Life Goes On

by Alan Sillitoe

  He growled. ‘I’ll disembollock him the next time I bump into him. I fuckin’ will.’

  We walked along the covered hall and into the main part of the house. Nobody frisked me to see whether or not I had a Sabatier carving knife strapped to my leg. I was one of the family, it seemed, which is what I wanted to be. Or maybe if he intended killing me after the Canadian fiasco (if it had been a fiasco – I had begun to doubt it) he would do it with a couple of well-sighted Kalashnikovs.

  ‘If I see him crossing Frith Street, I’ll run him down with the Roller. What did Claud say?’

  He hit me on the back, then lowered his voice. ‘He’ll give me one more chance. If I get cut up again he’ll put me on the dole. Said he couldn’t have people who couldn’t look after themselves. Well, I fucking ask you, that fucking Dicky Bush came through that door like a human cannon ball. I didn’t stand a chance. Next time, though, it’ll be him who’s for the mincer.’

  I gave him a crash on the back that sent him three yards forward. ‘Even Sidney Blood won’t recognise him, eh?’

  He righted himself. ‘I don’t know how he knew I was there, though.’

  ‘He saw you through that crack in the door. Then he went back up the stairs and wound himself up like a spring. A bloke like that don’t go into any place without finding who’s inside first. We haven’t got to be too proud to learn, Kenny.’

  He followed me into the house, where the party was as normal as you’d find anywhere on Saturday night in Richmond – or Ealing. I sauntered into the main drawing room, which was furnished in the best Harrods style. A wall had been knocked down, and an Alhambra-type archway connected the two halves. Crystal chandeliers scintillated from the ceiling, and mock old masters in heavy gilt frames decorated the walls. Persian carpets that looked genuine covered the floor. It was lucky I’d togged up in my best, having stumbled into an obviously grand occasion.

  About a dozen people were present, and I didn’t know who to talk to first, a problem solved by Moggerhanger coming across and putting an arm around my shoulder. I wanted to shake it off because it felt like the tail of an anaconda which was looking out for a secure purchase to an oak tree. He led me to the table where Mrs Blemish and Matthew Coppice were serving glasses of Moët et Chandon. ‘I’m more than glad you could come, Michael. It’s a real pleasure to have you with us again.’ He handed me a filled glass from the table and steered me into a corner. ‘We’re going to need your services as we’ve never needed them before. Thank God you’ve honoured me with your presence.’ He wasn’t drinking.

  It sounded like a knifing at least, but my wonderful day with Frances Malham had ensured that I was beyond caring. ‘I intended coming tonight, whatever happened. I don’t see how anybody could have done better than me in Canada, even though it didn’t work out.’ I stopped myself. Pride wouldn’t let me grovel to that bastard.

  ‘I’m the one to say whether it worked or not.’ He laughed, until he saw Parkhurst, who was standing alone, let his cigar-end fall on the carpet and tread it in. ‘Can’t you pick ’em up and put ’em in the ashtrays provided?’ He could play the heavy dad when he liked. ‘I’ll blind you if I see you do that again.’

  Parkhurst looked red-hot pokers at him, then turned and said something to Cottapilly who had a glass of champagne in each hand.

  ‘It seemed to me you sent me to Canada as a decoy,’ I said. ‘Or because you thought it was the easiest way to get me killed.’

  His arm came over me again, this time as if the anaconda had got a real grip on the south-east leg of the heavy walnut table, and squeezed my shoulders. ‘You’ve got guts, Michael. And you’re clever. You’re also lucky. Not only that, but you’ve got a sense of humour. If ever I want someone for a hard job, I don’t ask whether they’re intelligent, or lucky, or experienced (though they’ve got to be all of that), but if they can take a joke.’

  ‘One of these days I’ll die laughing, though I wouldn’t mind knowing exactly what did happen when I got to Toronto.’

  He took out a couple of Partagas and we lit up. ‘Let me say this: in the bag you carried was a lot of paper work which couldn’t be trusted to the post. It was worth a lot of money, so we had to send somebody like you, otherwise the Green Toe Gang wouldn’t think it was genuine. Now they do, and they’re acting on information that’s ruining their operations in North America. Certainly, it was a dangerous job, but what do you think I’m handing you this thousand-pound bonus for?’ He slipped the cheque into my lapel pocket, behind the tip of white handkerchief. ‘I expected you to get back. I can’t afford to have a valuable and trusted friend like you get hurt.’

  ‘I feel reassured.’

  ‘Imagine, Michael, if I’d sent someone of lesser calibre than your good self.’ He took a good long puff at his cigar. So did I. ‘Take Kenny Dukes. He’d have bought the biggest teddy bear at London Airport as a present for a tart he knows in Toronto. Cottapilly would have gone for a giant fire-engine to keep him company on the long flight. They’d have been spotted straightaway because those hotheads over there would have thought they didn’t intend to deliver the goods. No, it had to be someone like you, who’s got no foibles and would deliver the stuff without a hitch.’

  ‘I feel better all the time.’

  ‘“If the earthenware pot floats downstream with the brass ones we all know what must happen to them.”’

  ‘It’s kind of you to say so,’ I said in the right tone of voice.

  ‘You’re so cool and clear-thinking it’s as if you’re not as working-class as you say you are. Still, life is a bit of a mystery at times. I would have had you to dinner after the Blaskin party, but that’s not my way of doing things. When you invite only one person to dinner he’s always unnerved because he doesn’t know whether he’s come to eat or be eaten.’

  We laughed, as if we had been nothing but friends for years, and that even in death we would not be divided. ‘When the ladies have retired,’ he said, ‘there’s going to be a meeting. I’ve a job in the offing that I’ve been contemplating for years. We’re going to deal the Green Toe Gang a blow which will settle their hash in this country. In the meantime, go and enjoy yourself, while I talk to my dear wife.’

  I could never decide whether life was too short or life was too long. Mrs Blemish was dishing out champagne at the drinks table and either she didn’t know me, or she was playing the part of waitress which included not knowing anyone at all. She wore a white cap across her grey hair and a short black apron, and looked far more self-possessed than the forlorn woman I had given a lift to near Goole. I reminded her of the occasion, but she smiled, and said while filling my glass: ‘I’m on duty, sir.’

  I drank to her. ‘Congratulations on getting away from Percy. That’s all that matters.’

  She had the most beautiful bow-like lips, suggesting that her teeth were still perfect. But those lovely lips trembled, and I felt like kicking myself for having reminded her of less fortunate days.

  ‘A month after I got this job, he found me. I don’t know how. He pleaded with me to go back to Tinderbox Cottage. I said I wouldn’t. I was polishing the silver at the time. He threw a bundle of it across the floor, and Lord Moggerhanger heard the dreadful clash and came in to ask what was going on. He swore at being disturbed. Percy said he was my husband and wanted me at home, but Lord Moggerhanger told him that I had agreed to work for him, and that he and Lady Moggerhanger were so satisfied with me that they wouldn’t let me go, and that if Percy didn’t clear out he would have him thrown out. Then Percy pleaded to be given a job as well, and Lord Moggerhanger, after thinking about, it agreed to take him on as a handyman. He could catalogue the books in his library. Percy did this in a couple of days, and I’d never seen him so happy. But when he finished he attacked me with a knife. Lord Moggerhanger came in and knocked him down. He wouldn’t let him go, even then. In fact he was even less inclined to do so but sent him to be the caretaker of a place called Peppercorn Cottage. I’ve never been there, and don’t
want to, but Percy can stay forever for all I care, as long as he’s out of the way. I told Lady Moggerhanger that I would only remain providing I didn’t see Percy. She said she would talk to Lord Moggerhanger, and see if he wouldn’t keep Percy away from me. I haven’t seen him for a fortnight, and that’s longer than at any time since before we were married. I feel a new woman.’

  ‘You look it.’

  She filled my glass without gauging the amount, though none was spilled. ‘I’ll never forget your help. When you gave me a lift to the Great North Road, you brought me luck.’

  ‘The luck of the Irish.’ I wished her more for the future.

  ‘There’s something about my husband that Lord Moggerhanger likes,’ she said. ‘He seemed to regard Percy even more highly when he became violent and dangerous.’

  ‘That’s how some people are,’ I said, reluctant to go further into the matter. A couple of waiters wheeled in the food, so I went to get my share. Toffeebottle was a small, bald but very compact man with big hands, and eyes of pig-cunning. God knows where Moggerhanger had picked him up. He wore a black suit and bow-tie at the throat of his ruffled white shirt, which made him hardly distinguishable from the waiters. He reached for the boneyard of chicken legs in aspic jelly and put three on his plate. Then he helped himself to chips, boiled potatoes, rice, corn salad and bread and butter. ‘You can come back for your cheese and dessert,’ I said.

  He turned, from an acquiring world absolutely his own, and I put his accent a few miles north-north-east of Manchester: ‘There’ll be bugger-all left then, Mr Cullen.’

  ‘That’s probably true.’ I heaped things onto my own plate. ‘Are you in on the big job as well?’

  ‘We all are.’

  ‘I’ll feel safe.’

  ‘It’s very nice of you to say so.’

  Oh no it wasn’t. The Boss could hardly get all of us wiped out. ‘Is Lord Moggerhanger coming?’

  ‘He’ll be staying in the control tower,’ he whispered.

  I bumped into Pindarry, who avoided a flop of mayonnaise onto his electric blue suit. It went onto the carpet. Moggerhanger, talking to Polly, saw it. He saw everything. Pindarry saw him seeing it, so took a napkin from the snap-table and mopped up the mess. It was more than his bonus was worth not to. It was part of Moggerhanger’s nature to see everything, but it was also a talent he cultivated. He had read, or he had been told by Dr Anderson (for a fee or a crate of whisky), that great men notice everything. They had an omnivorous grasp of detail. True, yet not true. Child of the Bedfordshire parish, Moggerhanger had been born with keen eye and windmill touch. He’d abandoned school at fourteen, Blaskin told me (who had jollied Drudge-Perkins into doing some detective work), though he had not been attracted to it from birth, considering that as long as he learned the three ‘R’s’ any other knowledge he needed was accessible to someone of his intelligence, curiosity and greed. But just as it is true that great men owe their success to a grasp of detail, so it is equally true that their downfall is caused by an inability to delegate tasks whose success is vital to their continuing prosperity. Those who fall into this trap are not great men at all, Blaskin remarked, adding that Moggerhanger was just a nosy old bastard who couldn’t keep his hands to himself at a time when there were more blind eyes in the country than missing arms. I walked over to Matthew Coppice by the door. ‘How are things at Spleen Manor?’

  He spoke so that no one but me would hear. ‘Alport’s gone east.’

  ‘I nearly went west,’ I laughed, ‘in Canada.’

  ‘The finest dope comes from the poppy lands of Turkestan,’ he said. ‘Farmers grow it in secret on collective farms. Some say the Russian government knows, but doesn’t mind. They’ll do anything to get foreign currency. The stuff’s delivered to Alport in East Berlin by a Russian general. I heard you-know-who saying that next time we’ll pay them with a few sacks of grain, which they seem to need more than money. You’d be surprised how much white stuff comes from Russia. Somebody sells a lot to them, and they sell most of it to us. Then (and I don’t know how this is done, but it is) we sell it back to them for furs, diamonds and ikons. Breezeblock Villa at Back Enderby is bursting at the seams. So are one or two police stations. We send it to Russia on ships to Odessa and Rostov. It goes on barges up the Dnieper and the Don – then on to the Volga-Don Canal and up to the Moscow-Vladivostok railway. Russian Sailors can’t get enough of it.’

  I didn’t want to know so much, verbally, but couldn’t resist asking: ‘Why don’t they bring it from Moscow by plane, and save all this hole-and-corner trouble?’

  ‘Aeroflop’s too unreliable. You never know when the Russians are going to invade another country, like Afghanistan. They needed half their civilian air fleet to ferry in troops and guns. Lord M had a man carrying a valuable suitcase by Aeroflop to Australia. In Moscow there were no more planes, so they sent everybody back to Warsaw. The Poles didn’t know what to do with them, so they sent them back to London. Lord M’s courier had to book another route, and got there too late. The Green Toe Gang operating out of Amoy via Hong Kong made it first. Money was lost on that deal.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I was sweating because Cottapilly and Pindarry weren’t far away.

  ‘As long as it don’t snow,’ Matthew said loudly, in his simpleton fashion.

  I laughed, as if at the end of a long joke.

  ‘I’m writing it down,’ he said. ‘A packet of papers will be waiting at Upper Mayhem, like you told me. It’s dynamite. We can’t lose.’

  Only our ears, I thought, and a few fingers. The Arabs aren’t the only ones who chop your hands off for stealing. I slapped him on the back, then rejoined the crowd. ‘There are lots of new gangs coming up these days,’ Jericho Jim was saying.

  ‘Kid’s stuff,’ Kenny Dukes said. ‘Think of their names. Looting Tigers. Molotov’s Angels. The Window Smashers. Flames of God. Fucking riff-raff.’

  ‘Footpads and pickpockets.’ Cottapilly was also scornful. ‘Gaol meat.’

  ‘What’s wrong with pickpockets?’ Jericho Jim tapped me on the shoulder, and held my wallet in his hand. ‘You should watch this.’

  I grabbed him by the jacket, my fist lifted. ‘You fuckpig.’

  Moggerhanger smacked himself at the waistcoat with laughter. ‘It was only a joke among the lads, Michael. I bet him a pony he couldn’t get it off you.’

  He turned white, so I let him go. ‘Next time, I’ll beat the living shit out of you.’

  ‘No harm done,’ the boss said. ‘You aren’t a proper Londoner if you haven’t had your pocket picked. Good job it wasn’t on the street. You’d never have seen it again.’

  Jericho Jim straightened his tie. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. ‘Sorry about that.’

  He grinned. ‘Sorlright. I learned it in Borstal, but I never had to earn my living at it, thank God.’

  Lanthorn lit another of Moggerhanger’s cigars. ‘Those rioters and burners can expect little sympathy from me, Claud. What are they looting? Televisions, washing machines, videos, fags and booze. They should bring the army in and shoot the buggers like dogs. If they were taking bread and groceries I could understand it. My lads ’ud still go for ’em, though.’

  Scottish George hated such talk. ‘The social fabric’s coming to pieces. Only communism can put things right.’

  Moggerhanger liked a party. He was having a good time. ‘I don’t think so, Jack. Communism’s nothing but a middle-class plot to cure wild-cat strikes. Your free-born Englishman wouldn’t stand for it, God bless him!’

  ‘Well, I’m a Scot, sir.’ I liked George because he wouldn’t be intimidated. ‘It’s the only hope for the poor.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Mog said. ‘But look at how my only begotten son is pushing that delicious food around his plate as if it was yak shit.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Parkhurst drawled.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t swear.’ Lady Moggerhanger and Polly came over from the drinks table.

  ‘You don’t know you’re born,’
Moggerhanger said to his no-good son. Then he addressed us all. ‘You’re stinking rich, that’s why. You should have been alive before the war, and put up with what we had to put up with. I expect some of you remember. My mother and father were turned out of their cottage one autumn, and the five of us lived through the winter in a tent. And winters were winters in those days! When we got a house the following year my younger brother died. I made up my mind I’d never put up with that again. And I didn’t, eh, Jack?’

  Lanthorn nodded, and pulled on his cigar. ‘You were right. Some things are more than flesh and blood can stand.’

  ‘My mother’s eighty-five,’ Claud said, ‘and has a beautiful home in Golders Green. Somebody’s there all the time to wait on her hand and foot. She has enough money settled on her never to want, even if she lives to be a hundred.’

  ‘She’ll live longer than that if I know her,’ said his wife.

  ‘Maybe she will.’ I’d never seen him closer to tears – though he still had a fair way to go. I’d tell Blaskin that he had the human touch after all. He rubbed his hands together: ‘It’s no use wanting the impossible. Duty calls. It’s time we got down to work. And that means YOU,’ he roared at Parkhurst, who opened the door to slive out.

  ‘I’m going for a slash,’ he said. ‘And besides, I’ve heard your stories fifty times already. And for another thing, don’t expect me to work. I tried it once, and I didn’t like it.’

  Moggerhanger joined in our laughter, which said a lot for him. ‘I know when to concede defeat. That’s another reason why I am where I am. Flexibility furthers, Confucius, he say.’

  Mrs Blemish brought in a huge tea urn and a tray of mugs, and cake for everyone. Lady Moggerhanger and Polly went out, which left – apart from me and Lord Moggerhanger – Cottapilly, Pindarry, Kenny Dukes, Jericho Jim, Toffeebottle, Inspector Lanthorn, Matthew Coppice and Scottish George, and Mrs Whipplegate who stood by the telephone with her notebook.

  Moggerhanger had learned from Lanthorn that the Green Toe Gang stored their loot in a farmhouse near Great Creaton in Northamptonshire. It was their number-one depot containing counterfeit money, airline tickets, national insurance stamps, traveller’s cheques and real money, amounting in value to more than two million pounds. There was also, as it was quaintly put, a quantity of poppy seed. ‘The value of which,’ Moggerhanger said, ‘doesn’t bear thinking about – or it won’t till we have it safely under lock and key.’