Even the energy to reach the front door was beyond him. Bert couldn’t get up to save his skin, and though Herbert might manage it he would be neither better off nor wiser if he did. He unlatched the buckles of his overalls with one hand, twisted them free and loosened his bootlaces. The wardrobe mirror gave back a perturbed mask, as if he hadn’t looked into it for years. His father’s features showed more clearly. You’re the image of Hugh, his mother would say, as if to drive him round the bend and two-thirds up the diminishing zigzags. He had struggled free by becoming who he was not, and in spite of the battle found himself more than halfway back to being who he really was.
Dark hair, straight nose, forceful chin, and the cul de sac of a scar showed a self-engrossed though raddled aspect. A smile gave the image a facile supercilious charm which would deceive nobody, certainly not him. He was amused that cul de sac backwards produced (more or less) cased luc(k); which sign caused him to hope that the cul de sac he was caught in would turn into an open street, on which his luck would begin to change.
The mirror also reflected how his face might seem to others, because all the people he had ever looked at were in some way embedded there, which made it more of his own face than ever. Such switchings of template took place without his awareness, and turning his head from side to side, as if to discover how and why, was a gesture which further emphasized who he was.
The reflected image was made up of too many faces because the one that indubitably belonged to him had behind it all those people who, in his novel, had been through happiness and sorrow due to his god-like devising, though the basic aspect was as much under his control as the chariot of a Phaeton arriving successfully at the end of the day.
If his face seemed a mass of contradictions at certain moments there was a discipline within which could always bring it back to one he recognized, because whatever he cared to read there showed it could be no other than his own face, whether the roughneck Bert Gedling or the superior Thurgarton-Strang. Only a member of the elect could look in a mirror and realize there were many versions of his face instead of, like any oaf of the common run, thinking it complete and in no way puzzling.
He wrapped himself in the cold bedding and reached for the almost shredded copy of Caged Birds, to indulge in a soothing read, until his eyes would no longer obey his will, and he was so warmly asleep that he failed to hear Mrs Denman calling him down for supper.
Part Three
Seventeen
The publisher’s letter said they would appreciate him calling, at a mutually convenient time and date, when they might, after some discussion, be prepared to make an offer on his book. During days of fever the words shot and spiralled around his brain like fiery arrows, always reforming at a distance his arms couldn’t reach nor his eyes decipher. When his mind cooled back to equilibrium he thought that whoever had dictated such stilted language must have been to a similar school to his own. But then, maybe they all had in that particular trade.
Knowing the letter by heart, he sent every bit from the window while passing St Albans, and opened the Evening Post to gloat over Cecilia’s marriage to her middle-aged company director. Director? As they said about one who strutted around the factory, he couldn’t direct a trolley from one end of the firm to the other without getting lost, unless it was loaded with bags of somebody else’s money and he was going in ever-diminishing circles in the hope of reaching an exit.
If you looked at the photograph one way the man was handsome and self-assured, while squinting at it with one eye closed he seemed furtive and lecherous, and well on the way to being sent down for embezzlement. At the risk of thinking himself mean and despicable Herbert finally considered the man to be a type eminently suitable for Cecilia who, in her virginal wedding dress, would no doubt become a fitting partner for him.
A woman opposite, who he was starting to see as the spitting image of Eileen’s apparent reappearance by the town hall lions after he came back from the army, disturbed the recollection of his perfect afternoon with Cecilia on the hillside near Gotham, which had culminated in his sublime eye-contact with the fox. He saw again the clean orange flame of its pelt framed in green, snout to the wind and turned towards prey. Yet its instinct had been defective in not spotting the entwined bodies of two lovers. Even a fox made mistakes.
‘What time does this train get to London, duck?’
‘How do I know?’ Bert snarled.
‘Sorry, I was on’y askin’.’
So as to look more like Bert Gedling than Herbert Thurgarton-Strang he stood before a glass at St Pancras to set his cap at an angle, though not too much in case he appeared a caricature rather than dignified. The white silk scarf around his neck was barely visible when his jacket was fastened. A tall thin man of twenty-nine, he sniffed the worldliness of the air outside, mackintosh open and showing his smartest suit, a clean haversack settled on his shoulder. Fingers poking from the arm in its sling were available for adjusting his tie or dealing with trouser buttons. He took care not to look like one of the walking wounded back from a hard campaign of whippet breeding in the North.
The eternal pigeons circling Nelson’s head spiralled down in clouds to scavenge crumbs and corn. One settled on the thatched napper of a five-year-old boy with sparkling blue eyes who held a piece of bread in a still hand hoping a bird would come off its perch and eat. Bert smiled when one did. On his way through the same square from school, so long ago, identical pigeons had brought him luck, reinforced him with their powers of intuition and self-preservation, and sent him on a circuit which had brought him back. He waved to the kid’s young mother, and set off towards Covent Garden.
A streak of white shit struck the peak of his cap, from a Heinkel pigeon-bomber following along the street. He looked up at the plump-chested bird on the window sill turning its head this way and that, as if looking for another pigeon to blame it on. He slotted the map into his haversack and pressed the bell with the same force as starting a machine at work. Some Mrs Mop had not long scrubbed the step, but he scuffed his fag and leaned on the white button again. Maybe they were on holiday, though the date had been unmistakable. Or the letter had been posted from Mars and had been a hoax, in which case he would jump on the next train back. A busty woman in her twenties pulled the door open. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve got an appointment to see Mr Humphries.’ He turned his scar away, and tried a half-cock grin to put her at ease.
‘Come in, then.’ She showed him to a small office, treading backwards as if he might lunge forward for a kiss.
He wondered how long she had taken to nurture her posh accent from the glum corner of the country she had grown up in, and noted her diamond-shaped brass earrings, the string of black beads over her grey striped blouse, and a rosebud mouth with just the right curl for scaring callers away. Bert felt like belching in her face. ‘Worked here long?’
‘Longer than you.’
Sharpshit. He took his cap off. ‘It doesn’t sound long to me,’ Herbert said, in his most polished accent. ‘I’m rather surprised you can’t be rather more polite to an author. If it weren’t for someone like me you wouldn’t have a job.’