Life Goes On (46 page)

‘He wants to remove it?'

‘He wants to control it,' she said.

‘So that's his game.'

She nodded. ‘But he didn't have the chance to break Jeffrey. Elizabeth got rid of the foetus without him knowing. I helped her. It was a bloody awful experience for her. Not too pleasant for me, either.'

‘You poor kid!' I drew her to me, and received a warm kiss which I matched with my own.

‘That's all I know about Dr Anderson.'

And I knew that during or after his rave-up with Jeffrey's wife he had got hold of poor innocent Maria, who was now inflating with another of his monster-kids.

‘I expect he's writing a book on it,' she said, ‘full of graphs, statistics and obscene mathematical formulae that in reality mean extremes of emotion and misery. He wants to chart and document the point of return – or no return.'

‘He probably sends his findings to the Ministry of Defence.'

‘Or the Russians.'

‘Or both. How does one stop him?'

‘He'll end by running himself into the ground,' she said.

‘I wouldn't bank on it.'

She looked at the window, as if Delphick was going to come flying in triumphantly on his Winged Panda. ‘I wonder where he's got to?'

I could think of no one except Frances and myself. The world stopped, and I'd have a hard job to kick it spinning again. ‘Drowning his chagrin in The Jolly Scribblers because Hamley's wouldn't take his cheque.'

She looked at me, and even with my ever-burning optimism I could hardly call it a loving expression. ‘Maybe you really are Blaskin's son. Anyway, where is The Jolly Scribblers?'

‘Near Mornington Crescent. But I expect he's gone somewhere else by now – our peripatetic Panda Poet. It's catching.'

‘What is?'

‘You start to imitate those who sponge off you.'

‘I don't, but maybe that's because I'm a woman. Anyway, I must be going.'

I was in a state of terror, thinking that if she went I would never see her again, a feeling I would normally have despised. ‘It's time for lunch. Why don't you have something to eat?'

‘I'm not hungry.' She picked over the records by the Bang and Olufson hi-fi that was as thin as an After Eight.

‘I am.' I went to her. ‘For you. For your spirit, for all the thoughts you've had since you were born, and all the thoughts you'll have till you die. To say that I love you doesn't express what I feel.'

‘I'll put this Schubert on, if I may.' She looked at me. ‘In a way it's a pity we made love. I don't have to get to know you now.'

A stone hurled from the wall of a castle had hit me on the heart. ‘I feel the same about you. I hated making love just then, not that I didn't enjoy it, but because I knew you were the sort that would use it as an excuse for calling it the end. I thought you expected me to make love, and so I was forced to choose between disappointing you, or damning myself. The fact that I proved myself right doesn't make me feel any better. I can always use it for one of my stories.'

‘Maybe I'm wrong,' she said.

I didn't give a damn whether she was or not (I certainly did) and told her so. ‘I like Schubert, though not better than Bach.' Bridgitte used to play them. ‘I'm going away tonight, and won't be back for a few weeks.'

She was lost in the music, so I had to become lost as well. I would follow her anywhere, through snake-pits and dog-tunnels, though I would resist the idea for as long as I could.

‘I don't really know you,' she said. ‘Perhaps I was wrong.'

I sat by her and kissed her. ‘I don't know myself, so how can you? I'm not so sure I want to. Know yourself, and die. I have a stab at it now and again.' I came out with any nonsense because to mystify her was my only chance of getting anywhere. She was so knowing that to compete with her quality of mind and brain was useless, whereas gibberish might have some effect. I spoke into her warm ear. ‘You're the last person I expected to meet in my life, because I've been searching for you from the beginning. That's why it won't kill me if you vanish forever. To live with an ideal woman would be like being born again, and I don't think I could stand it. Self-destruction was never in my line.'

Such rubbish was a pointer as to how I really felt. I was half laughing as I spoke, but hoped she would mistake it for a state of emotion near to tears. I stopped, as if overpowered by the beauty of the music (maybe I was) and to see whether my words would fetch a response.

‘Have you ever written any poetry?'

I let a minute go by, as if I'd been waiting for such a question. ‘I'm sorry you asked that.'

‘Why?'

I watched another fifty seconds slide by on the clock. ‘They're locked in a drawer at my house in Cambridgeshire.'

After a while (she was good at the game as well) she said: ‘Can I see them?'

The speed of our conversation was sending me dizzy. I was beginning to crave a ding-dong battle with Bridgitte, or a bit of argy-bargy on the state of the nation with Bill Straw. ‘They're not finished. There are only six. I burned fifty last week. They were too much like Delphick's twaddle.'

She twitched.

‘I'll sort some out when I come back. If I come back.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘I won't know till tonight.'

She turned and kissed me. My hand went up and down her blouse, but I felt no response in me. ‘What poets do you like?' she asked.

‘Peter Lewis and John Jones. They're new young poets. They're sensational. They write so that people won't get any reaction at all when they read them. They're all the rage – or will be.'

‘Who publishes them?'

‘The Silence is Golden Press. No other poets can get a look in while they're on the scene.' I went on with my stroking and stoking. Her legs opened and I reached the crotch of her drawers. She was ready, but I was stone-cold. These young girls were shameless and wonderful. Five years older and I could have been her father. Even that thought didn't give me a hard-on. Schubert came to an end and left the field free.

She gripped my arm. ‘I don't want you to go away.'

‘I've got to.'

She undid her blouse and opened her bra in front so that I could knead the warm flesh. ‘I love you,' I said. ‘I think you know that. But my life's not my own.'

‘Nobody's is,' I thought she said, as my lips went to her nipples. There was nothing I could do but go back to kissing her lips, and gaze at her pale brown eyes through the gold-rimmed glasses. My lips kept sliding off her nipple, which was so small there was hardly anything for a purchase. I sent a single finger under her hair and around the back of her neck, then drew it forward to her ear, and felt the curving slim wire of her glasses. I prised it up, and put a hand also to the other ear, and lifted them off to see her naked eyes beneath, and the effect of such misty and undressed eyes, and the feel of her light glasses hanging from one of my fingers, and their release as I let them drop gently on the table, gave me a surge of blood that put me in the mode of action – and no mistake.

Twenty-Three

I made my way along Kensington Gore and the High Street, then turned into Holland Park, heading for the Bush. Young mums pushed their prams down leafy paths and across lawns, proud at having done the most ordinary thing in the world, while peacocks with spreading feathers observed them haughtily. After our day of love Frances had gone back to Oxford, saying she wasn't sure about seeing me again. We'd quarrelled and shouted, and reduced ourselves to silence, and my zombie-half could only hope that she would reappear sometime, somewhere.

A con-man whose ambition was to bask in idleness, whose only ability (if he had any) was in telling lies, comes sooner or later to a point when the lying and the laziness have to stop. I decided this was it. In answer to Moggerhanger's summons via his pillock-in-chief Pindarry, I walked seven miles to Ealing to let the fact sink in.

I made westerly at a steady pace so as not to arrive in a sweat, a warm wind flicking at my face as I stepped out on my stint through all the Actons. My shoulder bag was heavy, but that was part of the game. At Upper Mayhem I often did twenty miles a day around the Fens with Smog, packing a weightier rucksack with gear and grub, and a big tea flask, and setting out in early morning to spot butterflies at Wicken Fen and birds at Dugdale Wood, and not getting home till dusk.

Kenny Dukes was at the gate of the Big Chief's house. ‘You're the last one in. It's a real gathering. There's going to be something big on.'

The cuts from his meeting with Dicky Bush had healed, except for a nasty-looking ridge under his left eye. I aborted a witty remark about having fallen over a Sidney Blood book. ‘I'm glad you're on the mend.'

He growled. ‘I'll disembollock him the next time I bump into him. I fuckin' will.'

We walked along the covered hall and into the main part of the house. Nobody frisked me to see whether or not I had a Sabatier carving knife strapped to my leg. I was one of the family, it seemed, which is what I wanted to be. Or maybe if he intended killing me after the Canadian fiasco (if it had been a fiasco – I had begun to doubt it) he would do it with a couple of well-sighted Kalashnikovs.

‘If I see him crossing Frith Street, I'll run him down with the Roller. What did Claud say?'

He hit me on the back, then lowered his voice. ‘He'll give me one more chance. If I get cut up again he'll put me on the dole. Said he couldn't have people who couldn't look after themselves. Well, I fucking ask you, that fucking Dicky Bush came through that door like a human cannon ball. I didn't stand a chance. Next time, though, it'll be him who's for the mincer.'

I gave him a crash on the back that sent him three yards forward. ‘Even Sidney Blood won't recognise him, eh?'

He righted himself. ‘I don't know how he knew I was there, though.'

‘He saw you through that crack in the door. Then he went back up the stairs and wound himself up like a spring. A bloke like that don't go into any place without finding who's inside first. We haven't got to be too proud to learn, Kenny.'

He followed me into the house, where the party was as normal as you'd find anywhere on Saturday night in Richmond – or Ealing. I sauntered into the main drawing room, which was furnished in the best Harrods style. A wall had been knocked down, and an Alhambra-type archway connected the two halves. Crystal chandeliers scintillated from the ceiling, and mock old masters in heavy gilt frames decorated the walls. Persian carpets that looked genuine covered the floor. It was lucky I'd togged up in my best, having stumbled into an obviously grand occasion.

About a dozen people were present, and I didn't know who to talk to first, a problem solved by Moggerhanger coming across and putting an arm around my shoulder. I wanted to shake it off because it felt like the tail of an anaconda which was looking out for a secure purchase to an oak tree. He led me to the table where Mrs Blemish and Matthew Coppice were serving glasses of Moët et Chandon. ‘I'm more than glad you could come, Michael. It's a real pleasure to have you with us again.' He handed me a filled glass from the table and steered me into a corner. ‘We're going to need your services as we've never needed them before. Thank God you've honoured me with your presence.' He wasn't drinking.

It sounded like a knifing at least, but my wonderful day with Frances Malham had ensured that I was beyond caring. ‘I intended coming tonight, whatever happened. I don't see how anybody could have done better than me in Canada, even though it didn't work out.' I stopped myself. Pride wouldn't let me grovel to that bastard.

‘I'm the one to say whether it worked or not.' He laughed, until he saw Parkhurst, who was standing alone, let his cigar-end fall on the carpet and tread it in. ‘Can't you pick 'em up and put 'em in the ashtrays provided?' He could play the heavy dad when he liked. ‘I'll blind you if I see you do that again.'

Parkhurst looked red-hot pokers at him, then turned and said something to Cottapilly who had a glass of champagne in each hand.

‘It seemed to me you sent me to Canada as a decoy,' I said. ‘Or because you thought it was the easiest way to get me killed.'

His arm came over me again, this time as if the anaconda had got a real grip on the south-east leg of the heavy walnut table, and squeezed my shoulders. ‘You've got guts, Michael. And you're clever. You're also lucky. Not only that, but you've got a sense of humour. If ever I want someone for a hard job, I don't ask whether they're intelligent, or lucky, or experienced (though they've got to be all of that), but if they can take a joke.'

‘One of these days I'll die laughing, though I wouldn't mind knowing exactly what did happen when I got to Toronto.'

He took out a couple of Partagas and we lit up. ‘Let me say this: in the bag you carried was a lot of paper work which couldn't be trusted to the post. It was worth a lot of money, so we had to send somebody like you, otherwise the Green Toe Gang wouldn't think it was genuine. Now they do, and they're acting on information that's ruining their operations in North America. Certainly, it was a dangerous job, but what do you think I'm handing you this thousand-pound bonus for?' He slipped the cheque into my lapel pocket, behind the tip of white handkerchief. ‘I expected you to get back. I can't afford to have a valuable and trusted friend like you get hurt.'

‘I feel reassured.'

‘Imagine, Michael, if I'd sent someone of lesser calibre than your good self.' He took a good long puff at his cigar. So did I. ‘Take Kenny Dukes. He'd have bought the biggest teddy bear at London Airport as a present for a tart he knows in Toronto. Cottapilly would have gone for a giant fire-engine to keep him company on the long flight. They'd have been spotted straightaway because those hotheads over there would have thought they didn't intend to deliver the goods. No, it had to be someone like you, who's got no foibles and would deliver the stuff without a hitch.'