‘Oh, yes. He likes to look at me cleaning it up.’
‘Let him wait,’ I said, ‘for a few minutes. Sit down and finish your smoke. Let him go to sleep before you clean it up. If he misses the show he might not bother again.’
‘You’re so clever, Mr Thompson,’ she said, but halfway through her cigarette Crispin called: ‘Come to me, Bridgitte. My room smells awfully. I can’t go to sleep until it’s clean.’
‘Ignore him,’ I said, pouring her some whisky.
‘I don’t drink,’
‘Try it. It’s good for wiping that up.’
‘Perhaps you are right.’ She took a little, but made a painface over it. Then she swallowed more, and finished off the glass. I poured her another.
‘Come in here,’ Crispin shouted. ‘If you don’t wipe my shit up, I’ll do it again.’
‘Go to sleep, you little — ’ I shouted.
‘If you don’t come and clean it I’ll tell Mummy and Daddy there’s a man in the flat, then they’ll send you away, Bridgitte.’
I went in to look at him, an angel standing up gripping the bedrail, a long white nightshirt covering down to his feet. He had a thin, well-formed face and ginger hair. I went back to the living-room. ‘They call him Smog,’ said Bridgitte. ‘On the night he was expected they couldn’t get his mother to the hospital because it was smoggy, so he was born in the ambulance car on the way there.’
He began to cry. ‘Come and wipe my shit up. Please. I’m tired.’
‘You don’t live here,’ he said, when I walked into his room. ‘Are you a burglar?’
‘No, I’m a plumber. I’ve come to fix your windpipe.’
‘What’s a windpipe?’
I noted where he’d done his mess. ‘You’re a very intelligent child,’ I said. ‘Very clever indeed to do it down there.’ Girding my stomach I got on hands and knees and put my face close to it. ‘What’s this in it?’ I asked, in a pleasant voice. ‘Oh dear! It’s full of half-crowns. My God, it is, and all.’
He leapt off his bed and knelt by my side. ‘Where? Where?’
‘There,’ I said, ‘can’t you see ’em?’ His face went close and I gave it a push so that he fell right into it. Bridgitte came running in at his scream. ‘You’ve got a bit on your face!’ I said to him. ‘What a thing to do to yourself. Bridgitte, get him into the bathroom and clean him up. He won’t do it again. Will you, Smog?’
‘You fool,’ she said.
I sat down for another drink, and in ten minutes she came in to say that Smog was fast and peacefully asleep. ‘He’ll not do it any more in such a hurry,’ I said. ‘You see if I’m not right.’
‘If he tells his parents,’ she said, half a smile coming back to her, ‘I won’t be here to see whether he does or not.’
‘Plenty of other jobs. Perhaps Mother could find a place for you at Nondescript Hall. I have a brother who needs looking after just as much as Smog, and more or less in the same way — from time to time. He’s ten years older than me and his name is Alfred. Had a nervous crisis at twenty-one because he couldn’t face inheriting so much money either. It’s the disease of our generation. Slashed his wrists, took fifty Aspros, and put his head in the gas oven, but the cook found him and snatched the pillow away because she couldn’t bear to see it getting dusty on the floor because she used it when sitting down for her tea or elevenses. So Alfred woke up with a gurgle, and then she saw the blood and called my mother, who gave her a minute’s notice on the spot and phoned the family doctor, who brought Alf round and kept the whole thing quiet. Alf has the constitution of an ox, like most of our family. Tough as nails, all of ’em, except me — and it’s one crisis after another with people like that.
‘I had tuberculosis at sixteen, and it took a year or two to get over it. Now I’ve got this question of conscience coming up, and I don’t know what to do about it. But let’s not get stuck too much on my troubles. I’m sure you’ll be as right as rain now with Smog. You can come up with me to the Hall if you get the sack. We’ll tell Mother we’re engaged to be married if you like. It won’t make her very happy, but she’ll have to take note of you. I’ll also introduce you to Alfred. When he’s lucid he’s the most charming fellow in the world. Spends most of his time rowing around our own lake and fishing in it. He catches so much that Mother’s thinking of opening a canning factory for him — tinned pike and salted minnows from the Dukeries. Good for the export trade — go all over the place.’
Her large round blue eyes were turned full on so that I continued jabbering till they dimmed a bit, then I reached over, and kissed her. I was surprised that she glued her lips on to me. From that moment the wagons rolled. We wriggled around that opulent sofa, shedding our clothes like mad animals their skins. We fell on to the floor, and when I was well into her juice-tunnel, the telephone shattered my erection as if it had been made of glass. But she wasn’t put off by it, and I managed to stay in her and set myself going again. She reached for the phone with one hand, and held my shoulder tight with the other. ‘Hello?’ she said, over my grunts. ‘Yes, it is. Dr. Anderson is out. Do you want to leave a message? You phone in the morning? All right. I’ll tell him.’ Then she began to gobble me up inside, and dropped the telephone as she fell back.
Later we sat in the kitchen to eat cornflakes and jam, then bacon and eggs. I was lucky to be in such a well-provided household. I pulled her up from the food, dancing belly to belly and back to back to Dr Anderson’s hystereo music in the living-room. She was out of breath and laughing, then stood rigid when Smog appeared at the door, looking at us with tired but curious eyes. ‘Can I do it?’ he said.
‘Go back to bed,’ said Bridgitte sternly. ‘You’ll catch cold.’
‘He wants a bit of fun just like the rest of us, don’t you, Smog?’
‘Of course.’
‘All right, get that shimmy off,’ I told him, ‘and we’ll all dance together.’ In spite of his dirty habits, and I hoped he was cured of at least one, he was a good sport, and hop-trotted between us both to Dr Anderson’s unique collection of bongo tunes. Then he sat high on my shoulders, licking a spoonful of honey while I slid around to his shouting and laughs.
‘Will you come tomorrow, because I like you?’ he said, when we’d got him on the high stool in the kitchen eating scrambled egg. ‘I like dancing, and music, and midnight feeds.’
‘If you’re a good lad to Bridgitte, I’ll come here often.’
‘If you don’t, I’ll tell Mummy and Daddy.’
‘It’s not midnight,’ I said, ‘but you’d better go to bed or your parents will be back, and if they catch us, it’s out in the street for all of us.’
He made a face as if to cry: ‘Even me?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but we’d look after you. You’d come with me and Bridgitte.’ He laughed, and said he hoped his parents would catch us in that case, but Bridgitte slipped his nightshirt on and carried him against her bare breasts to his room. When she came back the party was over, so we got dressed and cleared up the mess. Exchanging telephone numbers, soft murmurs of undying love, we finally let each other go.
The manager at the hotel started to trust me, so that instead of paying my bill every three days, it was all right now if I left it for as long as a week. He was thin and pink-faced, and what was left of his fair hair was also thin — the sort of a man who would have been melancholy and sad if he hadn’t gone into the sort of job where his living depended on him being bright and cheery. He called me Mr Cresswell, and seemed mystified by by comings and goings. One night at the bar I bought him a double brandy and gave him a Havana cigar I’d lifted from Bridgitte’s place, and from that point on we were as friendly as his job would allow him to get. I didn’t tell him anything about myself, saying I was down on business for my family, which involved a bit of research at Somerset House. This impressed him, so he left it at that, giving me a wink now and again to hope that things were going well, as if we were in some secret together, or he thought I might be coming up for a lump sum in a will. It was hard to say what he thought, for it seemed to me that the less words passing between us the better, and the more nudges, hints, and winks, the closer I’d get to winning his confidence.