Life Goes On (29 page)

Moggerhanger laughed. ‘You should know, Jack.'

Alice smiled. ‘I'm divorced. I was married at twenty-two, and split up three years later. My husband was a smooth-talking con-man who wanted me to support him.'

‘You walked out?'

‘No. He found somebody who would. I was devastated, for a while. His burning ambition was to be idle. He saw idleness as the greatest virtue.'

‘You make my blood run cold.'

‘I haven't had anything to do with any man since. I even stopped seeing my father. My mother was dead, so it wasn't too difficult. He wanted me to go and live with him, because he'd retired from the bank. But I had my own flat: my husband was so idle he hadn't even signed the lease.'

We sat with plates on our knees. ‘I'm really interested in what you're saying. Your fine and subtle face has an expression which shows you're at peace with yourself. To someone like me, who has a passion for work, to the extent that I've not had much to do with women in my life – nor men either, come to that – you're the most attractive and fascinating person I've met. I'd like to get to know you.'

‘You may not find as much as you expect.'

I held a piece of meat close to her mouth.

‘No thank you.'

‘Let me be the judge of that,' I said earnestly.

‘I'm up here to work.' She sipped her wine. ‘And I'm dead tired.'

‘I think you misjudge me.' I clinked her glass, and took a long swallow. ‘I've been sexually impotent since I was fifteen. All I do, when I can, and I don't very often, is sleep with women, just for love and comfort. None of them have yet been able to induce me to have proper sexual intercourse.'

I'd used that ruse a couple of times before, yet I regretted trying it with Alice because it should have been possible to get her into bed by normal diplomatic methods. I was inveigled into such a statement because her claim not to have made love with a man for what must have been at least ten years struck me as an even bigger lie. The fact that I fell for it was my second mistake that night. Maybe I was tired as well. Or perhaps I hadn't gone far enough and should cap it with a third lie by telling her I was queer.

‘We'll be here for a few days,' she said, ‘but I don't think I'll have time to take you on.'

Matthew Coppice gazed as if he envied me being so close to her. Well, I couldn't share her with him and that was a fact. I'd have to call off my campaign and make a real effort the following day. There was a time for everything, and in this case it wasn't now, but she didn't know how right she was when she gave me a lovely goodnight smile and said: ‘See you at breakfast!'

Moggerhanger looked from his hugger-mugger game of cards with Lanthorn. ‘Being difficult, is she? The thing is, Michael, you don't have the art of courtship. Nobody does, these days. But it'll cost you a pony or two in flowers with her. And why not? It feels all the better when you get there.'

‘In my opinion,' I said, ‘it always feels good.'

‘That's no way for a young swain to talk.' He bellowed with healthy laughter and returned to his double dealing, a man of the world but not completely in it, which made him too cunning by half. I helped myself to Matthew Coppice's trifle of sponge, tinned fruit and custard, into which he must have poured several bottles of strong sherry because at the first spoonful my eyes watered. Lanthorn said it was the best dessert he'd had at Spleen Manor. When Matthew brought in coffee I asked where he'd learned to cook. ‘I worked at an old folks' home.' He had only a faint Yorkshire accent. ‘I'll tell you about it some time, if you're interested.'

Facing me, and away from present company, I saw him wink, a signal that mystified me, because there was no business I could possibly have with a broken-down old caretaker like him. I swallowed his weak brew and wondered how much he was making on the housekeeping bills. ‘Any time. I like stories.'

He looked grateful and relieved, and I almost thanked him for allowing me to make him happy. He shook my hand so furtively that I wondered whether he'd done it.

I heard Alice Whipplegate humming and splashing around in the bathroom, and was tempted to look through a keyhole in passing, or get out my Swiss army knife to widen a crack in the door. Such actions were below even me, but when I came to her room I opened the door and walked in. It was bigger than mine. The wardrobe had a few dresses already hung, and a table was cluttered with various combs and cosmetic pots. I pressed the mattress of the single bed, then noticed that her diary was open, with the ink barely dry:

‘I'm quite enjoying my trip,' she'd written, ‘though I must say I was dog tired on the way up. I managed to get some reading in, at least, even though it was only a trashy novel by Gilbert Blaskin. The only trouble was that I had this chauffeur practising heavy breathing down my neck. He's a real bore, forcing attentions on me that I definitely do not want. He actually told me he was impotent. The oldest gag in the book. He'll be telling me he's gay next.

‘Hell, I suppose I'll have to put him off somehow. It's so tedious. There's always some pest hanging around. I'm sure it won't be easy to get rid of him, though. He's so cocksure. He's not really bad looking, but I just don't fancy him. If I did, he'd be the one to complain after a while.

‘Must take a bath. Dead beat after my time with Parkhurst last night. Now, there's a man, though I don't suppose anybody would think so. An ENGINE! He just fucks and fucks as if he's in a ballet on stage at Covent Garden, saying nothing because he's thinking of the money he's going to win at gambling after the show's over. He got THREE jackpots out of me, the brute. Lord Moggerhanger wanted him to come with us, but I'm glad he didn't. I'd never be in a fit state to get anything done.'

I walked out and slammed the door. You can't win 'em all. I got into my flowered dressing gown and waited outside the bathroom for her to finish so that I could go in for my evening ablutions. Clutching my toilet bag, I tapped on the wood. ‘Can I share the sink?'

She opened the door, and walked by. ‘Good night, Mr Cullen!'

‘Good night,' I called cheerily.

I couldn't sleep. A moon lit up the room because there were no curtains. I tried one side, then the other, thinking of my encounter with Ettie in the broom cupboard. I recalled making love in the toilet at 30,000 feet to Polly Moggerhanger on our way back from Geneva. I even longed for Bridgitte. What I wanted most was a drink, preferably a pint of Jack Daniel's. Sounds of shouting from downstairs told me that Moggerhanger and Lanthorn were cheating at cards. I regretted having had only two glasses of wine at supper. I regretted not having scrawled ‘Fuck You' across Mrs Whipplegate's diary. In fact I regretted not having torn the page out and posted it to Blaskin for use in one of his novels. Bollocks, I said to myself. Die, I told whoever had got me into this boiling stew.

Insanity was coming on fast. Alice wasn't having an affair with Parkhurst after all. The cunning little vixen had only written that stuff in her diary knowing I would sneak in and read it. She was testing me to see whether or not I would be discouraged. She loved me passionately. Maybe it was the first of a series of many tests that I was expected to pass. She carried the diary with her and filled in a page so as to scare off any bloke she was with, and left her door unlocked so that he could go in and read it. How can I think such things? I thought, falling asleep.

I was chasing her along an avenue of piled woodplanks. There was a tug at my arm and I woke up. A blue Yorkshire dawn spread across the window and showed Matthew Coppice sitting by my head. ‘What the fucking hell do you want?' I asked, as humanely as I could.

‘Sorry if I woke you, Mr Cullen.'

‘I am, as well.'

‘It's the only time I can talk to you. In secret, that is. These people here would kill me if they knew.'

‘I'm sure they would,' I said, just to comfort him.

‘Do you think so?'

‘Well, you said so.'

‘Did I?'

‘You certainly did. But I suppose you're right.' He was dressed as he had been at supper and still reeked of whisky. Ash from his fag fell on my bed. His chin was smooth and he also smelled of aftershave, being the sort who shaved twice a day but had a bath only once a month. Why did I keep meeting people I felt sorry for?

What I needed was Moggerhanger's rock-hard reality – though the thought made me want to puke. Poor old Matthew Coppice, he hadn't even been to sleep. ‘Make it short,' I said. ‘I'm still hoping for a night's rest.'

‘I've fixed you something to drink.' He fetched a tray from the door and set it on my knees: a big pot of coffee, a jug of steaming milk and a plate of hot toast and buttered teacakes. The coffee was ten times better than the slop we'd had after supper, I told him.

‘When I meet someone like you, Mr Cullen, my impulse is to be absolutely frank.'

While tucking into the excellent breakfast, I congratulated him on his skill in reading character.

‘In my early days,' he said, ‘I was a steward on a British Railways restaurant car. The best job I ever had. I don't mind telling you that we made a packet. One of the others was a young woman called Elsie Carnack, and we used to think up ways of making money on the side. Of course, we had to share it with the rest of them at the end of the day, but every week it amounted to quite a bit. We diluted the orange juice, put water in the soup and thickened it with flour, doctored the coffee, took in our own cheeses (some of which fell off the back of a lorry, if you take my meaning, Mr Cullen), sold our own bread, gave half portions where we thought it wouldn't be noticed, short changed, fawned so that we would get good tips, and dispensed our own wines and liqueurs – oh, I can't remember all that we did.'

He seemed quite excited.

‘Elsie and me saved what we could and left our jobs in the restaurant car when we got married. We sold the concession, as a matter of fact, though not long afterwards there was a crackdown and the syndicate got fined, or lost their jobs. The ringleader was sent to jail and Elsie had a good laugh over that. I never liked her laugh, mind you, and should have been warned by it. But love is blind, isn't it, Mr Cullen?'

I could only nod at his wisdom. ‘Even National Health specs don't help.'

‘Me and Elsie bought a big house in the country very cheap and called it Forget-me-not Farm, which we ran as an old people's home for seven years. As you can imagine, we had quite a rapid turnover. I loved the work. Some of the old folks were wonderful people. I was at it twenty hours a day. I would even read to them if they were blind. And some of the stories they told me! They'd lived long and had been all over the world. Some had been famous in their time, but they were forgotten now. A few were ga-ga, of course, but I did my best for them. Elsie took the business side of it too much to heart. She found a way of keeping the bodies fresh for three or four weeks after they had died, so that we could go on claiming maintenance. The relatives didn't bother to visit them, so there was no risk. And it wasn't doing the old folks any harm if they were already dead, was it, Mr Cullen? Not that I liked the idea, though it made a big difference to our profits by the end of the year. Mind you, we had one or two narrow escapes, though I was working so hard that much of the time I didn't know what was going on. That was my downfall. I should have done. One day Elsie vanished. She took the money, and anything valuable that the residents owned. It was terrible. She'd robbed them blind. She robbed me, as well as leaving me with all the debts. She even took my best Rolex watch which one of the nice old chaps had given me. The result was that the police came and found two bodies in the deep freeze, underneath all the vegetables. I took the blame on my shoulders. Elsie was let off, but I got seven years. Seven years! When I think of what the judge said about me my blood runs cold. “The worst case of vampirism on the elderly that I've ever had to deal with,” he said, and it got in all the papers. Did you read it, Mr Cullen?'

‘I must have been abroad at the time.'

He seemed disappointed. ‘I suppose I deserved it. During the latter part of my time in prison I had Parkhurst Moggerhanger for a cell mate. He was in a very bad way, going off his head in fact, so I looked after him as if he was one of the people in my old folks' home. I saved his remission. He got better, and came to rely on me. I pulled him through his bad patch and when we were discharged we kept in touch. I had nowhere to go, so I went back to live with my old mother in Halifax, bless her. She's dead now, Mr Cullen.'

‘I'm sorry about that.'

‘Parkhurst told his father about me, and Mr Moggerhanger, as he then was, took me on as a caretaker for whichever property needed me. He wanted to show his appreciation, and I was thankful for it because I was a finished man, done for and never to rise again, when I came out of prison. And yet, having taken this position, which I did with alacrity – I admit it with tears in my eyes – it seems I've only jumped from the frying pan into the fire, because I am an accessory after the fact of things which go on here, so that if there's ever a proper round-up by the forces of justice – if there is such a thing – I'll be over the wall and inside again for even longer than last time. That's why I want you to help me, Mr Cullen.'

I could have choked. Fortunately I'd finished his delicious breakfast. I had helped Bill Straw by bottling him up in Blaskin's roofspace, but Bill Straw was a friend of long standing, whereas Matthew Coppice was one only as of last night – if he was one at all. I was never wary of acquiring new friends, which may have been why I had so few real ones. Besides, an open and unafraid disposition such as mine always made people suspicious. There was something about Matthew Coppice, however, that told me not to trust him entirely. Moggerhanger was no fool, and he was certainly capable of setting this drab minion onto me to find out if I had any resentment at having been put away by him ten years ago.