‘Search me! It was just about to fall off the back of a lorry, I expect, and somebody — don’t ask me who — caught it in time and stopped it smashing to pieces.’ Archie stroked his battered face. ‘Ain’t she a beauty? I still can’t see why you want one, though.’
‘It’s summat to keep me out of mischief. I don’t fancy gerrin beat up like yo’.’ He slotted in a sheet of paper, and ping-ponged his name. Then he did Archie’s, both exquisitely printed. ‘How much do you want for it?’
‘They said twenty-five. Is that all right?’
‘I shan’t argue.’ He smiled: good to think of his father coughing up for such a potent tool. ‘Can it wait till the weekend? I’ve got a cheque to cash.’
‘I suppose so. But no longer, or I’ll have to volunteer for Korea. Them lads want their money quick.’
‘I shan’t let you down. It’s worth a fortnight’s wages to me.’ He craved to see some of his handwriting in print, but could not dismiss Archie so soon after he had brought the machine. As consolation he clacked out both names again, and thought how distinguished they looked. He turned to Archie. ‘You’ll have to stop going with married women.’
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I love married women. They know so much. And they’re grateful when you mek ’em cum, especially if they’re married to a numskull, as most of ’em are. Can’t think why. Anyway, let’s go down the road for a pint, and seal the deal. Bruises like these make you thirsty.
Fourteen
The wall of the restaurant was mostly glass, making two of everything and everyone, which suited him fine: a double ration of his own face each belonging to the other. One sort was all Thurgarton-Strang, roman-nosed and verging to swarthy, and a cicatrice whose up and down soreness acted like a barometer for his spirit. Then there was the brighter and more accepting version of Bert Gedling, out for fun rather than mischief, and not giving a toss for anyone in the world, not even for himself should he need to fight his way out of a perilous fix.
How the place with such mirrors had got through the Blitz he would never know, but a surreptitious side-on view of all the Cecilias, whose eyes were preoccupied in other directions to avoid his scar — because it wasn’t a pretty sight tonight, or even at the best of times — showed how tragic her aspect could occasionally be. Maybe he and she were made for each other, though he rather thought not. Her laughter always seemed as much a punctuation device as cursing did with those in the factory, because there was nothing humorous about their glum meal. She seemed sad, and distant in thought. ‘Say something,’ he told her.
An obliterating glare dissolved, as it should from a carefully brought up young woman. She smiled: ‘I liked your short stories.’
His thank you came with a sneer, hard to say why.
‘They’re typed very well,’ she said. ‘Not a mistake anywhere.’
He objected to her thinking he’d make a good clerk, or penpusher, but let it pass. ‘I got a book out of the library on how to touch-type.’
She drank her coffee as if it were brewed from superior acorn dust and, forgetting her determination to make him break silence first: ‘They’re very vivid. But why do you write about people who swear all the time, and do terrible things to one another? I mean, they’re always getting drunk, and being sick all over the place.’
He pulled himself back from laughing. ‘That’s the way they are. It’s no good playing it down.’
‘I think you play it up, though.’
‘I appreciate the criticism.’ He didn’t. She could at least say she was entertained, or amused, or had learned something about people she didn’t know. Or she could just say his stories were wonderful, and shut up. ‘I’ll have to check what you say, and then maybe I’ll do better by making things a bit more subtle.’
‘There must be other subjects to write about.’ She was encouraged by his attitude. ‘People just don’t drink and fight all the time.’
She didn’t mention the fucking, of which there was quite a bit, though it must have been in her mind. It was certainly in his, but he wouldn’t bring the matter up in case it delayed him getting such a nice middle-class woman into bed.
‘What’s more,’ she went on. She didn’t, presumably, know when to stop. ‘You are not like that.’
‘Thank you very much.’
His table manners and behaviour tonight were impeccable, even to someone who had always found such fault with the clerks who had taken her out that they soon gave her up for a girl who would provide unstinted love and approval. None had come close to the perfection of Herbert at his best. ‘You aren’t, though, are you, darling?’
Certainly not, but the Bert in him regretted not wearing overalls and having a spanner to brandish. ‘I couldn’t write about such frightful people if I was. Nor would I care to.’ He mimicked a public school accent with sufficient accuracy to stop her suspecting he had at one time used it. Nor did he want her to think he was mocking her accent, of the local but clearly enunciated sort. He was far enough into alien territory to feel irritated and uncomfortable, and to realize he should be on his guard. It was hard enough fitting into one sort of life, and here he was jinking among three.
His obvious hedging and dodging put a flush into her delicately boned face. ‘You should read more books by Walter Hawksworth. He’s good. You’d learn a lot from him.’ He wondered if she had ever been to bed with Hawksworth, the way she went on. Hawksworth was a good writer, she said. He wrote about those whom any sensible person would want to be like. Even if people in his books happened to do something bad they did such actions later on that they ended up good. Hawksworth didn’t write about those common people who lived all around us, and who didn’t care about the difference between right and wrong. The people all around us, well, you knew how they lived already, in any case, so you didn’t need to read about them.
She was so delightful it would be easy for him to relinquish the role of Bert Gedling, or enough to give that impression. His defences fell flat when he was only vaguely aware of the rough side of himself and could be mostly a Thurgarton-Strang, a part in the play of his life which seemed to charm her, though he couldn’t really care whether it did or not. He could, after all, be who he liked whenever he liked and behave in any way he cared to, having had a good education and come from the sort of family that she would never know about. He had just spent a good part of his week’s wages paying for their dinner and she hadn’t even had the grace to thank him. She wasn’t always aware of the change in his accent, and whatever was in her mind he could only hope it would snare her into doing all he wanted her to do, though as soon as this looked like coming about — and his villainous faculties, he smiled, would tell him precisely when — he would revert positively to Bert Gedling in the hope that her ant-like restless desire would let him do what he liked no matter who he felt himself to be.
‘I’m going slowly through the Everyman Library.’ One of the books Isaac had given him had a full list at the back. ‘I’m on Joseph Conrad at the moment. Lord Jim was terrific. Jim is a ship’s officer who jumps overboard when he thinks the boat’s going down, and leaves all his dago passengers to drown.’
‘What an awful thing to do.’
‘It makes a marvellous novel though. And he pays for it in the end. You’d like it.’