He stumbled in the hall as he took off his grey leather overcoat. ‘Is that you, Michael? I can smell my cigars. Or is it the odious breath of yesteryear?’
How can a son describe his own father? Luckily I hadn’t known about him till I was twenty-five, so that makes it easier. As for his description of me, I read it in one of his recent novels and it wasn’t very good. It was slightly disguised, of course, as every fictional description must be but, slashing away the trimmings, he called me lazy, untruthful, mercenary and – words I hadn’t heard till then – uxoriously sybaritic. Where he got such an idea I couldn’t imagine. The description was so skewwhiff it’s a wonder I recognised myself, and the fact that I did worried me for a while. And if it wasn’t me, I was either trying to see myself as someone I wasn’t, or I was someone I couldn’t bear to see myself as. But such a description, bare as it was, certainly convinced me as nothing else that I was his son.
As for him, he was tall and bald, so bald that with the cleft in his head where a crazed husband had hit him with the blunt end of a cleaver, he looked like nothing less than a walking penis. I didn’t for a moment suppose that this was the only reason many women found him attractive because he also, presumably, had a certain amount of what passed for charm. He had dead grey fish eyes, rubbery lips and a shapeless nose, but he was tall, energetic, talented (I supposed), and incredibly randy. As my mother, who knew him well, once said to me (though she hardly ever really knew him well for more than a few minutes at a time), ‘Even a man has to stand with his back to the wall when that bastard comes into the room.’
‘Well, Michael – it is Michael, isn’t it? – what brings you here so early in the morning?’
I stood up, not wanting to act in any unusual way when I knew that Bill Straw was sobbing disconsolately in his upstairs prison. ‘It’s afternoon. I just thought I’d come and see you. Is it strange that I should want to visit my father now and again?’
He came back from the kitchen with two raw eggs in the bottom of a tall glass, poured in whisky to halfway, beat it to pulp with a fork, and slid it down. ‘Breakfast. It isn’t strange at all. It’s positively perverse. How’s Bridgitte?’
‘She’s left me. She’s gone to Holland with the kids. I’m devastated. I’m lost without the kids around. I don’t know which way to turn.’ I encased my head in my hands, acting the hackneyed bereft husband in the hope of giving him some material for one of his novels.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I never liked the bitch for giving me what, with a proud simper, she called grandchildren. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the thought of grandchildren. Even if I die at a hundred-and-two I’ll be too young to be a grandfather and I’m only fifty-eight. Or is it forty-six?’ He poured another whisky. ‘No matter. At least not after last night.’
He wasn’t even good to me, so I didn’t have fair reason to hate him, but I knew one way of making him jump. ‘How’s work, these days?’
He belched. ‘Don’t use that word. I’ve never worked in my life. A gentleman never works. I write, not work.’ His eyes took on sufficient life for someone who wasn’t in the know to imagine not only that he was alive, but that he was a normal human being. ‘The worst thing I ever did was marry your mother so that I had no further right, in the technical sense, to call you a bastard. But you are a bastard, all the same. I never did like your insulting insinuations that I might be capable of the cardinal sin of work. All I do is write, and fuck. And never you forget it.’
‘It’s hardly possible,’ I said, ‘since you begat me.’
‘So your mother said. But you’re rotten enough, so it might well have been me.’
I poured another tot for myself. ‘In my view the greatest disaster of modern times was when you first got blind drunk on the power of words.’
He threw his great cock-head back and laughed. ‘You’re right, Michael. I’ve vomited over many a sofa in a dowager’s salon. There aren’t many decent homes I can visit anymore, but then, who wants to visit a decent home?’
We had something in common at least. ‘All I wanted to know, in my clumsy fashion, is how the writing is getting on?’
‘Why didn’t you say so? If I have any love for you at all it’s only because you’re so ineradicably working-class – hell’s prole, and second to none. Just like the lovely lads I had under me during the war. I’d acknowledge you much less if you came from within sniffing distance of the Thames Valley and had been to Eton – like me. The writing’s getting on very well, since you ask. I’ve got so much to do I don’t know which way to turn. I can’t keep off it. Just a minute.’ He went into his study, and I heard the clack of a single key on the typewriter. He came back, smiling. ‘I wrote a comma. Now I can go out again, though not while you’re here. You’ll smoke the rest of my cigars. What did you really come for? I might be a writer, but I’m not a bally idiot.’
‘I was on my way to Harrods to buy a waistcoat, and I nipped in on impulse.’
‘A waistcoat? What colour?’
‘A leather one.’
‘Hmm! Not bad.’
‘With horn buttons.’
‘Better.’ Then he went back to being nasty. ‘And you thought you’d come here to disrupt me from my life’s work? You’d like to stop me writing the novel to end novels, wouldn’t you?’
‘I expect it’s been done,’ I said, ‘fifty years ago.’
‘That’s what you think.’ He threw his empty glass on the sofa. ‘I’d rather write a novel any day than a scholarly treatise on dumb insolence at the first Olympiad.’ He laughed. ‘But the thing is, Michael, my boy, I’ve got a commission to do something which is right up my street. A job wherein the research is going to take me to all the porn shops, strip clubs, lesbian hangouts, camp brothels, cat houses and underground cinemas in Soho. I can hardly believe it. I’ve just had a ten thousand pound advance to get started on it right away.’
‘You fucking writers have all the luck.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing so charming as a working-class chap who doesn’t swear. But as soon as he swears you know he’s trying to pass himself off as middle-class. It sounds so uncouth. Mind you, I did swear when I was a young man, but it was only a happy-go-lucky fuck-this fuck-that sort of thing. I don’t do it anymore. It restricts my vocabulary.’
‘Don’t tell me how to behave. But who’s commissioned you to write that book?’
He chuckled. ‘A peer of the realm. One of your self-made salt of the earth boys from the provinces who are periodically ennobled so that they won’t cause more trouble to the body politic than they have to. He thinks he’s God’s gift to England because he has all the vice dens in the palm of his hand, and can be trusted not to let them get out of hand. He wants me to do his life story, a whitewash job if ever there was one. His wife read one of my novels, apparently, and didn’t like it, so he thought I was just the writer to do it. But if he thinks I’m going to get much mileage out of making him into little Saint Claud Mogger-donger he’s wrong. I’d much rather write the true story about him, except that I’ll save the real material for one of my later novels, though I suppose I’d better go to his ancestral Moggerhanger village in Bedfordshire to write a nice lyrical opening chapter on his antecedents and their hanging ground. There’s bound to be a gibbet or two I can go into raptures over, like Thomas Hardy. Why, Michael,’ he shouted when I ran into the bathroom, ‘have I said anything wrong? If I make you sick, you’ve made my day.’
The cold porcelain of the toilet struck my forehead. I tried to throw up, but not a grain of bile would rise. The hammer of a metronome was going back and forth, a decade one way, and a decade the other. It wasn’t fear that turned my guts as much as that old familiar sensation of helplessness at being in the hands of fate. I tried to look on the bright side, but only a forty-watt light-bulb glowed. I couldn’t imagine what side-swipe of chance had brought Blaskin and Moggerhanger together, especially when, unknown to the former, one of the latter’s
most wanted men was fretting in the attic above. I washed in cold water and, braving myself to meet whatever might come, went back to the living room.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ Blaskin said, with malicious perkiness. ‘You look as pale as Little Dorrit, and you’re trembling like the Aspern Papers. Do you have an appointment with fear?’
‘I’ve got problems,’ I admitted.
His eyes glowed. Sidney Blood wasn’t in it. ‘What are they?’
‘If I knew I wouldn’t have them, would I?’
After a two-minute silence he said: ‘Michael, we’ve all got problems, but a writer, like a soldier, goes through life with his problems unresolved. I’ve been both.’
I was fed up with his penny packets of wisdom. ‘You disgusting old bastard,’ I spat back. ‘I don’t need you to tell me that everybody goes through life with their problems unresolved.’
He stared, maybe thinking there was something to the slum brat after all. He didn’t like it. There was certainly no point in hoping for a bit of human kindness from a writer. He rubbed his head as if wanting it to come, then rubbed his eyes as if he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of what did. ‘I had a bad night last night. I spent it with Margery Doldrum, and didn’t get anywhere. So leave me alone. I’ve got work to do. The heart of darkness is within. It used to be outside in jungle or desert where we could handle it, but now it’s back on home ground. It crept in to roost, with most of us unaware of its movement, but in reality it never left – not all of it, anyway.’
I hoped to cheer him up. ‘You should write that down. It’s not bad.’
‘You think so?’
‘I would, except that I’m not a writer, like you.’
He found a pencil and scribbled on the back of an envelope. There was an unopened pile of mail on the low-slung Swedish-type table. ‘I’m going to give a talk on the modern English novel, so it’ll come in handy. Sometimes even a son like you can be useful.’
‘How is the novel going?’ As his son, I thought I should at least show an interest in his work. But I only thrust him back into despair. You can’t win.
‘It isn’t a novel, it’s the Dead March from Saul, a chain-and-ball half-page a day, sometimes down to a comma a day, up a narrow valley with no blue horizon visible to cheer me on. I’m one of the poor bloody infantry lost in the moonscape south of Caen but soldiering on in the knowledge, but mostly the vain hope, that I’ll get there soon and still have my feet left at least. But the joy of endeavour and solitude comes in now and again, Michael, sufficient to keep me going on this first draft route report. Fortunately, doing Moggerhanger’s biography – or ghosting his autobiography, I’m not sure which yet – will bring in a few thousand, so I’ll at least have enough hard cash to keep your extravagant mother at arm’s length. I wish you’d stop turning pale when I mention Moggerhanger, by the way. It unnerves me. It’s not that I don’t love your mother, but I can’t even write commas when she’s around. So I’ll deliver fifty pages of Moggerhanger’s trash now and again to line my pockets. If there’s one thing he knows nothing about, though he thinks he knows everything there is to know about everything else, it’s writing. I can put one over on him there.’
‘I don’t suppose he knows what he’s let himself in for.’ I looked glumly at the netsuke to cheer myself up. ‘It must be good being a writer, and able to make people so unhappy.’
‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘but do you think it’s easy? If anybody comes to me and says they want to be a writer I tell them to get lost before I cut off their hands, blind them, and burst their eardrums. In any case, it’s going to be impossible for a writer to flourish in the future. The manuscript of every book will have to go to the Arabian Censorship Office before it’s published. So will all radio, and especially television scripts. The Foreign Office don’t want us to offend anybody whose hands are on the oil taps. Every book and newspaper article will have to be passed by UNESCO after getting the go-ahead from the Third World nations to make sure you don’t irritate them in their state of perpetual envy against better-off countries. No, it’s not going to be so easy.’ An unmistakable scratching sounded from the other side of the ceiling. His big head jutted up. ‘What the hell’s that? Are they up there already?’
I started to sweat. ‘It’s pigeons, I expect.’
‘They must have broken in again. They don’t breed. They multiply.’
I reached for my coat and briefcase. ‘Must go. It’s getting late, and I’ve got business to attend to.’
He came over to count the netsuke which he had seen me looking at.
‘Shurrup!’ I shouted, putting all the Nottingham ferocity into my voice, while hoping my eyes bulged and my cheeks quivered.
‘What did you say?’
I laughed in his face. ‘Shurrup!’ I bawled again. ‘Shurrup! I think I’m going mad.’
‘Do you mind leaving, and coming back when it’s a bit more advanced and so obvious I can’t ignore it? Maybe you’ll let me observe you then, and write about it. I’ve got work to do in the meantime.’
He followed me to the door to make sure I didn’t whip a painting under my coat, and all but pushed me into the corridor, whose blank walls and escape route I was never so glad to see in my life.
Five
On the wall behind Moggerhanger’s glass desk a notice said: ‘While you are thinking about it, you can be doing it.’
I studied this cracker motto from The Little Blue Book of Chairman Mog, knowing that if wild horses pulled him apart, a thousand others would spill out. Even his big toe must have been packed with them. I remembered from ten years ago that if you tried to live by such rules you fell under his spell, so I knew I had to watch myself, especially when, on turning to the door I had come in by, I saw in a place where only the particularly anxious or the peculiarly double-jointed would look, a framed embroidered text saying; ‘If you haven’t tried everything you haven’t tried anything.’
I wondered if there wasn’t a microphone behind, but supposed the television scanner was in the fancy light-bulb above his desk. The furnishings had altered since I had last been there. A framed picture of the Queen stood on a shelf of the bookcase otherwise crammed with manuals on natural history and birdwatching. Behind the desk was a coloured map of England with a dozen pins stuck in different places, which I assumed were localities at which Moggerhanger had business properties, retreats of pleasure or hideaways. A single chair behind the desk suggested that everyone but Moggerhanger stood when in that room. Before he had become a Lord there were several chairs, but not anymore. He was even more English than Blaskin.
On the desk was a duraluminium model of his private twin-jet in flight which he kept at Scroatham aerodrome north of London. By the desk was a black-handled bottle of brandy six feet tall fixed in a brass frame on wheels. God knows how many gallons it contained. The cork was as big as a sewer lid, but the liquid shone like something out of heaven. I longed for a drink but didn’t know how to tackle it. One false move and I would be missing, presumed drowned. I visualised Kenny Dukes pushing it through the Nothing to Declare door at London Airport, the contraption disguised as an old lady on her way back from a recuperative sojourn on the Riviera.
The bookcase swung open, then closed with the delicacy of a powder puff going back into its box. ‘You seem to be fascinated by my exhortations.’
‘I was admiring the needlework, Lord Moggerhanger.’
‘As well you might. My daughter Polly did it. She went to the best Swiss finishing school.’ She certainly had. I’d finished her off a fair number of times ten years ago.
He wore the best quality navy-blue pinstriped suit and waistcoat, a thin silver watch chain across his gut. He had lost weight, though not much. Nothing ever gets lost, he once said to me. It only goes missing. He had decided on his reduction at the time of his appearance in the New Year’s Honours List, being unable to abide the idea of a fat lord. Vanity, I thought, will be his undoing.
‘What brings you here,
Michael?’
‘I heard you wanted a chauffeur, Lord Moggerhanger.’
I noticed the dullness of contact lenses when he looked at me. ‘Who from?’
‘Kenny Dukes. I met him in The Hair of the Dog.’
‘Kenny’s in Italy, and not due back till tonight. He goes once a month to get the family shopping from Milan. So don’t lie to me. Your wits are in cement. Do you want your feet to be? Why did you call, when you could have phoned first?’
‘I didn’t have your number.’
‘It’s in the book. You don’t seem as sharp as you were ten years ago, Michael. I’m surprised at you. You see, it’s always been my contention that those whom the Gods wish to drive mad they first make ex-directory. All those pop stars and writers who scrub their names from the phone book as soon as they think they’re too well-known are crazed with self-importance. Anybody wants to talk to me, all they have to do is look me up in the book and pick up the phone. I may be a Lord – and don’t you forget it – but I’m still a democrat at heart.’
He was the only person I knew who you couldn’t lie to, and get away with it. There was nothing to say. He looked at me for a while, with a gaze that seemed more pregnant than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The last time I had worked for him I’d gone to prison because I was one of the expendables and now, facing him for the first time since, a thought flashed into my mind that promised danger and pleasure. The only emotion that can combine the two so neatly is revenge, yet how could someone like me dare to contemplate getting a Peer of the Realm put behind bars for a good long spell, even though he was the most crooked bastard in Great Britain – and that meant the Commonwealth, which probably meant the world? I let the suicidal, self-destroying notion go. ‘It was a bit remiss of me. I’ll know better next time.’
‘I’m sure you will, if there is a next time. Are you sure you want to be my driver? I’ve had a few more applicants, as you can understand. One of them was Kenny Dukes’s brother Paul, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more wicked villain than that. On the other hand, he’s the sort of driver who’s been practising on stolen cars since he was twelve. Now he’s twenty-five and in his prime.’
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