Life Goes On (42 page)

I offered them a brandy.

‘Are you married?' Phyllis said, ‘or aren't you?'

‘Separated.' I saw no reason not to tell.

‘Life's hard,' she said. ‘I sometimes wonder how I can go on. I can't explain it, really.'

‘Don't, then.' I ordered brandy and coffee, and lit a cigar. ‘I tried to kill myself last year. I took an overdose of opium, but it didn't work. Then I hanged myself and the rope snapped. Next, I shot myself, and missed. So I decided it wasn't for me to take my own life.' I'd had my bellyful with Bridgitte often wondering how much longer she could go on with her so-called dreadful existence, and I wasn't going to take the same crap from a woman I'd treated to an expensive meal which she had eaten with sufficient gusto to suggest she intended living forever. Ettie just looked, knowing Phyllis had said the wrong thing. It was getting harder to choose the one I would go to bed with. Both, I decided, stroking Ettie's arm so that she wouldn't feel hard done by. ‘I love to see you eating all that rich food.'

She'll be telling me she's pregnant next, I said to myself.

‘It's because I'm pregnant,' she said.

‘Don't say such things, for God's sake.'

She laughed, a wicked little weaselly laugh. ‘I can be a better liar than you, if I put my mind to it.'

Phyllis was warbling with laughter again. I told them more about the beauties of Peppercorn Cottage, till the bill came, when I put on a serious face, just to let them know they were having a good time.

Darkness had been switched on outside, a feeble glitter of blue between rooftops. Phyllis held one arm as we walked along, and Ettie took the other. Noises had softened, and on a quiet corner of the network of main drags even the trilling of pigeons could be heard – if you had ears as sharp as mine.

‘I can't tell you how much your company means to me.' My words could apply to either of them. ‘On an evening like this.' After ten dull years with Bridgitte at Upper Mayhem I was falling in love with every woman I swapped six words with. I was starting to live again, except that getting entangled with Moggerhanger might mean I was going to die.

‘I'm having a wonderful time,' Phyllis said. ‘But I'm a little bit tiddly.'

‘I am, as well,' laughed Ettie.

I kissed her on the cheek. ‘What we need is a drink.' We wandered up a darkened street off Long Acre, past Stanford's map shop, turned a few more corners and came to something like a warehouse with a light over the door and a notice that pulled me up short: ‘Ronald Delphick, Poet Lariot, Reading Tonite. Admish: One pound.'

Phyllis made a motion of rolling up her sleeves.

‘We're going in,' I told them, ‘but he's mine.'

Ettie ran up the stairs. ‘Don't spoil my fun.'

He was already reading, but we pushed our way in and sat on a wooden form among a few dozen other people. We couldn't help making a clatter, and Phyllis giggled as they moved their legs to let us get by. Delphick stood on a stage, a hand on his panda's head. ‘I hate people who come in late, but at least it's another three quid.'

They laughed. He wouldn't be so glad when he saw who it was. ‘“Dusk Queen”,' he said, ‘is the title of the next poem. I hate titles, but my public insists, so here goes. I hate my public, though I've got no option but to love them. I dedicate the poem – I hate dedications also, but what the hell –' more laughs – ‘to Prue, a generous little girl I once met, and don't suppose I'll meet again because she's undergoing psychiatric treatment, though to be fair to myself, she would have been, anyway, sooner or later.'

‘Get on with it, Ronald,' a bearded man shouted.

‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, or two rather.' He read each line as if it was a whole poem, sufficient space between the words so that he could get his breath – the same poem he'd let me have just before dropping him off near Stevenage, though it sounded better now.

He stopped long enough for us to know it was the end, so that we could cheer. ‘What bullshit,' I said in Ettie's ear.

She stabbed me in the ribs. ‘Shut up. It's wonderful.'

Everyone clapped, and so did I.

‘I wrote that at Doggerel Bank.' He was breathless with emotion. ‘That's the place where I live, or exist, rather, on the pittance I earn as a poet. But when I cut my throat, not having eaten for three days, I'll leave it to the National Trust. They can run it as the Delphick Museum, where my fans can come and mourn. My few belongings will be laid out here and there.' He took a paper from his sugarbag jacket. ‘And this is what they'll find. I dedicate this list to the farmer who lets me have the cottage at five pounds a year. It's the least I can do because I haven't paid him since I started living there.' Phyllis was choking with mirth. Everyone clapped, and he hadn't yet read the list. Ettie looked adoringly in his direction, and I wondered what had really gone on between them at The Burnt Fat service station on the Great North Road.

‘Of course, it's not a shopping list. That would be too long to read. It's not a laundry list. That would be too short to bother about. It's a list of absolute essentials, which is just about right.'

There was a pause in which he gave us time to think about his eloquence and contemplate the honour still to come. ‘Well, the list I'm going to read begins like this. I must explain that it's only the first draft. In fact I'm still making some of it up, which gives an insight into the poetic process of yours truly.

‘So here's my list,

And I'm not even pissed.

In my mess-of-pottage cottage you will find

French letters on a clothesline

Greek letters on the wall,

A pot dog on the shelf

Hopscotch on the floor

Girlie-mag pix on the ceiling

And a hi-fi in the bog.'

‘I have a dog called Fido, by the way, and when I call “Hi, Fi!” he comes running in for his daily popsong.' Laughter for at least ten seconds. ‘To resume my list:

‘Eccles cakes in a bag

Pencils in a row –'

He changed gear, a priestly booming in his voice:

‘A knife fork and spoon

To eat up the moon –

And a tinlid for an ashtray.

A typing machine,

With old man ribbon

Who just keeps rolling along.

A table of planks

That I made with these hands,

And an orange box to sit on.

A row of books held up by a wire:

When I choose one for the fire

I read poems from the smoke.

An old fag packet

And a dead beer bottle

Newcastle Brown, I think it was

But most of all

The bed I lie on's

Made at birth

And can't be got from

But whose clean sheets I share

With Ettie and Betty and Phyllis and Dylis.

Yet when I'm alone I share a bone

With my randy Panda

(Don't I, pet?)

And watch the snow come down the window

All

Winter

Long.'

The last three words had half a minute between each, and the effect was tremendous. Nobody thought they had been robbed. The interval had come, and before leaping from the stage he reminded us that books of his poems were on sale by the door – and drinks available at a bar downstairs. He would sign any we wanted him to, even Blake's or Shelley's, or T. S. Eliot's, and sink any pints that were offered.

There was a luscious girl at a table by the head of the stairs, with piled blond hair, a broad high forehead, almond-shaped eyes, a small curved nose, full lipsticked lips and a face narrowing to a dimpled chin. She wore rimless glasses and smoked a cigarette from a black holder. There was the faintest sheen of fair hair on her upper lip. She wore a purple high-necked blouse with small white buttons down the middle going between her breasts to a slim waist. A stock of books burdened the table and a tin to one side contained a few pound notes and coins.

I was immediately in love with her because, apart from her obvious qualities, she struck me as being the most intelligent person I had ever seen. She glowed intelligence, as well as mystery and beauty – but above all intelligence. How I could tell, I didn't know, unless it was by looking at other faces around me, especially Ettie's and Phyllis's. I wasn't even interested in seeing what her legs were like, but stood in front of the table as people were going downstairs for their drinks. ‘I'll buy three books.'

She didn't look up, but passed them over and took my tenner.

‘Will you come down and have a drink?'

She smiled. ‘I'm with Mr Delphick.'

‘You can both come.'

‘You'll have to ask him.'

‘Are you his girlfriend?'

‘In so far as he can have one.'

‘Is he impotent?'

She laughed again. ‘He's somewhat promiscuous, as you can imagine.'

‘I wouldn't be, with someone like you.'

‘You don't have someone like me. At least I don't imagine so.'

‘What's your name?'

‘Frances Malham. Why?'

‘You've bowled me over.'

An even heartier laugh showed her clean and lovely teeth. I'd never been so close to such a person. ‘It's nice of you to say so,' she said.

I could feel my elbow plucked from behind. ‘Where do you live? Where do you work?'

Thank God my questions amused her. ‘I'm at Oxford. Doing a medical degree.'

‘You're going to be a doctor?' I was ready to faint.

‘I hope so.'

‘Are you coming, or aren't you?' Ettie squeaked.

I was ready to turn round and deliver the most vicious but enjoyable smack at her chops, and tell her that if she persisted in pestering me I would rip off her drawers and strangle her with them, but that would undoubtedly have destroyed the good impression I was attempting to create before Frances Malham. I had never known myself to be in such a trap. ‘Just a moment, darling,' I said.

‘I must see you again,' I told Frances. ‘I want to talk to you about Mr Delphick's work. I'm a writer, and I may be able to do something for him.'

Her face became even more intelligent, if that was possible. ‘What's
your
name?'

‘Michael Cullen. But I have another handle, and I'll tell you about it when I see you.'

She scribbled something on a scrap of paper and slipped it in one of the three books I'd bought. That was enough. I was satisfied.

‘Hello, pet.' I heard Delphick's horrible Yorkshire twang behind me, the sort he put on when in London. ‘Having trouble?'

I turned, and at the same time he recognised Ettie. The half smile went off his face. She had been entranced by his reading, but the fact that it was over, combined with the callous neglect just evinced by me, wiped out the effect of his performance with surprising speed. ‘I've been waiting to meet you, you fucking thief. Where's my ten quid?'

‘Ten quid?' he laughed. ‘I've yet to meet a person who got even ten pee back from me, never mind ten quid. Anyway, I don't owe it to you. I've never seen you in my life, you filthy little trollop. Piss off.'

The only thing wrong with Ronald Delphick, basically, was that he could speak, and he might just have been all right if he hadn't added that unnecessary dose of invective. I suppose he got carried away, and even I couldn't fault Ettie for the way she reacted, nor could I argue with Phyllis's heavy-handed response. Ettie reached across the table, and put her fingers in the box to take out what she considered her property, even though I had repaid the ten quid at lunchtime, and Phyllis caught Delphick a fairly comprehensive swipe across his complacent mug. Then another smack sounded when Frances Malham, that superb creation of beautiful intelligence, clipped Ettie so hard that she spun several feet backwards and barely stopped herself toppling down the stairs.

Quick as a flash, as they say, I got hold of Delphick's hands and pushed him beyond range. He'd been intent on battering Phyllis with clenched fists, which I couldn't allow, though it was hard to say why. He hit the wall with an impact that caused him to think twice about bracing himself for more. Before Ettie and Phyllis could join forces to go for lovely Frances Malham I grabbed their arms and dragged them kicking and screaming down the stairs.

Perhaps I was saving them from a mauling, because Frances may have more than held her own. Their obscene threats I will not put down on paper, though I suppose Frances must have heard them, which gave me a pain at the heart, until I remembered that she was a medical student, and had heard far worse already, or if she hadn't she would have to get used to hearing it in the future. I also remembered, when I had Ettie and Phyllis pinned against a wall downstairs, and was threatening to knee them both if they moved an inch, that I had left my books upstairs, one of which had Frances Malham's address inside. ‘Wait here,' I said, ‘or I'll kill you both.'

I went up four at a time, scattering people still coming down. ‘I'll never be able to write again. Look what you've done!'

I felt in an ugly mood. ‘Belt up, Delphick, or I'll kick fifty poems out of your arse, you troublemaker. You shouldn't rob a young girl who has to work for her money.' I grabbed the books from Frances. ‘I apologise for that little outburst. I love you. I'll see you again.'

She smiled, though she was clearly upset.

Slipping the books in my poacher's pocket, I got back to Ettie and Phyllis at the bar. I put a hand on each shoulder. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, behaving like that.'

‘Oh bollocks,' Ettie said. ‘I hate you.'

‘He ought to be flayed alive,' said Phyllis, ‘doing that to poor Ettie.'

‘Forget it,' I told them. I longed to see more of Frances, but not with those two slags around my neck. ‘Let's go to my flat. I'll give you a better drink than you can find here.'