I was enthralled. He should have been in a Himalayan ice cave dishing out advice to flaccid lovers. “And what did you have for your tea?”
“Ham, Collared head. Fish roes. Eggs. Black pudding. They know I like powerful stuff that tastes good. The trouble was we’d just got stuck in when a tall thin chap with a cap on came in and asked who the fuck I was, if you’ll excuse me using his word. ‘He’s my Uncle Horace,’ Betty said. He looked a bit leery: ‘I’ve been married to you for five years, and this is the first time I knew you’d got an Uncle-fucking-Horace.’ She picked up the breadknife, which inclined him to believe her: ‘Well, now you fucking do. He’s my Uncle Horace, isn’t he, mam?’ ‘I ought to know my own brother,’ her mother said. The man in the flat cap swilled a mug of tea: ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ The upshot was he went out of the back door with a couple of bundles under his arm, and I never saw the blackguard again, I’m glad to say.
“I retired to the bedroom with my darling Betty. In and out, we played Box and Cox till about three in the morning. I was fairly knocked out by then, and half asleep, till the kids and Betty’s mother in the other bedroom began screaming at a couple of flashing blue lights on the pavement outside. Suddenly the front and back doors got kicked in, and police were all over the place.
“‘Don’t say a word,’ Betty told me. ‘It’s not us they want.’ Getting my teeth in from the glass on the table, I began to wonder who they were after. If it was me, though I couldn’t see how it could be, and my name got in the press, my wife would kick up no end of a fuss.”
“And you wouldn’t be able to blame her,” I said, giving him the opportunity for some punctuation.
“I know that, you young fool. Anyway, a policeman tipped the bed up with one hand, and held it against the wall: ‘He isn’t under here.’ Another called from downstairs: ‘Where can he be, then?’ A fist was pushed at Betty’s lovely eyes: ‘Come on, where is he?’ ‘He went out at teatime,’ she said, as cool as a cucumber, as if it had happened a time or two before. ‘I expect he’ll be halfway to Mablethorpe by now, even if he’s walking. He never tells me where he goes, does he? I’m only his fucking wife.’ ‘He’s not under the stove, either,’ another officer shouted. The one with me and Betty had the gall to laugh: ‘We’ve got an old geezer from a geriatric home up here. Must have done a runner from his minders.’ In all innocence I gazed round to see who he was talking about, but it was only his sense of humour.
“‘He’s my grandfather,’ Betty said, ‘so you leave him alone.’ The copper wagged a finger at her: ‘Naughty, naughty! But if I was you,’ he said to me, ‘I’d make myself scarce. We don’t want anymore trouble than we’ve got.’”
He waited for the tinkling of pinball machines to calm down: “It sounded good advice, and I was in such a hurry to get out of the house I didn’t know what I’d left behind. As I hurried up the drive, with all the lights of the estate blazing away, one of the policemen called after me: ‘Hey, come back sonny! We shall want you to help us with our enquiries.’ I supposed he only shouted for a lark, so I turned a corner and headed for open ground where it was darker. I was in the Commandos during the War, and knew my stuff.” He pulled a faded photo from his wallet and held it close for a proper look. “That’s me, just there, in the middle. Handsome, wasn’t I?”
The beret was at a cocky angle, half a row of medal ribbons on his battledress, the background of bare hills looking a bit like Greece or Italy. His features were a mixture of brutality and youthful innocence, but the self-satisfied face was his right enough. “Cut a few throats, didn’t I?” he said. “But that’s how it was. Him or me. I’d do it again as well.”
“So you were up shit’s creek without a paddle?” I reminded him.
“For a while I was, couldn’t tell north from south, but when I got to the edge of a wood I saw my old pal Polaris shining its little heart out, and got my bearings. What was I to do? I floundered around in that bit of wood for an hour or two, though I did consider spending a couple of days there, snaring a rabbit and roasting it over a slow fire, just like the old times. But common sense got the better of me, and I put my thinking cap on. Betty’s husband was wanted by the law, that much was clear, and I wondered what for. From what I’d seen of him it could be anything from murder to marketing hard drugs. They wouldn’t have kicked the doors in like that if he’d only stolen a few Mars bars, would they?”
“You never know.” I was nailed down by his story. Had Blaskin been here he would have slavvered at hearing of such misfortunes. “What,” I said, admiring his ability to eat and talk so well at the same time—though I did get a few bits on my jacket, “happened next?”
“You may well ask.”
“I just have.”
“Don’t rush me. I’m not at my best when I’m rushed. The face was, I decided that my little romance with Betty was over, with a sad heart, I might tell you. I had a very soft and tender spot for that little baggage, but I couldn’t take anymore risks with such a family. I suppose all families are wicked in England today, but some are more wicked than others. On the other hand the thought of being shot of Betty cheered me up, because I was free to take up with another young lass. Starting over again is an enticing prospect. But to make a long story a bit shorter, I went by a circuitous route to where I’d left my car at the station, thinking that a good plan would be to cruise down to London and take a look at Soho. In any case, if I got home too early the wife might get suspicious.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
His face went as blank as the North Sea beyond Skegness. “How should I know?”
“If you don’t, who does?”
“Well, she does, I expect. Oh yes, I’ve just remembered.” But he forgot to tell me. My stomach ached from the effort of not laughing at the old chokka’s yarn. “Where does she think you are?”
“At my brother’s, in Halifax. Mind you, it’s not all roses when I want to go away. Weeks beforehand I tell her I’ll go and see my brother on a certain date, and she agrees to it as if she can’t wait to see the back of me. Then a couple of days before my departure she says she doesn’t want me to go. She might even have a good reason why I shouldn’t, but most often she just wants to put me through the hoops, knowing I don’t like to change what I’ve been planning to do for so long. Makes it a bit awkward for me, doesn’t it? All I have to do though is agree with her immediately and say: ‘Oh, that’s all right. I don’t mind. I won’t go. I can see my brother any time.’ This evidence of my good nature discombobulates her, doesn’t it? In the next few hours she forgets why she said she didn’t want me to go, and ends up pleading with me to follow my plan. So I go, don’t I?”
“Sounds like the ideal relationship,” I said, “but, all the same, don’t you imagine that while you’re on your travels she might be having a good time as well? What if she’d only said she didn’t want you to go because her boyfriend had told her he needed to change the time for his visit to her?”
A grin took over his face. “It did cross my mind. Everything always does. But if she is seeing somebody, then good luck to her.” His smile dropped into oblivion, leaving an aspect of utter misery: “Do you think she might be having an affair, then?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Especially since she doesn’t seem to spend any trouble checking up on you.”
The waitress came back to our table: “I don’t know what you find so interesting, listening to that filthy old swine. A few weeks ago he put his hand right up my skirt and squeezed my thingy.”
He gave as innocent a smile as was possible with such imperfect dentures. “Yes, I was spot on. Very warm. Right first time. But I thought you’d enjoy it, a woman of the world like you.”
She seemed about to weep. “If the manager comes in now he’ll throw him out again.” She bent low, and bawled into his ear: “When are you going?”
“Can’t hear you, darling. My hearing aid
jumped out last night when I was in bed with my girlfriend.”
She lit a cigarette, and turned to me. “Nobody would be seen in bed with a bag of old bones like that. All his tales are lies. I can’t think where he gets them from.” She stood back, and blew a smokescreen over him. “Just look at what a state he’s in. He’s been driving up and down the A1 for the last five years telling dirty stories to anybody who’ll listen. He hasn’t been in bed with no mother and daughter like he told me last time. He just goes around insulting women, and gets knocked about by husbands and boyfriends. That’s why he looks like somebody who’s been pulled through a hedge backwards. He ought to be put down. Nobody’ll do it, I know, but it’d serve the dirty old bastard right if they did.” She waved the smoke away, to see him more clearly, a hand so close to his nose he twitched backwards, though the grin was still there. “And don’t call me darling,” she said. “I’m Miss Smith to you,” which tone and language answered the question as to whether she was English or not. She was.
He stood. “I know when I’m not wanted.”
“A good job you do.” She turned to me. “He always says that, though.”
I wanted to kill him, yet held back, because her version didn’t at all fit my assumptions, or I didn’t want it to, recalling the snowstorm of french letters he’d spent a fortune on.
“You can pay me, and clear out,” she said, “or I’ll bring this tray down on your head.”
He went through his pockets, took out a wallet, and I saw that it was empty of money. Panic eddied in all directions from his lips. “I’ve been robbed blind,” he cried. “I’ll kill the bitch when I see her again.”
“Maybe the children did it,” I said. “They must be very lightfingered in that sort of family.” I spared the waitress the anguish of putting up with the old lecher washing pots in the kitchen for a week. “I’ll pay his bill.”
He stood, and took my hands with a sincerity I could well have done without: “I owe you.”
Any such payback would mean listening to another of his stories. “Forget it.”
A tear dropped onto his withered cheek. “Don’t say that. You never know, in this uncertain life, when you might need to recoup my pittance.” He wiped a fleck of coffee from his glasses. “Luckily I have enough petrol to get home. Here’s my card, if you should ever need me.”
The chances were that when I did he would no longer be alive. In fact at the rate he was going I wouldn’t even bet on a couple of hours.
I was happy at him doing a good seventy down the slipway, and placing himself neatly between two lorries before barging into the fast lane. When I dared take a hand from my other eye he was speeding along with a Porsche behind him.
I took a left off the A1 and wiggled my way to the land of the Fens, a zone of England I could never resist because of the great space between earth and sky. I drove along by fullish dikes which reflected flat bottomed clouds but high and woolly on the top. In winter the winds that had picked up speed all the way from Siberia and made the car shake as if I was steering a boat would clear the brain when you were walking, if they didn’t knock you down first.
In a good mood I headed east then southeast to the ex-station of Upper Mayhem, always feeling good when closing in on home.
The three chimneys were seen from miles away, but I soon bumped over the one-time level crossing and went in through the gate onto the parking lot, noting that everything was spickspan, the platforms swept, windows cleaned, and the glass in the lamps shiningly polished.
I sounded the hooter for whoever was on the premises. Dismal my great black ex-police dog or, more recently, Polly Moggerhanger’s panther friend, flopped one step at time from the signal box and ran to lick my hand, farting with delight before sitting a few feet back to make sure it was me and not the postman.
“I haven’t seen him so lively in a long time.” Arthur Clegg who followed him down earned his keep as caretaker, head gardener, and child minder when the kids came over to see me from Holland. In his early sixties, he was a spare man, much weathered in the face, a head of thick but short white hair. A collarless striped shirt, a pair of cutdown jeans, and the wreck of a fine pair of boots whose leather was still fresh at the ankles but cracked and broken around the toes didn’t impair his dignity.
I followed him into the house. “You’re due for a bit more stipend, I think.”
“I’ve got all I need,” he said. “I’m happy living here, you know that. For one thing I can go through your library again—though I’m getting a bit tired of Sidney Blood—and for another you keep the freezer full. And there are plenty of vegetables in the garden. I stay busy.”
The signal box looked so clean and neat he might have been expecting an express train to come through any minute from London, platforms swept and bordered with alternating red white and blue flowers as if a call from the Queen was in the offing as well, fences and gates shipshape, the garden weeded and, best of all, the house tidy. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. How do you do it?”
“I’ll tell you sometime, but mostly little by little, a bit every day.”
Having lost my job I could only wonder where money would be coming from to keep him on once my stock ran out. I sorted a few bills in the sitting room, throwing junk mail down for Dismal to play post office. His tail wagged on finding an envelope with, splashed across the front: “YOU HAVE WON FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS!”
Clegg said I looked worried.
“After you’ve pulled the whisky from the cupboard and poured a couple of drams I’ll tell you why.”
We clinked for health. “The fact is, I got the push from the agency, and Frances has as good as thrown me out.”
“Is that all? You still have this place.” He gave his ex-mining engineer’s laugh, as if the Doughty props were about to crumble in the narrowest seam of the pit but we would be out before they did. “If it has any relevance, there was a call from Lord Moggerhanger an hour ago. I told him you might be in later.”
The lads at the furniture factory and drug transport depot had phoned him to say I was back on the road and, putting two and two together, he knew I would turn up sooner or later at Upper Mayhem. I couldn’t think what he wanted, but whatever it was the advantage would end up far more weighty on his side than mine, though the dollop of prime malt stopped me caring.
Clegg with rolled-up sleeves went to cook us a meal in the kitchen, while I stood at the gate outside to finish another drink, a caressive wave of Fenland air keeping me in a good mood. I watched a cloud on fire drift west across a sea of blue, and took that too for a sign of encouragement for an idle life, wanting to stay where I was forever no matter how poor I became. I could, after all, go on the parish, where part of Clegg’s pay came from anyway. No one was allowed to starve in England, and I wasn’t too proud to take charity. At least Upper Mayhem was mine, paid for cash on the nail from the gold smuggling days, the best purchase I ever made. I gloated on how sitting pretty I was, when the phone in the house sounded M for Moggerhanger.
But it was Frances. “When are you coming home?” she said in a friendly and wanting-me-to voice.
“I’m home already.” I was in no mind for negotiation. “I’ve just got in. Had a good time in Nottingham.”
“I thought that was where you would go.”
“I only left yesterday.”
“I know you did. Seems weeks already. But Michael?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“You know I want you to be with me when you can.”
“All right, darling. Just give me a couple of days more, and I’ll be there.” I needed to go through the decompression chamber before going back. “I do love you.”
“Love you, too, much.”
No sooner was the phone down than it went again. Peace in the world wasn’t for me. “Michael Cullen, of Upper Mayhem,” I snapped into the mouthpiece. “I’ll pay you as
soon as I’m back in funds.”
This time it was Moggerhanger, and I couldn’t think what he’d want with me. Our last talk was three years ago when he suspected I was hi-jacking his Rolls Royce with millions of pounds worth of drugs in the boot, but I talked him out of the notion, and left the car for his minions to collect. I did though get on the Dutch ferry at Harwich with a briefcase of evidence to give to Interpol in Amsterdam, my intention being to ruin Moggerhanger for having put me in jail some time before. But Bill Straw was on the same boat and, sensing my intention, and realising I was out to do myself no good in the end, snatched the bag and skimmed it into the stormy waters, so that he really did save me from Moggerhanger’s far-reaching wrath.
His gravelly death-like tone sounded too much like a continuation of our phone talk three years ago. “Michael Cullen here,” I said again.
“Don’t be a damned fool. I know it is. And I know where you are. You owe me money, but I don’t recall a case when it wasn’t so with everybody.” He was referring to when I had once taken too much cash from the car for my expenses. “I have to admit,” he went on, “that I’m not in need of repayment, because I haven’t needed money ever since I wanted it. And yet, think if it was money owed to some poor chap waiting to pay his gas and light bills. You not producing the ready would be a crying shame. Likewise with me. You owe, I want, and I know you have the wherewithall.”
I allowed him to get his breath, but thought it politic to use some of my own. “I’ve lost my job, so I’ve got no money. And my wife’s given me my marching orders.”
“We’ll forget what you owe me, then. It can’t be more than a hundred, and for my peace of mind I’ll assume you spent it on your duties to me. You probably did. I’m not unjust, or avaricious. In fact my dear wife tells me that generosity is one of my failings. So I’ll forget the bygones, since there’s a favour I want from you.”
Moggerhanger Page 9
