My next chance of escape was at Hammersmith. I had enough on my plate at the moment. When she spoke, the shiver went through me and not her. ‘I go nowhere. I lose my job working in English house. Missis Horlickstone throw me out. Mister Horlickstone hit me. Children hit me. Too much work. At six o’clock I get up, clean, do breakfast, serve tea, take children to school on bus, then go shopping, come back, clean, cook lunch, serve, clean up, make tea, get children from school on bus, feed children, bath children, cook dinner, serve, clean up. You know what money I get?’
I thought the cheapskates would have paid her about thirty pounds a week.
‘Fifteen. I also babysit. No time off. For six months I work, live in box room, no air, no sky …’
I couldn’t believe it. She was joking, but was breaking my heart. ‘And they sacked you?’ I said at South Kensington.
‘I ran away. They’re on holiday in Bermuda. They come back next week, so I leave.’
I wondered whether she’d got the family silver in her suitcase, but knew she couldn’t be anything but honest. ‘And now you want a better job?’
Another hot tear stung my wrist. I imagined a white acid spot when it dried. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I want to go home, but my family need money. They live on it. I have no money for train to …’ She named some place in Portugal I’d never heard of.
So here was a lovely little down-trodden self-respecting intelligent thing like her with neither job, money nor place to sleep, in vast wicked London, sitting on the Underground facing a soft-hearted villain like me who also happened to be the son of Gilbert Blaskin. I supposed I could put her on the Circle Line and tell her to get off when it stopped. Where she would end up, I couldn’t imagine. She looked blank, and dumb with suffering. I wanted to go to the house she had come from and burn it down, which would be futile because the owner wasn’t in it, and would get the insurance anyway. ‘Where will you stay tonight?’
She wiped her eyes with a white laundered handkerchief. ‘I have money for room. Tomorrow I don’t know.’
‘Haven’t you got any friends?’
‘Missis don’t let me out.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘Don’t know. It takes time to get job.’
I drew my hands away and sat up smartly, as befitted a man who was about to become an employer. ‘You’ve got one already, if you want it. Here’s Piccadilly. We’ll get out now, and go for something to eat. You hungry?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Good. While we’re eating I’ll tell you about your new job.’
We found a place which served flock steak, chalk chips, ragdoll salad, whale fat gâteaux and acorn coffee. She loved it, so I made out that I did as well. ‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.’ I lit my cigar. ‘I have a country house in Cambridgeshire, as well as a wife and three children. Now, my wife and children are away at the moment, visiting our property in Holland, and won’t be back for a few days, but I’m supposed to find a woman to help with the housework. I was going to put an advertisement in the Evening Standard, but don’t need to now. What I suggest, Maria, is that you come with me to the house this evening and look the place over. I’ll pay your fare. If you don’t like it, you can stay the night, and a few more nights if you like, and then come back to London. My wife should be there, so you’ll be quite safe.’
‘You really got job?’
‘That’s what I said.’ She tampered with my dessert, so I pushed it across. ‘Come and see the house. At least you won’t waste your money on a hotel.’
She looked even paler under the artificial light. It was dusk outside, and people were hurrying along the street. ‘Why are you good to me, mister?’
The question tormented me more than it did her. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get her into bed. Maybe I couldn’t stand living alone. She finished my dessert and I stood up. ‘Let’s go, then.’
Out on the street it started to rain, and I had left my umbrella at Blaskin’s. I stopped, as if pricked with it, and snake venom was trickling down my leg. I saw the newsflash tickertaping across the Swiss Centre: NOVELIST ON MURDER CHARGE. Then I rubbed it away in the hope that it wouldn’t come true.
‘What’s a matter?’ she asked when I dropped the case. ‘No job for me now?’
‘No job for anybody,’ I told her, hurrying on, ‘if we don’t get to Liverpool Street and hop on that train.’
Six
‘Never,’ I remember Blaskin saying, ‘bother with a novel that takes more than five pages to cover one day.’ Blaskin said many things. Blaskin is all wind and piss. Whatever he said, he meant the opposite. It was his silence you had to beware of. You were only safe when he had a pen in his hand. Even then, you had to be ready to duck in case, like James Cagney in G-Men, he mistook you for a fly on the door, and aimed it at you like a dart.
The day I got the job with Moggerhanger was one of the longest in my life, or so it seemed at the time, proved by the fact that when I got back to Upper Mayhem with Maria, my troubles were just beginning. There were more lights shining in our comfy little railway station than had ever been set glowing when main line expresses rattled through. You could see the light for miles over the flat Fen country, a glow in the sky as if a new hydroelectric dam had been opened in the Yorkshire Dales.
My first thought, walking with Maria and her suitcase from the bus stop, was that a band of squatters had occupied the place. I had often worked out what I would do if that happened. I’d phone Alfie Bottesford in Nottingham and tell him to get a posse of the lads together so that in one rough assault we’d have those squatters, including women, cats and kids, their pots and pans bundled into blankets, wending their lonely way in a refugee column across the Fens.
But I could hear no triumphant wassailing as I opened the gate and stepped silently down the platform. The radio was on, and I signalled to Maria to slow down and say nothing, which gesture alone should have indicated that all was not right with her prospects for the promised job. My adrenalin was whirlpooling too much to worry about her. I looked into the booking-office-cum-parlour. Three half-packed suitcases were on the floor, and Bridgitte sat at the table trying to hypnotise a cup of tea. I felt like a marauder, dagger in teeth, about to fade back into the countryside, as if I had come to the wrong house. But it was as much mine as hers, just as were the years we’d been together, whose miserable intensity came back the longer I stared.
She pushed the cup aside and reached for a sheet of paper and a pen, obviously intending to write the farewell letter she had been thinking about since the day we were married. Her expression of disgust caused a pain in my heart. I had never seen such a sad and saintly face. Though she may have been miserable for reasons known only unto God, both of us were locked in it together, and her despondency stirred up my muddy love for her, a love that was part of my marrow. Anything else might lack reality, but not what I felt for her. Whatever she said or did, wherever she went, whatever happened to me or to the kids, my association with her would never cease to have been the most vital of my life. I looked at her longingly and secretly.