Fuck the neighbours, I stopped myself saying. “I’ll meet you in town, then,” though not much wanting to.
“Somebody’s bound to see me, and spread the gossip. But we could drive in your car to West Bridgford, or Radcliffe.”
“My clutch went bang on the way here, and I had to leave it at the menders.” I was glad for a verifiable reason, because if I took her anywhere by car I wouldn’t be able to put up with her unless I had a skinful. “We could go by bus.”
“Buses make me feel sick. But it’s all right. I’ve got to live this through. I shall never forget how good you were to me just now.” She proved her sincerity by such wild kisses I hoped we’d go to bed again. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she said, “if we kept on seeing each other, and then we got married? I know I shouldn’t talk like that yet, but I can’t help it. It would be so right and perfect for both of us, and for Charlene as well.”
I told her I was married, that I couldn’t see my wife popping her clogs for the next fifty years, at which she snapped free, and stood with her back to the imitation coal fire. The house was poshly furnished according to her catalogue of taste, and it was easy to see where every penny of Alfie’s office clerk wages had gone. He probably never had enough left over for a pint, or the bus fare for a spin into town on his own. No wonder he’d done himself in. Even I might have, in his situation, though she was a wonderful fuck when she let herself go.
“I can have my dreams, can’t I?” she said grittily. “Or would you like to kill those as well?”
“You can certainly have your dreams. Nobody would want to stop you having those, surely not me.” What would I want them for?
She put on a very hard look. “You don’t really care, do you?”
“You know I do.”
“No you don’t. You never did, did you?”
I was experienced enough to know it was often the case that the better the love making—and it had been supreme—the more a woman was likely to cry out against you when it was over. And here it was. The steamroller. The carpet bombing. It was both, with tears of venom thrown in, and I couldn’t think why. Even with Frances it sometimes happened. Maybe women held it against you because you hadn’t made their pleasure go on forever, or because you didn’t seem to sufficiently appreciate the good time they had given you. Or they hated the fact that you had the gall to be still in front of them, that you hadn’t vanished so that they could think of killing you in the peace of their own satisfaction. Or you didn’t seem willing to fall in with the plans they thought to spring on you, like now with Miss Forks, as I had known her in the old days. Whatever I said would only stoke up her resentment. “I’m the most caring person in the world,” was all I could say.
“No you’re not. You’re selfish. You always were selfish. You’re a real right absolutely rotten selfish bastard. You always have been and you always will be. You’ll never alter, that’s all I know.”
I felt as if I’d been whipped across the chops with a floorcloth soaked in the strongest bleach but, keeping a stiff upper lip (it wasn’t true that only the Dropshorts had them) I said nothing, though gripped my wrist to hold back such a smack across her flushed face she’d have been spinning like a top till Doomsday. I’d left Nottingham as a youth (one of the reasons anyway) so that I’d never have to do such a thing as hit a woman. All the same, trying to mix a subtle smile with a stiff upper lip took some doing.
“You forced me into sex when I was an innocent young girl. If anybody did it today I’d have counselling, and you’d get sent to prison.”
This was too much. “You were seventeen.”
“Then you took up with that fat cow Gwen Bolsover because she was posher than me. And when I got pregnant you ran off like a coward and left poor Alfie to take the responsibility. It was you who killed him, not me. You’re rotten to the core. You always was, and always will be.”
Rather than listen to this I should have run away just after flopping out of her, even if it had meant charging down the street with spunk wetting my legs. I thought she was about to snatch one of the imitation pot dogs off the mantelshelf and splot me, if so she would have seen some action, because gentlemanisation in no way fitted me for not giving blow for blow, woman or not, though I might have been sorry afterwards, for a few seconds. The best thing would have been to thrust her onto the deep piled lemon-yellow carpet for another session, except that she might have called rape.
The disadvantage of keeping quiet was that it got her going again. She wanted a real psychotherapeutic set-to, and I wasn’t the man for it. Her invective wasn’t even close to the mark, as far as I was concerned, was so wide in fact I assumed she was insulting for the sake of it—to enjoy herself, which made me angrier.
“The first time I took you home to meet my parents I saw you looking at my mother in the same way you looked at me before getting my knickers off. You with your smarmy ways. Your mother must have spoiled you rotten, but I suppose she would, wouldn’t she, seeing you was one of those who’d never had a father. You told me he had been killed in the war, but I knew the truth because I got it from Alfie.”
I wasn’t one of those who were silent by nature. I liked to talk, to argue if necessary, to see all sides of the question, but she had reduced me to using silence like a stringed instrument. I could only hope she would eventually wind down and shut her wicked little trap.
Not being part of the slanging match, I was the first to notice a young girl standing in the doorway. A satchel over her shoulders, she had straight black hair and grey-blue Cullen eyes, the image of my mother at that age, as I had seen from old photographs. She tended towards the same small mouth and slightly protruding teeth of Claudine, but there wasn’t a trace of Alfie anywhere. She nodded at me: “Who’s he, mam?”
Claudine did a quick come-down to normality. “An old friend who’s come to see me.”
Charlene took the hand I offered, and said: “You’re nice.”
I kissed her on the cheek, held her perhaps longer than I should. She was certainly mine, though I realised of course that every child was only its mother’s. “I heard you shouting at him with your big pan mouth,” she said to Claudine. “Just like you used to do to dad.”
Now I knew it all.
“You keep your opinions to yourself, or you’ll get a smack across the face. We were only talking about old times. Now come and get your tea.”
“I had it at grandma’s.” She turned back to me. “My name’s Charlene, but I hate it, so I tell everybody at school to call me Sam, and they do. I like that a lot better.” Her looks were plain, though she’d grow to be attractive because she knew what she wanted and would make sure she got it. “You really were going on at him, weren’t you? I can’t think why. It’s nice to have a visitor in the house now and again. We never did when dad was alive. I hope things change from now on.”
The air was steamy with unresolved nightmares, so I tried a diversion. “What’s your best subject at school, Sam?”
“Biology and maths.” She seemed grateful for the question. “Oh, and French. I love French.”
I dredged up a phrase or two from my travels with Frances, hoping I’d got it right and wasn’t called on to say more. “Moi aussi. J’aime beaucoup. J’était en vacance en France l’année passé.”
The effect was to set Sam aglow: “Oh, mam, he knows French. You never told me you knew somebody like that. It’s marvellous. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Even Claudine looked impressed, though grudgingly. Two gentle rises under Sam’s blouse showed that Claudine had bought her bras, which I thought a bit soon, though perhaps Sam had only put them on after Alfie had died. They made her look wanted, and I hoped she wouldn’t come to harm with all the snipe-nosed little Nottingham tykes (of which I had been one, I was well aware) trying to get her under the bushes. Maybe Claudine had already put her on the pill, and quite right, too. These days it was o
nly sensible, yet I couldn’t altogether like it.
“My teacher’s French. She’s called Giselle, and I love her. I’m her favourite.”
Maybe I should go and give Giselle a talking to. But no, let be what will be, though I hoped Sam wouldn’t grow up to be like my mother. “The trouble is,” I said, “I have to be going soon. I only called for an hour, to say hello to your mother.”
“Oh, no, please, don’t go yet. I’ve only just met you. And you know French.”
When she came close for a real kiss an avalanche of love seemed to hold us close. She was my fourth child, but my eldest. “You can stop that,” Claudine shouted, “or I’ll call the police.”
Sam leapt away. “What for? Just because I like him. You spoil everything.”
I picked up my hat and coat. That’s how she was, and I can forgive almost everything, but saying she would call in the law when all I had done was kiss the girl she said was my daughter put the lid on it. “I’ll leave you to tell her who I am. And if you don’t, I’ll come back one day and do it myself.”
It pleased me to see her turn pale. Let her live under the Sword of Damocles, thinking any minute it might fall on her when I wrote and told Sam I was her father. I took a card with the Upper Mayhem address and pushed it into Sam’s hand. “If you need me, that’s where you can find me,” but Claudine snatched it away.
“Don’t go,” Sam said in her softest voice, while Claudine stood icily by, no longer knowing what to do or say in the situation.
“I have to. I’m up here on business, and must keep an appointment at the Council House. But we’ll meet another time. Just make sure you do well at school.”
“I’ll write to you in French, then.” She flipped the card away from Claudine’s hand, and looked at it. “Michael Cullen’s a nice name.”
“But I’ll answer in English,” I said. “My French has got a bit rusty since university.”
If the door hadn’t had hinges it would have fallen flat. I was outside, and never happier to put the place behind me, except I grieved for Sam having such a deadhead for a mother. Still, she had enough of the Cullen streak not to let it bother her for too long.
My heart was even so a metronome dancing between soft and hard rock as I walked back to Radford, rejecting a bus because I was calmer while giving my legs something to do. I didn’t want to love Sam too much in case she got to be the centre of my world, then I had the impulse to go back and tell her to pack up and come to live with me at Upper Mayhem, but Claudine would have the social workers, if not the police, on my back in no time, so I plodded on much of the way in bleak misery, a rare experience for me.
I had wondered, though, while making love to Claudine, and then after hugging my daughter, about living closer to them than London or my country place. But you can’t go home again, not even if the bell tolls only for you. Alfie had realised that when life became serious it was time to pack it in, and I didn’t want to go that way.
Storm clouds are always waiting, and if you can’t see them they’re lurking behind the horizon and ready to pounce in any case. You can’t look everywhere at once. I was no longer in the mood for tracing Gwen Bolsover, the other paramour of my youth, who had been ten years older than me. I’d leave the pleasure of finding out what had happened to her for another visit, if there was to be one, and meanwhile would sluice a few pints in the Plough. By the time I had slept it off in the morning the car would be ready.
Chapter Five.
At Trent Bridge I forked into the left lane and turned west for Grantham, beads of water chased across the windscreen by Javert wipers. My ’flu or whatever had taken its miasma elsewhere, and I felt in top form passing the locale of Dropshort who had played the gentleman and rescued me the day before—though it had been no thanks to his trollop, who would have gone by with a wave of her knickers.
At the A1 turn-off George Delphick put up his thumb for a lift back to the carrot fields. I ignored his thieving of my mother’s posh chocolates, and hoped to bash his head in some other time. His two fingers lifted in the rear mirror as the Picaro shot by.
The weather always lightened going south on the Great North Road. My nose stopped running, the cigar gave off a roast beef aroma, and at eighty mph young Picaro purred like a she-cat on the batter, cruising along till Moggerhanger’s fake antique furniture warehouse was a fair way behind. In no hurry to reach Upper Mayhem I stopped at Moonshine Cross to take in fuel and food. My mother’s grit-cakes sopped up in raw milk at breakfast had left a belly ache that could only be annihilated with cornflakes and a full fry up.
From behind The Times I watched the indefatigable waitress, sprightly and robust, with clearly defined features, a pony tail behind like a horse’s, her carriage excellent as she smiled a way from table to table. Imagining her dressage as I rode her, I didn’t think she was English, since she was so pleasant at her work, and I imagined how succulent it would be to spend the rest of my life with her.
Two flies were having it off on a cube of sugar, and I was too fascinated by their lack of Kama Sutra expertise to wave them away. Everything has something to live for. The coffee came first, and I knew it was the real thing because it had froth on the top and tasted like cocoa. Breakfast was good, though, and while swabbing up the last of the liquid fat a face I’d seen before showed at the door.
Tall and rangy, he sloped in my direction, a tie hanging from his coat pocket like a dead snake, his previously immaculate boots mapped with milk chocolate mud, the hat in his hand had been through the mangle, a cut on his stubbled cheek had a bend in it, as if he had been interrupted shaving. With a hand deep in his trouser pocket, as if he had a hernia coming on, the other shook towards me as, I was sorry to say, a sign of recognition.
Someone had had it in for Horace Hawksley, a come down in a man of seventy-odd I’d never seen. He walked a few feet by, as if intelligent communication between brain and body had slowed since yesterday (though not impossibly damaged) then he swung back. “Michael Cullen?”
“So you never forget a name?”
“Nor a face.”
I noted a different angle to his lower dentures, as well as a slight bruise below his left eye, and that his watch chain was missing. “Sit down, if you like.”
He did, eyes shining. “I’m not who I say I am. You know that, don’t you?”
“I wondered about that, but then, I might not be who I say I am, either. Would you like a cigar?”
“After I’ve had something to eat,” he smiled. “Then I’ve got a story to tell you like no other.”
He expected me to listen, but why me? I wasn’t the only person in the place. I thought of telling him to get lost, knowing that the account of his misadventures so early in the day would wear me out. If Blaskin did this run he would pull in enough material to last him for life.
When the waitress brought me another rotten coffee she stared at Horace with a malevolence hard to understand, as he ordered the same thing I’d had. “You see,” he said, and I had no difficulty believing him, “things went a little less well than I expected.”
“I’m surprised. You were so confident and cock-a-hoop and, I must say, well prepared.”
“Yes, but in this case preparation turned out to contain nine-tenths of the enjoyment, so I got that much out of it, sufficient not to be demoralised for when I want to do the same stunt again. You see, I can’t afford to be discouraged. I’m too old for that, aren’t I?”
“You had one night away at least.”
“Only one? Are you sure? Is that all it was?”
“You should know.”
“I don’t, though. It seemed more like a month.”
I wondered who was off his block. One of us surely was, and more likely it was me. “There’s a calendar on the wall, if you want to check.”
“I’ve lost my reading glasses, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”
> It didn’t matter what time I got to Upper Mayhem, except it wasn’t my intention to be stuck here till next week. “So what happened?”
“Oh, everything. But it went like clockwork.”
He did look as if he’d fallen off Big Ben. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“For a while, anyway. It’s all coming back. Betty and the kids were very glad to see me, especially when I gave them the presents I’d been secretly stowing in my car boot for the last month. After that, things went crackingly good.”
His language bordered so close to the archaic, with which I supposed he had been brought up all those years ago, that it was almost edible. You could hear it coming out of the BBC.
The waitress slapped his breakfast on the table as if he’d misbehaved with her in the past: “Get it down you, and then go, you old goat,” her tone somewhat diminishing what beauty I’d thought she had.
Taking care not to inconvenience his dentures, he slid half an egg into his mouth. “Yes, crackingly good. I left the car at the station. Didn’t want it to be burned out by rough lads on the estate, did I? But I was happy to foot the couple of miles, because walking always gets my gander up—if you catch my meaning.
“Betty threw herself into my arms when she opened the door. She was very loving, and glad to see me, though a bit foul mouthed when shouting at the kids for calling me grandad, but who could blame her for that? She’d got her pride, after all. Once we’d closed the bedroom door she was all over me. I started to wonder whether or not I’d stocked up with enough rubbers.”
I was dying to know. “What do you take?”
Nonplussed was hardly the word. “Take?”
“To get it up.”
“So that’s what you mean.” He was insulted. “I don’t take anything. Only protein, plenty of meat, with lots of fat on it. Cheese, extract of malt, cod liver oil. How the hell should I know what I take? All I know is we didn’t come out of the bedroom for a couple of hours, and that was only to have the tea her mother had ready for us.”
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