I sat on Moggerhanger’s left, and Bill placed himself to the right, our suits made as neat as possible after the adventures of the day. Dismal was elongated between me and the fire for warmth, and to be in line for any donated food, though when I slipped him an anchovy he turned his blunt nose up at it.
Moggerhanger, in victory mode, filled our champagne glasses, and my intention of one day getting him packed off to prison, or of distressing him sufficiently to ruin his business, seemed as far away as ever. Not that my heart wasn’t in it, but the festive gathering was too unique to seriously mull on the idea.
He stood to make a toast. “Eating and drinking is the most important thing at the moment, so I’ll be brief, but little did I know on getting here this afternoon that I would have to put up with what I did from such an unexpected quarter. Just think of it. My son, my only son! If I’d been Abraham I would have slit his throat ten times over, no matter what God said. But I didn’t. I let him go. I’m too soft, and in any case what would his mother have said, or the police?”
A few noggins of his special brandy while changing into a lounge suit upstairs had made him maudlin already, and I wondered how long he would go on, because the rest of us were famished.
“If I’d been a priest I would have said the service of the dead over such an ungrateful villain. I’m not a priest, at least, but consider it, anyway. I’ve provided him with everything he cared to ask for. I stinted him nothing. But being disrespectful and treacherous is part of his nature. He’s been like that from infancy. Not only that, he grew up, for reasons I’ll never understand, to have a persecution complex, and we know how people always feel persecuted about the wrong things.
“He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was born with two, and one in each hand. If he’d been thrown in the water at birth and hadn’t let go of them (as he wouldn’t, because that was the character he was born with) he’d have sunk without trace, which might have been better for me in the long run, though I expect his generous-hearted mother will go on loving him, and looking after him. Still, that’s how mothers are, and who would want it otherwise?”
The tear that enlarged a vein by one of his bruised eyes, though a sign of human feeling, didn’t stop me thinking him the swine of swine.
“Alice and I have to thank you as our deliverers, and while getting me out of an unpalatable peril shouldn’t go to your heads, we do appreciate your timely appearance. So here’s to Michael, my golden boy no longer in the first shine of youth, and to William Straw (I hate diminutives) a late soldier of His Majesty the King, God bless his soul!—who did his usual workmanlike job.”
Dismal let a corner of the best Axminster fall from his mouth, and growled, so that Moggerhanger, the last man in the world to be slow on the uptake, added: “We also had to admire the assistance of that otherwise bone-idle pooch which Polly trained so well. Which reminds me that at least I have a daughter, even if she does sport the morals of a she-cat at full moon. Now let’s eat, and may the Lord make us truly thankful.”
He drank, and got stuck in. So did we, stuffing ourselves, with champers to swill it down. While Moggerhanger drank he kept the patter going like the guest speaker at a branch of the Spoke and Wheel Club, and we took it all in with enough willingness to keep him going, if not please him.
“When you were standing up to Parkhurst and giving him some lip, Michael, I could tell what was going on in your mind, and must say you had some nerve facing his gun like that. I’ve never known such pluck. I’ve seen men turn to Chivers in that situation.”
I passed the glass to be refilled. “It was in the line of duty, that’s all.”
“Don’t contradict. It’s the sort of pluck this country lacks. There’s none of it about anymore, so it does my heart good when I’m a witness to it, and the beneficiary as well. Where would we be if there was no pluck like that in the world? I ask you.”
He needed no indication that we agreed, the food being good, champagne free and copious (he sent Alice for two more bottles) and Dismal dozing as if after a fair day’s work. Listening in warmth and comfort to Chairman Moggerhanger’s tabletalk was no great hardship.
“As Polly said a long time ago: ‘Never turn your back on a toaster, dad!’—which showed her wisdom at seventeen. She said it in relation to her brother Malcolm as well, so there’s intuition for you. It was sharper than mine, for a while anyway. Malcolm did today what I never dared even think of doing to my own father. A fool doesn’t realise that what you think in that line you should never do, and that the thought itself has to be luxury enough to satisfy.”
His hypocrisy knowing no bounds made it more interesting than not. “I drink to that, sir,” Bill said, with his usual louche wink at me.
“You two chaps came and saved me, though if truth be told it’s not the first mix up I’ve had the luck to escape in the nick of time. Where would I have been without luck? And hard work, of course. People don’t like to work anymore. They look on luck as a God-given right. A superabundance of bullshit is destroying this country. From being a picturesque backdrop to the British character it’s been taken over by the idle poor and the brainless rich. Everybody’s set on outdoing everybody else, without contributing to the public good and the national exchequer.”
If there was anything worse than an angry young man it had to be an angry old man, though he wasn’t all that old. The country didn’t seem in such bad nick to me as Moggerhanger implied, but who could contradict him, or spoil his enjoyment after our close encounter of the day?
“It’s dog eat dog,” he went on, “and no good will come of it. It’s a national disease. There’s too much ignorance, and no respect for anything or anybody. Nobody gets on their knees anymore at the statues of great men who made the country comfortable enough for them to be idle in. They’ve got no gratitude. At school they only learn to worship pop stars and half-starved stick models. I sent my kids to expensive schools, and when they left they couldn’t even spell because the teachers were too idle to teach them. In state schools it would have been even worse.”
His kids had certainly been too dim and bolshie to learn, I thought as, to our amusement, his talk began spinning out of control. At least we hoped that was it. Fingering the regalia across his waistcoat, he went on: “What do they teach kids today?”
As if we knew, though Bill was brazen enough to try a response. “At least they get the three Rs, sir.”
“Oh do they? And do you know what they are? I’ll tell you. Reading, rioting and ’rithmetic! That’s the three Rs for you. And you know why? Because they’ve got to be able to read enough to recognise the stops on the Underground. Secondly, they have to know how to write a bit so that they can splash disgusting graffiti everywhere, ruining nice new buildings and train windows. As for thirdly, which is arithmetic, they need that to reckon up the money from purses and wallets after they’ve been out mugging. That’s modern education for you.”
He seemed fairly drunk, and though he might be disappointed at life now and again getting the upper hand, I imagined he must have a few million stashed in overseas tax havens.
“I mean to say, when it comes down to politics we at this table believe deep down in the same things. We might vote differently at election times, but whoever gets in doesn’t make much difference, because England—bless it—will still keep going in its own immemorial way, for the moment I suppose, no matter what the government does, or at least it will until we have to wear pillbox hats and bow to Mecca on prayer mats. By then, if I’m still alive, though I hope I won’t be, I’ll be manufacturing compasses so that our compatriots will know where east is when they come blind drunk from the pubs at dusk and the ragheads force them to grovel to Allah. There’ll always be a place for an entrepreneur like me, though,” which none of us could doubt.
“When I was young,” he laughed, “I fancied myself as part of the mob on its way to turn the red cock on the Houses o
f Parliament, but even then I realised that in a year or two I’d stand looking on as the pack of bloody fools went by. I knew as well that in another ten years I’d be behind a machine gun mowing them down. And I would be, if the Mother of Parliaments was in danger. I’ve always had my feet four-square on the ground, even though I do sometimes talk too much.”
When none of us shouted that he didn’t he passed the decanter of brandy, and cigars in a box as large as a coffin. “People don’t know who they are anymore, because the media tells them all the time that they’re different. So they don’t know where they belong. But me, when I get out of bed in the morning and look in the mirror, I know who I am. I know that not only is the face looking back at me mine, but the mirror is as well, and the wall it hangs on, not to mention the house the wall is holding up, and the garden around it.”
Until the mirror cracks, then breaks, and the walls fall apart, and the garden becomes a desert. He had talked himself out, so stood up. “Make merry. You’ve earned it. Help yourselves to the good things of life still on the table—though not for too long, because tomorrow’s another day, and if you live till then there’ll be a fair chance of living forever. But it’s time I got some shut-eye, so that I can face it as well.”
He must have been in pain all through the meal, and I had to admire his stoicism. “He’s one of the old sort,” Bill said, the same thought in my mind. “I wouldn’t care to cross him, unless in my own good time.”
Alice lowered her face towards the cheese plate. “She’s had it,” Bill said.
A hand under her arm, she lifted easily. “I’ll help you upstairs,” I said.
Bill couldn’t resist! “The poor woman’s done in, so no hanky-panky.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not Parkhurst.” I half carried her up the wooden hill and along the corridor, to the same room she’d had on our stay in Spleen Manor three years before. As I let her down on the bed she opened her eyes. “Thank you, Michael. Now undress me. I can’t move a finger.”
What could I do? Feeling no prurience whatsoever—it’s true—I took off her shoes, undipped suspenders to remove her stockings, and untied her pretty little neckerchief before undoing the buttons of her blouse, raising her as little as possible to get her warm arms through the sleeves. Unclipping the bra revealed small soft breasts and suddenly upstanding terracotta nipples on my not being able to resist a glancing kiss for each. I’d hoped she wouldn’t notice, since her eyes were closed, but she opened them, and looked at me, and in her state of exhausted mischievousness said: “Thank you again.”
“That’s all right. I used to be a ladies’ attendant, and I occasionally undressed them in the hope of getting a bonus for my skill at the end of the month.”
She smiled as I drew off her skirt. “I didn’t know a man could be a ladies’ maid.”
“Oh yes. I loved the job. Had it for five years. I started at eighteen, and did two years in college to get a diploma. The course cost a pretty penny, as you can imagine, but Gilbert Blaskin, with his usual generosity, paid the fees. Dressing and undressing a woman was the most difficult part to learn, and a lot of students dropped out after a month or two because they couldn’t get the hang of things. One of the students was thrown off the course because the grooming of his fingernails wasn’t up to scratch.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “The part I excelled in was the pleasuring side, though in a way it was more difficult than anything else. At the beginning we practised on big dummy replicas exported specially from Japan, but at our final exam we had a real woman, an anonymous volunteer from the local community. At the first job after graduation you had to be subtle, and know exactly when the pleasuring was called for. A false move, and you not only lost your situation but your certificate as well.”
I spent as much time as was decent in getting off her satin knickers, but she was naked for only a few moments, because I drew a sheet and blanket up to cover her in case she was chilly. “Oh, Michael, I love your stories. I’ll never forget the one you told me last time.”
“I haven’t finished this one yet. According to your luck the women for your finals could be any age but, as I recall, the one I had was exactly like you, with a similarly interesting face and the same utterly desirable figure. I toyed with her for at least half an hour, and before my fingers went in for the kill, as you might say, she was gasping, and trying to put them there, but I resisted till I was good and ready, and then you should have heard the noise, and seen her thrashing about. She came within seconds. I was awarded a distinction for that, got top marks, and passed out with flying colours. She let herself go so much that she cried out that she was the vicar’s wife. A lot of the other students didn’t do so well, because they all too often made the woman get there sooner than was right. So the orgasm didn’t last long and wasn’t as intense, or as high on the dial of the orgasm meter as mine, which was taken into account, as it should have been.
“It was drummed into us,” I went on, at the movement of her hands and her enlarging eyes, “that every square inch of a woman’s flesh is erogenous, and there was a chart on the wall in the college lecture room to show the erogenous zones from one to ten, and I memorised it quicker than anyone else. The nape of the neck was very important, as were the woman’s lips, but they rated about two on the scale. Then you got to the breasts and nipples, which took the score up a bit—to three or four—as did the insides of warm and silky thighs. You ascended by various degrees to the woman’s behind, and finally worked slowly to the clitoris which, naturally, rated ten out of ten. Maybe I’ve left a few choice items out, but they usually come back when I go into action, because I always have that chart before my eyes while attending to a woman. My experiences after doing such a course have always stood me in very good stead, as you might imagine. Anyway, now that I’ve convinced you that men can be ladies’ maids, let me tuck you in so that you can get some well-earned sleep. Then you’ll wake up fresh and energetic in the morning. I can go into greater detail for you some other time.”
Her eyes were wide open, and far from sleep. “Not on your life,” she murmured. “Now you can do some post-graduate work on me.”
Truth to say, I was fully as ready for it as she was, and an hour later, after being afraid a time or two that her cries would reach Moggerhanger, she fell asleep in my arms. I hadn’t intended to seduce her but, hearing no complaint afterwards—as how could I?—I was happy at having had the privilege. As she was drifting away I wondered whether to get a divorce from Frances and marry Alice, but knew that such uxorious speculation had little reality so close to making wholly satisfying love. Maybe I should sell the method of seduction to Blaskin, I thought, but decided it was far too good for him, who would in any case only use it in one of his trashy novels.
I disenveloped myself from Alice’s arms when she was far into sleep and, knowing nothing could wake her, made sure she was well tucked in for warmth. Glancing at my watch, I was surprised that it wasn’t yet midnight.
Chapter Twenty-Two.
I needed a long sleep, to dream away the memories of Parkhurst’s mad intentions. Slumber does the job better than counselling and with less trouble. All the same, never a late lounger, I went into Alice’s room and kissed her into a smile. She opened her hazel eyes: “I hope I’m not falling in love with you.”
I drew the clothes down to look at her breasts. “It’s good for the spirit to fall in love, keeps you young, especially when the sentiment is returned, as you can bet it is with me. You’re the most glamorous woman I’ve ever had anything to do with.”
She let every stitch fall aside, and held out her arms. “So what are you waiting for? I had the best night’s sleep for a long time, thanks to your top class academy treatment.”
“I’ll go downstairs for your orange juice first, remembering how you liked it as soon as you woke up.”
The kitchen was full of empty bottles, and unwashed pots which Dismal was lic
king clean. Some on the floor were broken, but he reached others by standing on hind legs at the table and separating each one.
Opening the fridge for Alice’s juice I pulled out cooked kebabs and a tub of hummus, knowing that a dog must have a proper breakfast. Two croissants went into the oven, a jug of instant coffee was made, and glasses of juice as well balanced on a tray I carried up the stairs.
“You were so long,” Alice said, “I was about to lay hands on myself.”
I loved it when a woman talked so openly. “I’m glad you waited, so that I could watch. But let’s have breakfast first.”
“You don’t disappoint me in anything.” She swallowed the juice, drank the coffee, and filled her mouth with croissant. How little it needs to make a woman happy! Or a man like me, for that matter, I thought, watching her do as she had intended.
I dressed and showered, and saw that Bill in the kitchen had done all the washing up. “There’s no such thing as men’s work, or women’s, come to that.” He took off the apron. “There’s only work, and I’ve done my share, so do yours now by wiping up and putting away. Then you can sweep the floor and get rid of the bones and broken plates. That dog’s a real vandal.”
“He’s got to live.”
“Granted, but what I would like to know is how you taught him to get into the fridge. He was about to stick his big juff inside when I came down.”
“He just worked it out, by dint of intelligence and persistence, and then honed the technique to perfection. How else do you think he did it?”
“Don’t get sarky. It’s too early in the morning. Another thing is, it took me some time getting to sleep last night, with you and Alice going at it like rabbits in a thunderstorm. I thought she was being murdered every time she cried out. I was about to get up and see if an intruder hadn’t broken in. I even thought Parkhurst might have come back, till I realised it was only you up to your tricks. And with a poor woman in that state! Your lechery knows no bounds.”
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