‘You’ll have to,’ I grinned.
He flopped back in the chair, but I could see he was a man of great strength: ‘The hungry generations tread you down all right. That’s what keeping up with the young is — allowing them to trample on you with impunity. If you get weak about it and try to keep up with the young, you only succeed in doing their job for them by trampling yourself down. To keep up with the young is a refusal to grow old, but by doing that you let them eat you up. If Pearl weren’t so busy sweating over her hot stove she’d write down that priceless aphorism. The thing is, Michael, I was everywhere during the war, except where I could pull a trigger. But I was in Nottingham — the soldier’s kiss from which he got the clap. We used to fight to get posted there. Nottingham was the Rose of England. I suppose it still is, what?’
Pearl came in and set a tray on the floor by Gilbert’s feet. ‘Don’t you remember anything pure and virtuous about it?’
‘I’m tired of masochistic women,’ he said, ‘but that’s the only sort I attract. When I get the other kind we fight on equal terms all the time, and then we part.’
‘Have you had many children?’ I asked.
‘None that I know of. It would have been jolly to have two or three, then I could have ruined their lives as well. I could hate myself even more. I don’t think there’s anybody in the world hates himself as much as I do. That being the case what else could I have done in life but write novels? I’ve got to pass it on to somebody, and who else but the great inert mass of the British public? A few thousand of them, anyway, but that’s better than nothing. I hate myself so much I don’t even have a personality — just a novel in my heart and a cock in my hand. Pearl’s writing all this down while the coffee gets cold. Get up you tripehound and pour me some.’ He clutched his forehead. ‘Oh, God, she’s even writing that down before she does it.’
She poured it so quickly that grounds slopped into the saucer. I thought that if life was made too hot for me by the Jack Leningrad gang I could always go into hiding again here, providing I was able to stand the stream of Blaskin’s mediocre self-pitying commentaries. It frightened me that I was his son, though I was heartened by the fact that he didn’t yet know that he was my father. I was beginning to think that marrying off my mother to a beaten-down old prick like this would be the worst favour I could do her. Coffee spilled on his dressing-gown, and at the same time I felt sorry for him, because his easy ways had got him nowhere, and there seemed nothing more terrible to me at my particular time of life. I realized how possible it was that if I did want to hide here he wouldn’t let me do so, whether or not he knew me to be his son, though I was tempted to try it out, just to see how finally rotten he was.
Pearl brought in other trays, and laid a cold supper before us. ‘There’s nothing in this house if not hospitality,’ said Gilbert. ‘Food comes first and love second, and the Devil take the hind leg of the chicken’ — at which he tore it in half, putting a stringy piece of carcass on my plate, and a solid piece of back-meat on his, while Pearl helped herself to fish and salami. ‘I’m beginning to remember rapey old Nottingham now,’ he laughed.
‘What about a girl called Alice Cullen?’ I asked.
‘Rings a bell. There was only one girl in Nottingham because I was shy in those days, though I don’t suppose she noticed it. Used to send out poems to little magazines, long before I descended to being a novelist. When the war ended I went into my first disastrous marriage. It lasted seven years, and my wife thought she was looking after me, saving me from myself and for myself. Poor woman died of a broken heart, and I was hooked again in six months. After seven years of this second go, my wife found refuge in the arms of someone of her own intellectual level, a man who talked twenty hours a day and didn’t say anything at all — a much younger man, which gratified me because it kept her out of my way while I went after my much younger women. The only trouble was she wanted me to go on loving her while she went on loving her psychotic, and I couldn’t do that, because while in some ways I didn’t mind being her husband — until now — I refused to give up playing that part only to become her father. Anyway, it staggered on for eleven years altogether. Where she is now I’ve no idea. Probably staring straight in front of her in some provincial looney-bin being consoled by her bourgeois intellectual drop-out. We quarrelled for years, on and off, but it didn’t come to anything because the only time I used to say I was going to leave her was in the middle of the night when I was too tired to get up and pack. When I woke in the morning I just had to face myself and the normal ordinary world again, and such things as leaving your wife no longer seemed important. It’s all sad, really, but making love is second nature to me. My first is self-preservation, and that’s my one real failing. But nowadays I just enjoy life with my little Pearl.’
He turned to her and said, in a dangerously tender voice: ‘Will you marry me, love?’
Her face reddened, lifted from her page, then turned pale: ‘Are you serious, Gilbert?’
‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘even she’s found out how to torment me. Life gets worse instead of better. I’m even beginning to have headaches.’
‘That’s cancer,’ she said, getting her own back.
‘If ever you marry, Michael, stick to her for life, because the next one is always worse than the one before. Pearl was gentle and obedient when she first came, but she’s a rotten little tiger now. Yes, my young days in Nottingham and sundry other places were the best times of my life. I’ve often thought of going back to find the girls I knew in my youth, and maybe marry one of them if they’re still eligible. But I suppose they’ve all got false teeth, and I couldn’t stand that, because mine would be on one side of the bed in a glass saying HIS, and HERS would be on her side, and while we went into a loving and oblivious sleep they’d be in the air above snapping viciously at each other like crocodiles. If not that, then she’d wear those horrible heavy steel curlers that would gnash my eyes out in the night. I couldn’t stand that sort of thing. But I do remember Alice Cullen — any relation of yours?’
‘She’s my mother,’ I said. He spewed chicken-shreds all over the table, as if about to have a seizure. ‘Last time I was up there,’ I went on, ‘she told me all about you. I’m your son, right enough.’ I filled in the puzzle, and he listened, hands stretched across the table so that I could have driven nails into them, or the bread knife — one at a time.
‘Now shall the eyes of the blind be opened,’ he said, his gills white nevertheless.
‘She never married after that,’ I told him, ‘I think you were the love of her life, though she was too proud and independent to say so. I don’t suppose she’d look at you now. In any case, she’s getting married in a month to a bloke who’s worth a hundred of you, a Communist. I’m sure she’ll do well by him.’
He stood up unsteadily, though he wasn’t drunk: ‘Pearl, go to the kitchen and get a bottle of champagne from the fridge. We must drink to this. I didn’t have children in either of my marriages. Thought I was sterile — which it seems I was, in the married state. But now I find I had a son from the first real love of my life — though I didn’t know it was going to be that at the time.’ He came round, and I stood up as well, knife in hand: ‘Put that down,’ he said.
I didn’t even know I was holding it. ‘Why did you abandon her?’ Memories of Claudine crushed me, and I couldn’t say anything else. What could I do but shake his hand firmly if I was to be true to myself?