for it, under the bonnet of another, but I pulled him by the arm and saved his life. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘watch it.’

‘I couldn’t care less.’

‘Well I could.’ I picked the cap up and put it where it belonged. ‘Let’s go and stuff ourselves with cake and tea, shall we, Smog?’

‘We’ll go back to the house,’ said Bridgitte. ‘I can’t face one of those awful English cafés where you get nothing but thick tea and fatty cakes.’ The bus landed us somewhere on the rim of Hampstead, then we walked along a few quiet roads to the new Anderson home. The front of it looked like a British Railways airliner stranded on a hillside, and we climbed a flight of concrete steps to get to it.

She showed me into a long living-room with windows from floor to ceiling, one side looking over a lawn. Smog threw off his coat and sat on the floor trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle that Bridgitte had three-quarters done, but he lost patience, broke it up, and started to read one of his school books. Bridgitte pressed a bell and a swarthy middle-aged woman came in and said: What you want?’

‘Make us some tea, please, Adelida.’

‘You had it already,’ Adelida said, ‘before you went to the school.’

‘I want some more, for three, Goddamn it.’

Adelida went off, grumbling.

‘A rough life,’ I said.

‘Impossible.’ She got up. ‘I’ll have to see to it myself,’ and went out, so that I fell to helping Smog with a page of his reading. His chaotic over-energized mind seemed to have grasped on to learning as something to steady himself by, for he read and wrote as well as I had on leaving school at fifteen. When tea was finished he asked me to play draughts, but after a couple of games he beat me at it, so I stopped thinking he was only a kid and played better, but even so it ended in stalemate. ‘Do you play chest?’ he asked.

‘Chess,’ I told him. ‘No, I don’t. I’ll learn, though, and next time I come we’ll have a game.’

‘You’re fairly ignorant.’

‘I’ll get better,’ I said, ‘and catch you up one day.’

‘But you’re old already, and that’s difficult for you.’

‘Who does all this to him?’ I asked Bridgitte.

‘His father,’ she said. ‘And his mother before that. He’s not as bright as he seems.’

‘I am,’ Smog said. ‘I’m top of my class at school.’

‘Anyway,’ I said to him, ‘you shouldn’t boast, or you’ll turn into a monster.’

He jumped on my knee. ‘Really? Then I can frighten everybody.’

‘You do already,’ I said.

The idea of another Swiss trip was burning me, because I hoped to see Polly on it. I knew this to be a crackpot fantasy, which could have nothing to do with Bridgitte sitting on my knee in the living-room after Smog-the-limb-of-Satan had been put to bed. Life was overflowing, for while Bridgitte was loving me I was fixed with all my wants on Polly who was God knew where. I pressed back her kisses absent-mindedly, yet firm enough for her not to suspect anything or leave off loving me. Maybe she felt I was a little distant but this made her try harder, almost smothering me, so that I was shamed into making some semblance of matching her, until this brought us blow by blow on to the carpet and rolling around at the bottom of passion’s pit. When she pulled at my tie, I parted the buttons of her blouse to get her breasts close to me, for at the moment, that was the only part of her I seemed to want, and when she tried to get my shoelaces undone I eased the zip of her skirt and drew it off. Her blonde hair was down and swathed all over me, yet still I only saw the features of Polly who even in the extremes of her sexual throe kept that faint tilt of irony on the left upper lip. Our rolling drew us slowly towards the stairs, and halfway up I opened her legs wide and licked her there till she came, her head falling backwards. I was a thousand miles from her, my bowels as cold as underground moss, so there seemed nothing I could not do to her, and with me in this frosty and distant mood, she became wilder than I’d ever seen her.

It seemed, impossible that she wouldn’t begin to suspect we weren’t as close as she thought we were, but when we got into the bedroom and I was put to it at last to strip down to my feathers, she took my diffidence to heart in such a way that it appeared only to prove an undying love, a tribute to her that no one had ever paid before. So at last, as I felt all this, I began to rise, at the moment when I thought I’d never be able to, not that night at least, and not with her. I slid in like a dream, and kept at it with her under me till she blew the walls of herself on to me, then I changed her on to her back and packed in every inch so that she grasped the pillows to try and take even more, yet at the same time escape it. The more exquisite and ferocious it got, the plainer did I see Polly and know she was the one I wanted to be with, and when every part of me finally turned into a fountain it was only in an effort to put out these sprouting flames because I was crying out Polly’s name, seeing no one else, and knowing I was in nobody but her. I bit my lips, and my inside heart cried out. There was no stopping the tears, and my cheeks were wet. She noticed this, and kissed them, talking to me in a crazy mixture of Dutch and English, and I was forced to begin returning her words, and her kisses.

‘Michael,’ she cried, ‘take me away. Let’s go off together.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘all right, love’ — and kissed her madly so that I wouldn’t have to say any more. I began to wonder how I’d come to let myself in for this, and felt my moral fibres going rotten under the force of this tough reflection. Yet in a way I did love Bridgitte, though not all of me, not the nine-tenths in the teeth of Polly. I wondered whether Polly knew how much she was haunting me, how much the black side of her was curled up in my gut, how much I loved her, in fact. And I wondered why, if this was so, she’d put herself so far beyond my reach. I wanted to unstick myself from Bridgitte and run down to the phone, to call again in case she’d come home in the meantime. But I couldn’t move, because Bridgitte was lying across me, so I rolled over her, and we went on with our kissing match, a furore growing between us, anything but talk beyond the normal words of love, when all her thoughts in that direction went on a road I did not want to go.

I grew cold again, half ashamed of those distant kisses, because she deserved more than that. Try as I could I couldn’t get closer, and make our kisses properly meet. It seemed the work of only half a man, though I ploughed her up to scratch when the fire finally took hold and I could let go. It wasn’t a prolonged marvellous shooting into her from the depthless part of myself, but it went in from the surface like a shower of steel dust. In spite of this and never thinking about anyone except Polly, I had the strongest definite desire when Bridgitte did finally get a look in, to make her pregnant. I don’t know why, but I was detached enough to be able to think of this, and I wanted her to have a baby. It was this thought that, towards the end of the evening, more or less pushed Polly away from my mind, and though at the same time it didn’t get me much closer to Bridgitte, at least I didn’t feel I was being such a bastard to her.

Instead of staying all night in the haven of my love I went back to the flat, on foot, to see if there were any messages regarding the next trip. It was three in the morning, and there weren’t, so I looked forward to my next collision with Bridgitte, and went to sleep.

In the morning William didn’t even have time to phone his mother at her hotel, for both of us were snappily told to get over to the flat in Knightsbridge with our passports. After a quick breakfast I went off, hoping to get a taxi before reaching the bridge. William was to leave ten minutes later so that we wouldn’t be seen going into the place together.

The ten-o’clock rush hour was pouring in, though no jams were forming yet. A small souped-up car charged out of a side street and ground itself obliquely into a bus. There was a rending of glass, and a dull scraping crunch of expensive tin. People came off the bus, and the driver got down. Nobody was hurt, and I hurried on, but it was a bad omen just the same. I got into a taxi, and lit a cigarette, unnerved by the reverberation of that impact. You either believe in omens or you don’t, I thought. I don’t. If you don’t, I suppose you believe that your fate is decided by heaven, or whatever it is, and not yourself. Believing in omens is the same as hoping that you have some control over your fate. You don’t. The cigarette tasted like foul soil. Omens are there to frighten you, not to warn you. I tried to cheer myself up on this, but didn’t much succeed.

I hung about in the anteroom waiting for William, looking through hunting magazines. I thought he seemed a bit flustered when he did make it, but we were taken straight in by Stanley. I had the feeling that something was not right with the world, and heard the man in the iron lung shouting into a telephone, and when I saw him through the perspex bubble he was going at that mouthpiece as if intending to eat it. When he put it down he set to rubbing and wringing his hands to get the blood back into them. It seemed to me he wouldn’t be in this job much longer.

‘There’s an emergency on,’ he said, ‘a big consignment to be shifted, and I want you two to do it, a hundredweight between you, this afternoon.’

‘My mother’s in town,’ William said, with a smile. ‘I thought I’d get these few days off.’

Jack Leningrad (or whatever his name was) grimaced, his face pale white. ‘You’ll have ten years off if I see another wrinkle of complaint around the sides of your mouth, my boy.’ He straightened his tie. ‘I want you to go to Zurich, then Beirut, Mr Hay. You’ll go to Paris, Mr Cullen. Your planes leave within five minutes of each other, so Stanley will drive you to the airport. Got the shakes already, Mr Cullen?’

He was looking straight at me, and he was right, because I had, and put my arm out to a chairback to stop myself falling. ‘I’ll be solid enough when the weight’s on,’ I said. It was too sudden, though I’d expected it from the moment we were called over.

In the car we decided that William would go through the customs first, and that I would follow almost immediately, so that we could have a drink before our different planes left. He made me promise to phone his mother and take her out in the morning, and I said I’d be glad to do this if all went well.

‘Don’t be dispirited, old lad,’ he exclaimed, with that wide false-teeth smile of his. ‘You’ll go through with flying colours, I know you will. It’s on the cards — not to mention the tea-leaves.’

‘I read my horoscope this morning, and it said my business plans would go awry.’

‘Forget it,’ he said, wanting to thump me on the back, but finding the effort to lift his arm too great. The weight didn’t bother me so much, but I felt as fat as a Michelin man, there for the world with its X-ray eyes to see. I hung around the bookstall, then walked towards the customs hall.

I stopped, ice at the heels of my feet. William was being interviewed by two customs men, and as I turned and walked away they were one on either side and heading him into a room. This is the end of him and me as well, I thought, panic in every vein and toe. This is the black finish of our trip down the Great North Road. I felt hunted, didn’t know what to do nor even where to turn. The place wasn’t busy and not many people were about, but I thought they were all police and narks ready to surround and rend me. I was so paralysed that I didn’t even feel enough shame to tell me to pull myself together.

I went to the nearest lavatory, intending to stand there and piss while I thought out what to do. But there was no method in me, only fear and sweat that I’d never known before, and if I’d suspected such a thing lurked in me I wouldn’t have taken this job on. I locked a lavatory door behind me and opened my coat, lifting out bars of gold and with shivering rapid hands dropping them into the lavatory. I piled all forty in and covered them with half a roll of toilet paper, wishing I’d never come to London but stayed and done my duty by Claudine, worked for her like an honest man should.

I left the toilet and went back into the hall. My idea had been to dump the gold and flee, hide on a remote island off Scotland for two years and hope I wouldn’t get my throat cut for cowardice, but for some crazy reason I went to the door of the departure lounge, and looked across at the customs men. There was William, talking to them, a smile across his face as if they were two old friends he’d been at school with. This sight mixed me up, but only for a moment, for I saw him wave gaily, and walk on into the departure hall, being safely through.

Shaking off my bewilderment I went quickly back to the lavatory. A man was standing at the urinal having a piss, and another was drying his hands. I went back to the toilet, but the door was locked, the engaged sign showing. I dashed into the next one, thinking I’d jump over the top or crawl underneath and strangle the bastard who was having a crap in there so that I could get my gold, but the one I was in turned out to be the one I’d used, and when I ripped off the coils of toilet paper, the gold was underneath, every bar of it still there. It was the good luck of my life, and at its sight I calmed down, and slotted every piece back into my coat. After two minutes silence I went to a mirror and combed my hair, straightened my hat, picked up my briefcase, not caring whether my fate was being decided, feeling that the excitement was over at last, come what may. I was no longer a fat man to the world, because to myself it seemed that I had sweated all the flesh of my bones away.

I walked through, and no one even looked at me, beyond a formal glimpse at my passport. William was already by the bar with a light ale in front of him: ‘What kept you, old smoke?’

‘I thought your number was up,’ I said, feeling a tremor of the shakes coming back, ‘when they started questioning you.’

He laughed, and ordered me a beer: ‘Just routine.’

‘The lousy poke-faced jack-snouts.’

‘They’re all right. Good lads, most of ’em. Got their job to do. No use hating them. That’s the road to bad breath!’

‘They searched you, didn’t they?’

‘Just to look in my wallet. It’s the travel allowance they’re worried about. I thought it was getting close but they didn’t get anywhere near. Still, next time I’ll use Gatwick. I’m a bit known here.’ His plane was called, and off he went.

In Paris I took a taxi to an address on the Île de la Cité. I was blind to Paris, except for its rain, being disappointed at not having seen Polly on the way there. The longer it got since a glimpse of her, the worse it felt. I delivered my goods, and then, as instructed, took a taxi back to the airport, and waited till seven o’clock for a leg-up to London. I sat in the airport lounge and drank black coffee, passing a bit of the time angling for a sweet look from the waitress but not getting anywhere near.

By nine I was back at the Knightsbridge flat, where Stanley put an envelope in my hand with the usual amount inside. I was then let out again, no word sparking between us. I met a taxi by the door, and got home to find William’s mother waiting for me. ‘He said you’d look after me,’ she said, as I took off my coat.

‘Had dinner then, Mrs Straw?’

‘No, my duck, but don’t bother about me.’

‘Well, I’m hungry. Let’s go and have a chop or two.’

‘That sounds lovely. Can I have green peas with it?’

‘You can have strawberries and cream if you like.’ I hadn’t expected her to be dumped on me so soon, and had meant to crash fifty thousand feet into sleep now that I was home. But after my promise I couldn’t just bundle her back to her hotel. She sat in an easy chair, with a good length of brandy on the arm. ‘I met some people the other day, and they want me to go to their hotel for a drink tonight, love. I wrote their address down, so I’d be glad if you’ll take me there.’ She fumbled in her big white handbag and passed me the back of an envelope.

‘We’ll do that, then,’ I said, glad there was a place to go to without having to decide. When I read the name it was the hotel I’d stayed at when I arrived in London, now written in a quick and keggy hand that depressed me, I don’t know why. Mrs Straw put on her glasses, while I stared at the paper, as if to help me decipher it. I had nothing to fear. In my new guise they wouldn’t even know me as the one who’d left without paying his bill.

‘Come on then, Mother,’ I said, jumping away from my sins of the past when they started to bite at my toecaps like hungry crabs. ‘It’ll be too late to eat at this hotel of yours, so we’ll go to a restaurant.’

‘Lovely,’ she said, standing up. ‘We can go there afterwards. Only for half an hour. They’re ever such jolly people. A man and his wife, come from Chesterfield. They’ll be ever so glad to see me.’

I hoped to stupefy her with food and wine before it came to that, so helped her into a new fur coat that William had bought for her. She talked about him through the dinner. ‘He’s always been as good as gold to me’ — that sort of thing, till I thought I’d go screwy if she said another word in this tone but then I found myself listening, and actually enjoying the way she went on. ‘He was always the same, even before his dad died, and that’s going back a bit, I can tell you. I know he’s been in prison and all that, but he’s one of the best lads any woman could want.’ She looked hard at me, as if wondering what effect her talk was having. It made me uneasy, because I hadn’t seen such an honest look for a long time. It was a hungry look, that threatened to black me out. ‘Tell me, my duck,’ she said, ‘what sort of work does he do?’

‘Ain’t he told you?’

‘Ay, he has. But you tell me.’

‘He does the same as me.’

‘What do you do, then?’

‘I’m a travelling salesman. A group of engineering firms got together and pooled their stuff, so some of us take samples of their production to various places abroad. It pays well, but it wears you out at times, so much running about.’

She wasn’t eating much of her chops, not even touching the tinned fresh peas: ‘That’s right. He told me all about it. But I wouldn’t like owt to ’appen to him. I’d die if it did.’

‘Aeroplanes don’t crash nowadays. You shouldn’t worry about that.’

She looked hard at me, not having believed a word of what I’d said: ‘No, it’s not that at all, and you know it. Don’t you?’

I laughed: ‘What, Ma?’

‘I’ve lived longer than you think I have. Admitted, most of my life it’s been under water from one sort of misery or another, but I’ve got eyes and ears and a mother’s heart, and when I look at Bill I know he’s living under a wicked strain, and there’s summat he’s keeping from me. I’ve got all my senses right enough. Knowing what I know and feeling what I feel, it pains me to come up against somebody like yo’ who won’t tell me the honest simple truth that wain’t do a bit of harm to me after all I’ve lived through.’

Her face looked pale and made of paper. Bits of powder and rouge turned her head into a lantern, with two eyes for candles. My heart was tight at the sight of her. ‘It’s secret work,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you any more, so please don’t ask me. But he’s in no danger, not Bill. He’s doing very well with his life at the moment, so you shouldn’t worry about him at all. I’m telling you.’ For God’s sake believe me, I added under my breath. My words made her smile with relief, because I excelled in fervour. When I remembered it afterwards I wept that I hadn’t told the simple but elusive truth.

‘I’d better take you back to your hotel,’ I said when the meal was finished.

‘I must just nip to the other place first. It can’t be far and we can take a taxi. Bill gen me ten pounds last night. He’s been so generous to me.’ I knew that in her fur coat she felt more cared for than she’d ever done in her life, and I hadn’t the heart to make a fuss about not going where she wanted, so in ten minutes we were at the door of the hotel.

The manager behind the desk still had the same sharp ulcerous look on his face. ‘Hello,’ he said to me, ‘back again? Thought we’d seen the last of you.’

‘I decided to come and settle up.’

‘Better late than never,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know you had pals here as well,’ said Bill’s bright mother, her hand crooked in my arm.

‘We’ll be in the lounge,’ I told the manager, ‘so bring the bill into me, with a double brandy, and a shandy. One for yourself, as well.’

‘When you came through that door just now I hardly knew you,’ he smiled. ‘You’ve prospered a bit since you pulled out so suddenly.’

I moved on, too exhausted to make much of a night of it in the lounge with Mr and Mrs Binns from Chesterfield, but they were happy and nice enough in their middle-aged way. They weren’t as pleased to see Mrs Straw as much as Mrs Straw would have liked, but it ended better than it started, for I plugged them all to capacity before we left, and paid my bill of nearly twenty pounds into the bargain. The manager had tears of gratitude on the pouches of his eyes. I’d got him to take a couple more brandies: ‘Nearly got thrown out because of you,’ he confessed, ‘because I’d had a few bad cases only a month before. You’re the first one that ever came back to pay in all my experience. It’s gladdened my faith in human nature a bit.’ On that slimy note, with the five of us fit to break into Auld Lang Syne, I pulled Mrs Straw into a taxi and back to her hotel. The same cab got me home. I was too done in to take a bath, and fell flat on to my bed like a board of lead, sleeping till midday with neither faces nor white horses to disturb my blackout.

I was wakened by the flat bell ringing, otherwise I might have stayed buried in warm wool till past teatime. I took the deep yellow envelope from the telegraph youth, still too much asleep to wonder what was in it. I dropped it on the table, then fell back on my bed. Half an hour later I got up and opened it on my way to the bathroom. As the piss piped out of me I read: = WILLIAM IN BEIRUT COOP STOP LUNG MOVING STOP ADDRESS FOLLOWING LOVE = LENINGRAD.

I surprised myself by catching on to it so quickly. Sun was coming in through the toilet window, so maybe that helped. Bill Straw had been caught in Beirut, and the man in the iron lung was being moved in a specially built pantechnicon through the London streets to another lair. Once he was installed, I would hear from them for a further assignment, unless the repercussions of international investigation swept us all into oblivion. I wondered what charge Bill would be on in the Lebanon, whether in fact the police there could fix him on anything at all, and somehow I couldn’t take it as seriously as I would if he’d been grappled at London airport, and thrown into the nick here, where he wouldn’t have got out in less than five years.

I set a kettle on the galley stove, and stood in my dressing-gown waiting for it to boil. I got the shakes, realizing I’d have to wait weeks for the kettle of news to boil. I’d be the last to get information from Jack Leningrad Inc, though I decided that when next called in for a job I’d threaten to smash that iron lung to bits with a hammer unless they told me all they knew. Worst of all, I had to phone his mother, but I decided to wait a couple of days, or till such time as she began to worry. I saw no point in upsetting her, by telling her immediately. If she asked why Bill hadn’t come back I’d say I didn’t know. And the next time she mentioned it she’d already be half inclined to receive bad news.

If Bill was really taken in Beirut, he was done for, in which case there was no reason why she shouldn’t know what was what, providing I could put my cowardice at having to spill the news to one side.

In most parts of me I didn’t believe it had happened, in spite of the fact that I’d been brought up to believe that telegrams didn’t lie. But I knew that this feeling was my loss, since there was no doubt that it had happened. Not only was Bill hooked, but I began to see that maybe the danger would root me out. There’d been nothing but fear since I’d started this job. But if I began to get worried at last, it wasn’t out of fear, only from wondering what it meant. This wasn’t the sort of work for somebody like me, certainly not what I’d come to London for. It was a load on my back, exactly what I’d intended to avoid. I’d been trapped, but how and by whom, that was the question. I sat down to some tea and bread. I was in the middle of a quicksand bog, nobody within ten miles to come and talk to me while I went down. The trouble was I had no impulse to run. Somewhere, way back in the dark, my Achilles tendon had been cut, and I didn’t grieve about that but I didn’t know whether this was going to turn out to my advantage or not. Was it ever better to stay still, or to run? If I didn’t get the impulse to run, then it was obviously better to sit still. When the impulse did come I’d run twice as quick and to a place twice as safe than I would if I set off somewhere without being absolutely impelled. So I made a virtue out of my idleness and sloth. When strength came out of weakness it had the force of self-preservation behind it, and that was what I depended on. There didn’t seem much else at the moment.

I got dressed and walked into town. On the way I put my three hundred pounds into the bank, which now made six hundred on deposit for a wet and thundery day. I took out half a crown, and flipped it up, heads I would phone Polly, tails I would try Bridgitte. It clattered healthily as it hit the pavement, rolled into a gutter and down a grate, lost for ever. You just had to make your own decisions.

There was no reply from Bridgitte, so I dialled Polly’s number. ‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice which struck me as strange.

‘Is that Polly?’

‘Yes, what do you want?’

‘I want to speak to Polly.’ Somebody went by the phone booth, with a placard saying ‘The Bomb Also Kills Children’.

‘This is Polly. Who is that?’

‘Michael.’

‘Michael bloody who?’

‘From Geneva. Remember?’

‘Oh, yes. How stupid. I’m sorry.’

‘I’ve got a few days off. Can I see you?’

‘Come over,’ she said.

‘Is that all right?’

‘Mum and Dad are in Ostend.’

‘As soon as I can, then.’ I put the phone down. Outside, I thought I’d dreamed it, but I knew I never had such dreams. With me, it was either reality or nothing.

Half an hour later I went up the drive of the Villa Moggerhanger, smelling the luxury of fresh hedges and growing flowers. Grey clouds were flying away from London, racing for the hills and grass. José, the Spaniard, opened the door and welcomed me like an old friend. ‘Mr Moggerhanger is out.’

‘I’ve come to see Polly,’ I told him. She was in the garden, so I found her clipping roses from a row of bushes near the back wall. I intended greeting her casually, so as not to alarm her, but she took my hands, hers cold, and I don’t know how it happened but both of us were kissing straight away. ‘I tried to get through to you half a dozen times, but your mother hung up on me. Then I had to do a trip to Paris.’

‘I’ve been longing for you,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just going to end like the others, that once you got to know me, as you did in Geneva and on the way back, then you wouldn’t want to see me any more.’

‘It’ll take at least a hundred years to get to know you,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up West for lunch.’ I was nervous of hanging around the Moggerhanger lair for too long in case Claud himself should suddenly spring up from the ground. My instinct told me to get out of the place, though I couldn’t see rationally why, since Polly said he was in Ostend — though maybe he’d only gone there for a drink.

‘I’d hate that,’ she said. ‘I’m turned off the middle of London. You’ve driven Dad’s Bentley, haven’t you?’ We walked together along the path, and she suddenly threw all the roses she had collected behind a laurel bush.

‘Like a dream,’ I said, my arm warm where she went on holding it.

‘Let’s go somewhere, then. I’ve got the key to one of Dad’s hideaways in Kent.’

‘Why not?’ I said, but playing it cool.

‘Sit in the lounge and pour a drink, while I go up and dress.’

‘I’ll watch if you like.’

She kissed me quickly: ‘No, I don’t feel like it now.’ Her bare pale legs went up the stairs, and I unlatched a tin of tomato juice, thinking of William trying to barter his way out of some Lebanese copshop with bars of gold, and of his poor old mother worrying herself daft as she knocked back shorts with her Chesterfield friends, while I’d been talked by feckless Polly into some mad adventure with Moggerhanger’s house on wheels.

We sat high in the front as I stepped on the power over Hammersmith Bridge and went towards the South Circular, the tape-recorder playing Tales from the Vienna Woods, and me smoking one of the Moggerhanger’s big cigars kept in the glove-box for special friends. Through Clapham a bowser was blocking the road, but there was no way of overtaking. ‘That Cooper just did it,’ Polly said.

‘I want to live. I’ll do it in my own good time.’

‘The exhaust’s giving me a headache,’ she complained.

I put on the winkers, swung out, and swept forward. The bowser seemed a mile long, and travelling fast, but I got straight up to fifty, then saw a bus coming full on towards me. It was too late to brake. Headlights flashed me, and I couldn’t go back. The bastard driving the bowser was set on getting me killed, didn’t slow down, or go in even an inch. I supposed he was a good honest worker who thought that rich pigs who drove around in such expensive cars should be put up against a wall and shot — or crumpled to death under a bus.

Polly clutched me, and I thought what a wonderful way to die, but by twelve inches, a single foot and no more, I was in front of the bowser and just about safe, trembling in every inside limb, my tongue hollow, Polly half fainting against her seat, wondering how other people could be so rotten.

The road was empty up ahead, and I left the bowser behind, until at a traffic light on stop he drew in between me and the kerb. I leaned across Polly and wound down the window: ‘Are you trying to kill me then, mate?’ I said in my best Nottingham accent.

He wore a cap, and his broad face grinned: ‘Yes.’

‘Better luck next time, then,’ and I shot forward as the lights changed to yellow. ‘His eggs were fried too hard for breakfast.’

‘I was scared to death,’ she said.

‘That’s his idea of a joke. I grew up with people like that. Worked with them — for a little while. He just wanted to see if I’d lose my nerve and pull back. I could have done, but didn’t. Still, it’s not often we get a thrill like that, is it, love?’

She held my arm: ‘Take care, though.’

‘I wouldn’t do anything else with you in the car. Myself I don’t care about. I’m neither here nor there. Easy come, easy go. I’ve had a good time up to now, and if the Big Door suddenly fell on me I might have time for a grin before the blackout made a fossil of it.’ This was the last thing I felt, but I needed to say it in case she’d seen how frightened I’d been when the bus nearly got me. ‘I think you must have had a fairly awful life to get into that state,’ she said. ‘Are you still on that gold-smuggling job?’

We were on a dual carriageway, traffic thinner: ‘I gave it up.’

‘Since when?’

‘My best friend got caught. So now I’m going straight, waiting to meet an honest girl to keep me on the right path.’

‘That’s not me, then,’ she laughed, and I was surprised when, instead of saying how good it would be for me to give it up, she said I shouldn’t really weaken and pull out just because my best friend had been caught, that now was the time to go on, because maybe no one else would be pulled in for a long time, like it was always safest to travel by plane just after a big air disaster. I hadn’t lost my nerve overtaking a petrol lorry — and she did admire me for it, after all — so why lose it at something far less dangerous? For my part, it was all talk, because I never seriously intended resigning my lucrative position, and as far as not losing my nerve between the lorry and the bus, once I got there I had no option but to go on and get out of the trap. I hadn’t lost my nerve, not totally, but all my fibres had melted, and my bones had been under the hammer, I knew that now, a handshake with my final moment that hadn’t been final after all. Polly was out on a limb. She wasn’t in my guts. I was sailing towards trees and hills, sorry the sea was but forty miles off, otherwise I’d have driven on as far as I could get around the world. ‘You don’t know me,’ I said. ‘I give nothing up. That’s what makes me stupid, and lets me, live high. I had a chip on my shoulder but it turned into a bird and it wasn’t a budgerigar, either. Nor a vulture, come to that. Just a kite to keep me a few inches off mother earth.’

‘You’re so funny,’ she said, ‘have you read any good books lately?’

‘I thought it would come to this,’ I laughed, taking her hand. ‘Ever since I told you I loved you.’ We went through a traffic jam in Tonbridge with the windows down and the radio sending out Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I forgot for a while the sort of car I was in, but realized it when I saw the other faces looking at me. ‘When do we get to this place in the country?’

She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth: ‘Don’t lose patience. That would be even worse than losing your nerve. Another half-hour.

‘I feel like an unlucky pilgrim, caught in the trap of England’s arterial lanes. We’ll get a dose of arterial sclerosis if we’re not careful. All those other screw drivers seem to have it already.’ In my right mind I might have sung a song to them, but with Polly by my side an obsession kept twisting in my trousers, and the smell of summer grass didn’t calm it beyond noticing. Where be ye, my love? She was by my side, but sitting apart and not sweetly under me, looking ahead at the green tunnel and tarmac track. ‘It’s a change from the lake,’ I said.

She guided me on to a minor road, then along an unpaved track. ‘Dad’s never been here by Bentley. He usually comes in the Land Rover.’

The wheels sank into a rut. ‘It’s understandable.’ Grey clouds made it feel like rain through the open windows. The soil on the track had been churned by tractors, and when I went too fast on what seemed a level place I hit a water-filled rut and red slosh flew as high as the windscreen, while bushes on both sides scraped the windows and paintwork. ‘You should have told me,’ I said, ‘and we could have left the car by the road.’ Even Moggerhanger didn’t deserve this done to his car, though it was too late now, as we went into another dip. ‘Much farther?’

‘Not much.’ A tractor came round the bend, a man perched on top wearing a cap and khaki raincoat, and having the smallest possible stump of fag between his lips. I crushed in the brakes, waited for the small smash, the sort that hurts no one and does no damage, until you try to stand up, when you fall down before you’ve had time to realize that forty blood vessels are ruptured, or the car itself drops to pieces bit by bit in the weeks that follow and you never know what was the cause of it. But I slithered up to the tractor and stopped a few inches short. The man took off his cap, and smiled: ‘Hello, Miss Moggerhanger! Is your father coming today?’

‘I don’t think so, Bill. Everything all right at the house?’

‘Well, it’s still there,’ he said, as I began to back away. He turned into a field and left the track free, so on I went, splashing over the humps and hollows till I came to an asphalted space in front of a plain two-storeyed brick cottage. The garden was fenced off with white palings, and had a bird bath in the middle of the lawn. At the front door Polly felt in her handbag for the key. It wouldn’t fit in the lock. ‘Let me try,’ I said, but it was soon plain that she had brought the wrong one. ‘Never mind,’ I said, calmly, boiling with rage at such a mistake, ‘we’ll get in somehow.’

‘Oh,’ she cried, tearfully, ‘how stupid I am.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, my arm around her. ‘We’ll find a hotel somewhere. Everything turns out all right, as long as you never think you’ve made a mistake.’ She laughed at this piece of suicidal wisdom, and I tried to lift up the front windows.

‘I don’t think it’ll be much use. Dad always locks up when we leave, and he really knows how to do it.’

‘Even he can slip up. Let’s go to the back.’ It was raining again, and through the windows it looked very comfortable. A cat sat on a soaking mat by the back door, flanked by half a dozen empty milk bottles. It got up and rubbed itself against Polly’s ankle, as if happy that somebody had come back at last to feed it. The door was locked and bolted from the inside, so I tried the windows. Unless I broke a pane, nothing would come of that. ‘There’s a skylight window,’ she called out.

‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘I didn’t bring my wings with me. However, I’ll get up that drainpipe that leads to the apex of the roof, and slide down to it from the top. Do you dare me to try?’

The cat was cradled in her bosom, and I wanted to belt its earhole out of it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘because I know you’ll try.’

I went back to the car for a jack-knife, and opened it. ‘If I fall,’ I said, putting it between my teeth, ‘I’ll have no roof to my mouth.’

‘Nor your head. But please don’t do it.’

‘I’m obsessed by it, I’ve got to do it now, but if I fall it’ll be your fault. You’ll have to push me in a wheelchair for the rest of our lives.’

‘Oh goody!’ she said, as I went up a few notches. I needed to be drunk to do this well, but there was no booze in the car. It seemed as if I was a born steeplejack, because my arms had been so strengthened by William’s briefcase training. The one spoiling item was rain spitting all over me that made the drainpipe and its supports more slippery than it need have been. I straddled the roof and shuffled myself along.

Polly shouted from below: ‘That window may be locked as well!’ I suppose she wanted me to have a fit and fall, but I’d assumed it would be locked, anyway, which was why I had the jack-knife. The big danger was in sliding halfway down the slope of the wet roof to get to the window. I might lose control and plummet to my doom. It would have been better thatched, but Moggerhanger was always practical, preferred to see rain sliding plainly down his slates, rather than getting mushed up in thatch, where he couldn’t keep an eye on it. That stretch of slate glistened, and I couldn’t see much to grip on after I’d started the slide. Polly stood out in the back garden for a full view of me against the sky, and I could see her down in the weeds and rotten cabbages.

‘Can you get it open?’ she called, seeing that I hadn’t yet reached it. I lay flat on the roof, my shoes splayed outwards and arms full length. I could feel the rain on my neck, and I seemed stuck like this for ages, lacking the cool courage and trust to let go. My shoes began sliding, and I pressed them with all force so as to slow down. This helped, for I hit the sill of the skylight, went over it, and stopped.

I was safe, but only by my nails slotted between wood and wood. Cows were moaning from fields round about, a long low gut-stirring complaint saying that I shouldn’t be where I was and that if I fell it would serve me right. I was in such a plight that I actually had time to wonder why I was there, and secondly how I’d ever get back to earth if I didn’t succeed in breaking in through the window. The only way down was as a human bomb of flesh and blood, to bounce at the earth like a sack of apples and oranges. Be brave, I said, and imagine how cool you’d be if there was only a twelve-inch drop beyond that drainpipe. So I calmed myself, and, hanging with one hand took the clasp knife from my teeth and dug it in the crack of the skylight. To my relief, it was loose, and after some probing I yanked it up and let it fall on my fingers — which cracked them, but I gripped by both hands and drew myself to the ample opening. The skylight frame rested on my head, then my shoulders, till I was out of the rain and able to look into the attic room below. How, though, was I actually to get into it? My scalp itched, and sweat blended with the raindrops, but it was advisable to get in feet first. Luckily there was a bed underneath, with a mattress laid across the frame. I slithered on to it like a crocodile, rolling into a ball as I landed, but spraining my ankle as it hit the end of the bed. I spun about and cursed at the fiery ache, feeling alone in the world, forgetting everything but that torment. Yet I was inside, and stood to celebrate the fact. I held on to the bed and rolled my foot around, then walked to the door, noticing on my way that half a dozen expensive shotguns were laid along a rack by the far wall.

When I opened the back door Polly said: ‘I thought you’d gone to sleep up there.’

‘It was quite a drop,’ I told her, as we went through the kitchen, which smelled of dampness and old cornflakes. ‘Is there any brandy in the place?’ I found some in the living-room cupboard, and we drank a good slug of it. I put my arm around her, feeling lecherous at the noise of rain dinning against the window. ‘Did you shut the skylight?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Please go and make sure, love.’

I hobbled up to the attic, found an aluminium ladder, and clamped the window into place. The bed was already patched with wet. I picked up a double-barrelled high-powered fowling piece and playfully aimed it through the skylight at the piss-filled clouds. The victory at getting in, and the fact that I would soon be entangled in the warm limbs of sweet Polly, must have turned my head, for in a moment of panache I pulled both triggers. A double explosion thumped my shoulder and threw me on the floor, and the shots brought down a shower of glass and splinters, so that slits of blood joined up with marks of rain and sweat.

Polly stood in the doorway: ‘For God’s sake, what have you done?’

‘I’m wounded. Don’t just stand there, help me up. Whoever could have left a gun loaded without murder in his heart?’

‘You’re not wounded,’ she said accusingly.

‘We’d better move the bed, and put a bucket under the hole, otherwise your house will get senile decay.’ I hobbled around and looked busy clearing up, while Polly said she’d never known anyone to sprain their ankle simply by firing a shotgun. I couldn’t convince her that I’d done it getting in, and that she just hadn’t noticed it before.

We had a shower, warm water soaking our skins back to life and sensitivity. She held me by the roots while I latched on to her breasts and soaped her between the legs, until she suddenly jerked and fetched forward as she came. Without waiting to get into the bedroom we lay on the towels and bathmats and shocked off together, wet and raw and flushed after the difficulties of getting in. We pulled each other into the bedroom. She put on a nightdress, then opened a drawer and took out one of her father’s linen shirts. ‘Put this on.’

‘I’m not cold.’

Her dark eyes were on fire, and I don’t think she could see me at all: ‘Still, put it on.’ It meant nothing to me, so I did, and it was so big it was like a nightshirt, pin-striped and without a collar. She lay down, her head on the pillow and hair spread like feathers. My handle grew up, and pushed out the shirt, which she lifted till she got to it, and then I slapped her around and fucked her as hard as I could, while she moaned and whimpered about never having had it like this before, which I didn’t believe, though I couldn’t think of anything as my prick cut into the shrine of her and shot my life at her womb.

There was nothing to eat in the place, that was the only trouble. We found a box of matzos in the larder, and some cheese that I had to lop the rot from, so we lived on this and black sweet tea till the following morning, though we didn’t need too much time to eat. Nor did we benefit from the fresh country air. Polly told me the story of her life, of how she was brought up at Moggerhanger Hall, and the adolescent shock she got when she caught on to her father’s profession. She’d always been his darling, and still was, and he lost no opportunity in reminding her of that and the many times as a child when she’d said that when she grew up he was the only one she’d consider marrying. She asked me about my life, and I told her all I knew of it, and of my adventures as a gold-smuggler, on which she asked all sorts of questions about the Jack Leningrad Organization. I told her about William being caught in Beirut, and that because of this the man in the iron lung might be on the move to a new hideout.

‘All this is worth nothing,’ I said, while we lounged on the bed, me in her father’s shirt which by this time had a bit of rank stiffening in it. ‘The moon is worth nothing. The world is worth nothing. The rain can piss itself to death. All that’s worth anything are your kisses.’ She almost fainted into my arms at this, and my hand went down as her soft breasts flattened against me, and her eyes closed. ‘We’ll have lots of honeymoons, and if life tries to waylay and grab us we’ll kick it in the teeth. There’s only us, not life.’ Her tongue and fingers were in my mouth, as if wanting me to pour out more such words, but I was half gone, then all gone as I went into her again, and got the piston of the two-stroke cycle at a regular knock. It amazed me how much spunk a man had in him, and I wondered how many times he shot in a lifetime and how many plastic buckets this would add up to, how many furrows it would irrigate, how many babies drown. These off-side thoughts kept me going, and I played her on her belly and back and side and from behind, till finally when she was spreadeagled under me and facing me, and had come at last, and I felt her velvet gobble beginning again, I calculated it was time to let go, and did, and she pulled me by the arse till I felt her fingernails must be full of either shit or blood. She cried out as if I were trying to kill her, which I swear I wasn’t, and I felt a roar come out of me without knowing much about it.

As we went sadly towards the car I hoped our simple brick cottage would melt under the rain and banish back into the soil because I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone ever going into it and spoiling the thick atmosphere that we had created and left there. Even to dynamite it would be better than that. I drove like a pilot towards London, neither of us saying much. There wasn’t even a traffic jam in Tonbridge, and two hours later we were crossing the bridge and steaming through the mist and mire into Ealing. The thick slosh of reality was getting back at me, and I felt nervous as I drove the mudstained Bentley up the drive of Moggerhanger Court.

I took the remaining cigars out of the glove-box and said goodbye, wondering if she expected me to match her with the tears she looked like shedding.

‘Phone me,’ she said.

‘I will’ — solid in my intention.

‘Father has other places we can go to. They’re all over the place.’

‘We’ll go to every one,’ I said.

On the mat was a telegram and a letter. I opened the telegram first, and it read: PROCEED ROME TOMORROW STOP AWAIT PHONE CALL = JACK LENINGRAD. I took a bottle of beer from the fridge and put some sausages under the grill, so that the whole flat smelt like home. Whereas the telegram bucked me up and made me feel better, the sight of Bridgitte’s bulky letter irritated me, though I hadn’t yet opened it, because I looked forward to getting back to work with no distraction. I read a couple of old newspaper stories about foot and mouth disease, then noted that England’s currency reserves were running low, and how gold was getting scarcer. Time and a pot of tea went by on this, but soon I was forced to open the letter.

‘Dear Michael,’ Bridgitte wrote, ‘such terrible things have happened to me that I don’t know where to begin.’ I nearly threw it in the fire, but was compelled, like a dear reader, to read on.

‘I’m so distressed that I weep all the time. You see, Donald, my husband, came back the morning after you left, and Adelida met him at the door while I was still in bed. She’d just returned from taking dear Smog to school, and must have told Donald that you had been in the bed with me, because the first thing I knew was the clothes pulled back and his wild hands smacking me. I screamed, but I was black and blue before he stopped. Then he stood there calling me all the rotten English names, such terrible things I can’t tell you.

‘He made me get dressed, then pushed me all down the stairs to the front door, and threw me out of it. By this time he was crying himself, but as the tears came to his own face his knocks and kicks at me got worse. As I went sobbing down the path I heard him raving at Adelida and telling her to pack and get out as well. He’s a psychologist and a doctor, and he’s supposed to be a man of wisdom and understanding, but he acted like a beast to me. He’s never been anything but a beast.

‘I had only a few shillings in my pocket so I went by Underground and bus to your flat. Nobody was in. I sat for an hour on the stairs, still not really awake, and hungry because the Beast had thrown me out with no breakfast. I went to see a Dutch friend of mine who lives in Chelsea with a student, and she gave me cheese and tea, but was too poor to put me up.

‘I decided that the only sensible thing was to go back to my husband, and when I got there he wasn’t in. The door was open and I caught Adelida putting my clothes into her own suitcase. I said that if she didn’t take them out I’d phone the police, but she said I was a whore and could phone who I liked. When I started to dial the phone she threw my stuff over the floor and ran away from the house. So I packed my case properly and found my money purse with pounds in it. If the worst came to the terrible it was enough to get me to Holland, but I didn’t want to go there because my family, who had always hated my husband, would only have said I told you so and sent me away.

‘I sat on my case in the living-room surrounded by chairs, and didn’t know what to do. I was stunned, and it was all my fault. And then I thought: “Why didn’t I think of it before? Michael’s gone to his home in Nottinghamshire.” A ray of joy spread over me. Also I remembered the address, Ranton Grange, so I called a taxi and went straight to the station, where I got a ticket to Nottingham.

‘It was a wonderful journey, because as soon as the train got to countryside my tears dried and troubles went, and I had a cheap lunch in the dining-wagon. The only strange incident that happened, on the train anyway, was when I was on my way back to the carriage. I was passing a first-class compartment and inside was a little old woman, who took off a fur coat and tried to push it through the window out of the train. The space was small and the coat was big, so she had a hard job to get it out. She pulled it down and rolled it up longways, to make it easier, and she was mumbling and crying all the time. I went in and talked to her, so that after a while she forgot about throwing her coat off the train, and started to tell me her life story. But it was all very quick and I didn’t understand anything, thinking she was just another of your mad people in England.

‘Then I went back to my own seat in third class, because the ticket man came and said I had to. Nottingham was nice and different from London, all open and good to look at, full of busy and smiling people, and I said to myself this is just the town that Michael would come from. I asked a station man how I would get to Ranton, and he told me to walk down to the bus place, so that in an hour I got there. What beautiful country! But I had to walk a long way down a lane to get to your house at the Grange. By this time I was a little bit tired, but hoped your mother would not be angry for me calling on you.

‘The gate was locked, and I pressed a bell button, and down the drive came a man who I thought must be the brother you’d told me about. He looked kind, but suspicious, and asked me what I wanted. I said I had come to see Michael, and he said you weren’t at home, that you were in London. This was a big blow, and I was beginning to think that it was a really bad day. “Are you his brother?” I asked. He nodded, and looked at me, hard. He was about ten years older than you, and good-looking, though his eyes were steely, and he had a small ginger moustache. “He told me a lot about you,” I said. He took my case and asked me to come to the house for a cup of tea, said he couldn’t possibly let me go since I had come so far. He apologized for you and said you didn’t often make mistakes like this, and that you ought to be more careful where a young lady was concerned. I said I hoped I wouldn’t disturb his mother, and he said, “Oh, don’t worry about her. I’m afraid she recently died,” and I thought it strange that you hadn’t told me, but I just said how sorry I was.

‘A servant took my case and we went into the house, a big mansion with paintings of dead soldiers on all the staircases, and I thought how lucky Michael is to have a childhood here. Your brother gave me lunch, and he ordered a bottle of wine to be sent up, and then another, and the more I ate and drank the better I felt about my disappointment at not seeing you. Then I felt dizzy, and your brother asked his housekeeper to show me a room where I could rest for half an hour. He then said that afterwards he would drive me to the station. So I followed this old woman into a room that looked over the loveliest green park. I stood by the window to see it all. Then I lay down on the bed, feeling small in the middle of it. I was exhausted from the events of the day that was not much more than half gone, and I fell asleep in no time.

‘When I opened my eyes, your brother (I mean that devil) was standing by the bed and looking down at me. “Is it time to go?” I said. He started to undress, and I ran to the door, but it was locked. “It’s even soundproof,” he laughed at me. “Let me go,” I cried, “I’ll miss my train.” “They run every day,” he said. “I’ll tell Michael,” I said. “Who the devil’s that?” he said, naked but for his shirt. “Your brother,” I told him. “I don’t have a brother. Only a sister, and she’s in South America, I hope.” I ran back to the bed. “Don’t be a silly girl,” he said, pulling his shirt off, “enjoy yourself.”

‘“Who are you?” I cried.

‘“I’m Lady Chatterley’s son.” Somehow he didn’t frighten me any more, and when he kissed me I couldn’t do anything about it. I realized by now that I must have remembered the wrong address, but a few days later Clifford told me that there was no one by your name in the whole county, and he knew all the good families in it. So you are the most terrible liar, and I shall never forgive you, even though I still love you. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be writing this letter.

‘Clifford put me on the train in Nottingham and begged me to visit him again some time. Back in London I went to my husband, thinking that we could be together again. But when he wanted to know who I’d spent my time with I wouldn’t tell him. He’d been to your flat looking for you, to push your face in, he said, but he hadn’t found you. We had lunch together at the house (he already had another housekeeper looking after him) and I thought things were going to be all right, because afterwards we went to bed, but then he asked me to tell him again where I’d been for the last few days, and when I still wouldn’t he said he just had time to smash up the house and get rid of me before going off to Harley Street to see some patients. He threw all the vases into the fireplace, ripped the pictures off the walls, and smashed a window. Then he hit me and kicked me. He is uncivilized and savage, and I thought there’d be no end to it if I stayed with him. He kicked his wife, that’s why she left him. He kicks poor Smog, and he kicked me. I told myself I’d never live with a psychoanalyst again, as I went crying down the path with my suitcase. I’ve got a place to live and a job. My room is in Camden Town, and I work as a shop assistant. I hate it, because I don’t have any freedom, and I’m unhappy because I’ve been phoning you and don’t get any reply. So please, please come to see me, or be in when I phone, because my life is smashed and ruined and I am so unhappy, Michael. I love you and want to go away with you. Even though you betrayed me by your lies, I still want you.’

She went on in this way for a few pages more, but I crumpled the letter up and threw it in the slop bin. What a crazy girl she was, I thought, going up to Nottingham to look for me. How can you trust someone who believes everything you say? As for the stately home she’d ended up in, it must have been the one I’d described so knowingly in my lies, the one I’d cycled by and admired so often as a youth. Some swine had taken advantage of her innocence, and now she was a serving girl behind a shop counter. What a comedown for an au pair girl from milk-and-butter land.

It was already afternoon, the livid sky filled with water, which made me feel even more sorry for her. But I had to go out in it, for the cupboard was empty and the fridge was bare, so with raincoat and umbrella I slipped down the stairs to a little man’s shop on the main road, whose window was filled with orange drinks and tinned peas. I got Splendour Loaf and meatlets, choc-cake, and Tiger-eye frozen fish toes, the fifth-rate grub that dulls the brains of every Englishman. Big drops of rain dragged themselves out of the sky in an effort to wet me on the way back, but I reached the comfort of my flat in safety.

I tried on the phone to get Bill’s mother and tell her the fate of her son, but the hotel manager said she’d gone back to Worksop some days ago — which was one problem less to bother me as I lay down the receiver. Only at this moment did it occur to me that she’d been seen on the train by Bridgitte, though I tried not to be dead certain of it. I put on the kettle again for tea. There was a framed photograph of Bill’s mother on the sideboard, and her look went right into my heart when I took up courage and stared at her. She asked what the hell Bill was doing in London instead of earning an able living in Worksop. Come to that, she asked what I was doing here as well, but I looked at her and said nothing, thinking she ought to stick to Bill and leave me alone. Bill no doubt was guzzling typhoid sherbet in a far-off nick, so he certainly needed worrying about, far more than I did, and that was a fact.

Yet at least he was surrounded by bad breath and flesh-and-blood, whereas if my appendix suddenly burst I’d bleed to death and nobody would be any the wiser. I wasn’t going crazy, but I didn’t like living alone, and Bill’s old mother behind that sheet of glass knew it very well, those features showing a mixture of despair with love just beneath it and trying to break through, and to succeed in seeing her love, you had to look at her with all your spirit, and with tears about to come out of your own eyes. I wanted to turn it to the wall, but didn’t have enough coal in my brain for that. While filling me with remorse it also showed me there was nothing I could do for Bridgitte, that no mad rescue was possible or necessary because who, by the standards of Bill’s mother, could say she was either badly-off or suffering? Certainly not me, as I looked at the tragic photograph that Bill had so lovingly framed with his own hands — and made a somewhat shoddy job of it at that. I thought of doing a rush trip to Worksop to explain the fate of her son but knew that this wasn’t on the cards because I was stuck to the flat on Jack Leningrad’s orders.

I was saved from the pain of this by the ringing telephone, and was surprised to hear that Appledore trill: ‘Oh, you’re back! Michael! I can’t believe it.’ I told her about my imaginary adventures in Lisbon during the last few days, but after a while she broke in and said: ‘Listen, tell me yes or no, can we come over and see you?’

I was on my guard: ‘Who’s we?’

‘Smog and I. I got him from school after giving up my job today and we’ve nowhere to go. Oh, Michael,’ she was crying now, ‘let us come over and see you.’

‘All right, then.’

She laughed with joy: ‘I knew you would. I told Smog you would. Oh, I’ll kiss you when I see you.’ All I had to do was sit down and wait, casting a rugged glance now and again at old Ma Straw. If I’d had liquor in the house I’d have drunk a mountain, but there was only a drop of sherry and I hated that.

Smog threw himself at me and started to cry, so I took him to a chair and sat him on my knee. ‘Get your coat off,’ I said to Bridgitte, who looked thin and wan, though it made her appear more interesting.

‘You were the only one I could turn to,’ she said.

‘I know, love. I know. I got your letter. It was pretty daft of you to go to Nottingham. Next time you feel like a trip up there I’ll give you my mother’s real address.’

She pouted: ‘I don’t know why I did it. But it seemed like exactly the right thing to do, and the journey made me feel a lot better.’

‘I’ll bet it did,’ I said, riled that she’d had a good time with somebody else. Smog had quietened down, and now she began to snivel. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, meaning to go to her, but Smog clung so tightly that I couldn’t move. His face was wet from tears. ‘I want to live with you. I don’t like life like I did once. Dad is rotten, and things are all mixed up.’

‘Listen, Smog,’ I said, ‘life isn’t too good for anybody. Even children have to grow up and find that out. You’ll be seven soon, so you’re nearly a man. Lots of things have happened to you, and lots more will happen. It’s like that. You’ll be safe with Bridgitte and me, I promise. As far as I’m concerned we could all live together, all the time, but I don’t think your father would like that. Still, you don’t have to worry, because we’re friends for life.’

He looked at me, his face small but already formed as if he were fourteen. ‘Can I have some tea and cakes?’

‘Come into the kitchen and help me to look for them,’ I said, ‘because I’m damned if I can remember where they are.’ I made a game of searching, and he was lost in it while I went into the living-room to kiss Bridgitte back to life: ‘Let’s forget about my lies,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about it.’ She was warm and steamy after the rain, and from our long embrace I saw Smog standing in the doorway with a packet of chocolate cakes in his hand. He forced himself between our legs, so that we made a house for him to hide and be warm in. ‘You’ve built me a cottage,’ he said. ‘Let’s fry some crumpets and stroke the cat.’

‘I’ll sing you the Volga Boat Song while I’m at it,’ I said. ‘But we don’t have a cat. I used it to clean the windows down this morning and it ran away.’

I fixed him up in the main bed, since it seemed that William wouldn’t be needing it for a while. Bridgitte and I sat like any man and wife at supper, when the phone rang. It was Stanley to say I’d be wanted in Rome the following day, and that I should present myself at the usual Knightsbridge flat by nine in the morning. ‘What about William?’ I asked.

‘No news,’ he said. They were doing all they could, which was a lot, but they couldn’t say anything now, though they expected results every minute. I bit my tongue and said all right I’d be there.

It wasn’t gold this time, but the errand of carrying a valise of true-blue British banknotes through the customs. I went out and back in a couple of days, by train and boat, landing at Dover and going through with my allowance of booze and fags so that no one could suspect a thing. It was my third time away and third time lucky, plying my trade in the mainland traffic and working with all the nerve I could muster, for not only was I fucking God’s own country, through the ribs, but I was getting a fat slice of pay for it as well, and what man could be more favoured than that? The hint was dropped when I collected my divvy that the notes were forged anyway, and I didn’t boast of it, even to myself, but gently let it seep down to the flowing dust of my blood in the hope that such easy tasks would become second nature to me. On the other hand, by the normal permutations of chance, I knew I could not do many of these trips without getting caught, or feeling the pressure of them break through to my face and give me away, even though to myself I might still seem to be in full control. So I had to think about the future, and organize some plan of withdrawal, keeping an eye cocked to my own safety should Jack Leningrad Limited not want me to leave when I felt it was time to do so for my one and only good, which was the only one that mattered.

I did many more trips, and had nearly three thousand pounds in the bank. I wouldn’t let my hands get to it till I’d packed the job in because if I bought an expensive car I might get caught, in which case it would rot in the street while I did my three or five years. I hadn’t the ultimate confidence that I would go unscathed, and that was why I had to get out.

I seemed to live on more solid ground while Bridgitte and Smog were at the flat, as if I were a married man with full responsibility going off to work now and again to earn them cakes and meat. We assumed that Dr Anderson would be interested in the whereabouts of his son, but when Bridgitte phoned to let him know that Smog was all right, the housekeeper said Dr Anderson was on a six-week lecture tour in America — where he no doubt told his audience that they had to be kind to one another. I tried to phone Polly, but couldn’t get through to her, so my love changed from the burden it had been at first, to an almost bearable pang whenever she jumped into my mind, which was still often enough to make me flinch when it hit me.

But there was work to be done, a high-stakes trip to Lisbon, and I came back first class on a beautiful Caravelle, so that I could get soaked in champagne and stretch my legs, which deserved it after the work they’d done. I intended to doze the few hours away, but I reckoned without Arnold Pilgrim, a tall thin man who sat by my side. I’d seen him sloping in, and he had the sort of face that seemed clamped tight by never having known what he wanted to do in life. He looked by now on the point of finding out, yet realized he’d left it too late to find the means for doing what he wanted to do. I talk from hindsight, but his rather staid and baffled face wasn’t easy to forget, even on first sight, and I remember the journey because in one, sense it was vital to my life.

We joked over the champagne, and he told me he had just been to Portugal to negotiate the sale of forty thousand machine tools, or cars, or litres of wine — I forget which. It seemed to have been successful, whatever it was, so I said: ‘Here’s to it, then!’ I knew I should neither drink nor talk, but these rules of William’s I waived more and more, for I considered that to be too reticent while travelling only drew suspicion rather than the reverse. After all, William was rotting in jail, so he could afford to talk.

Using the soul of Gilbert Blaskin, I told Arnold Pilgrim I was a writer, and that I’d just been to Lisbon for a week’s holiday. The only danger in this, I realized after he started talking, was that he would spill his heart to me for the entire flight, which he did. ‘When I get home,’ he said, ‘I’m going to murder my wife. There’s a story for you, if you’re a writer.’

I was sitting by his side so couldn’t look dead-on at him, but the way he said it made me want to laugh, because he sounded as if he were serious. ‘You’ll want to know why, I expect. Well, don’t you?’ he demanded, when I didn’t say anything.

‘Why should I? I’m not your wife.’

‘I see what you mean. But I’ll tell you, anyway. My wife and I married quite young, ten years ago to be accurate, and we were really in love, as you usually are when you’re young, and when you get married. I hated all women, and she hated all men, so we got on like a house on fire, as it were. We started buying our own house in Putney, because I was well thought of in my job. There was a touch of ground frost in her makeup, but we thawed it out after a while. She was passionate, which meant that she realized her frostiness but did her best to overcome it. At the same time, I was cursed by a certain incompetence, which this also righted as time went on. So we got to our state of married happiness not without difficulty, but we got there, and I see now that we were happy, because we never really talked about happiness but just let the years flow by.

‘But we were children, because we were inert enough to think that we never needed to do anything for each other. In a sense we were right: we could have lived in reciprocal blindness till old age, but I suppose it’s always better to leave childhood behind.

‘My wife made friends one day with a woman, when they were both borrowing books at the local library. I never knew what they had in common, but this other woman, as the friendship went on, was the sort who was very independent. She was married, but made a cult of being self-sufficient in her life — as far as she could. Her husband was a photographer who did freelance work for magazines, and his wife was also a sort of journalist. My wife was fascinated by her, there’s no doubt of that, because she also had big ideas about women’s status in the world, ideas which I’d encouraged, as long as they didn’t disturb me. This other woman was the epitome then of what my wife had always wanted to be, for she had everything: a house, a good husband, a child, a job that she enjoyed, even a lover. There seemed nothing left to want. In the next two years I even became friendly with the husband, but not to the extent that Beryl was friendly with his wife, for he seemed a bit of a queer to me. I thought it was good that they should like each other, though I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t see how this other woman in some way disturbed her. My wife would cite her in arguments, and hold up her life to let me know how dull and narrow her own was. Then this other woman gassed herself.

‘My wife had known that she was depressed and withdrawn, but she hadn’t expected this, even as a remote possibility. Later it became known that the husband had been having an affair with another woman, and that the wife had found out, but had not told him or anyone that she knew. In spite of her own lover, she couldn’t stand her husband doing that sort of thing, so she quietly did herself in. It was a terrible shock to my wife, who was haunted by her friend’s death for weeks, so that I really believe she even began to think of turning on the gas as well. Nothing in the world seemed secure to her any more. I did my best by way of comfort, but was pushed completely to one side. In her shock it even seemed as if she blamed me in some way for what had happened, thinking perhaps that if she’d never married me she wouldn’t have been so dependent on the views that her friend held so intensely, in which case she would have been more human and open to sympathy, and it might then have been possible to fathom that her friend was going to kill herself. She may have saved her, she thought, but she was too deeply involved in her friend’s principles, and too dependent on my love and support — though she claimed that this never meant very much to her. But there was more to it than that, and it was a few years before I was able to see the outcome of it. You never know where a thing begins, I know that, but I think I can see where it’s going to end.’

It was hot in the plane, and he wiped his forehead and cheeks. He spoke as if telling me about something that had happened to another person rather than to himself, smiling at whatever in his story disturbed him — which meant he had a faint smile of disgust or self-pity on his face most of the time. ‘I’m not going to’ complain for myself, or say I was full of perfect love and understanding. I’m sure I was in love with her, though she claims I wasn’t and never was. Our marriage came to seem like a negation of love. It was heavy with underground recrimination, as if we were both haunted and overshadowed by a new demonic force that hadn’t been there before — though maybe it had, but had taken all this time to brew itself up between us. But the lever of it had been the woman’s suicide, of that I have no doubt.’

I offered him a cigarette. He didn’t smoke, or wouldn’t. He only drank. So I lit one: ‘It was a pity though. Your wife must have had a rough time.’

His voice was caught in a laugh of irony: ‘She did. No doubt about that. I was sorry for her, and did my best about it. But nothing could be enough. She had to find her own cure, which meant trying to destroy me. It was the only thing she could do, but it was too much of a price for me to pay, though I was made to pay it. The method she chose was that age-old one of having an affair, of betraying me and letting me know that she was betraying me, and continuing it to the point of trying to drive me mad. The affair’s been going on for two years, though in that time she has grown more secretive about it because she has now become more deeply and seriously attached to the man she took up with. She ties me to her by saying how much she loves me, tells me she’s only ever loved me, and loves no one else no matter what she does or whatever happens. This saps my resolution to clear out, but I discovered that she was put up to this ploy by her boyfriend. She is a monster, but so am I. It is easy for her to deceive me because I am away from home so often. Why did I get such a job if I can’t trust my wife? We still live as man and wife, and make love often enough for us to seem so. But if the only way she could find to get over her friend’s vampire suicide was to morally destroy me, my price for recovering from this attempt is to kill her. I put the matter in a nutshell, though I hope I’m not boring you.’

We had food in front of us, and it gave me the energy to go on listening: ‘It’s fascinating.’

He tucked into this food remarkably well, considering the ideas he had for his wife’s future. I suppose a person always eats well before committing a murder, but not before killing himself — though I must admit that I still didn’t believe he was serious. ‘So when she grew more careful,’ he said, ‘I became more assiduous in finding out what she was up to. It’s cost me hundreds of pounds, which in other and happier times would have been better spent on repairs to the house, in having her shadowed by private detectives. Do you know how many men are necessary to follow one person? It’s a hell of a business. I only found out when I got a bill from one agency of over two hundred pounds. It takes three men to follow her. Maybe she suspects I’m having her watched and does a bit of evading. But I know exactly what she does and where she goes. So before leaving this time, after several days of vindictive skirmishes and one dreadful final quarrel, I got her to promise solemnly that she would give him up and not see him again, so that we could make a new start. All seemed set for a bright future — though at heart I didn’t believe it would work for a minute. We kissed tenderly when I left for my business trip. But I called at the detective agency in Soho on my way by taxi to the airport and gave them the usual details, paid them a good advance sum in cash, and told them that if they by any chance tailed her to her lover’s flat they were to telegraph the fact to my hotel in Lisbon. I made up my mind that if she went through with any more treachery, I would murder her. I would destroy her. She would perish.

‘And when I left I hoped with all my heart that everything would be peaceful and calm, that she would not betray me, that all would be forgotten and forgiven. I was in a good and optimistic mood on the way out and for the first few days, when no telegram arrived, I thought that life really could begin again. More days went by, and no news. I was happier, I think, than I’d ever been in my life. My business negotiations went very well. My brain was clear, and I bargained with more than usual firmness. I got to the stage of packing my suitcase, and I was on my way out of the hotel, with a taxi waiting by the kerb to take me to the airport, when a bellboy ran up and handed me a telegram. I read it in the taxi, lay back sweating and half fainting. I had visions of bloody entrails, while rain was pouring down the windows of the taxi. The streets outside glistened and jumped with rain — but it was a perfectly blue clear day, as you know. I felt my eyes change colour. I looked ahead and saw a huge horse lying dead in the middle of the road and blocking it, almost the whole of its side scooped out as if it had had some dreadful accident, a white horse, its head rearing in agony, as if trying to lick the vast red wound. She’d spent every night with him. I screamed at the taxi driver to stop, but he laughed and went right on through it. The white mare would be killed. There’s nothing else I can do.’ His hands were shaking so much that he dropped his fork. He didn’t try to pick it up or get another but finished the meal with his knife alone, which began to look sinister enough to me, as more and more champagne went into my stomach.

‘That’s no reason to kill somebody,’ I said. ‘Just throw her out — with her coat on.’

‘I don’t have the strength to do that.’

‘It’s still a bit rough, that she happened to marry a man who only had the strength to kill her when she did something like that.’

The stewardess poured our coffee. ‘I thought you were a writer,’ he sneered softly. ‘If you are, you ought to understand that there’s nothing else I can do.’

‘What about afterwards?’ I asked.

‘Time has stopped. There’s no more peace, not for one minute, any time, anywhere. That’s all gone and finished. No more peace, and no more love.’

‘You’re a saint,’ I said, ‘to try for those two things, the first saint I’ve met, on an aeroplane at thirty thousand feet as well!’

‘I suppose you think I’m old-fashioned?’ he said guardedly.

I thought he was drunk, but didn’t say so. ‘There’s no such thing as old-fashioned. I have enough understanding to know that much.’

With a sudden flush of good-will he reached over and shook my hand: ‘I’m glad you said that. You’ll go a long way as a writer.’ I held out my cup for more coffee, and got a hot spot on my trousers as the plane lurched. If it crashed, his wife would be quids in. ‘I feel better now,’ he said, ‘after that meal, and so much champagne. Perhaps I really have got a soul. I was beginning to doubt it after my ups and downs of the last week.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Maybe you won’t feel so bad when you get home.’

‘Oh, no. When I feel in this mood I loathe her more than ever. I can only murder when I feel in this mood. The bottom of the ocean is in my stomach. The top of the sky is in my lungs. My spirit’s flying between the two.’

He wasn’t crying, but tears were coming out. I lifted my glass: ‘Let’s drink to happy landings, anyway.’

He smiled, showing a very good-natured face, as if all his troubles had gone.

‘What I want,’ I said, confiding in him, ‘is to find a hideaway in the country where I can write in peace. The town is like a nutcracker crunching me. I feel I’ve got to get out and work.’

‘That shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said. ‘While all this has been going on with my wife, we’ve occasionally talked about finding a place in the country where we can go now and again, and try to get back to our old basis of love. Of course, she never meant this to be possible, but it was a good reason for her to send me out of town to look at places as they came up for sale so that she could be free to go to her lover. Well, she won’t be free to go anywhere much longer. I shall be back in an hour, and then I’ll do it. I know exactly what I’ll do. But let me tell you what I found, an old disused railway station for sale in the Fen country. It’s been empty for some time, and nobody seems to want it, so I think you can get it for about twelve hundred. I’ll give you all the information on it.’ He reached for his briefcase, and handed me a few sheets of paper: ‘I’ve seen it, and you’ll want nothing more remote or quiet than that. I was going to take it before I came on this trip, but you might as well have it now. There’s a surveyor’s report in those papers. The place is in good condition, though it needs a few gallons of paint.’

I put them in my pocket: ‘Are you sure you won’t be needing them?’

‘Absolutely certain. I won’t need peace, or any place to hide from now on.’

‘Thanks, then,’ I said. ‘If you loathe your wife, don’t you think that’s a sort of love?’

‘In paradise maybe, but not here on Earth. I’ll never love her again. I can only love someone if I can finally trust them. Love is an extension of trust, and if you’re too young yet even as a writer to finally know what that means, Mr Blaskin, then you are lucky. But trust has nothing to do with whether a person can be trusted or not, if love is involved. The normal sort of trust is only an unspoken treaty of self-preservation between two or a group of people. When this has gone, and I am forty years old, there’s nothing left. The earth has slid from under me, and I am falling. There’s just one more thing to do on my way down.’

‘You know best,’ I said. ‘It’s your life. But thanks for telling me about that railway station.’

I followed him down the steps when we landed, stood far enough away in the bus to the customs hall to get a further look at him in his neat shirt and tie, well-trimmed beard, stylish hat, all of it impeccable enough to warn any woman off him. He stared out of the window and saw nothing, the corners of his mouth drooping so that nobody could say he wasn’t unhappy. I thought I ought to warn his wife about his intending homicidal crackdown, tell her to watch that split-level look to his eyes — that she had maybe spent all her life putting there. Still wondering whether I should do it I followed him from the bus and into the customs. By chance we went through at the same moment. I saw his head jerk, and he began to run, as if told to stop and surrender by someone only he could hear, but deciding to make a break for it against all chances.

Halfway across the hall was a woman, fair and slight in the quick view I got of her, wearing a discreet hat and a light grey suit, a faint smile of welcome on her face, as if not wanting to invest too much of a smile in case the bottom fell out of the market, and in case he shouldn’t see her smile but walk right through her like his taxi had driven through the dying mare. But I was wrong again, which is what comes of being a bastard, who is too often wrong. He ran towards her, and she saw him. I watched. They latched together like lovers who had not seen each other for weeks, a murmuring groan from each that I’d swear I heard if I claimed to have invented it. They kissed openly a couple of times, his grin fixed, hers still a modest smile with half-closed eyes as if she was taken up by a great force and couldn’t stop herself, but at the same time didn’t want to see anyone who might be noticing them, or indeed even acknowledge the strokes of lust that taunted her for coming straight to the airport from the Christian Woman’s Club. It was touching, and made me hungry for the same thing, a living advertisement for the love-shop. They walked towards the escalator, arms around each other as if they were both sixteen.

Because I’d expected him to go straight home after what he’d told me, and cleave her down the middle, I thought I didn’t know I was living now that the exact opposite seemed to be on the cards. My mistake showed me what a baby I was and how little I knew of the world. All I’d got out of meeting him were the details of a remote railway station I could retire to when I decided to sever connexion with Jack Leningrad Incorporated. I supposed that the Lovers of Putney would be immersed in each other for the next twenty-four hours, so decided to steal a march on him and get to the Fens first thing in the morning to view the place, assuming that since things seemed to be patched up with his wife he would still entertain notions of getting it for himself.

I was looking forward to seeing Smog and Bridgitte, but the flat was empty. A letter on the table said she had taken Smog and gone back to her husband. He had found out where they were and had phoned them, sobbing and weeping and imploring them to come back so that they could live once more as a happy and loving family. Smog didn’t want to go, so Bridgitte had to get him kicking and screaming out of the flat. What he hated most, she wrote, was having to go back to school, and no longer playing this thrilling game of being on the run from his father.

I took a shower so as to have moving water for company, and to swill off the grind of travel. Every journey pulled flesh from me and I didn’t know why, though the physical cost, the fear of getting caught, and the guilt perhaps of doing this work at all, might have added up to an amount I could only just pay, and I was kicking at the limit of my capabilities. I felt as if my blood had been sucked out, but then cheered up, as I lay back and lit a cigar, at the idea of seeing the railway station. I read the timetables, then phoned the agents, Smut and Bunt of Huntingborough.

‘It’s cheap,’ he said, ‘because it’s beyond the commuter belt, but it’s the most beautiful little station you ever saw. Just the place, I would say, for a writer like you.’ The land was flat and waterlogged, grey and green under a vast and heavy sky, metalled by the sun just breaking through. Beautiful. I felt a free man, for the first time since I’d set out from Nottingham on my old jalopy two years ago. I didn’t feel like going back to London, but the trouble was that I’d no idea where to set off for if I didn’t. ‘It’s not easy to get a mortgage for these old stations, though. Don’t know why.’

‘I pay cash.’

He took a humpbacked bridge over a dyke and nearly shot my throat into my brain. ‘That’s all right then,’ he said, envious rather than impressed.

The nearest village was Upper Mayhem, and half a mile on the other side of it we turned into a cul-de-sac, at the end of which was the station, well away from the nearest houses. ‘Any offers yet?’

‘There’ve been one or two, but they’ve fallen through. A chap in London, from Putney, was quite firm on it, but we haven’t heard from him lately. It’s first come, first served. I’ve only got the keys to the back door.’ He opened a wooden gate to get there, and it fell forward off its hinges. He picked it up and set it against the wall. ‘You might find it a bit damp, but you have to expect that in the Fens. Nothing that a few good fires won’t cure.’

It reeked with must as he opened the back door. There were three simple rooms downstairs, with a scullery. ‘Toilet in the garden,’ he said. Upstairs were four more rooms, and half a ton of soot in one of the fireplaces. I didn’t tell him I used to be an estate agent. The plumbing wasn’t up to much, but the ceilings looked all right. I stood at the end of the garden and trained my binoculars on the roof to make sure the slates were in place, and the chimney-stack firm. According to the survey it would need a bit of work done in a few years, but sufficient to the day is the ruination thereof.

‘We’ll go to the actual station,’ he said, which lay across a hundred yards of asphalt, badly holed in places.

‘How much does the land come to?’

‘Two acres. Room to swing a cat, certainly.’

‘Any rabbits around here?’

‘Quite a few.’

I noticed a huge potato field beyond the track, and fruit orchards on the other side of the station. ‘Not an architectural gem,’ I said, ‘though I expect I could make it cosy.’ To the left was the booking office, and all the shelves and ticket compartments were still there, as well as a few cupboards. Across the hall was the waiting-room, with plain seats going around the walls. We strode up and down the platform, passed the ladies and gents lavatories.

‘You say they want twelve hundred for it,’ I said. ‘Is it open to offer, or not?’

‘It’s a firm price. They wouldn’t take less.’

I offered him a cigar. ‘What about a thousand?’ We lit up, and walked back towards the house. ‘You can try,’ he said. ‘Maybe eleven hundred would get it.’

‘I’ll offer eleven then. I’ll need the other hundred to stop it falling down.’

‘It’s pretty firm, the main structure. Are you married?’

‘Divorced,’ I told him. ‘I gave my London house to my wife.’

Back in his office I wrote a cheque for the ten per cent deposit, and gave the name of William’s solicitors as stake holders.

I had a meal at the hotel in Huntingborough, then got the train back to town. When I reached the flat nothing had happened in my absence. I felt let down when I saw no letters or telegrams of alarm waiting for me, so after some beans on toast I phoned Polly, and Moggerhanger himself answered: ‘What do you want?’

‘Can I speak to Polly?’

‘She’s out. Who’s that?’

‘Kenny Dukes,’ I answered, and put the phone down. Then I phoned Bridgitte’s number, and Anderson said: ‘Who’s that?’

‘Mind your own business,’ I said. ‘I’m not one of your weak-headed patients who answers all your questions. Let me speak to Bridgitte.’

‘So it’s you?’ he said, frothing.

‘Yes, it’s me. And if you don’t mind I’d like to talk to Bridgitte.’

‘You mean my wife,’ he said.

‘Bridgitte Appledore,’ I told him, ‘Mrs Anderson if you like.’

‘You damn-well bet I do. You can’t talk to her. And if you see her any more I’ll bloody-well divorce her, and you’ll be paying off court costs for the rest of your life. I’ll spin you around my little finger.’

‘Listen,’ I said, holding the phone a few feet away and shouting into it to trample over his gallop. ‘I’ll see who I like when I like, so get that into your headshrinking head. And if you hit Bridgitte again, or if you kick Smog again, I’ll use your head for a football all over Hampstead Heath.’

I put the phone down, and didn’t feel like using it again any more, having drawn two dud numbers, but thinking I might be third time lucky I contacted Jack Leningrad to say I was back in town, at which they didn’t show much interest, as if they might be glad to see the back of me now that I’d made my expected quota of successful trips. It was my honourable intention to relieve them of all responsibility for my welfare, in any case, but only in my own good time. I was looking to my retreat, not wanting to end up in the next-door cell to William, which wouldn’t be difficult for them to arrange, if they supposed I knew a bit too much. I suspected it was no accident that William had been caught in the Lebanon rather than in England where he would have been brought to court and may have talked too freely.

A few days later, when they loaded me up with gold for Turkey, I looked at each piece in case it was hollow and filled with poppy seed, for if I were searched at that place with such stuff on me it would mean twenty years’ darkness. They noted my suspicions, and didn’t like it, but when I saw them weighing me up I liked it even less. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to fight a war on ten fronts. I was as helpless before the Leningrad outfit as I had been with Moggerhanger’s, and if I lost my nerve it would be through this feeling, not at the brief and occasional ordeal of dodging the customs. Back from Istanbul, I spoke to Stanley, who said there’d be nothing doing for the next three days, after which there could be a bit of a rush.

Brooding on the misery of William’s mother, I’d become tender enough to write to my own and let her know where I was and that I was well. A letter was pushed through the door with a Nottingham postmark and she said, to my surprise, how much she’d worried about me, and how much she missed me, and how much she loved me — love being a word I don’t think I’d heard her mention before. She told me the news of my grandmother’s death a month ago, which may have upset her because now, apart from me, she was alone in the world, though I thought she must be far from lonely if I knew my mother, who’d never been the person to let boyfriends grow under her feet, and I supposed she was still the same, not being too much above forty. My grandmother, she said, had left me a locked box, and nobody knew what was in it, but she thought it might contain family photos that hadn’t been seen for years. So I ought to go up and collect them some time, though if I was busy they’d be kept safe for me until I wasn’t, whenever that might be.

I wandered around town all day, reading the letter every time I stopped for a coffee or snack. I was touched by the fact that my mother missed me, and intrigued at the thought of what was in my grandmother’s box, so the next day I got on a train at St Pancras and steamed north for Nottingham.