‘That’s because you’re young,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll learn.’
I was always being told that, and it riled me. They said it in order to bring me round to their opinions. As far as I was concerned I’d learned already, but I had yet to find out how wrong I was. ‘They stay longer if you treat ’em better,’ I said.
‘Who wants them to stay? There are plenty more where they come from. They never get wise, either, so don’t tell me that.’
Pearl came in with a tray. ‘Do you take it black or white, Mr Blaskin?’
‘Better give it to me black, Pearly dear. That’s the way I’m feeling tonight, so watch your bum when we get to bed. I’m the sex maniac incorporated tonight.’
Her face went vermilion at this, so she turned to pour coffee for me. ‘Do you want me to leave?’ I asked Gilbert. There was a row of small pictures along the deep-blue wall behind his chair, of horses floundering to death, and jolly huntsmen in their bloody jackets lying on top of them with gritty smiles.
‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘unless you can’t stand my personal remarks to Pearl. You don’t mind, do you, lovely?’
She didn’t speak, tried to smile, but the coffee went down her wrong throat and she coughed to clear it out. I offered to start typing his novel right now.
‘The morning’s better,’ he said. ‘I can’t be bothered to find it. I think I put it in the bread bin. Or maybe it’s under my pillow. Or in the airing cupboard. Anyway, don’t bother me with such supremely unimportant questions. I think I’m going to have a thought.’ He lifted himself a little, and one of his profundities splintered the room.
‘It’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but how much are you going to pay me while I work for you? I was getting twenty a week at my last job.’
He threw his cigarette towards the electric fireplace but it landed on the carpet. ‘What’s all the hurry?’
‘I’ve got to go out and find a room for the night.’
He glared at Pearl, who still had her nose in the coffee: ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s the spare room if you want it. We can talk terms in the morning.’
It didn’t seem a bad place to hole up in if Moggerhanger should think to hunt me out for the theft of his cigarette lighter. ‘Darling,’ Gilbert said to Pearl, singing like a canary, ‘are you going to sit there watching a hole burn itself in my best carpet? One of my great great-uncles looted it from India, and that would be a sad end for it.’
I found the spare room, and on my way called at the kitchen, taking half a cold chicken from the fridge, as well as a few slices of Miracle Bread from the bin, and a tin of orange juice and two bananas. So I lay in bed and puffed myself on Blaskin’s goodies, while he was in the main room doing his best to stuff Pearl Harby.
I woke in the morning to the noise of Handel’s Messiah, which seemed a mockery to the confusion I felt inside me, because for a while I didn’t know where I was. Then the music made me want to laugh, because it was so great to hear first thing up from the dreams of oblivion that no matter where I was I felt glad to be alive and wanted to go on living for ever. Looking out I saw a great façade of drainpipes and back windows, lit up by the sun. By my pocket watch it was almost ten o’clock, and the smell of breakfast filtered under the door, together with the music singing ‘O my people’ which, the longer it went on, made me want to cry with joy, booming as if the world was full of drums and voices, so that when I lay down again, with my eyes closed, it began to pull me backwards by the feet, back towards some great river I’d never get out of.
I dressed to my shirt and trousers, then hungrily followed my nose. Blaskin was sitting in a grandad-armchair at the end of the kitchen table, a wine-dark dressing-gown looped around him, frowning over the various plates of breakfast that Pearl had laid out. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is serious in the morning. In the morning you realize with deadly dread that the past is the present, because whatever has happened in the past is part of now. To know this gives you an angel’s grip on life, but it’s a bitter pill, just the same.’
He began eating, and Pearl, whiter than the night before and far more haggard, wrote quickly in a pad by the side of her cornflakes, maybe what he was saying, though I couldn’t be sure, because at the same time she breathed heavily as if she were making up a shopping list. ‘My next novel is to be called Motto by Gilbert Blaskin. People may think I’ve gone crackers, using a title like that, but it’s the thought that counts.’
I launched a thousand cornflakes into a dish of milk. ‘I’ll give you two pounds a week with your room and food,’ he offered.
‘Two pounds fifteen,’ I haggled.
He glared at me. ‘Two pounds ten.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, thinking to take it for as long as it suited me.
‘My novel is about a man who came out of a Christmas cracker, and lived by the same motto, through thick and thin, until he gets run over by a bus while being chased by the police for firing an air-gun at a horse-guard’s horse. Pearl, the bacon’s cold.’ I couldn’t see myself lasting very long in this place, though I thought that if I was here for the next half-hour I’d be all set to hang on as long as I liked.
She stopped writing: ‘What was the motto, Mr Blaskin?’
‘You’ll have to search the novel for that. It’s a quarter of a million words long and based on the Oedipus legend told backwards. It consists of four fateful words, but it does for our hero. Two will be hammered into his feet to lame him, and the other two will put out his eyes. That’s how he gets run over. He can’t see. Also he can’t run, but he hobbles very well. They find a copy of the Factories Act in his pocket, which is the only pornography he ever allowed himself. Also, of course, the pertinent question may be brought up as to how a blind man can aim an air-gun at a horse. The fact was, he didn’t need to run at all, would merely have been bound over, or patted on the head and given a safe seat by the Conservative Party. Such is life, he said, as they lifted the bus off him a few seconds before he expired!’
I got up and put the coffee back on the stove, while he chewed the fat of his insane liver that lived off the fat of the land. I wished I’d been working in a factory so that I could have told him to belt up and get some real work done.
His novel, a pile of paper tied up in purple cloth, was taken from a locked safe in his study and carried to my room as if it were the royal baby, and set on a table where I was to copy it on to a typewriter. I did ten pages the first day, but after that I speeded up to thirty or forty. It was better than I thought it would be, after all the gobbledegook he spouted when he wasn’t actually writing, and at the end of each day I quickly read what I’d done to make sure I’d missed no part of the story. Pearl sat in the living-room copying his notes, and writing her own book on what the great man said, and what his ideas were. She must have been more of a genius than he was to fathom that lot out. And while we were busy Gilbert himself was in his study, writing to the record of Handel’s Messiah, which he played over and over again. He said that with such music he fancied himself in the wilderness, with no other soul nearby for a hundred miles, and that’s what he liked because it kept his thoughts on an inspired and elevated level. Sometimes when he was in the kitchen or living-room eating in silence he would get a glazed look over his eyes and cry out: ‘Pass my pen. And some paper. I can feel it. Something’s coming!’ Pearl would usually hustle to do his bidding, so that he was able to scribble a few lines of whatever it was, then get back to the serious business of eating or throwing back brandy.