‘You’d better run,’ I said to Delphick. ‘He sounds like the Son of Almanack Jack.’
‘I’ll throttle the bastard,’ Delphick said. ‘He’s not going to talk to me like that. He’s got to show some respect to a poet.’
‘Leave him alone.’
But he was halfway across the road with hands lifted, and the next thing I knew a remarkably agile fist shot out from the Bundle of Rags, and Delphick, after a suitably dramatic cry, was lying on the pavement. I suppose there was some justice left in the world, but when the Bundle of Rags lifted his beribboned footcloths to stamp on Delphick’s face I pushed him away so hard he nearly cracked the plate glass window of a car showroom. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘Piss off.’
He looked at me while lighting his cigar. ‘You must allow that I had a case.’
‘I suppose so. But don’t kick a man when he’s down, even though he would have done the same to you.’
‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he said. Then he drew back. ‘No, I’d better not. Call me Sir Plastick Bagg, if you like. Suffice it to say that I come out on one night a week to see how the other half lives. I have no sex life, so what else can I do? The Madam sends me out, and I like it. It’s like being in the shit pit as a kid, old boy. So nice to have met you.’
‘I was going to offer you a fiver,’ I said.
‘Don’t bother. I’ll be home for breakfast. Knowing my proclivities, the Ministry of Defence allows me a day off each week, so that I can sleep in. Goodbye. I hear there are rich pickings on the Strand.’
It was a shattering experience. One learns only slowly what’s going on in the world. Delphick was back with his panda-pram. ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ I said.
He dabbed his bruised face, and we stood without speaking, an occasional car moving up and down the road. He pulled at the rope covering his pram. ‘I’ll give you a poem. I’ve got just the poem. You’ll love it.’
‘Save it for somebody else.’ I was in no mood for verse, but remembered he had nowhere to go, so pulled a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘Take this, to get a bed somewhere. Or you can borrow it till I’m in trouble and want you to help me.’
He ran to a lighted window and held it up, then came back and pushed his panda-wagon a few yards along the road. I decided that if he walked away without saying thanks I would give him a pasting and kick his panda-wagon to bits.
He was in tears, the bloody actor. ‘I’ll never forget this. I know you aren’t rich, and I appreciate it more than I’ve ever appreciated anything. And thanks for saving me from that madman in rags. Can I have your address?’
You had to think quick with Delphick. ‘I shan’t be there much longer. I expect I’ll see you around some time. I might call on you at Doggerel Bank.’
‘Well, cheers then, mate. And thanks a lot.’ He went up the street, while I traipsed down to Trafalgar Square and hailed a taxi that took me to my cosy room above the garage at Ealing.
Seventeen
The business trips Moggerhanger sent me on were mostly short hops by air to the Channel Islands, from which place I returned with hundreds of Krugers stitched into the game pockets of my tailor-made shooting coat. God knows what the customs thought when so many sportsmen and hunters started coming through. It was as if caribou had become the blight of Jersey, and stags were stampeding around on Guernsey. They just loved tomatoes, I could have told them if they’d cared to ask.
I made six trips altogether, for a hundred-pound bonus at the end of each, and soon I had nearly a couple of thousand in the bank. We took a risk, the one condition being that if we were caught we were to say nothing more than that it was our first time and that we were on our own. We had various bits of paper to suggest it, and proof of a bank account in the Channel Islands with ten quid on deposit. It was worked out so that nothing could be traced to the Big Firm itself. One morning Moggerhanger called me in and said he wanted me to go to the New World in a couple of days. ‘Where’s that?’ I asked.
‘You’ll do,’ he said when he had stopped laughing. ‘It’s a special mission to Toronto, and I want somebody with a head on his shoulders.’
I never anguished over making a decision, in the hope that one day I would make the right one. Be that as it may, what frayed my temper on setting out to get the one o’clock plane for America was the fact that I had such difficulty picking up a taxi, and didn’t reach the airport terminal till half past twelve. When I asked Alice Whipplegate why Kenny Dukes couldn’t drive me there in the Roller she said he was in hospital swathed in bandages, having told the police he had fallen on a crate of broken bottles in Bateman’s Alley.
The plane was delayed and we were still in the airport lounge at three o’clock. I drank a dozen cups of coffee, ferreted my way through the Daily Telegraph from back to front and envied a grey-bearded man with glasses reading a fat book called The Way We Live Now which, judging by his expression, was telling him something he wanted to know.
At four o’clock I settled myself in a window seat on Shoestring Airways, my briefcase-type travelling bag stowed in the rack above. Our Jumbo 747 was so full that not even a man hoofing up the runway waving a first class single fully paid up ticket could have been taken on board. I thought I would rather spend a week at sea than travel with four hundred people in this sort of random meeting hall where, within two hours, everyone would jump up and start battering their way out through doors and windows. And the trip was scheduled to last for seven. My only consolation was in thinking of the millions of dollars in travellers’ cheques pre-packed by Toffeebottle in my holdall and the ease with which I had carried it through the customs. I had been led to understand that the money was payment for goods gratefully received.
‘Do you mind if I have your window seat?’ She liked looking out, she said, so I moved to the middle and read the tattered safety instructions card. The airline magazine was equally shabby, otherwise all was well in the Sardine Express. Four babies were crying from different parts of the plane, just to make us feel at home. Things had altered since the Glorious Sixties when, loaded with gold for the Jack Leningrad organisation, we had travelled first class.
Getting up to thirty thousand feet, we flew over Birmingham, Peppercorn Cottage, Manchester and the Scottish Highlands. The pilot announced that we would cross the Atlantic along the fifty-eighth parallel, then go over Labrador and Quebec. Every trip I took for Moggerhanger got me thinking that I should make it my last. But a mere hint, and I would have been sent on one in which I was caught and put away for as long as would make no difference to his operations. Once you began working for him, in all stupidity and innocence, you kept on till he in his own pleasure stood you down. I began to wonder whether Bill Straw wasn’t his recruiting agent, who spun his likely tales to get candidates standing in line for a job. No doubt Moggerhanger’s psychologist told him that those couriers who believed in loyalty to friends were not the types to run off with the gold or money they had to carry. Even racketeers had a use for industrial relations experts, and you could always rely on someone like Dr Anderson to sell his advice.
I saw the cauliflower tops of cloud through the window, when the woman leaned forward to take something from her bag. Maybe the psychologist’s mathematical certainties fell to pieces when put to the test by flesh and blood. If every person is different, and they are, he can’t be right about all of us, because what if I went missing in Toronto and started out all over again under a new name, using the money in my bag? Would Moggerhanger send someone to cut Anderson’s throat? Or did Anderson protect himself with a rider at the end of each report saying that his conclusions were not guaranteed and he would not be held responsible if anything went wrong? A man like that was never without a good lawyer, which was a pity, since my possible desertion could not also be used as a way of settling old scores with him.
An indication of my disturbed state of mind was that I hadn’t so far shown an interest in the woman by my side. Perhaps it was because she seemed so ordinary, b
ut a couple of hours on board Air Steerage induced me to take in her short dark hair and pale face, with a skin so translucent I fancied I could see traces of veins underneath. She had a small nose and dimpled chin, and a faint vertical line in the very middle of the lower and slightly protruding lip. I took this in from a few seconds of side view and from what I remembered when she had asked me to change seats, a disturbance which now seemed a waste, because she leaned against the window and was trying to sleep, one arm folded over her head.
Unsatisfied by her position, she woke up, and pouted at the racket of a screaming kid. It began to get dark, settling into a twilight that lasted most of the way over. I offered my hip flask: ‘Travelling’s not what it was.’
She had a few swigs, and I could see it going down, by the movement of her lovely throat. ‘What a wonderful idea, to travel with one of these.’
‘I always have.’ I felt her body touch mine as she settled back into her seat. ‘If I go by train I have a tea-making set. When I’m in the car I have a hamper from Selfridge’s as well as a tent and sleeping bag. I like to get my priorities right.’
‘You must do a lot of travelling.’
I nodded. ‘If I’m not on the move, I’m not living. I can’t stand not getting out of England every month or two. When I’m feeling ready to do myself in I go through what I call lifeboat drill – that is to say, escaping from the country at sensing that people are about to go around hanging such as me from lamp posts. Once, I cycled in a panic to the coast and got on a boat for France. Another time I hitch-hiked to Scotland. Sometimes I drive. Or I may go by air. Or I just pick up a rucksack and walk. Are you on holiday?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s a long journey.’ I passed the flask again – after I’d drunk some. ‘I know how you feel. When I can’t write another word of the book I’m doing I go to the Heathcliffe Hotel in Yorkshire for a week. Or to Moonshine Manor in Cornwall. Either place will unwind me. At the moment I’m off to Toronto for a couple of days. I came on impulse to the airport this morning because I had to get away. I thought I might go to Rome, or Israel. But before I knew what I’d done I’d bought a ticket for Canada. I’ll go to Israel later. How about you?’
‘That was lovely whisky.’
A single drop stained my trousers when I held the flask upside down. ‘Glad you honoured me by enjoying it.’
‘I’ll get some more when the trolley comes.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said earnestly. ‘I do too much drinking alone, and I don’t like it. Night after night I sit with a bottle of the best hooch, staring at my typewriter, the blinds drawn, all lights on, and hearing nothing but the odd car go by. I keep the blinds drawn and lights on during the day as well, I get so glued up and depressed. The only thing I’ve got for company is a dog. I turned him loose this morning, to live on sheep till I get back. Being alone isn’t good for me.’
She smiled. ‘It’s generous of you to share your whisky, all the same.’
‘The most natural thing in the world.’ I touched her warm wrist, though only for a second. ‘I live in Cambridgeshire most of the time. I bought an old railway station ten years ago, and use it as a gentleman’s cottage. It’s very nice in spring.’
‘What do you do?’
I was waiting for that. ‘Do?’
‘For a living.’
I leaned back in my seat, and let ten seconds go by. ‘I’m a writer.’ What else could I say? ‘In other words, a conman of the worst type. I tell stories by lying, and make a living out of it.’
‘That’s a lovely way of putting it. Can I ask you your name?’
‘Michael Cullen.’ I was unable to lie about that one. ‘But I write under several pseudonyms, such as Gilbert Blaskin and Sidney Blood.’ I added the names of a couple of novelists from the north, but she said she hadn’t heard of them, either.
‘It sounds an interesting life. I’m going to Toronto because I’ve just got a divorce, and I’ve got to go somewhere. I have a sister there, so at least there’s somebody.’
The plane grumbled and bumped, and a notice implored us to fasten seatbelts. I stood up to get mine disentangled. ‘It’s always better to move in a crisis.’
‘My crisis is over,’ she said, ‘and I can never have another as bad as that.’
Oh, can’t you? I thought, though I wasn’t ill-mannered enough to say so.
‘It started the day I was married, fifteen years ago. My husband had qualified as an accountant and we were set for a long and happy life. I admit I was uneasy about it, having just left university. But I don’t think I showed it. I was in love, after all. And we know what that means.’
At a particularly big bump, she held my arm. The fact that she was terrified brought out different aspects of my concern. I was happy she was in such a state, yet sad to acknowledge that there was little I could do for her. A baby had been screaming for ten minutes and they could hardly tell the mother to take it outside. Earphones were issued as a last resort and the film began. ‘Do you want to look?’
She shook her head. ‘The trouble was that almost from the day we were married he wanted to leave me, I don’t know why. He didn’t tell me, but I felt it, and I knew I had been right when he eventually did tell me. We were driving around in the New Forest and he lost his way so we had our first big quarrel. Then he came out with it. He said he couldn’t stand me. He wanted to leave me. By now I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay with him, but I hadn’t mentioned it. I told him that if he wanted to leave me he could. If he was unhappy (and he was – I’d never seen anyone so unhappy as he sat numbly over the steering wheel), then he ought to go, as long as he knew that he wanted to. He burst into tears and said that he couldn’t.
‘It was obvious the marriage was a disaster. I didn’t even know whether I loved him anymore, and I had to assume I didn’t, otherwise I would have left him there and then so that he would at least have been happy at not wanting to leave me anymore. You can imagine – you being a writer – what a mess it was. I asked him if he had met anyone else. “No,” he said, “but have you met another man?” “Yes,” I told him, “I have met another man to the one I married, and he’s sitting right by me.”
‘He called me a whore and said how could I be so disloyal to him? I didn’t know which one he meant, and neither did he. He was so shaken that I had to drive home. When he was with me he was never less than insane, but I know for a fact that during this time he worked hard in his profession, and got on in the firm. He also made a lot of money freelancing other people’s accounts. I supposed for a while it was a pity we didn’t have a child, but as things went on without improvement I felt it was for the best. All this time I didn’t have a lover, mostly I suppose because he kept me in that state of hypertension and misery that paralysed me, and which put off any man who came near me. It was the same with him, I’m fairly sure, unless he had a quick screw at one of the office parties at Christmas.’
‘Why didn’t you throw him out?’
‘I should have, I know that now. When I thought about it, things hadn’t been right from the start. He had a sister who hated me, though I think I know why. I went to his house once to call on him before we were married, and he wasn’t in. His sister was upstairs when the bell rang, getting ready to go on holiday to Venice, and because she was neurotic the bell startled her so much that she tripped as she came down the stairs, and broke her ankle. From then on she hated me even more, as you can imagine. I should have taken it as a sign and called the whole thing off but, as I said, I was in love with him.’
‘He sounds like a real vampire.’ Sidney Blood would have been proud of him, I thought. ‘Or maybe he was just waiting for you to throw him out.’
She spoke calmly, as if there was ice in her belly. ‘That’s what I should have done. But I couldn’t. He wanted to go, but couldn’t. Perhaps we were in love with one another. It was hopeless. Maybe love is only complete when it becomes your enemy.’
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ?
??while I write that down. I may use it for one of my books. You don’t mind?’
A faint colour came into her cheeks. ‘Why should I?’
I went to the bar and returned with two half bottles of champagne. Rule number one, as stated in Moggerhanger’s Handbook of Regulations, said that no heavy drinking was to take place, but I decided to ignore it. We chinked plastic glasses.
‘But he did leave,’ she said. ‘Neither of us could stand it any longer. We talked it over for days. It was as if we were both getting ready to go away together. It was crazy. What had driven him mad I still don’t know, but I know that by now I had begun to go the same way. I helped him to pack his suitcases, which he appreciated very much. There was more friendship in the air than I’d ever known. If only we could live like this every day, him always packed and thinking about leaving, maybe life would have been tolerable. We even made love better than for years, on the settee. I couldn’t believe it. Neither could he. But he couldn’t change his mind. As a silly man who had given his word he couldn’t climb out of the ditch he had dug for himself without a nervous breakdown. By now I didn’t want him to change his mind, either. I could take only so much. Maybe he really wanted to stay, but wouldn’t do so unless I crawled and grovelled. There may have been a chance, but I wasn’t strong enough. I was too worn out to take it.
‘Everything’s got to end some time, I thought. During the few years we were together you can imagine how often I was in a bad mood. That meant that we didn’t make love much, because he found it impossible to make love to me when I was in a bad mood. That of course was exactly the time when I wanted him to do it. I would have come out of my bad mood then. But when I was in a bad mood he went into a worse mood, so it was even less possible for him to make love. The only time he could make love was when I was in a good mood, which under the circumstances wasn’t very often since I couldn’t be in a good mood because he was always in a bad mood. And when I did happen to be in a good mood, in spite of everything, I didn’t always want him to make love. Neither did he, as often as not, but when he did I had to let him. Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t. There was endless friction on that front alone.’