‘We get on fine, the two of us.’
‘Keep it that way, then you can buy me a meal now and again.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. He gradually straightened up while walking, till he seemed at last to be a little taller than I was.
We found a place, and indulged ourselves at my expense. Bacon and cheese sandwiches got washed down by innumerable bucket-sized mugs of tea. The place was full of porters and lorry drivers, as if I were back in a Nottingham café near a factory, where the blokes go because they can’t stand the better food of canteen dinners. It was warm, smoky, steamedup, and timeless, and I began to feel as tired and done in as Almanack Jack looked. In spite of his bang-about life he seemed better fleshed with food than I was, and in the end he was thumping me on the shoulder and telling me not to look so depressed. Then he fell forward on his arms and went to sleep.
He heard me stand up to get more tea and sandwiches, and when I came back he was wide awake, and started snapping into it. ‘I don’t know why you sell almanacks,’ I said. ‘You only frighten people half to death with the prophecies inside.’
‘That’s what they want,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t buy them otherwise. They’re only human, after all. If you can’t have a good earthquake or war to look forward to in somebody else’s country, life isn’t worth living.’
‘You don’t believe that crap.’
‘No. But they do. I think war is stupid as well.’
He leaned back, lit a cigar of mine, and sent the first smoke out slowly, like a calculated trick, as if knowing that he could bring it back again when it began to stray too far. The unfamiliar smell fetched disapproving looks from a couple of men nearby, but Jack was enjoying himself, as if the smell of a cigar brought back a lucidity that he’d had, once upon a time. ‘Those that indulge in war,’ he said, ‘seem to like it so much that once they start they can’t stop, like two people fucking. In fact war is a male homosexual act between consenting nations, carried out in full view of God. Otherwise it wouldn’t have gone on so long. My almanacks make no difference, whether it comes or goes. Ever tried prophesying peace? You wouldn’t sell a single copy. You’d be a bloody liar, what’s more.’
I didn’t like this idea from him, that I was a liar, but my hard-earned food was making him light-headed, so there seemed no way of stopping him, short of walking out. And I couldn’t do that because I still had half a mug of tea and a sandwich in front of me.
‘I can pick up your thoughts like a man in the park stabbing bits of toffee paper with a sharp stick. Ever since you saw me dozing on Hungerford Bridge you’ve been thinking I ought to have a shave and get a job. Don’t deny it. But just because you’ve become someone’s bodyservant, don’t get feeling so superior to me. If it hadn’t been you on the bridge just now who’d felt guilty at seeing me shivering to death and got me something to eat, another mug would have turned up sooner or later. I feel superior to you, mate, because having slipped off the social scale altogether, I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. You can’t get any higher than’ that in the world, take it from me. So when you do me a good turn, I’m not too grateful because I’m doing as much for you as you are doing for me. The unemployed should be treated as great gifts to a nation, because if they didn’t in their largeness of spirit agree to be unemployed, all the other toffee-nosed bastards who’ve got jobs couldn’t hold them. The unemployed should be fed and pampered, given double pay to what they’d get if they were working. There should be special centres where they could queue up for a daily ration of cigars. One prominent motto of my Democratic Republic of Euphoria would be: Hail to the unemployable, because they should inherit the earth in payment for letting the guilt-ridden neurotics of the world work.’
I suddenly felt the weight of Moggerhanger at one end pulling, and Almanack Jack at the other. His head fell forward, and in a few moments he was properly asleep. I got up and walked out, on foot all the way back to Ealing, brooding on the black ingratitude of such sly bastards as Almanack Jack. I took time off to phone Bridgitte’s place again, stood in a callbox at four in the morning, listening like a madman to that regular brain-sawing rhythmic buzz, feeling that if anyone were in the flat they’d have to get up and answer it or be driven as crazy as I was beginning to feel.
I wasn’t called till midday, thank God, and then only for a short visit to the lawyers. Moggerhanger didn’t want a holiday after his strain of waiting for the trial. He wasn’t that sort of man, and I should have known he wouldn’t be. In fact he was more ebullient and bullying than ever, and I began to hate his guts, though I didn’t want to quit because I liked the job so much, wanting at least to hang on to it while the mystery of Bridgitte’s disappearance was clawing at me. I also found that my heart in some way was missing Smog, which made me wonder what sort of a person I was. He’d latched so much on to the secret life of Bridgitte and myself that it almost seemed as if he were our child and not Dr Anderson’s.
My work was so hard that Moggerhanger should have had three chauffeurs instead of one, because now I was going at it from eight in the morning till sometimes ten at night. After his acquittal, business was surging. Clubs, brothels, and gambling pits were opening all over the place, and in spite of all regulations Moggerhanger was a law unto himself. The police had tried to get him, but he had beaten them with their own rules, and in consequence they treated him with far greater deference than before.
I was going fifty miles an hour along Bayswater Road at ten one night when a motor cyclops stopped us. When he peered in he said: ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know it was you, Mr Moggerhanger.’
‘That’s all right. I was busy at these papers and didn’t know he was doing half a ton. Go a bit slower, you damned fool,’ he called to me. When we got going again he apologized: ‘I had to do that, Mike. They like to keep face, these coppers. Go as fast as you like beyond the Gate. We’re late already.’
From the Arch to the Gate, through the Bush to the Scrubs, and my daily zig-zags continued. I felt a marked man going into some of the more bizarre clubs that Moggerhanger had under his thumb. There was a striptease joint in which men peeled off to the buff in some corny act or other. The spectators seemed mostly lesbians, hefty women in rural drag up from the country, or grey-haired bony-faced executive business women, too drunk and bawdy to go back to work after three in the afternoon.
After a tour of such clubs and properties Moggerhanger told me to come to the house because he’d like a word with me. I was too dead tired to wonder what was up. We went into the living-room, and he didn’t tell me to sit down. ‘I hear you were at the club last week?’
I nodded.
‘I also hear that you left with June, and that you took her home.’
‘I saw her to the door.’
‘Maybe. But you didn’t get back here till five in the morning.’
‘I walked around.’
He laughed: ‘You’ve cooked your goose. I can’t have my chauffeur messing with my girlfriend. You can get out. I’ll pay you a month’s notice. Now. Tonight.’
‘That’s not right,’ I said.
‘Go in the morning, then. If you’re here when I get back for lunch tomorrow they’ll find your body — or part of it — in the Thames by the time it gets dark.’
‘It’s a bit sudden,’ I told him, trying to sound contrite so that he might let on who had told him about me and June. ‘What are you going to do for a chauffeur?’
There was a flicker of doubt regarding my guilt: ‘Kenny Dukes is taking over.’
‘Is he then? He’s always been envious of my job, the fat snake. If he can get it as easy as this, then good luck to him. There’s never been anything between me and June.’