‘I want to go through Barnsley and Wakefield.’
Clegg looked at his map. ‘You’ll be skirting the rim of the safety area.’
‘I know. But I have to call at a house near Kirkby Malzeard called Doggerel Bank. It’s not far from Ripon.’
‘It’s a risk. Still, we won’t be much beyond half-an-hour from safety. We’ll run up on the M1 for a while, and then go through Leeds.’
I belted along, but kept my ears as wide apart as they’d go in anticipation of a Wailing Winnie with a flashing blue light. We skirted Sheffield and got onto the motorway, and since there was only one more service station before Leeds, I drove onto it. Why I wanted to phone Blaskin I don’t know, but in my reckless state perhaps some voice from the past might persuade me to believe that a future was in the offing.
I parked as near to the entrance as I could get, and Wayland ran in to get coffee. Clegg put Dismal on a lead and was last seen being pulled towards the dustbin area behind the kitchens. The phone was answered after five rings. ‘Mr Blaskin’s residence,’ a woman said.
‘This is his son. I want to speak to the shabby old wanker.’
‘Please moderate your language, Mr Cullen, while I see whether the eminent novelist is at home. He’s in rather a temper today.’
I didn’t have time to say a mantra before he came on.
‘Michael, is that really you? Last night I dreamed that you’d fallen into the mincer and was dead. I woke up laughing, it was so horrible. Where are you? Are you really alive? If you are, don’t come to within five miles of me, or I’ll blast you asunder. How could I have given birth to a monster who knows how to strike vitals which even I don’t know how to find and didn’t even know I’d got? How could you have done such a wicked unfilial thing? I can’t believe it.’
He would have gone on for three volumes, but I shouted him down. ‘What have I done now, fuck-face? You know I would do anything to hurt you, I love you so much, but I never thought I would succeed, you’re such a selfish, hard-bitten old bastard.’
‘Don’t swear,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s only an excuse for rotten English. Shows deplorable lack of style, and I don’t like that in a son of mine. Give me a moment, and I’ll tell you what you’ve done.’
I thought he’d hung up, and found myself getting worried, in spite of everything. He was robbing me of my recklessness, and I didn’t like that.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that you wrote me a trash novel?’
‘Of course I do. It was very trashy indeed. It was the best rubbish I could write.’
‘Maybe it was. I don’t know what’s what anymore. I thought it was putrid too. I couldn’t have done worse myself.’
‘I did it to get you out of a jam, if I remember. You wanted to leave your publishers, but were contracted to hand over one more novel. So I suggested you give them a rotten one that they would have to turn down. Out of the goodness of my heart I wrote it for you.’
I thought he was crying. ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘How the hell should I?’
‘He accepted it!’
I laughed. ‘You must be joking.’
‘You won’t laugh if you get a javelin through your throat. He says it’s the best thing I’ve done. It was “hats off”! He wants to put it in for the Windrush Prize. Michael, why did you do this to me? Where are you, so that I can kill you? Why did you write a prizewinning best seller, you awful abortion you?’
It was getting harder and harder to do the right thing in life. ‘I’ll never help you again,’ I said coldly. ‘But why don’t you calm down and look at the situation rationally? It won’t do you any harm, for a change. Ask your publisher for a twenty-thousand quid advance. He won’t pay it. You’re free. If he does cough up, give me half. It’ll only be fair.’
‘Never!’ he croaked, and I heard no more.
I was getting sleepy, and looking forward to a night’s kip on Delphick’s flagstoned floor, or at least an icy wash from his cold-water butt. After a quick swill of coffee I went out to see Clegg and Dismal coming back from their promenade around the dustbins. Dismal must have emptied at least three, because a fragment of plastic cup still adhered to his jowl. ‘You disgusting beast, don’t we feed you enough?’
He licked my hand lovingly, and left a streak of stale ketchup over the back. Wayland shuffled out of the cafeteria and got back on board. We soon put Leeds behind us (thank God) and headed for Harrogate. It was a very up and down highway, with nice views of the dales left and right, between the built-up ribbon of road. The scenery soothed me, and I soon forgot Blaskin’s insane maledictions. With a father like that, who needed friends? I pushed in a cassette for some music. Wayland said it was Brahms, so I turned it a bit louder for him. In Harrogate I dropped Clegg outside a supermarket, telling him to go in and buy everything, then get maps of the Ripon area from a bookshop. Because there was no parking I played Red Indians till he reappeared on the pavement with a trolley spilling over with food and booze. ‘There’s hardly room to sit,’ Wayland complained when he loaded it into the back. ‘Why do we need so many stores?’
I marked Doggerel Bank on the map for Clegg. ‘I don’t feel secure unless the car’s loaded with victuals. It’s one of my weaknesses.’
‘You must have had a deprived childhood.’
I let that one go, and we glided up the hill with a puff pastry in our mouths. Dismal was so full already that he played with his like a cat with a mouse, but when I cursed him for making a mess he licked it up, then got back on the seat to be patted.
Clegg, the rally navigator, didn’t take us directly through Ripon. A few miles beyond Harrogate he gave the fork left by a park, and after half a mile told me to split right up a steep hill onto the moors. my nervometer settled down to zero at such a straight and narrow road which went closer to the sky than the main drag to the east. There was little traffic, and we made so many turns, forks, bends, dips and steep ascents that I couldn’t imagine anyone staying on our tail.
Clegg guided me to Doggerel Bank without going through a village. A piece of slate stuck on a crumbling wall of boulders pointed towards a track paved with stones, in some places rubble, in others only grass-grown ruts. On either side walls made the lane so narrow I was afraid we would scrape against them.
A bend took us through a belt of tall trees, and after a while I spotted a yard, a broken gate thrown to one side and almost covered in nettles, and across the cobbles was a simple stone-built slate-roofed cottage. Clegg, Dismal and Wayland got out, while I turned the car in case an urgent getaway was necessary, though I had no reason to think it would be. I bumped a drainpipe, tapped a wall and hit Delphick’s reconstituted panda-pram, but with Clegg’s expert guidance I managed to set the gleaming snout of the Rolls-Royce pointing towards freedom.
A wireless was playing. ‘I love Haydn,’ said Wayland, who hoped he was coming to a civilised place. I thumped the door but there was no answer. When I banged the knocker it fell off, so I laid it on the lid of the water butt and pushed the door open. Dismal sniffed his way up the corridor like Inspector Javert back on duty. The music got louder, and I walked into a room furnished like Ali Baba’s cave.
It was a smallish parlour, but dressed up like an interior as far from Yorkshire as it was possible to get. The floor was covered with mock oriental carpets, and a kind of green blanketing had been tacked around the walls, going a third of the way up, above which was plain whitewash turning yellow. On a round low table was an Indian-style vase with several sticks of smoking joss stuck in it. The bed by the wall was more of a platform, about eighteen inches off the ground, but covered with blankets, pillows and cushions, rugs and sheepskins, in all kinds of piebald or gaudy colours. It made my eyes ache to look at it. On the turntable lid of the hi-fi system was a box of Turkish Delight. Cigarettes, half a bag of sliced bread, a roll-up tin, a bunch of keys and a biker’s helmet lay on the floor.
Naked Ronald Delphick leaned against the wall, his arms around the
shoulders of a woman who would have been altogether bare but for a pair of flimsy pants. Both were apparently far gone in listening to the music, but on our party entering, and especially at the advent of the Hound of the Baskervilles leaping on the bed and pushing his nose at the woman’s breasts (God knows what he had in mind) she screamed: ‘Oh God, a fucking nightmare! Get that dog off!’
Delphick looked up, shouting: ‘Not you and that mongrel again. I can’t believe it.’
It was encouraging, and indeed touching, that even in his panic he remembered us. I kicked Dismal off the bed, and apologised. ‘I’m sorry about that, Miss. I’ve usually got him on a hawserchain, but he slipped out of it.’
Delphick put his trousers on. ‘I know who you are, but fuck off. I’m not at home today. Unless you have a block or two of cannabis resin. Otherwise, get up that hill and never come back. I’m tired of intruders and fans who come down here just to see me. An East German tourist bus came looking for me the other day because they’d heard there was a working-class poet living here. I saw it coming down the lane so I took to the woods. I’m not a National Landmark. All I want is peace to go on writing my immortal poems. I’m writing one now, as a matter of fact, which only has words ending in the letter T and it’s a very hard job. You’re not taking all this down?’
‘Oh, you’re such a fucking bore.’ The woman turned her back to us, and reached for a yellow cotton blouse hanging on a nail. I noticed a large tattoo on her back which said ‘I love Janet’. Then the blouse covered it and she turned to us, still fastening the buttons. ‘The only time I can put up with you is when you’re silent, or when you’re fucking me. Otherwise, you’re full of shit.’
Delphick belched. ‘Don’t take on, love.’
Clegg had gone out with Dismal, while Wayland stood in the doorway, and I stayed in the room. I recognised the woman, and told her so. She was in her mid-thirties, slender and with a fine pair of legs. She had shoulder-length but straggly dark hair, an oval thinning face and, as I had seen, small rounded breasts. She was one of those outspoken bi-sexual specimens with one illegitimate kid who comes from a working-class home north of the Trent. I knew her, all right.
‘I’ve seen you before, as well.’ Her smile was friendly. ‘In London, wasn’t it?’
‘And on the Great North Road. I gave you a lift once, when I was going down to the Smoke for the first time.’
She pondered for a while, then laughed. ‘In that old banger, with Bill Straw? I remember. That bastard had just got out of the nick. You’re Michael?’
‘You’re June.’
‘And if you’ve forgotten me, I’m Ronald Delphick.’
‘Piss off and sulk.’ She turned her back to him, and asked me: ‘What the hell are you doing in this place?’
The information I had on her was coming back. She’d known Delphick since they were teenage lovers, and he’d put her in the family way, then deserted her. She had taken off to London, had the baby, and got a job as a stripper in one of Moggerhanger’s clubs. She’d even been Mog’s girlfriend for a while. I’d seen her occasionally in London during my gold-smuggling days, and once made an unsuccessful attempt to get into bed with her. What the hell she was doing with Delphick again, I couldn’t begin to say.
‘I’m a friend of Ronald’s,’ I confessed, ‘though you might not think so, in view of the welcome he’s giving me.’
‘I didn’t realise he had any friends.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘He’s got sponsors, and people he ponces off, and a few little gang-banging groupies, and one or two idiots who grovel down the lane on their bellies so’s they can touch his little finger, but friends – he wouldn’t know one if you burst into flames and died for him.’
The smile on Delphick’s face got wider the longer she went on. ‘If a mark of friendship is to know your enemy,’ she said, ‘then I suppose I’m about the only real friend he’s got, and I hate his guts. The only reason I can stand him is that I know him, and he’s only harmless if you’ve got no illusions. But watch out, all the same, because his inventive mind with regard to treachery is always one notch ahead of yours. Otherwise I love him, and within his very narrow limits I believe he feels a pale shade of regard for me now and again. We occasionally meet for a fuck, for old times’ sake. I write and say that Beryl – that’s the little girl I had of his, she’s twelve now – is asking about him. But he’ll never see her in case she looks at him with her big give-me-a-quid-eyes. So I see him just to torment him with the fact that she’s still alive. But he’s as dead as ever. I don’t suppose he’ll ever grow up because if he did he’d be even less genuine than he is now, and then he wouldn’t know me at all.’
‘I love you, Petal, you know that,’ he said. ‘Such bad opinions almost give me a hard-on.’ He grabbed her, but she got free and pushed him onto the bed which, if it hadn’t been built on boxes, would have collapsed.
‘Let’s go into the kitchen,’ she said, ‘and make your visitors some tea. I’m sure they’ve paid for it a hundred times over or they wouldn’t be here.’
‘We’ve got no tea,’ he said.
‘No tea?’
‘Nor sugar.’
‘We’ll have coffee,’ I told him.
‘We’re out of that, as well.’
‘What about cocoa?’
‘I don’t buy it.’
‘What about a glass of ale?’
‘If there was ale in the house there wouldn’t be any. I’d have drunk it all.’
‘Do you think you could spare us a cup of water?’
‘That’s different. Why didn’t you say so? Just go on down the lane to the farm. There’s plenty there. Tell him I sent you. He’ll give you all the water you want. He’s very generous, old Jack. A real good sort. Man of the people. Salt of the earth. He’ll give you a cup of water.’
‘I’ll settle for a double whisky, on second thoughts.’
‘Are you joking? People bring whisky here. They take a sip, and leave most of it.’ He laughed. ‘There’s nothing in the place. We’ve got to go shopping sometime, Pet.’
June went ahead, leading us to the kitchen. ‘Take no notice of him. He wouldn’t give you a hair from his nose. I’ll make you some tea.’
She lifted the lid of the Rayburn and set a kettle on. The place was rough, but adequate. There was even a stool to sit on. Dismal sniffed at the bread bin, more out of curiosity, I hoped, than hunger. Clegg stood by the door, waiting for the word to sit down, while Wayland took a stool as far from the stove as he could get because of the heat. I was near the window with Delphick who, following my gaze, saw the back of the Rolls-Royce. He stopped smiling when he saw me looking at him. ‘Nice car,’ he said.
‘You had a ride in it, remember?’
‘And how.’
‘It’s not mine.’
June came to look. ‘So you’re still working for Claud? How is the savage old bastard?’
‘Prospering.’
She took the cigarette out of her mouth. A tooth to one side was darker than the rest. ‘Why did you come here?’
‘I was in the area. Claud’s got a place called Spleen Manor not far away. I always wanted to see Delphick’s house. He told me it was a cowshed.’
Delphick laughed. ‘You know why? If all my patrons in London saw how nice it was when they came up they’d never leave.’
‘It’s bloody opulent,’ I said. ‘I don’t begrudge you, but how did you do it?’
June poured the tea. ‘I’ll tell you. First, an aunt died and left him a few thousand pounds. That was eight years ago. Our canny Delphick doesn’t tell anybody, least of all me, in case I ask him for a bob or two to buy Beryl some socks. He picks this place up for a song. Then every little scrubber he inveigled here did something to the place. And every little groupie spent what money she had, and brought something to beautify it. When he’d fucked ’em silly and bled ’em dry he booted ’em out. A gushing middle-aged admirer put in a damp course. Another had a carpet laid – then got laid on it. A third impro
ved the bathroom. Then he severs diplomatic relations with them all.’
He sugared his tea, and put the bowl back in the cupboard. June took it out and passed it round. ‘Can you blame me, though?’ he said. ‘It’s a reflection on how society treats its poets. If I got proper payment for my work I’d earn as much as a barrister. If only I was a novelist! I’d shamble around all day in my dressing gown, sit on the lawn in the sun, do a sentence now and again, and call for my housekeeper to bring me a drink, or serve tea which would include delicious little paper-thin cucumber sandwiches. I’d ask her to dish up some lunch of chips and venison whenever I felt like it. A novelist has it easy compared to a poet. I wish I could be a successful novelist.’
‘Is there any cake with the tea?’ I wasn’t hungry, but wanted to do him a favour by giving him a chance to be hospitable.
He turned sharply, as if worms were eating his guts. ‘Gritcake? Linseed cake? A cake of salt? I think we ate the last for breakfast, didn’t we, Pet?’
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