A Start in Life (52 page)

‘Make it King's Cross,' I said, ‘and stop worrying. I've got just the place for you.' I told him how I'd bought the railway station: ‘It's in the middle of nowhere. Nobody'll trace you. You'll have to buy a bed and table, that's all, but you'll be safe as houses and as right as rain. Stay as long as you like. I hope to be up myself in a month. Are you all right for money?'

‘That's no problem,' he said. ‘But you're a real comrade, Michael. I shan't forget this. I'm really in the shit this time, because the man in the iron lung is bound to smell a rat once he knows I'm back.'

‘He'll never know.'

‘That's what you think. His snoops already know I left Beirut. Moggerhanger's man got me to the plane without 'em knowing, but they'll start looking for me by tomorrow, though I'm sure nobody tailed me here.'

‘When they know you're back without reporting to them, they're going to suspect me more than ever. It's a very awkward moment.'

‘I'm afraid it is, lad,' he said, looking at me with those sad eyes that at times permeated his whole spirit. Without his briefcase and smart clothes, his good haircut and stylish hat, and after his time in the sink-hole, he looked very subdued, already hunted and dodging from hedge to hedge. ‘Why don't you come to the station with me?' he said. ‘I've got a couple of revolvers and some ammo. Two's better than one when you're on the run. We could hold 'em off a treat if ever they find us. Believe me, it'll be the wisest thing in the end.'

I saw the sense of it: ‘Can't. I've got too many things to wind up here. I'll see you in a month, though.'

‘I hope so,' he said, as the doorbell rang. ‘Don't say I didn't warn you.'

I managed a smile, and helped him with his luggage: ‘I shan't.'

I was sorry to see him go. He took some of my courage, though I kept enough of it to phone headquarters in a very jocular mood, to which Stanley reacted beautifully. I wanted to put my foot down as a brake and stop things tilting along so fast, but that would only draw unnecessary suspicion on me, so I had to learn to roll with it, and look out for myself as I went along. The tell-tale bead of sweat could be my ruin, a stray hair in my nose, a shoelace about to come undone. I had to be careful not to lose too much weight in case anyone should imagine I was afraid of the thin ice under me.

Stanley said it was business as usual. I was to be on a plane the day after tomorrow, late afternoon, so as to give Pindarry and Cottapilly time to get off first to Switzerland. After that there'd be a week's rest. I said I'd get there at three o'clock, but Stanley told me to make it an early lunch that day, and get to headquarters at two for loading. ‘I'm ready for anything,' I said. ‘The firm seems to be looking up these days.'

‘Our clients have confidence in us,' he said with a laugh, and hung up in the middle of another.

At seven I walked over the river and made for the Blaskin pad. Pearl opened the door, and showed no surprise on her small face, made even smaller by short hair that came in a fringe over her forehead, so that she looked more like some TV river-bank animal than ever.

Gilbert looked at me: ‘What the hell do you want? I thought you were stuck for ever in that city of sin, Nottingham. Didn't I last see you dropping off the train there? Not that I remember much. I was so drunk.' He wore a plum-coloured dressing-gown and had a cigarette in his wide mouth. He had no hair to go grey on his pink bald head, so his face had taken over that role. ‘Sit down and get some alcohol.'

‘You don't look good,' I told him, throwing down my coat. Pearl curled up on the rug at his feet, and I thought she was going to take off his carpet slippers and start kissing his toes. But she merely nestled her cheek on them.

‘I've had a few upsets,' he admitted, his head right back and canon-mouths of smoke going up at the ceiling.

‘June?'

‘Right,' he laughed. ‘She couldn't take it, I suppose, so she ran off with that phoney poet called Ron Delph. That's one way to get rid of her.'

‘Poor, poor Gilbert,' said Pearl. ‘He hadn't eaten for days, and he was lying near the gas stove when I found him, trying to turn the taps on, drunk and crying.'

He jerked forward, and lifted her face sharply with his feet: ‘That's your sorry tale, you lying bitch. Don't re-write my history, you Kremlin-faced pug, or I'll throw you out of that window and down into the dustbins.'

‘Naughty Gilbert,' she said, looking as if she were about to cry. ‘You're such a novelist, my love.'

‘To hell with that,' he said. ‘You are, not me, with your sycophantic thesis. Those that live by the novel shall die by the fucking novel, you trollop. Remember that, or your life won't be worth living.'

‘Does this go on all the time?' I asked, hoping to stop them.

‘Only when you're here, or somebody else is.'

He smiled: ‘We're like two lovebirds in a cage when we're on our own, aren't we, pet?'

‘Yes,' she said, her cheek back on his foot.

‘She's trying to drive me crazy,' he said, ‘but I'll get her first.'

‘I'm glad to see you so happy,' I said. ‘How's
The History of Carnage
?'

‘Bloody. I'd only done fifty pages when I cut my finger slicing a lemon. So I threw it aside. I'm back on the novel now. It's going very well, the best thing I can remember doing, in fact. Thank God I got rid of that whore June. She went on to Ron Delph, the Concrete Poet. Too much sand in him, I expect. God's a bloody awful builder.'

‘She had a kid by him when she was eighteen,' I said. ‘Maybe they'll get married now.'

He walked to the door and back again: ‘She never told me whose kid it was. Never mind, one more down the chute.'

‘Don't get depressed about it,' said Pearl soothingly.

He poured half a pint of whisky and held it up to the light: ‘Piss. But hot piss. If I drink whisky, I'm just plain randy – and it doesn't take long to get it over with, does it Pearl Barley? Go and make us some black coffee for Christ's sake. When I drink vodka I get brutal, and take my pleasure that way, so I can't say whether it's enjoyed by both parties because it depends who I'm with. Best of all is when I drink champagne, because then it goes on for hours.' He gulped his whisky. Pearl shook her head and went to make coffee. ‘You know what, Michael?'

‘What?' I said, watching him.

‘I should have been born without a penis. Not only would I have been a happy man, but there'd have been lots of happier women in the world as well. As soon as the doctor pulled me out of my mother he should have told the nurse to chop off my cock. It's not fair to man or beast. It's the curse of mankind, sex. If a man goes with a woman ten years older than himself he's humping his mother. If he goes with a girl younger than himself he's raping his daughter. If he pansies after a young man he's buggering his son. If he keeps pets he's a bit of a sod. If he gets off with an older man he's being bummed by his father. Hallelujah! If he gets a woman of the same age he's perverse because he's normal. The only answer is to be indiscriminate, hump into what hole you can get and as the mood takes you.'

He fell silent, but I knew it wouldn't be for long, so I asked him if he'd ever been in love. His bald head wrinkled. ‘Love? Way back in the swampy mists of time, I vaguely remember it. Adolescent infatuation. There was nothing between that and a lifelong attack of satyriasis which is still going on only because I can't stop breathing.'

‘Or boasting,' I couldn't help saying.

He looked hard at me. ‘Don't be impertinent, sonny boy.'

‘You were in Nottingham during the war, weren't you?' I said.

‘Stop me drinking, Michael.'

‘Why the hell should I?'

He sent his glass splintering against the wall. ‘I'll stop myself. What mercy can one expect from the hungry generation? I was the hungry generation twenty years ago, and I haven't stopped being hungry. The trouble is that I don't see why I should. But another hungry generation is coming up on me, and I don't like it.'

‘You'll have to,' I grinned.

He flopped back in the chair, but I could see he was a man of great strength: ‘The hungry generations tread you down all right. That's what keeping up with the young is – allowing them to trample on you with impunity. If you get weak about it and try to keep up with the young, you only succeed in doing their job for them by trampling yourself down. To keep up with the young is a refusal to grow old, but by doing that you let them eat you up. If Pearl weren't so busy sweating over her hot stove she'd write down that priceless aphorism. The thing is, Michael, I was everywhere during the war, except where I could pull a trigger. But I was in Nottingham – the soldier's kiss from which he got the clap. We used to fight to get posted there. Nottingham was the Rose of England. I suppose it still is, what?'

Pearl came in and set a tray on the floor by Gilbert's feet. ‘Don't you remember anything pure and virtuous about it?'

‘I'm tired of masochistic women,' he said, ‘but that's the only sort I attract. When I get the other kind we fight on equal terms all the time, and then we part.'

‘Have you had many children?' I asked.

‘None that I know of. It would have been jolly to have two or three, then I could have ruined their lives as well. I could hate myself even more. I don't think there's anybody in the world hates himself as much as I do. That being the case what else could I have done in life but write novels? I've got to pass it on to somebody, and who else but the great inert mass of the British public? A few thousand of them, anyway, but that's better than nothing. I hate myself so much I don't even have a personality – just a novel in my heart and a cock in my hand. Pearl's writing all this down while the coffee gets cold. Get up you tripehound and pour me some.' He clutched his forehead. ‘Oh, God, she's even writing that down before she does it.'

She poured it so quickly that grounds slopped into the saucer. I thought that if life was made too hot for me by the Jack Leningrad gang I could always go into hiding again here, providing I was able to stand the stream of Blaskin's mediocre self-pitying commentaries. It frightened me that I was his son, though I was heartened by the fact that he didn't yet know that he was my father. I was beginning to think that marrying off my mother to a beaten-down old prick like this would be the worst favour I could do her. Coffee spilled on his dressing-gown, and at the same time I felt sorry for him, because his easy ways had got him nowhere, and there seemed nothing more terrible to me at my particular time of life. I realized how possible it was that if I did want to hide here he wouldn't let me do so, whether or not he knew me to be his son, though I was tempted to try it out, just to see how finally rotten he was.

Pearl brought in other trays, and laid a cold supper before us. ‘There's nothing in this house if not hospitality,' said Gilbert. ‘Food comes first and love second, and the Devil take the hind leg of the chicken' – at which he tore it in half, putting a stringy piece of carcass on my plate, and a solid piece of back-meat on his, while Pearl helped herself to fish and salami. ‘I'm beginning to remember rapey old Nottingham now,' he laughed.

‘What about a girl called Alice Cullen?' I asked.

‘Rings a bell. There was only one girl in Nottingham because I was shy in those days, though I don't suppose she noticed it. Used to send out poems to little magazines, long before I descended to being a novelist. When the war ended I went into my first disastrous marriage. It lasted seven years, and my wife thought she was looking after me, saving me from myself and for myself. Poor woman died of a broken heart, and I was hooked again in six months. After seven years of this second go, my wife found refuge in the arms of someone of her own intellectual level, a man who talked twenty hours a day and didn't say anything at all – a much younger man, which gratified me because it kept her out of my way while I went after my much younger women. The only trouble was she wanted me to go on loving her while she went on loving her psychotic, and I couldn't do that, because while in some ways I didn't mind being her husband – until now – I refused to give up playing that part only to become her father. Anyway, it staggered on for eleven years altogether. Where she is now I've no idea. Probably staring straight in front of her in some provincial looney-bin being consoled by her bourgeois intellectual drop-out. We quarrelled for years, on and off, but it didn't come to anything because the only time I used to say I was going to leave her was in the middle of the night when I was too tired to get up and pack. When I woke in the morning I just had to face myself and the normal ordinary world again, and such things as leaving your wife no longer seemed important. It's all sad, really, but making love is second nature to me. My first is self-preservation, and that's my one real failing. But nowadays I just enjoy life with my little Pearl.'

He turned to her and said, in a dangerously tender voice: ‘Will you marry me, love?'

Her face reddened, lifted from her page, then turned pale: ‘Are you serious, Gilbert?'

‘You see,' he said to me, ‘even she's found out how to torment me. Life gets worse instead of better. I'm even beginning to have headaches.'

‘That's cancer,' she said, getting her own back.

‘If ever you marry, Michael, stick to her for life, because the next one is always worse than the one before. Pearl was gentle and obedient when she first came, but she's a rotten little tiger now. Yes, my young days in Nottingham and sundry other places were the best times of my life. I've often thought of going back to find the girls I knew in my youth, and maybe marry one of them if they're still eligible. But I suppose they've all got false teeth, and I couldn't stand that, because mine would be on one side of the bed in a glass saying
HIS
, and
HERS
would be on her side, and while we went into a loving and oblivious sleep they'd be in the air above snapping viciously at each other like crocodiles. If not that, then she'd wear those horrible heavy steel curlers that would gnash my eyes out in the night. I couldn't stand that sort of thing. But I do remember Alice Cullen – any relation of yours?'