I hoped to cheer him up. ‘You should write that down. It’s not bad.’
‘You think so?’
‘I would, except that I’m not a writer, like you.’
He found a pencil and scribbled on the back of an envelope. There was an unopened pile of mail on the low-slung Swedish-type table. ‘I’m going to give a talk on the modern English novel, so it’ll come in handy. Sometimes even a son like you can be useful.’
‘How is the novel going?’ As his son, I thought I should at least show an interest in his work. But I only thrust him back into despair. You can’t win.
‘It isn’t a novel, it’s the Dead March from Saul, a chain-and-ball half-page a day, sometimes down to a comma a day, up a narrow valley with no blue horizon visible to cheer me on. I’m one of the poor bloody infantry lost in the moonscape south of Caen but soldiering on in the knowledge, but mostly the vain hope, that I’ll get there soon and still have my feet left at least. But the joy of endeavour and solitude comes in now and again, Michael, sufficient to keep me going on this first draft route report. Fortunately, doing Moggerhanger’s biography — or ghosting his autobiography, I’m not sure which yet — will bring in a few thousand, so I’ll at least have enough hard cash to keep your extravagant mother at arm’s length. I wish you’d stop turning pale when I mention Moggerhanger, by the way. It unnerves me. It’s not that I don’t love your mother, but I can’t even write commas when she’s around. So I’ll deliver fifty pages of Moggerhanger’s trash now and again to line my pockets. If there’s one thing he knows nothing about, though he thinks he knows everything there is to know about everything else, it’s writing. I can put one over on him there.’
‘I don’t suppose he knows what he’s let himself in for.’ I looked glumly at the netsuke to cheer myself up. ‘It must be good being a writer, and able to make people so unhappy.’
‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘but do you think it’s easy? If anybody comes to me and says they want to be a writer I tell them to get lost before I cut off their hands, blind them, and burst their eardrums. In any case, it’s going to be impossible for a writer to flourish in the future. The manuscript of every book will have to go to the Arabian Censorship Office before it’s published. So will all radio, and especially television scripts. The Foreign Office don’t want us to offend anybody whose hands are on the oil taps. Every book and newspaper article will have to be passed by UNESCO after getting the go-ahead from the Third World nations to make sure you don’t irritate them in their state of perpetual envy against better-off countries. No, it’s not going to be so easy.’ An unmistakable scratching sounded from the other side of the ceiling. His big head jutted up. ‘What the hell’s that? Are they up there already?’
I started to sweat. ‘It’s pigeons, I expect.’
‘They must have broken in again. They don’t breed. They multiply.’
I reached for my coat and briefcase. ‘Must go. It’s getting late, and I’ve got business to attend to.’
He came over to count the netsuke which he had seen me looking at.
‘Shurrup!’ I shouted, putting all the Nottingham ferocity into my voice, while hoping my eyes bulged and my cheeks quivered.
‘What did you say?’
I laughed in his face. ‘Shurrup!’ I bawled again. ‘Shurrup! I think I’m going mad.’
‘Do you mind leaving, and coming back when it’s a bit more advanced and so obvious I can’t ignore it? Maybe you’ll let me observe you then, and write about it. I’ve got work to do in the meantime.’
He followed me to the door to make sure I didn’t whip a painting under my coat, and all but pushed me into the corridor, whose blank walls and escape route I was never so glad to see in my life.
Five
On the wall behind Moggerhanger’s glass desk a notice said: ‘While you are thinking about it, you can be doing it.’
I studied this cracker motto from The Little Blue Book of Chairman Mog, knowing that if wild horses pulled him apart, a thousand others would spill out. Even his big toe must have been packed with them. I remembered from ten years ago that if you tried to live by such rules you fell under his spell, so I knew I had to watch myself, especially when, on turning to the door I had come in by, I saw in a place where only the particularly anxious or the peculiarly double-jointed would look, a framed embroidered text saying; ‘If you haven’t tried everything you haven’t tried anything.’
I wondered if there wasn’t a microphone behind, but supposed the television scanner was in the fancy light-bulb above his desk. The furnishings had altered since I had last been there. A framed picture of the Queen stood on a shelf of the bookcase otherwise crammed with manuals on natural history and birdwatching. Behind the desk was a coloured map of England with a dozen pins stuck in different places, which I assumed were localities at which Moggerhanger had business properties, retreats of pleasure or hideaways. A single chair behind the desk suggested that everyone but Moggerhanger stood when in that room. Before he had become a Lord there were several chairs, but not anymore. He was even more English than Blaskin.
On the desk was a duraluminium model of his private twin-jet in flight which he kept at Scroatham aerodrome north of London. By the desk was a black-handled bottle of brandy six feet tall fixed in a brass frame on wheels. God knows how many gallons it contained. The cork was as big as a sewer lid, but the liquid shone like something out of heaven. I longed for a drink but didn’t know how to tackle it. One false move and I would be missing, presumed drowned. I visualised Kenny Dukes pushing it through the Nothing to Declare door at London Airport, the contraption disguised as an old lady on her way back from a recuperative sojourn on the Riviera.
The bookcase swung open, then closed with the delicacy of a powder puff going back into its box. ‘You seem to be fascinated by my exhortations.’
‘I was admiring the needlework, Lord Moggerhanger.’
‘As well you might. My daughter Polly did it. She went to the best Swiss finishing school.’ She certainly had. I’d finished her off a fair number of times ten years ago.
He wore the best quality navy-blue pinstriped suit and waistcoat, a thin silver watch chain across his gut. He had lost weight, though not much. Nothing ever gets lost, he once said to me. It only goes missing. He had decided on his reduction at the time of his appearance in the New Year’s Honours List, being unable to abide the idea of a fat lord. Vanity, I thought, will be his undoing.
‘What brings you here, Michael?’
‘I heard you wanted a chauffeur, Lord Moggerhanger.’
I noticed the dullness of contact lenses when he looked at me. ‘Who from?’
‘Kenny Dukes. I met him in The Hair of the Dog.’
‘Kenny’s in Italy, and not due back till tonight. He goes once a month to get the family shopping from Milan. So don’t lie to me. Your wits are in cement. Do you want your feet to be? Why did you call, when you could have phoned first?’
‘I didn’t have your number.’
‘It’s in the book. You don’t seem as sharp as you were ten years ago, Michael. I’m surprised at you. You see, it’s always been my contention that those whom the Gods wish to drive mad they first make ex-directory. All those pop stars and writers who scrub their names from the phone book as soon as they think they’re too well-known are crazed with self-importance. Anybody wants to talk to me, all they have to do is look me up in the book and pick up the phone. I may be a Lord — and don’t you forget it — but I’m still a democrat at heart.’