I wondered if this long yarn wasn’t her technique of putting off men who were about to make a play for her. If so, I would have taken my hat off to her, if I had been wearing one. ‘You make me sweat.’
‘Do I? Anyway, when the great day came I helped him into a taxi and kissed him goodbye. The only condition was that I wouldn’t ask where he was going. That was easy. I didn’t want to. When the door closed and he was driven away I was desolate for a couple of hours, but then I began to mend. I was happy. I wanted money to live on, so two days later I got a job as a typist and general office dogsbody. My wages were low, but I managed. It was no real problem. In fact everything was wonderful. No one could understand why I was so happy and calm. I made friends, with a woman or two, and a married couple in the same street. I invited them over for drinks. There was even a man I thought I might fancy.
‘Well, you’ve guessed it. He came back. I found him on the doorstep one day, when I got home from work. My heart sank. I wanted to kill him. Just as I had got back on my own two feet this had to happen. My impulse was to turn round and walk off, never to see him or the house again. If only I had. But I couldn’t. I swear it had nothing to do with him. It was just that I lived there. Whatever I thought, he was back. He had become more and more unhappy the longer he was away. It was only three months. We had grown to be so much like Siamese twins, spiritually, that maybe his continuous misery was only at the thought that I was getting happier and happier.
‘We had a real quarrel then, such as we’d never had before. It didn’t clear the air and end our troubles, either. Things aren’t that simple. It made them worse. There was no solution. I went for him with a hammer. No, I didn’t murder him. Even that would have been an advance on our situation. I caught him at the temple, and I never knew he had so much blood. Perhaps that was his trouble. Anyway, two weeks later I left him, and I didn’t go back. He was still at his work, the life and soul of the firm, I suppose. I packed up and got a room. I had arranged a transfer to another office of the same firm, in St Albans. In a couple of years, by which time he’d got himself another woman – thank God, I was quite happy about that – the divorce came through. I’m the manageress of the office now, and they’ve given me extended leave, because I had to get away. I’ve been very calm, and maybe the reaction was delayed, but the hard fact of the divorce hit me like a bomb, not because of anything to do with him but due to something in myself. I’m absolutely free now, and at last know who I am. Only I can tell me who and what I am, not any man. I live very well on my own. I’ve even managed to save money without skimping myself. I have friends, though no man friend who I would let be my lover.’
‘If you dislike men so much,’ I said, ‘why are you telling me all this?’
She held my hand for a moment, and finished her beaker of champagne. ‘I’m not one of those who hate men. It’s just that nothing good’s happened with men, that’s all. In any case, you’re a writer and I can talk to you. My name’s Agnes, by the way.’
‘Glad to know you.’ I opened the second bottle. ‘I’m writing a novel called The Way We Live Now, but I’m stuck halfway through. That’s why I had to get away for a few days.’
The plane droned on. Now and again I got a glimpse of the film, which seemed to be about an endless car chase, the occasional vehicle erupting into a fireball. ‘They gave me a bonus for the trip,’ she said, ‘and I went to Knightsbridge and spent some of it on underwear.’
The seatbelt lights scintillated, and air pockets scared her. They scared me, too. The stratosphere shook the Boeing as the proverbial terrier is said to shake a rat. Then it went as if on velvet. I didn’t mind the plane falling apart, but I would have appreciated having the fuselage lit as we went down. ‘Underwear’s a good thing to spend money on,’ I said. ‘Keeps up the old morale.’ I put my hand on her thigh, quite unobtrusively I thought, but she tapped it away: ‘It’s not for you.’
‘It’s for you, then, is it?’ I responded.
‘Oh damn,’ she said, ‘trust me to sit next to a writer.’
‘The sort of experience you’ve told me about takes longer to get over than you think.’ I wondered if there would ever be a time when such misery between man and woman would not exist. Even in China, I said to her, a peasant and his wife were not beyond an occasional slash with a billhook in the rice fields when the Red Brigade commissar was looking the other way. No system could cure it, and I suppose in fact it kept us going because otherwise we would be bored to death. At the risk of making an enemy for life I told her this as well, and she said: ‘You’re wiser than you look!’
Another car exploded on the screen, maybe to get us used to the idea of the plane disintegrating. The fuselage was grumbling so much I wondered if it could stand the strain of the next two thousand miles. She didn’t feel me twitch at her remark. The only thing that stopped me slapping her chops was the thought of that sexy underwear clinging to her thighs and arse. I couldn’t understand why she had told me such a come-on thing, unless the idea of contempt for men had bitten so deep that she didn’t care anymore. ‘If I ran an airline, I’d call it Pornair and show blue movies all the way, one that men would enjoy, and one for women.’ She took my hand at another lurch of the plane. The film show ended with a convoy of cars and lorries exploding one after the other, and half a dozen babies started crying at the same time, as if we had miraculously taken more on board since the trip began. ‘I think the pilot’s got a lever on his instrument panel that controls screaming kids.’
The lights came on, and a smell of casseroled meat hinted that food bins weren’t far away. ‘I’ll throw up if I don’t eat,’ she said.
I was famished, and wolfed the grub as if I hadn’t seen any for a week, though didn’t omit to pass her tit-bits from my identical dish. ‘I’ll be at the Grand Park Hotel in Toronto. Smack in the middle. I’ll probably only stay two nights, being a restless sort of person. If I’m there longer than that, I usually hang on for a fortnight, or until I’m bored. Is your sister going to be waiting for you?’
‘She isn’t even expecting me. I’ll phone her from the airport. If I had written beforehand to say I was coming she might have told me not to bother. If she isn’t pleased to see me, I’ll go on to New York. I got a visa before I left, just in case.’
She wasn’t to know, but so had I. As soon as Moggerhanger said Canada, I said New York to myself, and though he was certain to put me on such a tight schedule that I wouldn’t be able to use it, I got straight down to Grosvenor Square with a photo and the filled-in documentation, and fixed myself up just in case.
‘Do you know,’ she said, when I ordered wine with the meal and filled her cardboard cup, ‘a man’s never tried to get me drunk before.’
‘It’s hard to believe. I often got my wife swined-up when she was tense and couldn’t throw off a bad mood. Just to melt the clouds. She even knew what I was doing and, forgive a bit of crude talk, but the fucks we had afterwards were wonderful. I felt the sky wafting my arse as I went on and on. Then she got on top of me, and the wind tickled her lovely arse. Marvellous what a little loosening up with alcohol can do. I would never try to get a woman so pissed that she couldn’t enjoy sex, though. I’m not a brute.’
‘I know.’
I popped a spoonful of trifle into her mouth. ‘That’s the nicest thing you said to me since we took off.’
She slopped it immediately back, and luckily it went onto her tray. Her gills were the colour of whitewash. ‘Excuse me, but I must go for a pee.’
I pushed the old lady by my side – who had been eavesdropping on our salacious chit-chat – into the gangway. The noise of Agnes’s progress up the plane was painful to hear. Perhaps the experience of meeting me had been too exciting for her. I tripped over the old woman’s reticule, and led my latest loved one to the toilets.
‘It’s bloody disgusting,’ someone called – a podgy bloke wearing a cricket jersey and a porkpie hat.
A stewardess, swinging a bunch of keys and lea
ning against what looked like a washing machine, poured a miniature bottle of vodka into a mug of cocoa. ‘We get all sorts on planes these days.’
‘It isn’t her fault,’ I snapped. ‘Everybody’ll have it soon. They must have taken bad food on in London.’
My arm around Agnes’s waist went under her plump breast, and I drew it back. Far be it for me to take advantage of a woman in such a state. People were shoving their trays aside, faces bunched up with doubt about the food. Twenty were already queuing at the toilets, but I pushed Agnes in as soon as a startled Indian woman came out, then stood guard, hearing her retch even above the hum of the engines.
I don’t know why, but as I listened to her almost rhythmical unloading, I was fixed with the certain realisation that disaster waited for me in Toronto. My life had been filled with occasions on which my most profound feelings, warning me of the wrath to come, had been ignored. Whether or not it was the closeness of Agnes I don’t know, but this time I decided to acknowledge the feeling that something nasty was being made ready for me, and take steps to avoid it.
I recalled the expression on Moggerhanger’s big-daddy face at the briefing in London. The attaché-case was handed over locked, and when I asked for the key he said I wouldn’t need it because they (whoever they were: I was too lowly in the cogwheels of international skulduggery to be told) had it on the other side. The key had gone over by letter. ‘But what,’ I asked, ‘if the customs officers in Canada want me to open it? I don’t want to end up in the uranium mines.’ I only got a small dose of laughter this time. ‘That’s a risk you’ve got to take,’ he said. ‘It’s a high risk business.’ Like fuck it is – flashed through my mind. ‘Whether you have the key or not, it’ll make no difference if they ask you to open it. Tell ’em you lost it. If they axe it open they’ll just look foolish, because there’s nothing incriminating inside. So no more questions, Michael. Believe me, they won’t stop you. It’s the neatest little job you’ve ever been given to do, and as easy as pie.’
I could only suppose that the payment I had to deliver was in counterfeit notes, that I was the fall guy in a plan of deception that would deceive nobody. Those who were waiting for straightforward recompense, believing in honour among thieves, could not credit the fact that, being an out and out criminal, Moggerhanger wasn’t as perfidious as many inhabitants of Albion had long since been known to be.
Perhaps I was wrong, and my sanity had taken a turn for the worse, but I was determined, after I had delivered my case, to get out of town as soon as – and as secretly as – possible. With Agnes I would be less suspicious than travelling alone, and so I wondered whether my acting scared wasn’t just another plot cooked up by my subconscious to get a woman into bed. I tried not to show my confusion of spirit as I leaned on the bog door, knowing at any rate that I hadn’t fallen so desperately in love that I would risk my own throat when I could get there by infinitely safer methods.
Against a sheet just back from the laundry she would have been invisible on coming out of the lavatory. I licked her wrist, I don’t know why, and she smiled at me with gratitude as we went towards our seats. ‘My husband would have baled out of the plane even without a parachute at this happening,’ she said, ‘but you didn’t abandon me.’
‘Is she all right, duck?’ A wag with a Nottingham accent (you found them everywhere) called that she should have done her business in the sickbags in the pocket of the seat in front, like others were now having to.
‘She’ll spew all over yo’, mate, if y’aren’t careful,’ I replied in an even coarser vein.
He turned to his wife. ‘Bleddy-’ell, a din’t know there wore another Nottingham ragbag on board. Wunders’ll never cease!’
I was laughing as we settled back into our seats. ‘I’m very ashamed, though,’ she said.
‘Don’t make me feel sorry for you. After all, you were only sick.’ I kissed her cold lips, and she held my hands for having been kind to her. I felt as if we’d been married for ten years, such a homely and horny sensation that the peril I would be in once I got to Toronto came palling back over me. My armpits sweated terror. I didn’t think matters through step by step as to how I would avoid the coming trouble, but the picture was played out before me by the time Agnes’s lovely head rested on my shoulder, as we drifted over the woods of Canada. When she woke up I suggested we go to New York, via Niagara Falls, and her look found a special place in my photo-archive. I’d never seen a face with nothing in its expression except an unqualified acceptance of my good nature – though it occurred to me also to hope that if things went wrong in Toronto we wouldn’t end up under the ice together.
As if we had planned it for months, we rattled on about arrangements for getting to the United States. I told her everything, and explained the dangers I would be in, but she laughed as if I’d concocted a story as a writer to take her mind off her recent sickness. To make life safe for us, but especially for her, I would check in at my hotel and deliver what I had brought over for Moggerhanger. I would, as soon as feasible, go out for a walk, and not show my face there again. I braced myself to carry off the meeting with as much nerve as a British con-man can. Agnes would be waiting for me at the Union Station three hours after we had landed – which would be half past four in the afternoon, Toronto time.
Eighteen
Moggerhanger was right. The Canadian customs didn’t open my luggage. I don’t know why I was born with such a suspicious mind. Nevertheless, as soon as I was clear of immigration control I bought a map of the city and planned my campaign. I had only to imagine Bill Straw in my place to see how things should be managed, though why I should regard that bastard with such companionable affection when he had been the one to get me into the mess, I’ll never know. All the same, I would have given anything for a chinwag and booze-up with him, even if he couldn’t stop boasting about how he had nearly wiped out half a battalion of Sherwood Foresters in Normandy before realising they were on his side.
I took a taxi to the Union Station and checked my suitcase into the left luggage, then stood in line and got two tickets to Niagara Falls. I bought a new suitcase into which I flung a few magazines from a trashcan, and after that little bit of survival business went by taxi to the Grand Park Hotel. On arrival I stepped out with a duty free cigar in my mouth and a plastic bag of clinking booze-bottles as if I had come straight from the airport. My Burberry seemed like paper in the sharp wind and I was glad to reach the lobby, where they told me at the desk that my room was waiting. When I got up it was plain that Pole Axe Tours looked after those who did Moggerhanger’s donkey work. There were two beds, a desk, wardrobe, bathroom and – I could hardly believe that the future was coming true so quickly – a big colour television which would produce blue movies if I phoned down to the cable clerk. A list of titles in a booklet showed a few choice stills, and I salivated over whether to ask for The Story of O, The Beauties of Coral Island or Devil. Take the Hind Leg.
A ringing telephone suggested that other matters were in the offing. I was informed that a Mr Harrow in the coffee shop would like to see my samples, so I picked up the bag and went down, pleased at the speed of events – though there was enough power in the bumping of my heart to run a steam engine.
With his little goatee beard he should have been selling fried rabbit. I met the glare of his teddy-bear glassy eyes, and held out my hand to be shaken. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Harrow.’
His whitewash brush of a beard twitched. ‘I’m his clerk. No need of names. Harrow’s that guy over there, wearing the red and white scarf.’
A fair-haired chap of about thirty sat before an empty plate a couple of tables away. ‘Five seconds after he moves,’ Goatee said, as if his warbling throat contained a miniature tape recorder, ‘get up and follow him to his Lincoln Continental parked outside. He’ll drive you down University Avenue. You don’t need to engage him in conversation. When he stops at a traffic light get out, but leave your bag in the car. Your job’s done. Walk north, back towards t
he hotel. You’ll be free to leave. Repeat what I’ve said.’
I told him to bollocks. ‘I’m too old to play such games.’
He stood up. ‘I hope not – if you want to be older. But good luck and have a nice day, tomorrow.’ He walked into the lobby while I kept an eye on Harrow with the red scarf. I liked travelling, though often felt desolate till I got to such high points of action as this. Harrow stood up and, when the sweep second hand of my watch passed over five divisions, I followed. The commissionaire opened the back door to the Lincoln and I put a dollar into his hand. The afternoon rush hour seemed to be on, unless it was always like that. I only saw the back of Harrow’s head, and two eyes when he looked in the mirror to make sure I wasn’t poking a gun at his neck and asking him to drive me to Vancouver.
He stopped at a traffic light halfway down University Avenue. I got out, and set off north as ordered. But, as I cannot emphasise too often, I wasn’t born yesterday, not even in North America, because at the first intersection I turned right onto Yonge Street, and hopped a taxi to Union Station.
Agnes was waiting at the entrance to the platform and we rushed towards each other like young lovers who hadn’t been to bed for a week. I was trembling with passion and fear, wondering how long my clockwork would go on being better than the clockwork of those who would be after me as soon as they opened my bag and saw they had been paid in forged currency. On the other hand, I couldn’t be certain there was anything wrong with the transaction, only that I’d got scabies on my heels due to a primitive fear in my stomach.
The train pulled out, shuddering and rattling through a sea of lights, a scintillating air-conditioned rainbow-land all around. Agnes was by my side, and I didn’t think about making love, as if we had known each other long enough to have put that kind of thing behind us already. Perhaps the unimaginable had happened, and I was growing up, or getting old, as we went towards the land of freedom and opportunity.
Life Goes On Page 26
