‘What do you want to question her about?’
I leaned closer towards him across the table. We were in a transport cafe not far from the Hole in the Wall by Waterloo Station. It was bright in there, dinner hour, a fine day; the Formica tables were packed with lorry-drivers eating the meat, mash and two veg, washed down with a pot of tea. He bit into a slice of Wonderloaf with marge on it.
‘She’d got mixed up with a bloke who wound up dead in some shrubbery over in West Five last Friday. Very dead.’
‘Murder?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought Babsie’d’ve done that,’ said Spark. ‘She never lost her cool. She had too much bleedin cool if you arst me. Cool. She was fucking freezing, mate.’
‘Still, she was mixed up with this man; you can see why I want to talk to her, can’t you?’ I showed him Staniland’s picture. When he had recovered from it, he thought some more. ‘Well, I don’t know where she lives, squire, if that’s what you mean. But I’ve heard she does the clubs this side of the river. Old Kent Road, the Elephant, you know.’
‘Where’ve you heard that from?’
‘Some of my mates have seen her in them, ones that used to know us when we was together. I’ve remarried, got two little kiddies, so I’ve no money to throw round in them places, never mind the punch-ups. I can handle myself all right, but it’s when they get the knives and shivs out and you find you’ve got half your face missing.’
‘Any particular club?’
He sighed. ‘You people do go on and on, don’t you?’
‘That’s what we draw the ratepayers’ money for.’
‘You tried a pub called the Agincourt, down Greenwich way?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not very helpful in there, are they?’
‘They would have been if I’d leaned on them harder,’ I said, ‘only I’m not all that keen on throwing my weight about, it’s the quickest way of shutting them up.’
That got him more on my side. ‘She used to be over at the Hard Rock Club, down by Surrey Docks,’ he said at last, ‘but that was a while back. Still, you might try it. It’s rough in there, but they, like, do a bird for a geezer, see? Mind, as I say, I never see her. The wife wouldn’t stand for it, that’s only natural, ain’t it?’ He looked at the clock. ‘Christ, I only got fifteen minutes, then I gotter go. You can’t take a chance with a job these days—not with three million folks on the dole.’
‘This won’t take long,’ I said. ‘Did your ex work the clubs while you were married to her?’
He nodded. ‘She bin on em since she was a kid. But it wasn’t that I minded so much—what drove me mad was the way she had blokes back at the house, bold as fucking brass, while I was out at work. Any number of em, right under the neighbours’ noses. Christ, I even caught er at it one time. I didn’t half give er a whack, but it didn’t do no good, and I’m not one for thumpin women anyway. Talking of clubs,’ he added, ‘we met at one. She was a real knockout at eighteen, Babsie was, I can tell you—she’d got style. We started goin together, but I never could really make sense of her. She was a Banana girl—didn’t ave no mum or dad. She was like a one-off. Got all her marbles an that, I’m not sayin she adn’t, but you could just never get right through to her. Like if you arst er where your dinner was, she’d stare through you like she adn’t really heard you, that sort of thing. Unnerved me, it did.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, anyway, one day I arst er would she. Would she marry me, I mean. Christ, she went bleedin potty. You can stuff your bleedin marriage, she said, I don’t want no kids nor a mortgage or any of that crap. But we’ll ave a good fuck (scuse me) if you like—I can’t think why you never arst me before, she said. Well, you could’ve knocked me flat. I’m a man that likes a charver if ever there was one, but my life, that put me right off—I couldn’t’ve got it up that time, not if she’d bin Clordia Cardinal. Still, come to a rub, we did get married, and what a bleedin carve-up, as I say. I was on the buses in them days, the 137 route out of Clapham there. It got to be a nightmare with me, that job; once I knew she was carryin on with other fellers I started nearly missing stops wonderin what the hell was goin on at home an that—I ad to pack it in at the death. I said to myself, this as got to stop, Arthur, otherwise you are gointer go fuckin barmy. So one night I just faced er with it, it was a Sunday, and you know what she said? Okay, okay, she said, keep your syrup on, I can’t think why you hung on this long. Well, I said to er, you really are just scum, Babsie, ain’t you? Ah, cut it out, she says, and with that she packs just one case of clothes an says you can keep all the rest of the gear, cunt, be seein you. It was hell the first few weeks she was gone; but then suddenly I woke up one morning feelin better, I don’t know why. So I got out of bed (I’d bin spending a lot of time in the pit, mopin), ad a wash an shave, went down to the local depot of National Carriers, an got this job. I’d rather bore up the M1 with the radio on anyhow than grind round central London all day in a bus.
Mind, I’m not sayin London Transport weren’t good employers, look after their people an such, but you get too many fights on the buses now, specially at night. Anyway, come to a rub, I never looked back; I met my wife an we’ve got the two lovely kiddies an a house out Plumstead way. I just hear about Babsie from my mates now an then, like I said—but I never seen er again, not from that day to this, an that’s all I c’n tell you.’
16
‘I’m sorry to trouble you like this, Mr. Viner, and thank you for asking me to lunch. It wasn’t necessary.’
‘Oh, it’s no trouble, and it’s quite unusual, having lunch with a police officer. Let’s sit down and have some. It’ll be pretty vile, I’m afraid.’
‘Our own canteen’s nothing to write home about,’ I said.
We were in the BBC cafeteria out at Wood Lane. The surrounding tables were occupied by perennially young men. Some of them were producers, while others just looked exactly like producers. There were some pretty girls sitting around as well who looked as if they, too, fitted into the organization in some suitably vague way. Anyway, everyone looked very, very secure in his talent. Viner came back with our lunches on a tray and doubtfully tackled his main course, corned beef and gherkins. When I brought up the subject of Staniland he said: ‘I’ve always had a very soft spot for Charles. He isn’t in any trouble, I hope?’
‘Not anymore,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid he was beaten to death last Friday.’
‘Oh, God,’ he said, his mouth dropping open. ‘Why?’
‘That’s what I’ve got to find out. And who.’
‘Why come to me, though? I haven’t seen Charles for two years.’
‘I’ve come to you because he wrote about you. We found a lot of his writing and some cassettes he’d recorded. I’m following up every name in them; it’s all I’ve got to go on. I just want to talk to anyone who knew him; I’m trying to get any kind of line on him I can.’
‘Yes,’ said Viner, ‘yes, of course. I understand.’ He was only about thirty, but I liked him. He looked as if he had brains.
‘According to Staniland,’ I said, ‘the BBC took him on as a scriptwriter. Why at forty-eight? Seems a bit old.’
‘He’d submitted a play for television,’Viner said. ‘They didn’t do it, of course, it was far too good.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘You wouldn’t unless you worked here,’ said Viner. ‘It did what good work usually does—it hit out too hard. It was set in South London, which fascinated him. The play was about tarts, blacks, clubs, drugs and riots; it also blasted the trendies. It was called ‘A Nasty Story’, a title he’d borrowed from Dostoevsky. I was asked to read it, and I was the only person who told them, look, you’ve got to do it. Of course they wouldn’t. Still, they liked his dialogue enough to give him a trial as an assistant scriptwriter, and he ended up working with me on serials. I liked him a lot. He could be bloody funny—and did he have talent! For writing? Really masses!
He could take a ten-page scene, reduce it to fifty lines of dialogue, and the whole meaning sprang out at you.’ He hesitated. ‘When he was on form, that is.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Well, he drank,’ said Viner, ‘and I mean he really drank. The Beeb’s idea of drinking in the office is an occasional pale ale—Charles’s was a bottle of Scotch a day. Or two. Mind, he never passed out; his eyes just used to turn inward. I remember he was sick into his handkerchief once, but he was never incoherent, even. The bottle would be on his desk out in the open, and if a passing bigwig didn’t like it—well, Charles had rather a sharp tongue.’
‘Even so,’ I said, ‘he struck me as pretty vulnerable.’
‘Well, yes, he had a skin fewer than most of us. The two things that really reduced him to pulp were boredom and his relations with women.’
‘He certainly didn’t have much luck with them.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Viner. ‘His wife Margo was all right. Attractive, too. She used to come out here and pick him up sometimes.’
‘The name Barbara Spark mean anything to you?’
‘I’m afraid not. Who is she?’
‘A woman he knew that I’d like to have a word with. Anyway, never mind, go on.’
‘Well, after a time, Charles started to get more and more restless here. I can quite understand why, of course—he wanted to write his own stuff, the work he was doing for us showed him his own talent. But there’s no room for that kind of thing at Auntie’s. Instead—I don’t know if you’ve watched any of a frightful historical series that’s just been repeated?’
‘Yes, I got an eyeful of it on the box the other night. It was about some king.’
‘That’s right, the private life of Edward the Confessor. Charles nicknamed it The Pincushion People because the clothes were so ridiculous. He and I had to write the script for it, and it’s been repeated. God knows why—its ratings are awful. Anyway, one day Charles said to me: “I just can’t stand these ghastly Pincushion scripts we’re doing anymore; they’re even more depressing than that comedy we tackled, ‘Billy Ballpoint’.” “There’s nothing we can do about it now,” I said. “Oh, don’t be so feeble,” he said. “Here, pass me that story line.” “It’s too late to rewrite all that,” I shouted at him, “it’s been approved, everyone’ll have a fit.” “All the better reason for rewriting it totally,” he said. Next day he had finished one episode. “Here, read it,” he said. Christ, I’ve never laughed so much in my life. Poor old Edward the Confessor, who after all had never been strong on laughs, had been turned totally inside out. One abrupt twist, and he’d turned the whole thing into a farce. “You may be mad,” I said when I had finished it, “but you’re completely wasted in here—you should be writing gags for a top-line comedian, you’d make a fortune. But it’ll never do,” I added, throwing it back at him, “they’d crucify you upstairs.” “They’ll do that anyway sooner or later,” he said, “so they might as well get on with it.” Whereupon he took it upstairs and slung it in somebody’s in-tray. Well, nothing happens in a hurry here, as you probably know; everything’s decided by committees all terrified of doing the wrong thing. However, they sent for him a while later, and down he came, duly crucified, and looking cheerful. “Well, they’ve done it to me,” he laughed, rubbing his hands. “I’m fired, thank God. It was worth it, too—that ghastly trendy-leftie producer burst into tears when I told him what I thought of the approved script.” “But what are you going to do now?” I said. “Get pissed on my severance cheque,” he said. “You’re not busy, so ring for a cab and let’s go up to the Dead Piano Club in Ken Church Street.’ ”
Viner sighed. ‘I don’t remember much about the next couple of days.’
‘And was that the last time you saw him?’
‘Yes, I saw what was left of him onto a twenty-two bus at the bottom of Greek Street. I missed him at the Beeb.’ He paused. ‘Besides, he helped me out once. I got into a bit of shtuck at the bank; couldn’t find the money for the rates. Charles fixed me up—three hundred quid. He was like that—do anything for anyone if he could, even for people who sent him up or downright disliked him. “Don’t bother paying it back,” he said, “you’ll do me a favour one of these days.” I never did, of course. Do you want the castle pudding with treacle or the ice cream?’
‘I’ll have the ice cream.’
‘Very sensible,’ said Viner. ‘I do hope to Christ you catch whoever did it.’
‘I don’t think I’ll have much trouble identifying them,’ I said. ‘It’s proving it, that’s the snag. They don’t like tapes in a court of law—a good barrister can knock that kind of stuff to pieces.
Besides, I’m on this alone. It isn’t as if we were after the Yorkshire Ripper.’
‘I just can’t understand how he could have got up anybody’s nose to the extent that they’d beat him to death like that,’ said Viner. Suddenly he was nearly in tears. He pulled himself together and said: ‘I suppose it must have been some kind of nut?’
‘Yes, probably. I don’t want them to get out of it that way, though.’
‘Whatever else was the matter with Charles,’ said Viner, ‘he was a lovely man.’ He put a lump of sugar into his powdered coffee and stirred it. The liquid swirled darkly as the sugar went down. He drank up his coffee quickly and looked at the wall clock. The lunch hour was over; the canteen had grown quiet and empty. We were both silent; there was nothing more to say.
After a moment Viner whispered: ‘I must go now.’ He shook hands with me and hurried away.
17
I put on another of Staniland’s tapes:
Most people live with their eyes shut, but I mean to die with mine open. We all instinctively try to make death less difficult for ourselves. Personally, I’ve got two ways. First, I drink. I drink for oblivion, and then a fall of some kind or a blow, once I’m beyond thinking and feeling. That’s how I’d die, with my eyes shut. My other way is to rationalize my experience. But, no matter now logically you think, you soon get in a muddle. Existence is blind—neither for you nor against you. This impartiality contradicts everything in human experience; there is neither love nor hatred, caresses or assault, in your dealing with the everyday. Existence is like a stock exchange—you can make as big a fool of yourself as you like, and go on until you’re hammered. Look at Duéjouls. What a gruelling experience that was. To buy that great ruined house in the middle of nowhere, with the last of that money from my brother, and then pray like Micawber for something to turn up, so that I could renovate the place and turn it into something. I couldn’t get anywhere with what I wrote; Margo always said I never would. She said flatly that I was too old, too out-of-date and too drunk. We used to have the most frightful quarrels about it in the kitchen at Duéjouls, while the rain leaked through the rafters with the regular beat of a clock. Yet it was all right while she and Charlotte were there. She always cheered me up, always said: ‘It’ll be all right, Daddy,’ coming in from school and throwing her books on the settle, then going up to her room to listen to John Travolta.
But afterwards. When they’d gone. Loneliness distorts you in the countryside.
Nothing turned up. No money came. I was at the end of my resources. I was thrown back onto prising tomorrow’s money out of the day after. For five years I was a peasant, and switched my brain off. I cut timber on the causses with a chainsaw in the winter. The snow was blue up there against the grey air; at eight hundred metres the clouds came right down on your back among the oak thickets. In the summer I took a harpe and went from one vineyard to another in the great heat, wherever I could get work from the peasants. I look at myself in the mirror here, now, in London, and marvel how I ever could have done it. Déchausser: cutting the weeds away from the root of each vine. Two thousand vines always uphill—a gulp of wine after the next row (eighty metres to a row); no, the next, I can hang on—I must hang on. I worked alone and singing to keep the solitude at bay in the gusting heat and the wind that sweeps up the valley
, boiling you to your naked waist. They won’t get me out of here, I kept saying to myself; whatever else collapses around you, it won’t be you. I was too old for the work; the young men who worked with me kept telling me I was too old. But I kept going—seven in the morning until seven at night with an hour off at midday. I became as hard as whipcord, but with a brain like cottonwool. I just coasted vaguely over the past. To bed exhausted at night, with the alarm clock set for six in the morning, and the next, and the next. A bath occasionally, and my aching legs relaxed against the clean rough sheet. I had no need to think—and not a fuck in all that time, not even with Margo: just the utter quiet at night except for the stream below, panting like an old locomotive in a station. I can do it, I said to myself, even if I’m too old really. My hands bled at first, and I was slow. But I was stolid and painstaking and oh, God, I needed the money for us to eat with, the three of us, and the minimum wage was only seventy-eight francs a day when I started.
The house had sixteen rooms. After Margo and Charlotte had gone, I would talk to myself out loud all day in the kitchen where I had moved my bed and my gear; the other fifteen were empty (now that I had burned all their clothes), except for the bats. I did the roof in my spare time, so that it didn’t leak anymore.
I didn’t ask my brother for anything—at least, not until I got back to Britain. And even then I only dropped a hint or two. Working on the land down at Duéjouls had made me proud. But when I saw I wouldn’t get anything from him and my sister-in-law, I went on the dole for a while over the river there in Battersea, where I had found lodgings. All I had left were a thousand pounds’ worth of equities which I’d intended for Charlotte, but I was hungry. I cheated; I didn’t declare the equities to the Department of Health and Social Security Papers. Why the fucking hell should I? I was nearly fifty, and I’d never claimed anything from the state before in my life—it had all been the other way round. Still, it was interesting, being interviewed at the DHSS. The black man behind the counter asked me if I was really British. I slid my passport across without a word, but I was thinking: I’m a fucking sight more British than you are, at any rate. However, I didn’t say anything in case he wrote ‘Refused’ across my application. I couldn’t afford to have that happen because I was broke by then, having had to give my stepson Eric some money, and I needed something for rent and food. I needed a drink, too, but I wasn’t in France anymore with wine at two francs a litre—here it was two pounds. This was when I wrote that play for the BBC and got a job there. In the play, which I called ‘A Nasty Story’, a title I borrowed from the Russian (you can keep Tolstoy), I asked what you were supposed to do in London with the tenner a week that’s left over from your supplementary benefits once you’ve paid the rent. I had nothing left for me in France; I’d made the house over to Charlotte with a local notaire in case something happened to me. As for my rent in Battersea, I had to pay it on the dot as soon as I’d collected my Girocheque, otherwise I’d have been locked out with all my gear inside. It happened to a few people in that house. The landlord just waited his chance—what a bastard! He must have made a small fortune like that: all it cost him was changing the lock.
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 9