I had lived too long to believe anything he said. He was a living monument to envy and opportunity, and different from me only insofar as his ways of survival varied.
“Why don’t you come to Cambridge and hear me give a piquant performance with my panda? You’ll see me in full spate. You’ll be bowled over. Students are always generous and appreciative. You might even pull a couple of tarts yourself. If there’s one person they like more than me it’s a pig-ignorant type like you who doesn’t know anything about poetry. They love him. They’re all over him. They want to convert him into a lover of poetry, especially of Ronald Delphick’s immortal verse. I’m not joking. Come and see for yourself.”
“I know your game. You only say all that because you want me to drive you and your poxed-up panda wagon to Cambridge tomorrow. It won’t work. I’ve got better things to do.”
He turned sulky. “It was worth a try, you’ve got to admit. Is there anymore of that lovely strong tea, Mr Clegg? I’ve only had two, and I’m still parched, after entertaining you with my latest effort. If I’d performed all that at a gig I’d have earned fifty quid. You might at least give me a cigar, or a common fag if you can’t be generous. You aren’t too stingy for that, are you?”
“Delphick, you’re a guest in my house, at the moment anyway, and while I let you stay you’ll have to be as polite to me as I’m trying very hard to be to you. I can’t say fairer than that, can I, you scumbag?”
I admired the way he came straight back, making me regret that I might have offended him. “It’s all very well for you,” he said. “You exist on only one layer of the mind, because that’s all you’ve got. You’re a simple bloke, and good luck to you, but I operate on several, though I can live on one at a time when I feel like it, but mostly it’s three or four, and sometimes they’re mixed up together. But whichever it is, at least I know I’m doing it, because I’m a poet. In fact that was how I found out I was one. Nobody told me. They didn’t have to. It came in a blinding revelation when I was drunk one night. I was somebody special from then on because I could function on more than one level of my mind at a time.”
“You just made that up,” I said. “Get the trickster another pot of tea, Clegg, please.”
“Of course I made it up. It’s even more that proves I’m a poet, and more complicated and worthwhile to the world than you are.”
I’d had enough of him. “I’m going upstairs for a kip. I had a busy day yesterday. But don’t touch a scrap of our food till I come down for supper. If you do I’ll tie you to the railway line and let an express run you over.”
“I just love the way people run their mean bourgeoisie lives,” he sneered.
“Then piss off.”
“Nothing personal, though, when I say that.” He took a swill of the tea. “Could you lend me ten quid before you go to sleep? Then I can go to the local boozer for a couple of quarts and a cheese cob.”
“Sure I will. I’ll let you have a tenner, no strings attached, if you get a brush and a tin of paint from the cupboard down there by the sink, and paint the fence along the front of the garden.”
“Work?” He stood at the noise of his own shriek, the tea mug still in his hand. “Are you really suggesting that I work? That’s not fair. I make a perfectly reasonable request, as an honoured guest, for a loan, and you tell me to go outside and do some work. It’s taking an unfair advantage. Even supposing I wanted to work, which I never would, think of my mother turning in her grave at the sight of me doing it. She was the best mother anybody ever had. She was fiercely supportive, and never let me do a stroke. If I had some money to go to the pub though, I could drink to her memory, couldn’t I? Can there be a greater sign of devotion from a son than that? I ask you, work! I was her only son, and she worshipped the ground I stood on. I’ll never forget the time when a young scrubber came to the door and said I’d got her pregnant. I was hiding behind the sofa in the parlour, while my mother called her a filthy young trollop and smacked her across the chops. Oh, she sent her away crying right enough! That’s loyalty for you. We were a close knit working class family we were.”
In spite of such heart rending affection for his mother, who I hoped was dead, and if she wasn’t in hell she ought to be for producing Ronald Delphick, there were two phrases I’d come to abominate, which were ‘working class’ and ‘close knit’. Delphick used them all the time, I was sure, at gigs, to awe the audience and confirm his authenticity as a son of the soil. I recalled one of his phony poems which began: ‘I’m the salt of the earth that gave me birth, through toil and grit in factory and pit’.
“I might have mentioned this before,” I said, “but if any two definitions are calculated to drive me into paroxysms of antipathy”—I laid it on with a trowel — “they’re ‘working class’, and ‘close knit’. You should be ashamed to pull rank like that.”
“You think there’s no class feeling left in England, do you?” he ranted.
“If there is I scraped all that shit off my shoulders decades ago. I grew up as a latch-key kid in a one-parent family, in a very respectable back to back, and started work at fifteen, so I never gave it a thought.”
He leaned back, to say complacently: “Well, I have to think about it, don’t I? Where would I be if I didn’t? I play it up for all it’s worth. My audiences love it when I read working-class poems that take the piss out of them. They think I’m taking the piss out of myself. Sometimes I perform a sad poem that makes them feel guilty and cry. Do you want me to read ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Factory’? Or a villanelle on ‘The Closure of a Coalmine’? Or ‘Some Lines Concerning the Death of a Single Mother who Couldn’t Make Ends Meet on Social Security’? There’s the same poem for all of them, so I just switch the titles around. Here, I’ll read one for you.”
He reached under the table for notebooks spilling from his satchel, and drew a hand back as if he’d put it into a bundle of poisonous snakes. “Fucking hell! Your dog’s eating my precious and immortal works.” He brought up a clutch of papers. “They’re covered in dog snot. There’s wet hairs and fang marks all over them.”
He moaned as if such a catastrophe hadn’t overtaken a poet since the beginning of creation, so I gave Dismal a push to indicate that he move away, and while Delphick put the material into some sort of order for his next memorable appearance I took a tenner from my wallet to console him for the upset. “When you’ve finished what you’re doing you can go to the Hair of the Dog a mile away down the lane and soothe your battered sensibilities.”
He winced at the name of the pub, left the rest of his output on the floor, and took the money. “This is entirely unexpected, real generosity on your part. You’ve made my day, and renewed my faith in the goodness of my fellow men.”