‘I was talking about it with someone at Penguin’s yesterday,’ Dominic said, ‘in Chez Victor’s.’
‘Were you, then?’ Humphries leaned against the desk, hoping his chief editor would have enough diplomatic sense to handle the kind of rogue element carefully that neither of them had met before. ‘They’ll have first refusal on the paperback rights, but only if they’re quick about it, and if they come up with the right price.’
‘Penguins!’ Bert exclaimed, in control again. ‘I thought they on’y touched classics. I’ve read all of them, though.’ The more mystified they were about his ability to produce a book from such a background the less they would imagine him to be who he really was, in which case Herbert could afford to throw out a few hints now and again as to how cultured he was. ‘I’ll ’ave to be off soon. I want to get back up north before my lawyer shuts ’is offices.’
He felt absolute joy, walking arm in arm with Bert in the sunshine up St Martin’s Lane, both too full of their success to get straightaway back into the Underground. Such freewheeling happiness made his strides seem ten feet long, no one nearby coming up to his measure. ‘We did it, old boy, we pulled it off,’ Herbert said.
‘Fuckin’ did,’ Bert crowed. But a cloud went over his face: ‘What about that snotchops who looked a bit funny when ’e saw yer, though?’
‘Oh, you mean that little twerp Dominic? Don’t worry about him. I’ll deal with him when the time comes.’
‘Yer’ll have ter watch ’im, is what I think. Trouble is, ’e in’t as daft as he looks.’
‘I assure you, he is. I know him from a long time ago.’
‘Do yer? Where was that, then? You aren’t ’oldin’ summat back from me, are yer?’
A steely tone came into Herbert’s voice. ‘That’s none of your business. Don’t get too uppity with me, Bert Gedling, or I’ll close the lid on your box.’
The doppelgänger had worked overtime and been convincing, and would stay in control only as long as he needed it. No doubt Dominic would say to Humphries that Bert Gedling put him in mind of someone at his old school. ‘So much so that it’s damned uncanny, though of course it can’t be him. It’s impossible, unthinkable, idiotic to suppose so’ — which would set Humphries laughing so loud and long as to bring on an epileptic fit.
Eating a dismal sandwich in the station buffet, Herbert’s elation declined. His apparently successful deception seemed to have cheated him of a proper achievement, and he wondered what the result would have been had he called on them as Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, and haw-hawed with his old public school swagger.
Such metronomic moods never let him enjoy anything for long, so he slept all the way back, the ordeal having been more exhausting than he could have imagined.
He poured from the half-bottle of White Horse. ‘I’m a working-class novelist to them, you see, and they only know me as Bert Gedling.’
‘Instead of someone of impeccable military and clerical descent?’ Isaac put water into his glass. ‘It’s a bit too strong for me.’ He sipped. ‘I don’t see the problem, though. You’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie in it. What’s wrong with that?’
‘I’ll get used to juggling the pair of us, I suppose.’
‘You’ve done quite well so far.’
‘But why do I suddenly feel uneasy about lying?’
‘Success brings its uncertainties. It needs more strength of character than failure.’
‘Maybe I should have been an actor.’
‘You’d have been a bad one,’ Isaac said, ‘because your life wouldn’t have depended on it. Not like your writing.’
Herbert slowed down on the whisky, not caring to get Bert pie-eyed — though he felt like swigging the lot. ‘You probably know more about me than anybody else.’
‘Perhaps, but don’t worry about it.’
‘You should have been the writer, not me.’
Isaac took a clean handkerchief to his spectacles, of the sort made from wire and always about to fall to pieces. ‘I couldn’t write to save my life.’
‘Well, you’re acute about other people, you’ve read far more than me, and you know a lot about human nature.’
He smiled. ‘I knew you’d make one sooner or later, though. You’ve got everything it takes: education, confidence, experience, imagination, and a split personality. You seem to dislike most people, except those you write about, which is one way of saving your soul. Anyway, we’d better read that contract, clause by tricky clause, so that we can make sense out of it, and see that it’s all shipshape and correct. Open your Bert Gedling writing pad, and we’ll get cracking.’
Eighteen
‘Are summers longer than winter?’ Archie said.
Diagrams of astronomy were drawn across Herbert’s mind from schooclass="underline" the earth rotates on its own axis in a left-hand annual orbit around the sun; but he’d forgotten the dates of the equinoxes. ‘Maybe just a bit.’ He smiled. ‘The days are longer, though, especially in the afternoon.’
‘I know that,’ Archie said.
‘Does it bother you?’
‘Well, today I don’t want it to get dark, but some days I can’t wait.’
‘You’re a dirty old man,’ Bert said.
‘I’m not, I’m a dirty young ’un. I will be a dirty old man, though, when I’m old.’
‘You’re hopeless,’ Bert twitted.
‘I know. It’s lovely. I like meeting a woman in the dark.’
Chitchat against the wall, the same as ever, not many variations but it carried the time along between canteen and hooter. With hardly a cloud in the sky, the yards and sheds of the factory seemed to function better in the sun than under the mists of winter, when it looked what it was, a slum that should be swept away. The signal went for getting back to work. ‘I sometimes think that if I hear that moaning minnie one more time I’ll go off my head.’
‘I’ll live to see the day,’ Bert said. ‘Come on.’
He had been given lighter work because of his injured arm, which wasn’t yet healed. No one doubted when he told them, though it was true enough. He serviced other people’s machines, pushed trolleys up and down the gangways, and checked finished material before it was taken away, feeling at times as if he had never written a novel, or been to London, as if the life of writing couldn’t possibly be part of him. Such blank moments worried him that he might sink into being Bert Gedling and no one else forever. There were times when he hated the name.
Nor was it encouraging when the men and women bantered him as to how he had landed such a cushy job for his convalescence. While the flesh of his wound coloured back to normal he spent a fortnight sharpening tools, finally put back on his lathe though the scar was still raw enough to give pain when he knocked it against box or turret. Galling though the work was he forced a smile and stuck up two fingers to the heckling so that the others could say: ‘Good old Bert! He’s back on form!’
Walking home in the warm evening uplifted the spirit, a happier mood after spending his energy for eight hours. The short future of some spare time made life tolerable, and in his room he massaged all fingers into sufficient flexibility to put a few paragraphs on to paper. Any old words to which he could attach the grandiose label of thought. From lathe to typewriter, one machine to another, seemed not too big a difference.
Archie called on Saturday morning: ‘Come outside, and see what I’ve got.’ He and Raymond had bought an old banger of an Austin between them for seventy quid.
‘How long yer bin drivin’?’