A glint in her eye told me she might think that would be no bad thing, while I began to wonder whether there could be any paternal connection when he rattled on so cruelly, but my mother, meeting him again twenty years after the event, had persuaded me, and him, that such was the fact. Around the time of my conception she had been a factory worker, and more liberated than most women today, as free as dandelion fluff, with maybe a different lover every night — or so my grandmother had once said, thinking me too young to understand.
How Blaskin had been deceived I didn’t know. There wasn’t much physical similarity between him and me, yet I dreaded living till sixty and going bald. I was the same height, and might still inherit a scar down my skull. He and my mother were convinced I was his son, and perhaps it was true. Only the uncertainty was precious, but if I was, everything being possible, how could I be disappointed? Whomever I came from I was still me.
“Yes,” he said to Mabel, “I recall the heady days when I first got you over the bath and shafted you like the devil I was. Do you remember, my delectable ice maiden? Her scream, Michael, when she had an orgasm, sounded like another execution in Red Square. Then she said she hadn’t had one, to take me down a peg or two.”
“I hate you, Gilbert, I really do.”
“For God’s sake leave her alone,” I said.
He laughed, hardly on his worst form. “She loves it. Why does she sit there if she doesn’t? Oh, I know, she wants to see how far I’ll go, but curiosity will be her downfall. In any case, my delicious icing cake, you’ll be here forever. When we did a runner to the South Seas three years ago she tried to kill me, then got frightened at the notion of having nothing left to live for if I popped my clogs. So she nursed me back to health, and her sentimental attention almost put me back at death’s door. Being a novelist I know her better than she does herself, and she doesn’t appreciate the advantages of being so understood and affectionately cared for.” He tinkled the silver apostle spoon around the empty cup. “Whenever I hear your melodious voice, dear Mabel, my heart’s no longer a desert. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Something like that. I don’t know whether or not I love you, Gilbert, but you’re certainly a factor in my life.”
Though I didn’t like having such a grand seat at the Wimbledon sex war they made it hard for me to go back on the street and think ordinary peoples’ lives were more exciting. Strawberries and cream would have been a help. I recalled Geoffrey Harlaxton treating me to prime seats once, but here I was at a different match, unable to escape Blaskin’s Great Game playing before my eyes and too close to the insides of my ears. If this was how Englishmen treated their women I was as Irish as my mother claimed our antecedents to be. I knew I was different. I charmed women, made them laugh and feel wanted, looked on older ones as queens, and younger ones as princesses, so as to get any of them sooner into bed.
“Whenever,” Blaskin began coolly, which I knew he wouldn’t be for long, “somebody says you’re a factor in their life, especially your wife or paramour, tell her, in no uncertain terms, to spirit herself away and never come back.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said.
“Do.” He turned. “Mabel?”
“Yes, Gilbert?”
“I want you out of the flat for the rest of the day. I’m expecting a foreign research student in an hour, so go and spend a happy time shoplifting in Harrod’s. You’ve no idea how skilful she is at it, Michael. She takes a reticule, dresses like a Chelsea woman locked out of the Flower Show, and comes home laden with goodies. Nowhere’s safe in that establishment, from the furniture department to the food hall. I hope she’ll be caught one day and get put inside for a year, so that I can have a mite of peace. Trouble is though she would be in her element there, and set up a workshop for petty thieving in no time. But she’s too damned clever to get caught.”
“It’s fiction, Mr Cullen.” She blushed, as I took out a cigarette and waited for Blaskin’s next serve. “All fiction,” she said, though with such a smile I couldn’t take it for the truth.
“Oh no it’s not. She brought back that box of Romeo and Juliet cigars last week, which turned into scotch mist as soon as I had my hands on them. But to return to the topic of heretofore. Whenever I’m expecting a research student I contrive to be struggling with the vacuum cleaner as she comes through the door. She sees my sad attempt to get it going. I can’t even find the socket to plug it into, so the dear girl takes it with a smile of ‘Oh what can you expect from a such a great novelist?’ and ends by hoovering the flat more thoroughly than Mabel ever could, who’s English to the bone. Then, to reward my pretty little student, I fumble around the kitchen, as if to get something to eat. She gives a little tinkling laugh of disbelief as I put spaghetti into a saucepan with no water, and ends by cooking a wonderful continental meal, the sauce enough to melt the tastebuds. It’s not the watery soft cabbage, brown paper roast beef, rehydrated potatoes and tinned carrots I get from Mabel, who tries to outdo my old boarding school. Nothing like that. It’s a meal fit for a gentleman. I open a couple of bottles of choice wine, the label depending on her nationality, to encourage my gorgeous student further, and after the last delicious drops of her coffee we fall into bed for the best of desserts.”
“Every word he speaks is false,” Mabel said. “I can’t think why he doesn’t save it for a novel. It might be so much better there, though I doubt it.”
“He used it in the novel before the last,” I reminded her. “I’ve read them all, and it wasn’t very convincing, either.”
She turned from me and said: “Gilbert, I’m sick and tired of hearing you say such awful things before me over and over again. It bores and distresses me terribly. I can’t listen to anymore of it.”
I was ready to agree, and take her part, until she came close to the tears he so much wanted to see. “The next thing he’s going to say, Michael, is that I’m a lesbian.”
“I know she’s improving when she realises what I’m going to say next. But I only say such things to amuse her. A man who can’t make a woman laugh is the lowest of the low. Besides, darling,” he said to her, “you have such a wonderfully shaped behind to inspire me, like jelly escaped from its mould. Still I love you to madness, and you know it. I’ve never loved anybody else. There, what more can I say? In any case, you come from very good stock, a fact that means so much to me, such a line of nobility I’m sure your family has a long entry in the Almanac of Gotha.”
I couldn’t have stopped her. Nobody could. I knew what was coming and so, I’m sure, did Blaskin, who went on full red alert, though he was unable to prevent a real life happening that would certainly read well in a future novel. Wasn’t his popularity with readers based on the fact that he could always ‘make something happen’? Now he had. Perhaps it was what he had hoped for all along.
Mabel stepped to the tray by his side, lifted it high, and let all that was on it fall squarely over him. Cup and saucer, milk and sugar, napkin and spoon struck his baldness and ricocheted over the carpet. “There, you foul beast. That’s what you wanted, and now you have it.”
He pushed the tray aside. “You’ll only have to clean everything up.”
Her eyes were gleaming. “The student will have to do it, won’t she? If she comes.”
“Oh, she’ll come all right, much sooner than you ever did.”
“You never made me come,” she cried. “Never. You’re not capable of it.”
“I know. Only a lesbian could make you come, if she rowed you like a galley slave.”