Life Goes On (7 page)

I was bored with the situation and wanted to get back to Upper Mayhem to see if there was any sign of Bridgitte and the children. I was missing my pall of misery, because I thought, in my superstitious fashion, that being steeped in agony for lack of her might bring her back quicker than if I stayed to have a good time in Soho.

He squashed another bug, then pulled me back into my chair. ‘All right. I'll do it. And I appreciate it. But I've got a request to make, and I hope you'll say yes.'

‘The answer's no.'

‘You haven't heard it yet.'

‘You've got several score of the most ruthless mobsters in London after you, and you're making conditions.'

‘No,' he said, ‘I'm finding you a job. I heard a couple of blokes say yesterday that Moggerhanger wanted another chauffeur. Why don't you apply for the post? He's good to his employees. You worked for him before, didn't you? No, don't take it like that. Sit down, old son.'

I did, before I fell. ‘That was ten years ago, and I ended up in prison.'

‘Didn't we all? You got mixed up with Jack Leningrad. And you shagged Moggerhanger's daughter. I don't know which was worse in his eyes. But Polly's married now, and Jack Leningrad's moved to Lichtenstein.'

My head spun, yet I was tempted to work again for Moggerhanger because I would get behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce. Secondly, I would earn some money, and thirdly, I might have another go at Polly, married or not.

‘What's in it for you?'

‘The reason is,' he said, ‘that if you're working for Moggerhanger – who as well as the Green Toe Gang is after my guts – you might pick up bits of information as to whether or not he's on my trail. I'll have a friend in the enemy camp, and feel safer with my own intelligence and security system.'

I was silent for a while. So was he. I didn't mind thinking myself at the turning-point of a long life, because I sometimes imagined it as much as twenty times a day, but what sent shivers up my backbone was to have Bill think it as well. I was horrified at having no say in whether things happened to me or not, so gave him my view on the matter as gently as I could. ‘Drop dead. Get cut to bits. Count me out.'

‘I can't fathom it,' he said after a minute or two. ‘Here I am, telling you that if I'm alive six weeks from now I promise on the sacred memory of my dead mother to share with you – and to share equally – the hundred thousand pounds I've got stashed away. If that's not making it worth your while, nothing is. I know loyalty and friendship are precious commodities, Michael, but even they should have a price. I'm nothing if not realistic and generous.'

I was as greedy as the next man, and thought of all I could do with fifty thousand pounds. Corn in Egypt and the Promised Land rolled into one. I would turn the railway station into a fitted carpet palace. I'd repave the platforms, repair the footbridge, lay ornamental gardens on my stretch of line, as well as put in a new stove for Bridgitte and buy her a vacuum cleaner. I'd also give a flashing-light chess set to Smog, and if he failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge I'd buy him a degree from an American university, so that if he wanted a job he could become a secret member of the communist party and join the Foreign Office. Then, in our old age, after he'd become a colonel in the Red Army, we could spend our holidays in his nice cosy flat in Samarkand – or even Moscow, in the summer. Oh, the best laid plans of mice and men.

He grinned. ‘Is it on?'

‘You superannuated clapped-out Sherwood Forester,' I said, ‘I suppose so.'

‘You leave my old regiment alone. Sometimes I quite like your gift of the gab, but not when you insult the Sherwood Foresters. Best regiment in the British Army. We had four battalions wiped out on the Somme, and God knows how many in the last lot.'

I apologised. What else could I do? ‘I don't stand a chance of getting a job with Moggerhanger.'

‘Who knows? He's allus got a soft spot for a reformed rake. Nothing's guaranteed in this life, but you might just land it. You allus was game, I will say that for you. You don't get anything in this life unless you try.'

I was irritated by him. ‘I'll just be able to stand you for as long as it takes to install you at my old man's flat. Let's get out of here.'

‘Don't forget your umbrella,' he said when we were halfway up the stairs, and daylight struck my eyes like ball-bearings from a catapult. ‘It might start raining.'

Four

The first new thing I saw while snooping around Gilbert's study – as he called it: he'd never studied anything in his life, except women – was a large coloured chart on the wall above his typewriter, showing the ages at which every well-known home, foreign and colonial novelist had died. His own name had a question mark by the side in brackets, at which I didn't know whether to laugh, or dab my eyes with his clean white blotting paper. He might be nudging sixty, but I didn't realise he was afraid to die.

The sheet in the typewriter seemed to be page one of a novel called
The Hijacked Vampire
. Below the line saying Chapter Three he had written:

The privilege of learning from experience is only given to those who survive it. Many do survive, yet it is both pitiful and amazing to discover the numbers who do not, especially when one tries to imagine those people as individuals. Each life starts innocently enough, grows side by side with its dreams, and ends with its limbs broken amid pints of blood.

I crossed out ‘pints' and wrote ‘litres'.

If we could profit from the experience of death, would we go more readily to die?

Such drivel went on for a few more lines, ending in a paragraph of exes. Maybe he was halfway human after all.

Bill lay on the settee in the living-room, smoking one of Blaskin's cigars and tippling a glass of Glenfiddich whisky. ‘Can you get me something to eat, Michael?'

There was no reason to lose my temper at this late stage, but maybe the Age Chart on the study wall had depressed even me. ‘If he comes in and finds you in that condition, with delirium tremens and lung cancer, he'll slit your throat and tip you out of the window just as efficiently as a member of the Green Toe Gang or Moggerhanger's Angels. So let me show you to your six-week hideaway, then I can clear out. He won't be happy at finding me here, either.'

An old-fashioned antique gramophone with an enormous tin horn stood on one of the tables. In a cabinet behind was a lavish (locked) display of netsuke, such art and handiwork as I had only seen in museums. Some lovely old oil paintings of sailing ships and rustic scenes decorated the walls – as well as a portrait of Blaskin as a five-year-old, hardly recognisable except for the unmistakable signs of vice and wilfulness in that lovely face. I wondered how safe these treasures would be with a born marauder like Bill eating his heart out upstairs.

He swallowed the whisky and stood up, an athletic leap showing how fit he was. But there was panic in his eyes and voice. ‘What am I going to do while I'm up there?'

‘I'll schlep down to World's End and find you a harp.'

‘I must have provisions, or I'll starve. You can last only so long trapping pigeons. And I'll tell you one thing, Michael, they don't taste very nice with all that petrol and grit inside 'em. I tried it once.'

I took a bottle of wine, a loaf, a German sausage and a jar of olives from the larder. He put them in his pockets. ‘What a friend you are.' He was almost crying. ‘I'll never forget you. A real friend.'

Maybe he hadn't invented the tale of his trip to Switzerland after all. He was too sentimental to be imaginative. Proper lies were beyond him. If they weren't, he'd be far too dangerous to himself. As it was, he was only a threat to others, me in particular. I had to help him for two good reasons: friendship and money, a combination impossible to deny, so I led him to the box-room at the end of the corridor. A bare light bulb illuminated water and wastepipes and old picture frames leaning against a pile of steamer trunks. A ladder with the first rung broken led up to a trapdoor – square in the middle of a map of water stains. He hung back. ‘I'm not going up there.'

‘Yes you are. Just imagine you're in prison and the lads have selected you as a volunteer to do a roof protest. Only don't start chucking slates on people going into Harrods. They might not like it.'

He relaxed. ‘I'll never know why I let you twist me round your little finger. But before I go up, just nip back for a couple of candles or an oil lamp, will you? I draw the line at living in the dark.'

As I was opening kitchen drawers he shouted: ‘And a blanket, while you're at it. And some more of them delicious Havanas. Oh, and a bottle of whisky and a few pats of best butter. And two pounds of sugar to put on my bread.'

Needless to say, I got him nothing except the candles and a blanket. We went up into the roof. ‘You didn't happen to see a camp bed down there, by any chance?' he said.

The tank was part of the hot water system, so at least he wouldn't freeze to death. The roof arched above the whole flat, huge beams curving to an apex in a sort of cathedral for dwarfs. ‘You can paint
The Last Supper
on the end walls.'

‘I would if I could eat it,' he answered morosely, clasping my hands. ‘You will come up and see me, won't you? And let me know how you get on with Lord Moggerhanger. I take a friendly interest in your career, Michael, you know that. I feel a bit like your elder brother.'

Only my head was visible above the floorboards. ‘Stop it, or you'll make me swear. I'll come and see you as often as I can.'

Or as often as I dare, I thought, treading carefully down the ladder and hoping he wouldn't make any noises that would lead to his discovery.

I sipped whisky and smoked a fag in the living room to think things over, wondering if I shouldn't phone the police, or Moggerhanger, or the Green Toe Gang, or all of them together, and tell them where Bill Straw was hiding and then get quickly back to Upper Mayhem before the cyclone struck. The police were just as interested in putting the fetters on Bill as was the underworld, though I supposed he was right to go more in fear of the latter, since legal capital punishment had ended years ago. If I did send out a general call to all interested parties even Blaskin might get winged in the crossfire for harbouring a man on the run, though it was futile trying to damage him because he'd only use the inconvenience as material for his writing, and end up richer than before.

I only mulled on the options of treachery so that I would never act on any of them. Then I wondered whether I should apply for the chauffeur's job with Moggerhanger. A spot of work would take my mind off Bridgitte which, after all, would be better than wallowing in misery at home. London always put me in a free and easy mood. With the naïvety of a newborn babe I thought that at this stage of my life I had nothing to lose, no matter what I did. The catch of the door sounded, and my father came in, singing a little ditty to himself:

‘I knew a man who couldn't write

He sat up brooding half the night

Not because he couldn't write

But because his shoe was tight, tight, tight!'

He stumbled in the hall as he took off his grey leather overcoat. ‘Is that you, Michael? I can smell my cigars. Or is it the odious breath of yesteryear?'

How can a son describe his own father? Luckily I hadn't known about him till I was twenty-five, so that makes it easier. As for his description of me, I read it in one of his recent novels and it wasn't very good. It was slightly disguised, of course, as every fictional description must be but, slashing away the trimmings, he called me lazy, untruthful, mercenary and – words I hadn't heard till then – uxoriously sybaritic. Where he got such an idea I couldn't imagine. The description was so skewwhiff it's a wonder I recognised myself, and the fact that I did worried me for a while. And if it wasn't me, I was either trying to see myself as someone I wasn't, or I was someone I couldn't bear to see myself as. But such a description, bare as it was, certainly convinced me as nothing else that I was his son.

As for him, he was tall and bald, so bald that with the cleft in his head where a crazed husband had hit him with the blunt end of a cleaver, he looked like nothing less than a walking penis. I didn't for a moment suppose that this was the only reason many women found him attractive because he also, presumably, had a certain amount of what passed for charm. He had dead grey fish eyes, rubbery lips and a shapeless nose, but he was tall, energetic, talented (I supposed), and incredibly randy. As my mother, who knew him well, once said to me (though she hardly ever really knew him well for more than a few minutes at a time), ‘Even a man has to stand with his back to the wall when that bastard comes into the room.'

‘Well, Michael – it is Michael, isn't it? – what brings you here so early in the morning?'

I stood up, not wanting to act in any unusual way when I knew that Bill Straw was sobbing disconsolately in his upstairs prison. ‘It's afternoon. I just thought I'd come and see you. Is it strange that I should want to visit my father now and again?'

He came back from the kitchen with two raw eggs in the bottom of a tall glass, poured in whisky to halfway, beat it to pulp with a fork, and slid it down. ‘Breakfast. It isn't strange at all. It's positively perverse. How's Bridgitte?'

‘She's left me. She's gone to Holland with the kids. I'm devastated. I'm lost without the kids around. I don't know which way to turn.' I encased my head in my hands, acting the hackneyed bereft husband in the hope of giving him some material for one of his novels.

‘Good,' he said. ‘I never liked the bitch for giving me what, with a proud simper, she called grandchildren. If there's one thing I can't stand it's the thought of grandchildren. Even if I die at a hundred-and-two I'll be too young to be a grandfather and I'm only fifty-eight. Or is it forty-six?' He poured another whisky. ‘No matter. At least not after last night.'