I swigged his plonk: ‘I can talk for hours, but I never give anything away, and neither does it dilute my ideas, if that’s what you mean.’
He laughed. ‘You know, Michael, I think I believe you.’
Seeing that she had set us going, his wife went to check the dinner. ‘Polly tells me you’re in love,’ he said, at which Polly stood up and said she was going to see if there was anything she could do in the kitchen. He had pronounced the phrase in love as if I’d been caught by him trying to blow a safe in such a clumsy fashion that I wouldn’t even have buckled the hinges. I stood up.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
I walked to the mantelshelf, and finished off my whisky, refusing to sit when that bastard told me, even if he was Polly’s old man, and one of the richest men in London — or Ealing. ‘I am in love with her,’ I said, ‘and have been from the moment I saw her.’
He smiled: ‘You don’t have to spit the words out like rusty tacks. I wanted to hear it from your own lips, that’s all. But you’ve been going about things like an elephant trying to be cunning. I’ve always admired tact, and don’t particularly like somebody who’s sly and devious from his toenails up. I believe you when you say you’re in love with Polly and want to marry her, but at the same time I love her as well — and never you forget it — so I don’t want her to get into the hands of the wrong person. The fact that we both love her gives us something in common. Don’t let that go to your head, though.’
‘I’m sorry if I spoke too sharply,’ I said, ‘but you can be sure I’ll do my best to make her happy.’
He got up and went to the whisky pot. ‘Another drink?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Don’t think you’re in much of a position to make a bargain,’ he said, hovering over me. ‘Not yet, at least. I know you’re a sharp person, so I’d like a few words with you after dinner. We’ll go to my study and let the ladies go about their own business. In the meantine. let’s drink this. I’m not supposed to, but I will for once.’
He took only a sip of it before we went in to dinner. It was the most stultifying meal I’d ever been at. I weighed every word carefully in my brain-pan before letting it out to do its best, or worst, and the same seemed true of the adult Moggerhangers, even of Polly. She was particularly subdued, and that I liked least of all, though occasionally she did try to open some new road of conversation. But everything seemed to die in its tracks, and I thought Moggerhanger himself was responsible for this. In fact he seemed to exult in it, as if showing off in front of me the power he held over his family. But I had my pride too, and was by no means inclined to start an entertaining stream of talk. To do so would have pleased him, for he would know himself responsible for it, and congratulate himself on having broken my nerve. There were moments when I didn’t know what I was doing there, until I looked across at Polly and managed a smile of complicity out of her. Worst of all, as if even that was planned, the food wasn’t up to the standard I’d been stuffing myself with at the Italian place.
Towards the end of the meal we were comparing the merits of the various holiday spots in Europe, such as Klosters and Monte Carlo, Majorca and Cortina, none of which places I’d been to. But pretending that I had gave the conversation a more jumpy and natural rhythm, which caused a slight melting of the ice between us. When we stood up to go back into the living-room things became quite affable. But the deep armchairs felled me again. They were like fox-holes, from which we couldn’t talk but only snipe each other. I’d never imagined I could have landed so deeply into the household of such a bourgeois racketeer, but I supposed it to be just another proof of my unworldliness. Though I’d previously worked for him I’d thought this middle-class nook was only a front to face anyone who might accuse him of being a criminal to the core — which he certainly was.
I’d been curious during most of the evening to know what he wanted to talk to me about. After an hour of brain-dragging small-talk he stood up and asked Polly and her mother to excuse us. I took the hint that I shouldn’t see Polly again for a day or two, so wished them goodnight and followed Moggerhanger into what he called his library. It’s true, there were books in it, a stand of five shelves full of novels I wouldn’t be seen dead, or even alive, reading, though I did have time to notice a couple by Gilbert Blaskin, one called Vampires In Love and another entitled The Seventh Highway.
Happily there were no deep armchairs in this room, otherwise I’d have gone berserk with the table knife I’d slipped into my pocket at the end of the meal. The room was walled in panelled oak, and Moggerhanger stood behind his desk, neither of us being inclined to sit down.
‘Brandy?’
‘A noggin,’ I said.
He pushed it over, as well as an opened box of Havanas: ‘Only one,’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ I said, unwrapping it.
‘And hand that knife over. Nobody goes out of this house with one of my knives, unless it’s in his back.’ He laughed at this joke, and even I thought it funny as I slid the knife on the desk. I wished I hadn’t stolen it now because some gravy had congealed inside the pocket of my best suit. ‘I just wondered whether you’d notice it.’
He sat on the desk itself: ‘I don’t like pissed-up young tiddleywinks making tests on me, so watch it.’
I certainly watched him, because I knew him to be as savage as a shark, a wild man who wore gold cufflinks and stank of after-shave lotion. ‘Tell me what you want, then.’
‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he joked. It was obvious to me that Polly had made a big mistake in letting him in on our secret. He was her own father but she didn’t know the first thing about him, taking his career for that of an honest property dealer when the only property he’d ever dealt in had been other people’s. There was not a hope of Polly and I ever marrying under his vicious auspices, so it didn’t matter to me whether I showed him any respect or not. ‘It was a pity you stopped working for me.’
‘You gave me the sack,’ I told him.
‘Yes, so I did.’
‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I didn’t feel like being a chauffeur all my life.’
‘There’s worse jobs.’
‘And better.’
‘I’m glad you think so. I would have had something better for you, by and by.’
‘I can’t help it if I were headstrong,’ I said, ‘but I’m getting over it.’
‘There’s hope for us yet, then, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘What sort?’
He sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. ‘If you want to join the family, I might ask you to prove your regard for it by getting you to show a bit of loyalty. I think I can safely say that my wife likes you, and I know Polly does. As for me, I always considered you the sort who would get on in the world — as you’ve shown by the job you’ve landed yourself in. I was pleased to hear it when Polly told me about it.’
He gave me a hard look, and half a smile, and I knew he knew what was cutting through my mind. I’d have walked out, if I could have covered my retreat with a Molotov cocktail. The effort not to smile, twitch or say any halfcock joke made me sick at the stomach. ‘In my experience,’ said Moggerhanger, ‘the hardest thing for any man to do, including myself, is to keep his business to himself. You’re still young, though if I were at the butt-end of your flap-mouth I wouldn’t consider it much of an excuse. But I can understand you not thinking it too bad an indiscretion, because a man often tells things to his girlfriend that he’d never tell anyone else, not even his mother. And you weren’t to know that Polly has never had any secrets from me. She may hold back a while with some, but sooner or later she’ll confide in me or her mother, and I might say here and now that I find that sort of thing a great virtue. Anybody who confides something to me that’s in any way profitable can rely on me to stand by them for as long as they’ll be able to stand themselves. And that’s saying something. It’s saying a bloody lot, Michael, in fact, and I want you to know it.’