Life Goes On (45 page)

‘He is.'

My determination never to lie again was as strong as ever, because I was quickly coming to realise that telling lies never did me any good. On the other hand they rarely caused those I told them to much harm. It seemed hardly worthwhile acquiring the moral taint of being known as a liar. On the other hand, I didn't know why – if my lying was so ineffectual – I was made to feel so tainted. As I got older my guilt in this respect became worse, especially sitting beside Frances Malham in the back of a taxi, as I took her hand to try and comfort her. If the intention of my recent bout of lying was to put her off a sponging fraud like Ronald Delphick, then they were told in a good cause, but if they were told to draw her in some way closer to me, then the sooner I acted on my determination never to lie again the better. On the other hand (how many hands have I got?) I was so in love with her that any amount of lying seemed justified. These thoughts having gone through my mind, I felt much improved. After helping her out of the taxi, I left the driver a good tip.

Going up in the lift I sensed a new curiosity coming from her regarding my good self. I smiled, and she couldn't have been too despondent because the beginning of a return smile settled on her lips. ‘I hope he hasn't done anything silly like doing a bunk,' I said. ‘He was certainly making himself comfortable when I left.'

I stood aside to let her out first. She may have been a supporter of Women's Lib, but I was taking no chances. If my politeness struck the wrong note she could have the pleasure of being scornfully indulgent, but if I was impolite when she expected me not to be her contempt might be fundamental. I was canny enough to know, however, that no female who attached herself to Ronald Delphick could have believed in Women's Lib.

The flat was uninhabited.

‘Ronald!' I looked in all the rooms, and came back rubbing my hands – almost. ‘Let me take your coat, then we can sit down and have a drink, while we think the situation over.'

‘Perhaps that's the most sensible idea.'

Could there have been a more wonderfully intelligent-looking young woman with such a Venus de Milo figure? If only she had no arms to match, though I supposed in that case she would have been very dextrous with her feet when it came to defending herself. ‘What would you like?'

‘Vermouth.'

‘Splash?'

‘Please.'

‘Ice and lemon?'

She nodded. ‘I wonder what's happened to Ronald?'

‘I expect he's gone off to Hamley's for another panda, and to Mothercare for a pram.'

She put on a show of concern. ‘You don't like him, do you?'

‘Well,' I said, ‘put it this way: no.'

She looked around. ‘I still can't believe this is Gilbert Blaskin's flat.'

‘Do you like his books?' I said nonchalantly.

She thought for a while. ‘Well, yes – though I think his attitude to women is putrid.'

I held up my glass. ‘You can say that again. Cheers.'

‘Cheers.'

I was unable to bite off my tongue. ‘This place isn't a patch on Delphick's Yorkshire manor, I admit.'

‘I didn't mean that.'

I looked into her eyes made smoky by the rimless specs. ‘What
do
you mean? Do you mind telling me?'

She made a little tremor with her mouth. It was impossible that such a sensitive mechanism as her face couldn't detect even the most feeble lie. I held out my hand. ‘Come on, I'll show you the flat.'

I drew her into Gilbert's study. ‘Look around. Feel free. His first editions are in that bookcase. In the drawers underneath are his press cuttings. On that filing cabinet is a photograph of him as an army officer with two of his mates. You can easily pick him out. He's already bald, and you can see by his features that he's hopelessly corrupt.'

She walked from wall to wall, sipping her drink. ‘You don't seem to resemble him very much.'

‘You've made my week.' I passed a couple of pages from his latest novel. ‘Read this. Apart from Blaskin, you'll be the first one to do so – and I doubt if even he has, he was so busy writing it.'

Flushing, she sat on the couch. ‘Really?'

‘You're the first one.'

‘Shall I read it aloud?'

‘If you must. I mean, if you like.'

‘I can't read as well as Ronald.'

‘Nobody can.' I sat by her side. ‘But I'd love to hear
you
, all the same.'

‘“As soon as he saw her,”' she read, ‘“he knew it was The Road to Cheren all over again. The paper flowers on the table were pretty, and when he lit his cigar at the candle he tried not to blow smoke into her face. She didn't trust him, and didn't like him, but when did that have anything to do with love?

‘“The coppery glow of spring spread over the flat fields. Nothing comes of waiting. He told her that he loved her. She said he never had. He never would. Nor much of hoping, either. Only out of doing does a light show through. And that, all too often, incinerates. There was but one thing he wanted, and he hoped she too was in the mind for it. Moral regeneration was his only hope, and therefore hers.

‘“She looked at him, and realised that for all his thirty years, he wasn't grown up. He never would be, so what was she doing at the Fenland Hotel? But if he was to grow up, she could see all too clearly what he would grow up to be, and she didn't like it. The fact that she could see into the future, however, made all the difference between a live and a dead relationship. ‘If a rolling stone gathers no moss,' he said, ‘whose loss is that?'

‘“(If I don't get her knickers off, I'll burst. Never say it cannot happen here. It always might, whether it does or not. That doesn't make sense. Or does it? Everything's too turgid. Write it fourteen times. You need a drink, you lazy swine. No, get her as far as that four-poster bed at least. Lead up to it slowly. Make 'em wait. Make yourself wait, you awful old prick. Why don't you admit it?)

‘“She sipped her brandy, and the pursing of her lips boded well for when she lay naked on the bed and he lowered his head to suck an orgasm out of her lovely full-lipped cunt. He loved women, but loved those women more who loved women. Oh, Lady Samphire of the Ouse! What do we have to lose except the reek of virtue?”'

It was time for me to cough. He always spoiled it, and things would get worse. Such vile words coming out of Frances Malham's lovely mouth in the purest of accents seemed, to say the least, incongruous. I put my arm around her shoulder. ‘Maybe you should stop. It's only the first draft.'

She laughed, flushed though she was. ‘It's funny.'

‘It's foul.'

‘I'm getting an insight into the way he works. It's wonderful.'

‘It gets worse. It must be the specimen sheet that he lets lady thesis-writers read when they come to interview him. Then he lays them down where you're sitting now – if they get the message. It's almost as bad as Sidney Blood without the violence. There's no trick he doesn't stoop to.'

She put the papers on the table. ‘I suppose all writers are the same.'

If Blaskin walked in she was lost. I dreaded the click of the door. ‘It's the creative process. They're in a permanent state of randiness. I've written a couple of books for Blaskin, so I know.'

‘You?'

I kissed her hair. ‘He has so many ideas he has to farm them out. He gives me the gist, I knock it off, he polishes it up, his secretary types it, the doorman posts it, some daft publisher prints it. One day I'll branch out on my own. You learn a lot working for Blaskin.'

She took off her glasses, and our faces touched. We were fully clothed, but I noticed the heat of her body. I could only assume she felt mine, for she moved a few inches. Being scientifically minded, she realised that such narrow space would make the heat increase, till the flashpoint came.

I had such an elegant hard-on that, if need be, I could have balanced a plate of black puddings on it as I made my way towards her up a flight of stairs. I put my hand on her leg and gently touched the thigh under her skirt. My hand went as far as it could go. She was in flood. I wasn't far off. Being in love, I came too quickly when we lay back on the couch. I wanted her to take her clothes off, but she said it was too late. Such easy success was bad for me. I had expected to pursue her for days, maybe weeks, but she had arranged for events to rip along at her own special pace, something which women did more and more these days. It was the way we fucked now – sometimes. Back from the bathroom, she said: ‘I'd like another drink. I made myself come, otherwise I feel lousy.'

‘Sorry it didn't work together.'

She smiled, and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I'd like a cigarette as well.'

We sat in the living room. ‘I don't know who you think I am or what I'm like,' she said, ‘but I'm sure your ideas are wrong. My father was a doctor who died ten years ago, when I was twelve. He went to the surgery one day and the receptionist phoned my mother two hours later to say he'd had a heart attack. He was sixty and they'd been married fifteen years. He smoked and drank very heavily and that was what killed him. As well as overwork. I was the only child. My mother was over twenty years younger. She had practically no money, and got a job as a doctor's receptionist to pay for my education. If it hadn't been for Uncle Jeffrey I think she would have gone under. He's my mother's brother. He's been wonderful, and still helps out, though he has a family of his own. But he won't have any more children because he had a vasectomy three years ago.'

Was there never going to be a dull moment, an uneventful minute without one single surprise? Working for Moggerhanger was employment for senior citizens by comparison. I had given Jeffrey a punch in the face for having put Maria in the family way – just a few months ago – and here was Frances telling me that such a thing couldn't have been possible. I was too numb to pray that the earth would devour me. No wonder he'd laughed. Was it at the thought that his vasectomy hadn't worked again? Or did he know it was foolproof, and he was justifiably amused at my crackpot accusation? Yet if it wasn't him, then who had got Maria pregnant? She'd lied to me, though if she hadn't I would never have gone to the Harlaxtons and met Frances so as to bring her back to Blaskin's abode (by an equally outrageous lie) and confirm our friendship by a more delectable fuck than the hugger-mugger in the broom cupboard at The Palm Oiled Cat with Ettie. There seemed little hope of stopping that old roundabout as long as I breathed. A start in life goes on to the end.

‘Are you sure he had a vasectomy?'

‘I know the doctor who did it. He was one of my father's old friends. I also know the doctor who talked Jeffrey into having it done. His name was Dr Anderson. Jeffrey was going to him for analysis at the time, because he'd had a bit of a crack-up, and his advertising firm paid for the treatment. Jeffrey was in absolute terror of the world ending. He said he couldn't bear the thought of his children going up in smoke and flame at the same time as himself. And the idea of having one or two more children so that they would also be incinerated was even more terrifying. He called such anguish paying the Moloch Tax. He had apocalyptic visions of slaughtering Elizabeth, then the children and himself. He thought he might wake up in the middle of the night and soak the house in blood and paraffin – he said. So at least he was determined to have no more children and add to the casualty list.'

‘He's such a cheerful-looking, extrovert bloke,' I said.

‘I know. But the issue paralysed him, and even the fact that Aunt Elizabeth was on the pill didn't convince him that he wouldn't have more children. After the vasectomy he was normal, positively exuberant in fact, and went back to work. If I had to give anyone my idea of a good person, I'd tell them about Jeffrey.'

There was something wrong here, which was not surprising considering her opinion of a shit like Delphick. Still, I owed Uncle Jeffrey an apology, just as I owed Maria a smack across the chops. Another item which scratched me on the raw side was the way Dr Anderson, the evil genius of the psychology underworld, kept turning up. He seemed to be as big a pest on the body politic as was Moggerhanger on the social fabric, and if I had any say in the matter I would pull the plug on both. The only question was how. ‘Do you know anything about Dr Anderson?'

I fully expected she would bring out a list of his good deeds, telling me of how he was the benevolent supporter of five thousand orphans in the Third World, that he personally washed mugs in a soup kitchen by Waterloo Bridge on Saturday night, and that he ran a home for battered wives in Glasgow.

‘I think I would like another drink.'

‘Willingly. Cigarette?'

She smoothed her skirt and stretched out her legs. ‘All I know is that for some time after Jeffrey had his vasectomy, Dr Anderson was having an affair with Elizabeth.'

‘He was screwing Jeffrey's wife? You're joking.'

I caught in the openness of her mirth a similarity to that of Jeffrey. ‘I never joke about things like that. I often think that if I could bring myself to tell lies my life would be easier. Anyway, the upshot of Anderson's affair with Elizabeth was that she got pregnant. Would you believe it? It seemed that Anderson recommended vasectomies to his married patients as often as it seemed convincing to do so, and then, if their wives were halfway attractive, he had an affair with them to get them pregnant.'

‘But you said Elizabeth was on the pill.'

‘She came off it after Jeffrey's vasectomy, and Anderson provided pills which weren't effective. Isn't that diabolical?'

‘I'm appalled.'

‘So was I.'

‘And Elizabeth got a bun in the oven?'

‘What a horrid way of putting it. You see, Anderson is investigating a breakdown theory, pushing people as far as they will go, to see at what point in their decline they begin to pull out of the dive naturally. Some do, some don't. After a certain point he's not interested in those who go down to the depths never to come up, but only in those who get out of it. It's this point of rebound that fascinates him.'