“You don’t disappoint me in anything.” She swallowed the juice, drank the coffee, and filled her mouth with croissant. How little it needs to make a woman happy! Or a man like me, for that matter, I thought, watching her do as she had intended.
I dressed and showered, and saw that Bill in the kitchen had done all the washing up. “There’s no such thing as men’s work, or women’s, come to that.” He took off the apron. “There’s only work, and I’ve done my share, so do yours now by wiping up and putting away. Then you can sweep the floor and get rid of the bones and broken plates. That dog’s a real vandal.”
“He’s got to live.”
“Granted, but what I would like to know is how you taught him to get into the fridge. He was about to stick his big juff inside when I came down.”
“He just worked it out, by dint of intelligence and persistence, and then honed the technique to perfection. How else do you think he did it?”
“Don’t get sarky. It’s too early in the morning. Another thing is, it took me some time getting to sleep last night, with you and Alice going at it like rabbits in a thunderstorm. I thought she was being murdered every time she cried out. I was about to get up and see if an intruder hadn’t broken in. I even thought Parkhurst might have come back, till I realised it was only you up to your tricks. And with a poor woman in that state! Your lechery knows no bounds.”
“Shut up, blabmouth. She’s coming down.”
“Hello, my darling.” Bill opened his arms, at her lithe and soignée figure in a gorgeous damson-coloured frock with a white collar. He leered, as if he had made love to her instead of me: “You do look nice and rested. There’s nothing for you to do. Me and Michael’s cleared up, and we’re thinking about breakfast. Anything special you’d like?”
“Lord Moggerhanger asked me to take his upstairs first. He’s looking a little better this morning.”
After drying and stacking I took Dismal out for fresh air. Ragged-arsed clouds were shifting in from the higher hills, a chill sweep of wind smelling of fresh pastures and sheep droppings, yet freshening my nostrils after sleeping in a sealed room, which had mugged me sooner into oblivion.
Bill set four places at the table, laying out plates of grilled bacon and sausages, fried eggs, and tinned tomatoes, as well as toast and pots of coffee. “The sort of breakfast we used to dream about in the army,” he said, “but which only the officers got, and they had to be lucky, as well.”
Moggerhanger came in, a cigar still smouldering between his fingers. The wine-dark dressing gown had a masonic emblem at the top pocket, and his face was still far from reconstituted into its old form, looking something like landscape between the Flanders trenches. He took a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and poured a large glass. “I’m glad to see you’re all being fed, from the best of what my reserves have to offer. You’re eating quickly as well, which pleases me, not because we have a lot of work to do afterwards — though we do — but because I never could abide slow eaters. You can’t trust them. They’re lazy, and think too much of their stomachs, so aren’t the sort of people I’d want on my books. When you’ve finished, Michael, stand by for moving some cartons from the storeroom to the horsebox.”
I counted thirty, as he did as well, only more carefully, in case I flipped one into the boot of my car. No need to speculate on what the packets contained. In the coming weeks a lot of people in London and the rest of the country would be lying on their backs and, even in daylight, counting the stars.
Perhaps he read my mind. “Without this stuff, Michael, those young chaps in the City working their computers for the financial good of the nation wouldn’t be able to get through their long day. Oh, I know, lots of riff-raff get hold of it as well, and it doesn’t do them much good, but the country can do without them. If they’re weak enough to use it, they’re expendable.”
His face turned as wine-dark as his dressing gown when Dismal sniffed eagerly around the last carton on the ground, scratching and licking as if about to tear a way to its insides. “Take that hound away,” he shouted, “before I drive a stake through its heart.”
I dragged Dismal clear before he could put in a kick for which I’d have to retaliate by knocking the old bastard about.
But he laughed. “It was Polly who first suggested I take him on board for training. Whenever an assignment was collected he’d sniff out whether it was genuine or not. He worked very well for a while. Then on one occasion, in Eric Alport’s chintzy bijou gem by the Thames, though I should name no names, he clambered from box to box giving each one the OK, till halfway through he cocked up his leg and began a very splashy piss all over the goods. Luckily it didn’t penetrate, but I thought it best to lay him off after that.”
“He makes a good house dog for Upper Mayhem,” I said.
“Keep him, then, for all I care. We’ll leave here at twelve. I’ve already arranged for a local firm to fix the French windows. Your job will be to follow down the M1 and A1, as far as the turn-off for your house. Then you can leave us. But if you see that mad poet pushing his panda wagon along the hard shoulder going south, don’t stop and pick him up. He’s a bloody pest. Alice noticed him on the other side of the road yesterday. I know you’ve got the makings of a soft heart, but as far as hitchhikers are concerned, leave them alone, especially that one.”
I was only interested in Alice. “Will she come in my car?”—hoping she would, so that we could have another session at Upper Mayhem, before I put her on the train to London.
“She’ll be in the Roller with me. As for Straw, he can travel all the way in the horsebox. I think I can rely on him not to take any of the powders.”
I was glad to put in a good word for Bill. “He’s never indulged in stuff like that. I know from experience that the only stimulant he has any time for is warfare. He lives as if he’s on active service all the time.”
“I like that. I might even take him on the staff. But come on, work before talk. Let’s get moving.”
In the kitchen, I gave Alice a goodbye kiss. “I love you, Michael,” she said.
I used to think of her as a hard woman. Now she had a tear in her eye. “Love you too,” giving another kiss so that she would believe me.
“Say it better than that.”
“I do love you, my adored one.”
“Better. See me again, won’t you?”
“How can I forget last night?”
“What about this morning?”
My memory book would never be too full to forget it. “Second to none, seeing you do that.”
I swear she blushed. “The main course was better, though. But don’t only see me at work.” She wrote her address. “I want to hear more of your stories, and soon.”
“And you shall, darling. After I qualified as a ladies’ maid I had adventures to tell you about that’ll make your hair stand on end.” We billed and cooed, till Sergeant Straw showed his lantern jaw in the doorway to say time was up, and we were going over the top.
Nothing untoward disturbed us on the run south. Leaving Yorkshire, it was high cloud all the way, flecks of water on the windscreen replaced by blotted yellow curlicues of squashed insects. I passed the time counting Eddie Stobart pantechnicons coming and going, and mulling on my night of love with Alice.
The first thing noticed on manoeuvring into the open gate at Upper Mayhem was Ronald Delphick’s panda wagon, a fly sheet pinned to the chest saying: ‘National Poet on the Road. Coins for cups of tea much welcomed,’ then the name of the town where he would give his next reading. Some unwitting motorist in a Land Rover must have given him cartage from the A1. I intended going into the house to kill him, but Clegg met me at the door: “He came in dead beat last night, and I hadn’t the heart to get rid of him. He slept in the signal box.”