Birthday

ELEVEN

Motoring to visit his brothers he would either travel along the M1, or go up the Great North Road, depending on whether he intended calling at Derek’s first, or at Arthur’s. He would sometimes avoid the latter route due to a forecast of mist, and take his chance among coagulating lorry traffic on the motorway.

Whichever he chose, he could home in on either of his brothers’ places as if a Decca navigator had been planted in his brain from birth, much as a bird might have its own inertial system. When his sister Margaret lay dying in the City Hospital he got there in two hours due to far less traffic, but nowadays, even steaming along the outside lane, he couldn’t often reach the legal limit.

A car in front, which would not get into the middle lane and let him go by, ought to have been scorched by the dexterity of his curses but, without the guts or know-how to increase speed, or lacking the sense to shift back to where he belonged, annoyingly was not. Brian never supposed himself to be in a hurry, but the motorway existed, so it seemed sensible to make the best headway possible. His fine-tuned reactions had taught that the faster he went (within limits) the less energy was used, a throwback from his factory days.

Even so, somebody faster than you, with whatever philosophical justification, or most likely with none at all, would be coming up behind, a blood-red underslung gobbet of speed flashing white lights into the back of your skull, in which case you either became in his mind what the slowcoach was in front of you, or you got in and let him by, then came out again and fell in behind the same car still trying to thrust ahead but getting only as far as you had been a few moments before.

On the Great North Road (otherwise the A1 (M)) though mostly dual carriageway, the urge to go fast was less acute, since occasional traffic islands slowed you down. The more relaxing route could take up to an hour longer, because you were now and again slowed by a gaggle of juggernauts jockeying for position to overtake, the drivers no doubt fed up with seeing the same fat-arsed pantechnicon and boring logo for mile after mile, though for all their effort the only alteration in the scenery when they had finished their nerve cracking manoeuvre was a different number plate.

On the A1 (M), close to the A606 turn-off, he was reluctant to risk a stomach upset at a service station, so stopped to eat his sandwiches by peaceful Rutland Water. Having much of the parking area to himself, he wandered to the shore, the surface cut by the plumage of gliding swans, fields beyond subtly indicating that he was in a country with no name in the motoring atlas, a landscape from one of his dreams in which the seemingly unpeopled terrain belonged to him alone.

He recalled quizzing Arthur on the meaning of life, who had replied: ‘What’s the point thinking about what you can never know? I came out of my mother, and when I kick the bucket I’ll go into the soil. No more daylight. Nothing at all. What more can you say?’

Looking across at the coastal indentations of the artificial lake created by engineers and surveyors, he felt no need either to wonder about where he would surely be going, yet could imagine a Grand Deity responsible for every change of the universe, controlling the labyrinthine progress of all human and animal beings.

The chill wind of the winter’s afternoon sent him to his car and on to Nottingham. Avril’s chemotherapy was finished, nothing more to be done, corpuscle wreckers undermining her body with ravages invisible except to X-rays. She had been sent home, and Arthur was looking after her, with only optimism to deploy against the unstoppable course of her illness.

Driving over Trent Bridge he got in lane for his customary glance at the sluggish band of water wide enough to keep the two halves of the country from each other’s throats. He had swam in it, rowed boats in it, played by its banks as a kid, walked and cycled along it, fished in it once with Arthur, and many a time fucked in the shrubbery along the Clifton bank. There was no other river for which he felt so much affection, sliding sinuously with never the same face, for which familiarity had bred love and never contempt.

He threaded the traffic, eyeing each signpost in case instinct let him down in the morass of roads and one-way turnings that, according to Arthur, Derek had taken such pleasure in creating. His latest script had been handed in and would go into production soon. Another lump sum was on its way but, he told Arthur, he would feel like vomiting when his name came up on the credits. Though the idea was more banal than usual, he had regretted not being able to laugh as loud as those in the studio on hearing it was to be called: ‘Anyone for Dennis?’

Derek reminded him that the money he got for it would buy a lot of Alka Seltzers, and that nothing mattered as long as you made people laugh for half an hour and forget their troubles. Let television live for them, and hope they stayed tuned in.

At the city centre cars spun in from every angle as he turned into Slab Square and cruised around to observe the people, well fed now and comfortably dressed in anoraks and bomber jackets and trainer shoes, no overalls or sports coats, or drab footwear. He saw black faces here and there, or someone wearing a Moslem pillbox hat, or turban, though he’d noticed that when such people opened their mouths the accent was often as Nottingham as the rest, language a perfect mixer.

Arthur helped him in with his camera bag, a holdall, a cardboard box of books and magazines, a couple of bottles of wine, and a carton of the best orange juice from the supermarket for Avril. ‘How is she?’

‘Not too well. But she always says she’s all right. She’ll never say how badly she feels. But she can’t keep her food down anymore.’

‘Does she rest a lot?’

‘All she can. I’m glad you’ve come, though. She’ll be glad to see you.’

She sat at the kitchen table in her usual place, as if dressed for going out, wearing a beige sweater, and a skirt as neat as if just back from the cleaners, her wig smoothly combed and so exactly placed one would never guess her affliction.

He kissed her on the lips. ‘How are you, then?’

She smiled, ‘Oh, so-so.’

‘You look all right.’

She had drawn more into herself, gathering her resources to fight off what was attacking her; but the more she did so the weaker she became, which made her even less able to preserve her wellbeing. Science had failed, and it was up to her, she was on her own, she would get weaker, when the lack of resistance would leave only hope, as effective as a stick in a typhoon.

‘Well, I’ve got to feel all right, haven’t I?’ She put a spoon into the bowl of half finished soup. ‘It’s just that I can’t keep much down, though I’m trying.’

A stranger might assume the frail aspect to be her normal physique, but he recalled her former stateliness and wit on her countering Arthur’s outlandish humour. She smiled, and lifted the spoon to her lips. ‘Did you have a good run up?’

‘Yes.’ He sat by her. ‘Not too much traffic on the Al. Hereward the Wake must have been asleep. But I did have a run-in with a camper van near Norman Cross.’

She gave her usual dry laugh of disbelief. ‘You’re a bit of a devil, if you ask me.’

‘The bloody madhead drives too fast,’ Arthur said.

‘It wasn’t my fault. I was on the outer lane, and this day-glo coloured vehicle with rusty bumpers swung out and nearly knocked me across the barrier, so for the next mile or two I worried him. I could see rats leaping out of the rusty holes thinking this was it. Then he lost his nerve and stopped on the verge, half tilted over. When I looked in my rear mirror he was shaking his fist because his engine had dropped out. At least I woke him up.’

‘I used to think I was a good liar,’ Arthur said, ‘but I can’t spin yarns like him.’ His concern focussed on Avril, who let her half spoonful of soup fall into the bowl. She hurried out of the room, waving aside offers of help.

‘She’s gone to be sick again,’ Arthur said after a silence. ‘She can’t even keep soup down. She takes tablets for that sort of thing, but they don’t work anymore.’

The day would come when she’d no longer be in her usual chair, no help to give against what was killing her. ‘Maybe there’s something else she can take.’

Arthur shook his head. ‘It gets harder to hope. I’ll go and see how she is.’

He stood up to look at the framed photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in his stove pipe hat standing against a background of outsized chainlinks, a smallish man with sensual lips, fine hands, and narrowed eyes, a slim cigar between his lips as if its smoke helped with thoughts of some mechanical contrivance not yet in anybody’s imagination.

A white shirt showed under his waistcoat, and a thin chain coming from around his neck would be connected to a small circular slide rule in the left pocket, while another instrument, possibly a compass, swung an inch below the waistcoat. Untidy hair sprouted from under the rim of his hat, and his wrinkled trousers had shines at the folds, as if made of thin leather.

Hands in pockets, but with a youthful vigour in his attitude, he was relaxing after the inspection of some job in hand. Mud on his none too protective boots proved the day inclement, chainlinks behind stained with swathes of rain. He had looked forward to a sweet refreshing smoke while clambering over girders and stanchions, and his momentarily weary gaze may have been because he was impatient with the photographer and wanted to be back at work.

Brian had read that certain people would like to see the cigar eradicated from Brunel’s lips, so that the young wouldn’t be influenced by his seeming pleasure in tobacco, but he thought it better to airbrush out the chains behind him, which were symbolic of a greater evil than that of a well deserved smoke.

In Brunel’s day people smoked and drank, fuelled themselves with rich food (not to mention opium or laudanum) and no doubt fucked all they could, and probably died younger than they might have done, but the civilizing benefits of their works had made life less brutal for those non-smoking teetotal vegetarian politically correct bigots of the present who cast an aura of sin over the simplest of pleasures.

Arthur, who hadn’t smoked for a few months because of a chest infection, asked for a cigar when he came down. Brian passed one from his case. ‘How is she?’

‘Trying to sleep. She’s better off in bed, but she wanted to put on a show, and greet you at the table.’ He blew a smoke ring at the ceiling, which relaxed his features. ‘Maybe she’ll feel better in the morning. It’s hard to know what to do, but after the nurse has been I’ll get the doctor in as well.’ He stood by the stove, and put some peeled potatoes into a saucepan. ‘There’s pork chops to slam under the grill, and mixed vegetables from the freezer.’ He turned on the gas. ‘We shan’t go hungry. And I feel better when I’m doing something.’

‘We could have eaten in town.’

He fitted the corkscrew to a bottle. ‘There’s no need to splash fifty quid on a meal. Last time you did I thought them turds was a bit off.’

‘I’ll pay the next food bill at the supermarket, then. But maybe the three of us’ll have lunch at the White Hart sometime.’

Arthur doubted it, but liked the offer as he filled two glasses of red. ‘They’ve ripped out all the small rooms since we last went, and made one big one, just to make more money.’ He slid the glass across. ‘They can pack more people in, though it looks the same on the outside.’

From staring into his wine he turned and grinned. ‘With little rooms you can have a drink in each and think you’ve done a pub crawl. If it’s raining you don’t get wet, and you can talk to people. I don’t drink much these days in case I have to drive Avril to the hospital, though I’d have to drink more than a drop before I couldn’t drive.’ He scissored a packet of minestrone to heat while setting the table. ‘I’ve got to look after both of us. I never did much around the house except washing up, but I’m getting a dab hand at it now.’

Arthur would always be able to care for himself, but the picture of him in the house alone, bereft, standing in the kitchen not knowing north from south, whether to go out or brew tea, if he should sit down or crawl into bed, laugh or cry, go and sit on a bench in the garden, or stay in and cut his throat, didn’t bear thinking about. He had never lived on his own, and though Brian had heard it was good for self-knowledge it didn’t stop you making mistakes, or lessen the suffering. Whoever said: ‘know thyself’ (and he was well aware of who it had been, but look where it had got Him) should have realized it would make little difference.

‘Maybe we’ll have a drink in town tomorrow,’ Arthur said, ‘I know I should stay in, but Avril gets upset if she thinks I don’t go out because of her. I drive around now and again just to make her think she can look after herself.’

‘We could call on Jenny. She’d like it if we nipped in to say hello.’

‘You’d better phone and let her know.’

Brian found the number in his address book, did a quick tap-dance with his finger ends on the plastic base. ‘I can tell your voice anywhere,’ she said. ‘You are a stranger, though.’

‘How are you?’

‘I’m all right. I always am, you know that.’

No use expecting her to tell him she wasn’t. ‘I’m staying a few days with Arthur and Avril.’

‘How is she?’

‘Not too good. She’s sleeping at the moment.’

‘Give her my love. I hope she gets better soon.’

‘Me and Arthur wondered if we might call in the morning.’

‘Of course you can. I’m always in.’

‘About half past ten.’

He put the phone back. ‘That’s settled.’

‘It’ll give us somewhere to aim for,’ Arthur said. ‘But it’ll depend on how Avril’s feeling.’ He cut into his chop. ‘She might be all right. But she goes up and down. What the end will be don’t bear thinking about.’

‘She’ll win through,’ was all he could say, which neither of them could believe. Arthur had videoed a programme about an aircraft carrier sunk in the Norwegian Campaign. The English captain had locked his aeroplanes in their hangars instead of having them in the air looking for the German warships.

‘It’s a good job the bastard went down with his ship,’ Arthur said, ‘because nearly all the sailors drowned as well.’ Not much talk left, as he stood to wash the pots. ‘I’ll be off to bed in a bit,’ his worry and grief beyond measuring. ‘We’ll get an early start in the morning.’

Avril had been sick every half hour, so Arthur had been awake all night. ‘We’ve got the nurse coming today, and Avril swears she can handle it on her own, but I’ll stay behind to see that it goes all right. She always says she feels fine, and there’s no cause to worry, so maybe they don’t do as much for her as they could.’

Brian propped himself up so as not to spill coffee on the sheets. Rain swathed the house roofs, a depressing day, but after a soak in the bath he felt more lively, as he sat down to toast and coffee. ‘Here’s the key to the door,’ Arthur said, ‘in case you’re back before me. She might have to go into the hospital, and if she does I’ll go with her to see that she’s all right.’

He put it into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do? I can fetch and carry, do anything you want.’

‘No, I’m better off on my own. But give Jenny my love.’ He allowed himself a smile. ‘And if she pulls you into bed don’t come crying to me afterwards and saying you’ve got her in the family way. I saw how when you kissed her at the party you couldn’t tear yourself away.’

He wove between cars parked on both sides, and stopped at the Pakistani newsagent’s for his Guardian, and Arthur’s Daily Mail. The owner looked as if he would like him to buy something else, so he asked for a packet of cigars which Arthur could smoke later.

Rain cleared grit and insect smears from the windscreen, and streaks of London pigeon slime from the roof. Years ago he would wash and polish the car every week, a real bullshit job, or he got a couple of bob-a-job kids to do it for a quid.

So as not to arrive at Jenny’s too early he drove like an old age pensioner, or a happy saver economizing on petrol, keeping to inner lanes and not overtaking on dual carriageways. Beyond Basford Crossing, uncertain of the way, instinct guided him by The Crossbow of the birthday party eleven weeks ago.

A Nottingham town plan was always in his side pocket (even when driving through France) so he pulled in, to find himself only a few hundred yards from where she lived, thinking he would have driven away if he hadn’t phoned already. The two-storeyed modern house was at the end of a quiet and peaceful drive, where those who didn’t live in the area were easily observed, neighbourhood watch never a new concept in Nottingham.

During the time it took to get to the door he noted the lawn well kept to the kerb, and wondered what sort of car was in her garage. He followed her into the living room, her bruised legs looking as if they caused some pain.

She sat with hands on lap, calm and smiling, waiting for him to talk, like royalty on whom such onus could never be put. It was impossible to know what lay behind her untroubled gaze. Only speech might show how happy or otherwise she was, but she gave no sign either way.

Entertaining his girlfriends had never been a problem. They would think him empty and dull if he didn’t keep the patter going, though not so much that she would think him a motormouth. You paused now and again, to let her talk, but such calculations would make no sense to Jenny.

‘I’m really glad to see you,’ she said, ‘I can’t forget how you made the effort to come up specially for my birthday party.’

There was little to say, as if she was too important for facile chat. Being there to come back to, she gave shape to his life, though he wondered if it would be more interesting to stay in the wilderness. ‘And I’m glad to see you,’ he said. ‘That’s all I came up for this time, as well.’ To forestall her calling him a liar (though she never would) he said: ‘This is a wonderful house you’ve got.’

‘I suppose it is, but I’m used to it. We lived in a council house at Bilborough, before George had his accident, then we were able to get this place. I know it’s big, but it wasn’t when I had seven kids running around. One of my daughters has taken one of the rooms upstairs because she got a divorce not long ago, and had to have somewhere to live. If you can’t go home again, where can you go? I sometimes think of getting a smaller place, but you can’t beat a bit of space, can you?’

He had to agree. Maybe that was why he had left the two up and two down, and sharing a bed with Arthur and Derek. He stood by the large window, the glass so clean it might not have been there. ‘Everything looks very tidy.’

‘Oh, I don’t have to look after it,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve got children and grandchildren for that. I don’t have to lift a finger. How many have you got?’

He turned. ‘Three, but I hardly know where they are, or what they are doing.’

She was amazed. ‘How is that, then?’

‘They like to lead their own lives. If they needed help, I’d hear from them.’

‘It sounds rum to me. I thought families stuck together. What about grandchildren?’

‘There could be one or two knocking around.’

‘Don’t you want to see them?’

‘Now and again, I suppose.’

She drew back, as if her questioning might turn him into the unfeeling person she knew he couldn’t really be. ‘You’re still as funny as ever. I never could make you out.’

‘It’s the same with myself, let me tell you.’

‘That’s not the way to go on,’ she said kindly.

But he was angry at being judged. ‘It’s the way I am.’

‘As long as it don’t bother you. I like having my family near me, so’s I can tell ’em what to do! They’re a good lot, though, and don’t need any telling.’

‘Like when they fixed your birthday party?’

‘That was a shock, I can tell you.’

‘Your face looked a picture when you came up those stairs.’

‘I’ll bet it did. But I just couldn’t believe it. Wasn’t it good of them? They went to no end of trouble.’

‘You deserved it, after all you’ve been through.’

‘I only did what I had to do, though it was bad near the end when George kept saying all he wanted to do was die. He asked me over and over for stuff to kill himself, but I couldn’t do a thing like that.’

He recalled talking about it with Arthur, who said: ‘She should have left him at the beginning. He’d have been just as happy, though the few times I saw him he was a miserable bastard.’

‘You wouldn’t leave me if I was crippled like that, would you?’ Avril said lightly.

‘No, love, I’d stand by you to the end.’

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘how could Jenny leave him?’

‘But she didn’t even love him.’

‘How do you know? She must have done.’

‘Not by then,’ Arthur insisted. ‘Not with a real love. He’d have been just as unhappy with lots of young nurses looking after him.’

‘That’s where I’d put you,’ she laughed, ‘if you had an accident. You’d like it a lot better than being at home with me.’

Arthur kissed her. ‘As long as you came to see me every day.’

‘I’d do that,’ she said, ‘but I’d have to make my toy boy wait outside, wouldn’t I?’

Jenny came back with his cup of tea. ‘What are you going to do for the rest of the day?’ he asked.

‘I expect I’ll do some knitting. Then read a bit. Cook myself some dinner. I like my days.’

She could keep them. Time to run. The tea scalded his throat because he couldn’t get it down fast enough. There had to be more in life than talking to someone with no common bridge.

She claimed a kiss at the door, as if by right, which he took as valid so as to get away more quickly. The day palled as he drove into town via the long south wall of Wollaton Park, passed the White Hart where his grandfather had taken his beer as a farrier, over Abbey Bridge and onto the boulevard by the Grove Hotel at whose bar his mother and her second husband used to drink, every glum place getting a good wash from the rain.

He parked by the Castle, which Arthur had always wanted to blow up. It would be a shame to destroy the works of art, but seeing it ascend into the sky even appealed to him at the moment. From the town centre he went into the Lace Market, wanting to walk his feet bloody and have them match how he felt, doubling back among the gothico-elegant warehouses and silent factories on Broadway (mentioned in Pevsner) to a pub on Bridlesmith Gate, where he sat in a sweat and had two pints of lager.

He browsed in Dillons and bought a street map he didn’t need, then had a big tasteless five quid lunch in a tastelessly decorated open plan pub. The vast space of Slab Square wasn’t where he wanted to be, either, but he walked around it twice, bought a magazine at the top of Birdcage Walk and threw it away at the bottom, then did an almost running march back to the car.

He drove to Wollaton Park, couldn’t be bothered to walk around the lake, stayed in the car and tried the Guardian crossword, rain sprinkling the windscreen, cigar smoke steaming up the inside and blocking visibility beyond, just as he wanted it, voices and engines blurred in the drizzle, thinking maybe the Hall would vanish as well, up the spout with everything, didn’t know what he was doing here, if it weren’t for Arthur and Avril (and Derek and Eileen) he’d slide down the M1 back to his snug hole in Highgate. He fell asleep, then woke up and set off for Arthur’s.

Basford Crossing looming up, flick the place, why had he come this way, with so many other routes? Remembered the time when they were going to Jenny’s party in Arthur’s car, Avril done with her chemotherapy and all of them optimistic about her chances.

Two traffic islands, and on the beam to get through there was a queue and he wondered why, thinking it must be the rush hour, if ever there was one, or maybe the traffic lights were broken, glued on red. The car in front moved, and he kept close, as if to unnerve the bloke, then he shunted forward, and on the turn saw the gates of the crossing closed, lights on red.

A train through Basford Crossing? Electric, no smoke, but a train nevertheless, and not a ghost train because it came in a hurry, electric invisible power rushing it between open gates, no kids to howl, but where was it going, and what for?

The gates swung inwards, lights flicked to amber and then green, and he was beyond before red came back. A train using Basford Crossing was a sign of hope, that things would get better for everybody, regenerate the area. Up the hill and over the top, on his way to the refuge of Arthur’s, he stuck two fingers out of the open window, and shot down the road at fifty.

TWELVE

The snout of Brian’s car pointed up the road, houses at the top, and above them a painting of clouds that brought the idea of freedom to mind, an aching to be off, knowing that one day he would have to go through the Tunnel and, after a while of wandering in France, set the compass for any other place culled out of the atlas.

Arthur walked across the pavement. ‘I saw you coming up the road. I’ve just got back from the hospital. I took Avril at four o’clock, and they kept her in. As soon as the doctor saw her this morning he got the hospital on his mobile and told them to send an ambulance. I sat with her in the ward till she went to sleep holding my hand. They doped her up to the eyeballs. I got back a few minutes ago, so you’re just in time.’ In the kitchen he pressed the kettle on. ‘It’s the best place for her. She wasn’t keeping anything in her stomach. There’s nothing else I can do.’

‘I only wish I could help.’

He set down two mugs of tea, a shade of his old self returning: ‘I was surprised to see you back so early. I said to Avril, “He’s giving her the one-eyed spitting cobra. He’ll start living with her, and stay in Nottingham like the rest of us.” She was being tucked up by then, and burst out laughing. But I’ll bet Jenny would be delighted, if you did.’

‘We sat around, and talked, just nattered like old friends.’

‘You won’t tell me anything. I’ve got you weighed up. I know everything about you and always will. Want more tea?’

‘I’ll never stop pissing.’

‘The place is only next to your bedroom door.’

‘Pour me one. If I thought I’d got myself weighed up I’d be dead.’

‘I don’t know about that. If you’ve got yourself weighed up you’re always spot on when it comes to weighing somebody else up.’

Such self-assurance was to be avoided, though his brothers only put on a simplicity of outlook to further their common humour. Upstairs, he looked along the shelves Arthur had carpentered, the top row tight with novels, others packed with travel and adventure books, atlases and maps, small encyclopaedias, date books and dictionaries found at car boot sales or Oxfam shops.

On the walls were framed pictures of Clifton Grove and Wollaton Hall and an antique map of the county he couldn’t tell whether genuine or not. An enlarged photograph of their mother and her second husband Tom included Avril and Eileen, Derek and Arthur and himself, taken in a pub twenty years ago, the mother not dead nor Avril dying, pints on the table and cigars half smoked, shorts and cigarettes for the women.

Arthur’s suits hung in the built-in wardrobe, shirts and underwear, ties and handkerchiefs folded and stacked in a chest of drawers. A chess set was laid on a table by the bed, a game Avril had learned from her father, and schooled Arthur in. Brian once found them in mid-match, each striving to avoid losing, or hoping for checkmate. He wondered whether Arthur would look at the board after Avril was dead, though his shirts would be as neatly folded in the drawers.

The central heating dulled him, so he hung his jacket over a chair and lay on the bed, recalling how he had a long time ago tried to become a novelist, but every proud-arsed bullshitting bowler-hatted toffee-nosed publisher with his rolled umbrella, idly indulging in his parasitical occupation for a so-called gentleman, had turned lily-white thumbs down on everything he wrote, Soviet Bloomsbury’s censorship wanting none of him.

His furnished attic room had been at 13 Cockroach Villas near St Pancras Station, as if ever ready, at such failures, to lug his suitcase down the street and get on the Puffing Billy back to where he came from. Unable to look at another page of scribble one day, he humped a television set — black and white — back to his room from a stall in Camden Town. After using his know-how to still the ever rolling screen it was obvious, on seeing the staid crap displayed, that funny scenes from his pen would have a better chance of making money than novels nobody wanted.

The truth was, he thought, using the sink instead of walking down four flights of stairs, that talent couldn’t be talent if it took so long to bring success, while the starvo humour of childhood and youth pattering in his brainbox for much of the day and night would make good entertainment on the goggle-box. To struggle at novel-writing, when cascades of money waited to overfill his pockets, hardly bore consideration.

In the sixties he’d had the good luck to meet Gordon Pike in a pub near the station. The Gordon Pike. The Great Gordon Pike. Gordon-fucking-Pike, mate. Well, nobody remembered him now, but why should they? Writers for television come and go, and so would he, which was why he thought it better to eat now and die later.

Where the money was, he had to be, and when fate took the upper hand he was only too willing to dig a fur-lined grave and live with good wine, cigars and fifty quid meals till he popped his clogs. No one but a wool-head would do otherwise. Largeness of spirit meant letting fate take care of you, and only self-indulgence would give the best out of life. Seeing a rung on the golden ladder, he swung on and held tight, coming from too far away to let anyone push him off.

Gordon Pike hadn’t had much schooling, the same for me, Brian said. Even dyslexics get into university these days, but then it was different, or maybe not so much, but a maverick had a chance. Pike, five years older, an air gunner in the war, had written concert party sketches to entertain every erk and bod at the Much Bindings and Little Wedlocks and Upper Mayhems he had flown from on his two tours of ops. Connections made got him into radio, and then writing for the box.

He made mattresses of money, but seemed about to descend into the melancholics’ plughole when Brian met him at the bar, unwilling to get the train to his wife and four kids in St Albans after dragging his feet (in elastic sided boots) from the bed of a girlfriend on Marchmont Street. Pike sobbed on about the hard days of his childhood, not fashionable to do so, but Brian outlined, over the third pint, something of his underprivileged infancy.

Pike, having met a man who understood, went up manic by manic steps to thinking life might be worth going on with after all, and gave Brian his card, telling him to phone if he wanted advice about his scripts.

Brian’s new acquaintance — the inert Pike, no less — spewed his way across St Pancras booking hall, but he got him into a train, then phoned the wife to say (no news to her) that hardworking dedicated Gordon would be needing assistance at the other end, and that she ought to be there, hoping she wouldn’t turn on the big guns of justifiable invective when the poor misunderstood genius opened his bloodshot eyes in the morning and shot his fist into her long suffering face.

Brian’s work was taken, sketches and short plays which, Pike said, were plugged into the hearts and minds (insofar as they had them) of the kind of people which those who ran the television business hadn’t a fart’s chance in a whirlwind of meeting, though they saw good money when they sniffed it. The light of magnanimity in Pike’s eyes betrayed pride at being able to overcome his loathing of everyone in the world just this once. For Brian it was enough, because Pike was God, and he learned from him, then forgot all he had learned, and became himself, as far as a self could be found.

Material came with nothing like the effort of writing a novel. Television up to then had shown family entertainment of the drabbest kind, while as the sixties picked up steam you could write about the lowest of the low provided the decibel meters showed a high enough score of idiot laughter.

He moved by taxi from his room in Cockroach Villas to a flat in Highgate and then, able to believe his wealth wouldn’t melt after waking from a good dream turning bad, a removal van took his accumulating chattels to a property in Chelsea. After waiting till Gordon Pike had conveniently killed himself, he sold his abilities to a company paying higher fees.

If he knew that the sixties were different from any other time it was only because he had read it in the newspapers, unable to believe any particular decade wasn’t similar to those already lived. He was behind the time, detached from it, observing, unwilling to use drugs at parties where hooks could be hung on the stench of marijuana smoked by those of all ages. A certain amount of alcohol and a good cigar was enough for him.

Too old to show interest in those bearded charlatans who toned down their posh school accents to a proletarian mumble, he recalled how so many people claimed to have an engine-driver as a grandfather (instead of being descended from an Irish grandmother) that the country must at one time have been chock-a-block with puffing billies going around in circles.

No utopian nursery themes impressed him, though he wasn’t so daft as not to notice any phenomena which might be useful in his trade. As the decade went on, better and better contracts came his way, as if being in opposition to the times made it easier to exploit his sense of humour.

During his marriage to Jane she showed him a barely comprehensible review in a weekly paper of a so-called play at the Roundhouse, a redundant engine shed in Chalk Farm made into a theatre. A troupe of actors in black tracksuits scrambled up and down a monkey climber in semi-darkness for over two hours, screaming insults at the audience, so that he regretted not having a few stones to hurl back. After the show he heard a man and his wife say they’d never enjoyed themselves so much.

His scorn brought on a quarrel that marriage could hardly sustain; either the actors’ intention had succeeded, or he used the event to undo a relationship there was no further use for. The beginning of the end, they lost their sense of irony, and humour turned into malice.

‘We never go out together,’ Jane said when he wouldn’t escort her to an Arts Lab. He was unable to understand, he said, how art could be produced in a place which carried out experiments on rats. Only individuals make works of art; and nothing but mechanical contrivances ever came from workshops.

Holding such comments back, or smiling to suggest that they were harmless, maddened her when wanting an honest opinion on some ‘happening’. ‘You’re getting to be like your grandfather.’ She nodded at the old man’s photograph pinned beyond his typewriter. ‘And you’re even beginning to dress the same’ — seeing him in a suit and tie for a party, rather than jeans that reminded him of overalls at the factory.

She took him to the LSE on the night of a ‘sit-in’, where talk of peasant revolutions and working class uprisings seemed a more exciting game to the students than Monopoly or Scrabble. He talked with someone on whom more than twenty thousand pounds of education was being wasted by a shilling copy of The Little Red Book. He wanted to know if Brian didn’t feel treacherous at having left his working class roots (as if he was an aspidistra!) instead of staying to politicize ‘the masses’ with his superior powers of understanding. Brian wanted to say fuck off and don’t be such a daft prick, but politely told him that no rural worker or factory hand with a sense of humour would listen to the exhortations of a Chinese tyrant, and he saw their talk as no more than a middle-class ploy to keep the workers in their place — for which remarks he was called a racist.

As for sex in the sixties, it made little difference to him. From the age of fourteen the commodity had been free enough with what girls he had known, or with women whether married or not, though from the present talk he could well believe that anyone born in that decade (and surely in any other) would have cause to wonder who their real father was.

When Jane shouted, after he’d caught her out in a love affair: ‘My womb is my own. I do what I like with it,’ he knew that if such was the case she could use it with man, woman or beast for all he cared, though he had to agree when she added that life was too short to be faithful. If he’d wanted loyalty from a woman he should have stayed with Jenny.

In the words of Tacitus they created a desolation and called it peace, yet often mustered sufficient affection to reopen the campaign, energy bubbling up like water in a desert when they thought the well had been sucked dry. Two intelligent and otherwise tolerant people could have continued living together, but it was a time more than any other when not to nod with the herd was taken as an heretical attack on a person’s deepest beliefs, and being in love was not enough.

The spirit of the age decided they had no common ground, though out of pride he preferred to think that with tact, skill in love, and diplomacy, he might have kept the marriage going. In bed they invariably went off like two pieces of dynamite, and no lovemaking had been the same since. After the divorce, when she went back to working on a newspaper, he long recalled (and still did) her short dark hair, lithe almost androgynous body (except when she was pregnant) and sizzling lavatory cleaner wit on which he had sharpened much of his own.

Among people he worked with were those who enjoyed the artful self-indulgence of the decade, until the time of sending their children to schools where ‘doing your own thing’ was thought to be more important than spelling or the precision of arithmetic. Some didn’t care, while others (who had more money, including himself) found places which still believed in education. Many were later to shake their heads at the increase of single mothers, at so-called football violence, and at unemployed youths ‘shooting up’ in underpasses, who were only doing in fact what they themselves had done in their flats and houses.

Meanwhile life in his home town had gone on as it always had. People such as those at Jenny’s party lived in the same old way, impervious to influence, sceptical, independent or ignorant (or both), engrossed in themselves and their families, taking no guff from anyone, nor talking it either. They were rowdy, went boozing, worked hard when they had to (and they nearly always had to) but skived when they could get away with it, and turned violent at times out of boredom or lack of excitement, or anger at not being acknowledged as intelligent human beings, or because a worm of unknown compounds was eating at their livers. They were themselves, and if he were to ask Jenny whether she or any of her family had taken drugs she would look at him ‘gone out’, too surprised to be offended.

Because such people had always been his inspiration he went on earning, but should his brain turn to wet sand, and no more cheques skim through his letter box in the morning or at midday, he had enough money not to worry about the future, though working as long as he could would enable him to go on feeling younger than his age. As happy as he had ever been after a lifetime of thinking that something was wrong if he wasn’t unhappy, he was guarding his time and freedom, having won the long struggle for autonomy.

He slept until Arthur called that supper was ready. ‘So how about coming down, and getting stuck in?’ he said at the second knock. ‘The wine’ll get cold if you don’t.’

Among the spread was a slab of cheddar, cut by wire from a drumlike piece in the local market. Arthur stabbed through the cellophane packet of smoked fish and laid a fillet on each plate.

A bottle of red among the edibles radiated like Eddystone Lighthouse over plates and side plates, glasses, knives and forks, and napkins in metal rings. ‘At least we eat well. I don’t know why, but I can’t remember what we used to eat as kids.’

Brian forked stuff onto his plate. ‘The smells from the dinner centre come back to me now and again and make my mouth water.’

‘You remember the two women who ran the place?’ Arthur laughed as he poured the wine. ‘The big fat one was Miss Carver, and her assistant was little Miss Bradley. Miss Carver used to hit us with a wooden spoon if we didn’t keep quiet. I even saw her take a swipe at Miss Bradley when she did something wrong. Another time, she gave her a kiss while she was slicing the bread. You could tell what they were a mile off, but they were guardian angels to us. Sometimes we’d get custard and bananas for dessert, and I remember the hot milky cocoa they used to dish out. I don’t see how anybody can have mental troubles if they’ve gone hungry. If I felt myself going mad all I’d have to do was think about the next meal.’

Brian clinked his brother’s glass. ‘I was looking at that family photograph in the bedroom, the one with Tom in it, taken about twenty years ago.’

Arthur found it impossible to mention Tom without laughing. ‘A good thing mam married him though. He looked after her a lot better than Harold ever did.’ Chain-smoking Tom, ten years younger, was the bloke she should have had from the beginning. In the war he drove tanks from Chilwell depot to loading ramps at one of the stations, and he’d had a good time taking ATS girls to the pubs in Nottingham, a smart quiff held down under a beret. After demob he never wore a hat again, mindful of his Brylcreemed sculpture to the end.

After his wife died from cancer he met Vera in the lounge of the Boulevard Hotel, and a few Sundays later took her to Skegness in his fifty pound banger. She felt safe with him because he never drove the old Austin faster than forty-five, nor ever did much more on the motorway: ‘I’ve seen too many pools of blood on the road,’ he told her, walking on the sands after a fish and chip dinner. Then he popped the question, and she said yes.

He was thin and above middle height, lantern jawed, blue-eyed and jaunty, cool and dependable. They’d sit holding hands and looking at television, each with a fag on the smoulder, drinking mugs of strong sweet tea. Sometimes they’d go to the pub, and put back shorts or half pints, or both in rotation.

Tom was the caretaker of a large chapel just off Slab Square, a four-roomed flat going with the job. On Saturday night, trying to sleep, Brian would hear gangs of drunks coming out of the pubs, the crash of glass sounding like bars of contemporary music, and curses when they set on each other under the chapel wall four floors below, then the clatter of boots as the shaven headed, earringed posse of Nottingham Lambs fled before the screaming sirens.

On Saturday afternoon Tom checked the heating system of the chapel for Sunday morning, while Vera with bucket and cleaning rags wiped down the pews, helping him to get the work done so that they could go back to their snug living room, to put the kettle on and have a smoke.

‘They were happy enough,’ Arthur said. ‘It was a charmed life. A shame Tom had to have that heart attack while he was up a ladder polishing the organ.’

‘He was lucky to go so quick,’ Brian said. ‘He was only sixty-odd, but at least he didn’t take up space in the hospital for more than a couple of days.’

Tom had been brought up by his mother, no father in the offing, and they had supposed him to be, though without prejudice, a bastard, but he told them the real story when the three brothers took him to the Trip and made him jolly with as much ale as he could sup, plus a neverending supply of fags.

His father Leo had worked at Chilwell factory during the Great War, and on Monday July 1^st 1918 the sun scorched the vast area of camouflaged roofs. People sweated to meet their quotas, in halls storing seven hundred thousand high explosive shells. Out of ten thousand people hard at work four thousand were women, and between them they filled fifty thousand a day.

Tom’s father hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. A clear June sky kept the sunshine recorders working as much overtime as the men and women, focussing the sun’s rays as it swung overhead from one horizon to the other. Blocks of ice were brought into the factory to cool the TNT, but the weather turned more sultry, and the atmosphere in the powder gallery was so oppressive that some found it hard to breathe.

They had been grumbling about the heat for weeks, and knew the machinery was overworked, but each shift vied with the other to turn out powder and fill more shells. The sticky TNT made the bearings overheat, some had been raised as dust to mix with the air, but work went on because the soldiers in France were suffering far worse.

On the First of July (another one, Arthur said) Leo walked out of the boiler house where he worked on maintenance, hoping for a cooling breeze, recalling how he had said to his mother at breakfast that he’d rather be up the Trent doing a spot of fishing in such weather. Standing on the concrete, he took his watch out at just after seven in the evening.

People in a cinema nearby were watching a film (silent, in those days) about an explosion, when the floor vibrated and dust started to fall from the ceiling. Eight tons of exploding TNT shook the ground as far away as Nottingham, breaking windows for miles around.

Leo took an orange from his pocket, then it vanished from his hand and he was thrown across the path to the laboratory door, too stunned to know how he got there. The whole compound was falling apart, nothing but smoke and wreckage as everyone tried to reach the safety barriers. Unable to stand, a man whose right arm was a bloody mess of rags and bone put his left arm around Leo and dragged him towards safety.

Every kind of vehicle was used for getting the wounded to the hospital, Leo on a cart pulled by a brewery horse, one of a long procession of injured men and women on the road to Nottingham. Pools of blood formed between the cobblestones, groans and screams terrifying the horses as whips cracked to drive them on.

Leo’s legs were amputated and he died ten days later, one of four hundred killed and wounded. A week later the plant was turning out shells again.

‘A real killpig,’ Arthur said. ‘Tom worked there in the next war, but they didn’t fill shells anymore. Even so, he nearly got blown up.’

‘Maybe it runs in the family,’ Brian said. On opening his eyes in the morning Tom had a few puffs while pulling on his trousers and shirt. He walked downstairs whistling a tune, and put the fag in his mouth to pull the door open. No sooner had he stepped into the room than a flash and a bang knocked him back, his eyebrows burnt and the fag blown from his lips.

‘It must have been like a bomb going off,’ Arthur said. ‘I expect to mam it sounded like the biggest bang since the Blitz. Tom said he got over the shock in a couple of seconds, but mam swore it was at least five minutes before he could speak. She came down in her shimmy, and opened the doors and windows, while Tom went out to give the gas board blokes the worst bollocking they’d ever had. The man who came said it was a miracle he hadn’t been killed, seeing as how big the leak was.’

‘But you’ve got to sympathize,’ Arthur went on. ‘These days he would have counselling. Social workers would have been all over him. Any whiff of trouble and they’re like flies on raw meat. But some people phone up for them, even if it’s only a husband or wife walking out on a marriage. And the social workers think they’ve got to come in case anybody does themselves in.’

He blew a smoke ring towards the stove. ‘I heard about a bloke who had a car accident, just a bang from somebody coming out of a side road, but he was so upset at his crunched up car he couldn’t stop shaking, and took himself to bed with a cup of tea and a hot-water bottle. He wouldn’t come down to go to work next morning, so his missis phoned the social services and asked ’em to send some counselling.

‘A young woman came, just off her course. I suppose they told her at head office to go and practise on him. The man’s missis sat downstairs waiting, but it seemed to be taking a long time, and when she went up to see how things were going she found ’em in bed together. There was fucking ructions. You could hear her screams all up and down the street, doors banging and cars stopping, even people switching off their tellies to come and see what the fuss was about.’

Brian stopped laughing to refill their glasses. ‘You’ve got to be exaggerating.’

‘Me? I never exaggerate, you know that. A bloke was going on about it at work. He lived two doors down and his wife heard it all. The social worker drove away in her natty little powder blue hatchback and nearly collided with someone turning into the street, so I expect she needed counselling when she got back to the office — before they gave her the sack. Anyway, the bloke she’d been to see went off to work the next day as happy as a bird because he’d pulled a young woman into bed. It all came out later that he hadn’t needed counselling at all. He was a sly bleeder: he’d only stayed in bed knowing his wife would phone for one and that they’d send a young girl. They’re like that round here. I’m sure his wife didn’t have him counselled again, however much he needed it by the time she’d done with him. But social workers are the enemy number one. Most people are wary of them. Nearly every other house has an absconded kid hiding in the attic, and social workers come round in vans now and again trying to get them put into care, like Germans looking for Jews. But nobody gives them up.’

After a silence Brian said: ‘I wonder where old Tom is now?’

‘Probably sniffing around Chilwell, to find out what caused the explosion that killed his dad. No, he’s well rotted in good earth, the only place after you kick the bucket. I suppose we like to think of people looking down on us after they’re dead, and I must admit I sometimes wonder if Grandad Merton’s keeping an eye on us. If he’s up there at all, or down, I’m sure he’s dressed in his best suit, with a dicky collar, a waistcoat and watch chain, and shining black boots. Old Nick favoured blacksmiths, so he’ll be looking on everybody with contempt because they’re moaning about the blazing fires. I can just see that gleam nobody could stand up against.’

His five daughters hated him, but he wanted to protect them from the dangers of a changing world. If he was hard it was because he had been born that way, working at nine in his father’s forge, and never learning to read or write. His older brother George beat him around the shoulders with a steel bar for any small fault, but he grew to well over six feet tall, into the sort of man who imposed his will on others. Bringing up eight children on the earnings of a farrier hadn’t been easy, but his three sons were also tall and fit and, like the five girls, lived well beyond three score and ten, though the credit for that was due even more to his wife Mary-Ann.

‘I was in grandad’s house at Christmas once,’ Arthur said, ‘and I noticed him looking at me as I tackled the plum pudding. He had his eye patch on. He had a smart black one to match his best suit, which grandma probably ironed for him. Anyway, his good eye made it seem as if he was about to laugh. “Don’t eat your pudding too quick, you young bogger,” he growled. Normally he liked to see you getting stuck into your food, so I suspected a trick. Then my teeth bit something hard, and I picked a silver threepenny bit out of my mouth. He’d got grandma to put it in for me, but he didn’t laugh, just looked pleased when I sucked it clean and put it in my pocket.’

‘He was good to us,’ Brian said, ‘but if any of Aunt Ada’s kids came to his door he’d chase ’em away with a stick.’

‘They were a thieving lot,’ Arthur said. ‘He thought people who got in trouble with the police were scum.’

The bottle being empty, Brian went to the front room for another. ‘I read that a litre a day keeps you healthy.’

‘I could do with a couple at a time like this. Grandad never said much, but I remember one Sunday dinner when I was slouched in my chair, he said: “Sit with your back straight at the table. And if you want summat ask for it, don’t reach. And don’t keep your hands on the table when you’re not eating.” So I had to behave, but I learned a lot from watching him. I expect he talked plenty in the pub with other men, though he’d have a lot to say, living in the area all his life. A few pints inside him and he’d be as talkative as anybody else. Not that he had much money to spend on ale, not on the old age pensions they got in those days. He worked his bollocks off all his life, then lived the last few years in poverty, like old people still do.’

Arthur clinked his glass. ‘We’ll drink to him. Aunt Ada said I took after him more than anybody else in the family. She said as long as I was alive Merton would be.’ He speared the last segment of pie. ‘Sure you won’t have it?’

He laid two black Toscanos between their places, the last from a fat cylindrical box from Italy. ‘I’m stuffed.’

‘Me and Avril drove to Spain once.’ He lit up, a noticeable relaxation of his features. ‘We got to Bordeaux and it was hard to stop, but after Bilbao we found a hotel on the coast. It was cheap and the grub was marvellous. We couldn’t speak any Spanish, but we got on so well with the people who ran it they couldn’t do enough for us.’

He stood at the stove to make coffee. ‘We took turns driving, but Avril did most of the navigation because I got us lost once in a French town. On the way back I wanted to drive around the Great War cemeteries in France, and see where the Nottinghamshire battalions got wiped out, but we only had a few quid left.’

‘In the next year or two,’ Brian said, ‘I’ll take both of you in my car. That’s a promise.’

‘I’ll keep you to it,’ Arthur said. ‘I like travelling, and so does Avril. We went to Rimini on a coach ten years ago, but I’ll never do that again. My legs were jammed against the seat in front, and I needed a few buckets of wine before I could straighten myself up. I had one though with every meal while I was there. I always feel good when I’m abroad.’

‘You, me, and Avril together. We’ll do it.’

Arthur knocked the ash from his cigar. ‘You think so? I don’t know. It’s a bastard, isn’t it?’

It was no use shirking the matter. ‘You’ve got to prepare for the worst,’ Brian said, ‘yet hope for the best. If I can’t speak openly to you I can’t do it with anybody.’

‘There’s nobody else I expect it from,’ Arthur said. ‘Or get it from, except Avril. She talks straight about it, and I talk to myself about it all the time, unless I’m saying it out loud to you. I’m always glad to see you for a couple of days.’

‘When I’m not here, if there’s anything I can do, give me a bell.’ Not even God controlled life and death, so any support would be feeble, though better than nothing. He would have taken Arthur’s pain had it been possible, but pain was greedy and never shared itself. He had known women survive cancer of the breast, and men who had beaten cancer of the colon if they caught it early, but no one had lived with cancer of the liver. Yet what if she started walking to Constantinople, eating nothing but garlic; or went by air to the alps of New Zealand and looked on scenery that would shame her illness away? He wanted the glint of mischief to miraculously reappear in her eyes, the colour of apples to shine in her cheeks, strength return to legs and arms, appetite reaffirm itself.

Arthur, a good-looking man who carried his age well, might marry again, easy to imagine, though he felt treacherous thinking so, as if impatient with her dying. ‘When I get back to London I’ll phone the hospital, but I’ll call you first, to check that it’s all right to talk to her.’

‘That’d be best. She might be back here in a few days, but I know she’d like to hear from you. She thinks a lot of you. I told her the other day I’d kill her if she died, and she said: “Well, I’ll have to come through, then, won’t I? I wouldn’t want you to kill me.” He poured coffee without asking. ‘The fact is, she civilized me. I settled down with her more than with any other woman. Everything that’s good in me I learned from her, and it’s a mystery to me why somebody who’s so marvellous got cancer.’

‘I’ve known more women recover from it than men,’ Brian said. The nursery bricks of hope couldn’t explain what lay at the core of illness, though science and a determination to defeat it were on Avril’s side. ‘People walk the streets who’ve been at death’s door,’ he said, to help Arthur’s fragile optimism, which may not survive his putting out the light for sleep. ‘Women have a way of fighting it men don’t have. Maybe it’s faith.’

‘She’s got that.’

‘When we go to France we’ll travel on minor roads and find nice little hotels in the evening. Whatever work I’m doing, I’ll put it by. Tell Avril. It’ll give her something to think about.’

There was no deceiving Arthur, though he was glad to hear of the plan. When Avril died it would be good to get him to France, after the year of mourning. On the other hand, all three might go, no one able to foretell the future.

THIRTEEN

When Brian told his father he was writing for television and making money at the game (real money: he raked in more in the first two years of his success than the old man had earned in a lifetime) Harold Seaton found the whole thing a mystery he hadn’t a hope of making plain. The fact that one of his sons worked for a medium which had mesmerized him from its first appearance was unbelievable. ‘You’re so lucky, our Brian,’ he said. ‘You’ll never have to work again.’

He smiled at the unforgettable comment, lucky indeed at not having to labour the way his father had (when not on the dole) with shovel and pickaxe. As a boy of twelve Seaton carried upholstered armchairs and sofas on his shoulders up flights of stairs. Nowadays such objects were moved by machines, or by two full bodied men, nobody treated as beasts of burden anymore, hernias or heart attacks or sprains bred out of common tolerance.

The weights he had shouldered in the factory at fourteen were now moved by forklift truck, though he didn’t recall being unhappy, as he looked around his carpeted study with its shelves of books impossible to live without. In the early days in London he had humped them about in suitcases, but later they were boxed by expert packers who, as he checked that they were taken down and put back in the right order, made him feel guilty at not having to stretch his muscles like them.

Reference books on the lowest shelf saved searching for some arcane fact or other in the public library, while above were texts of playwrights from ancient days to the present, as well as biographies of actors and comedians, books on the theatre, cinema and television. A ladder was necessary to reach Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Prince, The Crowd by Gustav le Bon, Hobbes’ Leviathan and Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man. Even higher were shelves of Everyman and Oxford Classics: Melville (especially The Confidence Man), novels by Conrad, Dickens, and scores of others, into any of which he could retreat from whatever miseries he made for himself. Without such books he would know even less who he was, and he feared to take many from their places because after the first page he would be compelled to read the rest.

On a side table stood objects of comfort and reassurance: a prize statuette from the Fellows of Humour Society for the best comic writing of one year; a Craven ‘A’ cigarette tin from his service days; a coat of arms mug of his home town; and a photograph of the bust of Euripides from the National Museum in Naples.

He came into his room every morning after a shower, and a breakfast of orange juice, cereal, bacon, egg, sausage and tomato in the kitchen. Except for a quick lunch of salad and bread and cheese, and the occasional making of coffee, he worked till time for a three-course spread in the evening, which never took more than half an hour to get on the table: cold fish for a first course, then meat with vegetables, and fruit or tinned pudding to finish, with half or a bottle of wine to send it down. If he wanted to see faces he went to the Café Rouge, always full of interesting people, and young girls with good figures.

He saw a traffic warden ambling up the street, with so much technological machinery swinging from his stocky white-shirted figure he looked as if about to go into action in Vietnam. He glanced at every windscreen to make sure the car had the correct accreditation. Stopping by a vehicle, he began tapping into his computer and Brian, with a surge of loathing, fetched his high velocity air rifle from behind the clothes in the wardrobe.

The man was gleeful at having collared a victim only half an hour before parking restrictions came off for the evening, maybe some poor bloke passing a few minutes with his girlfriend before her husband came back from work. Break the rifle, push in a fat bellied lead slug with his thumb, snap it shut, silently open the window an inch, and aim at the man’s neck. What a fucking surprise he would get. He would jump twenty feet, notebooks and clobber, flat copper’s cap and two months’ supply of little plastic envelopes winging across the pavement, as he screamed like a stuck pig. That would settle his nice white shirt. Paint it red. What a fuckface. Little Hitlerian bastard.

Not caring to waste the next few years in jail (‘AGEING SCRIPTWRITER IN DISGRACEFUL SCENE’) he slid the rifle back in its hiding place, though maybe serving time would give material for an updated version of Porridge. The man stuck his penalty notice in its neat little plastic envelope under the windscreen wiper, a smile on his pasty chops as if expecting people to clap from their windows, or jeer execrations, which he would like even more.

The tree-lined area was usually quiet, but tonight fireworks crackled as if a serious bout of street fighting had broken out, the odd thud suggesting one side or the other had got their hands on a trench mortar.

He dimmed the lights and stood by the window, red, green and orange bouquets flaring in every direction, hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth decorating the sky in loud continuous explosions, so much seeding of the clouds it was bound to deluge with rain in the morning, as after the Battle of Waterloo.

The multicoloured fire of primitive potlach went on and on, not so much to denigrate Guy Fawkes as to make him regret that the incompetent bastard couldn’t come back and do the job properly. As if a thunderstorm also plied its mischief, he recalled scores of earsplitting rounds fired at German bombers during the war, and missiles in the piercing certainty of their descent as you sat in the shelter hoping your number wasn’t chalked on the snout. Fireworks were harmless, joyful music to the heart, with no significance of death or wounds, rockets exploding in fairy colours, whistles going up instead of coming down.

He put on the light, and lit a cigar. The page of a penny exercise book (at least that was their price when he went to school) was half spent with dialogue, but at the end of a scene he wondered what could be done with the three dustmen, holiday luggage in the cab, and the stolen bank money concealed in the rubbish, which would be difficult to find when they got to France and wanted to pay the bill for their posh hotel at Le Touquet. In their panic they would throw the scummy detritus of England all over the neat chaussée.

Their vehicle, parked among the Volvos and BMWs and Mercedes, would bring even more laughs when they crunched a vintage Rolls (or maybe a Bentley) in the forecourt, and tried to pay the damage with bundles of pristine fifties, joking that they supposed the ink to be dry and Her Majesty’s head the right way up.

At the moment their dustwagon, brand new GB plates back and front, was waiting to embark. They hoped their papers were in order, and a vinegar-faced emigration official provided amusing repartee when they said they were making the trip for charity, before being allowed on board.

A young woman hitch-hiker came with them to France, being promised Chanel Number One from the duty free and a day in Le Touquet. The plot was easy, but speech elusive, though it would come if he sat long enough before the lined page.

The driver of the wagon was an earringed and tattooed ex-jailbird ready for any foray into unfamiliar areas. His loudmouthed humour was laced with cunning, so the possibilities of surreal chitchat were limitless, especially since the gentlemanly (though even more ruthless) Rodney, known as the Admiral, an ex-public school boy with impeccably false credentials, stayed with them to be sure of getting his payout at the end. Such a putrid mishmash promised mayhem.

He ran his finger along the nearest bookshelf, as when rattling palings with a stick as a kid, wondering what books to glance at, restless as ever before writing the first quips. The lit match to light a cigar fell on the carpet. He picked it up, tamped the flame with his fingers, and sat down to strike another. His pen went over the page, ideas pushing into order, dialogue like back and forth balls at Wimbledon.

The phone sounded. It often did at this point, and the shock to his body brought a mouthful of curses. He recalled how Jane used to interrupt him twenty — no, thirty — times a day, and wondered whether that had been the cause of their divorce. If it hadn’t, it fucking well should have been. Any further ideas went over and out like the carriages of the train toppling apart on the collapsing bridge over the River Tay. He snapped off the receiver. ‘Yeh?’

‘Hello, Brian, it’s Arthur.’

He could tell something was wrong. Arthur wasn’t talking from outer space: ‘She’s still in hospital, but they’re sending her home, because there’s nothing they can do. The doctor told me just now. Two months at the most. She knows it, and said she didn’t want to die in hospital. I don’t blame her. I saw them dying when I looked in a side ward once.’

‘What a killpig. You’re going to look after her on your own?’

‘A nurse’ll look in every day.’

‘You must have been expecting this.’

‘I have, but it’s different when you know for sure.’ His tone was level and restrained. ‘There’s nothing to be done. Not a thing.’

‘I’ll come up as soon as I can.’

‘I don’t mind if you can’t.’

He wanted to be alone with Avril while she was dying. Or perhaps she couldn’t bear anybody to see her. ‘I’ll phone tomorrow. I’m just sorry.’

‘I know,’ Arthur said.

He didn’t want to end the talk abruptly, but there was nothing except pain from Arthur, and on his side no mood for the usual talk. The crows were out in such force they hid the sky, and neither could make their voices heard above the noise. Repeating what they had already said would only bring them against the same full stop. ‘I’ll call you,’ Brian said, ‘as soon as I know what time I’ll get there. Anything I can do in the meantime, just pick up the phone.’

‘Yeh, all right.’

‘So long, then. Give my love to Avril.’

‘She might not be able to take it in. She comes and goes, out of sleep doped up with painkillers.’

‘Bye, then.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye,’ a declining syllable from both till each put down the phone.

His pen rolled aside, no more to be done. On his next visit he would stay with Derek and Eileen, because Arthur would want to be alone with Avril, no one to disturb their farewell silences or final pledges.

He tapped out the number. ‘Have a word with Avril,’ Arthur said, after their greetings. ‘I’ve just made supper, and she’s coming down in a few minutes to have hers with me.’

He didn’t ask how she was, assuming there’d be nothing new. ‘I’d love to.’

‘I can’t keep her in bed. She keeps getting dressed when she can. It’s a terrible effort, and I have to help her, then get her downstairs. It breaks my heart, but she’s determined to act normal.’

‘Put her on, then.’

‘Hello!’ Her voice was weaker than when they had talked over the years, and he wondered whether such determination to stay alive would draw down a miracle, or whether a miracle was more likely when hope lost its hold and there was nothing left but to stick up two fingers — if you still had the strength — and tell fate to do its worst. ‘I hear you’re having supper downstairs.’

‘The duchess has to eat some time.’

‘What nice thing is he giving you?’

‘Some chicken, he says.’

‘I hope you enjoy it.’

The ever toneless laugh may now have had a grin to go with it. ‘I eat what I can.’

‘Don’t let him get you drunk. You know what he’s like.’

‘Oh, I do. He’s a devil. I have to watch every move. But that’s why I love him.’

The pause called for a change of topic. ‘I’d come up to see you, but my car got bumped into yesterday.’

‘Not again. That car’s always in the wars.’

‘It wasn’t my fault this time. It got hit by a bus at the traffic lights. The driver must have been asleep. He saw the lights go green before I did, and slammed into the back of me. He went a bit pale when I made him get down from his cab to have a look at the damage. He thought I was going to clock him one, but I kept my temper.’

‘Were you all right?’

‘I was, but the rear lights got crunched, and part of the bumper. I wouldn’t like to drive up the motorway with no brake lights.’

‘We’ll be glad to see you. Arthur loves it when you’re here. But I’ve got to go now. If I’m not at the table on time he’ll shout at me!’

‘You’ll have to shout back, then.’

‘Oh, I would if he did, but I’ve never had to. He’s always been as gentle as a kitten with me.’

Nothing wrong, you might have thought, but nothing right either, because she had the courage to keep her worst fears to herself. He couldn’t go back to his desk, everything he wrote would be a mockery of her condition, as she stood with grace against the odds before going into the dark.