PART TWO
Thirteen
This is me, Gilbert Blaskin, writing. Fasten your safety belts. Cullen’s story has come into my hands, and there’s a gap in his narrative which needs to be bridged. It’s an unprecedented step for me to doctor an offspring’s book, but art ever instills a striving for perfection — and that means in anybody else’s work that comes to my always grateful hand. The reason Zhdanov Blaskin hates communism is that if ever it came to power, and I was made minister for culture, I wouldn’t be able to trust myself. Knowing there are limits to human perfectibility, especially mine, saves me from committing a multitude of sins against my fellow men. I only wish I could say the same about women.
A few days after seeing Michael Cullen for the first time in months, if not years (how the hell should I know when I last saw my son?) he came in one afternoon and left a creature called Dismal with me. He was in a peculiar mood and I couldn’t guess why, except that he was just back from a jaunt around the country on behalf of that bandit Moggerhanger. I hoped he hadn’t done anything that would get him in trouble with the police. He kept lifting his eyes and looking at the ceiling, as if expecting God to come down from his Kingdom and help him. It worried me. Then it irritated me. When he wouldn’t have a drink because he was driving I really began to worry. I had a ferocious headache after a long night on the town, so had the courtesy to drink his share with my own.
Nor did he stay long enough to change his mind. There’s more of me in him, in the manner of obstinacy, than I sometimes like to imagine, and he’s as firm in his ways as I am in mine. Though they don’t touch at the moment, I expect they will more and more as time goes on. I wondered what he had done to deserve such a fate.
Nor have I any liking for dogs. The hound he left with me, by the name of Dismal, tore a packet of my cigarettes to bits as if he was the wrath of God sent forth by one of those lunatic anti-smoking types. It endeared me to it, nevertheless. I wished he’d knocked the whisky bottle over as well. I put the cigarettes that survived back on the table, thinking that life was too short to give up smoking and that in any case it was just my luck to get cancer if I did. Then I poured another glass of whisky, as a continuation of my afternoon breakfast, and when it had slithered into my stomach like an egg on fire I told myself that this style of life can’t go on, something I always say when I begin to feel better, especially after a night out that ended in the police station and in court the morning after.
Down Sloane Street at midnight my car was halfway up a lamp post. ‘I have reason to believe you’ve been drinking,’ one of the young lads in blue said.
‘Let’s breathalyse the bleeder,’ said the other.
I was about to deny all knowledge of drink when unfortunately I was sick, which seemed to confirm their suspicions.
‘Unmistakable vomit,’ said the policeman in court.
‘Yes,’ said the magistrate, ‘you did rather stop a packet, didn’t you?’ He was a genial old cove, and I’d been up before him often.
‘A pint, sir, not a packet,’ said the constable.
‘Well, a quart, if you like,’ said the beak. ‘I don’t suppose Mr Blaskin has anything to say for himself. He never has.’
I’d been feeling queasy all night in the cell.
‘Twenty-five pounds fine, and fifteen pounds costs,’ grinned the beak. Then the bloody awful thing growled once more. The beak got panicky: ‘Make it twenty-five pounds costs for the dry cleaning. And get him out of here. Quick! Quick!’
It was too late. He called for sawdust, and I could only commiserate. I was lucky to get off so lightly. Realising such behaviour would have to stop, I lit another cigarette and poured more whisky. Dismal walked out of the kitchen and jumped on my knee. I pushed him off, and looked through the mail to see if there was any money. I found a two hundred pound money order for the translation of one of my early novels into Serbo-Croat, which would just about pay for last night’s foray. God looks after his own, and writers.
I went into the kitchen for something to eat. Every weekend I stocked up with goodies from Harrods, and though it was only Tuesday, there was nothing left. I gave Dismal a kick. He looked at me reproachfully, and ate a letter — fortunately not the one with the cheque in it. I patted him, sorry I had been unjust to such a clever dog who could get paté and sausages out of the refrigerator, or bread and tinned delicacies from the larder, or my best wine from the cupboard. I would have given a lot to see him working the corkscrew. I have a bad memory regarding the consumption of food, but I knew there should have been more than I saw.
At three o’clock my charwoman Mrs Drudge came in, and it was obvious that she hadn’t put on extra weight in the last few days. I daren’t say anything about the food shortage, because she was very sensitive about such things, perhaps because of her name. When she came into the living room and complained about the mess, as well she might, I said: ‘Where the hell have you been, Mrs Drudge, to let the flat get so untidy? I can’t put up with it. If things go on like this, I shall have to dismiss you.’
I suppose I must explain (being a writer) that her real name was Drudge-Perkins, and that she came from a highly respected family. She had a statuesque and severe aspect, and was forty years of age. For a brief period, in her early thirties, she had been my mistress. I say mistress advisedly, because that’s what it was like whenever I got her into bed. I’d first met her when I gave a talk at Camp House (Contemporary Arts, Music and Poetry) on ‘Art and the People’, or was it ‘The Novelist and the Moral Crisis of the Age’? She took me to task afterwards (her phrase) on my cynicism, which I called reality, but we climbed into bed before the argument got far, she because she wanted to hear my final views on the matter (I was very subtle and diplomatic in those days, not to say devious), and me because I needed to get to the fundamental parts of her matter. And so things went from bad to better and from better to ecstatic. She was one of the best women I ever had and she wasn’t averse to indicating, by her concupiscent frigidity, that I was one of the worst men for her. She was a single woman with a private income, and I rode that one till she offered to give it to me, so that I could nobly refuse, which I did. She did my typing for a while, after the demise of poor Pearl Harby, until I got tired of correcting her myriad mistakes (and her trying to alter my style and take out what she considered the dirty bits but which were tepid pictures of what really flowed through the sewers), and took on somebody else, when she agreed, as she put it, to clean my pigsty now and again. Her flat was in the same block, on the third floor, so she didn’t have far to come.
As for her appearance, what can I say, except that I still occasionally slavered over her, though of course, given our somewhat changed attitude towards one another, she was infinitely more difficult to get at. In order to emphasise the dignity of her position, and to show how far beneath herself she was stooping in cleaning up my slops, she never dressed below the standard of a Queen of Hearts out shopping. Her hair style was immaculate though severe, as befitted a personality which she had no intention of changing, even if she had been able to. She wore a conservative tight-fitting expensive dress whenever she appeared, sporting a string of pearls, a bracelet, a ring, and black shoes with a strap fastened demurely over the plump top of her foot with a shiny black button. She must have spent more time getting ready to come up and do my chores than on the work itself, but for the last five years she had never been less than frosty in her attitude to me who, though I have never done anything basically wrong, insulted her to the core by the fact that I had been born.