Life Goes On (27 page)

‘I buy British, Michael. I'm not a founder member of the British Abasement Society, like so many people today, who go crawling around anybody from the Third World to try and make up for what the good old British Empire didn't do to them. Some people don't know they're born unless they grovel and run the country down in the process. I think we in the old country have to pull together.'

The thoughts of Chairman Mog didn't bear thinking about, but it wasn't my place to say so as we floated north towards Spleen Manor. Percy Blemish stood by the roadside with his thumb in the air, on his way back to Tinderbox Cottage, I supposed, after an unsuccessful foray to look for his wife in London. ‘Run over his toes. I've seen him before. He's another nuisance.'

I kept a straight course. Twilight was coming on, that long slow drift into nothingness that marks the end of an English day. Mrs Whipplegate was the queen of her compartment, as long as Moggerhanger cared to be in the cockpit with me. Via the rear-looking mirror I glimpsed her face as often as I dared, that subtle and concentrated line of beauty shaped by a mind engrossed in a novel. I hoped there was some sex in it, and longed for the gaffer to get tired and move back for a snooze. Then Mrs Whipplegate would sit up front with me.

‘There's still too much revolution in the air these days,' he said. Somebody seemed to have wound him up, and it wasn't me. ‘It's doing nobody any good. Revolution is either for single people or childless couples, and then only as a parlour game. They'd be the first to go to the wall if it did come, as we all know, and as they ought to know but don't because they're too stupid.'

What seemed dead certain to me was that blokes like him would always come out on top. He asked Mrs Whipplegate to pass the food box, and helped himself to a smoked salmon sandwich.

‘I know a nice café up the road.' I thought how pleasant it might be to tank up at the place next to Ettie's diner. She'd be pleased to see me back.

‘I'm sure you do,' he said, ‘but I like to eat my own stuff. Even when I'm going round my clubs I take my dear wife's sandwiches – especially then. London is the salmonella capital of the world. Never eat out in it.'

On drawing level to overtake some rep in his flash Ford he increased speed so as to keep up with me. Moggerhanger pressed the window button and bawled out: ‘You fucking anarchist! Jam your shoeleather down, Michael, and then cut in.'

That was the most dangerous thing you could do, and as I was the captain of the ship I didn't do it. ‘I'd rather not, sir.'

‘I suppose you're right,' he grumbled. I pulled well out in front, then settled back into the inner lane at a steady sixty. ‘The roads are crowded with maniacs,' he said. ‘I'd go everywhere by train if I could have my own carriage. First class rail is no longer any protection. There's no way to travel on public transport anymore for a man like me. The riff-raff are everywhere.'

My headlights brought the road continually towards the wheels. I suppose the driver of the Ford was familiar with the area and knew what he was doing. He overtook at speed, shot directly in front of us and went along at about thirty miles an hour. This was a difficult situation. He was determined to hold us up. Maybe he'd had a bad day and couldn't bear to have a Rolls-Royce – plus a horsebox, which hurt him even more – overtake him and stay close on the same road.

‘Flash the swine with all beams,' Moggerhanger said, a youth again, who wanted a burn-up and a set-to. I shook my head, edged out and overtook as gently as I could. He tailgated me, two feet behind at fifty miles an hour, all lamps burning, so lighting us up that I felt we were in an operating theatre. ‘And that's where he'll be soon,' Moggerhanger growled, ‘if he doesn't pack it in.'

I increased speed to sixty, and when I thought he had given up and dropped behind, he roared by at eighty, cut in just in front, and tried to stop dead so that I would go smack into the back of him.

He misjudged the mobility of his car. I jammed on my brakes and swerved into the fortunately clear right lane, while he shot up the bank, turned over three times with bits coming away from all points of his car, and settled into a steaming wreck on the hard shoulder. I slid by and gathered speed. Let him get out of that one. He was insane. He'd tried to kill us.

‘There's your riff-raff,' I said.

Moggerhanger went purple with laughter. ‘Did you touch him?'

‘No.' My guts were like jelly.

He banged both hands on his thighs. ‘If only I'd had a movie camera. I'd play it over and over to my dying day.'

I felt guilty, though not at fault. ‘It was too close for me.'

‘You're a cool customer, Michael. By God, you were quick.'

I didn't like his tone of voice. If he thought I was getting too good he would send me on the job to end jobs. ‘Lucky,' I said, ‘not quick. We'd have been battered if I'd hit him. So would he. I don't know where they come from.'

I didn't feel easy that I'd made his day. ‘You did right not to stop,' he said. ‘Let somebody else pull him out. It's like being on the bloody battlefield. If he'd damaged my Roller I'd have blown his head off. I hope you got the number, Alice. Inspector Lanthorn can get me his particulars then.'

Hearing her first name made my fright with the maniac worthwhile, and I said it over and over to myself as we went through the night – with a wave at Ettie's diner to the right. She went back to her book, while Moggerhanger, after brushing the crumbs from his clothes, thumbed through a sheaf of estate agent's handouts.

The cloud had moved, and I saw star patterns high in front. Alice laid the book in her lap, and Moggerhanger put his papers away. He slotted in a tape, treating us for the next half hour to a concert by Jack Emrod and his Old Time Orchestra playing the honeysuckle favourites of yesteryear. By half past seven we were well on our way, with Retford to starboard and Worksop to port. Even Nottinghamshire was falling behind as we headed for the motorway by Doncaster.

He yawned, but didn't go to sleep. ‘Yes, Michael, business is booming. At least my business is. My clubs can't do enough trade. I drive around Soho and look out on the world from behind smoked glass windows, and can't but reflect on how well I'm doing. When I see two specimens from the north wearing woolly hats and football scarves, I know they're going to spend a quid or two in one of my places before they go back to their train with bloodshot eyes and empty pockets. It used to be said that there was one born every minute, but nowadays, with the population explosion, there are two, if not three or four. I think it was an American president – and correct me if I'm wrong – who once said that in order to fool some of the people some of the time you've got to fool all of the people all of the time!

‘I've got the top end of the market buttoned up as well. The fact is, there's a job to do in this country in the seventies and eighties – if not till the end of the century. It's a job of national importance, and I'll tell you why. There's a lot of oil money floating around, millions in cash accruing to those robed potentates of the Middle East, bless 'em, and it's my job to cream off as much as possible. By hook or by crook – it don't much matter which, as long as you don't make it too obvious – the sterling must stay in London. It's vital for our national survival. I've had word about it from on high, and I'm all set to do my bit. It's 1940 all over again, only money's involved this time, not blood, though in the long run it's just as important to a country like this. The sterling balance will ever have us by the short hairs, so we have to get the money out of them by women, the roulette wheel, select entertainment which they can't get anywhere else in the world (nudge-nudge, wink-wink); surgical operations that won't do them too much harm, but which won't do them much good either; flats and houses at exorbitant prices that are going to cost so much in maintenance that by calling on the services of an army of bodgers (a trade at which we British excel) it'll help the unemployment problem; and by palming off onto them all kinds of goods whether they need them or not, but goods that they think they'll die if they don't have. That's real business, Michael. And nobody can say it ain't honest. As for armaments, though, the built-in obsolescence factor is such that even I think it's a disgrace.'

There was a pause while he lit a cigar. ‘The trouble is, I'm not the only one in the trade. If I was, everything would be all right, but some new organisations commit such daylight robbery it makes my blood run cold – and that's not an easy thing to do. Fly-by-night firms are popping up all over the place, as if the oil wells are going to run dry tomorrow. They can't get their hands in the till fast enough, and so far I've never seen any of them with bandages on their wrists. It makes the Great Train Robbery look like absconding with a blind man's penny-box. Investment banks go bust overnight. Ships full of goods disappear at sea. A man pays millions for a block of flats that belongs to somebody else. You name it, they get up to it. And it goes on even at the bottom end of the market. Some people are so unscrupulous that they add insult to injury by taking most of the money out of the country, to such places as Zürich and Lichtenstein. But me, though I make a lot, I plough it back. I buy houses and land, and invest on the stock exchange.' He held a finger across his throat. ‘I'm up to here in National Savings. A pittance. But it looks good. I also employ people, such as yourselves. In other words, I keep as much money as I can in the country, and I spread it around, not only as security for my family, but as a patriotic duty. Yes, I've got a lot invested in good old England, Michael. If ever the ship goes down you won't see me in the lifeboat with a lot of rats.'

The thought of Moggerhanger in a lifeboat horrified me. How far would you get with such a shark on board? ‘Well,' he went on, ‘I shan't go on, except to say that there are more gangs than there used to be, and the worst is the Green Toe Gang. How they got that damned name, I'll never know. But what's in a name? Suffice it to say, they've given me more trouble these last two or three years than I think I deserve. They seem to know more about what goes on in my business than they should by any intelligent assumption, as if they've got somebody planted in my office. If I could find out who it was, well, I don't think I need tell you, Michael, what I'd do. A loyal man like you knows very well what I'd do. If there's anyone I can't stand it's a traitor. I've learned in my life, though, that a good man rarely sells himself for money. That's why I've taken you on. I sorely need someone like you within arm's reach because you know, and I know you know, that being a traitor's not for the likes of you or me, because we had similar upbringings, give or take a bob or two. I worship steel, not gold. Never turn your face on a friend, or your back on an enemy.'

‘No, sir.' I spoke only to find out whether I still had a voice. The more he went on with such blarney the more I distrusted him. Bill Straw once said that Moggerhanger never told you anything without reason, and if he did it was always bad – for you.

‘You can stop at the next layby,' he yawned. ‘I want to change places with Alice and get my forty winks.'

The miles went quickly. I was near Tadcaster by the time I made the switchover and he bedded down under a thick patchwork blanket.

‘Do you mind if I call you Alice?' I asked when I set off again.

‘Why not?'

I caught a smile in the profile that peeped out of a flimsy headscarf.

‘I still hope you'll do me the honour of having dinner with me after we get back to Town.'

She took the book from her bag. ‘I'd like to read, if you don't mind.'

‘Make free. What is it?'

‘Something by Gilbert Blaskin called
The Warp and the Weft
.'

‘Is it good?'

‘I can't tell. I'm only halfway through.'

It was the one I had typed for him, and added a few bits in my own right, when I first met him in London. ‘I know Blaskin.'

‘You do?'

‘He had an affair with my mother.'

She didn't believe somebody like me could possibly be acquainted with a novelist. Her laugh, however, encouraged me to hope I was more than halfway there. ‘That was thirty-five years ago. He was a lieutenant in the army, stationed near Nottingham. Then he went overseas and left her pregnant. Out popped me.'

The book, at any rate, was back on her knee. ‘What an imagination.'

‘When we go to dinner, I'll tell you more. But I'm afraid I'll never be able to introduce you.'

‘That's because you don't know him.'

‘No. If I did, I'd lose you. He's the biggest lecher in the kingdom. And I'm passionately in love with you. It's as much as I can do to drive this car.' My hand was sliding up her thigh. ‘Does being in a car make you feel randy?'

‘Sometimes it does.'

‘We'll have to contain ourselves. But I'd love to suck your delicious cunt till I made you come.'

‘Stop it,' she said sharply.

‘Did you see Gilbert Blaskin's last television interview?'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘It was one of that series called “Writers and Their Habits” on Channel Five. He was interviewed by that lovely young person called Marylin Blandish. Do you know her?'

‘I've seen her. She's pretty.'

‘They were in his flat, and she started asking him pertinent intellectual questions about his work, and he gradually got his chair close enough to give her a kiss. It was so quick and light that she almost didn't know it had happened. Then he gave her one that she did know about. And then, Women's Lib being all the rage, she thought she'd equalise by kissing him.'

‘I don't believe a word of what you're saying.'

‘I'm not asking you to. The intellectual question and answer game was kept up through long looks and subtly moving lips. Old Blaskin's patter was so good – or something was – and it was a full moon that evening, so she kissed him back, and the television crew, instead of closing the show as they should have done, were so mesmerised at what was happening, and at what seemed likely to transpire, that they just watched and carried on working.'