He had money to spend, and London was all around, but being his own gaoler stopped him breaking out, unless to buy a cleaver at a bucket shop and disembowel a stranger in a dark alley. Without a motive he would never be caught. Would God or anyone look askance if he threw a child in the moiling water from Hungerford Bridge? It was the worst of dreams.
There was no other self in the offing but the one that sought to overpower him, a stranger he would have to fight like Theseus and the Minotaur. The rite of passage, to he couldn’t tell what or where, gave a mixture of lassitude and voracious impatience, out of which not even Bert from way back could show him an escape route, except to say that he ensconce himself in the nearest pub and talk to people, something he was totally unable to do.
To get on a train for the north and wallow in the life he had abandoned, or go to Norfolk and shoot a few rabbits, and falter under the questions of his ageing parents, would be annihilation. The bark of Simpson the games’ master might get him running, or the old army shout of rise and shine, but that was no more than a laugh. Or he could call Deborah from the box along the street and, babbling out his confusions, show himself as a worm not fit to live. They’d been close to getting into bed a few nights ago, but she said they hadn’t known each other long enough, and he steeled himself to be gallant and not push the opportunity into boorishness.
He sliced brown bread and opened a tin of sardines into a saucer: the survival of the fittest had to begin with yourself. A barb on the ragged edge of the tin drew copious blood, an encouraging sign. Maybe his despair had been brought on because nothing had gone into his stomach since a meagre breakfast of distant coffee and a slice of buttered bread. He had been too intent on opening letters from the mat downstairs to eat much. Those with typed addresses were seen to first, in case there were cheques inside. The second half of his advance came for the novel, and a few hundred for a paperback, as well as cash for an American edition, an unnerving cocked hat for one post. He unfolded and flattened them with his buttery knife: let the teller at the bank wonder what the stains were.
The top came easily off a bottle of White Horse and, filling a cup halfway, alcohol felt good at the lips, put pepper in his belly, to be mopped up by a sandwich. As if the blood was ink he pressed several folds of blotting paper over it till the skin was dry, and whisky could be rubbed into the cut.
Behind the window of a showroom in South Kensington he saw an Austin Healey Four Cylinder One Hundred Sports Car, on sale for five hundred pounds, a heartening object to spring into your sight on a Monday morning. He sloped back and forth along the low slung brutish panels, fingered the dark green wings as smooth as marble. ‘I’m serious. It’s a beauty.’
‘Then sit in it, pal.’ The salesman was a tall Germanic-looking man with rimless glasses and an amiable worldly squint. ‘The boss isn’t in yet. Cup of coffee while you wait?’
‘That’s very good of you. Yes, please.’
‘No trouble.’
Herbert stroked the pristine wheel, and felt his prospects good enough to stick up two fingers at the notion of getting a job. Solvent for at least a year, it would seem like twenty at the rate time had gone in the last two decades. He called the man over. ‘Don’t care if I do go broke. I’ll have it.’
The boss came in, overcoat, scarf and homburg, despite the warmish day, looking like a brother (or cousin) of Glenny the rackrent landlord, whose offer of a job Herbert had turned down. ‘I’ll have it, if I can drive it away.’
‘How would you like to pay, sir?’
All problems solved, he drove on to the road. After the car had soaked its gallons out of a pump near Shepherds Bush, he took the paces slowly around quiet streets so that he could gauge the dimensions. Drops of rain splattered the windscreen, wipers leaving a clean Perspex after every heartfelt sweep. In the coffee bar his position by the window kept the car in view long enough for him to know it was his.
He rocketed from the starter’s line at the Notting Hill Gate traffic lights, well in advance of any slow coach or happy saver, cruised along the Bayswater Road, and threaded a way through Mayfair and Soho, feeling like a kid who had been given a sparkling mechanical toy for his birthday.
Pulling up at a phone box he called Deborah. Could they meet after work? ‘I’ll take you to dinner.’
‘Yes, please. Can’t wait. I know a terrific place in Hampstead.’ She wondered, putting the receiver down, if he hadn’t been a hoaxer, not Bert Gedling at all, unless he was trying to bring his accent into line, which would be no bad thing.
At his solitary tea in the thirties splendour of the Hyde Park Hotel he imagined her thoughts, and smiled at their progress. She would analyse every nuance, and sooner or later get close to the right answer. Looking into the Bible he learned that Deborah was a prophetess, reason enough for falling in love.
The waitress brought extra butter and filled his pot with hot water whenever he called. She had a stout figure and dark straight hair, and Herbert, because of her accent, wanted to know where she came from. She told him she’d been a teacher in Australia, and was working her way around Europe. Feeling quixotic, he left a pound note for a tip.
Deborah, walking down the steps of the offices, heard him pip the horn from across the street, and paused at the kerb for traffic to pass. Herbert seemed to get his first real look at her face, her features usually too volatile to picture her properly when among other people.
As for what she was like inside — inside? Where the fuck was that? — whoever you looked at, and thought you had weighed up, and knew from the spleen outwards, could remain a mystery, and the weighing up had to begin all over again. No one realized that better than he, and you could but speculate: often wide of the truth, yet sometimes close to reality. People, like quicksilver, needed a lifetime to properly pin down, the only thing being that you couldn’t afford to wait that long, and so used the imagination to fix them for better or worse at a particular moment and say that’s how they were.
She was a little above middle height, and walked across the road in such a way as to show she had been carefully brought up but had enough independence to go her own way. Her nose pointed somewhat in the air, as if she considered everyone else as shit, which amused him, though he liked how her white and even teeth showed he deserved a smile. Either she was more beautiful than he had supposed, or it was marvellous what a sports car did for you.
He looked in no way, she thought, like the proletarian novelist he was said to be, when leaning over the wheel to unlatch the door, though on opening his mouth he couldn’t help betraying himself. ‘Come on in, duck, and I’ll tek yer for a ride in this mechanical pram.’
His accent was bound to mellow after a while, unless he’s playing it up because he hopes I find it sexy, which in a way I do. The interesting scar — a mark of Cain if ever there was one — hinted at a fair amount of trouble in his life, never mind how he said he’d come by it, though without it he might look a bit more ordinary.
She thought him handsome, but unpredictable and hard to know, perhaps a man to beware of. Her father had warned her of people ‘from further down the ladder’, who tried to pass themselves off for what they hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming. Otherwise the kindest and gentlest person, he said he couldn’t bear social climbers. ‘They’re only out for themselves, so avoid them like the plague. You know what they say? “Put a beggar on horseback, and he’ll ride roughshod over you.”’
He was only trying to protect her, bless him, but she was quite good at looking after herself, thank you very much. Bert Gedling wasn’t climbing anywhere, though he sometimes gave the impression of treading in hobnailed boots across the whole spectrum. Luckily he wasn’t fat, or coarse, or bumptious, or anything like such a person might be as shown on television. Nor was he paranoid or set on murder. His nails were scrubbed, and hair smartly cut, shoes polished and cravat arranged into the neck of his shirt. He used deodorant, so didn’t smell, and even if it was his only suit he knew how to use a clothes brush. Perhaps he came from a more respectable level of the working class than he let on or, going by his rough-beast streak, he was the black sheep who even so hadn’t been able to throw off the cleanly habits of his family.