Clegg asked me into a room just inside the door, where he had a sort of office or study. He hadn’t shaved for a few days and the stubble, like his hair, was grey. I sat down, when he asked me to, in an armchair. On the wall behind was a framed railway map of England. I was left alone while Arthur Clegg went hospitably into the kitchen to make some tea. I don’t know what he thought I’d come for, because he asked nothing and said nothing, imagining perhaps in the quirky darkness of his mind that I just happened to be passing and had called in. But his grey shallow eyes showed him to be far more alive to the world than I was, and while he was busy with his teapot and old cups he’d left a record on his pick-up, playing part of what I knew to be Handel’s Messiah. I supposed he spun this sort of music all day to stop himself going sideways up the wall till he got the hell out of his gloomy house. I wondered why I had come, now that I was here, and the voice was telling me that the trumpet shall sound, while I didn’t know how to get to the point because I knew he knew he didn’t have to give me a blue penny for the favour I’d done him.
He asked how I was getting on, and I saw that the only thing I could do was be dead honest and tell him I’d just been booted out of my job on his behalf. He smiled at this: ‘That’s the way of the world. What did you expect?’
I wasn’t ready to let things go as easily, and said I was glad to hear he’d got four thousand six hundred for his house: ‘That was due only to me, and you shouldn’t forget it.’
‘Oh, I won’t, my lad,’ he said, putting half a biscuit between his false teeth. ‘Not in a hurry, anyway.’
‘It’ll take me a good while to get another job,’ I said, ‘and I’ll need a bit to tide me over. A hundred and fifty would see me right.’
‘You’ve upped your price?’ he grinned.
I was beginning to dislike the way he too obviously played with me, and wished I’d brought a blunt instrument to threaten him with — though I knew that as a wicked thought, because it went out of my mind very quickly, especially when he said: ‘There’s many a slip between the first offer being made and the final payment falling into my bank. He can still back out, as you know. He’s sending a surveyor over tomorrow, and if his report’s no good, I expect the deal will be off, or he’ll want a lower price. But if it all goes through as planned, I’ll give you a hundred. That’s what you said, wasn’t it?’
‘It’s not much of a share.’
He poured more tea, looked me straight in the eye: ‘It’s all you’re going to get. It’s more than you deserve, twenty per cent, in any case, but I’ll stick to our agreement. A pity you lost your job over it, though. What’s a bright young lad like you going to do now?’
‘I’m going to London.’
‘That’s even brighter of you. This town would soon be too hot to hold you, I suppose.’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Nobody said you had. But you’ll like London, if I know you. You have the face to like it — though God knows, you must be careful.’ He waffled on like this for another half-hour, while I sat at my ease and listened to him tell about museums and famous places he thought I should see down there.
When I left he shook my hand, held it and squeezed it, and his fingers were ice-cold so that I felt sorry for him, though I didn’t know why. After all, he had no troubles any more, having got rid of his wife and kids, and being about to sell his house for a good fat price. He’d have nothing then, and he’d be free. Maybe this was why I had that faint shred of sorrow for him.
I got back in time to meet Claudine by the cinema. She was glad to see me, smiled as I took her hand and kissed it like an Italian count. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ she said, ‘have you got a raise, or been promoted?’
‘Better than that. I’ve got the sack. I feel wonderful.’
She stopped so suddenly in the middle of the pavement that a couple of postmen going at a good pace behind bumped into us and almost knocked me flying. It was as if I’d buried the blunt end of a claw-hammer in her back: ‘What for?’
‘A good reason. A bloody good reason.’
Her stony anger flashed itself full into me. ‘But why?’
I had to tell her something, or just walk away, and I couldn’t do that. The real reason I’d got the push now seemed petty and stupid, and my pride buckled under it: ‘I was in the office this morning’ — persuading her to walk along so that it would be easier to talk — ‘when Weekley asked me to type a sheet of information about a house. Then I had to cyclostyle it, but the machine was no good and it left off the bottom part. When he saw it he called me an idle bastard, and I said that if there was an idle bastard in this office then he was that idle bastard, the idle bastard. At which he calls me a thieving bastard, an illiterate no-good bastard from Radford, so I punch him one, and knock his glasses flying. Everybody in the office had to hold me down, otherwise I’d have pummelled him into putty. He sent somebody for a copper, but they couldn’t find one near, so Weekley then said I wasn’t worth taking to court because I’d go there soon enough on my own, being already a criminal who could only go from bad to worse. All he wanted was to see the back of me, which he did, because I got out as fast as I could. I’ll never go near the place again. I hate it.’
I piled it on so high it nearly toppled over. ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘Oh, how awful.’ We walked in silence while the full blood of it sank into her, and me, getting more horrible all the time. ‘What have you been doing all day?’ she asked.
‘Sitting in coffee bars,’ I said gruffly. ‘What else could I do after that little set-to?’
‘You ought to have been looking for another job. You might have had one by now.’
‘I hadn’t got the heart to.’
‘Why do you do it? Oh, Michael, why did you do it?’ she cried with such anguish that a man passing by laughed at the thought of what I’d done to her, the dirty bastard. It sounded as if I’d just killed her mother, or something. ‘Well,’ she said, when I didn’t answer, ‘we can’t announce our engagement till you get another good job, and even then, I don’t know.’
‘Do you love me?’ I asked, ‘or don’t you? Just tell me, for God’s sake, so that I’ll know where I stand.’
My sarcasm was mixed with a dash of bile, but she took me dead seriously: ‘I don’t know. I’m all mixed up. Oh, why did you do it?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ I said, ‘and I mean it: I couldn’t stand working in that office with such a gang of four-eyed ponces for the next four hundred years, getting deader and deader and deader and deader, selling rotten houses to poor drudges who are even worse than dead but who just wanted a rose-painted kennel to die in, or a converted matchbox rabbit-hutch to bring their snotty-nosed kids up in. I’ve had my short sharp dose and that’s enough to last me all my life. In fact I might die next year and I’d weep scalding tears if I’d wasted so much time saying yes-sir and no-sir to that lot of bleeders. I’d rather work in the blackest factory on earth than go through that again. I might be a fool and a thief but I’ve not yet been brainwashed enough to crawl into that sort of death with a lettuce up my arse.’
‘Stop it!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t swear. Go away. I don’t want to see you. Don’t follow me.’ I stood, watching her get on to a bus that, conveniently for both of us, drew into its stop at that moment. It trundled towards Canning Circus, and for ten minutes I didn’t move but leaned against the wall of the cathedral wondering what I’d done, why I had made Claudine so desperate and unhappy that she had to walk out on me. It was the finish, I knew, because knowing her heart so well, I could see that I’d split the ground under her feet, and that the absolutely unforgivable had been done and said.