Life Goes On

by Alan Sillitoe

  The sea was heaving so much I wasn’t feeling too good myself. ‘I have more than enough evidence.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ he said, beaming with simple good nature – or so I thought.

  How dense and disbelieving could he get? However good a friend he was, the holes in his understanding were big enough to drive a lorry through. ‘Haven’t I?’ I raged. ‘Haven’t I? Don’t I?’

  ‘I bloody well know you haven’t,’ he shouted against a sudden change of the wind, veins standing out on his face and throat.

  I fiddled with my briefcase and pulled out Matthew Coppice’s envelope. ‘What’s this, then? What is it? You want to know what it is? I’ll tell you. It’s everything. All I’ve got on Moggerhanger is in here, documentary evidence that’s going to shake the criminal world to its foundations.’

  ‘Don’t be so bleddy daft.’ He thought his Nottingham accent would make me back down. My beloved, fatal, powerful packet of damning evidence against Moggerhanger and all his works flapped in the air only a foot from Bill Straw’s nose. ‘This,’ I shouted, ‘will hang the drug-peddling villain!’

  His bottle-blue eyes, like a pair of kid’s marbles about to hit each other in the game of the century, couldn’t believe their luck – I realise now. He snatched the envelope. ‘What do you want that for?’ – and threw it into the sea.

  Maria vomited again and again, but Bill was too busy to console her. My gorge solidified. I was safe from seasickness, though not, for a while, safe from doing the bastard in.

  ‘Your envelope may look like a lifeboat.’ He held me from jumping after it. ‘But it’s too small, Michael. It’ll sink without trace, and so would you. I like you too much to let you kill yourself in such a cause. An old Sherwood Forester doesn’t let that happen to a mate. And I like myself too much to let you kill me. So stop it. We didn’t come all this way for it to end like that. There are better things in life than death, as your good father once said to me. It’s no use struggling. I know what you want better than you do yourself, at the moment, and I’m only doing it knowing you would do it for me in similar circumstances. Life’s all we’ve got, Michael, and it behoves us to keep it. God wouldn’t like it to be otherwise. And when a Sherwood Forester brings God into the issue you know he’s serious. He’s on the firing step. So keep still, will you? We’re both on the firing step. Stop struggling and spluttering, because you’re not going over the top. I’m not going to let you. The only way you’ll get over that rail is if you take me with you, and you may be strong but you’re not strong enough for that. I’m staying where I am, and so are you. Those bits of paper aren’t worth it. The only way to dispose of Moggerhanger is to kill him, but don’t try that either, because you’ll get killed first. And if you’re not, you’ll be killed afterwards. You can’t fight him and Lanthorn as well, and the whole of the British nation, because Moggerhanger is so powerful that he’s one of them, and if they insist on clutching him to their bosoms that’s their affair, because believe me they clutch worse things to their bosoms than Moggerhanger, and for you to kill yourself to get rid of him, and to do them in the eye as well, which is what it would mean, is just not worth you losing your life. Nor is it worth me losing mine, which is what would happen if you lost yours. Moggerhanger is as rotten as the whole country, Michael. They’re one and the same thing, and for you to think you can do anything about it not only astounds me but saddens me. Let them rot, because though the country deserves a better fate – and I love England just as much as you do, if not more – you’re not the one to cure it. It’ll have to do without you. One person can’t alter the course of history without the whole country being on his side, and if the whole country is on his side anyone can alter the course of history. I suppose Blaskin said that as well. Or I don’t know what I’m saying. You’re upsetting me, I’ll tell you that. I’ll go out of my mind if you don’t stop struggling. Look on the bright side. The three of us can take a holiday in Holland on my money, or part of it anyway, and drive down the Rhine to Switzerland in your jalopy. Then we’ll come back to Blighty and go to Upper Mayhem, where Maria will have her baby.’

  ‘You fucking won’t,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, don’t get like that. Let’s go inside to that cosy bar, and you can buy me another drink. We’ll take Maria with us. She’ll be lighter going down than she was coming up, and that’s a fact, won’t you, my lovely little duck?’

  I hated his guts, but no more intensely than I hated my own. I knew what he had talked about with Moggerhanger, and why Moggerhanger had let him and Maria go. I knew indeed that he had been working for Moggerhanger all along, that the despicable bastard was nothing less than his recruiting sergeant who from the beginning was set on to get me for a few hard jobs, and to keep an eye on me while I was doing them. Even Eric Alport being on the train when I came into London at Bill’s summons had been no accident.

  At that moment by the boat rail, my life cracked in two, and I saw the halves, visible at last with my own clean insight. People like Straw and Moggerhanger had known them all along and put each one to good use. While I had been philandering, the world had fucked me rotten. True, I had sensed treachery at odd moments, but lunatic vanity had prevented me following the hints and realising that, far from being a man of the world, I was the most gullible person in it.

  The shock of this revelation, that only friends could betray you, flared my murderous rage up again. I remembered my umbrella, with which Bill had prodded the dog in Charing Cross Road and, recalling the results of that inadvertent jab, I lifted it to deliver a similar thrust at him, which I hoped would prove fatal.

  I don’t suppose my attack was serious, but I had to make the effort, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get a proper night’s sleep to the end of my days. Old Sherwood Forester that he was, he anticipated the move, easily took the umbrella from me, and slung it after the packet of papers into the water. ‘It’s unethical to use a thing like that.’

  I looked failure staunchly in the face.

  ‘You can’t win ’em all, Michael.’

  ‘Tell me something new.’

  He laughed. ‘There’s no such thing, old son.’

  I stood by the rail, hypnotised by the lift and fall of the ship, a repetitious movement which emphasised the scale of my downfall. What the connection was, I did not know, but for the first time in my life I realised that I was not going to live forever. I had never thought so, but for the first time I was afraid, and gripped the wood to steady myself. I felt death happening like a dress rehearsal that could turn at any time into the real thing, and I would have no say in the matter when it did. The certainty that life no longer went on was absent. I would exist from minute to minute, and I’d have to be grateful for every fresh second that ticked by.

  I stood till I couldn’t see the waves for darkness. Bill had no doubt put Maria to bed, then gone to phone or wireless Moggerhanger to inform him that Operation Get Cullen had been successfully concluded. By playing his cards right – which he had certainly done – he had saved me from worse trouble than I was already in. Because it would sooner or later have happened, he might have done me a favour by making it come sooner, but I could see no way of thanking him.

  The storm became worse, and the temptation to turn the dress rehearsal into the first and last performance became harder to resist. One flash, and I would be over. I was too inert. A calm sea might have drawn me, but not this spume-ridden upchucking wilderness. It was a killer I wanted no part of, a spider’s web of violent water which would not get hold of me if I had anything to do with it. And I still had. I wouldn’t even give it my vomit. If I spat to leeward I would get it back in the eye. The sea had to be treated with respect, and would get me if it could – though I would never fraternise.

  I had tried to nail Moggerhanger, and had failed because I had neither the gut, the guile nor the patience. I hadn’t tried hard enough. I was too few. Let go. The sound of music came through a lull in the wind noise. The animals were out, in the ship
and on the sea, in the air and in me. There was no telling who they were after but, if I was going to die, I might as well live. Knowing I had come to such a realisation late in life glued my eyes open. Chagrin and misery made perfect matchsticks. It would be the way I lived now. All I could think of when I got to my cabin was Frances Malham. A start in life goes on to the end.

  Thirty

  Reader, I married her.

  Or she married me. I no longer dodge the traffic like a London pigeon in its prime. Moggerhanger lost interest in me as soon as Bill Straw reported that the evidence against him had gone into the sea. How had they found out? Matthew Coppice was the weak link in the none too strong chain. Chief Inspector Lanthorn, in his ferreting and always busy way, had suspected him. He was all ears and eyes, and nailed him one day at Spleen Manor, where he tricked, shamed, then bullied him into confessing by the obvious and simple expedient of making me out to be a more evil villain than either Moggerhanger or himself. Coppice’s moral sense was riddled with idiosyncrasies, which made him as vulnerable as a colander in a millpond.

  Lanthorn didn’t enjoy his triumph for long, because a fortnight later, while walking across Whitehall, he cracked up frorn a heart attack as powerful as if he’d been hit by a lorry load of Katyusha rockets. Moggerhanger continues to prosper, however, though things for him aren’t as easy as they were.

  I also prosper, and I’ll tell you what happened. As soon as the boat docked at the Hook of Holland I drove to where Bridgitte was living with her boyfriend. He was a straight and decent bloke, and I knew she would be happier with him than she’d ever been with me. I returned to Upper Mayhem with the children, which was what I went to see her for. She let them go, knowing she could visit them at any time. They were glad to be in their old rooms, and back with their pals in the village. They loved Dismal who, since Polly Moggerhanger had lost interest in the selfish beast, became the Hound of Upper Mayhem.

  My next move was to find out whether Jeffrey Harlaxton’s offer of a job at his advertising agency had been serious. It had, and still was, he said. My creative lying and quick thinking had made a firm impression, talent which would be put to proper use at last. I was given a contract with rates of pay and conditions which no person could refuse. If I had realised that such cushy jobs were available from the beginning, I might always have been honest and industrious.

  I gave Clegg the signal box to live in, and made him caretaker, head gardener and child minder of Upper Mayhem – and also dog handler, because Dismal lodges under the table that runs the length of the signal box. ‘My ambition in life is to be as happy as you are,’ I said to him during the first supper after I got back from Holland.

  He gave a wise smile. ‘You’re not old enough for that – yet.’

  Bill Straw, the second arch-villain in my life after Lord Moggerhanger, wrote to say that he and Maria were married and living in Portugal, where he had bought what he called an ‘estate’. His subtle entrapment of me on the boat had been his last professional job, for which he must have been paid according to its importance.

  Maria had her kid, and also another – ‘so I don’t expect either the underworld or the inland revenue will be hearing much more from yours truly,’ he informed me. He sounded as besotted about his wife as when he first set eyes on her hips, which maybe was the only good thing to be said for him. They invited me to Portugal for the summer, but I’d had more than enough of Bill Straw to last one lifetime.

  Bridgitte remarried after our divorce, and stayed in Holland. Smog went to work on a kibbutz for six months, and in his last letter wrote about marrying his girlfriend, who was born in Israel. Frances and I are going out to see him in a couple of months.

  What about Blaskin? Life goes on for him as well. He motored up to Upper Mayhem with Mabel Drudge-Perkins and they stayed a few days. It made me sick to see her shining his boots before he got up in the morning, though when he ill-used her, a bit more spit went on them than polish. It took him a week or two to forgive me for writing the trash-novel which won him the Windrush Prize, but he generously gave me half the swag of ten thousand pounds, and used the rest to pay off debts before setting out on his travels.

  Moggerhanger had taken umbrage at the fact that nobody would touch the book that Blaskin had ghosted. After getting the Windrush Prize, even though he despised it, Blaskin considered it would be unbecoming of him as a recipient of the award, and as an officer and a gentleman, to send out Moggerhanger’s life story under his own name. So he re-wrote it as if Moggerhanger had done it himself, then told him to take it or leave it.

  Not unnaturally, and having paid out so much money, Moggerhanger did not like the portrait of the elderly Dorian Gray which it turned out to be. No publisher would take it, in any case, perhaps because the Tories were back, and times had changed. If the seventies were less spaced out than the swinging sixties, the eighties promised to be as tight as a drum. Blaskin thought it necessary to absent himself for a while both from Moggerhanger’s wrath and an era which would look less tolerantly on the antics of someone like him. He went to live with Mabel Drudge on the island of Vanua Leva, a place so far away I didn’t even know where it was. Neither, I think, does he.

  Not long ago a letter reached me from some Australian backpacker going the rounds of the Pacific, saying he had heard a report that Mabel had killed Blaskin. The incident hadn’t even taken place after a quarrel. A further epistle, this time from Blaskin himself, said that she hadn’t in fact killed him, but had only half killed him – which fell in nicely with her plans for their future because she hated him so much. She was now nursing him back to half-spate.

  My mother has gone to America, and I last heard from her in California where she was living with a women’s group at a camp in the mountains. She asks for money from time to time, and I send it.

  Where else could I have told this tale other than in Blaskin’s flat? I spend my nights here during the week, and do him the favour of forwarding mail. Frances is with me as I write. She listens to music, and occasionally comes over to tell me to hold nothing back in the account of my final adventures with Moggerhanger, and to let myself rip in my own true voice – something harder to do the longer I work at the advertising agency, though I’ve come to the end of my story just in time.

  Jeffrey Harlaxton looked a bit shocked when he heard Frances would marry me but, as I said to him, you can’t win ’em all. I sometimes think I’m only holding my job in advertising until something better comes along. Whatever I do, I have great hopes for the future. Perhaps a start in life really will go on to the end, unless another adventure proves once and for all that it decisively does not. But that is in the hands of fate, more than it is in mine, though I’m keeping my options open.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Michael Cullen Novels

  Chapter One.

  The funny-money City of London, on a clear spring day, put me into a philosophical mood. I’d heard that you became wiser as you get older, no matter how dodgy the start. Not me. Where’s the liberty in going along with that? Liberty, like the wine of a good year, doesn’t come cheap. It’s enough to keep on keeping on, and let wisdom take care of itself, which generally happens. All I had learned for sure was that fight against Fate and you’re done for, dropped by parachute—if you have one—into the middle of Dreckland.

  The blue-skied day was so fresh I seemed to be convalescing after a long illness, or living in my carefree twenties again, though I was edging towards forty. Sound in wind and limb, and as footloose and fancy free as fancy could still make me, I felt at the acme of self-satisfied overconfidence, until a cornering taxi painted my turn ups black with diesel smoke, reminding me that last night I’d had the alarming notion that if I succumbed to sleep I would never wake again. Such premonitions I could live without, but since nothing could stop slumber on its wool bound iron wheels I knew on waking this morning that the day was going to be another fateful one in my life.

  How right I was. In the office a letter
on my desk told me I’d got the push. In so many words it informed me that my imagination and genius for lying weren’t needed anymore. The fact was that my obvious and endless contempt for the job had got under my colleagues’ pinstripes, and they didn’t like it. What had taken them so long? All they believed in was a load of bollocks, and they knew it, and they knew I knew it, but my frequent jokes on the matter were no longer allowed.

  They diligently worked to persuade people what they should buy. They deliberated on what the folk ought to eat, the clothes they must put on their backs, the powders to wash their baths and shit pans with. They stipulated the sort of fire-hazard beds to sleep in, and chairs to fall back in while watching infantile entertainment on television. They decided in their toy balloon tinpot heads that people should believe what they would never believe themselves. But how wrong they were to think they ran the world.

  The last account I worked on had appalled more than worried them, as I had meant it to, and because I had done my best to fuck up their values more than anybody ever had in the history of advertising it was no surprise when the guillotine kissed my clean-shaven neck. So here I was, free for as long as the quarter’s cheque lasted, knowing that three years with them had been more than enough.

  I should have resigned with the usual psychiatrist’s report certifying I was off my trolley and not likely to clamber back for the rest of my life. Tendering for their understanding and goodwill I could have got a golden handshake and gone off like a dog with a tin tail to breed hamsters on a farm in Wiltshire. Not me. By making them sack me I had cut off my nose to spite my face, which my mother had always said was my usual way, and would do me no good.

  Motorists barked their horns at an ambulance blocking Marchmont Street, while one of the crew helped a crippled old lady into her doorway. A chap in a white Mercedes leaned his pink head out and told them to get a move on: “Or I’ll run her over.”