Life Goes On (36 page)

I was back. Watch out, Moggerhanger. I walked towards the taxi through the beautiful odour of real English rain. They couldn't water that, at least.

Nineteen

Going over Hammersmith Flyover, a maroon Rolls-Royce told me I was back in Mogland. Pindarry wore his funny little Austrian-type hat with a feather up the side, and I recognised Moggerhanger's big head in the back. He leaned against the window and, having much to think about, didn't see me. At the moment only he was in my mind and I thought it a bad omen that I should spot him so soon after my arrival.

The presence of Harrods reassured me and it felt good to be safe home again. Letting myself into Blaskin's flat, there wasn't even Dismal to greet me, nothing except a couple of letters on the lounge table.

Dear Michael, [the first said]

I've decided to cut and run. I couldn't stand it any longer. Not that Gilbert isn't a gentleman. He certainly is that, the way he treats Mrs Drudge. We had some good times together. I had all the food and booze I wanted, but as soon as I finished writing his Sidney Blood story I lost interest in living here, and wanted to get out. Another thing was that that Mrs Drudge was getting on my wick. Every time I laid my hand on her arse she jumped a mile, as if I was going to rape her, or as if I wasn't fit to touch such a person as her. I ask you, what kind of life is that? She wasn't to know, I suppose, that it was only a friendly gesture. She also complained that I didn't make my bed. Me make my bed! Anyway, I knew it was either her or me, and as I didn't want to inconvenience Major Blaskin, Sergeant Straw had to get back into the wilderness and live under fire. Well, it makes a change.

Another thing is, I got so stir-crazy yesterday I went out for a walk as far as Harrods. You know my weakness for the place, well I went in for a look around. I saw that pillock Cottapilly in the toy department buying a fire engine. He's got the best collection of toy fire engines of anybody I know. He's very queer for fire engines, I can't think why. Anyway, I don't think he saw me, but I can't be sure. If he did it's only a matter of time before they come and get me, or before they tip off the Green Toe Gang so that
they
can come and get me. Life's not easy, Michael. It never was, not for yours truly. Oh, and another thing. I've taken Dismal. I'm sorry about that. I know you're fond of him, but with me it's a matter of life and death. I'll buy a white stick from the Blind Shop, and with dark glasses and my coat collar turned up like on the pictures, I'll be an object of pity and respect to all passers-by. I'll have an impenetrable disguise, what's more, and be able to pull in the odd penny or two if I don't think it's safe to go to my room and help myself to proper financial collateral from under the floor-boards. If I find I can't cope with him I'll put him in a basket and send him back to you by British Rail. That's a risk, I know, because he might well end up in the engine sheds at Swindon running in and out to buy teabags. I'll try and look after him, though. I hope you had a restful trip to Canada. See you some time.

Your old pal, Bill

PS. The probability is that by the time you read this I'll be on some island in the South Pacific being served pineapple brandy by a smiling young girl in a grass skirt and no top.

The other letter, also in Bill's handwriting, was from Lincoln Prison, on official notepaper:

Dear Michael,

I have been arrested but they'll let me go if you send twenty-five pounds for the fine to the above address. I'll explain later.

Bill Straw

I needed a long time to think about that one, but his peril was also mine, so five minutes later I put the money into an envelope, and paper-clipped it to a covering note as from Upper Mayhem. Then I went out and dropped it in the postbox so that it would arrive next morning. I needed all the pals I could get. If I didn't knit myself quickly into some framework of defence I was finished, because whatever had gone wrong in Canada would sooner or later have unpleasant consequences for me. I wanted to throw myself out of the window and smack the ground five floors below. If I had known Moggerhanger was going to be standing underneath I might have done. But to do so otherwise was a luxury I couldn't afford. I would just have to survive. My feet hadn't touched the ground nor my soul the sky for almost a week. I recalled Agnes like the wet dream I always hoped would come true while going to sleep, and had to pinch myself into believing I'd seen her, though without our meeting on the plane I would have walked to my death in Toronto. She saved my life. The phone went and I picked up the receiver: ‘New Scotland Yard, can I help you?'

He or she hung up.

I wanted to be with Agnes and hold her close, but she was probably in Hawaii by now, working her emotional way around the world. The phone went again. ‘Natural History Museum. Head Keeper speaking, can I help you?'

‘Mr Cullen, you're not being serious.' I recognised the melancholy voice of Matthew Coppice. ‘I'm phoning from Spleen Manor, just to tell you that my investigations into Lord Moggerhanger's activities are proceeding apace and according to plan.'

‘That's very good,' I said. ‘Just keep on keeping on.'

‘Thank you. I shall. But I do like a bit of encouragement, Mr Cullen.'

A moment after I hung up, the phone bell tolled again. I was beginning to think I was home. ‘Michael Cullen here.'

‘This is Lord Moggerhanger. Come and make your report. The customs people told me you were in.'

I was so astonished that I didn't know what to say. ‘I'm a bit tired.'

He chuckled. ‘As well you might be, Michael. I'm not a hard man. Take a seventy-two hour pass. Then I shall want to see you.'

He hung up. I hung up. It was mutual enough to satisfy my honour. He expected me to come running. Let him wait. I wasn't a London pigeon, to eat out of his hand. I'd run when he did. I found a half-bottle of wine in the fridge and wobbled some out for a drink. Air travel not only frazzled me at the edges, it made me thirsty.

Wandering around the flat I saw the first thirty pages of the shit-novel I'd written for Blaskin. A khaki circle showed where Bill had put his tea mug, and the cellophane wrapping of a cheap cigar between the pages told me he'd read it. Under the last line he'd pencilled: ‘You can do better than this. Not trashy enough, old son.'

The typewriter would soothe my nerves, so at great expense of spirit I got my erring couple out of Tinder-box Cottage and into a maze like the one at Hampton Court. The husband was looking for the lover, the lover was looking for his girlfriend, the girlfriend was looking for her lover, and they were both looking out for the husband. I carried this on for a few pages to sustain the anguish and suspense, and in the middle of that particular section I typed the first chapters of Genesis word-backwards. I also copied a few paragraphs from a book by somebody called Proust (one of Blaskin's favourites) and ended the chapter in mid-air so that I could start the next one in Peppercorn Cottage.

I was all set to go on, but Gilbert came in with a tall thin woman he introduced as Margery Doldrum.

‘I'm happy to see you're working. I think that trash novel's a very good plan.' He told Margery about it while pouring drinks. ‘I never thought I would have a son who would stand by me in my afflictions.'

He walked restlessly from kitchen to living-room, from bedroom to study, leaving all doors open in case he got pregnant with another book and started to have labour pains at the same time. I told Margery about my trip to Canada, especially relating to Agnes, and she thought I was mad or lying, or both. She didn't seem all that stable in the eyes herself, but that was because she was acquainted with Blaskin. He came back carrying a chapter of his novel, put it on the table, then got to work trying to open a bottle of ink – so clumsily that Margery looked at me as if to say: ‘What can you expect with such a male chauvinist genius?'

‘I've been invited to Jack and Prue Hogwash's cottage next weekend, in Wiltshire,' she said. ‘Why don't you come, Gilbert? Bring Michael, if you like. There'll be quite a party.'

‘I'd rather not, my love.' He went on fiddling with the ink bottle. ‘I was invited to Roland Hamstreet's place a month ago, and to my everlasting regret, I went. I've wasted too many hours of my precious life at weekend cottages. It's the hugger-mugger I can't stand, not to mention the fact that if somebody takes a piss in the furthest bathroom from the kitchen, the yolk of your egg shimmers in the frying pan when he pulls the chain. If a tractor goes by in the lane outside, all you see through the window are tyre-treads chucking up mud like water from a mill. Michael, why in tarnation did you screw the lid on this bottle so tightly?'

It must have been Bill Straw after he wrote his letter. ‘Let me do it,' I offered. But he wouldn't: ‘Walk from one room to another idiotically smiling because you've just survived one of their batty parlour games, and you leave your head stuck to one of the beams like a bit of skin. Try to find the toilet in the middle of the night and you end up in the dog kennel. That's the only room in the house with human dimensions. If the Bomb goes off, though, I expect a cottage will be the safest place to be. Half the population will be saved because the roofs are too low to catch the blast.'

‘Oh, stop it,' said Margery. ‘You make me sick.'

At which I gathered that she also had a cottage.

‘Thank you very much, Margery, but I can't stand cottages.' He got the bottle of ink open, but so suddenly that he splashed half over his latest page. ‘Now see what I've done, a whole week's work gone.' He looked at me with a spoiled, malevolent stare. ‘Michael, you idiot, how could you have done it?'

‘You talk too much.' I spoke without malice, wanting only to take his mind off the accident. ‘I told you to let me do it.'

Margery laughed, enjoying herself, and Blaskin's bile got the upper hand. ‘Still here, are you? Why didn't you go with Wayland Smith, and see how he gets his material on the great smuggling ring that's threatening our national existence?' Then he turned on me. ‘Listen, John Fitzbastard, clear off.' I missed his fist, just. He missed mine, because I didn't really aim. He gets worse as he gets older, I said to myself as I went out, case in one hand and umbrella in the other. I barged into the lift. He ran after me, shouting that I should come back and finish his trash-novel.

Upper Mayhem in late spring was the most wonderful spot on earth, and buying it was the only thing I'd done right in my life. I got there at dusk, clapped out and jet-lagged, unmistakably rejected and utterly dejected, smelling flowers and fresh fields as I walked down the lane, incapable of understanding why I had responded to Bill Straw's letter two months ago and given up such a comfortable den.

Gnats danced in the evening warmth, frogs croaked from a nearby dyke, and birds were like specks of dust between drifting clouds. A whiff of coal smoke blended with the smell of soil. Here was the peace I wanted, and I made up my mind not to leave it again, as I entered my domain via the booking hall, crossed the footbridge over the line to the opposite platform and went up the garden path into the house.

A loving welcome from Bridgitte was a thing of the past, but I thought I had a right to a not unduly cold reception after an absence during which I had been doing my best to earn a living, if not actually to stay alive so that I might do it again – occasionally – in the future. Maria sat by the living room fire knitting a white shawl, and her smile was part of the domestic order which I now craved more than the exciting life I had been pushed into. She had put on weight, which improved her appearance, and she looked happy, as if she also found Upper Mayhem the perfect haven. When she got up and kissed me it was like being welcomed home by a loving daughter.

‘Where's Bridgitte?'

‘In kitchen.'

Leaving my suitcase by the door, I picked up the jumbo box of chocolates bought at Liverpool Street. Bridgitte sat on the floor wiring up a plug for the electric iron. ‘Let me do that,' I said.

‘I can manage.'

‘The blue wire goes on the right.'

When she got up I gave her the chocolates. She put them on the sideboard. ‘What have you come back for?'

I was feeling worse by the second. ‘Because I live here. Because I love you.'

She held the iron high, as if to bring it down on my head. I was ready for her, though I hoped without showing it. ‘Stop that, you bitch!'

‘I didn't believe you'd ever have the cheek.'

‘Where else could I come?'

Her face went from a shade of pink to blood red. ‘You must be in trouble.'

‘Somebody's going to kill me.'

‘Oh, when?'

It was the best thing she'd heard in years. ‘I'll fix you up with a nice seat in the shade as soon as I know. You seem in a bad mood today.'

She put the iron down and turned away. I knew from the change in the contours of her shoulders that she was crying. An earring fell off as she said: ‘How could you do it to me? How could you?'

I'd always thought that what the eye didn't see the heart didn't grieve over, so had she, by some magic message system, heard about my ten-minute grapple with Alice Whipplegate, or my brief encounter with Agnes in the New World? ‘How could I what?'

‘Do that to Maria, and then bring her here.'

‘I took pity on her, the same night I brought her. What the hell do you mean?' I was arrowing into a pit of fatigue. ‘I thought I'd come home to my everlasting love. But I'm not staying. I'm off. I've had my bellyful.'

‘You've had your bellyful, have you?' She wiped her eyes and took off the other earring. ‘You're a treacherous, lecherous beast. You had the cheek to bring Maria here when she was pregnant, and you thought you'd get away with that, did you?'