A Start in Life

Part Six

I lounged among a heap of newspapers and magazines in a first-class compartment, but soon got bored with them and went to the dining-car for lunch. I’d left it late, and the only remaining place was opposite two other people. I’d felt like being alone with my thoughts, didn’t even want to be asked to pass the salt or ashtray. The man’s hand was on the table, and the girl by his side touched it, then rested hers on it. I was looking at the window, fascinated by beads of rain breaking and multiplying on their way down the glass as the train rushed along. Then I heard my name spoken, and, being forced to look, I saw that the loving and handsome couple in front of me were none other than Gilbert Blaskin, and my old friend June. I couldn’t speak, and a wide smile came on to Gilbert’s already wide mouth: ‘Having a rest from the big city?’

I smiled back, but it nearly broke my face: ‘Where are you two going?’ I hadn’t seen June since our encounter in the taxi, for which I wasn’t exactly well disposed towards her. ‘June and I came down to London together in my car,’ I explained to him. ‘And now you two are travelling north together. My head’s beginning to spin.’

‘It’s a small world,’ said Gilbert. ‘We all know that. But she’s going back north with me now, aren’t you, darling?’

‘I gave up my job at the club,’ she told me. ‘Gilbert and I have known each other for months, and we’ve decided to stay together. You know, the old “man-and-wife” kick.’ They’d already had brandy, and we were served with scalding soup.

He toasted her: ‘Maybe we’ll even get married. We don’t talk about it, though it’s in the air we breathe. I’m divorced now, thank God.’

I couldn’t stand their brimming happiness. ‘What happened to Pearl Harby?’

He winced, but I waited for an answer. ‘She left me.’

‘You mean you threw her out.’

‘She left me, old son.’

When the next course came I asked June how Moggerhanger was these days, and she didn’t take it so well: ‘You’re as rotten as your car. Why don’t you drop to bits?’

‘I’d like to, but I can’t.’

‘Not yet, you mean.’ Then she smiled, too happy for many hard feelings: ‘He came to the club and asked for Kenny Dukes. Moggerhanger said something about Kenny trying to get off with his daughter Polly, who’s a lecherous little bitch, I might say. But he told him not to phone her again. Kenny went all flustered and tried to deny it, and when a few more words flew Claud punched him, and had him thrown out of the club.’ I laughed, because that must have been the result of my casual phone call, but I didn’t tell her, merely tut-tutted at Moggerhanger’s vile temper and irrational suspicions. Her opinion of Polly seemed no more than a bit of feminine pique. And one good turn deserves another, I thought, remembering how Kenny Dukes had done me down in a similar way when I lost my chauffeuring job.

The meal ended amicably because we all got drunk. On the way back to the compartments Gilbert fell down, and I trampled on his hat. This made him truculent, but I told him to pack it in and not get so ratty over an accident. ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out,’ June said to me, ‘if you try anything.’ She picked up the hat and put it on Gilbert’s cock-head. ‘Come on, love.’

In spite of our differences we sat in the same compartment, much to the disgust of an elderly parson, who told Gilbert to stop using such foul un-Christian talk in front of a lady. ‘Don’t worry, your reverence,’ June said with a downbeat leer, ‘I’m not a lady, and he’s not a Christian. If he is I’m going to stop living with him,’ at which he got up and walked out.

‘I’ll have to take you everywhere,’ Gilbert said to her. ‘I like space, and you’ll clear every place I go into. We’re made for each other.’

I asked him if he was writing another book.

‘Not if I can help it,’ June said. ‘We’re too busy living, aren’t we, Gilbert my sweet?’

‘Almost,’ he said, standing up to do physical jerks on the luggage rack. ‘I’m doing a monumental non-fiction work at the moment called The History of Carnage. My publisher thinks there’s a market for it in these years of peace.’ He was out of breath, so sat down between us. ‘I should get good material living with dear June. The reason I’ve been so unsuccessful and unhappy with women so far in my life is because I’ve never found one that will stand up and fight with me. June is a real match. In a restaurant last night she threw an avocado pear, and it splattered beautifully, oil and all.’

‘He kicked me under the table.’

‘I wanted to see what you’d do.’ Gilbert smiled: ‘Whenever I did it in the past I just got a look of regret from the injured party.’

‘Next time,’ she said, ‘I’ll throw the table as well.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘and I’ll break your bloody neck.’ I marvelled at the way he seemed to have altered. I could only assume that Pearl had been driven into the looney-bin. I got off at Nottingham Midland and left the happy couple to their love and kisses.

I’d sent a telegram to my mother the day before and, as I hoped, she had got the afternoon off work so as to be in when I arrived. I took a taxi from the station, craning my neck to get a view of Castle Rock as I went by, caught in the swamp of memory, and loving every minute of it, so that I could get out of it blithely any second. Nobody can feed me the crap that you can’t go back, that you can’t go home again, because I never believed I was going anywhere, anyway. You do what the hell you like, and don’t need to believe in any such thing that ties you down and stops you moving. To go back or to go forward is better than standing still, that’s all I know, though the only final moving you do is in the skinbag of yourself.

She was cleaning out my room. ‘I’ll only stay tonight,’ I said, ‘because I’ve got to be back at work tomorrow.’

I stood in the scullery as she lit the gas.

‘What work?’

‘Travelling’ — adding the usual explanations.

She had her curlers in and wore a turban to cover them up: ‘You’ve landed a good job.’

‘It pays well.’

‘Do you like it, though?’

‘It’s easy.’

She laughed, and we plonked in the armchairs opposite each other: ‘You always were on the lookout for a cushy billet.’

I offered her a cigarette: ‘How’s your work then?’

‘The same old drag. But it keeps me alive and kicking. Do you want something to eat?’

‘I’m not hungry.’ She made the tea, poured it, put in sugar and milk, stirred it up, and pushed it towards me. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be at Grandma’s funeral,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t know about it.’

‘We tried to find you. I even went to the police, but there was nothing they could do.’

This made my stomach jump: ‘I’ll keep in touch from now on.’

‘It’s best if you do, in case something happens to me. Not that I’m likely to be a drain on you, because I’m getting married soon. Albert and I have fixed it for about three months from now.’

‘Albert?’

‘You’ll meet him tonight, if you come out down town.’

My grandmother’s box was upstairs, and I was given an envelope with the key in it. It wasn’t full. There were the rent books she’d kept right through her life, all the lapsed insurance policies, birth certificates, a family Bible which, when I opened it, had the births and deaths of several generations of the family written in the fly-leaves, not only by her but by others before her. There were character references from people she had worked for from the age of twelve — packs of that useless detritus that old-fashioned half-literate people liked to hoard. I tore up a few of the rent books and stacked them in the fireplace, piled them on and got a good blaze going with my lighter, for the room was damp and cold. Some fifty-year-old newspapers came out, and these I put to one side to read later, curious as to why she had saved them. Then a pack of ancient photos, a few of them daguerrotypes, members of the family who had steamed over from Ireland.

I compared the dates on the back with the notes in the Bible, and one photo was particularly interesting because it was of the first Cullen to come from County Mayo at the time of the Famine. He’d brought six sons and a wife with him, and the photo showed a man who looked very much like photos I’d seen of myself. It gave me a shock. Polly Moggerhanger had taken one of me in Geneva, and the same stiff self-conscious pose was there. The man of eighteen-forty wore a fine suit, with a waistcoat that had a watch-chain looping across it. He was just above middle height, about thirty years old, and wore a derby hat (or was it a billy-cock?). But he had my thin lips and straight nose, the same arching of the back as the head looked superciliously into the air as if expecting trouble from that quarter. It gave me a pang to realize he’d been dead eighty years, and that maybe in another hundred years someone like me would be looking at a photo of me and saying the same thing to himself. Time has no meaning, I thought, when it comes to photos hoarded by an old woman. I tried to picture his life in the England of those days, but I couldn’t. He’d worked with his sons on the railways in Cambridgeshire, and I supposed they’d earned good money with it. He certainly looked well dressed in this photo.

I put it in my wallet, continued digging in the trunk. There was a bonnet, a few embroidered handkerchiefs, a hymn and prayer book, a man’s yellow necktie or cravat, and a gold watch that didn’t go when I wound it up. Lower down and beneath everything was a small leather bag with something inside that weighed heavily. I opened the string, and gold coins fell out. There were fifty altogether, and I’d never seen golden sovereigns before, that must be worth four or five quid each. The sight and weight of so much gold made my mouth water, and for several minutes I ran them through my fingers like a miser. I was so long up there my mother must have thought I’d laid down and died, so I put all the things back except the gold and humped my way to the living-room.

She looked up from her novel. ‘Get anything?’

I clinked the bag down: ‘Photos, rent books, and this.’

‘What the hell is it?’

‘Fifty gold sovereigns.’

She stood up: ‘Do you want any more tea?’

‘If it’s fresh. There’s half for you, and half for me. It’s over a hundred pounds each.’

‘It was left to you,’ she called from the scullery.

‘I insist on going halves.’

This obviously pleased her: ‘All right. Albert and me might go to Paris for a few days with it. I’ve always wanted to go there.’

‘That’s a good way of spending it,’ I said, pleased that she hadn’t wanted to fritter it away on sensible things like clothes or the house.

I met Albert that night, and we hit it off together, which was just as well because my mother wanted me to ‘give her away’ when the time came, and we both knew I wouldn’t give her away to just anybody. She looked so young dressed up that if I’d met her in London and she’d not been my mother I could imagine wanting to get off with her. As for Albert, he was about fifty, and had been a factory worker most of his life. But from being a boy he’d been in the Communist Party and had educated himself, so we had a lot to talk about. Before the war he’d actually been sent to Russia by his trade union, and in those days, being so young, he’d thought it was great. Even now, he wasn’t one of those who’d opted out. He knew all about what had been going on, but still kept his faith in a better world and all that. I didn’t see eye to eye with him on some of this, but there’d always been a tradition of religious tolerance in our family, so there was no reason why I shouldn’t respect him for it. We drank steadily, as if we’d never stop talking, and I could see how pleased my mother was that we took to each other. I certainly wouldn’t mind him going to Paris on part of the Cullen gold. My grandmother must have got her hands on so much during the Great War when she was working at the gun factory. I’m glad to know that somebody made something out of it apart from the millionaires. She must have gone out of her way to get gold so that it wouldn’t lose its value, and I was glad that at least one member of the Cullen family had shown a bit of wisdom for once.

I left my twenty-five sovereigns locked in the box, and went back to London, an ideal journey in that I neither met nor spoke to anyone. Sunshine came warmly into the musty compartment as I left Nottingham, but two hours later the train passed St Albans and entered the drizzle. My mother had packed sandwiches so I didn’t need to go to the restaurant coach. As for drink, I never got thirsty. I don’t know why but I could go a whole day without liquid of any kind, not even feeling uncomfortable for lack of it.

On St Pancras Station I bought a newspaper to pass my time on the Underground, and when I unfolded it I saw a headline which made me feel uneasy, not to say queasy. HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN RIVER. POLICE LAUNCH SEARCH ON PUTNEY REACH. HUSBAND GASSED. I read it several times. Her head had been discovered in the mud, and my friend on the plane from sunny Portugal had done it after all, in spite of that loving reunion I’d witnessed at London airport. The gory gossip was given, and all the office girls were reading it up. I chopped my vomit back and saw his face before me, mad and vivid in its details, when even on the plane during his spiel I hadn’t got a good look at it, and so could never have known what was really behind those amiable, intelligent, grotesque eyes.

His story had fixed me, there’s no doubt of that, because who isn’t still gripped by tales of medieval jealousy, mother-love, and spite, even though it can be seen as rockingly funny? But I couldn’t see that far behind his eyes and believe he’d really meant what he said. I decided that from now on I’d accept what people said as being part of their true interiors. They are incapable of lying when they are desperate, and in any case your intuition has to tell you when they were in this state. If I had taken the pains to see, which wouldn’t have been that far beyond me, to the deepest recesses behind his eyes in which that picture lurked in black and grey and red, of his wife’s head tilted in the mud and staring at some innocent barge going by in the moonlight, I might have saved her, and him. But I didn’t, because somehow my feet were no longer plugged into the earth, and my aerial was withered in its contact with heaven. It seemed I had been living underwater not to have known the truth of what was so obvious, and been able to do something about it. I saw everything sharp and clear with the bare eye, but a lazy idleness inside kept a permanent cloth-bound foot on the deeper perceptions that blinded me from action. Some explosion was necessary in my consciousness and I didn’t know how to bring it about before something happened due to this inadequacy that would be fatal to me.

The train rumbled under the earth of London. I was packed in with office workers, my eyes uncontrollably reading all the inane advertisements that even such thoughts as I was having could not blot out. I took my eyes away and set them on someone’s blank back.

I was relieved on reaching the flat to find a letter from the estate agents saying that my offer of eleven hundred for Upper Mayhem station and house had been accepted. I was asked to instruct my solicitors to proceed as quickly as possible with a view to exchanging contracts. I didn’t want telling twice, so in the morning called up Smut and Bunt asking them to get a move on in case someone should now come and pip me by a bigger offer. The man from Putney was out of the running, but as far as I knew there might be others, and in view of my precarious situation I was now more set in my heart than ever at, getting that bit of property.

I dialled headquarters to see if a trip was lined up for me. Stanley was in an expansive mood. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not for a couple of days, Michael. We’ve got Arthur Ramage going to Zurich in the morning and he’s so good he can do two men’s share. So stand by the day after tomorrow.’ Before I could say Arthur Ramage ought not to be such a graballing bastard, he hung up. Ramage was a legend in the smuggling trade, king of the job. William had called him champion, held him in awe because he’d been on it for years without getting caught and had exported more gold than Cunard — making himself so rich by his earnings that he owned a prosperous farm in Norfolk. He got good prices for all his jobs because they were the trickiest, and William said that if he wrote a book about it it would be a bestseller except that he’d get three hundred years in jail for endangering Britain’s economy. Every time the Prime Minister got up in Parliament to try and talk his way out of a financial crisis you could bet Arthur Ramage had been in action. Whenever Britain got its neck saved by a massive loan from overseas to reinforce its gold stocks, Arthur Ramage set to work again (with the connivance of the Jack Leningrad Organization) to wittle them away. In fact if you took all such talk seriously you might honestly begin to believe that those who made the massive loan were the ones who got the gold back again via Jack Leningrad in order to keep the pot boiling and their commission and profits piling up. It was all so dirty I could only laugh at it, because if I took it seriously and wept I might not have earned the money to buy my station.

I went out to have a meal in Soho. Before going in I phoned Polly, and by the breath of luck she picked it up herself. There was a tone of gladness in her voice at hearing from me. ‘Are you working tomorrow? If not, why don’t you come and see me?’

A bloke outside hugged a girl to him and waited to come in. ‘I was on in the morning,’ I said, ‘but somebody else is going to Lisbon for a change.’

‘As long as it’s not you, love,’ she said softly. ‘I have missed you. What unlucky man is taking your place?’

‘Oh, a bloke called Ramage will be doing it for the next two weeks, on the same day. You don’t know him, though. I’ve only seen him once myself. A champion.’

She broke in, as if I might go on boring her for half an hour over it. ‘The house should be clear by ten. Phone me, and then come over. You can help me pick roses.’

‘As long as I don’t get pricked.’ She laughed, and hung up. I did likewise, pushed my way roughly by the bloke and girl struggling to get in.

The head waiter bowed as he’d previously done to William, and I didn’t like the omen of it, though just the same I was pleased because when I couldn’t think of what to order he’d pamper me with the dish of the day, or suggest something special that might tempt me in my jaded mood. So in order to bring my fragmented mind to heel I treated myself to a good feed and washed it down with half a bottle of champagne. My dreamprint for the future, in so far as I hoped it would work, was to leave my gold-smuggling profession, put a certain proposition to Polly Moggerhanger, and retire with her to a life of bliss at my railway station. Yet none of this seemed real or possible, because I knew that no matter how fondly I mused on the future, it was all worked out for me, in spite of my wants and hopes. Still, this part of reality didn’t suggest itself strongly enough to douse my appetite. I looked around the room for a girl who might interest me, but it was an off-night, for not many people were there.

I walked in the rain down Charing Cross Road, on my way towards Hungerford footbridge, meaning to wend home along the south bank. Near midnight I met Almanack Jack, with a sheet of plastic over himself, holding two carrier bags. ‘What’s in there, Jack?’ I asked. ‘You’ve done another job?’

He told me to eff-off, and shambled on.

‘It’s me,’ I said.

‘Who’s me?’ he growled.

‘Michael, of bacon-sandwich fame. Remember?’

A breeze sent drops of rain from him, and his breath was tainted with decay, and pure steam-alcohol he’d been floating down himself. ‘I’m grovelling,’ he said, coming close. People passing thought he was tapping me for a bob or two, so hurried on in case he should turn to them, though they made it seem as if they were merely trying to get on out of the rain. ‘Grovelling,’ he said, ‘can’t you tell?’

‘Is it like that, Jack? I can’t see it though. You’ve never done that.’ A vivid picture came to me of my grandmother dying and I didn’t know where to turn my head, wanting to get away from him like those people and buses going down Whitehall. ‘I can’t escape it,’ he said, ‘and that’s the truth. A hundred million people are standing on the moon holding up the Earth, and they’re going to throw it on my belly. They want me to burst. It’s the world’s end, the only way it can end.’

I lit a fag but didn’t offer one, wanting him to ask so that I could see he was coming back to his right mind. Maybe he’s in it already, I thought, and has spent most of his life trying to get there. ‘They won’t be able to lift it,’ I said, ‘so you’ll be safe enough.’

He laughed: ‘They will, don’t you worry. I sleep under a bridge. Even then, I try to keep awake. But I sleep. Can’t help it. When they throw it the bridge will break. Bound to if you think of the weight of the world. Straight through and on to me.’

‘You can’t live without hope,’ I said, as much for myself as him, wishing I hadn’t bumped into him, because I didn’t feel as safe and callous as I’d always thought I was.

‘You’ll never do it,’ he said, out of nothing. ‘No, you’ll never do it.’

I tried to laugh, but my throat cracked: ‘Do what?’

‘Never,’ he said.

‘Do what, Jack?’ He stared at me, grey eyes through grey beard. ‘Do what?’ I asked. ‘You’re cracked, you stupid get. You’ve had too much plonk down you.’ I wanted to go, but hung on to him like an old friend, as if he were the last person in the world I knew in London. ‘None of us will do it,’ he said, leaning against the wall. ‘We haven’t got the stomach. Too much heart and not enough stomach. No brain either. The world is an apple with a maggot inside, so even half a man could hold it and put his foot on it.’

I could stand here listening all night, but he wouldn’t know who I was. He was too far back in the attics of his own mind. ‘What is it you want then, Jack?’

‘Eh? Who are you?’

‘I’m asking you what you want most in the world,’ I said, feeling the rain eating its way through to my shirt collar despite an overcoat.

‘Bread and jam,’ he said. ‘Slices of bread and butter, spread with jam. And tea. Tea. Hot.’ He clutched his carrier bags: ‘You can’t have my almanacks, though, so don’t try it.’

‘I don’t want them,’ I said, taking a few pound notes out of my wallet. ‘Has anybody been bothering you? I’ll break their heads.’

‘Rotten fruit,’ he said. ‘They’ll bury me in rotten fruit.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said, ‘take this money and have a binge on bread and jam. It’ll make you feel better.’

He stared at the notes. ‘Take it,’ I said, then had to dodge, because with great strength and cunning he swung both heavy bags of almanacks at me, one of them catching me sharply on the hip. He screamed, and kept swinging, and both bags burst so that almanacks went flying all over the pavement and into the wet road, blown open by the wind. He rushed at me, kicking so that I had to fly for my life from his madman’s strength. I didn’t run far, turned, and saw him leaning against a wall, his face pressed to it. I walked back and he went away, but I caught him up and touched his elbow. It was impossible to leave him, not only for his good, but mine as well. ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘it’s me, Michael.’

He stopped and looked hard: ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, calmly, but with great weariness.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To hell,’ he said, ‘unless somebody gives me a couple of bob.’

‘Hang on Jack. Here’s three quid. In a month or two I’ll be getting a house in the country, and if you want to, you can live there. It’ll be quiet, and you’ll like it, an old railway station neat Huntingborough.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘I mean it,’ I said, giving him the money.

‘I’m down on my luck, but I’ll pay you back.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’m earning it at the moment.’ I found a five-pound note in my wallet, and gave him that, too. ‘Take care of it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will. Eight pounds. It’s years since I had that much.’ I left him, hoping he’d survive the next month or so, then I’d let him come to the station till he got his strength back. Plans altered as you made them, though to make plans was the only way to get anywhere.

After languishing with Polly in various beds of the Moggerhanger household, and in the cottage hideaway in Kent, I knew what I wanted at last, and though it seemed crazy and catastrophic for someone like me to marry her, yet that is exactly what I set my heart on. I told her about my railway station, embroidering on its beauty and solitude, until it seemed the most romantic retreat in the world for two people as much in love as we were.

Driving back from the country, she said that even though she was in tune with all my proposals regarding Upper Mayhem, she didn’t really want to make too violent a break with her father, whom she loved, and whom she wanted to reconcile to our elopement sooner or later. She would abide by her own passionate wish to stay with me for ever (she was an even more eloquent talker than I was, at times, it was beginning to seem) but I would have to be patient and help her to make the break at the right time.

This plea delighted me, being definite proof of how seriously she took our planned departure. At the same time passionate and sensible, she made her way to the deepest part of my heart, and the least I could do was help her to make the break at the time of her choosing, because whether I stayed another few months with Jack Leningrad made no difference to me when a whole future of bliss was involved.

She was the first person I’d ever been completely open with. My natural bent to tell lies became submerged, and if I did feel the fever of fantasy coming on me I meshed it into a story so ridiculous that there was no chance or danger of her believing it had any connexion with the truth. I thus discovered that love makes people honest, but the only trouble was that in the subterfuge world of smuggling, such honesty might be a disadvantage, a race against time between Polly coming to Mayhem with me, and me giving myself away in one of my passages through London airport or Gatwick. She knew of all my techniques as a bona-fide traveller burdened by impossible loads, for I told her when I was going on a trip and where, and who as far as I knew would be going that evening or the following day. Confiding so easily helped me to carry on the work till she decided it was time for the lovers’ flit. And doing it longer than I’d contemplated didn’t faze me because with every journey I was piling more money into the bank.

I asked Polly to come with me on one of my trips to Paris, but her parents were going to Bournemouth for a few days and wanted her to go with them. There was nothing she’d like more than to stay with me in Paris, she said. ‘I’ll tell my parents to go to hell. It isn’t right that I’m forced to spend three deadly dull days in Bournemouth when we could be in Paris together. You mean more to me than my parents, so I’ll come, even though it might mean the break taking place sooner than I’d thought.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s all right. Let’s wait. We might not spend a few days in Paris now, but we’ll have all the time we want later on, and we won’t need to disturb anyone about it either.’ When I talked her out of doing anything so rash as making a break now, she had tears in her eyes at my solicitude. I said I didn’t want to be responsible for such a thing, in case she found it hard to forgive me later. In any case I hoped that after we’d eloped, and set up house at Upper Mayhem, her father would see his way to forgiving us and letting me once more into his protection and confidence.

It always came back in the end to care and cunning and patience and nerve, so that at last I was beginning to get the pattern of my life, and the feeling of these qualities became so intense that my strength increased to a height wherein I had to watch it so that I didn’t become slipshod. I sensed myself acquiring the confidence that could ruin me, but because I saw it, I thought that was sufficient protection against it. A man did not stop being a fool merely by knowing he was one. This was even less likely than being clever by simply realizing that one was clever. If anything, the knowledge that I was a bastard had stopped the appropriate distillation of bitterness entering my view of things. If I’d been like everyone else with a married mother and father, the iron in the soul might have bitten into me sooner and given me that extra veneer of protection against the world.

But Polly was my brilliant star, my beautiful heavy-breasted love whose sweet cunt turned into a morass as soon as I touched her. In the cottage bedroom we turned on Moggerhanger’s high-powered radio and danced naked to Arab music. Sometimes she brought a few hash cigarettes that put us into such a high trance that we could dance and fuck all night.

One evening I took her to my favourite eating-place. We hadn’t met for three days, and our hands, mine warm and hers cool, joined over the table, glasses of Valpolicella not yet touched. ‘Let’s drink to our departure,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is say the word. I’m ready. Contracts have been exchanged for my country seat, and in a couple of weeks I’ll actually have the deeds. Michael Cullen will be a property owner!’

She looked anxious, worn by some inside trouble: ‘Do we just run away?’

‘Isn’t that what we agreed on?’

She took her hand back and lifted her glass a little higher: ‘Let’s drink, then, to when we are together, properly.’

The wine went into my stomach like sour ice: ‘Not well warmed.’

‘Oh, Michael, I hope you won’t think I’m stupid at what I’m going to say.’ The temperature of my stomach dropped, and met the chill of the wine. ‘What is it, love? I could never think such a thing about you.’ The waiter asked what we wanted to eat. ‘Let me order,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I like it when you take charge.’ I asked for smoked eels to start with, followed by ravioli, brought up by escalope, then sweetened by zabaglione. The waiter floated away and she took my hand again: ‘You know we’re a close-knit family at home, don’t you, Michael? I couldn’t do anything to make my parents too unhappy.’

‘I’m not asking you to,’ I said, not caring about them one way or another, until after we were married: ‘It’s good that you don’t want to hurt them. I like you even more for it, if that’s possible.’

‘Well,’ she said, and I expected the worst, ‘I’ve told them about us.’

I held myself from keeling over. ‘What did they say?’

‘They took it very well. Father knows you, of course, and Mother remembers you, but they want to meet you again. They’d like you to come to dinner on Friday, if you aren’t working.’

‘Really?’

‘I was very nervous, but I couldn’t help telling them because we’ve never had secrets from each other. Not for long, anyway. And just going off to live with you would upset them terribly. I just wouldn’t have been able to do it when the time came.’

‘That’s all right, love.’ I looked to see if any of Moggerhanger’s hoods were keeping me under watch and key.

‘I said how much in love we were. Father was very kind about it, and told me I wasn’t to worry.’

I regretted ordering such a big meal, but when the food did come I began filling up. I would have liked to trust in God at that moment, except that my optimism had been strangled at birth. I was afraid that Moggerhanger would now get his claws into me, either to do me in without more ado, or make my life so miserable that I’d have to flee even beyond England to keep breath in my body, out of sight and mind both of Polly and my railway station. Yet I ate so much that fear seemed to have a peculiar hunger of its own.

‘It’s a lovely meal,’ she said, noticing my appetite, and stroking my wrist while we waited for the second course. ‘It’ll be all right, Michael. I know Father and Mother will take to you.’

‘I hope so,’ I said bravely. ‘I can be charming when I like, you know that! Being in love stops me being nervous.’

She touched my arm and gave a luminous loving smile: ‘Wait!’

It didn’t get through to me: ‘Most of what you wait for never comes.

‘You waited for me tonight,’ she said. ‘We can call at your flat on the way home.’

I was certainly nervous at going to the Moggerhangers’ for dinner. I felt I had need to be. It was a simple physical fear of being set on, because Moggerhanger was no fool. From his point of view I intended robbing him of a daughter. Of course, at the same time he would gain a son, let us not forget it (I said to myself in town, as I bought a large expensive lot of flowers for the household, knowing that there was nothing he liked more than to see the right thing done), though this seemed unlikely to console a man in Moggerhanger’s shoes who saw sons as being available at ten a penny. So I considered myself a big enough threat to set him into back-handed action. Nevertheless I still saw the position as hopeful, and had a feeling that perhaps after all things would turn out well for Polly and myself. I respected Moggerhanger for the way he’d got on in the world, but I didn’t have much human sympathy for him. It’s no use saying I wanted him to perish, because I did, but I knew also there was no hope of this, and neither did I think the bunch of flowers would do any good, though I carried them just the same.

José opened the door and took my raincoat. Mrs Moggerhanger came into the hall: ‘I’m so glad you could come, Mr Cullen. My husband and daughter are out strolling in the garden. Do join us. It’s such a pleasant evening.’

We walked through the living-room and made an exit by the french windows. She was taller and thinner than Polly, but dark-haired, and must have been even more good-looking, though at forty-five I still wouldn’t have said no to her. There was a soft pink light over the lawn, meshing with green, and in the distance by the lilac bushes Polly was talking to her father, a hand on his forearm. I should have been happy at meeting my future in-laws, but there was something I didn’t like about this evening.

‘Hello, Michael, I’m glad to meet you again,’ he said, and sounded so friendly that for a moment I thought his remark was genuine. I very much wanted to tell myself that he did mean it, but a protective manifestation of my scurvy spirit prevented me from doing so, and this troublesome nagging caution stayed with me most of the evening. Moggerhanger said he’d like to show me the garden.

‘I’m interested in horticulture,’ I said, ‘because I like flowers, especially roses, but I don’t know much about them, though I suppose I should because Harry Wheatcroft comes from up my way.’ Polly smiled, as if to say I was doing very well indeed.

‘They’re a man’s best friend,’ said Moggerhanger. ‘I only say that because I could never stand dogs.’

‘I’ll have to study a few gardening books,’ I said, ‘since I have a few acres with my country place near Huntingborough. It’ll take a bit of getting in order.’

‘I taught Claud all he knows,’ his wife said, with a touch of homely pride.

He left Polly’s arm, and took hers. ‘She did, Michael, that’s quite true. It’s saved us a few arguments, this garden. Whatever house I buy I always make sure it’s got a good piece of ground that I can turn into a riot of colour. I don’t get much spare time in my sort of work, but I’m never bored when I do. We’ve got a penthouse in Brighton, and there’s a beautiful roof-garden we’ve created there. We are a bit naughty when we go abroad, aren’t we, Agnes?’ he chuckled. ‘We can’t resist smuggling a few plants back into the country. We get them by the customs all right. Not that those chaps bother me. I suppose they know what’s going on, really, but I tip them the wink. A few fivers in the benevolent fund goes a long way.’

Agnes laughed: ‘Now then, Claud, you know you’ve never done such a thing.’

His voice turned a shade sterner. ‘Not as far as you know, Mother.’

‘It’s getting chilly,’ she said, ‘I don’t want Polly to catch cold. Do we, dear?’

‘Oh, don’t fuss,’ she exclaimed, while giving me a wide and loving smile in front of them.

I sank into a deep armchair. It was too low and soft. My feeling was to get up again and stand at my own height by the mantelshelf where I could be seen to greater advantage. But I sat, and accepted a heavy cut glass nearly half filled with whisky. ‘What kind of work do you do now?’ Mrs Moggerhanger asked with a smile.

I told her the same old lie, but it went down well, for I embellished it concerning some upgrading I was in for because the firm was opening new branches in Europe, even as far afield as Turkey, and I was coordinating this new scheme at the moment so that while extending operations I was making it possible for us to economize at the same time. ‘I don’t want to bore you with it, though. I’m likely to talk all night if you don’t stop me.’

In any tight spot about my job I threatened to go on for hours rather than be reticent, so that any listener was only too glad to drop it. Moggerhanger cut in: ‘Well, we don’t want to spoil your inspiration, and that’s a fact. I often find it doesn’t pay to talk too much about your work. It waters down your ideas without your noticing it. If I’m taking a man on, I decide whether he’s much of a talker, and if he is he don’t stand a chance.’

I swigged his plonk: ‘I can talk for hours, but I never give anything away, and neither does it dilute my ideas, if that’s what you mean.’

He laughed. ‘You know, Michael, I think I believe you.’

Seeing that she had set us going, his wife went to check the dinner. ‘Polly tells me you’re in love,’ he said, at which Polly stood up and said she was going to see if there was anything she could do in the kitchen. He had pronounced the phrase in love as if I’d been caught by him trying to blow a safe in such a clumsy fashion that I wouldn’t even have buckled the hinges. I stood up.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

I walked to the mantelshelf, and finished off my whisky, refusing to sit when that bastard told me, even if he was Polly’s old man, and one of the richest men in London — or Ealing. ‘I am in love with her,’ I said, ‘and have been from the moment I saw her.’

He smiled: ‘You don’t have to spit the words out like rusty tacks. I wanted to hear it from your own lips, that’s all. But you’ve been going about things like an elephant trying to be cunning. I’ve always admired tact, and don’t particularly like somebody who’s sly and devious from his toenails up. I believe you when you say you’re in love with Polly and want to marry her, but at the same time I love her as well — and never you forget it — so I don’t want her to get into the hands of the wrong person. The fact that we both love her gives us something in common. Don’t let that go to your head, though.’

‘I’m sorry if I spoke too sharply,’ I said, ‘but you can be sure I’ll do my best to make her happy.’

He got up and went to the whisky pot. ‘Another drink?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Don’t think you’re in much of a position to make a bargain,’ he said, hovering over me. ‘Not yet, at least. I know you’re a sharp person, so I’d like a few words with you after dinner. We’ll go to my study and let the ladies go about their own business. In the meantine. let’s drink this. I’m not supposed to, but I will for once.’

He took only a sip of it before we went in to dinner. It was the most stultifying meal I’d ever been at. I weighed every word carefully in my brain-pan before letting it out to do its best, or worst, and the same seemed true of the adult Moggerhangers, even of Polly. She was particularly subdued, and that I liked least of all, though occasionally she did try to open some new road of conversation. But everything seemed to die in its tracks, and I thought Moggerhanger himself was responsible for this. In fact he seemed to exult in it, as if showing off in front of me the power he held over his family. But I had my pride too, and was by no means inclined to start an entertaining stream of talk. To do so would have pleased him, for he would know himself responsible for it, and congratulate himself on having broken my nerve. There were moments when I didn’t know what I was doing there, until I looked across at Polly and managed a smile of complicity out of her. Worst of all, as if even that was planned, the food wasn’t up to the standard I’d been stuffing myself with at the Italian place.

Towards the end of the meal we were comparing the merits of the various holiday spots in Europe, such as Klosters and Monte Carlo, Majorca and Cortina, none of which places I’d been to. But pretending that I had gave the conversation a more jumpy and natural rhythm, which caused a slight melting of the ice between us. When we stood up to go back into the living-room things became quite affable. But the deep armchairs felled me again. They were like fox-holes, from which we couldn’t talk but only snipe each other. I’d never imagined I could have landed so deeply into the household of such a bourgeois racketeer, but I supposed it to be just another proof of my unworldliness. Though I’d previously worked for him I’d thought this middle-class nook was only a front to face anyone who might accuse him of being a criminal to the core — which he certainly was.

I’d been curious during most of the evening to know what he wanted to talk to me about. After an hour of brain-dragging small-talk he stood up and asked Polly and her mother to excuse us. I took the hint that I shouldn’t see Polly again for a day or two, so wished them goodnight and followed Moggerhanger into what he called his library. It’s true, there were books in it, a stand of five shelves full of novels I wouldn’t be seen dead, or even alive, reading, though I did have time to notice a couple by Gilbert Blaskin, one called Vampires In Love and another entitled The Seventh Highway.

Happily there were no deep armchairs in this room, otherwise I’d have gone berserk with the table knife I’d slipped into my pocket at the end of the meal. The room was walled in panelled oak, and Moggerhanger stood behind his desk, neither of us being inclined to sit down.

‘Brandy?’

‘A noggin,’ I said.

He pushed it over, as well as an opened box of Havanas: ‘Only one,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ I said, unwrapping it.

‘And hand that knife over. Nobody goes out of this house with one of my knives, unless it’s in his back.’ He laughed at this joke, and even I thought it funny as I slid the knife on the desk. I wished I hadn’t stolen it now because some gravy had congealed inside the pocket of my best suit. ‘I just wondered whether you’d notice it.’

He sat on the desk itself: ‘I don’t like pissed-up young tiddleywinks making tests on me, so watch it.’

I certainly watched him, because I knew him to be as savage as a shark, a wild man who wore gold cufflinks and stank of after-shave lotion. ‘Tell me what you want, then.’

‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he joked. It was obvious to me that Polly had made a big mistake in letting him in on our secret. He was her own father but she didn’t know the first thing about him, taking his career for that of an honest property dealer when the only property he’d ever dealt in had been other people’s. There was not a hope of Polly and I ever marrying under his vicious auspices, so it didn’t matter to me whether I showed him any respect or not. ‘It was a pity you stopped working for me.’

‘You gave me the sack,’ I told him.

‘Yes, so I did.’

‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I didn’t feel like being a chauffeur all my life.’

‘There’s worse jobs.’

‘And better.’

‘I’m glad you think so. I would have had something better for you, by and by.’

‘I can’t help it if I were headstrong,’ I said, ‘but I’m getting over it.’

‘There’s hope for us yet, then, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘What sort?’

He sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. ‘If you want to join the family, I might ask you to prove your regard for it by getting you to show a bit of loyalty. I think I can safely say that my wife likes you, and I know Polly does. As for me, I always considered you the sort who would get on in the world — as you’ve shown by the job you’ve landed yourself in. I was pleased to hear it when Polly told me about it.’

He gave me a hard look, and half a smile, and I knew he knew what was cutting through my mind. I’d have walked out, if I could have covered my retreat with a Molotov cocktail. The effort not to smile, twitch or say any halfcock joke made me sick at the stomach. ‘In my experience,’ said Moggerhanger, ‘the hardest thing for any man to do, including myself, is to keep his business to himself. You’re still young, though if I were at the butt-end of your flap-mouth I wouldn’t consider it much of an excuse. But I can understand you not thinking it too bad an indiscretion, because a man often tells things to his girlfriend that he’d never tell anyone else, not even his mother. And you weren’t to know that Polly has never had any secrets from me. She may hold back a while with some, but sooner or later she’ll confide in me or her mother, and I might say here and now that I find that sort of thing a great virtue. Anybody who confides something to me that’s in any way profitable can rely on me to stand by them for as long as they’ll be able to stand themselves. And that’s saying something. It’s saying a bloody lot, Michael, in fact, and I want you to know it.’

He became quite emotional, more so than I’d ever seen him. And he shall reign for ever and ever, I thought, looking at him. ‘Loyalty,’ he said, suddenly calm, ‘there’s nothing to better it, Michael.’ Loyalty to whom? I wondered, as if I didn’t know, but I grew shakier by the minute, as he went on: ‘I’ve been familiar with the Jack Leningrad Organization for a long time. In fact I was a founder member, you might say, but I got pushed out by a little piece of chicanery just after the war — when I wasn’t as strong as I am now — by that bastard in his iron lung, who at the time was all hale and hearty. The organization, you see, began early in the war, and I was the lynchpin and mainstay of it, because in those days the danger was great — we had the Germans to put up with as well as the British. In spite of the occupation of France and everywhere else, we had couriers travelling all over Europe, and sometimes to Soviet Russia. Our offices were in Lisbon, London, Gibraltar, Zurich, and Madrid, and how we got gold from one place to another is just nobody’s bloody business. And at times it was a very bloody business indeed, with our chaps getting picked off by British or German officers who considered that they hadn’t been paid enough to leave well alone. There was near damn-all profit in it at times. Still, business picked up after the war when we booted Churchill out — the only trouble being that I got booted out as well. Not that it was a bad thing, because it put more strength in my elbow to push other affairs along, and I made more money than if I’d stayed with the Leningrad gang. That’s years ago, and I’ll tell you Michael that in the last year I’ve had a mind to get the organization back into my fold.’

I was about to reach for another cigar when the canny bastard pushed them over. ‘The obvious way to begin, without using too much push, was to get a man in who could reconnoitre the situation. And this I did.’

I nearly choked on smoke: ‘William Hay?’

‘Right. You’re too sharp already. But he got nabbed in the Lebanon. At first I thought the Lung had got him picked up so as to get rid of him. But that wasn’t the case, because if they’d got him pulled in for that reason, they’d have had you in the same black hole of Beirut because he was the one who got you into the set-up. See what I mean?’

‘You’ve got me sweating,’ I said. ‘Internally. Blood.’

‘But they haven’t tumbled to a thing. You’re in the clear, my boy! So I can go on with my campaign.’

‘Why are you going back into their organization? Is there that much profit in it for you?’

He gave a great laugh. ‘Not a bit of it. I’ve got so much I can’t want any more and keep my self-respect. I’m doing it because I’m bored for an hour every day, and I’ve got to put my brains and talent to something, otherwise the capital investment will run down.’

‘And now you’re proposing that I take William Hay’s place.’

‘Oh, Michael! If only I’d had a son like you! As well as a daughter, of course! And now my fondest hopes may come true, because you might be my son-in-law. What more can I want?’

‘Things are looking up,’ I said.

‘They’ll look up even more if you tell me you’ll do it.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘Just keep me informed on who does what, and what they take where, and when. I’m sure that’s not too much for you. You’ve got the talent for it.’

‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d like a couple of days to think it over.’

‘Better and better. If there’s a thing that’ll ruin a man quicker than a loose mouth it’s hurry. But you realize that this conversation is so secret that to mention it anywhere would be a personal disaster for you?’

‘It’s engraved on my heart,’ I said. ‘But how would you break up such an organization as Jack Leningrad’s? It’s very tough and extensive, I might tell you.’

‘That’s my worry. I’ve got it all worked out. Say you’ll come in with me, and when I take over you’ll be my operations chief. You’ll have a house, an American car, a boat — and Polly as your wife — and I’ll tell you that you won’t get a better wife, or a better father-in-law come to that.’ His face grew hard: ‘With someone like you working on the inside of Jack Leningrad’s lousy set-up I’ll have his couriers disappear so fast into the nets of the law that he’ll wonder why God’s, turned against him. Then I’ll pay that paralytic a personal visit, I’ll smash his lung to pieces and watch him die like a fish on his own floor. So think it over, Michael. We’ll do great business together.’

‘Promise me one thing,’ I said, ‘and I’ll think very seriously about it.’

‘Anything,’ he said.

‘Find out where William Hay is, and help him.’

‘Done. Expect him back in a week or two. Don’t ask any questions, but welcome him like a brother and a hero.’

He offered his chauffeur to drive me home, but I wanted to walk, to stop the crazy spinning in my head by pitching my eyes against the night air. I hadn’t the least intention of working for Moggerhanger, even though it seemed against my own best interests not to do so. I not only didn’t trust him but I disliked him intensely. True, I was caught up with Polly, but the idea had been to go off and live with her at Upper Mayhem, where I hoped he wouldn’t track us down. I’d never had a father and I didn’t want one now. The idea of it made me sick. How could any self-respecting man want to laden himself with a father? Not me, certainly, I told myself as I walked along, rattling two silver forks together in my pocket, and smoking another of the half-dozen cigars I’d lifted from the box unbeknown to the all-seeing Moggerhanger. Even if I decided to give up my cushy job with Jack Leningrad, it wouldn’t be to get entangled with Moggerhanger, because his promise of an eminent career for me as a racketeer didn’t bode well for my head staying on my shoulders. And I knew for certain and for sure that even if I helped him to get Jack Leningrad back into his grip, he’d never in a million years agree to me marrying Polly. All his rhetoric about loyalty and standing by people who’d done him a good turn was nothing more than wind and piss. He’d kick me aside when he got what he wanted, and then make Polly forget me by having her marry somebody else.

I sweated at the thought of what she had told him. It seemed to have been quite enough for him to be going on with for a while. I wondered why she had done it, because such a thing wasn’t necessary in order to explain that we were in love and wanted to get married. My suspicions took me home through a series of nightmares, one being that Claud was already on the board of Jack Leningrad Limited, and was playing this bit of theatre only to find out whether or not I was loyal to the organization. Also, it had probably started months ago when he’d seen to it that Polly and I were on the same plane to Geneva, knowing we’d get acquainted on board like any two young people would. Even my socks were sweat-soaked. Maybe she wasn’t his daughter, but someone he’d taken from the club to work for him in this way. One minute I felt unborn, the next I was going crazy, and though I knew that these fantasies were mostly unjustified, the one about Polly being specially set on to me in order to get information for her father lingered and bothered me.

It was a relief, once I was back at the flat, to get a call saying I was to take a consignment to Zurich on the next morning’s plane. I was so locked in with thoughts about Moggerhanger’s proposition that I walked through the airport customs as if in a dream. Lines of weary people at the beginning of their holidays straggled from each counter, and I joined them patiently, obviously not one of them, almost expecting a smile of recognition and commiseration from the officials when I went through the eggtimer into the crowded departure lounge. As always, I looked for friendly recognition from some old acquaintance, for though in a risky situation, I felt exposed without friends, one fly among many but unlike any of them. There was a smell of sweat, tea, coffee, mildewed fag smoke, make-up, booze, boot-polish, and nondescript dust, and a scattering of displaced faces staring dreamily in all directions, tourist-agency labels fastened on their lapels. In spite of my nonchalant air and familiarity with the procedure of separation, I knew that in my heart I felt the same as they did. It only seemed in all truth that my heart was buried a bit deeper than theirs, that’s all, as I stood looking at them like an experienced traveller — though I wasn’t at that time to know by how much.

I came back from Zurich next day and went straight to the man in the iron lung’s flat to collect my pay and report the success of my trip. Stanley opened the door with a sombre look on his face. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Has the firm gone bust?’

He let out a cry: ‘That’s just not bloody funny, Michael. Come quickly. The boss wants to see you.’

‘I’ve got to see him,’ I said, ‘because I’ve some bad news.’

I had the satisfaction of seeing him jerk back from me: ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just this,’ I shouted. ‘I’m fed up with doing these trips at three hundred a shot. I’m one of your most experienced men, and I think four hundred would be nearer the mark, so from now I’m putting in for a raise. This bloody Volga Boat Song has gone on too long as far as I’m concerned.’ I threw my smuggler’s coat at his feet for him to pick up himself or leave there to rot.

He tried to calm me down. ‘All right, Michael, maybe you’ll get it, but for God’s sake be careful and break it to him bit by bit because I tell you he’s in an awful state today. Arthur Ramage has been caught on the Lisbon run.’

He looked closely at me as he broke the news. ‘How do you expect me to feel?’ I cried. ‘He was the champion, the best man ever known in the trade. What do you expect? A smile because it wasn’t me? Goddamn it, somebody couldn’t keep their mouth shut.’

As if full of grief and rage, because that was my only chance of not being killed as I walked through that door, I knocked Stanley aside and barged into Jack Leningrad’s pad with as much violence as I could muster. Cottapilly and Pindarry, two men I hardly knew were standing by the iron lung, but I rushed the whole length of the floor screaming that Ramage had been sold down the river, that Leningrad himself had done it, had picked up the phone to make an anonymous call to London airport because he thought Ramage had gotten too big for his elastic-sided boots and had wanted to split the organization so that he could take charge of part of it with the idea of one day snapping up the lot. So he’d gone the way of all flesh, just the same as William Hay, who Jack Leningrad had also framed.

‘It’ll be my turn next,’ I ranted on, ‘I can feel it coming. I’m working for a nest of vipers. You’re hand in glove with the customs men yourself and you can do what you like with us. Cottapilly and you, Pindarry, you’ll go after me, don’t worry, and that fat pasty-faced paralytic slug knows it. We’re puppets to him, wax figures that he’ll throw into the deepest jail as soon as he sees fit or gets frightened enough. He’s paranoid. We’re loyal, but he thinks we’re all set on doing the dirty on him. And if it’s not that, he now and again gets a spiteful little fit of sadism and thinks to pass the time on and gratify himself by getting a few of us caught. And when this happens he makes sure that the one he’s going to have pulled in has three-quarters of his load in false gold.’

I was on my knees, screaming all the preposterous things I could think up, then on the floor, then standing up against the wall only ten yards away from him, sobbing, keeping him in good view all the time. His pale face grew yellow, and I could see a twitch at the temples under the border of black sleek hair that went thinly over his head. Out of the speakers came his raging voice, from every side of the room in stereo. ‘Stop it, you lying vandal. It’s not true.’ He held a heavy revolver and pointed it at me.

‘I’ve been loyal,’ I said, calming down, ‘I’ve worked hard, Mr Leningrad. You can rely on me to do my utmost. Maybe I said too much just now, but the news went through me like a knife. It’s terrible. I’m blinded by it. I can’t go on.’

He actually smiled: ‘You have to, Mr Cullen. We’re in a tight spot. We’ve got a rush job on, urgent. If you’re loyal, as you say, you must stay with us.’

I stood by his lung: ‘If I do I’ve got to have four hundred a trip. I can’t do it for less because I’ve bought a house, and my overheads are appalling.’

His eyes narrowed. He hated my guts, but wouldn’t at the moment say so: ‘You’re not getting married, by any chance?’

‘Never. But I’ve got to have a quiet place I can go to between trips, if I’m not to have a crack-up.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Berkshire,’ I told him. ‘A cottage, but it cost the earth — and a bit of the sky.’

He chuckled and put down his gun. ‘All right. Four hundred. But you’re off to Athens in the morning.’

My only thought on the way out was to hope the plane to Greece crashed with me on it so that all my troubles would come to an end. Because was I in trouble? I knew who’d arranged for Arthur Ramage to be caught. It was Claud Moggerhanger, either by an anonymous phone call to London airport, or because he wanted to give his old friend Inspector Lantorn an easy job to do, in the hope that Lantorn would keep his claws off the Moggerhanger operations for a week or two. And who had told Moggerhanger that Ramage went to Lisbon every Friday laced-up with gold? His darling daughter. And which unthinking love-crazed flaptrap had told Polly? Me, not imagining that she’d even take it in, never mind relay it so accurately and with such deadly intent. And why had he done it? Not only to play havoc with Jack Leningrad, because that seemed rather an obvious thing to do, but precisely to warn me to go in head and bollocks with the Moggerhanger conspiracy-takeover, or vanish the same way as Arthur Ramage. It was as plain as the dismal day, that the great intriguer of the age had been caught in a vast and sticky web, with a murdering spider ready to come from each corner and scoop out his guts. All this went through my mind when Stanley broke the news, and I knew that the man in the iron lung would have it in for me as being the only person who could have published Arthur Ramage’s itinerary. Maybe he would kill me on the spot, such was his ugly mood, and for that reason I threw my medieval fit and ranted for a higher wage. It had worked, for the moment. He was almost bound to have me followed or watched from now on. I had to take care even of the air I breathed, and that was no sort of life for me.

But to abandon everything would mean slipping into oblivion, and that was not part of me. I had come too far through the keyhole of myself to do that. I wanted Polly, in spite of her absolute and rotten treachery. She had been set on to me from the first, and of that I could only be certain. But I wanted Polly more than ever, even because of her treachery, for by that alone I felt we were made for each other, that she had more depth and dimension than I’d ever dreamed of. I had fucked her countless times, and she had now monumentally fucked me, so that while I had made us one flesh, she had made us one spirit, an element of fatal cooperation I had never encountered in anyone else nor was likely to. She seemed so much larger now that I couldn’t have noticed her before, but I knew I was as far from having her — or her having me — as I’d ever been, because even if I threw in everything and worked for Moggerhanger, it would mean little in the end. I thought I was fit enough to live in a jungle, but now I was certainly beginning to doubt my ability to survive in this little corner of it. How could I go off with an easy heart to Athens when I expected any minute that Moggerhanger would think to pick up the phone and stop me?

I went. And I came back. I could only assume he was giving me more time than I’d expected or even hoped for. The one consolation of this cat-and-mouse game was that my bank balance continued to grow. I paid the cash for Upper Mayhem station, then took the bundle of deeds and a spare set of keys to Nottingham, where I stowed them in my grandmother’s chest. Whatever happened, they would be safely hidden there. Work had slackened off. Maybe there was no more gold left on the island, though this would not stop the Jack Leningrad machinery dead in its oils because they also imported it. As fast as I took it out, others brought it back. Profits were made both ways, and everyone was happy.

So I had a few days in Nottingham. My mother wouldn’t take time off work, but I was quite happy going around on my own. On a cold windy day I was muffled up in my overcoat, and warmed by a cigar as I walked along Wollaton Road. I’d been away a long time, but none of it was foreign to me. I was born here, and it swam in my blood. All other places were a swamp I had to stop myself sinking into, but here my feet were on solid ground — even though the pavements were uneven and there were often potholes in the roads. With a place like this I didn’t need a mother or father. Say what you like, the place where you were born and brought up is bread and butter for the rest of your life, no matter where you go or what you do. If you deny it, you stamp on your own feelings. If you don’t have it, you can’t see other places with the freshest of eyes. I speak from hindsight, and I speak from youth, and I speak from myth, and the trio will always meet when you’re feeling low and desolate. At such times, if you’re far away you know you can’t go back there, and don’t even want to, but to think of that solid indestructible land soothes your eyes for a few hours.

I walked along, my thoughts spinning as if in a milk-churn making cheese. Up the hill from the weighing house and Horse Trough and White Horse pub was the railway bridge, and Radford station whose booking hall we used to raid as kids for a handful of timetables to push through letterboxes or scatter in the streets as if they announced the coming of bloody revolution. We’d hide in the timber traps of the goods yard and run from the railwayman who didn’t give a damn whether we got away or not. If I hadn’t been a long time in London I don’t suppose I’d have had all these memories flopping up into my brain like wet fish. Beyond the station was the tobacco warehouse on one side, and the Midland pub on the other, then newer houses and the Crown pub on the corner of Western Boulevard. We used to swim in the old canal on hot days, and once I remember a boy of five falling off the lock gate and hitting the concrete edge fifteen feet below which stopped him going into the water and getting drowned but didn’t prevent him from getting a savage dose of concussion that sent him running after skylarks for the next few years, though he eventually recovered so well that he went to grammar school. And when I was fifteen I remember a mate and I went up the canal one dark night with Connie Ford who sat between us on a lock gate and wanked us till we shot into the moonless dark. I laughed through my cigar smoke. This was the only place where I could feel free of all the Moggerhangers and Leningrads of the world, where sentimentality was realistic, and memory meant safety, and familiarity strength. I coined my happy phrases, not taking much notice as to where I was going but knowing that all these thoughts were false and not worth a farthing.

I turned up Nuthall Road, and smelt the first undying smell of evening mist coming down from the collieries and Pennines. I caught it so strongly in the nostrils of my heart that it even warmed my penis and made it half stand up. I’d got something very bad, but it didn’t frighten me at all, just made me know I was still prone to it and therefore still alive.

It softened my soul for when I saw Claudine coming out of the supermarket and putting a basket of groceries on top of a baby sleeping in the pram. She saw me first, but even so I wouldn’t have backed away if I’d been the one to spot her. Her face turned pale, as I’m sure mine did as well. I looked at the baby, about a year old, pink, fat, and peaceful. ‘You might well stare,’ she said, ‘you rotten bastard.’

I smiled: ‘He looks as if he’ll thrive.’

‘It’s a she.’

I took another look: ‘Are you pleased with her?’

‘Of course I am. Alfie is as well.’

My mouth dropped: ‘Alfie?’

‘It’s his. We got married over it. Just in time as well.’

‘That lets me out, then. I was on my way to ask you to marry me. I’ve earned a lot of money in London, and I’ve spent the last three months fixing up a house for us both near Huntingborough, a marvellous place in the country that I paid cash for. It’s got a marvellous garden, full of flowers, just the sort I thought you’d like. I even got a job there, as manager of a car-hire firm. But nothing goes right with me. My life’s in ruins. Always was, and always damn-well will be.’

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘You swine. I sincerely hope so. You’re rotten with lies. I hate your guts. Alfie’s worth fifty of you, and I’m glad it’s him I ended up with. At least he loves me and doesn’t only think of himself. As for you, I don’t care how well you’re doing in London, but you’re heading for a fall, and that’s a fact. I should think even that place will get too hot for you before long, if it isn’t already. I expect you’ve only come back here to get out of trouble there, if I know you. Or have you just come out of prison? You can stop looking at her, even if it is your baby. I only hope she’ll grow up with none of your rottenness in her, though thank God I’m pregnant again, and by Alfie this time.’

I lowered my head, tried to look affectionate: ‘I’m sorry you feel that way. I didn’t mean to make you bitter. I just thought we might be able to get together again. That’s what I came up specially for. I’ve always been in love with you, you know that, and still am, even though you’ve gone and done the dirty on me by getting married to Alfie. It wasn’t my fault if you couldn’t wait.’

‘Oh,’ she wailed, ‘how rotten can anybody get?’ She shouted, and women coming by laden with fish-fingers and Miracle Bread stared at us.

‘I can get a lot rottener,’ I said, ‘to someone who’s betrayed me.’ I hated saying all this, but couldn’t stop myself, wasn’t even enjoying it, didn’t know why I was doing it, at least not then. She went away sobbing, and even the kid began kicking up a row from under the basket of groceries.

I walked backwards, watching her go, grieved at what I had done to myself more than to her, because even though I knew how lousy I’d been, and regretted it to my core, she at least had a daughter and her husband. My gall felt as if about to burst. I was sweating, and walked with the wind behind me.

When Mother came home from work she told me to cheer up. ‘You’re always full of troubles and worries. Can’t you store up that experience till later on in life?’

I split my face into a smile: ‘Maybe I want to get it over with now.’

‘Don’t hurry it. There’s plenty of time.’

‘I’m worn out.’

‘At your age? Stop feeling sorry for yourself, that’s all I can say.’

‘I’m not bloody-well feeling sorry for myself,’ I snapped.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m glad you’re showing a bit of spirit at last. Eat your steak and chips before it gets cold.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry? That’s new, coming from you. Still it’s a start. A thin one though.’

‘It’s all I can do at the moment,’ I said with my mouth full. She was reading the newspaper, and I went on eating.

Albert was working late, couldn’t come out with us, so we got on a thirty-nine and went down town to sit a few hours in Yate’s wine lodge. I put her on to port, while I stuck to brandy. ‘Are you and Albert really going to get married?’

She laughed: ‘Are you jealous?’

‘No, I’m not. I’ve got enough of that on my plate. It’s just that life’s so long.’

‘A good job it is,’ she said, ‘or we’d all be dead.’ She looked young enough for any devil’s work, with her perm that had come out well, and her lipstick that drew your eyes to it and away from the few wrinkles at the corners of her temples. ‘I’m not even too old to have another kid,’ she grinned, ‘if I put my mind to it.’

This remark gave me a funny feeling which, if it came about, and I couldn’t believe it would, showed me with a little brother playing uncle to any newborn bastard I might have of my own. ‘Life’s not only long,’ I said, ‘it’s a stew.’

‘As long as it’s tasty, and doesn’t get cold on the hearth. I don’t know, Michael, you’re a funny one. Sometimes I think you’re just like your father — when I remember him.’

I poured my brandy down, but it tasted like soda water: ‘You told me I never had a father,’ regretting such a stupid phrase when she replied: ‘Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ? I’ll get a cross for you from Littlewoods if you like, or maybe I’ll rent one for three days.’

‘Stop joking, can’t you?’

‘I’m in that sort of mood. Get me another port, duck.’

I called the waiter, couldn’t speak till he’d brought the drinks and I’d annihilated my brandy and asked for another. ‘You’ll go corky inside,’ she said. ‘He used to knock them back like that. And he used to buy me port. Funny. The cheeky bastard said he thought all working-class women liked port, and he was right, because I did, anyway. We even came to this place, when there was any booze, and staggered away in the blackout at closing-time. Maybe port’s good for the memory. He was younger than me, though I was young enough, God knows. A young sergeant, though he spoke like an officer. Oh, we had a good time, till he got posted somewhere else. He even wrote me a letter or two, then they stopped after I’d told him I was pregnant. I was so mad I burnt the letters and a photo.’

I felt white and avid: ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?’

‘Didn’t think to, I suppose. You know me: memory like a sieve. He wasn’t what you’d call good-looking, but he was lively, and had an educated way of talking — though he used the most terrible language — awful, mixed it with everything he said.’

‘Go on. Go on.’

‘Let me get my breath, then. I don’t often talk about old times.’

‘You’re telling me,’ I said. ‘Once every twenty years, I suppose.’

‘Don’t get like that with me, or I’ll throw this drink up your nose.’

‘All right, Ma. Let’s have a good time. It’s a long while since I got drunk.’

‘You’re not very like him, though. There’s too much of me in your face. He had the funniest shape of head, and even though he was only twenty he was already going bald. But what a marvellous man he was, because in spite of his flash talk he was very gentle at times, almost shy, and maybe that’s what I liked most about him. He practically lived with me for a month, thought it a great thrill to be in a house like ours, but he’d always come with a bottle of whisky to make himself really at home. We had some good times between us. I could earn good money because of the war, and it was easy to wangle a house of my own, especially with Gilbert’s help. He forged anything. Used to get a bus from his camp and make straight for the house. Sometimes he’d wait for me outside the factory, and I remember how happy this made me, though I never told him so. He’d laugh and say I was sentimental, rubbing it into my face like broken glass, so that I’d get into a paddy and throw pots around if he didn’t stop. He often liked that sort of thing, and just sat there goading me. He was a real devil when he got started, though I was as bad. But we had some times together. It seemed to go on for ages, and now it seems like no time at all. I can’t always remember it, even. He didn’t get drunk, he just got dangerous, though at the sound of a cup smashing he’d smile and be happy again.

‘I always missed when I threw things, but he liked the sound. Some people are funny. I used to call him Blasted Blaskin, and this would make him laugh more than anything. I can’t tell you all the things we got up to, you being my son. What are you looking so white for? I thought you could take your drink?’

I felt the slab of concrete in my stomach lifting up, as if it were suddenly trying to get out of my mouth. ‘I’ve got to get into the air,’ I said, standing. ‘It’s killing in here.’

‘You do look bloody pale,’ she said, taking my arm. ‘What’s got into you?’

The concrete flagstone lifted: ‘Come on, let’s go.’

‘Oh, all bloody right then.’

We went down the stairs and the fresh air pulled me round a bit. She was flummoxed, as if I might be going odd in the head and she had no idea what was expected of her, no cups or glasses being handy to throw at me.

We walked into Slab Square, the illuminated front of the town hall looking so tall I hoped it was about to fall flat on its face and bury us. That cock-headed tripehound seemed not to have altered in all his waking life, still on a mad career from one dripping slit to another. He threw up his women left and right and centre, and just as quickly others came back to him, flocking towards the same unwholesome fate. He was a bastard right enough, a real travelling trickster if ever there was one, and if my mother’s memory served her right, this sky-licker, this grub who rubbed his prick along the bare earth so that wheat and sunflowers shot up in abundance and gave him a great and lazy life, was my one and only unsuspecting father.

We made for the Eight Bells, and managed to get a seat: ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know this bloke you’ve told me about, and from your description of him he hasn’t altered a bit.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t go on about it or I shall begin to get upset. It’s so long ago, but now you’ve brought it all back I’m getting sentimental. You make me feel as though I’m still in love with him, the rotten swine. I was, for years and years. When I was with another chap I used to make believe he was Gilbert, to try and bring him back to me. Not that it was much good, but it was a game that helped me to bear it. Ah, well, it’s more than twenty years, but it’s only a minute when you lost somebody you thought a lot of. I told myself he’d been sent to Egypt and got killed. I lived with that, till the war was over and I forgot him. But you never forget. For a woman to lose a man she loves is only one bit less than losing a kid.’

I was almost in tears, not only from shock and brandy, but from realizing what a hard life she’d had, all because of Gilbert Blaskin, and of having me without being married, a fact that didn’t let her forget the man who gave me to her, and at the same time made if difficult if not impossible for her to get somebody else. I thought how the world was a million times harder on women than men. Blaskin had gone his own sweet screwing way, though from what I knew he’d been miserable, except that he hadn’t really suffered in the way my mother had because he’d never had the honour and torment to really fall in love. To bring her back to life I told her a little of what I knew about him, just to give him reality and, if possible, rob him a little in her mind of the sentimental glory she attached to him. ‘I know it was only a dream,’ she said, ‘and that if we’d had much more time together we’d have started to drive each other round the bend and halfway up the bloody zig-zags.’

‘Still,’ I said, taking her hand, ‘you had your dream.’

She drew it away, as if I were Blaskin: ‘You can say that, I suppose.’

‘You should see him now. He don’t look up to much.’

‘Neither do I,’ she said.

‘You do,’ I told her.

She got angry: ‘Pack it in. When are you going back?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’d go tonight, but the last train’s gone.

‘When are you marrying Albert?’

‘In six weeks,’ she said, as if I’d changed the subject.

‘Don’t you think you ought to marry Gilbert Blaskin instead?’ I asked, and she laughed so long and loud that people in the pub began looking at her and wondering what was going on between us, as if we’d cracked some dirty joke about them all.

I took a lunchtime train that punched its way south through the steel fallopian tube of Trent Bridge. Cows stood in fields under the sousing rain, stock-still as if they were actually made of rain and wanted to grow bigger from it. I’d had no breakfast so went to the dining-car for a meal, shaken so much to bits on the way that I was almost not hungry by the time I got there.

I thought of the worry and trouble waiting for me when I got to London, but when food started to slide in, no worry seemed too difficult to sort out, and my chopfallen state soon left me. The train was so fast it seemed to gallop, swaying soup over the lip of the plate, so that it was difficult holding a newspaper at the same time. I looked to see if anyone of my name had died or got married, or was to be remembered in gratitude for having given their glorious lives in any of the world wars, or whether any he or she was getting engaged or had had a nice new legitimate baby between them. But there was no sign, so I stared at the houses or motorcars for sale, and saw nothing to suit my exigent tastes.

When I smoked a cigar no one stared at me and thought I shouldn’t be smoking it, as they might a couple of years ago, and when I paid my bill the cashier wasn’t surprised at the five-bob tip I left for the waiter. Then I looked at the news part of the paper to see if Ron Cottapilly or Paul Pindarry, those ganglions of Jack Leningrad Limited, had been nabbed at the customs in the last twenty-four hours. They had not, though if I had my way it wouldn’t be long now, because as soon as I got to St Pancras I went into a box and got through to Moggerhanger.

‘Who is it?’ he said. I told him I’d thought over his proposition. He laughed: ‘I knew you wouldn’t come up in a hurry, Michael, for which I always admire a man, but when you left it so late I thought you’d had an accident, like getting caught or something. It struck me as unlikely, but you never know in your sort of game. I hear they did have rather a nasty jolt in your firm, didn’t they? Man called Ramage. Fate strikes pretty hefty blows from time to time, I must say. It was all I could do not to send a message of condolence to the Iron Lung. But I never do anything in bad taste. I’m not that sort of person. What have you decided, then?’

I’d worked myself to a sweat of rage while listening to his two-faced banter: ‘I’m joining you,’ I said, ‘and that’s straight. I’ll go on working for Leningrad, and I’ll phone you any time I’ve got information. Or I’ll phone Polly, it’s just the same, I realize. In any case I’m only doing it for our future happiness. Do you understand?’

His voice sounded right in my ear, as if he was no farther than the next telephone box. I looked nervously that way, but it was empty. ‘If you’re to work for me,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to alter that tone of voice. I’m old-fashioned, I am. If you talk in that voice it’s obvious who you’re working for, and since we don’t want anybody to know, you’ll have to moderate it a bit, won’t you, Michael? I expect you to understand that, just as I’m to understand that you’re doing it for Polly’s future happiness — as well as your own. Are we on the same wavelength, or not? Tell me that, and the deal’s on.’

‘It’s on,’ I said, trying not to breathe hard or curse. ‘I phone you. You don’t phone me. It’ll work best that way.’

‘I’ll tell you how we’ll do it, Michael,’ he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘phone me whenever you know anything. I’ll never try to contact you — unless you find a note under your plate at that Italian restaurant where you eat. Old Tonio’s in my good books there, and I sometimes let him help me.’

‘That sounds all right.’ I was going to say goodbye, but the line went dead, meaning he’d hung up on me. Moggerhanger never said goodbye in case it brought him bad luck. He looked upon it as an unnecessary waste of breath.

My next move was to call on Blaskin with the idea of getting him to marry my mother before she could throw herself away on that worthless Albert. I didn’t care whether I stayed a bastard or not — I’d be one of those till my left foot was tipped into a soily grave — but I wanted Blaskin to make an honest woman of my mother. He’d had his own runner-bean way too long, and it was time one of his sins came home to roost, namely me, because I was beginning to see how serious it was that he’d rampaged through the world, and God knows how many innocent women, without anybody having lifted a finger against him. I took the Underground to Sloane Square, then walked a couple of corners to the block of flats where he lived. It was his divine luck that he wasn’t in, so after ten minutes’ ruminative smoke outside his door, I walked over the river and home.

I saw William sitting on the settee when I went into the living-room, listlessly thumbing through the Evening Standard. Beside him were two suitcases. ‘Get away from me, you treacherous bleeder,’ he said, when I went up with a big smile of welcome to shake his hand.

‘What?’ I yelled back.

He stood up, half a grin. ‘Don’t take it so bad. It’ll happen to you some day. Not by me, though. Never by me.’

‘What sort of a swamp am I in?’ I said, pouring two drinks. ‘I’ve never betrayed anyone. You were hooked by working for Moggerhanger. The Leningrad group of British Industries found out, and you got pulled in.’

He took the whisky: ‘I’ve been all this time with the corsairs, boy, in a Moslem slave-hole, and I’m out of the habit of taking raw booze.’ But he drank it as if it were Jaffa Juice: ‘If what you say is true, and you may be right, then they’ll be on to you next, because I recruited you.’

I was sweating again. ‘You got pulled in because the Beirut cops wanted Moggerhanger’s ransom,’ I said, fishing for any old explanation.

He laughed bitterly. ‘You can take your pick, that’s all I’m saying. But I’m back now, thanks to Claud. I’ve called for my things. I’m off, Michael, on the run again. The Leningrad lot don’t know I’m back. When they do they’ll nail me. I know they will. To tell you the truth I don’t know where to go. They’ll get Cottapilly and Pindarry on to me, and they’re like Dobermann Pinschers. They’ll tear me to pieces. Moggerhanger won’t hide me. He laughed on the phone just now when I reported in, and told me to steer clear. I’ve got a taxi coming in twenty minutes to get me to a railway station. Don’t even know which one yet.’

‘Make it King’s Cross,’ I said, ‘and stop worrying. I’ve got just the place for you.’ I told him how I’d bought the railway station: ‘It’s in the middle of nowhere. Nobody’ll trace you. You’ll have to buy a bed and table, that’s all, but you’ll be safe as houses and as right as rain. Stay as long as you like. I hope to be up myself in a month. Are you all right for money?’

‘That’s no problem,’ he said. ‘But you’re a real comrade, Michael. I shan’t forget this. I’m really in the shit this time, because the man in the iron lung is bound to smell a rat once he knows I’m back.’

‘He’ll never know.’

‘That’s what you think. His snoops already know I left Beirut. Moggerhanger’s man got me to the plane without ’em knowing, but they’ll start looking for me by tomorrow, though I’m sure nobody tailed me here.’

‘When they know you’re back without reporting to them, they’re going to suspect me more than ever. It’s a very awkward moment.’

‘I’m afraid it is, lad,’ he said, looking at me with those sad eyes that at times permeated his whole spirit. Without his briefcase and smart clothes, his good haircut and stylish hat, and after his time in the sink-hole, he looked very subdued, already hunted and dodging from hedge to hedge. ‘Why don’t you come to the station with me?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of revolvers and some ammo. Two’s better than one when you’re on the run. We could hold ’em off a treat if ever they find us. Believe me, it’ll be the wisest thing in the end.’

I saw the sense of it: ‘Can’t. I’ve got too many things to wind up here. I’ll see you in a month, though.’

‘I hope so,’ he said, as the doorbell rang. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

I managed a smile, and helped him with his luggage: ‘I shan’t.’

I was sorry to see him go. He took some of my courage, though I kept enough of it to phone headquarters in a very jocular mood, to which Stanley reacted beautifully. I wanted to put my foot down as a brake and stop things tilting along so fast, but that would only draw unnecessary suspicion on me, so I had to learn to roll with it, and look out for myself as I went along. The tell-tale bead of sweat could be my ruin, a stray hair in my nose, a shoelace about to come undone. I had to be careful not to lose too much weight in case anyone should imagine I was afraid of the thin ice under me.

Stanley said it was business as usual. I was to be on a plane the day after tomorrow, late afternoon, so as to give Pindarry and Cottapilly time to get off first to Switzerland. After that there’d be a week’s rest. I said I’d get there at three o’clock, but Stanley told me to make it an early lunch that day, and get to headquarters at two for loading. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ I said. ‘The firm seems to be looking up these days.’

‘Our clients have confidence in us,’ he said with a laugh, and hung up in the middle of another.

At seven I walked over the river and made for the Blaskin pad. Pearl opened the door, and showed no surprise on her small face, made even smaller by short hair that came in a fringe over her forehead, so that she looked more like some TV river-bank animal than ever.

Gilbert looked at me: ‘What the hell do you want? I thought you were stuck for ever in that city of sin, Nottingham. Didn’t I last see you dropping off the train there? Not that I remember much. I was so drunk.’ He wore a plum-coloured dressing-gown and had a cigarette in his wide mouth. He had no hair to go grey on his pink bald head, so his face had taken over that role. ‘Sit down and get some alcohol.’

‘You don’t look good,’ I told him, throwing down my coat. Pearl curled up on the rug at his feet, and I thought she was going to take off his carpet slippers and start kissing his toes. But she merely nestled her cheek on them.

‘I’ve had a few upsets,’ he admitted, his head right back and canon-mouths of smoke going up at the ceiling.

‘June?’

‘Right,’ he laughed. ‘She couldn’t take it, I suppose, so she ran off with that phoney poet called Ron Delph. That’s one way to get rid of her.’

‘Poor, poor Gilbert,’ said Pearl. ‘He hadn’t eaten for days, and he was lying near the gas stove when I found him, trying to turn the taps on, drunk and crying.’

He jerked forward, and lifted her face sharply with his feet: ‘That’s your sorry tale, you lying bitch. Don’t re-write my history, you Kremlin-faced pug, or I’ll throw you out of that window and down into the dustbins.’

‘Naughty Gilbert,’ she said, looking as if she were about to cry. ‘You’re such a novelist, my love.’

‘To hell with that,’ he said. ‘You are, not me, with your sycophantic thesis. Those that live by the novel shall die by the fucking novel, you trollop. Remember that, or your life won’t be worth living.’

‘Does this go on all the time?’ I asked, hoping to stop them.

‘Only when you’re here, or somebody else is.’

He smiled: ‘We’re like two lovebirds in a cage when we’re on our own, aren’t we, pet?’

‘Yes,’ she said, her cheek back on his foot.

‘She’s trying to drive me crazy,’ he said, ‘but I’ll get her first.’

‘I’m glad to see you so happy,’ I said. ‘How’s The History of Carnage?’

‘Bloody. I’d only done fifty pages when I cut my finger slicing a lemon. So I threw it aside. I’m back on the novel now. It’s going very well, the best thing I can remember doing, in fact. Thank God I got rid of that whore June. She went on to Ron Delph, the Concrete Poet. Too much sand in him, I expect. God’s a bloody awful builder.’

‘She had a kid by him when she was eighteen,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’ll get married now.’

He walked to the door and back again: ‘She never told me whose kid it was. Never mind, one more down the chute.’

‘Don’t get depressed about it,’ said Pearl soothingly.

He poured half a pint of whisky and held it up to the light: ‘Piss. But hot piss. If I drink whisky, I’m just plain randy — and it doesn’t take long to get it over with, does it Pearl Barley? Go and make us some black coffee for Christ’s sake. When I drink vodka I get brutal, and take my pleasure that way, so I can’t say whether it’s enjoyed by both parties because it depends who I’m with. Best of all is when I drink champagne, because then it goes on for hours.’ He gulped his whisky. Pearl shook her head and went to make coffee. ‘You know what, Michael?’

‘What?’ I said, watching him.

‘I should have been born without a penis. Not only would I have been a happy man, but there’d have been lots of happier women in the world as well. As soon as the doctor pulled me out of my mother he should have told the nurse to chop off my cock. It’s not fair to man or beast. It’s the curse of mankind, sex. If a man goes with a woman ten years older than himself he’s humping his mother. If he goes with a girl younger than himself he’s raping his daughter. If he pansies after a young man he’s buggering his son. If he keeps pets he’s a bit of a sod. If he gets off with an older man he’s being bummed by his father. Hallelujah! If he gets a woman of the same age he’s perverse because he’s normal. The only answer is to be indiscriminate, hump into what hole you can get and as the mood takes you.’

He fell silent, but I knew it wouldn’t be for long, so I asked him if he’d ever been in love. His bald head wrinkled. ‘Love? Way back in the swampy mists of time, I vaguely remember it. Adolescent infatuation. There was nothing between that and a lifelong attack of satyriasis which is still going on only because I can’t stop breathing.’

‘Or boasting,’ I couldn’t help saying.

He looked hard at me. ‘Don’t be impertinent, sonny boy.’

‘You were in Nottingham during the war, weren’t you?’ I said.

‘Stop me drinking, Michael.’

‘Why the hell should I?’

He sent his glass splintering against the wall. ‘I’ll stop myself. What mercy can one expect from the hungry generation? I was the hungry generation twenty years ago, and I haven’t stopped being hungry. The trouble is that I don’t see why I should. But another hungry generation is coming up on me, and I don’t like it.’

‘You’ll have to,’ I grinned.

He flopped back in the chair, but I could see he was a man of great strength: ‘The hungry generations tread you down all right. That’s what keeping up with the young is — allowing them to trample on you with impunity. If you get weak about it and try to keep up with the young, you only succeed in doing their job for them by trampling yourself down. To keep up with the young is a refusal to grow old, but by doing that you let them eat you up. If Pearl weren’t so busy sweating over her hot stove she’d write down that priceless aphorism. The thing is, Michael, I was everywhere during the war, except where I could pull a trigger. But I was in Nottingham — the soldier’s kiss from which he got the clap. We used to fight to get posted there. Nottingham was the Rose of England. I suppose it still is, what?’

Pearl came in and set a tray on the floor by Gilbert’s feet. ‘Don’t you remember anything pure and virtuous about it?’

‘I’m tired of masochistic women,’ he said, ‘but that’s the only sort I attract. When I get the other kind we fight on equal terms all the time, and then we part.’

‘Have you had many children?’ I asked.

‘None that I know of. It would have been jolly to have two or three, then I could have ruined their lives as well. I could hate myself even more. I don’t think there’s anybody in the world hates himself as much as I do. That being the case what else could I have done in life but write novels? I’ve got to pass it on to somebody, and who else but the great inert mass of the British public? A few thousand of them, anyway, but that’s better than nothing. I hate myself so much I don’t even have a personality — just a novel in my heart and a cock in my hand. Pearl’s writing all this down while the coffee gets cold. Get up you tripehound and pour me some.’ He clutched his forehead. ‘Oh, God, she’s even writing that down before she does it.’

She poured it so quickly that grounds slopped into the saucer. I thought that if life was made too hot for me by the Jack Leningrad gang I could always go into hiding again here, providing I was able to stand the stream of Blaskin’s mediocre self-pitying commentaries. It frightened me that I was his son, though I was heartened by the fact that he didn’t yet know that he was my father. I was beginning to think that marrying off my mother to a beaten-down old prick like this would be the worst favour I could do her. Coffee spilled on his dressing-gown, and at the same time I felt sorry for him, because his easy ways had got him nowhere, and there seemed nothing more terrible to me at my particular time of life. I realized how possible it was that if I did want to hide here he wouldn’t let me do so, whether or not he knew me to be his son, though I was tempted to try it out, just to see how finally rotten he was.

Pearl brought in other trays, and laid a cold supper before us. ‘There’s nothing in this house if not hospitality,’ said Gilbert. ‘Food comes first and love second, and the Devil take the hind leg of the chicken’ — at which he tore it in half, putting a stringy piece of carcass on my plate, and a solid piece of back-meat on his, while Pearl helped herself to fish and salami. ‘I’m beginning to remember rapey old Nottingham now,’ he laughed.

‘What about a girl called Alice Cullen?’ I asked.

‘Rings a bell. There was only one girl in Nottingham because I was shy in those days, though I don’t suppose she noticed it. Used to send out poems to little magazines, long before I descended to being a novelist. When the war ended I went into my first disastrous marriage. It lasted seven years, and my wife thought she was looking after me, saving me from myself and for myself. Poor woman died of a broken heart, and I was hooked again in six months. After seven years of this second go, my wife found refuge in the arms of someone of her own intellectual level, a man who talked twenty hours a day and didn’t say anything at all — a much younger man, which gratified me because it kept her out of my way while I went after my much younger women. The only trouble was she wanted me to go on loving her while she went on loving her psychotic, and I couldn’t do that, because while in some ways I didn’t mind being her husband — until now — I refused to give up playing that part only to become her father. Anyway, it staggered on for eleven years altogether. Where she is now I’ve no idea. Probably staring straight in front of her in some provincial looney-bin being consoled by her bourgeois intellectual drop-out. We quarrelled for years, on and off, but it didn’t come to anything because the only time I used to say I was going to leave her was in the middle of the night when I was too tired to get up and pack. When I woke in the morning I just had to face myself and the normal ordinary world again, and such things as leaving your wife no longer seemed important. It’s all sad, really, but making love is second nature to me. My first is self-preservation, and that’s my one real failing. But nowadays I just enjoy life with my little Pearl.’

He turned to her and said, in a dangerously tender voice: ‘Will you marry me, love?’

Her face reddened, lifted from her page, then turned pale: ‘Are you serious, Gilbert?’

‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘even she’s found out how to torment me. Life gets worse instead of better. I’m even beginning to have headaches.’

‘That’s cancer,’ she said, getting her own back.

‘If ever you marry, Michael, stick to her for life, because the next one is always worse than the one before. Pearl was gentle and obedient when she first came, but she’s a rotten little tiger now. Yes, my young days in Nottingham and sundry other places were the best times of my life. I’ve often thought of going back to find the girls I knew in my youth, and maybe marry one of them if they’re still eligible. But I suppose they’ve all got false teeth, and I couldn’t stand that, because mine would be on one side of the bed in a glass saying HIS, and HERS would be on her side, and while we went into a loving and oblivious sleep they’d be in the air above snapping viciously at each other like crocodiles. If not that, then she’d wear those horrible heavy steel curlers that would gnash my eyes out in the night. I couldn’t stand that sort of thing. But I do remember Alice Cullen — any relation of yours?’

‘She’s my mother,’ I said. He spewed chicken-shreds all over the table, as if about to have a seizure. ‘Last time I was up there,’ I went on, ‘she told me all about you. I’m your son, right enough.’ I filled in the puzzle, and he listened, hands stretched across the table so that I could have driven nails into them, or the bread knife — one at a time.

‘Now shall the eyes of the blind be opened,’ he said, his gills white nevertheless.

‘She never married after that,’ I told him, ‘I think you were the love of her life, though she was too proud and independent to say so. I don’t suppose she’d look at you now. In any case, she’s getting married in a month to a bloke who’s worth a hundred of you, a Communist. I’m sure she’ll do well by him.’

He stood up unsteadily, though he wasn’t drunk: ‘Pearl, go to the kitchen and get a bottle of champagne from the fridge. We must drink to this. I didn’t have children in either of my marriages. Thought I was sterile — which it seems I was, in the married state. But now I find I had a son from the first real love of my life — though I didn’t know it was going to be that at the time.’ He came round, and I stood up as well, knife in hand: ‘Put that down,’ he said.

I didn’t even know I was holding it. ‘Why did you abandon her?’ Memories of Claudine crushed me, and I couldn’t say anything else. What could I do but shake his hand firmly if I was to be true to myself?

‘It’s no use saying I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘because I am.’ He stared at me, and I stared at him, wondering why the hell I’d let myself in for this. Pearl, holding the champagne, glared at us both as if we were pulling some fast trick on her, and at me in particular so that I knew she finally didn’t like me at all. My one ambition was to get into a simple situation, but no sooner had this deep wish struck than I knew it to be impossible. I couldn’t even hate my father for what he’d done to my mother, now that I’d found him, meaning that he was no use to me at all. And I was glad I couldn’t put him to this use, for he was unable, because of this, to sap my strength. At the same time he had none to give me. Meeting him like this was just one more experience for me to mull over from time to time. While we drank the champagne he looked at me, a strange glimpse, almost as if he were afraid in some way. He was certainly shocked, and I had the feeling that he might go off and hang himself in an odd moment of boredom or emptiness at some time in the near-future. But this crazy idea passed off, and he asked me all about my life. I refused to tell him anything at first, saying he only wanted to know so that he could put it into one of his novels. Then he started to cry and said this was true, which made me laugh, while Pearl ran for some pills, so I told him what I thought he wanted to know about myself, which had no connexion whatever to the truth. Some time later I said I was going to the toilet, but I picked up my coat and walked out of the flat, not even bothering to say goodbye.

I went round Sloane Square a few times, then got into a phonebox and dialled Moggerhanger. The line was dead, and when I looked down I saw that the paybox had been ripped out. At the next one I phoned Blaskin’s flat, listening for him while two men stood outside waiting to come in after me. ‘Hello?’ said Blaskin.

‘This is Michael.’

‘I thought you were in the toilet?’ he shouted.

‘I left. I’m in Hampstead. Listen, I never want to see you again. I’m not your son and you’re not my father, so get that into your stream of consciousness.’

I slammed the lid down before he could reply, and pushed my way out of the box. Halfway to the World’s End I realized I’d yet to phone Moggerhanger. At the next booth I got straight through to him. ‘I’m going to Geneva the day after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Pindarry and Cottapilly will be off to Zurich in the morning.’

‘I shan’t forget you for this. You’ve got a place in my heaven from now on.’

‘Can you put me on to Polly?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ he said, and I could see him trying to laugh, ‘she went to Geneva, to see her old schoolfriend. I expect she’ll be back in three or four days. If you’re lucky she might be waiting for you when you get there.’ This was the best weather forecast for some time, and wishing him goodnight I got back into fresh air and headed for the river. The thought of a few days by the lake with Polly put my head above the clouds, made all my mix-ups seem very small indeed. I thought that if I kept my nerve, watched myself, played my cards right; if I was patient, cool, and prayed for the upkeep of my luck, repeated all such clichés as if they were prayers, then I’d sail out of this tricky patch unscathed and happy. I’d haul down the skull and crossbones and henceforth live at Upper Mayhem under my purple banner of bliss with sweet Polly Moggerhanger for ever and ever.

Sleep was deep and dreamless that night, and it’s as well that it was. I’d expected a quiet and uneventful day on my own before the trip to Geneva, but during breakfast the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it, no matter who was trying to needle through. I counted the times it rang, thinking it couldn’t go on to more than fifty, but at the thirteenth I lost patience and picked it up. ‘Hello?’ I said sharply.

‘Michael? It’s Bridgitte.’

I’d expected Polly, Leningrad, my mother, Blaskin, Moggerhanger himself, but not Bridgitte. Why couldn’t I expect everything, even the unexpected? ‘How are you, my own sweet darling? I’ve been phoning you for days and days.’

‘You liar,’ she screamed. ‘I’ve been trying to get you.’

‘What’s wrong?’ She was crying again, and her sobs went through to me. I was getting used to women crying, and was beginning to feel sorry for them when I heard it, no longer feeling just annoyed. ‘What is it, love? What can I do for you?’ I almost pleaded, till I pulled myself together and stopped it.

‘Come over to the house,’ she said, ‘now. It’s Smog.’

‘I’ll be right over on the number-two helicopter,’ I said. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘Dr Anderson was killed last week, in a car crash on the motorway. Oh, that’s all right, don’t be sorry. He was buried the day before yesterday. I don’t care. But Smog won’t eat. He’s curled up in the dark, and won’t open his eyes.’

I slammed the phone down without giving her time to finish, picked up my coat and ran.

I flagged a taxi at the end of the street, and told him to get up to Hampstead like a jet because I’d just heard that my son was ill and in danger of his life.

‘Leave it to me, mate,’ he said, and drove over the first junction with the light just changed to red. ‘I shan’t kill you,’ he laughed, ‘just rest back and try not to worry.’ He went up through Chelsea and Kensington, over the Park and through St John’s Wood. I offered him a cigar. ‘Light it and pass it in,’ he said. I couldn’t see much of his face, but he wore a cap and seemed about forty, and had glasses on. ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. Things’ll be all right. Take it from me. Kids often go off a bit, but you’ll pull him round. How old is he?’

‘Seven.’

‘That’s all right. Under five, and it might be touch and go. What’s wrong with him?’

‘Don’t know. Wife just phoned. Can’t get much out of her.’

‘Women!’ he said. ‘Never mind, mate. They do their best.’

‘And more,’ I said. So we went on, and soon he was pulling up by that open flight of steps climbing the green bank of the garden. I gave him two quid, but he pushed one back. ‘Don’t skin yourself. Just get going.’

‘All the best,’ I shouted, going like Batman, but feeling sick.

I called for Bridgitte. She wasn’t in the living-room. Half the furniture had gone, and there were suitcases all over the floor. Of course Smog was upset. How could he grieve in an atmosphere like this? I had a sudden vision of the brutality of the world towards children, and ran down the stairs into the kitchen. A saucepan of milk was boiling over on the electric stove and causing a great stink. She wasn’t there so I ran upstairs, on to the bedrooms, looking in each one till I found her.

She stood by the window, staring outside: ‘I saw you on your way up.’

‘Then why the bloody hell didn’t you come down and let me in?’ I was full of rage, then saw Smog in the bed, curled up. He seemed to be asleep. ‘What’s the trouble?’ I lowered my voice in case he was. I knew she wanted me to kiss and comfort her, but I was too concerned about Smog to feel much sympathy for her distress. She wore a black sweater, and a black skirt, black stockings, and black carpet slippers with black pompoms in the front — as if she’d really fitted herself out for mourning day and night. I suppose she had a black nightdress, and stuffed herself with black wadding if she was having a period.

Smog groaned and turned over, facing me without opening his eyes. ‘He’s drunk warm milk,’ she said, ‘for the last four days.’

‘And you haven’t got a doctor?’

‘Not yet. His mother came to the funeral, then went off and left us. She’s gone up to Scotland.’

‘I suppose he sleeps all the time?’

She lit a cigarette, and nodded.

‘Go down and make him some Quaker Oats,’ I said, ‘and cool it with milk and butter. Put plenty of sugar in. I suppose you can do that?’

‘Of course I can.’

She went out. I stroked Smog’s face, and he looked at me. ‘What’s all this?’ I said. ‘I’ve come to see you, and I wanted to take you out.’

‘Daddy’s dead.’

‘I’m your dad. I thought you knew. I always told you I was.’

‘You’re Uncle,’ he said.

‘I’m your dad now, as well.’ He was pale, his lips thin and pink as if somebody had tried to doll him up with lipstick. His feet kicked under the clothes. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘My head keeps ringing.’

‘Like a telephone?’

He smiled. ‘No, like a big single bell.’

‘I suppose that earwig got loose, and started swinging on it. Everybody’s head has got an earwig in it. But you know why they always get on that bell and make it ring?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘To tell you that they’re hungry. They want you to stuff some food into your mouth for them.’

‘I don’t feel hungry.’

‘But they do. Your earwig must be getting very restless, ringing that bell like that. If you want it to stop, you have to eat something.’

He leaned on his elbow, but fell back. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

He thought about it. ‘What do earwigs like best to eat?’

‘Depends. Some of ’em are like tigers, and only want raw meat. Others eat bacon and eggs. Mostly they like a nice breakfast if they haven’t eaten for a while. I should think yours is that sort. A bit of porridge to start off, warm, with some milk stirred in it. That’ll keep him quiet for an hour. Then try a bit of scrambled egg.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Listen, Smog, I’ve never told you a lie, have I? A few stories maybe, but no lie. So you try it, and if the ringing doesn’t stop, then you’ll know I’m telling a lie. Either that or the earwig wants scrambled egg.’

‘Where’s the porridge, then?’ he said.

‘I don’t know that there is any. I’m about to have my breakfast, starting with porridge. Bridgitte’s bringing it up to me on a tray so that I can talk to you while I’m eating it. There was only a bit left in the packet, but maybe I’ll give you a spoonful of mine, just to keep the earwig quiet. The thing is that if he doesn’t get fed soon he’ll call on his pal the hedgehog to get on that bell and help him to ring it a bit louder. Here’s Bridgitte, and I’m starving for my breakfast. I always eat porridge to start with, so you’ll have to look sharp if you want any of it from me.’

I was able to feed him nearly all of it. He wanted some scrambled egg as well, but I gave him a drink of water, then lay down with him on the bed so that in two minutes he was asleep. ‘It’s half past ten,’ I said. ‘We’ll wake him at one with some toast and egg. I’m sure he’ll eat now. If I stay all day, he’ll be back to normal by the morning.’

I was sweating with the effort of getting him to eat, and went down to the kitchen so that we could make coffee. ‘I knew you’d do it,’ she said. ‘That’s why I didn’t call a doctor.’

‘Thanks for having such blind faith in me, but it was Smog’s life you were playing with. Why all the packing in the living-room?’

‘I’m going to Holland, with Smog, for a couple of weeks.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’ll come back here. This house is mine.’

‘You’ll live here?’

‘I’ll sell it.’ I made the coffee myself, because first she dropped the milk, then tipped over the sugar.

‘Stay with me, Michael. I need some help.’

‘I’ll stay today. Tomorrow I’m working. I’m going to Switzerland for a couple of days. I’ll get in touch when I come back. We must pull Smog around. After coffee we’ll go to the living-room and put the cases away. We’ll arrange the furniture and clean the place up a bit, so that when I carry Smog down this afternoon he’ll see we’re all orderly and settled. I only care about him at the moment. I never believed it was women and children first, only children.’

We set the living-room to look more or less the same as it had before Anderson was killed. Bridgitte sat in one armchair, and I was in another by her side, both looking through the big windows and down over the lawn.

‘I’m sorry I’m such trouble,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘Your trouble seems like calm to me,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry Anderson died. This is the first moment I’ve had to tell you.’

‘I hated him,’ she said, pulling her hand away.

‘He couldn’t help being what he was. He was Smog’s real father, so I can’t finally damn him.’

‘He was Smog’s father as far as we know,’ she said.

‘I don’t give a bugger who his father was,’ I said sharply. ‘That’s never been a big point with me,’ She didn’t say anything, and neither did I, content to rest in this little calm whirlpool we’d unexpectedly made. Then I took her hand again and stood up, so that she did the same, pressing herself to me. Scalding tears ran on to my face.

‘What are you crying for? Don’t cry, love.’ I saw the picture of her when we first met, when she had been plump over the bones and pink-cheeked, when the eyes had been ingenuous and wide at my lies, and her hair fresh and too young to be tidy. Now the natural shape of her face had come out, the oval skin over the bone pear-shaped head, and eyes blank with misery she never knew how she’d got into. I took her face between my hands and kissed all parts of it, saying nothing because the time hadn’t yet come to use talk on her. Whenever I kiss someone I can’t help telling them that I love them. The words come as soon as the flesh of my lips touches theirs. A kiss with me was never only a meeting of skin, but something that reached right to the middle of me, where it releases those three words out of their box that lead either to pleasure or trouble. They were evidently the words to say now, because it certainly seemed as if she’d been waiting for them. I knew it always paid to tell a woman that you loved her, because unless she was unnatural and had a heart of stone she was bound to respond. But that wasn’t the reason I said it now, for it came spontaneously out of me. Her response was scorching, and we moved in on each other so that I knew we had to find a flat surface somewhere, even a bit of old board, though in such a house it was bound to be more luxurious than that.

‘You’re the only person who’s ever cared about me,’ she said.

‘I can’t help it. What else can I do if I love you? We’ve already been to bed together, and I’m bound to love somebody I’ve been to bed with, aren’t I?

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘I’m not asking you,’ I told her. We went upstairs, but I was disturbed because she could not stop weeping, as if she didn’t know who she was or where she belonged. I couldn’t do any more than lie down and hold her close. ‘Did you tell your parents about it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Yes. I wrote a letter yesterday.’

‘Yesterday? A letter? Why didn’t you phone?’ I stood up and lit two cigarettes. ‘Or send a telegram?’

She smiled, as if pleasantly astonished at her own thoughtlessness. ‘I don’t know. Really I don’t.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘I know,’ she said, weeping again.

I held her. ‘You’re not. But stop it.’

‘I don’t like my parents.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘I came to England to get away from them.’

We made love, and she clung to me as if I were a tree and there was a gale trying to blow her away. When she came it was as if an electric shock had gone through her, and she nearly snapped my old man off. It was one o’clock, so we got dressed and went to see Smog.

He was lying with his eyes open. ‘I heard you,’ he said. ‘What were you doing?’

‘We were lying on the bed,’ I said, ‘loving each other.’

‘Was it nice?’

‘Are you hungry?’ I sat him on my knee: ‘Bridgitte’s getting you some more breakfast.’

‘That earwig’s gone,’ he said. ‘The bell doesn’t ring any more.’

‘We’ll give you some egg then, otherwise he’ll wake and get up to his tricks again.’

‘I’m hungry,’ he said. So we fed him, and he ate well. Afterwards I read one of his books, then another, and he didn’t want to go to sleep, but eventually he did.

I walked alone for an hour over the Heath, up to my ankles in mud and rotten leaves. It started to rain, so I hurried towards the Tube station, and wandered around till I found a bookshop to browse in. I saw an old copy of a Gilbert Blaskin book marked at two bob but I thought it was expensive so didn’t buy it. Nothing interested me. Smog seemed to be getting back into himself, so I was worrying about tomorrow.

Kids were coming out of school, and I made my way back. I didn’t seem to be connected to anything solid. I floated. The present bore no relationship to what was about to happen. This made me think that the world was going to end soon, or that something big was coming to pass. I felt an impulse to cut and run. My instinct told me how to cut and where to run to, so there was no excuse for not obeying it. And because I knew I hadn’t an earthly chance of doing what it said, I felt that something even bigger than my instinct had me in its power. It was having a game with me. I felt an impulse to get away from the rain which was covering the trees and bushes of the Heath in mist.

I got Smog down to the living-room for tea, and he sat near the window, joyfully watching the rain painting its glass. His eyes had grown larger since morning. His skin was fragile, as if made of porcelain; until it moved when he smiled or turned to ask for more food. I told him I would be going away for a few days, that I had to go because it was to do with earning my living. ‘Why don’t you just go to the bank?’ he said.

‘That’s not how you get money. You’ve got to earn it first.’

‘But I’ll make you some,’ he said, jam all over his mouth. Full of energy, he ran to look for felt-pens. I cut paper into small pieces, and he covered each one with designs, but he sensed that something was wrong and made me cut more shapes. Then he asked me for a five-pound note, which he wanted to copy. When he’d done, he wouldn’t give me the note back. So I let him borrow it, but said he must give it to me when I came home at the weekend, adding that if he was a good boy and ate all his meals, I’d take him to Hamley’s, where he could spend it on toys. He went to sleep happy.

I said to Bridgitte that I would see her soon, telling her to look after Smog first, and then herself, which she promised to do. ‘I don’t like people to travel by aeroplane,’ she said. ‘They crash.’

‘Not with me on it. I’m not worried about that. I have faith in those marvellous pieces of machinery.’ Her black clothes were thrown off, and she lay on the bed in a flowered dressing-gown, while I had nothing on. A small bedlight glowed at us. I got dressed, saying I had to go. But I was afraid something might happen to her and Smog, as if only I could look after them, as if without me they were at the mercy of I didn’t know what. I knew it was a stupid fear, which only came because I thought I was more powerful than I was, and that they were weaker than they were. Bridgitte was perfectly strong and competent. Yet I was also scared of what might happen to me after I left, and it had nothing to do with any plane taking a nosedive.

The rain had stopped, and stars were out, gaps between the clouds blown out of shape by a strong wind. At the bottom of the steps I hesitated, and wanted to go back. But I walked away, my footsteps sounding as if they carried someone in a hurry. If they did, I didn’t know what for, because I felt frightened for the first time in my life. I imagined ambushes as I walked along by the Heath, so that I was glad to reach the Tube station and traffic lights, and make my way down Haverstock Hill. I intended walking home through the middle of town, not willing yet to try my hand at sleep. Even a passing car gave me comfort, and eventually the exhaustion I felt put me into a more hopeful mood, and I knew that I would not feel nervous in the morning.

It was a fine cold day, and I started it with a bath and a shave both to freshen me up and to get me clean for Polly when I met her in Geneva that afternoon. I boiled an egg, then phoned Bridgitte to say that I loved her and Smog, and that they were to wait for me at the weekend. When she promised I could almost feel her hot breath going into my ear. Smog was well, she added, and had eaten a lot for breakfast. Right now he was playing in the garden with a neighbour’s boy, the son of an architect whose wife had just left him. He was already talking, she said, of what he would buy with the five pounds when I took him to Hamley’s. That made me happy, at any rate, and I put down the receiver.

I stood looking along the rooftops and backs of the blocks of flats, and I didn’t want to go out, a desire I put down to idleness. But soon I thought of the good lunch I would treat myself to before going to the Jack Leningrad depot for the ritual of loading up, so got my coat and hat on, picked up my briefcase packed with overnight things, took one last look at the den, and departed for a walk into Soho. The river flowed green and oily at the bridge, and I looked into it for a message. I found none, yet felt satisfied by the patterns and movement there.

Tonio greeted me like a compatriot when I went into his dining-room for lunch. I no longer liked him since Moggerhanger had mentioned that Tonio kept in touch regarding the activities of his customers. But I smiled and asked how he was, kept my lips to their accustomed style of action. When he went to give my order I thought (and only knew later how right I was) that he had gone to phone Moggerhanger about my movements. I would have stopped eating there, except that the food was good, though if I had done so Moggerhanger would have become suspicious of me, and in any case when things got complicated I preferred to do what I wanted to do in the first place, because usually it made no difference. On top of having my own way, I got a good meal as well, which I was going to need for the long trip before me, which was none other than to Brazil.

When the Jack Leningrad outfit loaded me up with gold I would sell a bar of it in Geneva, and then make connexions as fast as possible to Rio de Janeiro with the rest. From what Moggerhanger had said I didn’t expect Polly to meet me at the airport, so I would be in and out before she thought to contact me. My plans were in as shaky a condition as I could expect if I hoped for them to succeed. I would send for Polly when I got to Brazil, and imagined in the present euphoric state of my intentions that shed be delighted to come, but if it turned out that she played hard to get, or was too much under Moggerhanger’s thumb to slip away, then I’d make a similar proposal to Bridgitte and Smog, and I was sure they’d take up the idea like a shot. Everything was in a fluid condition except hope, and that’s all I needed, because hope and luck usually went together with me.

Halfway through my zabaglione Almanack Jack came in, one of the few people I didn’t want to see at that moment. I pushed my sweet away quickly, so that I wouldn’t have to offer him anything to eat, and lit a cigar. Tonio came to ask whether I wanted coffee, but really to grab Jack by the beard and collar and frog-boot him out of it. ‘Leave him alone,’ I snapped, ‘or the pair of us will get hold of you.’

He looked at me as if wondering whether I’d gone mad, then went to get the boiled dandelion root that he called coffee at two bob a thimbleful. ‘What’s the score then?’ I asked Jack. ‘You might as well sit down. I won’t be coming here again.’

The grey coiling beard grew around and under his coat, but he looked fairly clean and didn’t smell too bad. ‘The score’s ten to them and none to me, but I’m not complaining. I’m off the plonk. I’m not even hungry. Young people give me money now because I’m part of the scene. It’s changed. I don’t ask them, but they want to be generous, especially if they’re poor. Some of ’em look worse off than I am, but they push a penny or sometimes as much as a few coppers into my hand.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘You were in the front line.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but I want to pull out and go into a rest area for a month or two. If I can manage that I’ll get enough strength to go on till I’m ninety.’

His grey eyes were turning yellow, and the skin visible through his beard was like painted asbestos. ‘I know a nice quiet country place less than a hundred miles from London,’ I said. ‘Might do you a lot of good. It’s that railway station I mentioned.’ Tonio put our coffee down, then looked at us from the doorway to the kitchen. In case he could hear us, or the table was bugged, I wrote the address for Jack, and told him that somebody was there already, but mentioned no names. Then I scribbled a few words to William. I didn’t imagine they’d get on well together, but asked him to give Almanack Jack the waiting-room, where he could fend for himself. ‘I’ll be up myself in a few days,’ I said, ‘just to see that things are functioning. Do you need money to get there?’

‘I’d like a quid if you’ve got it.’ I gave him two, then said I had to run because I was going to work. When I paid the bill I didn’t leave anything at all for a tip, which was something else Tonio could tell Moggerhanger, if ever he felt like it. Seeing nothing by the plate he didn’t come forward to help with my coat, and so I buttoned up and went outside. A taxi stopped to let someone out. I jumped in.

It was a treacherous day, the sky high over the town, with small clouds in it, and a cold wind when I opened the slit in the taxi window, a very good day that sharpened the brain and woke you up before you wanted to be out of bed. But I was on my way, feeling optimistic and full of perception, captain of my own rotten rowing-boat.

Stanley hung my own coat on a hanger and put it into a cupboard where it would stay till I got back. ‘Cottapilly and Pindarry off?’ I asked casually, getting into the tailor-made over-mac.

‘Without a hitch.’

‘They’re good men,’ I said. ‘Very handy people.’

He looked overworked, stooped a little as he went in before me to the big hall. ‘The ticket to Geneva,’ he said, pushing a plastic wallet into my hand. ‘Return.’

‘I hope so,’ I laughed. ‘Never play that trick on me.’

He stopped, and turned. ‘Listen, I’m sick of your jokes.’

‘Don’t the others ever chaff you?’

‘Never,’ he said. ‘So don’t you.’

‘No wonder they got caught, then, if they haven’t got that much sense of humour.’

He was sweating. ‘Who were you thinking of?’

‘Ramage,’ I told him. ‘Who else?’

‘Who indeed?’

‘We’d better get in, or I’ll be too late.’

I felt as if I’d been cast among a nest of madmen, instead of a bunch of cool and persevering smugglers out to beat the British Government’s paid servants of Customs and Excise. To wonder what I would do with fifty thousand pounds’ worth of gold when I finally sat cackling over it by the shadow of Sugar Loaf Mountain no longer seemed to concern me, for my only thought was to act in good faith, as if I were still set on carrying it to the specified place for Jack Leningrad Limited who were known throughout the city as a business firm of the highest integrity.

I walked across the hall towards the iron lung. ‘Good morning, Mr Leningrad.’

He was listening to a record of Chaliapin singing one of his Russian songs, but he turned it down so that it almost faded away. ‘It’s afternoon,’ he said, ‘It’s past two o’clock.’ I must have been out of focus, for he swivelled his mirrors and periscopes, then smiled and asked if I was ready.

‘You know me,’ I said. ‘I hope I get a gold watch at the end of twenty years’ faithful service.’

I heard his dry laugh; ‘We’ll put it before the committee. In the meantime you’ll be a bit closer to it if you start loading up.’ Stacked on the purple cloth of a nearby table were fifty slender bars of the best gold, the fortune of my life that would set me up with a vast ranch in Brazil or the Argentine and make me king of all I surveyed. I held my coat open, and feeling Stanley slot the first bar’s definite weight and warmth in one of its pockets, it seemed as if during some past time my guts had been pulled slowly out of true by the worries of life, and that now, one by one, they were being stuffed neatly back again. The second bar went in. Stanley, like a skilled craftsman-packer, always started from the top so that no tell-tale wrinkles would be left in the coat when he had finished, and the whole weight was in. I regretted that Smog, Bridgitte and myself weren’t travelling together to South America by boat, for then Smog could while away the long hours by playing with these golden bars on the cabin floor, making his own squares and pyramids, triangles and palisades, his eyes glittering over it all. I was smiling at such a pleasant picture, which vanished when I noticed Leningrad looking at me, his fat face and beady eyes behind that battery of equipment surrounding his iron life-saving lung.

Stanley slotted in the third bar, when the telephone rang. As he picked it up, the man in the iron lung lifted his extension at the same time. ‘When?’ Stanley cried. ‘Oh, my God!’

I didn’t like the shocked tone of this, but thought I might as well go on with the loading while Stanley and Leningrad continued their business conversation at the phone. ‘Don’t touch it,’ a voice screamed at me.

The phones were down, and Stanley’s face was dusty with horror as if I were part of a bad dream he’d been having all through his life that had suddenly turned into reality. ‘What’s wrong then?’ I demanded, as superciliously as I could, looking from one to the other.

‘Cottapilly and Pindarry have been caught,’ Stanley said.

‘That’s their hard luck. What’s it got to do with me?’

‘I’ll kill you,’ Leningrad screamed.

‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘You told me they were off already.’

There were tears in Stanley’s eyes. He was crying with rage. ‘They were fetched from the plane when it was already taxiing to the runway.’

‘We’d better get on with the loading,’ I said. ‘If they’ve caught those two they won’t be looking for me. I’ll be as safe as houses.’ A gun was beamed on me, and I knew that Stanley had another ready under his coat. I had the terrible and empty feeling that I was going to have my light put out, and all I could do was go on talking, get in as many words as I could before blackness came, as if under those guns and at the end of it all words were the only thing left.

‘You informed on them,’ said that thin voice, cracking out of speakers all over the room.

‘What’s in it for me?’ I said. ‘They must have given themselves away, somehow or other, so keep your accusations to yourself.’

Stanley’s eyes were almost out of his head. ‘Who else then?’

‘You,’ I said, ‘That’s who else. Load me up and let me go, or I’ll tell Mr Leningrad all I know about you, or maybe we’d all better get ourselves out of here in case Cottapilly and Pindarry talk. And they will, those two, don’t you worry,’ I added, as if I was dead certain of it, traducing all and sundry so that I’d go blue in the face and stamp out my guilty look. ‘I’ve never seen such double-crossers. None of us are safe, so we’ve got to stick together and trust each other. That’s our only hope. If we don’t, we’re done for. It’s certainly a lousy world I’ve landed in when as soon as trouble comes it’s dog eat dog. Worse than a jungle. I’m the best man you ever had, and you’re throwing my faithful service away as if it was an old banana skin. Even if I do do this trip and get away with it, I’m finished with the likes of you lot. There’s not even honour among thieves any more. I’m disgusted to my marrow.’

I was overflowing with honest irrepressible indignation, but this time it wasn’t working. Leningrad turned a knob that increased the volume of every loudspeaker in the room, so that he drowned me out. ‘You scum, liar, traitor. You’ve double-crossed us. Tell me who it was to, or I’ll kill you on the spot.’

I was going to tell him the truth, I swear I was, when the door snapped open, and a revolver shot spattered across the room. I felt it sizzle past my head, a lurch of hot wind that sent a scorching breath at my ear. It must have disconnected some line of the iron lung’s communications system, because the man inside was shouting, and no sounds came out.

Claud Moggerhanger stood at the closed door, while Kenny Dukes, gripping a huge cosh, and Slasher with hands in pockets obviously holding down some threatening weapon, rushed across to the iron lung. Slasher took whatever it was from his pocket and tackled Stanley, who was struggling with a gun. They went down at my feet, and I stepped back so that they wouldn’t dirty my boots or crease my trousers. They fought like lions and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Stanley had a lot of strength and courage in him. They rolled over, blood spurting between them, because Slasher had his blade out and was managing to weave it from time to time.

The table capsized, and forty-seven bars of gold slewed across the floor. Kenny Dukes was getting to work on the equipment of the iron lung, and a loudspeaker had come on again because Leningrad was waving his arms about inside, yelling at him to stop. But Kenny worked like an expert demolition man wanting to prove to a new employer how efficient he was at smashing iron lungs. Under the tangle of splintered equipment Jack Leningrad was firing a revolver across the room at Moggerhanger, and Claud was dodging about the floor with the agility of a man in his prime.

Screams and shots were pitching all over the place, and Stanley who seemed to be bleeding in several places at once was pleading for mercy from Slasher, but just as it seemed that Slasher was seriously thinking about it Stanley got in a kick that sent him flying across the room. Windows that had been painted over with thick black lacquer were shattered by bullets, and the whole tangle of iron lung was on the floor with the man buried in it, and Kenny Dukes still bashing away at the wreckage from above.

I lay on the floor, watching the gold, waiting my chance, and while the chaos was sweeping round me I stuffed another couple of bars in my pouches. Moggerhanger’s hand jabbed into the air when one of Leningrad’s last bullets clipped him, and for a moment he was too dazed to guard the door. With all the jack-rabbit strength in my legs I leapt out of the room, leaving yells of murder, and the heartening sound of more breaking glass behind me. My briefcase was in the vestibule and I grabbed it in a last inspired frenzy of possessiveness — before getting clear of the place for the last time.

Rather than fumble with the lift, I ran down the stairs, calming myself before reaching the exit. I walked into the street, buttoning my coat as I went up by Harrod’s and on to Brompton Road. People passed me, noticing nothing unusual, but I was bewildered, not knowing to which point of the compass I should flee. I had a vision of Upper Mayhem station, of William Hay with his boots off mashing tea in the booking office, then with his feet propped up and a novel bent back in his hands. But to go there would betray him, for I knew they’d trace me soon enough. The wild woods and open fields didn’t appeal to me, either, and neither did I care to head for Nottingham because that would bring trouble on my mother. The one person who could help was my grandmother. She’d defend me against all the gangsters of heaven and hell, never let them get near me. But my grandmother was dead, so no help could be expected from that quarter. The fine day had turned to drizzle and low cloud. At last I got a taxi and sat inside.

‘Where to?’

‘London airport,’ I said, not thinking about it. My instinct took over, though by now I was beginning to hate its guts. I felt cut off from the roots of my intuition, and that being the case, because it definitely seemed so, I sensed a sort of resurgence coming out of the shock and panic, a hope that once more my organism would reform and provide me with the ability to grapple at the unexpected. I didn’t want to think. If you think, I told myself as the taxi made a fair lick west along Cromwell Road, you cut yourself off from luck and the benefit of action.

There was still time to get the Geneva plane, and I had the ticket in my pocket, as well as five bars of gold that would see me right for a year or two. I was already planning my future. I’d sell the gold, open an account with the money in Zurich, buy a few old clothes and a rucksack, call myself a student of languages, then hole up in some quiet town and wait for what came my way. I’d grow a moustache and a beard, and as long as I paid my bills and lived an uneventful life no one would bother me. With only five bars of gold Brazil was out, for a bit of travel there would eat up most of it. In any case I’d feel safer not too far from Moggerhanger’s claws than I would if I were to drop myself conspicuously in some such exotic place. Later I’d get in touch with Bridgitte, though not for a while. As for Polly, it seemed as if she was out of my life for ever.

I sat back calmly as we reached a bit of green on the edge of London, smoked a cigar, and checked my ticket. It was real. My brain settled itself into accepting this new and unexpected future. I certainly hated Moggerhanger’s guts, and couldn’t wait to get a good distance between us. The last information I’d passed on had set him working so hastily to get Pindarry and Cottapilly cooked that he’d nearly caused a bullet to be put through my own head. His sense of loyalty was even worse than mine, so we should never have met, and all I could want in my eternal hopefulness was that he’d now be glad to see the back of me.

I dropped a fiver to the taxi man and hurried in to have my ticket checked. There was exactly enough time. It was a quiet day in the Airline Transit Camp, and I walked calmly into the departure hall with ticket and passport ready. The idea of saying goodbye to the island for a long time boosted my spirit because the morass would be behind me and emptiness in front, just as it had been when I’d set out from Nottingham and tried my luck down the Great North Road. Perhaps someone like me needed this shot-launch into the wide-open spaces every few years.

My ticket was clipped, and I walked across the space to show my passport with a smile. The customs man was watching me, but I went by him without trouble into the waiting-room. A sudden great hunger scooped a hollow in my stomach, and I stood looking at the cafeteria counter, wondering, whether to knock down a couple of double brandies and a few cream cakes before my number was called, or whether to sit calmly and contemplate the last of England from the plate-glass windows beyond which a misty rain smoked across the runways. I felt a pang at leaving Polly, though I couldn’t believe I’d absolutely seen the last of her, hoping that at some future time kind Fate would enable us to meet again. Then there was Bridgitte and Smog, who in some ways I thought more softly on, and I wondered how the three of us would ever meet. I saw matronly Bridgitte in ten years’ time travelling with a sixteen-year-old youth through a north Italian town, the pair of them getting off a bus in some sunny and dusty piazza. I would be lazily painting at an easel on which a few pigeons rested. I’d go over to them, and Smog would be very protective to Bridgitte and wonder who the hell I thought I was, trying to get off with her, but Bridgitte would recognize me, and I’d invite them back to my simple room, by which time Smog would have remembered me perfectly and with great affection.

I asked for a cup of coffee, when a hand rested on my shoulder. The long pale face of a customs man said: ‘Will you come with me, sir?’

No one was to call me that again for a long time. We went back to the passport counter. He asked, now with two more customs men looking on, how much money I was taking out of the country. I told him, and was asked to open my wallet. With the legal amount of currency I had nothing to fear. I stepped out of my existence so as to watch myself being calm, smile, open my briefcase. I expected to be released, as William had been on one of his former forays, and was already congratulating myself on the fact that this little interview did not matter because I wouldn’t be coming through here again.

‘Would you follow me, please?’

I walked into another room, out of the gaze of honest or lucky people who were asked no questions at all. Two policemen were waiting, as well as a lamp-post of a plain-clothes detective whom I recognized as none other than Chief Inspector Lantorn. ‘Take off your overcoat.’

I knew that it was all finished. Lantorn himself lifted out the five bars of gold, and I was cautioned that anything I said might be used as evidence against me, while the customs men outlined the laws under which I was charged.

On my way to the police station I knew that Moggerhanger had arranged for me to be picked up at the same time as he’d mentioned Cottapilly and Pindarry. When he threw out his net, he cast it wide.

My legs trembled, but I had no wish to sit down. They offered it, but I still stood up, as if I didn’t want to be obliged to them for anything. Lantorn pushed me on to a bench. My iron lung was also smashed, and the light that flooded in frightened me so that I could hardly breathe. I wondered when Moggerhanger’s lung would smash, and smiled at the possibility of helping to bring it about. But in spite of everything I couldn’t think of what he’d done to deserve it, because with Inspector Lantorn gripping my arm as we went to another part of the police station, how could I prove Moggerhanger to have done anything wrong at all? If he’d thought there was any good chance of my doing so, he wouldn’t have had me picked up with such alacrity.