Life Goes On Page 8

  Bridgitte was crying.

  ‘It’s true.’ Maria’s tone was such that no one could disbelieve her, and I wanted to take her to bed from that moment on, but from that moment on knew I never would. ‘He help me.’ She pushed her case to the wall, took off her coat, picked a chair from the floor and set it against the table. ‘Tomorrow, I leave,’ she said. ‘But it true what Michael say. English people in Ealing no good. Woman shout at me. Don’t feed me. Children scream and kick. Mr Horlickstone put hand up my clothes, get drunk, laugh at me and say he want to stroke my tits. Englishmen, no good.’

  I don’t know why, but these sentiments took Bridgitte’s fancy, especially the bit about Englishmen being no good. She swabbed her big blue eyes, and I was left sitting among the wreckage while she and Maria went talking into the kitchen to get something to eat. An owl sounded from outside, and an occasional car bumped over our level crossing. I sat, conscious that I had done the wrong thing ten times over, and that I wasn’t wanted on voyage. I would have gone back to London except that it was too late. In Soho things might just be starting to jump, but in the Fen country, after eight o’clock at night the social amenities of civilisation are rolled up like a carpet and put away till next day. I had to tolerate their crazy laughter while I went to my room and packed a case to take to my quarters at the Moggerhanger domain. Bridgitte would laugh on the other side of her face when I told her I’d found a job.

  Downstairs, there wasn’t a sight of suitcases or broken glass. The table was set for a meal, hors d’oeuvres already laid out in dishes and platters, a bottle of Dutch gin and a packet of Dutch cigars and a box of Dutch chocolates and a red football of Dutch cheese. I almost expected to see a salt cellar windmill, a clog full of radishes and a wimple hat sprouting tulips. I’d known Bridgitte so long that lovely Holland was almost as much in my blood as hers.

  The smell of roasting meat suggested she had ripped something from the deep freeze as soon as she got back. I was the luckiest man alive to have a Dutch woman for a wife, whether she hated me or not, but how long this lunatic confrontation could go on I had no way of knowing. Bedtime was on the cards and, after the meal, we made the most of it.

  The Railway Inn, just across the road from the station, had the slowest service of any pub in the area. A quick drink was more of a possibility the further you got from that particular pot-house, and if you thought you could run into the Railway Inn for a pint and pork pie before catching your train you were bound to miss it – unless you left everything half finished on the bar.

  The jovial bastard who ran that pub must have doubled his profits from unfinished drinks. No wonder he called you ‘squire’ and had his ninety-year-old mother serving behind the bar and washing the single glass they had for all their customers, while he looked out of the window at trains coming and going – mostly going – with a wide smile on his fat-chopped face. He had a sign saying ‘Quick Lunches’ tacked up outside, but even a paper plate of soapy cheese and sliced miracle bread took half an hour to cough up. No wonder he kept pigs at the end of his ten-acre garden. They were fed on the fat of the land, and produced pork that tasted of raw onions. He was notorious in the area for making people miss their trains due to slow service, yet the pub was often full. Perhaps it was a mark of the times that people didn’t mind if they lost their appointment in London. In Switzerland they’d have chucked him off the Matterhorn.

  Bridgitte drove me there so that I could catch the twelve-thirty. She was in a good mood after our night of unsolicited passion. Often this wasn’t the case, orgasms making her itchy and nervous, like a hangover, but perhaps breaking the news of my job at breakfast, as she came in with a platter of sliced cheese, cushioned her morning mood. I suppose it did mine, as well, because after so many years together they often coincided.

  ‘A job?’ The shock was almost as great as the one I’d had when she went off to Holland. ‘What can you do?’

  ‘Chauffeur,’ I said. ‘And it’s living in. I’ll only get home at weekends. Unless I work weekends. Then I’ll get home in the week. I’ll get home as often as I can.’

  She had become a person of order in the last few years. She liked to live to a pattern, to know what was happening and exactly when. Uncertainty depressed and irritated her, as it would anybody, so the fact that she might not know when I would turn up made her spill coffee on the cloth. I soothed her by saying I would never come home unless I telephoned from London first.

  ‘And who are you working for?’

  ‘An English lord.’ I forked up a slice of ham. ‘He’ll pay two hundred and fifty pounds a month. It’ll be very useful now that we’re employing Maria.’

  ‘She’s not working for us.’

  In the pub I ordered two pints, and we sat at a table by the window. ‘Why not? She’s a godsend.’

  ‘I’ll let her stay a few days. That’s all.’

  ‘She loves it at Upper Mayhem. She was as bright as a daffodil at breakfast. She likes you, anyway.’

  ‘I like her, but we can’t afford to pay her, not on your two hundred and fifty pounds a month.’

  I could have kicked myself, but sipped at the jar of ale and looked at the clock. There were ten minutes to go before the train came, and I had to buy my ticket. ‘I’ll get enough money, don’t worry. There’ll be a bonus on top of my pay, every so often. Our financial worries are over.’

  ‘Lord who?’ she asked.

  I hoped she wouldn’t recollect. ‘A chap called Moggerhanger. But I’ve got to go, or I’ll be late.’

  I waited for her to rage at my foolishness. ‘If you go to prison again, that’s the end of us. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Come off it,’ I laughed. ‘Moggerhanger is an English lord. How can he do anything criminal? It’s not like the sixties anymore. He’s a reformed character. We all are.’

  We had to get across to the station, so I picked up our glasses, the drink in them hardly touched, and followed Bridgitte to the door.

  ‘Squire!’ the publican roared. ‘You can’t take them glasses out there.’

  I emptied the beer from both into a fever-grate, then took them back inside. ‘Sorry, squire!’ I hee-hawed aloud at his fury. ‘Bit absent-minded these days.’ Giving Bridgitte a quick kiss, I made a dash for the train.

  A sixty-year-old grey-bearded chap in front of me emptied his leather purse on the counter and sorted his coins to decide whether any were false, in which case they were worth more than the real ones. I managed to get on board by jumping on the last carriage.

  It would be untrue to say that nothing happened on the trip to London. Such a situation is unthinkable, certainly since Bridgitte had set the ball rolling by her strange behaviour in the last few weeks. But because events on the train had no bearing on subsequent occurrences, there’s no point in retailing them, the plain fact being that I got back to Ealing just inside the twenty-four hours Moggerhanger had allowed me.

  I’d thought of calling at Blaskin’s to find out how Bill Straw was faring in his attic hideaway, but having got up so late after my night of homely passion with Bridgitte it hadn’t been possible. Not that I worried about him. He would have to fend for himself, even if he did starve to death.

  The flat over Moggerhanger’s garage was furnished little better than Bill’s pigeon coop. There were plain wooden planks on the floor, and the walls were whitewashed. If I wanted a face-swill there was a tap and sink in one corner. A single bed, a chair, a small table and a hotplate completed the amenities. For sleep there were two horse blankets, but no sheets. A forty-watt light-bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling, at which I assumed the electricity was included in my salary.

  A red-white-and-blue biker’s helmet with a hole in it was as far into a corner as it could get, as if it had been kicked there. I chose a paperback from a pile on the floor, and lay on the bed. Kenny Dukes’s name was pencilled inside the cover. The story – Orgy in the Sky by Sidney Blood – seemed to be about a gang of five-year-old six-footers doing a wareho
use robbery with a fight, a shoot-out and a fuck on every page. Towards the end, one or the other happened every second paragraph. Whenever it said something like ‘He smashed his fist into his smirking face’ Kenny had underlined it as if wanting to commit the immortal words to memory. Heavy scoring in the margin highlighted an occasional comment like: ‘That’s good!’, so that with such marks the book was impossible to read without being brainwashed and ending up a replica of Kenny Dukes, the forty-year-old skinhead only half reformed. I honestly didn’t know why Moggerhanger kept him on, because someone of his limited intelligence was bound to be more of a liability than an asset.

  Maybe Kenny knew too much, and it would be embarrassing to do him in because he came from a very big family and was related to every thug in south London. Yet Moggerhanger had some affection for him, treasuring his qualities of loyalty and dumb violence. All I knew was that I didn’t like Kenny Dukes and Kenny Dukes didn’t like me, but as I considered myself to be at least six pegs above him in the social scale it was up to me to keep our relationship on a diplomatic if not friendly level.

  Someone came up the stairs – and Kenny Dukes crashed the door open. ‘Get off my fucking bed, or I’ll smash your face to pulp.’

  His portly and upright carriage was spoiled by the fact that he was slightly round-shouldered. Otherwise I don’t suppose he was a very bad figure of a man, except that his arms were too long. In fact they were the longest arms I’d seen on a person who could still be called a human being. And he could – just. They were positively anglepoise, so that in a fight you had to close in as soon as possible to avoid their reach.

  I leaned on my left elbow. ‘Don’t you ever use long words such as: “I’ll obliterate your features so that your own mother wouldn’t recognise you in Woolworth’s on Saturday afternoon”?’ Then I put on a pseudo-Yank accent straight out of Sidney Blood: ‘Anyway, if you wanna know where the dough is, there’s seventy-five thousand smackers under the bed, all cut out of newspaper. They passed us a dead duck, and we’ve got to get out and find ’em.’

  He came in close, but recognised the style. ‘That’s my book.’

  ‘Come closer, Sunshine.’ The interior ratchet of my right arm drew back. I couldn’t go on reading Sidney Blood’s inspiring prose forever, without acting on it.

  ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ he said.

  I wound up the springs in my feet as well. During ten years at Upper Mayhem I’d done plenty of labouring on the station and its surroundings. I’d helped local farmers at potato harvests. Every morning I did half an hour’s jumping on the spot with dumbbells. Without being a fanatic, I believed in keeping the six feet and eleven stone of me supple and ready for action. Bill Straw wasn’t the only one to develop his physical abilities. As for shooting, I could get two rabbits on the run with the twelve bore, in view of which I wasn’t going to put up with any shit from Kenny Dukes.

  I shot off the bed like a rocket, and his fist went by my face and hit the pillow so hard that the frame shook. Being heavy he lost his balance, of which I took advantage by gripping him at the neck so that he couldn’t move. He kicked around, but his boots couldn’t reach me. I’d always known him to be the sort of courageous coward who wasn’t afraid to come out from under his shell and turn into a bully.

  ‘What’s the excitement?’ I said. But he wasn’t the type who would plead for me to let him go, either. Whether this was due to obstinacy, or to a chronic lack of vocabulary I didn’t know. ‘We don’t want bloodshed, do we? Not this early on in our relationship.’

  He gasped as if his chest would burst. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

  I squeezed him harder into the half-nelson. ‘I’m Michael Cullen. We met ten years ago, remember?’ While his elastic-band computer was processing this bit of information I let him go and jumped clear, putting myself in such a state of defence that when he regained the vertical he made a rapid gut-decision not to carry on the feud, at least for the time being. ‘I’m working for Moggerhanger as well,’ I said, ‘so if there’s any argy-bargy he’ll fire us both. You know that. Now lay off.’

  His pig-eye cunning, which hid softening of the brain behind, stood him in good stead for once. ‘You was reading my fucking book.’

  ‘I needed intellectual stimulus.’

  ‘And you was on my fucking bed.’

  ‘I can’t read standing up. And once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.’

  He sat down, mollified for the moment. ‘Fucking good, ennit?’

  ‘Best book I ever read.’

  He smiled. ‘Yeh.’

  I sat on the bed. ‘You read a lot.’

  ‘Every minute, when I’m not fucking birds and ’ittin’ people, and driving one of Lord Moggerhanger’s flash Rollers with all the dazzle-lights on.’

  I pulled on my whisky flask. ‘Like a drop?’

  He took a swig. I wouldn’t trust him five minutes with a twenty-year-old banger. ‘Can’t drink much in case I’m called out,’ he said. ‘We’re on tap all the time. Could be four in the morning. There’s no night and day for Lord Claud.’

  ‘What about time off?’

  A laugh made him look human. ‘When you’re dead you get time off. But now he’s got you, he might let me go home a few days.’

  ‘You’ve been busy?’

  His eyes narrowed, perhaps at the notion that I was pumping him. ‘Just looking around for somebody to hit and kick.’

  ‘Who for? You might as well tell me. I expect I’ll have to find him sooner or later.’

  ‘The boss tells, not me.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I opened my case, and found The Return of the Native which I’d finished on the train. Bridgitte had read it three years ago when she’d done an Open University course. ‘Try this. It ain’t as good as Sidney Blood, but it’s all right.’

  He turned it over like a piece of cold toast. ‘Don’t like books about wogs.’

  ‘Wogs?’

  ‘Fucking blackies. Can’t stand ’em.’

  ‘It isn’t about blacks.’ I found it hard not to laugh. ‘I’m a native myself.’

  ‘You don’t fucking look it. You’re like me.’

  I let that pass. ‘We’re all natives.’

  ‘You’re fucking pig-ignorant.’

  ‘You’re a native as well.’

  He stood up, looked at himself in a piece of mirror by the door and straightened his tie. He wore an expensive grey suit and a silk shirt which was ready for the wash. Being of a similar build to his employer, I wondered if they weren’t Moggerhanger’s throwaways. ‘I’ve drunk your drink,’ he said, ‘but you ought to be careful what you’re saying.’

  I don’t know why I persisted. ‘I’m a native of Nottingham because I was born there. Lord Moggerhanger is a native of Bedfordshire because he was born there. You’re a native of Walworth.’

  ‘Kennington.’

  ‘Kennington, then, because you were born there. The blacks in London aren’t natives, unless they were born here, and then they are. That’s all it means. The Return of the Native is about a man who comes back to the place he was born at.’

  His mind veered off my explanation. It was too long. ‘I’ve got to be going. Got to go and see my mum. Knock her about a bit, otherwise she won’t fink I love her.’ He winked, as if he’d been taking the piss out of me. ‘Don’t break my wanker,’ he said as he swaggered out of the door.

  I lay full length on the bed, and decided I liked being at work, and went to sleep wondering how Maria was getting on with Bridgitte. Being so different, they seemed made for each other. Perhaps Bridgitte would send for the children from Holland. Maria thought Upper Mayhem a paradise and would work for nothing as long as she was allowed to stay, though she wouldn’t go short of money – I’d see to that. She and Bridgitte would settle down and keep the place going for when I needed a refuge from the busy world. I laughed at the picture and, a final vision showing my homely settlement in flames, thought that at least I had done some positive good by fin
ding Bill Straw a hiding place.

  Kenny Dukes was right. At four in the morning the blower went. It was fixed to the wall by the door so I had to cross the room to answer it. ‘Come to the house,’ Moggerhanger said. ‘And I don’t mean in your pyjamas.’

  I smartened up and, wide awake, crossed the yard to headquarters. The man by the door, no doubt with a gun under his coat, was Cottapilly, a big heavy swine who always went upstairs as quiet as a cloth-footed fly, so nimble on his feet that people expected to see a small man. He then put their surprise to maximum advantage. Afterwards, neat little turds of fag ash were seen on the stairs, as if someone had gone up on their hands and knees. He wore no collar or tie, but his boots were impeccably polished.

  I was even more certain that some important scheme was being put into action when I saw Jericho Jim sitting in the corridor outside Moggerhanger’s office. He was thin and of medium height, with thick grey hair and an incredibly lined face, though from a distance you would have taken him for thirty instead of fifty. Each icy blue eye shone like the point of a pen torch that a doctor shoves down your gullet to look at your tonsils. He’d been most of his life in prison, but had escaped so many times, even from Dartmoor, that they called him Jericho Jim, though his real name was Wilfred. He always ate the middle from a loaf first, on the assumption that he might die in the next five seconds or in case some well-wisher had put a file inside. It was a matter of old habits dying hard, and that by their feeding shall you know them. He stopped pulling the comb through his wavy hair to run his hands over my jacket and trousers.

  ‘Do you think I’m barmy?’ I said.

  ‘Instructions,’ he lisped. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

  The room wasn’t as empty as it had been the day before. Moggerhanger stood behind his desk wearing a flowered dressing-gown that came down to the floor, and smoking the kind of cigar that his doctor had said would put him in his bury-box. But I suppose it was a case of once a lord, always a lord. His manner hadn’t altered from when I first saw him. There was an open map on the table, and as soon as Pindarry closed the door Moggerhanger pointed to it. ‘Michael, can you read one of them?’