We flagged a cab on the main drag, and in half an hour were joshing down the escalators of Tottenham Court Road station. At Liverpool Street Bill groaned with hunger, so I bought him cakes and sandwiches. With mouth still full he went to the bog and rubbed half a mile of toilet paper over his boots to get the whisky off. He washed his face and combed his hair, retied his tie and handkerchiefed bloodmarks from his face. Encouraging me to do the same, I did.
A train to the Fens left in ten minutes, and I couldn’t refrain from marvelling at our luck in getting away so clearly. “That was a job well done.”
“I’d like a bust up like that every week,” Bill said. “It would keep me in trim for life.” I faced the engine, fields flying by. Our boots and trousers still reeked of Moggerhanger’s whisky, and a few sharp glances from other passengers came our way, which was fine because, with our clothes torn in places as well, they thought we’d been to a wild party, so didn’t want to get too close. I was even wary of lighting up, in case we vanished in an orange flash like the bloke in Bleak House. “What I need from now on,” I said, “is an extended period of leisure, after all the running about in the last few weeks.”
“Better you than me,” Bill said. “Never a dull moment’s the ticket for me.”
“You aren’t still thinking about Runna-Runna, are you?”
He sighed. “A bit of nation building would have been so exciting and rewarding, so I have my regrets. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life it’s that you can’t have everything.”
Which gave me reason to laugh. “I want to spend the summer sitting in a deckchair by my bit of railway line, reading novels and listening to the birds, with a trip to the bank now and again for a slice of the cash. I’ll have a fully furnished fur lined kennel built for Dismal, who deserves no less, and on rainy days we’ll sit together in the signal box admiring the view.” On one level, so het up was I, I didn’t see how I could ever be calm again, though realised that two or three days would rectify that. “There’s a hotplate in the signal box for frying eggs and making tea. I could play the hermit for weeks there if I wanted to.”
“And then what?” Bill bit into another sandwich. “Every good thing must come to an end. Storm after calm—you know the sort of thing—but I prefer storm all the time so that I know where I stand. Calm’s a worrying state to be in.”
“We’re different,” I said. “If storm comes, then let it, but I’ll be more able to face it after a stretch of peace. The longer calm goes on from now on, the better. Part of my life’s coming to an end now that we’ve put the lid on Moggerhanger.” I laughed, rather shakily perhaps, so that people standing turned to stare, even more convinced I’d been soaking whisky at the sort of party they’d only dreamed about. “I’ll never forget how that giant bottle broke up and flooded the room. You should have seen the look of horror on Moggerhanger’s clock.”
Bill’s hand, rubbing across his face, painted on a serious expression. “I didn’t want to deprive you of the pleasure, but I have to say that such an act isn’t in any training manual I’ve ever read. You overstepped the mark in dealing with that bottle. When I ordered you out you should have obeyed instantly, but I won’t put you on a charge, since we got away unscathed. I remember in Normandy going through a wood and seeing a hut with a padlock on the door. I thought there must be calvados inside, but because we were under fire we had to look in after the Gerries had gone. When we got to it I knew they must have seen it as well, so why hadn’t they gone inside for a drink? I told the lads to give it a few hundred rounds, and it went up like a real fireball. The fact is, I expect our recent bust up at you know where will get to the ears of the Green Toe Gang. Not only will Oscar have a good laugh, but he’ll want two chaps like you and me to join his organisation. He’ll pay well, commensurate with our expertise.”
“No,” I said.
“There you go again. When I’ve run through my fortune—I’ll be a gentleman in that, at least—I might ask Oscar for some gainful employment. I’ll have to, if I’m on my uppers. And you know I’ve never liked being idle. Even begging was only a means of survival till something better came along. And it always did, because hard work was bred into me as a kid.”
“Stop bellyaching. I’m not tempted. When I’m broke I’ll do something, but meanwhile I’ll stay idle till I get bored. In any case there’s running repairs to do in the house, and on the outside as well.”
We found a taxi at the station to take us the twenty-odd miles home. The driver, a small dark chap wearing a beany-like Moslem hat, sniffed us up and down as if wondering whether to take us, due to the odorous booze. “What’s bothering you, brother?” Bill said. “Our money’s good, so get going.”
We sat in the back. “After a high tea of sausages and eggs,” Bill said, “we’ll go and stock up at the supermarket. I noticed your freezer was getting a bit low when I last looked in, so we’ll need at least two trolleys.”
“A good plan,” I agreed. “I’ll pull in enough to last me and Clegg for a fortnight. We won’t even have to go out for a box of matches, unless you intend staying another day or two.”
“Michael, that would make little difference. You know I don’t eat enough to feed a fly. I say, what’s that smoke up ahead? It’s a bit early in the year for burning stubble.”
“Don’t know.” I was mulling happily on my forthcoming period of exquisite laziness, seeing myself taking Dismal on pleasant walks along the water channels, even across a few muddy fields. Sophie would call and we’d go out hand in hand, then come home to an especially big bed I’d installed in the signal box. If not Sophie, I’d inveigle Frances to share a uxurious weekend. Blaskin would drive up in his superannuated Bentley with Mabel, his car smelling strongly of leather so intensely it always made her want to throw up, especially at the way he drove. I’d bed and breakfast them and give them dinner, though for one night only in case, staying longer, they might murder each other.
The driver braked, barely able to swerve where the road widened, to let a fire engine drum by, so close that one of its screaming sirens threatened to detach and fall on us. “I expect some farmer’s dropped a kerosene lamp on a hay stack,” Bill said. “Look at the smoke, though, Michael.” He coughed, and gripped my arm. “I don’t think it smells of hay, either.”
At a corner in the lane I cried out so loud that our nervous driver barely avoided putting us into a ditch. The way ahead was blocked by fire engines.
“I’m afraid,” Bill said, “that your dreams of dolce fa niente will not be possible for the foreseeable future. Luckily, our gallant green goddess men, at the risk of their worthy lives, seem to be doing their best to stop it spreading to the signal box.”
I deteriorated in seconds to a lump of animated jelly, at the spectacle of the Spoils of Cullen going up in smoke. Leaping from the car, leaving Bill to pay for once, I was held back by a policeman. “It’s a listed building,” I shouted, as if the inane claim would be my passport to getting closer.
“It was certainly on somebody’s list,” Bill said, unnecessarily, “and that’s a fact.”
“I don’t care whose list it was on,” the copper said, his arm across me like the bar of a gate. “If you go any nearer you’ll burn, so you’re not going.”
Bill wiped sweat from his face. “Don’t worry, Michael. You’ll be able to build it up again with the insurance, and put Buckingham Palace in its place. I’ll help you to fill in the forms.”
I had never believed in insurance. Money coughed up for it was so much wasted, assuming anyway that in ten or twenty years I’d have saved enough to buy another house, if it hadn’t been spent (as it had been) rather than put aside. Luckily, my sensible and farseeing Dutch wife had paid the remittances by a standing order I’d been too lackadaisical to cancel which, however, provided little consolation as I saw the main part of the house on its way to becoming gutted, and the waiting room and ticket office w
ell scorched.
“It hasn’t got to the signal box yet,” Bill said, who seemed to be enjoying himself. “You can rely on me not to desert you in your hour of need. I won’t mind kipping down in a ruin, especially when I think of some of the places I slept in in Normandy.”
“Fuck off.” I walked up the lane, between fire engines queuing up to spew their water, calling: “Leave me alone.”
He came after me. “Very understandable sentiments under the circumstances. You’re somewhat shell-shocked. Who wouldn’t be, except me? I had a lad in my platoon who was a demon in action, but manifested a genuine bout of shellshock afterwards. He didn’t stay like that for long, though. A few bangs at the loaf soon got him smiling like the rest of us, and he was always grateful. An officer once caught me knocking him about, but he turned a blind eye.”
To try stopping his windpipe wasn’t on, since his jaws only moved to help me out of my despair. I backed away nevertheless. “Well, you can keep your hands off me. Look at it. It’s still burning. All I own. What will I do now?”
“Michael, it’s only property, though I know that at a time like this you need a friend to stand by you, and I’m your man.”
No leisure, no Sophie, no Frances, no mother with her lesbian girlfriends, not even Blaskin and Mabel to sample my hospitality, the most humane intentions gone for a burton, from one minute to the next all I owned turned into an inferno and on its way to becoming an ash heap. Every reason for staying alive was wafting up in smoke and hiding the sun.
“If it was winter we could take advantage of the heat,” Bill went on, which made me suddenly and perhaps unaccountably glad to have him at my side. “Even in France, in the summer, we’d enjoy a little fire after it got dark.”
I wondered what disaster could have stricken him before he cracked up, and decided that nothing ever would. I was happy for him. The thought that God always looked after his own indicated, as the afternoon passed, that I might eventually recover from the shock, till I shouted in such misery that only Bill’s strong hold stopped my legs folding: “Where’s Clegg? And where’s Dismal?” A picture of them fully roasted and dead in the kitchen made me feel a callous bastard for not having thought of them before.
Bill laughed. “I expect they’re all right. Remind me to tell you sometime about when I was in a house that burst into flames over my head. It was my fault. I wanted a brew up, and put too much petrol on the fire. You should have seen me run. It took five minutes for the lads to forgive me.”
His assumptions proved correct when I spotted Clegg and Dismal crossing the line, and ran as close as I could get towards them. “What happened, then?”
“I don’t know,” Clegg shouted. “I was out with Dismal for a walk, but the house was well alight when we got back. I can’t understand it. I didn’t leave anything on the stove. But I’ve taken all I could to the signal box, so I hope it doesn’t spread that way. Dismal kept wanting to run into the house for his Bogie, so I put him on a lead.”
I couldn’t tell whether the wet on my cheeks was from tears, or sweat due to the heat. Smoke was elbowing the main column skywards, but the bigger flames had gone down. Luckily the car had been parked far enough off not to be damaged, so I handed Bill four fifties to go to the supermarket and bring us back something to eat.
He rubbed his large hands together, the glee of the swaddie written all over him: “We’ll have a marvellous fry up in the signal box.”
I shouted, as he started the car: “And don’t forget a carton of Bogie for Dismal.”
Chapter Thirty.
At this late age, of forty coming fast, it was obvious that something had to change. Yet how to make it when I still seemed locked behind the bars of being twenty-five years old, was another matter. The experiences of the last few months had had their effect, but the old me, ancient from birth, fought to keep its stranglehold. Even Dismal, disturbed at my disconsolate pondering, spun his eyes sufficiently to indicate that you couldn’t expect new tricks from an old dog.
Intuition nevertheless told me that waiting for Fate to do its worst must stop, that its malign persuasions could only be forestalled by saying yes to this and no to that, and thinking soberly to the limits of what wisdom had been gained. To that extent had I altered, since walking the streets of London in so feckless a mood on the day of losing my job at the advertising agency.
The final twist of my meandering picaro tale was muddied by injured pride, and from chagrin, as we sat together under the flaring lamps of our camping kit in the cave of the signal box on the night of the fire, smoke still bruising our nostrils, like a trio of bandits after a robbery that had gone wrong. We boiled beans, fried eggs and bacon, and mashed tea for a dour meal. The day’s happenings had so upset Clegg that he sliced his hand on the breadknife, shook his head even before staunching the blood, and murmured again and again at how guilty he felt, till Bill barked in his sergeant’s voice that if he didn’t knock off his moaning he would throw him onto the railway line.
“You could as well say it was all my fault, Cleggie,” I consoled him, “because I wasn’t here to keep an eye on things, either. I should have foreseen what was likely to happen.”
“Now we know where Cottapilly, Kenny Dukes and Pindary were,” Bill said, “while we motored to London and delivered Moggerhanger’s dope like a couple of fools.”
We figured how they had hid along the hedge till Clegg had taken Dismal for his after-lunch walk and then, seeing their opportunity, and losing no time, they slipped in to do the business. Setting the red cock on a house was a far from unknown method of a villain getting his revenge. The job must have been so easy they laughed all the way back to where their car was hidden. I should have used my imagination, and known Moggerhanger would find a way of putting me to a little inconvenience for the stunt we had pulled on him.
Even had there been neighbours close it wouldn’t have stopped them. I failed to consider how isolated the place was when I bought it. For one thing the price had been too good to argue about, and for another I was chuffed at having a railway station all to myself, able to dream of trains rumbling through while yours truly was content to go nowhere.
You can’t think of everything, though events now told me that you should at least try. To save as much of my sanity as could be spared I put the incident down to Fate, but for the last time, and with a capital F, that unknown quantity which makes something happen beyond the limits of expectation. At least we had screwed a hundred thousand out of Moggerhanger, and I had smashed the pride and joy of his whisky tank, which he could never have anticipated either. Nothing made up for the firing of my house, but he had something to remember me by. What a bastard he was, though, planning to have me smashed to pulp by his Bermondsey specials, and burned out as well. He’d never been one to do things by halves.
The insurance man suggested that the house might have gone up like a box of matches due to faulty wiring. I offered neither denial nor comment, on the advice of Bill, who said that if I fell into an argument they might try to do me down. He was a man of the world in more ways than me, and though nothing had been wrong with the electrics, because I’d had the place rewired on buying it, I did as he said, and kept shtum. So I got a fair deal for the restoration.
The house wasn’t a total wreck, in any case. Within a year the floors had been rebuilt, the roof replaced, chimneys rebricked, and decorations done. Bill’s forceful bonhomie with the builders, as well as my sharp eye, and the fact that I worked harder than ever in my life, denied them any opportunity to bodge or skive, so that it came back to home and beauty stage by stage, not quite Buckingham Palace, as Bill had urged, but a solid and comfortable replica worth keeping for life, which was all I wanted. How could I lose my affection for a place reborn from such a memorable fire?
Clegg, Dismal and I pigged it meantime in the signal box, while Bill bought a bivouac tent and camped well away from the building site. As blissful as
a sandboy, he whistled and sang all day long, making fires of charred wood collected from the surroundings to boil and fry his meals on. He couldn’t have had such a good time since Normandy, and only a few artillery shells whistling over would have made him more at home.
As soon as the fire had gone down we put together a long unsigned letter to Scotland Yard, saying that if they called at a certain house in Ealing they would find several hundredweight of hard drugs stashed away. They might visit Spleen Manor, Peppercorn Cottage, and Doggerel Bank as well, where incriminating powders might also be found. Motoring to Oxford to drop our missive in the box, I wasn’t sufficiently optimistic to suppose such narking would do the trick.
But it did. Those in high places thought it time that Moggerhanger’s long run was fullstopped. Kenny Dukes and his two pals, resting and gloating at home base from their firebug endeavours were, to our delight, pulled in.
Apart from the establishment at Ealing simultaneous descents were made on Moggerhanger’s other depots. Ronald Delphick was dragged screaming from his Yorkshire retreat with hurriedly concealed powder spilling from his armpits.
Moggerhanger at home swore he knew nothing about drugs even when shown clear evidence, claiming—a villain to the end—that his employees had been storing the disgraceful material without his knowledge. The police went about their work as if they’d wanted to nail him for years, but had only been waiting for a convincing tip-off, and all but took the settlement to pieces, finding tons of hard stuff in an underground room which even I hadn’t known to exist.
Chief Inspector Lanthorn must have turned in his grave, or maybe two, because he would never have been satisfied with one. My only regret was that he hadn’t been alive to get corralled into the fiasco, though I mentioned in the letter that the goings on of his son at a certain Channel port should be investigated as well.
After the trial Bill shouldered a crate of champagne up the signal box steps, and Clegg laid out a celebratory meal on a pair of packing cases pushed together. A double tin of Bogie made up Dismal’s menu and, Clegg chopping a few sprigs of parsley over it, he gobbled the mess with disgraceful speed. The champagne poured into a saucer was tongued into his gut so greedily that in a private incarnation he must have been none other than Champagne Charlie, which caused us to wonder about his future.
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