“It was certainly on somebody’s list,” Bill said, unnecessarily, “and that’s a fact.”
“I don’t care whose list it was on,” the copper said, his arm across me like the bar of a gate. “If you go any nearer you’ll burn, so you’re not going.”
Bill wiped sweat from his face. “Don’t worry, Michael. You’ll be able to build it up again with the insurance, and put Buckingham Palace in its place. I’ll help you to fill in the forms.”
I had never believed in insurance. Money coughed up for it was so much wasted, assuming anyway that in ten or twenty years I’d have saved enough to buy another house, if it hadn’t been spent (as it had been) rather than put aside. Luckily, my sensible and farseeing Dutch wife had paid the remittances by a standing order I’d been too lackadaisical to cancel which, however, provided little consolation as I saw the main part of the house on its way to becoming gutted, and the waiting room and ticket office well scorched.
“It hasn’t got to the signal box yet,” Bill said, who seemed to be enjoying himself. “You can rely on me not to desert you in your hour of need. I won’t mind kipping down in a ruin, especially when I think of some of the places I slept in in Normandy.”
“Fuck off.” I walked up the lane, between fire engines queuing up to spew their water, calling: “Leave me alone.”
He came after me. “Very understandable sentiments under the circumstances. You’re somewhat shell-shocked. Who wouldn’t be, except me? I had a lad in my platoon who was a demon in action, but manifested a genuine bout of shellshock afterwards. He didn’t stay like that for long, though. A few bangs at the loaf soon got him smiling like the rest of us, and he was always grateful. An officer once caught me knocking him about, but he turned a blind eye.”
To try stopping his windpipe wasn’t on, since his jaws only moved to help me out of my despair. I backed away nevertheless. “Well, you can keep your hands off me. Look at it. It’s still burning. All I own. What will I do now?”
“Michael, it’s only property, though I know that at a time like this you need a friend to stand by you, and I’m your man.”
No leisure, no Sophie, no Frances, no mother with her lesbian girlfriends, not even Blaskin and Mabel to sample my hospitality, the most humane intentions gone for a burton, from one minute to the next all I owned turned into an inferno and on its way to becoming an ash heap. Every reason for staying alive was wafting up in smoke and hiding the sun.
“If it was winter we could take advantage of the heat,” Bill went on, which made me suddenly and perhaps unaccountably glad to have him at my side. “Even in France, in the summer, we’d enjoy a little fire after it got dark.”
I wondered what disaster could have stricken him before he cracked up, and decided that nothing ever would. I was happy for him. The thought that God always looked after his own indicated, as the afternoon passed, that I might eventually recover from the shock, till I shouted in such misery that only Bill’s strong hold stopped my legs folding: “Where’s Clegg? And where’s Dismal?” A picture of them fully roasted and dead in the kitchen made me feel a callous bastard for not having thought of them before.
Bill laughed. “I expect they’re all right. Remind me to tell you sometime about when I was in a house that burst into flames over my head. It was my fault. I wanted a brew up, and put too much petrol on the fire. You should have seen me run. It took five minutes for the lads to forgive me.”
His assumptions proved correct when I spotted Clegg and Dismal crossing the line, and ran as close as I could get towards them. “What happened, then?”
“I don’t know,” Clegg shouted. “I was out with Dismal for a walk, but the house was well alight when we got back. I can’t understand it. I didn’t leave anything on the stove. But I’ve taken all I could to the signal box, so I hope it doesn’t spread that way. Dismal kept wanting to run into the house for his Bogie, so I put him on a lead.”
I couldn’t tell whether the wet on my cheeks was from tears, or sweat due to the heat. Smoke was elbowing the main column skywards, but the bigger flames had gone down. Luckily the car had been parked far enough off not to be damaged, so I handed Bill four fifties to go to the supermarket and bring us back something to eat.
He rubbed his large hands together, the glee of the swaddie written all over him: “We’ll have a marvellous fry up in the signal box.”
I shouted, as he started the car: “And don’t forget a carton of Bogie for Dismal.”
Chapter Thirty
At this late age, of forty coming fast, it was obvious that something had to change. Yet how to make it when I still seemed locked behind the bars of being twenty-five years old, was another matter. The experiences of the last few months had had their effect, but the old me, ancient from birth, fought to keep its stranglehold. Even Dismal, disturbed at my disconsolate pondering, spun his eyes sufficiently to indicate that you couldn’t expect new tricks from an old dog.
Intuition nevertheless told me that waiting for Fate to do its worst must stop, that its malign persuasions could only be forestalled by saying yes to this and no to that, and thinking soberly to the limits of what wisdom had been gained. To that extent had I altered, since walking the streets of London in so feckless a mood on the day of losing my job at the advertising agency.
The final twist of my meandering picaro tale was muddied by injured pride, and from chagrin, as we sat together under the flaring lamps of our camping kit in the cave of the signal box on the night of the fire, smoke still bruising our nostrils, like a trio of bandits after a robbery that had gone wrong. We boiled beans, fried eggs and bacon, and mashed tea for a dour meal. The day’s happenings had so upset Clegg that he sliced his hand on the breadknife, shook his head even before staunching the blood, and murmured again and again at how guilty he felt, till Bill barked in his sergeant’s voice that if he didn’t knock off his moaning he would throw him onto the railway line.
“You could as well say it was all my fault, Cleggie,” I consoled him, “because I wasn’t here to keep an eye on things, either. I should have foreseen what was likely to happen.”
“Now we know where Cottapilly, Kenny Dukes and Pindary were,” Bill said, “while we motored to London and delivered Moggerhanger’s dope like a couple of fools.”
We figured how they had hid along the hedge till Clegg had taken Dismal for his after-lunch walk and then, seeing their opportunity, and losing no time, they slipped in to do the business. Setting the red cock on a house was a far from unknown method of a villain getting his revenge. The job must have been so easy they laughed all the way back to where their car was hidden. I should have used my imagination, and known Moggerhanger would find a way of putting me to a little inconvenience for the stunt we had pulled on him.
Even had there been neighbours close it wouldn’t have stopped them. I failed to consider how isolated the place was when I bought it. For one thing the price had been too good to argue about, and for another I was chuffed at having a railway station all to myself, able to dream of trains rumbling through while yours truly was content to go nowhere.
You can’t think of everything, though events now told me that you should at least try. To save as much of my sanity as could be spared I put the incident down to Fate, but for the last time, and with a capital F, that unknown quantity which makes something happen beyond the limits of expectation. At least we had screwed a hundred thousand out of Moggerhanger, and I had smashed the pride and joy of his whisky tank, which he could never have anticipated either. Nothing made up for the firing of my house, but he had something to remember me by. What a bastard he was, though, planning to have me smashed to pulp by his Bermondsey specials, and burned out as well. He’d never been one to do things by halves.