Moggerhanger

Chapter Four

Away we went, me sitting so high in the cab that I saw a lot more of the countryside than from my low slung Picaro riding piggy-back behind. At the frontier of Robin Hood’s county a sign showed a man in Sherwood green holding a bow, a dying stag at his feet with the arrow in its throat.

The driver told me he was thinking of packing up his job in the AA and going to work for the Post Office. Everybody itched for a change in their lives, and who could blame them? Maybe something in the St. Vitus climate left no one satisfied, not even me.

I felt my cold coming back, as it usually did on the approaches to Nottingham. I dropped the car at a garage not far from my mother’s, and the manager told me to pick it up next day, providing I had a credit card and could pay three hundred quid. The AA man informed me that he wasn’t allowed to take tips when I offered him a fiver for a drink, so I said it was for his kids’ money box, and then he did.

I walked into my mother’s house without knocking. She lived in one of the few old terraces still standing in the area, and I found her at the kitchen stove boiling some cereal product from Peru. She wore purple trousers and a charcoal grey sweater, and multicoloured saucer-sized earrings like Catherine Wheels about to spin her off into what heaven I’m sure she couldn’t imagine. Her hair had no grey so I knew she had been to the dyers, or she’d done it over a bucket. She was close to sixty, though I didn’t know which side. “I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “Have you got any fags?”

I took a carton of Chesterfields out of my bag. “I bought them from a smuggler this morning. Only don’t drop them in that mess of pottage, or you might make it tastier.”

She laid the smokes by, and resumed her stirring. “It might ginger me up. I’m thinking of going back to meat.”

“A good idea,” I said, “and that’s a fact.”

“I’m lively enough, though, don’t you fret.”

“Shall I go to Billy Balls the butcher and buy you a hundredweight of chops?”

“No, I’ll get some tomorrow — organic.”

“Do you have enough money?”

“As much as I want. Gilbert’s generous. He sends me a nice cheque every so often.”

“He told me he was missing you. Said he was dying to see you, only the other day. He talked about your romantic beginnings. He went all moony about what you used to get up to.”

“Moony? That selfish bastard? He’s as hard as teak. I don’t believe it.” She bent down for another smell at the disgusting stuff on the stove. “Are you keeping busy?”

“You know me. Never anything else.”

An overweight girl with a round face and straight mousey hair stood in the doorway. “This is Paula,” my mother said. “She keeps me busy and lively, don’t you, love?” She gave her a kiss on the lips. “I love her so much I almost wish she had a sister. Don’t I, pet? And you can keep your filthy man’s hands off her.”

She needn’t have worried. I was still besotted by Dropshort’s foul-mouthed beauty, till it occurred to me he hadn’t been Lord anything at all. People hardly ever being what they say they are, he was a cove who had pulled off a big bank robbery and, having been to acting class as a youth, and done a fair amount of time studying the subject as well as others in jail, he was living it up while he could, doing so well in the pose of a dissolute lord he almost had me fooled. I hoped he wouldn’t get pulled in by the police before reaching Stamford.

“I’m glad to see you, anyway.” She drained the soft brown blebs and spooned them into two soup plates, unable to stop looking soppily at Paula. “It’ll help us to keep up with our sinful pleasures, won’t it, love?” She turned on me. “How is the big-headed novelist, anyway?”

“Top of the world. He’s still giving Mabel hell.”

“They deserve each other. Come on, darling,” she said to her girlfriend, “get something to eat. I was always hungry, at your age.” They sat at the small table, foreheads almost touching, spooning away as if eating caviar. My stomach turned at the sight. “You can have the back bedroom,” she said. “I aired it this morning.”

“You mean you let the diesel fumes in?”

“Don’t be cheeky.”

“I don’t want to put you out.”

“If I thought you was going to do that I wouldn’t have let you into the house. And sit down. I don’t like people standing while I’m eating.”

“I’m not people.”

“You are while you’re standing up. Are you sure you don’t want a plate of this? It looks as if you could do with something to clean you out.”

“I don’t want cleaning out.”

“Everybody does.”

I nodded towards Paula. “She does, by the look of her.”

“You leave her alone. She’s my very special friend. Aren’t you, love?”

She spoke at last. “Am I?”

“Well, you were in bed last night.”

I wouldn’t have touched her with a barge pole. “Where did you pick her up?”

“I didn’t pick her up,” she flared, as I’d known she would. “I found her one evening sobbing her socks off in the Plough. Some man she lived with had tried to knock her about, and when she fought back he kicked her out. She said she’d got nowhere to go and was about to go down to the Leen and drown herself, so I took her in. The man came round here later looking for her, wanting to get her back. He started arguing on the doorstep. He threatened me. Me! I took the breadknife and pointed it at his guts. A real ratface he was. The blade went so close it ripped a bit of his cardigan. I always keep my knives razorsharp, for cutting up men who get a bit leery. I don’t know whether he was more terrified at that or at my laugh, the wicked prick. But he saw I wouldn’t stand any nonsense, and ran for his life. He never came back, either. I’d have chopped him up if he did. We women have to stick together, don’t we, precious?”

I could hardly believe it when the plump little scrubber gazed at my mother and smiled — “Oh yes!”—which made her look a bit more sexy, though it wouldn’t do to run your mother off. On the other hand she’d think nothing of doing it to me if I’d brought Dropshort’s baggage in for a cup of tea. Her flirting with Frances when we were first married didn’t bear thinking about. I thought I was going to lose her. Blaskin made a pass at Frances as well, but held back on noting my wound up fist. Was ever anyone cursed with worse parents? “I’m going out,” I told her.

“Don’t get into trouble, then. I know you. Just remember you’re in Nottingham. It’s not like the old days when you could walk around and feel safe. If you haven’t got good shoes on and you step on a needle you could be dead in six months. The town’s full of druggies.”

Searching out old acquaintances when you’ve nothing better to do is a good way of passing the time. If they’d been your girlfriends you wanted to see how much worse off they had become after you’d walked out on them. The first amenable sweetheart to consider was Claudine Forks, who had married my pal Alfie Bottesford on finding out she was pregnant. She told him the kid was his but in fact it had been mine, and he’d been so dim she didn’t have much persuading to do.

I found the phone book under a flowerpot in the parlour, and after a few flips got Claudine’s address. My mother looked up from splodging Paula. “If you come back late I’ll smell your fingers.”

“Don’t be disgusting.” I slammed the door to cut her laughter. It was four o’clock, and I hadn’t had lunch, but rather than call at Lord Jim’s fishbar on the main road I fetched a tuna and pickle sandwich from the car at the garage (which wasn’t yet being worked on) and munched a trail of original mixed grain brown bread crumbs along the main road. Space between clouds was a luminous duckegg blue, the air pure and refreshing compared to the old train smoke and factory smells I remembered, though I didn’t know which I preferred most.

I turned up over the bridge where the station used to be, hoping to stretch my hitherto pampered legs by a mile or two’s extra walk, happy enough to be floating around home soil as in my tadpole days.

I had seen so little of Nottingham in the last thirteen years it was like being in a foreign country, though one in which I at least knew the language. I’d met Alfie Bottesford in primary school, and one day he took me home to meet his fat mother, who wore glasses and worked at Player’s making cigarettes. A father was nowhere in the offing, meaning Alfie was as much as a bastard as I was. We played marbles on the cobbled street, till his mother called us in to eat bread smeared with black treacle, and drink such strong tea it stopped me sleeping for a week.

When Alfie took up with Claudine in his teens he tried to have it with her because that’s what you did at that age, whoever the girl was, but she wouldn’t let him near, though she was a passionate thing with a wonderful pair of breasts. I met her one night and talked her into it, so we were soon familiar with every field and copse on the outskirts of the city. Sometimes we even had it in her parents big fluffy marriage bed while they were out at Labour Party meetings. Thinking about it gave my John Thomas a rise.

After I left for London she went back to Alfie, and married him, with my little pea in her pod. So I didn’t know whether they would be glad to see me, though was big headed enough to wonder why they shouldn’t. Friends who aren’t friends for life aren’t worth having, and could never be too long apart not to call on one another.

I walked by the grey walled tobacco warehouse, seriously thinking — which I never liked to do — about the purpose of my life. Seeing no future, I wondered what it had in store. You could never go home again, so that wasn’t an option, and I wouldn’t now, but felt myself firmly in the grip of the unknowable, a state I had formerly regarded as of no importance simply because I didn’t like it. Useless speculation was futile, however, and all I could do to feel normal was to go where fancy took me. I’d never been imperilled by such trivial thoughts at Upper Mayhem so it would be best to go there and be still for a while, wait until something happened, and soon enough it would. The mind gets sick to make the body healthy again, and if it kills you in the process it only means you were too sick to recover and didn’t deserve to.

Claudine and Alfie lived in a matchbox bungalow at 24 Camomile Gardens, their address burned on the wavy wooden notice with a hot poker. I pressed the Swiss meadow cowbell button twice before the door opened.

“What do you want?” But she knew me straight away, and I didn’t have to wonder whether or not it was her. She was a little broader amidships, bristols pointing fair and square as if to push me back along the path and up the street, the same hungry though still pretty face, yet a daze of anguish from her fiery grey eyes as yet unexplained. Her all-black dress made her look like a lady-croupier in a gambling den. Surprise flickered away as she said: “You’ve heard, then?”

“Heard? I just came to see how you and Alfie were getting on. I’m only up for the day.”

“I think you’d better come in.” She stepped back, and I followed, keeping my hands from her arse because something suggested it wasn’t the time. “You and Alfie have a nice little home. You must be very happy here. Does he still work at Golden’s place?”

She turned, and faced me squarely. “You really haven’t heard yet?”

What could I say? “Not a word. What is it?” I felt a fool, knowing I ought to have got some news or other.

A wad of tissue from her sleeve mopped up the waterworks. “He died, six months ago.”

I was shocked, pole-axed, plain slammed. A slice of childhood and youth gone to pieces. I’d always thought Alfie would live forever, like me, and could only tell her so. If friends from so early on didn’t, who could you trust to do so? I asked, my tone as if blaming her, though I didn’t mean it that way: “What happened?”

She stood a few feet away, to tell the story as if for the umpteenth time. “He had a sore throat last year, and it wouldn’t go away. I made him see the doctor. I bullied him no end. He hadn’t been to one before in his life. Anyway I got him to go, and the doctor said he’d only got a bad cold, which would go away soon. It kept on, though, and Alfie thought he wasn’t being told the truth, and that the doctor knew he’d got cancer of the throat. When he went back to the surgery the doctor only laughed, and said again that all he had to do was wait long enough and it would go away. When Alfie went a third time he sent him for tests, and they didn’t show anything wrong, but Alfie wouldn’t be convinced, and got more and more miserable. I talked and talked, but it made no difference. Then one night he went out for a walk. I asked him where he was going, but he wouldn’t say. He never came back. They found him floating in Martin’s Pond three days later. He never had cancer at all.”

She fell into my arms, and I was beginning to wish I had never left London. “Oh, Michael!”

Poor daft Alfie. If I’d been there the idea of topping himself would have been knocked smartly on the head. “Didn’t he have pals at work to put him right?”

“One or two, but even they began to believe him after a while. He’d tell them again and again, with this mad look in his eyes. The more they tried to talk him out of it the more he said he knew he’d got it. He told me one night that the doctor had been to talk to them, and they were all laughing behind his back. Then he would only think they were trying to cheer him up. If only the doctor had given him some pills to calm him down.”

“You can’t blame the doctor.” I pressed her close for a kiss on the forehead, as much to console myself as her. Alfie would never think of hurting anyone, but he had done worse damage to himself, and damned those he had left behind even more. He didn’t have the endurance to wait for Fate to do him in, and wasn’t in his right mind to wonder how those he loved would manage when he’d gone.

Suicide is the worst crime you can commit, yet looking back I realised that Alfie couldn’t have done anything except kill himself, only waiting for what he saw as a reason. Why had he left it so late? We’d known each other from playing ragball at six or seven in the schoolyard. He had no father — as the saying went — only a stout mother who loved him more than if he’d had two fathers. In spite of that I couldn’t help thinking how good it was that he had killed himself sooner rather than later, because if he had found out that Claudine’s child wasn’t his he might have taken her and the daughter with him.

Yet it was anger more than guilt that wouldn’t go away, and I decided that if there was an afterlife I’d give him a pasting he’d never forget when I got there. On the other hand if he’d done nothing else he had proved himself to be a man who knew his own mind, and had died on his own terms. Having to think in such a way was my temperament, so I mumbled into Claudine’s ear to show how much I was affected by her plight, suitably adult condolences that opened her lips on mine, and I wasn’t slow in melting my grief with hers.

“It was so awful, Michael.”

“He was my oldest friend,” I said. “I liked him more than any other kid. We were as close as brothers”—which I supposed was why I had played the dirtiest trick of all on him, and if that didn’t make us close I couldn’t think what would. I kissed her again. “I’ll never believe he’s gone. Not like that, anyway. It’s terrible. I can’t believe it.”

On the sofa, face to face and holding hands, she kissed me as if I was the only comfort she’d had since Alfie’s death. “I’ll never get over it, I can tell you that.”

My arms went around her. “I didn’t imagine in a hundred years I’d hear such tragic news when I rang the bell. I was looking forward to a happy reunion, talking to you both about old times. The three of us would have gone for a night on the town, laughing and drinking together.” The more I went on the wetter her lovely but foxy face became, arms firmly around me. The only way to stop her tears was to lean back with her.

“I’m so wound up, Michael, I don’t know what to do. I’m even wound up when I’m sleeping. I don’t know what to do.”

I did. The pitchblend of misery was the breeding ground of lust. It seemed I had come into the world to do Alfie down, though now that he was out of the world it couldn’t much matter what I did with Claudine, could only look on her as a farewell gift from someone who all those years ago hadn’t realised it had been mine.

The settee was long enough for her while I was kissing her ears, but it wouldn’t suffice for me when fully stretched out. “Let’s go to your bed,” I said.

Her eyes stayed closed as she led the way into the room smelling of scent you sprayed over the bath. She slipped off her drawers with no help from me, and went for my zip like a banana girl in the Amazonian rainforest. My underpants got tangled in trousers, socks and shoes till I reached to push the whole lot away. Even at my age I’d never quite worked out how to avoid that hiatus in the proceedings, when both parties were in so much of a hurry.

“I can’t believe you’re here with me, Michael.”

I could. It was like old times, a nostalgic flush of homeland and youth coming so powerfully back I didn’t wonder whether it was love or not, my head of steam blotting the whole world out. In up to the hilt, I stopped to unleash her breasts, then went into the sweetest coupling I’d had since having her so many years ago, only this time her second coming with its gobbling pressures and variations seemed to last far longer, fired not so much by me being in the cockpit but by her not knowing who or where she was due to the shock of Alfie’s death. Either that or she also wanted to obliterate the present by getting back to the days when she’d only known me in the way she was knowing me now, so I stopped wondering whether or not I was doing the right thing.

Her eyes were at all eight points of the compass while doing up her clothes. We’d both come so much that the disinfectant bluebell aroma had been satisfactorily vanquished, and she had no need to rush for the aerosol, since Alfie wasn’t in a state to kick open the door and sniff suspiciously. She fell into my arms. “I’ve always loved you and only you. Even when Alfie used to get on top of me I’d think of how we used to do it in mam and dad’s lovely big bed.”

What a slut, to come out with that, and Alfie not yet rotted into dust. Yet I had to feel sorry for her, and hoped she wouldn’t waste her life on such as me from now on. We smooched our way back to the living room, not as light as before, with gunmetal clouds wafting across the large windows. She sat in a chair, facing me on the settee. I had hoped to be left alone for a few minutes while she made a cup of tea in the kitchen, and shimmied in with a plate of biscuits. But such hospitality wasn’t in her mind. “You know Charlene’s yours, don’t you, Michael?”

Of course I did. “You mean your daughter?”

Her tone was edged with spite. “Ours. I was pregnant when I married Alfie, but he didn’t know. And if I didn’t tell him, how could he?”

“Not very well. I can see that.”

“You’d run off to London, so what else could I do?”

“Where is she now?” I might as well take a look, as long as I wasn’t asked to pay the arrears of her food and lodging for the last thirteen years.

“She always calls at her grandma’s on her way home from school. But she shouldn’t be long.”

“How old is she?”

“You know she’s thirteen, so don’t pretend you don’t. But she’s ever so clever at school. She wants to do her ‘O’ Levels. She does all the homework they give her. And now she hasn’t got a father.” She was crying again. “I’ll never forgive Alfie for drowning himself. How could he have done a thing like that, with such a lovely daughter?”

It was plain a mile off. I would have gone the same way if I’d been caught in such a trap, but I’d had the sense enough to get out, while young and easygoing Alfie had been driven stupid by her, and killed himself. He’d been a lively kid, but I recalled the occasional blankness of his eyes, staring oddly into space. Never knowing why he was on earth had, in time, become a nightmare he couldn’t do anything but die to get away from. I was surprised he’d lasted so long, but he’d always seemed a late developer, otherwise he would have known that Charlene wasn’t his when he went with Claudine in her white finery up the aisle of the church.

Mulling on the matter, I was nearly as upset as she was, which comforted me because if I hadn’t been I’d have had as stony a heart as Alfie when he decided to kill himself in spite of a lovely wife and daughter. “I’m sorry to have to say this, but he did it because he only cared for himself. He was so selfish he could think of nothing better to do, and I can’t think why.”

She had no answer to this. Maybe she’d often thought it herself. I’d set out on a run up the Great North Road, hoping for some peace in which to reflect on my own life, and had found myself in a can of worms. I wiped my nose, though it wasn’t dripping from my cold anymore. Maybe I should run back to my mother’s and drive her mad by trying to get off with her girlfriend. “I’ll take you out this evening,” I said. “We’ll go on a pub crawl, and make merry. Cheer ourselves up in the Royal Children.”

She sat by me, and held my hand. “I’d love to, but I can’t. If the neighbours saw me walking out with another man already they’d think I was a right slag.”

Fuck the neighbours, I stopped myself saying. “I’ll meet you in town, then,” though not much wanting to.

“Somebody’s bound to see me, and spread the gossip. But we could drive in your car to West Bridgford, or Radcliffe.”

“My clutch went bang on the way here, and I had to leave it at the menders.” I was glad for a verifiable reason, because if I took her anywhere by car I wouldn’t be able to put up with her unless I had a skinful. “We could go by bus.”

“Buses make me feel sick. But it’s all right. I’ve got to live this through. I shall never forget how good you were to me just now.” She proved her sincerity by such wild kisses I hoped we’d go to bed again. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she said, “if we kept on seeing each other, and then we got married? I know I shouldn’t talk like that yet, but I can’t help it. It would be so right and perfect for both of us, and for Charlene as well.”

I told her I was married, that I couldn’t see my wife popping her clogs for the next fifty years, at which she snapped free, and stood with her back to the imitation coal fire. The house was poshly furnished according to her catalogue of taste, and it was easy to see where every penny of Alfie’s office clerk wages had gone. He probably never had enough left over for a pint, or the bus fare for a spin into town on his own. No wonder he’d done himself in. Even I might have, in his situation, though she was a wonderful fuck when she let herself go.

“I can have my dreams, can’t I?” she said grittily. “Or would you like to kill those as well?”

“You can certainly have your dreams. Nobody would want to stop you having those, surely not me.” What would I want them for?

She put on a very hard look. “You don’t really care, do you?”

“You know I do.”

“No you don’t. You never did, did you?”

I was experienced enough to know it was often the case that the better the love making — and it had been supreme — the more a woman was likely to cry out against you when it was over. And here it was. The steamroller. The carpet bombing. It was both, with tears of venom thrown in, and I couldn’t think why. Even with Frances it sometimes happened. Maybe women held it against you because you hadn’t made their pleasure go on forever, or because you didn’t seem to sufficiently appreciate the good time they had given you. Or they hated the fact that you had the gall to be still in front of them, that you hadn’t vanished so that they could think of killing you in the peace of their own satisfaction. Or you didn’t seem willing to fall in with the plans they thought to spring on you, like now with Miss Forks, as I had known her in the old days. Whatever I said would only stoke up her resentment. “I’m the most caring person in the world,” was all I could say.

“No you’re not. You’re selfish. You always were selfish. You’re a real right absolutely rotten selfish bastard. You always have been and you always will be. You’ll never alter, that’s all I know.”

I felt as if I’d been whipped across the chops with a floorcloth soaked in the strongest bleach but, keeping a stiff upper lip (it wasn’t true that only the Dropshorts had them) I said nothing, though gripped my wrist to hold back such a smack across her flushed face she’d have been spinning like a top till Doomsday. I’d left Nottingham as a youth (one of the reasons anyway) so that I’d never have to do such a thing as hit a woman. All the same, trying to mix a subtle smile with a stiff upper lip took some doing.

“You forced me into sex when I was an innocent young girl. If anybody did it today I’d have counselling, and you’d get sent to prison.”

This was too much. “You were seventeen.”

“Then you took up with that fat cow Gwen Bolsover because she was posher than me. And when I got pregnant you ran off like a coward and left poor Alfie to take the responsibility. It was you who killed him, not me. You’re rotten to the core. You always was, and always will be.”

Rather than listen to this I should have run away just after flopping out of her, even if it had meant charging down the street with spunk wetting my legs. I thought she was about to snatch one of the imitation pot dogs off the mantelshelf and splot me, if so she would have seen some action, because gentlemanisation in no way fitted me for not giving blow for blow, woman or not, though I might have been sorry afterwards, for a few seconds. The best thing would have been to thrust her onto the deep piled lemon-yellow carpet for another session, except that she might have called rape.

The disadvantage of keeping quiet was that it got her going again. She wanted a real psychotherapeutic set-to, and I wasn’t the man for it. Her invective wasn’t even close to the mark, as far as I was concerned, was so wide in fact I assumed she was insulting for the sake of it — to enjoy herself, which made me angrier.

“The first time I took you home to meet my parents I saw you looking at my mother in the same way you looked at me before getting my knickers off. You with your smarmy ways. Your mother must have spoiled you rotten, but I suppose she would, wouldn’t she, seeing you was one of those who’d never had a father. You told me he had been killed in the war, but I knew the truth because I got it from Alfie.”

I wasn’t one of those who were silent by nature. I liked to talk, to argue if necessary, to see all sides of the question, but she had reduced me to using silence like a stringed instrument. I could only hope she would eventually wind down and shut her wicked little trap.

Not being part of the slanging match, I was the first to notice a young girl standing in the doorway. A satchel over her shoulders, she had straight black hair and grey-blue Cullen eyes, the image of my mother at that age, as I had seen from old photographs. She tended towards the same small mouth and slightly protruding teeth of Claudine, but there wasn’t a trace of Alfie anywhere. She nodded at me: “Who’s he, mam?”

Claudine did a quick come-down to normality. “An old friend who’s come to see me.”

Charlene took the hand I offered, and said: “You’re nice.”

I kissed her on the cheek, held her perhaps longer than I should. She was certainly mine, though I realised of course that every child was only its mother’s. “I heard you shouting at him with your big pan mouth,” she said to Claudine. “Just like you used to do to dad.”

Now I knew it all.

“You keep your opinions to yourself, or you’ll get a smack across the face. We were only talking about old times. Now come and get your tea.”

“I had it at grandma’s.” She turned back to me. “My name’s Charlene, but I hate it, so I tell everybody at school to call me Sam, and they do. I like that a lot better.” Her looks were plain, though she’d grow to be attractive because she knew what she wanted and would make sure she got it. “You really were going on at him, weren’t you? I can’t think why. It’s nice to have a visitor in the house now and again. We never did when dad was alive. I hope things change from now on.”

The air was steamy with unresolved nightmares, so I tried a diversion. “What’s your best subject at school, Sam?”

“Biology and maths.” She seemed grateful for the question. “Oh, and French. I love French.”

I dredged up a phrase or two from my travels with Frances, hoping I’d got it right and wasn’t called on to say more. “Moi aussi. J’aime beaucoup. J’était en vacance en France l’année passé.”

The effect was to set Sam aglow: “Oh, mam, he knows French. You never told me you knew somebody like that. It’s marvellous. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Even Claudine looked impressed, though grudgingly. Two gentle rises under Sam’s blouse showed that Claudine had bought her bras, which I thought a bit soon, though perhaps Sam had only put them on after Alfie had died. They made her look wanted, and I hoped she wouldn’t come to harm with all the snipe-nosed little Nottingham tykes (of which I had been one, I was well aware) trying to get her under the bushes. Maybe Claudine had already put her on the pill, and quite right, too. These days it was only sensible, yet I couldn’t altogether like it.

“My teacher’s French. She’s called Giselle, and I love her. I’m her favourite.”

Maybe I should go and give Giselle a talking to. But no, let be what will be, though I hoped Sam wouldn’t grow up to be like my mother. “The trouble is,” I said, “I have to be going soon. I only called for an hour, to say hello to your mother.”

“Oh, no, please, don’t go yet. I’ve only just met you. And you know French.”

When she came close for a real kiss an avalanche of love seemed to hold us close. She was my fourth child, but my eldest. “You can stop that,” Claudine shouted, “or I’ll call the police.”

Sam leapt away. “What for? Just because I like him. You spoil everything.”

I picked up my hat and coat. That’s how she was, and I can forgive almost everything, but saying she would call in the law when all I had done was kiss the girl she said was my daughter put the lid on it. “I’ll leave you to tell her who I am. And if you don’t, I’ll come back one day and do it myself.”

It pleased me to see her turn pale. Let her live under the Sword of Damocles, thinking any minute it might fall on her when I wrote and told Sam I was her father. I took a card with the Upper Mayhem address and pushed it into Sam’s hand. “If you need me, that’s where you can find me,” but Claudine snatched it away.

“Don’t go,” Sam said in her softest voice, while Claudine stood icily by, no longer knowing what to do or say in the situation.

“I have to. I’m up here on business, and must keep an appointment at the Council House. But we’ll meet another time. Just make sure you do well at school.”

“I’ll write to you in French, then.” She flipped the card away from Claudine’s hand, and looked at it. “Michael Cullen’s a nice name.”

“But I’ll answer in English,” I said. “My French has got a bit rusty since university.”

If the door hadn’t had hinges it would have fallen flat. I was outside, and never happier to put the place behind me, except I grieved for Sam having such a deadhead for a mother. Still, she had enough of the Cullen streak not to let it bother her for too long.

My heart was even so a metronome dancing between soft and hard rock as I walked back to Radford, rejecting a bus because I was calmer while giving my legs something to do. I didn’t want to love Sam too much in case she got to be the centre of my world, then I had the impulse to go back and tell her to pack up and come to live with me at Upper Mayhem, but Claudine would have the social workers, if not the police, on my back in no time, so I plodded on much of the way in bleak misery, a rare experience for me.

I had wondered, though, while making love to Claudine, and then after hugging my daughter, about living closer to them than London or my country place. But you can’t go home again, not even if the bell tolls only for you. Alfie had realised that when life became serious it was time to pack it in, and I didn’t want to go that way.

Storm clouds are always waiting, and if you can’t see them they’re lurking behind the horizon and ready to pounce in any case. You can’t look everywhere at once. I was no longer in the mood for tracing Gwen Bolsover, the other paramour of my youth, who had been ten years older than me. I’d leave the pleasure of finding out what had happened to her for another visit, if there was to be one, and meanwhile would sluice a few pints in the Plough. By the time I had slept it off in the morning the car would be ready.