He must have been used to this sort of thing, because he offered me his hand to shake, and said how pleased he was that his work after all was having some effect on people like me. I went on telling him how good his books were, though in fact I’d only read one of them, or tried to, because I couldn’t get more than halfway, and had given it to Claudine for a birthday present, which made her see how different I was from other boyfriends, because none of them had given her a book before. She’d read it to the end and thought it was wonderful.
I told him I’d seen him in a pub on the A1 road but had been too shy to talk, and he said he remembered the place, being on his way back from Sheffield where he’d been to give a lecture on the modern novel and its place in society. He’d also spent a week cooped up in his flat with dysentery after the meal he’d eaten at the place I’d seen him in.
‘It’s a wonder you didn’t get anything worse,’ I said, ‘the things they dish out on the roads in this country,’ and he said how much better it was to be driving around France in the car, and I said I hadn’t had that pleasure yet. He introduced me to his girlfriend, who had lost much of his attention because she idolized him too much to make positive statements of admiration as I did. Her name was Pearl Harby, and I noticed her looking at me with big eyes as well. He didn’t explain who she was or what she did, but in the next opening of his brandy-mouth he wanted to know what I was doing in town.
‘I’m a chauffeur,’ I said, ‘or was until tonight. I left the job because the bigshot I drove was in such a hurry to get back from the country today that he told me to go over the speed limit through a built-up area. I thought it was dangerous, because kids were coming out of school. A big argument followed, and when we got back I told him I didn’t want to stay any more.’
Blaskin laughed: ‘You’re brash, and young, otherwise you’d have found some way out of it. What other jobs have you done?’
‘Estate agent, clerk, bouncer at a strip club, garage mechanic, to name a few. I’ve done most things.’
‘Can you type, dearest?’ he asked Pearl Harby.
‘No, Mr Blaskin.’
He turned to me. ‘Can you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good speed?’
‘Any speed.’
He ordered more drinks, all round. ‘I want somebody to type my novel. My secretary walked out on me because I was randy and tried to drag her into bed when she brought me my breakfast this morning. My wife left last week so she can’t type it, and the publisher’s clamouring at my shoulders. When can you start?’
There could only be one answer to that question: ‘Now.’ This pleased him, as it pleased everyone, and when he asked me where I lived I said where my own two feet are touching the ground.
‘You lucky bastard,’ he said jovially.
I stiffened: ‘Nobody ever calls me a bastard and gets away with it’ — my hand gripping the beer mug to rip him open with.
He laughed: ‘Well, let me be the first. Let’s be jolly and gay. I hate serious people. They take to politics and ruin everything.’ He dipped down and put his arm round Pearl Harby, dragging her close for a big kiss. I couldn’t very well smash the glass into his bald head, so held back till he stood upright again, but by then it was too late. My anger had gone and for the first time in my life I thought what the hell does it matter if someone does call me a bastard? It’s only in fun, and they can never know the truth anyway.
Most of the people in the room began moving towards the stairs. ‘We’re going up for a poetry reading,’ Gilbert said. ‘Come and listen. There may be a fight — you can’t tell, once poets get together.’
I pushed down the rest of my beer and joined the crush, making a way through with my suitcase. A girl in front didn’t like this at all, for she glazed me with the fire of her blue eyes and tut-tutted sharply. All I could do was smile, and change it to a flat look when her boyfriend swung round to find out whether I was trying to get off with her. Gilbert and Pearl came up the stairs in the gap I made. ‘What do you carry in that case?’ he asked.
‘Ashes,’ I said. ‘Mother, Father, two brothers, a sister, and four cousins.’
He held me grimly by the shoulder: ‘Listen, you aren’t a writer by any chance, are you?’
‘I’ve got more to do with my life.’
‘And you haven’t thought of becoming one?’ We were stopped at a small table and had to pay half a crown to get in.
‘Forget it,’ I said. He smiled with relief, while I paid all the fares and we passed into a large room with rows of wooden chairs laid out in it.
He leaned across Pearl Harby: ‘There’s a big attraction tonight, a working-class poet from Leeds.’
‘You don’t say?’ I said.
‘Ron Delph. The club invited him to read his poems. It’s hard to get poets to read their own work, but we’re hoping things will improve.’
‘Does it pay much?’ I said.
‘Five pounds, and expenses. Delph won’t live in London. He works in a brewery office, and won’t leave. Here he is!’
As soon as the name of Delph was mentioned I saw June’s face again while she’d told her story, that flash of it in my driving mirror. I was interested to know what he looked like after her information that he was the one who’d jaggered her with a daughter. He stood up front by a table, stared at everybody for a long two minutes. Then he took a bus or train ticket out of his pocket, and read in a loud monotone something like:
We enjoyed that, because though it might have been ordinary, he made it sound good. He tore the ticket into quarters, and threw it like confetti towards us. He was tall, had dark flat hair, and looked like a conjuror, because next he took a roll of toilet paper out of a shopping basket, and began undoing it, tearing it off sheet by sheet, and with everyone saying ‘Shit’, which he went on to say about a few hundred times.
We were held, hypnotized, pushed into silence — except for a few ignorant bastards who let out a giggle now and again, and someone who called: ‘Pull the chain, Ron, pull the chain’ — and nearly stopped the show. The tension was hardly to be borne as he got to the end of the roll, and especially when, with the final tear-off, he didn’t intone the expected word but spelled it slowly, letter by letter, S — H–I — T. A great noise of clapping spread in the room, as if a wooden ship of long ago were grinding itself up a long stretch of seashore rocks.
His next poem was about a man who accidentally stepped on a butterfly and killed it, and ends in tears of remorse for his savage act. ‘After the last General Election,’ Ron shouted, ‘my mother became Minister of Culture. She changed her name and put in for a new past, then marched down Whitehall to the marital music of a grenade of budgerigards.’
‘By God, he’s got talent,’ said Blaskin, lighting a cigarette and resting his head back on fag-smoke air, the schizophrenic’s pillow he always carried about with him.
‘But I’m not a poet of the niggling moral doubt,’ Delph shouted, picking a button off his jacket (which I’m sure he’d loosened deliberately hours before) and throwing it into the mouth of someone on the front row who yawned. ‘I’m in it for the quick quid and all expenses paid, and I want everybody to know it. I’m not a death-wish beetle eating away at the fabric of society. I’m just looking for a patron to buy me a coin-op laundry so I can sit in the warmth of it and spread my bed while my living goes on earning itself all around me. So if anybody knows a millionaire with the right incline I’ll note his post-office box in my little black book and — ’