People were moving off, first class first, which meant her, so she found her pile of luggage and joined the procession, held tightly to the rail as if the ship were still moving and she was afraid of being pitched, baby and all, too quickly down. Through the hangar-wide doorway Albert Handley stood on the quayside, talking to one of the stewards. She had written, not asking him to meet her, yet knowing he would. He wore a long brown overcoat, collar up, and a cap with a short peak. He’d offered a cigar to the steward, lit one himself, talking all the time and looking the ship’s length to try and find her. But he gazed offhandedly along the wrong deck, as if further gangplanks would slide out from there and she would descend, easy to see, all alone but for the baby. He seemed too close to the earth to look in the right place. She waved. He saw her. The great doors of the shed opened, luggage and people already going in. He flapped back: ‘Get off that coffin, before you start to love it. Come on, I’ve bribed the customs to let that pot and hashish through!’
She smiled at such rousing, had seen him only once, dead drunk at the opening of his first Bond Street show that made him catastrophically rich and famous as a painter. Being Frank’s friend, he was tenuously hers, and turned out to welcome her in spite of the final-sounding quarrel when he and Frank last met.
Tall, slim and swart, his eyes glowed with wellbeing, odours of cigar-smoke and after-shave. They neither kissed nor shook hands, but he uncovered the baby and bent close: ‘You go off with my best friend, and this is what you bring back!’ — grinning as they stood on the quay. ‘Come on, my Rambler’s waiting on the other side of that concentration-camp wire-fence. I’ll run you home to Buckinghamshire if that’s where you want to go. Shall I carry the heir to the Dawley millions? I expect he will end up as the bloody Emir of Khazakstan after Frank’s done freebooting around, in spite of his spine-communism. What’s he trying to do, anyway? Liberate colonial peoples from the gin-traps of modern imperialism? He can’t tell that to me. If he was a real liberator he’d be right back here trying to liberate us from these dead tectonic chiselheads about to open your case. Look at them. Go on, look at them! Then he’d really wither up under the napalm of their blank stares.’
She was early off the boat, and three came towards her. A pale long-lined face with bluebottle eyes, holding a notice in front of her saying what she could and could not bring into the country, asked her to read it. The baby cried, and two of the customs men frowned. The one who didn’t must be a Welshman, Handley thought, or a Scot.
‘Open that,’ Jack Lantern said, tapping one of her cases with his notice-board. Albert bent to do so. ‘Are you her husband?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t live together, either. We do it by post — registered.’
The man looked at her underwear, Moroccan slippers, a Moslem robe, filigree daggerwork from Fez. ‘Can I see your passport?’
‘I don’t have one,’ Handley said, ‘on me.’
‘How did you get into the country?’ A faint smile, as if seeing him already marched screaming back to the ship.
‘He came to meet me,’ Myra said, quietening Mark. More people were spreading bewildered into the enormous shed.
‘You’re not allowed in here,’ Jack Lantern said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘My car’s outside,’ Handley told them. ‘I had a word with the AA man and the RAC man as I came in. They’ll vouch for me.’
‘How are we to know you’re telling the truth?’ Jack Lantern’s pal put in with a sneer.
Handley made a genuine appeal. ‘Would you do me a favour?’
Now they’d got him. He was begging for something, the first stage towards tears and breakdown. They lightened in feature: ‘What exactly do you mean?’
‘Deport me. Go on. Get me on that ship so that I can leave when it turns round, away from the servile snuffed-out porridge-faces of this pissed-off country. It goes to Australia, doesn’t it? There’s a bit of the Ned Kelly in me, so send me there. Not to mention a touch of the tarbrush and a lick of the didacoi. I’m an alien right enough. I don’t even have one of your seed-catalogue passports. So deport me if you don’t believe me, and see if I grovel and scream to stay in this senile dumping-ground.’
He picked up Myra’s cases, and she followed him towards the exit, expecting at any moment to be pounced on and dragged back towards some sort of aliens’ pen. Albert didn’t look round, his neck and face, every pore and inch of skin, fighting to keep the blood from bursting out of him: ‘Frank was right. How can you start here? You can’t. It’ll be so desperate though, when it does start, that you’ll need the training-grounds of Algeria to stand any chance at all.’
His car was parked in the sunshine, a low-slung black American station-wagon with rear red indicators as round as traffic-lights. ‘I need this monster for my mob. Seven kids I’ve got, or did have when I last counted them, and they’ll never leave me now that I’ve struck money. Before, I thought there was a chance they might starve to death or get run over, but now they’re with me for life.’ He assembled a carrycot in the back. ‘I thought you might need it. It was Enid’s kind thought, really. We’ve got a dozen or two around the house and gardens. You can keep it till he walks. A coming-home present.’
Chapter Two
Because of his bellicose mood he drove slowly through the patched-up flat marshland of Essex. The radio played, the heater warmed, the baby slept after his psychic shouting at the customs. ‘They couldn’t touch me,’ he said. ‘They could deport me, they could put me inside for a bit, but I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Whatever happens boils up the old paint-pot for when the keel gets level again.’
‘You wouldn’t talk like that if you weren’t a well-known painter,’ she said, though knowing that he would.
He overtook a giant bowser full of milk-shake: ‘It makes me bitter, the way they treat people. All I did was scale a wall, snap open a door, and walk under a crane to get to the ship. When I meet people I meet them, not wait behind a gate as if I know my place. If I wasn’t a well-known painter I don’t suppose I’d be meeting somebody like you at all, coming off a big posh liner. I was at a party last night, and bumped into a publisher — Arbuthnot by name — who’s got your husband’s book on his list — George Bassingfield, isn’t it? — and he was raving about how superb it was. You’re a woman of the world, even if you have had a baby by my best gun-humping pal!’
There was no way to stop him ripping open wounds like letters with a paper-knife. She had sent George’s manuscript to the publisher he’d mentioned while still alive, and would sign the contract now that she was back in England.
She fed the baby in a pub, Handley tasting his first pint of the day at the bar, as the baby supped the milk of Myra’s nowadays ample breasts in a private room upstairs. They were taken for man and wife, Handley lean, sardonic and domineering; Myra cool, dark-haired, attentive to her baby — a couple who, being so hard to place and travelling in such a car, were thought by those who served them to have inherited vast amounts of money they could never have deserved. ‘Do not define yourself. Other people can do that,’ she thought, holding Mark high on her shoulder for his glass-eyed paradisal belch.
On the road again, gliding between frosty March fields to the almost silent sewing-machine engine, Myra thanked him for coming all the way down from Lincolnshire to meet her.