Screaming like a stuck pig, still in the Nun’s headdress, Angelica dived under the bed, followed immediately by the two minions and Gabriel.
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Gabriel as two more plants sailed through the air. ‘Burnham Wood came to Dunsinane, now it’s going back again.’
Ducking to avoid more flying vegetation, I shook off the silk sheets, ran across the room, dived behind the curtain and started to pull on my clothes. By the sound of it Gareth was still laying about him like a maddened bull. As I looked out he was having a punch-up with Mannie who wrong-footed him and sent him crashing to the ground. The next moment Gareth had got to his feet and thrown Mannie into the middle of the remaining potted plants.
‘Oh my poor jardinière,’ wailed Gabriel’s voice from under the bed. ‘What will the plant shop say?’
As I crept out from behind the curtain, a silver teapot and two glass paperweights flew across the room, none of them fortunately hitting their target.
Gareth paused; he was breathing heavily. Cy was still nursing his jaw in the corner. Mannie was peering out of the plants like a spy in L’Attaque. Vic was shaking his head and picking himself up. Cy’s assistant got to his feet. As he started edging nervously towards the door, Gareth grabbed him by the collar.
‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Where are those rolls of film? Come on or I’ll beat you to a pulp.’ His fingers closed round the boy’s neck.
‘Over there on the trolley,’ choked the boy in terror.
Gareth pocketed the rolls. As I sidled round the wall towards him, he glanced in my direction and jerked his head towards the door. He was just backing towards it himself when Vic moved in, catching him off guard with a blow to the right eye. Gareth slugged him back, sending him hurtling across the room, then, trying to right himself, tripped over one of the light wires and cannoned heavily into a pile of tripods. It was getting more like Tom and Jerry every minute.
Next minute, Andreas, who’d been watching the whole proceedings without lifting a finger, picked up the champagne bottle and, cracking it on the underneath of the bed, moved with incredible speed across the room towards Gareth. Cornered, Gareth scrambled out of the tripods, shaking his head. His right eye was beginning to close up. His forehead, just above his eyebrow, was bleeding where Vic’s gold ring had gashed it.
He backed away from Andreas until he reached the wall.
‘Now then big boy,’ murmured Andreas, his voice almost a caress. ‘I’ll teach you to get tough with me.’ He brandished the jagged edge of the bottle in Gareth’s face. ‘Give me back that film.’
Gareth stared at him, not a muscle moving in his face.
‘You lousy cheap punk,’ he said.
Then I froze with horror as I saw that Mannie had extracted himself from the potted plants and, armed with a flick knife, was moving relentlessly in from the right. Without thinking, I picked up the Christopher Wray lamp and hurled it at him, slap on target. Just for a second Andreas’ concentration flickered, giving Gareth the chance to leap on him, knocking him to the floor. Over and over they rolled like Tommy Brook and Mr Tod, yelling abuse at each other. Then finally Gareth was on top smashing his fists into Andreas’ head. For a minute I thought he was going to kill him; then he got up, picked Andreas up and threw him through the Habitat wallpaper like a clown through a hoop.
There was another long pause. Gareth looked slowly round the room. Everyone flattened themselves against the wall or the floor. Then suddenly there was the sound of clapping, and Angelica emerged from under the bed, her Nun’s headdress askew.
‘I’ve been waiting three years for someone to do that,’ she said.
Blood was pouring from Gareth’s arm. He must have jagged it on Andreas’ bottle.
‘You’ll bleed to death,’ I moaned, gathering up a peach silk petticoat that was lying on the floor.
‘Well, bags I give him the kiss of life,’ said a little voice from under the bed. Gareth grabbed my wrist. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
Chapter Nineteen
I hoped Gareth had worked off his rage breaking up Cy’s studio, but as we stormed up Parkside towards London, with Wimbledon Common on our right, the full storm of his fury broke over me.
‘I tried to help you,’ he yelled. ‘We all did. Jakey’s nursed you like a baby through the last eight weeks, and then you have to pick this afternoon to blow the whole thing — just when Jakey needed you. I don’t understand you, Octavia. Have you got some sort of death wish? Don’t you care about anyone?’
He overtook another car; you could have got fag paper between them. Thank God we were going against the traffic. Home-going commuters crawling in the other direction stared at us in amazement. Some of them were stopping to put their hoods up. The stifling heat hadn’t let up, but an ominous, bilberry dark sky had replaced the serene unclouded blue of the morning.
‘Why did you do it?’ said Gareth, overtaking yet again. ‘Go on, I want to know.’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Sure you can’t. Well I’ll tell you; you’re so bloody idle you can’t resist making a quick buck from Andreas. But my God, you’d have paid for it. He’d have broken you in a couple of months.’
We were passing Wimbledon Windmill now. I gazed stonily at the dried-up pond and the great sweeps of platinum-bleached grass, blackened everywhere by fires.
Gareth warmed to his subject:
‘I guess you’re turned on at the thought of all those men on news-stands slobbering over your photograph, misting up windows in Soho to get a second glance at your tits, not to mention the ones in bedsitters wearing raincoats. .’
‘They’d hardly keep their macs on in the bedroom,’ I protested.
‘Don’t be flippant,’ he howled.
We had reached the roundabout at Tibbet’s Corner now, but he was so incensed he kept missing the turning off to Putney and had to go round three times, which didn’t improve his temper.
‘Don’t you give a fuck about your reputation?’
‘I don’t care,’ I snapped. ‘I needed the bread in a hurry, that was all. But you’re so well-heeled you wouldn’t understand things like that.’
Gareth turned on me, enraged.
‘Haven’t you any idea how poor we were when I was a child?’
‘I don’t want to hear,’ I said, putting my hands over my ears. ‘I’ve read D. H. Lawrence, I know quite enough already about poverty at the pithead. I’m just fed up with you going round censoring my behaviour. Who the hell do you think you are, Mary Whitehouse, you great Welsh prude?’
‘You’ve called me that already,’ he said.
‘What!’ I shouted, my hands still over my ears.
‘Don’t bug me,’ he shouted back and, seizing my arm, yanked my hand away from my ear.
I sat very still, watching the white marks left by his fingers slowly turning red. Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed the peach silk petticoat I’d tied round his arm completely drenched in blood, and a red stain creeping down his blue check shirt. He’d gone very white. Suddenly the fight went out of me.
‘For God’s sake let’s call a truce and go to Roehampton Hospital. You need stitches in that arm,’ I said.
‘I don’t want any stitches,’ he said, screeching to a halt at the top of my road. Leaning across, he opened the door.