Part Three

Seventeen

The publisher’s letter said they would appreciate him calling, at a mutually convenient time and date, when they might, after some discussion, be prepared to make an offer on his book. During days of fever the words shot and spiralled around his brain like fiery arrows, always reforming at a distance his arms couldn’t reach nor his eyes decipher. When his mind cooled back to equilibrium he thought that whoever had dictated such stilted language must have been to a similar school to his own. But then, maybe they all had in that particular trade.

Knowing the letter by heart, he sent every bit from the window while passing St Albans, and opened the Evening Post to gloat over Cecilia’s marriage to her middle-aged company director. Director? As they said about one who strutted around the factory, he couldn’t direct a trolley from one end of the firm to the other without getting lost, unless it was loaded with bags of somebody else’s money and he was going in ever-diminishing circles in the hope of reaching an exit.

If you looked at the photograph one way the man was handsome and self-assured, while squinting at it with one eye closed he seemed furtive and lecherous, and well on the way to being sent down for embezzlement. At the risk of thinking himself mean and despicable Herbert finally considered the man to be a type eminently suitable for Cecilia who, in her virginal wedding dress, would no doubt become a fitting partner for him.

A woman opposite, who he was starting to see as the spitting image of Eileen’s apparent reappearance by the town hall lions after he came back from the army, disturbed the recollection of his perfect afternoon with Cecilia on the hillside near Gotham, which had culminated in his sublime eye-contact with the fox. He saw again the clean orange flame of its pelt framed in green, snout to the wind and turned towards prey. Yet its instinct had been defective in not spotting the entwined bodies of two lovers. Even a fox made mistakes.

‘What time does this train get to London, duck?’

‘How do I know?’ Bert snarled.

‘Sorry, I was on’y askin’.’

So as to look more like Bert Gedling than Herbert Thurgarton-Strang he stood before a glass at St Pancras to set his cap at an angle, though not too much in case he appeared a caricature rather than dignified. The white silk scarf around his neck was barely visible when his jacket was fastened. A tall thin man of twenty-nine, he sniffed the worldliness of the air outside, mackintosh open and showing his smartest suit, a clean haversack settled on his shoulder. Fingers poking from the arm in its sling were available for adjusting his tie or dealing with trouser buttons. He took care not to look like one of the walking wounded back from a hard campaign of whippet breeding in the North.

The eternal pigeons circling Nelson’s head spiralled down in clouds to scavenge crumbs and corn. One settled on the thatched napper of a five-year-old boy with sparkling blue eyes who held a piece of bread in a still hand hoping a bird would come off its perch and eat. Bert smiled when one did. On his way through the same square from school, so long ago, identical pigeons had brought him luck, reinforced him with their powers of intuition and self-preservation, and sent him on a circuit which had brought him back. He waved to the kid’s young mother, and set off towards Covent Garden.

A streak of white shit struck the peak of his cap, from a Heinkel pigeon-bomber following along the street. He looked up at the plump-chested bird on the window sill turning its head this way and that, as if looking for another pigeon to blame it on. He slotted the map into his haversack and pressed the bell with the same force as starting a machine at work. Some Mrs Mop had not long scrubbed the step, but he scuffed his fag and leaned on the white button again. Maybe they were on holiday, though the date had been unmistakable. Or the letter had been posted from Mars and had been a hoax, in which case he would jump on the next train back. A busty woman in her twenties pulled the door open. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve got an appointment to see Mr Humphries.’ He turned his scar away, and tried a half-cock grin to put her at ease.

‘Come in, then.’ She showed him to a small office, treading backwards as if he might lunge forward for a kiss.

He wondered how long she had taken to nurture her posh accent from the glum corner of the country she had grown up in, and noted her diamond-shaped brass earrings, the string of black beads over her grey striped blouse, and a rosebud mouth with just the right curl for scaring callers away. Bert felt like belching in her face. ‘Worked here long?’

‘Longer than you.’

Sharpshit. He took his cap off. ‘It doesn’t sound long to me,’ Herbert said, in his most polished accent. ‘I’m rather surprised you can’t be rather more polite to an author. If it weren’t for someone like me you wouldn’t have a job.’

‘Think I’d care? They pay me next to nothing.’ She looked for something on the desk, which he thought might be a perfumed clothes peg to put on her snout, then fastened a few papers together. ‘What are you going to see Mr Humphries for?’

You may be Bert Gedling, he thought, but you don’t have to think like Archie Bleasby. He went up close. ‘It’s about a novel.’

‘And you have an appointment?’

‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Bert Gedling’s the name.’

‘Oh.’ She pressed a button on the intercom, and a Donald Duck squawk came back. ‘Sit down.’ She pointed to a chair, as if he was blind. ‘He shouldn’t be long.’

He preferred to stand, sniffing the dusty upholstery of the sofa while relishing a whiff of the girl’s scent. To bolster the role of Bert Gedling, which he must put on in no uncertain terms, he recalled acting in the Ovid play at school. Now that he was on a real stage the experience would be put to more practical use, though the encounter with a publishing firm was a come-down compared to Phaeton’s fatal drive across the universe in the Sun God’s horse and cart. Life and death stakes weren’t on the cards, but if this wasn’t a metamorphosis he didn’t know what was.

Perhaps the file box under Humphries’ arm was to give the idea that he was hurried, the ruse wasted on Herbert, who saw him as ordinary enough in that he only had one side to his personality, and wouldn’t be difficult to deal with. If he was a worried man he was the sort who had been born that way, and so was able to put on a smile of pretending to be at ease, betrayed by lines across his brow as close as contours defining a steep hill.

He looked at Bert from the doorway and, twiddling a watch chain across his waistcoat, came forward to shake his hand. ‘Humphries,’ he said, unable to meet his eyes. He led the way to a large office on the first floor, the stair walls decorated with framed photographs of authors who looked as if they had been to the same school as Herbert Thurgarton-Strang.

They sat at opposite ends of a leather-covered couch. ‘Well, Mr Gedling,’ Humphries said, still hugging the file box as if his lunch was in it. ‘I don’t see any point in beating about the bush. We’ve read Royal Ordnance, and we’re very impressed. We want to publish it.’ He paused for a look of surprise, or even pleasure, but Herbert, knowing it was called for, and in spite of a bumping heart, gazed across at a shelf of novels, deciding it was unlikely that he had read books with such gaudy spines.

‘Mind you, it’s an unusual piece of work, and there’s no saying how well or otherwise it will sell, but we’ll certainly do our best to push it. I don’t think there has been a working-class novel quite like it, though I’m afraid you might have to alter a few of the more explicit words.’

‘Oh, well, ’appen I will,’ he grudged. ‘People’ll know what I mean, anyway.’

‘No doubt about that.’

Above the bookcase stood a large framed photograph of a school cricket team, and Bert walked across as if interested in the books. ‘You published all these?’

Humphries laughed. ‘Oh, many more than that.’

‘It’s a lot.’ He managed a look at the photograph and saw, among the lines of faces, his old adolescent self, not as he would like to have imagined — head half backwards, with a sneer at the world, or at least an aspect of Byronic contempt — but as a sixteen-year-old with a look of trepidation, he would almost say fear, certainly anxiety, unease, a nervousness at the lips and a stare showing how at bay and unhappy he must have been. To cover the shock and before turning round he took out a packet of Woodbines. ‘Fag?’

‘No, thank you. Are you all right?’

‘I was only thinking I ain’t read any o’ them books. I’ve got a lot to mek up for.’ The cigarette hid his face in smoke. Isaac’s advice had been to let them do most of the talking, but it was necessary to emphasize his identity as Bert Gedling, so he couldn’t stay dumb.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much time.’

‘True. I’ve slogged my guts out in a factory since I was fourteen, but at least I learned how to write a novel about that life.’

‘You certainly did. Do you still work there?’

Thoughts and talk lived on different levels, and he decided it was best not to speculate on how the photograph of the old cricket team came to be in Humphries’ office. ‘I’ve got to earn a living, ’aven’t I?’ He looked around the room. ‘There are worse places.’

‘What about your family?’

Bert’s impulse, which Herbert trod on, was to tell him that his family was none of his fucking business. Instead he decided he would be more convincing if he didn’t clip off too many aitches. ‘Mam and Dad was killed in an air raid, so an aunt took me in. When she couldn’t stand me going out to pubs and coming back kay-lied she threw me on the street and I ’ad to live in digs.’

A real son of the people. Amazing. Humphries shook the money up and down in his left trouser pocket. ‘How did you learn to write so well?’ — not a grammatical slip anywhere, and the neatest-cleanest typescript I’ve seen for a long time. They’d even wondered whether it wasn’t a novel cooked up by some university chap pulling a fast one, but it was far more authentic than that.

Bert smiled. ‘Easy. I read a lot o’ books. Then again, I went to a good school till I was fourteen. If yer didn’t spell right yer got bashed.’

Humphries stared, as if not entirely believing that he had before him an all-round twenty-two carat, totally unspoiled self-taught novelist from the working class. Bert gave the stare back, then crumbled his expression into the cheery open-hearted smile of a workman which, he knew from much practice with the mirror, would make him look like a berserker only halfway gone from self-control. Humphries cleared phlegm from his throat for a further question. ‘Where did you acquire that scar? And the sling? You seem to have been in the wars.’

Humphries felt free to ask about the scar because he looked on him as from a lower sort of life. He may not know why he’s doing it, Herbert thought, but that’s how it is. If he took me as one of his own kind he would have waited for me to tell him about it. The trouble is he doesn’t even know he’s being supercilious, and because I do, and because I want him to think I’m somebody I’m not, I won’t give him a mouthful of well-delivered execration, but get back to being Bert.

‘I was. Life’s a battlefield where I come from.’ He lifted the sling an inch or two. ‘Industrial accident, this. As for the scar, they’re a rough lot up north. I offended a bloke in a pub, but don’t ask me what I said. Maybe I only just looked at him, and the ponce came for me with a knife. Got a swipe in before I could dodge. He thought he’d frightened me off, but nowt frightens me. I had my boots on, so I went straight back in and kicked the knife out of his hand. Then I cracked ’is ribs to stop his complaints. He didn’t look very pretty after I’d done.’

He flipped his cigarette end into the empty fireplace, as if ready to go out and manufacture another fracas, or give a performance on the spot, should there be any sign of trouble.

Don’t overdo the Bert bit. Pull back. Yet it was irresistible, because playing the role was as near as he’d get to driving a chariot across the sky — better in fact because he wasn’t as daft as Phaeton, so it wouldn’t be fatal. Functioning through the eyes, brain and heart of Bert made Herbert wonder how long he could keep up the stance, a long part to play, and not always easy, calling every moment for care and dexterity. It was hard to understand how Humphries was unable to penetrate such an everyday person and see the real man within. Had he led such a sheltered life? Still, didn’t Archie always say that if you live a lie you become the lie itself, and didn’t feel you were living a lie at all? He was acting out of inspiration, and knew it was safe to carry on. ‘I enjoy a bit of a bust-up on a Saturday night.’

He should be on the stage. Humphries offered a cigar from his leather case. It’s even better than too good to be true. They smoked in apparent peace. ‘Well, Mr Gedling — or may I call you Bert?’

Herbert nodded. ‘Any day.’

‘We’ll draw up a contract and make an advance of two hundred pounds. Half now, and half on publication.’

‘For ten years work? Is that all authors mek on a long book like this?’

‘You’ll earn more when the royalties start coming in.’

Bert detected a fear on Humphries’ part that he might reach for his novel and march off with it elsewhere. ‘That’s only a promise, though. You can’t live on promises.’

‘It’s more than that, I think. Do you have an agent?’ — as if he could deal with him or her more easily.

Ash fell from Bert’s cigar, such a good Cuban it didn’t break on impact but lay like a turd on the carpet. He put his foot on it for luck. ‘My lawyer will look at the contract. He knows all about book advances. But I did think five ’undred would be nearer the mark.’ Herbert could live a year on that, with care. ‘That’s what he said when I showed him your letter.’

Humphries put the ashtray between them. ‘Has he read it — the book, I mean?’

‘Loves it. Reckons it’s as good as owt that moaning minnie D. H. Lawrence wrote, though I suppose he was having me on.’ Herbert could see him trying to decide whether he was bluffing or just being naive. Dense thoughts were struggling around in the compost of Gedling’s brain, which made him unpredictable, untrustworthy.

Humphries wondered with a frisson what F. R. Leavis would say to his views on Lawrence. Though clearly from the boondocks, Gedling was no fool, and in spite of the clarity of his writing there was something sly about him, which may be no bad thing when, Humphries thought, we put him through the publicity machine. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Bert. As a gesture of confidence and goodwill, and to show our faith in you, we’ll make it three hundred — if I’m able to square it with the other directors, which I think I can.’

Herbert had hit as much of a jackpot as the one-armed bandit could deliver, but it was even so beyond what he had hoped for. He asked, as if still not satisfied: ‘When will you publish the book, then?’

Humphries barked into an intercom for a sheet of schedules. ‘I want you to know, Bert, that we have a policy here of treating our authors with decency and respect. We look after them, but expect loyalty in return.’

A better-looking girl than the female Cerberus on the front door came in with the schedules. ‘Thank you, Deborah.’ He flipped through the papers. ‘We’ll bring Royal Ordnance out in the autumn,’ he told her, ‘which gives us about six months, plenty of time to get advance copies to the reviewers.’

‘Deborah, eh?’ Bert said, when she had gone. ‘A bit of all right, in’t she?’ Cool and haughty Deborah in her purple blouse, with a nice golden trinket between her tits, had given him a quick look, and assumed it told her everything about him, but once outside she would realize that such was not the case. If — no, when — he met her again that kind of uncertainty would give him half a chance.

‘She’s one of our up-and-coming editors,’ Humphries said.

The curt tone was a good reason for Bert to frown: ‘Autumn’s a long way off. I was thinking a couple of months would do the trick.’ He stretched his legs from the sofa, and blew a perfect smoke ring towards the fireplace. ‘I might ’ave another done by then.’

‘That’s all right. We can bring it out next year. Do you have a title?’

A photograph of Rodin’s Thinker, seen in a book at Isaac’s, showed the attitude to take, until the words flashed into his brain. ‘Ye’, I’ll call it The Other Side of the Tracks.’

‘No resting on your laurels, eh? That’s good. And in the meantime you’ll go on working in the factory, I suppose?’

The country house he’d buy would have a well-shaved lawn you went on to from French windows. There’d be a table, and a sunshade under which he’d scribble tales from the factory on to a foolscap pad so that the sunshine breeze couldn’t flush the papers away. A middle-aged motherly housekeeper would disturb him with the musical tinkle of a tea tray, or perhaps wake him from an illicit snooze. Maybe his good luck and swelling fortune would run to a flat above the National Gallery, with a view almost level with Nelson’s melancholy phizog. In the morning he’d amble across the Square in his dressing gown and carpet slippers to eat breakfast in Joe Lyons, a friendly nod at the policeman who’d soon get used to such eccentricity: ‘Nice morning, Mr Gedling!’ ‘Would be, if I hadn’t drunk so much last night.’ ‘Ah! You authors!’

On the other hand maybe he’d live half-starved in a furnished room for the rest of his days, and struggle with the poverty he’d read about in George Gissing’s books. ‘The factory’s all I know. Unless I pack it in and get a job as a clay-kicker down the pit. The money’s better there, better than writing novels, any road up.’

Humphries clasped hands, and Herbert could never see such a man feeling contrite at the thought of a writer on his uppers. ‘I don’t think you’ll have to do that kind of work much longer.’

‘I hope not. I’ve done my bit.’

‘Before you go, though’ — he pressed a button — ‘I’d like you to meet my chief editor, who wrote such an enthusiastic report on your novel.’

Herbert lay back, uninterested, smoking at his ease, when who should walk in but that wanking little blighter Dominic Jones, who had been his best friend at school. Bert considered himself to be in the shit bucket up to his neck, at the same time realizing that publishing was just the sort of occupation in which to find someone like Dominic. So, he told himself, get deeper ever deeper into Bert as quickly as you can, though even Archie’s skin might not be thick enough to hide in.

‘Dominic, I’d like you to meet Bert Gedling, who wrote Royal Ordnance that you admired so much.’

Bert uncoiled himself to greet this pink plump man of middle height, already slightly bald, but spiffingly dressed, as they would have put it during those long ago days at school. ‘Hey up, Domino.’

The same old baby face, but turning to petulance. ‘Dominic, if you don’t mind.’

It was him, right enough. Bert corkscrewed so deeply into Gedling that his own mother wouldn’t have known him or, better still, he wouldn’t even have spotted himself walking along the street. ‘Sorry, I thought it was Domino. They ’ave funny names down in London.’ He used the grip of a million handlepower, so that Dominic needed all his spartan school upbringing not to flinch at the pain. He couldn’t possibly connect Bert with the Thurgarton-Strang whose contemptuous handshake had never been more than the extension of one finger, and who he had last seen playing table tennis in the games room more than twelve years ago. The scar helped, as did the muffler, the calloused hands and hardened face, the half-closed eyes, and one or two blackheads cultured for the occasion.

Dominic backed a pace. ‘It’s certainly a good novel. Unusual, too.’

‘That’s high praise,’ Humphries said, ‘coming from him. It’s only the third book he’s accepted since the new year. What did you say about it?’

‘A real achievement, both as art and realism.’ He looked at Herbert, but then, he would, wouldn’t he? Herbert felt the horizons spinning, the room in a flux, as if he had put back six pints of Younger’s Number One, and never drunk anything more potent than cocoa before. Bert was reluctant to come up and help keep the perilous world at bay, but Herbert kept him up front by the scruff of his neck.

‘I was talking about it with someone at Penguin’s yesterday,’ Dominic said, ‘in Chez Victor’s.’

‘Were you, then?’ Humphries leaned against the desk, hoping his chief editor would have enough diplomatic sense to handle the kind of rogue element carefully that neither of them had met before. ‘They’ll have first refusal on the paperback rights, but only if they’re quick about it, and if they come up with the right price.’

‘Penguins!’ Bert exclaimed, in control again. ‘I thought they on’y touched classics. I’ve read all of them, though.’ The more mystified they were about his ability to produce a book from such a background the less they would imagine him to be who he really was, in which case Herbert could afford to throw out a few hints now and again as to how cultured he was. ‘I’ll ’ave to be off soon. I want to get back up north before my lawyer shuts ’is offices.’

He felt absolute joy, walking arm in arm with Bert in the sunshine up St Martin’s Lane, both too full of their success to get straightaway back into the Underground. Such freewheeling happiness made his strides seem ten feet long, no one nearby coming up to his measure. ‘We did it, old boy, we pulled it off,’ Herbert said.

‘Fuckin’ did,’ Bert crowed. But a cloud went over his face: ‘What about that snotchops who looked a bit funny when ’e saw yer, though?’

‘Oh, you mean that little twerp Dominic? Don’t worry about him. I’ll deal with him when the time comes.’

‘Yer’ll have ter watch ’im, is what I think. Trouble is, ’e in’t as daft as he looks.’

‘I assure you, he is. I know him from a long time ago.’

‘Do yer? Where was that, then? You aren’t ’oldin’ summat back from me, are yer?’

A steely tone came into Herbert’s voice. ‘That’s none of your business. Don’t get too uppity with me, Bert Gedling, or I’ll close the lid on your box.’

The doppelgänger had worked overtime and been convincing, and would stay in control only as long as he needed it. No doubt Dominic would say to Humphries that Bert Gedling put him in mind of someone at his old school. ‘So much so that it’s damned uncanny, though of course it can’t be him. It’s impossible, unthinkable, idiotic to suppose so’ — which would set Humphries laughing so loud and long as to bring on an epileptic fit.

Eating a dismal sandwich in the station buffet, Herbert’s elation declined. His apparently successful deception seemed to have cheated him of a proper achievement, and he wondered what the result would have been had he called on them as Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, and haw-hawed with his old public school swagger.

Such metronomic moods never let him enjoy anything for long, so he slept all the way back, the ordeal having been more exhausting than he could have imagined.


He poured from the half-bottle of White Horse. ‘I’m a working-class novelist to them, you see, and they only know me as Bert Gedling.’

‘Instead of someone of impeccable military and clerical descent?’ Isaac put water into his glass. ‘It’s a bit too strong for me.’ He sipped. ‘I don’t see the problem, though. You’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie in it. What’s wrong with that?’

‘I’ll get used to juggling the pair of us, I suppose.’

‘You’ve done quite well so far.’

‘But why do I suddenly feel uneasy about lying?’

‘Success brings its uncertainties. It needs more strength of character than failure.’

‘Maybe I should have been an actor.’

‘You’d have been a bad one,’ Isaac said, ‘because your life wouldn’t have depended on it. Not like your writing.’

Herbert slowed down on the whisky, not caring to get Bert pie-eyed — though he felt like swigging the lot. ‘You probably know more about me than anybody else.’

‘Perhaps, but don’t worry about it.’

‘You should have been the writer, not me.’

Isaac took a clean handkerchief to his spectacles, of the sort made from wire and always about to fall to pieces. ‘I couldn’t write to save my life.’

‘Well, you’re acute about other people, you’ve read far more than me, and you know a lot about human nature.’

He smiled. ‘I knew you’d make one sooner or later, though. You’ve got everything it takes: education, confidence, experience, imagination, and a split personality. You seem to dislike most people, except those you write about, which is one way of saving your soul. Anyway, we’d better read that contract, clause by tricky clause, so that we can make sense out of it, and see that it’s all shipshape and correct. Open your Bert Gedling writing pad, and we’ll get cracking.’

Eighteen

‘Are summers longer than winter?’ Archie said.

Diagrams of astronomy were drawn across Herbert’s mind from school: the earth rotates on its own axis in a left-hand annual orbit around the sun; but he’d forgotten the dates of the equinoxes. ‘Maybe just a bit.’ He smiled. ‘The days are longer, though, especially in the afternoon.’

‘I know that,’ Archie said.

‘Does it bother you?’

‘Well, today I don’t want it to get dark, but some days I can’t wait.’

‘You’re a dirty old man,’ Bert said.

‘I’m not, I’m a dirty young ’un. I will be a dirty old man, though, when I’m old.’

‘You’re hopeless,’ Bert twitted.

‘I know. It’s lovely. I like meeting a woman in the dark.’

Chitchat against the wall, the same as ever, not many variations but it carried the time along between canteen and hooter. With hardly a cloud in the sky, the yards and sheds of the factory seemed to function better in the sun than under the mists of winter, when it looked what it was, a slum that should be swept away. The signal went for getting back to work. ‘I sometimes think that if I hear that moaning minnie one more time I’ll go off my head.’

‘I’ll live to see the day,’ Bert said. ‘Come on.’

He had been given lighter work because of his injured arm, which wasn’t yet healed. No one doubted when he told them, though it was true enough. He serviced other people’s machines, pushed trolleys up and down the gangways, and checked finished material before it was taken away, feeling at times as if he had never written a novel, or been to London, as if the life of writing couldn’t possibly be part of him. Such blank moments worried him that he might sink into being Bert Gedling and no one else forever. There were times when he hated the name.

Nor was it encouraging when the men and women bantered him as to how he had landed such a cushy job for his convalescence. While the flesh of his wound coloured back to normal he spent a fortnight sharpening tools, finally put back on his lathe though the scar was still raw enough to give pain when he knocked it against box or turret. Galling though the work was he forced a smile and stuck up two fingers to the heckling so that the others could say: ‘Good old Bert! He’s back on form!’

Walking home in the warm evening uplifted the spirit, a happier mood after spending his energy for eight hours. The short future of some spare time made life tolerable, and in his room he massaged all fingers into sufficient flexibility to put a few paragraphs on to paper. Any old words to which he could attach the grandiose label of thought. From lathe to typewriter, one machine to another, seemed not too big a difference.

Archie called on Saturday morning: ‘Come outside, and see what I’ve got.’ He and Raymond had bought an old banger of an Austin between them for seventy quid.

‘How long yer bin drivin’?’

‘A couple o’ months.’

‘I suppose you’ve got a licence?’

‘What’s one o’ them? Course I ’ave. I took the test last week; passed first time.’

‘Is it taxed?’

‘What do you think that is on the windscreen? A Guinness label? Come on, and I’ll tek yer to Aspley for a run round the estate. If Macmillan says we’ve never ’ad it so good I want to ’ave it good as well, if not better.’ He opened the kerbside door for Bert to get in. ‘When I see somebody in a posh car who’s rich I don’t want to nick his money — I just want to be rich myself.’

Archie the demon driver bawled at the dilatory, and cursed the speed mongers until he had passed them as well, his reaction micrometer-tuned. Bert felt no anxiety that he would chock or be chocked. He would certainly make a good job of driving the sun chariot across the sky.

‘My motto is,’ Archie’s eyes gleaming at a straight bit of road, ‘nobody in front, and nobody behind. If you see somebody in your rear mirror, it don’t matter how far away he is, he’s right behind you.’

Beyond the middle of town Archie got out and tied L-plates back and front. ‘Come on, Bert, there’s no traffic here, so it’s your turn to have a go at the wheel. But whatever you do,’ he said, showing the gears, ‘don’t drive like me, or you’ll never pass your test.’

‘I never like to tek tests.’

‘Nor me, but this one you’ll ’ave to, sooner or later. Don’t worry about it, though. You either get through, or you don’t, and if you don’t you can allus tek it again.’

‘I suppose so.’ Archie was more locked into the world and its ways than Bert ever could be, Herbert thought, because he never had to question who he was or continually mistrust himself. He was solid enough to show such confidence in a friend that he could even offer him the wheel of his car, which was as close to love as any two people could hope to get.

One machine was much like another. At the controls it was a matter of synchronization, the only difficulty being that man and machine moved at the same time, which Herbert soon got used to because Archie was a patient instructor. Bert enjoyed driving so much that Herbert wondered why he hadn’t bought a car years ago, in which case he could have driven to London and impressed that fuckpig Dominic even more with his proletarian dexterity.


The galley proofs of Royal Ordnance came with a covering note from Dominic. Herbert tackled the tight knots of the string, no problem to industrialized fingernails. He got it off in one length because Mrs Denman kept a drawer full, having the habit, even so long after the war, of not wanting to waste anything.

The long story was so enthralling it seemed to have been written by somebody else. All was clear, everything was in place, as he read from sheet to sheet, though by the end he sensed it might not be so, and a second reading showed printing errors missed on the first time through.

The dedication page was blank, no name, no words of memory or appreciation, nothing to thank anybody for. He wanted to write: ‘To Bert Gedling, without whose labour and life’s blood this book would never have been written.’ Or maybe: ‘To Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, without whose help this confidence trick of a novel could not have been cobbled together.’ But such notes would betray him to the wolves, who would rip him even further apart than he already was because of the stunt he was playing on them.

His sense of loss seemed beyond a joke, knowing he should dedicate the book to Cecilia because writing it had cost him her love. The fresh clean sheets were soaked in the invisible ink of shared memories, which he wanted to retain for his own special hoarding till the emptiness in him was filled with something else — or he became bored and no longer interested in picking up bits of the book at random with which to torment himself.

The sheets were needed urgently, the slip of paper said, and so, turning back to the dedication page, he wrote: ‘For Beryl Denman’, then posted the package back, by which time he felt almost the same enthusiasm for the book that Humphries had shown.


Archie navigated him over the Trent and into a maze of lanes beyond the Fosse Way. A haycart or occasional tractor held them up, or a dozen cattle being shifted by dog and man to another field. Wheeling and turning through villages where hardly anyone seemed to live gave safe practice at the controls, so easy for Herbert till for some reason he saw beyond the windscreen the climbing of the lorry into the mountains of Cyprus. The woman in the vineyards looked at him, and he felt the same agonizing pull, seeing the curve of her breast as she lifted her arms, the houri eyes, the benevolent and promising smile.

Sunlight flooded the turning, and a tree came towards him, arms of privet and hawthorn ready to embrace him for a meal. He swung the wheel, slid along the bank and let the skid carry him till he was able to straighten out. Heartbeats pounded to his head as tyres scraped the verge, missing the tree and almost hitting another.

Archie, unnaturally still, said nothing. Herbert stared ahead, back to more measured driving. ‘That was careless. It won’t happen again.’ Such a near call unsettled him, seared his throat, and maybe Archie’s, since he indicated the way to a snug pub at Cropwell Bishop.

When cool beer and salty crisps were on the table, Bert said: ‘What’s up wi’ yo’? Ye’re too bleddy quiet for my liking. You’ve hardly said a word all evening.’

‘Tek yer sweat. We’ll have a sup o’ this first.’

I’ve more than enough material, but something’s eating him, so I have to listen. Convinced he knew everything already, Herbert considered it time to quit. He’d soaked up people’s troubles like a sponge, and felt he was sinking under water.

‘I’ll tell yer.’ Archie flipped open a packet of Senior Service, smoke soon drifting from his lips. Herbert saw him as a much regarded man of the local world, dovetailed into every square and circle; whereas he, Herbert, had problems only death could settle, though he expected to keep it at bay for the usual three score and ten. ‘Go on, then, tell me.’

‘Can’t yer guess?’ Archie leaned across, as if walls still had ears. ‘I’ve got a girl up the spout.’

‘You’ve what?’

‘In the club, on the tub, a bun in the oven, preggers.’

‘So what? She’s married, in’t she?’

‘Is she fuck.’

‘Yer didn’t use owt?’

His bitter laugh suggested he had turned at last into a victim of Fate. The following smile indicated that he did not altogether dislike the fact. ‘I’d got a frenchie in my pocket. I allus ’ave, you know that, but summat stopped me bothering. We was in her house on a Saturday night while her mam and dad was out at the boozer. I didn’t think I’d get it in that night, but she looked at me, and I looked at her, and suddenly we was latched on. I went in raw. In no time at all we was going at it like rabbits in a thunderstorm. Never known owt like it. Fuckin’ madness! She’s a lovely girl, long red hair, and tits like a statue’s. Only nineteen, as well. I must have bin in love with her. I still am. I can’t stop thinkin’ about her. When she says she loves me I believe her. She says it every time we meet, and I love to hear it, just as she does when I say it to her. It’s marvellous. Such a nice girl, as well. She’s a Catholic, at least her family is, mam and dad Irish. She wants a lot o’ kids, but we shall have to see about that.’

He knew Archie would make a superb father. ‘Then it’s no problem, is it?’

‘I suppose not. I’m thirty, and I’ve ’ad a good run for my money. It’s about time. I’ll be all right with her.’

Herbert could only think of saying: ‘We’ve got to grow up sooner or later, Archie, my owd.’

‘Yeh, but I can’t see yo’ ever doing it.’

He’s right. I’m as grown-up as I ever will be, Herbert thought, or will ever want to be, or will ever need to be for what I want to do. I was a grown-up me from the day I was born, and growing up’s got nothing to do with it, in any case. I don’t have any wish to kill myself in that way, and never will have. Growing up is for the others, for those who can’t do anything else but live dead, or for those who go on living for people who write to show the living dead that they might not be as dead as they feel. ‘Yer can’t?’

‘Well, yer don’t show any sign of it. You’re a funny bogger, though. I never could mek yo’ out. Ye’re just like one of the lads, but sometimes there’s a posh bogger trying to scramble out. I’ve allus known it, but I’ve never said owt. A bloke can be what he likes for all I care, as long as he don’t think he’s better than me, and I know you’ve never thought that.’

‘You’re right there, Archie.’

The pink of the setting sun deepened against the window, and the steady expression in Archie’s grey eyes seemed to need the kind of answer which would soothe them both, and fuse them together into one brotherly flame, or at least find an explanation for the intolerable burdens that had bothered them since birth. ‘You’re not the only one who’s puzzled,’ Herbert said. ‘Sometimes I can’t even mek mysenn out.’

‘For instance,’ Archie said, ‘you could have bin a chargehand at work, but yer’ve never wanted to get on. Another thing is, yer’ve met some nice women, but you’ve never said owt about getting married.’

Bert banged him on the shoulder. ‘Come on. Let’s slop another one down, then we can get back. I’m beginning to feel knackered.’

A pall of dusk lay over the fields, films of mist permeating the greens and browns till next morning. He knew Archie too well to judge him, which may have been a limitation when writing about such people, but the fact was that Archie’s sins were also his, otherwise he couldn’t have written Royal Ordnance at all. Under a microscope rather than a magnifying glass, he recognized the eternal turmoil of unrest, indicated by lines across Archie’s forehead, the down-curving lips, and the occasionally twitching fists when speaking of real or imagined injustice. Perhaps it was only a phase in life which he, as well as those written about, would one day leave behind. Such feelings had become his own, which neither he nor Archie were ever likely to relinquish.

They leaned on a gate, staring at a dim light from a farm across the dip, and a cluster from the village like white spots surrounding a mysterious rural rite they could never be part of. Archie’s voice startled him. ‘Work tomorrow. Never stops, does it?’

Archie knew nothing of his novel. No one did. Maybe they would one day. He wanted to tell him, but didn’t in case the confession broke their notion of equality and trust. Whatever happened, he needed the friendship of his life to be safe, though the test would come later, which Archie would pass as easily as he had that for his driving licence.

‘Tek the wheel on the way back as well,’ Archie said, ‘to mek sure you get over that near miss’ — his first reference to it.

Herbert decided that his work in the factory must come to a stop. It would be too easy to stand rooted to the same spot forever, and go on till his life was washed away like milky suds flowing over shaved steel. ‘I’m packing it in,’ he said, when they were going over Trent Bridge. ‘The firm, I mean.’

Archie handled the window down to bawl at an old man in a new Ford Popular who was too slow getting away from the lights. ‘I’ve been expecting it,’ he said. ‘You should ’ave done it years ago. What shall yer do, though?’

He stopped for a Belisha beacon, so enclosed in himself, so dead selfish all his days that he hadn’t realized how intensely Archie must always have thought about him — even though such thoughts had been made plain enough in his book. ‘I’ll go down to London, be on the loose for a while. I’ll have to get a job sooner or later, I suppose, but I’ve got enough dough for a month or two. Give me time to look around.’

‘Good luck to you, is all I can say. Let’s not lose touch, though.’

Bert turned into Waterway Street. ‘We’ll never do that.’


He wiped his hands on the sud rag, and walked along the gangway to the plate-glass office. A week’s notice was the formality. ‘That’s a shame,’ the foreman said. ‘We thought you’d be with us forever. You’re the sort of bloke we can’t afford to lose, with these new export orders coming in.’

Good of him to say so, but all he could feel was a sadness that had no sorrow in it, because the world he half knew already was dominating his expectations. ‘I’ll miss the old place.’

‘If it’s the wages, I can put you in for a bit more.’

‘I’ve got a job in London.’

‘Ah, I wondered if it worn’t summat like that.’

On the last afternoon he wiped his hands, looking around as machinery fell silent and sweepers came in to clear up. Overhead belts squeaked to a stop, dynamos whined into their weekend rest, and men reached for jackets and knapsacks, put on caps, fastened bike clips, and set out on a quicker walk than most had shown coming in. Waiting in groups, they clocked off, the ding of each buff card pushed down into the available slots making a monotone song of release that set Bert whistling as he made for the gate.

He pushed his card down and bent it — Gedling, Bert — not sorry to walk away from a part of his life he could now afford to let go of. Men began running for the exits to be first at the bike sheds, and some who had cars were already revving up along the street. Archie waved, and offered to drop him off at his digs.

‘It’s all right. I feel like walking. See yer in the Eight Bells though later on.’

Archie wound down the window. ‘I’ll be there.’


The flowered dress, as she stepped from the ambulance that had brought her from the hospital, draped the stones in weight that had been taken away by her illness. ‘There’s nothing more they can do for her,’ Frank wept in Herbert’s room, handing him the clean towel brought up as an excuse. ‘If God would take me instead of her I’d be the happiest man in the world.’

‘It’s never like that, though, is it?’ was all Herbert could say.

‘I’ve never believed till now, but you’ve got to have Somebody you can pray to in a case like this.’ He straightened Herbert’s pillow, as if caring for him also might bring a miraculous recovery for Mrs Denman. ‘Tell her you’ll come back and see her, though, won’t you, Bert? You see, she still thinks she’s going to get better.’

Another week and he would be gone. He couldn’t wait, though wanted to see as much of her as possible. ‘I hope so, too. But we’d better go down. I don’t think she ought to be left alone for long.’

‘I shall miss yer, Bert.’ The snuffle in her voice embarrassed him into feeling pity, contemptuous of himself at not being able to help her. One of the last people he cared to see waste away and die, she would turn into a memory like all the others he would say goodbye to, and while she went on living she would turn him into a memory as well, which he hoped for so as to get the weight of the intolerable past off his back. Something would fill the space, but he was too weary of the present to wonder what it might be.

Despite her frailty and pain she stood up to set out his tea. Frank signalled with his eyes that they weren’t to stop her. ‘Will you be going home to your folks?’

Some were afraid to go home again because they dreaded the womb of milk and comfort, and would face anything rather than risk annihilation, but the stronger the fundamental tug, the more energy was generated in resisting it. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m sure you’ve got a lovely home to go back to,’ she said, ‘if you want to.’

A decent response, in words of Archie’s calibre, would be humane, but no lightning bolt of emotion came to melt his rigid control. ‘No, Ma, I’m off to live in London,’ was the best he could say.

‘I don’t know why you want to leave here at all.’

‘It’s only that I think my life’s got to change.’

She sighed. ‘It must be marvellous to be young, and hope for summat like that. Are you going to get that book published?’

He hated to see tears in her eyes. ‘If I do you’ll be the first person to get a copy.’ His tone was such as to stop her asking more, because a proper explanation of his departure would take years to write, a job to be set aside for some later date, and from a different person. ‘I’ll be back as often as I can to see you.’ He wasn’t sure how he could. ‘You can rely on that.’

The factory had taught him to waste nothing, a place wherein energy was sweat which you couldn’t afford to lose, where you needed to conserve if your backbone wasn’t sooner or later to melt. Economy of effort had been the order of all days, and time meant money in your pocket to pay for booze, or to treat a woman, and to live as well as you could.

He had learned a lot, the long way and hard, much that was impossible to quantify, though with little awareness of the struggle because he had been young. To slough off the invisible skin of overalls would need long exposure to different qualities of air. Certainly it would take time for his body and the roots of his hair to discard more than a decade of imbibing disinfectant and the atmosphere of iron and steel. From having been a workman for so long he felt a frisson of excitement at the prospect of change.

Nineteen

Not quick enough to count the girders, he worried at losing his speed of perception, a bad sign when heading for London. Thirty years old was over the hump, the highway to decrepitude — if you didn’t watch it. A green and sluggish Trent slurried the past away, not forgetting to take his guilt at deserting Mrs Denman, though he supposed such a feeling to be on the plus side, having admitted it, and left a suitcase to signal he’d be going back. Abandoned as well were oil-soaked overalls, dulled boots, cap and knapsack, for slinging in the dustbin, or handing to any ragman who would take them.

‘I understand how you feel,’ Isaac had said. ‘Fate likes to work its little coincidences. Doesn’t it just? Anyway, she might live longer than you think, or longer than either of us, for that matter.’

‘All the same, I’m a real shit.’ Herbert stacked the books he had borrowed on the table. ‘She’s been absolutely first rate, right from the beginning. You could say she’s made me halfway human.’

A doubting smile formed on Isaac’s thin lips. ‘Send her a copy of the book.’

‘Oh, I shall do that. There’ll be one for you, as well, someone else I don’t like leaving.’

The sentiment was waved aside. ‘You mustn’t worry about that. I’ll live forever. Or until God says so, which has to be the same. Just come back and say hello when you can spare a moment from the fleshpots of London. There’s no place like it in the world. I loved it in my youth. What happy days!’

A first-class seat had never before been indulged in, but his status as a possibly successful writer while standing in the queue brought out the demand — from what part of himself he preferred not to know — for which he got a ‘sir’ with his change. Two suitcases snug on the rack were as heavy as if packed with stones, one more piece of luggage than he had gone with, yet they were mostly books and papers, and hardly equal to the sum-tonnage of experience gained.

Despite strong arms the pull was hard, lugging them into the streets of St Pancras. He crossed at a light on red, and a gravel lorry hogging by splashed his turn-ups. The anonymity of London to bask in buoyed him on to a spring-heeled track, but when rain drummed on his mackintosh he went into the first bed-and-breakfast place and paid fifteen bob for a night in advance. The man spoke Greek to his wife as to which room was empty, and Herbert supposed they were from Cyprus but, because of the present troubles, thought he’d better not tell them of his time there with the army. A subtle smell of olives and resinated wine followed upstairs when the man showed him into a room with immaculate sheets. The curtains wouldn’t keep out much light. Or dull the noise: traffic was continuous. He left his cases and went to find somewhere for lunch.

Three days at the hotel would rush him as much as a week’s board in Nottingham. Real life had jumped him at last, economy with money helping him to become more of a man of the world. In the coffee bar he smoked a cigarette while culling the Evening Standard for advertisements of furnished rooms. A quick move was necessary, even if only to escape the squeals and moans of the middle-aged couple next door, who jumped around at night to make the best of their clandestine tryst. At breakfast the man, obviously from the North, called to Herbert: ‘Do you make model aeroplanes, chum?’

Herbert smiled at such a strange idea. He didn’t.

‘What a shame!’ The man, only trying to be friendly, went back to his plate of kippers. ‘Just wondered if you might.’ His wife (or whatever) a fragile woman, sat with one big blush on her face, avoiding all eyes.

Isaac had mentioned an area of cheap rooms south of the Elephant and Castle. He spread the town plan, pencilled streets on which vacancies were indicated, and found a box on the main road to make phone calls. London air is different, he had been told. Wind never came from where you expected because of so many buildings. Multiple winds, some more subtle than others, brought grit rather than homely smoke, making him feel scruffy instead of plain worn out by work. He came up from the underground and back into the air, a coating on the skin that would wash off at night and leave no trace in the morning.

Mr Glenny the landlord sat outside the address in a Rolls Royce, and came on to the pavement to shake hands. He wore a boiler suit and was hard to place, though Herbert didn’t think such a rig was meant for labouring. His tie and pin were precisely fixed, and gold cufflinks shone from the sleeves of a laundered purple shirt with a white collar. Maybe it was the closest he could get to a de luxe prison garb, which he’d one time been used to. On the other hand a squashed snout suggested experience at prize fighting, while his accent seemed local enough. ‘What’s your line of work?’

Herbert felt he could be as direct as to tell only half a lie. ‘Publisher’s office.’

Glenny didn’t believe him, but because he distrusted everyone it made little difference. ‘Want it long?’

‘As long as I stay.’

‘Have a look, then. You might not like it.’

‘Who else lives here?’

‘Riffraff. But they pay me.’ He pushed the door open against a wedge of letters. ‘They’re all right, though. As I said, you might not want it.’

Meaning it might not be good enough for him. It was. Preference had nothing to do with the matter. Any simple billet that stopped rain splashing on to his head would do, and no fortnight’s rent passed more willingly from his hands. The room was larger than Mrs Denman’s, two windows instead of one looking on to the street. The ghastly shit-coloured wallpaper could be ignored. Compared to Isaac’s cramped accommodation it was a clover field, furnished with a hot plate and small sink, lavatory and bathroom down a few stairs, all for fifty bob a week. A stink of beer and sweat lingered like poison gas from the last labouring occupant, but by keeping both windows open the place soon freshened into the faintest mixture of train smoke, car fumes, and skirting-board dust.

When the hunger clock struck he burnt offerings of sausages, in a pan bought from a junk market for sixpence. An orange, or a banana sandwich, satisfied for dessert. There was ample cash for food, and though the shopfronts of London were lavish with temptations, especially to someone living alone, he didn’t eat more than was needed, or snack between meals. Walking everywhere kept him thin.

An hour passed, blank, musing, contented, pleasurable to be on his own, footsteps along the street not even causing him to wonder where they were heading, nor care, since they could have no connection with him. Laughing to break the spell, he cleared the table except for the red enamelled mug of scalding tea, whose handle was bound with post office string, otherwise it was too hot to lift with softening fingers.

Two hundred pounds in his account was enough for idling away without anxiety. When down to his last fifty he would scout for work, as if the novel was already dead and buried. A month was to elapse before copies could be in the shops, and he refused to rely on earning more. The ever wise Isaac had told him there were always jobs going in London, but Herbert decided that if nothing interested him he would go back in the army and do some work or other. Standing at the window, mug in hand, fag in the other, he optimistically felt that the more uncertain the future the more promising it would be. In no way would he take on work that dirtied his hands.

Hungerford footbridge was his favourite way into the West End. Clouds lifted from the wide expanse of water, a long way up the sky above the City and St Paul’s. Excursion boats of late summer tracked in and out from Charing Cross pier. Responsible for no one but himself, he felt as rich as if all he could see belonged to him, as if he had rented it out and was waiting for the leases to fall due. If he stood on the balustrade and opened his arms to fly he wouldn’t have to fight against the crowds to get from point to point, though among the mob he felt both his personalities merging into one. More people looked at him than they ever had in the runnels of Nottingham, as if by some magic he had become unique enough to be noticed.

In a fortnight he would have to pass himself off as the unregenerate Bert Gedling, so had better get even more firmly back into the old pit-prop guise or it would be a case of the impostor of the age being out on his arse. Meanwhile he could give in to the luxury of being Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, the only way to tolerate anonymity in a conurbation of eight million.

Dusk was the time of doubt and loneliness. Gedling told him not to be mardy, while Thurgarton-Strang scorned to be influenced by such failings. He wrapped up complimentary copies of Royal Ordnance to Isaac and Mrs Denman, as well as one to Archie (not forgetting another to his parents) as careful with each bundle as if they were packets of sugar in the days of rationing.

The Jaffa-orange of the landlord’s bulb gave little light, so he changed the wattage for a hundred, which spread a satisfactory whiteness over the table and outlined every inked word of his letters. Glenny called in to collect the rent at half past nine on Thursday evening, as if he had a girlfriend in the neighbourhood, or was trying to dodge the income tax man. ‘Settling in, Mr Gedling?’

‘Yes. Suits me fine here.’ Glenny sat in the best chair of the two, so there was no option but to ask: ‘Would you like coffee?’ To Herbert’s surprise he said yes, as if raking in rents was his only social activity. He dashed some Nescafe into a glass. ‘Do you have many properties to call at?’

Glenny seemed to like the question. ‘Half a dozen round here. It keeps me going. What would I do otherwise? I started my life as a porter in the markets.’

‘Milk and sugar?’

He did.

‘You’re a bit of a dark horse, aren’t you?’

Herbert couldn’t fault the man’s direct style. ‘I worked in a factory up North for ten years.’

‘Looking for something different now?’

‘I might be.’

He sipped his coffee. ‘You been in the army?’

‘I did three years, some of it in Cyprus.’

‘I suppose that’s where you got that decoration on your cheek?’ Glenny, a big man, tilted the chair, but came forward when a crack sounded somewhere in it. ‘Do you want to do some work for me?’

‘Doing what?’

‘Getting in the rents.’

‘Is that all?’

Glenny coughed. ‘There’s one or two undesirables I need to deal with.’

‘Sounds good.’ Life was scattered with signposts, the right or wrong one lightly followed. He saw himself as an ex-service thug with his own gang, hired by anyone who needed rough stuff to increase assets or further their careers. Any reinforcements he could get by asking Archie and a few others down from Nottingham. The picture wilted. ‘The only thing is I’m waiting to hear about another offer. Comes up in a fortnight.’

Glenny shook his head, disappointed. ‘Shame. Let me know if you think about it and change your mind.’ His laugh was dry. ‘You’d be good at it, especially with that scar.’

Herbert liked the villain. ‘Thanks for the offer.’

He turned from the top of the stairs and grinned. ‘And thank you for the coffee. And I don’t mind you using that hundred watt bulb.’

Motoring lessons were advertised in a shop window on Walworth Road for a pound an hour, and he booked half a dozen, to practise driving around London. After the first session the instructor guided him over the river and into the thick of it. ‘You’ve got the knack, pal.’

‘All I want to know is how to pass the test,’ Herbert said sharply, stuck behind a post office van in High Holborn.

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. You should get it first time.’

Thanks to Archie, but he wanted less talk and more knowledge. ‘We’ll see.’

‘I know a nice car for sale, an Austin. Only a couple of hundred. You could practise all you liked, then.’

‘Without a licence?’

‘Get an international driving permit from the AA, then you can say you’re on your way abroad if you get stopped by the law.’

‘No thanks.’

Between motoring practice he walked up Villiers Street by Kipling’s digs, across the Strand with a wave at friendly Nelson to his left, a white atoll of cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Adept at artfully dodging buses he jinked through Lamb Passage (careful of his head) on to Floral Street, and cut up into Long Acre. Idleness, the freedom to do as he pleased, which he had been wanting all his life, gave a spring to his step by the post office, a different walk than after absconding from school and sending the missive to his parents.

Coming out of the National Gallery, with its vacuous and self-satisfied faces of the famous dead, he dropped a well-deserved sixpence to the bony old man in a blue beret chalking portraits on the flagstones. Brilliant colours delineated Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, Nelson, Wellington, Disraeli and other great personages, each powdery base to be washed away in the next downpour.

In Lyons on St Martin’s Lane he sat down to the fuel of pie and mash, glancing from behind his News Chronicle at elegant office girls out for lunch. Isaac had told him with a laugh that you had to be wary of saying good day to a pretty girl in London in case you were accused of being a white slaver about to needle her with drugs and bundle her off to South America. Herbert wouldn’t approach them anyway, whether from reticence after so long in the Midlands or because he was still uncertain as to who or what he would finally turn out to be. He only knew that he liked looking.

‘Don’t you know me, then?’ a woman called, when he was on the street and wondering which direction to go in next. The voice jerked his heart. He had heard it before, though this time the accent was different, the tone in no way vitriolic or accusing. She faced him. ‘You should.’

She was gloved and hatted, carried a Harrods’ shopping bag, and a smart umbrella. An Italian leather reticule hung from the other arm, and her smile showed delight at the chance meeting. A boy of six, and a girl a little older, stood close, each in the stiff new clothes of their prep school. ‘It’s a long time ago, I know, but I’ve often thought about you.’

‘So have I.’ Her corn-dolly beauty had faded in ten years, but the make-up and smell of perfume attracted him. There seemed more of a gap in their ages compared to then, but he recalled her naked, and in every conceivable sexual position — as if it were yesterday now that he looked into her blue eyes and met the same intimate smile — the pines of Cyprus outside the room. Pangs of love and regret came from so long back, as she vividly recalled the times they’d had. Such memories were a luxury, blossoming out of instantaneous recognition. She laughed excitedly, and touched his arm. ‘I can’t get over bumping into you like this. I knew you straightaway.’

He stroked his scar, as if to hide it, but she had already taken note. ‘It’s amazing,’ was all he could say for the moment.

‘Mummy,’ the boy crowed, ‘will we be going soon?’

‘This is Samuel,’ she pointed out. ‘And that’s Dorothy.’

Sam sneered, and Dorothy glowered when he touched their heads.

‘Nice kids.’

‘They’re terrors.’ Her remark made them smile. ‘Are you happy these days?’

‘Very.’ Herbert thought it a strange question. ‘How about you?’

‘Oh, absolutely.’ Her lips told him otherwise, as she had meant them to, but who could be as happy as in the old days? ‘My husband has an accountancy firm,’ she said, and asked what he was up to in Town. He told her most of what had happened since their affair. The girl put out her tongue from behind Alice’s back, and Herbert glared, which delighted her.

‘Marvellous. You spent all that time on research in a factory? How brave! It must be good. I’ll look out for the reviews. But call me whenever you like. Here’s my number. My husband’s a great reader, when he has time, so I’ll buy him your book. We must go now: we’re for the National Gallery, then I’m taking these despicable sprogs to tea — just so’s they can be sick, I suppose.’

‘I’m not a sprog, I’m a schoolboy, aren’t I, Dorothy?’

‘No,’ she shouted piercingly, ‘you’re a fat little sprog.’

‘I’ll kill you when we get home.’

‘Oh no, not again,’ she yawned, a pale but capable hand across her mouth.

Herbert smiled. ‘They must be a handful.’

‘Not really. I give them a good smack now and again.’

‘Yes, and it hurts,’ Samuel shouted.

If I have children will they be Gedling or Thurgarton-Strang? Probably neither, he thought, though I don’t suppose I will have any. He turned to Alice. ‘Buy a copy of my book for your husband if you like, but I’ll send one for you alone.’

‘You are a darling.’ In a lower voice: ‘I loved you, you know.’

‘I adored you,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought about you. None of it was forgotten.’ It wasn’t true, but the situation required such remarks from a Thurgarton-Strang, and maybe also from Bert Gedling. He wouldn’t call on her, but the picture of doing so, and resuming their passion, and eloping, and setting up house (maybe in Cyprus) unrolled itself like an obligatory film. The last words out of the pathetic group hurrying away came from the boy who wanted to know about that man’s scar, and Herbert assumed a passing bus muffled the smack Alice gave him.


During two hours’ practice on the day before the motoring test he was caught in traffic along Piccadilly and around Trafalgar Square, which made him confident that he could drive anywhere without fear or hindrance. ‘I’ll blind the bastards if I don’t pass,’ he said to his instructor, feeling as competent at the wheel as any of those brash pig-ignorant louts who had often tried to kill him on Belisha crossings in South London.

Ice-cold attention to the test course made him neither slow nor fast, as if the hypercritical eye of Archie overlooked him instead of the middle-aged jaundiced cloth-capped examiner with his little moustache and poised clipboard. A railway bridge, a blind corner, the slope for a hill start, an obstacle course of crossings and traffic lights along the main street, a circuit of the gasworks, and backing into a quiet avenue — all was normal and predictable. He could quote the Highway Code from start to finish and inside out.

The test man filled in a sheet of pink paper. ‘I have to tell you that you’ve passed’ — as if his liver was going through the mincer with chagrin. Herbert supposed he was expected to jabber with gratitude, but his lips stayed locked as he took the permit, and gave a thumbs-up to the motoring school man by the kerb so that he could be driven back to his digs.

Twenty

People on the stairs made room for him so that Humphries at the top could grasp his hand and crow for everyone to hear: ‘Have you seen the reviews?’

‘No, I ain’t.’ Bert felt rough and surly, out of the sunlight into the hugger-mugger, the party no more than a chance to meet good-looking tarts from the office. Copies of the book had been displayed in shops for at least a week before publication. Herbert had seen a stack in a window on Southampton Row. ‘Is that by me? Did I write that?’ ‘You fucking bet you did,’ Bert told him. He stood back on the pavement for a wider view, Bert’s gloating stamped out by a sneer from Herbert, and confirmed by the horn of a taxi that nearly took his heels off.

‘We’ve had three good ones so far, and I’m sure there’ll be others.’ He was disappointed by Bert’s formal get-up, but Herbert knew that if he’d decked himself out in cap and muffler, and pulled a reluctant false pedigree whippet on a piece of old clothes line, people would begin to suspect, anyone in the know realizing that when a factory worker attended a party, or went out on a Saturday night, he wore the best in his wardrobe.

Humphries thought he looked like a slightly more eccentric Sir Richard Burton of Victorian exploring days — though without the beard — which was not surprising, since he had come from that largely unmapped expanse of territory beyond Potters Bar. Never mind, he’ll seem the genuine article as soon as he opens his mouth. ‘I’ll be introducing you to Jacob Wright later.’

Herbert, playing the part of Bert, felt threatened, disgruntled, almost paranoid among such people. Time must pass before a modification of his uncouth accent would seem a natural development of living in the south. ‘Who’s ’e, then? Is ’e a window cleaner?’

‘Oh, no.’ He wondered what the devil that could mean. ‘He’s from New Books Magazine, a very influential rag. It should get you in all the libraries, including Boots, so talk to him. He wants to do a full page. They’re even sending a photographer.’

‘I’m only interested in the crumpet.’ Bert turned to a woman with shapely breasts and a beehive hairdo, offering glasses of wine. ‘What’s yer name, duck?’

‘Fiona,’ she smiled, moving on.

‘Maybe you’d rather have beer?’ Humphries pointed to a gaggle of bottles on his desk. ‘We got these in specially.’

Bert took out his Waterman to script his moniker in a copy of Royal Ordnance for the firm’s archives. ‘It’s all right. This red vinegar’s OK, but I’d like some chips wi’ it the next time, and a bit o’ salt.’

The book jacket showed a group of brutal-looking workmen standing by a machine — which could have been anything from a one-armed bandit to a coffee dispenser — undecided whether to dismantle the contraption and walk out with the bits under their coats, or pick up hammers and smash it to pieces as representing all that was ugly in their oppressed lives.

‘Like it?’

He didn’t know what to say. Humphries obviously thought it was the best thing since he’d been to Rome on ten pounds and seen the Sistine Chapel. Herbert wouldn’t look at such a cover on a shop table. He’d run a mile. It was ghastly. Even a half-undressed woman on the front would be better. ‘Love it.’

‘We all do.’ He named the famous artist. ‘He did us a jacket for Walter Hawksworth’s novel a few years ago. The book wasn’t very good, though it sold well.’

Herbert was sure it did. Still, the cover wasn’t the fault of his book, which he lifted high to examine as the one object that might join his disparate parts. The greater the distance between them the more he felt himself an author, whether Bert Gedling who everyone should be wary of (or feel superior to) or Herbert Thurgarton-Strang who carried a bag of iron filings in his soul. Either way, he sensed people’s unease as he signed the book, and lifted another glass of wine as if such work was wearing to an extent that factory graft never could be, and he needed a reward for tackling the unfamiliar system with such panache. Despite its murkiness, the drink went down like a well-greased adder.

Dominic showed him into a small office. ‘It’ll be quiet in here.’

Herbert wondered whether sharp questions on his past weren’t about to commence, but Daniel Sloper the photographer turned Dominic and a couple of others out so that the flashing could happen in peace. ‘All the pictures I’ve ever ’ad took mek me look like the back end of a tram smash,’ Bert grumbled.

‘These won’t.’ Sloper was a tall and well-stocked man in his twenties. He threw his brown leather jacket over a chair in the best motorbiker’s style, but kept his silk scarf tied on like a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, which garment seemed to Herbert the social equivalent of his own white muffler.

Bert offered a glass from a tray of drinks on the desk. ‘Sup this, mate. It’s good for a cough.’

‘Chin-chin, old boy!’ Sloper took a modest swig and, as if knowing what real wine was, poured the remains into an ashtray. He set up screens and tripods, holding a light meter here and there, Herbert noting the thoroughness of a man who knew his trade. Using few words but with amiable and persuasive gestures, he got Bert to stand by the window, and then the door and, lastly, against a solid background of books. A dozen scar-side shots made Bert, in his formal suit and tie, look both villainous and interesting.

Sloper folded up the photographic trappings, waved cheerio, and trundled downstairs in his riding boots.

Herbert felt knackered already, as if his soul had been sucked out and spat into the gutter. ‘You’ll have to get used to it.’ Dominic tried for nonchalance in lighting a Black Russian cigarette, but the match broke in two, and fell flaring on to the carpet. Before he could get down and put it out, Bert stamped on it, glad to see Dominic’s face red with futile exertion as he came up. ‘Yer’ve got to be quick where I come from.’

‘I suppose it will take you some time to become accustomed to life in London. We had thought you’d come to the party wearing overalls. Just to play the part, of course.’ Being jocular, he was unaffected by Herbert’s scowl, who was wondering how he could enquire about Rachel he’d had such a crush on at school. ‘Ah well, where I come from yer put yer best rags on for a party. My sister Rachel allus towd me I’d got to dress smart. She’s good at that. ’Ave yo’ got a sister, Dominic?’

‘I did have.’ The cold-blooded toad-faced bastard was barely interested. ‘She married an oaf who works in the City. Hardly see her now. Got three nippers.’

‘If you don’t like her ’usband me and some mates can do yer a favour and kick the snot out of ’im. I’ll get some o’ the lads down from Nottingham, to mek a proper job of it. All you need to do is give ’em a bit of beer money and their train fares. It’ll be a day’s outing for them. They’ll love it.’

Dominic shuddered in trying to stop him. ‘No, I don’t think so, certainly not. We don’t do that sort of thing here.’

Herbert turned away. That was that, then. He knew Dominic’s old style, of being too icy to say his sister was also called Rachel, and not chiming in about her for a bit. Can’t let these low-born types get too familiar, was what no doubt swamped into his unfriendly prep school mind.

A girl with short brown hair leaned on the top rail of the stairs, glass in hand, talking to a man whose suit even Bert knew to be very expensive. ‘In’t she marvellous, that one there. Deborah, in’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Humphries said. ‘I think you saw her before. But come along, it’s time to be interviewed.’

A short-arsed putty-faced bloke smoking a curved pipe lifted himself from the sofa to shake the toiler’s hand. Touch it, rather. ‘I’ve read your book, and liked it. It’s unique, in its portrayal of the working class.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘I’m not the only one who thinks so.’ At least he had humour enough to laugh. ‘But I’m sure you must have read a lot to produce a book like that. You can’t deceive me. Impossible to fault it.’

‘Neither could I. That’s why I sent it ’ere. I suppose yer was just waiting for somebody to come up with that sort o’ novel and barge his way in. Still, I would say summat like that, wouldn’t I?’

Jacob looked as if thinking he might not turn out to be as naive as he appeared. ‘How did you start writing? But let’s sit down, and be comfortable.’

‘I’m used to standing on my feet eight hours a day. Well, I don’t know. I just got into it. When I was twenty-five I looked round and thought I might ’ave summat to say about the world. Are you doin’ shorthand?’

‘I am. But go on. It’s interesting.’

‘So I got a pen and a packet of paper, and wrote about what I knew. One o’ my mates sold me a typewriter that fell off the back of a lorry, and I was on my way. Mind you, it took a few years to gerrit all clear.’

‘So how many drafts did you take it through before sending it to Humphries?’

‘You’ve got more questions than a copper who puts his hand on your shoulder after a bust-up in a pub. I lost count at fifteen.’ Bert set the tone to be aggressive rather than complaining, wanting only to get back among the booze and women. What else was he here for? Such a party had nothing to do with Royal Ordnance, though it was obvious Jacob must be dealt with. ‘It looks like you’re writing your own book about me, putting everything down on that jotter.’

‘It could happen one day. We haven’t had a book like this before, from a real working-class novelist.’

‘How is it different?’ Bert asked naively.

‘Well, you’ve written about men who don’t even think to better themselves.’

‘Better themselves? What would they want to do a thing like that for when they’ve got good jobs in a factory?’

Jacob’s shorthand swirled along. ‘I see what you mean. It does give authenticity.’

Bert thought a lecturing tone was called for. ‘I’m not a working-class novelist, anyway. Where I come from, if you call somebody working class, they smash yer face in. But I suppose you want to pigeonhole me, like everybody else. I’m just a novelist, or I will be when I’ve done a few more,’ which intention Herbert thought a fair ploy to confirm that he would go on to become a real writer, certainly a better occupation than standing at a lathe. ‘In a few years the fact that I’m an author from what you fucking well call a working-class environment’ — let him wonder where he got that word — ‘won’t get anybody on the hop, because everybody’ll be doing it.’

Jacob wiped sweat from both sides of his face. ‘I’ll quote that statement, but tell me something about your family.’

‘Family?’ He gave a suitably grim laugh, and settled himself, as if the burden of revelation might become too great, and he’d collapse into a fit. ‘The owd man was on the dole when I was a kid. Not that he couldn’t get a job, though. He was just bone idle.’ He recalled the unsolicited account of Archie’s younger days, listened to one Saturday night in a pub when they hadn’t been able to get a nobble on from any of the women, about his father and the means-test man and the starvo times in the thirties, before the war started that drummed everyone into work. Archie was too pissed and despondent to care what he was saying, and went on till Herbert felt he had lived through such miseries himself.

‘The old man kicked me out to work at fourteen, to bring some beer money into the house. Then the family was killed in an air raid, except me, who was in bed with a married woman — or I would ’ave been if I hadn’t bin a bit too young. She was a cousin at my auntie’s, as a matter of fact.’

Jacob nodded, and tut-tutted, and scribbled, and nodded again, till even he thought Bert was trowelling it on a little heavily. ‘Let’s talk about politics.’

Bert scratched his left ear, which hadn’t been bothering him, till the finger-chafing brought an itch out of its burrow and refused to be eliminated, so he stopped, and closed his right eye to gain more control, looking sceptically at Jacob with the other. ‘Politics? Well, it’s allus been Labour for me, like the rest of us up there, though you do find a few fuckpigs that vote Tory.’

‘That’s always been a problem,’ Jacob said, showing his own colours as if to encourage him.

‘My temperament,’ Bert went on, ‘is a bit bolshie. I happen to think Darwin was right,’ Herbert interjected. ‘It’s the survival of the fittest in this chronic world, which suits me fine. I reckon the country’s over-governed. I don’t like the idea of conscription, and I think income tax should be scrapped.’ Herbert, though in danger of spoiling matters, maundered angrily on against every ruling institution and useful organization in the country, and stopped just short of appearing a fool or, worse, betraying his real background.

Jacob wondered what he would be able to make of all this. ‘I don’t understand how someone who left school at fourteen could write a book like Royal Ordnance. In a way I don’t quite see it.’

Neither did Herbert, who hoped his test was close to the end, for he began to despise himself at such apparent success. ‘Well, I read a lot, didn’t I?’

‘But what about the scholarship, and going to a grammar school?’

‘A what ship?’

‘A scholarship.’

‘What sort o’ ship is that?’

He told him, and after a few more fruitless skirmishes thought a touch of provocation would put him back on the ground. ‘Before you came in this evening,’ Jacob smiled, ‘I heard someone say he thought your book was good, but he did wonder how long you would be able to keep it up. Do you have anything to say about that?’

Bert’s face twitched, and set hard. He looked towards the window, as if able to see outside and turn dark into daylight — and back again. ‘Is he still ’ere? I’ll knock him down the stairs’ — especially if Dominic had been the know-all loudmouth. ‘They can blab what they like,’ he said moodily.

‘I forget who it was.’ Jacob put book and pencil back into his pocket. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking to you,’ and took out a handkerchief to get the steam off his glasses. Herbert stretched himself, and cracked his knuckles, as he and Archie had often done in a duet to amuse the women at the end of the day, to indicate that the interview was over for him as well. Humphries had been listening by the door.

‘That was fine, Bert,’ he said when Jacob had left. ‘You’re ideal for interviews.’

‘I was only talking. Showin’ off, I suppose.’

In the crush of the party, he excused himself between several backs, and lifted the last full glass from a tray before another hand could close on it. Deborah’s hugger-mugger with Dominic enraged both Bert and Herbert. ‘Fuck off, Jones,’ they said, ‘or I’ll bash yer pretty face in.’

A ripple went up her body at the prospect of some mindless violence, ending in a giggle which spilled a few beads of wine. ‘Look here, Herbert,’ Dominic said. And then he grinned. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you Herbert?’

Bert glared into his eyes. So the bastard had rumbled him. Or had he? If he was fishing he’d bury the hook in his finger. Dominic looked back impertinence passing for courage, as in the old days. It was one to one again, though pride and upbringing might well stop Dominic letting on if he did know, at least before so many people. Herbert, at the same time, no longer wanted to keep up the illusion of being someone he definitely was not. But he had to, and wondered what resources of his actor’s talent remained to help him if he started drowning in the morass of his lie — or if his so far solid chariot began breaking up.

‘It don’t bother me if you call me Herbert,’ Bert said, ‘as long as you don’t mind being dead. Nobody’s called me that since I went into hospital to have my heart out. I was about four at the time. Anyway, piss off, so’s I can have a conversation with this lovely, intelligent, and smashin’ bit o’ stuff called Debbie.’

Dominic collected the blush of chagrin from one side of his smarmy clock with a cursory wipe and put it into his trouser pocket for a future emergency, but the other side of his face showed that he didn’t seem in any way concerned at leaving them together, giving one aspect to Bert and another to Herbert, so that each could make his choice. Even so, Herbert was glad to note how he shouldered himself along a disgruntled track towards a flat-chested woman who looked like his sister Rachel and blushed as he came close.

Herbert’s words to Deborah had jerked out after soaking up too much inferior booze, but he decided to stay with her, and to rein in Bert for the rest of the evening, come what may, and put on whatever charm he could of a Thurgarton-Strang. She would only think he was learning fast. ‘I’m sorry about all that. It’s just that I get drunk on plain English now and again, which I think’s no bad thing in this place. Anyway, it ’elped to get rid o’ that lounge lizard.’

‘I’m glad you did.’ She looked at him with the sort of open full-toothed smile he could never have got from Cecilia. ‘If I’d tried it I’d have been given the push.’

Herbert sensed that she and Dominic were closer than just acquaintances at the office, and if so he was glad to break up their affair, which would serve Dominic right.

Twenty-One

A light of inspiration in Herbert’s room shone from the picture by Briton Rivière. Phoebus Apollo drove his chariot of the sun over a flower-strewn plain, the sullen pack of lions in long shafts gnashing their teeth at the efforts of the lord and master to gibe them on. Powerless to strike back from the reins and drag him down, such rage could only be slaked by sensing a time when the inexperienced Phaeton would struggle to control them and become their victim.

The reproduction, one of an album from a secondhand furniture shop, all houses cleared, provided another stitch in the tapestry of his progress, as well as a warning. He was half in the picture but too much in the bad dream of his room: a boil on the ceiling was about to burst, and drown him with pus while the walls closed in.

The yen to work was dead, relief impossible, for the time unthinkable. He only felt secure when alone in his room, but even that no longer held back the sensation of being close to madness. The room had turned into a prison, in which his anchor found no rock to grip.

He had money to spend, and London was all around, but being his own gaoler stopped him breaking out, unless to buy a cleaver at a bucket shop and disembowel a stranger in a dark alley. Without a motive he would never be caught. Would God or anyone look askance if he threw a child in the moiling water from Hungerford Bridge? It was the worst of dreams.

There was no other self in the offing but the one that sought to overpower him, a stranger he would have to fight like Theseus and the Minotaur. The rite of passage, to he couldn’t tell what or where, gave a mixture of lassitude and voracious impatience, out of which not even Bert from way back could show him an escape route, except to say that he ensconce himself in the nearest pub and talk to people, something he was totally unable to do.

To get on a train for the north and wallow in the life he had abandoned, or go to Norfolk and shoot a few rabbits, and falter under the questions of his ageing parents, would be annihilation. The bark of Simpson the games’ master might get him running, or the old army shout of rise and shine, but that was no more than a laugh. Or he could call Deborah from the box along the street and, babbling out his confusions, show himself as a worm not fit to live. They’d been close to getting into bed a few nights ago, but she said they hadn’t known each other long enough, and he steeled himself to be gallant and not push the opportunity into boorishness.

He sliced brown bread and opened a tin of sardines into a saucer: the survival of the fittest had to begin with yourself. A barb on the ragged edge of the tin drew copious blood, an encouraging sign. Maybe his despair had been brought on because nothing had gone into his stomach since a meagre breakfast of distant coffee and a slice of buttered bread. He had been too intent on opening letters from the mat downstairs to eat much. Those with typed addresses were seen to first, in case there were cheques inside. The second half of his advance came for the novel, and a few hundred for a paperback, as well as cash for an American edition, an unnerving cocked hat for one post. He unfolded and flattened them with his buttery knife: let the teller at the bank wonder what the stains were.

The top came easily off a bottle of White Horse and, filling a cup halfway, alcohol felt good at the lips, put pepper in his belly, to be mopped up by a sandwich. As if the blood was ink he pressed several folds of blotting paper over it till the skin was dry, and whisky could be rubbed into the cut.


Behind the window of a showroom in South Kensington he saw an Austin Healey Four Cylinder One Hundred Sports Car, on sale for five hundred pounds, a heartening object to spring into your sight on a Monday morning. He sloped back and forth along the low slung brutish panels, fingered the dark green wings as smooth as marble. ‘I’m serious. It’s a beauty.’

‘Then sit in it, pal.’ The salesman was a tall Germanic-looking man with rimless glasses and an amiable worldly squint. ‘The boss isn’t in yet. Cup of coffee while you wait?’

‘That’s very good of you. Yes, please.’

‘No trouble.’

Herbert stroked the pristine wheel, and felt his prospects good enough to stick up two fingers at the notion of getting a job. Solvent for at least a year, it would seem like twenty at the rate time had gone in the last two decades. He called the man over. ‘Don’t care if I do go broke. I’ll have it.’

The boss came in, overcoat, scarf and homburg, despite the warmish day, looking like a brother (or cousin) of Glenny the rackrent landlord, whose offer of a job Herbert had turned down. ‘I’ll have it, if I can drive it away.’

‘How would you like to pay, sir?’

All problems solved, he drove on to the road. After the car had soaked its gallons out of a pump near Shepherds Bush, he took the paces slowly around quiet streets so that he could gauge the dimensions. Drops of rain splattered the windscreen, wipers leaving a clean Perspex after every heartfelt sweep. In the coffee bar his position by the window kept the car in view long enough for him to know it was his.

He rocketed from the starter’s line at the Notting Hill Gate traffic lights, well in advance of any slow coach or happy saver, cruised along the Bayswater Road, and threaded a way through Mayfair and Soho, feeling like a kid who had been given a sparkling mechanical toy for his birthday.

Pulling up at a phone box he called Deborah. Could they meet after work? ‘I’ll take you to dinner.’

‘Yes, please. Can’t wait. I know a terrific place in Hampstead.’ She wondered, putting the receiver down, if he hadn’t been a hoaxer, not Bert Gedling at all, unless he was trying to bring his accent into line, which would be no bad thing.

At his solitary tea in the thirties splendour of the Hyde Park Hotel he imagined her thoughts, and smiled at their progress. She would analyse every nuance, and sooner or later get close to the right answer. Looking into the Bible he learned that Deborah was a prophetess, reason enough for falling in love.

The waitress brought extra butter and filled his pot with hot water whenever he called. She had a stout figure and dark straight hair, and Herbert, because of her accent, wanted to know where she came from. She told him she’d been a teacher in Australia, and was working her way around Europe. Feeling quixotic, he left a pound note for a tip.

Deborah, walking down the steps of the offices, heard him pip the horn from across the street, and paused at the kerb for traffic to pass. Herbert seemed to get his first real look at her face, her features usually too volatile to picture her properly when among other people.

As for what she was like inside — inside? Where the fuck was that? — whoever you looked at, and thought you had weighed up, and knew from the spleen outwards, could remain a mystery, and the weighing up had to begin all over again. No one realized that better than he, and you could but speculate: often wide of the truth, yet sometimes close to reality. People, like quicksilver, needed a lifetime to properly pin down, the only thing being that you couldn’t afford to wait that long, and so used the imagination to fix them for better or worse at a particular moment and say that’s how they were.

She was a little above middle height, and walked across the road in such a way as to show she had been carefully brought up but had enough independence to go her own way. Her nose pointed somewhat in the air, as if she considered everyone else as shit, which amused him, though he liked how her white and even teeth showed he deserved a smile. Either she was more beautiful than he had supposed, or it was marvellous what a sports car did for you.

He looked in no way, she thought, like the proletarian novelist he was said to be, when leaning over the wheel to unlatch the door, though on opening his mouth he couldn’t help betraying himself. ‘Come on in, duck, and I’ll tek yer for a ride in this mechanical pram.’

His accent was bound to mellow after a while, unless he’s playing it up because he hopes I find it sexy, which in a way I do. The interesting scar — a mark of Cain if ever there was one — hinted at a fair amount of trouble in his life, never mind how he said he’d come by it, though without it he might look a bit more ordinary.

She thought him handsome, but unpredictable and hard to know, perhaps a man to beware of. Her father had warned her of people ‘from further down the ladder’, who tried to pass themselves off for what they hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming. Otherwise the kindest and gentlest person, he said he couldn’t bear social climbers. ‘They’re only out for themselves, so avoid them like the plague. You know what they say? “Put a beggar on horseback, and he’ll ride roughshod over you.”’

He was only trying to protect her, bless him, but she was quite good at looking after herself, thank you very much. Bert Gedling wasn’t climbing anywhere, though he sometimes gave the impression of treading in hobnailed boots across the whole spectrum. Luckily he wasn’t fat, or coarse, or bumptious, or anything like such a person might be as shown on television. Nor was he paranoid or set on murder. His nails were scrubbed, and hair smartly cut, shoes polished and cravat arranged into the neck of his shirt. He used deodorant, so didn’t smell, and even if it was his only suit he knew how to use a clothes brush. Perhaps he came from a more respectable level of the working class than he let on or, going by his rough-beast streak, he was the black sheep who even so hadn’t been able to throw off the cleanly habits of his family.

It didn’t much matter that she would never be able to introduce him to her father, as he wove with aggressive skill through traffic up Charing Cross Road. She caught looks of curiosity and admiration from other motorists, and glares of vile envy from one or two pedestrians. Her father would probably have been among the latter, but she didn’t care what he would think of Bert, and would do as she liked, which was what living in London was all about.

My lovely popsy girl, he laughed, shooting the amber towards Camden Town, is enjoying her spin with Champagne Bertie, and I’m wallowing in being with her. Like an air stewardess in the telly ad she lit a pair of cigarettes and put one between his lips. Life was on the mend, though he supposed Archie in his place would have preferred her to be married, peril being pornography to him. Herbert took a hand away to up the gear. ‘You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met, seen, or even dreamed about, and I love you. I know you don’t believe me, but I can’t help that.’

He was lying, of course. The first words of any man who wanted to be intimate with you was to say he loved you. And the first move of a woman who wanted the man to make love to her was to light a cigarette and put it between his lips. Her laugh at his declaration carried them much of the way up Haverstock Hill.

She lived on the third floor of a large old house, which allowed him to park his precious motor off the road — and close the top to stop pigeons making a mess of the upholstery. There were trees along the drive, but the garden had degenerated into a jungle.

‘That’s my Mini over there,’ she nodded. ‘I don’t drive it to work, though it’s good to rattle around in at weekends, or go to see my parents in Woking now and again.’

A curvaceous bottle of old Cliquot was lifted from behind the seat of his Healey. ‘Smart little buggy, the Mini. Do you have a room, or a flat?’ Meaning that if she’s sharing maybe I’ll have a go at the other girl as well.

She drew him into the hall. ‘A flat, and I don’t have to share.’ Rising damp, woodworm and deathwatch beetle, with a dash of Colorado thrown in, it stank like his old school, tingled at the nostrils as they went up creaking stairs. She leaned on the banister. ‘Daddy bought me a ten-year lease.’

He wondered if the building would last that long. ‘What does he do, your old man?’

‘He was a barrister, but retired early.’

How a barrister’s daughter levelled with the son of a brigadier general he neither knew nor cared, all such stuff left behind decades ago, at least on his part. Maybe everyone would start to think the same, though he doubted that anything could fundamentally change in such a country. Even if her father was a docker he wouldn’t have minded.

He followed her into a large sitting room, with bedroom, kitchen-diner, and bathroom attached. ‘Quite a nice pied-à-terre, duck.’

‘It used to belong to Dominic, till he got a place in Chelsea.’

‘That fat worm.’

‘He’s a good editor. And it was kind of him to tell me the flat would be falling vacant. I’d always wanted to live in Hampstead, instead of the bedsit in Fulham. Oh, by the way’ — she took a letter from her handbag — ‘Dominic asked me to give you this. It came via the office.’

Postmarked Nottingham, he was glad to note, for it might help to establish his authenticity in Dominic’s oyster eyes. He put it into his pocket, and looked around the room. She certainly did live here, everything neat and shipshape. ‘A very cushy billet.’ He took off his jacket only after she had shed her coat. ‘Where are the napkins?’

‘In the kitchen drawer. Glasses top left in the cupboard.’ Like all the men she had been used to he was curt, but basically courteous, so why should she think him any better or worse? He came in with two glasses: the cork hit the ceiling. ‘After we’ve polished this off we can go out to eat. I’m clambed to death.’

She would have preferred dry sherry, but maybe he had seen an old Charles Boyer film. ‘I’m fairly hungry, as well.’

He stood by the bay window looking into the half-leaved branches, mouth down and brown eyes sharp but, she thought, seeing only himself, different now to the mad but gallant boyo who had driven her from the office. His saturnine aspect showed character, too broody perhaps at times, as if he was having a struggle coming to terms with himself — with his so-called success, probably — since whether he admitted it or not, it must be something of a shock, though so far she had to admit he was carrying it off with panache, unless he was a consummate actor.

Everything about him puzzled her, even so, because she had seen no supposed workman on the street with anything like the quality of his looks at certain moments. Perhaps experience in the matter was lacking, not having been further north than Whipsnade Zoo, and then only for a few hours, and gazing at faces not at all likely to help her speculations. It could be that there were many specimens like himself in the great unknown North, and that if she were to see him in overalls and cloth cap, with a spanner in one hand and a hammer in the other, and a cigarette between his lips as he puzzled out some difficult job or other, she would have no trouble in identifying him as a run-of-the-mill workman.

Another explanation — though this was really fanciful, as if out of a Victorian novel — was that he had been snatched from his cradle by some villainous woman who had, for the price of a bottle of beer, palmed him off to a family as low down in the social scale as his had been above it. Anyhow, what had changed him from one person to the other she couldn’t know about, but she was more than half in love with the result, and felt like getting into bed with him this minute, whether or not it was because of the champagne, but didn’t want him to think her cheap or easy to get in case he lost all respect for her, as her mother had said men would if she let them get that far, and in fact as one or two had already done.

He swung away, and set down his empty glass, deciding it wasn’t the time to tell her who he was. It was necessary to avoid possible recrimination, or at best a long explanation as to why he’d got into the Bert guise at all, if he wasn’t to forfeit his chance of seducing her. A confession had been urgent from the beginning, and though there would never be an ideal moment, it would certainly be stupid to make one now.

So after rehearsing the suitably crass lingo of his next announcement, he said: ‘Come on, love, let’s finish this bottle of bubbly, then we can go out and find one o’ them posh troughs to scoff at. Maybe they’ll light us a couple of orange candles, and somebody’ll scrape out a tune on a fiddle when we spoon into each other’s eyes.’


She broke away from his kisses and sat on the bed. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

What a question! — needing only a look for an answer.

Knowing there to be no option because of the way she felt, she began to undo her blouse, her eyes willing him to undress as well, though he wanted no telling.

Why and when she had decided to be intimate with him he couldn’t say, but if it didn’t happen now it never would, so he was more than ready.

She felt unsteady, after his topping up of her glass in the restaurant, and fumbled at her skirt, though it soon dropped. She nudged her shoes off.

He noted that her way of getting her underwear off was balletic, not only as if she had done it more than a few times before (he may be misjudging her, and yet who hadn’t when you thought about it?) but that she believed, as a smart and experienced Home Counties girl would, in the no-nonsense utility of effort to get sooner to the point where pleasure could begin.

On the other hand you could say there was something puritanical in undressing so quickly, for he preferred to take his time, ploughing through fancy underwear, silk, cotton, or nylon, it didn’t matter which, as long as, phase by phase, he reached what was inside and found it ready.

He kissed the closed lids of her eyes, and her delicious lips on which the taste of fruit and wine and coffee lingered, as if he wanted no more of her than that, stifling the crude language of Bert so as to spoil nothing and please both. The only way he could give his lust a patina of love and affection, and bring it to the level of romance which he assumed all women wanted — at least the women he had so far had — was to imagine her as a version of someone else. He worked his way backwards and forwards through every intimacy with other women, savouring the lechery, till he returned to the here and now of Deborah, the freshest of them all, whose love he was intent on winning till it matched his own.

The line of her naked back when she turned to pull down the bedclothes made him fully stiff, as he held her breasts and embraced her gently from behind. Resisting the force of passion that threatened to overwhelm him, he proceeded subtly, even at the risk of her wondering how a man of his sort had acquired such tact.

Her lips voiced the usual request as to whether he had ‘coped’. Nothing in the world would have been better than going in without, but the ultimate raw love of conception was only to happen after marriage. ‘You know I love you, Bert. I can’t hold myself back, but we have to take care.’

He stroked her hair and held her closer. ‘I know, darling, and I love you too much not to.’

‘When I can’t resist,’ she murmured, ‘you’ll know what it means, won’t you?’

He saw it, at the moment, as a promise he could hardly wait to keep. It was better with her than with all the others put together, certainly better than it could ever have been with Cecilia. But then, the fucking you were doing at the moment was bound to be the best, and he was more than satisfied, after making her come for the first time.


The letter lay on the floor between trousers and vest. Frank said Mrs Denman was ‘about to pass away, and is asking for you, Bert, and wondering how you’re getting on. It’s a crying shame she’s having to go through so much. Ralph isn’t any help at all, even though he is her son. He hardly shows his face, as if he’s frightened of what’s happening. He said he’s got a lot of work on, would you believe it? And he’s got to look after Mary, he says, because she’s got varicose veins. After all his mam’s done for him. That’s what happens though when you pamper your kids.’

And so on. His unremembered dreams had not been of the sort to set him up for agreeable social intercourse but, even so, it was a matter of a shave, shower, coffee, and putting on a second-best suit so that she would neither think he had come down in the world, nor was making a show because she was about to die.

The drive through Watford was tedious. Maybe it was market day in St Albans. Luton and Bedford went fairly easily, and so did Kettering, but then came the final killpig of threading through Leicester, only useful for stopping to buy the best of flowers. He pulled in once for petrol and coffee, and twice to make notes on his impressions of the route.

Mrs Denman never left his mind, the cause of his tedious slog to the north, an obstacle race turning the hundred and thirty miles into a thousand. There was talk of a motorway opening soon, which would cut a chunk off the four hours — when it came — yet he thought it fitting that the expedition to see Ma should be anything but an easy option.

Nottingham looked livelier and brighter than six months ago, and on a midweek morning as well. Maybe coming in by road at the wheel of his own car, and knowing the place no longer meant hard labour, put him in a mood that overawed the reason for his visit. More traffic ran to and fro over Trent Bridge and, in spite of half a sky of cloud, sunlight found a way on to the tarmac as he passed the school where he’d enlisted, and turned off towards Wilford Road.

Frank opened the door. ‘Thank God you’ve come. I knew it was you as soon as the car stopped.’ His hand was dry and bony. ‘You’re a good lad, Bert, is all I can say.’ Why was it that those who nursed the dying looked old and as if near death themselves? ‘The doctor’s just gone. He gave her enough painkillers to put a regiment down, but she’s hanging on, bless her.’

Bert also felt himself ageing as he went up the stairs. ‘Look who we’ve got here, my love,’ Frank called. ‘All the way from London. A real Prodigal!’

‘I just happened to be passing.’ So frail, it seemed as if she would sink through the bedclothes, a rag of her former self, soon to melt into the earth. But a hand came towards him, and he took it, turning back into the old Bert without effort. ‘Hey up, Ma, what’s all this, then?’

Her eyes opened. ‘Hello, Bert.’

Tears were floating in his head, unable to find a way out, which was how it should be. As long as the stalactites were dripping somewhere inside. ‘Thought I’d call and say hello. I’m on my way through.’

She smiled. ‘Going to the moon, are yer?’

‘And back,’ he said.

‘When I lit the fire last week …’

‘I tried to stop her,’ Frank said, ‘the silly sausage!’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there was a bit o’ burnt paper fluttering against the bars, like a moth it was, a black moth.’ Her words came out one by one, as if torn by the teeth from a telegram. ‘You know what that meant, Bert?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘It meant a stranger was on his way to see me. And here you are. I thought it might be you.’

‘That’s right, Ma, and it was.’ She was mistaken. A more important visitor was on his way.

Frank must have thought so too. ‘I’ll get a jug, and put these flowers in some water.’ He hoped she’d noticed them. Her eyes closed, opened again. ‘They’re lovely. Thank you, Bert.’

‘That’s all right. I was walking past an allotment near Leicester, and went over the fence to nick ’em. I left a few bob on a stone, though, outside the hut door, so’s the man could have a pint or two while he wondered what had happened to his blooms.’

She was away again, so he stayed silent, and hoped she would live, but knew she couldn’t because the frayed piece of string she was hanging on to was about to give. Her voice came, weak but clear. ‘Frank read me your book. You got it right.’

Wiping his face was the nearest to a waterfall of tears. He was in the house, so couldn’t say it was the rain, hadn’t been to work, so couldn’t claim it was sweat, had Al vision so couldn’t laugh that his eyes had gone for a burton. ‘Thanks, Ma.’ His impulse of dedicating the book to her was the only good deed he could remember. ‘I’m glad you liked it.’

‘Write me another.’

He kissed her luminous forehead now so narrow, and then the cool damp lips. ‘I am doin’. It’ll be done soon. I’ll write you lots.’

‘I’ll stay alive to read ’em. I’ll get better now.’

‘I know you will.’

She slept, crying in her sleep as if to get breath, or maybe down there was where she fought her pain, alone in the dark, sorting out memories and dreams. The usual sound of kids playing came from beyond the window, a little girl squealing every few seconds like a stuck pig. He’d done the right thing in coming to see her, but wanted to leave, go back to Deborah, who might wonder where he had gone. She wouldn’t let go of his hand, though the grip grew more and more feeble. ‘You can come down now for a cup o’ tea, and summat to eat,’ Frank whispered.

He didn’t want to sleep in his old room, told Frank he would be staying with somebody in town. He put up at the George Hotel behind the Council House, then walked across Slab Square to call on Isaac. The front door was locked and bolted, windows boarded up. He went into a shop lower down the street to buy cigarettes, and asked about it.

‘It’s being redeveloped, duck, as far as I know.’

‘An old man lived there. Do you happen to know anything about him?’

‘Couldn’t say. I expect they rehoused him. They don’t chuck anybody on the streets, not now they don’t.’

Which was a comforting thought. Yates’s was crowded, and he positioned himself by the door in case Isaac shuffled in. It wasn’t his night, and Herbert was irritated by the noise, so after his second pint he walked up the street to have dinner at the hotel.

The morning weather poured a deluge into the gloom, and he regretted having no workman’s cap for his head. He took the two bags of groceries bought for Isaac to Mrs Denman’s.

‘You needn’t have done this,’ Frank said.

‘Just a contribution to the household. How is she?’

Frank’s face was wet with tears, a phenomenon in that Herbert hadn’t noticed them begin. They were suddenly there. ‘She’s fighting, is all I can say. You know, Bert, I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’ll be a blessing when it’s over.’

Herbert thought so, too. A faint untidiness made the house seem dead already. ‘I shan’t disturb her, then.’

‘No, that’s right. Come back this afternoon. She might be a bit better by then. Forget what I said just now. The only thing that’s left of me is hope.’ He sat in the armchair, almost fell into it, as if his legs had lost the strength to hold him up. ‘It’s funny, though. I told her to see a doctor last year, but she said it was only a cold that wouldn’t go. Maybe every complaint that’s going to carry you off starts with thinking you’ve got a cold. I shouldn’t have believed her.’

‘There wasn’t much you could do,’ Bert said.


After the funeral he avoided the main route out of the city by paying the fourpenny toll over Wilford Bridge to Clifton, practising the indirect approach for getting back to London. To his right were the dark trees of the Grove he had walked along with Cecilia, and he smiled at no longer regretting his lost love.

In the few days between death and burial he had called at various council offices, and put on his haughty Thurgarton-Strang voice to get Isaac’s address out of a snotty-faced penpusher. The old folks’ ground-floor flat was spacious and newly furnished, a living room flanked by kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. ‘There’s so little else I want’, Isaac smiled, ‘that I’m beginning to think my time’s almost up. I’ve even got good neighbours.’

‘You deserved this years ago.’

‘No, I’m happy enough.’

Only the scattered books made it halfway familiar, and Herbert took a few off the settee so that he could sit down and unload his misery on to someone who had suffered more, and knew how to listen.

Working his way across country to intercept Watling Street, he thought maybe he should have stayed on a couple of days to console Frank. But Frank was strangely calm, icy almost, fully in control. The agony was over for Beryl so it was finished for him too, and he would grieve in his own way, for as long as it took, Herbert supposed, to get back to being only himself, when he’d maybe meet someone and marry again. His era of tears had ended, and Herbert was glad. In the past he’d been scornful of whoever shed them, cruel even — let the dead bury the dead — but the black dog of experience was firmly latched on to his shoulders, and the illumination of being a writer was always before his eyes — or mostly so — though in spite of his new tolerance he was inclined to scoff at such thoughts, unless impelled to pick up his pen and get them into a notebook.

By the aerials of Rugby and Daventry he was on the Roman road, and well on his way to London, beamed towards Deborah. She pulled him south, tarmac rolling under his car, distance lessened at every signpost. Wanting her nakedness to cling to, he cut his speed in case he never got there, despair vanishing now that Mrs Denman was dead and out of pain.

Twenty-Two

Awake, yet not awake, alert in the needle-grey dark but unable to open his eyes, the misty palisades closed in. Beryl haunted him through the deepest oceans of memory, till she had tracked him back to her lair. He must get out of bed on Monday morning, and reach for clean overalls, cram in his kitchen breakfast and, after as sociable a good morning as could be dredged up, bike his way through cold murk to the factory.

Such terror had its consolations when the limits of despair and indignation pulled away, and he felt the purest happiness to know that the factory had no more call on him, and that Deborah was in the kitchen pressing orange juice and brewing coffee.

To disperse the final wisps of nightmare he gloated, no less, on how the new year had brought more money from Humphries, and a thousand pounds advance for film rights which promised another fee on writing the script. There was much to be said for riches that fell so easily into your hands. ‘It’s as if I’ve inherited a coal mine.’

Deborah set the tray down, passed the Sunday papers, and put an arm around him. ‘Darling, they nationalized them years ago. In any case, whatever you get, you’ve earned.’

He supposed he had, if it counted as back pay at so much a year. Such money didn’t tempt him to waste time on the pleasures of London, a night or two each week at Deborah’s taking care of that. Otherwise he stayed in his room to finish The Wrong Side of the Tracks, not as easy as writing Royal Ordnance, which had been put together as if time had no importance. On the other hand he couldn’t afford to let The Wrong Side of the Tracks take nearly as long, not drawing a regular wage from the factory for his support. Since most of it had been done, or at least thought about before coming to London, he forced the pace through revision after revision till it was finished.

Time had to be found for interviews in certain newspapers: SENT OUT TO WORK AT FOURTEEN TO GET DAD SOME BEER MONEY. He hated their disgusting headlines, but couldn’t deny that he was responsible. Keeping up the image of Bert Gedling was becoming more tedious and difficult, only manageable by exaggerating the role, which made the headlines worse. The deception was getting bad for his self-esteem, and he was terrified at being so much up to his neck in Gedling that he would never be able to come out of him, and have to stay fixed for life in the skin of a monster so mindlessly created.

The only way to go on was to separate himself into three compartments, one containing the all-seeing Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, another the calloused and resentful Bert Gedling, and the third a distillation of someone able to handle both in television interviews. Perhaps Deborah sensed his struggle when she gave a few hints on how to manage. He had worked out certain rules for himself, but nodded appreciatively, as Bert would, when her advice confirmed them. ‘Don’t you know’, she said, ‘that you never say a straight yes or no to any of their questions?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Now you do. That way they have less chance of making you say things you might regret. And it gives you time to think about what to say next. Also, never say anything that might lead them to think you’re naive.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll try not to.’ Having already decided to climb out of Bert Gedling’s boots as soon as he unobtrusively could, he wondered, when Deborah went on, if she hadn’t been put on to him by Humphries. ‘You’d better do as I tell you,’ he would say, ‘and let him think you’ve fallen in love with him, or you won’t have a job any more.’ The only way to find the truth was by asking her to marry him, but she had to know who he was first. Even if she was Humphries’ secret agent or, worse, that shitmouth Dominic’s, her loving performances in bed were so genuine he had nothing to complain about.

At his first television interview she thought he’d scored about seventy per cent, which was good, she added, though it might have been better. The producer, Arthur Hornbeam, said everything was marvellous, but he would, wouldn’t he? All the same, he seemed happy with it, and went on to wonder whether Mr Gedling would consider writing plays for the medium. ‘Someone like you would be paid top rate. The time’s just about right for that kind of stuff.’

He drained his paper cup of cheap whisky, and threw it into the bin. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘But can you go on churning out the same old thing?’ Deborah asked, as they lay in bed.

‘Standing on my head, I should think.’

He wasn’t so sure, didn’t care to deal only with the rough and tumble of low life for the rest of his days. After a few further books from the dustbin of his experience he would scribble about more worldly happenings, expand his imagination, alter the scenery, and become a real novelist, as everyone would expect him to do. Still, it wasn’t yet time to disillusion Deborah about his ability to suck at the cow’s teat forever, in case she let something drop to Humphries.

Waking in the morning, care had to be taken not to let his accent slide too far into the public school twang. ‘I’ll tell you another thing, luv, it’s a lot better writin’ books than it is sweatin’ blood all week in a factory.’

‘I’m sure it is, Herbert. You don’t mind the Herbert bit, do you?’

‘Call me what you like. Loves yer, don’t I?’

‘And I love you. More coffee?’

‘Another thing is, I reckon it’s time I did a bunk from my hole and corner billet near the Elephant. It’s too far on the wrong side of the river.’ People who assumed he was already a millionaire might wonder where he really came from if he stayed in such a squalid area.

She adjusted a fold of breast inside her brassiere, and reached for a pair of clean pants. ‘Why not lease a flat for a few years in Belsize Park? That way you can commute between here and there.’

She used her London expertise, and looked at the Roy Brooks column in the Sunday papers. After a couple of weeks she found a place. ‘They want three hundred and fifty a year, as well as five hundred for carpets and curtains. I went there this morning, and it’s fine. Let’s see it, before someone else makes an offer.’

A woeful Bert tone came up in Herbert’s throat on hearing such sums spoken of so lightly. ‘Eight ’undred and fifty quid’s as much as I used to earn in a year,’ but Herbert, who knew the price to be realistic if not reasonable, choked back more of the same on seeing the flat. ‘I’ll have it.’

Deborah led the helpless booby into Heals to buy the basic amount of utilitarian furniture that would fit with the newly painted walls. Selfridge’s was for pots, pans, cutlery and provisions. Cheques fluttered away like leaves from an autumn tree, a day’s shopping to suck out all energy. At lunch in the White Elephant neither could say much, though a surreptitious holding of hands and the warm touch of knees seemed to deepen their attachment, as if exhaustion was a more potent fuse than any talk about love.

The time was right to reveal himself as Thurgarton-Strang, yet he hesitated. The chariot was clicking along smoothly at the moment. ‘You’ve got to tell her sooner or later,’ Bert said. ‘No use putting it off.’

‘Tell her what?’ — as if he didn’t know.

‘That ye’re not me, and never was.’

‘I’ll do it in my own good time.’

‘There’s no such thing. And when you do she won’t like it.’

‘What do you mean?’

Bert laughed. ‘Well, she likes me better than you. I know for a fact she won’t want to see the back of me.’

‘I doubt that’s the case,’ he said huffily.

‘Oh, don’t yer? You wait. It’s me she fell for, not you. Yer can’t deny it. You’ll find out when you tell ’er.’

‘It’s got to be done, though,’ Herbert sighed.

Bert changed his tone. ‘Ye’re not going to leave me, are yer?’

‘Afraid I’ll have to.’

‘Well, I shan’t cry about it. Good luck to yer, is all I can say.’

‘You’ve been a good sport, Bert. I’ll never forget you.’

‘You wain’t be half the man you was before.’

‘Oh, I think I will. In any case I won’t need to be.’

‘You’d better do it now. I would if I was you.’

Deborah, from looking at two women waiting for a table, turned back to her coffee. ‘I’d like to know what profound thoughts I’ve disturbed you from, darling.’

‘Oh, I was only thinking how much I loved you.’

‘What a simple uncomplicated mind you have.’

‘That’s how I am.’

‘I know. And I love you, too.’


The Other Side of the Tracks had been in Humphries’ office a week and Herbert went to see him. ‘Well, what do you think?’

‘We’ll do it in the autumn.’ He reached for a box: ‘Cigar, Bert?’

‘No thanks.’

‘I read it on the train, going home the other night, after Dominic had finished with it.’

Herbert lit a cigarette. ‘You must have read it as quickly as you can turn the pages.’

‘Almost.’ He cut his cigar. ‘I think Dominic wants to suggest a few alterations.’

The stack of typescript lay on his desk, next to a new effort by Walter Hawksworth, and Herbert put a hand over his own. ‘I’ll buy a cross from an ex-service stores and crucify anybody who touches a word of this. You can come to the party if you like. There’ll be champagne, not fucking red vinegar. I’ll invite all the reviewers. Calvary won’t be a patch on it, especially if I nail up two publishers as well.’

Humphries laughed. ‘There’s no need to go to such expense. The book’s marvellous. It might even get a Book Society Recommendation, and do better than Royal Ordnance.’ He didn’t want the bloody fool taking his novel to another firm, after all they’d done for him.

‘What about the advance, then?’

‘Oh that? Well, we’ll up it a bit this time.’ He spun the fine gold chain till the watch hit his finger. ‘We’ll do you proud, in fact. What do you say to five hundred?’

Bert picked up the typescript. ‘I’d better show it somewhere else — unless you make it a thousand.’

‘A thousand?’

‘Seems reasonable to me,’ he said in a tone which suggested to Humphries that he wasn’t a bad mimic. ‘And keep Dominic’s hands off it, or I’ll give him a good hiding.’

‘Now look here, Bert, you just can’t talk like that.’

He laid the typescript on a bookcase by the door, and flopped into an armchair, pushing out his legs. Deborah had Roneoed a letter which Humphries had written to Reginald Stone the paperback publisher, giving reasons for expecting a larger advance than the one offered.

‘It’s uncanny. He’s writing about the workers in just the way we’ve always thought in our secret hearts they should be written about. We could barely have hoped for it, but now it’s here. Of course, some strait-laced old vicars and JPs in certain places will complain about the obscene way it’s done, and tell us that the “lower orders” shouldn’t be written about at all, since it will give them ideas above their station, but Mr Gedling has given the working classes, whatever else one says, a genuine portrait of themselves, as well as a voice. All we have to do, as time goes on — if he doesn’t do it himself, of course — is to steer him into our mouth instead of his mouth, a little more like Walter Hawksworth, if you see my drift. If we can do that we’ll have real bestsellers on our hands, not retailing in tens of thousands but by the million. Meanwhile the joy of it is, he’s absolutely one of them, and how he came to write novels I’ll never know, because he’s quite uneducated. But he certainly deserves what money he can get, and the wealthier he becomes, and the sooner he gets to depend on it, and is able to settle into a respectable life, the better it will be for everybody. So I think it’s just as much in your interest as it is in mine that you see if you can’t double your offer. You won’t lose by it, I assure you.’

After several readings blind rage at the conspiratorial twist of Humphries’ mind made him sweat more than he’d ever done in the factory. Veins on his temples jumped as he tried to stay nonchalant, barely able to resist saying he knew about the letter. Obtuse clodhopper Bert had made him blind to such insulting views of his talent and intentions. He would go his own way whatever they thought or felt, even though he had as yet no clear notion as to what that way would be. It wasn’t surprising that Dominic had itched to get his doctoring maulers on the typescript. Herbert would read the proofs word by word, to detect any clandestine tampering. ‘I don’t mind sitting here all day, till I hear your last word on what you’re going to pay me for an advance.’

‘Oh, all right,’ Humphries’ tone was no longer patronizing, ‘we’ll make it a thousand pounds. I only hope your royalties will run to it.’

‘It’s your problem if they don’t. But I think I’d better find an agent.’ Some good firms had written to offer their services. ‘If I’d got one already they’d have screwed even more out of you.’ He stood up and held out his hand. ‘I’ll ’ave that cigar now, if you don’t mind.’


The flat was set up and finished, a home in which he relished being alone. He stood in the large study-sitting room, looking around as if in a dream, amazed at all that had happened in a short space of twelve months. The flat belonged to him for the forever of five years, by when he would have a bigger place to fall into a trance about, maybe even a house. Change was no problem, for didn’t he get used to being a factory worker straight out of school? The staging post of a furnished room at the Elephant and Castle was easy to forget. He felt he was becoming a lover of comfort, and neither knew nor cared from what part of himself such maturity came. On the other hand he knew that not much was certain in life. Prosperity could any moment be snatched out of his hands by malignant fate. It was as well to be prepared, or at least not to be too surprised by the unwanted and unexpected. The picture of Phoebus Apollo, framed in thin black wood, hung on the wall above his writing table, and the hardworn copy of Caged Birds was available in the bedroom drawer.


Archie jumped from the carriage and strode along the platform. ‘Hey up, fuck-face!’

‘I’m glad you could make it,’ Bert said, a handshake and then an embrace.

‘I towd ’em I ’ad a bad back, and would be in bed for the day. The gaffer gen me a leery look, but since I’ve never ’ad a day off before in my life he couldn’t very well say owt. Anyway, I’d a gen ’im a mouthful, if ’e ’ad.’

It was a tonic to hear the old accent from someone born and bred to it, yet disturbing to know how much of his own had already gone down the chute. ‘The day’s yourn, Archie, so what do you want to do with it?’

Archie gripped his arm by the ticket barrier. ‘I wouldn’t mind a black and tan at Dirty Dick’s.’

‘You still like the owd titty-bottle, eh? They wain’t be open for a couple of hours, so we’ll go to my place first.’ A start had to be made on letting Archie see his altered style of living. Walking together into the Underground, Herbert wondered whether they could be taken for two workmen down for a day in the Smoke to see the sights. Though sartorially on a par in that Archie had donned his best suit, and Herbert wore his one for everyday, some difference between them must be obvious. He hoped so, but at the same time cared not to think about it. The connection had been false from the beginning, but he felt a brotherly responsibility for Archie, and nothing but gladness at having set the meeting up. ‘How old is the baby now?’

‘Three months, give or take an hour or two. He’s a beauty, but the little boggerlugs screams his guts out from the colic, or if he don’t get his own way. It teks all Josie’s strength to pick ’im up. He’ll soon be bigger than she is.’

‘So when are you having another?’

‘Give ’er a break, though I wouldn’t mind. I don’t want too many, or I’ll run out of beer money.’ The train rattled through Euston and Camden Town. ‘I only know the middle of London from when I was in the army, but I don’t think I’d like to live down ’ere.’

‘I’m not sure I like it all that much, either,’ Herbert said. ‘I’ve got used to it, though.’ Somewhere in the countryside might be more civilized, but he didn’t feel ready for it yet.

‘I suppose you ’ave. But you know, Bert, when you was in the factory and one of us, I allus knew you were up to summat and wouldn’t stay forever. I couldn’t be sure what it was, but you was different, and that was a fact. You used to try and hide it, but not from me you couldn’t. I got the first clue when you wanted that typewriter.’

Herbert put a hand on his shoulder. ‘And I knew you knew, but there was nothing I could tell you at the time.’

‘I expect you thought it’d put you off your stroke. I’d ’ave called you a bleddy liar, anyway.’

Herbert laughed. ‘Come on, we get out here.’

He looked on his bijou garden flat as the height of fine accommodation in crowded expensive London. Whatever family he came from, he had never expected such light and space for his own exclusive use. Archie’s almost unnoticeable look around brought nothing like: what a marvellous place, you’ve really dropped into it you lucky dog, how much does it cost a day? He behaved, or so Herbert liked to think, in the same way as Bert would in a similar situation if Archie had won the pools.

Archie picked up The Times Literary Supplement. ‘What the fuck’s this newspaper?’

He had meant to stow it away. ‘It’s all about books. Let’s have some coffee, shall we?’

‘Yeh, I was up at six this morning. A lot of the blokes at work read your book,’ he went on when Herbert came back from the kitchen.

Herbert stopped halfway in pouring the coffee. ‘Did they like it?’

‘Mostly. But one or two said you was giving them a bad name, about knocking on with other women. I towd the sanctimonious bastards to ’ave more sense. It worn’t about them at all, I said. You’d made it all up. But they wouldn’t believe me. They swore they kept recognizing themselves. I thought when I saw you I’d tell you, so’s we could have a good laugh about it.’

Herbert wondered why he had never been able to match the fluency of Archie’s lingo, whereas the screed at his desk came out with no trouble. Being on guard during speech could explain it, but not near as convincingly as that the language had never belonged to him. Reality couldn’t finally exist independent of birthright. ‘I suppose I’d better wear glasses and a false beard if I come up for a visit,’ he said when they stopped laughing, ‘or I’ll get duffed up.’

‘Nah! But don’t yer mean when you come to hear more o’ them lovely stories?’

‘There is that, as well.’

‘Yer did mek most of ’em up, though, didn’t yer?’ he winked. ‘If ever you want any more, just let me know. They grow on trees where I come from.’

After a session at Dirty Dick’s, and a meal upstairs, they traipsed back to Liverpool Street and got on the Underground for Tower Hill, quiet for the most part since neither by now had much else to say. Archie wanted to see the Crown Jewels and the Chamber of Horrors, and Herbert was glad to go, because he would never see such things otherwise. A boat to Charing Cross pier set them on a walk through Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly, which gave enough to talk about, Herbert telling Archie the story of his life.

They swing-doored into the Hyde Park Hotel, agreeing that enough had been done of London to last a long time. A thin young man at the piano tinkled out ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. ‘We can get a hearty tea here.’

‘I’m ready for it.’ Archie sat on a short sofa by one of the side tables, which gave a view of the ‘talent’ walking through to the rooms of the hotel. Niches to either side were filled with mirrors, in one a gigantic spray of orange and purple flowers. By the far wall square glass-topped tables were placed as if for writing at, each white sphere bulb making little impression because the salon was lit whiter from overhead than day outside.

Two dowager-looking women at the next table talked about their daughters who were soon to be married. Archie finished gazing. ‘Do you have your tea here a lot?’

Herbert laughed. ‘I’ve been a couple of times before, once with my girlfriend.’

‘You dirty dog! When are you going to marry her?’

He signalled the waiter. ‘Well, I’m thinking about asking her.’

‘On’y thinkin’? Do it. Join the club. You’ll never regret it.’ He leaned across: ‘Does she know all about what yer towd me just now?’

‘I think she suspects. Some of it.’ It was his problem, and nobody else’s, certainly not Archie’s. ‘I like this place. Thought you’d like to see it, and get away from the crowds on the street.’

‘As long as they mash a good pot of tea.’

‘I think they do.’

‘You’d better tell her, though. There shouldn’t be any secrets between man and wife.’

‘I know.’

Archie looked again at the mirrors and upholstery, at the orange globe lamps on expanding wooden tripods, and up at the flatly arched ceiling with yellow and orange panes of glass in the centre. ‘Who pays the bloke at the jo-anna?’

Assailed by ‘Tea For Two’, Herbert speculated as to whether his parents had come here after seeing him off to boarding school. ‘The hotel, I suppose.’

‘He’s good, not like some of the ivory bashers up in Nottingham. I like the old tunes, though. They mek me think of the days before the war,’ he nudged, ‘when we was clambed half to death.’ A waiter in coat tails took their order for two full teas. ‘Looks like he’s got a ramrod up his arse.’

‘Probably has.’ Herbert laughed with him. I’m loosening up, he noted, enjoying himself again. The Australian girl must have gone on her travels. Archie would have fancied her.

‘I prefer my job to his,’ Archie said. ‘I suppose he earns a lot more than I do, but fancy relyin’ on tips.’

Herbert lifted the silver teapot with a folded napkin. ‘Somebody has to do it.’

The hot handle didn’t bother Archie. ‘You’ve got soft.’

‘I suppose I have.’

‘No, I don’t mean it. You’re as hard as nails, Bert. Inside, anyway. But I’m glad you brought me here. I’m not bluffin’. I’m enjoyin’ every minute of it.’

A longing in Archie’s tone concealed a wish, Herbert thought, to see more and know more and feel more, a wish close to envy except that it had come from the heart. The fact that he could never grow into the life in no way lessened the sense of wanting to, and yet, if he won a million pounds, he would be a different man in a year, taking to a moneyed existence as if born to it. ‘We’ll do it again. Any time you can get down.’ You’re my friend for life. ‘Bring Mary and the kids, if you like.’

Archie gave a familiar bang on the shoulder. ‘She might fall for you and your posh life, and then where would I be? Anyway, yo’ cum up to see us sometime, and it’ll all be on me.’

‘I will, you can bet on that.’ But would he? Would he ever want to, or be able to? What would Deborah think of it up there? They’d go, nevertheless. He’d make sure to.

‘I won’t let the lads rip yer to bits,’ Archie said.

They fell to laughing again, a few sour glances from the next table, one of the women reminding Herbert of his mother. ‘Let’s get this down us,’ Archie said. ‘Looks good. A thing I ain’t told yer yet, Bert, is that I’m to be a shop steward at the firm. One o’ the union blokes had a word with me the other night.’

‘It took ’em long enough,’ Bert said, as they settled down to the minuscule triangular sandwiches, and the scones, butter and jam, which called for more or less silence.


After a bath in the hottest water he donned a plaid dressing gown (a present from Deborah) and ate his cooked breakfast. Newspapers pushed through the door were read as quickly as he could flip the pages. The dream state had become normal life.

By ten he had put on a suit and Windsor-knotted his tie, polished his shoes, and sat at the desk to sort mail. Requests for talks and autographs were replied to, an onerous duty, and he cursed an upbringing which stipulated that every letter be answered. He paper-clipped a couple of fivers to a letter, and posted them to Isaac in his new council flat.

A magazine editor asked for a story, so he scanned one of the sketches slopped into his notebook over the years and worked it suitably up, putting it through the mill of his new Olivetti typewriter. He set it aside for posting to his agent, with an attached note saying that whatever sum was offered he should get double or else.

He dressed up because you never knew who might knock at the door and want to see an author at work. It could be someone who had admired his glistening green underslung road dog by the kerb, and clawked his initials on it. If any such caller found him slopping around unshaven, in a ragged old jersey and egg-stained trousers — after a lifetime’s work in overalls — they would have little confidence in his future as a novelist.

A working-class writer dressed in anything other than a three-piece suit would give the impression of being a vile trickster. And since he was, that wouldn’t do at all. Londoners weren’t as daft as Bert had often wound himself up to assume, or as they often enough looked and were. Nor was Herbert Thurgarton-Strang so unknowing as to look down on anyone before they had revealed themselves as such. You had to treat people as if they knew everything, just as you wanted them to believe you knew everything. All in all, such thoughts were a wasteful way of passing the time, and he was glad to be interrupted by Dominic Jones, walking down the steps towards his garden flat. He decided to let Bert open the door. ‘Hello, shag! Cum for a coffee?’

He sat comfortably in the armchair and opened The Times, irritating Herbert by making himself so free. Coming back from the kitchen he noticed how much weight he’d put on, cheeks puffier and skin more pallid. The white woollen fisherman’s sweater under his jacket, and a pair of overall trousers called ‘jeans’, was a rig Herbert could only wear when it would no longer be suspect on someone like him. Anyway, who would tolerate overalls when you could afford something else? He passed his old friend a mug of coffee. ‘What’s up, tosh? Bad news from the firm?’

Herbert recalled their days at school, when Dominic had been a trusting pal, cherubic features turned up with an almost worshipping expression. My raddled phizog must bring back the same reflections in him. Dominic’s eyes went positively piggy when he began to speak. ‘I don’t know how you got into all this proletarian writer business, Herbert, but I think it’s time I let you know that I suspected you from the first.’

He was glad he had given him a spoonful of Distant instead of grinding the best coffee. ‘You are a vile little rat, aren’t you?’

He threw the Times down pettishly. ‘Now you’re sounding like your old self. It didn’t take long, did it?’

‘I’ll tek just as long as I like,’ Bert snarled.

‘Well, you know,’ he became more relaxed, a state which Herbert was dead set to alter, ‘it isn’t fair to deceive people.’

‘What do you intend to do about it, you jumped-up publisher’s pimp? I didn’t think they paid you enough to suck their arses.’ Stirring his coffee, Herbert went through the fantasy of murdering him and burying the corpse in the garden. A pleasant few minutes would be had, booting down the soil.

‘What you have done’, Dominic went on, ‘is absolutely immoral, but at least I’d be interested to know how you did it. It wasn’t a bad performance. The last time I saw you before you turned up at our office was when you absconded from school.’ His face fizzled back into that of a frightened little boy. ‘You never wrote to let me know how you’d got on. They were the most miserable months of my life.’

‘I’m sorry about that. But I was too busy fitting into my new circumstances. I’ll tell you how it was done, though.’ He explained the metamorphosis, and at the end of his narrative didn’t need to suggest he was more than halfway into another. ‘Don’t you think it was something of an achievement, living two different lives for so long?’

‘I ought to, I suppose, but wouldn’t it be even more of an achievement if you came clean, and told Humphries who you are?’

‘He wouldn’t believe me, and even if he did he wouldn’t want to. I’m making him too much money, and making too much myself. To tell him so that he would be absolutely convinced might give him a heart attack. Not that I’d be bothered about that, but he does have faith in me as Bert Gedling, and that’s flattering to my vanity.’

‘You always had plenty of that.’

‘So I did. I’m a writer, after all. Which also means I’m amoral.’ As time passed, however, he’d relax his guard, and blend with the surrounding milieu, be tamed and controlled by the sort of people he would need to mix with. By becoming one of them, they would stop commenting on how he dressed, especially when he allowed them to see what a good job he was making of his integration into the accepted way of life. As his accent became indistinguishable from theirs, his Thurgarton-Strang stridence would be taken as just another of Bert Gedling’s affectations.

On the other hand if Dominic decided to rip his disguise clear with something like proof he would be tempted to dissimulate to the end. Few would believe such an outlandish story, or care to. He would drive the chariot of Bert across the heavens till it broke up, or Herbert brought the whole caboodle into a controlled landing. No matter what change came about in his novels and filmscripts (or even essays: he was collecting notes for ‘The Art and Metaphysics of Straight Narrative’) he would never let them forget that plain Bert Gedling could come lumbering back into the ring any time he liked — whether to their amusement or dismay was no concern of his. ‘Why do you need to tell Humphries? I don’t see what’s in it for you.’

‘Because I can’t live within spitting distance of a lie, or allow you to do so. It’s rather curious, but I still look on you as a friend.’

‘You poor little worm who never grew up. You’d be an informer, would you? A nark. A sneak. You’d shop your own grandmother for that little frisson of school-prefect honour. Don’t you know that that kind of thing is on the way out?’

Dominic winced. ‘It’s not. You’re premature. I’ll never believe it. The fact is, I’m leaving the firm.’

‘Are you?’

‘I’m going into the Foreign Office. I’ve always wanted to. Well, my parents never stopped hoping while I was at Cambridge. It’ll be a far better job, so I must clear matters up before I go.’

‘So that’s your nasty little game? Want to go out with a bang, do you? Do you remember your last words to me when I lit off from school that night?’ He looked at him with the most candid and intimate expression possible. ‘I remember, if you don’t.’

‘What were they?’

‘You said, “I’ll never betray you.”’

‘Maybe I did. And if I did, that’s why I want you to own up. Don’t you see?’

‘You’ll do well at the Foreign Office. I will own up, though, in my own good time.’

‘No, Herbert, it has to be in my time.’ Dominic’s expression was that of a satisfied cat with a half-dead mouse at its feet. ‘I can’t let you play false to yourself any longer.’

Herbert laughed at his language, and his sentiments from a dying age. He endured the silence, determined not to speak. If he’d had a cricket bat handy Bert would have broken it over the smarmy fuckpig’s loaf.

‘There’s only one thing which will stop me blowing the gaff.’ Dominic put on his sickliest face. ‘Shall I tell you what it is?’

Herbert’s ears were stopped as if by the noise of the factory, but through the roar of engines he choked out: ‘Go on, then, Slime.’

‘What I want to say is that I’ll tell Humphries the truth, unless you stop seeing Deborah. I’m in love with her. Always have been. I want to marry her, if she’ll have me.’

Herbert had never known there were words which could shock and oppress him to the extent that they would bring him close to fainting. He leaned against the desk. ‘Have you asked her?’

‘No, but I will.’

The poor honourable fool, not having the guile or gumption to lie and say she’d accepted him. He’d often wondered whether or not Dominic was his rival, and Deborah hadn’t bothered to settle the matter, though he was hardly in a position to cavil about somebody keeping their past to themselves. ‘Well, I have asked her, and she’s said yes.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Dominic said with trembling lips.

Bert stood, thumbs wide-angled in the arm holes of his waistcoat, where they were safer than being free to punch Dominic’s face in. ‘Believe what you like, but it’s true. You can do what you like, as well, but let me tell you this, you blackmailing runt: if you aren’t out o’ this flat in three seconds — no, two — I’ll give yer the sort o’ kicking’ yer’ll never forget. And if yer do blow the gaff I’ll cum after yer wherever you are, even if ye’re dyin’ from malaria in the middle o’ Borneo.’ He freed his hands from the waistcoat, and smiled. ‘Understand, old boy?’

He wouldn’t bother, but let him worry. The door slammed, and he picked up the phone so that he could pop the question to Deborah. In love with her more than ever, the wonderful word yes came into his ear.

Twenty-Three

The telegram said: ‘Father died of massive stroke in middle of night. Devastated. Mother.’ Herbert thought him luckier than Mrs Denman, to go in such a way. The bullet zigzagging around the Arakan jungle nearly twenty years before had hopped on a plane and found its mark at last. So many people were dying it seemed as if God had got his hands on a machine gun.

He settled into the car, regretting he hadn’t been there to see him go. Headlamps burning, he threaded the needle between trucks and the offside green verge, overtaking with a screeching hooter where no sane person would, but slowing down at the latter part of the journey because he didn’t want either the shame or inconvenience of following his father so soon.

Maud stood by the window, gazing into the garden at the antics of the housemartins flying up and down to feed their young under the eaves. You won’t see him stumbling around clipping the bushes any more, Herbert thought as he placed himself by her. ‘I came as soon as I could, Mother. I’m very sorry about it. And sad, too.’ Nothing else to say, though it was obviously the right thing.

‘Darling, it’s terrible. I can’t believe it.’ She could barely speak through her tears. ‘I thought he’d live forever. He always joked he would. Longer than me, I hoped. I suppose everyone says that. The day I first saw him on the beach near Lowestoft seems only last week.’

He felt out of place, but told himself that nothing could be as affecting and important as the death of your father, especially to your mother. He tapped the black cat away when it pushed against his leg. ‘Poor old Hugh!’

Maud looked askance at his use of his first name. ‘He loved you more than you’ll ever know, probably because you gave him more heartache than he ever deserved.’

It was as well Bert had no say in this, for he might swear at the notion that Herbert had made his father’s life a misery simply by living as he’d wanted.

A plate of cold mutton and pickles was set before him at the kitchen table. ‘You must be starving. There’s a bottle of beer in the refrigerator if you want it.’

‘I’ll get it.’ He couldn’t deny that she looked handsome and forlorn in her black skirt and black jacket, black beads, and a black band across her hair, above a lined and pallid mask of loss. Such a hurried dressing into the part stopped her going to pieces. Fresh tears down her cheeks avoided the obstacles of those which had dried a few minutes ago. ‘I think I’ll go up to his study for a while.’ Trying to find pity for this old woman, he hoped she would take his intention as a chilling sort of remorse, which he couldn’t feel, though supposed it would seep into him during the next few months.

‘Don’t go in there yet.’ She didn’t want to be alone. No longer had to be. Impossible to say why he lifted her hand to kiss. She forced him to stand, and drew him between her arms, all bones, ardour and grief. ‘Oh, Herbert, my life’s finished. I can’t tell you how it feels. My heart’s breaking.’

It isn’t, and won’t. Grief doesn’t last, he wanted to say. Everybody recovers. Live for me. I won’t mind. I’ll look after you as much as I’m able. We’ll be closer from now on. He stood aside without speaking.

What madness, to talk about life being at an end. She wasn’t much over seventy, and looked younger. Still, the old man had died, and they’d been nearly forty years together, ten more than he’d been alive. ‘You’ll be all right.’ He held her, feeling pity, tears checked because a grown man didn’t blubber. He forced the smile from his face: hadn’t yet written about tragedy so close, could have felt worse if he had seen the old man die. On the other hand he might have been less disturbed. It would have been interesting.

‘He was so honest. Such an upright person. I hope you find comparable love and devotion in your life, Herbert.’

In harness from the cradle to the grave, he’d had nothing to be dishonest about. Nothing important, certainly. ‘I’ll go into his study’ — anything to get out of her way. ‘I want to look at where he was happiest’ — or to see if there’d be a clue as to what kind of a man he was now he’s dead.

‘No, Herbert, it’ll take a while to get tidy.’

They’d lived such a neat life. If a single bibelot was out of alignment on shelf or table it had to be put back in case a hair’s breadth of their life was going astray. Everything ordered and pre-ordained, a charmed but restricted existence he could never fall in with. Yet he envied them, and regretted that he couldn’t live in the same way, though the barrack-room tidiness of his own flat suggested he might be on the way to getting there.

He couldn’t care at all whether or not he saw the old man’s study. It was a ploy to be alone, but his mother needed him every minute in her sight, and her overpowering sorrow was like warm mud too thick to swim from. ‘Your father is in the living room. They’ll be coming for his — him, at two o’clock.’

She was halfway to being dead herself, and wanted him, who couldn’t recall when he’d been so much alive, to comfort her and coax her back. On the other hand he had never known her to be so vibrant. Before leaving London there’d been neither time nor thought of phoning Deborah. He wanted her with him now, to commiserate and hold him, to say she loved him, to lick his ears, anything to space out the millibars of such a bleak atmosphere. She would shield him from a sensation he shouldn’t be exposed to, feelings only real if written about from the imagination. He didn’t know what he wanted to be kept away from, since the experience must surely be good.

Deborah would know how to comfort his mother, or would try anyway. He saw them melting together, a very sexy scene, anger as he brushed the picture out. He would show her the house, walk her through the gardens, and take her to the orchard where he had once stood in the rain hoping to find out who he was, so long ago that he couldn’t imagine the man he had been. Trying to find his true self — poor fool — he hadn’t known that if he did nothing about it his self was sufficiently strong and centred to come out of the shadows and find him. He took his mother’s hand. ‘Let’s look at him, then.’

‘It’ll be a big funeral. You can help send out the cards. Quite a few will go to his regiment.’

The idea pleased him. All the old buffers would come. A few young ones as well, maybe a platoon to fire a volley over the coffin. ‘So they should.’

Hugh’s moustache was greyer than grey, and the flesh it sprang from as white as if he had never been east of Suez. He looked satisfied more than at peace, about right for a soldier. His saluting arm seemed alive and set to come up for a final gesture of farewell. Maud kissed the cold lips, weeping as if to bring him back to life and walk with him arm in arm into the garden, talking about vegetables and what to have for dinner.

Real life’s about to begin for her, as it is for me. ‘We all have to die.’ He regretted the callous remark, but its brutality calmed her: ‘I know. It’s the only consolation I have.’

‘I would like to look into his study some time.’

‘Not till after the funeral.’

Such peculiar fancies should be allowed to someone in a state of shock. ‘Why ever not, though?’

‘He must have known a stroke was coming on. I heard this weird noise, but thought he was just reorganizing his books. He did, from time to time. In fact you might say he did it endlessly. It calmed him. And he liked the room to be tidy. But when I found him I saw he’d made a bit of a mess. I’ll never know why.’

She didn’t bother to stop him when he walked towards the stairs. The tobacco smell from years of puffing was strong but stale, and the door wouldn’t open its full arc, some obstacle preventing it. Her tone set off an alarm in him: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to push.’

He slid through the gap, couldn’t go right in for fear of increasing the wreckage. If his father hadn’t found the maniacal energy maybe the stroke wouldn’t have gripped him in such a vice. He might have halfway recovered and been in a wheelchair, the vilest horror to him. Or perhaps he sensed the inevitable, hoped it wasn’t certain even so. He had tried to head it off by an animal rage against the injustice of death, or even against fear which had dragged out his utmost violence, giving him astounding strength.

Herbert found the curved pipe snapped in two behind the door, its bowl filled with slightly charred tobacco, as if Hugh’s last wish had been to fill it and light up to face the end in familiar comfort. Finding the onset too quick, he had broken it before crushing half a dozen others underfoot and attacking everything else in the room.

Books and papers had been pulled from shelves, broken and torn. An orang-utan gone mad. Tables and chairs upturned, smashed, ripped, thrown, kicked, whirled about and trampled as if a fragmentation grenade had done its work. Not one piece belonged to any other.

He walked over paper and glass and set a chair on its legs, put the mahogany table back in place, awestruck at the damage yet lightheaded with satisfaction that in old age his father had shown there to be more than one part to himself. At the same time as immersing himself in this wilful mayhem he had stacked maps and notebooks in a corner and left them — for me, Herbert knew.

He smiled, as if within the one seam that mattered he knew the old man almost as well as he knew himself, and in some quirky way even better. In his fight to the death Hugh had been influenced by a barbarous dignity at the iniquity of having to die, but within it had left a final message saying that he also had lived his life as two people. Unable to give in to it he had waited till the last moment to make the gesture.

Maud stood behind. ‘Now you know. But it wasn’t like his true self to do such a thing. He was never like that. Not in a million years. A week ago he told me about a pain at the top of his head. Only lasted a few minutes, while he was in the garden. He said it was like a small plate of steel pressing into his skull. Then it went away. I wanted him to get a check up, and he said he would if it came back.’


When everyone had gone from the funeral, a deadly calm set over the house. Lord of the manor — though his mother might dispute that — Herbert sat in the lounge. Two bottles of the best Languedoc had been finished at dinner, and he felt more than half drunk, while noting that his mother could soak it in like a trooper. ‘He couldn’t have had a better send-off,’ she said ruefully.

Some of the mourners had looked curiously at him because he wasn’t in the army, thinking what a pity he wasn’t made of the same stuff as his father. It was good that the old world stayed with us a bit to be written about. ‘Yes, it was quite impressive.’

Such a verdict confused her, though maybe there was more of Hugh in him than she had supposed. ‘That novel of yours, Herbert, it’s very skilful, and I was amused by some of it, but I can’t really feel people live like that, these days.’

An uncompromising retort was squashed. ‘Father knew they did. They were his soldiers in both wars.’

She was happy at the mention of Hugh. ‘I suppose they were. He was glad to know you had the decency not to use your real name. He appreciated that.’

The unceremonious attack needed no response. Maybe calling himself Bert Gedling had been nothing more than a long march towards finding a pseudonym — all that his deception and exile had been for. If so, what a waste. ‘Did he like the book?’

‘Yes, said it was first rate.’

‘I’m sorry he didn’t tell me.’

‘He knew I would. Probably didn’t think you needed to be told. On one level he was disappointed in you, but on another he was proud.’

You can’t have everything, nor did he expect it. ‘Are you going to stay on here, Mother?’ He pulled another cork and filled both glasses, to dull his pain but most of all hers. ‘Let’s drink to Father. He’d like that.’

She laughed, whinnying and tearful. ‘We’ve drunk to him already, but if we do it again I know he won’t mind.’

‘You could get a flat in Chelsea,’ he said, lighting a cigar of his father’s. ‘We’d be able to meet nearly every day.’

‘I belong here.’ She looked around to confirm that the furnishings would support her. ‘It’s only a few miles from where I first set eyes on your father.’

‘The house is rather large, though.’ A bloody mausoleum that should go under the hammer.

The swig she took was enormous. ‘I’m a soldier’s widow. We know how to manage. But what are your plans for the future?’

A widow could meddle more openly. He didn’t care about the future. Living a few days ahead had always been good enough, the only way possible. ‘I’ll go on as I am, and come and see you when I can. You’re only a couple of hours or so from Town.’

‘And if it were five or six?’ she smiled. ‘Don’t feel obliged. I wouldn’t put up with that.’

The cat used his stretched-out legs as a ramp to get on to his lap. Stroking its silky fur, he wanted to go on talking, as if his father’s death made him more voluble. ‘I see myself earning a living as a writer. But I can’t be bothered to think about the future, which has a way of looking after itself.’

‘It’s a healthy attitude,’ she said. ‘That’s how Hugh looked at life, and why he was so happy — or at least never unhappy.’

‘I may get married, though. Deborah’s her name.’

This interested her enough to pick up the glass again. ‘Is that who you were on the phone to yesterday? You were talking in a rather strange voice.’

‘I’m in love with her.’ He wanted, as Archie would say, to go in raw. A new dimension was needed in his life, deepening attachments to give fresh limits to his nerve ends. ‘She works at my publisher’s.’

‘Is she from a good family?’

‘Good enough. You’ll like her.’

‘I’m sure I shall.’

‘And she’ll like you.’

‘Do you know, darling, you really do remind me of your father.’ She giggled, stood up, swayed and, just as he was beginning to think she’d got a bit too light-headed, sat down again: ‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, it’s what your father said when I first met him, and he wasn’t able to stay when my father asked him to tea.’

He poured more wine. ‘I can just imagine him saying it.’

‘You fill your glass too near to the brim, dear.’

‘Sorry.’ He was amazed at getting so drunk with his mother. ‘I’ll check it next time.’ Back in Town he would disown Bert Gedling and become entirely his Herbert Thurgarton-Strang self, give out who he was, and see how they — whoever they were — liked it. They may not be so interested to know, though his next book would still be pseudonymed Bert Gedling, since there was no point in losing the advantage of that. Maybe he would walk into Humphries’ office with a bottle of smelling salts and tell him straight out. Or he would get him to arrange a set-piece press conference and, performing a languorous recitation in the voice of his birthright, relate the real story of his life, so that, forced to believe, they would bray for his soul with howls of execration. Such a confrontation would be quite unnecessary, but he spun out the fantasy for his mother’s enjoyment.

‘I’d want to be there. Hugh would have, I’m sure of it. He would have been proud of you.’

‘Never mind, Mother. Don’t cry.’

‘Why not, I should like to know?’

‘Because we’ve got to surround Blue Force by morning!’

Life was good when they could laugh in the midst of death. He was crying at last, drunk, maudlin, the handkerchief from his lapel pocket in time to stop tears spoiling his waistcoat. He told himself not to be so damned weak. ‘I’ll stay on a few more days. Deborah will come up for the weekend.’

‘I’d like to meet her. It’ll give me time to get sober, sober enough to drive you both to the station anyway. She can have the room next to Hugh’s study.’

‘I thought you were a woman of the world, Mother.’ He looked into her grey eyes, lines around them lost in the dimmed light. ‘We don’t bother about such things as separate rooms these days.’

‘I want her to have her own room, and feel like a proper guest. What you would do in the night would be your own business.’

‘Mine will be more than adequate for us both. As for driving to the station, we have our own transport now.’

‘All right, darling, I won’t say anything more. I know times have changed, since the war especially. And I don’t want to lose you, Herbert.’

He envied her directness. ‘You’ll never do that, and you know it.’

‘You’re all I’ve got.’

True it was, and the circle had come around, stopped spinning and closed. He didn’t really know how to feel about it.


Deborah’s grey Mini nosed its way up the drive. He opened the door. ‘Glad you found the place.’

Gentle auburn waves came out from her parting, telling him she’d been to the hairdresser’s. White blouse and brown Liberty’s scarf at the neck, beige skirt and laced brown shoes were right for meeting his mother. ‘You look wonderful, darling. Let’s go this way.’

‘You sounded so mysterious on the phone. But what is all this about anyway?’

He led her on a slow circuit around the house. ‘I want you to meet my mother, and stay with us for a few days.’

‘Your mother? You said she was dead.’ If not, maybe she works here, and he was ashamed of it. There was no sign of Bert in him today, though he could turn it on and off like a tap. ‘Is she the housekeeper?’

He wondered how long it had been since a genuine loud laugh had ascended over the grounds. ‘Good Lord, no! We own the place.’

She stopped, and looked at him. ‘You said something on the phone about not being who you were supposed to be. Well, I’d gathered that much already. I’d been waiting for you to tell me for weeks,’ though she hadn’t felt it could be as important as what seemed on its way.

‘It was difficult,’ he said, passing the neglected old summerhouse. ‘I really had to hang on until now. If I’d told you cold you might have thought it just another of my impersonations. Dominic knew, almost from the beginning. He never gave me away, though he threatened to. We went to school together.’

She was pale with loss, and chagrin, showing a new Deborah. ‘I can’t believe any of this.’

‘I ran away from school when I was seventeen, went to Nottingham and worked in a factory. It was the best way to hide. After the army I drifted back there, and turned into a workman, you might say.’

‘Well, I suppose someone like you might say anything.’

There was nothing but to go on remorselessly. ‘I stayed at the factory. I don’t know why, but the years rolled by. I wrote the novel to keep myself sane. And that’s it. You know it now.’

The wind was warm, but she felt cold. He kissed her, and she pushed him away. ‘It’s just not feasible.’

‘I hoped it wouldn’t hurt you when I told you.’

‘Hurt?’ He was obviously telling the truth. ‘I’m bloody blasted. And this is your family home?’

Not wanting to feel a worm, he became blasé. ‘Yes. I thought you’d be pleased. Thurgarton-Strang is my real name.’

She’d heard the name but couldn’t think where, picked a flower from the clematis, crushed it and let the petals drop. ‘I didn’t fall in love with a liar.’

‘I never lied. I became someone else, but I wasn’t so mean and despicable as that.’ The chariot was weaving out of control, and he felt himself fighting for his life. ‘I just did what I had to do, otherwise I’d probably have killed myself. I’ve been thinking about it. I had to become two people so as to be even one. As far as I know I’ve harmed no one, but I’m more than glad to give up all the Bert Gedling stuff. I only hoped it wouldn’t make any difference to our relationship when I did. Maybe I put it off because I thought it might, out of funk. No, not that, either. I just waited, and let the right time come along.’

Your time, not mine.’

‘Well, there never was any right time.’ How could there be? He saw a tear in her left eye, found it touching and gratifying, if not promising. She wiped it away angrily. He cleaned a white chair by the edge of the lawn with his handkerchief. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

A touch of Gedling there. Or was it? He forgot the ‘duck’. ‘Damn you,’ she cried. ‘I have to get used to you all over again.’ She had noticed the obituary of Brigadier-General Thurgarton-Strang in the office Times last week, and now she knew who he was. Bert Gedling’s father. It was almost laughable.

‘Not entirely, I hope. There was a lot of me in Bert Gedling, as you’ll probably find out. One person’s very much like another, after all, when you rub the paint off.’ Which he was sure she would be able to do, though he would take care always to be one move ahead.

She had speculated on whether his father had been a postman, or a shoemaker, or a plumber — he’d never given a straight answer — but to prophesy this had been beyond sensible reach. From a mixture of self-disgust and pique she thought it might not be difficult to stop feeling superior to him, which she had done in some ways. It was unjust that he’d been responsible for that. She supposed her father would be happy to meet the present version of whoever he was, but could she trust Herbert when, as he said (and she felt it was true) there was so much of Bert Gedling in him whether he had played the role or not? Thoughts rushed through her mind. Anyone from his class who had acted the workman for so long was bound to be unpredictable for the rest of his life, and even if he hadn’t been a workman he would still have been someone to be wary of.

‘All I know’, he was saying, and she couldn’t disbelieve him, ‘is that “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds”. Or it shouldn’t be.’

‘You call that alteration?’

The chariot needed final and expert guidance at the reins, and couldn’t be allowed to break up. He stroked her hair, ran a finger over her lips, and felt the wet grass through the knees of his trousers. ‘It’s the best I can do. I love you. That’s all I’m trying to say. You’re the love of my life, and we’re made for each other. I knew it from the moment I saw you.’

Maybe getting to know the rest of him would be more interesting than putting up with the single phenomenon of Bert Gedling, and she wasn’t the sort of girl to eschew an adventure. ‘And I certainly love you,’ she said, contemptuous of all caution.

He stood up. ‘Ah! Here’s my mother, coming from the garden. And she’s carrying the vegetables.’

Deborah was also glad of a reason to stand. ‘She looks as if she needs some help.’

Back in London, he would take down the picture of Phoebus Apollo and put it in the dustbin. ‘Yes, she is rather like Ceres laden with abundance.’


The old folks had been assiduous in doing what they could to control the grounds and garden, which were ruinous and overgrown. A man from the village had helped, but he had died six months ago, and no one else was forthcoming.

‘He was a thieving old devil,’ Maud said. ‘He took most of our tools, over the years. I expect his son’s using them now. But you can see why we didn’t say anything. It was too much work for Hugh. I do want to keep up the summerhouse, though. He loved to sit there and drink his whisky in the evening.’

Deborah said he ought to do something about it, so Herbert paced the large lawn, wondering where to start. A tree overhung the summerhouse, coating the reinforced glass roof with leaves and seeds. His mother was right: if it wasn’t pruned the force of vegetation would crack the guttering, and the place would crumble.

He fetched a ladder from the garage, a handsaw and a pair of the strongest clippers, wondering where to start on the tangle of growth. Roll up your sleeves, to begin with, and put on an old cap of your father’s. That done, he attacked the tree’s outriders methodically, going round and round and slowly closing in, as if reducing the sinews of a besieged fortress. The trunk was too close to the wall of the summerhouse to get the ladder between, but he erected a platform of wooden boxes and sawed through overhanging branches.

Cut them from a tree on one side, and they would grow more forcefully out of the other. Enjoyment was part of the process, a renewal of his habit of labour. To reach the highest python-like limb he leaned with all the strength of his right arm against the roof and, with his left extended to the utmost, sawed through with a measured forward and backing of steel teeth, every second hoping that the boxes beneath his feet would keep their stability. The strength of his arm did not let him down, and he felt a certain pride at the force and endurance of his muscles.

A laugh from Deborah sounded from the open door of the kitchen, where they were cutting and scraping at vegetables. Maud said something he couldn’t make out, and both laughters duetted into the air.

Every inch of gutter around the structure was clogged with seeds and leaves, embedded in black mud, and the only way to clear it was by trawling four fingers along the trough and throwing the stinking mess overboard whenever the ridge became too high. He rammed stiff wire through the pipes to make certain the rain would be carried away instead of streaming down the walls and rotting the wood. Rose bush tendrils between the drain and glass edge of the roof were clipped and pulled out. He unthreaded each growth and pushed them back in spite of their aggressive thorns.

In a few days he would drive to Woking with Deborah and meet her parents. She hoped he would behave, and he thought he might be able to. ‘You’d better,’ she said. There had been something more than usually stimulating, making love in his own house, and her cries were those of a shot fox when she came. He poured into her almost at the same time, on imagining her travails of giving birth.

His hand slipped, he grabbed a lower shoot but it was dead, came away with his weight. But it slowed his fall, and he landed without harm, persuading him to let only neutral matters go through his mind.

The branches were high above the hut, clear sky between, where they could do no damage. With a long-handled broom he swept the remaining seeds and leaves from the roof so that the sun would light through. Mindless though useful work was a tonic, and he was happy. The tree, cut back and rendered harmless, would only grow upwards. Its structure was neat and simplified, superfluous baggage gone, and a soft wind as of appreciation played among the remaining leaves. His mother would be happy too, though no doubt she’d blub a little at memories of Hugh when he brought her out to show what had been done.

Rounding off the job as a real workman should, he swept the inside tiles, and drew a bucket of water from the garden tap to mop them and enhance their black and whiteness. A table and two chairs streaked with green mould had to be wiped clean with a damp rag. The effort of his care and attention would impress because it was a mark of love, something to make up for not having been much of a son during most of his life.

He climbed the tree for a view of his work. The rectangular summerhouse, with its wide windows from waist to roof, stood in free space, renovated and accessible, a place complete. He got down to look across from the spot on which he had made his confession to Deborah. Instead of threatening, the tree stood guard, would grow tall and orderly, unencumbered by any rival encroacher.

Deborah called that coffee was ready. So was he. The work was finished. Out of something had come something more, a neutral structure for him, an edifice of memories for his mother. Next year the same would need to be done, and the year after that, for as many times as were thought necessary. He would live here with Deborah and the children when Maud was gone, so the maintenance would continue for as long as the summerhouse did not crumble, or for as long as he stayed alive.

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