‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘The answer’s no,’ he said. ‘I was in love with my father, but he was killed down the pit when I was seven. While he was alive I didn’t know I was in love with him, but when he died I knew I’d never get over it and love anybody else — except maybe my mother, but she’s still alive, so it’s still only an infatuation. There’s lots of women I like, and some I wanted to marry, but as for love, I can’t say I have. I’ve often wondered about it, when it’s going to happen and if it ever will, but I’ve been waiting so long that I’ve given up hope. I broke my heart as a kid, before I could understand what was what, not altogether over my father, but over what came after. The general misery of our lives. There was nothing to live for except life itself, nobody even to say we were living like this so that tomorrow would be better. I couldn’t stand it. I was made to despair too young. After that I couldn’t fall in love — not at all.’ He flicked his ash halfway across the room. ‘I’m not moaning about it. I sometimes think that English hearts weren’t strong enough to bear that much.’
‘Don’t you want revenge, then?’ I said, thinking how much better off I’d been than he had.
‘On who? Even if I knew I wouldn’t want it. I wasn’t so crushed that I wanted revenge. Revenge is the last resort of the dead in spirit. I enjoy life too much to think about that. As for love — we always get back to it, don’t we? — well, I’m resigned to it never happening, but don’t think I’m unhappy about it because I’m not. That’s the way my life went, and now that I know it’s settled that way, I feel easier in myself. It’s no use clamouring over things your common-sense tells you you’ll never get, is it? Some people I suppose would eat their own bollocks to save their fingernails, but not me, mate. I’m doing all right now, and I want it to stay like that till I decide what to do with the money I’m piling up. I’ll be worth a lot soon, and do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy a smallholding, go into the market-gardening business. I’ll get a cottage and three or four acres in Notts with the cash I’ve stashed. My mother can stay with me if she likes, and if I meet a woman who’ll team up and work at it the same as I do, then I’ll be satisfied.’
‘I hope you make it then,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s true that you have to be forty to realize what you want out of life.’
‘I’ve known that since I was twenty. But I’ve not admitted it to myself or spoken it out loud. It’s been laying low. I only yap about it now that there’s a chance of it coming about, and no fucking peradventure about it. But tell me the stuff on this bint that’s got your heart going up and down like a yo-yo. I can envy you that much at least.’
‘It’s somebody I met before I went away, but there’s no point talking about it.’
‘There’s every point. If you don’t talk you choke, and if you choke you rot. You go all black inside and explode when you’re fifty. Horrible mess. I believe it’s called cancer, the plague that afflicts the silent type with the stiff upper lip.’
‘Well, I’ll never get that disease. I’ll just have to get in touch with her.’
‘Let’s get out,’ he said, ‘and get in touch with some food. I’m hollow.’
We went to the restaurant in Soho where I’d first met up with him again after our trip from the North, and drank a bottle of wine each, because William said it was his birthday. He insisted that we do no less because it was, he said, with beady eyes set on me, the first one he’d spent in affluence for a good few years. And not only that, but a birthday was always special and not to be treated lightly because it meant that you had survived another year of life, had fenced off death, maiming, starvation, and black night of one sort or another. You could put your fingers to your nose at the year that had gone, while setting yourself to greet the oncomer with respect. ‘A birthday is a time to count the miracles,’ he went on, ‘and tot up my luck. When I was a kid nobody bothered with them. They went by unnoticed because we were too busy breathing. The fact that I’ve got time to remember it these days shows how well-off I am.’
‘You’re in a fine mood,’ I laughed, ‘but how old are you?’
He sliced up his escalope. ‘Thirty-nine’s the score, and I feel every year of it.’
I went with him to St Pancras Station to meet his mother. When he saw her come out of a second-class carriage he started shouting, ‘I sent ten pounds for you to travel first class, and now you do this dirty trick on me. It ain’t right, Ma.’
‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ I backed away because I couldn’t believe all that screeching came from her. In any case she aimed it at me, and for a moment I thought she was right off her pot and that she took me for William, but then it was plain that the mechanism of her eyes was at fault. ‘What would I do in first class, you great loon? You don’t know who you might meet in them places. And don’t snap at me like that. Nobody’d know you were my own son. After all I’ve been through! I’ve a good mind to get back on this train and go back to Worksop.’
William turned pale, but bent down to kiss her. ‘Don’t do that Ma,’ he pleaded like a little boy, ‘I wanted you to do it in comfort, that’s all.’ This seemed a bit rare when I remembered his own journey. He’d certainly rung a lot of changes in his belfry during this last year. ‘Where’s your suitcase?’ he asked, when the circle of listeners began to clear off.
She was a small thin person, an absolute proud wreck, with a pale-blue coat and a powder-blue hat over her coal-grey hair. She had glasses and false teeth, and it wasn’t possible to tell her age, though in spite of these trimmings she was nearer sixty than forty, shall I say. ‘I forgot it. Like as not it’s in the carriage still.’
‘I’ll go and get it.’ When I came back with it, my socket tearing at its load, I saw them going towards the exit, where William had a taxi waiting. The taxi driver swore at the weight of it: ‘What’s in here, lead?’
‘Gold bars,’ Bill laughed. ‘She brings her own coal with her!’
His mother pulled me into the taxi beside her: ‘It’s nice to have two young men with me, on my first trip to London. It is a big place, isn’t it, Bill? Bigger than Worksop, anyway.’ I got out at Cambridge Circus, not wanting to hear her comments on Nelson’s Column.
I walked into the Square, nevertheless, and joined the throng. My hat was jerked off by the wind, and I ran across the flagstones to get it, under the spray of both fountains, scattering pigeons right and left. I looked at every girl’s face to see if it was Polly Moggerhanger’s. I don’t think I was in love with her. There was too much of a bite in it for that, as if I was the apple that Eve had bitten, rather than Adam himself who’d got booted out of paradise and must finally have felt proud of it.
I bought a tin of corn from a stand and fed the pigeons, holding my palm flat and watching a bit of real greed as they jostled each other to gobble it up. I liked their button eyes, as they pecked and trusted me not to grab them while they had their fill. I bought tin after tin, and the more they scoffed the more wary they got, so that while I could have snatched them easily when they were hungry, I had only to lift a finger now and they went off in a cloud. I was a friend of all the world, in my coat of many colours, and the corn vendor gave me a couple of free tins till finally the pigeons were strutting over the corn without picking it up, because other people were podging them as well.
I went into a callbox and dialled the Moggerhanger number. A woman answered, maybe her mother. ‘Is Polly in?’
‘No,’ she said, and hung up. I walked towards the Strand hoping to see her. A jeweller’s window interested me for a few minutes, then I doubled back and went into Lyons for lunch. I wasn’t hungry and left the plate spilling with cake-scraps and cellophane. I poured half a bottle of red sauce over it and shambled away.