There was a pause while he lit a cigar. ‘The trouble is, I’m not the only one in the trade. If I was, everything would be all right, but some new organisations commit such daylight robbery it makes my blood run cold — and that’s not an easy thing to do. Fly-by-night firms are popping up all over the place, as if the oil wells are going to run dry tomorrow. They can’t get their hands in the till fast enough, and so far I’ve never seen any of them with bandages on their wrists. It makes the Great Train Robbery look like absconding with a blind man’s penny-box. Investment banks go bust overnight. Ships full of goods disappear at sea. A man pays millions for a block of flats that belongs to somebody else. You name it, they get up to it. And it goes on even at the bottom end of the market. Some people are so unscrupulous that they add insult to injury by taking most of the money out of the country, to such places as Zürich and Lichtenstein. But me, though I make a lot, I plough it back. I buy houses and land, and invest on the stock exchange.’ He held a finger across his throat. ‘I’m up to here in National Savings. A pittance. But it looks good. I also employ people, such as yourselves. In other words, I keep as much money as I can in the country, and I spread it around, not only as security for my family, but as a patriotic duty. Yes, I’ve got a lot invested in good old England, Michael. If ever the ship goes down you won’t see me in the lifeboat with a lot of rats.’
The thought of Moggerhanger in a lifeboat horrified me. How far would you get with such a shark on board? ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I shan’t go on, except to say that there are more gangs than there used to be, and the worst is the Green Toe Gang. How they got that damned name, I’ll never know. But what’s in a name? Suffice it to say, they’ve given me more trouble these last two or three years than I think I deserve. They seem to know more about what goes on in my business than they should by any intelligent assumption, as if they’ve got somebody planted in my office. If I could find out who it was, well, I don’t think I need tell you, Michael, what I’d do. A loyal man like you knows very well what I’d do. If there’s anyone I can’t stand it’s a traitor. I’ve learned in my life, though, that a good man rarely sells himself for money. That’s why I’ve taken you on. I sorely need someone like you within arm’s reach because you know, and I know you know, that being a traitor’s not for the likes of you or me, because we had similar upbringings, give or take a bob or two. I worship steel, not gold. Never turn your face on a friend, or your back on an enemy.’
‘No, sir.’ I spoke only to find out whether I still had a voice. The more he went on with such blarney the more I distrusted him. Bill Straw once said that Moggerhanger never told you anything without reason, and if he did it was always bad — for you.
‘You can stop at the next layby,’ he yawned. ‘I want to change places with Alice and get my forty winks.’
The miles went quickly. I was near Tadcaster by the time I made the switchover and he bedded down under a thick patchwork blanket.
‘Do you mind if I call you Alice?’ I asked when I set off again.
‘Why not?’
I caught a smile in the profile that peeped out of a flimsy headscarf.
‘I still hope you’ll do me the honour of having dinner with me after we get back to Town.’
She took the book from her bag. ‘I’d like to read, if you don’t mind.’
‘Make free. What is it?’
‘Something by Gilbert Blaskin called The Warp and the Weft.’
‘Is it good?’
‘I can’t tell. I’m only halfway through.’
It was the one I had typed for him, and added a few bits in my own right, when I first met him in London. ‘I know Blaskin.’
‘You do?’
‘He had an affair with my mother.’
She didn’t believe somebody like me could possibly be acquainted with a novelist. Her laugh, however, encouraged me to hope I was more than halfway there. ‘That was thirty-five years ago. He was a lieutenant in the army, stationed near Nottingham. Then he went overseas and left her pregnant. Out popped me.’
The book, at any rate, was back on her knee. ‘What an imagination.’
‘When we go to dinner, I’ll tell you more. But I’m afraid I’ll never be able to introduce you.’
‘That’s because you don’t know him.’
‘No. If I did, I’d lose you. He’s the biggest lecher in the kingdom. And I’m passionately in love with you. It’s as much as I can do to drive this car.’ My hand was sliding up her thigh. ‘Does being in a car make you feel randy?’
‘Sometimes it does.’
‘We’ll have to contain ourselves. But I’d love to suck your delicious cunt till I made you come.’
‘Stop it,’ she said sharply.
‘Did you see Gilbert Blaskin’s last television interview?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘It was one of that series called “Writers and Their Habits” on Channel Five. He was interviewed by that lovely young person called Marylin Blandish. Do you know her?’
‘I’ve seen her. She’s pretty.’
‘They were in his flat, and she started asking him pertinent intellectual questions about his work, and he gradually got his chair close enough to give her a kiss. It was so quick and light that she almost didn’t know it had happened. Then he gave her one that she did know about. And then, Women’s Lib being all the rage, she thought she’d equalise by kissing him.’
‘I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying.’
‘I’m not asking you to. The intellectual question and answer game was kept up through long looks and subtly moving lips. Old Blaskin’s patter was so good — or something was — and it was a full moon that evening, so she kissed him back, and the television crew, instead of closing the show as they should have done, were so mesmerised at what was happening, and at what seemed likely to transpire, that they just watched and carried on working.’
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’
‘Neither had I. But Blaskin — so he told me later — regretted not being able to control his actions, and he slipped his waistcoat off with the excuse that it was hot under the lights, and after a few more minutes he got her blouse off, both of them mumbling away about where a writer finds his ideas and discussing in an otherwise perfectly normal way how he lets politics in the twentieth century influence his work. The TV crews were fascinated by that — as Blaskin and Marylin slithered onto the medium piled carpet. Blaskin’s hand went up her clothes and fumbled at her tights with a look of beatific malevolence as he told her about his horrible childhood at boarding school and the poems he wrote when he was seventeen on the Spanish Civil War.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m certainly not. It’s as true as I’m sitting here. She unzipped his flies with salacious speed, while questioning him in deadly earnest about his first book called Walking Wounded in Eritrea. They kissed passionately, and went on about society and the writer, till his trousers came off at the mention of Suez. He said that for a writer reality is a prison and that you should live only in order to rub your nose in the delectable cunt of reality. He threw her tights in the air, saying he couldn’t be a communist, but left that sort of thing to the Russians and those leftwingers who ought to know better. Her tights landed across a camera lens, and one of the quick-witted crew snatched them off and stuffed them in his mouth for a souvenir, so that they hung out of his mouth as if he’d swallowed an overdose of textile spaghetti.’