“I did make you come,” he said, “when I tried the other place, because you said that was what you wanted. You cried for an hour afterwards, out of guilt and the fact that you enjoyed it so much, and only stopped when I made you a cup of cocoa.”
“Scratch an Englishman,” she smirked, “and you find a Turk. We all know how true that is, don’t we?”
“Oh yes,” Blaskin smoothed the top of his head, as if the old scar itched from the grains of sugar, “people have been know to say I had a touch of the tarboosh!”
I admired her dignified restraint on saying: “It’s a mistake, Gilbert, to imagine you can get to know yourself through sexual promiscuity. That sort of thing is only for the beasts. Not that I think you have a real self, though if you did I wouldn’t like to know you. You’d probably be far worse than you are now.”
He took a propelling pencil and a miniature notebook from his dressing gown pocket. “Wonderful! Go on, my usually taciturn victim. Tell me more. It’ll fit very well into kickstarting a part of my novel.”
She arched her back to get full height. “I’m not a victim.”
“You are sometimes,” he said moodily. “And then, how victims strike harder when they do!”
“You have an ideal relationship,” I said, though my irony was, for the moment anyway, beyond them. “It’s like Darby and Joan.”
“Or Punch and Judy,” she said.
“Call it Box and Cox,” Blaskin broke in. “But she’s a difficult woman, Michael. She could only love a man if he satisfied her unfulfilled romantic yearnings, and I can’t do it because I never had anyone to practice on for when I met her.” He put a hand to his brow to simulate despair. “Oh God, but I’ve done my best to bring her to life.”
I gave Mabel high marks for self-possession when she said: “Please, Gilbert, I wish you wouldn’t talk in that way. I really can’t think you mean all you say. I’m sure you don’t mean it. You should be more dignified, and take yourself seriously.”
More than six feet tall, he stood against the hangings of the high windows, and put a hand into his breast pocket. “Whoever takes themselves seriously should never have been born, especially a novelist. Oh dear, why didn’t I save that for the thesis girl? What was it I said, Michael? I’ve forgotten already.”
I told him. He was eternally spouting cracker mottoes, though I kept the observation to myself. If I’d said a tenth as many hard words to Frances as he diatribed to Mabel I would have been booted out long ago, and quite right. Perhaps they carried on in such a way only to entertain their guests, and had rehearsed this session during the night for my benefit.
“Michael,” he said, “I can’t stand this life anymore. She’s killing me. The only relief is when I put in some work on my book, unless she’s thrown out what I’ve done so far into the Serpentine. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Everything to do with your work is precious to me,” she said. “You know that by now.”
“Then where’s the handwritten manuscript of No Poppies in Eritrea, my first book of poems as a young subaltern? I was looking for it last week, to drool over how good I was in my younger days.”
“I remember you taking it to Bertram Rota when you were out of funds.”
“Hell’s bells and buckets of Flanders blood! You don’t say? I can’t believe it.”
“I saw you put it under your coat.”
“What about my essays A State of Rage? And the novel I wrote under the name of Sidney Blood The Ogres’ Orgy? And Sonnets From Burnt Oak? I got the Wurlitzer Prize for that. I haven’t seen them anywhere.”
Her expression was sinister. “Gone. All gone. You sold them all.”
“What, even The Secret Journal of the Ladies of Llangollen?”
“That too.”
He clutched his head. “My heart’s breaking. I’m losing my grip on life, and you’re no help.” He turned to me. “She’s lying. She was probably drooling over the last one. You can never get the truth out of someone who’s trying to kill you.”
“I’m only doing it as your muse,” she said, “to encourage you. You can’t complain about that.”
“Let’s go into my study, Michael,” he said. “I’d rather hear what you’ve come to tell me.”
We left Mabel humming to herself and clearing up the detritus from the tray. His study was the largest room of the flat, all available wall space fitted with mahogany bookshelves from floor to ceiling, except for one section where a framed chart—at which I looked with fascinated concern—depicted the ages at which every great writer of the past had died, from Antiquity to Sidney Blood and Gilbert Blaskin.
“It was done by Mabel,” he said. “Her only work of art. She’s waiting to take it out of the glass and lovingly write in of my demise.” He turned it to the wall. “I took it to the dustbin some time ago but she brought it back. She swabs it clean of tobacco smoke every morning.”
“What a way to live.” I sat in the armchair, while he lay on the sofa staring at papers stacked on his desk, waiting for the will to go across and start work. “What are you writing these days?”
“I wish I could tell you. Two hundred pages done, and I don’t know what it’s about.”
“Does it matter?”
“Not to my readers, but to me it does.” He opened a large wooden cigar box and gave me a tube. “Light up. It won’t kill you. I’ve been hoping they will me for years, but nothing does, as long as I go on working. I survived the war, except for a scratch or two, and am too old to die young, so God can fornicate with Himself. There’s nothing like a good cigar after coffee, except brandy perhaps. And so, my only begotten son, and bastard that you are, what can I do for you?”
“I’m not a bastard. Not that I mind, but you did marry my mother. Or are you a victim of Alzheimer’s already?”
“How can I forget her?” He went to the desk, and tapped out a word. “It’s a few years since I met her. Did she go back to that commune in Turkey?”
“The last time I heard, she was in Nottingham.”
“Ah! What a divine place!” He blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. “That’s where we fell in love. I was walking by the Council House one afternoon, and she came towards me, but instead of passing by she took my arm, as bold as brass. ‘Tommy,’ she said—I was a Second Lieutenant, but it meant nothing to her—‘I like you. Let’s go into Yates’s and have a drink.’ We fell madly in love, even before we got to our second glass. What black passion! There’s no love like the first, Michael, and the first is always the last.”
“And I was the result?”
“You were, my boy. You were born after I left. I was already in North Africa. But I never forgot Nottingham and your cavalier young mother. She would lead me into that little grubby house and, whenever there was time, and there always was, we’d go at it even before she got out of her overalls. The more she reeked of disinfectant from the factory the more I liked it. Life hasn’t been the same since, except in my novels.”
“It’s so long ago, though.” I thought about my early affairs in Nottingham, when I’d had spiky Claudine Forks, and shafted Gwen Bolsover who I hoped was also pregnant when I left. “I’m surprised you remember it.”
“All the past is like yesterday,” he said, “no matter how far off it seems.”
“Have you written about the time with my mother?”
“That would break the spell. We can’t throw magic away like that. There are some things that even novels don’t deserve.”
He didn’t believe that for a moment, and I expected to see all the details soon enough in print. He went back to his desk, to type a phrase this time. “So why are you in trouble? I want the whole truth, so help me Ghengis Khan!”
White and curving vampire teeth seemed to grow out of his jaws. I had called for an hour, not to talk about my life, which was mine and mine alone, but to delay getting h
ome, when I’d have to tell Frances I’d been thrown out of the agency. I explained to him nevertheless that I’d lost my job and why, no reason not to, it didn’t matter to me, and in any case it was my notion of good breeding to pay for the mouthwash coffee, the cigar and, such as it was, the entertainment. Having a father still alive at my age might be a bore, but it had its obligations.
He leaned at ease. “Fact is, no son of mine ought to have a job. It’s undignified. Shows lack of style. It’s bad taste. I’d be ashamed to meet him on the street. I never had a job except in the army, but that was soldiering. You come from too good a line to have a job.”
“But you have one.”
“Writing?” He laughed. “If anybody asks me what I do I tell them it’s not work, it’s a crucifixion, but I certainly don’t use that ghastly word. No, you’ll have to pull yourself together and support yourself some other way. Jobs are for those with prolish souls.”
“My mother worked in a factory.” He warranted a smack across the chops. “Was she a prole?”
“Certainly not. She only did it during the war.”
He was right. To my knowledge she hadn’t done a stroke since. I too thought nine to five work was anathema, proving in some way that he was my father. Why I had let myself be steered into a job I’ll never know. Geoffrey Harlaxton had flattered me about the efficacy of my lies, after I had stopped him being all but murdered by his wife for his carelessness with other women. And Frances might not have married me if I hadn’t shown some enthusiasm to become employed. So when offered a job at the advertising agency I said yes, because how could I resist her glistening eyes beneath those gold rimmed spectacles, winking me towards a walking yet very delectable doom?
He reamed his cuticles with a paperknife. “Tell me what you intend doing.”
“I’ll take a fortnight to think things over. I’ll get in my car, go on the road. I can reflect while driving. A spot of aimless motoring will be the best way to flush that crooked advertising agency out of my system. I’ll go to Nottingham, and see how my mother is.”
The point of the paperknife pricked his tender flesh. “Oh hell!” He leapt up. “Now look what you’ve made me do!” His pain and anguish was a rare treat. “For God’s sake,” he said, “if you do see your mother, don’t encourage her to come and call on me.”
“I thought you still loved her?”
“I do, no doubt, but I don’t want her around my neck. I’m approaching the age when I can have all the women I want, but the trouble is,” he added mischievously, “so is she.”
I would say he was longing to see her, that he couldn’t live without her, and that if she descended on him and seduced Mabel he deserved no less.
“On your way out,” he said, “tell Mabel to stop sulking in the kitchen and bring some bandages to staunch this blood. It’s a task she’ll enjoy. I do like to give her at least one treat a day.”
Chapter Three.
“My only option is to light off for a week or two,” I said to Frances, after informing her of my jobless position. I’d hoped she was too weary at the end of her long day to care what I did, though there was no other time I could have told her.
I tried to make my departure more acceptable by calling at Marks and Spencer’s for a bag of ready-made eatables and a bottle of wine, so that she wouldn’t need to think about feeding us both, which at least made her smile as I put things in the oven and set the timers. I gave her a glass of red, and began a spiel about how my work at the agency had become intolerable, leaving nothing out and throwing in a few adversities from my imagination. “So all I want, before applying for another job”—like hell I would—“is to motor around awhile and consider what will be best for me to do. There’s no other way if I’m to stay sane.”
On our second glass, and halfway through a tray of tasteful pickies, she managed another smile, and tapped the bun of her shining golden hair as if to stop it collapsing, though I’d never seen it happen. “I suppose if you must, you must.”
Perhaps she didn’t see my going as so outlandish because of her past admiration of the performance poet Ronald Delphick, and his free and easy way of spending much of his time travelling the country. Or she looked forward to me amusing her with details of my adventures on getting back from a world unlike the donkey circle of healing she was locked in.
I recalled Blaskin saying that the more you made a woman realise you knew her thoughts better than she did herself, whether true or not, the more she would love you. Thinking Frances might be half consciously longing to break free in the same way I was about to do, I said: “So why don’t you come with me? We’ll be sure to have a good time.”
She actually laughed. “Michael, you’re incorrigible, not to say irredeemable. You know I can’t,” which silenced me for a while. Then she reached for my hand, and for the rest of the evening we didn’t talk about my going anywhere.
After I had gone she might contact Delphick, go to one of the scumbag’s gigs, if he was in London. His advantage over me was that he stank rotten, always needed a shave, and was dead scruffy. Not that he couldn’t pay for a decent suit, and lay out a quid on a squirt of deodorant, but he relied on groupies and acolytes to slip a few fivers into his pockets, and tell him he was a genius as they did so.
His dropout aspect had once attracted Frances, but she hadn’t seen him for three years, and I hoped she never would again, though even if she did there was nothing I could do about it. No marriage could endure if you hinted to your wife that you didn’t trust her, whether or not she was trustworthy, though I knew Frances had no time for hanky panky, and too much dignity as a doctor to indulge in affairs.
Reminding her of this at breakfast, she responded with an unpleasant analysis of my character, which I would rather not repeat because, accurate or not, everything about me will be revealed soon enough. When the woman you live with starts telling you unpleasant facts about yourself, that you were already too well aware of in any case—and she knowing that you were—it’s time to sling your hook. I was mindlessly eager to go, while knowing that if I stayed a few more days we would get back to our usual state of love.
So, like a fool, I went, not even slamming the front door in anger so that she could blame me for going and not herself, knowing as I flicked on the ignition that the anger I felt could be for no one but myself. I only knew that if I had made the choice between freedom or death I must be careful from then on in case both possibilities turned up, a reflection which will explain itself later.
After Northway Circus my smart little blood-red Picaro Estate sniffed the expanse of high sky ahead, and took me at seventy up the outside lane to the last roundabout before Bedfordshire. Any misery I felt at leaving home and Frances had melted, and with a lit cigar comfortably smouldering I flogged young Picaro as if Eskimoing through snowfields, galloping over desert, or flying the sky, the north-going road as familiar as the back of my hand.
After the last exit to Baldock came the perilous dual carriageway of the Great North Road, and I muttered the highway’s name on belting along. In spite of a good forecast, or maybe even because of it, grey clouds crowded in for the inevitable rain, though the countryside like a green plate told me it didn’t matter whether or not I went to Nottingham, provided I put as much distance as possible between myself and London. Not certain where I was heading had never been any bother, going at the moment like an arrow.
Near St. Neot’s I was tempted to fork northeast to my railway house at Upper Mayhem. Once in the fortress of warmth and plenty it would close around and never let go. Dismal my favourite and only dog was there, as was Clegg the elderly handyman who kept the place going. The freezer was stacked with food, the outside shed packed with fuel, and a made up bed was waiting for me to sink into with no will to get out. I scoffed the notion away, heaven being no life for a grown man.
I switched off the jungle music from Radio Deadhead, and a glance at fields
and coppices to either side—a sleeve of spring green, and splashes of blossoming Queen Anne’s lace—set me longing to be out of the car and walking among the perfume of mangel wurzels or early potatoes, fainting with pleasure at sprouting wheat and upstart refreshing hedges, sniffing bay rose and white daisies.
The reality was I would get stung by nettles, clawed at by brambles, drenched by rain (which was just beginning, but it had rained yesterday), my soles so jacked up with mud on crossing a field that after walking fifty yards I’d be on stilts. I was better off in the car.
Distances signposted up the Great North Road were laid out in penny packets of ten or twenty miles, as if the fact that it led to Edinburgh (or even Doncaster) was a state secret which foreigners weren’t to know about. Whoever arranged them was afraid again of a German invasion, or wanted tourists sleeping their nights to Scotland in rathole hotels that charged twice as much as at far better places in France or Spain. It made me laugh that on coming the other way London would be signposted four hundred miles off, as if the policy was to get rid of tourists who by now had been robbed of their last penny. Dover might even be indicated from Inverness, though I’ve never been that far to find out.
A plastic bag flapped by the roadside like a crow in its final agony. Speed cut the scene short. A mile-long line of lorries on the inner lane set me charging to get clear, nowhere to go when a car behind flashed me to move in, but I let him overtake soonest possible, his face as enraged as one of Conrad’s duellists in the film. I’d read the story, and much else, under the guidance of Frances, more than in my life before, which was supposed to make me a better person, she said, though whether it did I’ll never know.
The mad driver was one of Moggerhanger’s footpads, Kenny Dukes, and I wondered where he was going at such a spate, as I overtook a tinker’s short arsed pick-up with smoking exhaust, loaded with old bathtubs and gas stoves. A big sleek rat jumped off it onto the green verge, as if sensing the vehicle would drop to bits in the next five minutes. I took it easy, and lost Kenny who was doing a ton in the distance. Having driven enough miles in my life to get to the moon and back I wanted to stay alive.
Moggerhanger Page 4