Bridgitte drove me there so that I could catch the twelve-thirty. She was in a good mood after our night of unsolicited passion. Often this wasn’t the case, orgasms making her itchy and nervous, like a hangover, but perhaps breaking the news of my job at breakfast, as she came in with a platter of sliced cheese, cushioned her morning mood. I suppose it did mine, as well, because after so many years together they often coincided.
‘A job?’ The shock was almost as great as the one I’d had when she went off to Holland. ‘What can you do?’
‘Chauffeur,’ I said. ‘And it’s living in. I’ll only get home at weekends. Unless I work weekends. Then I’ll get home in the week. I’ll get home as often as I can.’
She had become a person of order in the last few years. She liked to live to a pattern, to know what was happening and exactly when. Uncertainty depressed and irritated her, as it would anybody, so the fact that she might not know when I would turn up made her spill coffee on the cloth. I soothed her by saying I would never come home unless I telephoned from London first.
‘And who are you working for?’
‘An English lord.’ I forked up a slice of ham. ‘He’ll pay two hundred and fifty pounds a month. It’ll be very useful now that we’re employing Maria.’
‘She’s not working for us.’
In the pub I ordered two pints, and we sat at a table by the window. ‘Why not? She’s a godsend.’
‘I’ll let her stay a few days. That’s all.’
‘She loves it at Upper Mayhem. She was as bright as a daffodil at breakfast. She likes you, anyway.’
‘I like her, but we can’t afford to pay her, not on your two hundred and fifty pounds a month.’
I could have kicked myself, but sipped at the jar of ale and looked at the clock. There were ten minutes to go before the train came, and I had to buy my ticket. ‘I’ll get enough money, don’t worry. There’ll be a bonus on top of my pay, every so often. Our financial worries are over.’
‘Lord who?’ she asked.
I hoped she wouldn’t recollect. ‘A chap called Moggerhanger. But I’ve got to go, or I’ll be late.’
I waited for her to rage at my foolishness. ‘If you go to prison again, that’s the end of us. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Come off it,’ I laughed. ‘Moggerhanger is an English lord. How can he do anything criminal? It’s not like the sixties anymore. He’s a reformed character. We all are.’
We had to get across to the station, so I picked up our glasses, the drink in them hardly touched, and followed Bridgitte to the door.
‘Squire!’ the publican roared. ‘You can’t take them glasses out there.’
I emptied the beer from both into a fever-grate, then took them back inside. ‘Sorry, squire!’ I hee-hawed aloud at his fury. ‘Bit absent-minded these days.’ Giving Bridgitte a quick kiss, I made a dash for the train.
A sixty-year-old grey-bearded chap in front of me emptied his leather purse on the counter and sorted his coins to decide whether any were false, in which case they were worth more than the real ones. I managed to get on board by jumping on the last carriage.
It would be untrue to say that nothing happened on the trip to London. Such a situation is unthinkable, certainly since Bridgitte had set the ball rolling by her strange behaviour in the last few weeks. But because events on the train had no bearing on subsequent occurrences, there’s no point in retailing them, the plain fact being that I got back to Ealing just inside the twenty-four hours Moggerhanger had allowed me.
I’d thought of calling at Blaskin’s to find out how Bill Straw was faring in his attic hideaway, but having got up so late after my night of homely passion with Bridgitte it hadn’t been possible. Not that I worried about him. He would have to fend for himself, even if he did starve to death.
The flat over Moggerhanger’s garage was furnished little better than Bill’s pigeon coop. There were plain wooden planks on the floor, and the walls were whitewashed. If I wanted a face-swill there was a tap and sink in one corner. A single bed, a chair, a small table and a hotplate completed the amenities. For sleep there were two horse blankets, but no sheets. A forty-watt light-bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling, at which I assumed the electricity was included in my salary.
A red-white-and-blue biker’s helmet with a hole in it was as far into a corner as it could get, as if it had been kicked there. I chose a paperback from a pile on the floor, and lay on the bed. Kenny Dukes’s name was pencilled inside the cover. The story — Orgy in the Sky by Sidney Blood — seemed to be about a gang of five-year-old six-footers doing a warehouse robbery with a fight, a shoot-out and a fuck on every page. Towards the end, one or the other happened every second paragraph. Whenever it said something like ‘He smashed his fist into his smirking face’ Kenny had underlined it as if wanting to commit the immortal words to memory. Heavy scoring in the margin highlighted an occasional comment like: ‘That’s good!’, so that with such marks the book was impossible to read without being brainwashed and ending up a replica of Kenny Dukes, the forty-year-old skinhead only half reformed. I honestly didn’t know why Moggerhanger kept him on, because someone of his limited intelligence was bound to be more of a liability than an asset.
Maybe Kenny knew too much, and it would be embarrassing to do him in because he came from a very big family and was related to every thug in south London. Yet Moggerhanger had some affection for him, treasuring his qualities of loyalty and dumb violence. All I knew was that I didn’t like Kenny Dukes and Kenny Dukes didn’t like me, but as I considered myself to be at least six pegs above him in the social scale it was up to me to keep our relationship on a diplomatic if not friendly level.
Someone came up the stairs — and Kenny Dukes crashed the door open. ‘Get off my fucking bed, or I’ll smash your face to pulp.’
His portly and upright carriage was spoiled by the fact that he was slightly round-shouldered. Otherwise I don’t suppose he was a very bad figure of a man, except that his arms were too long. In fact they were the longest arms I’d seen on a person who could still be called a human being. And he could — just. They were positively anglepoise, so that in a fight you had to close in as soon as possible to avoid their reach.
I leaned on my left elbow. ‘Don’t you ever use long words such as: “I’ll obliterate your features so that your own mother wouldn’t recognise you in Woolworth’s on Saturday afternoon”?’ Then I put on a pseudo-Yank accent straight out of Sidney Blood: ‘Anyway, if you wanna know where the dough is, there’s seventy-five thousand smackers under the bed, all cut out of newspaper. They passed us a dead duck, and we’ve got to get out and find ’em.’
He came in close, but recognised the style. ‘That’s my book.’
‘Come closer, Sunshine.’ The interior ratchet of my right arm drew back. I couldn’t go on reading Sidney Blood’s inspiring prose forever, without acting on it.
‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ he said.
I wound up the springs in my feet as well. During ten years at Upper Mayhem I’d done plenty of labouring on the station and its surroundings. I’d helped local farmers at potato harvests. Every morning I did half an hour’s jumping on the spot with dumbbells. Without being a fanatic, I believed in keeping the six feet and eleven stone of me supple and ready for action. Bill Straw wasn’t the only one to develop his physical abilities. As for shooting, I could get two rabbits on the run with the twelve bore, in view of which I wasn’t going to put up with any shit from Kenny Dukes.
I shot off the bed like a rocket, and his fist went by my face and hit the pillow so hard that the frame shook. Being heavy he lost his balance, of which I took advantage by gripping him at the neck so that he couldn’t move. He kicked around, but his boots couldn’t reach me. I’d always known him to be the sort of courageous coward who wasn’t afraid to come out from under his shell and turn into a bully.