We trotted up the road, glad so many people were about. They always came out when the rain stopped. ‘Where did you get this umbrella, did you say?’ he panted.
‘I told you. I found it.’
‘It must be poisoned.’
We darted across Cambridge Circus, then doubled back towards Long Acre. ‘I didn’t know. But don’t throw it away. It might come in handy. And keep it away from me. My ankles ache already, it’s so close.’
The Hair of the Dog, like auntie’s parlour, was tarted up rather than down. The flock wallpaper was deep crimson and reeked of Jamaican rum. The corner of a condom packet showed from under the pseudo-Axminster carpet. I’d have known one anywhere. I looked around the walls at the plastic gold-leafed light-brackets for a sign of the condom itself. There was a framed picture of a child with big tears in its eyes, the sort that should have a microphone behind it. ‘Why did we come here? Isn’t it one of Moggerhanger’s clubs?’
He looked as if the question was unnecessary. ‘What I don’t like about you,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry to say there are some things I positively abhor, if you’ll forgive my strong language, is that you are so simple, so, in other words, fucking crude. It’s not even as if you’re trying to hide something. There’s virtue in concealment, when it’s necessary, and even when it’s not, providing you know what you’re doing. But to show yourself as simple when you really are simple is inexcusable. The first sign of leaving it behind would be for you to know that you are simple and, being ashamed of it, learn how to keep your soupbox shut.’ He leaned forward and held my hand. ‘Do me a favour and make a beginning, there’s a good lad. Then we might not only get somewhere, but reach wherever it is we’re going in one piece. Are you getting my drift?’
I now knew beyond doubt that the story he had spun was as false and fantastic as he was. Behind his deviousness there was just a great blank sea – but one in which I might well sink without trace. He was working for someone, either Moggerhanger or the Green Toe Gang or both, and he had been asked to recruit me for some project that needed the skill, expertise (or perhaps just plain simplicity), that I was supposed to have. I didn’t like it at all, if only because the pay wouldn’t be good enough. Yet I had passed the test of loyalty and, in my determination to prove that I was nowhere as simple as I looked, I used the excuse of curiosity rather than loyalty to stay on and find out what it was all about. ‘You’re just a funny old windbag. Just tell me why you really got me out of my railway station.’
If I didn’t like him it was only because he couldn’t be straight with me, not through any moral fault or basic unfriendliness either on his part or on mine. On the other hand I did like him. I liked him very much. His thin jaws had flesh on them compared to a few years ago, but you could still see where the lines had been. The mark of hard times that had raddled his face for the first twenty-five years was sufficiently padded to give it a look of nonchalant ruthlessness, and that was what I didn’t like.
‘You’re a bit of a chump, Michael.’ Judging by his smile, if the room had been above ground, and had a window or two, the sun would have shone on his face. ‘Untrustworthiness never got anybody anywhere.’
‘Let’s call it caution,’ I said. Never trust anybody, was what I had believed all my life, though for reasons I could never understand it hadn’t stopped me trusting more people than was good for me.
‘That’s different. If I thought you weren’t cautious I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I? Now me, I’m cautious. But I’m also careful. I think on two levels. All the time I’ve been talking to you I’ve been thinking. Do you know anybody else who can think and talk at the same time? About different things, I mean?’
‘Only an old school pal called Alfie Bottesford, and he went mad.’
He looked as if he’d like to kill me. If we’d been on a desert road fifty miles from anywhere, and he’d had a gun but I hadn’t, he might have considered it. I told him.
‘Too fucking right.’ He patted my hand amiably. ‘But seriously, Michael, let’s make a plan of campaign.’ After five minutes’ silence he asked ruefully: ‘Where shall I hide? That’s all I want to know.’
I told him, quick as a flash of lightning at a garden party. My best thoughts always came without thought. ‘We’ll get a taxi to my father’s flat in Knightsbridge. I can’t think of a better place for you to hole up in for a while.’
‘Not so loud. Even walls have ears.’
‘Not this one. It’s crawling with bugs.’
He snatched his hand away, as one bit the end of his finger. ‘Bloody hell, so it is.’
‘We’ll hide you in Blaskin’s flat, just behind Harrods. Very good for shopping. Their Chelsea buns are second to none. Not to mention the sausages. You can even buy a dressing gown if you want to go for a walk.’
He was impatient. ‘Will your old man mind?’
‘If he does though, you’re made. He’s an eminent novelist.’
‘I know. I’ve met him, though I don’t suppose he’ll remember the occasion. It was in the railway station at Upper Mayhem the first time he came to see you there. He nearly went mad with pleasure when he climbed the iron ladder to get at the railway signal. He set it to derail the London express because he thought his publisher was on it, then burst into tears when you told him the line had been closed two years. I’ve never heard such language about poor old Beeching. It was all your fault though that he was so upset. I don’t think I’ve known anybody as callous as you. The things you’ve done.’
‘He wasn’t upset. He’s a novelist, don’t forget. He was just dying with chagrin, but he wasn’t by any means upset. If he got upset he wouldn’t be able to describe the situation in a novel. He’s far too canny to get so upset that he couldn’t write about it.’
Bill looked worried. ‘I hope he doesn’t write about me if he catches me hiding in his flat.’
I squashed a bug on the table. Bill dropped one in his vodka and it died immediately. ‘He may write about the situation in ten years. But he won’t know you’re there. He’s got the top flat these days, and there’s an attic he never goes to. With a bed and a pisspot, you can hide there for as long as you like.’
He gripped my elbow as though to break it. ‘Michael, I know that some poor Jews had to hide like that in the war from the Germans, but I couldn’t take it.’ He pointed to his temple. ‘I’ve seen that house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank lived. I’m not that strong. I’d go ga-ga after half an hour.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Die. I suppose I’ll be sorry if you do, but I’ll have done my best, so you won’t be on my conscience when I read about them fishing ossobuco from Battersea pond, Peking duck from Putney Reach, and searching vainly for the plain roast beef.’ I stood up to go. ‘I know Blaskin’s loft isn’t Claridge’s, but at least it’s central and you can almost stand up in it. Try it for a few days. What have you got to lose?’
I was bored with the situation and wanted to get back to Upper Mayhem to see if there was any sign of Bridgitte and the children. I was missing my pall of misery, because I thought, in my superstitious fashion, that being steeped in agony for lack of her might bring her back quicker than if I stayed to have a good time in Soho.
He squashed another bug, then pulled me back into my chair. ‘All right. I’ll do it. And I appreciate it. But I’ve got a request to make, and I hope you’ll say yes.’
‘The answer’s no.’
‘You haven’t heard it yet.’
‘You’ve got several score of the most ruthless mobsters in London after you, and you’re making conditions.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m finding you a job. I heard a couple of blokes say yesterday that Moggerhanger wanted another chauffeur. Why don’t you apply for the post? He’s good to his employees. You worked for him before, didn’t you? No, don’t take it like that. Sit down, old son.’
I did, before I fell. ‘That was ten years ago, and I ended up in prison.’
‘Didn’t we all? You got mixed
up with Jack Leningrad. And you shagged Moggerhanger’s daughter. I don’t know which was worse in his eyes. But Polly’s married now, and Jack Leningrad’s moved to Lichtenstein.’
My head spun, yet I was tempted to work again for Moggerhanger because I would get behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce. Secondly, I would earn some money, and thirdly, I might have another go at Polly, married or not.
‘What’s in it for you?’
‘The reason is,’ he said, ‘that if you’re working for Moggerhanger – who as well as the Green Toe Gang is after my guts – you might pick up bits of information as to whether or not he’s on my trail. I’ll have a friend in the enemy camp, and feel safer with my own intelligence and security system.’
I was silent for a while. So was he. I didn’t mind thinking myself at the turning-point of a long life, because I sometimes imagined it as much as twenty times a day, but what sent shivers up my backbone was to have Bill think it as well. I was horrified at having no say in whether things happened to me or not, so gave him my view on the matter as gently as I could. ‘Drop dead. Get cut to bits. Count me out.’
‘I can’t fathom it,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘Here I am, telling you that if I’m alive six weeks from now I promise on the sacred memory of my dead mother to share with you – and to share equally – the hundred thousand pounds I’ve got stashed away. If that’s not making it worth your while, nothing is. I know loyalty and friendship are precious commodities, Michael, but even they should have a price. I’m nothing if not realistic and generous.’
I was as greedy as the next man, and thought of all I could do with fifty thousand pounds. Corn in Egypt and the Promised Land rolled into one. I would turn the railway station into a fitted carpet palace. I’d repave the platforms, repair the footbridge, lay ornamental gardens on my stretch of line, as well as put in a new stove for Bridgitte and buy her a vacuum cleaner. I’d also give a flashing-light chess set to Smog, and if he failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge I’d buy him a degree from an American university, so that if he wanted a job he could become a secret member of the communist party and join the Foreign Office. Then, in our old age, after he’d become a colonel in the Red Army, we could spend our holidays in his nice cosy flat in Samarkand – or even Moscow, in the summer. Oh, the best laid plans of mice and men.
He grinned. ‘Is it on?’
‘You superannuated clapped-out Sherwood Forester,’ I said, ‘I suppose so.’
‘You leave my old regiment alone. Sometimes I quite like your gift of the gab, but not when you insult the Sherwood Foresters. Best regiment in the British Army. We had four battalions wiped out on the Somme, and God knows how many in the last lot.’
I apologised. What else could I do? ‘I don’t stand a chance of getting a job with Moggerhanger.’
‘Who knows? He’s allus got a soft spot for a reformed rake. Nothing’s guaranteed in this life, but you might just land it. You allus was game, I will say that for you. You don’t get anything in this life unless you try.’
I was irritated by him. ‘I’ll just be able to stand you for as long as it takes to install you at my old man’s flat. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Don’t forget your umbrella,’ he said when we were halfway up the stairs, and daylight struck my eyes like ball-bearings from a catapult. ‘It might start raining.’
Four
The first new thing I saw while snooping around Gilbert’s study – as he called it: he’d never studied anything in his life, except women – was a large coloured chart on the wall above his typewriter, showing the ages at which every well-known home, foreign and colonial novelist had died. His own name had a question mark by the side in brackets, at which I didn’t know whether to laugh, or dab my eyes with his clean white blotting paper. He might be nudging sixty, but I didn’t realise he was afraid to die.
The sheet in the typewriter seemed to be page one of a novel called The Hijacked Vampire. Below the line saying Chapter Three he had written:
The privilege of learning from experience is only given to those who survive it. Many do survive, yet it is both pitiful and amazing to discover the numbers who do not, especially when one tries to imagine those people as individuals. Each life starts innocently enough, grows side by side with its dreams, and ends with its limbs broken amid pints of blood.
I crossed out ‘pints’ and wrote ‘litres’.
If we could profit from the experience of death, would we go more readily to die?
Such drivel went on for a few more lines, ending in a paragraph of exes. Maybe he was halfway human after all.
Bill lay on the settee in the living-room, smoking one of Blaskin’s cigars and tippling a glass of Glenfiddich whisky. ‘Can you get me something to eat, Michael?’
There was no reason to lose my temper at this late stage, but maybe the Age Chart on the study wall had depressed even me. ‘If he comes in and finds you in that condition, with delirium tremens and lung cancer, he’ll slit your throat and tip you out of the window just as efficiently as a member of the Green Toe Gang or Moggerhanger’s Angels. So let me show you to your six-week hideaway, then I can clear out. He won’t be happy at finding me here, either.’
An old-fashioned antique gramophone with an enormous tin horn stood on one of the tables. In a cabinet behind was a lavish (locked) display of netsuke, such art and handiwork as I had only seen in museums. Some lovely old oil paintings of sailing ships and rustic scenes decorated the walls – as well as a portrait of Blaskin as a five-year-old, hardly recognisable except for the unmistakable signs of vice and wilfulness in that lovely face. I wondered how safe these treasures would be with a born marauder like Bill eating his heart out upstairs.
He swallowed the whisky and stood up, an athletic leap showing how fit he was. But there was panic in his eyes and voice. ‘What am I going to do while I’m up there?’
‘I’ll schlep down to World’s End and find you a harp.’
‘I must have provisions, or I’ll starve. You can last only so long trapping pigeons. And I’ll tell you one thing, Michael, they don’t taste very nice with all that petrol and grit inside ’em. I tried it once.’
I took a bottle of wine, a loaf, a German sausage and a jar of olives from the larder. He put them in his pockets. ‘What a friend you are.’ He was almost crying. ‘I’ll never forget you. A real friend.’
Maybe he hadn’t invented the tale of his trip to Switzerland after all. He was too sentimental to be imaginative. Proper lies were beyond him. If they weren’t, he’d be far too dangerous to himself. As it was, he was only a threat to others, me in particular. I had to help him for two good reasons: friendship and money, a combination impossible to deny, so I led him to the box-room at the end of the corridor. A bare light bulb illuminated water and wastepipes and old picture frames leaning against a pile of steamer trunks. A ladder with the first rung broken led up to a trapdoor – square in the middle of a map of water stains. He hung back. ‘I’m not going up there.’
‘Yes you are. Just imagine you’re in prison and the lads have selected you as a volunteer to do a roof protest. Only don’t start chucking slates on people going into Harrods. They might not like it.’
He relaxed. ‘I’ll never know why I let you twist me round your little finger. But before I go up, just nip back for a couple of candles or an oil lamp, will you? I draw the line at living in the dark.’
As I was opening kitchen drawers he shouted: ‘And a blanket, while you’re at it. And some more of them delicious Havanas. Oh, and a bottle of whisky and a few pats of best butter. And two pounds of sugar to put on my bread.’
Needless to say, I got him nothing except the candles and a blanket. We went up into the roof. ‘You didn’t happen to see a camp bed down there, by any chance?’ he said.
The tank was part of the hot water system, so at least he wouldn’t freeze to death. The roof arched above the whole flat, huge beams curving to an apex in a sort of cathedral for dwarfs. ‘You can paint The Las
t Supper on the end walls.’
‘I would if I could eat it,’ he answered morosely, clasping my hands. ‘You will come up and see me, won’t you? And let me know how you get on with Lord Moggerhanger. I take a friendly interest in your career, Michael, you know that. I feel a bit like your elder brother.’
Only my head was visible above the floorboards. ‘Stop it, or you’ll make me swear. I’ll come and see you as often as I can.’
Or as often as I dare, I thought, treading carefully down the ladder and hoping he wouldn’t make any noises that would lead to his discovery.
I sipped whisky and smoked a fag in the living room to think things over, wondering if I shouldn’t phone the police, or Moggerhanger, or the Green Toe Gang, or all of them together, and tell them where Bill Straw was hiding and then get quickly back to Upper Mayhem before the cyclone struck. The police were just as interested in putting the fetters on Bill as was the underworld, though I supposed he was right to go more in fear of the latter, since legal capital punishment had ended years ago. If I did send out a general call to all interested parties even Blaskin might get winged in the crossfire for harbouring a man on the run, though it was futile trying to damage him because he’d only use the inconvenience as material for his writing, and end up richer than before.
I only mulled on the options of treachery so that I would never act on any of them. Then I wondered whether I should apply for the chauffeur’s job with Moggerhanger. A spot of work would take my mind off Bridgitte which, after all, would be better than wallowing in misery at home. London always put me in a free and easy mood. With the naïvety of a newborn babe I thought that at this stage of my life I had nothing to lose, no matter what I did. The catch of the door sounded, and my father came in, singing a little ditty to himself:
‘I knew a man who couldn’t write
He sat up brooding half the night
Not because he couldn’t write
But because his shoe was tight, tight, tight!’