Moggerhanger

Chapter Sixteen

Hatchbacks scooted like blackclocks around my brain. It’s only a dream, I told myself in the dream. Didn’t someone say life itself was a dream? My grandfather’s big wooden mallet squashed the beetles flat. I heard them crack under every blow but it made no difference because they turned into boats and floated here and there to find a landing. Someone pulled the plug, and daylight flooded in.

I woke up wondering where I was. Dreams only meant that you had been down deep, which had to be good. I was safely back in Moggerhanger’s flat above the garage, but how safe was safe after his warning on my vulnerability from the Green Toe Gang? I couldn’t know that whatever he’d said about spreading the word among them that I was not to be touched was worth the breath it was blurted on. No one could live forever in a state of alertness, yet I had to be ready for any onset of peril, while confidently assuming that my instinct for self-preservation would look after me.

If Moggerhanger was playing cat and mouse to see whether someone of my expertise would enter into negotiations with the Green Toe Gang, as a test of loyalty to him (he had a liking for such machinations) he could get stuffed, since I was the one who could well be playing the same game with him, and should I come to believe he was pressing me too close on that front I would send a stamped and self-addressed envelope in a letter to Oscar Cross offering my services.

Walking down to the Mall to put my money in the bank I noticed two old people kissing at a bus stop. Such public billing and cooing at their age was rare, and I supposed that at seventy-odd they went at it at home like rabbits in a thunderstorm. If they were man and wife there was no life on vinegar hill for them, who had no doubt been making love since fourteen, in which time he had pumped sufficient in to fill a swimming pool, and she had come enough for her cries to reach heaven. They looked fit to be banging away with mutually adoring exertion at ninety, to be found dead by one of their twelve children in each other’s arms.

Leaving them to their snogging I wondered whether, being a marked man, I would reach that age and still be going at it. I certainly would be if I did, which merry notion took me into the bank, and then out knowing that at least the cheque was safe enough to pay for a few more weeks of life.

I thought of calling on Frances, but she wouldn’t be home from the surgery till six, so to get my legs in shape after so much motoring I headed for Notting Hill Gate, where I’d take the Tube into Soho. I was alone, but the sky was mine, and if any of Oscar Cross’s Green Toe Gang tailed me they’d have a job keeping up, because I walked faster than anybody except Bill Straw in full infantry spate.

A dead straight condensation trail, turning woolly at the lowest height, came from a jumbo jet, and I wanted to be on it but, a dab hand at sensing trouble, I did a bit of jinking in case someone was at my heels, excited at the thought of Bruce Loggerheads from the GTG behind me, who I could waylay on one of the many turnings to Goldhawk Road and give him a fright.

Trees were budding along Holland Road, in spite of traffic smoke, but when rain sheeted down I buttoned my mackintosh and slogged on. At the Gate I bought a Times, and escalated to the Central Line for Tottenham Court Road.

The Palm Oiled Cat was my favourite Soho Pub. Wayland Smith was at the bar, a well-built middle-aged man who worked for the BBC. An unrepentant Marxist, he sported a short grey Lenin-style beard and steel-rimmed spectacles. Except in the blaze of summer he wore a long leather overcoat to look like a commissar, and a brown fur hat made from a nondescript Siberian tomcat. Or maybe he’d trapped it himself at Daub and Wattle Cottage in Wiltshire. He gave an icy it’s-off-to-the-Gulag-for-you-my-lad smile. “Good to see you, Cullen.”

My pint tasted rotten, but at least I was drinking it in Soho. “Still working for the Beeb, Wayland, dumbing down all those shows?”

This was maligning him and the Great Corporation, for their efforts to keep the populace docile instead of being out on the streets throwing bricks at illegal immigrant and government ministers. It wasn’t hard to twit him in that rig, but another smile made him seem more human, though I knew better. “We only give the people what they want,” he said. “But how are you getting along?” He always handed out as good as he got: “Still in the smuggling trade?”

“I do bring a few poor folk over in the boot of my car now and again, whenever I’m feeling bored. I go to France and pack half a dozen in a white van, and don’t charge them a penny for the dubious pleasure of living on this right little tight little island. I’ve even taken one or two all the way to Bradford so that they can burn a few more books on sticks, and chase that writer for the million dollar reward.”

He nearly puked up the beer I’d bought him. “That’s the worst sort of racism.”

“Too fucking right, but you won’t say that when you have to send all your dumbed-down scripts to Mecca and get them stamped as OK to produce. Another thing is that if you tried to walk through Mecca in what you’re wearing now they’d have your guts for garters, so don’t talk to me about racism, you scumbag.”

I wanted to make him jump, but he wouldn’t spend the energy on me. “Religion may be the opium of the masses,” he said, “but it’s sacred all the same,” thus giving me more enjoyment that I deserved.

“Nothing’s sacred to me,” I said. “I never did believe in mumbo-jumbo.”

Margery Doldrum came in, and called out, before he could say he’d been in half an hour already and was waiting to leave: “Wayland! Been here long?”

She was willowy without being anorexic, with a well-painted face, and very fine legs visible due to the short skirt. She greeted me with a wave and a smile, and sat on a stool by Wayland. We had met at the time of her fling with Blaskin. “I’ve got you the gen on the GTG,” she said. “It’s all typed in here.”

Wayland stowed the plastic case of papers into his East German briefcase, while I tried not to show I knew what GTG acronomically signified. Instead of gulping the lees of my pint I ordered a double whisky, meanwhile noticing two bluebottles, who had survived the winter, playing leapfrog on the leaded windows from one square to the next, till one caught the other and they began their business.

Wayland frowned at Margery’s careless mention of the GTGs, so it was futile to act as if I hadn’t heard. “Still hoping to nail the drug smugglers and get a knighthood? You’re wasting your time. You tried the same game a few years ago with Moggerhanger, and it didn’t work. It won’t with the Green Toe Gang, either. I got you out of the drek, remember?”

“It’s only something on my mind,” he said sulkily. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Very hush-hush, is it? You want to sell it to ITV? The Beeb wouldn’t like such an underhand move.” I turned to Margery: “Can I get you a drink, love?”

“I’ll have a Cointreau.” She lit a cigarette. A youngish bloke with a General Custer hair-do came in, who I recognised as the man I’d given a quid to outside Selfridge’s a month ago. “Spare a copper for a pint?” he said to Wayland.

I knew he’d get no change there, and he didn’t, Wayland looking on him as a failure of the capitalist system who should be out on the streets throwing Molotov cocktails so that nice middle-class people like Wayland could watch it on television. I gave him something, and so did Margery, but a man further along the bar lifted a fist and told him, in unnecessarily strong language, to fuck off. The landlord’s features turned peevish at him going out to the next pub instead of staying to spend some of what he’d begged in his.

“Another of Thatcher’s dropouts,” Wayland said.

“I suppose you think he should be put to work making motorways in the Highlands?”

“Something like that.”

“When did you last wield a shovel?”

“What do you two have against each other?” Margery said.

I made the order. “Not a thing. I very much admire Wayland’s investigative journalism. He should just leave the drugs trade alone.”

“Someone has to do it,” she said.

Perhaps it would be best to encourage their pursuit of the Green Toe Gang, which would leave me a free hand to nobble Moggerhanger. In any case, I had no reason to involve myself with the GTGs. Let Wayland and Margery do it, though their plaguy incompetence could land them in an adder’s nest of such danger that after getting cut up for their trouble the morticians would have difficulty fitting the bits together. I had no wish to see Margery with a beard.

“Such opinions from you,” Wayland piped up smugly, “convince me that we should continue to do precisely what we’re doing.”

“All right,” I said, “but the Green Toe Gang don’t mess about. Do a programme on unmarried teenaged mothers in south London. Or investigate Islington Borough Council. You’ll only get knee-capped there, and that’s not so bad, though you’d look a right pair on crutches.”

“Tell the GTGs that. They’ll love you.” Wayland waved Margery’s cigarette wisp away: he’d given up his Stalin pipe on realising that King Arthur hadn’t smoked. “It’s too interesting to let go of.”

“Moggerhanger might deal with you marginally better,” I said, “if he caught you at something like that, because his outfit’s British to the core. But there’s a foreign element in the Green Toe Gang — which is the way things are going these days — and if you fall into their hands, God help you.”

He leaned close, a triumphant smirk. “What if I were to tell you I’d heard about a merger between Moggerhanger and the GTGs?”

“I wouldn’t believe it.”

“You may not even consider it worth thinking about, but I shan’t rest easy till Oscar Cross is behind bars.”

“And you know what would happen then? One morning at five o’clock the police would smash your front door down and find a kilo of cocaine in the line of Matrioshka dolls along your chest of drawers in the bedroom. You would have been well and truly framed, and telling it to the beak would do you no good. You’d then find yourself in the same cell as Oscar Cross, or a couple of his associates. They wouldn’t top you. Oh no”—I tried to sound like a lifetime jailbird in the know, “they’d let you live, day by day, with all the aggro they could invent. And as soon as you got out they’d move in for the kill.”

Wayland put on a show of not being afraid. In any case he was the type who’d like to see everybody behind bars except himself, loudspeakers in the cells impossible to turn off day or night, his voice on a circular tape shouting the benefits of Marxist-Leninist misery.

“All I’m trying to do,” I said, “is keep both of you from harm. If Oscar Cross or Moggerhanger are going to get caught let the police do it, and if you’ve got any information they don’t have you should give it to them like responsible citizens. Otherwise, stay clear.”

He looked glumly into the remains of his soapsuds, then his piggy little eyes glinted through the mists of middle-aged deliquescence at me, and I thought that if a puritanical vegetarian non-smoker like him got into a future Labour Government he would have an Institute of Political Correctness going within a week. “We don’t have anything concrete,” he said. “It’s still speculation, at the moment.”

“Keep it that way. Do something else. Write a novel, like Gilbert Blaskin. It keeps him out of mischief, most of the time.” I turned to Margery. “Another, love?”

She smiled at the mention of Blaskin. “How is the old roué?”

Her affair with him had long ago ended, so I could say: “When I left his place an hour ago he was doing something unspeakable to a young woman thesis writer on his casting couch, at the same time complaining that the life of a novelist was absolute agony. His hands started to go up her skirt, and her bulging eyes looked like those of a rabbit about to be eaten by a python at the zoo, so it was obviously the time for me to leave. The last thing I heard at the door was him saying: ‘I don’t have much to do with any woman now, my dear, unless it’s a case of instantaneous unadulterated and perfervid passion, against which no man can be expected to stand.’ They must be belting the arses off each other by now.”

“I find that utterly disgusting,” Wayland said, but I caught the flavour of envy, suggesting that he might be redeemable after all, at least in the next life. At the moment though he didn’t like me coming out with such patter in front of his Lady Guinevere, not daring to say so because he could see she enjoyed it.

Her lips moved more from regret that Blaskin wasn’t humping her than out of jealousy. She blushed under her make-up, and laughed. “He certainly has a way with words.”

“He most surely does. I further heard him schmooze while still at the door: ‘How can a specimen of beauty and honour like you have any truck with a moral delinquent like me? Life is a trilogy — but don’t write this down yet — of childhood, boyhood and youth, except that my youth is lasting till death, my delectable darling.’”

Margery drained her Cointreau. “And then?”

Getting a hard-on at my erotic ruminations, I had no option but to go on. “He was leaving no stone unturned to make sure of her. As I finally left he was lifting off her little lacy bra. She didn’t seem to mind a bit.”

“He never changes.”

“Where would the world be if he did?”

“But is he working on anything?”

“Apart from that girl, he’s writing — or so he told me — a novel to end novels, though I can’t think it will be his last. He told me last week that a book called Ulysses, which I don’t know anything about because I’ve never read it, has led a lot of writers of the 20th century being lured into a cul de sac, and it’s his duty to turn out a novel that would get them out. He was pissed out of his ribald mind, so I can’t vouch that he’ll ever do it.”

She showed almost as much interest in that as my sex talk. “It sounds a fascinating idea. I’ll phone and see if he’ll give me an interview. I’m sure I could get it on the air — if we edit it for swearing.”

“He’d love to see you,” I said, enjoying Wayland’s look of horror at the possibility of losing his girlfriend to a lecher like Blaskin. If I couldn’t have her I was more than happy for him to ply his randy old corkscrew, as I’m sure she was. On the other hand maybe Wayland felt easier on leaving me with Margery now that I had made Blaskin the villain. “I must get back to the office,” he said, neglecting to thank me for the beer, not that I expected it, having set it before him only to make his ulcers jump.

“You going back to Richmond?” I said to her, moving close now that the field was clear.

“I shall be, later.”

“There’s something I couldn’t tell you in front of Wayland.” I kissed her cheek. “It would have been inappropriate.”

“So I imagine. But what is it?”

“I’ve fallen in love. No, don’t say anything. Not yet. It’s those expressive eyes, and your subtle inviting lips. The combination goes straight to my heart, and touches something I never knew was there. So is it any surprise, feeling the way I do?”

She straightened herself. “You’re too bloody articulate for my liking. You’re worse than Gilbert.”

“Don’t say that. More often than not I’m painfully tongue tied, though I can prove my devotion if we go back to Richmond.” Such talk showed me her half-naked body with legs spread, and I was disappointed on hearing: “I work too hard to have random affairs.”

“So do I, but I’d willingly sacrifice my time in such a cause,” I said, in her ear at a couple of men trying to get my drift. For a moment I saw her fighting to change her mind, but I had realised by now that you can’t win ’em all, and in any case didn’t fancy going out as far as Eel Pie Island, so wasn’t let down when she said: “Thanks for the offer, Michael. I appreciate it at my age. But no.”

“There’s just one thing,” I told her. “Just forget Moggerhanger and the Green Toe Gang. Or let Wayland go it alone. I love you too much to see your agreeable features not looking as pleasant as I always find them.”

At Liverpool Street Station I looked around for Bill Straw, but his begging site was taken by a bearded young man and his dog. I supposed Bill had found a better pitch, so threw the dog a quid and, buying an Evening Standard, went back into the Underground, my intention of going to Upper Mayhem scattered in the wind by pangs of guilt towards Frances.

I took a train west, on my feet all the way. Between the morning and evening rush hour there used to be plenty of seats, but not anymore, and I wondered where all the people came from, and whether the government wasn’t cooking the population figures, lying as usual about everything.

I got into the house with keys Frances thought I’d thrown on the table in anger two weeks ago. To pass the time I searched her private drawers, for letters from boyfriends, or a running-away fund of stashed banknotes, knowing I wouldn’t find anything because she lived for work that was too exhausting to allow any hanky-panky.

At the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, I heard the car, so put the kettle back on before she came through the door. My name was uttered with just the right tone of enthusiasm: “How did you get in?”

“You left the window open, in your hurry to go out mending ’em and bandaging ’em. Join me in some coffee. I’ll take it to the living room.”

I put hers into a cup and saucer instead of the usual Coronation mug and, as she sat down, the bun of auburn hair, like a new baked farmhouse loaf, started to slip a bit. Her normally pale face, skin that anyone would call fine, was even more pallid from overwork, worrying that one of her patients might be saving up drugs to kill himself. Young as she was, lines were starting to show at the mouth and forehead. She cleaned her small gold-rimmed glasses. “Why didn’t I hear from you?”

“Didn’t you get my postcard? I sent it airmail.”

“Only this morning. It’s on the shelf in the surgery. I enjoyed looking at it between patients. But you could have phoned me.”

I sounded a fool. “The job was top secret.”

“You’ve gone to pieces since leaving the agency. Geoffrey said you would.” She was weeping. “And I always thought you were so strong.”

She was trying to stop smoking, but when I gave her a cigarette she puffed at it, and seemed more relaxed. “Geoffrey was glad to get rid of me,” I told her, “and so were the others. As for me, my spirit at the agency was dying because of the false life I was leading. The work was killing me. I lied that I was enjoying it to camouflage the truth that I was going out of my mind.” The only way to stop her tears was to tell the story of my trip to Greece which, being from my experience and not my damaging imagination, was long enough for them to dry. I took my time, and put on a good performance, up to Moggerhanger handing me the cheque. “You can have a couple of thousand towards the mortgage.”

“I don’t want it.”

I wrote it, all the same, but she leaned the slip of paper against my empty mug. “You’ll need whatever money you have for yourself.”

She was right. I most likely would. As well as earning a fair amount as a doctor she had inherited money, something I hadn’t known when we met, and I had never asked how much. Taking up with a woman who has her own money is an added bonus, but in any case I’d chipped in plenty from my salary towards the house, so I put it in my pocket.

She held my hands. “Your story was a good one, but I’ve heard so many in the last three years that I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

I was struck to the core by this lack of trust. “Even if I tried to tell you about the mechanics of lying you’d accuse me of making it up for my own advantage. I never lie as a cover for any nefarious activities. You know very well I’ve had no affairs since the day we met.”

Which was true, up to the time of going to Greece, though with so many freedom loving women about I had often thought of it.

“I still love you, and you alone, and always shall,” I said, refilling her cup. “Telling lies is only the way to find out the truth about anything. If I concoct fantastic rigmaroles to entertain you it’s only because your life is taken up by the unremitting work of caring for old crocks, when you’re too tired to go to the cinema or theatre. Many a time when we were in bed I’ve told you I’d spent a couple of hours with my mistress, and given you such an explicit account you melted in my arms and asked me to do the same to you as I’d done to her. We both knew it was all lies, but you can’t deny it led to a session we both enjoyed. Everything concerning my trip to Greece is true, except for the bits I put in about my seductions, to spice up matters for your amusement, which I’ll elaborate on in bed later, after I’ve made a spaghetti supper, to be drunk with a bottle of that Bordeaux I laid down last year. While I’m in the kitchen preparing our love feast I want you to be upstairs getting some well-earned sleep. I can’t say fairer than that, can I, my ever enduring love?”

If you can’t make your wife feel good how can you do the same for anybody else, or even for yourself? She stood up to do as she was told, which I had learned no lady-doctor could resist. “Michael, you’re wonderful. I’m sorry I get on at you.”

A dose of homeopathic nagging was only a backhanded form of love, and I didn’t mind, as long as it showed itself in some way. We kissed affectionately. “Come down for cocktails and canapés in an hour. I’ll light the candles on the dining room table, and try not to burn my fingers.”

I did all I said, and she appeared for dinner wearing an amazing silk ball dress, taken from her mother’s wardrobe after she had died, which gave her the stance and figure of a queen. The rest had put a glow back into her face, and though I’d been as busy as all get out trying to make amends for my neglect of her, the kitchen was like a culinary battlefield — yet I mustered enough energy to suggest I’d been playing darts in the office all day. I was formally enough dressed from my kit over the garage, though I had changed my tie.

Naked in my arms that night she said: “I don’t want you to go away, but if you must I’ll understand, and not worry. Just let me know you’re safe every few days.”

On my progress from one place of refuge to another, taking evasive action against anyone after my guts, I would be careful to tell her where I was heading next, knowing I would be all right, and though optimism may tarmac the highway to hell — or a worse locality — I’d enjoy all merry facilities on the way. “I agree to call you more than every few days, if I can manage it, but if you don’t hear from me for a while you have Moggerhanger’s phone number, and can leave a message. He’ll know how to get in touch.”

“I know you can take care of yourself.”

“I promise. So let’s stay in bed for the next few days.”

“It would be heaven, but one of the other doctors is at a conference in Australia, and I’m needed to hold the fort. I love you for suggesting it, though.”

The poor overworked medical drudge set the alarm for half past seven, while I stroked the hair from across her face saying: “I’ll think of you every minute I’m away.”

“And I’ll think of you, my love.” Then she went straight off to sleep.

On opening my eyes in the morning I found a scrawled note by the bed: “Love you, Michael. Do take care, for my sake, and come back soon,” which I kissed and put into my pocket, not allowing the anguish to take me over.

I sat a long time over breakfast, since I’d cooked it myself, which gave the opportunity to consider the way my life was going, and ponder on what future there could possibly be for such as me. But I didn’t think about it for too long, because at my age only those who have no money go into the black hole of self-examination.

After clearing up the kitchen so that Frances wouldn’t have to do it on coming wearily home, and leaving a response to her love note, I went into the living room and picked up her spare ‘Doctor On Call’ notice. A few months ago her car had been broken into, and one of those was the only thing stolen, the radio in any case gone from the previous smash of the side window. The card in my windscreen might deceive some Green Toe Gang scum into thinking the car couldn’t be mine. As Moggerhanger said, you can’t be too careful, and must consider everything, because if you didn’t you’d soon have nothing left to think with. Not that I needed to reinforce my behaviour with the wisdom or otherwise of Chairman Moggerhanger’s homilies. Self-preservation had been bred in me from birth, though why I had committed so many mistakes in spite of it was not for me to say. The time had come, however, to stop making them.