I nearly opened the door and jumped out. ‘Sister?’
‘Gertrude Blaskin. She’s the matron of a hospital. I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her. She’s six foot, give or take an inch. I saw her arguing with Gilbert on the pavement once outside the National Gallery and she hit him with her umbrella, but Mr Blaskin grabbed hold of her and gave her a terrible blow at the back of the neck, then pushed her into my taxi as I drew up. What a family. I thought mine was bad enough.’
‘Are you sure he’s got a brother and sister?’
‘Certain. But they don’t see much of each other, and I can understand why. There’s no doubt about the relationship – they hate each other enough.’
I was appalled at the thought of such an aunt and uncle, but had no time to ruminate on the fact because at seven twenty-nine we pulled up by Covent Garden station. Being thirty seconds too early, neither Ettie nor Phyllis were there. I paced up and down. Things had been so hectic at Blaskin’s party that I’d only had two champagnes, and my mouth was as dry as a tinderbox. A smell of beer wafted up the street, and I was pondering on the delights of a quick quart when I saw Phyllis coming through the crowds. ‘Where’s Ettie?’ I gave her a kiss on her lovely red lips.
‘She had a headache, so I sent her home.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘She’s staying in my flat, till she can find a room. Anyway, she’ll get Huz and Buz to bed, and meet us at Raddisher’s in half an hour.’
The names rang two bells. ‘Huz and Buz?’
‘Bloody hell-raisers, but she knows how to keep them under. She’s a proper little madame, Ettie is, when she sets her mind to it. Which way shall we go?’
‘Hungry?’
She nodded.
‘Famished?’
‘I’m starving.’
We walked to Raddisher’s. I didn’t know what to say, still jangled by the taxi driver’s revelations, and in any case we couldn’t stay side by side because of the crowds.
Across Charing Cross Road I took her arm. ‘I think I’ve heard of Huz and Buz before.’
‘They’re in the Bible,’ she said.
‘I mean – as living breathing people.’
I had phoned for a table at Raddisher’s from Blaskin’s, and we sat upstairs by a window. ‘I thought you said you owned the place.’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said. ‘I come here so often it feels like it.’
‘I’ve only known another liar like you.’
‘What was his name?’
‘I forget.’ The waitress took her tatty-looking coat with its rat-fur collar, and I wondered what I was doing with her when I’d seen such gorgeously turned out women at Blaskin’s party. If my mother’s Nottingham-style slanging match hadn’t driven me away I might have gone home with Polly Moggerhanger.
Yet after a while, sitting opposite Phyllis at our small oblong table, looking at her lively dark eyes and cynically smiling mouth and high flushed cheekbones and little flattened nose, and her attractive bust sheathed in a white satin blouse from Littlewood’s with an emerald Woolworth’s plastic brooch holding it together, I changed my mind. ‘You’re lovely. I’m glad you came alone. You know how I feel about you. Ever since I first saw you I’ve been in a fever of sexual excitement waiting to set eyes on you again. It was a wonder I didn’t lay hands on myself.’
‘I was looking forward to it as well.’ We reached for each other’s hands over the table, stopped from going any further by the waitress asking if we would like to order.
‘I’ll have the wine first, White Bordeaux. Then Newcastle Pope – or Pope’s Newcastle – or Châteauneuf du Pape – a bottle of Jolly Red.’
‘What are you on about?’ Her annoyance at my rigmarole looked like getting out of hand. Ettie came just in time, flushed and fair, her small face slightly worried in case she had missed something.
Phyllis ordered smoked salmon and tournedos steak, as if I was made of money, and Ettie followed her example, both of them wanting to throw off the demoralisation of the meatless place they worked at. I didn’t mind, because Phyllis was worth spending all I had on, the sort of woman whose halfway good looks and exuberant spendthrift spirit would make any man feel cock of the walk. When we chinked glasses and began the meal she said: ‘Well then, what do you do for a living?’
‘I’m an estate agent, in Nottingham. I’m down here for a week, visiting friends.’
Ettie cut her smoked salmon into little squares, while Phyllis rolled hers up like a carpet and slid it in at one go. ‘What do estate agents do?’
‘A good question. Me, I’m the cat minder.’
‘Cat minder?’
‘It’s a vital part of our organisation.’ My seriousness convinced her. ‘Often when we show people around a flat or house they complain that a room isn’t big enough to swing a cat in, so we decided to keep a few cats to prove that a room was – or was not, indeed – big enough to swing a cat in. We keep four, as a matter of fact. After that, most other estate agents copied us, and also kept cats.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Haven’t you noticed, when you go into an estate agent’s office, a distinct reek of cats? It’s not unpleasant, because they’re very well housed. My job is to feed them, clean out their boxes and keep the log up to date.’
Phyllis finished off the buttered brown bread. ‘Log?’
I poured more wine. They knew how to knock it back. ‘A cat-log, in which is recorded the date, time, place and results of whenever the cat is taken out to be swung in a room to see how big it is.’
Ettie pressed her hands together. ‘Isn’t it cruel?’
‘Well, no, not on a strict rota basis it isn’t. And they’re used to it. It’s their life. They like the outings and look forward to the excitement. They only get used every two or three days. Not all clients argue about the size of a room, in any case. But if one expresses any doubt, or if we anticipate an argument we put the duty cat into the box and take him along. They’re very intelligent. If the room’s not big enough to swing a cat in, they’re wonderful at missing the walls and avoiding bits of fireplace. They set up a meeow like a radar set to indicate that the room’s too small, and then it goes back in the box. Once, though, when I was coming through the fishmarket old Whiskers got out. He leapt out of the bag, you might say. As to how I eventually got him back, that’s a story for another day. I might tell it when the steak arrives.’
We finished the white, and the red came. ‘Enjoying it?’
‘Marvellous.’
Ettie’s mouth was too full to speak, so she nodded. They half believed my cat nonsense, and if Phyllis didn’t I could tell she liked me for taking the trouble to spin it. I half regretted not having worked such an idea into Blaskin’s shit-novel, but you can’t think of everything. The food and wine put some colour into Phyllis, and I stroked her cheek with my middle left finger. ‘You’re the most splendid person I’ve ever met.’
It was obvious she had never been called splendid before, because her eyelashes went like butterfly wings. ‘I have a remote and charming little place called Peppercorn Cottage. One day we’ll go there, you, me, Ettie as well as Huz and Buz. It’s the most peaceful house you can imagine. How much longer are you both going to work at the Groundnut Café?’
‘I’ve got to earn my living,’ Ettie said.
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.