Was there never going to be a dull moment, an uneventful minute without one single surprise? Working for Moggerhanger was employment for senior citizens by comparison. I had given Jeffrey a punch in the face for having put Maria in the family way — just a few months ago — and here was Frances telling me that such a thing couldn’t have been possible. I was too numb to pray that the earth would devour me. No wonder he’d laughed. Was it at the thought that his vasectomy hadn’t worked again? Or did he know it was foolproof, and he was justifiably amused at my crackpot accusation? Yet if it wasn’t him, then who had got Maria pregnant? She’d lied to me, though if she hadn’t I would never have gone to the Harlaxtons and met Frances so as to bring her back to Blaskin’s abode (by an equally outrageous lie) and confirm our friendship by a more delectable fuck than the hugger-mugger in the broom cupboard at The Palm Oiled Cat with Ettie. There seemed little hope of stopping that old roundabout as long as I breathed. A start in life goes on to the end.
‘Are you sure he had a vasectomy?’
‘I know the doctor who did it. He was one of my father’s old friends. I also know the doctor who talked Jeffrey into having it done. His name was Dr Anderson. Jeffrey was going to him for analysis at the time, because he’d had a bit of a crack-up, and his advertising firm paid for the treatment. Jeffrey was in absolute terror of the world ending. He said he couldn’t bear the thought of his children going up in smoke and flame at the same time as himself. And the idea of having one or two more children so that they would also be incinerated was even more terrifying. He called such anguish paying the Moloch Tax. He had apocalyptic visions of slaughtering Elizabeth, then the children and himself. He thought he might wake up in the middle of the night and soak the house in blood and paraffin — he said. So at least he was determined to have no more children and add to the casualty list.’
‘He’s such a cheerful-looking, extrovert bloke,’ I said.
‘I know. But the issue paralysed him, and even the fact that Aunt Elizabeth was on the pill didn’t convince him that he wouldn’t have more children. After the vasectomy he was normal, positively exuberant in fact, and went back to work. If I had to give anyone my idea of a good person, I’d tell them about Jeffrey.’
There was something wrong here, which was not surprising considering her opinion of a shit like Delphick. Still, I owed Uncle Jeffrey an apology, just as I owed Maria a smack across the chops. Another item which scratched me on the raw side was the way Dr Anderson, the evil genius of the psychology underworld, kept turning up. He seemed to be as big a pest on the body politic as was Moggerhanger on the social fabric, and if I had any say in the matter I would pull the plug on both. The only question was how. ‘Do you know anything about Dr Anderson?’
I fully expected she would bring out a list of his good deeds, telling me of how he was the benevolent supporter of five thousand orphans in the Third World, that he personally washed mugs in a soup kitchen by Waterloo Bridge on Saturday night, and that he ran a home for battered wives in Glasgow.
‘I think I would like another drink.’
‘Willingly. Cigarette?’
She smoothed her skirt and stretched out her legs. ‘All I know is that for some time after Jeffrey had his vasectomy, Dr Anderson was having an affair with Elizabeth.’
‘He was screwing Jeffrey’s wife? You’re joking.’
I caught in the openness of her mirth a similarity to that of Jeffrey. ‘I never joke about things like that. I often think that if I could bring myself to tell lies my life would be easier. Anyway, the upshot of Anderson’s affair with Elizabeth was that she got pregnant. Would you believe it? It seemed that Anderson recommended vasectomies to his married patients as often as it seemed convincing to do so, and then, if their wives were halfway attractive, he had an affair with them to get them pregnant.’
‘But you said Elizabeth was on the pill.’
‘She came off it after Jeffrey’s vasectomy, and Anderson provided pills which weren’t effective. Isn’t that diabolical?’
‘I’m appalled.’
‘So was I.’
‘And Elizabeth got a bun in the oven?’
‘What a horrid way of putting it. You see, Anderson is investigating a breakdown theory, pushing people as far as they will go, to see at what point in their decline they begin to pull out of the dive naturally. Some do, some don’t. After a certain point he’s not interested in those who go down to the depths never to come up, but only in those who get out of it. It’s this point of rebound that fascinates him.’
‘He wants to remove it?’
‘He wants to control it,’ she said.
‘So that’s his game.’
She nodded. ‘But he didn’t have the chance to break Jeffrey. Elizabeth got rid of the foetus without him knowing. I helped her. It was a bloody awful experience for her. Not too pleasant for me, either.’
‘You poor kid!’ I drew her to me, and received a warm kiss which I matched with my own.
‘That’s all I know about Dr Anderson.’
And I knew that during or after his rave-up with Jeffrey’s wife he had got hold of poor innocent Maria, who was now inflating with another of his monster-kids.
‘I expect he’s writing a book on it,’ she said, ‘full of graphs, statistics and obscene mathematical formulae that in reality mean extremes of emotion and misery. He wants to chart and document the point of return — or no return.’
‘He probably sends his findings to the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Or the Russians.’
‘Or both. How does one stop him?’
‘He’ll end by running himself into the ground,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t bank on it.’
She looked at the window, as if Delphick was going to come flying in triumphantly on his Winged Panda. ‘I wonder where he’s got to?’
I could think of no one except Frances and myself. The world stopped, and I’d have a hard job to kick it spinning again. ‘Drowning his chagrin in The Jolly Scribblers because Hamley’s wouldn’t take his cheque.’
She looked at me, and even with my ever-burning optimism I could hardly call it a loving expression. ‘Maybe you really are Blaskin’s son. Anyway, where is The Jolly Scribblers?’
‘Near Mornington Crescent. But I expect he’s gone somewhere else by now — our peripatetic Panda Poet. It’s catching.’
‘What is?’
‘You start to imitate those who sponge off you.’
‘I don’t, but maybe that’s because I’m a woman. Anyway, I must be going.’
I was in a state of terror, thinking that if she went I would never see her again, a feeling I would normally have despised. ‘It’s time for lunch. Why don’t you have something to eat?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She picked over the records by the Bang and Olufson hi-fi that was as thin as an After Eight.
‘I am.’ I went to her. ‘For you. For your spirit, for all the thoughts you’ve had since you were born, and all the thoughts you’ll have till you die. To say that I love you doesn’t express what I feel.’
‘I’ll put this Schubert on, if I may.’ She looked at me. ‘In a way it’s a pity we made love. I don’t have to get to know you now.’
A stone hurled from the wall of a castle had hit me on the heart. ‘I feel the same about you. I hated making love just then, not that I didn’t enjoy it, but because I knew you were the sort that would use it as an excuse for calling it the end. I thought you expected me to make love, and so I was forced to choose between disappointing you, or damning myself. The fact that I proved myself right doesn’t make me feel any better. I can always use it for one of my stories.’
‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ she said.