His arm went around her again, much to Mabel’s stare of disapproval, while I thought it as well that we were both present, otherwise, daughter or not, incest would be a mere bagatelle to such a walking penis. I still couldn’t credit the fact that the whole thing wasn’t a dummy run for his next novel. He would certainly use it sometime.
He went to a cupboard. “What we need is a fair splash of five-star Napoleon.” The bitten off cork sailed towards the fireplace. He lit a long thin cigar, rolled the empty champagne bottle towards the kitchen for Mabel to pick up, then poured three tumblers of brandy as if it were cold tea. “Oh, father,” Sophie said, with the kind of sexy laugh I recalled from our cavorting on the train, “that’s far too much for me.”
“What? Is that a daughter of mine speaking? I can’t believe it. Take a sip, anyhow. You’ll soon feel as on top of the world as I am.”
I needed a drink, and so did Blaskin, whether he needed it or not, and seeing the pair of us working our gullets to get it down, Sophie took a sip as if she couldn’t go on living without it either. Mabel came in with a platter of roastbeef sandwiches on brown bread, cut neatly into triangles, in her wisdom realising that without something to soak up the alcohol we would soon be on the floor. Blaskin might have had that in mind but, even so, the brandy had such an effect on the three of us that he relaxed enough to fill a tumbler for Mabeclass="underline" “Join the family party, darling. I’m feeling paternal and expansive. I might even marry you one of these days, and make you the wicked stepmother of my darling daughter. How does that strike you?”
She drank more of the four-star firewater than I thought good for her. “It’s hardly a time for levity, Gilbert. Now that you have a daughter as well as a son you’ll have to act more responsibly. You’ll have to mind your Ps and Qs, won’t you? Or so I would think. Any other man would.”
I well knew that brandy would make him violent and abusive, and wasn’t far wrong when he responded: “Don’t lecture me, otherwise your possibly future stepchildren will witness the shameful scene of you getting a well-deserved smack across those frigid cheeks, not to mention being thrown bodily into the street. Now have another greedy swig, and let us hear no more of your moral strictures.”
I saw Sophie wondering at the adder bin she had fallen into, and began to question how much longer I would have a sister on tap, or Blaskin keep so loving a daughter close by. Mabel sat and finished her brandy, cheeks colouring like one of Harry Wheatcroft’s more flamboyant roses. “Gilbert,” she said, “I’ve just about had enough of your disgraceful remarks. I can’t allow you to humiliate me before the children. It’s the last straw.”
I was mistaken about Sophie, for she seemed to be enjoying a situation which would cushion the shock of having met me in such unexpected circumstances.
“I’m not trying to humiliate you, darling. God forbid! It’s simply that I don’t see why you should be so prickly at my sudden good fortune. And yet you are upset. Who better than me to recognise the signs? The face of an unhappy woman not only goes beyond grief in the beholder fortunate enough to witness it, but he feels his heart touched as well.”
He was trying to convince his daughter that he was a human being. It couldn’t last, but I was absorbed by Sophie’s expression of admiration at the effort he was making, and by the love that enabled him to be so eloquent about it. She obviously hadn’t met a writer before, at least not one like him.
“My paramour and myself are incipient schizophrenics,” he said, “who have learned that the only way to go on living with our condition is to stay together. We’re that rare couple who can never part unless we kill each other at the same instant, and where would be the sense or even the possibility of that?”
So far so good, or at least not too bad, but he poured Mabel another half tumbler and, being so near out of control after the first goodly portion, she thoughtlessly quaffed it, which turned her expanse of forehead as red as a traffic light.
“We’re so locked together in our love and passion,” he said to Sophie, “that I can’t post a letter without her suspecting me of having a clandestine affair. She counted the stamps yesterday, and played hell because one was missing. She demanded to know who I’d written to. Not being the man to hurt a woman, at least not unknowingly, I told her I’d posted a letter to the tax authorities with a first-class stamp. If the cheque got there too late a man, or men, would come and take my goods and chattels away, and they might, in their rapacious enthusiasm, take Mabel as well, which would break my heart.”
There was always more meaning in what Blaskin said than what he did, and he was obviously trying to weave a spell around Sophie, with what object I couldn’t yet say, because he was blinding me with his words as well, helped by the brandy I had stupidly put back. But while I had at least a notion as to what he was doing, Sophie had none whatsoever, and sat back looking at him like a rabbit before a snake. Even Mabel halfway sensed his purpose, which must have been why she let him go on:
“In my younger days I was idiotic enough to think property was theft, but now it’s income tax. They want eight thousand pounds from me, and thank God I have it in the bank. That’s eight hundred bottles of whisky — a bottle a day for two years, with two on Sunday. I told Mabel this, because you have to be absolutely straight and honest with the person you love, otherwise it’s here today and gone tomorrow — though where from? Oh yes, where was I?” He lifted his glass to Mabel’s face which was rapidly becoming formless. “The only way to live a painless life is to be continually half cut. Take whatever fate throws at you, and laugh over it, though only to yourself, even if you’re so paralysed you can no longer write, which state is what Mabel would like to see me in, though who can blame her?”
He gave a wild laugh. “No one can go from this world without dying. The black dog bites in the best weather, when you’re at your happiest, and I don’t want to die with my boots on, only when my mouth is full. Not that I could die with my boots on, because my women are very particular that I get them off before jumping into bed. Aren’t you, darling? Tonight I’m giving a lecture called ‘The Creativity of Passion in the Life of a Novelist.’ Or is it tomorrow? I hope so. Maybe it was yesterday. I’ll have to look in my diary.”
He was becoming incoherent. “You’re a ragbag of platitudinous encomiums,” I told him.
“What?” he cried, as if I had stabbed him. “What did you say? Come on, out with it again. No, save it till I can write it down.” He put a hand on his heart and began to sing, swaying so far sideways I hoped he would fall and crack his nose: “Pack up your truffles in your old kitbag, and smile, smile, smile …”
Mabel managed to articulate from her stupor: “Gilbert, you’re a frightful bore. And you give me too much to complain about.”
His pain seemed almost real. “Not in front of my daughter, darling, please, however much of a case you have. It’s also a mark of good breeding never to complain.”
“Even better breeding,” she riposted, to our surprise, “is not to complain of anyone complaining.”
“Oh, I don’t complain. Novelists never do. They dramatise. For example, when I’m looking into the quadrangle of my imaginary Piranesi jail I’m seeing the victim of a man who loved too much. He’s on his knees, moving along, but now and again he stands up and howls like a dog with a hot nose. He wears out a pair of trousers a week at the knees, but the warders don’t mind, because locomoting in such a way keeps him out of mischief, and saves a fortune in straitjackets.”
Sophie laughed. “Oh, I just love you, father.”
“Very much likewise, my dear. You’ve made a happy man of me today. I’m only sorry Mabel can’t take the fact on board. Perhaps I’ve been brutal and uncaring in never telling her when I was happy. On the other hand I never said I was unhappy. But when I was happy I ought to have said so, and didn’t because I thought she assumed I was happy. So perhaps I was. But Mabel is very frequently unhappy, because it’s the only weapon she has to make me unhappy, and she uses it like Captain Blood swinging across the rigging of her misconceptions. Therefore she makes me unhappy, and when two people are unhappy they make each other even more unhappy. A short time ago I was going to take her to a country hotel for the weekend called The White Elephant, for a treat. It’s set in three hundred acres of rolling landscape, and cost two hundred pounds a night. ‘A warm welcome to all our guests,’ said the gaudy brochure. And then, in small print: ‘No dogs, no children, and no smoking.’ So I cancelled, and it was something else she never forgave me for. I tried to make amends when she showed me an article in the newspaper saying you could stop smoking in one hour. I tried it, and did. I was proud of myself. She was proud of me, too, spooned so sickeningly at my success that on the sixty-first minute I lit a cigar to stop myself going up the wall.”