At that moment by the boat rail, my life cracked in two, and I saw the halves, visible at last with my own clean insight. People like Straw and Moggerhanger had known them all along and put each one to good use. While I had been philandering, the world had fucked me rotten. True, I had sensed treachery at odd moments, but lunatic vanity had prevented me following the hints and realising that, far from being a man of the world, I was the most gullible person in it.
The shock of this revelation, that only friends could betray you, flared my murderous rage up again. I remembered my umbrella, with which Bill had prodded the dog in Charing Cross Road and, recalling the results of that inadvertent jab, I lifted it to deliver a similar thrust at him, which I hoped would prove fatal.
I don’t suppose my attack was serious, but I had to make the effort, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get a proper night’s sleep to the end of my days. Old Sherwood Forester that he was, he anticipated the move, easily took the umbrella from me, and slung it after the packet of papers into the water. ‘It’s unethical to use a thing like that.’
I looked failure staunchly in the face.
‘You can’t win ’em all, Michael.’
‘Tell me something new.’
He laughed. ‘There’s no such thing, old son.’
I stood by the rail, hypnotised by the lift and fall of the ship, a repetitious movement which emphasised the scale of my downfall. What the connection was, I did not know, but for the first time in my life I realised that I was not going to live forever. I had never thought so, but for the first time I was afraid, and gripped the wood to steady myself. I felt death happening like a dress rehearsal that could turn at any time into the real thing, and I would have no say in the matter when it did. The certainty that life no longer went on was absent. I would exist from minute to minute, and I’d have to be grateful for every fresh second that ticked by.
I stood till I couldn’t see the waves for darkness. Bill had no doubt put Maria to bed, then gone to phone or wireless Moggerhanger to inform him that Operation Get Cullen had been successfully concluded. By playing his cards right — which he had certainly done — he had saved me from worse trouble than I was already in. Because it would sooner or later have happened, he might have done me a favour by making it come sooner, but I could see no way of thanking him.
The storm became worse, and the temptation to turn the dress rehearsal into the first and last performance became harder to resist. One flash, and I would be over. I was too inert. A calm sea might have drawn me, but not this spume-ridden upchucking wilderness. It was a killer I wanted no part of, a spider’s web of violent water which would not get hold of me if I had anything to do with it. And I still had. I wouldn’t even give it my vomit. If I spat to leeward I would get it back in the eye. The sea had to be treated with respect, and would get me if it could — though I would never fraternise.
I had tried to nail Moggerhanger, and had failed because I had neither the gut, the guile nor the patience. I hadn’t tried hard enough. I was too few. Let go. The sound of music came through a lull in the wind noise. The animals were out, in the ship and on the sea, in the air and in me. There was no telling who they were after but, if I was going to die, I might as well live. Knowing I had come to such a realisation late in life glued my eyes open. Chagrin and misery made perfect matchsticks. It would be the way I lived now. All I could think of when I got to my cabin was Frances Malham. A start in life goes on to the end.
Thirty
Reader, I married her.
Or she married me. I no longer dodge the traffic like a London pigeon in its prime. Moggerhanger lost interest in me as soon as Bill Straw reported that the evidence against him had gone into the sea. How had they found out? Matthew Coppice was the weak link in the none too strong chain. Chief Inspector Lanthorn, in his ferreting and always busy way, had suspected him. He was all ears and eyes, and nailed him one day at Spleen Manor, where he tricked, shamed, then bullied him into confessing by the obvious and simple expedient of making me out to be a more evil villain than either Moggerhanger or himself. Coppice’s moral sense was riddled with idiosyncrasies, which made him as vulnerable as a colander in a millpond.
Lanthorn didn’t enjoy his triumph for long, because a fortnight later, while walking across Whitehall, he cracked up frorn a heart attack as powerful as if he’d been hit by a lorry load of Katyusha rockets. Moggerhanger continues to prosper, however, though things for him aren’t as easy as they were.
I also prosper, and I’ll tell you what happened. As soon as the boat docked at the Hook of Holland I drove to where Bridgitte was living with her boyfriend. He was a straight and decent bloke, and I knew she would be happier with him than she’d ever been with me. I returned to Upper Mayhem with the children, which was what I went to see her for. She let them go, knowing she could visit them at any time. They were glad to be in their old rooms, and back with their pals in the village. They loved Dismal who, since Polly Moggerhanger had lost interest in the selfish beast, became the Hound of Upper Mayhem.
My next move was to find out whether Jeffrey Harlaxton’s offer of a job at his advertising agency had been serious. It had, and still was, he said. My creative lying and quick thinking had made a firm impression, talent which would be put to proper use at last. I was given a contract with rates of pay and conditions which no person could refuse. If I had realised that such cushy jobs were available from the beginning, I might always have been honest and industrious.
I gave Clegg the signal box to live in, and made him caretaker, head gardener and child minder of Upper Mayhem — and also dog handler, because Dismal lodges under the table that runs the length of the signal box. ‘My ambition in life is to be as happy as you are,’ I said to him during the first supper after I got back from Holland.
He gave a wise smile. ‘You’re not old enough for that — yet.’
Bill Straw, the second arch-villain in my life after Lord Moggerhanger, wrote to say that he and Maria were married and living in Portugal, where he had bought what he called an ‘estate’. His subtle entrapment of me on the boat had been his last professional job, for which he must have been paid according to its importance.
Maria had her kid, and also another — ‘so I don’t expect either the underworld or the inland revenue will be hearing much more from yours truly,’ he informed me. He sounded as besotted about his wife as when he first set eyes on her hips, which maybe was the only good thing to be said for him. They invited me to Portugal for the summer, but I’d had more than enough of Bill Straw to last one lifetime.
Bridgitte remarried after our divorce, and stayed in Holland. Smog went to work on a kibbutz for six months, and in his last letter wrote about marrying his girlfriend, who was born in Israel. Frances and I are going out to see him in a couple of months.
What about Blaskin? Life goes on for him as well. He motored up to Upper Mayhem with Mabel Drudge-Perkins and they stayed a few days. It made me sick to see her shining his boots before he got up in the morning, though when he ill-used her, a bit more spit went on them than polish. It took him a week or two to forgive me for writing the trash-novel which won him the Windrush Prize, but he generously gave me half the swag of ten thousand pounds, and used the rest to pay off debts before setting out on his travels.
Moggerhanger had taken umbrage at the fact that nobody would touch the book that Blaskin had ghosted. After getting the Windrush Prize, even though he despised it, Blaskin considered it would be unbecoming of him as a recipient of the award, and as an officer and a gentleman, to send out Moggerhanger’s life story under his own name. So he re-wrote it as if Moggerhanger had done it himself, then told him to take it or leave it.