The manager behind the desk still had the same sharp ulcerous look on his face. ‘Hello,’ he said to me, ‘back again? Thought we’d seen the last of you.’
‘I decided to come and settle up.’
‘Better late than never,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know you had pals here as well,’ said Bill’s bright mother, her hand crooked in my arm.
‘We’ll be in the lounge,’ I told the manager, ‘so bring the bill into me, with a double brandy, and a shandy. One for yourself, as well.’
‘When you came through that door just now I hardly knew you,’ he smiled. ‘You’ve prospered a bit since you pulled out so suddenly.’
I moved on, too exhausted to make much of a night of it in the lounge with Mr and Mrs Binns from Chesterfield, but they were happy and nice enough in their middle-aged way. They weren’t as pleased to see Mrs Straw as much as Mrs Straw would have liked, but it ended better than it started, for I plugged them all to capacity before we left, and paid my bill of nearly twenty pounds into the bargain. The manager had tears of gratitude on the pouches of his eyes. I’d got him to take a couple more brandies: ‘Nearly got thrown out because of you,’ he confessed, ‘because I’d had a few bad cases only a month before. You’re the first one that ever came back to pay in all my experience. It’s gladdened my faith in human nature a bit.’ On that slimy note, with the five of us fit to break into Auld Lang Syne, I pulled Mrs Straw into a taxi and back to her hotel. The same cab got me home. I was too done in to take a bath, and fell flat on to my bed like a board of lead, sleeping till midday with neither faces nor white horses to disturb my blackout.
I was wakened by the flat bell ringing, otherwise I might have stayed buried in warm wool till past teatime. I took the deep yellow envelope from the telegraph youth, still too much asleep to wonder what was in it. I dropped it on the table, then fell back on my bed. Half an hour later I got up and opened it on my way to the bathroom. As the piss piped out of me I read: = WILLIAM IN BEIRUT COOP STOP LUNG MOVING STOP ADDRESS FOLLOWING LOVE = LENINGRAD.
I surprised myself by catching on to it so quickly. Sun was coming in through the toilet window, so maybe that helped. Bill Straw had been caught in Beirut, and the man in the iron lung was being moved in a specially built pantechnicon through the London streets to another lair. Once he was installed, I would hear from them for a further assignment, unless the repercussions of international investigation swept us all into oblivion. I wondered what charge Bill would be on in the Lebanon, whether in fact the police there could fix him on anything at all, and somehow I couldn’t take it as seriously as I would if he’d been grappled at London airport, and thrown into the nick here, where he wouldn’t have got out in less than five years.
I set a kettle on the galley stove, and stood in my dressing-gown waiting for it to boil. I got the shakes, realizing I’d have to wait weeks for the kettle of news to boil. I’d be the last to get information from Jack Leningrad Inc, though I decided that when next called in for a job I’d threaten to smash that iron lung to bits with a hammer unless they told me all they knew. Worst of all, I had to phone his mother, but I decided to wait a couple of days, or till such time as she began to worry. I saw no point in upsetting her, by telling her immediately. If she asked why Bill hadn’t come back I’d say I didn’t know. And the next time she mentioned it she’d already be half inclined to receive bad news.
If Bill was really taken in Beirut, he was done for, in which case there was no reason why she shouldn’t know what was what, providing I could put my cowardice at having to spill the news to one side.
In most parts of me I didn’t believe it had happened, in spite of the fact that I’d been brought up to believe that telegrams didn’t lie. But I knew that this feeling was my loss, since there was no doubt that it had happened. Not only was Bill hooked, but I began to see that maybe the danger would root me out. There’d been nothing but fear since I’d started this job. But if I began to get worried at last, it wasn’t out of fear, only from wondering what it meant. This wasn’t the sort of work for somebody like me, certainly not what I’d come to London for. It was a load on my back, exactly what I’d intended to avoid. I’d been trapped, but how and by whom, that was the question. I sat down to some tea and bread. I was in the middle of a quicksand bog, nobody within ten miles to come and talk to me while I went down. The trouble was I had no impulse to run. Somewhere, way back in the dark, my Achilles tendon had been cut, and I didn’t grieve about that but I didn’t know whether this was going to turn out to my advantage or not. Was it ever better to stay still, or to run? If I didn’t get the impulse to run, then it was obviously better to sit still. When the impulse did come I’d run twice as quick and to a place twice as safe than I would if I set off somewhere without being absolutely impelled. So I made a virtue out of my idleness and sloth. When strength came out of weakness it had the force of self-preservation behind it, and that was what I depended on. There didn’t seem much else at the moment.
I got dressed and walked into town. On the way I put my three hundred pounds into the bank, which now made six hundred on deposit for a wet and thundery day. I took out half a crown, and flipped it up, heads I would phone Polly, tails I would try Bridgitte. It clattered healthily as it hit the pavement, rolled into a gutter and down a grate, lost for ever. You just had to make your own decisions.
There was no reply from Bridgitte, so I dialled Polly’s number. ‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice which struck me as strange.
‘Is that Polly?’
‘Yes, what do you want?’
‘I want to speak to Polly.’ Somebody went by the phone booth, with a placard saying ‘The Bomb Also Kills Children’.
‘This is Polly. Who is that?’
‘Michael.’
‘Michael bloody who?’
‘From Geneva. Remember?’
‘Oh, yes. How stupid. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve got a few days off. Can I see you?’
‘Come over,’ she said.
‘Is that all right?’
‘Mum and Dad are in Ostend.’
‘As soon as I can, then.’ I put the phone down. Outside, I thought I’d dreamed it, but I knew I never had such dreams. With me, it was either reality or nothing.
Half an hour later I went up the drive of the Villa Moggerhanger, smelling the luxury of fresh hedges and growing flowers. Grey clouds were flying away from London, racing for the hills and grass. José, the Spaniard, opened the door and welcomed me like an old friend. ‘Mr Moggerhanger is out.’
‘I’ve come to see Polly,’ I told him. She was in the garden, so I found her clipping roses from a row of bushes near the back wall. I intended greeting her casually, so as not to alarm her, but she took my hands, hers cold, and I don’t know how it happened but both of us were kissing straight away. ‘I tried to get through to you half a dozen times, but your mother hung up on me. Then I had to do a trip to Paris.’
‘I’ve been longing for you,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just going to end like the others, that once you got to know me, as you did in Geneva and on the way back, then you wouldn’t want to see me any more.’
‘It’ll take at least a hundred years to get to know you,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up West for lunch.’ I was nervous of hanging around the Moggerhanger lair for too long in case Claud himself should suddenly spring up from the ground. My instinct told me to get out of the place, though I couldn’t see rationally why, since Polly said he was in Ostend — though maybe he’d only gone there for a drink.
‘I’d hate that,’ she said. ‘I’m turned off the middle of London. You’ve driven Dad’s Bentley, haven’t you?’ We walked together along the path, and she suddenly threw all the roses she had collected behind a laurel bush.