‘Probably has.’ Herbert laughed with him. I’m loosening up, he noted, enjoying himself again. The Australian girl must have gone on her travels. Archie would have fancied her.
‘I prefer my job to his,’ Archie said. ‘I suppose he earns a lot more than I do, but fancy relyin’ on tips.’
Herbert lifted the silver teapot with a folded napkin. ‘Somebody has to do it.’
The hot handle didn’t bother Archie. ‘You’ve got soft.’
‘I suppose I have.’
‘No, I don’t mean it. You’re as hard as nails, Bert. Inside, anyway. But I’m glad you brought me here. I’m not bluffin’. I’m enjoyin’ every minute of it.’
A longing in Archie’s tone concealed a wish, Herbert thought, to see more and know more and feel more, a wish close to envy except that it had come from the heart. The fact that he could never grow into the life in no way lessened the sense of wanting to, and yet, if he won a million pounds, he would be a different man in a year, taking to a moneyed existence as if born to it. ‘We’ll do it again. Any time you can get down.’ You’re my friend for life. ‘Bring Mary and the kids, if you like.’
Archie gave a familiar bang on the shoulder. ‘She might fall for you and your posh life, and then where would I be? Anyway, yo’ cum up to see us sometime, and it’ll all be on me.’
‘I will, you can bet on that.’ But would he? Would he ever want to, or be able to? What would Deborah think of it up there? They’d go, nevertheless. He’d make sure to.
‘I won’t let the lads rip yer to bits,’ Archie said.
They fell to laughing again, a few sour glances from the next table, one of the women reminding Herbert of his mother. ‘Let’s get this down us,’ Archie said. ‘Looks good. A thing I ain’t told yer yet, Bert, is that I’m to be a shop steward at the firm. One o’ the union blokes had a word with me the other night.’
‘It took ’em long enough,’ Bert said, as they settled down to the minuscule triangular sandwiches, and the scones, butter and jam, which called for more or less silence.
After a bath in the hottest water he donned a plaid dressing gown (a present from Deborah) and ate his cooked breakfast. Newspapers pushed through the door were read as quickly as he could flip the pages. The dream state had become normal life.
By ten he had put on a suit and Windsor-knotted his tie, polished his shoes, and sat at the desk to sort mail. Requests for talks and autographs were replied to, an onerous duty, and he cursed an upbringing which stipulated that every letter be answered. He paper-clipped a couple of fivers to a letter, and posted them to Isaac in his new council flat.
A magazine editor asked for a story, so he scanned one of the sketches slopped into his notebook over the years and worked it suitably up, putting it through the mill of his new Olivetti typewriter. He set it aside for posting to his agent, with an attached note saying that whatever sum was offered he should get double or else.
He dressed up because you never knew who might knock at the door and want to see an author at work. It could be someone who had admired his glistening green underslung road dog by the kerb, and clawked his initials on it. If any such caller found him slopping around unshaven, in a ragged old jersey and egg-stained trousers – after a lifetime’s work in overalls – they would have little confidence in his future as a novelist.
A working-class writer dressed in anything other than a three-piece suit would give the impression of being a vile trickster. And since he was, that wouldn’t do at all. Londoners weren’t as daft as Bert had often wound himself up to assume, or as they often enough looked and were. Nor was Herbert Thurgarton-Strang so unknowing as to look down on anyone before they had revealed themselves as such. You had to treat people as if they knew everything, just as you wanted them to believe you knew everything. All in all, such thoughts were a wasteful way of passing the time, and he was glad to be interrupted by Dominic Jones, walking down the steps towards his garden flat. He decided to let Bert open the door. ‘Hello, shag! Cum for a coffee?’
He sat comfortably in the armchair and opened The Times, irritating Herbert by making himself so free. Coming back from the kitchen he noticed how much weight he’d put on, cheeks puffier and skin more pallid. The white woollen fisherman’s sweater under his jacket, and a pair of overall trousers called ‘jeans’, was a rig Herbert could only wear when it would no longer be suspect on someone like him. Anyway, who would tolerate overalls when you could afford something else? He passed his old friend a mug of coffee. ‘What’s up, tosh? Bad news from the firm?’
Herbert recalled their days at school, when Dominic had been a trusting pal, cherubic features turned up with an almost worshipping expression. My raddled phizog must bring back the same reflections in him. Dominic’s eyes went positively piggy when he began to speak. ‘I don’t know how you got into all this proletarian writer business, Herbert, but I think it’s time I let you know that I suspected you from the first.’
He was glad he had given him a spoonful of Distant instead of grinding the best coffee. ‘You are a vile little rat, aren’t you?’
He threw the Times down pettishly. ‘Now you’re sounding like your old self. It didn’t take long, did it?’
‘I’ll tek just as long as I like,’ Bert snarled.
‘Well, you know,’ he became more relaxed, a state which Herbert was dead set to alter, ‘it isn’t fair to deceive people.’
‘What do you intend to do about it, you jumped-up publisher’s pimp? I didn’t think they paid you enough to suck their arses.’ Stirring his coffee, Herbert went through the fantasy of murdering him and burying the corpse in the garden. A pleasant few minutes would be had, booting down the soil.
‘What you have done’, Dominic went on, ‘is absolutely immoral, but at least I’d be interested to know how you did it. It wasn’t a bad performance. The last time I saw you before you turned up at our office was when you absconded from school.’ His face fizzled back into that of a frightened little boy. ‘You never wrote to let me know how you’d got on. They were the most miserable months of my life.’
‘I’m sorry about that. But I was too busy fitting into my new circumstances. I’ll tell you how it was done, though.’ He explained the metamorphosis, and at the end of his narrative didn’t need to suggest he was more than halfway into another. ‘Don’t you think it was something of an achievement, living two different lives for so long?’
‘I ought to, I suppose, but wouldn’t it be even more of an achievement if you came clean, and told Humphries who you are?’
‘He wouldn’t believe me, and even if he did he wouldn’t want to. I’m making him too much money, and making too much myself. To tell him so that he would be absolutely convinced might give him a heart attack. Not that I’d be bothered about that, but he does have faith in me as Bert Gedling, and that’s flattering to my vanity.’
‘You always had plenty of that.’
‘So I did. I’m a writer, after all. Which also means I’m amoral.’ As time passed, however, he’d relax his guard, and blend with the surrounding milieu, be tamed and controlled by the sort of people he would need to mix with. By becoming one of them, they would stop commenting on how he dressed, especially when he allowed them to see what a good job he was making of his integration into the accepted way of life. As his accent became indistinguishable from theirs, his Thurgarton-Strang stridence would be taken as just another of Bert Gedling’s affectations.
On the other hand if Dominic decided to rip his disguise clear with something like proof he would be tempted to dissimulate to the end. Few would believe such an outlandish story, or care to. He would drive the chariot of Bert across the heavens till it broke up, or Herbert brought the whole caboodle into a controlled landing. No matter what change came about in his novels and filmscripts (or even essays: he was collecting notes for ‘The Art and Metaphysics of Straight Narrative’) he would never let them forget that plain Bert Gedling could come lumbering back into the ring any time he liked – wh
ether to their amusement or dismay was no concern of his. ‘Why do you need to tell Humphries? I don’t see what’s in it for you.’
‘Because I can’t live within spitting distance of a lie, or allow you to do so. It’s rather curious, but I still look on you as a friend.’
‘You poor little worm who never grew up. You’d be an informer, would you? A nark. A sneak. You’d shop your own grandmother for that little frisson of school-prefect honour. Don’t you know that that kind of thing is on the way out?’
Dominic winced. ‘It’s not. You’re premature. I’ll never believe it. The fact is, I’m leaving the firm.’
‘Are you?’
‘I’m going into the Foreign Office. I’ve always wanted to. Well, my parents never stopped hoping while I was at Cambridge. It’ll be a far better job, so I must clear matters up before I go.’
‘So that’s your nasty little game? Want to go out with a bang, do you? Do you remember your last words to me when I lit off from school that night?’ He looked at him with the most candid and intimate expression possible. ‘I remember, if you don’t.’
‘What were they?’
‘You said, “I’ll never betray you.”’
‘Maybe I did. And if I did, that’s why I want you to own up. Don’t you see?’
‘You’ll do well at the Foreign Office. I will own up, though, in my own good time.’
‘No, Herbert, it has to be in my time.’ Dominic’s expression was that of a satisfied cat with a half-dead mouse at its feet. ‘I can’t let you play false to yourself any longer.’
Herbert laughed at his language, and his sentiments from a dying age. He endured the silence, determined not to speak. If he’d had a cricket bat handy Bert would have broken it over the smarmy fuckpig’s loaf.
‘There’s only one thing which will stop me blowing the gaff.’ Dominic put on his sickliest face. ‘Shall I tell you what it is?’
Herbert’s ears were stopped as if by the noise of the factory, but through the roar of engines he choked out: ‘Go on, then, Slime.’
‘What I want to say is that I’ll tell Humphries the truth, unless you stop seeing Deborah. I’m in love with her. Always have been. I want to marry her, if she’ll have me.’
Herbert had never known there were words which could shock and oppress him to the extent that they would bring him close to fainting. He leaned against the desk. ‘Have you asked her?’
‘No, but I will.’
The poor honourable fool, not having the guile or gumption to lie and say she’d accepted him. He’d often wondered whether or not Dominic was his rival, and Deborah hadn’t bothered to settle the matter, though he was hardly in a position to cavil about somebody keeping their past to themselves. ‘Well, I have asked her, and she’s said yes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Dominic said with trembling lips.
Bert stood, thumbs wide-angled in the arm holes of his waistcoat, where they were safer than being free to punch Dominic’s face in. ‘Believe what you like, but it’s true. You can do what you like, as well, but let me tell you this, you blackmailing runt: if you aren’t out o’ this flat in three seconds – no, two – I’ll give yer the sort o’ kicking’ yer’ll never forget. And if yer do blow the gaff I’ll cum after yer wherever you are, even if ye’re dyin’ from malaria in the middle o’ Borneo.’ He freed his hands from the waistcoat, and smiled. ‘Understand, old boy?’
He wouldn’t bother, but let him worry. The door slammed, and he picked up the phone so that he could pop the question to Deborah. In love with her more than ever, the wonderful word yes came into his ear.
Twenty-Three
The telegram said: ‘Father died of massive stroke in middle of night. Devastated. Mother.’ Herbert thought him luckier than Mrs Denman, to go in such a way. The bullet zigzagging around the Arakan jungle nearly twenty years before had hopped on a plane and found its mark at last. So many people were dying it seemed as if God had got his hands on a machine gun.
He settled into the car, regretting he hadn’t been there to see him go. Headlamps burning, he threaded the needle between trucks and the offside green verge, overtaking with a screeching hooter where no sane person would, but slowing down at the latter part of the journey because he didn’t want either the shame or inconvenience of following his father so soon.
Maud stood by the window, gazing into the garden at the antics of the housemartins flying up and down to feed their young under the eaves. You won’t see him stumbling around clipping the bushes any more, Herbert thought as he placed himself by her. ‘I came as soon as I could, Mother. I’m very sorry about it. And sad, too.’ Nothing else to say, though it was obviously the right thing.
‘Darling, it’s terrible. I can’t believe it.’ She could barely speak through her tears. ‘I thought he’d live forever. He always joked he would. Longer than me, I hoped. I suppose everyone says that. The day I first saw him on the beach near Lowestoft seems only last week.’
He felt out of place, but told himself that nothing could be as affecting and important as the death of your father, especially to your mother. He tapped the black cat away when it pushed against his leg. ‘Poor old Hugh!’
Maud looked askance at his use of his first name. ‘He loved you more than you’ll ever know, probably because you gave him more heartache than he ever deserved.’
It was as well Bert had no say in this, for he might swear at the notion that Herbert had made his father’s life a misery simply by living as he’d wanted.
A plate of cold mutton and pickles was set before him at the kitchen table. ‘You must be starving. There’s a bottle of beer in the refrigerator if you want it.’
‘I’ll get it.’ He couldn’t deny that she looked handsome and forlorn in her black skirt and black jacket, black beads, and a black band across her hair, above a lined and pallid mask of loss. Such a hurried dressing into the part stopped her going to pieces. Fresh tears down her cheeks avoided the obstacles of those which had dried a few minutes ago. ‘I think I’ll go up to his study for a while.’ Trying to find pity for this old woman, he hoped she would take his intention as a chilling sort of remorse, which he couldn’t feel, though supposed it would seep into him during the next few months.
‘Don’t go in there yet.’ She didn’t want to be alone. No longer had to be. Impossible to say why he lifted her hand to kiss. She forced him to stand, and drew him between her arms, all bones, ardour and grief. ‘Oh, Herbert, my life’s finished. I can’t tell you how it feels. My heart’s breaking.’
It isn’t, and won’t. Grief doesn’t last, he wanted to say. Everybody recovers. Live for me. I won’t mind. I’ll look after you as much as I’m able. We’ll be closer from now on. He stood aside without speaking.
What madness, to talk about life being at an end. She wasn’t much over seventy, and looked younger. Still, the old man had died, and they’d been nearly forty years together, ten more than he’d been alive. ‘You’ll be all right.’ He held her, feeling pity, tears checked because a grown man didn’t blubber. He forced the smile from his face: hadn’t yet written about tragedy so close, could have felt worse if he had seen the old man die. On the other hand he might have been less disturbed. It would have been interesting.
‘He was so honest. Such an upright person. I hope you find comparable love and devotion in your life, Herbert.’
In harness from the cradle to the grave, he’d had nothing to be dishonest about. Nothing important, certainly. ‘I’ll go into his study’ – anything to get out of her way. ‘I want to look at where he was happiest’ – or to see if there’d be a clue as to what kind of a man he was now he’s dead.
‘No, Herbert, it’ll take a while to get tidy.’
They’d lived such a neat life. If a single bibelot was out of alignment on shelf or table it had to be put back in case a hair’s breadth of their life was going astray. Everything ordered and pre-ordained, a charmed but restricted existence he could never fall in with. Yet he envied them,
and regretted that he couldn’t live in the same way, though the barrack-room tidiness of his own flat suggested he might be on the way to getting there.
He couldn’t care at all whether or not he saw the old man’s study. It was a ploy to be alone, but his mother needed him every minute in her sight, and her overpowering sorrow was like warm mud too thick to swim from. ‘Your father is in the living room. They’ll be coming for his – him, at two o’clock.’
She was halfway to being dead herself, and wanted him, who couldn’t recall when he’d been so much alive, to comfort her and coax her back. On the other hand he had never known her to be so vibrant. Before leaving London there’d been neither time nor thought of phoning Deborah. He wanted her with him now, to commiserate and hold him, to say she loved him, to lick his ears, anything to space out the millibars of such a bleak atmosphere. She would shield him from a sensation he shouldn’t be exposed to, feelings only real if written about from the imagination. He didn’t know what he wanted to be kept away from, since the experience must surely be good.
Deborah would know how to comfort his mother, or would try anyway. He saw them melting together, a very sexy scene, anger as he brushed the picture out. He would show her the house, walk her through the gardens, and take her to the orchard where he had once stood in the rain hoping to find out who he was, so long ago that he couldn’t imagine the man he had been. Trying to find his true self – poor fool – he hadn’t known that if he did nothing about it his self was sufficiently strong and centred to come out of the shadows and find him. He took his mother’s hand. ‘Let’s look at him, then.’
‘It’ll be a big funeral. You can help send out the cards. Quite a few will go to his regiment.’
The idea pleased him. All the old buffers would come. A few young ones as well, maybe a platoon to fire a volley over the coffin. ‘So they should.’
The Broken Chariot Page 32