A dual carriageway took us between stunted trees, and in spite of a few attractive laybys I decided to drop Delphick at the slip road into Stevenage, so that he could push in with his panda-pram in appropriate style. The southern weather was better, open sky with few clouds, so neither he nor his cargo of literature would get wet. I told him my intention.
‘That’s good of you,’ he said. ‘If you’re ever in Yorkshire, you’ll be welcome to stay a day or two at Doggerel Bank. There’s always a pan of stew on the Rayburn, and a demijohn of elderberry wine. Bring a sleeping bag, though, because I’ve only got one bed. And a bottle of whisky, if you can. It gets a bit damp at times, but you’ll manage all right.’
He meant well. ‘Thanks.’
‘And a few tins of cat food might be useful.’ He couldn’t think of anything else, a bad silence because I dreaded the time when I would have to let him off. I wanted to go back and plead with Ettie to come with me, and even for Delphick to stay on, so that at least I would be among familiar faces when the big chop came.
If my depressions ever lasted more than a few moments maybe I would have learned something. But they didn’t, and I never had the spiritual constitution to support mental pain long enough either to be destroyed by one, or educated and improved. I always sensed a feeling of regret when I began to come out of the gloom. ‘Tell me a poem,’ I said to Delphick, ‘and I’ll give you thirty bob.’
‘Two quid.’
‘Two quid, then.’ I’d have given him five. ‘There’ll just be time before I put you off.’
He rustled a few papers. ‘I’ll tell you a love poem.’
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘What’s wrong with a love poem? Panda and me perform love poems perfectly.’
‘Don’t you have a funny poem?’
His laugh nearly cracked the mirror. ‘There’s no such thing. Laughter and poems don’t go together. People only buy poems when they cry, or are moved. If I make ’em laugh they just feel good, and walk out by the overloaded table without buying one of my books.’
‘Any poem will do,’ I said.
He phlegmed out of the window. ‘Listen to this, then. It’s called “Dusk Queen” – by Ronald Delphick:
‘A rhododendron for a rudder
as we steer the wild canals:
slither-lines of silver between black and green.
Geraniums on cottage windows
claw golden glass,
smokestacks pouring eye-shadow
in God’s evening glare
grabbing the day and night to work in.
Headstocks of a coalmine draw
cages up at dusk as our barge
between the slag heaps steers its way,
and you on the burnished poop deck
sitting while you play
Gary Glitter on the wind-up gramophone.’
A Capri cut in a bit too close in front, playing his own little game. A Rolls-Royce is sport for everybody, and Delphick didn’t notice my smart avoidance procedure. ‘I know it’s not that good, and that I’m still working on it, but you might fucking well say something.’
‘If I had a lady in this car,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t have given you a lift in a million years.’
‘Oh,’ he said nastily, ‘you’re power mad, are you?’
‘But I liked your poem. It was better than I thought it would be.’
‘Oh, bloody good. Bloody good. Now I know why I sweat blood. Just to hear something complimentary like that. You’ve not only made my day, but you’ve made my life.’
‘I enjoyed it.’ Praise cost nothing. ‘I was so engrossed you nearly made me have an accident.’ The straight dual carriageway was fabulous for speed. I remembered the cluttered and winding ribbon of death on my first motorised trip to London nearly fifteen years ago. ‘You really did.’
‘A real accident?’
‘Another split second and we’d have been a blazing funeral pyre on the central reservation: you, me, Dismal and Panda going skywards in a cloud of soot and flame – and maybe the four people in the offending car as well. A holocaust, in fact.’
‘Marvellous.’ He scribbled away. ‘Go on.’
‘There would be a multiple pile-up and a tailback for ten miles, and the sky would reflect ribbons of blue flashing lights, as police cars and ambulances tried to get to us. And if one car’s petrol tank exploded, so would the one behind, and the one behind that, and you’d have the domino theory in action right back to York, like Dick Turpin’s horse of flame called Red Bess jumping the turnpike gates.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ he screamed, causing Dismal to bark. ‘Don’t tell me. Now I’ve got it: “Like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.” That’s it. Wonderful. What an image. Delphick does it again. “Dick Turpin rides a horse called Poker Lips through a multiple pile-up …” Now you can go on.’
His enthusiasm had dried me up.
‘Well, go on, then!’
‘Write your own poems.’ I signalled to get off the motorway. ‘Here’s the parting of the ways.’
We lifted his panda-wagon out of the boot, and he didn’t thank me for services willingly provided, but then, I was glad to see him go with pennant waving, making progress towards his triumphant reception in Stevenage.
I laid a hand on Dismal’s head as we got back to the big wide track. He seemed pleased that we were on our own again and nudged me fondly. I was tired. Composing Delphick’s poem had worn me out, making me realise how hard a poet’s life must be. A graceful road bridge spanned the motorway and gave a perfect side-on view of a jam sandwich, at which Dismal merely twitched. There was something reassuring about the sight, and in the apparition of a London taxi which overtook me and was soon well in front. I stopped dragging my heels and went a bit faster, thinking it time to show everybody that the Rolls-Royce was still king of the road.
When I overtook the taxi at eighty he flashed me, and Dismal breathed down my neck with full approval at our speed. I floated effortlessly up to a ton and wondered who had been in that cop car crossing the overhead bridge near Stevenage. Moggerhanger had many contacts among the jam sandwich fraternity, and both organisations were interested in my whereabouts, so maybe the cop car had radioed my progress to the metropolis. I slowed down to ninety, not wanting a speeding charge to be the first of many stepping stones to twenty-five years. ‘And it is recommended that he serve the whole of the sentence.’
There’s some benefit to having a split personality, especially when you have constant access to the most cheerful, positive and optimistic side. That was one of the things Bridgitte couldn’t stand, yet if I hadn’t had such an easygoing side to my nature we would have been divorced years ago, which maybe was something else she held against me. I felt a vivid and passionate longing to see Sam and Rachel, as well as Smog, but crushed it down as being counter-productive to my scheme of survival. It was no use driving to Harwich and onto the boat to Holland with so much unfinished business in the air.
I slowed down further on the long slope before the island at the end of the motorway and slid into the path of a lorry to get around. The driver didn’t like it, so told his mate to sit on the horn, the noise following me the whole way to Hatfield. It was bad driving, to bring such attention to myself. He tailgated me for a while, forty white halitosis headlights burning my neck and almost driving Dismal mad. Then he turned off, so I settled into a sedate trundle on the long grind to the North Circular.
From twenty miles away, on a rise of the road, I saw the sprawl of London. I could smell it, and the car seemed to speed up even though I didn’t put my foot on the pedal. Half a hoarding was missing, where a lorry had smashed into it, and a large signpost a few miles further along was so covered in mud it could hardly be read. The pull was definitely on when I got to Barnet, orange sodiums fully lit even though the sun burned bright. I threaded the denser but quick-moving traffic through the matchless boxwood villas of Mill Hill, till I was turning west on the North Circular, passing places
I had ticked off a few days ago but which now seemed from another life.
Every traffic light turned green at my advance, and I got into London too early for comfort. I had imagined a night approach, on the understanding that if there was a barney when I handed the car back there would be a chance to vanish like a cat in the blackout. I stopped at every pedestrian crossing to let anyone over who stood within fifty yards of the edge. If a traffic light did turn amber I was pathetically grateful for the favour of being held up.
‘Are you going then, or aren’t you?’ I shouted to one old lady, who therefore felt she must hurry so fast to the crossing that I dreaded her having a heart attack. I should have gone to Delphick’s gig in Stevenage, got him to take me on as his manager and press agent (or pander) so as to hold back from London for another few days.
Instead I decided to visit Blaskin’s flat, and see how Bill Straw was starving along. I cut into Town on Watling Street and Edgware Road and an hour later found a parking meter near Harrods.
PART TWO
Thirteen
This is me, Gilbert Blaskin, writing. Fasten your safety belts. Cullen’s story has come into my hands, and there’s a gap in his narrative which needs to be bridged. It’s an unprecedented step for me to doctor an offspring’s book, but art ever instills a striving for perfection – and that means in anybody else’s work that comes to my always grateful hand. The reason Zhdanov Blaskin hates communism is that if ever it came to power, and I was made minister for culture, I wouldn’t be able to trust myself. Knowing there are limits to human perfectibility, especially mine, saves me from committing a multitude of sins against my fellow men. I only wish I could say the same about women.
A few days after seeing Michael Cullen for the first time in months, if not years (how the hell should I know when I last saw my son?) he came in one afternoon and left a creature called Dismal with me. He was in a peculiar mood and I couldn’t guess why, except that he was just back from a jaunt around the country on behalf of that bandit Moggerhanger. I hoped he hadn’t done anything that would get him in trouble with the police. He kept lifting his eyes and looking at the ceiling, as if expecting God to come down from his Kingdom and help him. It worried me. Then it irritated me. When he wouldn’t have a drink because he was driving I really began to worry. I had a ferocious headache after a long night on the town, so had the courtesy to drink his share with my own.
Nor did he stay long enough to change his mind. There’s more of me in him, in the manner of obstinacy, than I sometimes like to imagine, and he’s as firm in his ways as I am in mine. Though they don’t touch at the moment, I expect they will more and more as time goes on. I wondered what he had done to deserve such a fate.
Nor have I any liking for dogs. The hound he left with me, by the name of Dismal, tore a packet of my cigarettes to bits as if he was the wrath of God sent forth by one of those lunatic anti-smoking types. It endeared me to it, nevertheless. I wished he’d knocked the whisky bottle over as well. I put the cigarettes that survived back on the table, thinking that life was too short to give up smoking and that in any case it was just my luck to get cancer if I did. Then I poured another glass of whisky, as a continuation of my afternoon breakfast, and when it had slithered into my stomach like an egg on fire I told myself that this style of life can’t go on, something I always say when I begin to feel better, especially after a night out that ended in the police station and in court the morning after.
Down Sloane Street at midnight my car was halfway up a lamp post. ‘I have reason to believe you’ve been drinking,’ one of the young lads in blue said.
‘Let’s breathalyse the bleeder,’ said the other.
I was about to deny all knowledge of drink when unfortunately I was sick, which seemed to confirm their suspicions.
‘Unmistakable vomit,’ said the policeman in court.
‘Yes,’ said the magistrate, ‘you did rather stop a packet, didn’t you?’ He was a genial old cove, and I’d been up before him often.
‘A pint, sir, not a packet,’ said the constable.
‘Well, a quart, if you like,’ said the beak. ‘I don’t suppose Mr Blaskin has anything to say for himself. He never has.’
I’d been feeling queasy all night in the cell.
‘Twenty-five pounds fine, and fifteen pounds costs,’ grinned the beak. Then the bloody awful thing growled once more. The beak got panicky: ‘Make it twenty-five pounds costs for the dry cleaning. And get him out of here. Quick! Quick!’
It was too late. He called for sawdust, and I could only commiserate. I was lucky to get off so lightly. Realising such behaviour would have to stop, I lit another cigarette and poured more whisky. Dismal walked out of the kitchen and jumped on my knee. I pushed him off, and looked through the mail to see if there was any money. I found a two hundred pound money order for the translation of one of my early novels into Serbo-Croat, which would just about pay for last night’s foray. God looks after his own, and writers.
I went into the kitchen for something to eat. Every weekend I stocked up with goodies from Harrods, and though it was only Tuesday, there was nothing left. I gave Dismal a kick. He looked at me reproachfully, and ate a letter – fortunately not the one with the cheque in it. I patted him, sorry I had been unjust to such a clever dog who could get paté and sausages out of the refrigerator, or bread and tinned delicacies from the larder, or my best wine from the cupboard. I would have given a lot to see him working the corkscrew. I have a bad memory regarding the consumption of food, but I knew there should have been more than I saw.
At three o’clock my charwoman Mrs Drudge came in, and it was obvious that she hadn’t put on extra weight in the last few days. I daren’t say anything about the food shortage, because she was very sensitive about such things, perhaps because of her name. When she came into the living room and complained about the mess, as well she might, I said: ‘Where the hell have you been, Mrs Drudge, to let the flat get so untidy? I can’t put up with it. If things go on like this, I shall have to dismiss you.’
I suppose I must explain (being a writer) that her real name was Drudge-Perkins, and that she came from a highly respected family. She had a statuesque and severe aspect, and was forty years of age. For a brief period, in her early thirties, she had been my mistress. I say mistress advisedly, because that’s what it was like whenever I got her into bed. I’d first met her when I gave a talk at Camp House (Contemporary Arts, Music and Poetry) on ‘Art and the People’, or was it ‘The Novelist and the Moral Crisis of the Age’? She took me to task afterwards (her phrase) on my cynicism, which I called reality, but we climbed into bed before the argument got far, she because she wanted to hear my final views on the matter (I was very subtle and diplomatic in those days, not to say devious), and me because I needed to get to the fundamental parts of her matter. And so things went from bad to better and from better to ecstatic. She was one of the best women I ever had and she wasn’t averse to indicating, by her concupiscent frigidity, that I was one of the worst men for her. She was a single woman with a private income, and I rode that one till she offered to give it to me, so that I could nobly refuse, which I did. She did my typing for a while, after the demise of poor Pearl Harby, until I got tired of correcting her myriad mistakes (and her trying to alter my style and take out what she considered the dirty bits but which were tepid pictures of what really flowed through the sewers), and took on somebody else, when she agreed, as she put it, to clean my pigsty now and again. Her flat was in the same block, on the third floor, so she didn’t have far to come.
As for her appearance, what can I say, except that I still occasionally slavered over her, though of course, given our somewhat changed attitude towards one another, she was infinitely more difficult to get at. In order to emphasise the dignity of her position, and to show how far beneath herself she was stooping in cleaning up my slops, she never dressed below the standard of a Queen of Hearts out shopping. Her hair style was immaculate though severe, as befitted a
personality which she had no intention of changing, even if she had been able to. She wore a conservative tight-fitting expensive dress whenever she appeared, sporting a string of pearls, a bracelet, a ring, and black shoes with a strap fastened demurely over the plump top of her foot with a shiny black button. She must have spent more time getting ready to come up and do my chores than on the work itself, but for the last five years she had never been less than frosty in her attitude to me who, though I have never done anything basically wrong, insulted her to the core by the fact that I had been born.
To say that I loved her would be strictly correct, and to say that she adored me, in her Greenlandish fashion, might also bear a taint of accuracy, but there was part of her which spoke in soft but irrevocable words to the effect that I was an animal to be avoided, and that since she couldn’t stay out of my sight she must keep herself as tightly laced as the underwear designs of male chauvinist pigs would allow her to get. We had each other well assessed. My flat became a tiger cage as soon as she entered it, and we neither of us minded because we knew our places exactly with regard to each other. Whenever she found me, at three in the afternoon, in bed with the current girlfriend, or even with my wife, she was as frosty and correct as ever, but I knew she was seething underneath, and she knew that I knew, and sometimes I would ask her to get into bed with us, but she trumped my wicked card by declining in the most polite and civilised manner.
She was the only woman with whom I couldn’t win, because we came from the same side of the tracks, but for that reason I could deliver her more painful blows than anyone else. And for the same reason, any blow she aimed at me could have no repercussions whatsoever. She was my perfect companion, and I was hers, but for that reason she would never marry me, and for the same reason I would never marry her. For the same reason again we had a nagging and eternal love for one another. Therefore she was only fit to be my charlady. From her point of view that was the only way she had of punishing me. We had an ideal relationship which it would be base to sully with wedlock. In any case, I was already married. It was not normal and happy, which would have pained her less, but unconventional and very light on my shoulders, which must have been torment to her. We were star-crossed lovers, both hearts walking in different parts of space yet indissolubly linked. I loved her as if she was a wayward brother I could never get to know, and if she loved me at all it was as a sister who had become a prostitute not to earn a living but because she liked it – a sister she could never get to know simply because she had no hope of bringing her back to the path of rectitude.
Life Goes On Page 17
