A Start in Life (41 page)

She wasn't eating much of her chops, not even touching the tinned fresh peas: ‘That's right. He told me all about it. But I wouldn't like owt to 'appen to him. I'd die if it did.'

‘Aeroplanes don't crash nowadays. You shouldn't worry about that.'

She looked hard at me, not having believed a word of what I'd said: ‘No, it's not that at all, and you know it. Don't you?'

I laughed: ‘What, Ma?'

‘I've lived longer than you think I have. Admitted, most of my life it's been under water from one sort of misery or another, but I've got eyes and ears and a mother's heart, and when I look at Bill I know he's living under a wicked strain, and there's summat he's keeping from me. I've got all my senses right enough. Knowing what I know and feeling what I feel, it pains me to come up against somebody like yo' who won't tell me the honest simple truth that wain't do a bit of harm to me after all I've lived through.'

Her face looked pale and made of paper. Bits of powder and rouge turned her head into a lantern, with two eyes for candles. My heart was tight at the sight of her. ‘It's secret work,' I said. ‘I can't tell you any more, so please don't ask me. But he's in no danger, not Bill. He's doing very well with his life at the moment, so you shouldn't worry about him at all. I'm telling you.' For God's sake believe me, I added under my breath. My words made her smile with relief, because I excelled in fervour. When I remembered it afterwards I wept that I hadn't told the simple but elusive truth.

‘I'd better take you back to your hotel,' I said when the meal was finished.

‘I must just nip to the other place first. It can't be far and we can take a taxi. Bill gen me ten pounds last night. He's been so generous to me.' I knew that in her fur coat she felt more cared for than she'd ever done in her life, and I hadn't the heart to make a fuss about not going where she wanted, so in ten minutes we were at the door of the hotel.

The manager behind the desk still had the same sharp ulcerous look on his face. ‘Hello,' he said to me, ‘back again? Thought we'd seen the last of you.'

‘I decided to come and settle up.'

‘Better late than never,' he said.

‘I didn't know
you
had pals here as well,' said Bill's bright mother, her hand crooked in my arm.

‘We'll be in the lounge,' I told the manager, ‘so bring the bill into me, with a double brandy, and a shandy. One for yourself, as well.'

‘When you came through that door just now I hardly knew you,' he smiled. ‘You've prospered a bit since you pulled out so suddenly.'

I moved on, too exhausted to make much of a night of it in the lounge with Mr and Mrs Binns from Chesterfield, but they were happy and nice enough in their middle-aged way. They weren't as pleased to see Mrs Straw as much as Mrs Straw would have liked, but it ended better than it started, for I plugged them all to capacity before we left, and paid my bill of nearly twenty pounds into the bargain. The manager had tears of gratitude on the pouches of his eyes. I'd got him to take a couple more brandies: ‘Nearly got thrown out because of you,' he confessed, ‘because I'd had a few bad cases only a month before. You're the first one that ever came back to pay in all my experience. It's gladdened my faith in human nature a bit.' On that slimy note, with the five of us fit to break into
Auld Lang Syne
, I pulled Mrs Straw into a taxi and back to her hotel. The same cab got me home. I was too done in to take a bath, and fell flat on to my bed like a board of lead, sleeping till midday with neither faces nor white horses to disturb my blackout.

I was wakened by the flat bell ringing, otherwise I might have stayed buried in warm wool till past teatime. I took the deep yellow envelope from the telegraph youth, still too much asleep to wonder what was in it. I dropped it on the table, then fell back on my bed. Half an hour later I got up and opened it on my way to the bathroom. As the piss piped out of me I read: =
WILLIAM IN BEIRUT COOP STOP LUNG MOVING STOP ADDRESS FOLLOWING LOVE
=
LENINGRAD
.

I surprised myself by catching on to it so quickly. Sun was coming in through the toilet window, so maybe that helped. Bill Straw had been caught in Beirut, and the man in the iron lung was being moved in a specially built pantechnicon through the London streets to another lair. Once he was installed, I would hear from them for a further assignment, unless the repercussions of international investigation swept us all into oblivion. I wondered what charge Bill would be on in the Lebanon, whether in fact the police there could fix him on anything at all, and somehow I couldn't take it as seriously as I would if he'd been grappled at London airport, and thrown into the nick here, where he wouldn't have got out in less than five years.

I set a kettle on the galley stove, and stood in my dressing-gown waiting for it to boil. I got the shakes, realizing I'd have to wait weeks for the kettle of news to boil. I'd be the last to get information from Jack Leningrad Inc, though I decided that when next called in for a job I'd threaten to smash that iron lung to bits with a hammer unless they told me all they knew. Worst of all, I had to phone his mother, but I decided to wait a couple of days, or till such time as she began to worry. I saw no point in upsetting her, by telling her immediately. If she asked why Bill hadn't come back I'd say I didn't know. And the next time she mentioned it she'd already be half inclined to receive bad news.

If Bill was really taken in Beirut, he was done for, in which case there was no reason why she shouldn't know what was what, providing I could put my cowardice at having to spill the news to one side.

In most parts of me I didn't believe it had happened, in spite of the fact that I'd been brought up to believe that telegrams didn't lie. But I knew that this feeling was my loss, since there was no doubt that it had happened. Not only was Bill hooked, but I began to see that maybe the danger would root me out. There'd been nothing but fear since I'd started this job. But if I began to get worried at last, it wasn't out of fear, only from wondering what it meant. This wasn't the sort of work for somebody like me, certainly not what I'd come to London for. It was a load on my back, exactly what I'd intended to avoid. I'd been trapped, but how and by whom, that was the question. I sat down to some tea and bread. I was in the middle of a quicksand bog, nobody within ten miles to come and talk to me while I went down. The trouble was I had no impulse to run. Somewhere, way back in the dark, my Achilles tendon had been cut, and I didn't grieve about that but I didn't know whether this was going to turn out to my advantage or not. Was it ever better to stay still, or to run? If I didn't get the impulse to run, then it was obviously better to sit still. When the impulse did come I'd run twice as quick and to a place twice as safe than I would if I set off somewhere without being absolutely impelled. So I made a virtue out of my idleness and sloth. When strength came out of weakness it had the force of self-preservation behind it, and that was what I depended on. There didn't seem much else at the moment.

I got dressed and walked into town. On the way I put my three hundred pounds into the bank, which now made six hundred on deposit for a wet and thundery day. I took out half a crown, and flipped it up, heads I would phone Polly, tails I would try Bridgitte. It clattered healthily as it hit the pavement, rolled into a gutter and down a grate, lost for ever. You just had to make your own decisions.

There was no reply from Bridgitte, so I dialled Polly's number. ‘Hello?' said a man's voice which struck me as strange.

‘Is that Polly?'

‘Yes, what do you want?'

‘I want to speak to Polly.' Somebody went by the phone booth, with a placard saying ‘The Bomb Also Kills Children'.

‘This is Polly. Who is that?'

‘Michael.'

‘Michael bloody who?'

‘From Geneva. Remember?'

‘Oh, yes. How stupid. I'm sorry.'

‘I've got a few days off. Can I see you?'

‘Come over,' she said.

‘Is that all right?'

‘Mum and Dad are in Ostend.'

‘As soon as I can, then.' I put the phone down. Outside, I thought I'd dreamed it, but I knew I never had such dreams. With me, it was either reality or nothing.

Half an hour later I went up the drive of the Villa Moggerhanger, smelling the luxury of fresh hedges and growing flowers. Grey clouds were flying away from London, racing for the hills and grass. José, the Spaniard, opened the door and welcomed me like an old friend. ‘Mr Moggerhanger is out.'

‘I've come to see Polly,' I told him. She was in the garden, so I found her clipping roses from a row of bushes near the back wall. I intended greeting her casually, so as not to alarm her, but she took my hands, hers cold, and I don't know how it happened but both of us were kissing straight away. ‘I tried to get through to you half a dozen times, but your mother hung up on me. Then I had to do a trip to Paris.'

‘I've been longing for you,' she said. ‘I thought it was just going to end like the others, that once you got to know me, as you did in Geneva and on the way back, then you wouldn't want to see me any more.'

‘It'll take at least a hundred years to get to know you,' I said. ‘Let's go up West for lunch.' I was nervous of hanging around the Moggerhanger lair for too long in case Claud himself should suddenly spring up from the ground. My instinct told me to get out of the place, though I couldn't see rationally why, since Polly said he was in Ostend – though maybe he'd only gone there for a drink.

‘I'd hate that,' she said. ‘I'm turned off the middle of London. You've driven Dad's Bentley, haven't you?' We walked together along the path, and she suddenly threw all the roses she had collected behind a laurel bush.

‘Like a dream,' I said, my arm warm where she went on holding it.

‘Let's go somewhere, then. I've got the key to one of Dad's hideaways in Kent.'

‘Why not?' I said, but playing it cool.

‘Sit in the lounge and pour a drink, while I go up and dress.'

‘I'll watch if you like.'

She kissed me quickly: ‘No, I don't feel like it now.' Her bare pale legs went up the stairs, and I unlatched a tin of tomato juice, thinking of William trying to barter his way out of some Lebanese copshop with bars of gold, and of his poor old mother worrying herself daft as she knocked back shorts with her Chesterfield friends, while I'd been talked by feckless Polly into some mad adventure with Moggerhanger's house on wheels.

We sat high in the front as I stepped on the power over Hammersmith Bridge and went towards the South Circular, the tape-recorder playing
Tales from the Vienna Woods
, and me smoking one of the Moggerhanger's big cigars kept in the glove-box for special friends. Through Clapham a bowser was blocking the road, but there was no way of overtaking. ‘That Cooper just did it,' Polly said.

‘I want to live. I'll do it in my own good time.'

‘The exhaust's giving me a headache,' she complained.

I put on the winkers, swung out, and swept forward. The bowser seemed a mile long, and travelling fast, but I got straight up to fifty, then saw a bus coming full on towards me. It was too late to brake. Headlights flashed me, and I couldn't go back. The bastard driving the bowser was set on getting me killed, didn't slow down, or go in even an inch. I supposed he was a good honest worker who thought that rich pigs who drove around in such expensive cars should be put up against a wall and shot – or crumpled to death under a bus.

Polly clutched me, and I thought what a wonderful way to die, but by twelve inches, a single foot and no more, I was in front of the bowser and just about safe, trembling in every inside limb, my tongue hollow, Polly half fainting against her seat, wondering how other people could be so rotten.

The road was empty up ahead, and I left the bowser behind, until at a traffic light on stop he drew in between me and the kerb. I leaned across Polly and wound down the window: ‘Are you trying to kill me then, mate?' I said in my best Nottingham accent.

He wore a cap, and his broad face grinned: ‘Yes.'

‘Better luck next time, then,' and I shot forward as the lights changed to yellow. ‘His eggs were fried too hard for breakfast.'

‘I was scared to death,' she said.

‘That's his idea of a joke. I grew up with people like that. Worked with them – for a little while. He just wanted to see if I'd lose my nerve and pull back. I could have done, but didn't. Still, it's not often we get a thrill like that, is it, love?'

She held my arm: ‘Take care, though.'

‘I wouldn't do anything else with you in the car. Myself I don't care about. I'm neither here nor there. Easy come, easy go. I've had a good time up to now, and if the Big Door suddenly fell on me I might have time for a grin before the blackout made a fossil of it.' This was the last thing I felt, but I needed to say it in case she'd seen how frightened I'd been when the bus nearly got me. ‘I think you must have had a fairly awful life to get into that state,' she said. ‘Are you still on that gold-smuggling job?'

We were on a dual carriageway, traffic thinner: ‘I gave it up.'

‘Since when?'

‘My best friend got caught. So now I'm going straight, waiting to meet an honest girl to keep me on the right path.'

‘That's not me, then,' she laughed, and I was surprised when, instead of saying how good it would be for me to give it up, she said I shouldn't really weaken and pull out just because my best friend had been caught, that now was the time to go on, because maybe no one else would be pulled in for a long time, like it was always safest to travel by plane just after a big air disaster. I hadn't lost my nerve overtaking a petrol lorry – and she did admire me for it, after all – so why lose it at something far less dangerous? For my part, it was all talk, because I never seriously intended resigning my lucrative position, and as far as not losing my nerve between the lorry and the bus, once I got there I had no option but to go on and get out of the trap. I hadn't lost my nerve, not totally, but all my fibres had melted, and my bones had been under the hammer, I knew that now, a handshake with my final moment that hadn't been final after all. Polly was out on a limb. She wasn't in my guts. I was sailing towards trees and hills, sorry the sea was but forty miles off, otherwise I'd have driven on as far as I could get around the world. ‘You don't know me,' I said. ‘I give nothing up. That's what makes me stupid, and lets me, live high. I had a chip on my shoulder but it turned into a bird and it wasn't a budgerigar, either. Nor a vulture, come to that. Just a kite to keep me a few inches off mother earth.'