Not all the barristers of London Town could save Moggerhanger from fifteen years in jail and losing his seat in the House of Lords.
“Getting sent down served him right.” Bill refilled our glasses. “But I don’t think he should have had his peerage taken away. After all, the ancestors of everybody in that place must have done worse to get their titles. Compared to them, Moggerhanger was lily-white.”
While enough funds from other enterprises, not to mention off-shore accounts, would secure Moggerhanger a comfortable retirement on a West Country estate, he could never get back into the same drug business, should he want to make up some of his losses, because the Green Toe Gang took all of the trade, though they soon ceased to do well against black gangs stepping in from the old Empire who were too vicious to interfere with. Bill and I drank to our having got out in time.
Blaskin, who called soon after the fire, was so horrified at our primitive accommodation that he lodged a few nights at a hotel in Cambridge. He asked for all the details of Moggerhanger’s conviction, to put in his next book, and wanted to know about my part in it. Never one to let good material go to waste, he nevertheless scoffed at the style of what I had already pencilled under the never clear enough light from the storm lamps. After running riotous red marks through every paragraph he added a few lines of his own, which angered me so much I told him to back off. “My stuff is easily as good as the crap you turn out, and a lot better than your Sidney Bloods.”
He chided me for imagining that novelists had to have their own way in everything, and cried like pampered children if they didn’t get it. “We don’t want it to be known that there are two of us in the world,” he said. “Why should I leave the writing of such a book to a tyro like you? I want it come out in my name, not yours.”
His horse laugh told me it was impossible for his hand not to go into reflex action at the sight of my scribble, so I capitulated.
Bill left after the house was finished, and I was sorry to see him go, waving for as long as he could see me on the platform. Dismal resumed his duties as guard dog, and Clegg, who could never be still, kept the station tidy and the surroundings so thoroughly up to scratch I wondered whether he didn’t go out during the night to spoil what had been done in daylight.
After I was reinstalled in the house Sophie would come up one weekend and Frances the next. Both knew of the arrangement, and neither minded because, after all, the sixties had long since been and gone. Frances twigged where I was and who I was with, but knew I would always love her, and so I do. Sister Sophie still wasn’t able to make the separation from her husband, since he could never decide to let her go. Some couples are like that.
Back from a walk across the fields one afternoon I spotted my fourteen-year-old daughter Sam halfway up the signal box steps, looking lively and lovely in an electric blue top and green slacks, which rig I supposed to be the day’s fashion for young girls in Nottingham. She ran down two at a time: “Dad!”
“How did you get here?” She took my hand on walking across the line. “It’s marvellous to see you,” I said, when in truth I had been too busy the last month or two to think of her. “But a bit of a shock, all the same.”
“You live in a railway station—how fab! And that cuddly big dog up there. He was standing up trying to move the levers, so I helped him, and then he licked my face all over.”
“We call him Dismal.” She’d had little to eat that day, so I sat her at the kitchen table, while Clegg cooked up a platter of ham and eggs, with little tomatoes straight from the vine.
“I’ve been planning to come here for years and years. As soon as I saw you that time I knew you had to be my father. I nicked your address from mam’s purse, then looked on a map to see where it was.”
She was my daughter right enough. “Does Claudine know you’ve come here?”
She gargoyled, though it still didn’t mar her prettiness. “I don’t know. I hate the rotten cow.” She played with the bangle on her arm. “She hates me, and always has. She’s got a boyfriend now. He’s a real creep. They do it to each other all the time. I caught them at it last week when I came home early from school. It was so disgusting I threw up in the bathroom. I’ll never do that with anybody.”
I was sorry to have confirmation that man hating ran so firmly on the female side of the family. “But does she know you’re here?”
She began to eat. “I don’t care what she thinks. I want to live with you. It’s smashing, all those fields.”
There was nothing I would have liked more. “Did you come on the train?”
She smiled as if expecting a compliment for making the trip. “I thumbed a lift all the way. It was easy as far as Grantham. Then I was picked up by a dirty old man.”
“Don’t tell me. He put a hand on your leg, and asked you to go to bed with him. You told him to stop his game and let you out of the car or you’d smack him in the chops, so that he would have such a crash his false teeth would fly away.”
She looked at me gone out, then laughed. “How did you twig all that?”
“Dirty Horace is well-known for it. He’ll get locked up if he’s not careful. At least I hope so. He’s the pensioner-rapist of the Great North Road. I’ll ram his hearing aid down his throat one of these days, if the police don’t confiscate it first.”
“You know everything, don’t you? I’m ever so glad you’re my father.”
“Even though I’m a man?”
“But you’re different. You wouldn’t carry on like crumbly old Horace. When we stopped he went on bended knees and asked me to marry him. He said his wife had died and he was lonely. He swore he would leave me everything in his will when he kicked the bucket.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I didn’t. I kicked him in the cobblers. He couldn’t chase me, because his glasses fell off. Then I walked to a lay-by and a lorry driver picked me up. I was all right with him. He gave me a Mars bar.”
I felt my stomach turn to a bag of ice cubes. “Don’t ever hitchhike again. It’s too dangerous.”
“I can look after myself. All we talk about at school is how to cut up men if they try anything. I’ve got lots of good tricks.”
“I’m sure you have. You can stay here tonight, but I’ll get you back to Nottingham in the morning.”
She pushed her plate to the middle of the table, tears sliding down her peerless face. “I’d rather die. You’ve got to take me in for good, now I’ve come all this way.”
I didn’t want my one and only daughter to go, but if she didn’t Claudine would set droves of social workers onto me. They’d leap the dikes like troops in a Picardy rush, determined to overwhelm our slit trench, because the more useless people’s jobs the more they fight like tigers to keep them. Claudine would have me marched off by the police for kidnapping minors. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. But we can write to each other any time you like. A few years from now you won’t even need your mother’s permission to come and see me.”
It was an evening when Frances was due. Sam and I were holding hands by the gate, looking across the fields whose greenery, under the light from high clouds, lay with an uncanny glisten on the landscape. Frances got out of the car carrying two large plastic bags as her food tax, as she called it, for the weekend. Her pale brown coat was open to show a white blouse and loose attractive bosom, a gold chain holding the tiny watch I’d given her some years ago.
After our kiss I introduced Sam, who almost fell down with pleasure on my letting it drop that Frances was a doctor, though she rallied when handed one of the bags to carry inside, then was commandeered to get more stuff from the car. After they’d installed France’s luggage upstairs I looked through the living room window from the garden. They were talking and laughing, and I thought what a pity it was that they weren’t really mother and daughter.
“She’s so nice and gentle,” Sam said later. “An
d she treats me like a real grown up person.”
I wasn’t surprised. “How old are you now?”
“I was fourteen last week.”
I took a twenty from my wallet. “That’s for your birthday, then.”
She pulled me down for a kiss. “Can I have a party for it when I come here next year?”
“I’ll think about it.”
In the remaining hour of light before supper Frances took her for a walk across the fen, leaving Clegg and I working on a loose post of the outside fence, hammering a new support deeply in, looked on by Dismal who was waiting for one of us to bludgeon a finger with the mallet. Threatened with a dab of creosote, he walked off to chase a cat, which ran across the line and mocked him from the other side. A few days ago I had seen him letting the same moggie sample his Bogie.
Clegg took the tools away, and went in to see about supper, while I smoked a cigarette, until Sam and Frances returned hand in hand from their stroll, Sam glowing as if she had made a conquest and was already half in love.
During supper she was unable to stop looking at my wife, and seemed about to faint when Frances smiled kindly at her. I laid a couple of chops on Sam’s plate, who made a spoiled little mouth to show she wasn’t much hungry, till Frances told her that a growing girl should eat whatever was set before her.
“Oh, all right.” Sam flushed with pleasure at having been spoken to again, and finished everything, as well as the fruit for dessert, and the cheese that followed.
After Sam had gone to bed, and Dismal trailed up the stairs to sleep, I supposed, by her side, Frances and I talked about what was to be done. I had related as many details as were necessary concerning my youthful affair with Claudine, and she said that as it should need little more than an hour to drive to Nottingham she would deliver Sam there in the morning. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble then, in persuading her to go.”
Sam, who would have travelled anywhere to be alone with Frances, got in the car as if set for a trip to heaven. She kissed me on saying goodbye. “See you soon then, dad.”
“You will, I know.”
Frances told me that on getting to Nottingham Claudine was also overwhelmed by her status as a doctor, and easily believed there had been no hanky-panky on my part for Sam’s overnight stay, though it was noted that she hadn’t informed the authorities that her daughter had gone missing, which Frances said she ought to have done.
Claudine laid out coffee cups and biscuit plates from her best Littlewood’s china, and Frances stayed until certain that Sam would get no aggravation after she had gone. Claudine even promised that Sam would be allowed to stay with me from time to time, most likely because, as Sam whispered on seeing Frances off at the door, she would have more privacy with her boyfriend.
Frances and I usually talked after making love, often straying into lickerish topics to get us going again. Or we ended by holding each other and drifting into sleep. Had she been jealous of the situation between me and Sophie I would have sent all thought of my would-be sister away, because I knew who I really belonged to. Perhaps she didn’t force the issue because, as a physician, she looked on my affair (if that’s what it was) as if she had written a prescription to cure me from getting into a more threatening relationship. She was so understanding I didn’t even feel guilty, which she’d have regarded anyway as just another sickness, and torn off a further healing chit.
Thinking of Sam, I said one night: “I’d love it if you had a child.”
Her lack of immediate response was filled with pleasurable kissing, until she spoke: “Michael, there’s something I have to tell you with regard to that. I don’t know why I haven’t before. Perhaps I didn’t dare. But it’s my turn now to ask for some understanding from you.”
Hell, what’s on it’s way? Didn’t she love me anymore? We were so snug it couldn’t be possible. Was our marriage heading for shipwreck? No, likewise. But at least I wasn’t long in finding out.
“A good while before meeting you,” her breath was hot against my shoulder, her face unseen, “I had a devastating abortion, which put paid to all that.”
And explained why she had never got pregnant after all the wonderful love we had made in our married life. I knew what was coming, and felt like vomiting. “Delphick?”
She turned to look at me, lips trembling. “You saved me from him, and I’ll love you forever for that. You see, darling, I hadn’t taken the pill for a few days, not expecting anything to happen. But he put something into my drink. There’s no other way to explain it.”
I felt like going out to kill Delphick, but the lucky bastard was in prison, and in any case what men she’d had before we met was no business of mine, and I knew she hadn’t had another since. All I could do was kiss her, and thank her for telling me.
“About Sam,” she said, as ever in control, “I can’t see her staying on with her mother after a few more years. It didn’t seem a good situation, so I can imagine her being thrown out, and if so we’ll have to take her on board. She’s lovely and intelligent, and I’m more than fond of her. On the way to Nottingham she said she would like to go to medical school, and when I said everyone had to study hard to do that she said she wouldn’t mind. We’ll make sure she goes to university, and knows we’re behind her when she needs us. I’ll leave money in trust for her, at twenty-one.”
Marvellous, I thought, before going to sleep, my daughter a doctor too.
A thick airmail letter covered in pictorial African stamps plopped through the letter box. I’d never had one from Bill, so it took a few lines before realising who was writing. He told me he was organising native troops for combat, and getting paid in diamonds. “Of course,” he went on, “I train them under active service conditions. When they’re proficient enough, and know which way to point a gun—though they learn quick—I tell them that as a month’s training exercise we’re going to invade the next province, and take it over from the government there. Off we go, lads, I say. Just do it like I told you. Michael, they love it, and so do I.
“It may surprise you to know that I didn’t have time to spend much of the loot from Moggerhanger, because before I could I got headhunted, and not from Borneo, either. For the present work, I knocked twenty years off my age in filling out the application form, and they took me like a shot, especially when I told them my record. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, old cock. There’s such a lot of work to do out here, but when I retire in a couple of years I’ll be made for life. I’ll come back to Blighty, buy the sort of motor as will by then befit my status, and drive over in style to call on you.
“Meanwhile, I’m in my element. You’d be surprised at the amount of ammunition that gets fired off, bombs thrown and rockets launched. It don’t bear thinking about. They shoot stuff off like it’s Christmas every day, though I shout at them no end. Where it all comes from I wouldn’t like to say, except that if it didn’t get here a lot of factories in the UK would shut down, and we don’t want poor blokes on the dole again, do we?
“Another thing here is that the women are lovely, some of them anyway, though now and again I’ve got to draw the line at those with the lid of a cocoa tin stitched into their lips. Obviously, I can’t always get the food I like—no custard creams or eccles cakes, for instance—but I’m fitter than I’ve ever been. You’ll never believe this, but we had grilled python for breakfast the other day, and I kept holding my plate out to my batman for more because it was delicious.
“We once talked about doing work like this, didn’t we, and I said I disapproved of it, but all I can say is that when needs must they certainly must. No man is perfect, not yours truly, and that’s a fact, and the joy is that I know it. If people only did moral things what would people have to argue about at those posh dinner parties I used to see through lighted windows in Wimbledon when I walked around on my uppers? Me being out here does them a favour. They can leave the immoral things for me to d
o, and go on thinking how good and pure they are.
“The longer I live the more convinced I am that a soldier is born and not made, but one thing for sure is I’m piling up money in a London bank like shit out of a camel, so when I come back to Blighty I’ll fasten on a nice little manor house, and settle down. If it’s got a few acres I might open a fitness academy, and lay out a commando assault course for young bloods from the City to get toughened up. Retirement for me won’t be too long away, Michael, because between you and me I’m closer to seventy than sixty, though I know I don’t look anywhere near it. I can put myself through the hoops quicker than most of the young lads.
“Oh yes, I almost forgot to tell you. Kenny Dukes and Ronald Delphick turned up here after they got out of prison. They talked me into employing them. You know what a soft touch I can be, and who could turn down a couple of backpacking Brits? They were both absolutely out of cash. I made Kenny my quartermaster, whose responsibility was getting supplies up from the coast, or collecting them from an airdrop. He’ll post this letter when he goes through the lines next time. Mind you, I’ve had to give him a good hiding now and again for slackness, and for treating the locals in ways that he shouldn’t, but he’s improving all the time.
“As for Delphick, I made him a corporal at first, because of what he told me about his education, and put him in charge of a few men, but they just rolled about laughing when he gave them a speech from Henry the Fifth. He was also shy of going on operations with them, and in any case couldn’t learn the front end of a gun from the back. Or he made out as if he couldn’t. I still have to give him a bit of a kicking from time to time, so mostly keep him as my tea boy. He’s not bad at that, but he’ll never amount to much. When I told him, after a particularly telling thump, that eternal conflict was the price of safety, he just wrote it down in a little damp notebook and grinned. What can you do with a tike like that?