I was saved from the pain of this by the ringing telephone, and was surprised to hear that Appledore trilclass="underline" ‘Oh, you’re back! Michael! I can’t believe it.’ I told her about my imaginary adventures in Lisbon during the last few days, but after a while she broke in and said: ‘Listen, tell me yes or no, can we come over and see you?’
I was on my guard: ‘Who’s we?’
‘Smog and I. I got him from school after giving up my job today and we’ve nowhere to go. Oh, Michael,’ she was crying now, ‘let us come over and see you.’
‘All right, then.’
She laughed with joy: ‘I knew you would. I told Smog you would. Oh, I’ll kiss you when I see you.’ All I had to do was sit down and wait, casting a rugged glance now and again at old Ma Straw. If I’d had liquor in the house I’d have drunk a mountain, but there was only a drop of sherry and I hated that.
Smog threw himself at me and started to cry, so I took him to a chair and sat him on my knee. ‘Get your coat off,’ I said to Bridgitte, who looked thin and wan, though it made her appear more interesting.
‘You were the only one I could turn to,’ she said.
‘I know, love. I know. I got your letter. It was pretty daft of you to go to Nottingham. Next time you feel like a trip up there I’ll give you my mother’s real address.’
She pouted: ‘I don’t know why I did it. But it seemed like exactly the right thing to do, and the journey made me feel a lot better.’
‘I’ll bet it did,’ I said, riled that she’d had a good time with somebody else. Smog had quietened down, and now she began to snivel. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, meaning to go to her, but Smog clung so tightly that I couldn’t move. His face was wet from tears. ‘I want to live with you. I don’t like life like I did once. Dad is rotten, and things are all mixed up.’
‘Listen, Smog,’ I said, ‘life isn’t too good for anybody. Even children have to grow up and find that out. You’ll be seven soon, so you’re nearly a man. Lots of things have happened to you, and lots more will happen. It’s like that. You’ll be safe with Bridgitte and me, I promise. As far as I’m concerned we could all live together, all the time, but I don’t think your father would like that. Still, you don’t have to worry, because we’re friends for life.’
He looked at me, his face small but already formed as if he were fourteen. ‘Can I have some tea and cakes?’
‘Come into the kitchen and help me to look for them,’ I said, ‘because I’m damned if I can remember where they are.’ I made a game of searching, and he was lost in it while I went into the living-room to kiss Bridgitte back to life: ‘Let’s forget about my lies,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about it.’ She was warm and steamy after the rain, and from our long embrace I saw Smog standing in the doorway with a packet of chocolate cakes in his hand. He forced himself between our legs, so that we made a house for him to hide and be warm in. ‘You’ve built me a cottage,’ he said. ‘Let’s fry some crumpets and stroke the cat.’
‘I’ll sing you the Volga Boat Song while I’m at it,’ I said. ‘But we don’t have a cat. I used it to clean the windows down this morning and it ran away.’
I fixed him up in the main bed, since it seemed that William wouldn’t be needing it for a while. Bridgitte and I sat like any man and wife at supper, when the phone rang. It was Stanley to say I’d be wanted in Rome the following day, and that I should present myself at the usual Knightsbridge flat by nine in the morning. ‘What about William?’ I asked.
‘No news,’ he said. They were doing all they could, which was a lot, but they couldn’t say anything now, though they expected results every minute. I bit my tongue and said all right I’d be there.
It wasn’t gold this time, but the errand of carrying a valise of true-blue British banknotes through the customs. I went out and back in a couple of days, by train and boat, landing at Dover and going through with my allowance of booze and fags so that no one could suspect a thing. It was my third time away and third time lucky, plying my trade in the mainland traffic and working with all the nerve I could muster, for not only was I fucking God’s own country, through the ribs, but I was getting a fat slice of pay for it as well, and what man could be more favoured than that? The hint was dropped when I collected my divvy that the notes were forged anyway, and I didn’t boast of it, even to myself, but gently let it seep down to the flowing dust of my blood in the hope that such easy tasks would become second nature to me. On the other hand, by the normal permutations of chance, I knew I could not do many of these trips without getting caught, or feeling the pressure of them break through to my face and give me away, even though to myself I might still seem to be in full control. So I had to think about the future, and organize some plan of withdrawal, keeping an eye cocked to my own safety should Jack Leningrad Limited not want me to leave when I felt it was time to do so for my one and only good, which was the only one that mattered.
I did many more trips, and had nearly three thousand pounds in the bank. I wouldn’t let my hands get to it till I’d packed the job in because if I bought an expensive car I might get caught, in which case it would rot in the street while I did my three or five years. I hadn’t the ultimate confidence that I would go unscathed, and that was why I had to get out.
I seemed to live on more solid ground while Bridgitte and Smog were at the flat, as if I were a married man with full responsibility going off to work now and again to earn them cakes and meat. We assumed that Dr Anderson would be interested in the whereabouts of his son, but when Bridgitte phoned to let him know that Smog was all right, the housekeeper said Dr Anderson was on a six-week lecture tour in America — where he no doubt told his audience that they had to be kind to one another. I tried to phone Polly, but couldn’t get through to her, so my love changed from the burden it had been at first, to an almost bearable pang whenever she jumped into my mind, which was still often enough to make me flinch when it hit me.
But there was work to be done, a high-stakes trip to Lisbon, and I came back first class on a beautiful Caravelle, so that I could get soaked in champagne and stretch my legs, which deserved it after the work they’d done. I intended to doze the few hours away, but I reckoned without Arnold Pilgrim, a tall thin man who sat by my side. I’d seen him sloping in, and he had the sort of face that seemed clamped tight by never having known what he wanted to do in life. He looked by now on the point of finding out, yet realized he’d left it too late to find the means for doing what he wanted to do. I talk from hindsight, but his rather staid and baffled face wasn’t easy to forget, even on first sight, and I remember the journey because in one, sense it was vital to my life.
We joked over the champagne, and he told me he had just been to Portugal to negotiate the sale of forty thousand machine tools, or cars, or litres of wine — I forget which. It seemed to have been successful, whatever it was, so I said: ‘Here’s to it, then!’ I knew I should neither drink nor talk, but these rules of William’s I waived more and more, for I considered that to be too reticent while travelling only drew suspicion rather than the reverse. After all, William was rotting in jail, so he could afford to talk.
Using the soul of Gilbert Blaskin, I told Arnold Pilgrim I was a writer, and that I’d just been to Lisbon for a week’s holiday. The only danger in this, I realized after he started talking, was that he would spill his heart to me for the entire flight, which he did. ‘When I get home,’ he said, ‘I’m going to murder my wife. There’s a story for you, if you’re a writer.’