Life Goes On (24 page)

‘Perhaps I'll do it later – if you promise to mend your ways.'

I put my arms around her, her magnificent breasts against my waistcoat, my lips at her cheek as she turned her head away. ‘You're not too old to be a mother,' I spooned. ‘Don't you want a baby, before it's too late? Imagine having a son to support you in your declining years, a big handsome chinless wonder weeping salt tears over his O levels? Surely, my lovely one, you must have thought of it, and if so, I would feel honoured if you'd choose me for the supreme sacrifice.'

I eased the zip from the nape of her warm neck to the valley of her ample bum. Two fingers unhooked her brassiere and my hands closed in front over her hot breasts. From early on I knew one had to be deft with hooks and eyes, and in my youth I had practised for days on a seamstress's dummy to make sure, drunk or sober, I had it off pat.

The muscles of her broad posterior relaxed as her perfume and make-up gassed me into further eloquence. ‘Think of a little baby,' I muttered into her ear, pulling her dress forward and her brassiere off. ‘All yours to bring up and turn into yourself with a man's face. You'd be the proudest mother by the sandpit, or pushing the perambulator through the park with the most cooing, laughing, puking, shitting little lovely kid you could ever have imagined. But if he picks up a pen, chop his head off.'

‘Gilbert,' she exclaimed, ‘it's not right to talk like that.'

‘Just his hand, then.'

‘You're too ghastly.'

‘I know, but all the same, I mean it when I say it would be an honour for me to be the father of your child. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone, or shall ever love anyone, in my life. We're so much made for each other that it pains me to be near you. Unless I fuck you I'm burning in the fires of hell. Surely you must understand that, from your cave of ice?'

‘I don't want you,' she cried. ‘I don't want you.'

I put the three middle fingers of her left hand into my mouth, and laid her right hand against my erection, then put both hands down her bloomers, and found her burning like the inside of a compost heap.

Her protestations of ‘Never! Never!' were belied by the state in which I found her. I knew her from of old. She had never wanted me. She always objected, right to the end. Even on this occasion she allowed herself – readily enough – to be piloted into the bedroom, as if I had just cut in on an excuse-me quickstep and we were going towards the refreshment table. I kicked the door in Dismal's face, who had followed us across the living room as if he wanted to be in on the nuptial roundabout.

‘I shan't thank you for it.' She lay back, and lifted so that I could draw her bloomers off. ‘I shan't thank you for it.' Though she didn't let go of that icy grip on her soul, she was let go of by a demon that was even more deeply in her, and up went her head and china-blue eyes and flickering lashes as she was taken out of herself sufficiently to stop her nagging that
she wouldn't enjoy it or thank me for it if she did
. Did she think I cared whether she enjoyed it or not, as long as I enjoyed it myself? She would certainly not enjoy it if I wanted her to enjoy it, so at least this way there was a chance that she would. I did want her to, though, I certainly did. The lid went off, and as I pumped in for the finals all I saw were her lovely breasts and her gorgeous swan neck, hearing her moans increasing in volume as if the breath was being pulled out of her, while near the end, when her legs would have floated across different continents if she had opened them any wider, the lid went off me as well with such a kettle of steam I thought it would never come back even if I sent a twelve month search party to look for it among my scattered entrails. And, after all, she did thank me for it. And I thanked her as well, which, under the circumstances, was the least I could do.

‘I shall never forgive you.' She turned away to fasten her suspenders. ‘Never.'

I wiped myself on her bloomers. ‘You said that the first time, several hundred years ago. And you've said it every time since. What you mean is that you'll never forgive yourself. Didn't you enjoy it?'

She turned to me so that I could zip up her dress. Such little attentions were worth a thousand bitter quarrels – to her.

‘I did not enjoy it.'

I pushed her away. ‘You must have done. I heard it. I couldn't help but hear it. They must have heard it across at Harrods and thought another shoplifter had been caught. In fact every time you come it sounds like another execution in Red Square. I've never heard anything like it.'

Her lower lip trembled, but whether in rage or misery I couldn't say. I don't believe she could, either, and I almost felt sorry for her. ‘I don't know why I love you,' she said.

‘Could it just be that I make you come,' I said, fingers in the armholes of my waistcoat, ‘in spite of yourself? Anybody else would take you seriously when you told him you were frigid, and be reduced to wanking himself off on your belly button while you looked on with your cold superior smile. You know, if there's anything I hate you for it's because you make me say what I really feel, and I can never forgive you for that. That's the only weapon you've got over me.' I kissed her again, very nicely I thought, anything to stop her weeping. ‘I don't know whether I love you, but you have a fatal attraction for me, and I suppose that's more than I can say for practically anyone.'

She cried like a little girl for about ten seconds. I held up my watch and timed her. I had never understood her, and never would, and that fact more than her distress made me occasionally despise her. ‘You should be smiling and happy,' I ranted, ‘but you're too mean. You
should
thank me for it. You
should
be grateful. Every time it happens to me my backbone goes to pieces, but I'm still grateful.'

‘You're vile,' she said.

‘You say that because you only came once. You want to come forty times and fall dead into oblivion, then you'd think you had a good time and say thank you with your dying breath. I don't blame you. But this isn't Swan Lake. It's Southwest One, Knightsbridge-on-Harrods, the great Middle East emporium. Nothing special anymore.'

She followed me into the living room. I put ‘The Blue Danube' on the hi-fi and poured two drinks.

‘You know I never touch that horrid stuff,' she said, so I knocked both of them back.

‘You're like Messalina, the whore of the Roman world. You're getting above your Sunday schoolteacher self.' I felt an ugly mood coming on. ‘And you haven't finished cleaning the place up yet. How much longer do you expect me to tolerate a slut like you?'

She stood straight, and put on her snow-maiden expression. ‘I do wish you wouldn't drink so much.'

I went into a knot to prevent myself hitting her. ‘Oh, do you? The reason I drink is that I'll soon be dead, and then I won't be able to do it anymore.' I heard noises, a heavy tread. ‘Somebody's walking about upstairs.'

She put her hand on my arm, and listened. It stopped. ‘There isn't anything. Are you all right, Mr Blaskin?'

‘It was those two drinks. Maybe you're right, darling. I ought to go out and get some air. Oh my sweet. I don't want to die.'

She kissed me, as if convinced I was having a funny turn and might well be about to croak. ‘Perhaps it would be best. You've done enough work for today, Gilbert. Shall I put you to bed with a hot drink?'

I know, and I've been told even more often than I've told myself that, being a writer, I should know exactly what I'm going to do before I do it, and that I should be aware of whatever I intend saying before I say it. Then I would be able to moderate my action and speech accordingly. Dear reader, believe me when I say that I am that dangerous beast who knows precisely what he will say before he says it, and exactly what he will do before he does it, but says it and does it all the same, to my everlasting shame but instant gratification.

I smacked her soundly across that lovely frosty face. ‘Don't nanny me. I don't need you to tell me when I've done enough work.' I poured another drink before she could express her opinion of the wicked treatment I'd meted out. ‘And stop gobbling all my food while I'm off the premises. I spent forty pounds on that last Harrods order, and there's practically nothing left. I've had hardly any of it, and Dismal doesn't know how to get in the fridge. No wonder you have such orgasms, eating so much rich food.'

I gripped her wrist as her fist came flying. She would put up with anything but that kind of accusation, and yet who else could be eating me out of home and gardens? It wasn't the cost that worried me as much as the mystery I couldn't solve. If Drudge hadn't eaten it I couldn't think who had.

I splashed around in the bath for a while with my plastic battleships, then scented myself up and changed into a clean suit, throwing the other onto the floor for Mrs Drudge to send to the cleaners. Dismal rummaged amongst it for something to eat – or was it smoke? Maybe I wouldn't send him to the dogs' home after all.

I took some money from my desk, and checked that all credit and club cards were in order. Drudge was having a rather satisfying weep, so I kissed her through the tears till she stopped, then went out, pleased at having given her something to live for, even if only me.

It was a chilly spring evening and I sloped along in boots, a long fawn overcoat, a hat and gloves, towards Piccadilly, afraid to cross busy roads after such a scene with Mrs Drudge in case I got run over. She was too highborn and civilised to send maledictions, but I took no chances on negotiating Hyde Park Corner.

After a single bullet of fire in The Hair of the Dog, I went along Shaftesbury Avenue and slipped into The Black Crikey, where the first person I spotted was Margery Doldrum, who I hadn't seen for a week. She was talking to Wayland Smith, a part-time sculptor who did something to the news at the BBC – one of those left wing intellectuals of the sixties who, unable to grow up, went into the media. Margery, who also worked at the BBC, had been my girlfriend up to a few months ago. She was thirty-eight, a willowy sort of woman, who only straightened up in a wind. At the wendigo sound of the gale she pursed her lips as if to give it some competition. She laid on make-up to improve the look of her skin, but only succeeded in showing an orange face to the world. Her disturbed eyes were probably the result of her experiences with me.

I met her when my last novel came out and she wanted to do something for it on the wireless. She flattered me, in a professional kind of way, so I did a bit of homework and peppered my talk with pallid witticisms trawled from old notebooks, and memorised them so that it wouldn't look too deliberate when I brought them out.

‘The trouble with me,' I remember saying, ‘is that I've got the sort of mind that considers clear thinking to be the death of intellectual speculation. Consequently I write the best parts of my novels when I don't know what I'm doing.' Other things, either stale or meaningless, were said in such a way as to make her think she had said them.

‘How does a writer like you live as well as write?' she wanted to know.

‘As you get older,' I said, ‘your unconscious comes more to the surface. You're in the lexicographical fire service beating out words with a damp cloth. You realise that guilt is recognising your sins, and you haven't got much time left, so you write rather than live. A novelist has to forget about what the novel is or should be while he's writing one. It's none of his business. That's the only condition in which his art, if that's what it is, can move on.'

And a lot more such bilge. But she loved it – or so she led me to believe by the serious cut of her lips and her stare at the little black tape recorder. Straight into the horse's mouth, they put it on the overseas programme as well. I invited her to lunch at my club and, two nights later, put on my topee and set out for dinner at her house on Grapevine Terrace in Richmond. The dugout canoe nearly sank crossing the Thames, so I was a bit late. I didn't even want to make love when I got there, but I did, as always, because I knew of no other way of getting to know women. But after making love I was never any nearer to knowing them than I had been before, except in a few cases where the uninhibited response of the woman not too long afterwards was one of absolute rancour. Then the relationship had the virtue of becoming lively. Margery Doldrum had made the first move, something which always disconcerts me, though it rarely happens. I had long made it a rule that if a woman makes the first move I don't follow up, because it means she has problems. But experience has shown that all women have problems, and so have all men, so the rule (as with every rule) seemed rather unnecessary and when Margery made the first move I was not slow in making the second.

From the bar stool in The Black Crikey she pinpointed me with that basilisk eye now so full of healthy hatred. ‘Why are you looking at me so hatefully, Gilbert?' she asked with a smile. ‘Are you going to drop us a few pearls of wisdom from your tired old snakepit?'

‘I'm not playing that game tonight.'

Wayland Smith wore a beard, that National Service uniform of those in early middle age who had just missed the real thing – unless they were young and had a Jesus complex and wanted to be crucified by the Third World, which couldn't afford to do it anyway because wood was too expensive. They would just tie him on an anthill for reminding them of their poverty. If you liked Wayland you could say there was a benign twinkle in his blue eyes. If you didn't you could say he had a malevolent glitter. I was inclined to leave him alone, but since I was in the same pub I was obliged to buy him a drink. ‘You have one too, my love,' I said to Margery.

‘I'll have a double brandy. Wayland's driving.'

He put his pudgy hand on her thin thigh and opted for a pint of best bitter. Ugh!