Wayland stowed the plastic case of papers into his East German briefcase, while I tried not to show I knew what GTG acronomically signified. Instead of gulping the lees of my pint I ordered a double whisky, meanwhile noticing two bluebottles, who had survived the winter, playing leapfrog on the leaded windows from one square to the next, till one caught the other and they began their business.
Wayland frowned at Margery’s careless mention of the GTGs, so it was futile to act as if I hadn’t heard. “Still hoping to nail the drug smugglers and get a knighthood? You’re wasting your time. You tried the same game a few years ago with Moggerhanger, and it didn’t work. It won’t with the Green Toe Gang, either. I got you out of the drek, remember?”
“It’s only something on my mind,” he said sulkily. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Very hush-hush, is it? You want to sell it to ITV? The Beeb wouldn’t like such an underhand move.” I turned to Margery: “Can I get you a drink, love?”
“I’ll have a Cointreau.” She lit a cigarette. A youngish bloke with a General Custer hair-do came in, who I recognised as the man I’d given a quid to outside Selfridge’s a month ago. “Spare a copper for a pint?” he said to Wayland.
I knew he’d get no change there, and he didn’t, Wayland looking on him as a failure of the capitalist system who should be out on the streets throwing Molotov cocktails so that nice middle-class people like Wayland could watch it on television. I gave him something, and so did Margery, but a man further along the bar lifted a fist and told him, in unnecessarily strong language, to fuck off. The landlord’s features turned peevish at him going out to the next pub instead of staying to spend some of what he’d begged in his.
“Another of Thatcher’s dropouts,” Wayland said.
“I suppose you think he should be put to work making motorways in the Highlands?”
“Something like that.”
“When did you last wield a shovel?”
“What do you two have against each other?” Margery said.
I made the order. “Not a thing. I very much admire Wayland’s investigative journalism. He should just leave the drugs trade alone.”
“Someone has to do it,” she said.
Perhaps it would be best to encourage their pursuit of the Green Toe Gang, which would leave me a free hand to nobble Moggerhanger. In any case, I had no reason to involve myself with the GTGs. Let Wayland and Margery do it, though their plaguy incompetence could land them in an adder’s nest of such danger that after getting cut up for their trouble the morticians would have difficulty fitting the bits together. I had no wish to see Margery with a beard.
“Such opinions from you,” Wayland piped up smugly, “convince me that we should continue to do precisely what we’re doing.”
“All right,” I said, “but the Green Toe Gang don’t mess about. Do a programme on unmarried teenaged mothers in south London. Or investigate Islington Borough Council. You’ll only get knee-capped there, and that’s not so bad, though you’d look a right pair on crutches.”
“Tell the GTGs that. They’ll love you.” Wayland waved Margery’s cigarette wisp away: he’d given up his Stalin pipe on realising that King Arthur hadn’t smoked. “It’s too interesting to let go of.”
“Moggerhanger might deal with you marginally better,” I said, “if he caught you at something like that, because his outfit’s British to the core. But there’s a foreign element in the Green Toe Gang—which is the way things are going these days—and if you fall into their hands, God help you.”
He leaned close, a triumphant smirk. “What if I were to tell you I’d heard about a merger between Moggerhanger and the GTGs?”
“I wouldn’t believe it.”
“You may not even consider it worth thinking about, but I shan’t rest easy till Oscar Cross is behind bars.”
“And you know what would happen then? One morning at five o’clock the police would smash your front door down and find a kilo of cocaine in the line of Matrioshka dolls along your chest of drawers in the bedroom. You would have been well and truly framed, and telling it to the beak would do you no good. You’d then find yourself in the same cell as Oscar Cross, or a couple of his associates. They wouldn’t top you. Oh no”—I tried to sound like a lifetime jailbird in the know, “they’d let you live, day by day, with all the aggro they could invent. And as soon as you got out they’d move in for the kill.”
Wayland put on a show of not being afraid. In any case he was the type who’d like to see everybody behind bars except himself, loudspeakers in the cells impossible to turn off day or night, his voice on a circular tape shouting the benefits of Marxist-Leninist misery.
“All I’m trying to do,” I said, “is keep both of you from harm. If Oscar Cross or Moggerhanger are going to get caught let the police do it, and if you’ve got any information they don’t have you should give it to them like responsible citizens. Otherwise, stay clear.”
He looked glumly into the remains of his soapsuds, then his piggy little eyes glinted through the mists of middle-aged deliquescence at me, and I thought that if a puritanical vegetarian non-smoker like him got into a future Labour Government he would have an Institute of Political Correctness going within a week. “We don’t have anything concrete,” he said. “It’s still speculation, at the moment.”
“Keep it that way. Do something else. Write a novel, like Gilbert Blaskin. It keeps him out of mischief, most of the time.” I turned to Margery. “Another, love?”
She smiled at the mention of Blaskin. “How is the old roué?”
Her affair with him had long ago ended, so I could say: “When I left his place an hour ago he was doing something unspeakable to a young woman thesis writer on his casting couch, at the same time complaining that the life of a novelist was absolute agony. His hands started to go up her skirt, and her bulging eyes looked like those of a rabbit about to be eaten by a python at the zoo, so it was obviously the time for me to leave. The last thing I heard at the door was him saying: ‘I don’t have much to do with any woman now, my dear, unless it’s a case of instantaneous unadulterated and perfervid passion, against which no man can be expected to stand.’ They must be belting the arses off each other by now.”
“I find that utterly disgusting,” Wayland said, but I caught the flavour of envy, suggesting that he might be redeemable after all, at least in the next life. At the moment though he didn’t like me coming out with such patter in front of his Lady Guinevere, not daring to say so because he could see she enjoyed it.
Her lips moved more from regret that Blaskin wasn’t humping her than out of jealousy. She blushed under her make-up, and laughed. “He certainly has a way with words.”
“He most surely does. I further heard him schmooze while still at the door: ‘How can a specimen of beauty and honour like you have any truck with a moral delinquent like me? Life is a trilogy—but don’t write this down yet—of childhood, boyhood and youth, except that my youth is lasting till death, my delectable darling.’”
Margery drained her Cointreau. “And then?”
Getting a hard-on at my erotic ruminations, I had no option but to go on. “He was leaving no stone unturned to make sure of her. As I finally left he was lifting off her little lacy bra. She didn’t seem to mind a bit.”
“He never changes.”
“Where would the world be if he did?”
“But is he working on anything?”
“Apart from that girl, he’s writing—or so he told me—a novel to end novels, though I can’t think it will be his last. He told me last week that a book called Ulysses, which I don’t know anything about because I’ve never read it, has led a lot of writers of the 20th century being lured into a cul de sac, and it’s his duty to turn out a novel that would get them out. He was pissed out of his ribald mind, so I can’t vouch that he’ll ever do it.”
She
showed almost as much interest in that as my sex talk. “It sounds a fascinating idea. I’ll phone and see if he’ll give me an interview. I’m sure I could get it on the air—if we edit it for swearing.”
“He’d love to see you,” I said, enjoying Wayland’s look of horror at the possibility of losing his girlfriend to a lecher like Blaskin. If I couldn’t have her I was more than happy for him to ply his randy old corkscrew, as I’m sure she was. On the other hand maybe Wayland felt easier on leaving me with Margery now that I had made Blaskin the villain. “I must get back to the office,” he said, neglecting to thank me for the beer, not that I expected it, having set it before him only to make his ulcers jump.
“You going back to Richmond?” I said to her, moving close now that the field was clear.
“I shall be, later.”
“There’s something I couldn’t tell you in front of Wayland.” I kissed her cheek. “It would have been inappropriate.”
“So I imagine. But what is it?”
“I’ve fallen in love. No, don’t say anything. Not yet. It’s those expressive eyes, and your subtle inviting lips. The combination goes straight to my heart, and touches something I never knew was there. So is it any surprise, feeling the way I do?”
She straightened herself. “You’re too bloody articulate for my liking. You’re worse than Gilbert.”
“Don’t say that. More often than not I’m painfully tongue tied, though I can prove my devotion if we go back to Richmond.” Such talk showed me her half-naked body with legs spread, and I was disappointed on hearing: “I work too hard to have random affairs.”
“So do I, but I’d willingly sacrifice my time in such a cause,” I said, in her ear at a couple of men trying to get my drift. For a moment I saw her fighting to change her mind, but I had realised by now that you can’t win ’em all, and in any case didn’t fancy going out as far as Eel Pie Island, so wasn’t let down when she said: “Thanks for the offer, Michael. I appreciate it at my age. But no.”
“There’s just one thing,” I told her. “Just forget Moggerhanger and the Green Toe Gang. Or let Wayland go it alone. I love you too much to see your agreeable features not looking as pleasant as I always find them.”
At Liverpool Street Station I looked around for Bill Straw, but his begging site was taken by a bearded young man and his dog. I supposed Bill had found a better pitch, so threw the dog a quid and, buying an Evening Standard, went back into the Underground, my intention of going to Upper Mayhem scattered in the wind by pangs of guilt towards Frances.
I took a train west, on my feet all the way. Between the morning and evening rush hour there used to be plenty of seats, but not anymore, and I wondered where all the people came from, and whether the government wasn’t cooking the population figures, lying as usual about everything.
I got into the house with keys Frances thought I’d thrown on the table in anger two weeks ago. To pass the time I searched her private drawers, for letters from boyfriends, or a running-away fund of stashed banknotes, knowing I wouldn’t find anything because she lived for work that was too exhausting to allow any hanky-panky.
At the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, I heard the car, so put the kettle back on before she came through the door. My name was uttered with just the right tone of enthusiasm: “How did you get in?”
“You left the window open, in your hurry to go out mending ’em and bandaging ’em. Join me in some coffee. I’ll take it to the living room.”
I put hers into a cup and saucer instead of the usual Coronation mug and, as she sat down, the bun of auburn hair, like a new baked farmhouse loaf, started to slip a bit. Her normally pale face, skin that anyone would call fine, was even more pallid from overwork, worrying that one of her patients might be saving up drugs to kill himself. Young as she was, lines were starting to show at the mouth and forehead. She cleaned her small gold-rimmed glasses. “Why didn’t I hear from you?”
“Didn’t you get my postcard? I sent it airmail.”
“Only this morning. It’s on the shelf in the surgery. I enjoyed looking at it between patients. But you could have phoned me.”
I sounded a fool. “The job was top secret.”
“You’ve gone to pieces since leaving the agency. Geoffrey said you would.” She was weeping. “And I always thought you were so strong.”
She was trying to stop smoking, but when I gave her a cigarette she puffed at it, and seemed more relaxed. “Geoffrey was glad to get rid of me,” I told her, “and so were the others. As for me, my spirit at the agency was dying because of the false life I was leading. The work was killing me. I lied that I was enjoying it to camouflage the truth that I was going out of my mind.” The only way to stop her tears was to tell the story of my trip to Greece which, being from my experience and not my damaging imagination, was long enough for them to dry. I took my time, and put on a good performance, up to Moggerhanger handing me the cheque. “You can have a couple of thousand towards the mortgage.”
“I don’t want it.”
I wrote it, all the same, but she leaned the slip of paper against my empty mug. “You’ll need whatever money you have for yourself.”
She was right. I most likely would. As well as earning a fair amount as a doctor she had inherited money, something I hadn’t known when we met, and I had never asked how much. Taking up with a woman who has her own money is an added bonus, but in any case I’d chipped in plenty from my salary towards the house, so I put it in my pocket.
She held my hands. “Your story was a good one, but I’ve heard so many in the last three years that I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
I was struck to the core by this lack of trust. “Even if I tried to tell you about the mechanics of lying you’d accuse me of making it up for my own advantage. I never lie as a cover for any nefarious activities. You know very well I’ve had no affairs since the day we met.”
Which was true, up to the time of going to Greece, though with so many freedom loving women about I had often thought of it.
“I still love you, and you alone, and always shall,” I said, refilling her cup. “Telling lies is only the way to find out the truth about anything. If I concoct fantastic rigmaroles to entertain you it’s only because your life is taken up by the unremitting work of caring for old crocks, when you’re too tired to go to the cinema or theatre. Many a time when we were in bed I’ve told you I’d spent a couple of hours with my mistress, and given you such an explicit account you melted in my arms and asked me to do the same to you as I’d done to her. We both knew it was all lies, but you can’t deny it led to a session we both enjoyed. Everything concerning my trip to Greece is true, except for the bits I put in about my seductions, to spice up matters for your amusement, which I’ll elaborate on in bed later, after I’ve made a spaghetti supper, to be drunk with a bottle of that Bordeaux I laid down last year. While I’m in the kitchen preparing our love feast I want you to be upstairs getting some well-earned sleep. I can’t say fairer than that, can I, my ever enduring love?”
If you can’t make your wife feel good how can you do the same for anybody else, or even for yourself? She stood up to do as she was told, which I had learned no lady-doctor could resist. “Michael, you’re wonderful. I’m sorry I get on at you.”
A dose of homeopathic nagging was only a backhanded form of love, and I didn’t mind, as long as it showed itself in some way. We kissed affectionately. “Come down for cocktails and canapés in an hour. I’ll light the candles on the dining room table, and try not to burn my fingers.”
I did all I said, and she appeared for dinner wearing an amazing silk ball dress, taken from her mother’s wardrobe after she had died, which gave her the stance and figure of a queen. The rest had put a glow back into her face, and though I’d been as busy as all get out trying to make amends for my neglect of her, the kitchen was like a culinary battlefield—yet I mustered enoug
h energy to suggest I’d been playing darts in the office all day. I was formally enough dressed from my kit over the garage, though I had changed my tie.
Naked in my arms that night she said: “I don’t want you to go away, but if you must I’ll understand, and not worry. Just let me know you’re safe every few days.”
On my progress from one place of refuge to another, taking evasive action against anyone after my guts, I would be careful to tell her where I was heading next, knowing I would be all right, and though optimism may tarmac the highway to hell—or a worse locality—I’d enjoy all merry facilities on the way. “I agree to call you more than every few days, if I can manage it, but if you don’t hear from me for a while you have Moggerhanger’s phone number, and can leave a message. He’ll know how to get in touch.”
“I know you can take care of yourself.”
“I promise. So let’s stay in bed for the next few days.”
“It would be heaven, but one of the other doctors is at a conference in Australia, and I’m needed to hold the fort. I love you for suggesting it, though.”
The poor overworked medical drudge set the alarm for half past seven, while I stroked the hair from across her face saying: “I’ll think of you every minute I’m away.”
“And I’ll think of you, my love.” Then she went straight off to sleep.
On opening my eyes in the morning I found a scrawled note by the bed: “Love you, Michael. Do take care, for my sake, and come back soon,” which I kissed and put into my pocket, not allowing the anguish to take me over.
I sat a long time over breakfast, since I’d cooked it myself, which gave the opportunity to consider the way my life was going, and ponder on what future there could possibly be for such as me. But I didn’t think about it for too long, because at my age only those who have no money go into the black hole of self-examination.