‘Well, Michael — it is Michael, isn’t it? — what brings you here so early in the morning?’
I stood up, not wanting to act in any unusual way when I knew that Bill Straw was sobbing disconsolately in his upstairs prison. ‘It’s afternoon. I just thought I’d come and see you. Is it strange that I should want to visit my father now and again?’
He came back from the kitchen with two raw eggs in the bottom of a tall glass, poured in whisky to halfway, beat it to pulp with a fork, and slid it down. ‘Breakfast. It isn’t strange at all. It’s positively perverse. How’s Bridgitte?’
‘She’s left me. She’s gone to Holland with the kids. I’m devastated. I’m lost without the kids around. I don’t know which way to turn.’ I encased my head in my hands, acting the hackneyed bereft husband in the hope of giving him some material for one of his novels.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I never liked the bitch for giving me what, with a proud simper, she called grandchildren. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the thought of grandchildren. Even if I die at a hundred-and-two I’ll be too young to be a grandfather and I’m only fifty-eight. Or is it forty-six?’ He poured another whisky. ‘No matter. At least not after last night.’
He wasn’t even good to me, so I didn’t have fair reason to hate him, but I knew one way of making him jump. ‘How’s work, these days?’
He belched. ‘Don’t use that word. I’ve never worked in my life. A gentleman never works. I write, not work.’ His eyes took on sufficient life for someone who wasn’t in the know to imagine not only that he was alive, but that he was a normal human being. ‘The worst thing I ever did was marry your mother so that I had no further right, in the technical sense, to call you a bastard. But you are a bastard, all the same. I never did like your insulting insinuations that I might be capable of the cardinal sin of work. All I do is write, and fuck. And never you forget it.’
‘It’s hardly possible,’ I said, ‘since you begat me.’
‘So your mother said. But you’re rotten enough, so it might well have been me.’
I poured another tot for myself. ‘In my view the greatest disaster of modern times was when you first got blind drunk on the power of words.’
He threw his great cock-head back and laughed. ‘You’re right, Michael. I’ve vomited over many a sofa in a dowager’s salon. There aren’t many decent homes I can visit anymore, but then, who wants to visit a decent home?’
We had something in common at least. ‘All I wanted to know, in my clumsy fashion, is how the writing is getting on?’
‘Why didn’t you say so? If I have any love for you at all it’s only because you’re so ineradicably working-class — hell’s prole, and second to none. Just like the lovely lads I had under me during the war. I’d acknowledge you much less if you came from within sniffing distance of the Thames Valley and had been to Eton — like me. The writing’s getting on very well, since you ask. I’ve got so much to do I don’t know which way to turn. I can’t keep off it. Just a minute.’ He went into his study, and I heard the clack of a single key on the typewriter. He came back, smiling. ‘I wrote a comma. Now I can go out again, though not while you’re here. You’ll smoke the rest of my cigars. What did you really come for? I might be a writer, but I’m not a bally idiot.’
‘I was on my way to Harrods to buy a waistcoat, and I nipped in on impulse.’
‘A waistcoat? What colour?’
‘A leather one.’
‘Hmm! Not bad.’
‘With horn buttons.’
‘Better.’ Then he went back to being nasty. ‘And you thought you’d come here to disrupt me from my life’s work? You’d like to stop me writing the novel to end novels, wouldn’t you?’
‘I expect it’s been done,’ I said, ‘fifty years ago.’
‘That’s what you think.’ He threw his empty glass on the sofa. ‘I’d rather write a novel any day than a scholarly treatise on dumb insolence at the first Olympiad.’ He laughed. ‘But the thing is, Michael, my boy, I’ve got a commission to do something which is right up my street. A job wherein the research is going to take me to all the porn shops, strip clubs, lesbian hangouts, camp brothels, cat houses and underground cinemas in Soho. I can hardly believe it. I’ve just had a ten thousand pound advance to get started on it right away.’
‘You fucking writers have all the luck.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing so charming as a working-class chap who doesn’t swear. But as soon as he swears you know he’s trying to pass himself off as middle-class. It sounds so uncouth. Mind you, I did swear when I was a young man, but it was only a happy-go-lucky fuck-this fuck-that sort of thing. I don’t do it anymore. It restricts my vocabulary.’
‘Don’t tell me how to behave. But who’s commissioned you to write that book?’
He chuckled. ‘A peer of the realm. One of your self-made salt of the earth boys from the provinces who are periodically ennobled so that they won’t cause more trouble to the body politic than they have to. He thinks he’s God’s gift to England because he has all the vice dens in the palm of his hand, and can be trusted not to let them get out of hand. He wants me to do his life story, a whitewash job if ever there was one. His wife read one of my novels, apparently, and didn’t like it, so he thought I was just the writer to do it. But if he thinks I’m going to get much mileage out of making him into little Saint Claud Mogger-donger he’s wrong. I’d much rather write the true story about him, except that I’ll save the real material for one of my later novels, though I suppose I’d better go to his ancestral Moggerhanger village in Bedfordshire to write a nice lyrical opening chapter on his antecedents and their hanging ground. There’s bound to be a gibbet or two I can go into raptures over, like Thomas Hardy. Why, Michael,’ he shouted when I ran into the bathroom, ‘have I said anything wrong? If I make you sick, you’ve made my day.’
The cold porcelain of the toilet struck my forehead. I tried to throw up, but not a grain of bile would rise. The hammer of a metronome was going back and forth, a decade one way, and a decade the other. It wasn’t fear that turned my guts as much as that old familiar sensation of helplessness at being in the hands of fate. I tried to look on the bright side, but only a forty-watt light-bulb glowed. I couldn’t imagine what side-swipe of chance had brought Blaskin and Moggerhanger together, especially when, unknown to the former, one of the latter’s most wanted men was fretting in the attic above. I washed in cold water and, braving myself to meet whatever might come, went back to the living room.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ Blaskin said, with malicious perkiness. ‘You look as pale as Little Dorrit, and you’re trembling like the Aspern Papers. Do you have an appointment with fear?’
‘I’ve got problems,’ I admitted.
His eyes glowed. Sidney Blood wasn’t in it. ‘What are they?’
‘If I knew I wouldn’t have them, would I?’
After a two-minute silence he said: ‘Michael, we’ve all got problems, but a writer, like a soldier, goes through life with his problems unresolved. I’ve been both.’
I was fed up with his penny packets of wisdom. ‘You disgusting old bastard,’ I spat back. ‘I don’t need you to tell me that everybody goes through life with their problems unresolved.’
He stared, maybe thinking there was something to the slum brat after all. He didn’t like it. There was certainly no point in hoping for a bit of human kindness from a writer. He rubbed his head as if wanting it to come, then rubbed his eyes as if he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of what did. ‘I had a bad night last night. I spent it with Margery Doldrum, and didn’t get anywhere. So leave me alone. I’ve got work to do. The heart of darkness is within. It used to be outside in jungle or desert where we could handle it, but now it’s back on home ground. It crept in to roost, with most of us unaware of its movement, but in reality it never left — not all of it, anyway.’