The Green Flash (20 page)

‘Because I knew you wouldn't like it.'

‘It was a deliberately underhand manoeuvre by which you arranged to feather your own nest at my expense!'

‘I feathered
your
nest,' I said, ‘ slightly more than I did my own. You've just done your sums. Didn't you notice? Grow up, woman! Be your age! We're not living in the nineteenth century.'

Her pale face flushed; I hadn't seen it do that before. I suppose I'd used the one unacceptable word. ‘ There are certain standards of business behaviour which are common to most generations, except of course to the conman and the jailbird, who naturally lives only by the ethics of Pentonville. It is really all my own fault I should have known that once a crook always a crook …'

‘Thanks a lot,' I said quietly.

‘Of course, you have been careful not to overstep the legal mark. Perhaps by your Own twisted reasoning you even really
thought
you were conferring a favour on me as well as on yourself. The fact that by so doing you undermined the whole fabric of that business confidence by which we all live –'

‘Business confidence!' I spat out. ‘Business con-trick! All retail price maintenance is a con-trick. My Christ, this really is a case of the pot calling the kettle black! When do you want me to leave?'

‘As soon as you can clear your desk.'

‘That I'll do with the greatest speed – and pleasure.'

‘You think you're being hard done to,' she snarled. ‘But just see for yourself! If this gets out, then –'

‘As I'm sure you'll see that it does!'

‘If this gets out you'll not find another high-class cosmetic firm that will
look
at you, I can assure you of that! Why don't you go and work for Roger Manpole. That is much more your style.'

‘Thanks, but I think I'll try some more manly occupation.'

‘Always concerned with your manliness, aren't you.'

‘What the hell do you mean by that?'

‘Only that people sometimes protest too much. Perhaps a life of crime is what really suits you.'

‘It will suit me,' I said, ‘just for a change, not to be a lapdog to an ageing woman. That will be a happy outcome of –'

‘Get out!' she said. If I had imagined beauty in her face, it wasn't there now.

‘I began to pull open one or two drawers, fish out a few personal possessions. The telephone rang and I snatched it up, shouted, ‘ Not now!' and banged it down. ‘Perhaps you would have liked to answer it?' I queried to her taut back.

‘Go to the devil!'

I said: ‘I wonder how you'll go along without me. Neither Marks nor Leo have the enterprise or drive to take over, and Alice Huntington will be as useful as a filleted plaice.'

‘I shall get my own man. There are plenty about. Plenty who will jump at the job!'

‘I could draft the advertisement for you,' I said. ‘But the papers wouldn't print it.'

‘It's strange,' she said, ‘ that John was right about you all along. He said you were a weakling who would let me down.'

I went up to her. She wouldn't face me, but I faced her. ‘Have a care,' I said gently. ‘Or I might try to disprove that. But it would be a pity to spoil your looks even more than the jaundice has.'

‘Get out!' she said between her teeth. ‘Get out, get out and
get out
.'

I

I knew that was the final whistle but, for a day or so after, I hung about in my flat, not quite sure what to do next. You can't suddenly lose both a top job and a top mistress without feeling the jolt. My teeth ached, but I knew it was no dental problem, just a psychological uppercut.

Of course I'd done the thing eyes open, knowing she might blow a fuse if she ever got to know. It had been part of the fun, so I could live with myself in this insipid profession, which at heart was based on grossly upped prices, and profits, at the expense of a gullible public. As she no doubt saw, it was cocking a snook at her personally too, and this had been what she couldn't swallow. I hadn't quite expected the sort of Hiroshima fallout that had actually occurred, but if that was the way she felt, that was the way; I wasn't going to argue any more. What I did regret, and what really got under my skin, was the thought that John had got the better of me after all. That rankled. That really rankled.

After a while, and partly to divert my thoughts, I devoted some little time and consideration to the matter of Malcolm Abden's death. This too seemed to mean a little more to me than I would have expected. The inquest had been on the Friday, and the report was headed ‘The Killer Tyres'. A Home Office forensic scientist had been called in, and had told the coroner that the tyres on the sports limousine ‘had not been manufactured to an adequate standard'. He had found a jagged nine-inch split in the tread which he was sure could not have been made by the accident. The tyres had done barely five thousand miles. I looked up the type of tyre in a book on new cars, and saw it was one of the new British low-profile jobs with an advanced steel-braced radial design; and it was fitted to four makes of popular luxury car. Somebody in that big tyre firm would be having kittens now.

I went to see a tyre man I knew. He said: ‘Of course they'll try to hush it up, pretend the Home Office chap and coroner are alarmists; in a week or two the motoring papers will come up with soothing syrup, you mark my words. They'll say the tyre was not properly fitted or under-inflated or something, so that the public will soon forget. But I'd like to bet there's ninety or a hundred thousand of those sets of tyres running around England at the moment, and the firm'll either have to call 'em all in or have them examined by experts, so as to avoid anything further, A second accident would put 'em out of business – where no doubt they deserve to be, if the truth be told.'

‘It won't bring Malcolm Abden to life again,' I said. ‘ There should be some way of suing them.'

‘Maybe his wife will. Or you?'

‘Me?' I said. ‘No. He's nothing to me. I scarcely knew him.'

‘It'd be a hell of a difficult case, because it boils down to proof, and that's so hard to come by if heavy damages are pending. However, if you see the widow, tell her to have a chat with her lawyers. The tyre firm might cough up a small fortune to settle out of court and duck the publicity.'

‘I don't know the widow,' I said.

‘Good time to get to know her then, isn't it? By the way, what're you driving?'

‘A DB6.'

‘Watch the tyres on that.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘They're high-speed jobs, designed for maximum road grip but not for long life. After eight or nine thousand miles you'll find the rubber will go as soft as orange peel.'

II

He's nothing to me. I scarcely knew him. Which was as true as sin. But now he was gone I was narked that he had cracked his skull in a cartwheeling car and had got himself buried too deep for me to have a chat with him again. His stupid flamboyant arrogance had fretted me when I met him, but somehow the surface antagonism hadn't counted too much. I couldn't go so far as to say he was the first Scotsman I'd actually liked, because I wasn't sure I liked him. He was engaging, meretricious, stimulating, and worth bumping against again. That was all. But it was enough.

With more time for thought, I thought about my last visit to Quemby. Seeing my mother again in that casual way had been like jogging against an old barred window silted with dirt. Some of the muck of years had fallen off and you could peer between the bars. I wondered how much I had actually hated my father. Of course I'd been scared of him, especially when he was gassed; but a lot of the time, it seemed to me, we maybe hadn't got on too badly. I remembered him rolling down a field with me when I was about seven, all the way down to the bottom, and his bright blue eyes twinkling with enjoyment at my laughter. I remembered him telling me about motor cars and him letting me sit on his knee and hold the wheel as we drove along. I remembered him teaching me to skate, and the way he picked me up that first time I fell on my belly and winded myself. I remembered the walks we had and the talks we had. But that was all earlier in my life before the poison began to spread. Funny how you forget things and how they sometimes squirm up into your mind again.

Sometimes I get this feeling of being separated from other people, different. Not better, not worse, but living on a different plane, living another sort of life. Their problems are not my problems; my problems are not theirs. Nor are their pains. This feeling is specially strong when I'm on my own. But then again, if the truth be told, maybe I always am on my own.

It's a funny old world. You're never quite sure how much of it is real.

One day, just for the hell of it, I thought I'd see how far I could get across London without paying a fare. I walked up to Selfridge's and got on a bus going east. We were at Oxford Circus by the time the conductor came round.

I said: ‘Marble Arch,' with a foreign accent.

‘You're going the wrong way, mate. Across the street. Any bus except a 25.'

‘Thank you. I am so sorry.'

I got off and walked towards Oxford Circus, caught a bus going down Regent Street. The conductor came when we were near Piccadilly Circus.

‘Selfridge's, please,' I said.

‘Not on this bus you don't. Look, man, you cross over and, see that stop? Catch a 6, a 15 or a 60.'

‘Thank you. I am so sorry.'

This way I got right across London to Hackney, never having too far to walk and earning a dirty stare from only one conductor, a Paki, who looked as if he'd seen it tried on before. In the end I got fed up with waiting at bus stops and took a taxi home.

Actually I'd had a semi-purpose in going to Hackney, because I thought of calling in at Henry Gervase Ltd to see if, now that pornography was more or less legalized, they were coming up with any new tricks. But when I got there I found they'd moved and the place was now occupied by ‘ Best Friend Dog Foods'. It did occur to me that this might be just another front, but I thought if I went in and it
was
run by Roger's nominees they might think I was looking for a job. I saw a chap coming out whom I vaguely knew – smart dark type with thin moustache – and this tended to confirm my hunch.

During this week I caught up with my play-going. I went to something every night and three matinees as well.

I went to the zoo and watched some rather jollier monkeys than those I'd seen at TBM Ltd. On the whole I thought well of monkeys. They had a simple, unaffected approach to life, and looked a deal more intellectual than the crets on the other side of the bars. Then I went to look at the ospreys and the eagles and wondered if my cousins in their far Highland pastures had anything as handsome to see on their lonely crags.

Odd that that relative of mine should have been done in by a defective tyre, just as surely, just as effectively as by a terrorist bomb or bullet. But instead of the world – and for ‘world' one reads ‘ media' – screaming their horror at another dastardly crime – from the Kennedys for ever backwards, into the so-called dark ages – instead of that, it was all slickly passed off as a motor accident, an unfortunate mischance, a tyre split that might or might not be somebody's fault, but who knows, who cares, it happened yesterday, it's past, soon over. Goodbye, Malcolm, planted in the ground.

I wondered where my father was buried. Couldn't remember a thing. I certainly hadn't been to any funeral, any cremation. I suppose I'd been, then in what the shrink called ‘self-protective isolation'. Maybe that was my normal state even now after all these years. I'd been a hell of a good sales manager for Shona & Co.; no doubt about that. But all the time – even through the whole of my fairly passionate affair with the Russian lady – had there not been this refusal to become totally committed? Wasn't this what she had always been beefing about? It all came to the same thing in the end.

On the second Tuesday, having decided to miss the first, I went to the fencing school. If Shona was there I could always duck out. She was not there, but Erica was, full of her usual spit and insolence. I found myself liking it more. The international fencing jamboree was just over and she had done well, so was feeling on a high. She had strange lines bracketing the sides of her mouth – strange in one so young, that is. They were laughter lines, chiefly. The sultry eyes were, I'd guess, not in character; she was essentially breezy, comic, full of herself, a bit superficial but ready for anything. Once again she made it clear that the anything could include me. After two weeks on my own I really didn't see any reason why it should not.

I said to her: ‘What comes, second in your life after fencing?'

‘Fencing.'

‘And after that?'

‘Oh … fun. Swimming, skiing, men, sunshine, caviar, rock, dinner parties, supper parties …'

‘Wait, wait,' I said. ‘You've lost me. Where exactly do men come – is it eleventh or twelfth?'

‘Somewhere like that. Why, are you feeling lonely?'

‘You could say so.'

‘D'you really think you've cracked up with Shona for good?'

‘Oh, yes. She made that very clear.'

‘And you?'

‘And me.'

She gave me the going-over with a long glance. ‘Well, I'm not above offering you solace.'

‘I rather fancy that.'

‘Just for a day or two – a week or two. Nothing serious.'

‘I'll probably go along with that too.'

‘Come to my flat to supper tomorrow evening.'

‘Why not to mine?'

‘Because I thought of it first. But mind – nothing serious.'

‘Agreed,' I said. ‘Just fun.'

III