‘Mr Cullen, you’re not being serious.’ I recognised the melancholy voice of Matthew Coppice. ‘I’m phoning from Spleen Manor, just to tell you that my investigations into Lord Moggerhanger’s activities are proceeding apace and according to plan.’
‘That’s very good,’ I said. ‘Just keep on keeping on.’
‘Thank you. I shall. But I do like a bit of encouragement, Mr Cullen.’
A moment after I hung up, the phone bell tolled again. I was beginning to think I was home. ‘Michael Cullen here.’
‘This is Lord Moggerhanger. Come and make your report. The customs people told me you were in.’
I was so astonished that I didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m a bit tired.’
He chuckled. ‘As well you might be, Michael. I’m not a hard man. Take a seventy-two hour pass. Then I shall want to see you.’
He hung up. I hung up. It was mutual enough to satisfy my honour. He expected me to come running. Let him wait. I wasn’t a London pigeon, to eat out of his hand. I’d run when he did. I found a half-bottle of wine in the fridge and wobbled some out for a drink. Air travel not only frazzled me at the edges, it made me thirsty.
Wandering around the flat I saw the first thirty pages of the shit-novel I’d written for Blaskin. A khaki circle showed where Bill had put his tea mug, and the cellophane wrapping of a cheap cigar between the pages told me he’d read it. Under the last line he’d pencilled: ‘You can do better than this. Not trashy enough, old son.’
The typewriter would soothe my nerves, so at great expense of spirit I got my erring couple out of Tinder-box Cottage and into a maze like the one at Hampton Court. The husband was looking for the lover, the lover was looking for his girlfriend, the girlfriend was looking for her lover, and they were both looking out for the husband. I carried this on for a few pages to sustain the anguish and suspense, and in the middle of that particular section I typed the first chapters of Genesis word-backwards. I also copied a few paragraphs from a book by somebody called Proust (one of Blaskin’s favourites) and ended the chapter in mid-air so that I could start the next one in Peppercorn Cottage.
I was all set to go on, but Gilbert came in with a tall thin woman he introduced as Margery Doldrum.
‘I’m happy to see you’re working. I think that trash novel’s a very good plan.’ He told Margery about it while pouring drinks. ‘I never thought I would have a son who would stand by me in my afflictions.’
He walked restlessly from kitchen to living-room, from bedroom to study, leaving all doors open in case he got pregnant with another book and started to have labour pains at the same time. I told Margery about my trip to Canada, especially relating to Agnes, and she thought I was mad or lying, or both. She didn’t seem all that stable in the eyes herself, but that was because she was acquainted with Blaskin. He came back carrying a chapter of his novel, put it on the table, then got to work trying to open a bottle of ink — so clumsily that Margery looked at me as if to say: ‘What can you expect with such a male chauvinist genius?’
‘I’ve been invited to Jack and Prue Hogwash’s cottage next weekend, in Wiltshire,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come, Gilbert? Bring Michael, if you like. There’ll be quite a party.’
‘I’d rather not, my love.’ He went on fiddling with the ink bottle. ‘I was invited to Roland Hamstreet’s place a month ago, and to my everlasting regret, I went. I’ve wasted too many hours of my precious life at weekend cottages. It’s the hugger-mugger I can’t stand, not to mention the fact that if somebody takes a piss in the furthest bathroom from the kitchen, the yolk of your egg shimmers in the frying pan when he pulls the chain. If a tractor goes by in the lane outside, all you see through the window are tyre-treads chucking up mud like water from a mill. Michael, why in tarnation did you screw the lid on this bottle so tightly?’
It must have been Bill Straw after he wrote his letter. ‘Let me do it,’ I offered. But he wouldn’t: ‘Walk from one room to another idiotically smiling because you’ve just survived one of their batty parlour games, and you leave your head stuck to one of the beams like a bit of skin. Try to find the toilet in the middle of the night and you end up in the dog kennel. That’s the only room in the house with human dimensions. If the Bomb goes off, though, I expect a cottage will be the safest place to be. Half the population will be saved because the roofs are too low to catch the blast.’
‘Oh, stop it,’ said Margery. ‘You make me sick.’
At which I gathered that she also had a cottage.
‘Thank you very much, Margery, but I can’t stand cottages.’ He got the bottle of ink open, but so suddenly that he splashed half over his latest page. ‘Now see what I’ve done, a whole week’s work gone.’ He looked at me with a spoiled, malevolent stare. ‘Michael, you idiot, how could you have done it?’
‘You talk too much.’ I spoke without malice, wanting only to take his mind off the accident. ‘I told you to let me do it.’
Margery laughed, enjoying herself, and Blaskin’s bile got the upper hand. ‘Still here, are you? Why didn’t you go with Wayland Smith, and see how he gets his material on the great smuggling ring that’s threatening our national existence?’ Then he turned on me. ‘Listen, John Fitzbastard, clear off.’ I missed his fist, just. He missed mine, because I didn’t really aim. He gets worse as he gets older, I said to myself as I went out, case in one hand and umbrella in the other. I barged into the lift. He ran after me, shouting that I should come back and finish his trash-novel.
Upper Mayhem in late spring was the most wonderful spot on earth, and buying it was the only thing I’d done right in my life. I got there at dusk, clapped out and jet-lagged, unmistakably rejected and utterly dejected, smelling flowers and fresh fields as I walked down the lane, incapable of understanding why I had responded to Bill Straw’s letter two months ago and given up such a comfortable den.
Gnats danced in the evening warmth, frogs croaked from a nearby dyke, and birds were like specks of dust between drifting clouds. A whiff of coal smoke blended with the smell of soil. Here was the peace I wanted, and I made up my mind not to leave it again, as I entered my domain via the booking hall, crossed the footbridge over the line to the opposite platform and went up the garden path into the house.
A loving welcome from Bridgitte was a thing of the past, but I thought I had a right to a not unduly cold reception after an absence during which I had been doing my best to earn a living, if not actually to stay alive so that I might do it again — occasionally — in the future. Maria sat by the living room fire knitting a white shawl, and her smile was part of the domestic order which I now craved more than the exciting life I had been pushed into. She had put on weight, which improved her appearance, and she looked happy, as if she also found Upper Mayhem the perfect haven. When she got up and kissed me it was like being welcomed home by a loving daughter.
‘Where’s Bridgitte?’
‘In kitchen.’
Leaving my suitcase by the door, I picked up the jumbo box of chocolates bought at Liverpool Street. Bridgitte sat on the floor wiring up a plug for the electric iron. ‘Let me do that,’ I said.
‘I can manage.’
‘The blue wire goes on the right.’
When she got up I gave her the chocolates. She put them on the sideboard. ‘What have you come back for?’
I was feeling worse by the second. ‘Because I live here. Because I love you.’
She held the iron high, as if to bring it down on my head. I was ready for her, though I hoped without showing it. ‘Stop that, you bitch!’
‘I didn’t believe you’d ever have the cheek.’
‘Where else could I come?’