My early morning hard-on came back, and I thought I’d said enough already to indicate that I had nothing to lose by spouting a bit more in somewhat plainer fashion. ‘Do you let rooms here, that’s all I want to know. I’d give my right arm and more to be alone with you. As soon as I came in and saw you by the hot water urn I knew I loved you. I wasn’t going to say so, though, because it didn’t seem right. I respected you. And besides, there’s a time and a place for everything, as it says in the Bible. My wife died five years ago, and I made a vow never to make love with anyone again, and as time went on it became easier to keep that holy vow’ — I made my voice miss a beat, and held my head as if in pain — ‘until I came in here and saw you.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she smiled, ‘but go on.’
‘That’s because you’re a very sincere person. I wouldn’t have told you this if I hadn’t seen straightaway that you were a very sincere person. What I’m saying is the truth, and I couldn’t have told it, except to a very sincere person. You’re the first person I’ve told it to, and I respect you enormously for not believing me. If you’d believed me I would have got up and walked out. There aren’t many sincere people left in the world, and now you’ve certainly made my day. You’re busy, I know’ — there was no one in now except us — ‘but I’d like to talk to you properly, just the two of us, in a private room somewhere, any room where we can be alone.’
My face got closer, and my hands crept around her waist. She shook, and I thought she was going to come out with some filthy language and run, but she held my hand and looked back at me so that while she melted at the touch of my fingers I melted at the crutch and pressed close enough for her to feel what, for better or worse, was coming between us at the hour of our tribulation.
The windows and door of the flimsily built café rattled at the passage of some particularly weighty giant on wheels. I knew the time had come, that it was now or never, so pressed even closer to begin whispering sweet nothings into her pretty eggshell ear, my lips brushing against the plain wire earrings. ‘I love you. I want to kiss your lips, suck your tits, and lick your sweet cunt till you come, then sink my prick into you, and grip your shapely arse and push your lovely guts around till my spunk shoots so far up you it comes out of your mouth and splashes against the opposite wall. Oh my sweet darling, I can’t wait.’
‘Oh, you dirty bastard,’ she said. ‘Come on, though.’
We leaned by the wall in a little cubby-hole of brooms and mops, and kissed ourselves into a frenzy. It was good to get back to somebody from the working classes (if I could find the right one, I’d always thought, and she was it) boiling for me because she didn’t think I was a slum-brat from the working classes. She came with a long moan, assuming I was somebody different (and I suppose I was by now), and then I shot, knowing that she could have been the girl next door, fully grown up, who I used to play dirty games with in the air raid shelter. It worked marvels, and was all the better for being over in a few minutes. Some say there’s nothing like a good fuck, and they could be right, but I say there’s nothing better than a quick fuck that comes off for both participants.
I asked her again to travel with me to London, and don’t know what I’d have done if she had said yes, but I only asked knowing she’d say no. ‘Next time I might,’ she said. Would I phone and write and call again, and then maybe we’d slowly get to know each other because she had never met anyone like me before. I was astounded and gratified that somebody could know me — or think they did, which was the same — in such a short time, when I’d been living in my own skin all my life, and was nowhere near knowing myself.
I thought, as I went out to the toilets, that you only had a chance of knowing yourself when you were acquainted with a lot of people who said they knew you and acted as if they did. But I also thought what a pity that somebody should fall in love with me, and me half in love with them, when I was on my way to London in a situation where, before many hours were out, I would get into an argument which might leave my face so cut up that Ettie wouldn’t recognise me anymore.
I felt as light as air because whatever was supposed to happen could never be said to have happened until it had, and between one and the other was always a wider space and a longer time than you could imagine. I glanced at the wall and saw a piece of paper stuck there, which I thought was something about not hurling your fag butts into the piss channel, but on zipping up and going close I read:
Ronald Delphick, poet lariot, roped into life with a naval cord, cabin-buoyed to the Wash and the Severn Seas. Yo ho ho on a fat woman’s hornipipe. Poetry performance, panda-wise, at Stevenage Leisure Centre half past seven tonight. Admission one pound fifty. Programmes two pounds. Books for sail.
I’d hoped he had vanished, but when I got outside he was wiping gnats off the windscreen with a piece of wet cloth. ‘Thanks for the breakfasts. I’m sorry for that bit of bovver in there.’
He seemed different, as if he’d been drunk in the café, or stoned, but was now fully recovered. While I’d been with Ettie he must have had a wash-and-comb-up in the toilet, because he looked cleaner and smarter. I couldn’t tell him to walk to Stevenage, so opened the door for him to get in. Dismal dashed out and left a squalid mess by a dustbin. When I looked for his breakfast plate Delphick said he’d already taken it inside. ‘I saw that waitress, and she was crying. What happened?’
‘It’s none of your business.’ I passed him a cigar. ‘Suck that.’
Dismal sat beside me, and I set off once more into the mainstream of motorised life. We were quiet for a while, Dismal like a statue in front, Delphick like a dummy behind and the panda sticking out of the boot like a waxwork. I didn’t feel lively, either, but was otherwise happy. The clouds were white and dense, like those on engravings of Greenland in picture books. I almost expected to see a whaling ship come from behind one, then braked to avoid hitting a Cortina, and swung out to overtake after checking in the mirror that all was clear.
A dual carriageway took us between stunted trees, and in spite of a few attractive laybys I decided to drop Delphick at the slip road into Stevenage, so that he could push in with his panda-pram in appropriate style. The southern weather was better, open sky with few clouds, so neither he nor his cargo of literature would get wet. I told him my intention.
‘That’s good of you,’ he said. ‘If you’re ever in Yorkshire, you’ll be welcome to stay a day or two at Doggerel Bank. There’s always a pan of stew on the Rayburn, and a demijohn of elderberry wine. Bring a sleeping bag, though, because I’ve only got one bed. And a bottle of whisky, if you can. It gets a bit damp at times, but you’ll manage all right.’
He meant well. ‘Thanks.’
‘And a few tins of cat food might be useful.’ He couldn’t think of anything else, a bad silence because I dreaded the time when I would have to let him off. I wanted to go back and plead with Ettie to come with me, and even for Delphick to stay on, so that at least I would be among familiar faces when the big chop came.
If my depressions ever lasted more than a few moments maybe I would have learned something. But they didn’t, and I never had the spiritual constitution to support mental pain long enough either to be destroyed by one, or educated and improved. I always sensed a feeling of regret when I began to come out of the gloom. ‘Tell me a poem,’ I said to Delphick, ‘and I’ll give you thirty bob.’