She drank more of the four-star firewater than I thought good for her. “It’s hardly a time for levity, Gilbert. Now that you have a daughter as well as a son you’ll have to act more responsibly. You’ll have to mind your Ps and Qs, won’t you? Or so I would think. Any other man would.”
I well knew that brandy would make him violent and abusive, and wasn’t far wrong when he responded: “Don’t lecture me, otherwise your possibly future stepchildren will witness the shameful scene of you getting a well-deserved smack across those frigid cheeks, not to mention being thrown bodily into the street. Now have another greedy swig, and let us hear no more of your moral strictures.”
I saw Sophie wondering at the adder bin she had fallen into, and began to question how much longer I would have a sister on tap, or Blaskin keep so loving a daughter close by. Mabel sat and finished her brandy, cheeks colouring like one of Harry Wheatcroft’s more flamboyant roses. “Gilbert,” she said, “I’ve just about had enough of your disgraceful remarks. I can’t allow you to humiliate me before the children. It’s the last straw.”
I was mistaken about Sophie, for she seemed to be enjoying a situation which would cushion the shock of having met me in such unexpected circumstances.
“I’m not trying to humiliate you, darling. God forbid! It’s simply that I don’t see why you should be so prickly at my sudden good fortune. And yet you are upset. Who better than me to recognise the signs? The face of an unhappy woman not only goes beyond grief in the beholder fortunate enough to witness it, but he feels his heart touched as well.”
He was trying to convince his daughter that he was a human being. It couldn’t last, but I was absorbed by Sophie’s expression of admiration at the effort he was making, and by the love that enabled him to be so eloquent about it. She obviously hadn’t met a writer before, at least not one like him.
“My paramour and myself are incipient schizophrenics,” he said, “who have learned that the only way to go on living with our condition is to stay together. We’re that rare couple who can never part unless we kill each other at the same instant, and where would be the sense or even the possibility of that?”
So far so good, or at least not too bad, but he poured Mabel another half tumbler and, being so near out of control after the first goodly portion, she thoughtlessly quaffed it, which turned her expanse of forehead as red as a traffic light.
“We’re so locked together in our love and passion,” he said to Sophie, “that I can’t post a letter without her suspecting me of having a clandestine affair. She counted the stamps yesterday, and played hell because one was missing. She demanded to know who I’d written to. Not being the man to hurt a woman, at least not unknowingly, I told her I’d posted a letter to the tax authorities with a first-class stamp. If the cheque got there too late a man, or men, would come and take my goods and chattels away, and they might, in their rapacious enthusiasm, take Mabel as well, which would break my heart.”
There was always more meaning in what Blaskin said than what he did, and he was obviously trying to weave a spell around Sophie, with what object I couldn’t yet say, because he was blinding me with his words as well, helped by the brandy I had stupidly put back. But while I had at least a notion as to what he was doing, Sophie had none whatsoever, and sat back looking at him like a rabbit before a snake. Even Mabel halfway sensed his purpose, which must have been why she let him go on:
“In my younger days I was idiotic enough to think property was theft, but now it’s income tax. They want eight thousand pounds from me, and thank God I have it in the bank. That’s eight hundred bottles of whisky—a bottle a day for two years, with two on Sunday. I told Mabel this, because you have to be absolutely straight and honest with the person you love, otherwise it’s here today and gone tomorrow—though where from? Oh yes, where was I?” He lifted his glass to Mabel’s face which was rapidly becoming formless. “The only way to live a painless life is to be continually half cut. Take whatever fate throws at you, and laugh over it, though only to yourself, even if you’re so paralysed you can no longer write, which state is what Mabel would like to see me in, though who can blame her?”
He gave a wild laugh. “No one can go from this world without dying. The black dog bites in the best weather, when you’re at your happiest, and I don’t want to die with my boots on, only when my mouth is full. Not that I could die with my boots on, because my women are very particular that I get them off before jumping into bed. Aren’t you, darling? Tonight I’m giving a lecture called ‘The Creativity of Passion in the Life of a Novelist.’ Or is it tomorrow? I hope so. Maybe it was yesterday. I’ll have to look in my diary.”
He was becoming incoherent. “You’re a ragbag of platitudinous encomiums,” I told him.
“What?” he cried, as if I had stabbed him. “What did you say? Come on, out with it again. No, save it till I can write it down.” He put a hand on his heart and began to sing, swaying so far sideways I hoped he would fall and crack his nose: “Pack up your truffles in your old kitbag, and smile, smile, smile …”
Mabel managed to articulate from her stupor: “Gilbert, you’re a frightful bore. And you give me too much to complain about.”
His pain seemed almost real. “Not in front of my daughter, darling, please, however much of a case you have. It’s also a mark of good breeding never to complain.”
“Even better breeding,” she riposted, to our surprise, “is not to complain of anyone complaining.”
“Oh, I don’t complain. Novelists never do. They dramatise. For example, when I’m looking into the quadrangle of my imaginary Piranesi jail I’m seeing the victim of a man who loved too much. He’s on his knees, moving along, but now and again he stands up and howls like a dog with a hot nose. He wears out a pair of trousers a week at the knees, but the warders don’t mind, because locomoting in such a way keeps him out of mischief, and saves a fortune in straitjackets.”
Sophie laughed. “Oh, I just love you, father.”
“Very much likewise, my dear. You’ve made a happy man of me today. I’m only sorry Mabel can’t take the fact on board. Perhaps I’ve been brutal and uncaring in never telling her when I was happy. On the other hand I never said I was unhappy. But when I was happy I ought to have said so, and didn’t because I thought she assumed I was happy. So perhaps I was. But Mabel is very frequently unhappy, because it’s the only weapon she has to make me unhappy, and she uses it like Captain Blood swinging across the rigging of her misconceptions. Therefore she makes me unhappy, and when two people are unhappy they make each other even more unhappy. A short time ago I was going to take her to a country hotel for the weekend called The White Elephant, for a treat. It’s set in three hundred acres of rolling landscape, and cost two hundred pounds a night. ‘A warm welcome to all our guests,’ said the gaudy brochure. And then, in small print: ‘No dogs, no children, and no smoking.’ So I cancelled, and it was something else she never forgave me for. I tried to make amends when she showed me an article in the newspaper saying you could stop smoking in one hour. I tried it, and did. I was proud of myself. She was proud of me, too, spooned so sickeningly at my success that on the sixty-first minute I lit a cigar to stop myself going up the wall.”
He paused, as if waiting for Mabel to have a heart attack. “Where was I? I was saying how happy I was to have discovered my darling daughter. See, I’ve made her laugh, and what man can want more than that? Yesterday I thought there was no romance left in my life. It was one of those increasingly rare moments when I imagined I was dying, either by cancer or my own hand—which is much the same thing. Fact is, I fall in love every few days, usually with a young woman passing along the street. I see her for only a few seconds, and sometimes she’s even older than Mabel, but I can be won over by a beautiful face.”
“You eternally randy bastard,” I broke in, seeing how Sophie was enjoying his spiel so much that he would go on forever if not stopped. But my r
emark had no effect.
“How can I live like that, when Mabel leaves me every full moon? She always comes back though, bless her, and sits in her room for a day playing the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, until she can bear to look at me again. She’s really a man in disguise, but she’s got a nice solid bosom, and loves other men. Maybe she had a transplant before birth, then set out to get me. If I hadn’t had all kinds of women I would begin to doubt the pleasure principle.”
Mabel fell with a great rumble onto the carpet.
“She might have had the decency to cook our lunch first,” Blaskin scowled.
“Poor woman.” Sophie joined me in getting her into the bedroom, though no sooner had we laid her down than she snapped free and ran for the toilet.
“Serve her right for getting mixed up with a writer,” Blaskin said, who would have fallen too, except that he lowered himself in time onto the settee. “What a wedding breakfast for me and my new found daughter. Can you cook, my love?”
“I’ve been known to,” Sophie said, “if there are pizzas in the freezer, and a dozen eggs. Otherwise I can’t boil water without burning it. My husband was glad to see the back of me because I’m no good in the kitchen.”
“Come and live here, then,” Blaskin slobbered.
“Oh no, I have a perfectly good house in Golders Green.”
He lay back, and closed his eyes. Sophie in the kitchen pulled a pack of lamb chops and some eggs from the fridge. “It’s marvellous, having you for a sister,” I said.
She was in my arms, breasts pressing against me, soft and hot, her lips warm on mine. “Oh, Michael darling, I’ve done nothing since I last saw you except think about us being on that train, and now that you’re my brother I want to go to bed with you more than ever.”
My knee was between her thighs. “Sweetheart, I can’t wait. We’re only half brother and sister, after all.”
“If we were full brother and sister,” she murmured, “it would blow the top of my head off. I’d never stop coming. Oh I love you. Don’t ever give me up.”
About to explode in a cloud of sperm, I eased her away. “We should sell the situation as an aphrodisiac, print false birth certificates to prove people are brother and sister. The birth rate would go up no end. We’ll call our firm Incest Incorporated.”
“You always have such good ideas.” Stopped in mid laugh, her eyes glazed as if she was about to die, then she also rushed for the bathroom, to be spectacularly sick. After what she’d drunk I was not surprised. I had taken care to put back less than anybody else, and now that hunger gnawed I didn’t expect to follow her.
Eggs went into an omelette pan, and chops laid under the grill. Slicing cucumber caused me to salivate, and I salted and quartered a tomato to put into my mouth. Blaskin was snoring like an engine on a Rolls Royce testbed, Mabel lay in an alabaster pose as if she would never get up again, and Sophie sat on the lidded toilet waiting for the next attack. A stint of cooking I was more than willing to do.
I’d picked up the notion from my mother that food would cure everything. If you had a gut ache she would say, eat. Likewise if you were dizzy. Belly pains needed something to grind on, otherwise you were letting yourself in for a more intense bout later. If you couldn’t stop coughing, eat. The tickles in your throat would go away. You had diarrhea? Eat. Constipation? Think nothing of it. Eat, because you’d need the padding soon enough. Illness of any sort could only be due to a lack of fodder.
So we must scoff plenty to soak up the alcohol, and make recovery certain. I stripped fat from a chop and reinforced more tomato with a slice of rye bread, feeling better by the time Sophie stood pale faced in the doorway: “I think I’m all right at last.”
I took in now that she must indeed be my sister, no longer hoped it was a dream, and gave her a glass of water. Pointing to a stain of sick on her blouse, I passed a paper towel. I’d do it for anybody, but how was she to know? Best not to tell her. “What a caring brother,” she smiled, as if we should start living together.
“Set the table next door. We’ll be eating soon.”
She picked up a bundle of knives and forks. “We’ll meet often, won’t we?”
“I’ll never be able to leave you alone.” Always say what a woman wants to hear, because she invariably needs the consolation, though I couldn’t help thinking that Sophie already had everything.
“Kiss me, then.”
I did, hands around her backside, but she couldn’t do anything with her hands full of cutlery. She broke away to lay the table, came back for plates. “They’re in the stove getting warm,” I told her.
“You think of everything. How did you learn to cook?”
“I watched my mother,” though I couldn’t remember. I had catered for Bridget while she was in the signal box giving birth. I’ll never know why she insisted on having her babies there, only that Almanack Jack and I had a right struggle getting a double bed up the wooden steps. I flipped the omelette. “There’s nothing to it but common sense.”
“My husband’s a real chauvinist pig. He doesn’t even come into the kitchen.”
“Can you blame him? I’d like to be one except it just isn’t in me. I suppose you’d be a female chauvinist sow if you could get away with it. I’d expect no less from a sister of mine.” When I pulled her to me she put a hand between my legs, only stopped undoing my buttons on seeing Mabel’s face of sour disapproval in the doorway. She had been about to witness a real live Rocky Horror incest sex show on the floor of her pristine scrubbed kitchen, and I could only smile. “See if you can bring Gilbert round,” I told her, “because we’ll be eating any minute. Take this platter with you, and these napkins.”
She came back. “I won’t put up with it. It’s downright wicked, what you were about to do. I saw you. I saw you.”
I pushed a basket of bread into her hands, thinking she ought to be grateful for my labour at the stove. “Put up with what?”
She was about to stamp her foot, but realised I wasn’t Blaskin. “You know very well what I mean.”
I was beginning to understand why he treated her as he did, then blanched at the idea that I should be able to do so. “On my honour, I don’t.” She stood in my way. “Let’s go in and eat, otherwise everything will go cold.”
“Turning the flat into a brothel,” she said. “That’s what. It’s unseemly. And with your sister!”
I ought to have regretted losing self-control, but couldn’t resist. “I know. And she was about to suck me off, but in any case what the fuck has it got to do with you? Apart from which, I simply don’t know why you should be so upset.”
“She’s chagrined at not being invited to join in,” Sophie said. “Aren’t you, darling?”
Blaskin’s voice boomed from the living room. “Don’t let her bully you, my children. She’s the world’s worst bully, a Britannia and Boadicea rolled into one. When you’re not here she bullies me from morning to night. The only way to stop her is to attack first, which I learned the hard way, and often resort to it to keep my self-respect.”
A flush of fury went over her face. I thought of walking out of the flat, but didn’t for Sophie’s sake, so pushed by, wanting the four of us to sit down and eat. Blaskin looked dangerously refreshed by his nap, took a goodly portion of the omelette, and spread butter on his bread as thickly as if it was a brick to build a house. He uncorked a bottle of Beaujolais and, I will say this for his good name, poured a glass for Mabel, as if wanting to dispel her frosty expression. Sophie and I stared at each other, longing for only one thing, which of course would have to wait.
Mabel, head lowered, sipped her wine. Then she looked up at the ceiling. “All this about Sophie being his daughter is stuff and nonsense.”
Did she know something I didn’t yet know? But: “Don’t believe her,” Sophie said to me. “Your father and I went through every detail. There can’t be any doubt.”
Blaskin picked up a chop, looked at it as if for poison or maggots, and bit out the heart. “Pure unadulterated jealousy is what Mabel’s on about, children. Envy, sour grapes, sublimated lust even—though I haven’t yet figured from what angle.”
“I only have your wellbeing at heart,” Mabel said, “to save you from a catastrophic slide into immorality and madness.”
Sophie and I attended to the food as if apart from them, me thinking that in this emotional penal colony the plates should have been made of paper, knives and forks of plastic, and the wine served in beakers. Blaskin didn’t respond immediately to Mabel, which was ominous, so I ate more quickly in order to be finished when the balloon went up. People were as mechanical as toys, predictable in their behaviour, as if fully formed at birth and set going like clockwork to do their worst in life, as with Mabel and Blaskin.
Because of his silence Mabel was still half cut enough to think she could take up where she had left off. “We’ve been living together for more than eight years, but I can’t see our association going on for much longer, because in all that time you haven’t made any honest attempt to mend your ways. Another human being most certainly would have. Oh I know, deep inside you there’s a core of sensibility that I love and am very proud to be associated with, but you’ve always perversely chosen to ignore it.”
He ate as if he too was on his own, but as she paused, steaming herself up for a further salvo of irritating criticism, he said calmly: “The trouble with getting old, my dear children—and I want you to listen to this as well, Mabel—is that you become more tolerant, more easy going, in the knowledge that it’s the best way to enjoy what years of life are left.”