There was nothing to eat in the place, that was the only trouble. We found a box of matzos in the larder, and some cheese that I had to lop the rot from, so we lived on this and black sweet tea till the following morning, though we didn’t need too much time to eat. Nor did we benefit from the fresh country air. Polly told me the story of her life, of how she was brought up at Moggerhanger Hall, and the adolescent shock she got when she caught on to her father’s profession. She’d always been his darling, and still was, and he lost no opportunity in reminding her of that and the many times as a child when she’d said that when she grew up he was the only one she’d consider marrying. She asked me about my life, and I told her all I knew of it, and of my adventures as a gold-smuggler, on which she asked all sorts of questions about the Jack Leningrad Organization. I told her about William being caught in Beirut, and that because of this the man in the iron lung might be on the move to a new hideout.
‘All this is worth nothing,’ I said, while we lounged on the bed, me in her father’s shirt which by this time had a bit of rank stiffening in it. ‘The moon is worth nothing. The world is worth nothing. The rain can piss itself to death. All that’s worth anything are your kisses.’ She almost fainted into my arms at this, and my hand went down as her soft breasts flattened against me, and her eyes closed. ‘We’ll have lots of honeymoons, and if life tries to waylay and grab us we’ll kick it in the teeth. There’s only us, not life.’ Her tongue and fingers were in my mouth, as if wanting me to pour out more such words, but I was half gone, then all gone as I went into her again, and got the piston of the two-stroke cycle at a regular knock. It amazed me how much spunk a man had in him, and I wondered how many times he shot in a lifetime and how many plastic buckets this would add up to, how many furrows it would irrigate, how many babies drown. These off-side thoughts kept me going, and I played her on her belly and back and side and from behind, till finally when she was spreadeagled under me and facing me, and had come at last, and I felt her velvet gobble beginning again, I calculated it was time to let go, and did, and she pulled me by the arse till I felt her fingernails must be full of either shit or blood. She cried out as if I were trying to kill her, which I swear I wasn’t, and I felt a roar come out of me without knowing much about it.
As we went sadly towards the car I hoped our simple brick cottage would melt under the rain and banish back into the soil because I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone ever going into it and spoiling the thick atmosphere that we had created and left there. Even to dynamite it would be better than that. I drove like a pilot towards London, neither of us saying much. There wasn’t even a traffic jam in Tonbridge, and two hours later we were crossing the bridge and steaming through the mist and mire into Ealing. The thick slosh of reality was getting back at me, and I felt nervous as I drove the mudstained Bentley up the drive of Moggerhanger Court.
I took the remaining cigars out of the glove-box and said goodbye, wondering if she expected me to match her with the tears she looked like shedding.
‘Phone me,’ she said.
‘I will’ — solid in my intention.
‘Father has other places we can go to. They’re all over the place.’
‘We’ll go to every one,’ I said.
On the mat was a telegram and a letter. I opened the telegram first, and it read: PROCEED ROME TOMORROW STOP AWAIT PHONE CALL = JACK LENINGRAD. I took a bottle of beer from the fridge and put some sausages under the grill, so that the whole flat smelt like home. Whereas the telegram bucked me up and made me feel better, the sight of Bridgitte’s bulky letter irritated me, though I hadn’t yet opened it, because I looked forward to getting back to work with no distraction. I read a couple of old newspaper stories about foot and mouth disease, then noted that England’s currency reserves were running low, and how gold was getting scarcer. Time and a pot of tea went by on this, but soon I was forced to open the letter.
‘Dear Michael,’ Bridgitte wrote, ‘such terrible things have happened to me that I don’t know where to begin.’ I nearly threw it in the fire, but was compelled, like a dear reader, to read on.
‘I’m so distressed that I weep all the time. You see, Donald, my husband, came back the morning after you left, and Adelida met him at the door while I was still in bed. She’d just returned from taking dear Smog to school, and must have told Donald that you had been in the bed with me, because the first thing I knew was the clothes pulled back and his wild hands smacking me. I screamed, but I was black and blue before he stopped. Then he stood there calling me all the rotten English names, such terrible things I can’t tell you.
‘He made me get dressed, then pushed me all down the stairs to the front door, and threw me out of it. By this time he was crying himself, but as the tears came to his own face his knocks and kicks at me got worse. As I went sobbing down the path I heard him raving at Adelida and telling her to pack and get out as well. He’s a psychologist and a doctor, and he’s supposed to be a man of wisdom and understanding, but he acted like a beast to me. He’s never been anything but a beast.
‘I had only a few shillings in my pocket so I went by Underground and bus to your flat. Nobody was in. I sat for an hour on the stairs, still not really awake, and hungry because the Beast had thrown me out with no breakfast. I went to see a Dutch friend of mine who lives in Chelsea with a student, and she gave me cheese and tea, but was too poor to put me up.
‘I decided that the only sensible thing was to go back to my husband, and when I got there he wasn’t in. The door was open and I caught Adelida putting my clothes into her own suitcase. I said that if she didn’t take them out I’d phone the police, but she said I was a whore and could phone who I liked. When I started to dial the phone she threw my stuff over the floor and ran away from the house. So I packed my case properly and found my money purse with pounds in it. If the worst came to the terrible it was enough to get me to Holland, but I didn’t want to go there because my family, who had always hated my husband, would only have said I told you so and sent me away.
‘I sat on my case in the living-room surrounded by chairs, and didn’t know what to do. I was stunned, and it was all my fault. And then I thought: “Why didn’t I think of it before? Michael’s gone to his home in Nottinghamshire.” A ray of joy spread over me. Also I remembered the address, Ranton Grange, so I called a taxi and went straight to the station, where I got a ticket to Nottingham.
‘It was a wonderful journey, because as soon as the train got to countryside my tears dried and troubles went, and I had a cheap lunch in the dining-wagon. The only strange incident that happened, on the train anyway, was when I was on my way back to the carriage. I was passing a first-class compartment and inside was a little old woman, who took off a fur coat and tried to push it through the window out of the train. The space was small and the coat was big, so she had a hard job to get it out. She pulled it down and rolled it up longways, to make it easier, and she was mumbling and crying all the time. I went in and talked to her, so that after a while she forgot about throwing her coat off the train, and started to tell me her life story. But it was all very quick and I didn’t understand anything, thinking she was just another of your mad people in England.
‘Then I went back to my own seat in third class, because the ticket man came and said I had to. Nottingham was nice and different from London, all open and good to look at, full of busy and smiling people, and I said to myself this is just the town that Michael would come from. I asked a station man how I would get to Ranton, and he told me to walk down to the bus place, so that in an hour I got there. What beautiful country! But I had to walk a long way down a lane to get to your house at the Grange. By this time I was a little bit tired, but hoped your mother would not be angry for me calling on you.