‘My sort of world is now your world,’ Teddy smiled, face reddening. There wasn’t enough truth in this to subdue Albert: ‘You’d never get half a foot in my world, not in a hundred years, mate. With all your lights and glitter you couldn’t come anywhere near it. I might be eating the food of your world, but that’s about all. It doesn’t even taste all that good. My only reaction to your sort of world, when you throw it at me like you did with the party, is to get drunk, have a black out so that in record time I don’t see it, I just don’t see it, hear it, or smell it.’ Albert had regained some of his youth. His sharp saturnine Norse face had given a Latin self-assurance to his eyes, a gesturing manner that comes of thinking you have a good reason for being alive. Before his success it had only occasionally flashed, but now it was part of him.
‘I’m not asking for thanks, Albert. But your steak’s getting chilled.’
‘I know, but all this meat-eating makes me feel like Eric-the-bleedirig-Bloodaxe. I’m not being too personal, Teddy, but there’s got to be people like you in the world, otherwise how could I show my paintings?’
‘Not to mention sell them. You put it in a very charming way,’ Teddy said, temper smoothed, half smiling. Albert jumped up, smashing knife and fork on his plate: ‘Will you stop patronizing me, you overfed fuck-monk?’
A wave of distress passed through Teddy. He also stood, his great body shaking. ‘I’m not patronizing you,’ he cried, almost weeping. ‘That’s the only way I can talk.’
Frank looked up at them: ‘If you don’t drop dead I’ll kill you. I’ve had my fill of this. I’ll go back to the jungle if this goes on.’
A waiter drifted close. ‘Anything else, gentlemen?’
‘Not at the moment,’ Teddy said, still glaring into Albert’s demonic eyes.
‘The manager would appreciate it then,’ the waiter said, ‘if you two gentlemen would stop quarrelling.’
They sat, unable to say who had broken off the staring match. Albert cheered up over his crêpe Suzette. ‘You see,’ Teddy said to him, ‘you’re a fairly rich man, so you may as well begin to accept the responsibility of it.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do everything I can to see that I end up in the gutter. It’ll be cleaner than this place. Sure, I can slosh down this stuff and smoke a fat cigar that stinks like arse-shit, drink from a skull-cup till I’m as bricked as a wall, but a mutton stew and a Woodbine would keep me just as happy, has done this last twenty years, hasn’t it, Frank?’
‘True,’ he muttered, thinking of Myra and wondering why she had bothered to write, glad that she had. He remembered, on his way back from the station, a nagging agreeable need to see her again, and next day, the first time ever, he deliberately stopped himself hoping for it, cut off his wish at the roots and went on working as Albert’s bodyguard. The letter had reopened all that, showed him the river again, the broad curving descending flood of the arterial river on whose bank he stood. Bodies, houses, trees were carried forcefully down it in the grey unearthly light of dawn, everything flowing away in the silence, the bleak scene composed of a single indefinable mood. He had often seen the river in his dreams, water clipping his feet and wanting him to be sucked in and swept away — as if he hadn’t been in it all his life.
‘I’ll have no liver left by the time I get back,’ Albert said cheerfully.
Teddy poured more coffee, drew on his cigar. ‘Grow another in your rural retreat. It sounds idyllic, the way you talk about it.’
‘It is,’ Frank put in. ‘I lived in the same place for a while.’
‘You aren’t going back there?’ Teddy asked him.
‘I’m not. Don’t ask me where I am going though. Maybe I’ll get a job in some factory around London. Settle down, sort of.’
‘Why do that? I can find use for you. At a better wage, I should think.’
‘We’ll see,’ Frank said.
‘I think you’ll end up back in Nottingham,’ Albert said.
‘I might if I was born in Timbuctou.’
‘He’s got a wife and two kids up there.’
‘I had. She’s in with somebody else now.’
‘It’s shocking,’ Teddy winked.
‘You could always get her back,’ Albert suggested.
‘That’s all finished. Nobody wants anybody back.’
‘You people from the north,’ Teddy said, ‘make everything sound so final and full of fate.’
‘They’re exactly like people in the south,’ Frank said. ‘You see the gut-ache written on their faces just the same. The difference about London though is the underground. Have you ever been in it at rush-hour, Teddy?’
‘Not in thirty years,’ he admitted, ‘and it wasn’t such a rush-hour then — or so I understand.’
‘I stood near a phone box once watching ’em come down the steps. I just looked at their faces. First, I thought they were dead people going into corned-beef tins. Then I saw that underneath these death-masks was a joy, a happiness that they’d accepted even though they felt wicked about it: this tragic face was put on to hide it, but it didn’t kid me. They were going back into the tripes of the earth like worms, into these tapeworms that scoot around in the real guts of London. That’s what they lived for every day. In their offices or shops they keep looking at the clock, thinking it’s because they want to knock off, but it’s only to get back for half an hour into these tripes, to be worms for a bit inside Great Mother Tripe. I wouldn’t like to get caught down there if the four-minute warning went.’
‘You’re pessimistic,’ Teddy nodded. ‘Life is hard for anyone, but there’s no need to make a virtue of it. I spent years keeping my head above water.’
‘Yes,’ Albert butted in, ‘and when you climbed out everybody was surprised to see how fat you were.’
‘They didn’t have time,’ Teddy said, pleased at such after-dinner wit. ‘I bought them all up.’
‘They must have had their backs to you.’
‘Perhaps,’ Teddy said, flushed by the meal.
‘The trouble with you,’ Albert said, mustering all his London venom, ‘is that in that masculine great frame of yours there’s a spiteful little bitch doing its bi-sexual nut.’
Teddy took it welclass="underline" ‘I’m learning quite a bit from you, certainly. Have another cigar. You still haven’t explained why you’re so pessimistic, Frank. You’re always dark-browed and quiet.’
‘You’ve no right to ask questions like that,’ he said.
‘Are we bringing human rights into it already? I thought we were just talking?’
Frank lit his cigar. ‘Nobody has the right to ask me why I am how I’m not. The only questions I’ll answer are those I’ve already asked myself and been able to answer. Those will be the ones I’ve spent my life answering — or trying to. Since coming to London I’ve not been getting very far.’
‘I’m with you there,’ Albert said. ‘It’s a dust bowl. All your time goes on drinking to keep alive. Any more wine in that bottle?’
Teddy slid it over: ‘I get all my answers from other people. It’s the best I can do, but I’m satisfied.’
‘You have to be,’ Handley said.
‘I don’t know where mine come from,’ Frank said. ‘So I suppose they come from myself.’
‘The best thing is just to go on living, and doing the best sort of work you can,’ Albert reflected. ‘Pessimism is everybody’s right, as long as they earn it.’
‘You’ve got to break through that sort of thing though,’ Frank said, ‘unless you want to die young — or be dead in everything after a certain age, which is the same thing. That’s why I left home and lit off. Pessimism is an idleness inside you, a spiritual deadness, if you like. It’s a load on your back that you’ve got to throw off.’