Moggerhanger

  “Then piss off.”

  “Nothing personal, though, when I say that.” He took a swill of the tea. “Could you lend me ten quid before you go to sleep? Then I can go to the local boozer for a couple of quarts and a cheese cob.”

  “Sure I will. I’ll let you have a tenner, no strings attached, if you get a brush and a tin of paint from the cupboard down there by the sink, and paint the fence along the front of the garden.”

  “Work?” He stood at the noise of his own shriek, the tea mug still in his hand. “Are you really suggesting that I work? That’s not fair. I make a perfectly reasonable request, as an honoured guest, for a loan, and you tell me to go outside and do some work. It’s taking an unfair advantage. Even supposing I wanted to work, which I never would, think of my mother turning in her grave at the sight of me doing it. She was the best mother anybody ever had. She was fiercely supportive, and never let me do a stroke. If I had some money to go to the pub though, I could drink to her memory, couldn’t I? Can there be a greater sign of devotion from a son than that? I ask you, work! I was her only son, and she worshipped the ground I stood on. I’ll never forget the time when a young scrubber came to the door and said I’d got her pregnant. I was hiding behind the sofa in the parlour, while my mother called her a filthy young trollop and smacked her across the chops. Oh, she sent her away crying right enough! That’s loyalty for you. We were a close knit working class family we were.”

  In spite of such heart rending affection for his mother, who I hoped was dead, and if she wasn’t in hell she ought to be for producing Ronald Delphick, there were two phrases I’d come to abominate, which were ‘working class’ and ‘close knit’. Delphick used them all the time, I was sure, at gigs, to awe the audience and confirm his authenticity as a son of the soil. I recalled one of his phony poems which began: ‘I’m the salt of the earth that gave me birth, through toil and grit in factory and pit’.

  “I might have mentioned this before,” I said, “but if any two definitions are calculated to drive me into paroxysms of antipathy”—I laid it on with a trowel—“they’re ‘working class’, and ‘close knit’. You should be ashamed to pull rank like that.”

  “You think there’s no class feeling left in England, do you?” he ranted.

  “If there is I scraped all that shit off my shoulders decades ago. I grew up as a latch-key kid in a one-parent family, in a very respectable back to back, and started work at fifteen, so I never gave it a thought.”

  He leaned back, to say complacently: “Well, I have to think about it, don’t I? Where would I be if I didn’t? I play it up for all it’s worth. My audiences love it when I read working-class poems that take the piss out of them. They think I’m taking the piss out of myself. Sometimes I perform a sad poem that makes them feel guilty and cry. Do you want me to read ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Factory’? Or a villanelle on ‘The Closure of a Coalmine’? Or ‘Some Lines Concerning the Death of a Single Mother who Couldn’t Make Ends Meet on Social Security’? There’s the same poem for all of them, so I just switch the titles around. Here, I’ll read one for you.”

  He reached under the table for notebooks spilling from his satchel, and drew a hand back as if he’d put it into a bundle of poisonous snakes. “Fucking hell! Your dog’s eating my precious and immortal works.” He brought up a clutch of papers. “They’re covered in dog snot. There’s wet hairs and fang marks all over them.”

  He moaned as if such a catastrophe hadn’t overtaken a poet since the beginning of creation, so I gave Dismal a push to indicate that he move away, and while Delphick put the material into some sort of order for his next memorable appearance I took a tenner from my wallet to console him for the upset. “When you’ve finished what you’re doing you can go to the Hair of the Dog a mile away down the lane and soothe your battered sensibilities.”

  He winced at the name of the pub, left the rest of his output on the floor, and took the money. “This is entirely unexpected, real generosity on your part. You’ve made my day, and renewed my faith in the goodness of my fellow men.”

  “Just clear off,” I said, reflecting on how cheap it was, after all, to get him out of my sight for an hour or two.

  “I can set off for Cambridge tomorrow knowing that all is not darkness in this hard world.” He pocketed some poems. “I never go out without one or two. A couple of days ago I read a few in The Jolly Roger near Tadcaster, and the coins that got thrown at me paid for two pints of Thunderstone’s best brew. They appreciate poetry in the West Riding.”

  “If you don’t belt up and go,” I said, “the ale in the pub will get too warm to drink,” at which he almost ran.

  I stayed three days, and even then hadn’t kipped myself out. I didn’t want to leave such a comfortable house, with sweet breezes wafting through the half-open parlour window. Along the railway line belonging to me was a shallow bank where fresh cowslips prospered, a yellow zone to lie on till darkness drove me in for food and drink. The grass wasn’t as dry as I had thought, but the wet patch still didn’t bring on a craving to be on my way—though go I had to.

  On the morning of departure Clegg set me up with as big a breakfast as could be made in two frying pans. “You’re trying to kill me,” I said.

  “You never know where your next meal is coming from, in the sort of adventures you can’t help falling into.”

  “I do. I’ve got money. Your plate’s wiggling, by the way. Go to the dentist for another fitting. Tell him to send me the bill. Moggerhanger owes me, so there won’t be a problem paying.” I forked prime Fen bacon onto a slice of fried bread. “And don’t say you can manage. You’ll have lots of time to manage when you’re dead. Just get it seen to.”

  He sat for his breakfast. “When will you be back?”

  “You know I never can tell. I hope it’ll be soon, that’s all. I’ll be going up by train, so you can drive me to the station.”

  I left the remains of my meal for Dismal who, though stuffed already on two tins of Bogie, drew rinds and egg bits into his cavernous mouth. He was such a whale in canine form that if I put my head between his jaws and gave a shout some poor old Jonah would scream that he wanted out.

  “Keep the shotgun primed,” I told Clegg when he let me off at the station, “in case the Green Toe Gang call to have a word with me. Don’t let them kidnap Dismal, though. He’ll eat their car as they drive him away in it, which wouldn’t do even his digestion any good.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three.

  The train left on time. It sometimes did. It often didn’t, and I waited on the platform half a day. When it did it might come to a halt for three hours somewhere down the line. Now and again some big-headed fare-paying respectable-looking passenger in first-class stopped us after gleefully pulling the cord, looking as smug as if LSD wouldn’t melt in his mouth as a member of the railway Gestapo pushed by on his way to beat to a pulp whoever in steerage he decided had done it.

  You could never tell what the delay was about. There was always something. It might be a fault in the heating system, and if so everybody in one carriage would be sweltering, eyes bulging as they undressed nearly to the buff, a few of them hacking at the sealed windows with the metal corners of their briefcases, hoping to get out to fresh air.

  In the adjoining carriage there would be people freezing to death, frantically buttoning their overcoats, or fastening newspapers around themselves with their ties if they were properly dressed. A few would begin ripping the seats apart intending to make a fire, survival of the fittest being in full spate.

  Those in the connecting space between a hot carriage and a cold carriage, appreciating the golden mean, had to decide between broiling their arses and freezing their faces, or freezing their arse and boiling their face. Under the circumstances the decision came to nothing, because the ticket inspector got there first and, immune to any drastic variations of temperature, charged ten quid to those passengers who w
anted to take his place, the amount collected being no inconsiderable addition to the tax-free part of his income.

  Sometimes he packed twenty or thirty into the space, till they hardly knew whether they were in the Black Hole of Calcutta or Captain Scott’s tent at the South Pole. One ticket inspector made enough money to retire in five years, after selling the concession to his mate, who made twenty thousand before going off to Tahiti. The company owning the line set the railway police on to find out why such well trained men were leaving their jobs so prematurely. When the reason was explained to the managing director he said he would only allow the transactions to continue if the ticket inspector split the difference in their takings with him—for the benefit of the shareholders of course whom, he felt it was his proud duty to state, he was duty bound to look after.

  These by no means unrealistic reflections served merely to illustrate that, since privatisation, anything can happen on a train in England, not necessarily causing injury or death, though cases of that were not unknown.

  However, relaxed and easy, I settled back to read The Times and smoke a cigar, but even then we were delayed half an hour because a cow had got onto the line, only removed after an announcement over the tannoy (though barely understandable due to so much static from faulty installation that it sounded as if coming from the middle of Arabia in a sandstorm) asking for someone—anyone, please!—to get out and milk it, which a young woman did with such charming expertise that every passenger applauded when the train grumbled on its way.

  A sixty-year-old chap wearing a tweed suit, tie and shining brogues, boarded at the first stop down the line. I had seen him before, though hoped he wouldn’t remember having set eyes on me. He was so close shaven that a line of blood like a thread of red string ran a few inches down one of his cheeks, indicating either an alcoholic, someone who might at any second go off his head, or a chap who’d just come out of the jungle and hadn’t yet had time to burn the leech off his face with the hot end of a cigarette.

  He sat opposite, as I’d known he was bound to, and I was halfway through an editorial about Mrs Thatcher before he spoke, in a croaky, manic, accusatory tone which I recalled from when I had given him a lift in Moggerhanger’s Rolls a few years ago on the A1. “What are you looking at me like that for?” he said.

  I continued reading, while he played with the silver watch chain across his waistcoat. He was Percy Blemish, the husband of Mrs Blemish who was happily working as the housekeeper at Moggerhanger’s, and who should never have married the bloke whose baleful grey blue eyes wouldn’t stop staring at me. When he wasn’t tormenting his wife with some self-indulgent mental turmoil or other he would talk an unwitting motorist at a service station or transport café on the Great North Road into giving him a lift towards Tinder Box Cottage outside Goole. He always looked respectable, but what I wanted to know was how he came to be on the train instead of joying along in a car and sending the driver mad.

  “I’m not looking at you.” I laid my paper down. “But if I am it’s because I’ve seen you before. If you keep on looking as closely at me as you are already you’ll know you’ve seen me before as well.”

  His lips wiggled about: “That’s as may be. You were staring at me, though. I would know, wouldn’t I?”

  “Normally,” I said, “you go up and down the country cadging lifts from car drivers, so why are you on a train?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “A week ago I saw your wife at Lord Moggerhanger’s, and she was getting on very well, except for worrying about you, which is more than you deserve. She told me she had no idea where you were.”

  “That’s because I try never to tell her. She says she’s worried, but it’s only so she can keep her claws on me. I want to be free. I don’t want people worrying about me. It’s painful to be incessantly worried about. It’s nothing short of vengeful persecution.”

  “In that case why are you going back to her, as you are now? Or so I assume.”

  “It’s not my fault. She brings it on herself. She never stops trying to drag me back to Moggerhanger’s. I stayed in a bed and breakfast last night, and couldn’t sleep because she kept floating in my dreams, worrying me, telling me to come back to her as soon as possible. I had no intention of doing so, but after hurrying through my breakfast, I knew I had to, without knowing why. I stood by the roadside signalling for a lift, but no one would stop, and because she was still calling me urgently I walked to the station and caught the train.”

  “Very sensible,” I said.

  “It might well be,” he conceded. “But I noticed a full moon last night. Is that why you’re looking at me?”

  His assumptions wearied me. The journey had started off well, and now I was lumbered with him. “If you say I’m looking at you again I’ll get the window open and do my level best to boot you out of the train.”

  He looked alarmed. “Did my wife tell you to do that?”

  “Mrs Blemish? Why should she? I haven’t seen her lately.”

  I didn’t like his smile: “I suppose she persuaded you to commit an act of violence against me, because she knows I’m going to murder her as soon as I see her.”

  I was intrigued. “How can she know that?”

  “Not telling,” he said childishly.

  “Is it because of the full moon?”

  “You see, you were looking at me.”

  “If I was I was only trying to decide which of your eyes to black. I rather fancy the left one.” Being so fundamentally barmy he drove everyone else in that direction. “But if you touch a hair of Mrs Blemish’s head not only will I give you a good hiding but so will Lord Moggerhanger. And when he’s finished he’ll hand whatever’s left of you to Kenny Dukes so that he can have a bit of fun as well. Just leave Mrs Blemish alone. Is that clear?”

  He wiped an eye, as if hoping a tear would come out, and soon. “Life is so unjust.”

  “It always is,” I agreed, “but I’m going to telephone Alice Whipplegate from Liverpool Street, and tell her that if she hears one sharp word between you and Mrs Blemish she’s to inform Lord Moggerhanger. Not only that, but I’ll fly to Ealing like Batman, take out my twelve-inch jackknife on the way, and deliberately do you in when I get there.”

  “But my wife’s always getting at me.” A tear did come to his eye, but he seemed unaware. “It’s victimisation.”

  “When a woman gets at a man,” I said sternly, “he always deserves it. Nobody knows that better than me. You have to be a man and put up with it, and if you can’t, then it’s time you grew up.”

  “You’re being exceptionally harsh with me. I only want to take her to task.”

  “Don’t. She’s the most noble and long suffering woman I know, while you, whether you’re off your bonce or not, are the most aggravating, callous, pig ignorant and self-centred person I’ve ever met, except Dismal.”

  He was more interested in knowing about a possible rival than putting up with a further demolition of his character. “And who might Dismal be?”

  “A dog, so I excuse him, because he can’t know any different. In any case, he’s also loyal, which makes up for everything. He’s also affectionate, at times, and that’s worth even more. He’s very proud, and never violent unless threatened, or unless he sees I’m in trouble. In other words, he’s a gentleman in canine form, which is why we’re two of a kind. There’s no side to either of us, so you’d do well to take a leaf out of his book.”

  He gave a halfway normal smile, and I didn’t know whether to be pleased at the spectacle or jump off the train and run for my life, though the tragically boyish twist to his lips suggested he wanted in spite of everything to make the great leap forward into a state of tolerance for his wife. Perhaps he was trying to discard tormenting memories of Hell’s boarding school he’d been to as a boy. I’d heard anecdotes about such places from the blokes at the advertising agency, whic
h made accounts of Approved Schools and Borstals from my pals in childhood and youth sound like trips to Pleasure Island in Pinocchio.

  “I won’t hit her, then.” His mouth went back to its ordinary forlorn state. “I’ll just have a few words.”

  “Don’t do that, either. One thing can lead to another. And then to somewhere else. And the next thing you know the judge is putting on his black cap before sending you off to be hanged by the neck until you’re dead. Just say hello to her, and keep quiet afterwards, then things will go well, and she’ll make a fuss of you, and feed you cakes straight out of the oven, and stroke your hair, and tell you she loves you and can’t live without you, and that you’re never to go away from her again.”

  He stood abruptly, mouth wide open with horror. “I’d kill myself if that was the case. You’re tormenting me. I must get out of your sight. I have to go to you know where.”

  I drew in my knees to let him by, his unblinking eyes looking straight ahead, so I knew he wouldn’t come back. When he didn’t I assumed he’d found a way of jumping off the train, babies and loonies made of rubber and always landing harmlessly on the hardest gravel. He was nowhere visible on the building site of Liverpool Street station, so I wasn’t able to give him the final caution with regard to his wife.

  Since Blaskin disliked receiving visitors unannounced I phoned from the Underground. “Are you at home today?”

  “Michael, my boy, I’m a lot more than here.” He sounded so maniacally cheerful I hoped something was wrong. “Your sister is here, as well, and we’re having a cup of coffee together.”

  “Sister?” Was everyone I knew going insane? Blaskin didn’t often realise whether he was or not, being locked in the dense forest of some novel or other. “I haven’t got a sister.”

  He rattled on. “I’m glad you got in touch first, because if you had stumbled in here without doing so you might have died from shock, and no father, not even me, would want to go to the funeral of his only begotten son. It gives me the greatest pleasure to inform you that your lovely and most delightful sister has come to pay her old roué of a father a more than acceptable social call, so if you’re in the way of wanting to be introduced, do come and join us. Perhaps you’ll cheer up Mabel Drudge, who is crying her socks off in the kitchen at this unexpected development in my personal life.”