I could stand here listening all night, but he wouldn’t know who I was. He was too far back in the attics of his own mind. ‘What is it you want then, Jack?’
‘Eh? Who are you?’
‘I’m asking you what you want most in the world,’ I said, feeling the rain eating its way through to my shirt collar despite an overcoat.
‘Bread and jam,’ he said. ‘Slices of bread and butter, spread with jam. And tea. Tea. Hot.’ He clutched his carrier bags: ‘You can’t have my almanacks, though, so don’t try it.’
‘I don’t want them,’ I said, taking a few pound notes out of my wallet. ‘Has anybody been bothering you? I’ll break their heads.’
‘Rotten fruit,’ he said. ‘They’ll bury me in rotten fruit.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said, ‘take this money and have a binge on bread and jam. It’ll make you feel better.’
He stared at the notes. ‘Take it,’ I said, then had to dodge, because with great strength and cunning he swung both heavy bags of almanacks at me, one of them catching me sharply on the hip. He screamed, and kept swinging, and both bags burst so that almanacks went flying all over the pavement and into the wet road, blown open by the wind. He rushed at me, kicking so that I had to fly for my life from his madman’s strength. I didn’t run far, turned, and saw him leaning against a wall, his face pressed to it. I walked back and he went away, but I caught him up and touched his elbow. It was impossible to leave him, not only for his good, but mine as well. ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘it’s me, Michael.’
He stopped and looked hard: ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, calmly, but with great weariness.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To hell,’ he said, ‘unless somebody gives me a couple of bob.’
‘Hang on Jack. Here’s three quid. In a month or two I’ll be getting a house in the country, and if you want to, you can live there. It’ll be quiet, and you’ll like it, an old railway station neat Huntingborough.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘I mean it,’ I said, giving him the money.
‘I’m down on my luck, but I’ll pay you back.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’m earning it at the moment.’ I found a five-pound note in my wallet, and gave him that, too. ‘Take care of it.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will. Eight pounds. It’s years since I had that much.’ I left him, hoping he’d survive the next month or so, then I’d let him come to the station till he got his strength back. Plans altered as you made them, though to make plans was the only way to get anywhere.
After languishing with Polly in various beds of the Moggerhanger household, and in the cottage hideaway in Kent, I knew what I wanted at last, and though it seemed crazy and catastrophic for someone like me to marry her, yet that is exactly what I set my heart on. I told her about my railway station, embroidering on its beauty and solitude, until it seemed the most romantic retreat in the world for two people as much in love as we were.
Driving back from the country, she said that even though she was in tune with all my proposals regarding Upper Mayhem, she didn’t really want to make too violent a break with her father, whom she loved, and whom she wanted to reconcile to our elopement sooner or later. She would abide by her own passionate wish to stay with me for ever (she was an even more eloquent talker than I was, at times, it was beginning to seem) but I would have to be patient and help her to make the break at the right time.
This plea delighted me, being definite proof of how seriously she took our planned departure. At the same time passionate and sensible, she made her way to the deepest part of my heart, and the least I could do was help her to make the break at the time of her choosing, because whether I stayed another few months with Jack Leningrad made no difference to me when a whole future of bliss was involved.
She was the first person I’d ever been completely open with. My natural bent to tell lies became submerged, and if I did feel the fever of fantasy coming on me I meshed it into a story so ridiculous that there was no chance or danger of her believing it had any connexion with the truth. I thus discovered that love makes people honest, but the only trouble was that in the subterfuge world of smuggling, such honesty might be a disadvantage, a race against time between Polly coming to Mayhem with me, and me giving myself away in one of my passages through London airport or Gatwick. She knew of all my techniques as a bona-fide traveller burdened by impossible loads, for I told her when I was going on a trip and where, and who as far as I knew would be going that evening or the following day. Confiding so easily helped me to carry on the work till she decided it was time for the lovers’ flit. And doing it longer than I’d contemplated didn’t faze me because with every journey I was piling more money into the bank.
I asked Polly to come with me on one of my trips to Paris, but her parents were going to Bournemouth for a few days and wanted her to go with them. There was nothing she’d like more than to stay with me in Paris, she said. ‘I’ll tell my parents to go to hell. It isn’t right that I’m forced to spend three deadly dull days in Bournemouth when we could be in Paris together. You mean more to me than my parents, so I’ll come, even though it might mean the break taking place sooner than I’d thought.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s all right. Let’s wait. We might not spend a few days in Paris now, but we’ll have all the time we want later on, and we won’t need to disturb anyone about it either.’ When I talked her out of doing anything so rash as making a break now, she had tears in her eyes at my solicitude. I said I didn’t want to be responsible for such a thing, in case she found it hard to forgive me later. In any case I hoped that after we’d eloped, and set up house at Upper Mayhem, her father would see his way to forgiving us and letting me once more into his protection and confidence.
It always came back in the end to care and cunning and patience and nerve, so that at last I was beginning to get the pattern of my life, and the feeling of these qualities became so intense that my strength increased to a height wherein I had to watch it so that I didn’t become slipshod. I sensed myself acquiring the confidence that could ruin me, but because I saw it, I thought that was sufficient protection against it. A man did not stop being a fool merely by knowing he was one. This was even less likely than being clever by simply realizing that one was clever. If anything, the knowledge that I was a bastard had stopped the appropriate distillation of bitterness entering my view of things. If I’d been like everyone else with a married mother and father, the iron in the soul might have bitten into me sooner and given me that extra veneer of protection against the world.
But Polly was my brilliant star, my beautiful heavy-breasted love whose sweet cunt turned into a morass as soon as I touched her. In the cottage bedroom we turned on Moggerhanger’s high-powered radio and danced naked to Arab music. Sometimes she brought a few hash cigarettes that put us into such a high trance that we could dance and fuck all night.
One evening I took her to my favourite eating-place. We hadn’t met for three days, and our hands, mine warm and hers cool, joined over the table, glasses of Valpolicella not yet touched. ‘Let’s drink to our departure,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is say the word. I’m ready. Contracts have been exchanged for my country seat, and in a couple of weeks I’ll actually have the deeds. Michael Cullen will be a property owner!’
She looked anxious, worn by some inside trouble: ‘Do we just run away?’