“You mean cross that river?”
“You want me to build Tower Bridge? If you don’t show willing I’ll kick you to death.”
Clouds turned a paler grey, and shifted to show some blue, a stroke of sun lightening the foliage. Bill drove the car slowly along the track till it was hidden by the trees. I thought of asking him to take me over the water so that me (and Dismal) wouldn’t get our turn-ups wet, but his scorn would have been too hard to bear. As it was, Dismal shook clouds of spray at me when we got across, but I couldn’t, at our delicate stalking up the lane, give him the bollocking he deserved. He went along the opposite hedge on full alert, as if after a crash course at the William Straw Infantry School.
Politeness required me to wish the time of the day to a good looking grey-haired woman in her fifties digging around with a trowel at the vegetable plot by Delphick’s house. “The lane seems quite busy,” she said. “A Rolls Royce went by a few minutes ago, and the driver called out that he was Lord Earwig. He was very handsome. I was hoping he’d pause for a chat.”
She put a hand to her aching back, as if not born for such work, and unbuttoned her pale duffel coat. “If you want the Poetry Master, he may be in the Meditation Room with a young acolyte, making sure she’s imbibing Buddhism. My class doesn’t start until after rhubarb tea, when he gives a talk on Mila Repa and the Round of Existence. Yesterday he spoke about the purpose of the anapaest with reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I hope you’ve come to hear him. He likes an audience for that, but,” she went on with a grain of bitterness, “only if they’re young and female. I don’t think he’d like to be disturbed at the moment though.”
“Do you enjoy gardening?”
She seemed grateful for my curiosity. “Not really, but Mr Delphick’s theory is that whoever wants to learn about poetry, especially those who admire his, will benefit by labouring at the soil. I’m supposed to be saying some lines of his over and over to myself as I work.”
“All his poems are trash,” I said. “He’s just a confidence man.”
Blushes brought charm to her features. “How can you say that? He said that giving me this work is a great sacrifice on his part, because he loves to do it himself.”
“I’ve known him twenty years,” I said, “and his ambition was always to have a place like this, with slaves working for him, and nubile girls waiting on him hand and foot. You can’t blame him, can you?”
Leaving her to think what she liked, I beckoned Dismal into the house, my kick banging the door against the wall.
“Who’s that?” Delphick shouted petulantly. “Who is it? Come on, who is it? Own up!”
“The rent man,” I called, following Dismal’s leap into the inner sanctum, where Delphick sat cross-legged on a shit-brown padded platform, candle flame dancing before him. He wore an orange blouse, a sky-blue scarf at the throat, and a sort of beany hat that fell lopsided at Dismal’s assault across the candles as if it was Midsummer’s Eve, and Delphick a long promised dinner with all the trimmings.
Blinds were drawn to shut out the green and dripping hell of the occidental world, so I flicked them up to let in light. “Your lease is up, Delphick.”
He screamed, though whether at a weak sunbeam, or the rasping dog tongue at his cheek, I couldn’t say. “Get that Hound of Heaven off. He’s stopping me going through The Happiness of the Great Liberation. What do you want, anyway? Whatever it is, I haven’t got it. And if you want to stay a few days, you can’t. There aren’t any vacancies till next week.”
I lit a cigar, knowing that a suitable response to someone I’d recently given shelter and sustenance would be a waste of words. I looked around, wondering where the bales and boxes of powder could be stored.
“Only I’m allowed to smoke in here.” He pushed Dismal away. “I hate other peoples’ smoke. This ground is holy, and unfamiliar fag smell pollutes the incense. The others have to go outside to smoke, whether it’s raining or not.”
I blew a goodly draft into his face. “Shut the fuck up. I know all about your off-shore accounts in Jersey and the Cayman Islands. You’ve sent plenty of cash out of the country in the last ten years, to avoid income tax. And so that you wouldn’t be suspected by the police you’ve carried on this loony poet existence as a cover, pushing that poor bloody panda in its pram up and down the Great North Road. You’ve made so much money you’ve been wondering when to cut and run, but you’ve hung on out of greed, to pile up more and more.”
Dismal enjoyed my speech more than Delphick, who maybe had never heard so many angry words from me at one go. His features went through varying shades of colour as I held him to the platform. “You’re wondering how I know, aren’t you? Well, I met Oscar Cross, and he told me about you showing him how to cheat to get through his eleven-plus when you were kids. He said he’d be grateful all his life, even though you did charge him a tenner. Thing was, though, he thought that nowadays you’d got above yourself, and drove too hard a bargain for storing his goods. He doesn’t trust you anymore. He’s been meaning for a long time to cut you out, told me he’d found a new depot.”
This part was all fiction, but I saw no harm in it. “The only trouble is getting somebody trustworthy to collect the stuff and take it to Holland. He has a better distribution system there, not to say a readier market. So after a couple of hours drinking gin I persuaded him that there was no one more capable of masterminding the move than me.”
He opened his mouth in the hope of speaking. He couldn’t, for the moment.
“I have a gun in my pocket,” I said, “which I don’t want to use, but I will if you move. I suppose you want to know how I found out about you? Remember the Sidney Blood you wrote a few years ago? A real shit novel it was, but I read it over and over one day at Peppercorn Cottage till I cracked the code. You were so cock-a-hoop at getting into the drugs racket that you couldn’t resist hoping the world would one day know about it. You wanted your biographers to come across it after you were dead and beyond the reach of the law. So that they would have something interesting about you to write, you encoded clues as to what you were up to, but in such a way that nobody would find out while you were alive. You must have had a lot of belly laughs over your Olivetti when you thought up the code. Using the first letter of every second word in chapter one made a nice little narrative, somewhat short winded but full of two fingered scorn for the world and satisfaction for yourself. I rumbled it while passing a few long hours at Moggerhanger’s rat-infested residence for his lower orders, and the knowledge came in more than useful during my talk to Oscar Cross. He doesn’t trust anyone, so it was a long job getting his confidence, but I did, because of what I knew, and he’s sent me to clear the house and deliver the stuff back to him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s an inadmissible farrago of pure nonsense.”
“Eloquence won’t save you. Let me put it this way. Dismal here is a trained police dog, as regards sniffing drugs. You can’t hide anything from him.”
“You’re a fantasizing pillock. All you say is a load of bollocks.” He tried a laugh, after his words of the demotic. “It’s all straight from a Sidney Blood, but not the one I wrote, which was real literature. It’ll go well with my collected works. I’m proud of that book.”
“Dismal!” I clapped my hands loudly. “Find the dope. Go on, move, or I’ll stop your Bogie!”
His great tail waving, as if already semaphoring a message of success to cops or customs officers, he ran towards the kitchen, stopped, sniffed, then came back with a knowing look, and set off two at a time up the stairs. Delphick was on his feet. “Come here, you bloody pooch!”