I pushed a basket of bread into her hands, thinking she ought to be grateful for my labour at the stove. “Put up with what?”
She was about to stamp her foot, but realised I wasn’t Blaskin. “You know very well what I mean.”
I was beginning to understand why he treated her as he did, then blanched at the idea that I should be able to do so. “On my honour, I don’t.” She stood in my way. “Let’s go in and eat, otherwise everything will go cold.”
“Turning the flat into a brothel,” she said. “That’s what. It’s unseemly. And with your sister!”
I ought to have regretted losing self-control, but couldn’t resist. “I know. And she was about to suck me off, but in any case what the fuck has it got to do with you? Apart from which, I simply don’t know why you should be so upset.”
“She’s chagrined at not being invited to join in,” Sophie said. “Aren’t you, darling?”
Blaskin’s voice boomed from the living room. “Don’t let her bully you, my children. She’s the world’s worst bully, a Britannia and Boadicea rolled into one. When you’re not here she bullies me from morning to night. The only way to stop her is to attack first, which I learned the hard way, and often resort to it to keep my self-respect.”
A flush of fury went over her face. I thought of walking out of the flat, but didn’t for Sophie’s sake, so pushed by, wanting the four of us to sit down and eat. Blaskin looked dangerously refreshed by his nap, took a goodly portion of the omelette, and spread butter on his bread as thickly as if it was a brick to build a house. He uncorked a bottle of Beaujolais and, I will say this for his good name, poured a glass for Mabel, as if wanting to dispel her frosty expression. Sophie and I stared at each other, longing for only one thing, which of course would have to wait.
Mabel, head lowered, sipped her wine. Then she looked up at the ceiling. “All this about Sophie being his daughter is stuff and nonsense.”
Did she know something I didn’t yet know? But: “Don’t believe her,” Sophie said to me. “Your father and I went through every detail. There can’t be any doubt.”
Blaskin picked up a chop, looked at it as if for poison or maggots, and bit out the heart. “Pure unadulterated jealousy is what Mabel’s on about, children. Envy, sour grapes, sublimated lust even — though I haven’t yet figured from what angle.”
“I only have your wellbeing at heart,” Mabel said, “to save you from a catastrophic slide into immorality and madness.”
Sophie and I attended to the food as if apart from them, me thinking that in this emotional penal colony the plates should have been made of paper, knives and forks of plastic, and the wine served in beakers. Blaskin didn’t respond immediately to Mabel, which was ominous, so I ate more quickly in order to be finished when the balloon went up. People were as mechanical as toys, predictable in their behaviour, as if fully formed at birth and set going like clockwork to do their worst in life, as with Mabel and Blaskin.
Because of his silence Mabel was still half cut enough to think she could take up where she had left off. “We’ve been living together for more than eight years, but I can’t see our association going on for much longer, because in all that time you haven’t made any honest attempt to mend your ways. Another human being most certainly would have. Oh I know, deep inside you there’s a core of sensibility that I love and am very proud to be associated with, but you’ve always perversely chosen to ignore it.”
He ate as if he too was on his own, but as she paused, steaming herself up for a further salvo of irritating criticism, he said calmly: “The trouble with getting old, my dear children — and I want you to listen to this as well, Mabel — is that you become more tolerant, more easy going, in the knowledge that it’s the best way to enjoy what years of life are left.”
Having finished the meal, he laid down his knife and fork, and drew the napkin across his mouth. “Though tolerance might land you in difficult situations, men are nevertheless lucky, and I am in particular, by having an occasional pleasant woman at my beck and call who comes to talk about my work. Unfortunately, suitable men aren’t very common for women, which is why so many turn for consolation to each other. When a man and woman live together and life becomes too hard it’s either time to die, or go your different ways. You might think that is the situation between my love and myself, but you’d be wrong. It’s even worse, because Mabel, by her moralising baby talk, is trying to goad me into getting up and giving her a smack across the face, so that you Michael, and you my dearest Sophie, will think what a vile cad I am for striking a woman, no matter how far provoked. She hopes, by the shock and humiliation of such a response from me, that you Sophie will despise me so deeply that you won’t come and see me again, which she knows would break my heart, though mend hers. It galls her that my gorgeous daughter has a place in my affections which is lost to her. She’s incapable of realising that my heart is big enough for both, and won’t take it into consideration because she wants to wreck my morale and stop me writing novels of which she has always disapproved, which would finish me off, something she decided to do long ago, for reasons I’ll never understand. Haven’t I loved her, nurtured her, respected her, made her life eminently worth living even when I had to chastise her because she was driving me to madness, and then only on me realising that she couldn’t live without such treatment? At one time I even wrote pornographic stories so that she could entertain herself while I was at the Latitude Club with friends she was too uppity to be seen with. Do you deny it, Mabel, my love?”
She didn’t.
“Her spiritual wellbeing has always been of vital importance to me, even more than my own, but how could I know that keeping her happy would make her want to drive me insane? And yet, in spite of everything there’s an eternal bond between us, our relationship going on like a novel that never ends.”
The only way for it to do so now was for Sophie and I to say nothing, and let him run down like a wind-up gramophone, but I couldn’t take anymore. “I wonder how it will end?” I said.
“Me? End? If I have to end I’ll stand at Heaven’s Gate with a pen in one hand and my penis in the other while ogling the angels.”
“Aren’t angels supposed to be sexless?” Sophie said.
“Much good it would do them.” He walked around the table to do what he’d intended doing all along, and I knew I’d been too optimistic in imagining that Mabel would get away with her unnecessary dressing down. Nor, I believe, had she expected to. Blaskin could exercise admirable control when in the mood, before whoever was on the end of his rage paid for his efforts at self-restraint.
Lifting her by the collar and tie, he delivered a slap at her astonished face. “Don’t ever tell me about my shortcomings before friends or family again,” he shouted. “Wait till we’re on our own, or in the bedroom where I can pump some sense into you.”
She was too shocked to cry out, at which he softened, or seemed to, though not, I was sure, from regret at what he’d done. Sophie’s expression was a cross between alarm at such violence, as if she was no stranger to it, and wonder at the privilege of being allowed to witness uninhibited warfare between man and woman.
Blaskin put an arm around Mabel’s waist, nuzzled her cheek, and led her back to the table. “There, my love, wasn’t so bad, was it, considering the terrible things you so self-indulgently said about me? Come, sit down and rejoin the family gathering.”
“You’re a beast, Gilbert.”
He turned to Sophie. “I hope that little incident didn’t shock you? If it did I’ll have to give her another.”