I pulled the trigger, to hear the click and have a good laugh, but the shattering crack made a hole in the whatnot, and brought down a square foot of plaster.
I stayed only long enough to confirm that my foolishness had done no harm, then ran out for my hat and coat, cursing Bill for having left a round in the breech.
Sophie came after me, and we embraced in the lift, her eyes glistening with excitement. “Oh, what a family! I’ve never known anything like it. Passion, incest, wife beating and attempted murder! And he’s only a writer. What a day for me! What a year even! I never dreamed it would be like that. Wasn’t my mother clever to have had an affair with a man like that?”
I opened the lift door to let her out. “I wish I could say the same.”
“But he’s so lovable. I can see him whenever I’m bored.” She leaned on me, and only in the street did I get an erotic whiff of her subtle and expensive perfume. “I’m going home,” she said. “Won’t you come with me?”
“There’s nothing I’d like better, but I must report to my employer Lord Moggerhanger. I’ll see you as soon as I can, though, dear sister.”
“Oh, please do. But phone first, in case my husband’s around. Not that I expect he will be. He spends all his time with a dolly bird from the office, and he’s welcome to her, as long as he leaves me alone.”
On Sloane Street we fell into another passionate kiss, only breaking away when an audience formed, expecting us to give a live show. I took a scrap of paper from my wallet and scribbled the Upper Mayhem address, before a last hug to say goodbye.
Chapter Twenty-Five
At four o’clock on that fateful afternoon the gates of Moggerhanger’s palisade were opened by Bill Straw. “I don’t call this late arrival showing very willing. Michael, it’s no way to hold a job down which, though not in any way pensionable, offers very fine prospects. You should have been here a couple of hours ago.”
I told him about my acquisition of a sister: “The same woman we saw on stopping off in Italy, name of Sophie.”
“I remember. Her brother Lionel was there, a very nasty sort, with his dirty vest and an earring. She looked a tasty bint, though. I’d forego a few custard tarts for a cuddle from her.”
I ignored his too dead common observation, and followed him upstairs to the flat. Sheets and blankets were folded in a neat stack at the end of both beds, a mug, knife, fork and spoon sparklingly clean on each. “You’ve made a very cushy billet,” I said. “But I’m not in the army, you know.”
“It would have done you the world of good if you had been, though for somebody who never has you’re not in bad nick. I gave the place a shine up this morning. Can’t stand fluff under the beds. Any of that, and it’s a case of jankers. Bullshit is next to godliness as far as I’m concerned.”
I lit a cigar. “Any idea what Moggerhanger wants us for?”
“Give me one of your smokes and I’ll tell you all I know.” He took his first puff as if there was the rest of the day to do it in. “This morning he asked about my military service. Now, we know he never asks anything without good reason. I told him I was in action all through the War, that I’d been in corners as tight as butchers’ shops, but my platoon was popular because I usually got the lads out without a scratch. ‘I’ve kept up my expertise as well,’ I said, laying it on thick, which is true enough. I could see how it pleased him. When he asked about you I said you hadn’t been in the army, but I’d taught you all I knew in the last fifteen years. ‘Michael’s like me,’ I said, ‘second to none, and game for anything, otherwise we wouldn’t have got out of that spot of bother in Greece, nor that argy-bargy at Spleen Manor.’”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t get like that, Michael. What’s life all about if we don’t have some excitement now and again? After that enjoyable chat with Lord Moggerhanger I went out for a hair cut. You could do with a traipse to the barber’s, as well.”
The phone rang, and he nodded at me to pick it up.
“I’m ready when you are,” Moggerhanger said.
“I’ll be down in two minutes.”
“Make it now.”
“I’ll walk as far as the kitchen with you,” Bill said. “Mrs Blemish is a lovely woman. She’s always baking pies and cakes. She thinks the world of me.”
“You’ve already had lunch, you greedy swine. How can you eat twenty-four hours a day, and stay as thin as a rake? I don’t know how you do it.”
He paused on the stairs. “Of course I’ve had lunch. A real hot dinner it was, as well. The slices of lamb melted in my mouth, with boiled spuds, garden peas and crispy Yorkshire pudding. Then there was apple tart and custard. But I tell you, forty press-ups every morning need some feeding.”
The smashing of crockery pressed a button deep inside me that I thought no longer existed, a primeval musical noise that brought out a mixture of nihilistic delight and childish vandalism. Bill was more conventionally horrified, as we ran into the kitchen and found Mrs Blemish with hands to her face, while husband Percy was gleefully throwing pots from the drying rack onto the floor.
Bill spun him round for a clap to both sides of his face that would have knocked anybody else clean out of the world, though they brought Percy straight back into it, the swivel of his eyes stopping dead as he took in where he was: “Why does everybody hit me?” he shouted, when the painful blows got through to his senses.
Bill gave him another. “It was only me, old cock, but if I catch you disturbing Mrs Blemish again, you won’t survive.”
“But she’s my wife,” he sobbed.
Bill hit him again, knocking him down. “That’s worse.”
“Please leave him alone now,” Mrs Blemish said. “He hardly knows what he’s doing.”
“He will next time,” Bill said. “Call it shock treatment. I can’t stand seeing women hit or bullied. I’m old fashioned, I suppose, but stopping somebody tormenting a woman is my only weakness, and I happen to be proud of it.” He pulled Percy to his feet. “Won’t do it again, will you? Never, eh? If ever you want to, just imagine I’m right behind you. Or above your head like the sword of Damocles. I can be a killer when my gander’s up.” He straightened his cuffs. “I’ve never witnessed such unruly behaviour, have you, Michael?”
“No,” I said. “But tell him you won’t do it again, Percy, or I shan’t be able to hold him back.”
He sat on a chair, bruised and trembling, the replica of an aging bank manager in respectable clothes, such a picture of pitiable discouragement I almost felt sorry for him. Bill pushed a broom at his chest: “Sweep up the broken pots, because if Lord Moggerhanger sees all this destruction of his property you’ll get a terrible kicking.”
I gave Alice Whipplegate a kiss, and asked her to announce me so that I could go in and listen to a few of Moggerhanger’s boring homilies.
Pride, arrogance and self-satisfaction was so ingrained in his clock you would have thought he ran the Bank of England and had just put up the interest rates. He wore his usual pinstriped navy blue suit, with an old school tie, or one of some veterans’ association, which he had no right to either, and a thin gold chain across his waistcoat. A few bruise stains still botched his cheeks, but he didn’t seem bothered by them. “Sit down, Michael. It’s good to see you again, after that bust up at Spleen Manor, where you comported yourself with honour and, I must say, absolute loyalty to me.”
I plonked myself on a straightbacked chair so as to stay alert. “There was nothing else I could do,” I told him. “Luckily I had impeccable back up from Bill Straw.”
He gave a look of distaste at the name. “That man’s a barbarian. There’s a ruthlessness about him I can’t quite take a shine to. What’s more his violence is so free floating he’s always liable to sell it to the highest bidder. He’s only loyal to me at the moment because I’ve told Mrs Blemish to keep his feed box stocked up with cakes and custard pies. He lives for the minute, and has no discernable ambition, and lacks an overall view of the scheme of things, which means he’s more in the hands of fate than most, and needs to be kept reined in. He has no conscience, and I prefer a man with a conscience, who goes into things with forethought and consideration. Having said that. I have my uses for him, though he’ll always want watching.”