‘“She looked at him, and realised that for all his thirty years, he wasn’t grown up. He never would be, so what was she doing at the Fenland Hotel? But if he was to grow up, she could see all too clearly what he would grow up to be, and she didn’t like it. The fact that she could see into the future, however, made all the difference between a live and a dead relationship. ‘If a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ he said, ‘whose loss is that?’
‘“(If I don’t get her knickers off, I’ll burst. Never say it cannot happen here. It always might, whether it does or not. That doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Everything’s too turgid. Write it fourteen times. You need a drink, you lazy swine. No, get her as far as that four-poster bed at least. Lead up to it slowly. Make ’em wait. Make yourself wait, you awful old prick. Why don’t you admit it?)
‘“She sipped her brandy, and the pursing of her lips boded well for when she lay naked on the bed and he lowered his head to suck an orgasm out of her lovely full-lipped cunt. He loved women, but loved those women more who loved women. Oh, Lady Samphire of the Ouse! What do we have to lose except the reek of virtue?”’
It was time for me to cough. He always spoiled it, and things would get worse. Such vile words coming out of Frances Malham’s lovely mouth in the purest of accents seemed, to say the least, incongruous. I put my arm around her shoulder. ‘Maybe you should stop. It’s only the first draft.’
She laughed, flushed though she was. ‘It’s funny.’
‘It’s foul.’
‘I’m getting an insight into the way he works. It’s wonderful.’
‘It gets worse. It must be the specimen sheet that he lets lady thesis-writers read when they come to interview him. Then he lays them down where you’re sitting now – if they get the message. It’s almost as bad as Sidney Blood without the violence. There’s no trick he doesn’t stoop to.’
She put the papers on the table. ‘I suppose all writers are the same.’
If Blaskin walked in she was lost. I dreaded the click of the door. ‘It’s the creative process. They’re in a permanent state of randiness. I’ve written a couple of books for Blaskin, so I know.’
‘You?’
I kissed her hair. ‘He has so many ideas he has to farm them out. He gives me the gist, I knock it off, he polishes it up, his secretary types it, the doorman posts it, some daft publisher prints it. One day I’ll branch out on my own. You learn a lot working for Blaskin.’
She took off her glasses, and our faces touched. We were fully clothed, but I noticed the heat of her body. I could only assume she felt mine, for she moved a few inches. Being scientifically minded, she realised that such narrow space would make the heat increase, till the flashpoint came.
I had such an elegant hard-on that, if need be, I could have balanced a plate of black puddings on it as I made my way towards her up a flight of stairs. I put my hand on her leg and gently touched the thigh under her skirt. My hand went as far as it could go. She was in flood. I wasn’t far off. Being in love, I came too quickly when we lay back on the couch. I wanted her to take her clothes off, but she said it was too late. Such easy success was bad for me. I had expected to pursue her for days, maybe weeks, but she had arranged for events to rip along at her own special pace, something which women did more and more these days. It was the way we fucked now – sometimes. Back from the bathroom, she said: ‘I’d like another drink. I made myself come, otherwise I feel lousy.’
‘Sorry it didn’t work together.’
She smiled, and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’d like a cigarette as well.’
We sat in the living room. ‘I don’t know who you think I am or what I’m like,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure your ideas are wrong. My father was a doctor who died ten years ago, when I was twelve. He went to the surgery one day and the receptionist phoned my mother two hours later to say he’d had a heart attack. He was sixty and they’d been married fifteen years. He smoked and drank very heavily and that was what killed him. As well as overwork. I was the only child. My mother was over twenty years younger. She had practically no money, and got a job as a doctor’s receptionist to pay for my education. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Jeffrey I think she would have gone under. He’s my mother’s brother. He’s been wonderful, and still helps out, though he has a family of his own. But he won’t have any more children because he had a vasectomy three years ago.’
Was there never going to be a dull moment, an uneventful minute without one single surprise? Working for Moggerhanger was employment for senior citizens by comparison. I had given Jeffrey a punch in the face for having put Maria in the family way – just a few months ago – and here was Frances telling me that such a thing couldn’t have been possible. I was too numb to pray that the earth would devour me. No wonder he’d laughed. Was it at the thought that his vasectomy hadn’t worked again? Or did he know it was foolproof, and he was justifiably amused at my crackpot accusation? Yet if it wasn’t him, then who had got Maria pregnant? She’d lied to me, though if she hadn’t I would never have gone to the Harlaxtons and met Frances so as to bring her back to Blaskin’s abode (by an equally outrageous lie) and confirm our friendship by a more delectable fuck than the hugger-mugger in the broom cupboard at The Palm Oiled Cat with Ettie. There seemed little hope of stopping that old roundabout as long as I breathed. A start in life goes on to the end.
‘Are you sure he had a vasectomy?’
‘I know the doctor who did it. He was one of my father’s old friends. I also know the doctor who talked Jeffrey into having it done. His name was Dr Anderson. Jeffrey was going to him for analysis at the time, because he’d had a bit of a crack-up, and his advertising firm paid for the treatment. Jeffrey was in absolute terror of the world ending. He said he couldn’t bear the thought of his children going up in smoke and flame at the same time as himself. And the idea of having one or two more children so that they would also be incinerated was even more terrifying. He called such anguish paying the Moloch Tax. He had apocalyptic visions of slaughtering Elizabeth, then the children and himself. He thought he might wake up in the middle of the night and soak the house in blood and paraffin – he said. So at least he was determined to have no more children and add to the casualty list.’
‘He’s such a cheerful-looking, extrovert bloke,’ I said.
‘I know. But the issue paralysed him, and even the fact that Aunt Elizabeth was on the pill didn’t convince him that he wouldn’t have more children. After the vasectomy he was normal, positively exuberant in fact, and went back to work. If I had to give anyone my idea of a good person, I’d tell them about Jeffrey.’
There was something wrong here, which was not surprising considering her opinion of a shit like Delphick. Still, I owed Uncle Jeffrey an apology, just as I owed Maria a smack across the chops. Another item which scratched me on the raw side was the way Dr Anderson, the evil genius of the psychology underworld, kept turning up. He seemed to be as big a pest on the body politic as was Moggerhanger on the social fabric, and if I had any say in the matter I would pull the plug on both. The only question was how. ‘Do you know anything about Dr Anderson?’
I fully expected she would bring out a list of his good deeds, telling me of how he was the benevolent supporter of five thousand orphans in the Third World, that he personally washed mugs in a soup kitchen by Waterloo Bridge on Saturday night, and that he ran a home for battered wives in Glasgow.
‘I think I would like another drink.’
‘Willingly. Cigarette?’
She smoothed her skirt and stretched out her legs. ‘All I know is that for some time after Jeffrey had his vasectomy, Dr Anderson was having an affair with Elizabeth.’
‘He was screwing Jeffrey’s wife? You’re joking.’
I caught in the openness of her mirth a similarity to that of Jeffrey. ‘I never joke about things like that. I often think that if I could bring myself to tell lies my life would be easier. Anyway, the upshot of Anderson’s affair with Elizabeth was that she got p
regnant. Would you believe it? It seemed that Anderson recommended vasectomies to his married patients as often as it seemed convincing to do so, and then, if their wives were halfway attractive, he had an affair with them to get them pregnant.’
‘But you said Elizabeth was on the pill.’
‘She came off it after Jeffrey’s vasectomy, and Anderson provided pills which weren’t effective. Isn’t that diabolical?’
‘I’m appalled.’
‘So was I.’
‘And Elizabeth got a bun in the oven?’
‘What a horrid way of putting it. You see, Anderson is investigating a breakdown theory, pushing people as far as they will go, to see at what point in their decline they begin to pull out of the dive naturally. Some do, some don’t. After a certain point he’s not interested in those who go down to the depths never to come up, but only in those who get out of it. It’s this point of rebound that fascinates him.’
‘He wants to remove it?’
‘He wants to control it,’ she said.
‘So that’s his game.’
She nodded. ‘But he didn’t have the chance to break Jeffrey. Elizabeth got rid of the foetus without him knowing. I helped her. It was a bloody awful experience for her. Not too pleasant for me, either.’
‘You poor kid!’ I drew her to me, and received a warm kiss which I matched with my own.
‘That’s all I know about Dr Anderson.’
And I knew that during or after his rave-up with Jeffrey’s wife he had got hold of poor innocent Maria, who was now inflating with another of his monster-kids.
‘I expect he’s writing a book on it,’ she said, ‘full of graphs, statistics and obscene mathematical formulae that in reality mean extremes of emotion and misery. He wants to chart and document the point of return – or no return.’
‘He probably sends his findings to the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Or the Russians.’
‘Or both. How does one stop him?’
‘He’ll end by running himself into the ground,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t bank on it.’
She looked at the window, as if Delphick was going to come flying in triumphantly on his Winged Panda. ‘I wonder where he’s got to?’
I could think of no one except Frances and myself. The world stopped, and I’d have a hard job to kick it spinning again. ‘Drowning his chagrin in The Jolly Scribblers because Hamley’s wouldn’t take his cheque.’
She looked at me, and even with my ever-burning optimism I could hardly call it a loving expression. ‘Maybe you really are Blaskin’s son. Anyway, where is The Jolly Scribblers?’
‘Near Mornington Crescent. But I expect he’s gone somewhere else by now – our peripatetic Panda Poet. It’s catching.’
‘What is?’
‘You start to imitate those who sponge off you.’
‘I don’t, but maybe that’s because I’m a woman. Anyway, I must be going.’
I was in a state of terror, thinking that if she went I would never see her again, a feeling I would normally have despised. ‘It’s time for lunch. Why don’t you have something to eat?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She picked over the records by the Bang and Olufson hi-fi that was as thin as an After Eight.
‘I am.’ I went to her. ‘For you. For your spirit, for all the thoughts you’ve had since you were born, and all the thoughts you’ll have till you die. To say that I love you doesn’t express what I feel.’
‘I’ll put this Schubert on, if I may.’ She looked at me. ‘In a way it’s a pity we made love. I don’t have to get to know you now.’
A stone hurled from the wall of a castle had hit me on the heart. ‘I feel the same about you. I hated making love just then, not that I didn’t enjoy it, but because I knew you were the sort that would use it as an excuse for calling it the end. I thought you expected me to make love, and so I was forced to choose between disappointing you, or damning myself. The fact that I proved myself right doesn’t make me feel any better. I can always use it for one of my stories.’
‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ she said.
I didn’t give a damn whether she was or not (I certainly did) and told her so. ‘I like Schubert, though not better than Bach.’ Bridgitte used to play them. ‘I’m going away tonight, and won’t be back for a few weeks.’
She was lost in the music, so I had to become lost as well. I would follow her anywhere, through snake-pits and dog-tunnels, though I would resist the idea for as long as I could.
‘I don’t really know you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I was wrong.’
I sat by her and kissed her. ‘I don’t know myself, so how can you? I’m not so sure I want to. Know yourself, and die. I have a stab at it now and again.’ I came out with any nonsense because to mystify her was my only chance of getting anywhere. She was so knowing that to compete with her quality of mind and brain was useless, whereas gibberish might have some effect. I spoke into her warm ear. ‘You’re the last person I expected to meet in my life, because I’ve been searching for you from the beginning. That’s why it won’t kill me if you vanish forever. To live with an ideal woman would be like being born again, and I don’t think I could stand it. Self-destruction was never in my line.’
Such rubbish was a pointer as to how I really felt. I was half laughing as I spoke, but hoped she would mistake it for a state of emotion near to tears. I stopped, as if overpowered by the beauty of the music (maybe I was) and to see whether my words would fetch a response.
‘Have you ever written any poetry?’
I let a minute go by, as if I’d been waiting for such a question. ‘I’m sorry you asked that.’
‘Why?’
I watched another fifty seconds slide by on the clock. ‘They’re locked in a drawer at my house in Cambridgeshire.’
After a while (she was good at the game as well) she said: ‘Can I see them?’
The speed of our conversation was sending me dizzy. I was beginning to crave a ding-dong battle with Bridgitte, or a bit of argy-bargy on the state of the nation with Bill Straw. ‘They’re not finished. There are only six. I burned fifty last week. They were too much like Delphick’s twaddle.’
She twitched.
‘I’ll sort some out when I come back. If I come back.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I won’t know till tonight.’
She turned and kissed me. My hand went up and down her blouse, but I felt no response in me. ‘What poets do you like?’ she asked.
‘Peter Lewis and John Jones. They’re new young poets. They’re sensational. They write so that people won’t get any reaction at all when they read them. They’re all the rage – or will be.’
‘Who publishes them?’
‘The Silence is Golden Press. No other poets can get a look in while they’re on the scene.’ I went on with my stroking and stoking. Her legs opened and I reached the crotch of her drawers. She was ready, but I was stone-cold. These young girls were shameless and wonderful. Five years older and I could have been her father. Even that thought didn’t give me a hard-on. Schubert came to an end and left the field free.
She gripped my arm. ‘I don’t want you to go away.’
‘I’ve got to.’
She undid her blouse and opened her bra in front so that I could knead the warm flesh. ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I think you know that. But my life’s not my own.’
‘Nobody’s is,’ I thought she said, as my lips went to her nipples. There was nothing I could do but go back to kissing her lips, and gaze at her pale brown eyes through the gold-rimmed glasses. My lips kept sliding off her nipple, which was so small there was hardly anything for a purchase. I sent a single finger under her hair and around the back of her neck, then drew it forward to her ear, and felt the curving slim wire of her glasses. I prised it up, and put a hand also to the other ear, and lifted them off to see her naked eyes beneath, and the effect of such misty and undressed eyes, and the feel of her light glasses h
anging from one of my fingers, and their release as I let them drop gently on the table, gave me a surge of blood that put me in the mode of action – and no mistake.
Twenty-Three
I made my way along Kensington Gore and the High Street, then turned into Holland Park, heading for the Bush. Young mums pushed their prams down leafy paths and across lawns, proud at having done the most ordinary thing in the world, while peacocks with spreading feathers observed them haughtily. After our day of love Frances had gone back to Oxford, saying she wasn’t sure about seeing me again. We’d quarrelled and shouted, and reduced ourselves to silence, and my zombie-half could only hope that she would reappear sometime, somewhere.
A con-man whose ambition was to bask in idleness, whose only ability (if he had any) was in telling lies, comes sooner or later to a point when the lying and the laziness have to stop. I decided this was it. In answer to Moggerhanger’s summons via his pillock-in-chief Pindarry, I walked seven miles to Ealing to let the fact sink in.
I made westerly at a steady pace so as not to arrive in a sweat, a warm wind flicking at my face as I stepped out on my stint through all the Actons. My shoulder bag was heavy, but that was part of the game. At Upper Mayhem I often did twenty miles a day around the Fens with Smog, packing a weightier rucksack with gear and grub, and a big tea flask, and setting out in early morning to spot butterflies at Wicken Fen and birds at Dugdale Wood, and not getting home till dusk.
Kenny Dukes was at the gate of the Big Chief’s house. ‘You’re the last one in. It’s a real gathering. There’s going to be something big on.’
The cuts from his meeting with Dicky Bush had healed, except for a nasty-looking ridge under his left eye. I aborted a witty remark about having fallen over a Sidney Blood book. ‘I’m glad you’re on the mend.’
Life Goes On Page 35
