Moggerhanger

Chapter Thirty

At this late age, of forty coming fast, it was obvious that something had to change. Yet how to make it when I still seemed locked behind the bars of being twenty-five years old, was another matter. The experiences of the last few months had had their effect, but the old me, ancient from birth, fought to keep its stranglehold. Even Dismal, disturbed at my disconsolate pondering, spun his eyes sufficiently to indicate that you couldn’t expect new tricks from an old dog.

Intuition nevertheless told me that waiting for Fate to do its worst must stop, that its malign persuasions could only be forestalled by saying yes to this and no to that, and thinking soberly to the limits of what wisdom had been gained. To that extent had I altered, since walking the streets of London in so feckless a mood on the day of losing my job at the advertising agency.

The final twist of my meandering picaro tale was muddied by injured pride, and from chagrin, as we sat together under the flaring lamps of our camping kit in the cave of the signal box on the night of the fire, smoke still bruising our nostrils, like a trio of bandits after a robbery that had gone wrong. We boiled beans, fried eggs and bacon, and mashed tea for a dour meal. The day’s happenings had so upset Clegg that he sliced his hand on the breadknife, shook his head even before staunching the blood, and murmured again and again at how guilty he felt, till Bill barked in his sergeant’s voice that if he didn’t knock off his moaning he would throw him onto the railway line.

“You could as well say it was all my fault, Cleggie,” I consoled him, “because I wasn’t here to keep an eye on things, either. I should have foreseen what was likely to happen.”

“Now we know where Cottapilly, Kenny Dukes and Pindary were,” Bill said, “while we motored to London and delivered Moggerhanger’s dope like a couple of fools.”

We figured how they had hid along the hedge till Clegg had taken Dismal for his after-lunch walk and then, seeing their opportunity, and losing no time, they slipped in to do the business. Setting the red cock on a house was a far from unknown method of a villain getting his revenge. The job must have been so easy they laughed all the way back to where their car was hidden. I should have used my imagination, and known Moggerhanger would find a way of putting me to a little inconvenience for the stunt we had pulled on him.

Even had there been neighbours close it wouldn’t have stopped them. I failed to consider how isolated the place was when I bought it. For one thing the price had been too good to argue about, and for another I was chuffed at having a railway station all to myself, able to dream of trains rumbling through while yours truly was content to go nowhere.

You can’t think of everything, though events now told me that you should at least try. To save as much of my sanity as could be spared I put the incident down to Fate, but for the last time, and with a capital F, that unknown quantity which makes something happen beyond the limits of expectation. At least we had screwed a hundred thousand out of Moggerhanger, and I had smashed the pride and joy of his whisky tank, which he could never have anticipated either. Nothing made up for the firing of my house, but he had something to remember me by. What a bastard he was, though, planning to have me smashed to pulp by his Bermondsey specials, and burned out as well. He’d never been one to do things by halves.

The insurance man suggested that the house might have gone up like a box of matches due to faulty wiring. I offered neither denial nor comment, on the advice of Bill, who said that if I fell into an argument they might try to do me down. He was a man of the world in more ways than me, and though nothing had been wrong with the electrics, because I’d had the place rewired on buying it, I did as he said, and kept shtum. So I got a fair deal for the restoration.

The house wasn’t a total wreck, in any case. Within a year the floors had been rebuilt, the roof replaced, chimneys rebricked, and decorations done. Bill’s forceful bonhomie with the builders, as well as my sharp eye, and the fact that I worked harder than ever in my life, denied them any opportunity to bodge or skive, so that it came back to home and beauty stage by stage, not quite Buckingham Palace, as Bill had urged, but a solid and comfortable replica worth keeping for life, which was all I wanted. How could I lose my affection for a place reborn from such a memorable fire?

Clegg, Dismal and I pigged it meantime in the signal box, while Bill bought a bivouac tent and camped well away from the building site. As blissful as a sandboy, he whistled and sang all day long, making fires of charred wood collected from the surroundings to boil and fry his meals on. He couldn’t have had such a good time since Normandy, and only a few artillery shells whistling over would have made him more at home.

As soon as the fire had gone down we put together a long unsigned letter to Scotland Yard, saying that if they called at a certain house in Ealing they would find several hundredweight of hard drugs stashed away. They might visit Spleen Manor, Peppercorn Cottage, and Doggerel Bank as well, where incriminating powders might also be found. Motoring to Oxford to drop our missive in the box, I wasn’t sufficiently optimistic to suppose such narking would do the trick.

But it did. Those in high places thought it time that Moggerhanger’s long run was fullstopped. Kenny Dukes and his two pals, resting and gloating at home base from their firebug endeavours were, to our delight, pulled in.

Apart from the establishment at Ealing simultaneous descents were made on Moggerhanger’s other depots. Ronald Delphick was dragged screaming from his Yorkshire retreat with hurriedly concealed powder spilling from his armpits.

Moggerhanger at home swore he knew nothing about drugs even when shown clear evidence, claiming — a villain to the end — that his employees had been storing the disgraceful material without his knowledge. The police went about their work as if they’d wanted to nail him for years, but had only been waiting for a convincing tip-off, and all but took the settlement to pieces, finding tons of hard stuff in an underground room which even I hadn’t known to exist.

Chief Inspector Lanthorn must have turned in his grave, or maybe two, because he would never have been satisfied with one. My only regret was that he hadn’t been alive to get corralled into the fiasco, though I mentioned in the letter that the goings on of his son at a certain Channel port should be investigated as well.

After the trial Bill shouldered a crate of champagne up the signal box steps, and Clegg laid out a celebratory meal on a pair of packing cases pushed together. A double tin of Bogie made up Dismal’s menu and, Clegg chopping a few sprigs of parsley over it, he gobbled the mess with disgraceful speed. The champagne poured into a saucer was tongued into his gut so greedily that in a private incarnation he must have been none other than Champagne Charlie, which caused us to wonder about his future.

Not all the barristers of London Town could save Moggerhanger from fifteen years in jail and losing his seat in the House of Lords.

“Getting sent down served him right.” Bill refilled our glasses. “But I don’t think he should have had his peerage taken away. After all, the ancestors of everybody in that place must have done worse to get their titles. Compared to them, Moggerhanger was lily-white.”

While enough funds from other enterprises, not to mention off-shore accounts, would secure Moggerhanger a comfortable retirement on a West Country estate, he could never get back into the same drug business, should he want to make up some of his losses, because the Green Toe Gang took all of the trade, though they soon ceased to do well against black gangs stepping in from the old Empire who were too vicious to interfere with. Bill and I drank to our having got out in time.

Blaskin, who called soon after the fire, was so horrified at our primitive accommodation that he lodged a few nights at a hotel in Cambridge. He asked for all the details of Moggerhanger’s conviction, to put in his next book, and wanted to know about my part in it. Never one to let good material go to waste, he nevertheless scoffed at the style of what I had already pencilled under the never clear enough light from the storm lamps. After running riotous red marks through every paragraph he added a few lines of his own, which angered me so much I told him to back off. “My stuff is easily as good as the crap you turn out, and a lot better than your Sidney Bloods.”

He chided me for imagining that novelists had to have their own way in everything, and cried like pampered children if they didn’t get it. “We don’t want it to be known that there are two of us in the world,” he said. “Why should I leave the writing of such a book to a tyro like you? I want it come out in my name, not yours.”

His horse laugh told me it was impossible for his hand not to go into reflex action at the sight of my scribble, so I capitulated.

Bill left after the house was finished, and I was sorry to see him go, waving for as long as he could see me on the platform. Dismal resumed his duties as guard dog, and Clegg, who could never be still, kept the station tidy and the surroundings so thoroughly up to scratch I wondered whether he didn’t go out during the night to spoil what had been done in daylight.

After I was reinstalled in the house Sophie would come up one weekend and Frances the next. Both knew of the arrangement, and neither minded because, after all, the sixties had long since been and gone. Frances twigged where I was and who I was with, but knew I would always love her, and so I do. Sister Sophie still wasn’t able to make the separation from her husband, since he could never decide to let her go. Some couples are like that.

Back from a walk across the fields one afternoon I spotted my fourteen-year-old daughter Sam halfway up the signal box steps, looking lively and lovely in an electric blue top and green slacks, which rig I supposed to be the day’s fashion for young girls in Nottingham. She ran down two at a time: “Dad!”

“How did you get here?” She took my hand on walking across the line. “It’s marvellous to see you,” I said, when in truth I had been too busy the last month or two to think of her. “But a bit of a shock, all the same.”

“You live in a railway station — how fab! And that cuddly big dog up there. He was standing up trying to move the levers, so I helped him, and then he licked my face all over.”

“We call him Dismal.” She’d had little to eat that day, so I sat her at the kitchen table, while Clegg cooked up a platter of ham and eggs, with little tomatoes straight from the vine.

“I’ve been planning to come here for years and years. As soon as I saw you that time I knew you had to be my father. I nicked your address from mam’s purse, then looked on a map to see where it was.”

She was my daughter right enough. “Does Claudine know you’ve come here?”

She gargoyled, though it still didn’t mar her prettiness. “I don’t know. I hate the rotten cow.” She played with the bangle on her arm. “She hates me, and always has. She’s got a boyfriend now. He’s a real creep. They do it to each other all the time. I caught them at it last week when I came home early from school. It was so disgusting I threw up in the bathroom. I’ll never do that with anybody.”

I was sorry to have confirmation that man hating ran so firmly on the female side of the family. “But does she know you’re here?”

She began to eat. “I don’t care what she thinks. I want to live with you. It’s smashing, all those fields.”

There was nothing I would have liked more. “Did you come on the train?”

She smiled as if expecting a compliment for making the trip. “I thumbed a lift all the way. It was easy as far as Grantham. Then I was picked up by a dirty old man.”

“Don’t tell me. He put a hand on your leg, and asked you to go to bed with him. You told him to stop his game and let you out of the car or you’d smack him in the chops, so that he would have such a crash his false teeth would fly away.”

She looked at me gone out, then laughed. “How did you twig all that?”

“Dirty Horace is well-known for it. He’ll get locked up if he’s not careful. At least I hope so. He’s the pensioner-rapist of the Great North Road. I’ll ram his hearing aid down his throat one of these days, if the police don’t confiscate it first.”

“You know everything, don’t you? I’m ever so glad you’re my father.”

“Even though I’m a man?”

“But you’re different. You wouldn’t carry on like crumbly old Horace. When we stopped he went on bended knees and asked me to marry him. He said his wife had died and he was lonely. He swore he would leave me everything in his will when he kicked the bucket.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I didn’t. I kicked him in the cobblers. He couldn’t chase me, because his glasses fell off. Then I walked to a lay-by and a lorry driver picked me up. I was all right with him. He gave me a Mars bar.”

I felt my stomach turn to a bag of ice cubes. “Don’t ever hitchhike again. It’s too dangerous.”

“I can look after myself. All we talk about at school is how to cut up men if they try anything. I’ve got lots of good tricks.”

“I’m sure you have. You can stay here tonight, but I’ll get you back to Nottingham in the morning.”

She pushed her plate to the middle of the table, tears sliding down her peerless face. “I’d rather die. You’ve got to take me in for good, now I’ve come all this way.”

I didn’t want my one and only daughter to go, but if she didn’t Claudine would set droves of social workers onto me. They’d leap the dikes like troops in a Picardy rush, determined to overwhelm our slit trench, because the more useless people’s jobs the more they fight like tigers to keep them. Claudine would have me marched off by the police for kidnapping minors. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. But we can write to each other any time you like. A few years from now you won’t even need your mother’s permission to come and see me.”

It was an evening when Frances was due. Sam and I were holding hands by the gate, looking across the fields whose greenery, under the light from high clouds, lay with an uncanny glisten on the landscape. Frances got out of the car carrying two large plastic bags as her food tax, as she called it, for the weekend. Her pale brown coat was open to show a white blouse and loose attractive bosom, a gold chain holding the tiny watch I’d given her some years ago.

After our kiss I introduced Sam, who almost fell down with pleasure on my letting it drop that Frances was a doctor, though she rallied when handed one of the bags to carry inside, then was commandeered to get more stuff from the car. After they’d installed France’s luggage upstairs I looked through the living room window from the garden. They were talking and laughing, and I thought what a pity it was that they weren’t really mother and daughter.

“She’s so nice and gentle,” Sam said later. “And she treats me like a real grown up person.”

I wasn’t surprised. “How old are you now?”

“I was fourteen last week.”

I took a twenty from my wallet. “That’s for your birthday, then.”

She pulled me down for a kiss. “Can I have a party for it when I come here next year?”

“I’ll think about it.”

In the remaining hour of light before supper Frances took her for a walk across the fen, leaving Clegg and I working on a loose post of the outside fence, hammering a new support deeply in, looked on by Dismal who was waiting for one of us to bludgeon a finger with the mallet. Threatened with a dab of creosote, he walked off to chase a cat, which ran across the line and mocked him from the other side. A few days ago I had seen him letting the same moggie sample his Bogie.

Clegg took the tools away, and went in to see about supper, while I smoked a cigarette, until Sam and Frances returned hand in hand from their stroll, Sam glowing as if she had made a conquest and was already half in love.

During supper she was unable to stop looking at my wife, and seemed about to faint when Frances smiled kindly at her. I laid a couple of chops on Sam’s plate, who made a spoiled little mouth to show she wasn’t much hungry, till Frances told her that a growing girl should eat whatever was set before her.

“Oh, all right.” Sam flushed with pleasure at having been spoken to again, and finished everything, as well as the fruit for dessert, and the cheese that followed.

After Sam had gone to bed, and Dismal trailed up the stairs to sleep, I supposed, by her side, Frances and I talked about what was to be done. I had related as many details as were necessary concerning my youthful affair with Claudine, and she said that as it should need little more than an hour to drive to Nottingham she would deliver Sam there in the morning. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble then, in persuading her to go.”

Sam, who would have travelled anywhere to be alone with Frances, got in the car as if set for a trip to heaven. She kissed me on saying goodbye. “See you soon then, dad.”

“You will, I know.”

Frances told me that on getting to Nottingham Claudine was also overwhelmed by her status as a doctor, and easily believed there had been no hanky-panky on my part for Sam’s overnight stay, though it was noted that she hadn’t informed the authorities that her daughter had gone missing, which Frances said she ought to have done.

Claudine laid out coffee cups and biscuit plates from her best Littlewood’s china, and Frances stayed until certain that Sam would get no aggravation after she had gone. Claudine even promised that Sam would be allowed to stay with me from time to time, most likely because, as Sam whispered on seeing Frances off at the door, she would have more privacy with her boyfriend.

Frances and I usually talked after making love, often straying into lickerish topics to get us going again. Or we ended by holding each other and drifting into sleep. Had she been jealous of the situation between me and Sophie I would have sent all thought of my would-be sister away, because I knew who I really belonged to. Perhaps she didn’t force the issue because, as a physician, she looked on my affair (if that’s what it was) as if she had written a prescription to cure me from getting into a more threatening relationship. She was so understanding I didn’t even feel guilty, which she’d have regarded anyway as just another sickness, and torn off a further healing chit.

Thinking of Sam, I said one night: “I’d love it if you had a child.”

Her lack of immediate response was filled with pleasurable kissing, until she spoke: “Michael, there’s something I have to tell you with regard to that. I don’t know why I haven’t before. Perhaps I didn’t dare. But it’s my turn now to ask for some understanding from you.”

Hell, what’s on it’s way? Didn’t she love me anymore? We were so snug it couldn’t be possible. Was our marriage heading for shipwreck? No, likewise. But at least I wasn’t long in finding out.

“A good while before meeting you,” her breath was hot against my shoulder, her face unseen, “I had a devastating abortion, which put paid to all that.”

And explained why she had never got pregnant after all the wonderful love we had made in our married life. I knew what was coming, and felt like vomiting. “Delphick?”

She turned to look at me, lips trembling. “You saved me from him, and I’ll love you forever for that. You see, darling, I hadn’t taken the pill for a few days, not expecting anything to happen. But he put something into my drink. There’s no other way to explain it.”

I felt like going out to kill Delphick, but the lucky bastard was in prison, and in any case what men she’d had before we met was no business of mine, and I knew she hadn’t had another since. All I could do was kiss her, and thank her for telling me.

“About Sam,” she said, as ever in control, “I can’t see her staying on with her mother after a few more years. It didn’t seem a good situation, so I can imagine her being thrown out, and if so we’ll have to take her on board. She’s lovely and intelligent, and I’m more than fond of her. On the way to Nottingham she said she would like to go to medical school, and when I said everyone had to study hard to do that she said she wouldn’t mind. We’ll make sure she goes to university, and knows we’re behind her when she needs us. I’ll leave money in trust for her, at twenty-one.”

Marvellous, I thought, before going to sleep, my daughter a doctor too.

A thick airmail letter covered in pictorial African stamps plopped through the letter box. I’d never had one from Bill, so it took a few lines before realising who was writing. He told me he was organising native troops for combat, and getting paid in diamonds. “Of course,” he went on, “I train them under active service conditions. When they’re proficient enough, and know which way to point a gun — though they learn quick — I tell them that as a month’s training exercise we’re going to invade the next province, and take it over from the government there. Off we go, lads, I say. Just do it like I told you. Michael, they love it, and so do I.

“It may surprise you to know that I didn’t have time to spend much of the loot from Moggerhanger, because before I could I got headhunted, and not from Borneo, either. For the present work, I knocked twenty years off my age in filling out the application form, and they took me like a shot, especially when I told them my record. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, old cock. There’s such a lot of work to do out here, but when I retire in a couple of years I’ll be made for life. I’ll come back to Blighty, buy the sort of motor as will by then befit my status, and drive over in style to call on you.

“Meanwhile, I’m in my element. You’d be surprised at the amount of ammunition that gets fired off, bombs thrown and rockets launched. It don’t bear thinking about. They shoot stuff off like it’s Christmas every day, though I shout at them no end. Where it all comes from I wouldn’t like to say, except that if it didn’t get here a lot of factories in the UK would shut down, and we don’t want poor blokes on the dole again, do we?

“Another thing here is that the women are lovely, some of them anyway, though now and again I’ve got to draw the line at those with the lid of a cocoa tin stitched into their lips. Obviously, I can’t always get the food I like — no custard creams or eccles cakes, for instance — but I’m fitter than I’ve ever been. You’ll never believe this, but we had grilled python for breakfast the other day, and I kept holding my plate out to my batman for more because it was delicious.

“We once talked about doing work like this, didn’t we, and I said I disapproved of it, but all I can say is that when needs must they certainly must. No man is perfect, not yours truly, and that’s a fact, and the joy is that I know it. If people only did moral things what would people have to argue about at those posh dinner parties I used to see through lighted windows in Wimbledon when I walked around on my uppers? Me being out here does them a favour. They can leave the immoral things for me to do, and go on thinking how good and pure they are.

“The longer I live the more convinced I am that a soldier is born and not made, but one thing for sure is I’m piling up money in a London bank like shit out of a camel, so when I come back to Blighty I’ll fasten on a nice little manor house, and settle down. If it’s got a few acres I might open a fitness academy, and lay out a commando assault course for young bloods from the City to get toughened up. Retirement for me won’t be too long away, Michael, because between you and me I’m closer to seventy than sixty, though I know I don’t look anywhere near it. I can put myself through the hoops quicker than most of the young lads.

“Oh yes, I almost forgot to tell you. Kenny Dukes and Ronald Delphick turned up here after they got out of prison. They talked me into employing them. You know what a soft touch I can be, and who could turn down a couple of backpacking Brits? They were both absolutely out of cash. I made Kenny my quartermaster, whose responsibility was getting supplies up from the coast, or collecting them from an airdrop. He’ll post this letter when he goes through the lines next time. Mind you, I’ve had to give him a good hiding now and again for slackness, and for treating the locals in ways that he shouldn’t, but he’s improving all the time.

“As for Delphick, I made him a corporal at first, because of what he told me about his education, and put him in charge of a few men, but they just rolled about laughing when he gave them a speech from Henry the Fifth. He was also shy of going on operations with them, and in any case couldn’t learn the front end of a gun from the back. Or he made out as if he couldn’t. I still have to give him a bit of a kicking from time to time, so mostly keep him as my tea boy. He’s not bad at that, but he’ll never amount to much. When I told him, after a particularly telling thump, that eternal conflict was the price of safety, he just wrote it down in a little damp notebook and grinned. What can you do with a tike like that?

“It does get dangerous out here at times, though, and I’ve had a few close shaves, but I love it. Not that I ask you to worry about me, because I know I’ll get out of it in one piece if ever the balloon goes up. There’s a bloke much like me training the wallahs on the other side, and if my lot comes to grief he’ll see me right. Likewise, if his lads go down the chute and he’s in peril I’ll look after him. We met for a chat recently, under a white flag, and worked it all out. He used to be in the Buffs.

“Must go now, and get Fred Karno’s army back on parade. In my few idle moments I often wonder how the kids and young men out here will get on when military instructors like me aren’t available to set them at each other’s throats. We’ll have to confetti them with french letters or contraceptive pills from Jumbo jets so’s they’ll stop breeding so fast. All the same, in this swampy heat who can blame them for having their bit of fun with the girls?

“Give my love to Dismal, and whoever else you’ve got stashed away at Upper Mayhem. I hope there’s still plenty left from your nest egg. Your old pal, Bill.”

The world has a place for everyone, I reflected, even me, but still I very much looked forward to Bill’s return, not doubting that I’d see him again, because if there was a born survivor, it was surely him.

When I decided that the house was back to its former state, only more so, I gave a dinner party. I felt financially safe for the foreseeable future, knowing that the fifty thousand would last some time because most was still on deposit. I would use as little as possible. Paying no rent, and living in the country, it would last at least until some other source turned up.

Blaskin motored in with Mabel for the celebration, and Clegg collected Frances and Sophie, who took the train to Cambridge. What they talked about on the way I did not want to know about.

I shopped for the best brandy, wine of a good year, Finlandia vodka, and Havana cigars. Clegg and I arranged a relatively cordon bleu repast of vegetable soup (puréed); fillets of smoked mackerel with anchovies, cucumber and hard boiled eggs as garnish; then a main course of roast lamb and assorted vegetables; ending with fruit salad for dessert, and sundry French cheeses.

Queenly Mabel wore a long navy blue skirt, and a blouse of vertical blue and white stripes ending at a little white collar at the throat with its scrap of purple tie. Her severe aspect led me to hope she wouldn’t torment Blaskin too much during the meal, as she walked downstairs after changing into something which now made her look halfway between a headmistress and a Victorian prison wardress, which I felt sure was how Blaskin wanted her to appear. He sported his wine-dark waistcoat and a jaunty cravat.

I was never any good at placing people around a table, and we ended up with Blaskin facing Mabel, while I was opposite Frances who could therefore keep Gilbert diagonally in view, with Sophie and Clegg to look at, when he wasn’t getting up to bring in plates and platters.

“Wish me luck, Michael,” Blaskin said, swilling back a shot of ice cold vodka straight from the freezer, and forking up a piece of smoked fish. “After finishing the Moggerhanger novel for you I’ll write my autobiography.”

I scented malice in his task. “If you deal with my mother in it she’ll scratch your eyes out.”

He was too easygoing at the moment to be offended. “On that score both of you are safe. It’ll only be about me. But autobiography is such a long word I thought fifteen letters was a little too much for you to take in.”

“Thirteen,” I said.

He soured at Sophie laughing at my riposte, which I regretted making in case he was tempted into something worse. Frances closed her eyes at the way things might go — and they undoubtedly would, I knew — and showed further disapproval at him saying: “When an author’s stuck for a book the first people to go to the wall are his family.”

I ignored his truism, and lifted my glass to drink to the reconstruction of the house. “When I’ve finished the Moggerhanger saga I’ll put the typescript in a briefcase and bring it to your flat.”

He hooked a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat. “Never put it in one of those. Too many masterpieces have been lost, stolen, or carelessly forgotten. A nondescript plastic bag is best, even a cardboard box if you travel up by car.”

Frances emerged from her trance of boredom. “What if you have a prang, and it catches fire?”

“In that case Michael would do well to go up in the conflagration as well, and get sent to the devil for such lack of foresight. I would only hope I’m not in Hell to meet him.” His domed forehead angled back for a laugh. “My publisher said my books weren’t selling so well these days. He said I needed a juicy scandal to make people curious about my work when the story was splashed over the tabloids. Thinking to do something about it, I picked up a couple of prostitutes in Shepherds Market and paraded with them drunk and laughing on my arms. Nobody looked at us. A policeman leaned out of his patrol car on Curzon Street and greeted me heartily: ‘Evening, Mr Blaskin. Written any good books lately?’ They shot on their way without waiting for a reply. So the story of Moggerhanger’s doings which you’re cobbling together should bring me back into the limelight.”

“I’m enjoying writing it,” I said. “I’ve always fancied myself as a writer, though I don’t suppose you’d like having one for a son. But what can I do when my money runs out?”

Frances confirmed by her looks that she disliked Blaskin. She always had, maybe sensing in him a direction my life might finally take. I had put her right on that fear several times, and tried to make sure she didn’t often meet him, though on doing so she coolly endured the experience for my sake.

“I’ll allow you to write a Sidney Blood for me now and again,” he said, hanging onto the tail of my thought, “which should help you along. Between one title and the next you can always do some typing for me.”

Before I could suggest whose fundament he could crawl into, Clegg brought the leg of lamb to the table, and to stop further disturbing talk from Blaskin I asked him to carve.

“We would rather you did it, Michael,” Mabel said. “The last time he made the attempt he cut his hand terribly.”

“I did,” Blaskin said. “She’d been sharpening the knife and greasing the handle all day, and her twisted smile at my life’s blood draining into the platter terrified me so much I thought my demise was close.”

Being away from the decor of Dumbell Mansions encouraged her not to be put down. “How can I forget? You said: ‘Forgive me, darling, for being so melodramatic, but I think I’m dying.’”

“It’s true, but my alarm lasted only a moment, because I thought: ‘If I’m dead, what will time mean to me then? You can’t take the love of your life with you.’” He looked too lasciviously at Sophie for my liking, though she seemed to be enjoying it. “Mabel nearly had an orgasm while staunching the blood and binding me up. The meat was delicious, though.”

Sophie came out of her wine haze. “Father, I love you, but you do go on a bit much.”

A muted ‘here-here’ from Frances brought a nod of agreement from me.

He pretended to weep, but Mabel was not discouraged. “He’s old fashioned in all his ways,” she said to us. “I’m still trying to get him to use a word processor, but he won’t countenance one. It would save him so much work.”

He filled his glass to the brim with vodka. “A writer at the Pencil Club the other day gave me a proselytising tirade on how practical they could be, but I replied that the road to Hell was paved with good inventions. I’ve done scores of books on my steam Remington, I told him, so why change?” He glanced at Mabel. “But how wonderful it would be, to live with a woman young enough to look on me as an anachronistic, sensitive, knowledgeable and endlessly fascinating character. Not knowing me, she wouldn’t have ten years of resentment to throw in my face, and I would be dead before I got to know her. Then she wouldn’t be too old to marry again, which would be a most amicable and civilised end of the affair. Still, nothing can be perfect in this life, certainly not with my beautiful but eternally icy Mabel.”

“Has it never occurred to you, Gilbert, that I’m not icy at all? I’m not even cold. I know myself to be the warmest blooded and most complicated of women, far more so than any you can have known.”

He crushed out his cigar. “That’s why we’re still together. Even though I can read your mind better than any of my books I never know what you’re going to say next. However, I’m certainly aware that you’re in no way icy when you’re boiling with vindictive rage, as you are now.”

He was getting out of control, and so would she be. I didn’t like it, but I was the host. In any case I was used to his tantrums, and was prepared to let the wrath wash over me without effect.

Knowing him about to go on, Frances could take no more and said, as if to some poor broken down superannuated malingerer in her surgery: “If you don’t grow up, Gilbert, and soon,” she fingered her little watch and looked straight at him, “and live a more healthy existence, and stop being self-indulgent and boorish, you’ll lose your ability to write anything worthwhile, and your will to live will go. You have to become more sedate in your elderliness, more philosophical and calm. Your work will then become much better, even though the books might not sell as well. I’m telling you, as a doctor, that your puerile and unhealthy lifestyle has to change, and if it doesn’t I for one won’t want to see you again.”

“About this Moggerhanger novel,” I barged in, filling the silence, and to break the astonishment. “I look on it as something like the present meal. Both will have to be edged towards a friendly and sensible conclusion. I’m not very skilled at bringing such mechanisms together, so if you help to end the novel, Gilbert, I’ll endeavour to push the meal forward.”

Frances sat back as if not having said a word to him, but he was still pale from her cool harangue. “I’m happy to know you need my assistance,” he said to me. “You’re talking to a man of experience, in all matters, and from now on he will train himself to be considerate, contrite and compassionate. For better or worse he will learn to mend his ways.”

If my putative father had anything it was style, though it was hard to decide whether or not I wanted his complete reformation. He took up the carving knife and cut a choice slice on the platter, laying it with a sober yet loving expression on Mabel’s plate, then passed meat to the rest of us: “Don’t you think that was rather a good way to help things along?”

“Yes,” everyone agreed, as his hand reached for Mabel’s wrist. We’d never known her so happy, and our meal went on merrily to the end.