‘Family?’ He gave a suitably grim laugh, and settled himself, as if the burden of revelation might become too great, and he’d collapse into a fit. ‘The owd man was on the dole when I was a kid. Not that he couldn’t get a job, though. He was just bone idle.’ He recalled the unsolicited account of Archie’s younger days, listened to one Saturday night in a pub when they hadn’t been able to get a nobble on from any of the women, about his father and the means-test man and the starvo times in the thirties, before the war started that drummed everyone into work. Archie was too pissed and despondent to care what he was saying, and went on till Herbert felt he had lived through such miseries himself.
‘The old man kicked me out to work at fourteen, to bring some beer money into the house. Then the family was killed in an air raid, except me, who was in bed with a married woman — or I would ’ave been if I hadn’t bin a bit too young. She was a cousin at my auntie’s, as a matter of fact.’
Jacob nodded, and tut-tutted, and scribbled, and nodded again, till even he thought Bert was trowelling it on a little heavily. ‘Let’s talk about politics.’
Bert scratched his left ear, which hadn’t been bothering him, till the finger-chafing brought an itch out of its burrow and refused to be eliminated, so he stopped, and closed his right eye to gain more control, looking sceptically at Jacob with the other. ‘Politics? Well, it’s allus been Labour for me, like the rest of us up there, though you do find a few fuckpigs that vote Tory.’
‘That’s always been a problem,’ Jacob said, showing his own colours as if to encourage him.
‘My temperament,’ Bert went on, ‘is a bit bolshie. I happen to think Darwin was right,’ Herbert interjected. ‘It’s the survival of the fittest in this chronic world, which suits me fine. I reckon the country’s over-governed. I don’t like the idea of conscription, and I think income tax should be scrapped.’ Herbert, though in danger of spoiling matters, maundered angrily on against every ruling institution and useful organization in the country, and stopped just short of appearing a fool or, worse, betraying his real background.
Jacob wondered what he would be able to make of all this. ‘I don’t understand how someone who left school at fourteen could write a book like Royal Ordnance. In a way I don’t quite see it.’
Neither did Herbert, who hoped his test was close to the end, for he began to despise himself at such apparent success. ‘Well, I read a lot, didn’t I?’
‘But what about the scholarship, and going to a grammar school?’
‘A what ship?’
‘A scholarship.’
‘What sort o’ ship is that?’
He told him, and after a few more fruitless skirmishes thought a touch of provocation would put him back on the ground. ‘Before you came in this evening,’ Jacob smiled, ‘I heard someone say he thought your book was good, but he did wonder how long you would be able to keep it up. Do you have anything to say about that?’
Bert’s face twitched, and set hard. He looked towards the window, as if able to see outside and turn dark into daylight — and back again. ‘Is he still ’ere? I’ll knock him down the stairs’ — especially if Dominic had been the know-all loudmouth. ‘They can blab what they like,’ he said moodily.
‘I forget who it was.’ Jacob put book and pencil back into his pocket. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking to you,’ and took out a handkerchief to get the steam off his glasses. Herbert stretched himself, and cracked his knuckles, as he and Archie had often done in a duet to amuse the women at the end of the day, to indicate that the interview was over for him as well. Humphries had been listening by the door.
‘That was fine, Bert,’ he said when Jacob had left. ‘You’re ideal for interviews.’
‘I was only talking. Showin’ off, I suppose.’
In the crush of the party, he excused himself between several backs, and lifted the last full glass from a tray before another hand could close on it. Deborah’s hugger-mugger with Dominic enraged both Bert and Herbert. ‘Fuck off, Jones,’ they said, ‘or I’ll bash yer pretty face in.’
A ripple went up her body at the prospect of some mindless violence, ending in a giggle which spilled a few beads of wine. ‘Look here, Herbert,’ Dominic said. And then he grinned. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you Herbert?’
Bert glared into his eyes. So the bastard had rumbled him. Or had he? If he was fishing he’d bury the hook in his finger. Dominic looked back impertinence passing for courage, as in the old days. It was one to one again, though pride and upbringing might well stop Dominic letting on if he did know, at least before so many people. Herbert, at the same time, no longer wanted to keep up the illusion of being someone he definitely was not. But he had to, and wondered what resources of his actor’s talent remained to help him if he started drowning in the morass of his lie — or if his so far solid chariot began breaking up.
‘It don’t bother me if you call me Herbert,’ Bert said, ‘as long as you don’t mind being dead. Nobody’s called me that since I went into hospital to have my heart out. I was about four at the time. Anyway, piss off, so’s I can have a conversation with this lovely, intelligent, and smashin’ bit o’ stuff called Debbie.’
Dominic collected the blush of chagrin from one side of his smarmy clock with a cursory wipe and put it into his trouser pocket for a future emergency, but the other side of his face showed that he didn’t seem in any way concerned at leaving them together, giving one aspect to Bert and another to Herbert, so that each could make his choice. Even so, Herbert was glad to note how he shouldered himself along a disgruntled track towards a flat-chested woman who looked like his sister Rachel and blushed as he came close.
Herbert’s words to Deborah had jerked out after soaking up too much inferior booze, but he decided to stay with her, and to rein in Bert for the rest of the evening, come what may, and put on whatever charm he could of a Thurgarton-Strang. She would only think he was learning fast. ‘I’m sorry about all that. It’s just that I get drunk on plain English now and again, which I think’s no bad thing in this place. Anyway, it ’elped to get rid o’ that lounge lizard.’
‘I’m glad you did.’ She looked at him with the sort of open full-toothed smile he could never have got from Cecilia. ‘If I’d tried it I’d have been given the push.’
Herbert sensed that she and Dominic were closer than just acquaintances at the office, and if so he was glad to break up their affair, which would serve Dominic right.
Twenty-One
A light of inspiration in Herbert’s room shone from the picture by Briton Rivière. Phoebus Apollo drove his chariot of the sun over a flower-strewn plain, the sullen pack of lions in long shafts gnashing their teeth at the efforts of the lord and master to gibe them on. Powerless to strike back from the reins and drag him down, such rage could only be slaked by sensing a time when the inexperienced Phaeton would struggle to control them and become their victim.
The reproduction, one of an album from a secondhand furniture shop, all houses cleared, provided another stitch in the tapestry of his progress, as well as a warning. He was half in the picture but too much in the bad dream of his room: a boil on the ceiling was about to burst, and drown him with pus while the walls closed in.
The yen to work was dead, relief impossible, for the time unthinkable. He only felt secure when alone in his room, but even that no longer held back the sensation of being close to madness. The room had turned into a prison, in which his anchor found no rock to grip.