His wandering thoughts were recalled by the sound of a car stopping on the far side of the street. He crouched lower, glancing at his watch. It was ten minutes past midnight. A man was getting out of the driving seat of a cab. It was Dwyer! This was it!
Everything was still. The orange London smog sulked overhead. The man walked slowly across the deserted street, hands in pockets.
Billing gripped the poker, fear gripped Billing.
The man came slowly to the iron gate. He stood there on the pavement, scrutinising the front of the house, with its half-open door, its lightless windows. He was a small, thick-set man, rather less terrifying than Billing’s imaginings. He wore a bomber jacket and cord trousers.
Suddenly he moved, looking to left and right and then, finding the street empty, running forward, covering the front path in two strides and reaching the steps that led up to the open door.
Billing jumped from concealment without thought, brandishing the poker. At almost the same time, Rose emerged from the shadows with a bucket of cold water, which she flung at Dwyer. Unfortunately, Billing, in his excitement, had given a shout of challenge as he emerged. Dwyer turned, fists ready.
Some of the water hit its target. Quite as much soaked Billing.
He struck out boldly, blindly, and the poker caught Dwyer across one shoulder, thwacking into the bomber jacket.
Cursing, Dwyer started to feel in one of his pockets, kicking out at Billing at the same time with a toecap to his right calf. Billing dropped the poker and punched Dwyer on the jaw. Dwyer responded with a left-handed punch which struck Billing full face. Blood immediately poured from his nose. His sight became foggy.
Another man jumped from the taxi and came across the street, shouting, intent on supporting Dwyer.
Still swearing, Dwyer managed to pull a knuckleduster out of his dripping pocket.
This was too much for Billing. He ran round the side of the house to the back garden, Dwyer in pursuit. Both men were shouting.
Rose hurled her bucket at the second invader. She ran down, seized the fallen poker and brandished it. The second man retreated respectfully and went to stand on the far side of the taxi, evidently deciding not to face an armed woman.
Billing almost fell over the broom he had been using earlier. Dashing blood from his face, he grasped it, swung it, and caught Dwyer amidships. With a grunt, Dwyer seized the free end of the broom. Then commenced a kind of folk-dance across the back lawn, each combatant fighting for possession of the weapon. Dwyer did a good deal of cursing. Billing gritted his teeth and hung on. He had an idea.
With the house between the fighters and the streetlamps, it was dark in the small back garden. He was at an advantage; he knew where things were. He had realised that, for all his aggressiveness, the taxi driver was a foot shorter than he. This was not an invincible enemy. The thought gave him hope. He set to work to manoeuvre Dwyer where he wanted him.
It did not take long. Dwyer stopped shouting and started to pant. The waltz they were doing became slower, the turns more gradual, even the supply of swear words more halting.
‘You leave my bloody missus alone – we got no quarrel between us,’ Dwyer said.
‘She’ll never come back to you.’
‘I rescued her from a life of drudgery.’
‘She hates your guts.’
‘You should have met her father.’
‘She hates your guts, Dwyer!’
And there they were. Putting all his strength into it, Billing charged. With the business end of the brush in Dwyer’s chest, he was forced to run backwards. There were only three or four steps to go. The next moment the back of his legs struck the curve of the side of the old bath.
He gave a cry and fell in backwards, helpless to save himself.
The bath was full of dark and oily rainwater, under which all kinds of unnameable things lurked. Among those things Dwyer was momentarily to be numbered. He surfaced, spitting and retching. Billing pushed him under again with the head of the broom.
‘I’m – help, I’m drowning!’ cried Dwyer, gasping. Billing pushed him under a third time, enjoying it. He thought he could actually drown the man and who would know? It would make the world a better place.
‘Swear you’ll stay out of our way and never bother Rose again,’ he shouted, when Dwyer next surfaced. He kept up the pressure with the broom against Dwyer’s chest.
‘Yes, yes, I swear. Let me out of this filthy muck.’ He spat a leaf out.
‘Swear!’ Prod, thrust.
‘Yes, yes, I did swear. I do. No more, guv, help me!’
Billing stood alertly by with his trusty weapon and allowed Dwyer to climb out of the bath and flop on his hands and knees. Dwyer pulled himself up to head blindly for the entrance, hands out before him. All fight had left him.
‘And never come bloody back,’ Billing shouted, as the defeated foe climbed damply into his vehicle and drove away with his friend. The taxi vanished round the corner of the street.
‘You’re marvellous, Hughie,’ Rose said, embracing him. ‘You settled his hash. Come on in and let me mop your poor dear nose.’
‘I fixed him,’ Billing said, proudly letting his nose stream. ‘I sure fixed him good.’ John Wayne couldn’t have managed better.
‘Your poor nose.’ She put a hand on his arm.
‘Don’t bug me, woman,’ he said.
Then he caught hold of her hand and went indoors with her, rather shakily, dripping blood.
Back in St Albans, Billing went to the doctor and got a certificate to remain a week off work. Not only was his nose grotesquely swollen; two crescent moons of a troubled crimson appeared to underline his eyes. It was a time to lurk away from the sight of men and, more particularly, from inquisitive small boys.
Nothing could injure his morale. He had fought and won. Now at last he would have a home he could legitimately call his own – its integrity gained in combat, as it were. He had at last found a native hearth and a surcease from wandering. His old recurrent dream had fulfilled itself; he was at last allowed home to his own fireside.
Yet his spirit, he told himself, was not entirely at rest. As he interpreted the dream, it was his parents who should have admitted him to the lesser home within the greater. He did not see the dreadful Dwyer as standing in loco parentis; that had been Gladys’s role.
These thoughts no more than ruffled the surface of his sea of calm. Yet they recurred when he sat in the old armchair during a week when he might have been working and instead sailed steadily on through the deep waters of the tome entitled The Psyche and Dream Journeyings.
In its pages, he encountered people with all kinds of strange misapprehensions, living distorted lives. ‘Thank heavens I’m not like them,’ he said to himself, marvelling. He read of a woman who could not distinguish her husband from other men, a man who could make love only when clutching a baby pig and other extraordinary cases. He wondered what those cases would have done with their lives if they had not suffered from their disabilities. It soothed him to think how lucky he and Rose were to be normal.
Before they returned to Shepherd’s Bush the next weekend, they gave notice of the move to the landlord of their flat. Their new house was now fit to live in.
It was late when they arrived in Shepherd’s Bush on the Friday night. Walking through the fresh new rooms together, still smelling appetisingly of paint, they decided to go to bed at once so as to make an early start in the morning, laying vinyl flooring in the spare bedroom and finishing the tiling of the bathroom.