Still incensed at such running away, I didn’t care whether or not I did see her again. At the same time I had to thank her for lifting me to a state of morale which had enabled me to deal so successfully with Moggerhanger. Then again, she had been responsible for my telling him I would drive his goods to Ealing, and I wouldn’t now be able to show her off beside me in the Rolls Royce.
“My aim in life is to have nothing ever happening,” I said to Bill when he laughed at Sophie’s deserting me.
Dismal snapped his jaws into a pile of disgusting Bogie, while we swilled tea and worked through a tin of custard creams. “It sounds as if middle age is getting at you,” Clegg said. “Things will always happen, especially to you, and you’re not old enough to wish they wouldn’t.”
Bill took up the last two biscuits. “If things stopped happening to me I’d know I was dead.”
“Yeh, but if you go on scoffing every crumb in the house like that we’ll have to shell out a couple of hundred quid at the supermarket tomorrow.”
“You’re worrying me,” Bill guffawed. “What will we do for money at the checkout?”
Clegg laughed so loud that only a hand to his mouth stopped his teeth breaking should they hit the teapot. “What neither of you irresponsible types realise,” he said, “is that it’s about time you settled down and had a family. There’s nothing like it to steady a chap.”
“I had three kids with Bridget,” I reminded him, “and then she left me.”
“Still, why not start again?”
I wondered who it would be with if I did. Kids by Sophie would have a hard time sorting out their relations, so I thought how perfect to have children with my beautiful wife Frances. She was too busy curing the ills of the world, but with a little encouragement she might be more than willing to cure mine. I felt lust and love for her, and pictured how magnificently sensual she would appear with a seven-month belly, far more so than any woman I’d known in that state. Bridget when pregnant had never had the delicate liveliness and intelligence I foresaw in Frances’s features.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I like people to talk,” Bill said when we were heading south on the A10. “I can’t stand silence.”
“I’m not married to you, so shut up.”
“Michael, there’s nobody more capable and willing than me of shutting his haybox when the need arises, as it invariably does, but the sort of mood you’re in will be of no use to us on the present trip. It isn’t for my advantage that I’m telling you not to brood. It’s just to let you know that I have your best interests at heart, and if you don’t believe that then there’s not much else I can do for you.”
He couldn’t see my smile. “Have a cigar, so that we can be silent and amiable at the same time.” We’d been first in the queue at the bank to hand over our parcels of money and witness the glittering eyes of the bank manager. Bill was calm, but my nerves were, to say the least, friable, for you never knew when the Sword of Damocles wouldn’t snap its thread and put the kibosh on our astounding success. When things went badly I could always hope they would get better, but this was a coup that scared me.
After a few days Bill would light off to spend the few thousand he was keeping back, and I would return to Upper Mayhem, staying there till I’d decided what to do. We were on our way to unload the white gold in London, and I hoped all would go well, but however it did, the die was cast.
Close to Buntingford, Bill said: “We’ve got to stop, for our elevenses.”
“But you’ve not long eaten your tens.”
“I know, and soon I’ll want my twelves’s, and then my ones’s and twos’s. We can afford it, can’t we?”
The café had homemade cakes in the window, and we went in to fill the place with our cigar smoke. We were the only customers, and hard luck on anyone who might mind. In any case the man and woman who seemed to be the owners were puffing on their fags like two chimneys from a cotton mill. I recognised them from when they’d run a tarpaulin shack in an A1 lay-by selling bacon and sausage butties as big as doorsteps, and quart mugs of iodine tea, to lorry drivers heading for the Midlands and all points north. Husband Ken still wore a mask of misery and failure, in spite of the notch or two they’d come up since those enterprising but uncertain days, in having a proper roof over their heads. Ken slapped our order on the table: “You’re the first fucking customers we’ve had this morning.”
“Don’t swear,” Lil said, busy at the tea urn. “People might not like it.”
“I’ve got a right to swear, haven’t I? A few more days as slack as this and we’ll be in giro land eating bits of paper.”
“There’s worse places.” Bill was busy with an eccles cake. “You could be on the pavement begging for a living, like I was a few weeks ago. And look at me now. I’m in the money. You ought to take things as they come. Live a bit more in hope.”
“Oh yes? And what shady business might you be in?” Ken demanded with, I thought, more belligerence than Bill would normally tolerate.
“Transport is my trade,” Bill said. “And don’t get sarky, or I’ll duff you up. Then me and my mate will rip this chintzy tinpot place to pieces — and I can’t alliterate further than that.”
“Oh, very fucking good. Do it then, if you like. We can get the insurance.”
“You wouldn’t be in much shape to enjoy the pay-out, I promise you. Bring me a few of them Bakewell tarts from the counter, and stop whinging.”
“He’s always complaining,” Lil said. “I tell him it does no good, but he just goes on. He won’t stop.”
Ken lit another cigarette from a packet out of the stock, and stood by while Lil hustled to get Bill’s cakes. “It might do no good,” Ken puffed, “but it lets off steam, don’t it? It’s what keeps me going.”
“That’s as may be,” Lil said, “but the customers don’t like hearing it. It’s what gives the place a bad name.”
“They’d better stop coming, then,” he said, as if ruination was a Nirvana to be aimed for.
“That’s why they don’t,” she said. “But where would we be if they did?”
“If I was you,” Bill put in for Ken’s benefit, “I’d have a shave, tie a tie on, and shut up. You ought to do some work while you’re at it.”
I thought Ken was about to explode into blood and guts, all over the lace-curtained windows. “Work?” he shouted. “Work, you say? Fuck me, I’m at it from six in the morning till late at night. Lil is, anyway, cleaning the place up, setting the tables, baking cakes, and doing funny things to the books. What man wants to see his wife working such long hours as that? I’m always working, though. I’ve been to the bank already with yesterday’s takings, haven’t I? Don’t talk to me about work. I’m up to here in it. And what do we have to show for it at the end of the week? I’d like to say it’s peanuts, but it ain’t even that.”
He seemed on the point of crying, but I can only suppose that pride stopped him or, being generous for once, he let Lil do it. “I got into this trade to make money,” he went on, “but all I do is earn a living.” He looked into the distance. “A posh restaurant near here charges fifty quid a meal, if you can call it that, and the bloke who runs it told me the other day that he’s getting out as soon as he’s made his pile. That clever bleeder’s not in it to make a paltry living. I ask you, what sort of a world is it when you can’t get in, make a mint, and then get out quick? It’s every Englishman’s right, ain’t it?”
Lil had used too much sawdust in the cakes, and the coffee was so weak it hadn’t even seen an acorn. “Surely,” I said, “working in this place is better than digging holes in the motorway?”
“Is it? Is it, then? What do you know about it? Them blokes earn five hundred a week just for leaning on a drill, or driving a dumper truck in circles. And they don’t have the worry. It’s the worry as kills me. Worry, worry, worry, all day long and in the night as well. It makes me sick at the stomach. Sometimes I can’t even eat my dinner.”