“If I’d been a priest I would have said the service of the dead over such an ungrateful villain. I’m not a priest, at least, but consider it, anyway. I’ve provided him with everything he cared to ask for. I stinted him nothing. But being disrespectful and treacherous is part of his nature. He’s been like that from infancy. Not only that, he grew up, for reasons I’ll never understand, to have a persecution complex, and we know how people always feel persecuted about the wrong things.
“He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was born with two, and one in each hand. If he’d been thrown in the water at birth and hadn’t let go of them (as he wouldn’t, because that was the character he was born with) he’d have sunk without trace, which might have been better for me in the long run, though I expect his generous-hearted mother will go on loving him, and looking after him. Still, that’s how mothers are, and who would want it otherwise?”
The tear that enlarged a vein by one of his bruised eyes, though a sign of human feeling, didn’t stop me thinking him the swine of swine.
“Alice and I have to thank you as our deliverers, and while getting me out of an unpalatable peril shouldn’t go to your heads, we do appreciate your timely appearance. So here’s to Michael, my golden boy no longer in the first shine of youth, and to William Straw (I hate diminutives) a late soldier of His Majesty the King, God bless his soul! — who did his usual workmanlike job.”
Dismal let a corner of the best Axminster fall from his mouth, and growled, so that Moggerhanger, the last man in the world to be slow on the uptake, added: “We also had to admire the assistance of that otherwise bone-idle pooch which Polly trained so well. Which reminds me that at least I have a daughter, even if she does sport the morals of a she-cat at full moon. Now let’s eat, and may the Lord make us truly thankful.”
He drank, and got stuck in. So did we, stuffing ourselves, with champers to swill it down. While Moggerhanger drank he kept the patter going like the guest speaker at a branch of the Spoke and Wheel Club, and we took it all in with enough willingness to keep him going, if not please him.
“When you were standing up to Parkhurst and giving him some lip, Michael, I could tell what was going on in your mind, and must say you had some nerve facing his gun like that. I’ve never known such pluck. I’ve seen men turn to Chivers in that situation.”
I passed the glass to be refilled. “It was in the line of duty, that’s all.”
“Don’t contradict. It’s the sort of pluck this country lacks. There’s none of it about anymore, so it does my heart good when I’m a witness to it, and the beneficiary as well. Where would we be if there was no pluck like that in the world? I ask you.”
He needed no indication that we agreed, the food being good, champagne free and copious (he sent Alice for two more bottles) and Dismal dozing as if after a fair day’s work. Listening in warmth and comfort to Chairman Moggerhanger’s tabletalk was no great hardship.
“As Polly said a long time ago: ‘Never turn your back on a toaster, dad!’—which showed her wisdom at seventeen. She said it in relation to her brother Malcolm as well, so there’s intuition for you. It was sharper than mine, for a while anyway. Malcolm did today what I never dared even think of doing to my own father. A fool doesn’t realise that what you think in that line you should never do, and that the thought itself has to be luxury enough to satisfy.”
His hypocrisy knowing no bounds made it more interesting than not. “I drink to that, sir,” Bill said, with his usual louche wink at me.
“You two chaps came and saved me, though if truth be told it’s not the first mix up I’ve had the luck to escape in the nick of time. Where would I have been without luck? And hard work, of course. People don’t like to work anymore. They look on luck as a God-given right. A superabundance of bullshit is destroying this country. From being a picturesque backdrop to the British character it’s been taken over by the idle poor and the brainless rich. Everybody’s set on outdoing everybody else, without contributing to the public good and the national exchequer.”
If there was anything worse than an angry young man it had to be an angry old man, though he wasn’t all that old. The country didn’t seem in such bad nick to me as Moggerhanger implied, but who could contradict him, or spoil his enjoyment after our close encounter of the day?
“It’s dog eat dog,” he went on, “and no good will come of it. It’s a national disease. There’s too much ignorance, and no respect for anything or anybody. Nobody gets on their knees anymore at the statues of great men who made the country comfortable enough for them to be idle in. They’ve got no gratitude. At school they only learn to worship pop stars and half-starved stick models. I sent my kids to expensive schools, and when they left they couldn’t even spell because the teachers were too idle to teach them. In state schools it would have been even worse.”
His kids had certainly been too dim and bolshie to learn, I thought as, to our amusement, his talk began spinning out of control. At least we hoped that was it. Fingering the regalia across his waistcoat, he went on: “What do they teach kids today?”
As if we knew, though Bill was brazen enough to try a response. “At least they get the three Rs, sir.”
“Oh do they? And do you know what they are? I’ll tell you. Reading, rioting and ’rithmetic! That’s the three Rs for you. And you know why? Because they’ve got to be able to read enough to recognise the stops on the Underground. Secondly, they have to know how to write a bit so that they can splash disgusting graffiti everywhere, ruining nice new buildings and train windows. As for thirdly, which is arithmetic, they need that to reckon up the money from purses and wallets after they’ve been out mugging. That’s modern education for you.”
He seemed fairly drunk, and though he might be disappointed at life now and again getting the upper hand, I imagined he must have a few million stashed in overseas tax havens.
“I mean to say, when it comes down to politics we at this table believe deep down in the same things. We might vote differently at election times, but whoever gets in doesn’t make much difference, because England — bless it — will still keep going in its own immemorial way, for the moment I suppose, no matter what the government does, or at least it will until we have to wear pillbox hats and bow to Mecca on prayer mats. By then, if I’m still alive, though I hope I won’t be, I’ll be manufacturing compasses so that our compatriots will know where east is when they come blind drunk from the pubs at dusk and the ragheads force them to grovel to Allah. There’ll always be a place for an entrepreneur like me, though,” which none of us could doubt.
“When I was young,” he laughed, “I fancied myself as part of the mob on its way to turn the red cock on the Houses of Parliament, but even then I realised that in a year or two I’d stand looking on as the pack of bloody fools went by. I knew as well that in another ten years I’d be behind a machine gun mowing them down. And I would be, if the Mother of Parliaments was in danger. I’ve always had my feet four-square on the ground, even though I do sometimes talk too much.”
When none of us shouted that he didn’t he passed the decanter of brandy, and cigars in a box as large as a coffin. “People don’t know who they are anymore, because the media tells them all the time that they’re different. So they don’t know where they belong. But me, when I get out of bed in the morning and look in the mirror, I know who I am. I know that not only is the face looking back at me mine, but the mirror is as well, and the wall it hangs on, not to mention the house the wall is holding up, and the garden around it.”
Until the mirror cracks, then breaks, and the walls fall apart, and the garden becomes a desert. He had talked himself out, so stood up. “Make merry. You’ve earned it. Help yourselves to the good things of life still on the table — though not for too long, because tomorrow’s another day, and if you live till then there’ll be a fair chance of living forever. But it’s time I got some shut-eye, so that I can face it as well.”